Innholdsfortegnelse for V. 1283 i The Week

What happened The BLM protests Thousands of people across Britain took part this week in Black Lives Matter protests, sparked by the police killing of George Floyd in America (see page 6). Most were peaceful, but there were violent clashes over the weekend in London, where some demonstrators hurled fireworks and bottles at the police in Whitehall and daubed graffiti on a statue of Winston Churchill while chanting, “No justice, no peace”. At least 49 officers were injured, some seriously. In Bristol, protesters pulled down a statue of the 17th century slave trader Edward Colston and tipped it into the harbour. In Oxford, thousands gathered outside Oriel College to demand the removal of a statue of the imperialist Cecil Rhodes. A statue of the slave-owner Robert Milligan in London’s Docklands…

Makers of the life-simulation game Sims have bowed to popular demand, and introduced an Eco Expansion pack, to allow players to make sustainable choices as they design their homes and neighbourhoods. Players who have invested in the pack can choose how they want to generate their power, and install machines to make rugs out of recycled textiles. They can also opt for septum piercings and partially shaved heads, and to drink kombucha. In a new series of the Looney Tunes cartoons, Elmer Fudd will no longer go hunting for “wabbits” with a shotgun. However, he will be able to chase Bugs Bunny with a scythe, Warner Bros said – and sticks of dynamite, anvils on the head and booby traps will also feature.…

The BBC has appointed Tim Davie as its new Director-General, to take over from Tony Hall on 1 September. Davie is currently the CEO of BBC Studios, the commercial subsidiary that makes programmes and sells them abroad, and has held responsibility for monetising brands including Top Gear and Dr Who. A former official in his local Conservative Party, Davie, 53, was acting Director-General during the Jimmy Savile scandal. The challenges ahead of him include negotiating with the Government over the future of the licence fee, and attracting more younger viewers to the BBC.…

Wilkieston, West Lothian A big thank you: As lockdown measures were eased in Scotland, a popular sculpture park near Edinburgh reopened to the public – but with pre-booked entry only and distancing guidelines in place. The 125-acre Jupiter Artland houses works by contemporary artists including Phyllida Barlow, Cornelia Parker and Andy Goldsworthy, but visitors are now greeted by a tribute to the NHS, made up of colourful messages painted on card. One Thousand Thank Yous was created by the owners of the estate, their children and others, but is based on a work by the US artist Allan Kaprow. Harrogate, North Yorkshire Hospital reopens: One of the temporary field hospitals set up to cope with an expected surge in the number of coronavirus patients has been repurposed to help reduce…

Kidal, Mali Jihadist leader killed: The leader of al-Qa’eda in North Africa and the Sahel was killed by French forces in northern Mali last week, following a seven-year hunt. Abdelmalek Droukdel, 50, an Algerian who had commanded al-Qa’eda in the Islamic Maghreb for 15 years, was “neutralised” at an unspecified location near the Algerian border, along with several of his “close collaborators”, according to the French defence minister, Florence Parly. She said that French troops had also captured Mohamed el Mrabat, the leader of IS in the Greater Sahara. Tripoli Haftar driven back: Libya’s UN-recognised government has won a decisive victory in its year-long battle to retain control of Tripoli. For 14 months, the capital had been under siege by the Libyan National Army (LNA) – made up of forces…

“Come the lockdown, The Archers did something completely new: its producers dispensed with dialogue and gave us the characters’ inner thoughts instead. If proof were needed that normalcy has finally imploded, the reimagining of the world’s longest-running drama from a set of gentle conversations about organic sausages and chicken feed into a series of interior monologues is it. The omnibus gave me the sensation of having taken a mild hallucinogenic, while also being bored to death. It was a bit like Beckett, were Beckett less concerned with death and more concerned with ‘compaction’ in farm machinery, where to find vanilla extract, and the cricket captaincy.” Jo Ellison in the Financial Times…

