Innholdsfortegnelse for V. 1209 i The Week

What happened Deal or “no deal” The Brexit battle resumed this week when MPs opposed to a no-deal exit, including several Tory rebels, inflicted a Commons defeat on Theresa May – the first defeat in the Commons on a finance bill in 40 years. The MPs approved a Labour amendment to the finance bill that would, in the event of a no-deal outcome, limit the Treasury’s ability to make tax changes to mitigate the costs of it. The move came at the start of five more days of debate on May’s Brexit deal, which is set to be put to a crucial Commons vote on Tuesday. This is the “meaningful vote” that the PM postponed in December after conceding she had no chance of winning. Few expect May to have…

Vegans, with the launch of a plant-based McDonald’s Happy Meal (marketed as vegetarian as it may contain traces of milk); a vegan Greggs sausage roll; and, at Waitrose, fishless fingers, made from breaded seaweed tofu. Sainsbury’s is soon to launch vegan “smoked salmon” flavoured with konjac powder. Booksellers, after the UK book market experienced its fourth consecutive year of growth. According to Nielsen BookScan, sales of print books grew 2.1% in value last year and 0.3% in volume. Michelle Obama’s memoir, Becoming, was the most valuable book of the year, taking £7.7m in sales; the bestselling non-fiction title was Adam Kay’s memoir about life as a junior doctor, This is Going to Hurt, while the overall bestseller was Gail Honeyman’s debut novel Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine.…

At least 115 MPs have called on the Metropolitan Police to do more to stop MPs and others being abused and harassed outside Parliament. In the most recent incident, pro-Brexit protesters shouted at Anna Soubry– calling the MP a “Nazi” – as she gave a live TV interview outside Parliament, then followed her shouting “scum” as she walked back inside. She criticised the police for not intervening and said the protesters should be prosecuted. The cross-party group of MPs who signed the letter said such concerns had been repeatedly raised with senior officers.…

Washington DC Trump’s crisis: Donald Trump has used his first televised address to the nation to warn of a “humanitarian crisis” on the Mexican border, and blame the Democrats for the partial government shutdown that has left hundreds of thousands of government workers without pay. The shutdown began in December after Congress failed to approve Trump’s budget, because of a row over the allocation of $5.7bn to build his steel barrier along the Mexican border. In a speech carried on all the major networks, the president said that 90% of heroin in the US comes via Mexico (though experts say most of it is smuggled through legal entry points), and spoke of US citizens who have been “savagely murdered” by undocumented migrants. However, he stopped short of declaring the emergency…

“I visited a Greggs franchise on the day it launched its £1 vegan sausage roll. Bafflingly, some people seem incensed that this product – which tasted exactly how I remember sausage rolls tasted when I stopped eating meat three decades ago – exists. Yet as veganism grows and McDonald’s offers vegetarian Happy Meals, the shoutiest dissenters are sniffing the wind. Gordon Ramsay, so enraged by meat avoiders he once said that if his children ever went vegetarian he would electrocute them, now offers a Veganuary menu to ‘replenish your body’. Amusing how stringent views can mellow when there’s cash to be made.” Carol Midgley in The Times…

A revolutionary “breathalyser” for cancer is being trialled for the first time. Researchers from Cancer Research UK will gather samples of breath from 1,500 people to look for early indicators of various forms of cancer in odorous molecules called volatile organic compounds. If the non-invasive Breath Biopsy proves effective, it would lead to far earlier diagnoses of many forms of cancer, potentially saving thousands of lives. Almost half of cancers are diagnosed at a late stage in England, which is one of the main reasons why – for instance – only 12% of patients with oesophageal cancer survive as long as ten years after diagnosis. The two-year trial at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge will start with patients with suspected oesophageal and stomach cancers, and later extend to those with prostate,…

An acclaimed French writer has been ridiculed for declaring that he could not love a woman his own age. “Mais non! That’s not possible!” said Yann Moix, 50. “I am incapable of loving a woman of 50. I prefer younger women’s bodies... The body of a 25-year-old woman is extraordinary. The body of a woman of 50 is not extraordinary at all.” In the Marie Claire interview, Moix (below) did concede that once he was 60, he might date a woman of 50, but it was not enough to stave off the inevitable backlash. On Instagram, Colombe Schneck, a 52-year-old writer, posted a picture of her bottom with the message: “Voilà, the buttocks of a woman aged 52… what an imbecile you are, you don’t know what you’re missing, you…

