Innholdsfortegnelse for V. 1130 i The Week

The Grenfell Tower fire What happened At least 79 people have now been listed as dead or presumed dead as a result of the inferno that ravaged Grenfell Tower last week. Britain’s worst fire disaster in decades is thought to have been started by a faulty fridge in a fourth-floor flat of the social housing block. The blaze rapidly engulfed the 24-storey building, trapping residents inside. The emergency services were praised for their reaction, but there was widespread anger and several protests over the lack of support from the authorities (see page 22). Responsibility for the relief effort was taken from Kensington and Chelsea Council –much criticised for failing to distribute aid and ensure homeless families were rehoused locally – and given to a task force led by chief executives…

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Mistrial in Cosby case: The sexual assault case against Bill Cosby, the comedian once known as “America’s dad”, has been declared a mistrial. After 52 hours of deliberation, the jury in Philadelphia failed to agree a verdict on the charges against him. (Jury verdicts in Pennsylvania must be unanimous.) Prosecutors said they plan to seek a second trial, which they must do within 120 days. Cosby is accused of drugging and assaulting Andrea Constand at his home in 2004. He has admitted giving her drugs, but insisted that they had a relationship and that the sex was consensual. Pundits have suggested inconsistencies in Constand’s testimony over the number of times she’d been alone with Cosby might explain the jury’s deadlock. Cosby, 79, has been accused of assault by…

GERMANY The billionaires planning for Armageddon Die Tageszeitung (Berlin) Is Armageddon inevitable? The US entrepreneur Robert Vicino seems to think it is: he claims that whether it’s brought about by war, a disease pandemic, a cyber meltdown or even an alien invasion, doomsday is nigh, and he is advising the rich to start preparing themselves, says Ilija Trojanow. Some US tech billionaires are already building themselves doomsday homes in remote parts of the Americas and New Zealand. Now, Vicino is hoping to transform a Soviet-era underground fortress in Germany into an invitation-only complex of luxury apartments capable of withstanding a nuclear blast. Guarded by a small army, it will be no ordinary bomb shelter: the plans include swimming pools, restaurants, hydroponic gardens, a communications centre and a fully equipped hospital,…

For the past five years, Kansas has been conducting a radical experiment, said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post . The state’s governor, Sam Brownback, and the Republican-controlled legislature have put the theory of supply-side economics to the ultimate test by slashing income tax rates, virtually eliminating taxes on small businesses and dramatically reducing red tape. The idea was that these measures would, as Brownback put it, act like a “shot of adrenaline into the heart of the Kansas economy”. In practice, though, their effect has been more like a “shot of poison”. Kansas’s job growth rate, far from shooting up, has lagged way behind national levels. The state, meanwhile, is projected to hit a $1bn deficit, and its public services have deteriorated to the point that Kansas’s Supreme Court…

The NHS drugs evaluator Nice has announced a U-turn on the use of a life-extending breast cancer treatment for terminally ill patients in England. To the outrage of many patient groups, Kadcyla (trastuzumab emtansine) had been rejected for routine use on the NHS on cost-benefit grounds: it costs £90,000 per patient, on average, and extends life by almost six months. But following negotiations with the drug’s maker, Roche, which are believed to have cut the price to about £50,000 per patient, Nice has decided that it should be made available to women with HER2-positive cancer that has spread and cannot be treated surgically. Some 1,200 woman a year are now likely to benefit from the drug. Younger women are disproportionately affected by HER2-positive cancer, and around 115,000 people had signed…

As Theresa May “endlessly fumbles”, Jeremy Corbyn looks like a powerful “leader chiming with his time”, said John Harris in The Guardian. Thanks to him, there are now Labour MPs “in such renowned lefty redoubts as Kensington and Canterbury”. As he proved during the election campaign, and with his visit to Grenfell Tower after the disaster, people really do appreciate a politician with “moral clarity”, and an emotional connection to ordinary voters. Among his supporters, there is a mood of “understandable triumphalism”. A Labour Party expecting to be shrunk has gained dozens of MPs, said Stephen Bush in the New Statesman. The result leaves it “tantalisingly close to power, needing just a 3.5% swing to win a majority”. Corbyn expected to be fighting for his job. Now he has “a…

