Innholdsfortegnelse for 1381 i The Week

What happened Moscow warned this week that the conflict in Ukraine risked escalating into a third world war. The remarks, by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, came after US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin visited Kyiv and promised more military assistance to Ukraine. Austin said that the US wanted to see Russia “weakened” so that it wouldn’t be able to launch further such offensives. The US later hosted more than 40 countries for defence talks in Germany, where Berlin, which has faced criticism for not offering more help, joined others in pledging to supply heavy weaponry to Ukraine. Western allies, said Austin, were gearing up “for the long haul”. On Wednesday, the Russian energy giant Gazprom said that it had halted gas exports to Poland…

“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.” That was Elon Musk’s first tweet after clinching a $44bn deal to buy the social network this week, said The Times. If the acquisition goes ahead, it will add Twitter to his “vast, if eclectic, empire”, which includes the electric carmaker Tesla and the space exploration firm SpaceX. But despite Musk’s high-minded rhetoric, the deal raised grave concerns across the world. Is it right that the world’s richest man – Musk is worth around $241bn – should privately own such an influential forum? (Although a fraction the size of Facebook, Twitter is the social media site of choice for Western politicians, policymakers and journalists.)…

British adults think the Government is handling almost every key issue badly, from inflation (74% badly; 14% well) to immigration (72% badly; 16% well). An exception is defence, with 41% say it is doing well and 35% badly. The Times/YouGov Among Tory members, Rishi Sunak is now the least popular cabinet minister, with a satisfaction rating of 5.2. Until his Spring Statement, Sunak was running third in the league table. Ben Wallace now tops it, with a satisfaction rating of +85; Liz Truss is second. Conservative Home 76% of Americans are against bringing the Tyrannosaurus rex back from extinction. 10% are in favour of the idea. YouGov…

Piers Morgan’s self-belief There have been some very low points in Piers Morgan’s roller-coaster career, says Polly Vernon in The Times. A yea ago, he lost his job at Good Morning Britain, after storming off set during a row about the Duchess of Sussex. Yet more ignominious was his dismissal as editor of the Daily Mirror, in 2004, for running fake photos of British troops torturing prisoners in Iraq. But such is his self-belief that he doesn’t frame these episodes as failures. “When I left the Mirror people would say, ‘Oh, you got disgraced,’ but I didn’t think so. I think the story we published was true. I had the head of the British Army tell me a few years ago I was right to publish it, which is good…

In their eight-years of existence, the republics of DNR and LNR have evolved into “North Korea-like statelets”, says Mansur Mirovalev on Al Jazeera. Both have restored the Soviet constitutions adopted by Stalin; in Donetsk, a 13.5m statue of Lenin dominates the main square. The death penalty is prescribed for various crimes, an anomaly in modern-day Europe. Conversations, phone calls and text messages are monitored by secret police; arbitrary arrests are common, and many reports suggest interrogators have used torture to extract confessions. There is no press freedom; electoral fraud is widespread; corruption is rife. Both republics are “entirely dependent on Moscow for financial and military support”, a report by the Freedom House NGO said this year. Crossings into Ukrainian-controlled territory are tightly restricted, and schools, universities, public services and businesses…

SWEDEN Should it be legal to burn the Koran? Expressen (Stockholm) Flirting with blasphemy laws is a risky business, says Expressen. Yet that’s exactly what’s happening in Sweden, after riots over Easter that were caused by threats to burn copies of the Koran publicly. The man behind those threats was Rasmus Paludan, leader of the Danish far-right party Stram Kurs (“Hard Line”), who is seeking to expand into Sweden. In the event, he didn’t turn up to his planned rally in the city of Norrköping; but that didn’t stop unrest there and elsewhere. At least 40 people were injured, and the episode led to calls in some quarters to outlaw the burning of the Koran as a “hate crime”, just as harassing Muslims and damaging mosques are already banned. Yet,…

Most stroke victims in England have to wait more than an hour for an ambulance, new NHS figures have shown. The average waiting time for emergency ambulance calls reached 61 minutes in March – the highest on record, and well above the 18-minute goal that ambulance trusts are meant to keep to for “category two” calls, which include strokes, chest pain, sepsis and epileptic fits. Average wait times for urgent but not emergency calls, such as non-severe burns and the late stages of labour, are now three-and-a-half hours, which is also a record high. When patients finally reach A&E units, there are further delays: in March, just 72% of patients in England were seen within four hours, the lowest proportion since records began in 2010. Not one hospital in England…

