Innholdsfortegnelse for V. 1154 i The Week

What happened Stumbling towards Brexit Theresa May’s attempt to reach a deal on the terms of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU unravelled this week, when Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) vetoed it at the 11th hour. During May’s visit to Brussels on Monday, EU leaders raised expectations that the deadlock over EU citizens’ rights, the divorce bill and the Northern Ireland border had been broken – meaning that talks on a future trade deal could begin. Yet in the event, May returned empty-handed, after the DUP’s Arlene Foster made it clear that she would not stand for May’s plan to avoid a hard Irish border: that Northern Ireland should maintain “regulatory alignment” with the Republic of Ireland after Brexit. Foster said that she would not countenance Northern Ireland…

Washington DC Flynn pleads guilty and co-operates: Michael Flynn, President Trump’s former national security adviser, has confessed to knowingly making false statements to the FBI about his contacts with a Russian diplomat, and – as part of a plea deal – he has agreed to cooperate with Robert Mueller’s probe into the Trump campaign team’s links with Russia, potentially raising the stakes dramatically for the White House. Significantly, Flynn’s indictment states that he took directions from a senior member of Trump’s team (so far unnamed, but widely rumoured to be Jared Kushner). The first former or current member of the Trump administration to be charged, Flynn (pictured) faces up to five years in jail. In response, Trump launched an astonishing assault on the FBI, in which he claimed that its…

The statistic that has us all in thrall Larry Elliott The Guardian Could you tell the difference if the economy was growing at 1% rather than 2%? I doubt it, says Larry Elliott. Yet this is the weird way we measure success or failure. Brexiteers crowed when GDP growth averaged 0.5% a quarter after the vote. Remainers did the same when it then fell to 0.3%. When the Budget shaved half a percentage point off annual growth forecasts last month, the pundits were in tears. Yet GDP is a lousy way to measure well-being. It’s just a monetary tally: sell more arms, build more betting shops, it goes up; quit smoking, it goes down. High growth causes environmental harm, yet this never shows up in GDP. Nor does it register…

Germany’s struggle to find a new governing coalition is being undermined by – of all things – a weedkiller, said Malte Kreutzfeldt in Die Tageszeitung (Berlin). Debate has raged for years about whether the chemical glyphosate, marketed by the US chemical giant Monsanto as Roundup, causes harm. Farmers swear by it, but Greens suspect it causes cancer. A Europe-wide campaign to get it banned has gathered more than a million signatures and the EU has been debating whether to renew Monsanto’s licence. Several meetings ended in deadlock, even after the proposed renewal period was cut to ten years. But all of a sudden German Agriculture Minister Christian Schmidt, caving in to Germany’s farm lobby, tipped the balance by voting in favour of renewing the licence, albeit for only five years.…

Is coffee good for us? Drinking three cups of coffee a day does more good than harm, according to a meta-analysis of all available research into the drink’s impact on health. University of Southampton researchers looked at the “health outcomes” associated with high coffee consumption and identified 19 that were beneficial and six that were harmful. The positive outcomes included a 34% reduced risk of liver cancer, a 19% lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease and a 27% lower risk of Alzheimer’s. The negative outcomes included a raised risk of lung cancer in smokers and of rheumatoid arthritis. Consumption during pregnancy was linked to a greater risk of childhood leukaemia and of pregnancy loss. While the results could be interpreted as a green light for everyone but pregnant women…

After decades on the pop scene, radio DJ Jo Whiley has met most of her heroes. Perhaps the most exciting – and disappointing – encounter was with Mick Jagger (below). “I’d done so much research and he bowled into the studio and said, ‘Have we met before?’ I said we hadn’t, and he responded, ‘Oh well, you’d be the one more likely to remember, wouldn’t you?’” she told The Sunday Telegraph. The rest of the interview was fine, while it lasted. “He was completely charming on air and as soon as the mic was off, he switched off as well and swept out again.” Donald Trump enjoys having his trousers steam-pressed while still wearing them, according to a new book by his former campaign manager. In Let Trump Be Trump,…

The world has gone “bitcoin bonkers”, said Harry Wilson in The Times. In 2015, each unit of the digital currency was worth little more than $300; this week, the price topped an astonishing $12,000. (The Winklevoss twins, who sued Mark Zuckerberg for stealing the idea for Facebook, invested around $11m four years ago. Now they are the first known bitcoin billionaires.) Prices have fluctuated wildly since bitcoin was created in 2009 by a shadowy programmer calling himself Satoshi Nakamoto; it still faces the widespread perception that it is mainly used by drug dealers and hackers “taking advantage of the anonymity afforded to move their money around the world beyond the prying eyes of the police”. But last week, two well-respected US exchanges, Nasdaq and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, agreed to…