Tennis Defending champion Andy Murray was knocked out of the Aegon Championships at Queen’s Club in the first round by the world No. 90, Jordan Thompson. Johanna Konta lost to Donna Vekic in the final of the Nottingham Open. Rugby union In their final match before the first Test against New Zealand, the British and Irish Lions beat the Chiefs 34-6. Rugby league Defending champions Hull beat Castleford Tigers 32-24 to seal a place in the Challenge Cup semi-finals, where they will play Leeds Rhinos.…

It was news that “no one – with the possible exception of Terry Gilliam – was sure would ever come”, said Sam Adams on Slate. A quarter of a century after embarking on the project, the director has finally finished shooting his Don Quixote film, which many had thought doomed. It was an idea the director had dreamed up in the early 1990s, but for years he struggled to find funding. Hardly surprising, said Gwilym Mumford in The Guardian. His script for The Man Who Killed Don Quixote was “wildly ambitious” – the tale of a 21st century marketing executive who goes back in time to 17th century Spain, where Cervantes’ eccentric hero mistakes him for his sidekick Sancho Panza. Yet by 2000, Gilliam had recruited Johnny Depp to play…

I credit the start of my “obsession” with muscat to a childhood encounter with a bunch of ripe muscat grapes, says David Williams in The Observer: “the pop of sweet perfumed juice” opened “my palate” to its wonders. Here are some great muscats, perfect for summer… Royal Tokaji Yellow Muscat, Tokaj, Hungary 2015 (£12.49, Laithwaite’s) Refreshingly aromatic, this wine has a “floral lilt and pear-and-citrus zip”. On Pantelleria, off Sicily, the muscat grape makes the sticky, tangy dessert wine Carlo Pellegrino Passito di Pantelleria 2014 (£10.99, 37.5cl, www.dbmwines.co.uk). Up north in Piedmont, it’s behind the frothy white peach lightness of Michele Chiarlo Nivole Moscato d’Asti 2016 (£8.90, 37.5cl, www.winepoole.co.uk). Colinas del Itata Old Vine Field Blend Muscat Corinto, Chile 2016 (£10, M&S) has “saline freshness and grapefruit zinginess”. It’s not…

The chancellor who united both Germany and Europe Helmut Kohl 1930-2017 In German, his surname means cabbage, and Helmut Kohl was not the most charismatic of politicians. Overweight, tactless, curiously impassive, he was considered dull and (in the UK) overly Teutonic, with his appetite for stuffed pig’s stomach and his seeming lack of humour. But Kohl, who has died aged 87, was a master political strategist, said Dan van der Vat in The Guardian. He cultivated an image as the regular chap from the provinces, the “intellectual underdog”, who hung on while “lefties and media sophisticates mocked”: he managed to seem on the side of ordinary voters against the government, even when he was running it. He became the longest-serving chancellor since Bismarck, and played a pivotal role in two…

Trade is the key to tackling productivity David Smith The Times In his Mansion House speech this week, the Chancellor, Philip Hammond, sketched out a new “plan” to raise productivity. He’s quite right to be concerned, says David Smith. “The expression ‘lost decade’ is thrown around a lot, but in the case of productivity, is entirely appropriate”: the latest figures show that output per hour in Britain is now “fractionally lower” than in 2007. Since productivity normally grows by 2% a year, it’s “hard to overstate” how unusual this is – and how worrying, given the link between productivity and living standards. The Government’s domestic initiatives to tackle the problem are just fiddling round the edges: “the key to raising productivity is trade”. Hammond knows this, which is why “he…

