Innholdsfortegnelse for 1568 i The Week

A golden retriever from County Fermanagh has been given a medal for helping to save her owner’s life, by raising the alarm when he had a cardiac arrest while asleep. Polly’s barking woke Hannah Cooke from her sleep in March 2024 to find that her husband, Adam, 37, was breathing strangely; they think Polly heard his noisy breathing from the kitchen directly below their room. Hannah performed CPR and called 999. Polly was this week honoured as a “CPR hero”. A three-year-old boy’s response to pioneering gene therapy has delighted doctors at Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital. Oliver Chu, from California, suffers from Hunter syndrome, a rare disorder that stops his body from producing a crucial enzyme. The disease gradually robs children of their physical and cognitive abilities; but within months…

Controversy of the week A Cop to forget As the Sun sets on Cop30, it’s hard to judge this summit as anything other than a “failure”, said Genevieve Guenther in The Guardian. When delegates first gathered in Belém, Brazil – the “gateway of the Amazon” – for the UN climate conference earlier this month, there was excited talk of finally agreeing a “roadmap” for the world’s transition away from fossil fuels. In the end, the final text didn’t even mention fossil fuels. Petrostates led by Saudi Arabia and Russia blocked that. (While President Trump, who describes climate change as a “con job”, snubbed the talks entirely.) Gone, too, was another roadmap to end deforestation; while the tripling of a climate change Adaptation Fund, allowing poorer nations to cope with its…

Paperboys and girls, some 1,700 of whom have been made redundant by Morrisons, after the supermarket sold off its newspaper delivery division – blaming a “long-term decline” in circulation. The teenagers had delivered papers to around 25,000 homes; the new owners will be using adult delivery drivers instead. Nathan Gill, the former leader of Reform UK in Wales, who has been jailed for ten-and-a-half years for taking bribes from Russia. Gill, 52, who served as an MEP before leading Reform’s 2021 Welsh parliament election campaign, was paid £40,000 to make pro-Kremlin statements in the European Parliament and on Ukrainian TV. The nation’s health, after a survey revealed Brits are eating fewer vegetables than at any time over the past 50 years. Cabbage intake has fallen 80% since the 1970s, says…

58% of British adults think it’s “socially unacceptable” to drive after drinking, even if alcohol consumption is within the legal limit.  Direct Line 0% of Britons now believe that the economy is in a “very good state”; 4% think it is “fairly good”; 44% think it is in a “fairly bad state”, and 35% think the economic situation is “very bad”. YouGov 43% of British Palestine supporters would end a friendship with someone who supported Israel; 46% of those who support Israel would do the same if a friend supported Palestine. More in Common One in four dog owners struggle to control their pet. Sainsbury’s Bank Pet Insurance…

Advice from the Sex Pistols Born in 1967 to actors Bruce Dern and the late Diane Ladd, Laura Dern was raised in the creative ferment of 1970s cinema. Yet despite the notoriety of the druggy, egotistical New Hollywood era, she felt safe then. It was in the 1980s, she told Michael Schulman in The New Yorker, that “stuff got crazier”. Teen movies became a big thing, and people her age were suddenly getting lead roles in big films. “We were the grown-ups – but we were children.” Many of her peers went off the rails; but Dern kept away from drugs. For this, she credits in part an encounter with the Sex Pistols when she was 12. “If you want your kid to make smart choices and not go down…

How did Franco die? General Franco, who had ruled Spain since his military defeat of the Second Spanish Republic in 1939, made his last public appearance on 1 October 1975. Looking gaunt and ill, he warned of a “Masonic, Leftist and Communist conspiracy against Spain”. In early November, he was taken to La Paz Hospital in Madrid, where he died shortly after midnight on 20 November. Later that day a mournful PM, Carlos Arias Navarro, made a televised speech to the nation, which began: “Españoles, Franco ha muerto.” (“Spaniards, Franco has died.”) A national mourning period of 30 days was declared, and tens of thousands of people lined up to view Franco’s body lying in state in the Royal Palace. After his funeral, he was taken to be buried at…

A man who had his dead wife cryogenically frozen, in the hope of eventual reunion, has sparked a debate in China – after it emerged that he has since found a new partner. Gui Junmin’s late wife agreed when she was terminally ill to be frozen in-190°C liquid nitrogen. But it has emerged that Gui found a new partner in 2020, after a severe attack of gout persuaded him that living alone wasn’t for him. Online critics accused him of selfishness; he has defended himself, saying that his new relationship is “utilitarian”. A nightmarish “festive” mural on the Kingston-upon-Thames riverside has created a backlash. From a distance, the artwork looks like a cheery Christmas fair. Close up, it features distorted faces and limbs, headless humans, dogs with chicken heads, a…

