Innholdsfortegnelse for V. 1138 i The Week

What happened The plan for Brexit The Government sought to step up the pace of Brexit talks this week by publishing the first of a series of position papers. Under the proposals, Britain will seek to smooth the exit process by mirroring its current arrangements with the EU for up to three years after quitting the bloc in March 2019. After this interim period – during which we would negotiate but not implement new trade deals with non-EU nations – the UK will seek one of two customs arrangements with the EU. Under the first, it would use vehicle-recognition software and other means to streamline border checks. Under the second, the UK and EU would enforce each other’s customs rules following a new partnership deal. London will insist in either…

Washington DC Lawsuit over transgender ban: Five transgender people serving in the US military have launched legal action against President Trump and top Pentagon officials over Trump’s planned ban on transgender troops. The lawsuit demands a reversal of the policy, on the grounds that it is discriminatory and unconstitutional. Other suits are expected once the administration takes concrete steps towards putting the ban into effect. Trump announced the plan on Twitter last month, catching the US military off guard, but the White House has yet to send any specific policy directive to the Pentagon. There are no reliable statistics on the number of transgender people on active service in the US military; studies have estimated the number variously between 2,450 and 8,800 (with thousands more in the National Guard and…

Don’t listen to the advocates of “Lexit” Ben Chu The Independent Only by leaving the EU will Britain be free to become a “social democratic nirvana”. So claim prominent left-wing advocates of “Lexit”, says Ben Chu. They argue that EU laws stand in the way of us reforming our economy along more Corbynist lines. But you only have to look at Europe to see this is nonsense. In France, university tuition is negligible; in Belgium, zero-hour contracts are banned; in Portugal, domestic energy consumers benefit from regulatory price caps; in Hamburg, people voted to return their power grid from private firms to municipal hands. Did the “neo-liberal jackboots of Brussels” try to block any of this? No. The Lexiters talk of a post-Brexit UK finally being able to stand up…

GERMANY This former president has no honour Der Tagesspiegel (Berlin) Germany is generous to its former presidents, says Gerd Appenzeller: it gives them an honorary payment (“ehrensold”) of s236,000 a year. Christian Wulff is no exception, though he resigned in disgrace in 2012 after just two years in the job; he was accused of corruption, after accepting a loan from an entrepreneur. Many were angry he got anything at all: though later acquitted of corruption in court, he caused outrage by trying to bully journalists into not covering the scandal. Yet it appears that for Wulff, even this enormous sum is not enough. He has now taken on a lucrative role as legal representative for the Turkish fashion retailer Yargici, which calls itself a “fun-loving brand for women”. This is…

British caterpillars are being killed by a “zombie virus” that causes them to march towards the Sun, before exploding. Wildlife experts say the “baculovirus” overrides the caterpillars’ natural instinct to hide in undergrowth, where they are safe from predators, leading them to crawl towards the top of host plants or trees. They then die and their bodies liquify – before bursting open in a shower of contagious goo that spreads the virus. The popped remains of caterpillars of the oak eggar moth – a common British variety – have been found in Winmarleigh Moss, near Garstang, Lancashire, and across the West Pennine Moors, littering the heather and bilberry plants on which they feed. “It’s like a zombie horror film,” Dr Chris Miller, of The Wildlife Trust for Lancashire, Manchester and…

“It’s a pattern we simply cannot ignore,” said Nazir Afzal, a former chief crown prosecutor, in the Daily Mail. Over the past six years, male gangs have been prosecuted for organised sex-grooming crimes in no fewer than 16 English cities and towns. The latest site in this grim roster is Newcastle, where last week 17 men and one woman were convicted of sexually abusing more than 20 vulnerable young females. In all but two of these grooming scandals, most of the perpetrators were Muslim men of South Asian heritage, predominantly of Pakistani origin. And all but three of their victims were teenage white girls. It’s clear that the growth of these gangs has been fuelled by misogynistic attitudes towards women in general, but in particular by contempt for white girls,…

