Innholdsfortegnelse for V. 1275 i The Week

“The trickle is starting,” said Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. Spain, Austria and Italy took their first hesitant steps this week in “the great return to work”, reopening some non-essential businesses and allowing some children to go back to school (see page 18). But there’s no end in sight for Britain’s lockdown. Following a meeting with its health experts, the Government was expected to announce on Thursday that social-distancing measures would remain in place for several more weeks. Ministers conceded as much beforehand. The Chief Scientific Adviser, Patrick Vallance, had earlier pointed out that the number of Covid-19 sufferers in intensive care units hadn’t quite peaked, and that daily deaths would continue rising for 14 days after the peak was reached. “For what it’s worth,” said Robert Peston in The…

In any “future inquiry” into why Britain was not better prepared for the coronavirus, the issue of personal protective equipment (PPE) will loom large, said The Times. Before the virus hit, shortages of PPE for NHS staff – gowns, gloves, masks, goggles and visors – during a pandemic had been highlighted as a potential major issue in government planning sessions. Yet clearly these were not heeded: shortages across the country have been so severe, medics have resorted to making gowns out of bin bags. This week, supplies were “critically low”, according to NHS Providers, which represents hospitals; the Royal College of Nursing advised members to stop work, rather than risk their health. That would be a last resort, but the advice is right: “the country can never defeat the virus…

Medics in Gateshead, who received their first delivery of gowns and scrubs made by the upmarket clothing company Barbour, which is based in nearby South Shields. “Much excitement at receipt of our first batch of ‘by royal appointment’ gowns,” tweeted a spokesman for the Queen Elizabeth hospital. Beatles memorabilia, after Paul McCartney’s handwritten lyrics to Hey Jude, scribbled down before a recording session in 1968, sold for $910,000 at auction, nine times the estimate. Other items in the sale in New York included an ashtray used by Ringo Starr at Abbey Road studio which sold for $32,000. Cyclists and pedestrians, with reports that councils in cities including London, Brighton and Manchester are drawing up plans to close off many streets to cars during the lockdown. Bob Dylan, who had his…

Tayside, Scotland New crop workers: Students and restaurant workers laid off as a result of the lockdown are among several thousand people who have responded to an appeal by farmers in Tayside and Fife for help harvesting this year’s fruit crop. Normally, farmers rely on seasonal workers from Bulgaria and Romania, but with travel restrictions in place, they faced seeing the fruit rot in the field – prompting the charity Concordia to launch an urgent “Feed the Nation” appeal last month. “We’ve had a big response,” farmer James Porter, who helps run the farming group Angus Growers, told The Guardian. “It’s very encouraging and it gives me a bit of hope we might still be harvesting our crops.” However, he warned that fruit picking is difficult and demanding work, and…

Jacqueline Wilson’s closet In Jacqueline Wilson’s 111th novel, Love Frankie, the title character, a bookish tomboy, falls for the “prettiest, coolest girl in class”. In a way, it’s the former children’s laureate’s most personal book yet, says Lisa Allardice in The Guardian. Wilson’s marriage to a policeman broke up when she was in her 40s and, for the past 18 years, she’s been living “very happily” with her female partner, Trish. Even so, she is loath to view it as a “coming-out novel”. “I’ve never really been in any kind of closet,” she says, laughing. “It would be such old news for anybody that has ever known anything much about me. Even the vaguest acquaintance knows perfectly well that we are a couple.” Nor does she see herself becoming a…

Disease-causing bacteria such as tuberculosis, cholera, and anthrax were first discovered and isolated in the late 19th century. However, a whole group of diseases – smallpox, measles, flu – remained unexplained. At first, their causative agents were thought to be very small bacteria, as they passed through the filters that trapped bacteria (in general, they are 50to 100 times smaller). In 1898, Martinus Beijerinck noticed that the invisible agent that caused the tobacco mosaic disease could be grown in living plants. He thought it must be some kind of soluble living germ and dubbed it a virus, from the Latin meaning a poison, venom or slimy fluid. By the 1920s it was clear that a whole class of tiny parasitic microbes called viruses existed. In 1933, it was established that…

