Innholdsfortegnelse for V. 1009 i The Week

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…

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…

Are contractors already being used? Very much so. It is reliably reported that since 2012, the US has been using private contractors to train Syrian rebels on how to secure chemical weapons stockpiles. In Qatar, private support staff maintain and clean the bases used by US planes for their air strikes against Isis. Erik Prince, who founded the mercenary outfit Blackwater, and now heads the Frontier Services Group, a military services company, is calling on Washington to get private contractors to “serve as the pointy end of the spear” against Isis. Is this a new phenomenon? Armies have always relied on civilian workers, often ex-soldiers, to provide support tasks, but since the conflict in Iraq their role has mushroomed. The US employed 155,000 contractors – about the same as the…

Taking a leaf out of Mao’s Little Red Book Deng Xiaoping, the great architect of reform in China, tried to make sure of one thing, said Ursula Gauthier in Le Nouvel Observateur (Paris): that a charismatic leader in the mould of Mao Zedong could never again wreck the country with his “delusions”. And ever since, Chinese leaders have cultivated blandness – to such an extent that former president Hu Jintao was given the nickname “the Robot” by critics. But things look set to change. Bent on restoring China’s “historic grandeur” and creating a personality cult around himself, the Robot’s successor, President Xi Jinping, has scrapped the rules that Deng put in place. He has even introduced his own version of Mao’s Little Red Book, a 500-page tome launched with great…

“This year marks a 30th anniversary of which Britain should be both proud and ashamed,” said Nigel Morris in The Independent. It was back in 1985 that we first outlawed female genital mutilation (FGM). And yet despite the fact that tens of thousands of women and girls in the UK bear the scars of this “abhorrent practice”, there hasn’t been a single successful prosecution in this country. In France, by contrast, there have been more than 40. Last year, it seemed this “dismal record” might be about to change when the director of public prosecutions, Alison Saunders, announced that charges were being brought against a 32-yearold London doctor, Dhanuson Dharmasena. He was accused of stitching up a mother who had just given birth in a way that effectively reinstituted the…

For many British Jews, 2014 will be remembered as the year in which a stream of anti-Semitic “venom and vitriol” poisoned the waters of social media, said Jewish News. The conflict in Gaza prompted a surge of abuse on Twitter, with Jews being compared to Nazis, and the appearance of the hashtag #HitlerWasRight. In some cases, the attacks were personal: the MP Luciana Berger was sent a tweet featuring her face with a yellow Star of David on it, and the words: “You can always trust a Jew to show their true colours eventually #HitlerWasRight.” This vile hashtag is still trending, said Tom Cheshire on Sky.com. On Sunday night, for instance, it was being tweeted at a rate of 80 posts an hour. Now a parliamentary inquiry into anti-Semitism has…

Never pay the kidnapper To The Times I am sad to see Anthony Loyd brand as “cruel” the Government’s rigorous hostage policy. Loyd’s views command respect, but his argument is flawed. Governments are commended for entering into the very negotiations that perpetuate the problem. The inevitable outcome is more kidnappings and higher ransoms, until “a few million dollars” becomes $200m. What then? When I travelled in bandit country as British ambassador in Rangoon in the early 1980s, I left a letter with my deputy instructing him that if I were taken hostage the British Government should make no concessions. A Burmese friend made discreet enquiries and was assured that the rebels, who had a track record of kidnapping foreigners, would never take the British ambassador because his government would not…

Selma Dir: Ava DuVernay 2hrs 7mins (12A) Martin Luther King marches to freedom ★★★★ In the spring of 1965, the Rev Martin Luther King set out from the town of Selma in Alabama to begin his famous civil rights march to Montgomery, the state capital. His protest, the horrific violence it prompted from state police, and the eventual reforms that enabled black citizens to register to vote without fearing for their safety – are the focal points of this “full-bodied, flat-out great film”, said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph. It has its faults, said Kenneth Turan in the LA Times. The scenes involving powerful white people – President Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) Alabama Gov. George Wallace (Tim Roth) and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (Dylan Baker) – lack subtlety and…

