Table of contents for 1490 in The Week

The last time Britain held a July general election was in 1945, said Ben Butcher in The Daily Telegraph. That vote, which ousted Winston Churchill as PM, “did not go well for the Conservatives” – and the one that Rishi Sunak has just called for 4 July seems unlikely to either. No incumbent party in Britain has ever voluntarily embarked on an election race while trailing so badly in the polls. The campaign had got off to the worst possible start for Sunak, said David Maddox in The Independent. He announced the move in Downing Street under pelting rain, while a protester blasted out New Labour’s 1997 victory anthem. In the wake of that inauspicious launch, he asked brewery workers in Wales whether they were looking forward to this summer’s…

When examining the likely result on 5 July, the words “since 1997” are hard to avoid, said Robert Ford in The Guardian. The Tories face their biggest polling deficit since 1997. This is the first Conservative government to trail Labour on the economy since 1997. The share of voters saying it’s time for a change is the highest since 1997; and the incumbent Government is the most unpopular since 1997. Yet Labour’s dismal performance in the 2019 general election means that it must gain 150 more seats in order to reach the 326 needed even for a working majority of one. That’s a “massive mountain to climb”, and will require Labour to secure the biggest swing since – yes – 1997. Still, the electoral calculus looks bleak for the Tories,…

Smooth peanut butter, after researchers found that children are 71% less likely to develop peanut allergies if given the spread in infancy. The team at King’s College London advised parents to give it to infants from weaning until age five – but whole or chopped nuts should be avoided, due to the risk of choking. Lads’ mags, with the news that Loaded, the 1990s staple, is to be reborn, with Elizabeth Hurley as its inaugural cover star. “Men need to be men, and there should be no shame in them being able to ogle beautiful women,” declared the new editor, Danni Levy.…

More than 140 hospitals in England have pledged to introduce Martha’s Rule, which gives seriously ill patients and their families the right to seek a second medical opinion if their own or a relation’s condition deteriorates, but they feel their concerns are being ignored. Patients at the hospitals involved will be able to contact a team to review the care being given. The rule is named after Martha Mills, who died aged 13 in 2021, having contracted sepsis after a fall from her bike. Her parents had raised concerns about her health repeatedly, but were ignored.…

New York Holiday wishes: While President Biden visited the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington, Virginia, his rival in the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump, marked the Memorial Day holiday this week by taking to his Truth Social platform to lash out at his enemies. “Happy Memorial Day to All, including the Human Scum that is working so hard to destroy our Once Great Country”, he wrote, going on to excoriate the judges in three trials he has recently faced. The third of those – the current hush-money trial in which he is accused of falsifying business records to cover up an affair with the adult-film actress Stormy Daniels – entered its final stages in New York on Tuesday, as the defence and prosecution made their closing arguments. If…

“In 2006, I had a short, private conversation with Margaret Thatcher. Briefed that she wasn’t at the peak of her faculties, I thought better of asking the question that still intrigues me now. What did she make of the nation she had moulded? On the one hand, it was an economic success: rich, creative, no longer Europe’s shambling neighbour. On the other, once-stable communities had changed. National assets were under foreign ownership. The capital city belonged more to the world than to Britain. Markets, it turned out, were un-conservative. Mistrusting abstract thought, conservatives don’t see this tension at the core of their worldview.” Janan Ganesh in the Financial Times…

Cash for kids: a policy that doesn’t work Editorial The Economist Should we pay women to have more babies? Plans are afoot in many countries to do so, in a bid to reverse low birth rates, says The Economist. South Korea is contemplating handouts worth $70,000 per baby. People are right to be concerned about falling fertility. The average woman in a rich country today will have just 1.6 children, a rate that, without immigration, would leave each generation a quarter smaller than the one before. But politicians are wrong to think that bribes will turn things around. There’s a common misapprehension that low birth rates are down to career women delaying starting a family. In reality, they’re mostly down to younger, poorer women doing so, partly because more are…

Alarming rise in type 2 diabetes The number of younger people with type 2 diabetes – a form of the disease that used to be associated with late middle-age – has risen dramatically in the past decade. According to a new analysis of NHS figures, about 168,000 under-40s currently have the condition, 39% more than in 2016-17. Diagnoses are rising at a faster pace in this age group than among older adults, says Diabetes UK, which compiled the report. Among over-40s, the number has gone up by 25%. The charity has urged ministers to implement a proposed ban on junk food advertising to children, and other measures designed to tackle obesity. “Drastic changes to the environments we live in and the food we eat are taking a toll on our…