Cricket: too little, too late for England “First, the good news for England,” said Brydon Coverdale on ESPNcricinfo. “They still hold the Ashes.” But after their 120-run loss in the second Test, in Adelaide, they are 2-0 down in the series – and it can only be a matter of time before they surrender the urn to Australia. They had a disastrous first innings, conceding 442 runs to the Australians and then responding with only 227 of their own. That left them needing their all-time highest successful chase to win the match – and it was testament to the way they “fought back” in the second innings, bowling out Australia for a mere 138, that they started the final day “with any sort of hope”. But it was all too…

To The Times Nigel Biggar’s article “Don’t feel guilty about our colonial history” was refreshing. Nobody wants to be subject to another, especially of a different race, and greed and exploitation were part of early imperialism. For my generation, however, Empire was a fact of history and, as shown by Dr John Darwin, not the original sin of Britain, but the default system of human governance. I joined the colonial service because I believed in independence as the objective, sharing the aspirations of the peoples I served (in Nigeria 1951-69, and the Western Pacific 1970-78), and wanting the best for their new nations. Those engaged in the dismantling of Empire for most of the time and in most colonies did a worthwhile job that provided huge satisfaction. There was mutual…

The Disaster Artist Dir: James Franco 1hr 43mins (15) Affectionate send-up of the worst film ever made ★★★ In 2003, a film called The Room was released to “zero acclaim”, said Tara Brady in The Irish Times. Direly written and acted, this low-budget drama has attained a cult following as the “Citizen Kane of bad movies”. This film, James Franco’s affectionate send-up of The Room’s making, is “hilarious and endearing”. Franco dazzles as Tommy Wiseau, The Room’s writer, star and director, said Nigel Andrews in the FT; Wiseau’s lack of self-knowledge makes for some rich comic moments. The film is studded with cameos from Seth Rogen, Bryan Cranston and the like, but it won’t make much sense to anyone who hasn’t seen The Room, said Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out.…

How UK debt would balloon under Labour Alex Brummer Daily Mail When it comes to putting numbers to policy proposals, the Labour leadership likes “to keep things vague”, says Alex Brummer. But we shouldn’t be blind to the “potential perils of high public debt” if Labour does come to power. According to the IMF, Britain’s ratio of debt to national output will hit a peak of 88.9% in 2018. Compared with other G7 industrial countries, that doesn’t look too bad (Japan’s debt stands at 240% of GDP). But Britain, being such an open economy, is particularly vulnerable, because a larger proportion of our debt “tends to be in the hands of foreigners who can easily be scared off”. There’s no “ideal level” of debt, but some economists reckon that 90%…

Who’s tipping what The week’s best buys Faroe Petroleum The Times Faroe has been striking some “interesting acquisition deals” while continuing to explore in Norwegian waters. Production is set to treble, the balance sheet looks solid and the oil price is recovering. Target 120p. Buy. 101.25p. Hollywood Bowl Group The Mail on Sunday Britain’s largest ten-pin bowling operator owns 58 modern centres aimed at a broad range of customers. Run by an experienced duo, the business is profitable and growing, with an attractive dividend. Buy. 188.5p. IMImobile The Daily Telegraph Shares in the software comms firm have been depressed by a large and persistent seller. Yet the fundamentals are strong. Cash-generative, growing strongly with good customer retention and set to pay a dividend. Buy. 201.5p. MJ Gleeson Investors Chronicle Gleeson…

Controversy of the week Porn in Parliament As if Westminster politics weren’t farcical enough already, we now have the spectacle of an ex-Scotland Yard officer accusing a senior Cabinet minister of being “a porn-surfing liar”, said Deborah Orr in The Guardian. “I have no doubt,” former detective Neil Lewis told the BBC last week, that First Secretary of State Damian Green accessed “thousands” of pornographic images on his own parliamentary computer. Green is also being investigated over a claim made by journalist Kate Maltby that he touched her knee while out for a drink in 2015. Yet none of this stopped Theresa May from getting Green to take her place at PM’s Questions in the Commons last week. Why would a self-professed feminist decide that a man being investigated for…

Lonely at the top Elon Musk should be on top of the world. The 46-year-old has started four billion-dollar companies (PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX and SolarCity) and is inventing world-changing technology. This summer, for example, he launched the Tesla Model 3: the first mass-market electric car. He had been working on it for 14 years; yet on the day of the launch, he felt nothing but misery. “I just broke up with my girlfriend,” he told Neil Strauss in Rolling Stone. “Well, she broke up with me more than I broke up with her, I think... It took every ounce of will to be able to do the Model 3 event and not look like the most depressed guy around. For most of that day, I was morbid. I had to…