Issue of the week: HSBC’s Swiss scandal Secret papers have laid bare a catalogue of wrongdoing and concealment. So why hasn’t anyone taken the rap? At a recent private dinner at HSBC, a senior executive of the bank was heard to remark that “bad behaviour would not end until someone within the organisation was arrested, tried and sent to prison”, said Alex Brummer in the Daily Mail. Following this week’s disclosures of industrial-scale tax cheating at HSBC’s private bank in Switzerland, that may yet happen. A huge cache of leaked secret bank account files has revealed that nearly 7,000 British clients stored billions in HSBC’s Swiss arm, much of it hidden away in so-called “black accounts”. The documents (originally leaked in 2007 by a Geneva-based employee, Hervé Falciani, who was…

The week’s best buys GlaxoSmithKline The Sunday Telegraph The pharma giant is expanding its vaccines business and growing its respiratory drugs offering. There are plans for a deal with Novartis to sell oncology products, and to spin off and list its HIV unit. Looks cheap and yields 5.5%. Buy. £15.18 Melrose Industries The Times Melrose buys underperforming engineering firms, improves and sells them. Its record of returning capital to shareholders is “astonishing”: the latest is 18.7p per share from the sale of wire ropemaker Bridon. Buy. 269.75p. Staffline Shares Staffline holds a robust position in temporary food packaging and logistics recruitment, and is winning Government contracts linked to Welfare to Work and prisoner rehabilitation services. Profits have more than doubled. Buy. 808p. Victrex The Times Victrex makes the specialist plastic…

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…

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…

Barbarians who embrace modernity Fraser Nelson The Daily Telegraph It’s easy to dismiss Islamic extremists as a throwback to a barbaric age. US Secretary of State John Kerry talks of the Taliban’s “medieval vision”; David Cameron calls Isis “a medieval threat”. But they’re wrong, says Fraser Nelson. The jihadis are creatures of modernity. It is their skill in exploiting social media that has brought them a worldwide following. The videos of their extreme brutality – beheading some captives, burning others alive, stoning women to death – are a new form of propaganda, a testament of implacable strength. Nor are their punishments “traditional” in any real sense: five centuries of records from the Ottoman empire yield just one case of an authorised public stoning. Our mistake is to assume the future…

What the scientists are saying… Half of us will get cancer One in every two people born in the UK will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lives, according to new research. In 2011, the risk was considered to be one in three. However, the change is not down to a sudden decline in the nation’s health: it’s simply that researchers now think the earlier figure was an underestimate, says the New Scientist. A team at Cancer Research UK pulled together data from the Office for National Statistics, and the UK’s national cancer registries, and calculated that a man born in 1930 has a 38.5% risk of developing cancer during his lifetime, whereas a man born in 1960 has a 53.5% risk. In women, the risks are…

The shocking scale of the abuse in Rotherham was hard to fathom, said The Daily Telegraph. Back in August, Alexis Jay’s inquiry concluded that in the 16 years up to 2013 at least 1,400 girls, some as young as 12, had been raped, beaten, tortured and trafficked by gangs of men – almost all of them of Pakistani heritage. These crimes had been committed in plain sight: youth workers tried to raise the alarm as early as 1997. In 2012, the abuse was detailed in a series of articles in The Times. Yet through all this, Rotherham children’s services failed to take action, or acknowledge the problem. Now, a Government inquiry into the council’s response has concluded that there existed within it a state of collective denial about the issue.…

“Poetry creates the myth. The prose writer draws its portrait.” Jean-Paul Sartre, quoted in The Guardian “Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is not putting one in a fruit salad.” Miles Kington, quoted in The Independent “Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.” Erica Jong, quoted on The Browser “I’ll be glad when I’ve had enough of this.” A fisherman’s favourite aphorism, quoted by Patrick Barkham in The Guardian “It wasn’t half bad. But this was only because I left at the interval.” Daniel Finkelstein on a play, quoted in The Times “Today is the shadow of tomorrow.” Parisian graffiti, quoted in The Guardian “Success takes you away from what you know, while failure condemns you to…

Should Harper Lee’s second novel see the light of day? It’s not often that you can tell in February what the book of the summer will be, said Rhys Blakely in The Times. But Go Set a Watchman, a second novel by the acclaimed author of To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee, which she is releasing at the age of 88, is undoubtedly going to be the year’s biggest hit. Although it will not come out until July, it is already the bestselling title on Amazon.com. And in second place is To Kill a Mockingbird. For more than half a century that book “has stood apart as a singular American masterpiece”, said Alexandra Alter in The New York Times. Lee’s novel about a black man accused of raping a white…

