Prizewinner of the week

A politician’s waist size may also be a sign of the amount of corruption in their regime, reckons the winner of this year’s

Ig Nobel economics prize. Pavlo Blavatskyy of Montpellier Business

School estimated the body mass index of ministers in ex-Soviet republics, finding “those places where officials were most likely to be on the take… were also home to the most portly parliamentarians”, says The Times. The link between girth and sleaze goes back a long way. Nero, one of the most corrupt Roman emperors, was also “one of the more corpulent”. Henry VIII (pictured) “grew more rapacious as his frame became more capacious”. Hermann Goering was “the greediest, in all senses” of Hitler’s inner circle. North Korea’s Kim Jong-un “is a model neither of healthy eating or good governance”. The satirical Ig Nobel awards “honour academics whose research is amusing as well as thought provoking”. The winners get a counterfeit 10trn Zimbabwean-dollar banknote.