Indholdsfortegnelse for 21 October 2022 i Guardian Weekly

Jeremy Hunt has shredded Liz Truss’s economic plans in one of the most astonishing U-turns in modern political history, including slashing the energy price freeze which the prime minister had repeatedly championed. The new chancellor dismantled almost all of what Truss’s leadership victory had been built on, including most of her tax cuts, and hinted a new windfall tax was in his sights – a move the prime minister had said she would not countenance. Hunt also refused to rule out cuts to totemic Conservative pledges, including defence spending and the pensions triple lock. Truss declined to appear at the dispatch box in parliament on Monday despite calls from Labour, leading one cabinet minister to clarify she was not “hiding under a desk”. In an interview with the BBC on…

Thousands of favela residents and activists have hit the streets of Rio to voice their support for Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the leftist frontrunner to become Brazil’s next president. Addressing a sea of supporters in one of Rio’s largest favelas, the Complexo do Alemão, Lula vowed to give his far-right rival Jair Bolsonaro “a thrashing” when South America’s biggest democracy holds the second round of its presidential election at the end of this month. “We’re going to win these elections,” proclaimed the 76-year-old ex-president who fell just short of an outright victory over Bolsonaro in the first round 10 days ago. Lula, who rose from rural poverty to become Brazil’s first working-class president in 2002, said he was determined to return to power “to prove to the elites who…

MY LUNCH IS SOME one-year-out-of-dateMarmite peanut butter spread over cracked black pepper Nairn’s oatcakes (best before December 2021). It follows a breakfast of old pink Coco Pops and a mid-morning snack of crisps that the manufacturer suggests I should have eaten when Theresa May was still in Downing Street. Many people are quite relaxed about food dates, sniffing their milk or inspecting their salad bag rather than relying on what the manufacturer has printed on the packaging. But there is a new breed of bargain hunter: one who seeks out food that is not just two days or two weeks out of date, but sometimes two prime ministers beyond its best before. Many do it purely to save money, others to help the planet, quite a few for the strange…

Hard to believe now, when we’re in the middle of the maelstrom, but one day this too will be the past. And when it is, when we’re out of the psychodrama – no longer staring at the screen, watching Kwasi Kwarteng’s plane do a U-turn in the sky en route to his being fired, for the crime of doing what his boss wanted him to do – it may not look all that complicated. Historians will look back and see a point of origin to the current madness, one that explains how a new prime minister could see her administration fall apart in a matter of weeks, even if we struggle to name that cause out loud right now. When the textbooks of the future come to the chapter we…

There is only one thing worse than no chips, when you have been promised them. It is thoroughly disappointing chips. That’s what I now have: dull, mouth-drying batons of mildly soft carbohydrate, under a brittle brown carapace. They have been cooked, after a fashion, in the white plastic and metal box in front of me. I don’t regard the engineering involved as the problem. The problem is language. The appliance is a Cosori Air Fryer, and the issue is that third word. It’s called a fryer but, after cooking with one, I can firmly say: it does not fry. It doesn’t even come close to mimicking the glorious impact of placing foods in a pan of tumbling, boiling golden fat. Not that people seem to care. Air fryers are in.…

LONGDEAN Cotswolds, England I’m just back from the dairy farm up the hill. Unfailingly helpful, John has agreed to collect a three-metre roller we’ve bought from another neighbouring farm that is on the market, with equipment being sold separately. I’ll repay him with sausages, our customary form of exchange. Commercial feed has cost double what it did last year. There’s a long, expensive winter ahead. The roller is needed for our soft river meadow where hooves compress the soil, leaving it dented and uneven. To keep one permanently in the field is ideal. The solution, however, is bittersweet. The farm for sale is known locally by the name of the family who have farmed it for decades. They were of a different generation, but nonetheless forward-thinking in their equality. His…

1 UNITED STATES Senator raises alarm over Saudi links with Russia A senior Democratic lawmaker raised alarm about the possibility that sensitive US defence technology could be shared with Russia by Saudi Arabia in the wake of the kingdom’s recent decision to side with Moscow over the interests of the US. Richard Blumenthal, a member of the Senate armed services committee who has proposed a one-year freeze on weapons sales to Saudi following Opec+’s decision to cut oil production, said he would “dig deeper into the risk” in discussions with the Pentagon. A rift that has emerged between the Saudi monarchy and Democrats in Washington, who have reacted with fury against a recent decision by the Opec oil cartel to begin cutting oil production next month by 2m barrels a…

Truss apologises for mini-budget disaster Liz Truss has apologised for going “too far and too fast” with the economic policies in her mini-budget and has accepted responsibility for the problems created by it. The prime minister refused to say whether her vision for Britain was “dead” during a BBC interview but admitted she had made mistakes. She also said she would lead the Conservative party into the next general election. Truss acknowledged that government policies have made things harder for people and their ability to pay their mortgages, the repayments on which have risen since Truss and her former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s minibudget in September. Last Friday, Kwarteng cut short a trip to Washington to have emergency talks with Truss. Those talks did not take place, instead, Kwarteng was made…

