Innholdsfortegnelse for V. 1242 i The Week

What happened Parliament suspended The Government asked the Queen to suspend Parliament just a few days after MPs return to work next Tuesday, until a fortnight before the Brexit deadline of 31 October. Prime Minister Boris Johnson said a new parliamentary session would begin on 14 October with the Queen’s Speech, outlining his “very exciting” legislative agenda. The Queen approved the request, which means MPs now have a greatly reduced period in which to pass laws to stop a no-deal Brexit. The House of Commons Speaker John Bercow described the move as a “constitutional outrage”. Last week, Johnson travelled to Berlin and Paris to discuss the possibility of renegotiating the Irish backstop. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel stated that it might take years to find a solution to the border…

Friends, the 1990s US sitcom, which – as it prepares to celebrate its 25th anniversary – seems to be as popular as ever. Netflix reportedly paid $100m to stream Friends this year (its stars each earn an estimated $20m a year in royalties); and a FriendsFest exhibition, touring the UK until late September, has sold out. Detectorists, with the discovery of one of the biggest treasure hoards in Britain – 2,528 silver coins, dating back to the reigns of King Harold and William the Conqueror, valued at around £5m. They were found in a field in Somerset in January, and handed to the British Museum for evaluation. Experts believe they were probably buried by a rich individual for safekeeping. Rosa Parks, the US civil rights activist, who was memorialised as…

25% of UK voters have taken some precautions against potential negative effects of a no-deal Brexit. 9% have stockpiled foods or medicines; 8% have delayed major purchases; 7% have altered travel plans. Tory supporters have taken the least action: 80% saying they have made no preparations, compared with 63% of Labour voters and 60% of Lib Dems. 40% of adults say they think no deal would be bad for the UK economy. 29% think it would be good for it. Opinium/The Observer 49% of Britons think keeping a brothel should be decriminalised. 22% think it should not. 44% think sex workers should not face prosecution for “street solicitation”, while 27% think they should. RightsInfo/The Independent…

Jerusalem Tensions rise: Israel has ramped up tensions with Iran by launching a series of attacks on it and its allies. On Saturday, Israel bombed an Iranian base in Syria, to stop what it claimed was a plan to attack Israel with “killer” (bomb-carrying) drones. The next day, an Israeli drone reportedly attacked a Hezbollah stronghold near Beirut, a violation of sovereignty which Lebanon’s President Aoun said amounted to a “declaration of war”. A Syrian-backed Palestinian group said one of its positions in Lebanon had also been attacked. In a statement, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces a tough re-election battle next month, did not confirm the latter attacks, but said Iran was “working on several fronts to carry out deadly attacks against Israel”, and Israel would defend itself by…

Two regulars at a Melbourne café have been locked in a battle over which is the more loyal customer. Fraser Harvey put up a poster of himself in Sensory Lab with the words “Customer of the Week”, but then found that an unnamed woman had replaced it with a framed photo of herself. Harvey mounted his poster in a larger frame – only for his rival to hire a projector and display her face across the entire café. Harvey responded by having loyalty cards and staff T-shirts printed with his picture on them – but tweeted “I may have just lost” when the woman, who finally identified herself as urban planner Harriet Noall, revealed she’d had a Sensory Lab coffee cup tattooed on her ribs. “We’re just two competitive dickheads,”…

CHINA Beijing’s plan has foundered on the rocks Foreign Policy (Washington DC) China caused panic a few years ago when it embarked on building artificial island fortresses in the South China Sea, says Steven Stashwick. In the Spratly Islands, an archipelago also claimed by the Philippines and other neighbouring countries, it constructed more than 3,000 acres of new land on rocks and coral reefs, much of which now bristles with long-range surveillance systems, ports, runways and bunkers. Western military planners feared the new installations would extend China’s power in the region – yet curiously, Beijing hasn’t deployed any new warplanes or missiles, and it’s starting to look as if the plan misfired. It may be that China’s most advanced military systems can’t deal with the heat and humidity: buildings have…

