Indholdsfortegnelse for 24 June 2022 i Guardian Weekly

In the crime-infested tri-border region where Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira disappeared, rumours abound over what happened at Puerto Amelia in January this year. Were Brazilian drug traffickers responsible for burning the Peruvian police outpost on the River Yavarí to the ground? Was it Colombian guerrillas who stormed the camp, shooting at the border guards and making off with their high-powered weapons? Or were the culprits rogue Peruvian police officers, perhaps working for organised crime? The answer depends on who you talk to – but the consequences were the same. Five months after the audacious raid, the camp lies in ruins. Charred logs are the only remnant of a lodging the Peruvian troops had called home. Filing cabinets and metal bunk beds are scattered in the undergrowth while the ground…

There are funerals every day in Kyiv, but this one felt particularly poignant. Hundreds of friends and fellow activists, clad in Ukrainian flags, gathered last Saturday to pay tribute to Roman Ratushnyi, a prominent political and environmental campaigner who was killed fighting near Ukraine’s second-biggest city, Kharkiv. “All our brightest, bravest guys are dying. The war’s toll on society is immense,” said activist Ivana Sanina, 23, last Thursday during an earlier remembrance ceremony for Ratushnyi. He was one of the student protesters beaten by the brutal Berkut riot police on the first night of the pro-western Maidan revolution in 2013. After Maidan, Ratushnyi worked as an investigative journalist, exposing corruption. But he is best known in Kyiv for leading a campaign in 2019 to protect Protasiv Yar, a green area…

The possible return to Pakistan of its former president Pervez Musharraf for the first time since he left the country in 2016 has reopened a bitter debate about the military dictatorship he led for more than a decade. Musharraf came to power in a coup in 1999 that toppled Nawaz Sharif’s government, and went on to hold the presidency between 2001 and 2008, when he resigned to avoid impeachment. Since then he has spent most of his time in self-imposed exile in the UK and the Middle East. A key ally of the US in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, his time in power became notorious for oppression and rampant human rights abuses. In 2007 he suspended the constitution, imposed martial law, sacked the chief justice of the Supreme…

Vittorio Piovani is a barber in Traversetolo, a village in central Italy. Every Sunday, he dons an elegant suit, shines his shoes, curls his long moustache and goes dancing at a club in a nearby town, like many other weekend clubbers. Except Piovani is a 75-year-old grandfather of three, living for a scene that gives him a deep-rooted sense of community and belonging. Piovani is a die hard fan of liscio, an Italian music genre and dancing scene, with dedicated venues called balere and devotees who are skewed heavily towards the over-65s). In its own way, it is a wild and counter cultural corner of European clubbing. The music is effervescent – with a lot of accordion – and the aesthetic is glamorous: band members wear satin dresses and bellbottom suits,…

Central banks around the world are pushing for the sharpest rise in interest rates in decades in response to soaring inflation. With living costs across advanced economies rising at the fastest annual rate since the 1980s, there are risks for households and businesses as growth falters. Here are the reasons rising rates matter: Why are central banks raising interest rates? The Covid pandemic, supply chain disruption, worker shortages and Russia’s war in Ukraine driving up energy prices has fuelled inflation Across the OECD group of wealthy nations, inflation has reached 9.2% – the highest since 1988. Britain has the highest rate in the G7 with the consumer prices index hitting 9% in April, the highest since 1982. Central banks have mandates from their national governments to target low and stable…

What a difference a war makes. Four months ago, the leaders of France, Germany and Italy would not have dreamed of supporting Ukraine’s candidacy for European Union membership. But last Thursday, there they were in a sunny Kyiv, all emphatically endorsing it. If this week’s EU summit agrees, following the positive opinion just given by the European Commission, this really could be, as President Volodymyr Zelenskiy put it, “one of the key European decisions of the first third of the 21st century”. It could mark a further round of eastern enlargement of the EU, as significant as the first big post-cold war round in the 2000s, which in two waves took in countries from Estonia to Bulgaria. The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus scores again: “War is the father of all…