Controversy of the week The bargaining begins “All but leaderless”, Britain hurtled on Monday into the first day of Brexit talks, said The Times. Theresa May was still trying to secure her survival as PM by making a “confidence and supply” deal with the Democratic Unionist Party. Her negotiating team had been given “no clear goal or starting point”, since even with the DUP’s support she would not have a parliamentary majority for the hard version of Brexit she had committed to in January. It is “hard to overstate the turmoil and confusion at the heart of government”, or the long-term risks this poses “to British livelihoods and Britain’s status in the world”. Brexit Secretary David Davis kicked off the talks with the EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, in Brussels…

Abuja Aid stolen: Nigeria’s government has admitted that vast quantities of food aid sent to the northeast of the country to help the victims of Boko Haram have been “diverted” (code for stolen). A spokesman for acting president Yemi Osinbajo (who is running the country while President Buhari is on medical leave in London) said that more than “50 trucks in every 100” had not reached their destination, but that more than 1,000 trucks of aid, guarded by some 2,000 military personnel and armed police, were now being sent north. About 1.8 million people have been displaced by Boko Haram: many of them are threatened by famine. In May, two officials were jailed for selling food aid. Last week, Nigeria apologised to Saudi Arabia after 200 tonnes of dates sent…

Facing the truth about our empire William Dalrymple The Daily Telegraph When it comes to attitudes to the British Raj, there’s no neutral ground, says William Dalrymple. Harsher critics deem it a crime on the scale of slavery and fascism; defenders insist it exported capitalism and democracy to Asia. One thing, however, all agree on: the empire “was the most important thing Britain ever did”. So how come it barely features on school curriculums? Children study the Tudors and Nazis, but seldom get “a whiff of Indian history”. As a result, we remain remarkably ignorant of our empire’s darker side: we think of the Raj “as all parasols and Simla tea parties”, not as an institution that perpetrated war crimes and reduced India from economic giant to third-world nation. British…

Dogs know life isn’t fair Dogs have a sense of fair play – but they didn’t learn it from us, new research suggests. On the contrary, their domestication may have taught them to accept that sometimes, life isn’t fair. For a study in Austria, researchers subjected both wolves and dogs to an experiment in which they were trained to respond to a command to press a buzzer, and given a treat as a reward in return. The animals obliged when they were performing the task solo – often even when they were not given rewards. But when a partner animal was introduced into the experiment, in an adjacent cage, their behaviour changed: if the partner animal got a prize when they didn’t, or got a better prize than they did,…

“It’s wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That’s where the mischief starts.” V.S. Naipaul, quoted in the London Evening Standard “When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.” George Bernard Shaw, quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle “Housing is not a question of conservatism or socialism, it’s a question of humanity.” Harold Macmillan, quoted in The Times “Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.” Wallace Stevens, quoted in The Guardian “The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.” Thomas Carlyle, quoted on The Browser “I could not live without champagne. In victory I deserve it. In defeat I need it.” Winston Churchill, quoted in The Observer “What the caterpillar calls the end, the rest of the world calls…

Theatre Anatomy of a Suicide Playwright: Alice Birch Director: Katie Mitchell Jerwood Theatre Downstairs, Royal Court, Sloane Square, London SW1 (020-7565 5000) Until 8 July Running time: 2hrs (no interval) ★★★★ The British writer Alice Birch is only 30 years of age, yet already she is a force to be reckoned with, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. She first drew attention to her “groundbreaking” gift with her 2014 play Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again, a “cluster of scenelets that formed a potent feminist rallying cry”. This year she has confirmed that promise with her screenplay for the much-praised film Lady Macbeth, in which Birch transposed Nikolai Leskov’s 1865 bodice-ripping novella from Russia to Victorian England. Now, in Anatomy of a Suicide – “an audacious but wintry examination of…

The Pony & Trap Newtown, Chew Magna, Bristol (01275-332627) Nestling on a quiet lane high up in the Mendips, and boasting cracking views, the charming Pony & Trap (all nooks, crannies and snug banquettes) was recently voted Britain’s third-best gastropub, said Matthew Bayley in The Daily Telegraph. And following my delicious lunch there on a warm early summer’s day, I was left to wonder: which other two gastropubs can be better than this? “And can the Telegraph send me to them too?” A snack of crunchy Scotch quail eggs with brown sauce was “a full English in one bite”. Plump sweet mussels were bathed in cream and cider and dressed in fronds of samphire. A main of pigeon (the menu here is so keen on local provenance that it…

