Indholdsfortegnelse for 5th March 2021 i Guardian Weekly

Nights to remember Mount Etna’s spectacular eruptions reached a peak early last week when its lava fountains soared to 1,500 metres – a display described by one expert as “one of the most striking in the last few decades”. Europe’s most active volcano has been on explosive form, spewing magma and ash reaching as far as Catania, 40km away. The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 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 in 1919. We exist to…

Ye Swan Htet, 23, had joined a sit-down protest on a bridge in west Yangon when he saw police approaching. Officers were carrying guns, he remembered, but he didn’t expect them to actually shoot. The protest was peaceful; crowds were singing and clapping. Then, gun fire rang out. Bricks burst open and a branch snapped from a tree. “There was a guy who got hit in his thigh by a rubber bullet, so I carried him to an ambulance,” he said. Ye Swan Htet saw five protesters run frantically towards him. They were carrying his cousin, Nyi Nyi Aung Htet Naing, who had been shot in his lower abdomen. Doctors in a nearby neighbourhood desperately tried to help, said Ye Swan Htet, but they were unable to save him. A…

After two years of blanket cover from Donald Trump, a new US president has officially blamed Mohammed bin Salman for the most savage political slaying of modern times and brought the Saudi heir’s unchecked run with Washington to a halt. Joe Biden’s confirmation that Prince Mohammed approved the butchering of Jamal Khashoggi bluntly ends the era of bromance between his predecessor and the kingdom’s de facto leader, and signals a very different relationship with a new administration. But the decision to avoid penalising the crown prince was seen in Riyadh as a validation of the weight it still holds even with hostile Washington officials. Despite being a pariah, it remains a key player and, given what could have transpired, the mood in the Saudi capital last Friday night was one…

When Shamima Begum, heavily pregnant and alone, escaped the USled coalition bombing of Islamic State’s last stronghold two years ago, she left behind a scene resembling hell and entered limbo. Begum was among an astonishing 64,000 women and children who poured out of Baghuz, a tiny oasis town on the Euphrates River, deep in the Syrian desert. Many of their husbands and fathers died defending the last sliver of the so-called caliphate. There was no plan in place for what to do with these families. Al-Hawl camp, where Begum surfaced, quickly became the focal point of a new humanitarian crisis starring unsympathetic protagonists. Already home to about 10,000 Syrians and Iraqis who had fled the group since 2016, suddenly it had a huge influx of new, and in some cases…

The Atlantic Ocean circulation that underpins the Gulf Stream, the weather system that brings warm and mild weather to Europe, is at its weakest in more than a millennium, and climate breakdown is the probable cause, according to new data. Further weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) could result in more storms, more intense winters and an increase in heatwaves and droughts in Europe. Scientists predict that the AMOC will weaken further if global heating continues, and could reduce by about 34% to 45% by the end of this century, which could bring a “tipping point” at which the system could become irrevocably unstable. A weakened Gulf Stream would also raise sea levels on the Atlantic coast of the US, with potentially disastrous consequences. Stefan Rahmstorf, of the…

Scott Morrison, the Australian prime minister, prides himself on his ability to shape media narratives. A former advertising executive, he is used to controlling the message. But over the past few weeks, one story has refused to bend to his will and exposed a weak spot: women. Morrison is struggling to manage growing anger over the handling of a young staffer’s rape allegation, the parliamentary culture, and how women working within it are treated. He has been unable to direct attention away from the issues raised by Brittany Higgins, a former media adviser who alleges she was raped by a colleague in a ministerial office in March 2019. Initially the matter was handled internally, with Higgins offered support, but also made aware that an election was weeks away. Higgins, who…

It is often described as India’s greatest unifier, a sport that – at least on the field – has been insulated from the religious schisms that have long divided the country. But in recent weeks cricket’s position as one of the final bastions of a secular India has come under attack, as the anti-Muslim sentiment that has been on the rise in India under the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) reared its head in an ugly cricketing scandal. Name game In a further sign of the links between the BJP and India’s favourite sport, it was revealed last week that the Motera Stadium in Ahmedabad – the world’s largest cricket venue with a 110,000 capacity has been renamed the Narendra Modi Stadium after the prime minister. Wasim Jaffer,…

An embittered Donald Trump used his first post-presidential speech to propagate the lie of a “rigged” election in 2020 and hint that he might try to beat Democrats “for a third time” in 2024. Grasping for continued relevance, Trump returned to his political comfort zone by fear mongering about immigrants and unleashing angry tirades against Joe Biden, his Republican critics and the media. The twice-impeached former president, greeted by wild cheers at the biggest annual gathering of grassroots conservatives in Orlando, Florida, falsely asserted: “Illegal aliens and dead people are voting, and many other horrible things are happening that are too voluminous to even mention, but people know. “I mean, it’s being studied and the level of dishonesty is not to be believed. We have a very sick and corrupt…

