Indholdsfortegnelse for 3 June 2022 i Guardian Weekly

On the final day of March, soldiers of the self-proclaimed Donetsk people’s republic entered the basement in Mariupol where Svitlana and Vitaly were sheltering. “You have 15 minutes to get ready and then you’re leaving,” shouted one, waving a rifle. According to the Russian narrative of its Ukraine invasion, it was the day Svitlana and Vitaly were liberated. But it did not feel like that to them. Instead, it was the end of one ordeal and the start of another: a wearying and humiliating journey through socalled “filtration” procedures, followed by forced deportation to Russia. The siege, destruction and conquest of Mariupol have been well-documented, but Svitlana and Vitaly’s experiences provide a vivid illustration of the unexpected terror that was visited on this city of half a million people over…

The impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine dominated this year’s World Economic Forum but it took George Soros to articulate what many of those making the trip to the Swiss Alps had been thinking. Davos would not be Davos without a broadside from the 91-year-old philanthropist and former speculator, but the conflict in eastern Europe prompted his most apocalyptic warning yet. “The invasion may have been the beginning of the third world war and our civilisation may not survive it,” he said. Others voiced similarly dark thoughts. So much so, that at times it felt as if the meeting was taking place not in May 2022 but in July 1914 or August 1939, times when the world has stood on the brink of the precipice. The historian Adam Tooze said:…

Matt Tandy is feeling the pressure. He may be the manager of a fabric and craft shop, but he’s also only 26 years old. As such, being asked if three yards is longer or shorter than 2.5 metres is causing him undue stress. “This is the one I need to get right, don’t I?” he says before sighing with relief when learning that his answer – three yards is longer – is correct. Nearby, a shopper more advanced in years smirks at Tandy’s hesitancy. His anxiety may soon be mirrored by much of the nation, with Boris Johnson reported to be planning to revive the use of imperial measurements. The UK currently uses a mix of imperial and metric measurements – think miles per hour but litres of petrol –…

After an hour-long hike from the nearest road, a Honduran anti-narcotics inspector with a shotgun slung from his shoulder led the way into a mountainside clearing littered with wilting coca bushes that his unit had uprooted in the days before. Black irrigation hoses criss crossed the roughly 1.5-hectare field down to the confluence of two creeks, where, under a canopy, lay the charred remains of a makeshift laboratory for processing the coca leaves into paste – the precursor of cocaine After decades in which Honduras served as a bridge state along the cocaine highway from South America to the United States, coca plantations are now spreading across the country like an invasive plant whose seeds are carried in the wind. In 2021, authorities eradicated a record amount of coca plants.…

In recent weeks there have been around 100 cases and at least 18 human deaths from a rare tick-borne disease in Iraq; a fourth case of the Ebola virus and more than 100 cases of bubonic plague have been found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; and just two years after Africa was declared free of wild polio, new cases have turned up in Malawi and Mozambique. A dangerous strain of typhus is circulating in Nepal, India and China. There are alarming outbreaks on several continents of mosquito diseases such as malaria, dengue and West Nile virus Set against this global context, the so-far very limited monkeypox outbreaks that started to appear in the past month are only remarkable because they are being reported in rich countries. May was…

When it’s too hot to turn on the oven or stove, what can I make for dinner? Will, Bridport, Dorset, England You’re talking Emiko Davies’ language, Will. From June to September, the Italy-based food writer keeps her cooker turned off, “unless it’s the early morning or late at night”. Wherever you are, cheese makes a good starting point for no-cook meals. “I might take mozzarella or ricotta and some prosciutto, then add seasonal vegetables or even fruit,” says Davies, who dresses the lot with olive oil “Salads are the best option,” says Zaw Mahesh, co-founder and head chef at Lahpet in London. “I pull together Burmese-inspired ones for a quick and easy meal, such as lahpet thohk, a traditional salad using pickled tea leaves, fried beans, tomato and cabbage dressed in…

Far below the Ibiza sun, a solitary lizard fidgets across the baking rocks on the southern tip of the island, happily oblivious to what may lurk ahead. After 6m years of isolated evolution, the Ibiza wall lizard, whose scaly finery runs from cobalt blue to acid green, is facing an existential threat. Over the past two decades, these lizards have disappeared from some areas of Ibiza and the neighbouring island of Formentera thanks to the rapid proliferation of invasive horseshoe whipsnakes and ladder snakes. “The density of the lizard population across the islands used to be very, very high,” said Antònia María Cirer, an Ibizan biologist who has studied the reptiles since the late 1970s. “There were so many that if you sat down anywhere to eat a sandwich or…