Sports fans have plenty to look forward to in 2019, said Simon Burnton in The Guardian. The Cricket World Cup will begin in May; the rugby version starts four months later. But why wait that long, when in the coming month, “alternative events abound like so much January snowfall”? First up are two unusual competitions that began this week. There’s the World Men’s Handball Championship, co-hosted by Germany and Denmark. And there’s the IceSnowFootball World Cup, in the Swiss town of Arosa. Featuring four teams – former England defender Danny Mills is playing for Sports-millions Global United All-Stars – it’s basically football, played on an Alpine ice rink covered in snow. But the real action comes in a fortnight, when the World Ice Fishing Championship begins in Bulgaria. Contestants must…

To the Financial Times Is it not high time to put the blame for the chaos in British politics where it truly belongs, on the framers of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act of 2011? Prior to that ill-considered and half-baked measure, a prime minister could stipulate that any measure before the House of Commons was a matter of confidence, with the automatic consequence that if it was lost, the prime minister must either resign, leaving it to the sovereign to find another person commanding a majority in the Commons, or – if he or she so chose – advise a dissolution of Parliament leading automatically to an immediate election. This mechanism broke all deadlocks, either by inducing a majority to pass the measure in question (MPs dread elections) or by installing…

My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite Atlantic Books 240pp £12.99 The Week Bookshop £10.99 From its title alone, you’d expect the debut from Oyinkan Braithwaite to be yet another “pulpy slasher story”, said Jon Michaud in The Washington Post. It proves, however, to be an affecting study of sexism, abuse and family dynamics. The narrator, Korede, is a “dutiful” hospital nurse in Lagos whose more glamorous younger sister, Ayoola, has an “unfortunate habit of killing her boyfriends” – always claiming afterwards to have acted in “self-defence”. In the novel’s bravura opening scene, Korede is summoned to her sister’s flat, where she spends three hours scrubbing the remains of her latest victim from the walls. Ayoola’s murderous tendencies soon intrude still further on her sister, said Carrie O’Grady in…

For years, curators at the Uffizi Galleries in Florence have tried in vain to retrieve from Germany an 18th century painting looted by Nazi soldiers during the Second World War, says Nick Squires in The Daily Telegraph. Vase of Flowers by the Dutch artist Jan van Huysum was stolen in 1944, and only resurfaced in 1991; it is now owned by a German family who have refused requests for it to be returned. Instead, the family has only offered to sell it back, and the German authorities have said that a statute of limitations on crimes committed more than 30 years ago prevents them from intervening. But last week the Uffizi’s German director, Eike Schmidt, raised the profile of the case – by hanging a photograph of the painting in…

Programmes Cold Feet James Nesbitt and Co. are back for another six-part series about the close-knit group of friends, now navigating their 50s. Mon 14 Jan, ITV1 21:00 (60mins). Prison A new extended episode of Paddy Wivell’s acclaimed documentary series, filmed over several months at HMP Durham. Mon 14 Jan, C4 21:00 (75mins). Is This Sexual Harassment? To find out what is regarded as inappropriate behaviour at work, journalist Ben Zand brings together 20 people aged 18-30 to see how they respond to a drama that ends with an accusation of sexual harassment. At each stage, the group is asked to vote on the behaviour exhibited. Tue 15 Jan, BBC1 22:45 (60mins). Revolution In Ruins: The Hugo Chávez Story Documentary about Chávez’s 14-year presidency of Venezuela. Wed 16 Jan, BBC2…

Tips of the week… male spa etiquette A guide by spa enthusiast David Baddiel ● Take the disposable paper pants. No pants may be the more comfortable option, but arranging a towel over yourself while lying face down is trickier than it looks. ● Position your face correctly in the massage table hole. This gets much more difficult once the massage has started, and wriggling around can be misinterpreted. ● Don’t empty bucketloads of water onto the sauna coals and let out a primordial roar. If you want more heat, ask you peers if they’re on board, and use the little ladle. ● Steer clear of earwax candling. It feels “as though you’re very slowly and painfully descending in an aeroplane”. ● If you’re staying at a spa hotel, don't…

