Innholdsfortegnelse for V. 1124 i The Week

What happened A new leader for France Emmanuel Macron won an emphatic victory in France’s presidential election on Sunday, taking 66% of the vote to Marine Le Pen’s 34%. Her share was lower than expected, but she still gained almost 11 million votes, nearly twice as many as did her father in the presidential run-off in 2002. In a rally outside the Louvre in Paris – where he emerged to the strains of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, the EU’s anthem – the 39-year-old Macron talked of a “new page in our long history”, but acknowledged the “immense task” ahead. He urged voters to give him the majority he needs when they cast their ballots in the two-round parliamentary elections on 11 and 18 June. The sour mood of the electorate…

Washington DC Shock dismissal: FBI director James Comey was unexpectedly fired on Tuesday, ostensibly over his handling of an inquiry into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. Clinton has claimed that had Comey not declared that he was reopening the investigation, days before last year’s presidential election, she’d now be in the White House. At the time, Donald Trump praised Comey for his “guts”; yet this week, he fired him, immediately raising accusations that his real purpose was to halt an FBI investigation into claims that his own advisors had colluded with Moscow to steer the outcome of the poll. Jeff Sessions, the attorney general appointed by Trump, had recommended that Comey be dismissed – though he had also defended him at the time. Comey learned of his…

On Facebook no one should hide their face Edward Lucas The Times Breaches of copyright. Rampant piracy. Fake news. Airing the views of criminals, perverts and terrorists. Facebook, Google and Twitter are bracing themselves for a wave of legal and political battles over these and other abuses, says Edward Lucas. And they deserve to be in the firing line. They wield vast influence – nearly two billion people use Facebook – yet do precious little to police the content of their sites. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg says he’ll hire 3,000 people to look out for child abuse images and hate speech, but they’ll never cope with the flood of abusive material. The basic problem the tech giants need to tackle is anonymity: this is what facilitates disgusting and illegal behaviour…

Prostate blood test breakthrough A £50 blood test can identify which men with advanced prostate cancer will respond well to the standard drug treatment, a study has shown. If adopted, it could prolong lives, and spare patients unnecessary side effects, by ensuring that those who won’t respond to the drugs are offered alternative treatments. In advanced cases, where the cancer is no longer responding to hormone therapy, and is spreading, patients are now usually offered two targeted drugs – abiraterone and enzalutamide. Many patients can take these and live cancer-free for years; but in other men, the cancer quickly returns. Now, by testing the blood of 265 patients, the team of British scientists, along with colleagues in Europe, have discovered that these drugs are not effective on tumours that carry…

“History is about arrogance, vanity and vapidity. Who better than me to present it?” David Starkey, quoted in The Times “A prudent ruler cannot, and must not, honour his word when it places him at a disadvantage.” Machiavelli, quoted in The Daily Telegraph “When a man opens a car door for his wife, it’s either a new car or a new wife.” Prince Philip, quoted in the Daily Mail “The truth will set you free, but not until it is finished with you.” David Foster Wallace, quoted in The Times “Art is as much about labour as it is about interpretation.” Journalist Britt Julious in The New York Times “That bloke in charge of North Korea looks like a wrong’un.” D.E. Britton in a letter to the Daily Mail “A…

Orwell was right To The Times Fake news is nothing new. In 1938 George Orwell wrote in Homage to Catalonia, his memoir of the Spanish Civil War: “In Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed.” Even more disturbing was the enthusiastic gullibility of the consumers of the fake news. “I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies, and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened.” What frightened Orwell was the feeling that “the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the…

Theatre The Ferryman Playwright: Jez Butterworth Director: Sam Mendes Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Square, London SW1 (020-7565 5000) Until 20 May, then transferring to the Gielgud Theatre (20 June-7 October) Running time: 3hrs 15mins (including interval) ★★★★ Tickets for The Ferryman sold out within a day of going on sale, instantly earning the play a West End transfer – and it’s not hard to see why, said Ann Treneman in The Times. The latest work by Jez Butterworth, the man who wrote the brilliant Jerusalem, it’s directed by James Bond director Sam Mendes and stars the brilliant Paddy Considine in his stage debut. Is the hype justified? For once, it is – this really is “something special”. Set in rural Northern Ireland in 1981, “at the height of the Troubles”,…