“A black man with a bag over his shoulder” Shingi Mararike The Sunday Times Like most of my black friends, says Shingi Mararike, I vividly recall the first time I had “the talk”: that tricky discussion your parents have with you about the realities of growing up in Britain when you aren’t white. Now in my mid-20s, I haven’t suffered any outright racist abuse or violence, but I’m wearily familiar with the veiled forms of prejudice that black people face here. Being stared at in the street, being followed round a shop, being mistaken for a cleaner in your workplace: it’s the casual indignities that wear you down. Earlier this year, I was detained by a security guard as I left my local Asda: he steered me back inside and…

The world’s oldest bug The fossilised remains of the oldest known land animal have been found on an island in the Inner Hebrides. An inch-long millipede-like creature, it lived 425 million years ago, making it five million years older than the previous record-holder. The researchers from the University of Texas who uncovered the fossil, on the Island of Kerrera, established its age by extracting microscopic minerals called zircons from the rock sediment surrounding it, and subjecting these to radiometric dating. They believe the ancient bug inhabited a lakeside environment, where it lived on decomposed plants. Insects evolved in the wake of plants, which began colonising the Earth’s surface around 450 million years ago. Insect fossils older than 400 million years are extremely rare, but from around 385 million years ago,…

Ten years after Madeleine McCann disappeared, her parents made a fresh appeal for information, said Gordon Rayner in The Daily Telegraph. The broadcast may have elicited “more sympathy than hope” from those watching. But last week, the police revealed that the appeal – in 2017 – had resulted in a key tip-off. For the past three years, the Met Police have been working with their German and Portuguese counterparts to track the movements of “a 43-year-old drifter”, who has become the first person to be publicly described by the Met as a suspect in the case. Sources in the media identified him as Christian Brückner, a child sex offender with a long criminal record, who is currently in jail in Germany for, among other offences, raping a 72-year-old American woman…

“It was no surprise, but it’s nevertheless shocking,” said Ben Chu in The Independent. After yet another round of unproductive Brexit talks last week, the EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, confirmed that no progress has been made in the almost five months since the UK formally left the bloc. Britain has until the end of June to request an extension of the transition period, which is due to expire in six months’ time, but the Government has repeatedly ruled this out. So despite the fact that coronavirus has triggered the worst recession in peacetime history, it seems ministers are happy to let UK firms also suffer the consequences of a messy no-deal scenario at the end of the year. It’s unbelievable. Willingly inflicting this added blow on our stricken economy…

To The Guardian Last week, my wife developed symptoms. I rang for a test the same day. I was told to go online and book a courier to deliver the test materials the next day. The courier duly arrived and departed. I then had to go back online to book another courier for pick-up. I performed the test and the courier picked it up. The system promised a result in two to three days, but we received the result six days after first contact. Such a system is absolutely useless for public health purposes, as numerous contacts could have infected others in the intervening six days. It is the result of the Government having ignored local public health services, opting instead for a complicated and centralised system, contracted out to…

Blake Mills: Mutable Set New Deal £12 As a music producer, Blake Mills has won Grammy awards and nominations for his work with artists including Alabama Shakes, Laura Marling, John Legend and Perfume Genius. This fourth solo album should be the one to turn him into a star in his own right, said Dave Simpson in The Guardian. The “tapestry of sounds” Mills creates has “fleeting, faraway echoes of John Martyn at his wooziest”; often it’s as close to avant-garde classical or chamber music as it is to rock and folk. His beautiful songs don’t shout their arrival; they emerge from a “gentle hum of guitar, saxophone, piano and pensive orchestrations” – to beguiling effect. The atmosphere is all, said Kitty Empire in The Observer. This is not so much…