New cars: what the critics say Auto Express For Volkswagen, “sensible has long been the name of the game”: rarely does someone invest in a VW because “it makes them weak at the knees”. But in a bid to crack the premium market, the German brand is now trying to produce “more interesting” models. Its first attempt is the all-new Arteon, a hatchback – longer and wider than the brand’s Passat – that replaces the old CC. Car magazine On the design front, Volkswagen has “certainly gone for it”. This is “easily the most striking model” in its portfolio, all “modern Jag meets BMW”. The interior is “pretty swish”, with ample legroom – although headroom isn’t quite so generous – and a sizeable, 563-litre boot. The Arteon is “loaded” with…

Thames Water: milked? Thames Water is in trouble again, said Gill Plimmer in the Financial Times. In March, it was fined £20.3m for releasing 1.4 billion litres of raw sewage into the Thames, in a move a judge described as “borderline deliberate”. And now the regulator, Ofwat, has slapped the utility, whose investors include pension and sovereign wealth funds from China, Abu Dhabi and Kuwait, with a second fine, of £8.55m, for its “unacceptable” failure to control water leakages. Ofwat reckons that 180 litres a day are lost for every property that the group supplies, due to underinvestment in infrastructure. Yet Thames paid out some £100m in dividends to investors in the year to March. “Thames Water is the company that gives even doubters cause to wonder whether renationalisation of…

Macron wins big European markets jumped nearly 1% on Monday after French President Emanuel Macron’s fledging La République En Marche! party secured an “overwhelming majority” in last weekend’s parliamentary elections, said Gavin Lumsden on Citywire. Investors are hoping he’ll use his “astonishing rise to power” to reform France’s restrictive labours laws and its expensive pension system – as well as reviving “faith in the European Union”. That’s a tall order, even if you buy into what Elliot Hentov, of State Street Global Advisors, calls France’s “wholesale political revolution”. But if Macron pulls it off, the benefits for European investors should be “twofold”, says Hentov: as well as increasing domestic investment and productivity, Macron is also “setting the stage for more audacious reforms of the eurozone”. Animal spirits “In truth, business…

Wu Xiaohui Rumours had been circulating for months that China’s anti-corruption brigade had the ambitious founder of the giant insurer Anbang in their sights, said The Economist. Then last week came news of Wu Xiaohui’s detention – and it has shaken the business community. Although many corporate bosses have been detained in recent years, Wu ranks as the most high-profile tycoon to be caught up in the country’s anti-corruption sweep. “Despite his brash dealmaking, he was once thought untouchable,” because he is married to a granddaughter of the former Chinese premier Deng Xiaoping, and had numerous connections with other Communist Party “princelings”. “Wu’s rise was almost as vertiginous as his apparent fall,” said the FT. Having made a fortune selling financial products in China, he shot to prominence internationally in…

Paris Attempted terror attack: France suffered another security scare this week when a man rammed a car filled with firearms and a gas canister into a police convoy on the Champs-Élysées, in what the authorities said appeared to be a botched suicide attack. Only the attacker himself was killed, apparently by injuries sustained in the collision and resulting fire. Early unconfirmed reports identified the attacker as a 31-year-old French national from the Paris suburb of Argenteuil, who had been on a terror watch list. France remains in a state of emergency, and security has been particularly tight on the Champs-Élysées since April, when a supporter of Islamic State opened fire on a police van, killing one officer. Separately, soldiers in Brussels – which is also on high alert – shot…

