The ObserverFood This article is more than 9 months oldMay I have a word about the real meaning of ambient foodThis article is more than 9 months oldJonathan BouquetItems that can be safely stored at room temperature now have their own special wordI know I must be an oddity but I do enjoy reading the City pages in newspapers, despite dodgy banks, inflation, doom loops, death spirals and Andrew Bailey.

UFOs This article is more than 10 years oldRoswell author who said he handled UFO crash debris dies at 76This article is more than 10 years oldFlight surgeon Jesse Marcel Jr said his air force father brought home debris from Roswell crash site in 1947Jesse Marcel Jr, who said he handled debris from the 1947 crash of an unidentified flying object near Roswell, New Mexico, has died at the age of 76.

The new vegetarianMiddle Eastern food and drinkThere’s a right way and a wrong way to make this brilliant Middle Eastern salad, says Yotam Ottolenghi. Here’s the right way… I have seen a million bastardised versions of this simple salad which hails from the part of the Middle East that covers Palestine, Lebanon and Syria. The most common issue is the proportions – far too many cooks do not realise that parsley is the star of the show here, not the bulgar, and definitely not couscous (to avoid any confusion, after each ingredient I've added in parenthesis what the chopped weight should be as it goes into the salad).

Society booksReviewThis much-touted literary love letter to Alcoholics Anonymous is too moral in its argument for the superiority of the sober Leslie Jamison’s narrative ode to Alcoholics Anonymous was written during a calm era (the Obama years) when getting sober may have seemed prudent and wise, but it is published, alas, at a time when intoxication is, if not prudent, at least sometimes necessary. It might have been almost amusing to get sober under Obama, with the sun shining cheerfully every day (but never burning too hot, contained as it then was under the hopeful rubric of a climate agreement with no less glamorous a provenance than Paris).

The ObserverIranThe US isn’t the biggest power in the Middle East any more. Iran isSimon TisdallWith China and Russia as its allies, the authoritarian regime is assembling a Middle Eastern coalition as Washington’s influence wanes The first of what may be manyUS-led air strikes on Iranian-backed Houthi Shia militants in Yemen marks another dismaying milestone on a long trail of western policy failures in the Middle East – the most pivotal and consequential of which remains the decades-old failure to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict.