Innholdsfortegnelse for V. 1089 i The Week

Turkey launched its largest military operation of the Syrian civil war last week, sending tanks and special forces across the border to drive Islamic State out of the town of Jarablus. The US supplied air cover for the operation, dubbed Euphrates Shield, which also seemed designed to deny the key border town to advancing Kurdish forces, and to install Turkish-backed rebels of the Free Syrian Army there instead. Ankara issued an ultimatum to the YPG, the US-allied Kurdish militia which has retaken large tracts of northern Syria from Isis, to retreat east of the river Euphrates or face “necessary measures”. US vice-president Joe Biden called on Kurdish forces to comply. Elsewhere in the war against Isis, Iraqi forces retook the key town of Qayyarah. The town is only 44 miles…

Copenhagen Female mosque: The first femaleled mosque in Scandinavia – one of only a handful outside China – officially opened in Copenhagen last week, with Friday prayers led by two female imams. One of the imams – Sherin Khankan (pictured) – said the Mariam mosque would “challenge patriarchal structures” in all religious institutions, as well as “patriarchal interpretations” of the Koran. There have been female imams in China since the 19th century, and in South Africa since 1995. A women’s mosque opened in Los Angeles last year, and in the UK there are plans for a female-run mosque in Bradford, though its prayers will be led by a male imam. Calais Entente still cordiale: Britain and France have reaffirmed their commitment to the 2003 Le Touquet treaty, which allows British…

We’re right to be alarmed by Zika Kelly McBride Folkers The New York Times Zika “is not some tropical infection that matters only abroad”, says Kelly McBride Folkers. The mosquito-borne virus has reached the US mainland, with a new cluster reported in Miami Beach last week. “And my generation in particular should be concerned”, because Zika can be transmitted by sexual intercourse, meaning it could continue to infect people even in the absence of mosquitoes. Men and women who contract Zika can be unknowingly infectious for months, even if they get no fever, rash or other symptoms. That’s alarming news for everyone of childbearing age, since Zika can cause microcephaly and other serious birth defects. Preliminary research from Zika hot zones such as Colombia suggests “sexual transmission is likely to…

“I predict that within a decade, most Western countries will have banned the burka, probably the niqab, and maybe even the pretty burkini,” said Tim Stanley in The Daily Telegraph. Granted, a French court last week effectively struck down the “burkini bans” imposed in around 30 mayoralties, describing them as a breach of “fundamental liberties”. But several mayors vowed to keep them in place, and Nicolas Sarkozy – who is having another tilt at the presidency – has called for a nationwide ban. This may seem extraordinary to British observers, who were shocked by recent pictures of a Muslim woman on a beach in Nice being ordered to remove her tunic by armed police. But polls suggest that a majority of French people support a ban. Why? Because they feel…

She said that Brexit meant Brexit – and it seems she meant it, said The Daily Telegraph. Theresa May has let it be known that she will be triggering Article 50, probably early next year – without putting it to a parliamentary vote. Some Remainers are outraged: they have this idea that Britain is plunging into a Brexit-induced recession, that the “ignorant masses” are regretting their folly – and that it falls to our MPs to save us from disaster. But this is nonsense. The economy seems robust; and the indications are that if there were a second referendum tomorrow, the result would be the same. Admittedly, “instinct” resists the thought of Parliament not having the final say on a decision of such importance. On the other hand, MPs voted…

Not such grey days To The Guardian Has The Guardian got it in for the 1950s? Your report on the late fashion designer Sonia Rykiel asserted that these years were “a time when women were expected to wear sombre tones and skirts”. The briefest glance at fashion publications of the 1950s will reveal every colour of the rainbow; and back then some of us even wore what we called “slacks”. More seriously, Simon Callow claimed that John Osborne’s play The Entertainer “presented post-Suez, midcentury Britain to itself in all its tarnished, seedy, impotent dishonesty, surgically exposing all the pain that lay behind it”. But how a historical period is experienced depends on your generation. We “baby boomers”, born in the mid-1940s, mostly experienced the 1950s as a time of optimism:…

