Jacob Zuma has finally unveiled his conspiracy claims and, after all the hype, the evidence he presents is surprisingly insubstantial. One thread of his voluminous application for a permanent dismissal of the charges is his claim that the case is essentially malicious, and has been pursued to stop him becoming president.

At the end of last month, some of the world’s most powerful companies took a first step towards saving the Amazon rainforest from the ravages of soya cultivation. An unlikely union of Greenpeace, McDonald’s and leading United Kingdom supermarkets successfully pressured multinational United States-based commodities brokers into signing a two-year moratorium on buying soya from newly deforested land in the Amazon.

There are two approaches to mathe­matics in this world, and both are elegantly laid bare by a bigamist, noisily en route to St Ives. This wanderer, you will recall, was accompanied by seven wives, each of whom had seven sacks. Every sack contained seven cats, and every cat had seven kits. Given the general pandemonium that this caravan would have created as it passed by, caterwauling and kvetching, one could forgive roving census-takers for fudging their figures that day.