One-of-a-kind design in France L’Arlatan Arles, France Created by Cuban-American artist Jorge Pardo, this eccentric 34-room hotel in the Provençal city of Arles is “utterly original”, says Claire Wrathall in the Financial Times. Housed in a listed 15th century building on the site of a Roman basilica, the hotel is a “hotchpotch”, with two courtyards. The floors are an extending seamless “tessellation” of multicoloured tiles in geometric patterns; the rooms are furnished in “sublimely comfortable” pieces, and there are paintings everywhere – on every door, wardrobe and minibar – by Pardo himself. The restaurant’s menu is “short, unpretentious, quintessentially French”, but what’s most surprising are the prices – this hotel “does not want to be exclusive”. It’s new, but it already feels like a classic. Doubles from s99. +33 4…

Big Tech: big angst Some 25 years after Jeff Bezos founded it in his garage, Amazon was named “the world’s most valuable public company” this week – the first time the e-commerce giant has taken the crown, said Margi Murphy in The Daily Telegraph. Amazon capped the market at $793bn, unseating Microsoft, as “bumper sales and its digital advertising and cloud services” led to predictions that shares could jump by as much as 20% this year. That was some succour for big tech investors as the battering taken by Apple, which cut sales forecasts for the first time since 2002, sent a new year chill through Wall Street; the “former stock darling” blamed a sharp economic slowdown in China. “Apple’s sales revision cascaded through global markets,” said Bloomberg. “Investors were…

Herb Kelleher “If you were aboard a Southwest Airlines flight in its early years, you might have bumped into a man dressed like Elvis,” says The Wall Street Journal. That would have been the airline’s co-founder, Herb Kelleher, who has died aged 87. A fun-loving, hard-drinking, chain-smoking former lawyer, Kelleher “never fit the mould of a corporate executive”. But his “achievements rank with the best of them”. Sometimes described as the father of no-frills air travel, he turned conventional industry wisdom on its head when he founded Southwest in 1967, by combining low airfares with high standards of customer service. He was the capitalist “who democratised the skies”. Warren Buffett once joked that “a far-sighted capitalist would have shot down Orville Wright at Kitty Hawk” to save future investors their…

“Half a century ago, when the first American set foot on the Moon, China was a slumbering dragon,” said Rhys Blakely in The Times. Its GDP per capita was $100 and it had yet to launch its first satellite. But on 3 January, China landed a probe on the far side of the Moon – a feat never before attempted – announcing itself “as a bona fide superpower in a new space race”. The landing of the Chang’e 4 probe was an impressive feat, but it wasn’t “technologically dazzling”, said the Financial Times. “Nasa could have done it many years ago had it wished to”; in fact, last week’s other big breakthrough in space – the fly-by of Ultima Thule, some four billion miles from Earth – was much more…

David Cameron, after it emerged that his character was axed from the final version of Channel 4’s drama Brexit: The Uncivil War, because its writer didn’t think he was interesting enough. James Graham said that by the time he finished his first draft of the script, he’d realised that the PM who called the referendum had already “slightly faded away into the distance”, and that the real “agent of change” was Dominic Cummings (see page 48). Commuters, who returned to work after Christmas to face another increase in rail fares. Regulated fares, which are capped at the Retail Price Index inflation rate for July, went up 3.1% on average this month. The overall cost of commuting by train has gone up 36% since 2010, according to an analysis by Labour.…

59% of paid-up Tory party members oppose Theresa May’s Brexit deal; 38% support it. In a three-way referendum, 57% would choose no deal, 23% would choose May’s deal and 15% would choose Remain. YouGov/The Times Three-quarters of French people are unhappy with the way President Macron is running the country. 55% think the “yellow vest” protests against his government should continue. 54% say their biggest political priority is higher earnings. Odoxa & Dentsu/Reuters 64% of British adults think university tuition fees of £9,250 provide poor value for money. 39% believe too many children in Britain go to university, while 14% think not enough do. YouGov/The Times…

