The Week V. 1024

What happened David Cameron has embarked on a whirlwind round of diplomacy as part of his plan to renegotiate Britain’s relationship with Brussels. The PM – who has promised to hold an in/out referendum before the end of 2017 – launched his reform drive at an EU summit last week, where he admitted that it would be tough and that he had not encountered a “wall of love” from fellow leaders. On Monday, he laid on a dinner at Chequers for European Commission President Jean-Claude Junker. Cameron was then due to visit five European capitals over the second half of the week to hold further talks with leaders. The PM believes that EU treaty changes are needed to bring about the reforms he wants, which include a UK exemption from…

What happened Iraqi forces launched a major offensive this week to retake the strategic city of Ramadi and the surrounding Anbar province from Islamic State (Isis) militants. A spokesman said government troops aided by Shia militiamen aimed to cut off the city, seized by the jihadis nine days earlier in a humiliating setback for the Baghdad government. US Defence Secretary Ashton Carter had publicly accused Iraq’s army of showing “no will to fight” in Ramadi; he claimed troops had withdrawn even though they vastly outnumbered their Isis attackers. Isis gave further evidence of its military strength in Syria, where it seized the ancient city of Palmyra (see page 20). Its fall, and the loss of vital gas fields nearby, are seen as a serious blow to the regime of President…

Controversy of the week In 1986, the people of Ireland were asked in a referendum whether they wanted divorce to be legal, said Paul Vallely in The Independent on Sunday. “They overwhelmingly voted No.” Not surprising, everyone said at the time, since Ireland was “the most Catholic country in Europe”. How things have changed. Last Saturday, it became the first country in the world to legalise homosexual marriage by the popular vote – with a resounding 62% in favour. The result revealed “the profound transformation undergone by Irish society in a single generation”. Modern Ireland has “shown its face”, said The Irish Times. As Dublin’s Archbishop Diarmuid Martin conceded, the time when bishops could instruct the Irish people how to vote has long gone. After “decades of exclusion, silence and…

Berlin 65-year-old has quadruplets: A 65-year-old mother of 13 gave birth to a further four children in Berlin last week, making her the world’s oldest mother of quadruplets. Annegret Raunigk (pictured), a teacher of English and Russian whose oldest child is 44, was artificially inseminated in Ukraine last year. She said she was “shocked” to find out she had a quadruple pregnancy, but never considered reducing the number of embryos and had no reservations about the challenge facing her. The three boys and one girl were born premature at 26 weeks, but have “good chances of surviving”, according to RTL Television, which has exclusive rights to the story. Zurich, Switzerland Assisted suicide: A British father of three who feared his spinal tumour would leave him paralysed killed himself at the…

Washington DC Bin Laden cache: Some 400 documents found in Osama bin Laden’s final hiding place were declassified by US intelligence last week – revealing that the al-Qa’eda leader was an affectionate family man who read widely while obsessing over security and micromanaging staff. Selected from a far larger, still-classified collection of material (allegedly including pornography) taken by US commandos from the Pakistani compound where they killed bin Laden in 2011, they include tender messages to his three wives and children, alongside history books, US government reports and conspiracy theories attributing the 9/11 attacks (which bin Laden masterminded) to the US government. His own letters, however, are realistic, eschewing the apocalyptic tone of newer jihadi movements such as Isis; and, unlike them, he remains fixated on attacking the US rather…

Simon Pegg grows up Simon Pegg has built a film career playing a certain type of geeky, comic book-loving perpetual teenager. But the star of Spaced, Shaun of the Dead and The World’s End is now 45. He has a wife and child, a house in Hertfordshire and £10m in the bank. It’s time to grow up. “I thought the other day that I’m going to retire from geekdom,” he told Craig McLean in the Radio Times. “I’ve become the poster child for that generation, and it’s not necessarily something I particularly want to do. I’d quite like to go off and do some serious acting.” To compound his dilemma, Pegg is currently co-writing the script for the third Star Trek film – while becoming increasingly impatient with this kind…