NIGERIA A horrific trade in kidnapped children Premium Times (Abuja) Barely a day goes by without some “grim” new development in Nigeria’s hopeless war against terrorism, said Premium Times. Last week, armed bandits “upped the ante” with two mass kidnappings within days – including the abduction of 303 children from a Catholic school in Niger State. Apart from the human cost, the optics for our country are “not good” at a time when President Trump is threatening military action over the killings of Christians. Given the frequency of such kidnappings over the past decade (279 students from Zamfara State in 2021; 344 in Katsina State in 2020), you’d have thought the government would have an effective strategy for dealing with them. Not so. It took Trump’s “bullying” for one terrorist…

Once widespread in Britain, the European wildcat is now only found in the Scottish Highlands, where it’s estimated as few as 115 survive in the wild and they are designated as critically endangered. Conservationists have been exploring reintroducing the mammal to England and Wales; and now, a study has found that a population could “flourish” in the woodlands of rural mid-Devon, where they’ve not been seen since the mid-1800s. There are concerns that the cats could pose a threat to native birds and poultry, and that they would interbreed with domestic cats. But the study found that 80% of local people are positive about the mooted reintroduction project. It also notes that the cats pose no threat to pets; that measures to protect poultry from foxes would be effective on…

Robert F. Kennedy Jr (pictured) is no stranger to controversy. The US health secretary once claimed a parasitic worm lived in his brain; now his love notes are setting the internet alight. “I am a river. You are my canyon,” the 71-year-old writes in erotic verses, allegedly sent to journalist Olivia Nuzzi, 32. “I mean to flow through you. I mean to subdue … you.” Nuzzi is equally breathless in her new memoir. “He desired,” she writes. “He desired desiring. He desired being desired. He desired desire itself.” Promoting his new book at the Royal Society last week, David Miliband “bristled” when told he needed no introduction, said The Times. The former foreign secretary recalled the same words being used when he’d visited a school in his constituency; the headmistress…

“Life is a magnificent robe, riddled with fleas.”Zhang Ailing, quoted in the Los Angeles Review of Books “A diplomat who says ‘yes’ means ‘maybe’, a diplomat who says ‘maybe’ means ‘no’, and a diplomat who says ‘no’ is no diplomat.”Talleyrand, quoted in National Review “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of socialism is the equal division of misery.”Winston Churchill, quoted on the Christian Post “Man is distinguished from all other creatures by the faculty of laughter.”Joseph Addison, quoted in The i Paper “When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.”Attrib. Saul Bellow, quoted on The Browser “People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.”Neil Postman, quoted in The New…

In the context of their autumn campaign, England’s final game against Argentina on Sunday was a somewhat “sobering” affair, said Gavin Mairs in The Daily Telegraph. Yes, Steve Borthwick’s side won 27-23 to secure an 11th successive victory. But they did so with a nervy, unconvincing performance that was a “pale shadow” of their statement win over New Zealand a week earlier. After taking a 17-0 lead, England allowed the Pumas back into the contest, and nearly paid a heavy price. One welcome feature of English rugby this autumn has been the strong showing of their bench. But here, Argentina’s substitutions made more impact than England’s “Pom squad”, and it was the Pumas who dominated the final quarter. A bright spot for England, however, was the performance of Bath centre…

To The Guardian Labour MPs are absolutely right to reject Wes Streeting’s plan to use private capital to build neighbourhood health centres. Like a family using a payday loan to buy their home, yes, we’d end up with a building, but we’ll have to sacrifice meals to keep up with the payments. Given Rachel Reeves’s lack of fiscal wiggle room, no one believes that the NHS’s budget will increase year-on-year to keep pace with the combined financial impact of inflation, the growing health needs of our ageing population and possible rising drug prices. So adding a new private finance debt burden to this cocktail will only result in trusts skimping on the only one of those things they have control over: patient care. Research has shown that some trusts pay…

The last time Bryan Cranston teamed up with Belgian theatre director Ivo van Hove – for Network at the National Theatre, then Broadway – it bagged the Breaking Bad star Olivier and Tony awards for best actor. “Only a fool would bet against a repeat triumph now,” said Fiona Mountford in The i Paper. I have never seen a better production of All My Sons, Arthur Miller’s 1947 classic about a toxic filial inheritance, and the rotten heart of the American dream. In this stunning new production, playing at just over two hours without interval, the drama assumes the “grim yet towering momentum, inexorability and universality of a Greek tragedy”. Cranston, as Joe Keller, gives a “magnificent performance of craggy, rugged resilience tempered with affability”. Cranston and Marianne Jean-Baptiste, playing…