The Schooldays of Jesus by J.M. Coetzee Harvill Secker 272pp £17.99 The Week bookshop £14.99 J.M. Coetzee “is not interested in writing books for escapism and entertainment”, said Duncan White in The Daily Telegraph. In The Schooldays of Jesus, a sequel to The Childhood of Jesus (2013), he presents further instalments from his cryptic allegory about a boy and a man – Davíd and Simón – who form an unlikely alliance after meeting on a boat travelling to an unnamed, Spanish-speaking country. Many critics found the earlier novel “baffling”, and this one opens in a similar vein: in place of plot, there are lengthy “Socratic” dialogues about “what numbers are”, or the nature of “sexual intercourse”. After Davíd enrols at a dance school, there’s much discussion of the metaphysics of…

Tuscan Rye 8 Lion Street, Rye (01797-223269) Located in a “crepuscular” space that once housed a “bygone tea shoppe”, Tuscan Rye has “glossy brown plates” on the tables, and “spectacularly bad art” on its walls, says Kathryn Flett in The Daily Telegraph. It is “stupendously, perhaps wilfully, unfashionable” – and so, of course, I loved it instantly. I loved it even more when a 40-something Frenchwoman with tattoos sat down at the next table, ordered a bottle of red, pored over the menu, and declared, with a sigh: “I vant airverysing!” I felt exactly the same – it was all sublime. Vitello tonnato – slivers of cold veal – had a “sweetness and subtlety” with a “lemony-capery-tuna-zing” topping that made for a “quite glorious” combo. My companion’s beef carpaccio was…

BHS: the bones of a pensions deal? It’s the end of an era on Britain’s high streets, said Kate Palmer in The Daily Telegraph. The last 22 BHS stores pulled down their shutters for the final time at the weekend, ending nearly 90 years of retail history. Meanwhile, the row over some 22,000 staff pensions continues. BHS’s former owner, Sir Philip Green, remains in negotiations with the Pension Protection Fund (PPF) over the fund’s £700m shortfall – amid reports that regulators, “frustrated by delays”, have considered issuing a “contribution notice” to his wife, Lady Green, who controls the companies that own the family’s assets. Sir Philip – who sold BHS for £1 last year and has spent the summer negotiating from his £100m superyacht – has warned that “attempts to…

Who’s tipping what The week’s best buys Cape The Times Shares in the industrial services provider are “entirely unloved” owing to exposure to North Sea oil and gas, and falling UK margins. But the group is performing well in Asia Pacific and the Middle East, and yields 7.5%. Buy. 201p. Concepta The Mail on Sunday Concepta has developed a testing kit to help women with unexplained infertility issues. Having already received regulatory approval in China, plans for Europe are well advanced. Shares “should go far”. Buy. 12.63p. DS Smith Investors Chronicle This provider of corrugated and plastics packaging has doubled revenues in five years, and is growing organically and via acquisitions. Resilient, as most of its products are staples such as food containers. Yields 3.4%. Buy. 417p. Persimmon The Times…

After a half-century of bloodshed, Colombia’s government last week announced a historic peace deal with the rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc). The accord, agreed between Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos and Farc’s Timoleón Jiménez after four years of talks, will end the longest civil war in Latin America, which has killed 220,000 people and forced at least six million from their homes. Under its terms, Farc will be allowed to enter politics as a mainstream political party once its 7,500 fighters have disarmed. However, the pact, agreed in Cuba, still needs approval in a referendum to be held next month, and the country is deeply divided. Leading the critics is the right-wing former president Álvaro Uribe, who has condemned the terms as far too lenient. In…

