Innholdsfortegnelse for V. 1120 i The Week

Washington DC Trump’s pick sworn in: Donald Trump’s nominee for the US Supreme Court was sworn in this week. The confirmation of Neil Gorsuch, 49, fulfils one of Trump’s key campaign pledges, and is one of the biggest victories yet of his presidency. It also ends a bitter partisan battle that began in February 2016, when the sudden death of Justice Antonin Scalia – a staunch conservative – created a vacancy. With the four-to-five conservative majority among the justices restored, many major cases, caught in a four-four deadlock, may now be decided. A beaming president declared that Justice Gorsuch would be “truly great”. Democrats in the Senate had tried to block Gorsuch’s appointment on the grounds that he is too conservative and favours corporate interests over “working America”. Republicans resorted…

GERMANY A well meaning gesture that just causes trouble Der Tagesspiegel (Berlin) Berliners must have thought that lighting up the Brandenburg Gate in a country’s national colours was a marvellous way to show sympathy after a terrorist attack, says Malte Lehming. But, in practice, it is proving contentious. Why, many want to know, did the famous landmark display the Union flag after the recent killings in Westminster, but fail to show the Russian flag after the even worse atrocity in St Petersburg? City authorities explain that Berlin is a “partner” of London, but not of the Russian city. But then why was the Gate lit after terror attacks in Orlando and Jerusalem, neither of which are official partners? Apparently, because Berlin has a “special relationship” with those places. It’s all…

Despite its reputation as the most fearsome of predators, the Tyrannosaurus Rex had a surprisingly sensitive snout, which it may have used as a courtship aid. Though its head was covered with armour-like skin, tiny nerve openings, or foramina, penetrated this hide, making its snout as sensitive to touch as human fingertips. Palaeontologists believe that all tyrannosaurs had this “third hand”, whose uses would have included building nests and picking up fragile eggs. In addition, the dinosaurs “might have rubbed their sensitive faces together as a vital part of pre-copulatory play”, US researchers wrote in the journal Scientific Reports. The theory follows the discovery, in Montana, of an entirely new member of the tyrannosaur family – Daspletosaurus horneri – which was about three-quarters the size of the T-Rex and lived…

Jeremy Corbyn has long wanted the media to stop harping on about his leadership, and to focus instead on Labour’s policies. Now he has made that possible, said Jane Merrick in The Independent – by finally producing a serious policy that the media can discuss. Last week, he announced that a Labour government would impose VAT on private school fees, and use the money raised to provide free school meals for all primary school children (extending a Lib Dem scheme, introduced by the coalition in 2014, that granted free school meals to all children in the first three years of school). The policy itself is deeply flawed – but it shows that at long last, Labour is getting on an “election footing”. “Squeeze the rich, feed the poor,” said Gaby…

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” Historian Will Durant, quoted in the Plymouth Herald “It turns out that confirmation bias means exactly what I expected it to mean.” Cartoonist Moose Allain, quoted in The Independent “Happiness is less important than trying to live in the right way.” Tolstoy, quoted in The Times “No pressure, no diamonds.” Thomas Carlyle, quoted on The Browser “Environmentalists hate the Tories, but they’d kill to close that many coal mines in China.” Geoff Norcott, quoted in The Daily Telegraph “When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.” John Muir, quoted on MontrealGazette.com “Without lies, humanity would perish of despair and boredom.”…

“All Tottenham can do is keep winning,” said Sami Mokbel in The Mail on Sunday. Second in the Premier League, seven points off the top, they know they must keep “applying relentless pressure” on Chelsea to stand a chance of stealing the title. Fortunately for Spurs, however, “at the moment winning is all they do”: their 4-0 “dismantling” of Watford last Saturday was their sixth league victory in a row. It’s incredible to think Spurs started the season as outsiders, said Andrew Dillon in The Sun. After they “choked” last year, when they came third, they were given little chance of finishing in the top four. Yet they have outperformed many of the league’s giants, despite a wage bill barely half that of the Manchester clubs. Tottenham are “supposed to…