Two hundred and fifty years after his birth, Joseph Mallord William Turner remains an “enigma”, said James Jackson in The Times: “a grunting curmudgeon, an establishment outsider, a visitor of prostitutes”, and an artist whose work “touches the sublime”. This new BBC2 documentary seeks to shed light on Turner’s character through close examination of his rarely seen sketchbooks: not just landscape studies and preliminary compositions that he would later turn into paintings, but also reams of “pornographic sketches”. The result is a show that zips “rather fascinatingly … in and out of Turner’s id, ego and superego”. An eclectic range of contributors offer their interpretations, said Roland White in the Daily Mail. Psychoanalyst Orna Guralnik, for instance, suggests that Turner’s detailed early depictions of buildings represented “a search for stability…

A self-portrait by Frida Kahlo has sold for $54.7m (£41.8m) at a New York art auction, “setting a new top sale price for a work by any female artist”, says Sian Cain in The Guardian. The 1940 painting, El sueño (La cama) – The Dream (The Bed) – features a smiling skeleton wrapped in dynamite on the canopy above. It surpassed the record set by the $44.4m sale of Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 in 2014. Sotheby’s, which auctioned the painting at a sale of surrealist art, has yet to identify the buyer; the seller’s name was not disclosed. It is among the few Kahlo pieces that have remained in private hands outside Mexico, where her work has been declared an artistic monument, and cannot by law be…

As the family members prepare for Scotland, Tony gets annoyed with Tom’s instructions for Bridge Farm and, egged on by Lilian, decides to go on the holiday himself – leaving a disgruntled Tom at home. Tony, Lilian, Helen, Ruairi and Kate make it to Scotland, but the car with Jakob, Alice, Natasha, Justin and Phoebe breaks down and ends up in Blackpool, where they spend an enjoyable two nights. Meanwhile, there’s been an accommodation mix-up at the castle, and tensions rise between Lilian and Leonie, who feels neglected by James. Helen forms a connection with Finlay, a local crofter. Phoebe starts having contractions – Alice and Jakob help her through them. At Bridge Farm, Tom confesses to Kirsty that he’s been dreaming about their son, Wren; Henry is suspicious when…

670 Grams 4 Gibb Street, Birmingham (07304-071289) With its “monochromatic, moody” interior, “semi-loud hip hop” and graffiti-festooned toilets, this restaurant in Birmingham’s Custard Factory sets out to be “edgy, ballsy, disruptive”, says Grace Dent in The Guardian. The same is true of Kray Treadwell’s cooking, which is “daunting, uncompromising” and, at times, downright weird. The menu, painstakingly executed over six or 12 courses, is a “cascade of small, meaningful bowls”. There’s Cornish bluefin tuna in a froth of eel milk (can you really milk an eel?), carabinero prawn with eggless custard, and barbecued mussels in turmeric sauce with a “sweet hit of caramel apple”. Nor does the “intensity” let up with the two desserts: one a carrot cake with a frosting of lamb fat (which proves much nicer than it…

● Giving children regular pocket money will help them learn how to budget. You could also put them in charge of the budget for a family day out. A linked bank account can be a useful introduction to online banking, and also allow you to track their spending. ● Teach them about compound interest. It’s important to understand how interest rates affect savings, and loans, in the long term. By extension, you might want to talk about credit cards – useful for spreading payments, but need careful management. ● Help children understand risk-to-return principles by investing in a Junior Stocks and Shares Isa; from 16 they can manage the account, and can withdraw money at 18. ● You’re never too young to get scammed, so teach children that if something…

Baroness Newlove 1961-2025 Baroness Newlove was, in her own words, just an “ordinary woman” from Warrington when she was propelled into the public eye by the savage murder of her husband Garry in 2007. A central heating engineer turned salesman, Garry had been at home on a summer evening when some local youths, high on drink and drugs, started vandalising their car. He rushed outside, in his bare feet, only to be surrounded, knocked to the floor and kicked in the head “like a football”, in front of their three daughters. He died 36 hours later. The Newloves and their neighbours had been very worried by the growing menace of anti-social behaviour in their once tranquil neighbourhood, said The Daily Telegraph; but meetings with police had got nowhere. Helen Newlove…

A looming breakthrough? Scotland has had the right to issue its own debt since 2015, when the nation was promised more powers after the “Yes” side lost the independence referendum, said Heather Stewart in The Guardian. A decade on, Scottish “kilts” – a play on British “gilts” – are finally looming through the mist. The breakthrough came when the ratings agencies Moody’s and S&P Global conferred respective credit scores of Aa3 and AA – putting Scotland on an equal footing with the UK score. If re-elected next May, the SNP government plans to issue £1.5bn of debt – this is tiny compared with the estimated £300bn of gilts the UK will issue this year, but establishes “the principle that Scotland can raise its own funds independently”. Beneath the kilt The…

