Innholdsfortegnelse for V. 1153 i The Week

What happened The Irish question British and EU negotiators reportedly reached an agreement this week on the so-called Brexit divorce bill. The final figure, left deliberately vague, is set to be between s45bn and s55bn. The news raised hopes that EU leaders, at a crunch summit in December, will give the green light to moving Brexit negotiations on to trade. A deal over the reciprocal rights of expat citizens is also said to be within reach, but the other big separation issue – Ireland’s future border arrangements – remains a sticking point. Dublin threatened last week to veto UK-EU trade talks unless it receives a written guarantee that the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic will remain “invisible”. It believes this can only be achieved by Britain staying in…

Lansing, Michigan Team doctor jailed: A disgraced former doctor to the US Olympic gymnastics team has pleaded guilty to seven charges of sexual assault as part of a deal that could see him jailed for at least 25 years. Larry Nassar, 54, was one of the US’s most respected sports doctors until a criminal complaint was filed against him last year. Subsequently, scores of women and girls – including members of the US Olympic team – came forward to say that he had abused them on the pretext of treating them for hip and back pain. In a Michigan court last week, he admitted using his fingers to penetrate seven girls, some of whom were under 13, and finally acknowledged that this was not a legitimate treatment. In a separate…

China is winning the hi-tech race Edward Luce Financial Times “Whoever becomes the leader in artificial intelligence will become the ruler of the world.” Russia’s President Vladimir Putin said that, says Edward Luce. And China clearly believes it. Beijing has made supremacy in AI a strategic goal: it has announced plans to draw even with the US by 2020, and dominate global AI by 2030. It is shoving money into AI research, even as the Trump administration is slashing funding for agencies that specialise in the field. None of this ensures China will prevail, of course, but at the very least it gives it an edge. China has other key advantages, too. Its economy is more online than America’s: it takes in some 40% of global e-commerce, mostly via its…

The NHS is to start offering tests for lung cancer in supermarket car parks, in a bid to improve rates of diagnosis, reports The Daily Telegraph. The scheme, announced by Simon Stevens, the chief executive of NHS England, is designed to reach patients who are reluctant to go to their GPs or for tests in hospitals – leading to potentially fatal delays in diagnosis. Under a pilot scheme carried out in Manchester, GPs wrote to smokers and former smokers aged between 55 and 74, inviting them to undergo checks at shopping centres, where many were given on-the-spot CT scans. The trial led to a quadrupling of the number of cases of lung cancer being discovered at stages one and two – when the disease is more treatable. The scheme is…

“A successful Budget nowadays is one that doesn’t fall apart after a week,” said Fraser Nelson in The Daily Telegraph. By those standards, Chancellor Philip Hammond’s second Budget last week was just the job. Unlike the general election, the Tory conference or the March Budget, it did not end “in disaster”. Hammond delivered a series of careful compromises. There was more money for house-building, but Theresa May “was granted her wish on protecting the green belt”. By cutting stamp duty for first-time buyers, he offered “a much-needed overture to the young”. Yet there was also money to prop up the NHS and the universal credit benefit reforms. Hammond seemed to have saved the Government’s credibility and “his own career”, which was teetering on the brink, said Tim Shipman in The…

Cricket: a dismal start to the Ashes “Well, it was good while it lasted,” said Paul Newman in the Daily Mail. For almost three whole days of the first Ashes Test, in Brisbane, “it really did look like England might compete and, whisper it, even win”. But on the fourth day “normal service was quickly resumed” and, by the end, Australia had raced to a “thumping” ten-wicket victory. England’s old failings “resurfaced at the worst possible times”: whenever the visitors looked set to apply pressure, “they either sold their wickets cheaply or found the old enemy had the greater strength and character”. We feared there would be a gulf in class between these two sides – we just didn’t expect it to be quite so big. Joe Root’s problems keep…