FRANCE Africans should not be treated as guinea pigs Slate.fr  (Paris) Some French doctors believe that Africans should be used as guinea pigs in the search for a Covid-19 vaccine, says Mame-Fatou Niang. In a recent TV discussion, Jean-Paul Mira, a senior intensive care doctor in Paris, said tests into whether the BCG tuberculosis vaccine could be used to treat Covid-19 patients should be conducted in Africa – “where there are no masks, no treatments, no intensive care units” to cloud findings. Camille Locht, research director for the National Institute of Health and Medical Research, concurred heartily. The exchange sparked a ferocious backlash; World Health Organisation chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus weighed in, saying he was “appalled”. But this sort of talk isn’t new: France has always seen its colonies as…

People aren’t sleeping well in lockdown, leading to a spike in back pain, a survey has found. Almost two-thirds of respondents to the Institute for Employment Studies (IES) survey said that anxiety was keeping them awake at night, while half reported new neck, shoulder or back pain. The latter is thought to be a side effect of the shift to home-working: millions of people who once sat at office desks are now hunched over laptops. “I do think there are going to be questions over whether people can sustain prolonged laptop working,” the IES’s Stephen Bevan told The Guardian. And though there are hordes of joggers in the parks, the population as a whole seems to be living rather less healthily: 60% of respondents said they’re getting less exercise than…

“Marriage is the alliance of two people, one who never remembers birthdays and the other who never forgets them.” Ogden Nash, quoted in Forbes “Madness is something rare in individuals – but in groups, parties, peoples and ages, it is the rule.” Friedrich Nietzsche, quoted in The Daily Telegraph “Worry is like a rocking chair: it gives you something to do but never gets you anywhere.” Humourist Erma Bombeck, quoted on CNN “Science advances one funeral at a time.” Max Planck, quoted in The Guardian “I guarantee you, you will find no reasonable man on top of big mountains.” Singer David Lee Roth, quoted in Rolling Stone “Take actions such that you would be glad to receive the news that you had taken them.” Eliezer Yudkowsky, quoted on The Browser…

“Of course, good parents would have already compiled a reading list ready for the day when they are holed up for an unspecified number of weeks with their beloved offspring in the face of a global pandemic,” said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. But the rest of us may “need to play a little catch-up”. A lot of the recommendations doing the rounds tend to be books that either “lean in to the current situation” or, conversely, remove readers from it: either “resonant” or “escapist”. In the former category, older children have “plenty of dystopian fiction to devour”, including Meg Rosoff’s How I live Now, Polly Ho-Yen’s Boy in the Tower and Gillian Cross’s After Tomorrow. For younger readers, there are many books about anxiety and how to deal with…

Laura Marling: Song for Our Daughter Chrysalis/ Partisan £10 Some stars have delayed the release of new albums due to the ongoing pandemic, said Rachel McGrath in the London Evening Standard – but Laura Marling has boldly pulled hers forward from August. “And boy, do we owe her a thank-you for it.” Song for Our Daughter is “superb” – a “calm, reassuring” collection of exquisitely wrought folk-pop that is “undoubtedly” among her best. Lyrically, the emphasis is on “folk storytelling” rather than on “confessional” material; musically, the feel is sumptuously beautiful. “What a marvel this album is,” agreed Roisin O’Connor on The Independent. More subtle than Marling’s previous work, the songs here “are as fragmented and beautiful as stained glass”. Blow By Blow is an “exquisite” poetic lament for a…

This “mesmerising” BBC documentary was shot over five years, and was conceived as a tale of an oligarch standing up to Putin. But it evolved into a study of a failing marriage – “a Jeremy Kyle Show for the one per cent”, said Carol Midgley in The Times. The billionaire is Sergei Pugachev, Putin’s former BFF, now being chased by him for $1bn, and the countess – the real protagonist – is Alexandra Tolstoy, an English beauty who met him in 2005 after her previous marriage (to a penniless Cossack horseman) fell apart. Early on, she “vulgarly” shows off her Chanel handbag collection and $40m Caribbean villa, but it’s hard not to like her. Especially when things go dark. “Then darker still.” The couple had put down roots in Chelsea,…