Microplastics have been found in the snowy wastes of the Arctic. That in itself is not particularly surprising – the pollutants have been found pretty much everywhere else scientists have looked for them – but it provides further evidence of plastic’s capacity to spread, even to remote areas far from human habitation. The researchers, from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, analysed snow samples from 22 locations, including ice floes off Greenland and Svalbard, the German and Swiss Alps, and the city of Bremen. In the Arctic samples, the average concentration of plastic particles was 1,760 per litre; in the European ones, it was 24,600 per litre. Snow captures particles from the air as it falls, which makes it a good indicator of airborne pollution.…

Tensions between President Macron and President Bolsonaro were aggravated this week when the Brazilian leader disrespected his French counterpart’s wife. A Bolsonaro supporter started it, by posting images of the two couples online with the words, “Now do you understand why Macron is persecuting Bolsonaro?” – a reference to the fact that while Brigitte Macron is 25 years older than her husband, Michelle Bolsonaro (pictured left) is 27 years younger than hers. Bolsonaro then appeared to endorse the post, commenting, “Don’t humiliate the man ha, ha, ha”. Macron was not amused: “Brazilian women are probably very ashamed of their president,” he said. “I hope they will soon have a president who is up to the job.” On his state visit to London, President Trump insisted on flying into Buckingham Palace…

An Afghan history lesson To The Guardian Simon Tisdall is completely correct in his analysis of the US peace initiative in Afghanistan: it is all about enabling the withdrawal of US troops and little about the future of the Afghan people; “details”, such as the shape of the future government of the country, are, apparently, to be settled later. This week saw one historic occasion for Afghanistan, the 100th anniversary of its independence from Britain, but the deal being negotiated in Doha more closely resembles the end of Soviet engagement in 1988. Desperate to stop a war they were losing, the Soviets negotiated the end of combat operations in 1989 and withdrew the bulk of their troops. Over the next few years, under pressure from the West, “cooperation troops” withdrew;…

As his “leaving present” to the Almeida, the theatre’s young associate director, Robert Icke, offers this terrific adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1912 play Professor Bernhardi, for which he also wrote the script, said Paul Taylor in The Independent. Schnitzler’s play, set in turn-of-the-century Vienna, is a brilliant dissection of the clash between science and faith, and of the anti-Semitism “growing like gangrene in Austrian society”. It tells the story of a Jewish doctor who treats a 14-year-old girl dying of sepsis following a botched abortion – and who controversially refuses to let a Catholic priest come to her bedside to administer the last rites. But in Icke’s reworking, the piece becomes a “gripping moral thriller and a scorching examination of our age”, said Sarah Hemming in the FT. The core…

“Egocentric demands are nothing new on Hollywood sets,” said Lanre Bakare in The Guardian. But this one may take the biscuit. Producers of the Fast & Furious franchise have admitted that its leading men – Jason Statham, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Vin Diesel – all insist that in on-screen fights, their characters never get too much of a beating. To ensure parity, Diesel apparently suggested a “rating system” for punches, body-slams and so on. It was deemed unworkable, so the actor instead relies on his sister, a producer on the films, to make sure he doesn’t come off looking weaker than the others; but Statham actually has it written into his contract that his character can’t be smacked about too badly. In this “arms race of machismo”, all three…

The National Portrait Gallery has filled a “glaring hole” in its Tudor collection, said Mark Brown in The Guardian. The unveiling this week of an unfinished portrait of Jane Seymour means that its galleries at last include a painting of Henry VIII’s third wife – the one who avoided “divorce or beheading but not an early death”. Acquired in 2016, the painting has undergone lengthy restoration – revealing that it is not, as was believed, a Victorian copy of the famous Hans Holbein portrait (in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum) but a contemporary version of it, most likely made in Holbein’s own studio. A mystery remains: why was the work abandoned when it was 90% complete, without elements such as the gilding in the headdress and jewels? There are several possible explanations…