It was a “standout moment for Instagram, the platform dominated by avocados and willowy young women performing post-salad handstands,” said Lucy Siegle in The Observer. Alexandra Shulman, who recently stepped down as editor of Vogue, last week posted a photo of herself in a bikini on holiday in Greece, casually captioned: “Time for the boat trip.” A “social media meltdown” resulted, as people around the world praised her “brave” and “empowering” action. Yes, it seems that “an undoctored picture of a 59-year-old” in an ordinary Boden bikini is an “act of revolution”. Why exactly did it cause such a stir, asked Alison Rowat in The Herald (Glasgow). Because Shulman “looked like an ordinary woman. She had lumps. Bumps. Wobbly bits. Veins. Most gobsmacking of all, she seemed entirely cool about…

Justin Thomas is very much a modern golfer, said John Huggan in The Daily Telegraph. Although he cuts a slight figure, weighing less than 11st, the 24-year-old Kentucky native hits the ball “startlingly” far, putting enormous effort into every shot. In the past, that “aggression” has cost him dearly – most recently at June’s US Open, when he started promisingly but fell away to a ninth-place finish. But in the PGA Championship last weekend at Quail Hollow, in North Carolina, there were no such mistakes: Thomas held his nerve to win his first major by two shots. And he did it in style, making a birdie on the penultimate hole. Thomas’s win was a “milestone”, said Bob Harig on ESPN. It followed the victory of Jordan Spieth, Thomas’s close friend…

To The Guardian In 2012 I was part of a team of “Games Makers”, to chauffeur North Korea’s Paralympic team – which consisted of one competitor, Rim Ju Song, and a small entourage. I was struck not only by their dedication, but also their sense of humour, good manners and informed curiosity about British culture. They appeared model citizens of the world. I make this point in the hope that, in this futile nuclear dance, we do not judge a people by its leaders, or think of them as fodder for the “fire and fury” brigade, simply because they are in the unfortunate position of being ruled by individuals of dubious character. Alan Corcoran, Godalming, Surrey To The Daily Telegraph I visited North Korea in 2009 and in 2014. Everything…

Atomic Blonde Dir: David Leitch 1hr 55mins (15) Introducing a new action hero This “sexy, boozy, violent and cool” thriller stars Charlize Theron as a British spy sent to 1980s Berlin to recover a missing microfilm, said Jamie East in The Sun. There she runs into a French agent (Sofia Boutella), with whom she has a passionate fling, and an unhinged MI6 station chief (James McAvoy). But who, if anyone, is to be trusted? The plot and characters are “superficial”, said Geoffrey Macnab in The Independent. Yet for sheer entertainment value, Atomic Blonde can’t be faulted. There are some brilliant fight scenes between the “cartoonishly indestructable” Theron and her opponents. Best of all is a ten-minute scene in which Theron battles her way down a staircase through a cluster of…

Best books… Christian Jennings The author and foreign correspondent Christian Jennings selects his six favourite thrillers. His latest book, Flashpoint Trieste: The First Battle of the Cold War, is available from Osprey at £20 The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth, 1971 (Arrow £7.99). The best thriller of the last 50 years tells the story of the English assassin who targets French president Charles de Gaulle. Atmospheric, accurate, tautly written, it has defined the genre ever since. City of Thieves by David Benioff, 2008 (Sceptre £8.99). Leningrad 1941: a Russian soldier and a looter are spared execution and given an impossible mission. In a starving city, they must find eggs for the wedding cake of an officer’s daughter. The picaresque quest that follows is terrifying, sad and funny. Blood…

New cars: what the critics say What Car? The previous XV wasn’t an especially good car – “in fact, it was quite a bad one”. Its handling was poor, and it was expensive, to boot. Now, Subaru has given the SUV a “substantial reworking’: built on the manufacturer’s brand-new platform, the car has updated engines, a new chassis and a redesigned interior and exterior. Can those changes turn its fortunes around? Auto Express This model is “certainly a step forward in terms of looks”. The new design is very handsome, with a more modern front end. The interior has also been upgraded – it looks more upmarket, with more shiny plastics and soft-touch materials, though the infotainment screens still lags behind that of many rivals. The cabin is spacious –…