A Belgian man who chained himself to a block of marble to represent the “burden of history” from which artists cannot escape was himself unable to escape – and had to be cut loose after 19 days. Mikes Poppe had attached himself to a chain that was buried in the block, and planned to chisel away at the block to liberate himself. But he realised he’d set himself a harder than anticipated task and, after 438 hours, asked to be cut free. “This block was symbolic of the history of art which I am trying to free myself from,” he said. “I discovered that this is not possible. It is a burden which I must always carry.” As usual, the Vladimir Putin calendar is flying off the shelves in Russia,…

CHINA Being middle class is just an illusion Quartz (New York) “Rich children go abroad, middle-class children get poked with needles, lower-class children get evicted from their homes.” That saying, which has cropped up a lot on Chinese social media lately, reflects “the sense of deep unease that comes with being middle class in China”, say Echo Huang and Isabella Steger. You may not get evicted from your home as the poor do (there’s recently been a crackdown on illegal dwellings on Beijing’s fringes), but you feel powerless in the face of government corruption. “Poked with needles” refers to a recent scandal at a posh Beijing kindergarten, where there have been allegations of child abuse. The children were found to have needle holes in their skin along with other signs…

Stone Age women led such punishing lives that their upper bodies were significantly stronger than those of female rowers today, scientists have discovered. But as the centuries wore on, women’s lives appear to have become less physically demanding – probably because developing technologies eased the burden of manual labour – with the effect that by the medieval period, their bone strength was on a par with that of the average woman today. To get a sense of women’s lifestyles through history, researchers from the University of Cambridge scanned the arm and leg bones of dozens of living women –including those of the university’s rowing team – and compared them with skeletons from earlier periods, ranging from the Neolithic, about 7,000 years ago, to the early Middle Ages. They found that…

The closer you get to Jeremy Corbyn, the stranger it seems that he could ever be described as a prime minister-in-waiting, said Sarah Baxter in The Sunday Times. When I met the Labour leader, his solicitous wife was fussing about him “eating up all his prunes for breakfast”. Dylan Jones, editor of GQ magazine, has claimed that on a recent photoshoot Corbyn seemed entirely at the mercy of his aides, who pushed him around “like a grandpa”. During the accompanying interview, Corbyn couldn’t name “his own business adviser” (nor, for that matter, could he name any book or any film he had recently read or seen). But if Corbyn himself seems as “ineffectual as the Wizard of Oz”, the forces behind him are anything but. Momentum – the “party within…

It’s a brave minister who embarks on a new strategy for the railways, said The Daily Telegraph. But that hasn’t stopped Transport Secretary Chris Grayling having a crack at a “leviathan” that has crushed many of his predecessors. Last week, he unveiled a new “vision” for the network, that – starting with the east coast line – will involve giving the firms that operate the trains more responsibility for managing the tracks on which their trains run. (Currently, state-owned Network Rail looks after the track.) And, in a more headline-grabbing move, he also said that some of the branch lines lost to the Beeching cuts in the 1960s could be re-opened – if (and it’s a big if) they’d enable new housing or development, ease congestion elsewhere and offer “value…

When goalkeeper David de Gea arrived at Manchester United in 2011, few thought he would last for long, said Jamie Redknapp in the Daily Mail. A wiry, error-prone 20-year-old, he looked ill-equipped for the “physicality of the Premier League”. But since then, the Spaniard has gone from strength to strength, said Barney Ronay in The Observer. In four of the past five seasons, he has been named in the Premier League Team of the Year. And last Saturday, in United’s 3-1 win over Arsenal, he produced “one of the great Premier League goalkeeping performances”. With 33 shots, Arsenal really should have won the game. But time and again, they were stifled by de Gea’s “brilliance”: he made 14 saves, equalling a Premier League record. As he “leapt and tumbled and…

Exhibition of the week Living with gods British Museum, London WC1 (020-7323 8181, www.britishmuseum.org ). Until 8 April Living with gods is “an absurdly brave attempt to tell the story of human belief – all of it, the whole shebang, from day one until today – through a telling assemblage of objects”, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. By its very nature, it is a “delicate” subject that presents all sorts of dangers to even the most seasoned of curators. Yet the British Museum has emerged triumphant. Curated by the BM’s brilliant former director Neil MacGregor (presenter of an equally splendid radio programme of the same title), it is “boundless in scope”, packed with dazzling exhibits and held together with “excellent storytelling”. The show brings together…