A cerebral approach to cooking Most of us are “inconsistent offal eaters”, says Jojo Tulloh in the FT. We may happily scoff chicken livers, yet consider brains a step too far. It’s often the “melting mousse-like texture” that gives people pause. For chefs, however, it is “precisely the combination of voluptuous texture, subtle taste and unfamiliarity” that makes cooking with brains so attractive. And in some of London’s best restaurants, dishes using brains – usually of lamb, pork or veal – are proving increasingly popular. One such establishment is the Michelin-starred Gymkhana in Mayfair, where a dish of spicy goat’s mince (methi keema) served with goat’s brains (bheja) – blanched, chopped and fried in a masala – has been a topseller since the Raj-inspired restaurant opened in 2013 (pictured). But…

Polymath known as the “Father of the Pill” Carl Djerassi 1923-2015 Carl Djerassi, who has died aged 91, was widely known as the “father of the Pill”. As one of the chemists who synthesised the female hormone progesterone in 1951, he helped millions of women to control their own fertility, and shaped a new world in which sex could be de-coupled from procreation. It became his defining achievement. “Any conversation,” he said, “begins with the Pill.” Yet though he was proud of this work, he didn’t want to be remembered solely for it, said The Daily Telegraph. A dandy, entrepreneur and selfdescribed “intellectual polygamist”, he contributed to several other scientific breakthroughs; published 1,200 papers; founded an artists’ colony; and wrote several books of poetry, as well as novels and plays.…

A weird world of negative yields Ben Wright The Daily Telegraph A big disadvantage of holding physical gold, says Ben Wright, is that it costs money. You must shell out for storage, and there’s no income from interest or dividends. But in today’s topsy-turvy bond markets, these drawbacks are no longer unique. Investors are now routinely “paying for the privilege” of holding “safe” government debt. Finland has just issued s1bn of five-year bonds paying out -0.017%; and yields on many other sovereign bonds are turning negative in the secondary market. In fact, JPMorgan estimates that around s1.5trn of eurozone government debt maturing in more than a year now falls into this category (nearly a quarter of the total). What accounts for this “weird” situation? Worry and deflation are factors, but…

The plumber: Kate, 39, Cambridge If I could ask all clients to do just one thing, it would be: “Make me a cup of tea.” You’d be amazed how many people don’t do it. I did one job where the husband was at home in the mornings and he’d make himself a pot of fresh coffee that smelt amazing. Then he would sit there playing on his computer all morning and drink it all to himself. I’d have to wait until his wife came home in the afternoon before I got offered a drink. It wasn’t a major problem for me, though – they lived near a Costa, so I’d just down tools and go over there at 10am every morning and take 20 minutes to drink it. You might…

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…

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…

The romance between Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh was always known to be passionate. But now the Victoria and Albert Museum has made public more than 200 of their steamiest love letters. In one, written when the pair were both still married to other people, Olivier fantasised about being in his lover’s embrace: “I am in your arms and you are stroking and coddling me and I am doing little more than grunting and nuzzling.” In another, he confessed: “I am sitting naked with just my parts wrapped in your panties. My longing for you is so intense.” Dominique Strauss-Kahn – the former head of the IMF, now on trial in France for pimping – told the court this week that reports of his “licentious” activities had been greatly exaggerated.…

“It is now five-and-a-quarter years since Sir John Chilcot began his inquiry into the Iraq war,” said Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph. Last week, he was summoned before the Commons foreign affairs committee to explain the delay – and one reason for it quickly became apparent: Chilcot’s inability to get to the point. He asked if he could give a “short opening statement”: that went on for seven resolutely uninformative minutes, until committee chairman Sir Richard Ottaway suggested it might be time to start the questioning. But even Chilcot’s answers drifted “on and on”. It’s not that he is inarticulate. “He is, if anything, too articulate. Ask him a question demanding a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and you will receive, in their stead, a grand unfurling of impeccably constructed…