The handsome, hard-drinking singer of Rhinestone Cowboy Glen Campbell 1936-2017 Glen Campbell, who has died aged 81, was “one of the sweetest singers anyone could ever hope to hear”, said Neil McCormick in The Daily Telegraph. As he demonstrated on smooth country classics such as Rhinestone Cowboy and By the Time I Get to Phoenix, he had the “pure flowing tone of a crooner”, but with “a whisky catch at the back of this throat that tugged at the heart of a melody and left listeners feeling every shift in the lyric”. For despite his apple-cheeked, all-American handsomeness, Campbell’s deceptively simple delivery hinted at his personal demons of alcohol and drug addiction. “I need you more than want you”, he sang on the wonderful Wichita Lineman, suggesting a…

Playing the Vix Last week’s “nuclear” stock sell-off cost a lot of people money, “but at least one person walked away smiling”, said Joe Ciolli at Business Insider. That would be “50 Cent” – the nickname of one particular “volatility vigilante” renowned for betting big “on a stock market shock”. He “raked in a whopping $21m in mark-to-market gain” when Wall Street’s Vix Index of volatility (known as the “fear gauge”) jumped 44% to its highest level since May. Who exactly is this rakish investor? Back in May, the Financial Times, citing sources in banks familiar with the trades, unmasked “50 Cent” as none other than Ruffer LLP – the $20bn London-based fund, renowned for its conservative investment approach, whose client roster includes the Church of England. Despite last week’s…

Is there any point to rules about what to drink with different foods? After half a century of dedicated exploration, I have to admit that there is not much point to most of them. Yes, many whites wines are easier to drink with fish than red, and no, I wouldn’t drink white Burgundy with a rib of beef, but aside from this, most of the time it is a question of personal taste. Cheese is a case in point. The usual preference was red wine with cheese but more recently, adventurous souls have recommended Sancerre with Brie or goat’s cheese and Sauternes with Stilton. My friend, Jeremiah Tower, who practically invented California cuisine, once served Château d’Yquem with roast beef and it was deemed a huge success. There are some…

Kenneth C. Frazier Andrew Ross Sorkin asked in The New York Times: “At what point do the CEOs of the largest companies in the United States tell President Trump that enough is enough?” For the boss of Merck Pharma, that moment came this week. Citing “a responsibility to take a stand against intolerance and extremism”, the nation’s most prominent African-American executive quit Trump’s American Manufacturing Council in protest at the president’s refusal to directly condemn the neo-Nazis and Klan sympathisers rampaging in Charlottesville. Trump’s response was to hit out. Now that Frazier has resigned, tweeted the President, he will have “more time to LOWER RIP-OFF DRUG PRICES”. It’s not unusual for Trump to attack any public figure who criticises or even mildly questions his actions. Still, his decision to turn…

Who’s tipping what The week’s best buys Apple Investors Chronicle If Q3 results are anything to go by, growth in the world’s biggest company looks unlikely to let up – and isn’t fully recognised in the share price, now nine times the forecasts for 2017-18. Buy. $159.32. Bluejay Mining The Mail on Sunday This Aim-listed explorer, focused on Greenland, has one of the largest and highest-grade ilmenite (used to make titanium dioxide) projects in the world. Expected to be highly profitable once commercial production starts next year. Buy. 18.25p. Cambian Shares Cambian’s shares have jumped nearly 75% in 2017, but could grow more. Its new specialist children’s behavioural services focus should pay dividends, provided it doesn’t grow too fast again. Buy. 213.5p. Coats Shares Supplying industrial threads to Nike and…

Controversy of the week The Korea missile crisis “How did we get here,” asked Fareed Zakaria in The Washington Post. Why does it suddenly appear that we’re “on the brink of a war in Asia”? From the start, President Trump’s administration “has wanted to look tough on North Korea”. But when the latest crisis blew up – precipitated by reports that Pyongyang had developed an intercontinental ballistic missile, and a nuclear warhead small enough to fit on it – Trump’s reaction was “deeply worrying and dangerous”. He threatened to bring down “fire and fury like the world has never seen” on North Korea; when pressed on the issue, he doubled down, promising that “military solutions are now fully in place, locked and loaded”, should Kim Jong Un “act unwisely”. Throughout…