In her memoir, the comedian Doon Mackichan recalls a brush with the star of a long-running British soap. While they were appearing together in a play, the actor, who she won’t name for legal reasons, grabbed her bottom in the queue for the canteen and said: “Nice arse.” The next time she saw him, she says, she “grabbed his crotch and said: ‘Nice bollocks.’” Afterwards, “He never spoke to me again.” Tatler has unveiled a new portrait of the Princess of Wales as the cover of its July issue – to mixed reactions. “I’m not quite sure what to say about this one, except, hmm…”, was the verdict of The Times’s Kate Mansey. Alastair Sooke, chief art critic of The Daily Telegraph, described it as “jaw-hits-the-floor bad”, and claimed that…

It was the moment they’d all been waiting for, said Gordon Rayner in The Daily Telegraph. More than 100 sub-postmasters gathered in London last week to watch Paula Vennells being grilled before the Post Office Inquiry. It was the first big public appearance in almost a decade by Vennells, who was the Post Office’s chief executive from 2012 to 2019 and has been dubbed “the most hated woman in Britain”, over her role in the Horizon IT scandal. If Alan Bates and his fellow campaigners had been hoping for “fireworks from a pantomime villain”, they would have been disappointed. What they got instead was “a dull, rather unimpressive figure in grey”, whose answers were often vague and cloaked in “management-speak”. The key takeaway from Vennells’ appearance, said Marina Hyde in…

Only the Manchester United hierarchy can answer the question that was on everyone’s lips at Wembley last Saturday, said Martin Samuel in The Sunday Times. Will his side’s surprise 2-1 victory over their bitter rivals Manchester City in the FA Cup final be Erik ten Hag’s last game as United’s manager? Few pundits had given United a chance in the days before this fixture; and reports in the week leading up to it claimed that ten Hag was destined for the sack even if he were to bring the FA Cup to Old Trafford for the first time since 2016. But if those reports prove accurate, then ten Hag made sure that his last act as manager will be “a hard one to follow”, at least in the short term.…

Football Southampton won promotion to the Premier League, beating Leeds United 1-0 in the Championship playoff final at Wembley. In the Women’s Champions League, Barcelona beat Lyon 2-0 – which means that England’s Lucy Bronze, Barcelona’s right-back, has now won the trophy five times in a row. Rugby union Toulouse beat Leinster in the Champions Cup final, winning 31-22 after three extra-time penalties. Cycling Tadej Pogačar won the Giro d’Italia on his debut, finishing ten minutes ahead of his nearest rival. Britain’s Geraint Thomas came third.…

by Tiffany Murray Fleet 352pp £22 The Week Bookshop £17.99 “Sometimes the most compelling family memoirs are not those that recount particularly extraordinary lives but which, rather, are told in the most beguiling voice,” said Nick Duerden in The Guardian. Such is the case with Tiffany Murray’s “sublime” account of “growing up in and around the famous Rockfield music studios in Wales in the mid-1970s”. Murray lived there with her mother, Joan – a “single parent still pining for the Swinging Sixties” – who served as Rockfield’s resident chef. Joan’s job meant that encounters with rock luminaries were an ordinary part of her daughter’s life: Murray describes serving tea to a “polite man” with striking eyes called David Bowie; and on another occasion, bumping into someone called “Fred”, or “Freddie”,…

Running time: 2hrs 15mins The West End “hasn’t ever really seen” a Romeo & Juliet like this one, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. This ravishing production stars Tom Holland – the London-born actor whose performances as Spider-Man have made him a Hollywood A-lister – and was directed by Jamie Lloyd, who has brought a series of starry but minimalist blockbusters to the London stage. Lloyd doesn’t just strip things back in terms of scenery and props – no balcony, no weapons – but also “ruthlessly” cuts back the text and slows down the action, “placing the lyrical language centre stage”. There is much use of cameras and microphones, a Lloyd trademark, with “mics on stands, and taped to faces”, capturing every utterance, while the action is replayed on…

The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy, 1886 (Penguin £8.99). This is a short read and yet is so profound. It opens with the death of society lawyer Ivan and then backtracks on the last few months of his life – highlighting how the realisation that he had led a superficial and meaningless life was even more agonising than the painful illness that leads to his death. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1886 (Penguin £9.99). I studied Russian A Level and it was always my ambition to read this in Russian. I never got round to doing that. Too difficult. But again, like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky tussles with questions about the meaning of life in this epic novel. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, 1958 (Penguin £9.99). Extraordinary to…