Aimed at young adults, Anthony Horowitz’s Alex Rider books have sold more than 20 million copies in the past 20 years, said Ed Cumming in The Independent. In 2006, the first of the teenage spy’s adventures was made into a film, Stormbreaker, that was criticised for “rounding off” the book’s “sharper edges”. Fourteen years later, it has been adapted for the small screen –alongside the second book, Point Blanc – with Horowitz himself as executive producer. The author “knows something about TV”, having also created Foyle’s War, and “from the first scenes” this miniseries is “more satisfying than the film” – “pacy” and “polished”, if a bit “clinical”. As a James Bond for teenagers, it works brilliantly, said Euan Ferguson in The Observer. The action moves at a pace, there’s…

“Our love affair with malbec continues,” says Jane MacQuitty in The Times. Last year, UK sales were up by a quarter. It’s a big grape that works best with “big food” such as lamb or steak – and so is perfect to serve at a barbecue. Some malbecs are still made in and around Cahors in southwest France, but now three-quarters of the world’s supply comes from Argentina. At the sub-£7 level, there are plenty of easy-swigging malbecs from the Mendoza region: the 2019 Exquisite Collection Organic Argentinian Malbec (£6.99; Aldi) has “masses of sturdy blueberry and bramble fruit”. Zuccardi’s 2018 Los Olivos (tivoliwines.co.uk), with its “floral, tobacco punch”, is a good buy at £10.99. If you’re after a “French original”, Causse du Théron’s 2016 Cahors Malbec (£17.99; thefinewinecompany.co.uk) is…

The “secretary” who worked at Bletchley Ann Mitchell 1922-2020 As far as her family and friends were concerned, Ann Mitchell had spent the War working as a secretary in the Foreign Office. Then in the 1970s, a book came out about Bletchley Park. Mitchell, who has died aged 97, was appalled. “I remember shouting: ‘He can’t write about that – we’ve all signed the Official Secrets Act!’” It was only then that she revealed to her husband of 30 years that she had been at Bletchley. Recruited in 1943, she spent 20 months working in Hut 6, converting “cribs” (segments of German text) into “menus” – complex diagrams that enabled the Wrens next door to set Alan Turing’s Bombe machines for that day’s messages. And it wasn’t until the early…

● US jobs boom The bulls are officially running again – at least in America, said The Wall Street Journal. Amid growing optimism about the economic recovery, the S&P 500 this week “erased all its losses for 2020”, and the Nasdaq tech index saw its “first record close in four months”. The reason for the latest surge of investor optimism isn’t hard to divine, said James Dean in The Times: a “record-breaking jobs report” that “left economists stunned”. The general forecast had been for a loss of eight million jobs. No one had “predicted an improvement”. So when the stats showed the “largest increase ever” in US jobs in April – some 2.5 million positions were created – financial markets leapt globally. The “non-farm payrolls figure” is seen as the…

Richard Hughes Britain’s “new fiscal watchdog” – who, if all goes to plan, will succeed Robert Chote at the Office for Budget Responsibility later this year – believes in “tearing up the old fiscal framework” in favour of a “radical rethink on debt”, said Patrick Hosking in The Times. Doubtless that’s “music to the ears” of Chancellor Rishi Sunak after his “recent blowout in borrowing”. The OBR is in charge of monitoring the Government’s performance against its taxing and spending rules – a tricky proposition when the economy is heading for its biggest annual slump in three centuries. Richard Hughes, who is currently attached to the left-leaning Resolution Foundation, is something of an “insider”, having previously served at the Treasury. But colleagues insist he is “not afraid to speak truth…

As of Wednesday, Britain had gone a record-breaking two months during which no electricity from coal-powered plants was fed into the grid. The last time this occurred was in 1882 – just before a coal-fired station opened in London to power street lights. The coal-free run was partly enabled by a steep fall in energy demand during the lockdown; and May’s sunny weather. The 61-day streak since 9 April is more than triple the previous record of 18 days set in June 2019. The first American woman to walk in space has now become the first female explorer to reach the deepest known point on Earth – and the first person to do both. Former Nasa astronaut turned oceanographer Kathy Sullivan, 68, made the 6.8-mile journey down to Challenger Deep,…