John Neal When he left the top job at Lloyd’s of London last January, John Neal was a man in demand, said The Wall Street Journal. After an apparently successful six-year stint at the world’s largest insurance market, he clinched a job with the American behemoth AIG, which dangled a $17m salary to lure him stateside as its second-in-command. Yet days before Neal was scheduled to take his seat in the C-suite, the offer was withdrawn. The sticking point? An internal investigation by Lloyd’s into an alleged relationship with a fellow employee. “Promoting your ‘friends’ is typically a bit of a no-no,” said Alistair Osborne in The Times. It seems that Neal created a new role for Rebekah Clement, a former aide to the New Zealand PM, as “director of…

Reeves’s Budget What happened After months of leaks, speculation and policy shifts, Rachel Reeves finally delivered her second Budget on Wednesday. It is a Budget designed to plug a roughly £30bn hole in the public finances with a series of tax hikes and some spending cuts, while also helping those on welfare. The Chancellor called it a “Labour Budget with Labour values”, telling MPs it would more than double her fiscal headroom, to £21.7bn, giving her a wider margin of error for meeting her rules on spending and borrowing. A leak by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) meant that the entire contents of the Budget were revealed 40 minutes before she stood at the dispatch box. The single biggest revenue-raising measure in the Budget is a three-year extension of…

A new fashion line called “I Wool Survive” made its debut at a New York fashion show, using wool from gay sheep. The Los Angeles designer Michael Schmidt partnered with Rainbow Wool (a German non-profit that rescues rams that refuse to mate with ewes) and Grindr, the LGBTQ+ dating app, to bring an “animal rights story” to the runway. More than half of published novelists in the UK believe that AI could replace their work entirely, according to a new report from Cambridge University. The study surveyed 258 novelists: 51% thought AI was likely to replace them; 39% said their income had already fallen as a result of it. Romance authors, followed by thriller and crime writers, were deemed the most exposed.…

Jury trials may be reserved for only the most serious crimes, such as rape, murder and manslaughter, under proposals drawn up by the Justice Secretary, David Lammy. Judges sitting alone would pass judgment on criminal offences with possible prison sentences of up to five years. Senior lawyers reacted with dismay, saying that it could “destroy justice as we know it”. The Ministry of Justice said that no final decision had been taken; but Crown Courts are facing record backlogs, which stand at around 78,000 cases in England and Wales. Official sources said that an announcement would be made early next year.…

Copenhagen Big defeat: Denmark’s governing Social Democrats – recently cited by the Labour Government as the inspiration for its hardline turn on migration and asylum – suffered sweeping losses in city and regional elections last week. National support for PM Mette Frederiksen’s party fell to a historic low of 23%, and the party lost control of Copenhagen for the first time in more than a century. Urban voters by and large shifted to parties to the left of the Social Democrats, while rural voters shifted to hard-right populist parties such as the Danish People’s Party. The next general election is due by October 2026. Geneva, Switzerland WHO shrinks: A quarter of the workforce of the World Health Organisation – the UN agency that directs and coordinates authority for global public…

1 Walk on the Wild Side, written and performed by Lou Reed 2 Yeh Hai Bombay Meri Jaan by O.P Nayyar and Majrooh Sultanpuri, performed by Mohammed Rafi and Geeta Dutt 3 Blowin’ in the Wind, written and performed by Bob Dylan 4 (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, performed by the Rolling Stones 5 I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me) by George Merrill and Shannon Rubicam, performed by Whitney Houston 6 Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard, written and performed by Paul Simon 7 Isn’t She Lovely, written and performed by Stevie Wonder 8* For the Love of You (Part 1 & 2) by Ernie Isley, Marvin Isley, Rudolph Isley, O’Kelly Isley, Ronald Isley and Chris Jasper, performed by The Isley Brothers * Choice if allowed only one record…

Francisco Franco Bahamonde was born to a military family in Ferrol, Galicia in 1892. He entered the army at a young age, and gained rapid promotion as a colonial officer in Morocco, fighting the vicious Rif War to put down a tribal rebellion. In 1936, he joined the army coup against the Second Spanish Republic, and from July brought the Army of Africa over from Morocco to Seville in the first major military airlift, using planes lent by Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany. In October, he was declared Generalissimo and Jefe del Estado of the Nationalist side. His forces, the most effective in Spain, backed by Germany and Italy, fought their way across Spain, “cleansing” Republicans kilometre by kilometre, using tactics developed in Morocco: torture, rape, summary executions. The White…

The Trump steamroller is slowing down Jonathan Lemire The Atlantic “Ten months into the president’s second term, Trump 2.0 is for the first time starting to resemble the chaotic original,” says Jonathan Lemire. Until now, President Trump and his team have run a tight operation. They used their four years out of office to create a policy blueprint, and they’ve rolled it out with ruthless efficiency. But the old “sense of disorder has returned, and the losses have begun to pile up”. Last week, Trump had to capitulate to Republican rebels and support the release of official files on Jeffrey Epstein. This followed another noteworthy retreat, when tariffs on goods such as bananas, beef and coffee were quietly lifted – tacitly admitting that Trump’s trade wars had pushed up prices.…