Programmes D-Day: Hour by Hour Archive footage, rare radio broadcasts and testimony from those who took part in the landings bring to life the preparations for D-Day. Sat 1 Jun, C4 20:00 (60mins). Vasa: The Ghost Ship Documentary following archaeologists and divers as they search Stockholm Harbour for more evidence about the legendary warship, which sank in 1628 and was raised in 1961. Mon 3 Jun, BBC4 21:00 (60mins). Queenie New comedy-drama based on Candice Carty-Williams’s 2019 bestseller about the tribulations of a 25-year-old British-Jamaican woman. Tue 4 & Wed 5 Jun, C4 22:00 and 22:35 (35mins each). Storyville: Against the Tide Intimately observed documentary about two best friends and fishermen in Bombay, each facing personal challenges as they pursue their different paths to economic survival. Tue 4 Jun, BBC4…

The striking spa town of Mariánské Lázn? in the Czech Republic has more than 100 mineral springs. Try the Nové Lázne, which has a sauna, steam room, cold plunge pool and a whirlpool (from L27; ensanahotels.com). The largest spa in Europe is in Romania. Therme Bucharest has ten pools, 16 water slides, ten saunas and Europe’s largest urban beach (from L29; therme.ro). The art nouveau Gellért Thermal Bath in Budapest, Hungary, has a marble gallery with a glass roof. There’s an outdoor wave pool, a cold plunge pool, plus geothermal pools and saunas (from L24; gellertbath.hu). Bulgaria’s biggest balneo-therapeutic resort, Hotel Royal Spa in Velingrad, has steam baths, a Himalayan salt sauna, a hammam and mineral pools (from L18; royalspa.bg). Set on the edge of a glacial mountain lake in…

Jannah Lamu Lamu, Kenya The Kenyan island of Lamu is a “bohemian hot spot”, known for its beautiful beaches and “crumbling” mansions. Newly opened by hotelier Anna Trzebinski, Jannah Lamu occupies a traditional building in Shela village, says Catherine Fairweather in Condé Nast Traveller. It has three two-bedroom suites and a one-bedroom penthouse that is “a honeymooners’ dream”. Its “breezy” spaces combine traditional design – painted beams, four-poster beds, polished-plaster floors – with contemporary touches. There’s a scented walled garden and three wooden dhows for “day trips to distant dunes and islands”. Suites from £430 b&b; jannahlamu.com.…

Pointless grandstanding at Hay Sam Leith The Spectator The Hay Festival has caved in to pressure from campaigners to sack its largest sponsor, fund manager Baillie Gifford, for investing in fossil fuels and companies that “indirectly support Israeli aggression against Palestinians”. Billed as “a mighty blow” against injustice, this seems “a rash and silly move”, says Sam Leith. It won’t change Baillie Gifford’s “core” model – the manager’s exposure to fossil fuels is anyway “relatively modest” (2% against an industry average of 11%) – and it jeopardises Britain’s largest literary festival. “Moral clarity is a hell of a drug.” Baillie Gifford isn’t perfect. But who is? “My iPhone is the fruit of exploitative labour and conflict minerals.” The firm – which also sponsors the Edinburgh Festival and the Baillie Gifford…

Who’s tipping what The week’s best shares Impax Environmental Markets The Mail on Sunday This eco-friendly trust’s holdings include packager Mondi, the cycle parts firm Shimano, and energy storage firms. Tough times, yet prospects are bright. Buy. 396p. InterContinental Hotels Group The Daily Telegraph IHG is a “high-quality” business with an “extremely diverse” hotels portfolio, solid financial position and loyal customer base. Falling inflation, rising air travel and a large pipeline of new rooms are “clear catalysts”. Buy. £78.02. Marks & Spencer Group The Mail on Sunday M&S has responded to changing demand by streamlining ops, improving products and enhancing its online presence. Annual results were “splendid” – profits up 58% – and there’s plenty of opportunity ahead. Buy. 299p. Mony Group The Sunday Times The price comparison site (formerly…

THE WEEK CROSSWORD 1416 Two Connell Guides and three Week-branded items will be given to the sender of the first correct solution to the crossword and the clue of the week opened on Monday 10 June. Send it to The Week Crossword 1416, 121-141 Westbourne Terrace, London W2 6JR, or email the completed grid/listed solutions to crossword@theweek.co.uk. Tim Moorey (timmoorey.com) This week’s winner will receive Week-branded items including a notebook, coffee mug and tote bag, as well as two Connell Guides (connellguides.com). ACROSS 1 Leave publicity cases almost exhausted (4-3) 5 This man could be the cover for the cover! (7) 9 Hot red meat sandwiches not available in say, Pret a Manger (5-4) 10 One in credit around and about (5) 11 Could be rabbit’s popular for butchers (4,2)…

