Indholdsfortegnelse for 11 March 2022 i Guardian Weekly

On the piste Vanesa Gaskova, of Slovakia, competes in the para alpine skiing women’s super combined slalom standing at the Beijing 2022 Winter Paralympics in Yanqing. The International Paralympic Committee banned Russian and Belarusian athletes from competing, following the invasion of Ukraine. 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 progressive values,…

Volodymyr Zelenskiy vowed to punish “every bastard” who committed atrocities during the invasion of Ukraine amid outrage at Russia’s shelling of civilians as they tried to flee a town on the outskirts of Kyiv, killing a young family. The president of Ukraine said in a video address last Sunday night: “They were just trying to get out of town. To escape. The whole family. How many such families have died in Ukraine? We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will punish everyone who committed atrocities in this war.” To the Russian forces behind the attack, in the town of Irpin on the western edge of the capital, Zelenskiy said: “There will be no quiet place on this earth for you. Except for the grave.” Hundreds of civilians had…

Since Russian rockets first began to slam into Ukraine, approaching 2 million people have fled over the borders of neighbouring European countries into a frightening and uncertain future. What we are witnessing, the United Nations has warned, is the largest refugee crisis in a century. Last Sunday, the UN high commissioner for refugees, Filippo Grandi, said after visiting the Moldovan border that the situation would only get worse. Officials said many of the refugees who had arrived in other countries had friends and places to go to, but Grandi said the growing number of refugees would put pressure on governments to absorb them. The world has watched families fighting to board trains in chaotic crowds, fathers kissing their children goodbye through car windows, and seen the shock and exhaustion on…

“War comes very early to the theatre,” said the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg. “Then he stands around waiting in the wings.” This time too. For a few years, there has been something, somebody, moving in the shadow of the stage curtain. Only a few people felt they recognised it. Even 10 years ago, big-power war in Europe was “unthinkable these days. Do try and keep up!” Then, somehow, it became “well, in theory, but just utterly unlikely”. Hard to say when that mental border was crossed; perhaps after the Yugoslav wars, perhaps in 2014 when Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea and sponsored proxy war in the Donbas region. And now they ask: “What sort of European war is this going to be? And how nuclear? And where will the next one…

When Jenni Metcalfe returned to her Brisbane home to survey the damage as the nearby river peaked, water had already risen a metre up the back wall. There was nothing she could do. “I sat in the gutter and watched it and cried,” she said. Communities on the east coast of Australia began to survey the wreck-age of fatal flooding that left townships devastated after more than a week of torrential rain. South-east Queensland and the north coast of New South Wales bore the brunt of the catastrophic weather conditions, which have claimed at least 17 lives. Residents in the city of Lismore in north-eastern NSW have been reeling from the worst flooding in its history, which sent huge areas of the regional city underwater with the cleanup likely to…

The official Uefa Europa League account tweeted “Happy Thursday everyone!” on the morning of 24 February, looking ahead to a crucial round of matches in Europe’s second most prestigious men’s football competition. Alas, not everyone was in quite as festive a mood. For, just a few hours earlier, Russian artillery had moved into Ukraine, bringing up the curtain on a bloody and avoidable war in mainland Europe. It’s easy to forget it now, amid the breathtaking speed with which the world of sport has closed ranks against Russia but, in the hours and days after fighting started, Uefa was hardly the only sports authority to monumentally fail to read the room. For example, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) eventually banned Russia from the Paralympic Winter Games but only after first…

One of my favourite books of the past few years was a debut novel by an Argentinian art critic that didn’t get nearly enough attention when it was published in translation in 2019. Optic Nerve by Maria Gainza is a digressive, virtually plotless account of a woman surveying her life through the paintings that enthral her. I found it so fresh, so piercingly beautiful, I felt like I’d had a door kicked open in my mind, as Bruce Springsteen said of hearing Bob Dylan for the first time. It was clear that Gainza, like British authors Rachel Cusk and Claire-Louise Bennett, was opening up new possibilities for the novel as a place of freedom, where you could blend fiction, memoir, art history and anecdote. She immediately felt like a thrilling…

