Indholdsfortegnelse for 12 August 2022 i Guardian Weekly

The floating guava market of Swarupkathi in southern Bangladesh continues to operate in the same way as it has for more than a century. Boats transport thousands of tonnes of guava each day, grown across 640 hectares of land. Farmers carry the fruit from orchards next to the river, and trading takes place on hundreds of boats. The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol 207 | Issue № 7 Guardian Weekly is an edited selection of some of the best journalism found in the Guardian and Observer newspapers in the UK and the Guardian’s digital editions in the UK, US and Australia. The weekly magazine has an international focus and three editions: global, Australia and North America. The Guardian was founded in 1821, and Guardian Weekly…

Roy Blunt lived up to his surname when he said last week: “So I’m about to use four words in a row that I haven’t used in this way before, and those four words are: ‘Speaker Pelosi was right.’” The Republican senator was praising Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, the first by a speaker of the US House of Representatives in a quarter of a century. But not everyone was so sure. In enraging China, which claims the self-governing island as its territory, Pelosi deepened a rupture between the world’s two most powerful countries – and may have hurt the cause she was seeking to promote. Last Thursday, China began a series of huge military drills around the island; the White House summoned China’s ambassador, Qin Gang, to protest. Last…

Like millions of people across Britain, Josina, a teacher from Sheffield, is being pushed into poverty by rising energy prices. This October, when bills are set to rise again, she will have to cut back on food and other essentials if she has any hope of keeping up with the payments. “It’s terrifying, especially with three teenagers in the house. They aren’t old enough to be out working yet. They’re relying on us, and it’s a really scary thought that you potentially can’t provide for your children in that way,” she said. So Josina, 35, has made a decision: she is not going to pay her energy bill. She is one of thousands joining a civil disobedience movement protesting at the soaring cost of energy. From 1 October, the energy…

Last Tuesday, viewers set new records on Flightradar24, one of the largest flight tracker websites in the world, as they watched the seven-hour flight of Nancy Pelosi from Kuala Lumpur to Taipei. The trip, shrouded in secrecy until its final moments, grabbed international attention after China made military threats in the weeks leading up to the visit, and then launched livefire exercises once she had landed. Ian Petchenik, the head of communications for Flightradar24, said the site had seen “unprecedented sustained interest” over Pelosi’s flight, and at its peak, a record 708,000 people were simultaneously watching the little red icon representing the House speaker’s Boeing C-40C as it looped around the Philippines to bypass Chinese bases in the South China Sea, then soared across the Luzon Strait and arced across…

It is less of a marathon and more of an amble. But then a “walking forest” of 1,000 trees was never going to move at speed. Since May, volunteers have been transporting the native trees planted in wooden containers along a 3.5km stretch through the centre of the northern Dutch city of Leeuwarden, giving people an opportunity to experience an alternative, greener future. Cool of the wild More tree cover in urban environments means lower land temperatures – a planning feature that is becoming increasingly crucial in a heating world. A study conducted across nearly 300 European cities show ed that urban trees can cool the land surface temperature by up to 12 C in summer. “We are a generation that has almost lost all hope,” said Johan Lakke, a…

PAULA HAWKINS AUTHOR OF THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN What makes a great thriller/crime novel? Memorable and compelling characters. Plot twists and cliffhangers can feel manufactured, a great character never does. What’s your favourite thriller of all time? Barbara Vine’s A Dark-Adapted Eye, in which the mystery is not a murder but the puzzle presented by a dysfunctional family’s fraught relationships. Vine’s insights are applied not to criminal masterminds but to us – ordinary people. What’s the best one you’ve read recently? Danya Kukafk a’s Notes on an Execution, which subverts traditional serial-killer narratives and asks questions about the way we talk (and write) about crime. RICHARD OSMAN AUTHOR OF THE THURSDAY MURDER CLUB What makes a great thriller/crime novel? Characters we care about facing impossible problems. We live in…

