30 June, 2023

In the headlines

The government has announced “the biggest ever expansion in workforce training in the NHS’s history”, says The Times. The £2.4bn plan includes doubling the number of medical school places, training 170,000 new nurses, and possibly reducing the time it takes to qualify as a doctor from five years to four. More than 650 people have been arrested in France after a third night of riots following the fatal shooting of a teenager by police. President Macron is under pressure to declare a “state of emergency” later today, allowing him to impose a curfew and ban gatherings in major cities. Dolly Parton won’t be following in Abba’s footsteps and coming back as an AI hologram after she stops performing. “I think I’ve left a great body of work behind,” she told a London press conference, “I’ll still be around.” Besides, she says, “everything” about her is artificial already.

Jeff Kravitz/Getty

Comment

Putin yesterday: still very much in charge. Getty

The West’s “wishful thinking” over Putin

On Saturday morning, says Rod Liddle in The Sun, I woke up to the news that a “coup against Vladimir Putin was under way”. Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner mercenaries were marching to Moscow, said reporters, cheered all the way by ordinary Russians. Putin’s “days were numbered”, we were assured, and an internal power struggle would leave Ukraine free to reclaim its territory. But by teatime, “Prigozhin had given in and skedaddled to Belarus”. Putin, meanwhile, was still very much in charge, “flinging missiles about with great gusto”. It just shows how “wishful thinking” impacts Western reporting. For 18 months we’ve been told Putin is “virtually on his death bed”, stricken by cancer or Parkinson’s, and that even his own people want him gone. But as Saturday shows us, however much we wish otherwise, Russians still “support their awful, murderous leader”.

What’s more, says Anatol Lieven in The Guardian, Putin’s decision to pardon Prigozhin is “not a sign of weakness, but a shrewd move”. There was never any real chance of Russia’s regular army switching to support the Wagner boss, so Putin stood firm and denied Prigozhin’s demands until he was forced to surrender. The dictator had “nothing to gain by seeking violent revenge”: he knows there’s a “deep inhibition” against internal violence in Russia, fuelled by inherited memories of brutal conflict after the Bolshevik Revolution, and the “anarchy and economic misery” that followed the break-up of the Soviet Union. His understanding that ordinary Russians fear nothing more than “intrigues, squabbles and politicking” among elites allowed him to act with level-headed resolve. Putin knew there was more to gain from magnanimity – “he had, after all, won”.

Photography

The National Maritime Museum has revealed the shortlist for its Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition, including snaps of a solar flare erupting on the sun’s surface; a comet streaking across a rugged sunset in the Negev desert; the spiral galaxy NGC 3521 looking like a “galactic gem”; and the “jellyfish nebula”, a remnant of a supernova in the Gemini constellation. See the rest here.

On the money

Instagram/@thebillionairesnetwork

There’s a thriving black market for live cheetahs in Gulf states, says Bloomberg. From 2010 to 2021, about 5,600 animals were involved in the trade, which usually involves them being “transported by boat out of the Horn of Africa”. Sales are arranged on social media and messaging apps like WhatsApp. Prices for a single cub, for which an Ethiopian poacher might receive as little as $100, reached $50,000 last year.

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Quirk of history

Two years early and incredibly good value: the Hoover Dam. Mark Newman/Getty

Big infrastructure projects weren’t always cursed to run behind schedule and over budget, says The Washington Post. After the US Congress authorised the construction of the Hoover Dam on the Arizona-Nevada border, it took just a year and a half to allocate water rights and settle the financing. In March 1931, the contracts were put out to bid, “a process that took a week”. By 30 September, 1935, President Franklin D Roosevelt “was being strapped into a steel frame to deliver a rousing speech at the world’s tallest dam”, which had been completed two years ahead of schedule and at a cost of less than $2bn in today’s dollars.

Comment

Elton John performing at LA’s Dodger Stadium in 1975. Twitter/@EltonOfficial

“To be English is to be an oddball”

Among the “casually destructive assumptions about other nations”, says Finn McRedmond in The Irish Times, one I hear all too often is that there is something “rotten and small-minded” at the core of Englishness. One look at Elton John shows just what a ridiculous lie that is. With millions of records sold and his “general cosmic level of fame”, it would be easy to forget that he “was once a radical”. The world was not always ready to embrace “strange male pianists in feather boas and sequins”. But he was a “trailblazer” of the kind that can only grow up in England – a country “naturally tailored to house eccentrics”.

Christopher Hitchens was fond of pointing out that weirdness is written into the very landscape, in strange place names like “Slaughter” and “Wittering”. In many ways, “to be English is to be an oddball: off-piste in matters of opinion, quirky in behaviour and independently minded”. Kooks like Elton and David Bowie and the many other renegades who followed them, brought unorthodox music into the American charts after first being accepted and embraced in England. In that sense, the country can credibly claim to be a “pioneering force” in cultural open-mindedness, welcoming the “weird and not quite yet socially acceptable”. In a US-dominated cultural landscape that can sometimes feel “terribly one-note”, it’s good to be reminded of the great tradition of the English eccentric.

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Fashion

There’s a new warm-weather aesthetic, says Eliza: “yacht girl summer”. It basically involves looking so “classy, elegant and expensive” that people assume you spend July cruising the French Riviera – think Succession’s Shiv Roy meets Gossip Girl’s Blair Waldorf. Staples of the opulent wardrobe include crochet dresses for lounging on the beach, linen two-pieces to stay cool while exploring coastal towns, and a large floppy hat that keeps the rays off your face while sitting on deck. For more ideas, click here.

Noted

A looming “artillery shortfall” in the Ukrainian military has led America to consider sending Kyiv cluster munitions, says Hal Brands in Bloomberg. The weapons, which “contain small bomblets that saturate the target area”, are a “humanitarian nightmare” banned by more than 100 countries – yet the US has a sizeable stock it can donate more easily than relatively scarce conventional ammo. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is pushing strongly for the move.

Snapshot

Snapshot answer

The world’s largest cruise ship has taken to the water for the first time. Royal Caribbean’s record-breaking Icon of the Seas – which weighs more than 250,000 tons and measures close to 1,200 ft long – has left a Finnish shipyard for its first round of “sea trials” before its first passenger trip around the Caribbean this winter. The boat’s 20 decks can hold 5,610 passengers and 2,350 staff; onboard, there’s rollercoasters, 40 restaurants and the world’s largest waterpark at sea.

Quoted

“I don’t believe in astrology; I’m a Sagittarius and we’re sceptical.”