Rugby union: England take revenge on Wales Encounters between England and Wales on the rugby field are never tame, said Patrick Sawer in The Daily Telegraph. They’re probably the biggest grudge matches in rugby. Two years ago – the last time they met at Cardiff in the Six Nations – Wales trounced England 30-3. And last Friday, with England desperate for revenge, the hostilities began long before the kick-off. First came the row over the roof of the Millennium Stadium. The Welsh had wanted to close it, but England were having none of it, said Wales Online. True, they had had loudspeakers blaring during training sessions to “ready themselves for the cauldron of noise”, but closing the roof would have “amplified the deafening noise of the home crowd”. The focus…

Best books… Helen Lederer Helen Lederer, the comedian, actress and journalist, picks her five favourite books. Her first novel, Losing It, has just been published by Pan Macmillan at £7.99 The Understudy by David Nicholls, 2005 (Hodder Paperbacks £8.99). Only an (ex) actor could write with such irony about the inevitable rejections and jealousies embedded in the world of acting. The hero has to understudy Josh Harper (12th sexiest man in the world). The humour is authentic and perfectly pitched. You could say at times I connected too much. The Magus by John Fowles, 1965 (Vintage Classics £8.99). I read this when I was alone in Paris (for two days) which heightened the adventure. I was obsessed by the magical writing. Reality and fantasy fuse in an erotic canvas. Paris,…

New motorbikes: what the critics say BMW S 1000 RR £13,700 Cycle World The S 1000 RR entered the superbike market in 2010, raising the performance bar “with the subtlety of a V2 rocket”. Now, five years on, “the onslaught continues”: the bike has been thoroughly revamped, losing 4kg and gaining 6hp (peak output is 199hp) and a “host of refinements”. The question is, with new competitors from Yamaha and Kawasaki, is the BMW still leader of the pack? The Daily Telegraph It’s “subtly but significantly” faster than the previous S 1000 RR, doing 0-100mph in under six seconds. But for all its intensity, it’s actually “easier” to ride. The gyroscope-enabled traction system cuts the power “very smoothly” when required, providing “a very high level of security” when you accelerate.…

Tesco: suppliers probe Good news for beleaguered grocery suppliers, said Graham Ruddick in The Daily Telegraph: the supermarket watchdog is going after Tesco. In its first formal investigation into the retailer’s treatment of suppliers since launching in 2013, the Groceries Code Adjudicator (GCA) reports it has “reasonable suspicion” that Tesco has been breaching the industry code. The GCA, led by Christine Tacon, “seems a bit late to the party”, said Alistair Osborne in The Times. The Serious Fraud Office and the Financial Reporting Council are already investigating the supermarket, in the wake of last autumn’s revelations that it “mislaid” £263m in profits; and new boss Dave Lewis has been “banging on” about the need to improve supplier relationships for months. Indeed, it’s tempting to wonder what the GCA has been…

Dick Costolo The Twitter chief has delivered a message to the victims of trolling in a characteristically forthright style, says Hannah Kuchler in the FT. “We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform, and we’ve sucked at this for years,” he admits in a leaked memo. “I take personal responsibility for our failure.” That may not, however, placate concerns that Twitter “sucks” in other areas too. With user growth sluggish, Costolo – a standup comedian, turned entrepreneur, turned corporate chief – is under pressure to broaden the platform’s appeal against growing competition from Instagram, Snapchat et al. Last week’s better-than-expected earnings may help, but Wall Street isn’t convinced, according to one analyst, by Costolo’s lightheartedness: “They just want to see a big advertising suit in the job.”…

THE WEEK CROSSWORD 940 An Ettinger card case 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 23 February. Send it to: The Week Crossword 940, 2nd floor, 32 Queensway, London W2 3RX, or email the answers to crossword@theweek.co.uk. Set by Tim Moorey (www.timmoorey.info) This week’s crossword winner will receive an Ettinger (www.ettinger.co.uk) visiting card case for business cards or to use as a mini wallet, and two Connell Guides (www.connellguides.com). ACROSS 8 Look back for tower (4) 9 Notes put on one side, head of Royal Mail again in trouble (10) 10 Very pleasing to eat around four (6) 11 Six outsize banks behind abuses (8) 12 Explore new copper site…