Who knew? Wagner’s Ring cycle isn’t a saga of gold, power and love. In fact, it is a tale of child abduction and dehumanisation. Or at least that is what Austrian director Valentin Schwarz seems to be arguing in the first part of this long-awaited new Ring cycle at the Bavarian festival. There have been changes of director, delays caused by the pandemic and the conductor Pietari Inkinen pulled out because of Covid. The baton passed to the Stuttgart opera music director Cornelius Meister, who opened the Ring with a well-paced, fluent account of Das Rheingold, beautifully played by the Bayreuth festival orchestra. In Schwarz’s concept-heavy production, Rheingold opens in a children’s paddling pool, from which Alberich, renouncing love for no obvious reason, seizes a young boy. It is a…

What can I cook outdoors – on the barbecue or a campfire – that’s easy and requires minimal equipment? Josh, Norwich, England When playing with fire, chef Itamar Srulovich suggests staying “in the realm of wrapped food”. And the simplest solution is whole sweetcorn. “It’s the ultimate summer food,” says the co-founder of Honey & Co. Make sure you get corn with the husk on: “ Grill them on the barbecue and the kernels will steam inside.” Once cooked and cool enough to handle, remove the husks and pop them back on the barbie, “ for a little smokiness”. Brush with chilli butter and honey: “It’s so good.” Prawns also fit the wrapped food bill: “Leave the shells on,” says Srulovich, “not only because they give a huge amount of…

I didn’t know if it would still be here. It’s been 34 years. Gary, the school caretaker, meets me at the gates. We walk across a car park and a court for tennis and basketball; there’s a little artificial football pitch on the other side, and up ahead of us is a row of allotments. Beyond that, there’s a fence to mark the start of the wood. I really do remember when all this was fields. “Which one’s yours?” Gary asks. “Not sure.” I was in my third year of junior school when I planted it. Everyone in our class planted one: a birch, a cherry, a lime, an ash, at the top of the playing field, when there was nothing but grass and a running track. We go into…

Things changed last week for Taiwan. When news of a highly controversial visit by the US speaker, Nancy Pelosi, drew threats of reprisals from Beijing, most citizens shrugged. China frequently fulminates over foreign visits to Taiwan, which it claims is a Chinese province it will soon retake, and with which it tries to stop any international cooperation. Its regular promises of countermeasures rarely exceed some People’s Liberation Army jets flying in and out of Taiwan’s large air defence identification zone (ADIZ). But analysts warned that this time looked different. Beijing’s protests were louder and more threatening, and gave little room for either it or the US to retreat without losing credibility. This time, it would have to follow through with something bigger, they said. China did. Dramatic escalation Shortly after…

Three billboards in the Ural city of Ekaterinburg shine a light on what was once one of Russia’s most shadowy organisations, the private military contractor Wagner. “Motherland, Honour, Blood, Bravery. WAGNER,” one of the posters reads. Another, which locals said had appeared in early July, depicts three men in uniform next to the words “Wagner2022.org”. The posters are testament to the transformation of the group since Moscow launched its invasion, from a secretive mercenary organisation to an increasingly public extension of Russia’s military. “It looks like they have decided that they will no longer try to hide their existence,” said Denis Korotkov, a former Novaya Gazeta journalist. Wagner was established in 2014 to support pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. The US and others say it is funded by Yevgeny Prigozhin,…

Boris Johnson and the Tory leadership candidates should agree an immediate emergency budget tackling the spiralling cost of living, Gordon Brown has said, or risk “condemning millions of vulnerable and blameless children and pensioners to a winter of dire poverty”. The former prime minister spoke out as figures show that more than 4 m households are likely to spend a quarter of their net income on energy. “The reality is grim and undeniable: a financial timebomb will explode for families in October as a second round of fuel price rises in six months sends shock waves through every household and pushes millions over the edge,” Brown wrote in the Observer. “The more the Conservative leadership election heats up, the more the remaining candidates have resorted to claiming the moral high…

There is a table in Soontaree Thiprat’s Phuket cafe that is always fully booked. Most of her customers at the Dibuk restaurant want to sit in the corner, at the spot with the red tablecloth and purple flower. It is the table where the male student characters Teh and Oh-aew, played by Putthipong “Billkin” Assaratanakul and Krit “PP” Amnuaydechkorn, sit and flirt in I Told Sunset About You and its sequel, I Promised You the Moon, a romantic Thai series that has proved hugely popular at home and abroad. Devoted fans have flocked not only from across Thailand but from Japan, Korea and Vietnam to pose for photos in Billkin and PP’s hangout. I Told Sunset About You is part of a recent wave of Thai dramas known as “boys’…