French employees, after a court ruled that they can’t be allowed to get excessively bored. The case was brought by a man who’d been given so little to do in his job, he’d suffered a breakdown (see page 39). It was, he said, a “daily humiliation”. The court awarded him s50,000 in damages for his “bore-out”. Charlotte Tilbury, who was rumoured to be close to striking a deal to sell her eponymous make-up brand for $1bn, seven years after founding it. The British entrepreneur, who has 3.5 million followers on Instagram, could walk away with £500m. The Beatles, who finally have a beetle named after them. Dutch researchers found the new species, Ptomaphagus thebeatles, in a park in Amsterdam – close to the Hilton Hotel where John Lennon and Yoko…

Face coverings will become mandatory on public transport in England from 15 June. Ministers said the policy was being brought in because of the difficulties of enforcing social distancing measures on buses and trains, as more people go back to work. Although there is no such rule in relation to shops, current guidance recommends face coverings are worn in enclosed public places. In Wales, people are now being advised to wear three-layered coverings in places where social distancing is not possible. Similar advice has been in place in Scotland since April.…

Prague Ricin hoax: Two Russian diplomats have been expelled from Prague in response to the revelation, by a leading Czech newspaper back in April, of a supposed Kremlin assassination plot. Citing as its source leaks from the Russian embassy to Czech intelligence, the Respekt newspaper had alleged that a Russian assassin had arrived in Prague intent on using ricin – the highly potent toxin that he’d brought with him – to poison three Czech politicians who’d antagonised Moscow. The three were placed in police protection, and Czech TV named the would-be assassin as Andrei Konchakov, head of Russia’s cultural delegation in Prague. But the Czech government has since concluded that the ricin story was bogus; that factional infighting inside the Russian embassy in Prague had led one faction to cook…

Pendleton’s daredevilry Two years ago, Victoria Pendleton suffered a serious crisis. She had returned from a failed attempt to conquer Everest, and her marriage was falling apart. After the highs and lows of her career as a double Olympian, she wasn’t in pain: “I just felt numb.” Slumping into a depression that left her suicidal at one point, she moved back in with her mother. “It was the most frustrating experience of my life as I thought, as an Olympic champion, I should be able to beat it. I couldn’t identify one specific thing – it was just too many things at the same time, and it overflowed.” But then she started to take stock. After a lifetime of not fitting in (too sporty for the girls at school, often…

A Belgian man has been the victim of a bizarre nine-yearlong harassment campaign: for nearly a decade, he has been sent pizzas that he never ordered. “I cannot sleep any more,” said Jean Van Landeghem, who lives in Turnhout. “I start shaking every time I hear a scooter on the street.” One day in 2019, ten delivery drivers turned up on a single day, one of them trying to deliver 14 pizzas. The 65-year-old has reported the campaign to police, but still doesn’t know who’s behind it. “I cannot take it any more,” he said. An irate homeowner interrupted a major housing policy announcement by the Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, to lambast the media for standing on his lawn. “Can everyone get off the grass, please?” the man asked…

THE GULF The tragedy of a disposable workforce Al Jazeera (Doha) The photo caused outrage on social media when it emerged in March, says Rima Kalush. It showed a glum-looking South Asian employee of the Saudi oil giant Aramco walking around one of its offices rigged up as a human hand gel dispenser. The picture perfectly encapsulated the dismissive treatment of low-income migrant workers in the Gulf. These people make up a great majority of the region’s labour force, and they’re bearing the brunt of the Covid-19 health risks. The Gulf states long ago institutionalised social distancing by keeping migrant workers on the margins of society, and absolving themselves of any responsibility for their well-being. The workers are tied to employers who have almost complete control over their legal residency…

