Table of contents for 1528 in The Week

For a man who claims to be a master of the “art of the deal”, Donald Trump has made an “unpromising start” to his negotiations to end the war in Ukraine, said The Independent. In his 1987 business guide, he wrote that his dealmaking style was to “aim very high” and then “keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I am after”. But when it comes to Ukraine, the US president has been handing concession after concession to Vladimir Putin. Before America and Russia’s foreign ministers even held their first meeting in Saudi Arabia this week, his administration unilaterally declared that there was no prospect of Ukraine regaining its pre-2014 borders or being admitted into Nato. After the meeting, Trump blamed Ukraine for starting the war, and echoed…

American presidents, of all political hues, have long urged Europe to take more responsibility for its own security, said Andrew Neil in the Daily Mail. Even Dwight Eisenhower, “not prone to inflammatory rhetoric”, warned Europe way back in 1959 not to “make a sucker out of Uncle Sam”. In the years since, European leaders have consistently promised to do better – while continuing to let the US “pick up the tab” for maintaining Nato’s strength in defence of their freedom. And even though the main threat to the continent’s security is neighbouring Russia, European countries have looked on passively as Moscow’s defence spending has rocketed. The result is that Russia, with an economy smaller than Italy’s, now spends more on defence than all European nations combined, amounting to 6.3% of…

Conclave, which was the surprise winner of the Bafta for best film. The Brutalist had been tipped for the award, but although it won best actor (Adrien Brody) and best director (Brady Corbet), Edward Berger’s Vatican-set drama, starring Ralph Fiennes and adapted from Robert Harris’s novel, scooped the top prize. Loving gestures, after new research by a German university found that heterosexual men are far more likely than women to be the first person in a relationship to say “I love you”.…

Only 10% of Gen Zers (aged 18 to 27) want to work in an office full-time. 17% would like to always work from home, and 24% want to spend most of their time working from home. More than half (52%) think their generation works less hard than their parents’; only 5% think they work harder. YouGov/The Times 33% of Reform UK voters think that Britain should cut back its contributions to Ukraine’s war effort if Donald Trump reduces US support, compared with 19% of Tory voters and 15% of Labour voters. Opinium/Politico Only 30% of British adults support the idea of paying more tax to fund an increase in defence spending. 55% oppose the idea. YouGov…

I was a firefighter convict Around 900 prisoners were deployed to help tackle the wildfires in Los Angeles last month, for which they were paid just $10.24 a day, says Natalia Mesa in High Country News. Eddie Herrera Jr might once have been among them. He spent the last two years of his 18-year prison term as a firefighter – and says the work had a transformative effect on his life right from the start, with his first call out to perform CPR. The patient, a police officer, died, but even so, the man’s brothers thanked Herrera for trying to save him and shook his hand. “I had never experienced anything like that,” he recalls. “I felt a sense of pride, because I knew that I was not being defined…

A woman in Japan has been arrested on suspicion of squashing a bun in a convenience store. The 40-year-old, who hasn’t been named, insists that when she pressed down on the bun (which was wrapped, in a four-pack) she was merely checking its “firmness”. However, police in the southern city of Fukuoka have accused her of squashing the bun, making it unsellable. The store’s owner says the woman has form, having been seen squashing buns on several other occasions. Residents of a care home in Middlesbrough were delighted when their weekly “knit and natter” session was replaced by a male strip show. A video of the event shows the stripper, Max Hunter, gyrating in front of residents as they clap and twirl underpants in response. “He has a nice body,…

Newspaper sketch-writers generally try to avoid boxing metaphors when it comes to clashes at Prime Minister’s Questions, said Tom Peck in The Times. Sometimes, though, they’re impossible to resist. We’ve often seen Kemi Badenoch “swinging” and “missing” at Keir Starmer. But last Wednesday, the Conservative leader stepped into the ring and “punched herself in the face and knocked herself spark out with her first question”. Badenoch’s chosen line of attack had sounded promising at first, said Isabel Hardman in The Spectator. Wasn’t it wrong, she asked the PM, that a family from Gaza had been granted the right to live in the UK under a scheme intended for Ukrainians. Starmer replied simply that he agreed with her that it was, and said the Home Secretary was trying to close the…

