Indholdsfortegnelse for 7 October 2022 i Guardian Weekly

When Kwasi Kwarteng claimed last month that his budget-busting plan for growth would usher in a “new era”, it appears unlikely he had in mind a sterling crash, rocketing mortgage rates, a 33-point poll lead for Keir Starmer and a humiliating climbdown, all within the space of 10 days. But Kwarteng and Liz Truss’s bold economic experiment, hailed with glee by the free-market thinktanks, has been comprehensively trashed. After the “mini”-budget, the chancellor was sufficiently relaxed to take his advisers to a Whitehall pub and pose for selfies with the landlady. By the end of last week, he was scrambling to find spending cuts to make his sums add up in the face of soaring borrowing costs. Last weekend, Truss was in full bullish mode, insisting on the BBC’s Sunday…

The banner hanging near Red Square was triumphant. It read: “Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Russia! Together for ever!” Last Friday, Vladimir Putin formally announced the annexation of these Ukrainian territories and celebrated with a victory concert in Moscow. Russia’s president addressed a cheering crowd. “Welcome home,” he said. “Russia! Russia!” they replied. For ever turned out to mean less than 24 hours. As workmen dismantled the stage outside the Kremlin, Ukrainian troops marched into the eastern city of Lyman, from where Putin’s army had just made an inglorious retreat. They were, according to the Kremlin’s version of reality, encroaching on Russia’s sovereign territory. In his angry west-bashing speech last Friday, Putin had declared that Donetsk province, which includes Lyman, would be officially incorporated into the Russian federation. Since his invasion…

It took Alina three goes at the local conscription centre to get her husband out of Russia’s war in Ukraine. She knew the local officials managing the mobilisation in her town south of Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, she said. So when her husband, who has health problems because of his weight and served in the army more than 15 years ago, was called up, she began hassling them. But as protests broke out last week in Dagestan and anger grew over the conscription, she said, something changed. Suddenly, they told her that her husband’s call-up was a mistake. Russia’s first draft since the second world war has caused unparalleled chaos and anger across the country. Hundreds of thousands of men have left their homes: some taken to fight in…

The stone and slate church of Santo Domingo de Guzmán held out for almost 1,000 years before surrendering to the bullet holes that dot its walls, the brambles that twist from its masonry and the rains that hammer its last rotting roof beam. So, too, did the ill-fated pueblo it once served. But now Fraguas, which clings to a hillside in the Sierra Norte natural park 90 minutes north-east of Madrid, is poised to achieve the distinction of becoming the Spanish village that was destroyed three times. Its first death came in the late 1960s, when it was expropriated by the Franco regime to make way for a huge reforestation programme; its second when it was used as an army training ground, leaving houses blown up and bullets lodged in…

Vladimir Putin’s 21 September mobilisation order, which aims to deploy 300,000 reservists to Ukraine, and possibly as many as 1.2 million, is an act of desperation aimed at saving a faltering war that he now owns. But his military call-up is also a huge gamble. For 22 years Putin has solidified his rule through an implicit pact with the Russian people: don’t make political waves and you will live comfortably. His mobilisation order has broken that pact, and many Russians are taking to the streets or running to the border to flee the country. It’s not hyperbole to suggest that Putin is facing his biggest challenge since becoming president in 2000. A leader who once seemed infallible and irreplaceable suddenly appears vulnerable: the media is now speculating about whether Putin…

David O Russell begins his elaborate screwball mystery by declaring: “A lot of this actually happened.” He means the film is a wacky riff on the 1933 “White House putsch” in which a cabal of American businessmen conspired to overthrow President Franklin D Roosevelt, hoping to dupe a retired major general called Smedley Butler into leading their fascist veterans’ organisation. Amsterdam imagines three veterans being drawn into these shenanigans. Christian Bale plays Burt Berendsen, a disabled ex-soldier who is now a doctor. Burt’s army pal Harold Woodman (John David Washington) is a lawyer, and they run an ex-servicemen’s gala dinner. The two men’s soulmate is the mercurial and brilliant Valerie Voze, played by Margot Robbie. There are some great supporting turns, which break the surface of this film’s soupy strangeness:…