Programmes Untouchable: The Rise and Fall of Harvey Weinstein Testimonies from the producer’s former employees, friends and Hollywood insiders, shed light on Weinstein’s arrogance and power. Sun 1 Sept, BBC2 21:00 (95mins). 50 Years of the Troubles: A Journey Through Film Film-maker Mark Cousins returns to his hometown of Belfast to view the Troubles through the prism of film and the city’s once-grand cinemas. Sun 1 Sept, C4 22:20 (55mins). A Confession Starring Martin Freeman and Imelda Staunton, this new crime drama is based on the real-life story of a police detective who sacrificed his career to catch a killer. Mon 2 Sept, ITV1 21:00 (60mins). The Capture A soldier’s murder conviction is overturned in the first part of this surveillance thriller about the intelligence services. Tue 3 Sept, BBC1…

It’s best to use a sweet apple for this recipe to complement the tanginess of the cheese, says James Rich, so opt for a Braeburn or Royal Gala, rather than a Granny Smith or Cox’s. You can either bake this as individual tarts – as I have done – or as a tray bake, in which case just roll out the puff pastry into a rectangle. Serves 10 75g unsalted butter 1 onion, thinly sliced ½ a sprig of rosemary, leaves removed and finely chopped a little plain flour, for dusting 2 x 320g packs of ready-made puff-pastry 1 egg, beaten for the cheese topping: 200g goat’s cheese 1 tbsp lemon juice salt and freshly ground black pepper 4 crisp dessert apples, such as Braeburn, peeled, cored and sliced a…

Three Camel Lodge Mongolia “The only luxe lodge in the Gobi appears like a mirage” from the dusty dunes, says Wanderlust magazine. The eco-friendly, solar-powered camp consists of a series of gers (yurts), “decorated warmly in the Mongolian style” with “intricately carved beds and wood-burning stoves”. By day, activities include hiking into the mountains in search of dinosaur fossils and petroglyphs, or camel trekking in the desert under “blazing blue skies”. There’s a massage ger and the Thirsty Camel bar to quench your thirst. Plastic use is very limited, wildlife is protected and profits go to “support struggling nomads in winter”. From £276 per person per night; threecamellodge.com.…

Industrial Heat/Eddie Stobart: Woodford double blow The woes of Neil Woodford and his long-suffering investors seem to know no end, said Daniel Grote on Citywire. In a new double blow, the “embattled” former star fund manager has been hit by a 40% write-down in the value of Industrial Heat – an unquoted nuclear-energy start-up and one of his most “controversial” investments. Separately, shares in another Woodford company, Aim-listed Eddie Stobart Logistics, have been suspended because it failed to publish its half-year accounts on time, after admitting it had overstated 2018 profits. The CEO, Alex Laffey, has now walked. The setbacks whacked both of Woodford’s already troubled vehicles – the “frozen” £3.2bn Woodford Equity Income Fund and his listed Patient Capital Trust. The frozen fund has lost some 11% in…

The dangers of ignoring Africa Larry Elliott The Guardian The G7 seems to have forgotten about Africa, says Larry Elliott – and that is a mistake that will return to haunt us. Until the 2008 financial crisis, the state of the continent tended to dominate these summits – in part because rich countries, “enjoying a spell of low-inflationary growth, could look beyond their own problems”. Moves to reduce debt, increase aid, improve governance and free-up trade culminated in the “big package” of reliefs agreed at Gleneagles in 2005. The boast was that Africa “was sorted” along with the rest of the global economy. The crash exposed that delusion, and meant “that the West took its eyes off Africa”. New research by Save the Children UK highlights the impact of this:…