Madama Butterfly, a nasty story about an American naval officer’s seduction and subsequent abandonment of a 15-year-old Japanese geisha, is a problem for opera houses today, despite its immense and enduring popularity. Puccini, in his work premiered in 1904, did what the best opera composers do: craft the most potent of situations and collisions to wring maximum emotion from an audience, while writing music of unbearable feeling and drama. But in 2022, opera houses are nervous about programming the work and some are even cancelling productions of it. Concerned that somehow representing bad behaviour could be seen as endorsing it (a fallacy that especially affects opera today), opera houses may feel Butterfly’s racial dimension feels just too hot to handle. Yet plenty of other operas contain content that is troubling…

I am the grandmother of a six-year-old boy. The mother divorced the father four years ago because of abusive behaviour. Although both parents are British, the mother and her son live in the UK and the father abroad. The child has a chronic condition, which means frequent visits to hospital and daily medication. The father remains extremely hostile to the mother. Access has been arranged by court order, and the mother is conscious that the child needs time with his father, which she tries to facilitate over and above the court order. The child’s drugs and update on his condition need to be passed over at the handover, but this doesn’t happen because of the father. Also, the father is constantly telling his son how much better his country is,…

India Even the mountains, the traditional escape from the unbearable city heat, now offer little respite Every summer, when the heat in the plains becomes unbearable, software engineer Akhilesh Gupta does what the British used to do when they ruled India – pack the family into the car and head out of New Delhi for a long drive to enjoy the cool air of the mountains. This year, the family couldn’t wait to go. Since mid-March, the Indian capital has been in the grip of a relentless heatwave with temperatures hovering around 45C. Such high temperatures used to be a fleeting feature of the summer. This year, they are the new normal. Demand for power has soared as Indians use more air-conditioners. Water shortages have hit some areas. Those who…

Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira were killed in an undeclared global war against nature and the people who defend it. The frontlines are the remaining biodiverse regions – the forests, wetlands and oceans vital for our climate and planetary life-support systems. These systems are under attack from organised crime and criminal governments who want to exploit timber, water and minerals for short-term, often illegal, profits. Often the only thing in their way is Indigenous communities and traditional forest dwellers, supported by civil society organisations, conservation groups and academics. My friend Dom knew how important this story was. It’s why he took a year off to research a book, How to Save the Amazon, and risked travelling to the bandit territory of the Javari valley with Bruno, one of Brazil’s most…

Forget Centre Court, St Andrews or Wembley. The biggest battles in this northern-hemisphere summer of sport are being fought in the boardrooms and backrooms, as federations wrestle with the thorniest question of all: should transgender women be allowed to participate in female competitions? Swimming’s global body, Fina, created a seismic ripple last Sunday when it voted to bar trans women from international female competition. Its argument, in short, was that swimmers such as Lia Thomas retain significant physical advantages – in endurance, power, speed, strength and lung size – from undergoing male puberty even if testosterone is later suppressed. The science backs that up. Research by biologists Emma Hilton and Tommy Lungberg on the effects of testosterone suppression on muscle mass and strength in transgender women “consistently show[s] very modest…

Rwanda was caught in the eye of a British political storm last week, and its officials are not happy with how the country has been portrayed. It was preparing to welcome asylum seekers last Tuesday until a dramatic 11th-hour ruling by the European court of human rights. Government officials in Rwanda are now accusing cam paigners of prejudice, saying the country’s record of human rights breaches is a thing of the past. “Much of the narrative about Rwanda that we are hearing in the media is frankly insulting,” said Yolande Makolo, the spokesperson for Paul Kagame’s government. “We don’t believe living in Rwanda is a punishment. Rwanda is a country that has been transformed over the past 28 years. It is a safe country. Our economy is growing. We lead…