Controversy of the week After 14 years of shambolic rule and one of the worst campaign launches ever, the Tories have played their “last moth-eaten card”, said Polly Toynbee in The Guardian. Rishi Sunak has pledged that, if re-elected, he would bring back national service, last seen in 1960. This “decrepit” notion was beloved of the now long-departed “Sir Bufton Tuftons” in the Commons. “It’s that never-ending Tory cry of youth hate: cut their hair, square-bash some discipline into them, bring back the lash!” Under Sunak’s plans, all 18-year-olds would be forced to either serve for a year in the Armed Forces or UK Cyber Defence, or to spend one weekend a month volunteering for organisations such as the NHS and fire service. Most sensible people have seen this pledge…

The Evening Standard, which is to close as a daily newspaper, bringing to an end almost 200 years of publication in London. It will be replaced with a new weekly version. The Standard has lost £84.5m is the past six years, according to its accounts, and has relied on funding from its part-owner, Evgeny Lebedev. South Korea, which was targeted by 260 balloons that scattered old shoes, batteries, manure and other waste across its territory. The incident came days after North Korea said it would retaliate against the “frequent scattering of leaflets and other rubbish” inside its borders by balloons launched by activists in the South. The movies, after US cinemas had their worst Memorial Day weekend in nearly three decades. The two biggest films, Furiosa and The Garfield Movie…

59% of British adults say they will be dismayed or disappointed if Rishi Sunak wins a majority. Asked in 2019 how they would feel if Jeremy Corbyn won a majority, 52% of British adults said they’d be dismayed or disappointed. YouGov 56% of American adults believe that the US is in a recession. It is not. Just under half believe that unemployment is at a 50-year high, though the unemployment rate is at under 4%, a near-50-year low. Harris/The Guardian Half of adults in the UK oppose the Government’s plan to release prisoners early. 21% support it, 22% neither support nor oppose it, and the rest don’t know. Savanta/The Daily Telegraph…

Letters to a daughter When the writer Genevieve Kingston’s mother was dying of cancer, she set about writing her two children letters for every one of their birthdays until they were 30 – plus more for them to open on key days in their lives. It was quite an undertaking: Kingston remembers the dining room becoming a card factory, and feeling jealous of the time it was taking. Her mother died when she was 12. For the first few years, waiting for the letters was agony. “I needed them so much,” she told Maddy Fletcher in The Mail on Sunday. “It was almost like holding your breath for a full year waiting for the next one.” But by her 20s, she’d started to find them sad. “It was almost like…

Google’s new AI search tool has been widely mocked for generating erratic and inaccurate answers. In one case, its AI Overviews urged users to mix glue with cheese to make it stick to pizza. In another, it was asked: “Can cockroaches live in your penis?” and replied: “Absolutely!”, then added: “It’s totally normal, too.” It also advised users to eat “one small rock per day”; to cook chicken at 38°C; and to smoke “two to three cigarettes a day” if pregnant. Asked to name fruits that “end with ‘um’”, the AI replied: “Applum, bananum, strawberrum, tomatum and coconut.” A Japanese dog that became a globally recognised icon of the internet has died, its owner announced last week. Kabosu, a Japanese shiba inu, inspired countless online jokes after a picture of…

ARGENTINA Insults do not good foreign policy make La Nación (Buenos Aires) Javier Milei has something of a penchant for dishing out extravagant insults, says Paul Mendelevich. Argentina’s president has called the Pope an “imbecile”, has labelled the president of Colombia a “communist murderer”, and has described his own country’s parliament as a “rat’s nest”. It was still shocking, even so, to see the casual disregard with which he trashed Argentina’s excellent relations with Spain last week. Speaking at a rally of far-right parties in Madrid, Milei denounced Spanish PM Pedro Sánchez’s ruling Socialists as “cursed and cancerous”, before labelling Sánchez’s wife “corrupt” – a reference to the investigation she’s facing for alleged influence peddling. His words unsurprisingly infuriated the Spanish government, which has recalled its envoy to Buenos Aires…

It feels rather like “the ravens leaving the Tower”, said Sam Lister in the Daily Express. After 19 years in Parliament and six cabinet roles under four prime ministers, Michael Gove has announced that he is standing down at the next election. “There comes a moment when you know that it is time to leave,” he wrote in his resignation letter – “that a new generation should lead.” Gove, 56, joins 77 other Tory MPs heading for the exit ahead of the 4 July poll. But none, said Gordon Rayner in The Daily Telegraph, has done more to shape British life than him. As education secretary, Gove unleashed a series of radical reforms, allowing schools to escape local authority control by becoming academies, and establishing free schools. He then campaigned…