The week’s best shares Berkeley Group The Sunday Telegraph The London-focused housebuilder has an impressive record of benefiting from house-price cycles. With funds to acquire land at subdued prices, it is well set to capitalise on undersupply. Buy. £39.69. Cineworld Group The Sunday Times Sales, profits and shares at the cinema operator are down. But industry trends are “looking good”, and fundamentals are sound with 9,500 cinemas and guaranteed seat-fillers – in the Star Wars and James Bond sequels – coming soon. Buy. 229.1p. RWS Holdings The Times The acquisition of Czech digital specialist Moravia has boosted the language services group, which boasts double-digit turnover increases in its Life Sciences and IP divisions. A niche operator and “canny acquirer”. Buy. 587p. SAP The Daily Telegraph This German “enterprise software” firm…

Controversy of the week Will HS2 hit the buffers? Is Britain’s biggest infrastructure project coming off the rails, asked the Daily Mail. HS2, the controversial high-speed rail link between London and Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds, is projected to cost a whopping £56bn. But last week the PM’s senior adviser, Dominic Cummings, referred to it as a “disaster zone”, and days after that remark Boris Johnson ordered an “independent and rigorous” review to determine whether HS2 is an economically viable solution to the UK’s transport needs or, as some say, just a preposterously expensive vanity project. Announcing the review, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said that a panel of experts, led by former HS2 chairman Douglas Oakervee, would judge whether the £56bn budget was realistic or more likely, in Johnson’s own words…

Fracking at the UK’s only active site was temporarily suspended this week, after four “micro-seismic” events were recorded at the facility outside Blackpool within a few days. One of them – a seismic event measuring 2.9 on the Richter scale – was the biggest ever recorded at the Preston New Road site. Nearby residents said they felt their houses shake, and heard a “guttural roar”. Operations at the site, which is run by the shale gas firm Cuadrilla, were halted, as they must be for 18 hours after any tremor over 0.5. A 2.3-magnitude earthquake at a different site in 2011 led to a seven-year suspension of fracking in the UK, and critics say it is still not safe.…

The Hague, Netherlands Euthanasia trial: A Dutch doctor has gone on trial for performing euthanasia on a patient with advanced dementia – the first such prosecution since the practice became legal in 2002. The unnamed retired doctor administered a lethal injection to the 74-year-old woman, in the presence of her family, in 2016. The patient had previously indicated that she wanted to die if her condition became severe, but prosecutors say that on the day of the procedure, she had given “mixed” signals. They argue that the doctor should have done more to verify consent. There is growing anxiety in the Netherlands about the morality of carrying out euthanasia on patients with advanced dementia, who can no longer convey that they are “suffering unbearably” (as stipulated by the law). Prosecutors…

Maupin’s straight start Armistead Maupin has been openly gay for so long, it’s hard to believe that for nearly half his life, he acted straight. Although indelibly associated with San Francisco, where he set the beloved Tales of the City books, Maupin grew up in a conservative family in North Carolina, says Helen Brown in The Daily Telegraph. After leaving college, he joined the US navy, did a tour of duty in Vietnam and even shook hands with Richard Nixon. It wasn’t until 1977, when he was 33, that he came out. From the point of view of his career, his timing was perfect. “It dawned on me early on – rather shrewdly, I think – that people were going to be famous for being queer. I realised that the…

M-Pesa, the groundbreaking mobile payment system launched in Kenya, has already proved extraordinarily effective at liberating the “unbanked” – without any of the risks posed by a privately-backed cryptocurrency like Libra – simply by making it cheap and easy to transfer local currency via smartphone. Launched by Safaricom in 2007, M-Pesa is credited with bringing millions of Kenyans into the financial system, spawning a host of start-ups and kickstarting local economies. By 2015, 17 million Kenyans were signed up and 25% of Kenya’s GDP was flowing through it. When it comes to scale, however, no one beats the Chinese. In 2017, Alipay and WeChat Pay (owned respectively by Alibaba and Tencent) together processed $15.4trn of mobile payments, more than 40 times more than the US total. And both are rapidly…