Canonsburg, Pennsylvania Cheap drugs: The US drugs company Mylan has caved in to public pressure and agreed to market a cheaper, generic version of its EpiPen – a syringe filled with epinephrine used to treat sudden, life-threatening allergic reactions. After Mylan bought the rights to the life-saving device, in 2007, its price surged by 500% in eight years; each two-syringe pack now costs $600. Meanwhile, the compensation paid to the Canonsburg-based company’s CEO, Heather Bresch, rose nearly sevenfold, to $18.9m – causing fury among customers, and a wave of bad publicity. The fact that, in some US states, schools and other institutions are required by law to purchase EpiPens has added to the public anger (see page 43). Washington DC Weiner marriage over: One of Hillary Clinton’s closest aides, Huma…

Facebook wants to take over the web John Naughton The Observer If there were a Nobel Prize for hypocrisy, says John Naughton, I’d give it to Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook. Last week the social network greeted users with a message thanking Tim Berners-Lee and other “internet pioneers” for making the world “more open and connected”. Nice sentiment: pity it’s utterly bogus. Yes, the web’s openness is what makes it special; it was designed to be a place where, without needing permission or lots of money, tech-savvy people could fashion whatever software they liked. That’s what enabled Zuckerberg, as a Harvard student, to launch his website and create an “empire of 1.7 billion subjects”. But now he’s “kicked away the ladder that elevated him”. In his digital world, no one…

HRT and breast cancer Undergoing hormone replacement therapy (HRT) may triple a woman’s chances of developing breast cancer, scientists have found. The study involving 39,000 women concluded that taking combined therapy – a mixture of oestrogen and progestogen – for five years increases the likelihood of breast cancer by a factor of 2.7, rising to 3.3 after 15 years. However, the other form of HRT, which only has oestrogen, does not appear to be associated with any raised risk. Studies have shown a link between HRT and breast cancer before, but according to Professor Anthony Swerdlow, of the Institute of Cancer Research, his findings indicate that the risks are “larger than most of the literature would suggest”. An estimated one in ten British women in their 50s are on HRT;…

The NHS is facing “the worst financial crisis in its history”, said Laura Donnelly in The Daily Telegraph. Last year it recorded a deficit of £2.45bn, and senior NHS managers in England have been ordered to draw up lists of services that could be cut to plug this “growing financial black hole”. The result is likely to be a “glut” of closures, with smaller Accident and Emergency units, and services for the elderly, stripped out and centralised. Officials have kept these “sustainability and transformation plans” (STPs) closely guarded, said Heather Stewart and Diane Taylor in The Guardian. Yet leaks show the scale of the cost-cutting envisaged. The STP for Leicestershire and Rutland would reduce the number of acute hospitals from three to two; in the Black Country, one district general…

Science offers us total mastery over our environment and over our destiny, yet instead of rejoicing we feel deeply afraid.” Anthropologist Edmund Leach, quoted in The Observer “If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man.” Mark Twain, quoted in the International Business Times “If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the person who has so much as to be out of danger?” T.H. Huxley, quoted on The Browser “Postponement: the sincerest form of rejection.” Robert Half, quoted on Forbes.com “I foresee all sorts of unforeseen problems.” Sir Humphrey from Yes Minister, quoted in The Daily Telegraph “To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.” Historian Will Durant,…

To The Times Reducing the number of genuine international students coming to the UK for periods of study will damage the British economy. International (non-EU) students make a £7bn contribution to the UK economy, generating 137,000 jobs across the UK. They also enrich our campuses and the experience of UK students, both academically and culturally. Many return home having forged strong professional and personal links that provide long-term benefits for the UK. Our higher education sector is one of the UK’s major success stories; we have the second-largest share of the global market, behind the US. Moreover, polling has shown that the British public do not see international students as long-term migrants, but as valuable, temporary visitors. International students come to the UK, study for a period, and then the…