The liberal May James May is not the person you might think you know from TV, says Robert Crampton in The Times. Unlike Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond – his former co-presenters on Top Gear, and now on The Grand Tour – May didn’t go to public school, but to a comprehensive in Rotherham. He hates giving offence and he doesn’t have a reactionary bone in his body. “I’m not UKIP or Brexit and I don’t believe things were better in the olden days. Everything was s*** until about 20 minutes ago,” he says. “I know everyone likes to think of me as very old-fashioned and tweedy, but I’m not. I’m very liberal. The world has got better and all the old ideas about class, race, sexuality, habits and so…

A Spanish auxiliary nurse who was forced to take a professional exam while she was in labour has been told she can retake it. On the day she was due to sit the test, Mar Herraiz had been up for 20 hours, and had been given an epidural; nevertheless, members of the exam board warned that she had to sit it, or fail the entire course. She took the case to the Spanish High Court, which has now ruled in her favour, saying that her treatment was not only discriminatory and insensitive, but “confounds the most basic common sense”. Seven per cent of American adults think that chocolate milk comes from brown cows, according to a survey commissioned by the US dairy industry. That equates to around 16.4 million people.…

In 1984, scientists in Western Australia noticed that female humpback dolphins in Shark Bay were diving down to the bottom of the ocean floor, grabbing a piece of marine sponges – and jamming them onto their noses. It seems the creatures had worked out that the sponges could be used to protect their beaks when they rooted around on the sea floor for fish: further research indicated that they had been passing this technique down the generations, mother to daughter, for almost two centuries. Now, male dolphins in Shark Bay have also started using sponges – but this time, as hats. They have been observed picking them up and putting them on, during a socio-sexual display known as a “banana pose”: the males lift their heads and tails out of…

Conservative MPs have “a new nickname for Theresa May”, said Ben Riley-Smith in The Sunday Telegraph. They’re calling her “the Caretaker Prime Minister”. After May’s electoral humiliation, and her flat-footed response to the Grenfell Tower fire, none of her colleagues are expecting her to fight another general election as leader. But at the same time, the Tories are nervous of ousting her too soon, lest it triggers the collapse of the Government and ends up installing Jeremy Corbyn in Downing Street. For now, it suits all of the party’s various factions for her to remain in post. The “hard Brexiteers” are happy for her to stay as long as she keeps pursuing their favoured model of EU exit. Pro-EU Tories, by contrast, are hoping that her weakened position will force…

Cricket: Pakistan’s “remarkable” triumph “Twenty-five years after Imran Khan’s cornered tigers stunned the world by winning the World Cup, Pakistan were at it again,” said Paul Newman in the Daily Mail. In the Champions Trophy final at the Oval, they “demolished” their arch-rivals India by 180 runs to pull off a “remarkable” triumph. When Pakistan “scraped into the tournament”, ranked bottom of the eight teams competing, few expected them to progress beyond the group stage. And they got off to a terrible start: thrashed by India in their opening match, they were “on the brink of elimination”. In just two weeks, however, they were transformed from “also-rans to worthy champions”. One of the most watched sporting events in history, with some 360 million viewers, this match will go down as…

To The Guardian One issue I hope to see addressed following the Grenfell Tower tragedy is the adherence of the public sector to the purchaser/provider split, which means that local authorities, the health service and others no longer directly provide in-house services, but commission them from external private sector providers, through competitive tendering. I know from many years’ experience as a senior local government housing officer that there was a time when a major technical project, such as the refurbishment of a tower block, would have been led by an in-house team including architects, engineers and other experts whose professional pride, ability to sleep at night and pension depended on getting it right. These days, such a project will usually be led by a commissioning team, who may have unrivalled…

Churchill Dir: Jonathan Teplitzky 1hr 38mins (PG) Never in the course of moviemaking… ★★ Winston Churchill had his flaws, but one thing he wasn’t was a “quivering, crying, wobbly-lipped, moany snowflake”, said Camilla Long in The Sunday Times. That, however, is the portrait presented by this “shiny new Brit flick”, which contends that, far from being the sabre-rattling bulldog of legend, Churchill vehemently opposed the Normandy landings, fearing a bloodbath like the 1915 Gallipoli disaster. Brian Cox gives a fascinating performance in the lead, every anxiety readable in the contours of his jowly face, said Geoffrey Macnab in The Independent. But sadly, the talented supporting cast, including Miranda Richardson as his solicitous wife, Clemmie, gets “limited screen time”. Films don’t have to be entirely accurate, said Andrew Roberts on Heat…