Boris Johnson is now “in a strange limbo – leading a party that will neither back him nor sack him”, said Fraser Nelson in The Daily Telegraph. This became clear last week, when Keir Starmer called for a vote on whether the PM should face a Commons inquiry into claims that he misled MPs over lockdown parties at Downing Street. Dozens of Tory MPs “point blank refused” to vote against the Starmer motion – and it passed unopposed. Out of 358 Tory MPs, only about 80 have publicly backed Johnson, while nine have called for him to quit – including the influential pro-Brexit MP Steve Baker. This suggests that over three-quarters of the party are still “reserving their judgement”. Most are “appalled at Partygate and exhausted by his antics, but…

“Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.”William James in Forbes “Experience of anything gained through ordinary educational channels is invariably out of date.”R.G. Collingwood, quoted on The Browser “There are only so many opinions to go round, and almost all of them are either obvious or wrong.”Giles Coren in The Times “If you haven’t contemplated murder, you ain’t been in love.”Chris Rock, quoted in the New York Post “There is nothing like a revolution to create an interest in history.”E.H. Carr, quoted in The Socialist Worker “The road to success is dotted with many tempting parking spaces.”Will Rogers, quoted on Goodreads “To observe attentively is to remember distinctly.”Edgar Allan Poe, quoted in the Eastern Daily Press “Everybody has got to die, but I have…

To The Daily Telegraph While I have no doubt that many are interested in sinking Boris Johnson, I’d far prefer our elected representatives to put their expensive time and efforts into sorting out why it takes six months to get a tax refund, four months to renew a driving licence or get a passport, and four weeks to get a doctor’s appointment. Mike Metcalfe, Butleigh, Somerset To The Daily Telegraph I recently discovered a government department I had never heard of called the Office of the Public Guardian. This is where applications are made to set up a power of attorney. Having completed two documents (health and finance) and attached the appropriate cheques totalling £164, I posted them first class on 25 February. Since then I’ve heard nothing, and there…

by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan Paul Mellon Centre 392pp £30 The Week bookshop £23.99 (incl. p&p) Before reading this entertaining book, I would have defined a “garden eccentric” as someone with a larger-than-usual collection of gnomes, said Ann Treneman in The Times. But Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, a landscape architect, reveals it as something rather grander: not a mere dabbler, but someone with a vision that takes the “quality of surprise to the extreme”. One such is Lady Broughton, who in the mid-19th century constructed a replica of the Mer de Glace, France’s largest glacier, near Chamonix – with white marble representing the ice – in her Cheshire garden. Or there’s Joshua Brookes, a London anatomist who, in the 1780s, built a “vivarium” – a ten-foot mini-mountain made from “chunks of the Rock of…

Karen Kilimnik at Sprüth Magers The American artist Karen Kilimnik (b.1955) emerged in the 1990s with a series of paintings that drew on the era’s pop culture. Rendered in the style of an obsessive fan, her likenesses of Leonardo DiCaprio, Princess Diana and Hugh Grant have an odd quality. You’d want to describe them as “fauxnaïf” were it not unclear quite how naive Kilimnik really was; any ironic intent might be in the eye of the beholder. The works in Early Drawings, 1976-1998 share many of these qualities. Schoolgirlish and occasionally winsome, they could so easily seem trashy: yet Kilimnik has a knack for intimating that even apparently banal doodles – touristic views of the Houses of Parliament, Peter Rabbit bumbling across a rainy townscape – might have hidden significance.…

● Some wines will benefit from exposure to oxygen before drinking. This “opens the wine”, releasing aromas and softening the tannins. Just opening a bottle won’t really help, though, as the neck is too small. You need to decant it to notice a difference. ● Young wines with strong tannins benefit from double decanting – being poured into a decanter and then back into the bottle, to give them more aeration. Do this at least one hour before drinking. ● Older vintages can be far more sensitive once opened, and may lose fruit aromas more quickly. If you leave a vintage wine to breathe for too long it will turn into vinegar. ● If you don’t have a decanter, simply swirling the wine in your glass can have a similar…