On the night of 30 October 2019, as Mexicans were preparing to celebrate the Day of the Dead, the family of Jessica Jaramillo stood in the rain watching police search a house on the outskirts of Toluca, the capital of Mexico State. At about 9pm, the authorities carried out a dead dog, followed by two live ones and a cat. Then they pulled out a woman’s body. Jessi, a 23-year-old psychology student, had gone missing a week earlier. On 24 October, she hadn’t appeared at the spot where her parents usually picked her up after class. Within a few minutes, she called her mother to say she was going out, hung up, then texted to add: “Don’t worry, I’m with Óscar.” That was strange. Óscar, the father of Jessi’s 10-month-old…

When old foes clash, things can turn nasty. But the goriest of all battles are those waged when former comrades go to war. This rule of politics has a vivid case study in the extraordinary duel being fought between Alex Salmond, who led the Scottish National party for 20 years, and Nicola Sturgeon, who was his deputy for 10 of them before becoming leader and first minister nearly seven years ago. I’ve had a ringside seat for many a political feud. I thought I could no longer be shocked, but nothing has been as lurid as the bitter struggle that has erupted in Edinburgh. Salmond accuses senior figures in the party he once led of a multi-tentacled conspiracy to destroy his reputation. In a 26-page document submitted to an inquiry…

Saturday, 23 May 2015 was an important day in Irish history. It was the day when the votes were counted in the samesex marriage referendum, with 62 % in favour. There was a big celebration in the grounds of Dublin Castle, with politicians on a platform, all miraculously on our side. On Irish television news, the headlines informed the nation that Panti Bliss, a brilliantly articulate campaigner, had arrived at Dublin Castle, as indeed she had. Being gay was all the rage just then. Leo Varadkar, minister for health, soon to be taoiseach, had announced that he was gay, as did a former minister from the other main party, as did a well-known TV news journalist. That day it would not have been surprising had all the bishops of Ireland…

In the searing afternoon sun, Myo, 21, stood in front of a police barricade near Yangon’s Sule Pagoda – one of just a handful of protesters to gather at the rallying point last Wednesday. He stood alone, a towel wrapped around his neck to soak up the sweat, and held a sign that read “humanity” in front of the officers. “The military took away my future,” said the digital artist. “My work can no longer pay me. This country had barely started trying to develop and now it’s 2021. I don’t know what made them think they should stage a coup.” One month on since the military seized power from the democratically elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi, waves of mass protests have spread across Myanmar’s towns and cities,…

Britain risks creating “a new Guantánamo” in Syria by leaving Shamima Begum and others stranded in Syrian detention camps after the supreme court rejected her appeal against a decision to revoke her UK citizenship. Last Friday the supreme court ruled unanimously in favour of the home secretary and against Begum. She will not be allowed to re-enter the UK and will not be able to have her citizenship restored while she is being detained in a Kurdish al-Roj camp in Syria, where she is unable to access a lawyer. A key figure in the case said the judgment left the 21-year-old in a legal limbo, un able to return to the UK or mount an effective challenge to the deprivation decision remotely. “The court has said she can appeal [against]…

First came the tree, all 19.5 met res of it, with roots and branches and leaves. Then, weeks later, the discovery of 150 fossilised logs, one on top of the other, a short distance away. Nikolas Zouros, a professor of geology at the University of the Aegean, couldn’t believe his luck. In 25 years of excavating the petrified forest of Lesbos, he had unearthed nothing like it. “The tree is unique,” he said. “To discover it so complete and in such excellent condition is a first. To then discover a treasure trove of so many petrified trunks in a single pit was, well, unbelievable.” Stretching across almost all of the island’s western peninsula, the petrified forest, a Unesco global geopark, is among the largest in the world. Its vividly coloured…

For more than a decade, Tiasa Adhya has spent many days (and nights) in a small wooden boat, gliding through dense vegetation in the wetlands and mangroves of West Bengal, scanning the banks for signs of a rarely seen wild cat – Prionailurus viverrinus “Fishing cats are fascinating animals,” the wildlife biologist says. “They have co-inhabited riverine deltas and floodplains alongside humans for centuries. Ancient cultures like the Khmer empire show evidence of fishing cats.” As co-founder of the world’s longest-running fishing cat research and conservation project, Kolkata-based Adhya is dedicated to this endangered felid “When we began our work in 2010, very little was known about these cats,” she says of The Fishing Cat Project (TFCP). Today, the species is slightly better understood and appreciated, though it still receives…