Best books… Posy Simmonds Posy Simmonds, the cartoonist, illustrator and author of Tamara Drewe and Gemma Bovery, picks her five favourite books. Her most recent book, Literary Life Revisited, is published by Jonathan Cape at £18.99 Ah yes, I Remember It Well: Paris 1961-1975 by Ronald Searle, 1987 (out of print). Ronald Searle became my hero as a child when I discovered his St Trinian’s cartoons in my parents’ bookshelves. A deeper appreciation of his extraordinary talents came later. (I used to try to imitate his jagged, scurrying, rococo lines.) The drawings in this book show Searle’s superb eye for mood, character and place. Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro, 1971 (Vintage £8.99). I often reread these interlinked stories about the dilemmas of girls growing up in a…

Serves 4 200ml sunflower oil, for frying 8 spears of tenderstem broccoli 8 baby carrots 8 radishes 12 button mushrooms For the batter: 150g plain (all-purpose) flour 100g cornflour (cornstarch) 1 tsp baking powder 200ml ice-cold sparkling water For the dipping sauce: 200g passata 2 tbsps soy sauce 1 tbsp maple syrup ½ tsp dried chilli flakes handful of fresh coriander, finely chopped 1 lime • Heat the oil in a deep pan over a high heat while you prepare the vegetables. Trim the ends of the broccoli and slice away the top ends of the baby carrots. Remove the very top and bottom of the radishes. Brush the mushrooms to ensure they are dirt free. • Now make the batter. In a wide bowl, mix together the flour, cornflour,…

Climber who sprinted up the North Face of the Eiger Ueli Steck 1976-2017 Ueli Steck, who has died aged 40, was probably the greatest mountaineer of his generation. He was known for his solo ascents, without bottled oxygen, of the great Himalayan peaks, including Everest, but was most closely associated with the North Face of the Eiger: having first climbed it aged 18, he returned, again and again, repeatedly beating his own speed record. The first climbers to complete the perilous route, in 1938, took four days. In 2015, Steck sprinted up the 5,500ft “Wall of Death” in two hours and 22 minutes. Unlike many Swiss climbers, Steck did not grow up in the mountains. He was born, in 1976, in a town in the Emmental Valley, the son of…

Archie Norman Talk about a Norman conquest, said Claire Hutchison in the London Evening Standard. Shares in M&S jumped 5% last week on news that Archie Norman – the retail turnaround king credited with “rescuing Asda from ruin” in the early 1990s – is joining the chain’s board as chairman. He will work alongside CEO Steve Rowe, the M&S lifer appointed last year to revive the group after a “prolonged” period of poor performance in all but its food divisions. Some analysts worry how the team will pan out with Norman as “a back-seat driver”, but most took the line adopted by Dr Clive Black of Shore Capital – that this is a “formidable appointment”. Norman is probably best known as “the only FTSE 100 chief to sit as an…

Controversy of the week A breach of trust? “It has become sadly common for foreign powers to be accused of intervening in elections,” said The Economist. “But usually it is Russia or China that is said to be involved.” Last week, Theresa May accused EU officials of “trying to affect the general election result”, and of attempting to sabotage Brexit talks – evidence of quite how bad relations have become between Britain and Brussels. The “souring of the mood” came after the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung published a “colourful” account of a “disastrous” dinner between May and the EU Commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, in London last month: Juncker apparently told May that he was leaving Downing Street “ten times more sceptical” that a Brexit deal could be reached, and…