Sir Harrison Birtwistle 1934-2022 Sir Harrison Birtwistle, who has died aged 87, was “the most feted British composer of his generation”, said the Financial Times. Unsentimental and “artistically fearless”, he created music that is sensuous and often exquisite, but “never pretty or picturesque”. The feeling, in his powerful and uncompromising pieces, is of an “unflinching engagement with the natural and human worlds, or the point at which the two meet”. Abrasive, dissonant and structurally complex, his work did not delight everyone, however, said The Daily Telegraph, and in the 1990s, two incidents won him a degree of public notoriety. The first was in 1994, when his 1991 opera Gawain was revived at Covent Garden. A group of anti-modernists known as the Hecklers organised a campaign against it, and as the…

What happened Emmanuel Macron won five more years as French president, defeating his rival Marine Le Pen by a bigger-than-expected margin of 58.5% to 41.5%. His victory in Sunday’s runoff made him the first sitting French president in 20 years to be re-elected, and followed a divisive campaign in which he cast his opponent as a threat to security and democracy. Le Pen, however, won the highest vote share ever for a far-right candidate in a French election – eight points more than in her duel with Macron in 2017. In a conciliatory victory speech in front of the Eiffel Tower, Macron vowed to work to unite France, and conceded that many of those who voted for him did so “not out of support for my ideas but to block…

A pilot in the US has had his licence revoked for allegedly crashing his plane on purpose, to make a YouTube video. In the clip, Trevor Jacob, 28, can be seen parachuting out of his plane as it flies over Californian wilderness; it then crashes into a hillside. He said he’d experienced engine failure, but fellow aviators spotted a few oddities – such as the fact he had put his chute on before the plane took off. Almost a quarter of free-to-use cash machines have vanished since 2018, analysis by Which? has shown. And since 2015, nearly half the UK’s bank branches have also closed. Sheffield Hallam in Yorkshire is one of seven constituencies that now has no bank branches at all. It has just 25 ATMs, seven of which…

Berlin Scholz’s U-turn: In a major reversal of policy that follows tensions within his coalition and intense pressure from allies, Germany’s Social Democrat (SPD) chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has agreed to allow refurbished German Gepard anti-aircraft tanks to be sent to Ukraine. His government had been heavily criticised for refusing to supply heavy weapons to Ukraine, even as allies such as the US, UK, Czech Republic and the Netherlands were increasing their deliveries. Scholz’s policy had also been questioned by his more hawkish foreign minister, the Greens’ Annalena Baerbock. Prior to his U-turn, Scholz had cited the risk of a nuclear war as a reason for holding back in arming Ukraine. His indecisive response to the crisis and long public silences on the issue have led the media to dub him…

“I will deny my eight-year-old son a smartphone until he has the money to get one himself. The smartphone is a gateway to compulsiveness and idiocy. I am addicted to mine, and I am 48. It’s too late for me, but not for him. The larger your fantasy life, the smaller your real one, and the worst evils flow from smartphones. I think they are demonic. There is porn, which is the opposite of love. There is Instagram, which tells him he is ugly (he isn’t). There is social media, which tells him not to change his mind (he should). Even respectable sources of information – such as Wikipedia – cannot teach you to read meditatively. Only books made of paper can do that.” Tanya Gold in The Daily Telegraph Desert…

Why our MPs are less than they should be Isabel Hardman The Guardian Ever thought about becoming an MP? Many people claim to have, says Isabel Hardman: in the latest YouGov poll, 21% said they’d considered it. Of course, very few go ahead and stand, and it’s easy to see why. The long hours and disruption to family life, the endless abuse, the potential threats to personal safety (two MPs have been murdered in the past six years): these are powerful disincentives. Then there’s the expense. The average personal cost a candidate had to bear in the 2015 election (when lost earnings, extra housing and transport expenses are taken into account) was £11,118. In tightly contested seats, the bill was higher still. Labour candidates in marginal seats “spent an average…

The rocky road from Adam Smith to Stalin Catherine Rampell The Washington Post Whatever happened to American conservatism, asks Catherine Rampell. A core Republican party belief used to be that free markets are preferable to government, that the state should intervene as little as possible. But that belief has now been cast aside, to be replaced by the authoritarian idea that the power of the state should be used to “reward friends and punish political enemies”. A classic case is the tantrum being thrown by Florida governor Ron DeSantis over Disney’s criticism of his “Don’t Say Gay” law, which bars teachers from instructing younger pupils on sexual orientation and gender identity. For payback, Florida’s senate has now passed a bill repealing the special status Disney had formerly been granted to…

