Innholdsfortegnelse for V. 1168 i The Week

What happened Punishing the Kremlin Twenty-three expelled Russian diplomats and their families left London for Moscow on Tuesday, as Britain and Russia continued to trade accusations over the recent nerve agent attack on a Russian former double agent and his daughter in Salisbury. Theresa May ordered the diplomats out last week as part of a package of sanctions. Moscow responded by expelling 23 British diplomats and closing down the British Council in Russia, which promotes cultural ties between the two countries. It denied any role in the attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal and suggested that the UK produced the toxin itself. The UK Government held back from a second round of reprisals, but began targeting Vladimir Putin’s London associates by subjecting Russian private jets to enhanced searches. The leaders…

Washington DC CIA “torture” controversy: Donald Trump’s nominee to become the head of the CIA, Gina Haspel (pictured), has been facing renewed allegations about her complicity in the torture of al-Qa’eda suspects. Last week, Trump named the present CIA director, Mike Pompeo, as his new secretary of state, and said he wanted Haspel, currently deputy director, to step into the main job. If her appointment is confirmed by the US Senate, she’ll be the first woman to run the agency. But it’s not uncontroversial: allegedly dubbed “Bloody Gina” by her colleagues, she ran a “black site” in Thailand where al-Qa’eda suspects were waterboarded in the 2000s. She has also been accused of ordering, in 2005, the destruction of 92 videotapes, kept in a CIA vault, that recorded waterboardings. Separately, President…

Why the Tories will soon yearn for Osborne Stephen Bush New Statesman There’s one big difference between the present Chancellor and his predecessor, says Stephen Bush, and it could cost the Tories the next election. It’s this: Philip Hammond, unlike George Osborne, has “no natural instinct for politics”. Look at his anodyne Spring Statement. He could have dampened the growing enthusiasm for Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-privatisation rhetoric by trumpeting some of the good economic news and handing out “a few giveaways” – so regaining control of the terms of economic debate. He did neither. What a contrast to Osborne, whose Budgets were devised to give David Cameron ammunition on the campaign trail. Hammond judges a policy by its merits; Osborne would judge it by its impact on Tory marginals. Not that…

ITALY Beware the cult of the health guru Corriere della Sera (Milan) One ugly by-product of the rise of populism in Italy is the growing influence of health charlatans, says Massimo Gramellini. They’re popping up everywhere, warning the gullible against non-existent plots and dangers. The latest to hit the headlines is health guru Mario Pianesi, head of an empire of macrobiotic restaurants and courses that tout the miracle properties of his Ma.Pi. diet. Pianesi, 73, preaches that almost all foods aside from beans and legumes are full of dangerous toxins. But now he and his wife are under investigation by police for running what amounts to a secret cult. Pianesi’s disciples were so devoted to their diet, and their “teacher”, that many of them, it’s alleged, were made to work…

Nearly every bottle of water tested as part of a new study was found to contain particles of plastic. The team that carried out the research, which involved 259 bottles from nine countries, said they’d found the particles “in bottle after bottle and brand after brand”. Typically there were ten particles per litre that were about the width of a human hair, and 314 smaller ones per litre. “It’s not about pointing fingers at particular brands,” said Dr Sherri Mason, a professor of chemistry at the State University of New York. “It’s really showing that this is everywhere, that plastic has become such a pervasive material in our society, it’s pervading all of these products that we consume.” There’s no evidence yet that microplastics, at the level typically consumed, are…

“Bored, bored, bored, bored...” Those were the words that Ahmed Hassan scrawled on his bedroom door last summer, around the time he began building a bomb at his foster home in Surrey, said The Independent. A few weeks later, Hassan – the 18-year-old Iraqi asylum seeker who was convicted of attempted murder last week – carried that bomb onto a London Underground train in a Lidl bag and waited until the carriage had filled up. He got off the train at Putney Bridge, before the bomb partly detonated. Had it gone off fully, scores of people could have been killed at Parsons Green station, on 15 September. Instead, the explosion created a fireball that ripped through the carriage. In court, survivors described being lacerated by flying glass, and being horribly…

On her progresses around Tudor England, Elizabeth I demanded so much of her hosts she almost bankrupted them, said Sarah Baxter in The Sunday Times. Prince Charles is not in her league – but if a new biography by Tom Bower is to be believed, he is still the “guest from hell”. This is a man so fussy that once, in advance of a weekend with friends, he reportedly sent a lorry with all the furniture he required for his rooms, including an orthopaedic bed with linen, two paintings of Highland landscapes, a lavatory seat and rolls of his favoured toilet paper. His food – organic, of course – came separately. They were lucky in a way, said Valentine Low in The Times. Another set of friends allegedly spent a…

