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OpinionChess This article is more than 8 years oldThe chess toilet scandal shows cheating isn’t black-and-whiteThis article is more than 8 years oldStephen MossGaioz Nigalidze’s disgrace for appearing to use a chess program in the Dubai Open reveals the merciless pressure on lower-ranking professionalsThe case of Gaioz Nigalidze, the 25-year-old Georgian chess champion being excoriated as a cheat for having allegedly hidden a mobile phone with a chess program in a lavatory while playing in the Dubai Open, is a peculiar one.

Journeys in literatureFictionWittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson – travels with a solitary soulThis extraordinary book is a journey into loneliness that encompasses all the stuff of life Kate, the narrator of David Markson’s 1988 novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress, is a world traveller. She has sailed the Aegean and the Bering Strait, and driven across Russia and western Europe. A painter, Kate has not only visited but lived in some of the world’s most famous art museums: the Met, the Louvre, the Uffizi, the Tate.

The ObserverUS crimeAccused of killing two white girls in South Carolina, George Stinney Jr was tried and electrocuted in just 83 days. As a judge ponders whether to quash the verdict, Karen McVeigh speaks to the families involvedAn old storage shed, half swallowed by weeds, shimmers in the hazy winter sunshine opposite the Green Hill Missionary Baptist Church. This is all that remains of the thriving lumber yard and sawmill on which Alcolu, a rural town in South Carolina, was built.

Happy Valley: episode-by-episodeHappy ValleyHappy Valley recap: series 2, episode 5 – did Sally Wainwright rip off Steinbeck?The penultimate episode had lots of booze, brilliant two-handers and a breathtaking ending that seemed shamelessly lifted from Of Mice and Men This week, before Jake Bugg starts to sing … Catherine and Ann have had a long drunken night out, while Frances has made the petrol bomb she plans to throw through Catherine’s window.

Cities from scratchCitiesThe rapper’s utopian attempt to secede from the US, as documented in his Netflix show Trigger Warning, is more than just clever TV The word “utopia” was coined in the early 16th century by Thomas More, writer, philosopher and counsellor to King Henry VIII. His book of the same name fantasised about an island nation home to a society free from Europe’s rule, where wealth was to be redundant and the fruits of the land shared equally by all.

CultureFor decades, film and TV fascination with aliens has reflected ourselves – our fears, anxieties, hopes – long before a Senate report took them seriously It came out of the sky: US releases highly anticipated UFO report Anticipation of the unclassified report by the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force has, unsurprisingly, sent America’s long-running UFO fascination into overdrive. The confirmation of an unexplained somethings by even Barack Obama has felt unsettling, like a misread headline.

The ObserverHorror filmsReviewA co-production between Ireland and Scotland with an excellent cast from both sides of the Irish sea, Colm McCarthy's crepuscular horror dispatches James Nesbitt from a travellers' camp in Ireland on a punitive mission to Scotland. He's settling some obscure, ritual score between, one infers, two branches of witchcraft and warlockry that he initiated by raping someone in the other camp. I'm not sure I got the plot right: the spirit of that Celtic shaman O'Pake hovers over the picture.

TheatreReviewPark theatre, London This adaptation of CS Lewis’s collection of sardonic letters from a senior to a junior devil is excessively and noisily theatrical The big question is whether CS Lewis’s 1940 collection of letters, written by a senior to a junior devil, is suited to the stage. You can create drama out of epistolary exchanges, but Lewis makes it difficult by providing only one side of the correspondence. As if to over-compensate, this imported American version, adapted by Max McLean and Jeffrey Fiske and performed and directed by McLean, is excessively and noisily theatrical.

The ‘fake embassy’ building in Accra, Ghana. Photograph: YEPOKA YEEBOLast year, the US state department said it had uncovered a fake embassy in Accra that had been issuing a stream of forged visas. The story went viral – but all was not as it seemed. By Yepoka Yeebo by Yepoka YeeboOn Friday 2 December 2016, a curious story appeared on the website GhanaBusinessNews.com. “Ghana security authorities shut down fake US Embassy in Accra,” the headline declared.