Prostate cancer bacteria found Scientists have identified five types of bacteria that are linked to aggressive prostate cancer, raising hopes that it may, one day, be possible to develop an antibiotic treatment for the disease. The bacteria, which include three that were previously unknown to science, were detected by analysing urine and tissue samples taken from 600 men. The study did not look into whether these bugs cause prostate cancer; however, bacterial infection is known to play a part in the development of other cancers, so it’s certainly plausible – and work is under way to establish it. “If you knew for sure that a species of bacteria was causing prostate cancer, you could work out an antibiotic to remove it and that would prevent progression, one would hope,” said…

Boris Johnson racked up £4,000 of parking tickets when he was GQ’s motoring correspondent, the magazine’s former editor has revealed. “In Boris’s own words, they started accumulating ‘like drifting snow on a windshield’,” said Dylan Jones. On the plus side, Johnson never got done for speeding – but there may have been a reason for that. Whenever a test car was dropped off at Johnson’s house, its mileage was logged; it was then noted again on collection. ”On many, many, many occasions, the mileage was precisely the same. So I leave you to draw your own conclusions,” said Jones. In 1969, John Lennon and Yoko Ono sent Harold Wilson a Christmas card reading “War is Over”. It was signed “with love”, but the prime minister was not impressed – and…

There are elections across the UK next week, said The Guardian. Much attention has been devoted to their potential impact on Boris Johnson’s leadership, but the most profound consequences of the 5 May ballots may actually be felt in Northern Ireland. All 90 members of the Stormont Assembly will be elected by proportional representation, and there’s a good chance that Sinn Féin will emerge with the largest number of seats. The current poll average puts its support at 24%, against the Democratic Unionist Party’s 19%. This would give the party the right to nominate its deputy leader, Michelle O’Neill, as the new first minister. In practical terms, it needn’t lead to a huge change. Under the power-sharing arrangement, the two largest parties must govern together, or not at all. But…

Is that it? Have we seen the last of the Gypsy King, asked Owen Slot in The Times. On Saturday night at Wembley Stadium, Tyson Fury retained his WBC crown with a comfortable victory over Dillian Whyte – and then announced that he was done with boxing. “Enough is enough,” the 33-year-old boxer declared. “I’ve fulfilled everything I wanted to fulfil.” If Fury means what he says, he’d become the first heavyweight champion to retire with an unbeaten record since Rocky Marciano in 1956, said Rick Broadbent in The Sunday Times. But there’s every reason to suspect his slippers will be “mothballed”. Fury is someone who changes his mind “as freely as he alters his stance”, and there’s also the small matter of a possible “date with the winner of…

Football Manchester City stay one point in the lead in the Premier League after beating Watford 5-1. Second-placed Liverpool beat Everton 2-0. Tennis Carlos Alcaraz, 18, made the world’s top 10 for the first time after winning the Barcelona Open. Snooker Mark Selby, the defending champion, suffered a shock defeat in the second round of the World Snooker Championship. The four-time champion lost 13-10 to China’s Yan Bingtao. Rugby union Saracens secured their place in the Premiership play-offs with a 38-22 victory over Exeter.…

by Katherine Rundell Faber 352pp £16.99 The Week bookshop £13.99 “The central riddle of John Donne’s life has always been this,” said Kathryn Hughes in The Sunday Times: how did the man who, in his “rapscallion youth”, wrote “some of the most erotic verse in English literature” – poems such as To His Mistress Going to Bed and The Sun Rising – “end up at St Paul’s Cathedral preaching that sex was a sin”? In her “thrilling reassessment of Donne’s oddly hinged career”, Katherine Rundell argues that the transformation was less unlikely than it seems. Donne’s poetry often involved the “yoking together of two apparently contradictory positions”, and Rundell suggests that his “love of paradox” likewise lay behind his decision to enter the clergy. Rundell is a fellow of All…