What the experts recommend The Kitchen 15 Huntly Street, Inverness (01463-259119) A “contented babble” rises across three busy floors when we arrive at this much-loved “modernist brasserie” in Inverness, says Jay Rayner in The Observer. The staff are warmly welcoming and it’s quickly clear that this place is very good indeed at “knocking out solidly built plates of food for people who have come to be looked after. Is it artful and striking? Is it surfing the wave of newness and pushing the culinary envelope? Is it hell. It’s dinner.” Nutty brown shrimps in spiced butter come with thick slices of warm, treacly bread and a pile of “frisky” pickled cucumber. “Glossy balls” of long-braised beef cheeks are glazed with an intense seafood bisque “in a way that shouldn’t…

The creator of the Brambly Hedge books Jill Barklem 1951-2017 As a student commuting from Epping to Saint Martin’s School of Art in London, Jill Barklem, who has died aged 66, would mentally remove herself from the crowded Underground train by daydreaming about the tiny inhabitants of the forests and hedgerows around her home in rural Essex, said The Guardian. These imaginings would later inspire a series of exquisitely illustrated stories, about a community of mice, that have charmed millions of children and their parents. The first four Brambly Hedge books – one for each of the seasons – were published in 1980, “creating from the outset a year-round introduction to Jill’s wonderfully imagined, small-scale world”. Gillian Gaze was born in Epping, Essex in 1951 and…

Neil Woodford Are markets looking a little toppy? You betcha, says the celebrated fund manager Neil Woodford, who warns there’s a risk of a “bigger and more dangerous” crash than ever before. “There are so many lights flashing red, I’m losing count.” Woodford, 57, whose eponymous fund manages £15bn, blames central bank money-printing for skewing the markets, says the Daily Mail. He’s also wary of the dramatic rise of bitcoin. Instead of chasing fashionable tech stocks, he recommends traditional UK firms whose shares have been hit by “Brexit-driven hysteria”. Warning of impending disaster, then fashioning “a lifeboat” for investors, is “a common strategy” in fund management, said Lex in the FT. But given the setbacks suffered by Woodford’s investments this year, his own vessel is hardly watertight. Vijay Mallya The…

The Hague, Netherlands Suicide in court: A former Bosnian Croat general killed himself in the dock of a UN tribunal in The Hague last week, when he learned that his 2013 conviction for war crimes had been upheld. “Slobodan Praljak is not a war criminal; I reject your judgment,” he said, before drinking potassium cyanide. Praljak (pictured), who was convicted of crimes against Muslims during the Bosnian war, died a few hours later. Croatia’s PM Andrej Plenkovic said that he regretted the failure of Praljak’s appeal and sent condolences to his family. An investigation has been launched into how Praljak obtained the liquid, and why no guard was by his side to take it from him. Hanover, Germany Rightward shift: Moderate members of the anti-immigration party Alternative for Germany (AfD)…

FRANCE Our Sun King president is going too far L’Obs (Paris) Emmanuel Macron sold himself as a radical democrat, says Pascal Riché, yet he governs more like King Louis XIV. As soon as he took office six months ago, his nostalgia for absolute monarchy came blazing through. Like the Sun King, he craves strong centralised government, which is why he’s come down hard on local authorities. He has culled the ranks of local officials, slashed local budgets and intends to replace the housing tax that funds local government with a block grant. But as French history teaches, if a monarch oppresses, the people revolt. French mayors, bristling at being labelled spendthrifts, gathered for a congress in Paris last month and set themselves in opposition to him. They’ll find allies in…

Britain is to become the first country in which Viagra can be obtained without a prescription, says The Guardian. The move was announced by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), which said it hopes that if the erectile dysfunction drug is easier to obtain, people will stop buying it from unregulated websites. Millions of men take Viagra and the like on prescription, but there is also a large black market for counterfeit Viagra: MHRA investigators have seized £50m’s worth over the past five years. Pfizer, the manufacturer, says it hopes Viagra Connect will be available in pharmacies from spring. Separately, GPs in England were told to stop routinely prescribing treatments for minor ailments, such as coughs and cold sores, to reduce the almost £650m that the NHS spends…

