The Week V. 1009

What happened Leaders from Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany met in the Belarusian capital Minsk on Wednesday in what was billed as a last-ditch effort to secure peace in Ukraine. The summit followed a week of frantic shuttle diplomacy, sparked by the escalation of a ten-month-old conflict that has killed more than 5,300 people and displaced almost a million others. A previous ceasefire deal was agreed in Minsk last September, but was largely ignored. Moscow-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine launched a fresh offensive last month and have since made significant territorial gains. The renewed fighting exposed differences of opinion between the US and Europe. EU leaders are opposed to arming Ukraine, arguing that this would only escalate the war. But attitudes are hardening in Washington, where several senior politicians have…

What happened Vowing to avenge the murder of a captured air-force pilot, Jordan last week launched a massive air offensive on Islamic State (Isis) targets. Its warplanes staged more than 50 raids in three days after the jihadis released a video showing the execution of Moaz al-Kasasbeh, locked in a cage and burned alive. The killing prompted global condemnation and promises of further action from the coalition fighting Isis. Jordan’s Interior Minister Hussein al-Majali said last week’s attacks were just “the beginning”: the aim was to “wipe out Isis completely”. But Britain’s own contribution to the coalition came under sharp attack last week from the House of Commons defence select committee, which described it as “strikingly modest”. In a scathing report, it noted that Britain had conducted just 6% of…

Controversy of the week “We’ve all done it,” said Iain Martin in The Sunday Telegraph. “At the end of a long, hard day you are asked a simple question, and the mind goes blank.” Such slips are “entirely understandable”. Still, it doesn’t look great if you are the shadow chancellor Ed Balls, and you are being asked, on Newsnight, to name a single business leader who supports Labour. “Well, um... the… um… er… Bill… um…,” said Balls last week, before admitting that he had forgotten the man’s surname. The Tories were delighted. “Bill Somebody’s not a person,” crowed David Cameron in the Commons. “Bill somebody is Labour’s policy.” Balls’s gaffe didn’t surprise me in the least, said the entrepreneur Luke Johnson in The Sunday Times. Ed Miliband and his colleagues…

Doubs, France Election scare for Hollande: France’s ruling Socialist Party has only narrowly beaten the anti-immigrant National Front (FN) in a by-election widely regarded as the first test of François Hollande’s presidency since the Charlie Hebdo attacks. The Socialist candidate, Frédéric Barbier, won a 51% share of the vote in the Doubs region, in eastern France near the Swiss border, putting him only a whisker ahead of the FN’s Sophie Montel, who took 48% – the party’s best-ever result in a by-election. Analysts said Montel’s campaign, warning of the “Islamist peril” facing France, had played well in the region’s depressed industrial towns. Her strong result suggests that Hollande’s assertion, in the wake of the Paris attacks, that a “spirit of January” would unite the country, was optimistic – and will…

New York Silk Road founder convicted: The 30-year-old founder of Silk Road, the $1.2bn black market on the “deep web”, is facing a minimum of 20 years in jail, having been convicted of seven felony charges including drug trafficking, criminal enterprise, computer hacking and money laundering. Working under the pseudonym “Dread Pirate Roberts”, Ross Ulbricht earned around $18m in the online-only currency bitcoin from drug deals conducted via the site. His defence team tried to argue that he had only founded the site as an experiment, and that he wasn’t its real “mastermind”. But during his trial in New York, prosecutors argued that his personal journals, and his bitcoin “wallet” containing millions of dollars, pointed to his guilt. Troy, Missouri Boy “kidnapped by his family”: A six-year-old boy was subjected…

The writer of small things Anne Tyler is regarded as one of the US’s greatest living writers, says Graeme Thomson in The Mail on Sunday. The 73-year-old has sold more than ten million books, and won a Pulitzer Prize. But her novels are famously modest affairs – about ordinary people behaving in ordinary ways – and so is she. “Every now and then people buy up the film options,” she marvels, “and I think: ‘Why? Nothing ever happens in them!’” She lives in Baltimore, just a block away from the gangland neighbourhood that provided the setting for The Wire. But that world seldom intrudes into her novels. “I’m aware I’m not confronting things. It’s an escape, an attempt to create a little world away from all this.” So she keeps…