There have been penalties for those who looked the other way when Epstein was convicted of child sex offences and decided to maintain relationships with the financier — but not for the British ambassador to Washington, reveals SOLOMON HUGHES
Asparagus: a prized perennial
From seed to sumptuous spears, MAT COWARD offers advice to gardeners with less-than-ideal conditions
Simon Hibbs (left) and Paul McGuffie at New Farm Produce Ltd in Lichfield, Staffordshire
Labour’s new Treasury unit will ‘challenge unnecessary regulation’ by forcing nominally independent bodies like Ofwat to bend to business demands — exactly what Iain Anderson’s corporate clients wanted, writes SOLOMON HUGHES
DR DYLAN MURPHY looks at a Big Brother Watch report which exposes the government as an enabler of DWP secret spying on benefit claimants
The EU faces a critical choice: will it remain in the shadow of an increasingly unreliable US ally, or will it forge its own path in a multilateral world where co-operation with China is essential, asks MARC VANDEPITTE as leaders meet for the EU-China Summit
A lot of discussion about how the left should currently organise – including debate on whether the Green Party is a useful vehicle for advance – runs the risk of refusing to engage with or learn from the reasons the left was defeated previously, argues KEVIN OVENDEN
For Egypt trade trumps the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, but how long can the country’s ‘misleaders’ – and others in the region – continue their indifference against the popular will of their own people, asks ROGER McKENZIE
THE best time to plant an asparagus bed is three years ago, the old saying has it, because the wait is about that long before you get a full crop. The good news is that once it starts cropping it should keep going at full strength for at least a decade, and can still be productive 20 years on.
In Britain it is traditional to stop cutting asparagus around June 21, giving the plants the rest of the year to recover their strength ready for next season. You get around six to eight weeks of harvest annually, starting in April, at a time when the garden isn’t producing much else except puddles. I think it’s that, as much as the supermarket price, which makes asparagus seem so luxurious, more so perhaps than anything else on the vegetable patch.
I’ve planted a few asparagus beds over the years, and some have been great successes while others have been equally impressive failures. Unfortunately, the rules don’t always help.
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