To The Times Your leading article makes light of Sarah Hall’s objection to Sleeping Beauty as a story for small children, but she has a serious point. The version of the story that we all know derives from Charles Perrault’s bowdlerised 17th century La Belle au Bois Dormant. Perrault’s statement that the prince “kissed” the sleeping princess to wake her was an obvious euphemism (to his contemporaries). All known earlier versions of this European folk tale (for example, from 17th century Italy and 14th century France) say that he rapes her and goes on his way. She bears twins while still unconscious: one of the babies sucks her finger in mistake for her nipple and draws out the splinter that caused her sleep. She wakes to find herself alone with…

Andy Palmere Aston Martin has “pulled a handbrake turn” under the leadership of Andy Palmer, says the FT. Last week, the luxury British carmaker – which has been bankrupt seven times – recorded two notable moments: launching its latest car, the £120,000 Vantage, and posting its first consecutive four quarters of profit since at least 2008. “It was a great day,” says Palmer, who took over in 2014 after 23 years at Nissan. “It made all the bad days worthwhile.” Described as the perfect fusion of “British West Midlands industrialist” and “Japanese perfectionist”, Palmer is a “real car guy”, who “spent weeks sleeping at the office” while he fixed Aston, which now plans to float next year. With five major new cars expected before 2022, “we’re in harvest mode”, he…

Controversy of the week Britain in the slow lane “The 1956 Suez crisis was the moment Britain had to wake up to the fact it was no longer the force it once was,” said Larry Elliot in The Guardian. “The 2017 Budget was its economic equivalent.” Forget the extra money thrown at the NHS and housing (see page 27). The real story was the “calamitous” news delivered by the Government’s official forecaster, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). It estimates that the UK economy will grow by less than 2% in each of the next five years – the worst forecast since 1983. Underlying this is an even more worrying appraisal. For the past century, the UK’s productivity – the measure of each worker’s economic output – has grown at…

“Nazanin knows we care” For Richard Ratcliffe, normal life stopped on 3 April 2016, when his wife and baby daughter were seized by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as they tried to board a plane back to Britain. Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who had been visiting family in Iran, was charged with sedition and later sentenced to five years in jail. Ever since, Ratcliffe has been fighting for her release. Nothing else matters. “I am in my own world. Someone said it’s raining today, but I didn’t notice,” he told Decca Aitkenhead in The Guardian. Big news stories, such as the downfall of Harvey Weinstein, register only as irritants. “I’d see his picture on the news and think: why isn’t my wife in the news, because that’s more important!” When Nazanin was first…

Disgruntled West Ham fans have been urged to stop calling emergency services to complain about a recent defeat. Apparently a number of fans have dialled 999 since the Hammers’ 2-0 loss to Watford this month left them in the relegation zone. In a tweet, the police warned: “Ringing 999 because @WestHamUtd have lost again and you aren’t sure what to do is not acceptable!“ If you’re after a bargain house, look on Fanny Street. Research in Australia has revealed that houses on streets with “embarrassing” names sell for 20% less than those on surrounding roads. The examples cited include Willys Avenue, Butt Street and Wanke Road. When police in Pasuruan, Java, pulled over a sorry-looking 22-year-old and discovered he was riding a motorcycle without a licence, they spared him a…

No water on Mars after all In 2015 Nasa declared that it had found “unambiguous” evidence for the existence of liquid water on Mars, raising hopes of finding life on the Red Planet. But alas it was wrong. The original announcement came after high-resolution images from the agency’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter revealed dark streaks on the planet’s surface, known as recurring slope lineae. With these appearing to vary over time and containing hydrated salts – often a sign of water – scientists assumed they were caused by underground water rising to the surface. But a new analysis, undertaken by the US Geological Survey and other institutions, has concluded that the markings were probably produced by nothing more than sand and dust slipping downhill. The report, published in Nature Geoscience, doesn’t…