Running time: 2hrs 40mins Emlyn Williams’s 1938 play The Corn is Green – about a teacher who makes it her mission to educate the children in a poor mining village in north Wales, and helps one of the students win a scholarship to Oxford – is a defiantly old-fashioned piece, said Sarah Crompton on What’s On Stage. It’s not been seen in London since 1985, making this powerful, “pitch perfect” production at the National feel “more like a resuscitation” than a revival. Director Dominic Cooke’s “inspired intervention” has been to turn the semi-autobiographical work into a memory play, with Williams “himself” appearing on stage to read the directions and character descriptions. With some of the sentiment stripped away by virtue of this simple device, the play becomes a “paean to…

Freddie admits to Elizabeth that he tweeted about inviting the Easter Bunny to boost sales for the Lower Loxley Easter event. Just as it seems it’s a no-show, the Bunny appears and saves the day. At his party in the cottage, drunk Ruairi lashes out at Ben; Alice shuts things down and puts Ruairi to bed, ignoring his insults. Oliver calls a snap meeting at Grey Gables and announces he’s sold a 60% share and is stepping down; Adil Shah, the new owner’s representative, will take over. The shocked staff are told they’ll be made redundant. Tracy worries how she’ll cope and Roy tells Oliver he’s destroying Caroline’s legacy. With staff deserting, Oliver tells Vince they’ll have to cancel Elizabeth’s surprise party, until Freddie steps in. Alice covers for Ruairi…

Makes 8 kebabs 4 tbsp balsamic vinegar 3 tbsp olive oil 1 tbsp brown sugar 3 garlic cloves, crushed 1 tsp smoked paprika 1.2kg pork leg, diced into 3-4cm cubes a bunch of spring onions, cut into 4cm lengths flaked sea salt and freshly ground black pepper For the pesto: 50g pine nuts 30g basil, leaves and stems, roughly torn 40g parmesan, grated 6 tbsp olive oil juice of ½ a lemon 1 garlic clove, crushed You will also need 8 metal skewers • Mix together the balsamic vinegar, olive oil, brown sugar, garlic and smoked paprika in a bowl. Season with salt and pepper, add the pork and toss together to coat. Cover and refrigerate for 12-24 hours. • To make the pesto, tip the pine nuts into a small frying…

Monmouth to Redbrook, River Wye A paddleboard is a great way to explore this quiet stretch of river in the lower Wye Valley. Enter near the steps downstream of Monmouth Rowing Club. Exit on the right near the footbridge in Redbrook. River Stour at Dedham, Essex Rent a wooden canoe from Dedham Bridge or launch your paddleboard from the roadside carpark and head 1.5 miles downstream to Flatford Mill, made famous by Constable. River Ure at Boroughbridge, North Yorkshire Launch from above the weir in Boroughbridge and head upstream through open countryside, around Westwick Lock and Island, to Newby Hall, whose grand gardens can be seen from the river. Medway Canoe Trail, River Medway, Kent This trail starts at Tonbridge Castle and ends at Allington Lock, near Maidstone, with various…

Ibiza’s laid-back little sister The smallest and most southerly of the Balearics, Formentera is a “bleached-out” wisp of an island fringed by some of the most spectacular, “bone-blonde” beaches in the Mediterranean, says Maya Boyd in Condé Nast Traveller. Half an hour by ferry from Ibiza, it figured on the hippie trail in the 1970s, and that “bohemian” spirit still defines it. These days, “gleaming superyachts” anchor off Playa de Ses Illetes, but the three-mile sands of Playa de Migjorn retain “old timers, locals and the lo-fi”. Once there, it’s the Kiosko 62, a bar “held together by frayed rope, nails and good luck”, that “has my heart”. The food scene is wonderful – look up Can Carlitos, A Mi Manera and Es Còdol Forodat – and there are some…

“We do not want this company to be in this temporary state longer than is absolutely necessary,” Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng told Parliament last November, when announcing the £1.7bn quasi-nationalisation of Bulb Energy. Nearly six months on – amid mounting embarrassment and expense – the need to offload Bulb is becoming pressing, said Gill Plimmer, Michael O’Dwyer and Jim Pickard in the Financial Times. Last week, co-founder Hayden Wood disclosed he is still being paid £250,000 a year to run the collapsed energy supplier. Meanwhile, around £2m has been forked out on bonuses to retain key staff. The overall bill for taxpayers is estimated to reach £2.2bn by next year, “making it the biggest state bailout since Royal Bank of Scotland in 2008”. Wood and his co-founder, Amit Gudka, each…