Yet again, Rachel Reeves is in hot water about her past, said The Economist. Last year, it emerged that although the Chancellor had repeatedly claimed to have worked at the Bank of England (BoE) for “a decade”, her LinkedIn profile stated that she was there for six years and four months. It also turned out that her next role, at HBOS, was not as an economist, as she’d put on her CV: she was a manager in customer relations. Now it seems that she was at the BoE for even less time than stated on LinkedIn; and that at HBOS, she was investigated for allegedly misusing her expenses. According to a BBC investigation, Reeves and two colleagues bought so many gifts and meals out for other staff and each other…

“What’s the distinction between a “f**k you” and a “f**k off”, asked Ian Hawkey in The Times. According to the Real Madrid manager Carlo Ancelotti, there’s a “world of difference” between the two. Or so the Italian claimed last Saturday following his team’s 1-1 draw away to Osasuna – “a game of ten against 11 for its last 50 minutes” after Jude Bellingham was red-carded for the second time in his Real Madrid career. The referee, José Luis Munuera Montero, said that after he’d awarded Osasuna a free kick late in the first half he’d heard Bellingham say “F**k you” – a phrase he’d taken to be a direct insult. But according to both Bellingham and his manager, the word he’d used had been “off”, not “you”. And that, the…

Ignoring expert advice To The Guardian Polly Toynbee’s article on Kim Leadbeater’s assisted suicide bill has a familiar feel, with its ad hominem attack on opponents and dismissive approach to their concerns. I am not religious, don’t read the Tory press and my opinions are not “sham indignation”. My perspective comes from my background as a psychiatrist with expertise in the interaction between severe physical illness and mental health. Leadbeater’s committee initially refused to hear from the Royal College of Psychiatrists and backtracked in response to the resultant outcry, eventually inviting a representative of the college and two other psychiatrists (one of them me), who appeared as individual experts. My session was interrupted by Leadbeater explaining to the committee that I and other witnesses didn’t understand the nature of suicide…

A succession of Greek tragedies have been staged in London lately, said Sarah Crompton on What’s on Stage. But “the play that comes closest to Greek theatre’s belief in a communal rite of shared experience is not Oedipus or Elektra”, but this adaptation of The Years, the French Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux’s novelistic memoir from 2008. The Norwegian director Eline Arbo’s production was first seen at the Almeida last summer, and has now transferred to the West End with its “alchemical magic” intact. Spanning the years 1941 to 2006, The Years is a memory play that builds “layer upon layer of allusive” feeling to create an “entire portrait of a world”. It’s an “emotional, coruscating experience”; a meditation on the “failure of liberation truly to liberate”, and on the “ongoing…

“The Australian stop-motion auteur Adam Elliot scored an international hit” with the macabre Mary and Max (2009), said Tara Brady in The Irish Times. His new animation, Memoir of a Snail, draws on his unusual background – the son of an acrobatic clown, he grew up on a prawn farm in the Outback – and unfolds in the same “unforgettable, grubby” style. Told partly in flashback, the story follows Grace (Succession’s Sarah Snook), a melancholic snail collector as she looks back over her tragic life: her mother dies in childbirth; she and her twin brother (Kodi Smit-McPhee) are orphaned when their alcoholic father succumbs to his sleep apnoea; Grace is dispatched to “a foster family of sexual swingers”, while her brother is sent to live with puritanical Christians, who aren’t…

Amedeo Polazzo at Herald St The paintings in Die Strudlhofstiege, this exhibition by German-born, London-based artist Amedeo Polazzo (b.1988), conjure some odd associations. Taken together, they form a series of mildly surreal snapshots: a tightly cropped close-up on a Bialetti coffee pot, the lid lifted just as it comes to the boil; pieces of supermarket fruit engulfed by an ocean wave; kindling crackling in a fireplace. The brushwork is intentionally scratchy, the mannered line reminiscent of Lucian Freud’s more stylised early pictures. You sense there’s a personal lexicon of symbolism at work, a private kind of mythology at which we can only guess. Polazzo, it seems, is constantly grasping to capture the most fleeting of phenomena in a paradoxically complicated and time-consuming idiom – in short, working overtime to distil…

1stDibs is a pre-loved design marketplace for original mid-century items from all over the world. The professional sellers are thoroughly vetted (1stdibs.com). Oxfam‘s online charity shop has a good collection of antiques, sorted into sections including glass, silverware, ceramics, coins and stamps (onlineshop.oxfam.org.uk). The Saleroom streams live auctions from 700 auction houses, allowing you to bid on millions of pieces worldwide. You can set alerts for specific items (the-saleroom.com). Vinterior is known for its collection of mid-century modern furniture, but also sells traditional antiques from more than 2,000 verified sellers worldwide (vinterior.co). Facebook Marketplace is like a giant online car boot sale, with a lot of dross but also some treasures. Results depend on your search radius (facebook.com/marketplace). Etsy is known as a marketplace for handcrafted items, but it also…