At 2pm last Wednesday, the Deputy PM Oliver Dowden advised that every household in the UK should stockpile emergency supplies – three days’ worth of food and water, along with torches and analogue radios – so they can be self-sufficient in the event of a national crisis. At 5pm the same day, Rishi Sunak called a general election. “Who drew up that timetable,” asked Martha Gill in The Observer. “What a juxtaposition: 14 years of Conservative rule; a nation cramming its cupboards with emergency baked beans.” Timing aside, it’s a sensible policy. As Dowden pointed out, we live in a “dangerous and volatile world”, an era of major geopolitical tensions, pandemics, frequent cyberattacks and ever-more common freak weather events. Britain lags behind many countries in this regard. Finland, for instance,…

Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc has long seemed destined to win the Monaco Grand Prix, said Andrew Benson on BBC Sport – but “fate stood in his way for a while”. Born in Monaco, Leclerc had wanted to be an F1 driver ever since his childhood, when he watched cars whizz around his home city’s streets from friends’ balconies. He lost his father, Hervé, to cancer a year before he entered F1, and had started from pole position twice before at Monaco, but never won. But these setbacks only served to make his victory in Sunday’s race “even sweeter”. On “the most demanding track in the calendar”, Leclerc was “sensational” all weekend: he qualified on pole and controlled the race throughout. With “the monkey finally off his back”, Leclerc was in tears…

Penrose’s Law To The Times Arresting fewer people (“Police urged to make fewer arrests”) is a delayed consequence of ignoring Penrose’s Law (1939): there is an inverse relationship between the availability of psychiatric beds and the prison population. Surely positive investment in mental health is better than ignoring offending behaviour. Dr Huw Davies, retired consultant psychiatrist, Bridgend Cash cows To the Financial Times It is true that foreign students in many cases are a cash cow, or golden goose, for universities, not only in the UK, but in many other countries including Ireland (“Britain risks throttling a golden goose”). But at what cost to academic standards? Many universities spend considerable sums of money attracting high-fee-paying foreign students, especially for postgraduate programmes. As a result, the finances of some universities are…

by Franz Kafka Penguin Classics 704pp £24 The Week Bookshop £18.99 When Franz Kafka’s diaries were first published soon after his death, aged 40, in 1924, they were heavily polished by his friend Max Brod, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. Brod – who’d ignored Kafka’s instruction to burn all his manuscripts – set out to turn him into a saintly figure, untouched by “human impulses”. He cut out anything remotely sexual (including his visits to prostitutes) and excised anything else he judged extraneous – including the letters, draft stories, dreams and aphorisms that Kafka had “stuffed” into his diaries. Now, more than 30 years after they appeared in Germany, the unexpurgated diaries have finally been published in English, sensitively translated by Ross Benjamin. And they’re a “revelation”.…

Ben Henriques at Browse and Darby Modern still-life painting is at its most enjoyable when you can tell that the artist himself has at least a modicum of attachment to that which he depicts. This fashion-averse but rather lovely show makes it abundantly clear that Ben Henriques (b.1967) is having a whale of a time arranging, rearranging and then re-rearranging the objects he has to hand at his studio in the West Highlands of Scotland. Whether he’s depicting a click-action Biro against a strangely stormy ultramarine background or a bottle of supermarket wine and a vase improvised from a jar of passata, there’s a palpable joy to his compositions and palette. While some paintings of flowers and fruit pitted against pastel cheeriness fall wide of the mark, Henriques is a…

Arabic Flavour 4 Northgate Street, Aberystwyth (01970-228078) A word of warning, says Jay Rayner in The Observer: do not go to Arabic Flavour in Wales hoping to be served quickly. “Do not go ravenously hungry. Prepare a few conversational gambits. Perhaps do not go in a large group. But really, do go.” The slowness of the service is due to the fact that the cooking – all of it – is done by Ghofran Hamza, a young Syrian who arrived in Wales in 2018 on a UN refugee resettlement programme, and is now telling her very “21st century story at the stove”. The restaurant, which she runs with her Greek partner, is a “quietly elegant space of guttering tea lights and sandstone-coloured walls hung with bursts of Arabic art”; and while…

SOURCE: EVENING STANDARD…

Sir Tony O’Reilly 1936-2024 Sir Tony O’Reilly, who has died aged 88, had a career of many parts, said The Daily Telegraph. Good-looking, quick-witted and seemingly possessed of unlimited energy, he first found fame as an Irish rugby player. Having won his first cap in 1955, he played for his country 29 times and toured twice with the British Lions. Meanwhile, he trained in management consultancy, and aged 25 became general manager of the Irish Dairy Board – in which role he masterminded the launch of Kerrygold butter. In the 1970s, he was employed by H.J. Heinz, moved to the US, and worked his way up to CEO and chair of the global food giant – while also finding time to build up a network of business interests of his…