Rolling Stone revived Ronnie Wood is counting his blessings. “I’ve had a fight with a touch of lung cancer,” he told Louise Gannon in The Mail on Sunday. “There was a week when everything hung in the balance and it could have been curtains.” The Rolling Stone – who was a smoker for half a century, before giving up last year – recently had a cancer removed from his lung. Mercifully, it hasn’t spread. “I was bloody lucky, but then, I’ve always had a guardian angel looking out for me. By rights I shouldn’t be here.” Until he met his third wife, Sally Humphreys, Wood’s hellraising was legendary. At one point, in 2008, he was so blitzed on booze and drugs that his family despaired of ever getting him straight.…

Residents of Durango, Colorado, were woken by a joyriding bear driving down the street. The animal had broken into the Subaru car and then accidentally released the parking brake, causing it to roll down the hill and smash into a postbox. The bear fled the scene before police arrived, but left plenty of evidence behind. It had smashed a window, ripped the steering wheel free of the shaft, destroyed the radio and defecated on the seats. “It would have taken a human hours to do what this bear did in a couple of minutes,” said one local resident. The rise in “extreme grooming” for dogs has been criticised by animal charities, who say pets don’t like being made to look foolish. The hobby – in which pet fur is dyed,…

Loneliness could be far worse for your health than obesity, and may even shorten your life. That’s the conclusion of American scientists who reviewed 218 studies into the impact of loneliness and social isolation, covering almost 3.5 million people. The data showed that the risk of premature death was 50% lower for those with “good social connections” than for the lonely, reported The Daily Telegraph. By comparison, obesity raises the risk of early death by 30%. “Being connected to others socially is widely considered a fundamental human need, crucial to both well-being and survival,” said the report’s lead author, Julianne Holt-Lunstad, of Brigham Young University, Utah. A recent study found that 18% of UK adults feel lonely often or always.…

“Put down the phone, turn off the laptop, and do something – anything – that does not involve a screen.” That, said the psychologist Jean Twenge in The Atlantic, is my plea to today’s teenagers, who are “on the brink” of a major mental health crisis. For the past 25 years, I have been studying behavioural changes across generations of Americans. The data stretches back to the 1930s, taking in huge upheavals such as the War and the sexual revolution. But I have “never seen anything like” the seismic changes caused by modern technology. Children born between 1995 and 2012 – I call them iGen – have grown up with a smartphone in their hands, and it has “changed every aspect” of their lives. They do much less face-to-face socialising…

“Education is what you get when you read the fine print; experience is what you get if you don’t.” Folk singer Pete Seeger, quoted in The Times “Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.” Charles Baudelaire, quoted on Forbes.com “Everything must be learned, from reading to dying.” Gustave Flaubert, quoted in The Observer “The difference between a politician and a statesman is that a politician thinks about the next election while the statesman thinks about the next generation.” Theologian James Freeman Clarke, quoted in The Times “The universe is not complicated, there’s just a lot of it.” Richard Feynman, quoted on The Browser “There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This…

Tennis Roger Federer withdrew from the Western & Southern Open, guaranteeing that Rafael Nadal will reclaim the world No. 1 ranking from Andy Murray next week. Football Chinese businessman Jisheng Gao and his family bought an 80% stake in Southampton. In the Premier League, Man United beat West Ham 4-0. Burnley beat Chelsea 3-2. Arsenal beat Leicester 4-3. Liverpool drew 3-3 with Watford. Cricket India beat Sri Lanka by an innings and 171 runs to complete their first whitewash in a three-Test series overseas.…

This summer’s cinema releases have been dominated by lazy sequels in franchises we’re grown bored of, said Dave Holmes in Esquire. “A fifth Transformers. A fifth Pirates of the Caribbean. A millionth Planet of the Apes, a trillionth Alien.” Is it any wonder that audiences are staying away? The industry has just reported a disastrous drop in summer ticket sales of 10.8% on last year. One reason people aren’t going to the cinema is that modern TV is so much better. “The talk of last summer was Stranger Things, and the talk this summer is Game of Thrones,” points out industry analyst Jeff Bock. “It used to be, ‘What’s playing this summer in theatres?’” Then there’s the Rotten Tomatoes effect, said Kyle Stock on Bloomberg. Time was when a hefty…