Bored by self-isolation? An “art-world power couple” were too, and they responded by creating a miniature museum of masterpieces for their pet gerbils, says Sarah Cascone on Artnet. Marooned in London, artist Marianna Benetti and curator Filippo Lorenzin used a mix of cardboard, paper and wood – all “gerbil friendly” materials, apparently – for Pandoro and Tiramisù’s exhibition. The pair created a gallery of tiny paintings including rodent-specific interpretations of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, Munch’s The Scream and Leonardo’s Mona Lisa for their pets to admire. As if that wasn’t enough, Benetti and Lorenzin fitted out their micro viewing room with miniature wall texts and even a stool for a diminutive security guard. If video evidence is anything to go by, the gerbils were “thrilled” by their museum-going…

Alistair confirms that some of Home Farm’s sheep have a disease – Josh did well to raise the alarm; Adam agrees. Overly concerned, Robert makes another misstep, suggesting that Lee intervene in Lynda’s physio treatment, to her annoyance. The rewilders find a way to agree on the barn development; now they need to convince Justin. Out on a walk, Emma tells Ed the explosion has given her perspective – she still loves him and wants their life back. Ed says it’s not enough and he can’t put himself or the kids through another break-up. Roy visits Blake with Lynda’s message, but a panicky Blake tells him to leave. Hearing about it later, Gavin alerts Philip. At Keira’s birthday party, Emma and Ed try to avoid each other. It’s Robert’s birthday…

There are echoes of the Greek dish moussaka in this hearty vegetarian traybake, say Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley. It works equally well as a main course or as a side dish, and it’s also lovely at room temperature. Serves four as a main or six as a side 5 medium aubergines 120ml olive oil 1 onion, finely chopped 6 garlic cloves, crushed 1 tsp chilli flakes 1 tsp ground cumin ½ tsp ground cinnamon 1½ tsp tomato purée 2 green peppers, deseeded and cut into 3cm chunks 1 x 400g tin of chickpeas, drained and rinsed 1 x 400g tin of chopped tomatoes 1½ tsp caster sugar 15g coriander, roughly chopped, plus 5g extra to serve 4 plum tomatoes, trimmed and sliced into 1.5cm-thick rounds salt and black pepper…

The diminutive detective who brought down the Krays Leonard “Nipper” Read 1925-2020 Leonard “Nipper” Read, who has died aged 95, was behind two of the most sensational criminal inquiries of the 1960s. He was on the team that caught the Great Train Robbers in 1963, and in 1968, he brought down the Kray twins. And yet “Nipper of the Yard”, arguably Britain’s most famous police detective, almost didn’t make it onto the force at all. At just five foot seven inches, he was rejected by Nottingham police, which insisted on recruits being six foot, and he only got into the Met by claiming he was still growing, and promising to do stretching exercises. Methodical, modest and unclubbable, he wasn’t like most coppers; he’d also enjoyed acting at school – all…

Imagination Technologies: China crisis A Blair government aide once infamously described 9/11 as “a good day to bury bad news”, said Oliver Shah in The Sunday Times. Were Chinese financiers “thinking on similar lines” when they mounted a coup at UK chip designer Imagination last week? There are certainly concerns in Parliament, where lawmakers worry that Covid-19 is “diverting attention from controversial technology transfers”, said Simon Jack on BBC Business. Imagination is owned by Canyon Bridge, a Cayman Islands-based private equity firm whose biggest investor is China Reform Holdings – a giant fund controlled by Beijing. China Reform tried to seize control by appointing four of its own directors, though the coup was “aborted”. But MPs this week summoned the Hertfordshire-based firm for more questioning amid “renewed concerns” its…