There was no remorse. When he entered the court last week, Ratko Mladic gave a defiant thumbs up to the cameras. And as the charges were read out, he screamed abuse at the judges and had to be dragged out. Thus, the former Bosnian Serb general known as the “Butcher of Bosnia” was not present as he was sentenced to life in prison for genocide and other war crimes. His conviction was a fitting end to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY): having indicted 161 people involved in the war that followed the break-up of Yugoslavia, it will now be wound up. (By contrast, 22 senior Nazis were tried at Nuremberg.) The wheels of justice turned slowly, said Tony Barber in the FT, partly because several suspects,…

Last season, Burnley finished 16th in the Premier League, two places above the relegation zone, said Jamie Jackson in The Observer. But many predicted they would be less lucky this time round and tipped them to go down. Those predictions now appear increasingly foolish: the Clarets sat seventh this week, just three points outside the top four. Away from home, they tally surpassed only by the two Manchester clubs. The club’s lynchpins in central defence, Ben Mee and James Tarkowski, have blocked more shots than any other defensive partnership; Nick Pope has made more saves per game than any other goalkeeper. That’s the fruit of careful work by their manager, Sean Dyche. He has taught his team to defend “as a have beaten Chelsea and drawn with Tottenham and Liverpool;…

Exhibition of the week Modigliani Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 (020-7887 8888, www.tate.org.uk ). Until 2 April Amedeo Modigliani’s life story is “pure romantic bohemian”, said Matthew Collings in the London Evening Standard. Born to a Jewish family in Livorno in 1884, he suffered from tuberculosis from a young age, yet still harboured a burning ambition to be an artist. And in 1906, to pursue his dream, he moved to Paris, where he lived in “dreadful poverty”, womanising, drinking and smoking hashish. This decidedly irresponsible lifestyle took its toll; he “rotted away” physically, eventually dying at the age of 35. But as this “great” new exhibition at Tate Modern demonstrates, his “intense, shockingly short life” yielded a wealth of brilliant art. It’s the largest retrospective of Modigliani’s…

What the experts recommend The Cartford Inn Cartford Lane, Little Eccleston, Lancashire (01995-670166) There are some “outstanding food pubs” in Lancashire at the moment, deploying the skills associated with classic French cuisine in the service of a typical British pub repertoire, says Jay Rayner in The Observer. I’m thinking of such stellar establishments as the Parkers Arms in Newton-in-Bowland, and The White Swan in Fence. The Cartford Inn is in that class. Its kitchen “can clarify a consommé, make a silky duck-liver parfait”, and rustle up a perfect choux bun of epic proportions. But here they are also “cheerleaders for the pasty, the suet pudding and the fish pie”. And all of it is lip-smackingly good: an oxtail, beef skirt and ale suet pudding has “luscious glossy strands of…

Tormented teen idol and star of The Partridge Family David Cassidy 1950-2017 Slim, fine-boned and boyish, David Cassidy, who has died aged 67, was one of the biggest teen stars of his generation. In the early 1970s, “teenage girls didn’t just follow him around”, said The Guardian – “they spirited themselves into hotels, camped in the air-conditioning unit of his house and howled at the sight of him”. Mobbed wherever he went, he received 25,000 fan letters a week at the peak of his popularity, and his fan club was said to be bigger than The Beatles’ and Elvis’s combined. The devotion Cassidy inspired was not unprecedented: Beatlemania had come first. But its commercial exploitation was new: even The Monkees, created by the same TV studio, were not…

Who’s tipping what The week’s best buys Cranswick The Times The food producer has added poultry to its “non-pork sty”, pushing revenues 21% higher. Performance is being driven by the price of pork and the spread into higher-margin areas, such as cooked meat. Buy. £29.91. Empresaria Investors Chronicle Shares in the specialist recruiter have plummeted on fears over new legislation in Germany and weakness in the Middle East. But the firm is well diversified and still expects record profits. Falls are overdone. Buy. 98p. Just Group The Mail on Sunday Panmure Gordon believes this retirement services firm has a “sustainable competitive advantage” over new entrants such as Legal & General. Market growth rates of 25% per year are expected to continue. Buy. 156.3p. NCC Group Shares The cyber-security consultant and…