“A university education used to be a one-way ticket to a better-paying job,” said Will Kirkman in The Daily Telegraph. No longer. Although graduates still earn more, on average, than non-graduates (taking home £35k a year compared with £25.5k, according to Statista), both the type of degree and the grade “have a big effect on future earnings”. The best value degrees Economics students can expect to find the best-paying jobs once they graduate – earning £36,178 a year on average, according to jobs site Adzuna. Other top degrees include business (£33,407), physics (£32,335), engineering (£32,322) and geography (£32,162). The worst value At the very bottom of the pecking order are fashion degrees, where the average salary of graduates, at £23,832, is “some £1,168 less than the average non-graduate salary”. Other…

A new remit for the Bank of England? Ben Wright The Daily Telegraph The Bank of England has a lot of jobs, but “its most important” is to keep inflation at 2%. So it’s not surprising that questions are now being asked about its “competence, governance and mandate”, says Ben Wright. Last week, the economist Gerard Lyons became the latest to suggest that its remit be changed, so that instead of just inflation, policymakers target “nominal gross domestic product” – the sum of inflation and real GDP growth. This, he says, would make monetary policy “more responsive and fit for purpose”. The idea has “a venerable tradition” and will likely gain momentum as the cost-of-living crisis escalates. It will also “almost certainly result” in a huge political row. The idea’s…

John Paulson The contrarian New Yorker will be remembered as one of “the monsters of the 2008 financial crisis” – having earned $4bn from “others’ folly” by betting that the US mortgage-backed securities market would implode, said Martin Vander Weyer in The Spectator. The financier’s fortunes since have been mixed. “But he did one good thing for the world in 2013” when he bought Steinway, the piano company whose concert grands – built in Hamburg and Queens, New York – “have long been favoured by virtuosi”. Paulson’s $500m investment had a sentimental spin: his sisters were pianists and his father couldn’t afford a Steinway. But he also deployed his “characteristic nose for value”, with a plan to refloat the 169-year-old firm on Wall Street, “with a billion plus valuation”. Bill…

The week’s best shares Britvic The Daily Telegraph The innovative soft drinksmaker has expanded its PepsiCo partnership and boosted its brand portfolio with plant-based drinks firm Plenish. Growth and income prospects remain sound. Yields 2.9%.Buy. 821.5p. Helical The Times Helical has completed a wave of mixed-use redevelopment projects (less than 5% for retail) in London’s Farringdon and Whitechapel, and is restoring its pipeline. Discounted shares account for uncertainty ahead. Buy. 433.5p. Ibstock The Times Thanks to a strong repairs and maintenance business, and its reinforced concrete cladding panels, Britain’s biggest brickmaker should overcome uncertain macro headwinds. Yields 4.25%. Buy. 167p. Jet2 The Sunday Times The budget airline has north of £1bn cash on the balance sheet and its load factor is only 2.5% behind 2019’s. Set to soar, given a…

A minute before midnight on 21 July 2021, as passengers staggered sleepily through Manchester airport, I stood wringing my hands in the glow of a vending machine that was seven feet tall, conspicuously branded with the name of its owner – BRODERICK – and positioned like a trap between arrivals and the taxi rank. Standard agonies. Sweet or savoury? Liquid or something to munch? I opted for Doritos, touching my card to the reader so that the packet was propelled forwards by a churning plastic spiral. The Doritos landed with a thwap, a sound that always brings relief to the vending enthusiast, because there hasn’t been a mechanical miscue. Judged by the clock, which now read 12am, it was the UK’s first vending-machine sale of the day. Nine hours later,…

THE WEEK CROSSWORD 1309 An Ettinger shoe horn and two Connell Guides will be given to the sender of the first correct solution to the crossword and the clue of the week opened on Monday 9 May. Email the answers as a scan of a completed grid or a list, with the subject line The Week crossword 1309, to crossword@theweek.co.uk. Tim Moorey (timmoorey.com) This week’s winner will receive an Ettinger (ettinger.co.uk) Bridle Hide travel shoehorn in black, which retails at £75, and two Connell Guides (connellguides.com). ACROSS 7 Sort of home phone (6) 8 Relation abroad? Son perhaps from South Korea (8) 9 What’s parched in the Kalahari desert? (4) 10 Greek agreed to take a rest mostly outside (10) 11 Noble dressed in cashmere (8) 13 Provider of drink…