Barcelona’s streets and squares have long been home to a cacophony of restaurant patios, buskers and throngs of residents and tourists. Now the city is on a mission to find out just how noisy these spaces can get, with the installation of sound level monitors in 11 areas. “It’s an absolute priority,” said Eloi Badia, the Barcelona city councillor who oversees ecological transition. “Noise pollution – with all of its sleep disorders, pathologies and stress – is one of the most important public health issues we have in the city, second only to air pollution.” A recent study by Barcelona’s public health agency found that about 57% of people in the city are regularly exposed to noise levels that exceed those recommended by the World Health Organization. The figure dwarfs…

Leo, an 18-year-old rook, is playing mind games. It’s a street-corner classic – cups and balls. Only the venue is the Comparative Cognition Laboratory in Ma dingley, Cambridge, and the ball is a waxworm. Leo – poised, pointy, determined – perches on a platform eager to place his bet. A wriggling morsel is laid under one of three cups, the cups shuffled. Leo cocks his head and takes a stab. Success! He snatches the waxworm in his beak and retreats to enjoy his prize. Aristotle, a fellow resident in a glossy black feather coat, looks on knowingly. Watching alongside me is Prof Nicola Clayton, a psychologist who founded the lab 22 years ago, and we are joined by PhD researcher Francesca Cornero. Clayton studies the cognitive abilities of both animals…

The Google engineer Blake Lemoine wasn’t speaking for the company officially when he claimed that Google’s chatbot LaMDA was sentient, but Lemoine’s misconception shows the risks of designing systems in ways that convince humans they are seeing real, independent intelligence in a program. If we believe that text-generating machines are sentient, what actions might we take based on the text they generate? It led Lem oine to leak secret transcripts from the program, resulting in his suspension As Google plans to make LaMDA a consumer-facing technology, the fact that one of its engineers was fooled highlights the need for these systems to be transparent. LaMDA (which stands for “language model for dialogue applications”) is designed to predict probable sequences of words. It can produce seemingly coherent English text on a…

This is part of what is allegedly the deepest gorge in the world. At its bottom, should you complete the steep descent from Vikos village, you reach the River Voidomatis, which suddenly arises from springs in its otherwise dry Jurassic limestone bed. Later, it joins the Aoös to form one of the most pure freshwater systems in Europe. At Vikos this manifests itself in deep, ice-cold water that is so translucent, yet so aquamarine blue, you’d think it had been chemically manipulated. The waves-oftened boulders look as if they have been positioned for bathing water nymphs, and through the sun-glazed leaves of oriental plane trees comes an intoxicating mix of piercing light with nightingale song. To cap a sense of astonishing natural abundance, there is a seethe of insects that…

1 COLOMBIA Former guerrilla fighter wins presidential election A former guerrilla fighter, Gustavo Petro, was elected as president, making him Colombia’s first leftist head of state. Petro beat Rodolfo Hernández, a gaffe-prone former mayor of Bucaramanga and business mogul, with 50.47% of the vote in a runoff election last Sunday and will take office in July amid a host of challenges, not least of which is the deepening discontent over inequality and rising cost of living. Hernández gained 47.27%, with almost all ballots counted, according to results released by election authorities. Petro’s election marks a tidal shift for Colombia, the South American country that has never before had a leftist president, and follows similar victories for the left in Peru, Chile and Honduras. “Today is a party for the people,” tweeted…

TRANSPORT Biggest rail strike in decades brings disruption Train passengers faced widespread disruption and cancellations as Britain’s biggest nationwide rail strike for 30 years began. Workers responsible for train lines and infrastructure across the UK walked out on Tuesday – with further action on Thursday and Saturday – leaving thousands of services cancelled and passengers forced to seek alternative means of transport. Only about 4,500 of the usual 20,000 daily services were expected to run due to the walkout by 40,000 RMT union members at Network Rail – the organisation that maintains the system – and 13 train operators. Much of Britain was without any passenger trains on the affected days. London Underground workers were also on strike on Tuesday, bringing the capital’s transport system to a halt. Last-ditch talks…