Dublin Government back from brink: Ireland’s deputy PM, Frances Fitzgerald, resigned on Tuesday – a move that averted the threat of a pre-Christmas snap election, but intensified doubts about the longer-term future of PM Leo Varadkar’s fragile coalition. His Fine Gael-led government depends for its survival on a “confidence and supply” agreement with the largest opposition party, Fianna Fáil. Fitzgerald’s resignation, over her handling of a case involving a police whistle-blower, came only hours before Fianna Fáil MPs were due to hold a parliamentary vote of no confidence. The scandal centres on what she did or did not know about the alleged decision by senior Garda commanders to smear the individual. The no-confidence vote would probably have brought down the government; her resignation avoids that, but Varadkar’s resolute backing of…

Brace yourselves: scientists have predicted that 2018 could be an exceptionally bad year for earthquakes. While it’s impossible to forecast earthquakes with any accuracy, it seems their incidence isn’t completely random. When US researchers looked at all the magnitude seven or more earthquakes that have occurred since 1900, they discovered five evenly spaced periods when their average annual frequency jumped, from about 15 to at least 25. These periods, they noticed, usually began five or so years after slowdowns in the Earth’s rotation, caused by changes in its core. As well as changing the length of day by a millisecond, it is thought that such changes create an outward pressure that results in more earthquakes after five or six years. The last time the Earth’s rotation slowed, according to atomic…

If the music ever dies, Morrissey could always get a job in light entertainment. The gnomic Mancunian singer, formerly of The Smiths, revealed this week that he was once offered a job on EastEnders, playing a character loosely based on himself. “I was invited to be Dot Cotton’s other son, a mysterious son no one had ever spoken about, who returns to the Square, doesn’t get involved with anybody and doesn’t immediately have sex with anybody, as most characters who come into the Square do,” he told The Sunday Times. “I was also offered a part in Emmerdale. I was to play an intruder in jodhpurs – which I’d longed to be, of course, I had waited years to be an intruder in jodhpurs.” In the end, however, Morrissey (pictured)…

“Every surgeon carries within himself a small cemetery.” French physician René Leriche, quoted in The Observer “Never write a letter while you are angry.” Chinese proverb, quoted in The Daily Telegraph “The trouble with the English is that they don’t know their history, because so much of it happened overseas.” Salman Rushdie, quoted in The Guardian “Teach a parrot the terms supply and demand and you have an economist.” Thomas Carlyle, quoted in the FT “We are continually faced with great opportunities brilliantly disguised as unsolvable problems.” Margaret Mead, quoted on The Browser “Don’t argue with idiots. They’ll bring you down to their level and then beat you with experience.” Brian Clough, quoted in The Times “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor…

Let’s follow Denmark To the Financial Times Your excellent report on UK stamp duty refers to the counterproductive increases of recent years being justified as an attempt to “stop foreigners buying London homes”. If that was truly a motive, it has failed up to now. If our politicians are genuinely concerned about this they should emulate Denmark, where foreigners cannot buy property unless they have already lived in the country for five years. This sensible safeguard has made “wonderful Copenhagen” relatively affordable and not blighted with empty tower blocks of flats. Will any MP try for a private member’s bill to raise this? Sam Dunkley, London The truth about housing To The Times The Chancellor’s modest housing measures deserve modest support, but most of this discussion misses the…