Varoufakis’s Brexit tips Yanis Varoufakis might be a motorbike-riding radical Leftist – but his heart goes out to Theresa May. The former Greek finance minister spent five months doing battle with the EU over its punitive debt-collection policies, and he has the psychological scars to show for it. “My advice to May is to avoid negotiation at all costs,” he told Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Daily Telegraph. “If she doesn’t do that… it will end in capitulation.” Varoufakis – who has written a memoir about his doomed struggle with the back-room powerbrokers of Brussels – predicts the EU will wage a war of attrition against the British PM, forcing her into one humiliating defeat after another. It will start, he says, with “the tactic of stalling negotiations. They will get…

Police in a “dry” state in India have accused rats of drinking some 900,000 litres of seized moonshine and other liquor that has gone missing from police stores. Officials in Bihar, where alcohol was banned last year, suspect that corrupt police either drank or sold the confiscated booze; but the local police insist that bibulous rodents are to blame. An inquiry has been launched. Workers at a call centre in Bury are reportedly being made to lie on the ground, if they don’t meet their sales targets, and have a dead squid dropped on their face. The Central Claims Group describes it as a team-building exercise, and said that although the forfeit was chosen by the team with the best sales figures, all staff had consented to the punishment beforehand.…

NEW ZEALAND Immigration is starting to cause trouble Stuff.co.nz  (Wellington) Everyone wants to come to live in gorgeous New Zealand – and we’ve been letting them, says Vernon Small. In the past year, this nation of fewer than five million has welcomed a record 129,500 immigrants. Given that 132,000 New Zealanders are unemployed, this raises the question: “why are we bringing in so many foreigners when there are so many out of work here”? The influx has strained our infrastructure and caused a housing shortage, particularly in Auckland. So now an “ugly casserole” of resentment and xenophobia is beginning to stew. Our own populist nationalist, Winston Peters of the New Zealand First party, has been ranting about immigration rates for years, but mainstream parties have also begun addressing the issue.…

An Italian neuroscientist has created a two-headed rat, a disturbing feat that he says takes him a step closer to carrying out the first human head transplant – something he claims he will be ready to do later this year. Dr Sergio Canavero first announced his plan to transplant the head of a paralysed man onto the body of a donor in 2015. He hopes to do this by cooling both bodies to slow their metabolisms, then severing the spinal columns and necks and fusing the blood vessels and nerves from one head onto those of the other body. He has already found a volunteer: a 31-year-old Russian with a severe muscle-wasting disease. In experiments, carried out in China, where Canavero is now based, he used groups of three rats:…

Justin Bieber raised eyebrows with his list of backstage demands ahead of a concert in Mumbai. The star (pictured) reportedly asked for ten luxury sedans and two buses to transport his 120-strong entourage, and to have ten containers of items, including a sofa and a ping-pong table, flown in for him. He also asked for a private jet to be on standby, and for three floors of a five-star hotel to be converted into a “private villa setting”, filled with antiques, Mughal paintings and purple carnations. Barack Obama twice asked a girlfriend to marry him, before he fell in love with Michelle, a new biography claims. In his book, David J. Garrow says that in his early 20s, Obama was involved in a serious relationship with Sheila Miyoshi Jager, who…

Cricket: Ireland’s unlikely success This is a historic time for Irish cricket, said Tim Wigmore in The Independent. Just over a decade ago, Ireland “had never played an official One-Day International (ODI)”, and the sport’s governing body had only one full-time member of staff – the national coach, whose “car boot doubled as the storage room for the team’s kit”. In a 2001 tournament in Canada, the team even had to draft in a journalist to serve as its 12th man. Yet now they’re on course to be granted full Test status in June, along with Afghanistan. The change has been extraordinary, said George Dobell on ESPNcricinfo.com. Thanks to the emergence of a generation of talented cricketers, Ireland have punched above their weight in the last three World Cups, beating…

To The Guardian It did not take long in the current election campaign for the Conservatives to trot out the old myth of Labour being the party of high taxation while the Tories are “tax cutters by instinct”. It may be true to say the Tories favour unfair cuts in direct taxation, but this certainly cannot be said of their less progressive and equitable “instinct” of increasing indirect taxation. Let’s not forget it was Margaret Thatcher who raised VAT from 8% to 15% only weeks after denying there were any plans to do so during the 1979 election campaign, and it was George Osborne who raised it from 17.5% to 20% following similar denials in 2010. Thatcher was fond of saying that Labour would spend until it ran out of…