Almost 400 potentially fatal antibiotic-resistant infections occur a week in England, new data shows. The UK Health Security Agency received 20,484 reports of life-threatening infections caused by bacteria resistant to one or more key antibiotics in 2024 – up 9% from 2023. About 90% of the infections were in the over-45s, and nearly half were in those aged 74 and above. The number of deaths of people with superbugs also rose, from 2,041 in 2023 to 2,379 in 2024. Limiting the use of antibiotics to those who need them the most is one of the best ways of combatting antibiotic resistance, and figures show that the prescription of antibiotics in NHS primary care fell between 2019 and 2024. However, private dispensing in community pharmacies more than doubled over the same…

It is the hectoring, jeering tone in Nigel Farage’s voice that brings it all back for Peter Ettedgui, said The Guardian. Farage used the same tone, at Dulwich College, the south London private school that both men attended in the late 1970s, when he would sidle up to him and growl: “Hitler was right” or “Gas them”. He would sometimes add “a long hiss to simulate the sound of the gas showers”, says Ettedgui, now in his 60s, who was one of the few Jewish children at the school. It wasn’t just Jews the young Farage singled out. “I’d hear him calling other students ‘P*ki’ or ‘W*g’ and urging them to ‘go home’,” says Ettedgui. Farage has denied the specifics of these allegations. But The Guardian has spoken to 22…

“There are not many days when you feel sick to the pit of your stomach watching England play Test cricket abroad,” said Simon Wilde in The Sunday Times. But last Saturday was “certainly one of them”. It is not simply that England lost the first Ashes Test by the “decisive margin” of eight wickets, and contrived to do so within two days. What hurts even more is that they wasted a golden opportunity to “win an opening Test in Australia for the first time since 1986”. At lunch on day two in Perth, Ben Stokes’s men led by 99 runs with nine second-innings wickets in hand – and looked in control of a contest which up till that point had heavily favoured the bowlers. But then, “in the space of…

Football Defending champions Liverpool are in the bottom half of the Premier League after losing 3-0 to West Ham at home. Arsenal extended their lead at the top to six points with a 4-1 victory over Tottenham. Golf Matt Fitzpatrick won the season-ending DP World Tour Championship, beating Rory McIlroy in a play-off. However, McIlroy did secure the Race to Dubai title – awarded to the year’s most successful player on the DP World Tour, the seventh time he has done so. Tennis Italy won their third successive Davis Cup, beating Spain in the final.…

“Swashbuckling”, is the word that best encapsulates Adrift, said James Marriott in The Times. This new Apple podcast is about the Robertsons, a family from Devon who, in 1972, became stranded in a dinghy on the Pacific Ocean for 38 days, after their 50-year-old schooner was attacked and sunk by killer whales during a round-the-world sailing trip. It is the kind of yarn you might hear “from a grizzled old sea dog in the corner of a pub in a port town”. Hosted by journalist Becky Milligan, it contains vivid testimony – of the whale attacks themselves; of assuaging their hunger by gnawing the meat off passing sea turtles; of their raging thirst; of the horrifying impact of sea water on their skin – from the now-adult Robertson children. It…

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, 1954 (Penguin £9.99). Jim Dixon is a junior lecturer at a nameless university, and finds himself in a love triangle (or possibly square), involving the ludicrous son of his equally ludicrous head of department. Amis’s debut brilliantly pokes fun at the pretensions of the provincial middle classes and has some of the most comically perfect set-pieces that have ever been committed to the page. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ by Sue Townsend, 1982 (Penguin £8.99). I first read this account of the teenaged angst of its eponymous hero, A. Mole – a Midlands schoolboy growing up in the 1980s – when I was aged around 13¾. And I’ve re-read it repeatedly in the years since – it never gets stale. A Short History…

Programmes Say Nothing Dramatisation of Patrick Radden Keefe’s book about the Troubles, focusing on the IRA’s abduction of Jean McConville in 1972, and its repercussions over four decades. First screened on Disney+. Mon 1 and Tue 2 Dec, C4 21:00 (55mins each). What’s the Monarchy For? David Dimbleby talks to palace insiders and politicians about the monarchy’s place in national life. Tue 2 Dec, BBC1 21:00 (60mins). Prisoner 951: The Hostages’ Story Documentary about the six-year imprisonment of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe in Iran and her husband’s campaign to have her released, examining their personal toll and the geopolitical backdrop. Wed 3 Dec, BBC2 21:00 (90mins). The Sycamore Gap Mystery This two-part docuseries follows Northumbria Police’s investigation into the unlawful felling of the beloved landmark tree in 2023. Wed 3 and Thu 4 Dec,…