Saltmoore Whitby, Yorkshire Following a recent makeover, this 19th century country-house hotel offers a “cosseting” introduction to coastal Yorkshire, says Lydia Bell in Condé Nast Traveller. Set on an estate between the North York Moors and sweeping Sandsend Beach, it has a beautiful garden and a spa offering Wildsmith treatments, with a pool, sauna, ice bath and more. Rooms are decorated in a range of fresh and earthy tones; some have balconies and roll-top baths. The “farmyard-forward” menu is “co-curated” by Tommy Banks (of Michelin-starred The Black Swan at Oldstead), and there are lots of activities on offer, including riding. Doubles from £350; saltmoore.co.uk.…

Three ways to dodge an economic crisis Toby Helm and Phillip Inman The Observer Few people would envy Rachel Reeves’s lot right now, say Toby Helm and Phillip Inman. The latest figures show that inflation picked up faster than expected in January, rising to 3%. It’s yet another blow for a Chancellor whose self-stated “number one mission” is “getting more money in people’s pockets”. In the teeth of stalling growth, a “mountain” of government debt and rising inflation, the £9.9bn of “headroom” (or spare money) left to meet her fiscal rules will probably have “disappeared” by the time Reeves makes her Spring Statement next month. She now “has three options to dodge an economic crisis, and all are unthinkable”. She must either raise taxes again; cut spending by more than…

Controversy of the week In a turbulent period in British politics, there has been one constant: an agreement that the UK’s defence spending should increase. Now, that “consensual background hum has suddenly become an ear-splitting alarm”, said Peter Walker in The Guardian: Washington has made it brutally clear that the US can no longer be relied upon to defend Europe, making our failure to boost our own military capabilities look dangerously complacent. Britain’s Armed Forces have been hollowed out by years of underfunding, said Eliot Wilson in The Spectator. In the 1980s, we spent around 5% of GDP on defence; today it is just over 2.3%. And it isn’t enough. Keir Starmer has suggested putting UK boots on the ground in Ukraine as part of a mooted peacekeeping force. That…

Associated Press, the news wire agency, after its reporters were banned from the Oval Office. In a statement, the White House cited AP’s decision to ignore the “lawful geographic name change of the Gulf of America”, by referring to the body of water as the Gulf of Mexico. AP says that its policy is to use names that will be easily recognised by its global readership – and said the attempt to control its editorial content violated the First Amendment. Celebrity hot spots, after one of London’s most fashionable restaurant/hotels, the Chiltern Firehouse, was ravaged by a fire. The blaze in the Grade II-listed former fire station is believed to have started when burning wood fell out of a pizza oven. Godstone, after a giant sinkhole swallowed up part of…

Munich, Germany Car attack: An Afghan migrant drove his Mini Cooper into a 1,500-strong crowd at a trade union rally in Munich last week, injuring 39 people. Two of them – a mother and her two-year-old daughter – later died. The suspect has been identified as Farhad Noori, 24, who arrived in Germany in 2016 and was granted “tolerated” status after his asylum application was rejected. A bodybuilder and “fitness influencer”, he had reportedly posted Islamist messages online. The attack, coming on the eve of the Munich Security Conference, has further inflamed the debate on immigration that has dominated campaigning for this Sunday’s general election. “Migration turnaround now!” Alice Weidel, co-leader of the far-right AfD, wrote on X/Twitter, listing a series of other recent atrocities committed by asylum seekers. Polls…

1 Silly Games by Dennis Bovell, performed by Janet Kay 2 Messiah, HWV 56 / Part 3: 43. Air: I know that my Redeemer liveth by Handel, performed by Dame Joan Sutherland, the London Symphony Orchestra (conducted by Sir Adrian Boult) 3 Easy Terms by Willy Russell, performed by Barbara Dickson 4 Amazing Grace by John Newton, performed by The Pipes and Drums and Military Band of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards 5 We Are the World by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie, performed by USA For Africa 6 Miss Independent by Mikkel S. Eriksen, Tor Erik Hermansen and Shaffer Smith, performed by Ne-Yo 7 Hit Me with Your Rhythm Stick by Ian Dury and Chaz Jankel, performed by Ian Dury and the Blockheads 8* I Look to You by Robert Kelly, performed by Whitney Houston Book: The Woman…