Back in July 2016, Theresa May gave a speech on the steps of Downing Street in which she promised to build a “country that works for every one of us” and not just the “privileged few”, said Tim Shipman in The Sunday Times. Seventeen months on, in a “stunning rebuke” to the PM, the board of the body charged with boosting social mobility in Britain has resigned en masse, in protest at her failure to do more to help people trapped in poverty. The chairman of the Social Mobility Commission, former Labour health secretary Alan Milburn, accused ministers of being so preoccupied with Brexit that they were not addressing the grievances that had led so many people in Britain’s most disadvantaged areas to vote to leave the EU. Earlier, the…

“People who can’t write, doing interviews with people who can’t think, to prepare articles for people who can’t read.” Frank Zappa on rock journalists, quoted in GQ “Without faith it is harder to navigate mortality.” Janice Turner in The Times “One has to have the experience of really believing before one can have the thrill of liberation.” Allan Bloom, quoted on ThePointMag.com “I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, quoted in the Metro “Death denial is the energy that drives the motor of consumer capitalism.” Jon Underwood, founder of the Death Café movement, quoted in The Times “He who hesitates is sometimes saved.” James Thurber, quoted on The Browser “The man who…

Industrial myths To The Guardian Ian Jack (“British industry isn’t dead. It just needs new tools with a cutting edge”) recycles the myth of “an industrial Britain that began to die in the 1980s”. On one hand, industrial output is higher now than it ever was in the 1980s. On the other, industrial employment began to fall much earlier than he implies – in the 1950s. Millions of jobs in textiles, shipbuilding, iron and steel, railways and coal were lost before the Margaret Thatcher years wreaked their own damage. Coal is a particularly common case of misunderstanding of the timing of decline; many more coal miners lost their jobs when Harold Wilson was prime minister than under Thatcher. If we are to have a serious discussion of the possibilities…

Theatre A Christmas Carol Adaptation: Jack Thorne, from the novella by Charles Dickens Director: Matthew Warchus The Old Vic, The Cut, London SE1 (0844-871 7628) Until 20 January Running time: 2hrs 5mins (including interval) ★★★★ Just two months after it was first published in December 1843, there were already eight versions of A Christmas Carol playing on the London stage, said Michael Billington in The Guardian. Charles Dickens’s novel has been “endlessly adapted” ever since, but The Old Vic’s splendid new version by Jack Thorne “stands high on my list of favourites”. This magnificent production provides everything you could wish for, agreed Paul Taylor in The Independent. It’s both “spooky” and “magically festive”; it brings real “psychological depth” to its treatment of Scrooge’s damaged personality; and its use of music…

Best books… Howard McWilliam The Week’s cover artist Howard McWilliam recommends his favourite illustrated books. His new book, The Art of The Week: Ten Years of McBill Covers (Dennis Publishing, £12.99) is available from The Week Bookshop. Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner by A.A. Milne, illus. by E.H. Shepard, 1926, 1928 (Egmont £8.99 each). Shepard’s roughly-hatched illustrations are a symbiotic match for the scruffy charm of Milne’s stories. They leave just the right amount of room for the imagination to breathe in-between the coarse pen marks – something that the cleaner lines of Disney’s adaptation never replicated. Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, 1981 (Hyperion £52.99). That said, there is so much artistically that Disney got right. Often referred to as “The…

The best… Christmas gifts for adults Heal’s Bristol Table Lamp This small lamp – it’s 23cm tall with the bulb – has a polished copper base. It’s also available in concrete, marble, oak or walnut (£89; www.heals.co.uk). Alessi 9090 Espresso Maker The first espresso maker that Alessi produced, the elegant 9090 comes in four sizes – from one cup to ten (from £105; www.alessi.com). NCYP Terrarium Featuring a copper frame (there are also black or silver options) this terrarium is a good size for ferns or cacti – although you could use it for candles instead (£26; www.amazon.co.uk). S’well Ultraviolet bottle This 500ml stainless steel bottle is designed to keep drinks cold for 24 hours and hot for 12 (£45; www.harveynichols.com). Dolce & Gabbana Smeg Toaster The fruit of a…

Toys R Us/Palmer & Harvey: Christmas casualties The latest stats from the British Retail Consortium (BRC) cast doubt on reports of a Black Friday “shopping bonanza”, said Tom Knowles in The Times. Mass discounts led to “meagre” sales growth last month, according to the BRC, leaving retailers “wondering whether the juice is worth the squeeze”. The 1.5% improvement was driven “almost entirely by growth in food sales”, reflecting the changing priorities of cash-strapped shoppers. It has been described as the “toughest autumn” for non-food sales in at least five years, said Sarah Butler in The Guardian. And casualties in the sector are mounting. With toy sales reportedly down 10% in the run-up to Christmas, the struggling retailer Toys R Us, which filed for bankruptcy protection in the US in September,…