The Health Secretary, Sajid Javid, has announced plans to appoint an “HRT supply chairperson” – in the mould of the vaccine tsar Kate Bingham – to address a national shortage of hormone replacement therapy products. Javid also pledged to convene a meeting with suppliers to “improve supply in the long and short term”. Prescriptions in England of HRT products, which ease the symptoms of menopause, have doubled in the last five years to around 538,000. The current shortages have been blamed on rising demand, as well as on manufacturing problems. Some women have reportedly resorted to buying HRT products on the black market, or asking friends to obtain them abroad.…

New York Drug charge: Just three months after stepping down as president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández was escorted handcuffed onto a plane last Thursday, and flown to the US to face drugs and weapons charges. Hernández, 53, who was once touted as a key US ally in its war on drugs, is accused of involvement in a “corrupt and violent” conspiracy to traffic 550 tonnes of cocaine into the United States. According to US officials, he became involved with the cartels in 2004. He allegedly used the money he made from them to fund his political rise, and then “abused his position as president of Honduras”, from 2014 to 2022, “to operate the country as a narco-state”, where violent gangs were able to act with impunity. He says he…

Big Man Stevo, a Kenyan YouTube star, plans to take advantage of the country’s polygamy laws by marrying three women: identical triplets Cate, Eve and Mary. The sisters insist the four-way relationship is jealousy-free, because they’re with Stevo on the condition that he loves them all equally. “Satisfying three ladies” isn’t a “big deal”, Stevo says, but it does require timetabling. “Every Monday Mary, Tuesday Cate and Eve Wednesday. Then on the weekend we meet all of us and have a good time.” Candles play an important role in Orthodox Easter, which was celebrated last weekend. This year, novelty Covid candles were a big hit. “The Covid-test candle is definitely our bestseller,” said Giorgos Souliotis, a shopkeeper from Athens. His outlet also stocked candles shaped like vaccine syringes, hand sanitiser…

If Boris Johnson has been feeling a bit unloved at home, his arrival in India may have been the tonic he needed, said Andrew Woodcock on The Independent. In the Gujarati city of Ahmedabad, the red carpet was “literally rolled out for the PM”. At the airport, he was greeted by a delegation “laden down with so many bouquets of red roses” that a cart was needed to wheel the flowers away afterwards. Then, en route to his hotel, he was driven along streets lined with billboards featuring his own face, 20ft high, under the words “Welcome to Gujarat”. Trade deals were the focus of the visit, said Kapil Komireddi in the Daily Mail, but there was a major “obstacle”: the war in Ukraine, and India’s consistent refusal to condemn…

Prince Harry has awarded himself an “unlikely” new role as “Mighty Queen Protector”, said Jan Moir in the Daily Mail. Last week, after stopping off for tea with Her Majesty on his way to the Invictus Games in the Netherlands, he told the US network NBC that he had been making sure that his grandmother is “protected and has the right people around her”. The two of them had a “special relationship”, he said: “we talk about things that she can’t talk about with anybody else”. (By contrast, when asked if he missed his father and brother, he couldn’t even “find it in his heart to simply say yes”.) It’s ironic, really. Far from being the Queen’s protector, this “smirking assassin” has done a vast amount of damage to the…

Since 2014, Mercedes has dominated Formula 1, said Luke Slater in The Daily Telegraph: they’ve won an unprecedented eight constructors’ titles in a row and seven drivers’ championships. True, having Lewis Hamilton, the outstanding driver of this period, has been a big help. But they’ve also had something else: the fastest car. How different things have turned out this season, said Giles Richards in The Guardian. Only four races in, and already Mercedes looks well off the pace – third in the constructors’ race, with just two podium finishes. And Hamilton is seventh in the drivers’ standings. At the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix on Sunday, he endured one of the most torrid afternoons of his career, finishing 13th and suffering the indignity of being lapped by the winner, Max Verstappen.…