Back in 2021, Keir Starmer looked as though he might end up as one of the most short-lived Labour leaders in history, said Jim Pickard in the FT. His party had just been trounced in local elections, and suffered a bruising by-election defeat to Boris Johnson’s Tories in Hartlepool. Just a year into the job, Starmer considered quitting. Yet three years later, he is on the cusp of entering No. 10, having engineered “one of the most stunning transformations in recent political history”. He has “eviscerated” his enemies in Labour, and expelled his former “friend” Jeremy Corbyn; he has shifted his party significantly towards the centre, in a quest to win back floating voters. Starmer has mastered “being serious”, and “a little boring”, in contrast to the “chaos” of the…

Holland & Barrett has been criticised for selling a chocolate bar studded with what it describes as “menopause almonds”. The health food chain claims that the £3.79 dark chocolate bar soothes menopause symptoms, and “contributes to the regulation of hormonal activity”. Menopause campaigner Kate Muir called the product “nuts” and accused the chain of engaging in “menowashing”. St Albans is aiming to become the first British city to go smartphone-free for children under the age of 14. Head teachers at 20 of the city’s 24 primary schools have written to parents urging them to delay buying their child a smartphone until they turn 14, “opting instead for a text/call phone alternative if necessary”.…

Labour’s deputy leader, Angela Rayner, will face no further action from the police following an investigation into the sale of her former council house in Stockport. Greater Manchester Police (GMP) said that it had closed the investigation into her alleged breaking of electoral law; she was accused of failing to properly disclose her main residence in official documents in the 2010s. Rayner also faced questions about whether she had failed to pay the appropriate capital gains tax and council tax. GMP said that such tax matters were beyond its jurisdiction, but that it had shared details with HMRC.…

Dublin Palestine recognised: Ireland, Spain and Norway have all formally recognised a Palestinian state, following coordinated announcements by their leaders last week. “It is a statement of unequivocal support for a two-state solution – the only credible path to peace and security for Israel, for Palestine and for their peoples,” Ireland’s taoiseach, Simon Harris, said in remarks echoed by the Norwegian and Spanish PMs. The news was welcomed by the Palestinian Authority and by Hamas, but Israel responded by recalling its ambassadors from Dublin, Madrid and Oslo. “This would be a terrorist state. It would try to carry out the 7 October massacre again and again,” said Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu. On 10 May, 143 of 193 members of the UN’s general assembly voted in favour of a Palestinian bid…

1 Bright Eyes by Mike Batt, performed by Art Garfunkel 2 The Sound of Music by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, performed by Julie Andrews 3 Elton’s Song by Elton John and Tom Robinson, performed by Elton John 4 Take On Me by Morten Harket, Magne Furuholmen and Paul Waaktaar-Savoy, performed by A-ha 5 Lullaby for Cain by Gabriel Yared and Anthony Minghella, performed by Sinéad O’Connor 6 String Quartet No. 4 by Michael Tippett, performed by the Tippett Quartet 7 Make Your Own Kind of Music by Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann, performed by Mama Cass Elliot 8* Night of the Swallow, written and performed by Kate Bush Book: The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot Luxury: A cinema screen showing The Devil Wears Prada * Choice if allowed only one record…

In 2023, there were 67,337 asylum applications in the UK, covering 84,425 people (some applications cover whole families); 37% of them came by small boats across the Channel. In 2022, there were 74,751 asylum applications. These are at the upper end of the figures for the past 30 years, which peaked at 84,132 in 2002 and dropped to a low point of 17,916 in 2010. Recent asylum figures are considerable, but they are insignificant as a proportion of total immigration, which reached 1,264,000 (or 764,000 net) in 2022. They are also smaller than the numbers arriving via official refugee schemes: in 2022, 154,600 Ukrainians arrived, the largest single group of refugees to the UK in its history. Britain’s asylum figures are fairly low by European standards: there were 13 applications…

Reckoning with a nation of potheads Jonathan Caulkins and Keith Humphreys Washington Monthly Americans’ use of marijuana has exploded in recent years, say Jonathan Caulkins and Keith Humphreys. In 1992, just 0.9 million people reported using the drug daily or almost daily. By 2022 – by which time about half of US states had legalised recreational use of the drug – that number had grown twentyfold to 17.7 million, overtaking the number who drink alcohol that often. Alongside this increased use, there has been “a spectacular rise in the potency of cannabis products”. Before 2000, the average potency of seized cannabis in the US never exceeded 5% THC, its active intoxicant. Now, the average potency of weed sold in licensed stores is 20-25%, and extract-based products such as vape oils…