The first responders On 4 March 2018, Salisbury was emerging from a cold snap that had put the local police under pressure. “Let’s have a relaxed day,” Sgt Tracey Holloway told her team when they came on duty. Just over an hour later, she and a colleague, PC Alex Collins, were called to a shopping centre where two people had been found slumped on a bench. “It only took us two minutes to get there,” says Collins. “The female was on her side. The male was in a very unusual position. He was sat on the bench, rigid, catatonic, staring into space. He was breathing but totally unresponsive. Our first thought was that it was drugs.” But Sergei and Yulia Skripal didn’t look like addicts: “They were quite well-dressed. There…

Womb rental: a racket for the rich Catherine Bennett The Observer Kim Kardashian is having another baby. Well she’s not actually “having” it herself. She and her husband, the rapper Kanye West, are paying another woman to give birth to it. “I’m totally gonna forget,” she explains. “Then a month before I’m gonna be like holy shit, we need to get a nursery.” Rent-a-womb is legal in the US, says Catherine Bennett, but should it be made legal over here? At present, surrogacy is only permissible in the UK on an altruistic basis: surrogate mothers can only be paid expenses. But the Law Commission – a panel of five men – is now reviewing surrogacy law, and rather than follow the example of Sweden, which has proposed banning surrogacy altogether,…

Is Kenya going to be the next country subjected to a creeping takeover by China? That’s what many Kenyans are anxiously wondering, said Nerima Wako-Ojiwa in The East African (Nairobi). As part of President Xi’s “One Belt One Road” initiative of international investment, Beijing is financing giant infrastructure projects there, including a new train link from the capital, Nairobi, to Mombasa. But reports that the government has put up one of Mombasa’s key ports itself as collateral for loans it may be unable to repay has caused public outcry. It could result in the port being owned and run by Beijing. That’s just what happened two years ago in Sri Lanka: to settle unpaid debts, its government had to lease the seaport of Hambantota to a Chinese company for 99…

Teenagers who spend hours a day on social media are at an increased risk of suffering from poor sleep and symptoms of depression, a new study has found, with girls appearing to be particularly badly affected. The study, based on interviews with almost 11,000 14-year-olds, found that 38% of girls who spend five hours a day or more on social media show symptoms of depression, compared with 18% of girls who are on social media for one to three hours. Among boys, 14% of the heaviest social media users suffer from depression, compared with 7% of the lighter users. The study, conducted at University College London and published in the journal EClinicalMedicine, also found that girls tend to spend more time on social media: two-fifths are on it for at…

“When you don’t have any money, the problem is food. When you have money, it’s sex. When you have both, it’s health.” J.P. Donleavy, quoted in The Times “I wait every year for summer, and it is usually good, but it is never as good as that summer I am always waiting for.” Martha Gellhorn, quoted in the LA Times “What you can imagine depends on what you know.” Daniel Dennett, quoted on The Browser “All tip and no iceberg.” Australian politician Paul Keating of a political opponent, quoted in the London Evening Standard “Never lose a chance of saying a kind word.” William Makepeace Thackeray, quoted in The Oldie “Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.”…

Cricket India drew the fourth Test against Australia, winning the series 2-1, their first ever series victory in Australia. Rugby union Wasps ended their five-match losing streak by beating Northampton 27-16. Leicester beat Gloucester 34-16. Exeter beat Bristol 14-9. Football Chelsea signed Christian Pulisic, a 20-year-old American winger, from Borussia Dortmund for £58m. He will remain at the German club on loan for the rest of the season. Liverpool striker Dominic Solanke joined Bournemouth for £19m.…

It’s that time when earnest resolutions are made to reduce alcohol consumption for at least part of the New Year, if not far beyond it. It’s very admirable, and I suppose should be encouraged in some cases, though I think it would be wiser instead to resolve to drink wine of better quality. Equally important is to diversify one’s selection of wine, otherwise you become stuck into simply repeating predictable wines year in and year out. How much more interesting to try wines from an entirely new region or country, such as Austria’s Grüner Veltliner. Corney & Barrow have always been happy to extend their range from classic Bordeaux and Burgundy – I must have first drunk the excellent Achaval-Ferrer Malbecs from Argentina more than a decade ago. Of course,…