Amazon’s squeeze on small business Tom Knowles The Times In what will come as a relief for many small companies, Amazon has said it will allow “third-party sellers” to resume shipping “non-essential items”. Not before time, says Tom Knowles. The restriction, put in place as the pandemic hit, risked devastating the livelihoods of the army of small traders who use a logistics feature called Fulfilment by Amazon – which allows them to access Amazon’s vast network of warehouses to ship their customers’ orders for a fee. Use of the service was pretty much universal: all but 6% of Amazon’s roughly 2.1 million independent sellers relied upon it. But when the online giant was “overwhelmed” by the surge in orders for “basic goods”, it abruptly cut them out. The policy had…

● Historic oil deal It was hailed as “the largest cut in oil production ever agreed”, marking the end of a damaging price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia. But will last weekend’s “global pact to stem the biggest rout in oil prices for almost two decades” really have a bearing on the price, asked Russell Lynch in The Daily Telegraph. The truce will see the Opec coalition and its allies cut production by ten million barrels of oil a day until July (“equivalent to a tenth of global output”), and then eight million barrels a day until the year-end. ● Staying power? The oil price had already recovered slightly from the mid-March market shock that left Brent Crude “reeling at a 17-year low below $25/barrel”. But prices remain more…

The week’s best shares B&M European Value Retail The Sunday Telegraph The discount chain, selling everything from groceries to pet supplies from its 620 UK stores, enjoys essential status. Well run, with the momentum to tackle the coming recession. Buy. 300.1p. DS Smith The Times Despite halting its dividend, the paper and packaging group is locked into the structural growth of fast-moving consumer goods and online deliveries with supermarkets and e-commerce customers. And shares are cheap. Buy. 292p. FW Thorpe The Mail on Sunday This “deeply conservative”, part-family owned LED lighting specialist sells its cost and energy-cutting products to hospitals, warehouses and offices. A strong reputation and healthy cash position. Buy. 287p. GlaxoSmithKline The Times A world leader in respiratory and HIV treatments, Glaxo has a healthy medicines pipeline, including…

The chief executive of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, has donated $1bn – more than a quarter of his $3.8bn total wealth – to fund global Covid-19 relief. Announcing the move on Twitter, the 43-year-old said: “Life is too short, so let’s do everything we can today to help people now.” Dorsey says he will transfer 19.8 million of his shares in Square, the payments company he co-founded, to a charitable fund called Start Small, which will then distribute the money. A 99-year-old war veteran who aimed to raise £1,000 for the NHS by walking 100 laps of his garden before his 100th birthday, on 30 April, has raised more than £8m in a week. Tom Moore, known as Captain Tom, is walking around his garden in Bedfordshire in ten-lap chunks, using…

“Remember when the World Health Organisation made Robert Mugabe its goodwill ambassador,” asked Christopher Snowdon in The Daily Telegraph. “We all make mistakes”, but the WHO’s decision to honour that “butcher”, in 2017, suggests that it’s either “fantastically corrupt”, or “run by people who have lost their minds”. Neither is a comforting thought to have about the organisation “charged with protecting the health of everybody on the planet”. This week, Donald Trump stated that he was cutting US funding to the WHO, pending a review: he has accused it of “severely mismanaging and covering up” the spread of coronavirus in China, and of being too “China-centric”. Clearly, he wishes to deflect blame over the virus. But on this point, he is dead right. In mid-January, six weeks after the virus…

There is growing evidence that seriously ill people may not be seeking the medical treatment they need, because they want to avoid being a burden on the NHS, or because they think that if they visit a GP or hospital, they will be infected with Covid-19. For instance, GP referrals of suspected cancer patients have fallen by up to 70% in the past month; NHS trusts across the country have reported sharp declines in the number of people with suspected heart attacks attending A&E; and in the week ending 3 April, England and Wales logged the highest number of deaths since records began in 2005, at 16,387 – 6,000 more than the average. Only half of the extra deaths were attributed to Covid-19.…