Best books… Charles Cumming Award-winning thriller writer Charles Cumming picks his six favourite books on espionage. His third Thomas Kell spy thriller, A Divided Spy, has just been published in paperback by HarperCollins at £7.99 Naples ’44 by Norman Lewis, 1978 (Eland £10.99). All of the chaos, black comedy and pity of war captured in the diaries of a British intelligence officer posted to Naples shortly after the German army’s withdrawal. Every page of this masterpiece has a sentence that takes your breath away. Red Heat by Alex von Tunzelmann, 2011 (Simon & Schuster £12.99). Did the CIA turn Castro into a communist? That’s one of the questions raised by this extraordinary book, which examines why America propped up dictatorships in Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic during the Cold…

One of the most famous foods of southern Italy is baccalà, or salt cod – fish that has been filleted fresh and then preserved in salt. Most Italian markets and fishmongers have large marble sinks in which baccalà is piled under trickling, cold water. In Britain, you are likely to be offered it dried. The salt cod must be soaked and rehydrated in fresh, cold water; it’s ready for cooking once it is white and the texture is puffy Perpicaregna-style salt cod Serves 4 450g salt cod 100ml olive oil 1-2 cloves garlic, peeled but whole 8 dried sweet green peppers • Soak the salt cod in a bowl of water in the fridge for 24 hours, periodically changing the water. Drain well. • Fill the bottom of a steamer…

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos once described his approach to the publishing industry as like “a cheetah pursuing a sickly gazelle”. Supermarkets are much heftier beasts, but one could sniff the “terror” last week when Bezos’s online behemoth announced its $13.7bn swoop on the US organic giant Whole Foods, said Alex Brummer in the Daily Mail. Shares in America’s biggest grocery chains “plunged in double digits”; over here; Tesco led the fallers. Bezos has gone in “with both feet” – this is Amazon’s biggest ever deal and “the largest transaction ever” in the US grocery sector. Having upended sectors from bookselling to cloud computing, the group (current value: “a shade under half-a-trillion dollars”) now “threatens to revolutionise grocery shopping”. According to Whole Foods’ CEO John Mackey, the deal started with “a…

“Now is not yet the time” to begin raising interest rates, observed the Bank of England governor Mark Carney this week – citing mixed signals on consumer spending and business investment, as well as “anaemic wage growth”. But the issue is definitely back on the agenda, said David Byers in The Times. That much became clear when three out of eight members of the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee voted for a base-rate rise at last week’s meeting. Policymakers are torn between tackling inflation (which at 2.9% is well above the 2% target), and responding to the risks to the economy from weaker real wages and a slowing housing market. Given the added uncertainty of Brexit negotiations, “I can’t see an imminent change,” said Jonathan Harris of Anderson Harris mortgage brokers.…

Who’s tipping what The week’s best buys Compass Group Shares The catering giant runs more than 50,000 canteens and cafeterias in 50 countries, employing some 500,000 staff. It also provides cleaning and building maintenance services. A solid track record justifies the premium. Buy. £16.59. John Menzies Investors Chronicle Menzies’s earnings are set to grow as it reduces exposure to its traditional distribution business. The acquisition of aircraft services provider Asig promises global expansion and cross-selling opportunities. Yields 3.1%. Buy. 723p. Majestic Wine The Times The wine and spirits retailer’s turnaround is on track, boosted by soaring gin sales. Revenues are up, thanks to increased sales at both Naked Wines (up 26%) and Lay & Wheeler. Expanding internationally. Buy. 349.25p. Royal Bank of Scotland The Daily Telegraph A “pariah stock”, this…