Новости за 09.04.2015

As Jim Murphy, Labour’s leader in Scotland, remarked during the last television debate, much of the coverage of the election is about the horse trading that will begin on 8 May rather than about the issues that will be at stake 24 hours earlier on polling day. Nowhere is this clearer than on defence. Defence is vital, yet the arguments have been too readily reduced to what the Scottish National Party (SNP) might or might not do in the House of Commons with MPs who are, as yet, not even elected.

The seventh Summit of the Americas, which begins on Friday in Panama City, will be a historic affair, with the leaders of Cuba and the United States in attendance together for the first time.

Controversial designs for a £125 million Nobel Center in Stockholm could be scrapped in the face of mounting opposition to the project, designed by award-winning British architect Sir David Chipperfield.

Dmitri Shostakovich was finishing the finale of his Violin Concerto No 1 when the Stalinists declared war on him and his music, whose ‘formalist perversions’ and ‘anti-democratic tendencies’ represented everything they wanted to eradicate; he lost his teaching job, and for the following five years presented only the blandest musical fare.