Turning a blind eye to catastrophe Editorial The Washington Post Global warming isn’t a future threat, says The Washington Post. It’s already here and disrupting life in the US. The Post has just conducted an exhaustive investigation in which our reporters crunched temperature records throughout the country. And we found that more than 10% of Americans, or 34 million people, live in regions that have already heated up by 2°C or 3.6°F – the mark that a United Nations scientific panel has warned will usher in severe and perhaps irreversible effects. Southern California, much of the northeast, Phoenix, portions of the Rocky Mountains and Alaska are just some of the areas experiencing this. And the impacts are far from subtle. Toxic algae blooms are ruining lakes that no longer freeze…

Prosperous Bronze Age Britons were infested with an array of parasitic worms, which they probably picked up by eating raw fish and frogs. Archaeologists excavating the Must Farm site in East Anglia – the well-preserved remains of a marsh settlement that was destroyed by fire 3,000 years ago – found, among other less grisly artefacts, a number of fossilised human faeces (coprolites) buried in the mud that surrounded the stilted roundhouses. When analysed, these proved to be full of parasite eggs, including those of fish tapeworms, Echinostoma and giant kidney worms. Fish tapeworms are particularly unpleasant: coiled in the intestine, they can grow up to ten metres in length. Chances are, they made the lives of ancient Britons fairly unpleasant; and their incidence has been on the rise again in…

“Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood.” Author Jane Yolen, quoted in the I newspaper “Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.” Journalist H.L. Mencken, quoted on Spectator USA “With Twitter, Caliban has found his medium.” Melanie McDonagh in The Daily Telegraph “Scorn pain: either it will go away or you will.” Seneca, quoted in The Guardian “If you want children to keep their feet on the ground, put some responsibility on their shoulders.” Advice columnist Abigail Van Buren, quoted in Good Housekeeping “A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.” Jean de La Fontaine, quoted in The Independent “I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1.…

To The Guardian Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is right – exhibitions by big-name artists are blighted by phone snappers posting their visit on social media. One solution might be more invisible art, like the piece Maurizio Cattelan reported to the police as having been stolen from his car (although he exhibited the incident report), or the empty plinth over which Tom Friedman got a professional witch to cast a malign spell. But I doubt this would work. When the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in 1911, more people went to look at the empty space on the wall than used to visit the painting itself. Today they would all be photographing it. Robin Blake, London To The Guardian I’m with Cosslett in despairing at crowds in art galleries taking…

“There’s nothing like an American play for a good old family barney,” says Claire Allfree in The Daily Telegraph. Many of the US playwriting greats – Eugene O’Neill, Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, Sam Shepard and, most recently, Tracy Letts (of August: Osage County fame) – have mined the family-at-war theme to great effect. Now the great young hope of American theatre, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, an African-American playwright still in his early 30s, gives these (white) forebears a “run for their money with this lacerating portrait” of the white Lafayette clan, who gather at their dead father’s Arkansas plantation house the night before it is sold off in order, it turns out, to “rip bleeding shreds out of one another”. In a previous acclaimed work, An Octoroon, Branden-Jacobs deconstructed a 19th century…

Personality counts for a lot in art, said Rachel Campbell-Johnston in The Times. Although we may not “linger on the signature” when looking at a painting, it tends to be the individual fame of great artists that draws us into museums and galleries. And without proof of authorship, even fine works of art tend to get overlooked, if not ignored. But does “a label alone” really have the power to “transform a work’s value and meaning”? This is the question posed by a new exhibition in Cambridge, Artist: Unknown, Art and Artefacts from the University of Cambridge Museums and Collections, which brings together around 30 works of art and artefacts that share two key attributes: first, that we do not know who created them; and second, that they “nonetheless bear…

Best books… Adam Nicolson The author chooses his favourite books. He will be appearing at the Corfu Literary Festival (corfuliteraryfestival.com) on 23 September. His latest book, The Making of Poetry (William Collins £25), is out now Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer by Richard Holmes, 1985 (HarperCollins £9.99). Richard Holmes’s essays gave the world a new way of seeing the past, following his heroes on the paths they took, subsuming his life in the realities of theirs. Bursting with a sense of possibility, opening sunlit avenues into other lives. Under Storm’s Wing by Helen Thomas, 1988 (Carcanet £20). The widow of the poet Edward Thomas, soon after his death in 1917 at the Battle of Arras, wrote two memoirs of their life together; intense, poignant, un-selfpitying, alive in the tenderness…