I wonder if the question should be: how do we deal with our own? Our kids will pick up on how we are feeling and are likely to mirror our own emotive state. Even if you don’t mean to expose them to news, children will realise that something is going on. It may not concern younger children at all but those who are a bit older or old enough to have a smartphone may well be worried. For a greater proportion of their lives than ours, they have lived with the pandemic and have been isolated for long periods of time from their peers. On the whole, this has not helped their mental health. So it is bad timing that they are now surrounded by war reporting. We cannot deny…

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The first day of the invasion – 24 February – was my 15th wedding anniversary. We had planned a party and had booked a table in a restaurant. But about 5am, my wife, my 10-year-old son and I were woken by Russian rockets flying over our home. The first thought was to grab everything we could and leave. But all the roads were blocked, and they were shelling us all the time. It was terrifying. So we went to a nearby underground car park and spent the whole day there. There were about 60 people inside. It was cold, there was no heating and people were lying on the floor. Occasionally we dashed back to the apartment to get supplies. We were eating cookies and crisps, anything you could grab…

At the train station in Przemyśl in Poland, thousands of refugees fleeing the Russian invasion of Ukraine get off the carriages every day, seeking asylum in Europe. As they arrive, dozens of Polish border guards and soldiers distribute food, water, blankets and hot tea with a smile. I look on as the soldiers help Ukrainian women and children with their heavy luggage. I can’t help but think this is the same border force that, for months, a short distance north, has been violently pushing back asylum seekers from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan who attempt to cross the frontier from Belarus. It is the same border force that brutally beat refugees from Aleppo, who are also victims of Vladimir Putin’s bombardments. In Przemyśl, Ukrainians get hot drinks. At the Belarusian border,…

Five Russian soldiers sit in a brick building. They are blindfolded: the latest prisoners to be captured inside Ukraine. A Ukrainian voice interrogates them. “Speak,” he says to the group’s Russian officer. What message would he like to send to his soldiers and to Russians back at home? “Frankly speaking, they tricked us,” the officer replies, referring to his military superiors sitting in Mos-cow. “Everything we were told was a fake. I would tell my guys to leave Ukrainian territory. We’ve got families and children. I think 90% of us would agree to go home.” The three-minute video was filmed under conditions of duress. The soldiers are evidently scared. And yet numerous similar interviews with Russian captives have been circulating on Ukrainian social media channels, expressing similar sentiments. Asked what…

Last month, scientists working with data from Tropomi, a monitoring instrument onboard the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-5 satellite, published some startling findings. Writing in the journal Science, the team reported it had found about 1,800 instances of huge releases of methane (more than 25 tonnes an hour) into the atmosphere in 2019 and 2020. Two-thirds of these were from oil and gas facilities, with the leaks concentrated over the largest oil and gas basins across the world, as well as major transmission pipelines, the team said. Launched in 2017, Tropomi has been a huge step forward for scientists researching methane, being the first instrument in space that can see plumes of methane emissions directly, said Lena Höglund-Isaksson, a methane researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. For example,…

Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, has managed to do what Joe Biden could not: bridge the partisan divide and bring, however fleetingly, Congress together. Many Democrats and Republicans who attended the US president’s first State of the Union address, last Tuesday, wore yellow and blue in solidarity with Ukraine, with some holding miniature Ukrainian flags. And when Biden discussed the world-shaking events in Europe – this will inevitably be remembered as his Ukraine speech, irrespective of inflation and other domestic concerns – the chamber rose as one to applaud time and again. Putin “thought he could divide us at home in this chamber and this nation”, said Biden. “He thought he could divide us in Europe as well. But Putin was wrong. We are ready, we are united and…

ELIZABETH WRAIGE REMEMBERS THE FIRST TIME SHE DELIVERED THE DIAGNOSIS. “Parents feel as if they’ve been hit by a sledge-hammer,” she says. Her patient, a baby boy, had been born tiny and perfect to overjoyed parents six months earlier. But they had begun to feel something was not right. He seemed floppy and was not moving normally. Tests showed he had spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), the most deadly genetic condition in children under two, in which a deficit of a crucial protein causes motor neurones to die, and the body slowly loses the ability to move. Babies with untreated type 1 SMA, the most severe form, will never sit, crawl or speak and are slowly robbed of the ability to move, swallow and breathe. Most die before they are two.…