Paris Lockdown goes on: President Macron has announced a four-week extension to France’s strict lockdown. In a televised address on Monday, in which he admitted his government had been insufficiently prepared for the challenge posed by the virus, Macron said schools and some non-essential shops would gradually reopen from 11 May, but that restaurants and cinemas might not open until July. The pandemic’s trajectory in France has been similar to that of the UK, though the death toll began to rise sooner there, and it entered lockdown a week earlier, on 17 March. As of Wednesday, there had been nearly 16,000 confirmed deaths, giving it a rate of 234 per million people; the UK’s rate is 182 per million. France’s rate compares favourably with Belgium’s (363 per million), but badly…

“I have developed a severe inferiority complex about my stay-at-home performance after encountering a list of terms for middle-class lockdown bingo on Twitter. I do not grow tomatoes, have drinks on Zoom or fancy Rishi Sunak. My family are not meditating, going on educational walks or doing morning exercise with Joe Wicks. Of the 13 terms on offer, all I managed were ‘tea’ and Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light. And ‘tea’ does not seem a mark of any distinction. We have participated in the ‘Clap for Carers’ but have not filmed it for our social media feeds. The bottom line is clear: we are shaming our class in the lockdown.” Robert Shrimsley in the FT Desert Island Discs returns later on in the spring…

Be careful how you treat the death statistics Sarah Knapton The Daily Telegraph Let’s not be too quick to accept “apocalyptic predictions” about the Covid-19 death toll in the UK, says Sarah Knapton. The claim that it could peak at 66,000 came from a report by the Institute for Health Metrics at the University of Washington that was branded “absurd” by UK experts, and has since been revised down to 37,494. The truth is that figures for national death rates are a poor basis on which to make predictions... or to allocate blame: there are just too many hidden variables. Britain, for example, is far more densely populated than France or Germany; and London (population nine million, compared with Berlin’s 3.7m and Paris’s 2.1m) is Europe’s only megalopolis. Societies with…

The stool-reading toilet Every time we flush the toilet, we dispose of potentially valuable medical data. Now, scientists in America have developed a “mountable lavatory system” to capitalise on this underused resource. The system, which can be fitted onto a standard cistern, performs a range of urine and stool tests, which it uses to search for markers of disease. Cameras and motion sensors capture information about stool consistency and “urodynamics” (flow rate, stream time and total volume of urine), while a “dipstick test” records white blood cell counts and protein levels. Because a lavatory may have multiple users, the system is also equipped with identification technology: a scanner on the flush handle that reads fingerprints and, lower down, a variant of facial recognition technology that verifies each user’s “analprint”. The…

With schools closed, many children’s book authors are live-streaming their work – and the results are “rather wonderful”, said Jen Barton Packer on Culture Whisper. On Facebook, Julia Donaldson has launched a weekly series, Julia Donaldson and Friends, bringing her stories to life with the help of singing, puppets and guests. Children’s laureate Cressida Cowell is reading her bestseller How to Train Your Dragon in videos released daily on her YouTube channel. Oliver Jeffers, author of favourites including Lost and Found, is streaming himself on Instagram every day at 6pm. And for those with an artistic leaning, the DrawWithRob sessions by illustrator Rob Biddulph (on robbiddulph.com) “are a must for any child who’s ever wanted to draw a dinosaur or a sausage dog”. Audiobooks are another excellent option during lockdown,…

Subtitled television demands extra concentration, but offers a great opportunity for vicarious travel that has perhaps never been more welcome than now. Here are a few of the best recent drama and comedy series from Europe and Asia. A French Village This saga follows the inhabitants of a village in eastern France through the course of the Second World War, devoting one season to each year. Avoiding the clichés of heroic Resistance fighters and evil collaborators, it mixes scrupulous attention to historical detail with suspenseful drama. On Hulu and Amazon. Midnight Diner Each 24-minute episode of this Japanese show tells the story of a different customer in a late-night backstreet Tokyo diner. The characters are diverse – from boisterous Society ladies to transvestites and mobsters – and the drama is…

The writer chooses five books about plagues. His 2009 novel, Let the Great World Spin, won the National Book Award in the US, and his latest, Apeirogon (Bloomsbury £18.99), is out now A Prayer for the Dying by Stewart O’Nan, 1999 (Penguin £11.99). The Persian poet Rumi wrote that the wound is the place where the light enters you. So while it might seem off-putting to read about plagues during this terrible pandemic, perhaps literature can be the light that enters the wound and illuminates all around us. My first choice is a masterpiece set in Wisconsin just after the American Civil War, as an epidemic hits the town. It evokes a dark world, but is also about the redemptive beauty of storytelling. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, 1855…