New cars: what the critics say Auto Express Although it has sporting pretensions, the BMW Z4 has always been more of a “boulevard cruiser”. But this model has taken a dynamic step up, thanks to the replacement of its fiddly metal folding roof with a canvas lid that opens in ten seconds, and the powerful three-litre, six cylinder engine on offer. The cheaper two-litre turbo petrol engines will, however, make more sense for most buyers. The Daily Telegraph The interior is “beautifully assembled”, with glossy, high-quality plastics and BMW’s infotainment software, which is among the best in terms of both usability and design. The car is big compared with an Audi TT or a Mazda MX-5, and more comfortable. Boot space has grown by 50% to 281 litres, and “spacious,…

London city break Three nights (room only) at the conveniently situated Thistle Kensington Gardens Hotel, next to Hyde Park, cost from £272pp (two sharing). 020-3564 4855, expedia.co.uk. Arrive 27 September. French medieval village Stay at the luxurious Le Mas Candille in the delightful village of Mougins, near Cannes, for 2 nights from £202pp (room only), excluding flights. 0800-0482 314, slh.com. Arrive 6 October. Seven nights in Hurghada Have a memorable stay at the adult-only Caves Beach Resort on an all-inclusive basis, from £946pp (two sharing), including Birmingham flights. 020-3598 4710, superescapes.co.uk. Depart 28 October. 4-star Barbados getaway Spend 7 nights at the Ocean Two Resort & Residences, with the beach minutes away, from £1,472pp b&b, including Glasgow flights. 020-8974 7200, travelrepublic.co.uk. Depart 24 October.…

The pound fell after the PM announced he would suspend Parliament shortly after MPs return from summer recess, hampering attempts to block a no-deal Brexit. Sterling slid nearly 0.6% to $1.22 on the news, which keeps a significant downside risk to the pound in play. UBS, the world’s largest wealth manager with $2.5trn under management, claimed the continuing US-China trade fracas posed a heightened threat to global markets. The bank is now “underweight” in equities for the first time since 2012. At the G7 summit in Biarritz, the US and Japan reached a trade deal “in principle” and President Trump promised “a very big trade deal” with Britain. At the central bankers’ gathering in Jackson Hole, BoE governor Mark Carney called for more global monetary policy – hinting that the…

Deutsche Bank – Germany’s troubled flagship bank whose previous clients include Donald Trump and the late Jeffrey Epstein – is in disgrace again, said Shane Hickey in The Guardian. The bank has agreed to pay a $16m fine over “allegations it hired unqualified relatives of powerful Russian and Chinese government officials to win business”. The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) claimed that the bank had “used false books to record the hirings”, which meant that junior relatives – known in China as “princelings” – avoided the usual “rigorous interview processes”. As a result, the bank was in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Some of the cases make entertaining reading, said Alex Lawson in the London Evening Standard. In one, Deutsche considered hiring the son of a Chinese…

Daniel Hall Litigation specialist Burford Capital has been in the headlines because of its war with hedge fund Muddy Waters, which maintains it is “arguably insolvent” – a claim angrily denied. Shares have already halved and now a $91m lawsuit, filed at the High Court by the Russian shipping group Novoship, has brought more unwelcome publicity, said the FT. A senior Burford executive, Daniel Hall – renowned as “a high-powered debt collector” who chases assets like yachts and luxury cars – is alleged to have exchanged “sensitive” documents obtained from Novoship (a former client) for a “sex tape” involving the US billionaire Harry Sargeant III, “whose assets he was investigating for another client”. Burford insists the case is nothing unusual. But it surely highlights “the high-stakes nature” of its business.…