Theatre They Drink It in the Congo Playwright: Adam Brace Director: Michael Longhurst Almeida, London N1 (020-7359 4404) Until 1 October Running time: 2hrs 40mins (including interval) Adam Brace’s dense, witty and “sharp-toothed” satire about white guilt and Africa “begins with a provocation, warning, apology and knowing wink, all rolled into one”, said Chris Bennion in The Daily Telegraph. “White words from black mouths,” complains a Congolese character called Anne-Marie. “That’s what this event is. And it has no value.” She isn’t talking about They Drink It in the Congo; she’s referring to the fictional London festival of Congolese culture organised by Stef (Fiona Button), a young, white Cambridge graduate, which drives the plot of Brace’s play. What value then, one is led to ask, has a drama “written by…

Best books… Tessa Hadley The award-winning novelist and short-story writer Tessa Hadley selects her five favourite books. Her latest novel, The Past, is available from Vintage at £8.99 The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen, 1929 (Vintage £8.99). The story takes place among the Anglo-Irish gentry in 1920. I read it first when I was a teenager and didn’t know anything about Irish history and politics; I loved it because every sentence was so perceptive and exciting. And it’s fabulously funny about class. Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland by Roy Foster, 2014 (Penguin £10.99). While I was revisiting Bowen’s novel recently, I was also reading Foster’s fascinating history of the generation of passionate and idealistic young Irish men and women who were behind the Easter Rising of April 1916.…

Olive oil ice cream Serves 4-6 200ml whole milk 140g golden caster sugar 100ml double cream 5 large egg yolks 160ml fruity olive oil an ice-cream maker (optional) • Place the milk, sugar and cream in a pan and slowly bring it to the boil. Make sure the sugar has dissolved. Remove from the heat and set it aside to cool. Whisk the egg yolks in a bowl with a balloon whisk. • When the milk and cream mixture is cool, add the egg yolks, a little at a time, to the pan over a low heat. You are aiming to create a custard. When the egg and milk mixture has thickened enough to coat the back of a spoon, remove it from the heat. • Add the olive oil…

Sir Antony Jay 1930-2016 Sir Antony Jay, who has died aged 86, was one of the two writers behind Yes Minister – the brilliantly incisive political comedy that, in the Thatcher era, “exposed the workings of Whitehall to a public not previously encouraged to consider such matters”. At the show’s heart, said Jenny McCartney in The Daily Telegraph, are two men – Jim Hacker, the guileless, perpetually alarmed minister for administrative affairs, played by Paul Eddington, and Sir Humphrey Appleby (Nigel Hawthorne), the devious permanent secretary who, with “sinuous logic and droll cynicism”, preserves bureaucratic control “at the expense of Hacker’s livelier ambitions”. Running for a total of just 38 episodes, from 1980, Yes Minister and its successor, Yes, Prime Minister, came to be regarded as essential viewing, not least…

The fraying of transatlantic unity Tony Barber Financial Times The ambitious Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) was in trouble long before the German deputy chancellor and the French trade minister dismissed the talks as a “failure” this week, says Tony Barber. Last October, the European Parliament noted that two years of talks had yielded little in terms of “tackling difficult issues”. More recently, the Brexit vote removed the EU’s most consistent supporter of TTIP from the equation, while this US presidential election has been notable for its “relentless denunciation” of trade deals. “On either side of the Atlantic, the siren songs of economic protectionism, nativism and populism are tempting politicians and voters.” TTIP is merely the latest casualty. But, as the dispute over Apple (see page 45) indicates, the…

In the summer of my 44th year, when everyone did the ice bucket challenge for ALS (or motor neurone disease), I did not participate. I took note of these Facebook activities, but I was never tagged by my friends to participate. I thought about doing the ice bucket challenge on my own, but I got caught up in the specific detail of whether a middle-aged man should have his shirt on or off during an internet display of virtue. And so nothing happened. Some time after that, in the autumn, I began to notice a hitch in my left leg when I walked or stood for too long. The knee would give out periodically. My leg was otherwise normal, it was strong, it didn’t hurt. I’m a doctor and so…