Tips... gardening projects to do with children Gardning is a great way to keep children busy outside – and there are plenty of ways to get them involved, said Laetitia Maklouf in The Times. If they want to do some planting, colourful succulents like sempervivums (houseleeks) are hardy plants that will survive inexpert handling. Or set them the challenge of making a display pot using moss, which you can have fun hunting down on the roof of a shed or between paving stones. Painting pots themselves can also be an amusing diversion; if you paint new terracotta pots with yoghurt or buttermilk, it will give them an aged look relatively quickly. If your garden is big enough, try allocating children an “adult-free space” to make them feel invested in it,…

Honor Blackman 1925-2020 Honor Blackman, who has died aged 94, may be best remembered as one of the most famous of the so-called Bond Girls: in Goldfinger, she played the leather-clad bisexual aviator Pussy Galore. But before that, she had made her name in The Avengers, as Dr Cathy Gale, a quick-witted anthropologist fighting crime with the debonair secret agent Steed (Patrick Macnee). Blackman joined the cast of the TV spy caper in 1962, as Steed’s first female partner, and proceeded to hurl the idea of “the submissive 1950s domestic goddess out of the kitchen window”, said The Daily Telegraph. Bored by scripts in which Cathy was always being directed to pull a gun out of her handbag, she mastered judo to brown-belt level, and turned her character into a…

The IMF warned that an estimated $9trn of global output will be lost this year and next – equal to the combined economies of Germany and Japan – making “the Great Lockdown” the worst recession since the Great Depression and “far worse than the global financial crisis”. Overall, the fund’s economists expect global GDP to fall by 3% in 2020, the biggest drop in almost a century. The World Bank highlighted particular concerns about South Asia: noting that the region could become the virus’s next “hotspot”. The IMF warning dampened stock markets, which had continued their march upwards. European and US markets are now trading more than 20% above their March lows. Despite a show of international solidarity to shore up the oil price with a “record” cut in production,…

Brother Robert Wotypka A holy row is brewing at Boeing, says Claire Bushey in the FT. Just before Easter, a group of “friars and nuns” filed a resolution with US regulators to force the troubled US aircraft-maker to become more transparent about its “lobbying practices”, in the wake of two crashes that killed a total of 346 people in 2018 and 2019. Now, they’re hoping to attract support from other big investors. The push by the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility – “a shifting coalition of religious orders” controlling $400bn in assets – is being led by a Wisconsin friar, Robert Wotypka, whose Detroit-based Capuchin order has owned Boeing stock for more than two decades. Wotypka has been gunning for more openness at Boeing for years and hopes the time…

City fund managers have been taking advantage of lockdown to ponder what the “new normal” will look like once it is over, says Ian King in The Times. Some implications are clear already: Dividends The British “super-cycle” in dividend payments and share buybacks is over. During 2019, UK companies paid a record £110.5bn in “divis” to shareholders – “up 11% on 2018 and a record for the third consecutive year”. Lazard Asset Management’s Alan Custis reckons many companies will take advantage of the current hiatus to make temporary cuts permanent, making those “maintaining payouts” – tobacco companies and oil companies, for instance – “more highly sought-after”. Supply chains Seema Shah of Principal Global Investors suggests the crisis has highlighted flaws in global business models. Companies could “move away from ‘just…

“This time last week, along with the rest of Fleet Street, I was writing Boris Johnson’s obituary”, said Trevor Kavanagh in The Sun. “I’ve never been so pleased to see my copy spiked.” During a week in London’s St Thomas’ hospital – including a three-day stint in intensive care – the Prime Minister almost “paid the ultimate price for Covid-19”. Now, he’s recovering with his pregnant fiancée, Carrie Symonds, at his country residence of Chequers, having left hospital on Easter Sunday. In a video message posted after he was discharged, Johnson said “things could have gone either way” for him and praised the NHS staff who “saved my life, no question”. The PM’s illness was all the more shocking because he’s usually “such a force of nature”, said Bagehot in…