In 1930, a man calling himself Wallace Fard Muhammad founded the Nation of Islam in Detroit. A figure of unknown origins who disappeared from history in 1934, Fard claimed his mission was to restore black people, the “lost tribe of Shabazz”, to their original faith of Islam. In 1934, Elijah Muhammad took over as leader, and cemented the group’s ideology, claiming that Fard was “God in Person”; that he himself was “God’s messenger”; that white people were “devils” created by a black scientist from Mecca named Yakub 6,600 years ago; and that Fard would return to Earth on a heavily armed spaceship called the “Mother Plane”. Eventually, there would be a global war (or Armageddon), which would wipe out the white “race of devils”. The group’s influence was at its…

ARGENTINA Why we have to suffer for the love of Trump La Nación (Buenos Aires) If Donald Trump jumped off a cliff, would Javier Milei follow him? I think we have our answer, says Daniel Santa Cruz. Two weeks after his idol pulled the US out of the World Health Organisation, Argentina’s libertarian president pulled us out too, justifying the move by saying his administration has “deep differences” with the WHO over the Covid pandemic. Doubtless he thinks he can score political points through populist grandstanding: and he may well be right. There’s “legitimate anger” over the previous administration’s Covid measures, which landed Argentina with the world’s second-longest lockdown and the appalling spectacle of a “VIP vaccination centre” for elites only. But none of that was the WHO’s fault; it…

More than 12 million people in the UK are now living with either diabetes or prediabetes, according to new data from the charity Diabetes UK. Some 4.6 million have a diagnosis of diabetes, up from 4.4 million a year ago, and a record high. The vast majority, 90%, have type 2, the form that is linked to excess weight, and which tends to occur in middle age. (Type 1 is an auto-immune disease and tends to develop in childhood.) A further 1.3 million people are thought to be living with undiagnosed type 2 diabetes, and it is estimated that 6.3 million people have prediabetes, which means that their levels of blood sugar are so high that, without treatment, they risk developing type 2 diabetes. Separate research has found that, worldwide,…

Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying bill – the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill – is one of the most high-profile reforms to be proposed in decades, said The Independent; few issues touch people’s lives more “profoundly”. So the Labour MP’s decision to significantly alter the bill’s terms has inevitably caused disquiet. Originally, the bill required that cases not only be approved by two doctors, but that a High Court judge also sign off on it. Leadbeater insisted that this extra layer made her bill’s protections the most robust in the world. But it turned out that the provision had a major flaw: High Court judges wouldn’t have time to do more than rubber stamp each case. So the plan now is for applications to be reviewed instead by a…

“It’s not a principle until it costs you money.” Bill Bernbach, quoted on Ian Leslie’s Substack “Canada is a really nice apartment over a meth lab.” Robin Williams, quoted on PolitiZoom “Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States.” Porfirio Díaz, quoted in The New York Sun “There is hope as long as history lacks closure. If the past was different from the present, so may the future be.” Terry Eagleton, quoted in The Atlantic “The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.” Hannah Arendt, quoted in The Washington Post “It’s hard to beat a guy when he’s got his mind made up that he’s going to win.” Muhammad Ali, quoted in…

To the Financial Times Your editorial on President Donald Trump’s “dangerous” approach to peace in Ukraine feels, I’m afraid, like mere carping. Trump has simply said publicly what everyone close to the issue has known for a long time. The heedless expansion of Nato, and particularly efforts to include Ukraine, fed Russia’s deep-seated security fears and helped provoke the war. It follows that any eventual peace will necessarily exclude early Ukrainian Nato membership. The war itself is in effect deadlocked, nobody sees a “silver bullet” to end this, so it is time to try to stop the bloodshed through negotiations. Nobody, not even Volodymyr Zelensky, believes there is any early prospect of Ukraine regaining all its occupied territory. And, finally, it will be principally for Europe, not the US, to…

Christie’s decision to hold the first-ever auction dedicated to AI-generated art has resulted in a significant backlash, said The Art Newspaper. The sale, Augmented Intelligence, which began in New York this week, features work by artists such as Refik Anadol, Harold Cohen and Claire Silver. An online letter, which has now been signed by more than 6,200 people, argues that some of the pieces exploit human artists, as they were created using AI models trained on copyrighted work. The letter describes AI art as “mass theft” and calls on Christie’s to halt the auction. Christie’s reply is that all of the works are by recognised artists who have used AI “to enhance their bodies of work”, and that, in most cases, the AI models they used had been trained on…