Scientists have found evidence that the disappearance of wildlife is occurring at a rapidly accelerating rate – renewing fears of a human-prompted “sixth mass extinction” that will endanger our survival. When researchers looked at 29,400 terrestrial vertebrate species for which population data is available, they found that of 543 extinctions that occurred since 1901, 173 took place between 2001 and 2014. Moreover, the extinction rate seems likely to increase further, as 515 species are classed as critically endangered, with populations of under 1,000. Examples include the Sumatran rhino (fewer than 100) and the Hainan gibbon (around 30). The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, warns that the accelerated loss of biodiversity will lead to the collapse of entire ecosystems – and so threaten human existence. “When…

When Penny Lancaster, the former model who is married to Rod Stewart, joined bobbies on the beat on the TV show Famous and Fighting Crime, she was confronted by a drug dealer who threatened to stab her. Now, she has decided to give policing a go for real and will serve as a City of London special constable. Lancaster said her brush with crime was “terrifying”, but that she belonged in the job. Stewart said: “No one’s ever been able to stop Penny if she’s decided she wants to do something.” The Irish MEP Luke “Ming” Flanagan learnt the perils of remote working, after he appeared trouserless during a live official broadcast last week (pictured). Translators stifled laughs as he spoke of the importance of getting “the maximum bang for…

“They say time heals all wounds, but we never live long enough to test that theory.” José Saramago, quoted on The Browser “A riot is the language of the unheard.” Martin Luther King Jr, quoted in The Guardian “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” Oscar Wilde, quoted in The Times “The most difficult thing is the decision to act. The rest is merely tenacity.” Amelia Earhart, quoted in Time “Restlessness and discontent are the first necessities of progress.” Thomas Edison, quoted in Forbes “Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images.” Salman Rushdie, quoted in Time “I only drink champagne on two occasions: when I…

13th With academic precision, director Ava DuVernay’s 2016 film traces a historical line from slavery in the US to the mass incarceration of African Americans now. Her focus is on racism in general, but also on the role of the 13th Amendment, which outlaws involuntary servitude except as a punishment for crime, allowing private firms to profit from inmates’ unpaid labour. On Netflix. The Up series Every seven years since 1964, Michael Apted has revisited a group of people he first filmed when they were seven years old. The US critic Roger Ebert wrote that the series “penetrates to the central mystery of life”, exploring the question of why each of us is who we are. On Amazon Prime. Pina The choreographer Pina Bausch died of cancer in 2009, just…

Lockdown treats The cheeseburgers at Noma... Diners at Noma – widely regarded as one of the world’s best restaurants – are usually offered a 20-course tasting menu costing £300. But if you can get to Copenhagen, you can now eat there for a fraction of that: having closed its doors in mid-March, Noma reopened in late May as a temporary outdoor bar. Gone is the six-month wait for a table (the bar does not take bookings) and gone are dishes such as “egg yolk sauce with ants” and “reindeer tongue with pine on skewer”. Instead, the menu features two items: a cheeseburger and a veggie burger, both costing around £20. “This is a new experiment where the door is open to everyone and it feels quite exciting,” Noma’s chef, René…

Tips of the week... easy DIY fixes ● Fix wobbly tables by cutting and sticking a few pieces of felt, preferably the colour of your furniture, underneath the right legs. Or try cutting out a bit of a cork coaster. ● If you don’t have a lubricant such as WD40, squeaky doors can be silenced with some cooking oil. If a door is coming off its hinges because a hole for a screw is too big, push some matchsticks into it. ● You can make a temporary cover for a ripped seat pad using the most attractive piece of fabric you have to hand. Cut a square, and use a staple gun, or a hammer and tacks, to fix it over the old cover. ● An unvarnished wooden table can…

AstraZeneca/Gilead: losing the plot “Nothing gets the blood running” like the prospect of a “mega-merger”, said Alex Brummer in the Daily Mail. So the possibility of a £200bn tie-up between Britain’s AstraZeneca and the US drug-maker Gilead – both big players in combating Covid-19 – has had “pharma analysts in overdrive”. Ostensibly, the deal looks dandy: Gilead has been moving markets stateside, with its promising retroviral treatments, and has a $18.9bn cash-pile “waiting to be spent”. Still, cynics were quick to suggest that a merger might also “put a Bunsen burner” under Astra boss Pascal Soriot’s “personal rewards”. If so, investors weren’t playing ball this week. Mere speculation about a dreaded “transformative” deal was enough to wipe £2.5bn off AZ shares, helping to topple it from its top spot…