A London couple are trying to recruit a social media-savvy nanny, for £39,000 per year, to help their eight-year-old daughter become a YouTube star. In an online advert, the pair say they are particularly interested in applicants who already have a “successful social media account” or a “good digital portfolio”. The unnamed parents, an IT director and a lawyer, admit they have “no idea” how to help their child realise her dream of becoming a vlogger, but say they want her to become an online star within two years. Around 82% of two-bed homes now have two or more bathrooms, and more than a third of four-beds have over four, according to Hamptons International estate agents. In 1950, just 46% of British homes had an indoor bathroom.…

The Office for National Statistics says it consistently underestimated migration to the UK from the EU from the mid-2000s to 2016, and that it overestimated migration from outside the bloc. As a result, its statistics have been reclassified as “experimental”. The ONS says that in 2015, net migration from the EU was 16% higher than it thought (equivalent to 29,000 more people), but from outside the EU it was 13% lower (25,000 fewer). Last year, the number of EU citizens arriving to work fell to 92,000, a six-year low.…

Chicago, Illinois Trump challenger: The radio host and former congressman Joe Walsh (pictured) has announced that he will challenge Donald Trump for the 2020 presidential nomination – becoming the second Republican to do so. A former Trump supporter and member of the Tea Party movement, Walsh described the president as “unfit” for office and said he “lies virtually every time he opens his mouth”. Trump’s other challenger, Bill Weld, has made little impact, but commentators think Walsh, who has promised to “get in the president’s face every day”, could be more disruptive to his re-election campaign. Washington DC Child detention protections removed: The Trump administration has announced new detention rules that would radically scale back the protections for child migrants in America. Under the existing Flores agreement, undocumented children must…

“These days, all of us are engaged in politics. Fanatically engaged. Furiously engaged. Twenty years ago, when I was in my teens, apathy was all the rage. In the newspapers, practically every political column was about the lack of interest in politics. Anxious MPs thought apathy was a bad thing. They assumed it meant people felt powerless to change anything. Certainly that was true, for some. But maybe the rest didn’t actually want to change anything – nothing big anyway. Maybe they took no interest in politics because on the whole, they thought life wasn’t too bad. A lesson for the future. Mass engagement is a sign things are going wrong. In a healthy democracy, no one would vote at all.” Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph…

Playing chicken with a free-trade deal Dominic Lawson Daily Mail A US-UK trade deal would greatly benefit Britain, says Dominic Lawson. But the reluctance of British officialdom to countenance the import of just one item – chickens – could strangle it at birth. Our officials profess horror at how US chicken farmers treat their birds, notably the way they rinse them in chlorine. Yet chlorinated chicken, as the EU Food Safety Authority accepts, is no more a health risk than the chlorine-sprayed salads in our supermarkets. The fact US chickens are kept in horribly crowded conditions is a more telling objection – or would be, were the same not true of birds reared by Britain’s hen barons. In fact, our own regulations allow up to 20 birds to be crammed…

A penguin as tall as a human Earlier this month, palaeontologists revealed evidence that New Zealand was once home to a super-sized parrot. Now it can add a giant penguin to its catalogue of extinct megafauna. Amateur fossil-hunter Leigh Love discovered the fossilised leg bones of the previously unknown species last year, while searching in a river on New Zealand’s South Island. An analysis has now confirmed that the bird weighed around 80kg and stood 1.6 metres (5ft 3in) tall – meaning it would have towered above the biggest of today’s penguins, the 4ft emperor penguin. Giant penguins aren’t entirely new to science, however: the remains of another species were discovered in Antarctica in 2000. Scientists believe they emerged following the extinction of dinosaurs and the disappearance of marine reptiles…