As she covers for her dad, Wayne, at The Bull, Fallon tries to improve on his recipes; Jolene advises her to stick to the menu. Disaster strikes at Bridge Farm as raw sewage suddenly spills out of the brook; Tom and Tony battle to stop it, but Helen is forced to close the dairy and throw out some of her stock. Meanwhile, the stench drives customers away from the Tea Room; Pat wonders how they’ll cope. As the fallout continues at Bridge Farm, the Beechwood houses are next to be inundated by the foul flood – Mick, Joy and the Maliks evacuate as their homes are ruined. Lynda offers beds to the Maliks, while Joy and Mick stay at Bridge Farm. Fallon discovers that Wayne has been lying about ingredients…

The UK’s first vegan Michelin star A restaurant that opened in east London seven months ago has become the first vegan establishment in the UK to be awarded a Michelin star, says Tony Turnbull in The Times. Kirk Haworth’s Plates, on Old Street, offers an “entirely plant-based” £75 seven-course set menu: dishes include slow-cooked leeks with chestnut cream and gooseberry dressing, and raw cacao gateau with sour cherry and coconut-blossom ice cream. Haworth was brought up in Lancashire and is the son of the chef Nigel Haworth. He converted to veganism seven years ago, not out of principle, but through necessity: he’d contracted Lyme disease, which led to a “debilitating” fatigue – and found that excluding meat and dairy from his diet boosted his energy levels. Having been trained “on…

SOURCES: THE DAILY TELEGRAPH/STUFF…

Asil Nadir 1941-2025 Asil Nadir, who has died aged 83, was the “poster boy” for the 1980s stockmarket boom, said The Guardian. A Turkish Cypriot immigrant with a background in the “rag trade” in northeast London, he acquired Polly Peck, a small stockmarket-listed textile business, in 1980, and in just a few years turned it into a £2bn conglomerate encompassing electrical goods, hotels, mineral water and fruit: the brands it owned included Russell Hobbs and Del Monte. His office was a large townhouse in Mayfair filled with exquisite art and antiques; his home a Palladian mansion in Rutland. Charming and stylish, with an air of “Midas mystery”, he befriended Princess Margaret, and sent his sons to Eton. In those get-rich-quick times, few questioned how he was making his money –…

Kenny Alexander In 2020, the gung-ho Scottish CEO of betting empire Entain abruptly quit, “to give some time to my family”. Soon after, a criminal investigation into alleged bribery at the company’s Turkish affiliate widened. In 2023, Entain paid the biggest fine “in British gambling history”, said André Dubronski on iGamingFuture: a £615m deferred prosecution agreement “to stave-off formal criminal charges”. Yet the jinxed company continues to be “hammered” by scandals and “leadership setbacks”. The latest boss quit last week after just five months. Now, the ghost of “King Kenny” is back. The industry “legend” is suing Entain for details of the disclosures made in the 2023 settlement. Why dig all that up again? Perhaps tellingly, the Crown Prosecution Service is reportedly still considering “filing criminal charges against individuals”. Alexander,…

Plenty of “consequential speeches” have been delivered at the Munich Security Conference over the years, said Patrick Wintour in The Guardian – not least Vladimir Putin’s 2007 address, in which he announced that Russia would never accept “a subordinate role in the new world order”. But last week’s tirade by US Vice-President J.D. Vance might just prove to be the “most consequential” of them all: “the moment the world order against which Putin railed fell apart”. To an audience already reeling from Trump’s dealings with Moscow, Vance unleashed an ideological assault on the US’s allies, said The Daily Telegraph. He claimed that free speech is “in retreat” in Europe where, he said, “entrenched interests” were silencing alternative viewpoints by using “ugly, Soviet-era words” such as “disinformation”. He accused mainstream politicians…

A council meeting about a proposed new low-traffic neighbourhood (LTN) in Lambeth, south London, became so heated that councillors were reportedly left “in tears” – and were offered a day off to recover. “Following Saturday’s event and the horrid time that was had by all, I wanted to offer you all a free day of well-being leave,” read an email from Lambeth’s head of transport strategy. They were once dismissed as the preserve of celebrities and the super-rich, but the British public is increasingly in favour of pre- and post-nuptial agreements, a survey has found. According to YouGov, 55% of adults think the agreements on how to split assets are a good idea, up from 42% two years ago. 41% think they make divorces less stressful.…