Best books… Fiona Sampson The prizewinning poet and writer picks her five favourite books. Her acclaimed biography, In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein, is published in paperback by Profile Books at £9.99 A Life of Picasso by John Richardson: Vols 1-3, 1991-2007 (Pimlico £30 each). Crammed with information and yet so elegantly written you don’t want to put it down, this is a mighty work of biography. I’m enthralled both by the ambition of Richardson’s enterprise and by the figure of Picasso as an artist: protean, ceaselessly productive and ultimately a mirror of the 20th century itself. Things I Don’t Want to Know by Deborah Levy, 2013 (Penguin £7.99). This first volume of Deborah Levy’s autobiography is deeply thoughtful, but also searingly honest. At its heart…

This recipe is so simple, it takes only ten minutes to get it ready for the oven, say England rugby star James Haskell and sports chef Omar Meziane. It is perfect eaten as a post-training snack – and delicious at any time! Banana bread with pumpkin & sunflower seeds 3 very ripe bananas 2 tbsps Meridian pumpkin seed butter (or similar) 2 tbsps Meridian sunflower seed butter 100g caster sugar 1 tsp vanilla extract 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda ½ tsp baking powder 1 egg 200g plain flour 1 tbsp pumpkin seeds 1 tbsp sunflower seeds • Preheat your oven to 180°C. Place the bananas in a large bowl and mash with a fork. Add the pumpkin seed and sunflower seed butters and mix. Next, add the sugar, vanilla, bicarbonate…

The Daily Telegraph The hype surrounding the launch of the Kia e-Niro – there have been reports of 42-week waiting lists – has been “astonishing”. Is it worth the fuss? In short, yes. Although Kia had to lower the electric SUV’s original estimated range from 301 miles to 282, it will still be one of the first truly practical, approachable and reasonably priced EVs. This is now “the best electric car on the market”. Autocar The e-Niro doesn’t “redefine the EV proposition” in any one way; it’s best regarded as a “Goldilocks option” in terms of range and price (at £32,995 after a £3,500 grant). Its 451-litre boot is bigger than a Nissan Qashqai’s, and the car is spacious despite the 64kWh battery under it. The familiarity of the “safe”…

Lord Ashdown 1941-2018 Paddy Ashdown, who died last month aged 77, was “perhaps the least likely leader the Liberal strand of British politics has ever had”, said Stephen Bates in The Guardian. A square-jawed former captain in the Royal Marines, with “eyes narrowed as if constantly scanning the horizon” for enemy combatants, he looked like a member of a “more militant party than the one he actually led”. But though regarded as uncollegiate by colleagues, and as a poor orator, he managed – through drive and “ruthless ambition” – to turn the Liberal Democrats from what he described as “a funny little herbivorous think tank on the edges of British politics” into a powerful third force. Born in New Delhi in 1941, Jeremy John Durham Ashdown was the son of…

It was a dramatic new year for stock markets, which sold off globally amid fears of a bruising economic slowdown exacerbated by trade tensions. US and Chinese negotiators met for talks under mounting pressure to reach a deal by early March to avoid an escalation in tariffs. In Britain, where business remained fixated by another March deadline, the Institute of Directors reported that confidence is at its lowest since the 2016 referendum result. The Confederation of British Industry said that companies in “despair” over Brexit have diverted hundreds of millions of pounds in investment outside the UK. Jim Yong Kim, the World Bank governor, announced that he will step down in February, three-and-a-half years before the expiry of his term. No reason was given, and the move “sent shockwaves” through…

Helium If marijuana was the hot commodity of 2018, helium could shape up nicely in 2019, says Dominic Frisby on MoneyWeek.com. “This strategically important gas has a multitude of uses beyond balloons, most of them in tech.” Demand is rising, and within two years, US national reserves will be fully liquidated. “Cue the rush to find more.” Bitcoin et al After crashing so spectacularly in 2018, could crypto currencies make a comeback? Some argue we are still in the “trough of disillusionment” phase of the hype cycle. Others, including Samuel Leach of Yield Coin, are betting on an exciting year of “real cryptocurrency growth”. That said, he reckons bitcoin, per se, has had it. “Bitcoin in my eyes is more like the grandad. You see others come up like Ripple,…