It’s not much of a scandal as scandals go, said Dominic Sandbrook in the Daily Mail. Last month Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn had himself filmed sitting on the corridor floor of a Virgin train. The 11am from King’s Cross to Newcastle was so “ram-packed”, he told the cameraman, that he couldn’t get a seat – a problem, he added, that commuters face every day. But this, it turns out, was a lie. Days later, Virgin boss Richard Branson released CCTV footage showing there were, in fact, plenty of empty seats. It was a trivial lie, but then, trivial lies tell you a lot about a person. This one “demolished” Corbyn’s claim to be a new kind of politician, one who eschews spin of any kind. “Traingate”, as this mini-scandal has…

Wolfe on Trump At 85, the great American novelist Tom Wolfe has learnt to take a long view of his country’s politics, says Peter York in The Sunday Times. He doesn’t buy for one moment Donald Trump’s claims that America needs to be made great again. “I think America is much underestimated. People have so much fun saying we’re going to hell. That’s an intellectual stance. When you think about it, just in terms of brute power, there’s no question that the United States is still at the top of the great wrestling match.” On the other hand, Wolfe is not especially unnerved by the prospect of a President Trump. “He’s not the first top-ranking politician who has no experience. If you think about Ronald Reagan, who started off as…

A Norwegian man had to be rescued from inside a public toilet, after crawling into it in search of his friend’s dropped mobile phone. The 20-year-old slipped down through the seat, and got into the tank beneath easily enough. But it seems he may not have realised that the outdoor lavatory was not attached to the sewage network, and that its tank was emptied only once a year. Thus he found himself thigh-deep in faeces, in a small, dark, animal-infested space – and unable to get out again. To make matters worse, he then vomited. He was stuck for an hour before firemen called by his friends smashed the plastic loo and dragged him out – without the phone. “It was pretty full down there,” they confirmed. A teenager who…

The Getty family has had its share of bad luck – including kidnappings, drugs and divorce – but Balthazar Getty is bucking the trend. The 41-year-old scion of the oil dynasty, interviewed in The Sunday Times last week, described a life of untroubled luxury in LA. “Some people are gonna hate me for this, but I never wake up before 11,” he confessed. “I have the same breakfast every day, brought to me in bed by the maid.” After porridge and a boiled egg, he goes for a cycle ride. “Then it’s an hour on the treadmill and a shower. It might sound silly, but I’ve got a six-stage procedure for my face, with toners, exfoliators, moisturisers and serums.” Yet he still finds time to throw parties – “and I’m…

Amatrice, in the mountains northeast of Rome, is the birthplace of all’amatriciana spaghetti; and last week, it was full of visitors preparing to celebrate an annual festival dedicated to the dish. Now, the ancient hilltop town – close to the epicentre of the 6.2-magnitude earthquake that struck central Italy in the early hours of last Wednesday – lies in ruins. Some 80% of the buildings in its old centre were reduced to rubble by the quake and its aftershocks; and many of those still standing are so weakened, they will have to be pulled down. More than 2,000 of the town’s residents, and those of surrounding villages, are now living in tents; and as rescue workers continued their grim task over the weekend, picking their way through streets that resembled…

Football: Premier League clubs splash the cash The Premier League is no longer divided between “haves and have nots”, said Paul Wilson in The Guardian. This year, all 20 clubs have “loot lying around in piles”. And they have spent it in extraordinary sums: for the fourth summer in a row, they have broken the record on spending during the transfer window. By the time the window closed, on Wednesday, they were expected to have forked out more than £1bn. As usual, the biggest clubs spent the biggest money: Manchester United and Manchester City each parted with some £150m. But even relative minnows have become big spenders: Crystal Palace, who finished 15th last season, bought Christian Benteke for £27m; Watford (13th last season) spent more than £50m. This was the…

Julieta Dir: Pedro Almodóvar 1hr 38mins (15) A melancholy melodrama “Love, loss, melodrama and a dash of camp”: this “slick, stylish” film, based on three short stories by Alice Munro, has the emotional blend we’ve come to associate with Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar, said Anna Smith in Empire. Told mainly in flashback, Julieta is the tale of an elegant middle-aged woman (Emma Suárez) recalling the events that led her, many years earlier, to become estranged from her daughter. It begins with a chance encounter on a train between her free-spirited 25-year-old self (Adriana Ugarte) and a hunky fisherman (Daniel Grao), said Libby Purves in the Daily Mail, their ecstatic coupling artfully reflected in the train window. It’s a bravura Almodóvar moment, which marks the start of an “exquisite”, if rather…