The Metropolitan Police’s effort to purge rogue officers from its ranks was dealt a blow last week when the High Court ruled that an officer who’d been accused of sexual assaults, including rape, had been wrongly dismissed. Sergeant Lino Di Maria, who denies the allegations, had been forced out of his job by having his vetting clearance removed. He argued that this had deprived him of his right to defend himself. In the past 18 months, 96 officers have left the force after having their vetting removed under a scheme introduced in response to the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer. The Met has vowed to appeal. NHS maternity fine An NHS trust has been fined £1.6m for a “catalogue of failures” that led to the deaths…

Washington DC RFK Jr confirmed: Robert F. Kennedy Jr was sworn in as US health secretary last week, after his nomination was confirmed by a 52-48 vote in the Senate. Several Republican senators had questioned the former presidential candidate’s fitness for office, given his record as a vaccine sceptic and as an exponent of conspiracy theories. Kennedy, the nephew of John F. Kennedy, has suggested that chemicals in drinking water encourage gender confusion, and has promoted wholly discredited research linking childhood vaccines to autism. But during his confirmation hearings, the 71-year-old denied that he would seek to curb vaccines, and said his concern was merely to ensure their safety. In the end, he was opposed by just one Republican: the former Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, who cited his own…

“I spent a week watching British soap operas – no wonder they’re dying. I was struck by their homogeneity, especially their reliance on violence – often male on female, but also teenagers lost to knife crime – so most episodes had scenes in police stations and hospitals. Infidelity was rife. Rows, like most conversations, were laced with alcohol. Drug abuse lurked off screen. No public gathering proceeded peaceably. By the end of the week, the soaps’ various plots had merged into a mush of grim, formulaic unpleasantness. It was depressing wintry viewing, or would have been had I believed a word of it. I didn’t because the soaps have lost the knack of verisimilitude.” Andrew Billen in The Times…

Turning down a heaven-sent opportunity Matthew Lynn The Sunday Telegraph In an “alternative universe”, Britain would now be celebrating an opportunity to turbocharge our economy and generate thousands of jobs, says Matthew Lynn. The vast deposits of recoverable gas just discovered in a field in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire – some 480 billion cubic metres – could “power the UK for seven years”. A study by Deloitte reckons that exploiting this would add £112bn to our GDP and generate £27bn in tax – more than enough to fill the “black hole” in the public finances. We’re not celebrating, though, because recovering it would entail fracking – and that’s a “taboo subject” in Westminster. No matter that other nations have shown fracking is both safe and highly lucrative; the availability of cheap energy…

What would happen if a US president openly defied the judiciary? Hard to tell, said Ruth Marcus in The Washington Post, because it has never happened before. Presidents have railed at judges, challenged verdicts and slow-walked the implementation of rulings, but they’ve never outright refused to accept court orders. Donald Trump, though, looks worryingly close to crossing that line. Many of his executive orders are currently caught up in legal challenges, and a federal judge has already scolded his administration for not properly complying with an order to unfreeze funding. Trump asserts that he will “abide” by adverse decisions as he appeals them through the courts, but close members of his team are “explicitly insinuating he might not”. Elon Musk has demanded “an immediate wave of judicial impeachments”. Vice-President J.D.…

How whales learn their songs All human languages share a particular pattern: the most common word (“the” in English) is used twice as often as the second most common word (“of”), which is used twice as often as the next one – and so on. This phenomenon is known as Zipf’s law, and it turns out that humans are not alone in following it: humpback whales do too. The discovery was made by researchers at Edinburgh and St Andrews universities, based on a detailed analysis of recordings of whale songs. These songs consist of long sequences of sound, made up of grunts, whistles, squeaks and other noises. The researchers’ challenge was to identify within these “sub-sequences” what might be analogous to words. To do this, they took inspiration from how…

Sir Edward Leigh became Father of the House of Commons (the longest-serving MP) last year – thanks to beating Jeremy Corbyn to the Register of MPs when they were both first elected, in June 1983. He signed the book 15 minutes before Corbyn, he recalled. “I was not going to bother, but somebody who has long since lost his seat said, ‘Go in now because you might become Father of the House 40 years later.’” When Adrien Brody was working on The Brutalist, a make-up artist mistook his prominent nose for a prosthetic, the actor has revealed. Speaking on The Tonight Show, Brody explained that he’d not worked with the make-up artist before, and noticed that she was busy rubbing a solvent into his nose. “She’s just working away, and…