Book of the week To Be a Machine by Mark O’Connell Granta 256pp £12.99 The Week Bookshop £10.99 Transhumanism is a California-based movement whose core belief is that “humanity should use technology to evolve beyond its current mental and physical limitations”, said Clive Cookson in the FT. The practices it advocates include cryogenics (freezing bodies in the hope that they may one day be revived), biohacking (augmenting ourselves with implants and prosthetics), and whole brain emulation (copying our personalities onto computers). And in this, his first book, Mark O’Connell – an Irish journalist writing in the “gonzo” style of Hunter S. Thompson – describes his encounters with several of transhumanism’s leading lights. Many of them are “hilarious”. There’s Roen Horn, a virgin saving himself for a riotous future life with…

It’s extremely unlikely you’ll have seen Man Down, a recently released thriller in which Shia LaBeouf plays a troubled Afghan war veteran. The reason I know that is because the film – which has been lambasted by critics as “deranged” and “incoherent” – was only screened in one cinema in the UK, said Stuart Heritage in The Guardian. And even there, in the Lancashire town of Burnley, it flopped. In its opening weekend, it sold just one ticket, grossing only £7. “Not £7m. Not even £700. But a mere £7.” In defence of Man Down, it should be noted that it was made available by online streaming services on the same day as its theatrical release, said Adam White in The Daily Telegraph. This approach cuts costs for distributors, who…

Popolo 26 Rivington Street, Shoreditch, London EC2 (020-7729 4299) Everything about Popolo is so bang on-trend – the distressed tiles; the industrial ducting; the “small plates for bloody sharing” – that I had written it off as a bandwagon jumper, says Marina O’Loughlin in The Guardian. Until, that is, I heard all-out raves about it from three different “clued-up pals”. They were right to be excited: Popolo is “the real thing” – a modern Italian run with “utter grace” by chef Jonathan Lawson, who combines a “spectacular mastery of pasta” and “whiz-bang creativity” with the courage to keep it simple when needed. Italian classics are flawlessly realised: roasted delicata squash and ricotta stuffed into fine pasta and bathed in sage butter; pork cheek agnolotti in a buttery porcini sauce.…

Indra Nooyi Pepsi’s cack-handed attempt to “co-opt protest movements for profits” has created a significant PR headache for CEO Indra Nooyi, said Julia Carrie Wong in The Guardian. The cola giant has been accused of capitalising on the Black Lives Matter and other opposition movements, by running a supposedly feel-good ad – featuring Kendall Jenner, a photogenic member of the Kardashian clan – that trivialised police brutality. To compound the gaffe, it was released on the 49th anniversary of the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King. Cue a social media outcry. Pepsi has now withdrawn the ad and made a grovelling apology. “Pepsi: the official soft drink of the resistance! Wonder what CEO and Trump business council member Indra Nooyi thinks about that.” That’ll be what they’re asking…

Controversy of the week Labour’s anti-Semitism “Labour has developed a unique skill under Jeremy Corbyn,” said Stephen Pollard in The Daily Telegraph. “No matter how bad the situation it finds itself in, somehow it contrives to find a way to make things unimaginably worse.” The suspension of Ken Livingstone last week was a “case in point”. The former London mayor had been found guilty of bringing the party into disrepute, for his assertion that Adolf Hitler supported Zionism “before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews”. These comments, a disciplinary panel concluded, were “prejudicial”, and “grossly detrimental”. The obvious next step, for a party which purports to have “zero tolerance” of anti-Semitism, would have been to expel him. Instead, the panel chose to do... nothing. Livingstone, 71,…

Tanta, Egypt Coptic worshippers slain: Dozens of Coptic Christians were slaughtered as they commemorated Palm Sunday last weekend, in two separate attacks that have been claimed by Islamic State. The first bomber blew himself up during a 9am service at the Mar Girgis (St George’s) church, in the city of Tanta, killing 28 people and injuring 78. Four hours later, police apprehended a second suicide bomber at the entrance to St Mark’s Coptic Orthodox Cathedral in Alexandria – but were unable to stop him from detonating his explosives. Seventeen people, including four police officers, were killed. The Coptic Pope Tawadros II was inside the cathedral, but was unhurt. The bombings, on one of the most important dates in the Christian calendar, were the latest in a series of deadly attacks…