Who’s tipping what 3i Group The Times The private equity group offers “reassuringly diverse exposure, geographically and by business sector”, investing in both unlisted and quoted firms. “Serious gems” include Dutch discount retailer Action. Yields 4.5%. 773p. Bunzl The Sunday Telegraph “Boring is sometimes best” in uncertain times. Bunzl supplies food packaging, cleaning products and equipment to industries from groceries to healthcare. Conservatively run, with slow and steady returns. £23.51. Cineworld Group The Sunday Times Cinema operators tend to perform well in economic downturns, and Cineworld is in prime position to benefit from 2019’s potentially record-breaking releases, including films from the Star Wars, Spider-Man and Frozen franchises. 254.2p. Diageo The Times With Guinness and Johnnie Walker among its 200 brands, Britain’s flagship drinks group offers “stable, solid and affordable growth”.…

Dominic Cummings, who was director of Vote Leave, is widely regarded as one of the key players in the success of the campaign to leave the EU. He is credited with coining the phrase “take back control”, and with plastering the explosively controversial words, “We send the EU £350m a week, let’s fund our NHS instead” on the side of the campaign’s battle bus. Tim Shipman, whose Brexit history All Out War was a source for Channel 4’s film, has argued that he was the referendum’s outstanding strategist: a brilliant and “dictatorial” leader, who “takes no prisoners, gets stuck in... and focuses relentlessly on the goal in hand”. Outspoken and mercurial, Cummings has followed a career path quite unlike anyone else in British politics. After a stint in Russia in…

The amount of time Britons spend on landline phone calls has halved in the past six years alone as people have embraced new ways of communicating. According to Ofcom, the number of landline minutes tumbled from 103 billion in 2012 to 54 billion in 2017. In that time, mobile minutes increased slightly, from 132 billion to 148 billion, while mobile data usage leapt from 0.2GB a month per person to 2GB. Revenue from sales of CDs, DVDs and video games (installed from a disc) fell again last year; they were down 11%, or £234m, as retailers struggled to compete with Spotify and Netflix. HMV, the sector’s biggest seller, had such a bad Christmas it went into administration on 28 December (see page 41).…

The Government has delayed a Commons vote to approve the roll-out of the controversial universal credit scheme to a further three million people. Instead, Amber Rudd, the Work and Pensions Secretary, says she will only ask MPs to approve a pilot scheme in which 10,000 welfare claimants are transferred to the new system. Only once the impact of the pilot has been assessed will MPs be asked to vote for the full roll-out. More than a million people are already on universal credit, which merges six benefits into one; charities have warned that it has left many claimants destitute.…

Berlin Data breach arrest: A 20-year-old man has confessed to committing one of Germany’s biggest ever data breaches, affecting some 1,000 public figures. The police said the suspect is not an IT expert, and that he’d managed to access sensitive data, including email addresses and family photographs, on hundreds of politicians, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, as well as journalists and celebrities, by exploiting security weaknesses – including the widespread use of easily guessed passwords such as “1234” and “Iloveyou”. The fact that politicians from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) were the only ones not targeted by the attack had raised speculation that it might be politically motivated, but the suspect, a student who lives with his parents in the Hesse region, denied this: he told police he was just…

This week’s edition of Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs featured artist Jeremy Deller 1 Block Buster! by Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman, performed by The Sweet 2 In My Room by Brian Wilson and Gary Usher, performed by The Beach Boys 3* Out of the Blue by Bryan Ferry and Phil Manzanera, performed by Roxy Music 4 Last Train to Trancentral by Jimmy Cauty, Bill Drummond and Ricardo Lyte, performed by The KLF 5 Fisherman by Cedric Myton, Roydel Johnson and Lee Perry, performed by The Congos 6 Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen, performed by Melodians Steel Orchestra 7 We Shall Overcome by Zilphia Horton, Frank Hamilton and Guy Carawan, performed by The Freedom Singers 8 Red Headed Stranger by Edith Elliott Lindeman…