A network of ultra-Christian, anti-abortion and far-right organisations is building momentum in its quest to influence abortion policy in Europe as the US supreme court considers striking down Roe v Wade, the 1973 ruling that legalised the procedure in the US. Elements of the network originally came together under Agenda Europe, holding yearly summits across the continent between 2013 until at least 2018, by which time it had grown to 300 participants, including politicians and Vatican diplomats. The group’s aim was to “restore the natural order” by devising ways to erode abortion rights, gay rights and policies on combating violence against women, as well as to reduce access to contraceptives. Organisers behind Agenda Europe summits include Terrence McKeegan, a former legal adviser to the Holy See’s mission to the UN…

IN THE WASP WOMAN, a 1959 B-movie directed by Roger Corman, the owner of a failing cosmetics company becomes the test subject for a novel anti-ageing formula manufactured from the royal jelly of wasps. Janice Starlin, played by Susan Cabot, appears 20 years younger in a matter of days, but inevitably transforms into a monstrous creature – half-woman, half-wasp – who goes on to brutally murder and devour a string of unfortunate men. It mattered not that bees, rather than wasps, produce royal jelly. The Bee Woman? Nowhere near as terrifying. Unlike bees, which we adore for their honey and waggle dances, wasps have suffered from a poor public image for millennia. In the 4th century BC, Aristotle dismissed wasps as “devoid of the extraordinary features that characterise bees”, adding…

When the machine begins to break down, nobody is spared: even in the most majestic corporeality, bones ache, muscles weaken, tendons hurt, joints creak. Walking, previously a thoughtless activity, now needs deliberation and strategy. Longer lives and longer reigns merely postpone the process. Aged 96, and with “episodic mobility issues”, the Queen last week used a motor buggy to get around the Chelsea flower show; her arthritic great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, aged 78 at the time of the diamond jubilee in 1897, toured her own garden party in a horse-drawn carriage, literally talking down to everyone she met. An even bolder innovation had been planned for her. A magnificent procession of 50,000 imperial troops marched or rode from Buckingham Palace by two separate routes converging at St Paul’s for a thanksgiving…

In a late short story by Jean Rhys, a woman sees a pair of children standing near a house that is very familiar to her, by an exotic, flowering tree. “I used to live here once,” she tells them. They can’t see that she’s there; she is a ghost, haunting her old home. This story lends its title to Miranda Seymour’s new biography, which places Rhys’s upbringing in the Caribbean at the centre of the narrative. She was born Ella Gwendol en Rees Williams in 1890, the daughter of a Welsh doctor and a white Creole mother descended from slaveowners on the island of Dominica, “[t]he island which haunted her mind and almost everything that she wrote” and “the wellspring of Rhys’s art”. For the rest of her life, Rhys…

The model boat, decorated with red, white and blue flowers, carried aloft by trainee sailors from nearby HMS Raleigh, processes through the crowded narrow streets of Millbrook. Town crier, mistress of ceremonies with garlanded staff, crowned king and queen drawn by a recumbent tricycle, sea cadet band, maypole and morris dancers proclaim the onset of summer. Overlooked by steep woods and sheltered from gales by Maker Heights, Millbrook Lake joins the Hamoaze (the estuary of River Tamar) opposite Devonport. The water here once served a fishing fleet, tidal mill, gunpowder factory, tannery, lime kilns, a brewery, rope walk and boat building. In the 19th century, apprentices built model boats to scale; if they sailed true, the boys could move on to next year’s apprenticeship. Each year the best boat was…

ECONOMY Chancellor’s windfall tax U-turn for energy firms Rishi Sunak bowed to months of pressure over the cost of living crisis with a £15bn ($ 19bn) package of support, part-funded by executing a U-turn to impose a windfall tax on energy companies. Announcing the measures last Thursday, in a bruising week for the government, the chancellor said his “significant set of interventions” would help the poorest in society – with a one off £650 payment for 8 million families on means-tested benefits, alongside an extra £200 for all energy bill payers that will not have to be repaid. After months of rejecting Labour calls for a windfall tax on energy giants, Sunak announced what he called a “temporary targeted energy profits levy”, which is expected to raise £5bn. He was…