The Irish dilemma To The Times Brexit certainly raises problems in relation to Ireland, because the Good Friday Agreement assumed that both parts of the island would remain in the EU. But the agreement does state unequivocally that Northern Ireland remains part of the UK unless and until a majority in the province decides otherwise. It is hardly consistent with the spirit of that agreement to propose, as apparently the EU’s draft text of the withdrawal treaty does, that a post-Brexit customs border be created in the Irish Sea, so that one part of the UK remains in the customs union while the rest is outside. One consequence would be that Northern Ireland, bound by the EU’s common external tariff, could not be included in UK trade agreements with third…

Theatre Humble Boy Playwright: Charlotte Jones Director: Paul Miller Orange Tree Theatre, Clarence Street, Richmond (020-8740 3633). Until 14 April Running time: 2hrs 30mins (including interval) ★★★ Choosing the plays that make up a theatre’s programme is an art form in itself, said Aleks Sierz on The Arts Desk. At the Orange Tree, artistic director Paul Miller is currently on a “continuous roll with his inspired mixing of the old and the new, forgotten classics and new voices, revivals and premieres”. His latest success is this first London revival of Humble Boy, a zesty, metaphor-rich family drama that was a smash hit for the National Theatre in 2001. If Miller can’t offer the original’s starry cast (Simon Russell Beale, Diana Rigg) he certainly succeeds in presenting this Cotswoldian spin on…

Best books… Philip Collins Philip Collins, the Times columnist and former speechwriter for Tony Blair, picks his favourite books. When They Go Low We Go High, his new book about the speeches that shaped the world, is published by 4th Estate at £16.99 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, 1813 (Penguin £4.99). Mostly because it has given me a joke that works every time: I know you’d prefer a Mr Darcy, but you are just going to have to put up with Mr Collins. I used it on my wedding day and every day since. Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack (Wisden £55). By a distance the greatest book ever published. This year’s almanack was better than last year’s, which was better than the year before, for ever. Almost every fact that you…

Smørrebrød (pronounced “smuhr-broht“) translates from the Danish as simply “butter on bread”, but it means so much more than that, says Trine Hahnemann. The open sandwich on rye bread has been the traditional Danish lunch since at least the Middle Ages; these days popular toppings include fish, meat, eggs, vegetables, cheese and even fruit. Here’s my classic rye bread recipe. I always have it in my bread basket and eat it every day. Makes 1 large loaf For the rye sourdough starter: 300ml buttermilk 300g wholegrain stone-ground rye flour For the rye bread Day 1: 1 new rye sourdough starter or 3 tbsps rye sourdough starter (see method below) 850ml lukewarm water 3 tbsps sea salt flakes 750g wholegrain stone-ground rye flour…

Stephen Hawking 1942-2018 He may not have been the world’s greatest scientist, but Stephen Hawking was certainly its most famous. Roaming “the cosmos from a wheelchair, pondering the nature of gravity and the origin of the universe”, he captured the world’s imagination like no scientist since Einstein, said The New York Times – and became a striking emblem of human “determination and curiosity”. His 1988 book, A Brief History of Time, has sold more than ten million copies, and he became not only acclaimed in his field, for his work exploring the properties of those mysterious entities known as black holes, but also something of a pop cultural icon. An Oscar-winning film was made of his life; he mingled with presidents and rock stars; and he popped up in numerous…

Sir James Dyson Now 70, Sir James Dyson has been designing vacuum cleaners for “exactly half his life”, says Harry de Quetteville in The Daily Telegraph. But the decades haven’t dimmed his technical curiosity about how things “might be improved”. He enjoys critiquing his Japanese electronic toilet so much that “one can’t help but wonder” if he’s “hinting at the possibility” of a Dyson model. For now, though, “the most exciting device in his pipeline” is an electric, semi-autonomous car, due in 2021. We live in a nation where “making money is rather demonised”, says Sir James, who insists he’s “not a good businessman”. But he’s not bad, either: now worth some £7.8bn, Dyson is thought to be the biggest landowner in the country, with more acres even than the…