Police in Western Australia rushed to a home in Perth last week, where a concerned passer-by had heard a toddler screaming and a man repeatedly shouting: “Why don’t you die?” They arrived to discover that a local man, Rhys Howard, had been attempting to kill a spider with a nappy. Officers on the scene reported: “Police spoke with all parties who advised that husband had only been trying to kill a spider (has serious fear of spiders). Apologised for inconvenience to police. No injuries sighted (except to spider).” The RSPCA has listed its 20 most surprising rescues of 2018. They include a dog trapped in a TV cabinet; a squirrel found stuck in a toilet in London; a hamster rescued from a narrow pipe using a tiny handcrafted ladder; a…

The “snowman” in space For Nasa, 2019 got off to a flying start, with confirmation, on New Year’s Day, that it had successfully coordinated the most distant space fly-by in history. Hours earlier, its New Horizons probe had passed by a small icy world four billion miles from Earth. Ultima Thule (a Greco-Latin term for “a place beyond the known world”) lies in the Kuiper belt, a ring of dwarf planets, ice and debris on the fringes of our solar system, a billion miles beyond Pluto. Hurtling passed it at 32,000mph, the New Horizons probe collected reams of data and took thousands of photographs, which it has beamed back to mission control. One of the first relayed images reveals Ultima to be about 21 miles long and ten miles wide…

Sajid Javid: floundering in the Channel? “It has already been a 2019 to forget for Sajid Javid,” said Dan Hodges in The Mail on Sunday. Not only has the Home Secretary been accused of referring to himself in the third person in meetings as “The Saj”; he also stands condemned of “manufacturing, then mismanaging, his very own migration crisis”. A recent increase in migrants seeking to smuggle themselves into Britain by crossing the Channel on flimsy boats led Javid to cut short a family holiday after Christmas and declare a “major incident”. He redeployed two patrol boats from the Mediterranean and called in help from the Navy. Javid has since come under fire from all sides, with critics accusing him of either failing to come up with proper solutions, or…

The FA Cup: a third round to savour “The magic of the FA Cup is alive and well,” said Stuart James in The Guardian. Throughout the competition’s 148-year history, upsets have always provided the greatest moments. In the third round, last weekend, there were giant-killings to savour. Newport County, a League Two team, secured a stunning 2-1 victory over Leicester, a club 74 places above them on the league ladder; another League Two side, Oldham, beat Premier League club Fulham 2-1. Even further down the pecking order, Barnet – a non-league team – progressed to the next round with a 1-0 win over Sheffield United, who sit third in the Championship. It was, in short, a classic third round. For Oldham, “the fairy tale was complete” even before kick-off, said…

More council houses To The Daily Telegraph Robert Colvile overlooks the real reason why our housing market has turned into a disaster for all too many people who simply want somewhere they can call home. Private housebuilders have never built more than 200,000 homes a year – indeed, the average since the War is about 150,000. The gap between what the market could do and what the country needed was filled by local authorities. When councils were stopped from building homes, nothing filled the gap and house prices rose exponentially. The golden rule of supply and demand asserted itself with vigour. Add Gordon Brown’s decision to remove tax breaks for owner-occupiers but leave them in place for private landlords, and we can see why many people are forced to pay…

Francisco Rodriguez at Cooke Latham Gallery  Comic strips don’t get much of a look-in when it comes to contemporary art. Although a handful of artists have found acclaim working in the form – the haywire American cartoonist Robert Crumb being the most obvious – it remains the preserve of a supposedly lower tier of culture. The Chilean Francisco Rodriguez doesn’t seem overly concerned by this snootiness – indeed, this exhibition, titled The Burning Plain, looks almost as if it could have been ripped straight from the pages of a particularly sinister Tintin title, the 40 small paintings it contains presented like panels in a graphic novel. The series contains a number of recurring motifs: images of jagged wire fences defended by guard dogs, shadowy figures dangling cigarettes from their…