Serves 4 2 handfuls of fresh coriander leaves 1 tsp cumin seeds ½ tsp fennel seeds 2.5cm piece of root ginger, roughly chopped 5-6 garlic cloves, peeled 1 green chilli (optional) 1 tbsp plain yoghurt 500g chicken drumsticks, skin on ½ tsp salt 1 tsp chaat masala 1 tsp garam masala 2 tsp Kashmiri red chilli powder juice of ½ a lemon 1 tbsp gram flour, toasted 2 tbsp neutral oil 3-4 tbsp oil, for frying a handful of fresh coriander leaves, chopped, to garnish lemon wedges, to garnish a pinch of chaat masala, to garnish a handful of raw red onion rings, to garnish • In a grinder or blender, grind the coriander leaves, cumin seeds, fennel seeds, ginger, garlic, green chilli (if using) and yoghurt into a thick…

Discover the long history of luxury textile manufacturer Johnstons of Elgin, founded in 1797, on a mill tour. You’ll also see dyeing, yarn production, weaving, purling, darning and the finishing process called “waulking” (£15; discover.johnstonsofelgin.com). On Sunday tours of David Mellor’s cutlery factory in the Peak District National Park, you will see the traffic lights he designed in 1966, and how cutlery is made. You can also visit the museum, shop and café (£4; ticketsource.co.uk/DavidMellor). Burleigh moved to Middleport Pottery in 1889, and the Grade II* factory has hardly changed. Watch potters at work, including using the underglaze technique, which takes years to master (from £11; burleigh.co.uk). Rapture & Wright creates sustainable hand-printed fabrics and papers in the Cotswolds. Visitors can see the printing process in action, and its unique wastewater pond…

Cristine Bedfor Seville Originally a splendid 1920s theatre and cinema, this building in Seville’s old town lay derelict for years before it was opened as a hotel (part of a small chain) this year. It remains pleasingly “theatrical”, says Emma Love in House & Garden, with interiors decorated in rich colours (powder pink, oxblood, lapis blue, emerald, mustard), lovely tiles, and textiles with historic prints. The 28 rooms manage to be at once “cosy” and “light and airy”. There’s a small rooftop pool, and a glass-roofed courtyard that serves mainly as the restaurant, offering “Spanish-influenced” dishes such as slow-cooked Iberian pork. Doubles from €350; cristinebedforhotel.com.…

Nvidia/Alphabet/AMD: chip-opoly challenge Nvidia’s better-than-expected results were hailed by many investors – and CEO Jensen Huang himself – “as proof that there isn’t an AI bubble”, said James Mackintosh in The Wall Street Journal. But after the initial stock jump, it didn’t take long for the shine to wear off. “Sure, Nvidia is selling a lot of chips.” But if there is a bubble, “this is exactly what you should expect”. The AI “hustle” is that massive spending will “eventually” pay off. But increasingly, investors don’t want to pay the huge costs needed to get to a “deeply uncertain end point”. That’s one reason why Google-owner Alphabet, which has concentrated on corporate sales of existing AI products, has been “virtually immune to the selloff”. Another, is the challenge posed to…

Death by a thousand hikes Marcus Ashworth and Stuart Trow Bloomberg By the time she stood up to deliver her second Budget on Wednesday, Rachel Reeves’s new tax measures had already been “tested to the max” by the Treasury’s sophisticated econometric tools. “These models provide precise estimates of the impact of tax, spending and borrowing policies on the economy,” say Ashworth and Trow. Yet, for all the “technocratic self-confidence” involved, it’s impossible to measure how a $3trn economy will react when “you start messing around too much” with the tax system. The Chancellor, a “habitual tinkerer”, has apparently yet to learn this. In framing her second Budget, Reeves has chosen to overlook “two fiscal truths” that threaten to wreak havoc on her finely crafted plans. First, the golden rule that…

The week’s best shares Aviva The Times The capital-light insurer has streamlined and refocused on its core UK, Ireland and Canadian markets. Since buying Direct Line a year or so ago, it’s now the UK’s biggest motor insurer. Profits are exceeding forecasts. Yields 6.2%. Buy. 632p. Big Yellow Group Investors’ Chronicle Shares in the self-storage giant are up 20% since August, fuelled by takeover speculation. A “quality operator”, with growing revenues and falling costs. Now focusing on upping occupancy. Buy. £10.94. Burberry Group The Times Once the “pinnacle of luxury”, the fashion house that lost its mojo is focusing on core strengths. Losses have narrowed, store sales are up and it’s returned to growth in China. Risky, with potential reward. Buy. £11.45. Diploma Investors’ Chronicle Organic revenues at the wiring,…

