The Week V. 1018

What happened With just three weeks to go before polling day, the two main parties finally unveiled their election manifestos this week. Both stole the other’s clothes in an attempt to secure a breakthrough in the deadlocked polls. Launching the Tories’ manifesto, David Cameron sought to re-brand the Conservatives as “the party of working people”, and to project a sunnier vision – a response to complaints that the Tory campaign had become too negative. The Tories pledged, among other things, to extend the “right-to-buy” scheme from council houses to housing associations, increase NHS spending by £8bn and remove family homes worth up to £1m from inheritance tax. In a similar exercise in political cross-dressing, Ed Miliband portrayed Labour as the party of economic responsibility. He promised that Labour’s policies –…

What happened Hillary Clinton ended months of speculation this week when she formally entered the 2016 race for the White House, aiming to become the US’s first woman president. The former first lady and secretary of state announced her bid for the Democratic Party nomination in a brief video message on her campaign website. If elected, Clinton said she would be “the champion of everyday Americans”. She later set out for Iowa, a key battleground state which will be the scene of the first nomination contest early next year. Clinton came under immediate attack from right-wing Republican Marco Rubio, who announced his own bid for the presidency. The Florida senator described the 67-year-old Clinton as “a leader from yesterday” and spoke of a “generational choice” for voters. At 43, the…

North Sea cod stocks are growing rapidly – and they could even be certified as sustainable in the next five years. Long regarded as one of the worst examples of over-fishing, the fish has been subject to tough regulations since 2006. Now, according to new research by the government-funded body Seafish, stocks are recovering to a surprising degree. For the time being, however, North Sea cod remains on the Marine Conservation Society’s list of fish to avoid. A story penned by Queen Victoria when she was ten is to be published for the first time. Written as a study exercise, The Adventures of Alice Laselles tells the tale of a girl sent to boarding school against her will. Having been stored for decades in the Royal Archives, it will be…

Controversy of the week It is exactly 150 years since the commander of the Confederate Army, Robert E. Lee, rode up to the Appomattox Court House in Virginia to surrender, said Tim Stanley in The Daily Telegraph. “A war that had claimed 750,000 lives – by far the bloodiest in American history – was over.” But the mood was far from triumphant. General Ulysses S. Grant, leader of the Union Army, raised his hat respectfully to his adversary, foregoing the traditional demand that the defeated side hand over their swords. One of the most traumatic aspects of the American Civil War was that – for whites, at least – it felt like “a war between brothers”. And as soon as it was over, “there was a hunger among many to…

Paris Isis cyber-attack: Hackers claiming allegiance to Isis seized control of France’s international TV network TV5Monde last week, knocking out its 11 channels, website and social media accounts in the jihadi group’s most spectacular act of cyber-warfare to date. A black screen appeared across the network at 10pm on Wednesday night, and a message reading “Je suis IS” – another term for Isis – was posted on its website by a group calling itself CyberCaliphate. The hackers also posted what appeared to be the ID cards of French soldiers’ relatives on the network’s Facebook page, along with threats. “Soldiers of France, stay away from Islamic State!” read one message, warning them that their families were in danger. It took 20 hours to return the network to normal. France’s government denounced…

New York Gay history: The award-winning author and gay rights activist Larry Kramer has sparked controversy with the first instalment in a planned two-part history of America in which he claims that many prominent figures of the past, from George Washington and Abraham Lincoln to Richard Nixon and Mark Twain, had secret gay lives. The American People: Volume 1, subtitled Search for My Heart, is an 800-page “labour of love” that the 79-year-old writer says is intended to counter the exclusion of a gay perspective from history, and which took him 40 years to complete. The New York Times has welcomed it as “a farreaching historical exposé”, but Kramer’s willingness to play fast and loose with the available evidence has raised eyebrows in academia. The book has been labelled a…