New data has revealed extraordinary rates of global heating in the Arctic, up to seven times faster than the global average. The north Barents Sea is a region where fast-rising temperatures are suspected to trigger increases in extreme weather in North America, Europe and Asia. Annual average temperatures in the north Barents Sea and its islands are going up across the year by up to 2.7C a decade, with particularly high rises in autumn of up to 4 C, making it the fastest-known warming place Temperatures far above average have been recorded in the Arctic in recent years, with seasoned observers describing the situation as “weird” and “simply shocking”. Some climate scientists have warned the unprecedented events could signal faster and more abrupt climate breakdown. Sea ice is good at…

Nearly four months after the Russian invasion began, more than 7.5 million people have fled Ukraine and millions more have been displaced within its borders. The UN’s original estimate that 4 million Ukrainians would become refugees as a result of the invasion has been dwarfed, and warnings from the UN that we were about to witness the largest refugee crisis in a century have been borne out. The exodus has been met with an unparalleled emergency response in neighbouring countries and the rest of Europe. Almost four months on, aid agencies and volunteer organisations working with Ukrainians say they are changing their approach to the crisis and expect it to last for many months, if not years. Chris Melzer, of the German branch of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees),…

Sitting in a classroom in district 17 on the outskirts of Kabul, four young women from a group dedicated to helping children displaced by war pulled tissues from a box and wiped away tears. The conversation had turned to the youngest of the women’s prospects in light of the Taliban’s return to power last August. The 19-year-old student explained how she had been stopped at the door of the university where she was studying engineering and told she must wear a burqa to enter. “I had never been asked to do it before,” she said. “They have been to my brothers and father and told them I must comply. I am being banned from the field trips that the boys go on. I am losing hope.” Her eyes welling with…

Only a few weeks ago, Sandra García was looking forward to the brighter future Nayib Bukele had promised opportunity-starved youth when he swept to power three years ago. “I gave him my vote believing we’d have a better life,” said the 23-year-old, one of hundreds of thousands of young Salvadorans who chose the authoritarian-minded millennial as their president. Those dreams imploded when the man she planned to marry, Juan José Ibáñez García, was seized during one of the most ferocious security crackdowns in recent Latin American history. Two days later, Ibáñez – who friends and family say worked in a pizzeria and had no links to crime – was moved to a maximum-security prison housing many of the 38,000-plus people the government claims to have imprisoned since the offensive began.…

Did you see episode three? The president calls his deputy a “pussy” and “wimp” for refusing to support his coup. An angry mob then goes after said deputy wanting to hang him. A legal scholar who cooked up the plan asks the president for a pardon. Last Thursday’s congressional hearing into the January 6 attack on the US Capitol in 2021 veered into you-couldn’t-make-it-up territory. But while political aficionados were agog, it remained less certain how many citizens were paying attention at lunchtime on a midweek workday. As the panel’s sessions near the halfway mark, their explosive narrative about Republican president Donald Trump’s failed power grab is struggling to break through to an American public consumed by economic anxiety. Democrats could find that gas at $5 a gallon, not the…

The January 6 hearings have been more impressive and more forceful than anyone could have expected – definitely worthy of primetime attention. Yet the hearings have been focused on Donald Trump and the past, rather than the continuing assault on the democratic system that the Republican party has fully embraced. The committee’s core task is to investigate the January 6 attack on the US Capitol and what led to it, of course. But everyone who believes in democracy needs to recognise that, in a very concrete sense, there is a continuing insurrection that far surpasses Trump. The committee’s strategy of building its case almost entirely on testimony from Trump people, Republicans and conservatives, not Democrats, is certainly effective if the goal is to prove the nonpartisan nature of the proceedings.…

There was a moment when Facebook was a democracy. Blink and you would have missed it, but in December 2012, as part of an initiative announced three years earlier by Mark Zuckerberg, the company unveiled new terms and conditions that it wanted to impose on users. They were invited to vote on whether they should be enacted, yes or no. The voters were pretty clear: 88 % said no, the new terms weren’t acceptable. It was a triumph of people power. Except that Zuckerberg had imposed a precondition: the decision would only be binding if at least 30 % of all users took part. That would have required votes from about 300 million of the roughly 1 billion users the platform then had (it’s since roughly tripled). But just over…

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