Indholdsfortegnelse for 28 January 2022 i Guardian Weekly

Salon music Stylists give haircuts on stage during an orchestra rehearsal at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. Dutch museums, theatres and concert halls played host last week to businesses that are allowed to open to customers as a protest against their own continuing lockdown closures. 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 hold power to account in the name of the public interest, to uphold liberal and…

CONSERVATIVES Former minister reignites claims of Islamophobia Allegations by the former Conservative minister Nusrat Ghani that she was sacked for being Muslim reignited accusations that the party is institutionally Islamophobic. Ghani, who was the first Muslim woman to speak from the Commons dispatch box, alleged in a Sunday Times interview that her “Muslimness” was raised when she was removed from a ministerial job in 2020, and said she was told it was “making colleagues uncomfortable”. On Monday the prime minister, Boris Johnson, ordered a formal inquiry into the allegations. The Muslim Council of Britain said it was “now time” for the Equality and Human Rights Commission to investigate the party. An investigation by the Guardian in 2019 revealed 40 new self-professed Tory members had shared or endorsed racist and inflammatory…

The term “rogue male”, denoting a rampaging bull elephant, is also used figuratively to describe a dangerously out-of-control, cold-hearted loner. It may be that Vladimir Putin has a cuddly side. If so, it’s well hidden. Russia’s president fits the rogue male profile to a – unscrupulous, vicious, cunning and ever ready to trample on others. Much effort has been expended trying to understand and explain Putin’s motives in threatening a wider war in Ukraine. Does he hope to restore past Soviet glories or crush Kyiv’s pro-western trajectory? Is it about his legacy or his need for a repeat electoral “Crimea bounce”? Such theories carry weight, but they all miss the essential point. Putin is and always has been an unpleasant, smirking, devious, KGB-trained thug whose main aim in life, besides…

Early last week a call came into the office of a senior cabinet minister from one of Boris Johnson’s team at Downing Street. No 10 was frantically lodging requests across departments for members of the government to go on the media the following morning to defend the prime minister – and face the inevitable barrage of near-impossible questions about “partygate”. Texts were exchanged. Agonised faces were pulled. Would it be a good idea? What was to be gained for the minister concerned? Was it just a hospital pass that required a decent excuse? In the end, a judgment was reached by the minister’s closest officials. “We have to do it, don’t we?” one said. “If we say no, it will be a declaration of fucking war.” Ministers and their staff,…

Before he got sick, Thich Nhat Hanh urged his followers not to put his ashes in a vase, lock him inside and “limit who I am”. Instead, the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk, poet and peace activist apparently told them: “If I am anywhere, it is in your mindful breathing and in your peaceful steps.” After the 95-year-old’s death last Saturday at Tu Hieu temple in Hue, where his spiritual journey started, the breadth of the legacy of his extraordinary life was laid bare with tributes from leading figures from across psychology, religion and social justice. The Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, said Nhat Hanh had lived “a truly meaningful life”, adding: “I have no doubt the best way we can pay tribute to him is to continue…

For bitcoin enthusiasts in Kosovo with a breezy attitude to risk, it has been a good month to strike a deal on computer equipment that can create, or “mine”, the cryptocurrency. From Facebook to Telegram, new posts in the region’s online crypto groups became dominated by dismayed Kosovans attempting to sell off their mining equipment at knockdown prices. “There’s a lot of panic and they’re selling it or trying to move it to neighbouring countries,” said cryptoKapo, a crypto investor and administrator of some of the region’s largest online crypto communities. The frenetic social media action follow ed an end-of-year announcement by Kosovo’s government of an immediate, albeit temporary, ban on all crypto mining activity as part of emergency measures to ease a crippling energy crisis. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies…

Joe Biden spent decades in Washington, striving to reach the White House. When he achieved the goal a year ago, at the age of 78, he spoke of a “winter of peril and possibility”, of cascading crises as an opportunity to think big and aim high. It turns out the Washington he knows so well has proved more foe than friend. The 46th US president discovered that not being Donald Trump isn’t enough to get things done or make people love him. Biden held only his second solo White House press conference last Wednesday – a testy and at times rambling near two hours – with his social and environmental spending agenda and push for voting rights laws foundering on Republican rocks. Biden arrived with sepia-tinted nostalgia for the Senate…

A few years ago, I inadvertently took part in a social media pile-on. Someone well known said something stupid and I enjoyed tweeting to that effect. But when she shared how upsetting she found the onslaught, I was forced to confront my unwitting bit-part in a collective act of bullying. There was nothing wrong with my tweet by itself, but hundreds of people shouting at you feels like abuse in a way that a single critique does not and the virtual nature of social media makes it harder to know when you are complicit in a form of mob justice. Things have got worse since then and I find myself returning to this idea of proportionality often. Last week, it was announced that author Kate Clanchy and her publisher, Pan…