Chinese authorities strictly censored discussion of a rare protest in Beijing last week that saw large banners unfurled on a flyover calling for boycotts and the removal of Xi Jinping, just days before the most important event of China’s five-year political cycle. Photos and videos of the protest on the Sitong bridge emerged on social media last Thursday, also showing plumes of smoke billowing from the bridge over a major thoroughfare in the Haidian district of the capital. “We want food, not PCR tests. We want freedom, not lockdowns. We want respect, not lies. We want reform, not a Cultural Revolution. We want a vote, not a leader. We want to be citizens, not slaves,” said one banner, while a second called for a boycott of schools, strikes and the…

The Russian missiles come to Zaporizhzhia when the “people’s dreams are at their deepest”, says Oleksandr Starukh. The governor of this southeastern region of Ukraine since 2020, Starukh, 49, took the call from his bed at 5.08am on the morning of 24 February when one of the first missiles of the Russian invasion had hit a local air defence system. Nearly eight months later he is still taking the dawn calls. The Russians generally strike, he says, at 2am, 4am and 6am. The latest raid out of the dark had been just a few hours earlier, when 10 S-300 cruise missiles and four Iranian-made Shahed-136 kamikaze drones crashed into the suburbs of the region’s eponymous capital at 5.30am last Saturday. This time the missiles had been targeted – albeit poorly…

UK government borrowing costs fell sharply and the pound rallied after Jeremy Hunt said he would cut short the price freeze on consumer energy bills and cancel most of the unfunded tax cuts in last month’s mini-budget. The yield – or interest rate – on 30-year UK government bonds fell by more than 0.4 percentage points on Monday after the chancellor’s statement, with a decline in borrowing costs across the board for short- and long-dated bonds. The pound rose by more than 2% against the dollar, trading above $1.14 on global currency markets. The FTSE 100 closed up 0.9% at 6,920, on a day of gains across financial markets in the US and Europe. In a sharp U-turn aimed at restoring market confidence, the new chancellor said he would scrap…

Organic farmer Kees Saibenga looks at the sea of white and pink blossoms before him. It is mid-July and millions of tiny buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum) flowers sway in the wind on the plot he is cultivating in the Dutch province of Drenthe. Saibenga is delighted that the crop is buzzing with a multitude of insect pollinators. “I’m so happy to be growing buckwheat,” said the third-generation farmer. Buckwheat flour, made from the seeds of the plant, is a key ingredient in popular Dutch foods such as pannenkoeken (thin, flat pancakes) and poffertjes (fluffy mini-pancakes), but almost all of the flour is imported. “At the beginning of the 19th century, buckwheat was the second-largest crop grown in the country, after rye,” said Peter Brul, an organic farming adviser. But with access…

When David Cottrell was about three, his father drove him down a short road toward the beach in their home town of North Cove. It was the early 1960s. The Cottrells owned and lived on a cranberry farm on this part of the south Washington coast. The small, unincorporated settlement, founded in 1884, sat along an embayment behind Cape Shoalwater, a claw-like spit that curled into the north end of Willapa Bay, where an estuary opens into the Pacific. At the end of the road, there it was. A big white building, part of an abandoned coast guard station, half over the bank’s edge, cracked open, in the water. The structure was the latest casualty of coastal erosion that was devouring the town. That night, Cottrell couldn’t sleep. And the…

Horror has been a staple of the movie business since its inception. People love to be scared, and Hollywood studios have wisely capitalised on this. There are many companies that have built their business, and their reputation, on horror films: cool-kid studio A24 are the newest in the game, with Ti West’s trilogy of sweaty slashers X, Pearl and MaXXXine, the upcoming third film. Horror universes may seem like a new phenomenon – but in fact horror films kicked off the whole “universe” concept, decades before superhero-led multi-platform series and films. Specifically, they started with Universal and its classic monsters series. Universal was associated with horror from the early days, when they accidentally hit the jackpot in 1931 with their versions of two literary properties, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary…

Shortly after her sixth birthday, Rachel Aviv stopped eating. It had been Yom Kippur the week before, and her family had observed the traditional fast. Back at school, she refused even the tiny portions her teacher put on her plate. “She looked at me carefully – I could feel her contemplating who I was, and her focus was exhilarating,” Aviv remembers. She persisted through dizzy spells and dehydration, and in short order she was admitted to the Children’s Hospital of Michigan for “failure to eat”. In the anorexia unit, the threat of the “feeding tube” hung over every meal. There were older girls in the unit, among them Hava, 12, who inducted newcomers into the rituals of calorie counting and exercise. Aviv was monitored for 45 minutes after she ate,…