Mindhorn Dir: Sean Foley 1hr 29mins (15) British comedy featuring a spoof sleuth ★★ Even if your heart doesn’t yearn for another low-budget British comedy, don’t write off this offering from the creators of The Mighty Boosh, said Danny Leigh in the FT. Scripted by Julian Barratt and Simon Farnaby, this “howlingly funny” film stars Barratt as Richard Thorncroft, a washed-up actor whose one success was as “Mindhorn” – an absurd 1980s TV cop with a bionic eye which had the power to detect lies (allowing him the catchphrase: “It’s truth time!”). But when a serial killer (Russell Tovey) declares he will only negotiate with Mindhorn, our hero gets the chance to play the role for real. Much of the humour resides in Thorncroft’s blustering desperation, said Brian Viner in…

New cars: what the critics say Volkswagen e-Golf from £27,150 (including government grant) Autocar The original e-Golf was an easy car to like. Unlike many manufacturers, Volkswagen opted to make its first production electric vehicle a “practical everyday car” – it looked just like any other Golf, albeit with a range of only 100 miles or so. This second-generation model improves on that: you can expect it to cover about 125 miles on a single charge (though VW claims it does up to 186). Auto Express Reassuringly, the e-Golf’s design is more or less unchanged: this is a car that “doesn’t shout about its eco credentials, and it’s all the better for it”. You’ll find it has a “sober but impressively solid” Golf interior, as well as a useful 12.3…

Berkshire Hathaway: death and regrets The Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting has been called the “Woodstock of Capitalism” and “a host of other corny names over the years”, said Bob Bryan on Business Insider. But this year, for all the usual banter between CEO Warren Buffett, 86, and his veteran investment partner Charlie Munger, the mood seemed “downbeat”. A good portion of the “marathon” Q&A session focused on two things: “Buffett’s death and Berkshire’s misses”. “If I die tonight, I think the stock would go up tomorrow,” quipped Buffett, citing the breakup value of the group. But his questioners wanted more information on who might succeed him. Buffett dodged that, embarking instead on a full “mea culpa” about how he’d overlooked tech stars Google and Amazon in favour of making “a…

Who’s tipping what The week’s best buys ConvaTec The Times This medical products specialist, with leading market positions in wound and ostomy care, was rapidly promoted to the FTSE 100 after floating last year. Driven by demographics, it is cash generative and set to beat growth forecasts. Buy. 295p. Moss Bros Group Investors Chronicle The gents’ outfitter continues to defy the gloomy high street: its 127-unit shop estate operates on flexible, short-term leases. Expanding online and internationally. Yields 6.5%. Buy. 100p. Rentokil Initial The Times The pest control specialist’s broad portfolio includes insurance, plant rental and hygiene businesses. Profits have doubled in five years thanks to global expansion. Shares aren’t cheap, but should go higher. Buy. £2.50. Sage Group The Times The software firm, known for its “dull reliability”, is…

West Jutland, Denmark Wolves arrive: For the first time in 200 years, wolves are roaming wild in Denmark, researchers have confirmed. Five wolves, including one female, have been identified in the sparsely populated West Jutland region. The researchers think the wolves migrated from Germany, more than 300 miles away. “We think these are young wolves rejected by their families, looking for new hunting grounds,” they said. Europe’s wolves were hunted almost to extinction in the 19th century: Denmark’s last wolf was killed in 1813. However, there has since been a revival, and there are now some 12,000 in Europe. Danish farmers have been complaining about wolves killing sheep since 2012; they have been offered funding for fencing, and compensation for losses. Hanover, Germany Mass evacuation: Some 50,000 people were evacuated…