Summoning the spirit of Ben Hogan might not be enough for Tiger Woods to prolong a remarkable career. That the golf world is not prepared for Woods to call time on tournament pursuits was clear in the aftermath of a road accident last week that left the 45-year-old requiring prolonged surgery on his right leg. Hogan did it, why can’t Tiger? Golf wants to cling on to an individual who transcends the sport and has singlehandedly hauled it into a different commercial stratosphere. The post-Woods age has lingered somewhere in the distance for some time, with no one really willing to address what it may entail. The reticence is completely understandable: Woods is a one-off. In 1949, Hogan was crushed having dived across his car to save his wife from…

Pudding Daintytot is a pink cat, with hearts sprinkled over its chest, a rainbow cresting behind it, wings, horns and a tail. “Born” in January 2019, Pudding is a “cryptokitty”: an example of what is known as a “non-fungible token”, the latest cryptocurrency craze – unique images, film clips, animations and even poems that are bought and sold online for increasingly large sums. Each cryptokitty is registered to a bitcoin-style database, and can be traded – and bred – according to algorithmic rules set down when the Crypto Kitties service was set up in 2017 by the Canadian startup Dapper Labs. The end result is a game, or art piece, that is somewhere between a real-world game of Pokémon, an automated version of Sotheby’s authenticity guarantee and digital trading cards.…

It’s a scene that’s been played out both in high drama and a blockbuster thriller, in Death and the Maiden and in Marathon Man – a victim chancing many years later upon their tormentor – but in Berlin in 2014 it happened for real. Anwar al-Bunni was in a grocery shop when he ran into a fellow Syrian émigré whose face was familiar. It took him a while to realise that the man was a former intelligence officer who, al-Bunni was sure, once interrogated and jailed him. That encounter led to a trial in a Koblenz court of two men: the intelligence officer and an underling, Eyad al-Gharib, who was last week found guilty of aiding and abetting a crime against humanity inside one of Bashar al-Assad’s jails, a crime…

Not long ago, Jannis Stürtz was at home in Berlin, checking the Instagram and Twitter pages for his record label, Habibi Funk. The former has 75,000 followers, testament to the treasure trove of information about “eclectic sounds from the Arab world” the feed contains: DJ mixes, old photos, posters, potted artist biographies, material that frequently goes beyond the stated remit and takes in visual art, film and sport. But one new name among the followers stood out: “Drake started following the Habibi Funk Twitter feed,” says Stürtz, in delighted tones. “Cool! I mean, that doesn’t make sense in my head, but cool!” Of course, if you were a famous rapper looking for new musical influences, you could do worse than check out Habibi Funk. Since 2015, the label has put…

The Nasa robot searching for signs of life on Mars is called Perseverance. It joins another rover named after a scientific virtue, Curiosity, which has been trundling around on the red planet since 2012. But why is perseverance a good thing? The word comes, via French, from the Latin perseverare, the root of which, severus, simply means “severe”: the compound term thus means one who follows a path steadfastly. So in English since the 14th century, often with a sense of pious virtue. We may assume that an extraterrestrial robot is not named after the special theological meaning (OED: “to continue until death in a state of grace”), but its handlers might hope it exemplifies another old sense – of remaining loyal, rather than going rogue in space.…

1 VACCINES Study shows Pfizer jab is as effective as trials promised The first major real-world study of the Pfizer/BioNTech coronavirus vaccine to be independently reviewed has shown that the jab is as good as the trials promised. A study of 1.2 million people in Israel, which has vaccinated most of its population, found that two doses cut symptomatic cases by 94% across all age groups and severe illness by 92%. The peer-reviewed data was published in the New England Journal of Medicine Meanwhile Public Health England has submitted a pre-print of a real-world study that shows that both the Pfizer and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines are highly effective in reducing Covid-19 infections among people aged 70 years and over. Since January, protection against symptomatic Covid, four weeks after the first dose,…

CORONAVIRUS Search for missing traveller with Brazil variant The government fac ed urgent calls for tougher border measures this week after UK officials said they were searching for one of six people infected with the highly transmissible Brazilian coronavirus variant. Public Health England said last Sunday that three cases of the variant had been detected in England and three in Scotland, but that the identity of one of those carrying the virus was unknown as they had not provided their contact details. The P1 variant, also known as the B1128 variant, shares some of the same mutations as the highly transmissible South African variant and was first identified in Manaus, Brazil, in January. It is thought that it could respond less well to current vaccines. Earlier this week an individual…