Number of people killed in school shootings After school shootings, focus on gun control spikes Sources: Cable news airtime of Fox, CNN, and MSNBC from the GDELT Project; Google Trends; Gallup opinion poll Last Tuesday’s school shooting, when 19 children and two adults were killed in Uvalde, Texas, was the second deadliest in American history, behind the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting when 20 children and six adults were killed. Mass shootings are so common in the US that most tragedies barely make a blip in the gun control debate. The country experiences a mass shooting nearly every day, and once every three weeks someone is shot on school property, according to Center for Homeland Defense and Security data. The majority of these shootings don’t get coverage in the national media.…

After three months of full-scale war against Ukraine, in which ground troops invaded from several directions and missiles hit targets across the country, right up to the border with Poland, the focus of the current phase of the conflict is back on the region where Russia has been fighting for eight years: Donbas. How fully and how quickly Vladimir Putin attains his objectives there may dictate how and whether other parts of Ukraine come back into play. The level of losses will also play a role. Donbas Russia has abandoned attempts to encircle all Ukrainian forces in Donbas for the more modest goal of creating “cauldrons” – smaller encirclements cutting Ukrainians off from supplies and reinforcements. Most recently, the focus has been on the city of Sievierodonetsk. Reports on Monday…

Why is everyone talking about China in the Pacific all of a sudden? In March, news leaked of a draft security agreement that would grant Chinese military and police significant access to Solomon Islands. The news surprised Australia and New Zealand, the Solomon s’ traditional security partners, as well as other Pacific nations and the US. The Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi has been on a 10-day visit in the region, hoping to persuade Pacific nations to sign up to a sweeping regional economic and security deal. The deal, which was leaked last week, covered everything from a free trade area with the region to providing humanitarian and Covid relief. It also lays out China’s vision for a much closer relationship with the Pacific, especially on security matters, with China…

‘We created a studio outside because a lot of people were not enjoying having to return to prison to record music. They don’t want to relive that experience, even for a few hours,” explains Steve Happi, the 33-year-old producer of Jail Time Records, a non-profit record label started in New Bell prison in Douala, the largest city in Cameroon. In December 2021, Happi opened a second studio in the Deido district of Douala, providing a recording facility outside jail for former prisoners like him. “We have people who have really changed because they have the opportunity to record for free,” says Happi, who founded the label in 2019 with Italian artist and director Dione Roach Roach was inspired to set up the project while delivering creative workshops in the prison…

Donald Trump’s big lie lost bigly in Georgia last Tuesday. Some might take this as proof that his spell over the Republican party has finally been broken, but that is what the party wants people to believe. The former president had been waging a personal vendetta against Georgia’s governor Brian Kemp and secretary of state Brad Raffensperger for failing to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Trump handpicked former senator David Perdue and congressman Jody Hice to challenge Kemp and Raffensperger in the Republican primaries. Both parroted the big lie and both were soundly beaten. It was a tangible sign that even many Trump voters are weary of “stop the steal” and eager to look forward. It was also a blow to Trump in a primary season where his scattergun endorsements…

America’s great appeal to the world was its promise of possibility: a society that could form anew, free of the past, and where individuals might do the same, reinventing themselves, renewing themselves, starting over. It was a myth, of course: it took no account of those people who were already there, and whose lives and lands were taken, or of those who had been brought to America in shackles. But it was a myth whose grip on the global imagination lives on But now we see something else: a country uniquely burdened with the dead weight of its past, and powerless to deal with a danger in its present or make a better future. The land of possibility stands paralysed, apparently unable to make even the smallest change that might…

It has starred in more car chases than Vin Diesel, more stunt scenes than Tom Cruise and more music videos than Madonna, and yet it never even had to audition for a part. Leaping across the Los Angeles river on its twin steel arcs, held aloft by its majestic art deco concrete pillars, the Sixth Street Bridge has provided a backdrop for shoot outs and dance-offs ever since it was built in 1932, appearing in everything from Grease to Terminator 2, and providing a dose of urban glamour in videos by everyone from Kanye West to Kid Rock. But Hollywood’s go-to crossing is no more. It was torn down in 2016 after being diagnosed with a terminal case of concrete cancer: the sand used in the mix had a lethally…

I have a 13-year-old boy who has just started going through puberty, and is becoming more exposed to the topic of pornography and harmful language about women. I understand his curiosity, and that an interest in porn is natural, but apart from discussing it with him, how can I ensure that when he eventually goes looking for porn, the porn he is exposed to is safe and not using “dangerous” language towards women? Are there any safe spaces or sites I can show him to prevent this from happening? He is a lovely boy and I’d hate to see him affected by what he finds, simply because of society’s inability to tackle this subject appropriately. Where is he being exposed to this? At school? With friends? It may be worth…

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