Controversy of the week Tech and democracy “Facebook represents a new kind of corporate power, the dimensions of which are only now becoming apparent,” said The Observer. Originally, it used personal information revealed by its users – now two billion strong – to allow advertisers to target them very precisely. But it rapidly became clear that the system could also be used “for delivering targeted political messages to voters”. It seems that this is what happened in Donald Trump’s 2016 election and the Brexit referendum. Cambridge Analytica, a British company that worked with Trump and the Brexit campaign, exploited Facebook’s systems to “harvest” the profiles of 50 million US voters. In the words of Cambridge Analytica’s whistle-blower Christopher Wylie, it used these “to exploit what we knew about them and…

A director’s inspiration Ruben Östlund is fascinated by human behaviour. “Basically, all my films are about people trying to avoid losing face,” he told Xan Brooks in The Observer. His last film, Force Majeure (2014), was about a father who abandons his family at the first whiff of danger, then lies about it. The Square, his new film, contains a scene in which one character, an artist, claims in an interview that he is interested in “human responses to art” – but is then completely thrown when a man with Tourette’s starts shouting at him from the floor. This episode was lifted from Östlund’s own experience: he was watching a play in his native Sweden “when this guy starts clapping and then shushing himself. Clapping and shushing... So we’re all…

A Romanian court has ruled that a 63-year-old man is dead, although he himself appeared in court to offer evidence to the contrary. Constantin Reliu went to Turkey in 1992 for work and lost touch with his family; his wife registered him dead in 2016. He was recently deported back to Romania, where he learnt of his death certificate. He tried to have it annulled, but lost his case because he had appealed too late. He remains legally dead and the ruling is final. “I have no income and because I am listed dead, I can’t do anything,” Reliu complained. A statue of a crucified Star Wars stormtrooper has caused outrage after it was installed in a London church for an art exhibition. Crucified Stormtrooper by the street artist Ryan…

A panda park in China about twice the size of Yorkshire has secured £1.1bn of funding, says The Daily Telegraph. The 10,000 sq mile park, situated across three provinces, will establish “migration corridors” linking 67 current panda reserves on six isolated mountain ranges. According to state media, this will allow bears to “mate with pandas from other areas” – enriching the animals’ gene pool and boosting numbers. China’s giant pandas now number just over 2,100, including 1,864 in the wild – roughly double the 1995 population. Although pandas came off the “endangered” list in 2016, they are still classed as “vulnerable”, and China wants to raise the wild population to at least 2,000 by 2025. While the park is touted as a boon for the local economy, there are fears…

Vladimir Putin’s victory in Russia’s presidential election on Sunday “was never in any doubt”, said The Economist. All viable challengers, such as anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny, had been prevented from running. The Kremlin, concerned about low turnout, “resorted to bread and circuses”, offering music, entertainment and food at polling stations. There were some reports of ballot stuffing, but such blatant fraud was largely unnecessary. Putin, who remains genuinely popular, racked up over 76% of the vote on a turnout of 67%. His nearest rival, the Communist Party’s Pavel Grudinin, won 12%. President Putin will take his victory “as a mandate to continue his current course, one defined in large part by confrontation with the West”. Recent weeks have been filled with news of the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal…

“When you have lost your inns, drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England.” Hilaire Belloc, quoted in The Daily Telegraph “The great thing to remember is that things aren’t as bad as they were in the 14th century.” Historian Tom Holland, quoted in The Times “All the world is not a stage: backstage and beyond the theatre are important territories, too.” Essayist Rebecca Solnit, quoted in Harper’s “Isn’t it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?” L.M. Montgomery, quoted in the Montreal Gazette “I cannot afford the luxury of a closed mind.” Red Cross founder Clara Barton, quoted on Al.com “Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic.”…

To The Guardian If President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination had been handled as the British Government has done with the Skripals’ poisoning, dozens of Soviet diplomats would have been expelled, trade arrangements and contacts with the Soviet Union would have been cancelled, and Soviet ships docking at US ports would have likely been seized. After all, Kennedy’s alleged assassin had resided in the Soviet Union and had long been married to a Soviet citizen. To his credit, President Lyndon B. Johnson – unlike Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson – called for an investigation and avoided voicing any conclusions beforehand, while refraining from pressuring allies to blame the Soviet government. There are many questions on the Skripal case that deserve answers, which only a thorough investigation can provide. Why was Mr…