I don’t want to waste the residual heat from my cooling oven. What can I cook or bake in there? Kay, Sheffield, England, UK “Kay could use her cooling oven to preserve many things,” says Mark Birchall, chef-patron of Moor Hall in Lancashire. Herbs that are past their best can be dried on an oven rack, then stuffed in to a roast chicken, say, while bread that’s on its way out can also be dried in a cooling oven and blitzed into breadcrumbs. Alternatively, turn tomatoes into future treasures, says Sam Grainger, chef-owner of Belzan in Liverpool. “Halve them, add salt and a little oil [so they don’t stick], and put in a cast-iron skillet or pan. Leave them in the hot oven until it’s cool, and they’ll get better…

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1 ENERGY Nord Stream blasts equal to large amount of explosive Denmark and Sweden have said leaks from the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea were caused by blasts equivalent to the power of “several hundred kilograms of explosive”. The conclusions were made in a joint report by Denmark and Sweden that was delivered to the UN. The UN environment programme said last Friday the ruptures are likely to have led to the biggest single release of climate-damaging methane ever recorded. Germany also said they believe that highly explosive detonations were responsible for the sabotage attacks. The EU, Nato and the governments of Poland, Sweden and Denmark have all said they believe the leaks were caused deliberately. Data analysis has revealed huge clouds of methane gas are hovering over the…

POLITICS Benefit cuts next battle for Truss’s economic plans Liz Truss refused to commit to raising benefits in line with inflation, amid a fresh battle with MPs over spending cuts, including concern from among her cabinet. The prime minister said pensions would rise in line with inflation, having committed to the pensions “triple lock” during the leadership campaign. But she said people on welfare benefits were in a “different situation” and said they were more able to look for more work. She said in a BBC radio interview that ministers were “going to have to make decisions about how we bring down debt as a proportion of GDP in the medium term … I am very committed to supporting the most vulnerable.” Penny Mordaunt, the leader of the Commons and…

Russia no longer has full control of any of the four provinces of Ukraine it says it annexed last week after Ukrainian troops reportedly advanced dozens of kilometres in Kherson province in the south of the country and made additional gains in the east. On Monday the Russian military acknowledged that Kyiv’s forces had broken through in the Kherson region. It said the Ukrainian army had managed to “penetrate the depths of our defence” around the villages of Zoltaya Balka and Aleksandrovka. The ministry of defence spokesperson Igor Konashenkov said Russian troops had occupied what he called a “pre-prepared defensive line”. They continued to “inflict massive fire damage” on Ukrainian forces, he claimed. His comments are an admission that Ukraine’s southern counter-offensive is gaining pace, two months after it began.…

It is a long way from the romance of a sun-dappled Highland glen. Picture instead a white cube equipped with the computer-controlled automation you would sooner expect to see in an Amazon or Ikea warehouse. Scotland’s state forestry agency believes this pre-fabricated structure, erected at an agricultural research centre near Dundee, could help combat climate heating by greatly expanding the country’s forest cover. Forest and Land Scotland (FLS) wants to plant tens of millions of new trees in coming years – conifers such as Norway and Sitka spruce, Douglas fir and Scots pine, and broadleaf varieties such as oak, alder and birch. This white cube, held up by steel ribs and girders, can help it do so at a remarkable speed – producing saplings six times faster than growing them…

On election day last month, Giorgia Meloni appeared to have found a way to flout rules demanding candidates stop all campaigning. The Italian far-right leader posted a video of herself on social media holding two melons in front of her chest while winking into the camera and saying: “25 September [voting day], I’ve said everything.” Meloni in Italian means melons, and it is also slang for breasts. For those who found the clip distasteful, the sexualised image was a further indication that Meloni would not be carrying the torch for feminists as prime minister. Others were surprised by the sudden turn in style by the Brothers of Italy chief, who had made being a woman and mother central to her campaign, but nonetheless acknowledged that it was a clever way…