THE WEEK CROSSWORD 1493 Two Connell Guides and three Week-branded items will be given to the sender of the first correct solution to the crossword and the clue of the week opened on Monday 8 December. Send it to The Week Crossword 1493, 121-141 Westbourne Terrace, London W2 6JR, or email the completed grid/listed solutions to crossword@theweek.co.uk. By Tim Moorey (timmoorey.com) This week’s winner will receive Week-branded items, as well as two Connell Guides (connellguides.com). ACROSS 8 Sounds like a school scandal in Yorkshire town (9) 9 High flyer in European capital wanting opening (4)  10 Assistant and girl? There’s one on each knee (6)  11 Bad disreputable clubs in Indian Ocean islands (8) 12 Source of cracks that can bring the house down (8)  13 Task some helper ran dutifully?…

What happened After days of frantic diplomacy, Donald Trump claimed this week that his negotiators had made “tremendous progress” towards ending the Ukraine War. The Ukrainian leadership indicated that it had accepted the “core terms” of a US-backed peace plan – and Trump said that his envoy, Steve Witkoff, would be dispatched to the Kremlin for talks with Vladimir Putin next week. However, significant doubts remained, both about the exact terms of the deal, and about Russia’s position. On Wednesday, Russian officials indicated that the deal was not acceptable. Last week, Trump had piled great pressure on Kyiv to sign up to a 28-point plan that the US had drawn up following Witkoff’s talks with Russian envoys in Miami. That proposal echoed Moscow’s maximalist war aims, by calling for Kyiv…

The Daily Mail group, which has struck a £500m deal to buy The Daily Telegraph, pending government approval (see page 35). Mutts and mongrels, with news that the Royal Kennel Club will admit non-pedigree dogs for the first time in its 150-year history. They will also be included in the club’s nationwide “dog census”, to be carried out later this year. Superman, after an original copy of the June 1939 first edition became the highest-priced comic book ever sold. The comic, which sold for $9.1m (£7m) at auction, was found by three brothers cleaning out their late mother’s loft in California, stacked under a pile of faded newspapers in a cardboard box.…

A trial assessing the impact of puberty blockers will begin in January, after it was approved by regulators. The drugs, which postpone puberty and have been used to give children with gender dysphoria more time to explore their identities, were banned by the NHS last year because the Cass Review found a lack of evidence about their effects. Now 220 children attending NHS gender clinics will be given the drugs for a trial by King’s College. Critics noted that their effects are often irreparable, and campaigners threatened legal action.…

Washington DC Trump receives Mamdani: President Trump surprised observers by extending a cordial Oval Office welcome to Zohran Mamdani, the newly elected mayor of New York City, whom he had previously described as a “communist lunatic”. Both men emphasised their shared interest in addressing the city’s cost-of-living crisis at the meeting last Friday. The president suggested that Mamdani “can do a very good job” as mayor, despite having previously threatened to withhold federal funds from New York. The previous day, he had labelled six Democratic lawmakers “seditious” because they had urged members of the military and the intelligence community to refuse unlawful government orders. “This is really bad, and Dangerous to our Country,” he wrote on Truth Social, suggesting that they should be locked up, and later adding: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOUR,…

“It is believed that in the fourth century, early Christians first observed ‘the Advent’, a sombre time for contemplation. In 2025, it seems, mostly, to represent an opportunity to pluck miniature diversions out of perforated-cardboard compartments. People with a tenuous relationship to Jesus Christ spending their Decembers counting down the days until his birthday, by opening doors behind which they are finding just about anything – tea, designer lipstick, wine, weed, cheese, knives, crystals, smoked sausage, toys for children, toys for dogs, toys for cats, toys for sex. They are participating in an ancient, sacred ritual by unboxing their daily thong.” Ellen Cushing in The Atlantic…

Why Britain is first choice for asylum seekers Tom Calver The Sunday Times Of the many factors that lead people to seek asylum in Britain, says Tom Calver, perhaps the most compelling relates to simple maths: the odds of success are so much higher here. It wasn’t always so. Back in the early 2000s, under Tony Blair, new arrivals from safe “white list” countries were detained and removed, often with no chance of appeal. But once the High Court outlawed that tough approach, the “grant rate” for asylum seekers soared – from about 16% in 2004 to 78% in 2022. True, the rate has since fallen, but the odds for the nationalities most likely to apply to Britain are still very favourable. Last year, the EU granted asylum to 45%…

An early glimpse of a supernova Supernovas – the explosions that follow the collapse of a dying star – are among the most violent events in the cosmos, and vital to astronomers’ understanding of it, but much about them remains a puzzle; not least because they take place in an instant, and so telescopes are rarely trained on them as they occur. A new study, however, reveals that scientists managed to catch sight of one of these blasts as it was still unfolding. In April last year, Prof Yang Yi of Tsinghua University in Beijing and lead author of the paper, had just stepped off a long-haul flight in San Francisco when he was informed that an asteroid-detecting telescope in Hawaii had identified the explosion of a star with up…