● Anyone with a FTSE 100 tracker fund will have exposure to HSBC and Standard Chartered – the two banks at the centre of the row over China’s imposition of a security law in Hong Kong. Many UK fund managers also hold significant stakes. HSBC accounts for 7% of the M&G Recovery fund, while TM RWC UK Equity Income is Britain’s biggest investor in Standard Chartered, with a 6% holding. ● Some “non-bank” FTSE 100 stocks are even more reliant on Chinese revenues, especially in the commodities sector. Most notable are BHP Group – which derived 53% of revenues from China and 88% from Asia overall in 2019 – and Rio Tinto (50% and 72%). ● Some smaller UK-listed firms rely almost entirely on China. Strix Group, which manufactures kettle…

The week’s best shares Amazon The Daily Telegraph Amazon continues to reinvent itself: from selling “everything” to developing hardware and building a cloud-computing giant. Thriving under lockdown, with expansion potential. Buy. $24.60. Capital & Counties Properties The Times This real estate investment trust (Reit) owns a £2.6bn Covent Garden estate and has just acquired a 26.3% slice of Shaftesbury, which has adjacent properties. The enlargement promises cost and strategic benefits. Buy. 169p. DS Smith The Daily Telegraph The packaging firm “sits at a compelling intersection” between the booming e-commerce sector and sustainability. Europe’s largest cardboard and paper recycler, it aims for 100% recyclable packaging by 2025. Buy. 345.4p. Frontier Developments The Daily Telegraph Frontier is at the forefront of the booming online gaming industry and has promising deals with Formula…

Taking a knee: how sport is addressing racism It started four summers ago, said Ben Hoyle in The Times. At the beginning of a San Francisco 49ers’ American football game, their black quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, decided he just wasn’t going to stand while the national anthem was played. Instead, he knelt – a gesture that quickly became known as “taking a knee”. It was Kaepernick’s way of trying to “raise awareness of police brutality towards African Americans”, and overnight it became a “national talking point”. Before long, other American footballers followed suit, and taking a knee became “as identifiable as the raised fist, black power salute that Tommie Smith and John Carlos made from the Olympic podium in 1968”. It also cost Kaepernick his football career: the 49ers released him…

Controversy of the week Policing America The Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kept his knee on George Floyd’s neck, in front of a crowd, for nearly nine minutes. Why on earth did he think he could get away with it? One explanation, said Nick Allen in The Daily Telegraph, is the “culture of impunity” that exists in many US police forces. There had been 17 complaints against Chauvin over 19 years. He had shot one unarmed suspect; he’d been involved in a fatal shooting. But 16 complaints were dismissed; in the other case, he was merely reprimanded. Since 2012, there have been 4,600 complaints against the city’s 800 police officers. In only 12 cases were the subjects disciplined, thanks largely to powerful police unions. This is normal for America, where…

Little Britain, which was removed from BBC iPlayer and Netflix, because of Matt Lucas and David Walliams’s use of blackface. The BBC said “times had changed” since the sketch show was first made, in 2003. The duo’s 2010 series Come Fly With Me was also pulled. In the US, Gone with the Wind was temporarily taken off HBO Max. Critics have long complained that the 1939 film contains racist depictions of black people and glorifies slavery. McDonald’s, after a study found that its packaging accounts for half the junk-food litter in England. The Keep Britain Tidy survey of ten cities over two days also found that Coca-Cola accounts for one in five discarded non-alcoholic drinks containers. More than 75,000 items were counted, two-thirds of them cigarette butts.…