New cars: what the critics say Auto Express You can’t criticise the C-Class for “a lack of variety”. Mercedes’s range of compact executive cars already includes a saloon, an estate and a coupé, with engines “from the pedestrian to the crazy”. And now, “in the interest of filling every niche”, Mercedes has brought out a convertible. As with its siblings, there’s a choice of diesel, petrol and AMG engines, with the diesels expected to sell best. Daily Express This drop-top has a “serious no-nonsense style”: like the rest of the cars in the C-Class range, its impact is “understated yet purposeful”. The cabin has a premium feel, with a classy dashboard, though when the roof’s up it can feel a bit dark and cramped. But at least the roof comes…

Donald A. Henderson 1928-2016 One of the world’s most lethal diseases, it ravaged human populations for millennia, and killed an estimated 300 million people in the 20th century alone. Yet now, smallpox is largely forgotten – and for that, much of the credit must go to the American epidemiologist Donald A. Henderson, said The New York Times. In 1966, aged 38, he was appointed to lead a World Health Organisation campaign to wipe out the virus. At the time, it seemed a hopeless task: indeed, Henderson used to say that he was only given the job so that when the programme failed, the US – which had pushed for it – could be blamed. If so, the WHO chose the wrong man, said The Economist. Brawny and brimming with zeal,…

Eddie Lampert The billionaire investor Eddie Lampert was once hailed as “the next Warren Buffett”, says Kevin Allison on Reuters Breakingviews. A devotee of Ayn Rand, the hedge fund star “parlayed $28m of seed corn” into a spot on the Forbes rich list by “making savvy bets on undervalued companies”. But Lampert has an Achilles’ Heel: a decade-long obsession with the struggling retailer Sears that increasingly “resembles Captain Ahab’s with Moby Dick”. Lampert’s mission to revive the iconic US retailer has become an increasingly “forlorn” and expensive pursuit: Sears shares have lost 90% of their value since 2007. Yet still he hangs on. Extending another $300m loan to the retailer last week is proof that he “just doesn’t seem able to let go of the harpoon”. The founder of Megaupload,…

● Marvellous motors The classic car market “is really motoring”, said Hugo Greenhalgh in the FT. Values have enjoyed “a steep recovery” over the past three years, according to the latest HAGI classic car price index. The best-performing marques – Mercedes-Benz, Ferrari and Porsche – are up by 85%, 65% and 60% respectively. By comparison, the FTSE 100 fell by nearly 3% during the period; while wine, “a useful comparator for alternative assets”, fell by almost 2%. “Scarcity value” is what drives investors. A winning combination of “rarity and racetrack pedigree” saw a 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO sell for a record-breaking $38.1m in 2014. Bear that in mind when looking for the classics of the future, advises HAGI’s Dietrich Hatlapa. He tips the 2014 Porsche 918 Spyder: just 918 models…

THE WEEK CROSSWORD 1020 An Ettinger coin purse and two Connell Guides will be given to the sender of the first correct solution to the crossword and the clue of the week opened on Monday 12 September. Send it to: The Week Crossword 1020, 2nd floor, 32 Queensway, London W2 3RX, or email the answers to crossword@theweek.co.uk. Set by Tim Moorey (www.timmoorey.info) ACROSS 9 Suspect insured covers mother and nanny (9) 10 Bats bowl for kids (5) 11 Love helping with address (7) 12 Leading European attached to another European briefly? That’s appropriate (7) 13 Part of a crop regularly seen in Le Havre (3) 14 Devil, say about right in show (11) 17 Divine substance in a way, one’s heard (5) 18 Yours truly in Tunisia with former African…