The rise of the armchair experts Marina Hyde The Guardian “Nobody knows anything,” was how William Goldman famously described Hollywood in Adventures in the Screen Trade. But the aphorism that best describes the way we live now, says Marina Hyde, is the reverse: “Everybody knows everything.” These days, “uncertainty is regarded as a sign of weakness”. If you’re meeting friends in a pub tonight, be sure that many of them will know everything about Syria “and speak with the same authority as a state department analyst of 30 years’ experience”. Some will say Donald Trump’s strike against President Assad shows “how bonkers” is the theory that he’s a Putin stooge; others will insist it was a covert deal with Putin; others will see it as a sign that Trump is…

Colds: worse for the lonely? Loneliness makes the symptoms of a cold seem worse, a study by US scientists has found. The researchers asked 213 healthy adults to complete questionnaires about their social lives and levels of perceived loneliness before being infected with the common cold through nasal drops. The volunteers were then quarantined for five days and asked to record their physical symptoms, logging their severity on a five-point scale. During the quarantine period, 159 of the participants developed colds. While feeling lonely had no bearing on the chances of this happening, it appeared to affect how rotten people felt. On average, those who had scored higher for loneliness also reported symptoms of greater severity. Yet when the researchers cross-referenced these results against the participants’ actual symptoms – by…

Barry Manilow kept his sexuality a secret for decades, because, he said, he wasn’t sure how people would react, and he was “scared of disappointing his fans”. But last week, the 73-year-old singer (pictured) finally came out as gay, explaining that he has been in a relationship with TV executive Garry Kief for nearly 40 years, and that they have been married since 2014. To his delight, his fans weren’t shocked or upset: they were happy for him. “The reaction was beautiful,” he said. “Strangers commenting: ‘Great for you!’ I’m just so grateful for it.” When it comes to his food, Prince Charles is nothing if not finicky, according to a new biography. Friends of the prince have apparently told the US writer Sally Bedell Smith that when he came…

“Jon Platt is nothing if not determined,” said The Daily Telegraph. Two years ago, he took his daughter out of school for a week-long family holiday, and was fined £60 by his local council on the Isle of Wight. A lot of parents do this (around 150,000 such fines are issued per year), and most pay up, considering it a price worth paying for a cheaper, low-season break. But Platt decided to challenge the penalty notice, arguing that he should have a right to make decisions about his own children. The case turned on the meaning of the words “fails to attend school regularly”, in the 1996 Education Act. In two lower courts, Platt’s lawyers successfully argued that as his daughter had a 92% attendance rate, she did attend school…

“The long, painful wait is over,” said Ewan Murray in The Guardian. Eighteen years and 74 majors into his career, Sergio García is finally a champion. In an “epic battle” on Sunday, the 37-year-old Spaniard defeated his close friend, Justin Rose, to win the Masters. Having choked so many times in the past, García was “never going to be allowed to end his drought the easy way”: after he bogeyed on the 10th and 11th holes, and went into the trees on the 13th, it looked as if he might be finished. But he fought back, triumphing at the first hole of the playoff. When the moment came, García “knelt on the hallowed turf, partly in disbelief at finally reaching this Holy Grail”. It was “one of the greatest duels…

Exhibition of the week Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable Punta della Dogana and Palazzo Grassi, Venice, Italy ( www.palazzograssi.it/en ). Until 3 December “Shock and awe” is something Damien Hirst understands, said Rachel Campbell-Johnston in The Times. Ever since he “exploded the BritArt bomb that changed our culture in the 1980s”, much of his impact has depended on it. Not surprising, then, that after ten years planning his comeback, the “artist-cum-entrepreneurial showman” should have veiled his new show in Venice in the utmost secrecy, leaving the critics in a state of wild anticipation. Was he about to astonish us again? Or would his new show turn out to be “a load of bullshit”? Let me be frank, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. Treasures from…

Wine buyers sometimes wonder why they should use a small specialist merchant rather than simply buy from a high street discount store, or perhaps even from the cellar door if they are travelling through France. There is nothing wrong with either approach, but it is better to develop a relationship with someone you trust. Take Private Cellar, one of the finest of the provincial wine merchants in Britain. They can rootle out small parcels from trusted suppliers, which other people don’t even know exist. The Spanish wines of Bodegas Pinuaga are a case in point; they can offer rare magnums as well as Colección, which is offered here in bottles. Sancerre Rosé, André Dezat 2014 The Dezats have been producing wine here since before Shakespeare was born. Sancerre is renowned…