40% of UK adults believe the US is a very racist society, and a further 40% say it is fairly racist. Just 8% believe the UK is very racist, and 44% that it is fairly racist. YouGov/The Independent For the first time since March, more Britons now have an unfavourable view of Boris Johnson (43%) than a favourable one (39%). Ipsos Mori/The Independent Among European countries, Britain has seen the biggest drop in public trust in the Government’s Covid-19 response, from 72% in late March to 41% last week. In Germany, trust has fallen just two points, from 72% to 70%. In France it is down from 54% to 42%, and in Italy, it is down from 78% to 66%. In Spain, it has risen from 42% to 46%. YouGov/The…

Washington DC Leadership vacuum: Donald Trump’s former defence secretary – the retired marine corps general James Mattis – publicly questioned the president’s fitness for office last week, as nationwide protests against racism and police brutality intensified. “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people – does not even pretend to try,” said Mattis. “Instead, he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership.” Mattis – who has until now refrained from criticising his former boss – referred to the forcible removal of demonstrators from Lafayette Square, in Washington, in advance of Trump’s much publicised trip to a church; and the president’s…

This week’s edition of Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs featured financial campaigner Martin Lewis 1* Livin’ la Vida Loca by Draco Rosa and Desmond Child, performed by Ricky Martin 2 Stand and Deliver by Adam Ant and Marco Pirroni, performed by Adam and the Ants 3 Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off by George and Ira Gershwin, performed by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong 4 The Circle Game, written and performed by Joni Mitchell 5 (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, performed by The Rolling Stones 6 The Blue Danube by Johann Strauss II, performed by The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra with Sir Malcolm Sargent 7 I Fought the Lloyds (feat. Martin Lewis) by Dan Oystar, performed by Oystar 8 Can’t Take My Eyes Off You…

Many on the US Right argue that the phrase “Black lives matter” is simply too heated and accusatory to represent a serious call for reform. “A lot of people feel that it is inherently racist,” Donald Trump said during his 2016 campaign. “It’s a very divisive term, because all lives matter.” Some have even argued that it inspires violence: in 2016, a black veteran killed five police in Dallas at the end of a protest against police killings of black men. Democratic politicians have also struggled with it. Hillary Clinton stated that “all lives matter” during her presidential campaign. The hashtag #AllLivesMatter has been used by critics of the movement; a counter-movement called Blue Lives Matter was founded to highlight anti-police violence. To supporters of Black Lives Matter, anger at…

HUNGARY Why Orbán pines for the empire The Washington Post Many Hungarians still pine for the Austro-Hungarian empire, says Heather A. Conley. The Treaty of Trianon, signed after defeat in the First World War a century ago, broke up the Habsburg Kingdom of Hungary and left almost two-thirds of its citizens living in neighbouring countries such as Ukraine, Slovakia, Romania and Serbia. These days, PM Viktor Orbán is happy to exploit this national nostalgia: he has passed laws giving passports and voting rights to ethnic Hungarians living across the border, and his government funds their sports clubs, schools and churches. These groups repaid the favour, helping Orbán win sweeping majorities as he builds an increasingly authoritarian regime. But his efforts to bind Hungary closer to its “lost lands” have infuriated…

More than 24,000 cases of cancer have gone undiagnosed as a result of disruption to NHS services caused by the coronavirus pandemic, according to an analysis by Cancer Research UK (CRUK). Most of those cases – just over 20,000 – are the result of delays in referring patients with cancer symptoms. The rest were due to screening tests being delayed. The charity also estimates that as a result of hospital services being put on hold, 12,750 fewer cancer patients than normal have had surgery, 6,000 fewer have received chemotherapy and 2,800 fewer have undergone radiotherapy. “Delays to diagnosis and treatment could mean that some cancers will become inoperable,” said Prof Charles Swanton, CRUK’s chief clinician. A study published last month by University College London estimated that the pandemic would lead…