Time is ticking for Keir Starmer’s “Calamity KC”, said Dan Hodges in The Mail on Sunday. The PM’s pal Richard Hermer has been mired in controversy since becoming Attorney General, and it won’t be long before voters start to realise just “how politically dangerous he is”. First, there’s his odious former client list – the lawyer having represented everyone from Gerry Adams to “jihadi bride” Shamima Begum. Then there are concerns that Hermer’s disdain for Britain’s history (he has said that “almost every element” of the empire was “racist”) might be influencing government policy, including the disastrous decision to hand over the Chagos Islands. Even his ministerial colleagues are losing patience, said Tim Shipman in The Sunday Times. They’ve accused the human rights barrister of blocking critical legislation out of…

Nick Kyrgios called it a “sad day for tennis”; Tim Henman said it “leaves a pretty sour taste”. Last Saturday, it was announced that the world’s best player, Jannik Sinner, had negotiated a settlement with the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) over offences committed last March, and would be banned for just three months. Sinner twice tested positive for the banned steroid clostebol, said Stuart Fraser in The Times. He claimed the substance had entered his system accidentally, as a result of it being present in an over-the-counter spray used by his physiotherapist to treat a small wound. And last August, a tribunal cleared Sinner of any wrongdoing. But that decision was appealed by Wada, on the grounds that even if the Italian wasn’t personally at fault, he was still responsible…

Tennis Emma Raducanu ended her run of four consecutive defeats by beating Maria Sakkari in straight sets in the first round of the WTA Dubai. In the second round she lost to14th seed Karolina Muchová 7-6, 6-4. Football Manchester United slipped to 15th place in the Premier League after losing 1-0 to Tottenham. Liverpool remain leaders after beating Wolves 2-1. Racing The Irish jockey Michael O’Sullivan has died from injuries sustained during a fall at a race at Thurles earlier this month. He was 24.…

“Hold the blue soup and pack away the big knickers,” said Kevin Maher in The Times: “Bridget Jones has finally grown up.” Over three “increasingly shambolic movie outings”, we’ve seen this “de facto national treasure” (deftly played by the Texan actress Renée Zellweger) pratfalling boozily “into mud piles and out of taxis”, and worrying incessantly about her“‘wobbly bits’. But you can only play the nincompoop for so long, and thankfully, and rather thrillingly, it’s all change here – in a film of sly sobriety and uncommon depths.” It turns out that Bridget has had a tough few years, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday: her beloved father (Jim Broadbent) has died, as has her husband Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) – killed while on a human rights mission to…

The Malaysian writer chooses his five favourite books. His debut, The Harmony Silk Factory, won the Whitbread First Novel Award. His new novel, The South (4th Estate £16.99), is out this week Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, 1956 (Penguin £9.99). I first read this when I was at university and return to it regularly. It’s the story of young people falling in love and trying to carve out a space for themselves in a foreign city – which sounds simple enough, but there’s so much packed into such a slim volume: discrimination, exclusion, desire, the denial of the self. To my mind, it’s also the ultimate Paris novel. Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov, 1898 (Bloomsbury £9.99). Of all of Chekhov’s plays, this is perhaps the one that has stayed with…

Programmes Dope Girls New six-part historical drama. At the end of the First World War, a housewife opens a Soho nightclub to support her daughters. Sat 22 Feb, BBC1 21:15 (55mins). Inside Classical: Elgar’s Enigma Variations with the BBC Philharmonic The orchestra performs Elgar’s masterpiece. Sun 23 Feb, BBC4 21:00 (95mins). Who Do You Think You Are? USA A new series of the US edition opens with Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston tracing his roots. Allison Janney and others follow later in the week. Mon 24-Thur 27 Feb, BBC4 19:30 (30mins each). Israel and the Palestinians: The Road to 7th October This three-part series starts in 2003 and then-Israeli PM Ariel Sharon’s withdrawal of settlers and troops from Gaza. It includes a rare interview with Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh, who…

A pilaf is one of the most popular dishes in Romania, says Irina Georgescu – a fantastic combination of any ingredients we happen to have to hand, cooked with rice. You can make a pilaf with chicken, vegetables or even fruit. The rice is cooked in plenty of stock, and stewed gently in a covered pot until it reaches a creamy yet runny consistency. Serves 4-6 35ml (generous 2 tbsp) sunflower oil 4 medium bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs 1 large brown onion, finely sliced 300g potatoes, cut into thick chunks 1 tbsp white-wine vinegar 250g long-grain white rice 1 litre vegetable or chicken stock ¼ tsp freshly ground black pepper 1 medium courgette 2 large garlic cloves 1 tsp chopped marjoram, fresh or dried salt To serve: good olive oil…