It has been an exhausting summer to be disabled. Every day there seems to be a news story. The Lizzo ableist slur, followed by the Beyoncé ableist slur – the exact same one – mere weeks later. The model whose prosthetic leg was edited out of a celebratory “beach bodies” advert. The virulent bullying of the deaf Love Island contestant Tasha Ghouri, both on social media and in the villa. Some of the slights have been more subtle, woven into the fabric of the work surrounding them so seamlessly that they could, and probably will, be explained to me by able-bodied people as being perfectly fine. But it was disappointing to see the final episode of Derry Girls – lauded as “ a triumph ” by reviewers – using a…

One of the many confounding pleasures of The Rehearsal, comedian Nathan Fielder’s elaborate social experiment/docu-reality HBO series, is how often the show exposes its own illusions. The central concept of the series is straightforward, if typically absurd: what if you could rehearse fraught conversations or situations in advance? How much could you control if you had every resource to prepare? The show depicts both the tedious constructions of facsimile – building a replica bar, hiring actors, stress-testing potential conversations – and the unnerving, at times sublime, suspension of disbelief. In his prior show, Comedy Central’s cult hit Nathan For You, Fielder drew laughs as the ultimate committer to harebrained ideas carried far past the point of sense, with such deadpan absurdity that you couldn’t distinguish between silly and serious. During…

For those not forced to live it day to day, the reality of Israel’s occupation of Pales tine can be conveniently repackaged with whatever euphemism fits the prevailing political mood, from “peace initiative” to “rising tensions”. For the past couple of years, the buzzword has been “normalisation” – the aim of the US-brokered Abraham Accords of 2020 by which a number of Arab states, led by the UAE, discarded their red line of independence for Palestine and established official relations with Israel. The Palestinians were not invited to the talks, and the star US negotiator, Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, described their 70-plus-year history of violent dispossession as “ nothing more than a real-estate dispute ”. The new tactic for dealing with the injustice at the heart of the region’s…

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1 UNITED STATES Senate passes $739bn healthcare and climate bill Senate Democrats passed their climate and healthcare spending package, sending the legislation to the House and bringing Joe Biden one step closer to a significant legislative victory ahead of crucial midterm elections in November. If signed into law, the bill, formally known as the Inflation Reduction Act, would allocate $369bn to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and investing in renewable energy sources. Experts have estimated the climate provisions of the bill will reduce planet-heating emissions in the US by about 40% by 2030, compared with 2005 levels Democrats have promised the bill will lower healthcare costs for millions of Americans. Those who receive health insurance coverage through the Affordable Care Act marketplace are also expected to benefit from lower premium costs. The…

CONSERVATIVES Tory rivals trade blows over economics and education Rishi Sunak launched a fresh attack on his Conservative leadership rival Liz Truss’s plan for tax cuts in an emergency budget, describing it as a “big bung” for large businesses and the better-off, which would do little to help those most in need. Truss had told the Financial Times that she rejected “handouts” as a way of helping people affected by the cost of living crisis, preferring to use tax cuts as the primary way of giving people financial support. She was accused of making another U-turn within a week, last Sunday, after her campaign tried to play down suggestions there would be no support payments to help millions of struggling people through an already worsening cost of living crisis this…

China’s decision to halt cooperation with the US over the climate crisis has provoked alarm, with seasoned climate diplomats urging a swift resumption of talks to help stave off worsening global heating. Beijing announced, last Friday, measures aimed at retaliating against the US for the “egregious provocation” of a visit to Taiwan by Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the US House of Representatives. While the extent of China’s withdrawal from climate discussions is not clear, the move threatens to derail the often fragile cooperation between the two largest carbon emitters, with only a few months before the crucial UN C op27 in Egypt. Experts say there is little hope of avoiding disastrous global heating without strong action by the US and China, which are together responsible for about 40% of…