Did a teenager cheat to defeat the chess world champion? This question has thrown the chess universe into turmoil since 4 September, when its top player, 31-year-old Magnus Carlsen, abruptly withdrew from the $350,000 Sinquefield Cup in St Louis after a stunning loss to the lower-ranked 19-year-old Hans Niemann. At the time Carlsen did not explicitly accuse Niemann of cheating. But chess watchers gathered Carlsen’s accusation from a cryptic meme he tweeted after the game saying he would be in “big trouble” if he spoke – fuelling wild theories, including one that Niemann cheated by receiving messages through vibrating anal beads. The uproar continued. On 19 September, Carlsen faced Niemann in an online game and resigned after just one move. Niemann denied cheating against Carlsen, commenting that the world champion…

Blackstone is the largest commercial landlord in history. Over the past two decades, it has taken control of apartment blocks, student housing, railway arches, film studios, offices, logistics warehouses and datacentres. Blackstone doesn’t just own real estate, it owns everything – or that’s how it can feel when you start to examine its bewildering array of assets. If you wear Spanx, have ever matched with someone on Bumble, stayed in a Hilton hotel or a Cent er Parcs resort, visited Legoland, the London Dungeon or a relative at a Southern Cross care home, you have encountered a company that forms, or recently formed, part of the Blackstone empire. Blackstone’s New York headquarters are in a skyscraper on Park Avenue. Every Monday, the firm’s founder Steve Schwarzman and chief operating officer…

It matters more when there’s money on it,” the British bookmaker Sky Bet’s marketing slogan used to say. It certainly mattered to our family, when my husband Luke took his life after struggling with a devastating gambling addiction. He’d started out betting on football every weekend with his friends, doing exactly what the ads portrayed as harmless fun. More than a million people are addicted to gambling in the UK, and every single day at least one of them takes their life. Last week it was revealed that up to 72 English football clubs have taken a cut of the money fans lose gambling with Sky Bet. It is almost unbelievable: clubs are encouraging their own fans to gamble and then those same clubs cash in when they lose. The…

Samson Kambalu’s solution to running late for an interview is characteristically swashbuckling: he drives his flash car up on to the pavement outside the front gates of an ancient Oxford college, fishes me out of the porter’s lodge and screeches off to the car park round the back. He’s carrying a large bunch of keys with which, like a dandified Hagrid, he unlocks the secrets of the Potterian world in which he has found himself, as associate professor of fine art at the Ruskin School of Art and fellow of Magdalen. The problem with Oxford’s much contested statue of Cecil Rhodes, he tells me, as we negotiate a winding staircase up to the senior common room, stopping off en route to pick up a glass of wine, is not that…

Strange things are afoot in the world of economic policy these days. Liz Truss is, by her own account, Margaret Thatcher’s biggest admirer and a fanatical devotee of economic liberalisation. Yet the new prime minister’s first act was to announce the largest government intervention in UK history: a price cap for retail energy markets expected to cost the Treasury more than the entire NHS budget. It is not an isolated case. The flagship fiscal policy of Truss’s predecessor – “levelling up” – was essentially an admission that free markets cannot be left to their own devices in allocating investment. In the world of money and finance, the era of quantitative easing has effectively nationalised large parts of the world’s major bond markets. The US has morphed into the world’s leading…

We have a chancellor who sticks to his guns, except when he doesn’t. Unfunded tax cuts for the rich are so popular there will be more to come, except that, actually, come to think of it, now there will be one fewer. And in No 10, the lady’s not for turning, except when she is. Confused? Not half as much as this government is. In a quarter of a century of covering party conferences I can’t remember a car crash like this, or a prime minister whose authority drained so fast. The speed of her decline is dizzying, as if someone had fast-forwarded the film straight to the big fight scene at the end; within the space of a week, she has lost the confidence of her MPs, the markets…