In some of London’s most exclusive neighbourhoods, you can suddenly sense the kind of unease that wealth usually keeps at bay. As the government talks up its crackdown on Russian oligarchs, a much wider shift may be afoot. Last Friday, the Financial Times quoted the chair of Aylesford International, a Chelsea estate agent whose current offerings include a four-bedroom apartment going for the best part of £12m ($16m). “The severity of these sanctions is the beginning of a new world, a new market,” he said. “I don’t think you can hide any more.” On Monday, the House of Commons debated the government’s economic crime (transparency and enforcement) bill – drafted four years ago but now finally revived, thanks to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Ministers say they want to tackle…

We have barely had time to draw breath after Inventing Anna, the story of super-grifter Anna Sorokin, who parlayed an innate grasp of upper-class manners into a life of plenty among the moneyed elite of New York. Now we have The Dropout, the story of the other great female fraudster of recent years, Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the medical company Theranos. It claimed it had developed technology that would revolutionise blood testing. In 2015, Forbes named Holmes the youngest self-made female billionaire in the country. She is now on bail awaiting sentencing for convictions for wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The series touches on issues that may have motivated Holmes (Amanda Seyfried, above) to act the way she did – constantly proving herself the equal of men…

What are the best recipes for using the whole of a citrus fruit? Jon, London E11 The most famous is Claudia Roden’s zero-waste orange and almond cake. She boils a couple of oranges in water until soft, then cuts them open (discarding the seeds) and purees in a food processor. This is then added to a batter of eggs, caster sugar, baking powder and ground almonds, poured into a greased and floured tin and baked. The result is wonderfully moist. Georgina Hayden also boils an orange for portokalopita, AKA her “all-time favourite way of using whole citrus – skin, pith and all”. Hayden blitzes the boiled orange with yoghurt, eggs and sugar. “This custard is baked into finely shredded filo, which creates a light and interesting sponge-like texture. It’s then…

UKRAINE Russia holds up threat of rocketing energy prices Moscow stoked fears of an energy war by threatening to close a major gas pipeline to Germany after the US pushed its European allies to consider banning imports of Russian oil over its invasion of Ukraine. In an address on Russian state television on Monday, Russia’s deputy prime minister, Alexander Novak, said: “A rejection of Russian oil would lead to catastrophic consequences for the global market.” He claimed the price of oil could rise to more than $300 a barrel. Novak cited Germany’s decision last month to halt the certification of Nord Stream 2, saying: “We have every right to take a matching decision and impose an embargo on gas pumping through the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline.” Analysts at Bank…

Ten days ago Kharkiv was a flourishing metropolis and home to 1.5 million people. It was, as resident Galina Padalko put it, “a beautiful place”. There were parks, a new German architect-designed zoo, thriving cafes and restaurants and a monumental central square, once adorned with a statue of Lenin. The city had several universities, international students, a ballet theatre and a cathedral that had withstood the past century’s darkest moments. In a few savage days, Kharkiv was transformed into a living hell. Many inhabitants shelter underground in basements, metro stations and ground-floor corridors. Russian forces have relentlessly bombarded the city, pulverising apartment blocks and other civilian targets and threatening to turn Kharkiv into a new Aleppo, which also faced Russian bombing, or a 21st century Guernica. It has borne the…

As war kicked off in Ukraine, soldiers at a military airstrip in the west of the country went hunting for the origin of a laser pointer they feared was marking out targets on their base. They found it in a nearby church. Behind the thick walls of the building in Kolomyia, run by monks loyal to Moscow, they also discovered a stockpile of food and alcohol, and three guns. “It’s very, very surprising, because it was a monastery,” said Father Mykhailo Arsenich, the army chaplain to the unit that searched the church. “There was a big stockpile of food, packed for military use, designed to keep 60 to 65 people for a very long time. “We found two pistols, and one hunting rifle, which was converted from a combat Kalashnikov.…