He makes for an unlikely terrorist, said Julia Jüttner in Der Spiegel (Hamburg). It’s all too easy to dismiss 72-year-old real estate broker Heinrich XIII Prince Reuss as just a confused old man. That’s not how German prosecutors see it, though. They accuse him and 24 fellow conspirators of stockpiling 380 firearms, plus sacks full of ammunition, at his hunting lodge in the spa town of Bad Lobenstein, with the intention of taking the Reichstag by storm. Their plan, say the prosecutors, was to kidnap Olaf Scholz and his ministers, parade them on TV, and then install Prince Reuss as the head of a new Fourth Reich, its borders based on those of Germany before the First World War. Last month, the first of what are likely to be three…

A spray that “glues” insects to plants could be an environmentally friendly alternative to chemical pesticides. The substance is made up of tiny sticky droplets that stay on leaves for three months and aren’t washed off by rain. In tests, it has proved highly effective at trapping the western flower thrip, a minute bug that attacks more than 500 types of crop: sprayed on the leaves of chrysanthemum plants, the thrips’ favourite food, it caught more than 60% of those that landed. The spray is nontoxic, and does not clog up machinery; and the droplets are too small to trap beneficial insects, such as bees. To make the new pesticide, scientists in the Netherlands took plant-derived oil and oxidised it to make it as sticky as duct tape, then ground…

The Gaza war is a “military quagmire and a human tragedy”, said The Economist. It is also fast turning into a “diplomatic disaster for Israel”, at a critical juncture in its history. Last week, the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor alleged that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister had committed war crimes in Gaza: using starvation as a weapon of war and deliberately attacking civilians. (Hamas’s leaders were also accused of war crimes.) The move is bitterly contentious, and the ICC judges won’t decide for weeks whether there’s enough evidence to issue warrants. There is certainly an arguable case that Netanyahu’s government has “breached the laws of war” in Gaza by not providing food and medicine to civilians “to the fullest extent of the means available”, as the Geneva…

“Democratic office feeds your vanity but starves your self-respect.”Matthew Parris in The Times “If I only had more humility, I’d be perfect.”Ted Turner, quoted in Advisor Perspectives “All of us invent ourselves. Some of us just have more imagination than others.”Cher, quoted in Time “The man who never was lost, never went very far.”Motto of the Sheffield Clarion Ramblers club, quoted by a Week reader “Art is what you can get away with.”Andy Warhol, quoted in The Guardian “I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of, so they can see that it’s not the answer.”Jim Carrey, quoted on Medium “It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.”Attributed to Bertrand Russell, quoted in Forbes “My songs spread slowly,…

To The Daily Telegraph Many people are pontificating about the Tories’ plans to reinstate national service, but few have actually done it. I did, and it was great. It set me up for life: to hell and back in the first three months, RAF West Kirby in the winter, three months in air radar school at RAF Yatesbury, then 18 months in the Ground Radio Servicing Flight at RAF North Front, Gibraltar. The experience provided good preparation for my career in the then-infant computer industry. Many of my colleagues learnt basic electronics in either the Navy or the RAF. A mixed system of national service and regulars worked then, and it will work again. Mike Ostick, Upton upon Severn, Worcestershire To The Guardian What did I gain from my national…

by Hari Kunzru Scribner 272pp £20 The Week Bookshop £15.99 Hari Kunzru’s “bracingly intelligent” new novel opens with its protagonist, Jay, “delivering groceries to a palatial home” in upstate New York, said Sandra Newman in The Guardian. The woman who answers the door is masked (it’s the early days of Covid), but Jay recognises her as Alice, “his girlfriend from another life”. Twenty years before, they’d been together in London, when he was an “up-and-coming Young British Artist”. But she went on to marry Jay’s “best friend and rival” (now himself a successful artist), while Jay’s career stalled, and he fell into poverty. Now, he’s sick with long Covid. Alice takes Jay in, and lets him stay in a barn on her property, said David Anderson in Literary Review. While…

Leonora Carrington, the Lancashire-born surrealist, has set an auction record for a British female artist, says The Guardian. Her 1945 painting Les Distractions de Dagobert (a detail from which is pictured right) sold at Sotheby’s in New York last week for $28.5m (£22.48m). Inspired by the life of the seventh century Frankish ruler Dagobert, who had a love for luxury and sexual excess, it is regarded as Carrington’s masterpiece; it shows extinct volcanoes, a lake of fire engulfing an inverted idol, and a watery world where a giant with two animal heads holds a human-faced pufferfish. It was painted two years after Carrington moved to Mexico to join a community of “exiled” surrealists and Mexican artists; she lived most of her life in Mexico. The painting is regarded as a…