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017. After years spent raising her twin siblings after their mother’s death, Isma is finally living her dream of studying in America. But she can’t stop worrying about Aneeka, her beautiful, headstrong sister back in London - or their brother, Parvaiz, who’s disappeared in pursuit of his own dream: to prove himself to the dark legacy of the jihadist father he never knew. The Week Bookshop price: £14.99, usually £16.99 The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa One of the great literary works of the twentieth century. Written over the course of Fernando Pessoa’s life, it was first published in 1982, pieced together from the thousands of individual manuscript pages left behind by Pessoa after his death in 1935.…

Snap: fading snapshot Most trendy tech start-ups “can withstand the red ink as long as they keep attracting more people to use their services”, said Jennifer Saba on Reuters Breakingviews. But after reporting its second consecutive quarter of disappointing results, Snap – the company behind the disappearing message app Snapchat – is worrying the market. Investors last week ignored the good news that revenue has jumped by some 150% year-on-year and focused instead on Snap’s “slowing user growth” and “widening” $443m losses. The upshot is that a third of its market value has been “erased” since its glitzy market debut in March – a poor omen for other “brand-name unicorns”, such as Spotify and Vice, currently waiting to float. Not so long ago, Snap was seen as “a feisty young…

Apple and Google steal the headlines, but could lesser-known tech “enablers” – the “picks and shovels” companies behind the latest big developments – produce better returns, asks James Connington in The Sunday Telegraph. Here’s a selection to consider… Infineon Technologies (German listed, market value £19.5bn). This semiconductor firm makes components used in systems such as emergency braking and battery management. According to Hyunho Sohn of Fidelity’s Global Technology Fund, “it has a market-leading position” and is “poised to gain from the move to electric and autonomous cars”. Nvidia (US listed, market value £75bn). Nvidia’s graphics processing units are become increasingly important for “vision systems” in autonomous cars. Artificial intelligence (AI) is another avenue for expansion, says Ben Rogoff of Polar Capital: Nvidia’s GPUs could be used to “train” AI networks.…

The US threat to China’s credit bubble Larry Elliott The Guardian All things considered, the financial markets took last week’s “Kim and Trump show” in their stride, says Larry Elliott. There was “the customary flight to save haven assets”, but the underlying assumption is that there will be no war between the US and North Korea, and that smart investors should “buy into the dips”. Yet even without a shooting war, things could still “turn nasty” for markets and the global economy. China’s gigantic credit bubble poses a huge threat – and an obvious trigger for its “pricking” is the ongoing possibility of US trade sanctions. President Trump has recently toned down his aggressive rhetoric in the hopes of persuading Beijing to apply pressure to North Korea. But there are…

Sisimiut, Greenland Wildfires in icy north: Greenland has been hit by a series of wildfires this year, according to Dutch researchers, who last week published satellite images showing the biggest fire ever recorded on the island. The blaze was first spotted on 31 July, and is still raging about 90 miles northeast of the town of Sisimiut. Wildfires are rare events on the vast island (which, at 2.17 million sq km, is around ten times the size of the UK), where 80% of the land mass is covered by ice up to 1.9 miles thick. Academics say the island’s melting permafrost – a consequence of global warming – is likely to be a contributory cause. Jessica McCarty, a geography professor at Miami University, told the BBC that the fire appeared…

Have the Kurds ever been a nation? No. The estimated 30 million Kurdish people living in adjacent mountainous areas of northern Iraq, southeastern Turkey, northwestern Iran and northern Syria – a region referred to as Kurdistan – remain the world’s biggest ethnic group without a state of their own. Kurdish tribes seem to have inhabited the region for millennia; and certainly from the time of their conversion to Islam, in the seventh century AD. Most are Sunni Muslims, but they are not Arabs. They speak local dialects of Kurdish, an Indo-Iranian language. There are also communities of Kurds in, for instance, Armenia, Georgia, Istanbul, Lebanon and Western Europe. Is independence a new ambition? Modern Kurdish nationalism began in the 1880s, when a rebellion designed to hack out a Kurdish state…