Aerial images of the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators who converged in towns and cities in recent days ha ve helped show the scale of animosity towards Myanmar’s military, which now faces the fallout of a nationwide strike. These events highlight the fragility of Myanmar’s political landscape. But they have also prompted a reckoning with the shortcomings, if not worse, of western engagement in Myanmar. The 1 February coup triggered a course reversal from western governments and institutions. Praise for November’s democratic elections, which handed victory to Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party, has since turned to condemnation of the generals and promises of action to coax – if not force – them from power. The US state department framed new sanctions as a means of “promoting…

Last Friday was the day that Joe Biden’s vaunted drive to put human rights back at the centre of US foreign policy slammed, as such drives usually do, into the brick wall of great power realpolitik. As promised, the new administration obeyed the law laid down by Congress and ignored by its predecessor. It published an unclassified summary of the intelligence assessment that the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, “approved” the murder and dismemberment of the Saudi reformer and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. For all the claims by the Trump administration that it could not publish for fear of revealing CIA “sources and methods”, the brief assessment was a logical inference from publicly available material. The 15-member murder squad included seven drawn from the prince’s own bodyguard, in…

When Sylvie Bermann arrived in London in August 2014 as France’s new ambassador, the UK capital was, she says, a city of “dynamism and optimism”. “Extraordinary place. French cabinet ministers came, one after the other, looking for Britain’s recipe for success.” Now, Bermann says in an interview in her Left Bank flat, lined with the souvenirs of 40 years in France’s diplomatic service, “it feels like I’ve lived through a revolution. To see all that blown up for a blind belief in some mythical idea … How did it happen?” To answer the question, the now-retired diplomat, who was France’s ambassador to Beijing before she moved to Britain, has written a book that pulls no punches. Goodbye Britannia calls Boris Johnson an inveterate liar, describes Brexit as the triumph of…

At first glance, the photograph of two smartly dressed older Turkish men, posing for the camera in an office filled with flags, could be of any important figures in the country – but it is rare for a picture to say so much about both the past and the future. On the left is Devlet Bahçeli, an ultranationalist political dinosaur who has in the past few years become an influential coalition partner in the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The man on the right, Alaattin Çakıcı, is the most notorious mobster in Turkey. Accused of 41 political murders, and jailed for ordering a hit on his ex-wife, who was shot dead in front of their young son, he was nonetheless freed from prison along with dozens of other mafia…

At last, Josiah Elleston-Burrell’s last day at school. It was 13 August 2020, a Thursday in the middle of a dismal pandemic-struck summer, and Elleston-Burrell had returned to St Joseph’s College in Croydon for one final visit, to collect his A-level grades. Tall and serene, well known on campus for wearing clothes of his own design, Elleston-Burrell wore a pale grey top that he’d customised with flecks of green and pink dye, coordinating with his Nikes. At 19, he was one of the oldest pupils at St Joseph’s, such a veteran of this south London state school that younger kids sometimes swerved towards him to reach out their fists in mute respect. Today, he was eager to be in and out quickly, the sooner to end a stalled career as…

Covid-19 continues to bring many inter-generational tensions to the fore. Older people bear the brunt of the disease’s impact on health; younger people have to make economic and social sacrifices to protect the m. But the pandemic is just one reason why the social contract between the generations is under pressure. Within families, the social contract between the generations is easy to understand. Parents want to give their children the capabilities and means to have a good life; children want their parents to have a comfortable old age. But at a societal level, it is more complex. The legacy we leave to future generations has many dimensions – the stock of human knowledge and culture, inventions, infrastructure and institutions, and the state of the natural world. In many advanced economies,…

Although no book published when bookshops are closed can be said to be well-timed, the historian Selina Todd’s Snakes and Ladders arrives at a moment of particular relevance. Just when society feels as if it has ground to a halt, Todd looks at what she calls in her subtitle the Great British social mobility myth. Of course the fact of social mobility is not a myth. As Todd shows, at various times over the past century or more, there have been significant surges in dynamic social movement. In the postwar years, for example, there was a large expansion in the managerial class as industry modernised. “The children born between the mid-1930s and mid-1950s,” writes Todd, “were more likely to be upwardly mobile than any generation before or since.” For Todd…

In the befuddlement of grief, I have achieved very little in the kitchen other than the occasional sub-par frittata. I lurk by the hob, my safe place, but largely I just wipe and sterilise. Our days of shielding are over. Covid did not catch my mother but his ghoulish cousin, cancer, made a land grab, taking lungs and bones, then her liver, and then, worse than any of that, it stole her appetite. This stage felt the most hopeless. I am from a family of sturdy-hipped women who have never willingly eschewed a bowl of wobbly, custard-smothered trifle or a toasted, buttered hot-cross bun. When mam began refusing these things, well, we knew that time was tight. I’ve deliberated many times about discussing grief in a food column yet the…