Kirsty is looking after Rex’s pigs while he’s away, but may be out of her depth. She and Mick discuss the plan to invite Joy’s elusive daughter Rochelle to her surprise party. At the cricket, Harrison behaves out of character and is rude to Pat. Over a pint, Freddie tells George he doesn’t fancy Alice’s chances in prison; George says he couldn’t cope himself. Neil checks in on George, who is still withdrawn; later he asks Harrison if he’s OK. Joy and Fallon are cheered up by a barn dance at Brookfield. Harrison returns to work, but his boss sends him home after he asks about Alice’s case. He’s even more upset when Fallon says she won’t worsen Alice’s situation by writing an impact report. Harrison and Tom have a…

• You can buy bespoke enclosures, or recycle old jars and bottles. For larger ones, try demijohns or fish-tanks with lids. • Drill holes in the lid, or remove the lid regularly to keep humidity but allow airflow. • Choose a moisture-retentive substrate with good drainage, such as bonsai soil or high-quality compost. Add hardscaping such as cork bark or petrified wood. • Buy small-leaved tropical plants from the baby-plant section of a nursery or garden centre. Fittonia, ficus and pilea, mosses and ferns are good, or try begonia, philodendron, saxifraga and jewel orchids. Slow-growing plants are best for beginners. • Water with a spray bottle using de-ionised or filtered water, not hard tap water. Do not overwater – if water pools at the bottom, soak it up with kitchen…

David Wilkie 1954-2024 David Wilkie, who has died aged 70, became Britain’s coolest man in the long, hot summer of 1976, when he competed for his country in the Montreal Olympics, said The Times. Not only did the swimmer win a gold medal by taking a full three seconds off the world record in the 200 metre breaststroke (with a time of 2 minutes, 15.11 seconds), he established himself as the moustachioed, long-haired, laid-back “poster boy” of British swimming, whose demeanour was in sharp contrast to that of the “uptight American swimmers”, who took all the other golds for men. “Yet he looked more confident than he felt.” He’d trained in Miami for two years for the event; and in the run-up, he’d been so anxious about competing against the…

In its early years, The Body Shop forged a reputation as “a trailblazer for a more ethical form of capitalism”, said The Sunday Times. Now it is suffering an unseemly carve-up. Bought last November by the private equity firm Aurelius, it collapsed controversially in February. And following a grisly session with administrators, a slimmed-down version is up for auction again. Who might buy? Aurelius is reportedly keen “to regain ownership”. But there are also some big high-street names in the frame – including M&S and Next. The latter at least has form: under CEO Lord Wolfson, it has become “a prolific acquirer of struggling brands”, including Made.com and Joules.…

Grinding critique The latest to feel the heat is Starbucks boss Laxman Narasimhan, who was chosen by founder Howard Schultz, only to suffer a very public takedown. The current management, fumed Schultz, needs to sort out customer service – perhaps by spending more time in the cafés. That’s BS The late Sir Ken Morrison, of the eponymous supermarket chain, gave a masterclass in backseat driving in 2014 when CEO Dalton Philips laid out a strategy to revitalise the business in front of investors. “I have something like 1,000 bullocks, and having listened to your presentation, Dalton, you’ve got a lot more bullshit than me.” Easy now EasyJet’s Stelios Haji-Ioannou labelled one CEO “over-rated”, voted against the pay package of another and, in 2020, attempted a mass defenestration of four directors,…

Lady Violet Manners The popularity of the Netflix Regency series Bridgerton has prompted a surge of interest in stately homes, said Hannah Prevett in The Times. Tapping it is Violet Manners, 30, who has raised £400,000 from investors to launch HeritageXplore, a “discovery and booking platform” aimed at younger, “heritage-curious” types. So far, 25 of the UK’s 450 privately owned estates have signed up, including Belvoir Castle, Blenheim Palace and Renishaw Hall. “The Bridgerton effect is a real thing,” says Manners, who, as a daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Rutland, “understands the cost and complexity of running a period property”. She already has an online hit under her belt: a podcast called Duchess, fronted by her mother. Wang Hongquanxing First they came for the tech titans, then the…

I am a writer, but I wish I were an artist. At school, I used to hang around the art room because that was where all the cool girls congregated at break. Artists have more fun. They throw the best parties, they drink, they smoke, they never talk about essential vitamins or mindfulness. Some of them make money, most of them don’t, but art is what keeps them going. When you meet, say, bankers or dentists, they always tell you their plans for what they’ll do when they retire, some hobby they’ll pursue. I’ve never met an artist who had a hobby, apart from Frank Stella, who told me he only carried on painting to feed his horse-racing habit, but even he was pretty old by then. Most artists just…