New cars: what the critics say Top Gear A five-door “liftback”, the Stinger is Kia’s first rear-wheel-drive car. Long and low, the Stinger has been designed to give the South Korean manufacturer some “proper brand kudos”, by proving that alongside the hatchbacks and crossovers it’s known for, it can do “handsome, interesting, driver’s cars”. It comes with an impressive range of equipment as standard and an “unbeatable” seven-year warranty. Auto Express The Stinger’s styling is “a little more extrovert” than some of its European rivals, with the Kia family “tiger nose” grill flanked by swoopy wrap-around headlights and aggressively sculpted air intakes. Its “heavily chiselled” body shape adds to the visual drama, as do the muscular haunches and the coupe-style roofline. The interior is well finished and, while a little…

Micro Focus: the curse of HP In the tech world this week, all eyes were on Facebook, which lost some $40bn of value on Monday alone as investors took fright over the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Unless, of course, you happened to own a slice of Micro Focus, said Jack Torrance in The Daily Telegraph. Shares in the FTSE 100 software company, which became Britain’s largest tech firm last year when it spent $8.8bn buying Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s software arm, suffered a 46% fall after reporting that revenues were falling faster than expected. CEO Chris Hsu carried the can for the “botched merger”, quitting with immediate effect to “spend more time with his family and pursue another opportunity”. But responsibility for the deal, which “always had a touch of hubris”, surely…

You can get your child off to great start in life by investing the full junior Isa allowance every year, says Ruth Emery in The Sunday Times. Only parents can open them, but anyone can contribute. The maximum that can be saved this tax year is £4,128. Here are some tips for taking baby steps to building a fortune. Cash or shares? “Junior Isas are, by their very nature, long-term investments,” says Nick Middleton of UBS SmartWealth. So “it’s arguably worth taking a bit of risk”. Research by Brewin Dolphin found that investing the maximum amount in a FTSE All-Share index each year, with dividends reinvested, would have resulted in a pot worth £161,342 over the past 18 years. Putting it all into a cash junior Isa would have produced…

The week’s best buys Gem Diamonds The Times Thanks to a strong run of discoveries, cost-cutting and marketing, the gem miner is recovering – and has sought to reduce the number of stones that get damaged by making the crushing process gentler. Buy. 96.5p. Indivior The Daily Telegraph Indivior specialises in developing drugs that tackle opioid addiction. Approval for a mechanism to deliver drugs via long-lasting injection will hurt generic competitors. Shares seem “very cheap” given the potential. Buy. 401.5p. Joules Group Investors Chronicle The retailer “perfectly caters to modern shopping tastes and behaviours” with appealing prices and quality products. A lean property portfolio is backed by good online growth and an increasing international footprint. Buy. 324p. Just Group The Times Just Group is a well-funded,…

Berlin Off-message ally: The fragility of Angela Merkel’s newly-formed coalition government became apparent this week, when her new interior minister directly challenged her authority by saying that Islam “does not belong to Germany”. Horst Seehofer, a senior member of the CSU, the Bavarian sister party of Merkel’s CDU, and a former minister president of Bavaria, also attacked the EU for its “patronising” attitude to eastern European countries that are unwilling to take in more refugees. His remarks – which he was at pains to qualify by saying that, of course, individual Muslims “belong in Germany” – were seen as a clear slight to Merkel, whose immigration policy he has often criticised. Seehofer was always likely to be a thorn in Merkel’s side, but she had to accept him into her…

Why false news spreads fastest False news travels much faster online than the truth – and it’s all because of our craving for novelty. In the largest-ever study looking at how news spreads on social media, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology analysed 126,000 stories on Twitter from between 2006 and 2017. They found that false stories were 70% more likely to be retweeted than those that were true, and that true stories took six-times longer, on average, to reach an audience of 1,500 people. One surprise was that automated robots – or bots – played no part in this discrepancy. “False news spreads more than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it,” said the authors of the study, which was published in the…

The actor Bryan Cranston has admitted to misreading the signals at an audition in the 1970s. Asked to “make out on a bench” with an actress, he was about to take the lead when she jumped on him, kissed him passionately, pawed at his body and then slapped him on the bottom. Her lust seemed so genuine, he asked her if she’d like to go on a date: her response was a pitying glance. “I would have bet money that this girl liked me,” said the Breaking Bad star. “But she was just acting. A brilliant, brilliant actor. I don’t know what happened to Meryl Streep.” Jeremy Corbyn often used to be photographed in a 1980s-style shell suit. But no more: apparently his advisers have decided that his favoured leisurewear…