It was one of Ayman al-Zawahiri’s last victories. Just over a week before the al-Qaida leader was killed in Kabul by missiles fired from a US drone, militants from the organisation’s biggest affiliate in sub-Saharan Africa attacked the most important military base in Mali. The tactics of the attack were familiar – suicide bombers blowing a gap in defences to allow gunmen to reach stunned defenders – but the operation marked an escalation. In more than a decade of insurgent warfare in Mali, al-Qaida had never struck any target of such significance nor so close to the capital, Bamako. The attack on the base in Kati underlined the tenacity of the organisation in Africa and elsewhere despite decades of intense pressure from a US-led counter-terrorist campaign and fierce rivalry from…

Five years ago, Unilever announced a “radical recycling” process aimed at tackling a huge waste scourge it helped to create: billions of single-use sachets that litter south-east Asia’s landfills, pollute its waterways and wash up on its beaches. The “sachet economy” of single servings at low prices, targeting poorer consumers, began across much of the developing world in the 1990s. Sold at shops and stalls across south-east Asia and Africa, these brightly coloured palm-sized packets contain everything from shampoo to coffee. But their size and multilayered structure render them almost impossible to collect and recycle. In Indonesia, which lacks the infrastructure to deal with waste, they represent the ultimate symbol of throwaway culture, making up 16% of all plastic waste. Indonesia produces 7.8m tonnes of plastic waste a year, according…

It was once the most popular boy’s name in France, inspired in part by Hollywood films and boybands. But for the more than 150,000 French Kevins, the name has become so targeted by mockery, comic sketches and class prejudice that a new documentary is hoping to set the record straight and “save the Kevins”. Kevin – sometimes spelled Kévin – saw a boom in France in the early 1990s. More than 13,000 babies were called Kevin in 1991 alone, when it was the most popular name in every mainland region. Sociologists say it is hard to pinpoint exact reasons for the French trend for the Celtic-origin name, but many families feel the name was boosted by US movie imports, including Dances with Wolves starring Kevin Costner or Home Alone, with…

Viktor Orbán, the autocratic leader of Hungary, has urged Christian nationalists in Europe and the US to “unite our forces” during a speech to American conservatives in Texas. The prime minister met the former US president Donald Trump in New Jersey and, last Thursday, delivered the opening address at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas, Texas. Orbán was given a rapturous welcome despite controversy last month when he railed against Europe becoming a “mixed-race” society, comments that one of his closest aides compared to the Nazis before resigning. In his CPAC address, he sought to portray western civilisation as under siege from progressives. He took aim at familiar targets such as illegal immigration, same-sex marriage, “leftist media” and philanthropist George Soros while quoting the Fox News host Tucker…

I DON’T SEE HOW IT CAN HARM ME NOW TO REVEAL that I only passed math in high school because I cheated. I could add and subtract and multiply and divide, but I entered the wilderness when words became equations. On test days I sat beside smart boys and girls whose handwriting I could read and divided my attention between his or her desk and the teacher’s eyes. To pass Algebra II, I copied a term paper and nearly got caught. By then I was going to a boys’ school, and it gives me pause to think that I might have been kicked out and had to begin a different life, knowing different people, having different experiences, and eventually erasing the person I am now. When I read Memories, Dreams,…

Fifteen years ago this week the French bank BNP Paribas announced it was closing three of its hedge funds heavily exposed to the US sub-prime mortgage market. On the day little heed was paid to the news, but it quickly became apparent that just about every big financial institution was up to its neck in securities linked to American home loans. In early August 2007, BNP was simply the pebble that marked the coming avalanche. Another August, another crisis. Memories of 2007 were rekindled by Andrew Bailey last week when the governor of the Bank of England announced that interest rates were being raised just as the UK economy is expected to hit the wall. Leaving the pandemic-induced collapse in activity apart, the last “proper” global recession was the financial…

An outburst of laughter, Freud maintained, is an eruption from the unconscious. It’s a belief that American psychoanalyst and poet Nuar Alsadir sets about unpacking in Animal Joy, her ruminative interrogation into the might and meaning of this vital mode of human communication. Understanding it better, she suggests, can open us up to a less constrained, more spontaneous experience of the world around us. Splicing sometimes dense academic theory with provocations drawn from the fraught years of the Trump presidency as well as from her personal and professional life, Alsadir covers topics as diverse as the equalising properties of a New York subway car, the Brett Kavanaugh supreme court confirmation hearings, and computer viruses as “a form of art and a form of prophecy”. An early portion of the book…