The Spectator

100 years of Pyrex, processed cheese and nudes in movies

From our UK edition

Marking a century Some things which celebrate their 100th birthday in 2015: 3-D films The first was shown at the Astor Theater in New York on 10 June, featuring the Niagara Falls. Nude scenes in films Audrey Munson played an artist’s model in Inspiration, a film by George Foster Platt released by the Mutual Film Corporation on 18 November 1915. It didn’t lead to a long career. By 1920 she was selling kitchen goods door-to-door. The following year she tried to take her life and in 1931 was consigned to a psychiatric hospital where she spent the rest of her life before dying, aged 104, in 1996. Pyrex, which was introduced in the buffet cars of American trains. Compulsory voting It was introduced for the first time in state elections in Queensland.

Spectator letters: RT replies, Bristol bristles, and Ross Clark doesn’t (yet) eat his hat

From our UK edition

Moscow writing Sir: After months of lamentations from western politicians and officials about losing the ‘information war’ to Russia, a former executive editor of Radio Free Europe tries to paint everything Russia Today does in terms of a ‘propaganda’ campaign (‘Moscow calling’, 6 December). If RT is not inherently bad, it is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, says John O’Sullivan. Take the sectarian violence in Libya, and the Syrian rebel groups that have now become Isis. Russia Today was reporting on these issues years before anyone else cared to. According to O’Sullivan’s article, when we cover the hypocrisy of US or European policies it is simply to further RT’s pro-Russian, anti-western agenda.