“Even by its own increasingly chaotic standards, the mess into which the Government has got itself over its new quarantine rules takes some beating,” said The Times. The new regulations – which came into force this week – require travellers to Britain to self-isolate for 14 days on arrival. This is “the wrong policy at the wrong time”. A 14-day quarantine would have “made sense” at the start of the pandemic – but instead, over the past three months, Britain, “almost alone in Europe”, continued to allow new arrivals from anywhere in the world, including virus hotspots such as China and Iran, “without so much as a temperature check”. Now, “at the very moment that outbreaks in many popular travel destinations have been brought under control”, and restrictions are being…

Mobs have got form To The Times This country has a fine historic tradition of unpopular public monuments being demolished by mobs. During the Glorious Revolution of 1688, an equestrian statue of James II in Newcastle was pulled down by rioting coal bargemen, and thrown into the Tyne. A month later the king himself was deposed. Salvaged bronze from the effigy was melted down and used to make church bells. Christopher Goulding, Newcastle-upon-Tyne A new era for Bristol? To The Guardian The days for Edward Colston’s statue have for several years been numbered. Putting aside the rights and wrongs of the manner of its removal, which the police will investigate, steps should now be taken on which everyone will surely agree. The statue should be pulled from the harbour and…

Best books… Roger Robinson The writer and educator chooses his six favourite books. His 2019 collection of poems, A Portable Paradise (Peepal Tree Press £9.99) won the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry and the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize 2020 Afropean by Johny Pitts, 2019 (Penguin £10.99). This winner of the Jhalak Prize is part travelogue, part memoir, part history. Pitts documents Black Europe in a crucial period of world politics. Extremely well written and argued, it encouraged me to assess my identity in relation to Europe. Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest by Hanif Abdurraqib, 2019 (Melville House £8.99). This book is amazing, even if you’ve never heard of the seminal hip-hop band A Tribe Called Quest. What I liked about it was…

Like many good things, peperonata – red and yellow peppers cooked down slowly with oil, garlic and onions – takes time to make, says Rukmini Iyer. Here’s my much simpler oven-cooked version, served with garlicky beans. It is perfect piled onto rounds of thickly sliced toasted bread. Roasted peppers with chilli, lemon & garlic beans Serves 4 5 vine tomatoes, quartered 1 red pepper, thinly sliced 1 yellow pepper, thinly sliced 1 orange pepper, thinly sliced 2 tbsp olive oil 2 bay leaves 1 large sprig of fresh rosemary ½-1 tsp sea salt flakes plenty of freshly ground black pepper for the beans: 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil ½ clove of garlic, finely grated ½ tsp chilli flakes ½-1 tsp sea salt flakes 1 x 400g tin of cannellini…

VonShef herringbone picnic blanket  Measuring 180cm x 147cm, this picnic blanket is bigger than most, but it rolls up easily. It’s made from a hard-wearing but comfortable fleece polyester, and has a waterproof backing (£33; vonshef.com). KitchenCraft Sweetly Does It cake carrier This simple 2-in-1 device doubles as a cake tin, for baking brownies, tarts and breads, and a carrier. Just clip the plastic lid onto the non-stick tray and use the handles to transport it to your picnic (£16; amazon.co.uk). John Lewis Meadow Filled picnic cooler backpack John Lewis has a huge range of picnic cooler bags in different volumes. This 15-litre backpack has a cooler compartment for food, and comes with plastic plates, cutlery and wine glasses for two, as well as a corkscrew and a butter knife…

Facebook is the definition of oligarchy Rana Foroohar Financial Times Oligarchs are immoral business leaders who, as Russia’s Vladimir Putin has outlined, use their proximity to power “to receive super profits”, says Rana Foroohar. Is there any better description of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg? He presides over a platform where much of America gets its news – and yet, unlike his peers, he has refused to “check and curb” President Trump’s power to promote “inflammatory” misinformation. He knows that if he did so he might lose the legal protections that shield Facebook from liability for its users’ posts – protections which Trump is now threatening to withdraw from tech companies that oppose him. The reality is that “like most large, ubiquitous and systematically important companies”, Facebook aligns itself with the powers…