Musical Everybody’s Talking About Jamie Lyrics and book: Tom MacRae Music: Dan Gillespie Sells Director: Jonathan Butterell Apollo Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, London W1 (0330-333 4809) Until 21 April Running time: 2hrs 40mins (including interval) ★★★★ Damn right everybody’s talking about Jamie, said Paul Taylor in The Independent. This “wonderfully funny and moving” new British musical – which has won a hatful of awards since its Sheffield premiere in February – is completely “irresistible”. Jamie is the “joyous, life-affirming” tale of a Sheffield 16-year-old whose careers adviser has pencilled in “forklift truck driver”, but whose heart is set on “drag queen”. Director Jonathan Butterell had the idea for this “fizzing” show after seeing a BBC documentary about a young drag performer, said Ann Treneman in The Times. And what he has…

Best books… Sally Rooney The Irish writer Sally Rooney picks her favourite books. Her novel Conversations with Friends is shortlisted for the 2017 Sunday Times/PFD Young Writer of the Year award. The winner is announced on 8 December Emma by Jane Austen, 1815 (Penguin £4.99). For its fine observation, comic brilliance and spectacularly deft grip on the reader’s sympathies, Emma is for me Austen’s masterpiece. It’s a novel that always manages to make me care a huge amount about very little. Ulysses by James Joyce, 1922 (Penguin £9.99). It took me a long time to finish this lengthy and at times difficult book, by which point I felt I had really earned the astonishing and incomparable beauty of its closing pages. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger, 1961 (Penguin £8.99).…

New cars: what the critics say Car magazine When the Cayenne launched in 2002, “purists were beside themselves”. Why, they asked, was a sports car manufacturer bothering to produce an SUV? But the car proved to be a “blitzing success”: almost 800,000 units have been sold, bringing Porsche “back from the brink” and making it “one of the most profitable names in the business”. And that means this new, third generation “has a lot to live up to”. Autocar Given the popularity of previous models, Porsche was “understandably wary of meddling” with its looks: for better or worse, the exterior is much the same. But the cabin is different and it’s a triumph, appointed with “sumptuous materials” and “seamlessly integrated” technology. There’s lots of space, including a whopping 770 litres…

UK banks: fit for a disorderly Brexit Britain’s major lenders are “robust enough to survive a chaotic Brexit”, according to the Bank of England’s latest annual “stress test”, which subjected seven UK banks to their toughest “doomsday” scenario yet, said Iain Withers in The Daily Telegraph. “The extreme scenario included a slump in both world and UK GDP, a dive in the value of the pound and house prices falling by a third.” Reassuringly, all but two banks – RBS and Barclays – passed with flying colours. In mitigation, the Bank pointed out that the tests were based on the two banks’ capital positions in late 2016; both have since improved their capital buffers and would now pass. “For the first time since the tests were launched in 2014,” no…

The UK’s managers must look to Asia Philip Aldrick The Times “If the Government wants to raise prosperity, it cannot afford to ignore bad management,” says Philip Aldrick. Yet the latest “255-page doorstopper of a white paper”, outlining Britain’s new industrial strategy, glosses over how to tackle the country’s “long tail” of poorly managed companies. It’s a serious oversight. As the paper itself notes, “management skills could account for a quarter of the productivity gap between the UK and the US”. Were that to be closed, Britain “would be £300bn richer without a single extra hour worked”. To kick-start change, we should look to Asia: techniques to upgrade management skills such as Japan’s kaizen (continuous improvement) programme, which helped transform that country after WWII, were at least as important as…

“I am a dunce with the interactive smartboard. I forget to take the electronic register. I leave bureaucratic chaos in my wake” A year ago I announced that after three decades I was leaving the Financial Times to become a maths teacher in a tough secondary school, and that I had set up Now Teach, a charity to encourage other fiftysomethings to quit their cushy jobs and join me. Almost everyone said the same thing: you’re mad. I replied that I was perfectly sane. I’d spent so long writing columns that I was no longer getting any better at it and was possibly getting worse. Many of my contemporaries were restive in their assorted jobs too, and while some were planning to slouch towards retirement, others longed to start all…