Peering through binoculars, Mykola Chekman pointed to the bridge connecting Ukraine to Russian-controlled Crimea. “It’s not the first time the peninsula has been occupied,” he observed. He added: “Crimea has seen a lot of war.” Chekman – a Ukrainian army photo grapher – was standing on the castellated tower of what was once a tourist cafe. It is now a base for Ukrainian forces, facing off against their invisible Russian counterparts across a shimmering expanse of water and duck-filled lagoons. The abandoned building is situated in the village of Chonhar in Ukraine’s southern Kherson province. A Ukrainian checkpoint with a blue and yellow flag marks the de facto border with what Moscow considers to be Russia, a ragged group of houses over the bridge. In the east of the country,…

UNITED KINGDOM Another grim week for Boris Johnson Like many middle class Chinese, the 26-year-old banker from Beijing spent the first two weeks of January celebrating the new year. She visited Dior, shopped at Walmart and lunched at Quanjude, the city’s best-known Peking duck restaurant. One evening, she watched a comedy show. And on one weekend, she drove with friends to a ski resort on the edge of the capital. Earlier this month it was announced she was Beijing’s Omicron “patient zero”. Authorities released a detailed account of her itinerary dating back to 31 December, and her lifestyle became the talking point of China. Authorities also noted that she had been triple vaccinated with Sinovac. In a country striving to “eliminate” coronavirus, this meant that more than 13,000 people, and…

On 24 October 1962, an American nuclear chemist, Harrison Brown, started to pen a guest editorial for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists just as the Cuban missile crisis reached its climax. “I am writing on a plane en route from Los Angeles to Washington and for all I know this editorial … may never be published,” Brown said. “Never in history have people and nations been so close to death and destruction on such a vast scale. Midnight is upon us.” With this dire warning, he was referring to the Doomsday Clock, which has been the Bulletin’s iconic motif since it was founded 75 years ago by Albert Einstein and some of the University of Chicago scientists from the Manhattan Project. Their work had contributed to making the atomic…

Steven has lost more bitcoins than most people will own. Raised in Shetland, Scotland, he left school at 13 to become a trawler man before moving into construction, eventually earning $115,000 a year digging tunnels for the new London subterranean Crossrail route. Despite his success, compulsive cryptocurrency trading, alcohol and drug use took over his life. Steven lost the “addresses” of between five and 10 bitcoins, rendering his digital buried treasure – worth up to $400,000 today – impossible to retrieve. Even if he had that money now, his addiction means it would soon be squandered. “Trading is gambling, there’s no doubt about it,” he said. “I taught myself how to be a good trader and tried really hard to manage my accounts and stick to a set of rules.…

It is hard to imagine humans spending their lives in virtual reality when the experience amounts to waving your arms about in the middle of the lounge with a device the size of a house brick strapped to your face. But this is where humanity is heading, says the philosopher David Chalmers, who argues for embracing the fate. Advances in technology will deliver virtual worlds that rival and then surpass the physical realm. And with limitless, convincing experiences on tap, the material world may lose its allure, he says. Chalmers, an Australian professor of philosophy and neural science at New York University, makes the case to embrace VR in his new book, Reality+. Renowned for articulating “the hard problem” of consciousness, Chalmers sees technology reaching the point where virtual and…

No single week in 12 months since Donald Trump left the White House has been as potentially catastrophic for him as last week was. It included a rebuke from the supreme court over documents related to the 6 January insurrection which Trump incited; news that the congressional committee investigating the riot was closing in on Trump’s inner circle; evidence from New York’s attorney general of alleged tax fraud; and, perhaps most damaging of all, a request from a Georgia prosecutor for a grand jury in her investigation of Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. The week ended with the leak of a document showing that the former president at least pondered harnessing the military in his attempts to overturn Joe Biden’s victory. “His supporters are going to support him…

Visiting the International Fair of Dakar is like taking a stroll through the ruins of some ancient Toblerone-worshipping civilisation. A cluster of triangular pavilions rises from a podium, each clad in a rich pattern of seashells and pebbles. These are reached by triangular steps that lead past triangular plant pots to momentous triangular entrance ways. All around, great hangar-like sheds extend into the distance, ventilated by triangular windows and topped with serrated triangular roofs. All that’s missing is triangular honey from triangular bees. Built on the outskirts of the Senegalese capital as a showcase for global trade in 1974, this astonishing city-sized hymn to the three-sided shape was designed by young French architects Jean Francois Lamoureux, Jean-Louis Marin and Fernand Bonamy. Their obsessive geometrical composition was an attempt to answer…

All I can say is that I should have known better. My decision to visit the branch of Amazon Fresh that has just opened near where I live was not a good match for the sweeping month-long programme of mindfulness I tentatively set in motion on 1 January. But curiosity got the better of me. And yes, the result was predictably awful. As any wellness guru could have told me, this way lay simmering despair and an almost overwhelming desire to buy a packet of crisps. I still have no idea how Amazon got the go-ahead to set up a branch of the grocery wing of its rampaging empire in this grade-II listed building: an old tram depot that was once the home of little antique shops (RIP). There was…