Although the cost of ingredients has fallen considerably more than that of ready-to-eat meals in recent years, Britons still aren’t cooking for themselves, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has found. In 1980, almost two-thirds of the average UK household’s food budget was spent on raw ingredients, but by 2000, less than a third was, broadly similar to today. Over the same period, spending on prepared food rose from 26% to 44%, while spending on eating out tripled from 4.7% to 15%. Google searches for the word “prayer” have skyrocketed during the Covid-19 pandemic. Last month, they doubled with every 80,000 new registered cases of the virus globally, according to a University of Copenhagen study.…

People aged 18 to 29 are reporting the highest levels of loneliness during the lock-down. They rate their levels at six out of ten, on average, while for the rest of the population, it is 4.5. Over-60s have been exercising the most in lockdown: 43% of them are spending more than 30 minutes exercising a day, compared with up to 35% in other age groups. UCL/The Times 74% of people in the UK prioritise limiting the spread of Covid-19 over saving the economy, compared with 61% in the US and 54% in Germany and Sweden. Kekst CNC/The Times 89% of Britons say advice on social-distancing has been clear. 68% approve of the Government’s handling of the crisis. ORB/The Daily Telegraph…

Washington DC Trump meltdown: Donald Trump’s decision to withhold funding from the World Health Organisation has been interpreted by his critics as an attempt to deflect attention from his slow and ineffective response to the crisis. Last weekend, the US overtook Italy as the country with the most Covid-19 fatalities (26,000 as of Wednesday), and the president’s approval ratings have fallen sharply over the past few weeks. At a press conference on Monday that CNN described as “off the rails”, the president first screened a campaign-style montage trumpeting his handling of the pandemic. He then embarked on a long, and notably angry, diatribe (which even the normally supportive Fox news stopped broadcasting before the end), in which he insulted and abused reporters who challenged his record, and claimed – wrongly…

A woman who claimed to be in a relationship with a 92-year-old chandelier has lost a bid to have her attraction to historic light fittings recognised as a sexual orientation. Amanda Liberty, of Leeds, complained to the press regulator Ipso about an article in The Sun that mocked her love for Lumiere, an antique chandelier that she bought on eBay. Ipso accepted that the article was “offensive and upsetting” to Liberty, but ruled that her attraction to lamps was not a sexual orientation protected under the press code. A bakery in Finland has tapped into the current demand for toilet roll by creating a cake of the same shape. Made of oat batter, passion fruit mousse and white fondant, the cake was described as a “game-changer” by Helsinki-based baker Saana…

SOUTH ASIA A region of terrifying vulnerability Asia Times (Hong Kong) Of all the parts of the world threatened by Covid-19, surely the most vulnerable is South Asia, says Shafquat Rabbee. The region’s three most populous countries – India, Pakistan and Bangladesh – are home to about a quarter of the people on Earth. South Asia contains many of the world’s most densely populated cities and some of its largest slums (Orangi Town in Karachi, for instance, houses 2.5 million people), making social distancing all but impossible in many areas. Combine that with mass religious gatherings and rampant corruption and mismanagement, and the risks are all too clear. The region’s healthcare infrastructure, meanwhile, is relatively sparse. The number of hospital beds per thousand people in Italy, Iran and China are…

Bird species that are able to “innovate” – by eating different foods, or developing new techniques to obtain food – are better able to withstand habitat loss, and are thus less vulnerable to extinction, a study has found. In an effort to confirm a long-held theory, scientists at McGill University in Canada trawled through ornithological journals going back 60 years for accounts of birds displaying “behavioural plasticity” in their foraging. They came up with 3,800 examples, including peregrine falcons that lingered near trees next to train tracks, so that they could prey on birds flushed out by gusts from passing trains; and herons that had learnt to use bread or insects to lure fish into snatching distance. The researchers then compared each species’ number of innovations against their risk of…