● Don’t worry if your teenager tells you they hate you. It’s a sign that they feel safe enough to push you away. Tell them it’s OK to be angry, but that you don’t like it when they talk to you like that. ● Allowing your child to offload will help them to manage their emotions. Listen, empathise, but keep an emotional distance. ● If they are monosyllabic, talk to the version of them you’d like to see, and that one will be more likely to show up. If you assume grumpiness, that’s what you’ll get. ● Let your children know you admire them and their character. Show you love them unconditionally, but stop short of adulation. ● Teenagers will take risks, so rehearse what-if scenarios. If they don’t want…

Phyllis Dalton 1925-2025 Phyllis Dalton was one of the great costume designers of late-20th century cinema. Acclaimed in particular for the attention to detail she brought to period dramas and historical epics, she won two Oscars, said The New York Times. The first was for Doctor Zhivago, for which she had to design more than 3,000 costumes – from the elegant outfits worn by the social elite before the revolution to the tattered greatcoats worn by Russian soldiers in the First World War. To add to her difficulties, scenes set in the Russian winter were filmed in Spain during the summer, so having fitted the extras with their heavy coats, she then had to persuade them not to disrobe. Her work on Zhivago – particularly the fur hats and fur-trimmed…

Fresh from “a 7-0 trouncing” at the hands of the UK investment trusts he hoped to upend, Saba Capital boss Boaz Weinstein has taken to posting “Never give up” videos on X/Twitter, said Alistair Osborne in The Times. In one, he cites the example of the American thoroughbred Rich Strike, which came from the back to win 2022’s Kentucky Derby at odds of 80-1. It’s true that this was only “the first wave” of Weinstein’s campaign – but it was “a spectacular failure”. As Investec notes, the self-styled “chess master” succeeded mainly in “galvanising an entire industry against him”. Still, when all else fails, there’s always the gee-gees.…

Some nine million Britons have fallen victim to financial fraud in the past year, said Claer Barrett in the FT – with “fake debt advice” and “friend-in-need” scams claiming the most victims. But as Nick Stapleton outlines in his book How to Beat Scammers, criminal networks are increasingly targeting wealthier victims, using sophisticated means. Pig butchering Scammers spend months “fattening up the pig” – perhaps via a romantic manipulation, or by posing as a “professional” online. “After months of innocuous messages, the victim’s trust is gained.” Using convincing websites, scammers take custody of funds and post realistic-looking returns on investments. The victim invests more, “until one day, their login stops working”. The granny trap To identify potential victims, scammers create AI-generated images on social media “that pull on heartstrings”. Commenters…

The week’s best shares Auto Trader Group The Daily Telegraph The online auto marketplace, with a “dominant market position”, is a “very high-quality” stock, generating 8% revenue growth and a 14% profits increase in a stagnant economy. Pricey – but “worth every penny”. Buy. 777.6p. Creightons Investors’ Chronicle The toiletries maker – sold via private labels to high street retailers – is recovering from supply chain and inflation problems. Costs and debt are down; margins are up. Known for “exceptional” product development. Buy. 30p. Iberdrola The Daily Telegraph Surging electricity demand, driven by hungry data centres feeding the AI revolution, should boost this “renewables juggernaut” – a leader in wind farms, solar parks and energy storage. Cash-generative and very profitable. Buy. €13.40. Intertek Group The Daily Telegraph The testing and…

THE WEEK CROSSWORD 1453 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 3 March. Send it to The Week Crossword 1453, 121-141 Westbourne Terrace, London W2 6JR, or email the completed grid/listed solutions to crossword@theweek.co.uk. By Tim Moorey (timmoorey.com) This week’s winner will receive Week-branded items, as well as two Connell Guides (connellguides.com). ACROSS 1 Heroin and cocaine increase quickly in intensity (8) 6 Balance of wordplay first lady’s overturned (4,2) 9 Vessels from Channel Island moving bow to stern (4) 10 Safe to take shelter in Cambridge college (10) 11 Theatrical dame OK to manage (4,2) 12 Apple check on case of networker (8) 14 Longed to secure…