If you’re after refreshing rosé, says Susy Atkins in The Daily Telegraph, it’s best to buy a young wine (2015 or 2016). Here are five great-value picks: Exquisite Collection Côtes de Provence Rosé 2016, France (Aldi, £5.99) is dry and packed with raspberry flavour, and comes in an elegant traditional Provençal bottle. Beronia Tempranillo Rosado 2015, Rioja, Spain (Ocado, £9.29) Not the cheapest, but one of the best Spanish rosados; fairly rich and soft, and full enough for a plate of ham, chorizo and salami. The Ned Pinot Noir Rosé 2016, Marlborough, New Zealand (Majestic, £10.99 or £8.99 in a mixed six). This is a lively, sunny pinot rosé, singing with fresh strawberries and juicy watermelon, nearly dry, and seafood-friendly. Le Froglet Rosé 2016, France (Marks & Spencer, £8) is…

Broadcaster who “hated injustice and loved a fight” Darcus Howe 1943-2017 The journalist, broadcaster and civil rights activist Darcus Howe dedicated his adult life to fighting the racism that was endemic in Britain in the 1960s and beyond, said Kehinde Andrews in The Guardian. “His key skill, as one of the main figures in the anti-racist, anti-police-brutality movement, was to translate the energy and anger of street protests into government action.” In a nod to the old colonial myth, he once claimed that he had come to Britain on a “civilising mission”. A man who “hated injustice, and loved a fight”, he was a divisive figure, said The Times; to some, he was just “a rabble rouser, albeit a cultured and eloquent one; to others he was a fearless campaigner…

Who’s tipping what The week’s best buys ASOS The Times The online fashion retailer has seen “meteoric” revenue growth, with profits set to rise 30-35% this year. Management is forward-looking and there’s plenty of room for growth in Europe and the US. Buy. £55.66. Cranswick Investors Chronicle The vertically integrated pork and chicken producer is set for “another banger year” with growth well ahead and strong profitability. Capex is up, but it has refinanced favourably and acquisitions are boosting growth. Buy. £25.57. CVS Group Investors Chronicle CVS owns and runs veterinary practices, developing medicines and accessories. Cash-generative, it’s expanding overseas, and the market is ripe for further consolidation and growth. Buy. £11.66. Learning Technologies Group The Times LTG provides training modules and assesses their efficacy. Operating in a growth market,…

Stockholm Truck attacker confesses: An Uzbek man has admitted carrying out the attack in central Stockholm last Friday in which four people were killed. Rakhmat Akilov, 39, drove a stolen 30-tonne truck down a major shopping street before crashing it into a department store, in what his lawyer described as a “terrorist crime”. Police say that a bomb was found in the truck which had failed to detonate. An 11-year-old girl, and a British citizen – named as 41-year-old Chris Bevington – were among those killed. Akilov (right) fled the scene, but was arrested hours later. Swedish police said the father of four was known to the security services, and had expressed sympathy for Isis. He’d been given a month to leave the country in December after his residency application…

Weldon’s woeful women Fay Weldon is a lifelong feminist – but a disobedient one. In recent years, the novelist has become impatient with the residual self-pity of the movement. “Women can choose who they marry, how much they earn, whether they have children,” she told Cole Moreton in The Mail on Sunday. “So why do they see themselves as victims? They go on thinking men are their oppressors.” Weldon, who teaches creative writing at Bath Spa University, sometimes despairs of her navel-gazing students. “Young women need classes in low self-esteem, not in high self-esteem. This is the same for both men and women, actually. They’re brought up now to have an unrealistic view of themselves. It makes them very hard to relate to the real world. It makes them long…

The world’s first interactive tombstones are being trialled at a cemetery in Slovenia. The stones look fairly conventional at first glance, displaying the deceased’s name and date of birth, but if they detect anyone standing in front of them for more than a few seconds, the 48-inch screens, encased within a marble-like surround, come to life, displaying further text, as well as pictures and videos of the customer’s choosing. Several have already been ordered, at a cost of s3,000. A group of friends invited a complete stranger to join them on holiday, because he has the same name as another man who’d dropped out. The ten friends, from Bristol, had booked and paid for the all-inclusive minibreak in Mallorca, and rather than see Joe McGrath’s flight and hotel bed go…