Cannabis linked to hypertension Cannabis smokers are three times more likely to die from high blood pressure than those who have never used the drug, researchers have found. The risk also grows with every year of use, according to the scientists, from the School of Public Health at Georgia State University, in the US. The study looked at 1,213 people aged 20 or older, who were questioned about their use of marijuana in 2005-06 as part of a national health and nutrition survey. The information was later merged with mortality data and adjusted for factors including tobacco smoking, age, gender and ethnicity. The findings, published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, suggested no association between using marijuana and dying from heart or cerebrovascular disease, such as strokes. But the…

Hell hath no fury like a disgruntled ex-employee, as David Davis is learning. The Brexit Secretary’s former chief of staff, James Chapman , announced last week that he wants to start a new political party dedicated to stopping Brexit. Chapman – whose CV also includes a stint as political editor of the Daily Mail – then launched a Twitter tirade against his former boss, claiming that “DD” had been “working a three-day week since day one”, never read the contents of his ministerial box, and “can’t even make plain ham sandwiches (no butter) – an unfortunate woman in his private office has to bring one to him every day”. Chapman also claimed to have been with Davis when he “leered” at Labour MP Diane Abbott , adding: “He was drunk,…

How did it happen, asked Jeff Cimmino in National Review. How did a double-barrelled, Eton-educated devout Catholic, who lives with his wife, six children and nanny in a Somerset manor house, suddenly find himself a contender for the Tory party leadership? Last week, a survey of Conservative members suggested that Jacob Rees-Mogg, the MP for North East Somerset – who has been described as “the Honourable Member for the 18th century” – was the second favourite to succeed Theresa May as leader, after Brexit Secretary David Davis. Rees-Mogg has developed an enthusiastic following on social media – a movement dubbed “Moggmentum”. The man himself played down the speculation, said The Guardian. “Domine, non sum dignus,” he declared (“Lord, I am not worthy”). But he also conspicuously failed to rule out…

Athletics: is Team GB good enough? For too long, Britain was a nation of “incorrigible baton-droppers”, said Oliver Brown in The Sunday Telegraph. But at the World Athletics Championships last Saturday, the men’s 4x100m relay team “restored national pride”, gatecrashing Usain Bolt’s final competitive race to win gold. It was hardly a “showpiece send-off” for the Jamaican, who tumbled to the floor with cramp. But even if he had been without injury, it is unlikely his team could have caught up with Team GB: their time of 37.47 seconds was the fastest in the world this year. To cap “an unforgettable evening for relays”, the women’s 4x100m team took an “unlikely silver”. Then on Sunday, in the 4x400m, the women’s team took silver, and the men bronze. Since 2012, British…

Mexico’s avocado mafia To The Guardian Your article about the avocado shortage misses the point about the nature of the problem and who is responsible. A farm in western Mexico that I owned until recently could not get its product on the market because the commercialisation is controlled by mafias, including local political organisations whose demands, if not met, lead to rotting crops. There is more than enough being produced to meet local and international demand at reasonable prices, but until the producers have direct control over marketing their avocados, the system of poorly paid harvesters, high prices for local consumers and the extortion of producers will continue. Among other things, the commercial and marketing organisations insist on bringing in their own pickers – who are generally very poor people,…

What the experts recommend Ikoyi 1 St James’s Market, London SW1 (020-3583 4660) The pair behind Ikoyi, Jeremy Chan and Iré Hassan-Odukale, both went into jobs in finance before realising their true calling was cooking, says Fay Maschler in the London Evening Standard. Well done them; lucky us. If you make the argument, as some do, that London is now “the most dynamic restaurant city on Earth”, the presence of this superb new West African-inspired eaterie is “a bit of a clincher”. A perfect example, not to be missed, is the first-course dish of Manx Loaghtan rib and asun relish. Asun, the peppery rub and marinade usually applied to goat meat (rather than Isle of Man lamb), is here “rendered as a shiny, spicy, habanero-spiked sauce”; the resulting flavour…