More than 4,300 people have been arrested after demonstrators took to the streets in 21 Russian cities last Sunday to condemn Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, while protesters in Kazakhstan turned out to chant “No to war” and “Putin is a dickhead”. The independent monitoring group OVD-Info – which has logged more than 7,500 arrests during anti-war protests – said it had documented the detention of at least 4,366 people in 53 cities including Vladivostok and Irkutsk. Opposition activists also posted videos showing protests in other cities. “The screws are being fully tightened – essentially we are witnessing military censorship,” Maria Kuznet-sova, from OVD-Info, said. “We are seeing rather big protests, even in Siberian cities where we only rarely saw such numbers of arrests.” Russia’s interior ministry said police had…

’Can we get a round of applause for Russia?” asked Nick Fuentes, on stage last week at a white nationalist event. Just days after he invaded Ukraine, many attendees responded by shouting: “Putin! Putin!” It would be easy to dismiss the America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC) in Orlando, Florida, as a radical fringe. But speeches by two Republican members of Congress guaranteed national attention and controversy. The backlash showed how the war in Ukraine has exposed the American far right’s affinity with Putin. That affinity is complicated by the tortured relationship between Russia and former president Donald Trump, whose rise Moscow supported with a covert operation to undermine US democracy. At AFPAC, Fuentes introduced the Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who would go on to interrupt the State of…

I can’t say I have confidence in the future, but I have a lot of confidence in its unpredictability, based on the fact that the past has regularly delivered surprises. It’s easy to forget in retrospect how astonishing the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution were in 1989, or the arrival of the Zapatista army on the world stage in 1994 or how marriage equality seemed like a long shot just before it became a reality in countries all over the world not long ago or how Ireland and Argentina recently legalised abortion. The terrible, too, comes along without warning. Often a major event – this unforeseen global pandemic, the invasion of Ukraine – then itself has indirect consequences that matter. The pandemic led to a radical…

It looks like something from a wildly imaginative sci-fi comic, an impossible vision of worlds slamming into each other in a fantastical collage. Elevated walkways leap across the sky while a trio of towers rise up like serrated blades, their edges sawing at the clouds. Beneath them, fountains cascade and cafes spill across lush waterside terraces, while an art gallery and library jut out overhead. A tropical conservatory wraps around the top of a subterranean theatre, next to a cinema buried beneath a crescent of apartments. And the entire multilayered edifice floats above a 2,000-seat concert hall carved into the ground. This is no sci-fi comic, but a cutaway diagram of the Barbican arts centre dating from 1982, rendered in vivid orange, red and green. Somehow, this miraculous Escher-like wonder…

Every postwar British leader has seen the Middle East as a threatening place. They worried about the loss of empire and the risk of having oil supplies cut off, and made bombastic claims about new Hitlers and terrorism. But one thing has been remarkably consistent: most prime ministers have overseen some kind of military intervention in the Middle East. That is one of the most striking themes of Nigel Ashton’s fascinating book on the beliefs and relationships that shaped British prime ministers’ policies in the region, from the Suez crisis to the Arab uprisings. Diary entries, telegrams, diplomatic records and interviews with aides and advisers help bring out the psychology, preoccupations and prejudices that framed British decision making. The result is an empathetic but not a sympathetic account. Even as…

Storms, like sorrows, come not single spies these days, but in battalions. Or at least, that was my impression from listening to the news. So between the exit of Dudley and the entrance of Eunice, I hurried out to check on some vulnerable old trees. Cycling towards Chatsworth House, I noticed a few middle-aged oaks. The clean trunk of one mighty specimen would, quarter-sawn, make a floor in the duke’s house. The oaks I really wanted to see were much older, a last fragment of a medieval forest that once surrounded the house. And since this corner of Chatsworth is off limits to casual visitors, I leaned my bike against the estate wall where I could look over at these fading giants. Ancient oaks defy our expectations. Like people in…