“Has the Labour party finally found its answer to Margaret Thatcher?” asked David Goodhart in The Spectator. As a forthright, trained barrister from a “religiously devout political family”, Shabana Mahmood has some things in common with the Iron Lady; and her storming performance in the House of Commons last week as she set out a package of radical reforms to the asylum system conjured further parallels. The way the Home Secretary turned the tables on “the racial justice panjandrums on her own side by citing her personal experience of racial abuse felt very Thatcher vs. the wets. So, too, did Mahmood’s combination of personal conviction and plain, jargon-free language.” At a time when other Labour leaders have struggled to connect authentically with the public mood, she comes across as the…

When Lando Norris crossed the finishing line of the Las Vegas Grand Prix in second place on Sunday, he “thought he had enjoyed a respectable evening”, said Jonathan McEvoy in the Daily Mail. Although the McLaren driver had finished runner-up to Red Bull’s Max Verstappen, it was still a good result on paper. With two races left to go, Norris had extended his lead over his teammate Oscar Piastri (who came fourth) to 30 points, and held a 42-point advantage over Verstappen. But two hours after the race concluded, Norris and Piastri were summoned by the stewards and told that they’d both been disqualified – for having cars with excessively worn skid blocks. At a stroke, the verdict reduced Norris’s lead over both his main rivals to a nerve-tingling 24…

The Dinner Party by Viola van de Sandt Tinder Press 320pp £20 The Week Bookshop £17.99 From Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway to Ali Smith’s There but for the, “literature loves a dinner party”, said Ruth Gilligan in The Guardian. As a device it has all the ingredients – stressful preparations, unpredictable social dynamics, “borderline obscene” alcohol consumption – for “total, delicious carnage”. “The latest entrant to this literary Come Dine With Me” is Viola van de Sandt’s “formidable debut”. Franca, a shy Dutch woman, is hosting a meal in London for her English fiancé, Andrew, and two of his colleagues. It’s the “hottest day of the year”, and on the menu is rabbit – despite Franca’s vegetarianism. Written in “intensely visceral prose”, the novel “offers plenty to savour” as it…

Tony Cragg at Lisson Gallery Tony Cragg is one of Britain’s most important living sculptors, but it’s easy to see why his art can set the cognoscenti’s eyes rolling. His sculptures – monolithic stainless-steel things that blend the dynamism of the Italian futurist Umberto Boccioni with a certain organic quality reminiscent of, say, Barbara Hepworth – have long been a favourite for corporate art buyers, adorning the lobbies of many a multinational business HQ. If a reminder of his brilliance is needed, though, this show does the job well. It is composed of a half-dozen pieces about the height of the average man, with which Cragg (b.1949) makes heavy metal look like dashed-off pencil strokes; a towering green column placed outside; and some (literally) reflective efforts that have the air…

Car Magazine With the market for petrol city cars dying out, Toyota has produced a version of the Aygo X with the Yaris’s 1.5-litre hybrid powertrain. The new Aygo X has two electric motors for a combined 114bhp, up from 71bhp, and this “glut of extra power” means the hybrid is much faster than the old petrol model, 0-62mph takes just 9.2 seconds, 6 seconds less. The 12-volt battery is placed under the floor of the boot. Auto Express The new model is a bit heavier, but at 1,090kg it’s still a “featherweight” in its class. The engine builds speed with “impressive enthusiasm”, and it feels agile and “effortless” in town and on motorways. The steering is accurate and well weighted, and despite “rudimentary suspension”, the car rides pretty well…

Selma van de Perre 1922-2025 Selma van de Perre, who has died aged 103, worked for the Dutch resistance during the War, and at one point infiltrated German headquarters in Paris – before being captured by the Nazis and ending up at Ravensbrück, said The Daily Telegraph. There, she was beaten and starved and forced to work in an armaments factory. She was held as a political prisoner; but her identity was false. Had the Germans discovered that she was Jewish, she would almost certainly have been killed. She would describe herself as “one of few Jewish survivors … but one of many Jewish people to fight the Nazi regime”. Selma Velleman was born in Amsterdam in 1922 into a non-observant family. Her father worked as an actor, and her…

Brutal stress test “Reversals of fortune are nothing new for bitcoin diehards – euphoric rallies, then brutal selloffs,” said Emily Nicolle on Bloomberg. Even so, few were prepared for “the speed and scale” of the reversal of the past few weeks. Last Friday, bitcoin fell to a low near $80,500 (from an all-time high of nearly $126,000 in early October); and the carnage across the wider altcoin complex has been even worse. Bitcoin has since recovered a little, but still looks set for its worst month since the $60bn collapse of the stablecoin Terra in 2022 triggered the demise of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX. The Fear and Greed Index – which measures market sentiment – is in “extreme fear” territory, according to CoinMarketCap. Vicious cycle Deutsche Bank reckons that crypto tokens…