The Ashes: the greatest Test innings in history “There has never been anything like this,” said Paul Newman in the Daily Mail. Not Ian Botham’s 149 at Headingley in the 1981 Ashes; not even the famous win at Edgbaston in 2005. England’s victory on Sunday – the “second miracle of Headingley” – was better than either of those. After their first innings, when they scored a paltry 67 runs, their hopes of winning the third Test – and winning the Ashes – looked “dead and buried”. Defeat would have ensured that Australia retained the trophy. But Ben Stokes had other ideas. In the second innings, teammate after teammate fell, but the 28-year-old all-rounder was still there. And he was there until the very end, when he smashed a four, to…

Liss Llewellyn – Art, Faith and Modernity  at Liverpool Cathedral and The Mercers’ Company, London In general, we remember interwar modernism as a cultural movement that didn’t have much time for Christianity. Nevertheless, many British artists of the period depicted Biblical subjects, and some were possessed of a deep spiritual conviction. This two-part show brings together an excellent selection of work, showcasing the gripping (if often rather awkward) ways in which some of these figures combined their avant-garde sensibilities with religious iconography. There are some familiar names here – notably an extraordinarily violent woodblock engraving by Eric Ravilious – but much of the appeal lies in works by overlooked figures. Of particular note are Helen Blair’s tumultuous Scene from the Book of Job; and a bizarre, unattributed painting that deploys…

Emma prepares for the sale of her things from Beechwood. Unbeknownst to her, Ed asks Will if he’ll buy the unsold items so that Emma might get them back in future. Will agrees. Lillian is busy as COO of Peggy’s trust but is looking forward to the presentations. She helps Jim prepare for his place on the Brainboxes team. Clarrie tries to reassure Will about Poppy’s health but he’s adamant he’ll stay off work until she’s well. Tracy solves a customer complaint on her first day at Grey Gables. Emma visits Will, and thanks him for buying items at the sale. He confesses his constant anxiety about Poppy. After a misunderstanding, Jennifer reveals to Brian that she’s the Courier’s agony aunt. Susan and Neil reconcile after his implication that she’s…

Nandine 45 Camberwell Church Street, London SE5 ( nandineuk@gmail.com ) There’s a cheering backstory to Nandine, says Jay Rayner in The Observer. Pary Baban, the matriarch of the family behind it, fled her home in Iraqi Kurdistan in the 1980s when it was attacked by Saddam Hussein’s forces, and picked up recipes as she travelled from village to village. Settling in London, she and her husband started running newsagents in the 1990s. More recently, they opened a sandwich shop, and now they have their own small restaurant, which is “knocking out huge plates of big-flavoured Kurdish food at the sort of prices that restore your faith not just in eating out, but quite possibly in humanity in general”. On a Sunday lunchtime we devoured an “extremely diverting”…

Writer and star of the counterculture classic Easy Rider Peter Fonda 1940-2019 Peter Fonda, who has died aged 79, did not have as much success as either his father, Henry Fonda, nor his sister, Jane. He won a place in popular culture, nonetheless, thanks to one film – the counterculture classic Easy Rider (1969). He had the idea for the film, about two hippie bikers discovering the “real America” on a road trip to Louisiana, and recruited Dennis Hopper to direct it. “I figure you direct it, I produce it, we’ll both write it and both star in it, save some money,” Fonda said. With a powerful rock soundtrack, and a career-making turn from the then unknown Jack Nicholson, the film was made for less than $400,000 and…

“She has been censored in China for stirring up insubordination and chastised in the UK for sexism and promoting unhealthy food.” But Peppa Pig has taken the City by storm – and now she’s “gone to market”, said Michael O’Dwyer in The Daily Telegraph. Hasbro, the US toy giant, has tabled a £3.3bn bid for the porcine cartoon character’s owner, Entertainment One, demonstrating that “child’s play” is “a serious business” for investors. On news of the deal, shares in the London-listed film and TV company jumped by more than a quarter amid speculation of a rival offer. Even without one, Hasbro’s swoop would still rank “among the ten biggest global media deals of the year”. Talk about “bringing home the bacon” for eOne, said Lex in the Financial Times. Still,…