UNITED STATES Let’s be honest about our deals with despots The Intercept (New York) “Another morning in Trump’s America.” Thus tweeted one contemptuous liberal pundit last week, in response to news that President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi, the repressive leader of Egypt, was visiting the White House. Another condemned the ugly “love-in”. The implication behind these criticisms, says Glenn Greenwald, is that previous US leaders would never have consorted with such an unpleasant despot. Which, of course, is total rot. Barack Obama funded and armed the Sisi tyranny for years. True, he never invited Sisi to the White House, but he sold him a lot of weapons, including F-16 aircraft, Harpoon missiles and M1A1 tank kits, at a time when Sisi’s regime was crushing dissent. Trump isn’t ushering in a new…

Turbulence strong enough to injure airline passengers and crew may become twice as common as a result of global warming, reports The Times. Research by scientists at the University of Reading suggests that rising carbon dioxide emissions are increasing temperature differences between bands of air at cruising altitudes. The effect is to make these jet streams flow faster – which, in turn, causes them to become less stable, as the layers of air within the streams move at a greater range of speeds. According to the study, this may lead to cases of severe turbulence rising by at least 85% by 2050. Turbulence can cause an aircraft’s altitude to deviate by up to 100ft, which, in extreme cases, can lead to unbuckled passengers – or other unsecured items – being…

Who’d have imagined, asked Janet Street-Porter in The Independent, that 38 years after “the Stonewall riots on the streets of New York led to Gay Pride marches around the world”, the battle for sexual freedom would come down to a row about toilets? But that’s where we are. The Barbican Centre has turned its loos into “gender-neutral toilets” so as to create “a supportive and tolerant space” for transgender people. The Gents are now called “With Urinals”, the Ladies “With Cubicles”: both are open to all. Yet instead of being congratulated for open-mindedness, the centre has been inundated with complaints from women about men taking over their toilets. “Dear Barbican Centre bosses,” tweeted BBC Radio 4 broadcaster Samira Ahmed, “Women have enough trouble with queues without you imposing your politics.”…

Why is it, asked Juliet Samuel in The Daily Telegraph, that some people feel such a cringing embarrassment about Britain’s religious heritage. Look at Cadbury, which has gone all “Happy Holidays” on Easter by rebranding the annual Easter egg hunts that it holds at National Trust properties. This year’s event has been renamed the “Great British Egg Hunt”. The US-owned confectioner said it had dropped the reference to Easter because it wanted to “invite people from all faiths and none to enjoy our seasonal treats”. But there was no need. People need to get over this strange idea “that anything smacking of Christianity is inherently exclusionary, no matter how much non-Christians might want to participate in it”. The “great thing about culture wars” – as opposed to real ones –…

The Grand National has served up “some fairy-tale results” in its 178-year history, said Marcus Townend in The Mail on Sunday. There was Foinavon’s victory in 1967; Red Rum’s historic third triumph 40 years ago. But One for Arthur’s win last Saturday “will rank alongside” them. Only the second ever winner trained in Scotland, the eight-year-old horse went into the race as a 14-1 shot, said Andrew Longmore in The Sunday Times. At one stage, he lagged far behind, with 20 lengths separating him from the leader. But Derek Fox, the horse’s 24-year-old Irish jockey, knew exactly what he was doing. There’s a simple recipe to winning the race: “hack round the first circuit, get serious down the back on the second and put yourself into contention two fences…

To The Times On the day after the Westminster attack, when the streets around Parliament were closed to traffic but remained partly open to pedestrians, an unexpected calm descended. Civil servants and tourists gathered along Whitehall to enjoy the street in the early spring sunshine. With vehicles removed, there was the sense of a new possibility even if in consequence of a hateful terrorist attack. Surely the moment has come for the plans to renovate Parliament to review the provision of parking and vehicular access. This historic corner could be made more secure from a repeat attack and be reclaimed for the people whom Parliament is supposed to serve and inspire. Ptolemy Dean, architect, London SE1 To The Daily Telegraph I fear the Duke of Westminster will be disappointed in…