Ben makes a replacement bottom for The Canterbury Tales. Brian surprises Jennifer on Christmas Day with news that he’s booked a table at La Femme du Monde for lunch. Christmas at Brookfield is awkward. Josh insists on calling Russ “Mr Jones” and pokes fun at him. Elizabeth, Lily and Russ leave early. The next day, Pip apologises to Lily for Josh’s behaviour. Lily’s angry, but then cries as she talks about how much she misses Freddie. Brian and Jennifer move out of Home Farm and into Willow Cottage. The Tales dress rehearsal is a mess and Ruth forgets her lines. On the actual night the show is a triumph and Peggy makes a surprise appearance as a magician. Tom and Natasha return from a blissful time in Wales. On New…

I’m not one for completely cutting out booze in January, says Fiona Beckett in The Guardian. Why make a miserable month even more dismal? But I do try to have only a single drink – just before bedtime, so I’m not tempted to have another. January is the perfect month for a whisky nightcap: I’m keen on Crabbie’s 46% non-chill filtered cask-strength eight-year-old (£29.95; The Whisky Exchange). It has “appealing notes of apple, pear and mango, with a touch of orange peel”. For a classic whisky mac, mix the Scotch 50:50 with ginger wine and top with boiling water. I also like ginger liqueurs such as The King’s Ginger (£23; Waitrose). If you’re lucky, you might find a bottle of Aldi’s The Infusionist gingerbread-flavoured gin liqueur (£9.99), which is “delicately…

BT Video Baby Monitor 6000 This video monitor has great sound quality, battery life and signal coverage throughout the house. It’s easy to set up, has a 5in colour screen, and you can tilt, pan and zoom the camera remotely (£100; argos.co.uk). My Babiie changing unit Great where space is limited, this changing table has a baby bath hidden under the changing mat (at a good height to stop you getting backache at bath time). There’s a drainage tube, and storage all around (£81; preciouslittleone.com). Sleepyhead Deluxe+ This snug baby pod is easy to move around, enabling you to make your baby comfortable anywhere. Made of breathable, hypoallergenic material, it comes in sizes for 0-8 months or 9-36 months, and you can add a mobile arch for an extra £18…

June Whitfield 1925-2018 One of Britain’s best-loved comic actors, June Whitfield was also one of its busiest, said The Daily Telegraph. For seven decades, she was rarely out of work and was still acting in her 90s. In the 1970s, she starred in the archetypal suburban sitcom Happy Ever After, and its follow-up Terry and June, as the unflappable wife of the “overgrown Boy Scout Terry Scott”. It was axed in 1987 as a new generation of alternative comedians came to the fore. In the 1990s, she was taken up by that generation, when Jennifer Saunders cast her as Edina’s “embarrassingly suburban” but acerbic mother in Absolutely Fabulous. In one episode, Edina is moaning about her weight, and tells her mother that inside her, a thin person is “screaming” to…

“It was truly the Christmas from hell,” observed Kim Bayley of the Entertainment Retailers Association. One old-timer had it particularly bad, said Simon Goodley in The Guardian. The music and film retailer HMV became “the first casualty of the slump in Christmas trade on the high street”, collapsing into administration for the second time in six years. The 97-year-old firm, whose first shop on Oxford Street was opened by Edward Elgar, accounts for “nearly a third” of all UK physical music sales, and nearly a quarter of DVD sales. Clearly, the nostalgic revival in vinyl and cassettes wasn’t enough to save it from the might of the streaming services. You can’t say we weren’t warned to expect some “seasonal stuffings”, said Alistair Osborne in The Times. Sports Direct boss Mike…

Britain is no Singapore of the north Liam Halligan The Sunday Telegraph “I groaned inwardly” when I heard Jeremy Hunt, the Foreign Secretary, “linking Brexit to Singapore” on a visit to the South East Asian city-state last week, says Liam Halligan in The Sunday Telegraph. Singapore has a lot going for it: since gaining independence in the mid-1960s, this “tiny land mass, packed with 5.5 million people, has prospered to become, in per capita terms, the eighth-richest nation on Earth”. But it barely resembles modern Britain or reflects the aspirations of most Brexit voters. By lauding Singapore, Hunt was appealing to those who want to copy its “low-tax, low-regulation” model. But many other voters backed Brexit because they want more government assistance for industry, which is currently impossible under EU…