“It is bizarre, but oddly revealing,” said Rachel Sylvester in The Times, “that Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters spent the weekend [wrongly] accusing the BBC of doctoring an image of the Labour leader’s hat to make him look like a Soviet stooge.” If anything has given that impression, it wasn’t the backdrop used on Newsnight, but Corbyn’s own statements about the Salisbury poisoning. While other politicians reacted with horror to the nerve agent attack, and accepted official claims that there’s “no plausible alternative explanation” to Russian involvement, Corbyn responded by taking the Government to task. Can it prove the Kremlin is involved? Why has Theresa May not sent a sample of the nerve agent for analysis in Moscow? Can we trust the word of spy chiefs after Iraq? The impression is of…

How Ireland dominated the Cheltenham Festival... It was “one of the great Gold Cups”, said Greg Wood in The Guardian. In Cheltenham last Friday, Native River and Might Bite “fought a private battle”. While the other runners trailed behind, each horse “dared the other to make a mistake or give some ground”. Finally, after clearing the last jumps, Native River “found the strength to see off his rival”. Riding the horse, Richard Johnson’s timing and judgement were “flawless”. In jump racing’s most prestigious race, he produced a ride “equal to the occasion”. Johnson has waited a long time for this victory, said Paul Hayward in The Daily Telegraph. Eighteen years have passed since his previous Gold Cup triumph. Fortunately, the 40-year-old English jockey is a “patient sort”. For two decades,…

Exhibition of the week Murillo: The Self-Portraits National Gallery, London WC2 (020-7747 2885, www.nationalgallery.org.uk ). Until 21 May Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617-82) was “the most famous artist in golden-age Seville”, said Ben Luke in the London Evening Standard. Best known in his lifetime for his “fervent religious paintings”, he remained fashionable long after his death: in the 18th and 19th centuries, his cheerful pictures of “street urchins” made him “the most celebrated Spanish artist” in Europe. Since then, however, Murillo’s reputation has “plummeted”, his achievements eclipsed by those of his near-contemporary Velázquez. Yet as this new exhibition dedicated to his portraiture demonstrates, his work has been “too easily dismissed”. In a curatorial coup, the show brings together the only two self-portraits Murillo is known to have painted,…

The Mash Inn Horseshoe Road, Radnage, Buckinghamshire (01494-482440) Slightly depressingly, this “restaurant-in-a-former-country-pub” has been renamed The Mash Inn because it’s now owned by a bloke called Nick Mash, says Keith Miller in The Daily Telegraph. Other than that, I liked it very much. The front part of what used to be The Three Horseshoes has been retained as a “curatorially correct country-pub taproom”, with a small bar, wonky brickwork and “all the trimmings”. Behind it, there’s a large stone-floored dining area and an open kitchen, dominated by a massive wood-fired grill, which turns out food that’s “ambitious, imaginatively conceived and confidently realised”. We went for the “daily menu” at £55 (there’s also a £150 tasting menu, with wine) and the balance of flavours was “superb”. We especially liked a…

With all the talk of Frankfurt and Paris snaring business from the City, who would guess that Rotterdam would “strike the first blow to Brexit Britain”, asked Deirdre Hipwell in The Times. Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch consumer group behind such staples as Marmite, Dove, Persil and Magnum, is abandoning “a dual structure” that has served it for nearly nine decades to move its legal domicile to the Dutch port. CEO Paul Polman insisted the decision had nothing to do with Brexit and made soothing noises about UK jobs and investment. But however it’s dressed up, the defection of the FTSE’s third biggest company is an embarrassment for the Government and the City. “Leaving the EU plainly didn’t help the UK’s pitch,” said Nils Pratley in The Guardian. But the Netherlands has…

Silicon Valley is ripe for regulation Christopher Matthews Dealbreaker Many analysts think that Facebook’s shares – hit badly by claims that its data was misused by Cambridge Analytica – now present “the perfect buying opportunity”, says Christopher Matthews. They’re probably right. Given the advertising duopoly still enjoyed by Facebook and Google, “the scandal likely poses no significant, short-term risk to the company’s bottom line”. Longer term, though, it may be a different story: pressure is growing to impose “Wall Street-style regulation” on the Silicon Valley giants. The data industry is now “ripe for aggressive regulation” designed to even out “the power disparities between individual investors and large companies”. There are even proposals to impose an “information fiduciary” standard on the likes of Facebook, allowing users to sue if their data…