Best books… Jonathan Meades The author, food critic and film-maker Jonathan Meades recommends five books by Anthony Burgess, whose centenary is this year. Meades’ new book The Plagiarist in the Kitchen is published by Unbound at £20 The Complete Enderby, 1995 (Vintage £12.99). Burgess’s greatest creation is F.X. Enderby, a down-at-heel poet who can only compose when at stool. He is the picaresque protagonist of four novels, of which the first two are the strongest. He is first discovered living in sordid digs in a south coast town where his closest friend is ’arry, an equally down-at-heel chef. Tremor of Intent, 1966 (Serpent’s Tail £8.99). Gross gluttony and animal sexual ecstasy have never been more joyously and graphically represented than in this riff on a spy thriller that mutates into…

Mango, papaya and coconut lassi If you shut your eyes while you’re drinking this lassi, the tropical flavours make you feel as though you’re on a beach somewhere far away. Serves 2 (drink immediately) ½ mango, peeled, pitted and chopped 1 papaya, skinned, deseeded and chopped 120ml coconut yogurt • Blend all the ingredients with 120ml of ice-cold water and serve over ice. Rhubarb and orange lassi We have two seasons for rhubarb in the UK. December to March gives us forced rhubarb (grown in the dark in sheds). The other is from April until September, when we get the main crop of outdoor-grown rhubarb. Serves 2 200g rhubarb finely grated zest and juice of 1 orange 4 tbsps honey 1 tsp orange blossom water 120ml natural yogurt • Cook…

New cars: what the critics say Auto Express For years, Seat was the Volkswagen Group’s “problem child”. Now, however, the brand is “flying”: sales are up, “thanks in no small part to the brilliant Ateca SUV”. It’s not hard to see Seat’s appeal – its cars are pretty much as good as a VW or Škoda, but usually “with a style and price advantage”. And the Ibiza supermini offers an added bonus: it’s debuting the VW Group’s new small car technology. Autocar This is a handsome car, with clean lines and “a sense of tension”. The cabin is almost “premium-looking”, but it’s held back by hard surfaces “where you might hope for soft ones” – on the dashboard top, for instance. The Ibiza is much wider than before, so there…

Lloyds/HBOS: innocent victimhood? The “corrupt gang” of bankers and consultants who conspired to asset-strip small businesses at HBOS’s Reading branch, in a £1bn fraud, were jailed for a total of 47 years in February. But there’s no sign of this sorry saga ending, said Tom Harper in The Sunday Times. Last week, Lloyds announced it would pay £100m to compensate 70 of the victims, “many of whom were forced to live below the breadline for more than a decade”. Meanwhile, the Financial Conduct Authority has re-opened its investigation into whether there was a cover-up at HBOS before its takeover by Lloyds in 2008. It’s slightly awkward, to say the least, that the current chairman of the FCA, John Griffith-Jones, was senior partner at HBOS’s former auditor, KPMG, when the scam…

Both China and the US will gain from the talks... Pete Sweeney Reuters Breakingviews “So far I’ve gotten nothing, absolutely nothing,” quipped Donald Trump before sitting down to dinner with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping last week. “He was exaggerating only slightly,” says Pete Sweeney. Xi’s team “did not show up empty-handed” to talks aimed at averting a trade war between the US and China. But their concessions were “re-gifts that cost China little”. One sop was allowing US beef into the Chinese market, “a classic example of a present saved for a rainy day”; the other was the promise of better access for Wall Street firms, a process that is “already under way”. Confident that its own financial titans can now handle the competition, Beijing has been steadily loosening…

“The local inhabitants were nice, cheerful, rather silly people: children in most things. It was sad to see them being civilised” “Exploring and sporting expedition, under experienced guidance, leaving England June to explore rivers central Brazil, if possible ascertain fate Colonel Percy Fawcett; abundant game, big and small; exceptional fishing; ROOM TWO MORE GUNS; highest references expected and given. Write: Box 1150, The Times, EC4.” So ran an advertisement in the personal column of The Times on 14 April 1932, inviting readers to help solve one of the greatest mysteries of the age: the disappearance, seven years earlier, of the explorer Percy Fawcett. It was answered by Peter Fleming – the elder brother of Ian, the creator of James Bond – who was dispatched to the Amazon as special correspondent…