Eight and a half years after Vladimir Putin announced the annexation of Crimea, he gathered the elites of Russia in the Kremlin’s St George Hall last Friday for another land-grab ceremony: this time laying claim to four more Ukrainian regions. The annexation formalities were preceded by an angry, rambling speech that dwelled only briefly on either Ukraine or the four regions of which Russia now claims ownership. Instead, Putin railed at the west for a litany of sins, ranging from destabilising Russia in the 17th century to allowing gender reassignment surgery He also reiterated his threat to use nuclear weapons, claiming the US had “created a precedent” for the use of nuclear force in 1945. The speech is likely to go down as another milestone in Putin’s reign over Russia.…

Tears filled Beatriz Simões’s eyes as she digested Jair Bolsonaro’s startlingly strong performance in last Sunday’s Brazilian election. Hours earlier the 34-year-old publicist had been convinced a hope-filled dawn was coming with the election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as Brazil’s next leader. But as she stood outside São Paulo’s museum of art – where Lula had come to insist his fight for power was alive – Simões wept as she pondered how loved ones had helped Brazil’s far-right incumbent surpass the predictions of pollsters. “How can it be that my friends, my relatives, people who know me – who know that I am a black woman – still support the kind of thing Bolsonaro supports?” Simões asked as she grappled with the far right’s seemingly profound grip on…

Nearly half of the planet’s bird species are in decline, according to a definitive report that paints the grimmest picture yet of the destruction of avian life. The State of the World’s Birds report, which is released every four years by BirdLife International, shows that the expansion and intensification of agriculture is putting pressure on 73% of species, while just 6% of bird species globally are increasing. Logging, invasive species, exploitation of natural resources and climate breakdown are the other main threats. Globally, 49% of bird species are declining, one in eight are threatened with extinction and at least 187 species are confirmed or suspected to have gone extinct since 1500. Most of these have been endemic species living on islands, although there is an increase in birds going extinct…

For Connie Irvin, 82, and her partner, Cheryl Lange, the cost of Hurricane Ian’s devastating tear across Florida was clear. “Our entire community is wiped out,” said Irvin. The pair lost their mobile home on Sanibel Island off the state’s west coast and are now homeless, staying in a motel inland about 50km away near Naples, Florida, that last weekend had no electricity. “It’s been very difficult. I now know what it’s like to be homeless and not have simple things like bathroom availability,” Irvin said. “We are lucky in that we are alive. There are a lot of people on Sanibel and down in Fort Myers that have lost their lives, and where I’m staying there are a lot of homeless people now.” The damage Ian has inflicted on…

Some “plan for growth”. Millions face futures they neither deserved nor were prepared for, so suddenly has disaster hit. Mortgage payers will be hammered. All homeowners face a sharp fall in house prices in which most of their wealth is held. Worse, those dependent on functioning public services and benefits confront privation and even destitution. Compelled to find up to £40bn ($45bn) of spending cuts in November to pay for Liz Truss’s unwanted tax cuts, the Treasury has to cripple the state to restore financial credibility. Capital investment, the science budget, new schools and hospitals, uprating benefits and public sector wages in line with inflation – forget them all. Instead of a stimulus to growth, Britain faces intense economic and social dislocation and ongoing stagflation. Austerity is back, this time…

STOKE-ON-TRENT Staffordshire, England I try not to make excuses so I’m going to tell the truth: everything in my garden is dead. The drought was fierce and I was sick, distracted. I couldn’t bear to look but I’m trying to now. It feels like sitting in a crypt. I’ve pulled up a damp chair and I am surrounded by skeletons, the limbs of my perennials dried, bent and snapped. The hydrangea’s flowers have turned to ghostly brown lace too soon, drooping leaves turned almost black like prayer flags. There is copper, rust and blood; piles of viburnum leaves dropped early in fright. The penstemon looks as if it has been set alight then frozen, its orange flames still and hellish. When the rains finally came, too late, the parched snails…