Richard E. Grant has been entertaining fans by reprising his role as the struggling actor in Withnail and I. In clips on social media, Grant revisits lines from the film that have acquired new resonance in lockdown, such as “I feel like a pig shat in my head”. On Easter Sunday, when it emerged that Boris Johnson had watched Withnail and I as he recovered from Covid-19, Grant recalled Withnail’s assertion that “the only programme I’m likely to get on is the f***ing news”. Presenter Steph McGovern is no stranger to the perils of live TV, she told Louise Gannon in The Daily Telegraph. One outdoor interview was curtailed by “the very clear sound of a couple having sex in an upstairs room with the window wide open” (the clip…

To The Times The decision by the Right Rev Stephen Cottrell, Bishop of Chelmsford, to ban clergy from the bedsides of the sick and dying could not be a worse call. In short, the bishop is instructing Church of England clergy who have volunteered their services as hospital chaplains during the crisis to “pass by on the other side”. I would imagine NHS staff would welcome the support of volunteer chaplains, providing that they have sufficient PPE gear for them. Is a patient’s spiritual state of mind so unimportant next to their physical condition? The directive from the Archbishops of Canterbury and York to ban clergy from entering their churches, even on their own, to pray and stream services over Easter is bad enough. But to try to prevent clergy…

There has never been a better time to start preserving your vegetables, said Xanthe Clay in The Daily Telegraph. With root veg in particular widely available during the lockdown, and a host of spring veg coming into season, preserving is a “longterm investment into future dinners”. There are a range of methods, such as pickling, salting, canning and fermenting. A good one for novices, though, is oven drying, which is ideal for courgettes and other thin-skinned summer squash, such as the saucer-shaped patty pan squash. Start by slicing the vegetables thinly using a vegetable peeler or mandolin (or a sharp knife will do), making sure to keep an even thickness. Lay the slices on metal baking sheets lined with baking parchment, and bake at the oven’s lowest temperature – ideally…

Jewellery making kit Using a process called “lost wax casting”, this set lets you create your own bespoke silver or gold jewellery. You carve a prototype out of wax, and then post it to the workshop where they will cast your design in silver (£29 tools and wax, plus £60 for sterling silver; notonthehighstreet.com). Pom pom stripe crochet blanket kit Using an easy-to-follow pattern, you can create this cosy blanket with colourful pom poms. Sizes range from 80cm x 70cm to 120cm x 170cm, and the set comes with lots of soft British lambswool (from £65; notonthehighstreet.com). The Ultimate Cheese Making Kit You can make ten different cheeses, including mozzarella, ricotta, feta, halloumi, paneer and goat’s cheese with this impressive kit. It contains the ingredients necessary to make 40 batches,…

The Marquess of Bath 1932-2020 The 7th Marquess of Bath, who has died aged 87, was the chatelain of the Longleat estate in Wiltshire, said The Times, and one of England’s most prominent eccentrics. A believer in polygamy known for his multiple girlfriends (or “wifelets”), he covered the walls of his 16th century home with explicit murals he called “therapies”, and founded the secessionist Wessex Regionalist Party. With his straggly hair and “crushed velvet trousers” , he looked like an “off duty wizard”. Yet behind this was a “serious man”, who cared about his heritage while resisting its confines. With an “almost obsessive need to explain himself to the world”, he planned a 19-volume biography, but only four volumes were issued, perhaps because his publishers baulked when he revealed that…

When John Anderson Hire was awarded a Royal Warrant in 2018, it must have been a fragrant moment, said Oliver Gill in The Daily Telegraph. Alas, all such glories fade. “The Queen’s portable lavatory provider has filed for bankruptcy” – felled by the collapse of “high society’s sporting and social calendar”. Royal Ascot has announced that it will go ahead, “but behind closed doors”. Other events such as Wimbledon, Henley and The Open have been shuttered for the first time since WWII – a disaster for mobile WC providers. John Anderson had a hedge: it also supplied the construction trade through its Superloo division. That isn’t looking too flush, either.…