Black lives in full colour To The Times Further to “The real story behind Bridgerton’s black star”, black people in Britain during the long 18th century were not “almost all living in abject poverty”. For my doctoral thesis I compiled a database that now has 5,000 entries: I am still using primary sources to discover what was actually happening, rather than what too many academics have assumed from published works. Most of the black people in England and Wales were, like the white population, getting by. The poor came to the attention of the authorities because they needed help, but literally thousands of black people did not: they simply disappeared into hard-working obscurity as shopkeepers, estate managers, ministers of religion and parish officials, etc. Their stories need to be remembered…

by Julian Barnes Jonathan Cape 192pp £16.99 The Week bookshop £13.99 Julian Barnes’s latest is that “old-fashioned thing, a novel of ideas”, said John Self in The Times. It is narrated by Neil, a former actor, but is really all about Elizabeth Finch, the “lecturer on a course on culture and civilisation that Neil took decades earlier”. Finch, who is “probably inspired” by Barnes’s friend, the late novelist Anita Brookner, is remembered as an inspirational teacher, someone “who obliged us – simply by example – to seek and find within ourselves a centre of seriousness”. Neil recalls their sort-of friendship – they occasionally met for lunch – and describes his quest, in the present day, to find out more about Finch in the wake of her death. Very much a…

The Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard, 1990-2013 (Pan Macmillan £9.99 each). A panoramic unpicking of the intimate lives of generations of one family, Howard’s intricate, painful, expansive sequence of five novels is usually, stupidly, dismissed as “domestic”, a “historical saga” about the middle class. Fools; it’s a masterpiece. If the author were male, we’d all take it seriously. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, 1956 (Penguin £7.99). Baldwin, a gay black American, knew Otherness; his writing about race is electrifying, but this short, harrowing novel about an Italian waiter in Paris is unparalleled for its understanding of fear, poverty, passion and the end of love. Milkman by Anna Burns, 2018 (Faber £8.99). Burns won the Booker for this dazzlingly bold, utterly true study of domestic terrorism, oppression, gossip, religion, sexuality…

Programmes Prisoner C33 One-man play starring Toby Stephens as Oscar Wilde, contemplating from his cell at Reading Gaol his previous life, and his humiliating fall from grace. Trevor Nunn directs. Sun 1 May, BBC4 21:00 (70mins). DI Ray New crime drama starring Parminder Nagra as a newly promoted detective, who is disconcerted to find herself being asked to investigate a “culturally specific homicide”. Mon 2, Tue 3, Wed 4 and Thur 5 May, ITV1 21:00 (60mins each). Imagine… Jacob Collier: In the Room Where it Happens Alan Yentob meets the musician, and hears from the likes of Quincy Jones and Herbie Hancock, who believe he is one of the world’s most talented artists. Mon 2 May, BBC1 22:40 (70mins). Kicking Off: The Rise and Fall of the Super League Documentary about the…

Little slice of paradise Spend 6 nights at the five-star Novotel Phuket Kamala Beach hotel, with uninterrupted views, from £1,034pp halfboard (including Manchester flights). 01234-230440, loveholidays.com. Depart 14 June. Five nights in Perugia Enjoy a stay at the Locanda Poggioleone, located in the lovely town of Castiglione del Lago, from £400pp b&b (including London flights). 020-3368 6221, broadwaytravel.com. Depart 4 July. Sail Three Seas Embark on a 7-night, adultsonly cruise from Dubrovnik, with visits to Malta, Corfu and Montenegro, from £878pp allinclusive (including Cardiff flights). 020-3451 2688, tui.co.uk. Depart 23 June. Short luxury break Stay two nights at Cocorico, a Portuguese guest house with a French touch in Porto, from £256 (two sharing) b&b (excluding flights). 0330-100 3180, mrandmrssmith.com. Arrive 15 June. Covid-19: please check government websites for testing and…

Netflix et al: the great cancellation Netflix’s landmark loss of subscribers isn’t necessarily a “godsend” for rivals in the “streaming wars”, said Jordan Williams on ScreenRant. Its travails are “a warning sign” that streamers can only push subscribers’ limits so far “before seeing hundreds of thousands cancel their accounts”. Fellow warriors Disney+ and HBO Max should take note. The “subscription economy” has gone into reverse as the “tightening squeeze” on incomes “causes consumers to rethink their discretionary spending”, said Judith Evans in the Financial Times. Companies across the board need to brace themselves for “the great cancellation”: streaming services are just the canary in the coal mine. And investors are taking note: global consumer discretionary stocks have fallen 14% since the start of the year, against 8% for the broader…

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