ITALY Maybe we should ditch the euro Il Sole 24 Ore (Milan) Italy isn’t poised to follow the UK’s lead and quit the EU, says Luigi Zingales: but a unilateral Italian exit from the euro is a “serious possibility”, and “it should be discussed seriously”. It’s more than likely that “eurosceptics will have a majority in the next Italian parliament”. As yet, only the far-right Northern League is openly opposed to continued use of Europe’s common currency. But if the populist Five Star Movement, Forza Italia and Brothers of Italy are “more ambiguous”, they are still floating proposals for a referendum on the issue, or for a parallel “fiscal currency” of dubious legality. And though the centre-left Democratic Party still seems loyal to the common currency, that could change if…

An opioid that is 100 times stronger than street heroin has arrived in the UK, according to the National Crime Agency. The musician Prince was probably killed by fentanyl, which is prescribed to reduce severe pain. He is thought to have taken it accidentally, having mistaken it for a much weaker painkiller. But in the US, dealers have been deliberately cutting heroin with fentanyl, and carfentanil, a similar but even stronger drug that vets use to tranquilise elephants. Both are so potent that it only takes miniscule quantities (a barely visible 0.00002g in the case of carfentanil) to trigger a fatal overdose, and in the US, they have been behind an epidemic of deaths. Now toxicology reports on six people recently killed by drug overdoses in the north of England…

Labour’s woes: is it time for a new party? “Credibility is one of those indispensable political qualities that barely rates a mention when it is there,” said The Guardian. “Yet when it is missing, nothing else matters as much.” This is a major problem for Labour. The policies it has published thus far – which include a massive housebuilding drive, a £10 minimum wage and free parking at hospitals – “do not yet add up to a very coherent platform”. Nor, for that matter, do Jeremy Corbyn’s attacks on “greedy bankers” and “rip-off bosses” seem likely to win over many Tory-leaning voters. But the more fundamental problem is that many voters simply can’t take Corbyn himself seriously. The Labour leader seemed not even to have persuaded supporters gathered in Manchester,…

Djokovic’s spring clean Novak Djokovic’s career path “took another bizarre twist” last week, says Peter Bodo on ESPN. The world No. 2 tennis player unexpectedly split from his coach, his fitness coach and his physiotherapist, little more than five months after sacking “supercoach” Boris Becker. Why all these changes? Djokovic hasn’t been himself since July, when he apparently became affected by “questions surrounding his personal life”. The Serb has won just one tournament in 2017, and “hasn’t looked like his impregnable self in his losses”. He clearly thinks a change of personnel will help him – but who knows whether this decision was “the result of great clarity or profound confusion”. Time will tell. Erasing records The latest bold new plan to clean up athletics is “utter nonsense”, says Matt…

Lahpet 5 Helmsley Place, London E8 (020-3883 5629) The Burmese are coming, says Grace Dent in the London Evening Standard. From supper clubs, east London pop-ups and the “wonderful blog” Meemalee, to the “smatterings of Burma” at Som Saa and Kiln – not to mention The Shan State, which sprang up on Shaftesbury Avenue last year, doling out Myanmar fermented green tea salad – Burmese food is where it’s at. In Hackney, Dan Anton’s Maltby Street Market stall, Lahpet, has found a permanent home in Helmsley Place – and a “prettily lit, verdant, inviting” home it is too: it “begs you to come in and peruse the menu”. The Mandalay fritters were thick, satisfying wodges of kidney bean with ginger, and I demolished a bowl of Shan rice noodles…

Who’ll cough up for the EU’s pension bill? Patrick Hosking The Times One item on Britain’s divorce bill with the EU is likely to come under particularly intense scrutiny, says Patrick Hosking: whether UK taxpayer money is being earmarked for the “gold-plated” pensions of EU officials, which many see as “the biggest gravy boat in Europe”. The numbers are huge. Almost 76,000 present and former officials have already been promised s64bn of retirement and healthcare benefits, with an average individual lump sum of s845,000. And the “killer” fact is that “there’s zilch in the kitty”. A House of Lords EU committee inquiry recently found that Britain’s legal liability for these pensions was a grey area. “But morally, we are completely on the hook.” If we try to dodge our share,…