1 UNITED STATES 6 January committee will go to jail, predicts Gingrich Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker, predicted on Fox News that members of the House committee investigating the Capitol attack will be imprisoned if Republicans retake the chamber this year. Gingrich ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012. He is now a prominent Trump supporter and adviser to House Republican leaders. Calling the members of the 6 January committee “wolves [who] are going to find out that they’re now sheep”, he said that if Republicans take Congress in November, “this is all going to come crashing down … they’re the ones who in fact, I think, face a real risk of jail for the kinds of laws they’re breaking”. The 6 January committee has recommended criminal charges…

Dark waters A clean-up worker is surrounded by oil on a beach north of Lima after freak waves from a volcanic eruption near Tonga caused an oil spill described as the worst ecological disaster to hit the South American country in recent history. Peru has demanded compensation from the Spanish oil giant Repsol after the spillage. Peru’s prime minister, Mirtha Vásquez, told journalists last week that the Pampilla refinery apparently” did not have a contingency plan for an oil spill. The country’s foreign ministry called on the company to “immediately compensate” for the damage caused by the spill on 15 January, which had inflicted “serious harm to hundreds of fishermen’s families” and had “put in danger the flora and fauna” in two protected natural areas. Authorities cordoned off three beaches…

Usually sold as a more “ecologically viable” source of omega-3, algae contains vitamins and antioxidants and is protein-dense. But research into efficient oil production is needed. Scanning the shelves and internet for fish oil is a dizzying task. There are dozens of brands available and, although the typical consideration for the popular supplement is that quality matters most, it is not the only factor. These prized products travel a long way before being labelled as “pure” and “fresh” – starting with the industrial-scale grinding down of a tiny fish that is crucial for healthy ocean and food systems. While some fish oil is made from cod, mackerel or sardines, most comes from Peruvian anchovetas, a type of anchovy. These silvery fish are an important source of nutrition for the wildlife…

Bisma Amjad plays cricket. She aspires to play internationally and was picked for Pakistan’s under-19 World Cup squad. But when the pandemic came, because she was a woman, there was nowhere for her to practise, so she dressed as a man to play alongside male cricketers at “gully cricket” – the street game. “Boys used to play gully cricket even during the pandemic, but the movement of girls was restricted,” said Amjad, 19, who has bowled at first-class and regional matches. “I had no option than to dress like a man and practi se with them.” In Karachi, Amjad often hears comments like: “Your skin will turn darker” or“It’s a boys’ game… Do a course that will help you after marriage.” She says that many girls from conservative families or…

WE HAVE JETPACKS AND WE DO NOT CARE. AN Australian named David Mayman has invented a functioning jetpack and has flown it all over the world – once in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty – yet few people know his name. His jetpacks can be bought but no one is clamouring for one. For decades, humans have said they want jetpacks, and for thousands of years we have said we want to fly, but do we really? Look up. The sky is empty. Airlines are dealing with pilot shortages, and this promises to get far worse. A recent study found that, by 2025, we can expect a worldwide shortfall of 34,000 commercial pilots. With smaller aircraft, the trends are similar. Hang-gliding has all but disappeared. Ultralight aircraft makers…

There is a common misconception that the developing world is full of archaic values and that women struggle to have their voices heard. The more countries I visit and the more female leaders I speak to, the more I am convinced the contrary is true. In fact, those in positions of power worldwide could learn important lessons from these strong women when it comes to tackling some of society’s most pressing issues, including pandemics, the climate crisis, education and infrastructure. Of course, successful female leadership in the developing world isn’t new. During her time as prime minister of India, Indira Gandhi was famously strong. In Africa, I met the highly respected former Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who was recognised among Time Magazine’s Top 100 Women of the Year in…

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In July 1986, James Birch, a young London gallerist with vague designs on global domination, set offfor the Soviet Union. It was his first visit and he had no idea what to expect. Mikhail Gorbachev had been general secretary of the Communist party for one year: perestroika and glasnost were in the air (or, at any rate, in the British newspapers). But still, Moscow was a world apart. On the advice of his travelling companion, a “cultural entrepreneur” whose carpet business often took him to the USSR, Birch packed chocolate digestives, in case he found himself short of food, and cartons of Camel cigarettes, to pay the drivers he would have to flag down for a lift, there being virtually no taxis in the city. At this point, Birch hoped…

For the past six months, our three-year-old son has been showing clear favouritism towards me. My partner finds it really upsetting and was recently devastated when my son blankly told him he loves mummy more than he loves daddy. We have another baby due any day now, so I try to comfort my partner by explaining that it’s probably normal behaviour for his age and is likely to be related to the changes that we are going through as a family, but he still gets extremely hurt by it. I feel constantly caught in the middle, which is exhausting and frustrating. I don’t know whether to try to talk to my son about it when he says these things, or whether to reassure my partner, who is very sensitive and…