ThisweekinBeijing, Xi Jinping is presiding over one of his country’s great shows of political theatre and, as he seals a long-planned political triumph, consolidating his power and extending his rule. The Chinese Communist party is poised to formally hand Xi another five years as party boss, and therefore leader of the country, at a summit that will also move his allies into key roles and elevate the status of his writings on power and government. The 20th Party Congress will – barring unprecedented last-minute drama – confirm him as the most powerful man in China since Mao Zedong, and probably enshrine him and his ideology in the party’s constitution. It is an uneasy precedent. After Mao’s death, China’s elite vowed never again to allow such concentration of power, and set…

The message from last week’s annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund was clear. War, pandemic and rampant inflation have put the global economy under severe strain. The mood was edgy, often fractious. The Americans had a go at Saudi Arabia for production curbs designed to push up the cost of oil. The Indians were unhappy with the aggressive increases in US interest rates. Britain was in the doghouse for a botched mini-budget that has sent tremors through financial markets. Russia made it clear it would veto attempts to condemn it for the invasion of Ukraine. Set up to encourage the world’s biggest developed and emerging market countries to find solutions to common problems, the G20 could not even agree on a bland summarising communique. The moribund state of the…

Oranges are to Seville what cherry blossom is to Kyoto, but the city is having to take preventive measures to protect its 48,000 orange trees from deadly bacteria that has already devastated citrus crops in Asia, Latin America and the US. The EU’s Life for Citrus campaign, which includes Spain, Portugal, France and Italy, is developing strategies to stop the spread of huanglongbing (HLB), Mandarin for “ citrus greening”, also known as yellow dragon disease. Caused by the bacteria Candidatus liberibacter, it is spread by insects. The infestation has already reached epidemic levels in 48 Asian countries and 53 African states, as well as Brazil and the US. It was detected in China in 1943, in Africa in 1947 and by 2005 had begun to devastate Florida’s orange groves. “One…

As the coronavirus grew from a fleeting concern to a fullblown panic, Lili Lim started to hear about people for whom the illness lasted weeks or even months. There were news stories of young people who couldn’t shake their fatigue or cognitive malaise, of people who had to quit their job due to debilitating exhaustion. For Lim, the symptoms were frighteningly recognisable. “We would see them and say that these people are exactly like us,” says the 27-year-old, diagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) – also known as chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) – in 2018. Lim is a ME/CFS patient-advocate and related to the plight of those with long Covid. “This is the same thing, just happening with a different virus.” Chronic fatigue syndrome and long Covid are both part of…

In the latest of what can often seem like the “final nails in the coffin ” of biodiversity across Europe, we heard in recent weeks that UK environmental protection is under threat. But while the global scale of the climate crisis and biodiversity loss remains alarming, vital new research, which I helped lead, shows there are also heartening examples of European wildlife bouncing back from the brink. For the past two years, we at the Zoological Society of London’s Institute of Zoology, along with colleagues at BirdLife International and the European Bird Census Council, have been investigating the fortunes of 50 European wildlife species over the past 50 years. These species are incredible comeback stories, and researching how they have recovered has been a refreshing and inspiring endeavour – the…

Letters for publication weekly.letters@theguardian.com Please include a full postal address and a reference to the article. We may edit letters. Submission and publication of all letters is subject to our terms and conditions, see: THEGUARDIAN.COM/LETTERS-TERMS Editorial Editor: Graham Snowdon Guardian Weekly, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU, UK To contact the editor directly: editorial.feedback@theguardian.com Corrections Our policy is to correct significant errors as soon as possible. Please write to guardian.readers@theguardian.com or the readers’ editor, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU, UK King Charles must lead by example on climate John Vidal makes some good points about the role that King Charles could take as a climate leader (Opinion, 14 October). However, he neglects to mention a key way in which the King could lead by example. Charles is…

When his leading man asked Park Chan-wook to describe his role in the director’s latest film, the noir romance Decision to Leave, Park told him the character was the sort of deferential police officer who “doesn’t carry a gun, but he carries wet wipes”. Park recalls this over Zoom with a sly smile; his interpreter laughs. The director, known for Oldboy and The Handmaiden, is at the Toronto film festival promoting Decision to Leave, which tells the story of a mild-mannered detective (played by Park Hae-il) who grows dangerously close to the lead suspect in a murder case. “It’s really nice to be able to go back to cinemas,” he says (he also attended the London film festival this month). “I think I had taken for granted being able to…

Yiyun Li has made something miraculous out of choosing to write not in her mother tongue, Mandarin Chinese, but in her adopted English. She moved to the US from Beijing with her husband in 1996, when she was 23, and has made her home there ever since. Inside the traditions of English prose, the writers she loves include Thomas Hardy, Katherine Mansfield, William Trevor and John McGahern, and you can feel this in the plain music of her style, the rich surprises of her perception, her relish for the earthy solidity of words. And yet she isn’t quite a realist; or rather, her realism is always self-conscious and reflexive. Particular scenes in her fictions give way all the time to a restless speculative questioning. Even Li’s childhood memories play in…