Indholdsfortegnelse for 9 December 2022 i Guardian Weekly

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1 RUSSIA Mass strike launched after drone attack hits airfields A drone attack on an airfield in the Kursk region set fire to an oil storage tank, a local governor said on Tuesday. It appeared to be the third such strike after explosions rocked two Russian airbases far from the frontlines on Monday as it was reported Kyiv launched a pre-emptive strike on bombers the Kremlin has used to try to cripple Ukraine’s electrical grid. The Russian defence ministry confirmed the attacks on Monday, blaming them on Ukraine and saying two warplanes were damaged. Russian media reports and video posted to social media indicated that an explosion occurred early on Monday morning at the Engels-2 airbase in the Saratov region, which hosts Tu-95 bombers that have taken part in missile…

POLITICS Labour would not seek to rejoin EU, Starmer states Rejoining the EU’s single market would not boost UK economic growth, Keir Starmer argued this week, saying it would create “years of uncertainty” for UK businesses, which would be worse than the closer trade links that would come. The Labour leader said that as prime minister he would instead seek to improve the post-departure deal agreed by Boris Johnson. Asked if he thought single market membership would benefit UK growth, Starmer said in a BBC radio interview on Monday: “No, at this stage I don’t think it would, and there’s no case for going back to the EU or going back into the single market. I do think there’s a case for a better Brexit. I do think there’s a…

In every conflict over the living world, something is being protected. And most of the time, it’s the wrong thing. The world’s most destructive industries are fiercely protected by governments. The three sectors that appear to be most responsible for the collapse of ecosystems and erasure of wildlife are fossil fuels, fisheries and farming. In 2021, governments subsidised oil and gas production to the tune of $64b n, and spent a further $531b n on keeping fossil fuel prices low. The latest figures for fisheries, from 2018, suggest that global subsidies for the sector amount to $35b n a year, over 80% of which go to large-scale industrial fishing. Every year, governments spend $500b n on farm subsidies, the great majority of which pay no regard to environmental protection. Even…

Ukrainian officials have recently been hinting at developments in the country’s grinding war with Russia. A long-range rocket, perhaps? Or a home made modified drone? The apparent evidence of a new and unexpected weapon was visible on Monday, when mysterious explosions hit two Russian airbases. Both took place a long way from the frontlines. Video from Russian social media showed a blast at the Engels-2 airbase in Russia’s Saratov region. Another happened at the Dyagilevo military airbase near Ryazan, a city just 200km from Moscow. According to Russian state media, three people at the base were killed and five injured when a fuel truck went up in flames. At least two planes were reportedly damaged. On Tuesday, the governor of Kursk said an airfield in the region had been attacked…

Strike action is not something most managers think about. The “winter of discontent” and the year-long miners’ strike were features of the late 1970s and mid-1980s. Since then, industrial action in the private and public sectors has fallen to a level so low that academics have given up studying it. When pay talks began a year ago for the current financial year, inflation was rising, but the Bank of England was reasonably certain it would be temporary. Union leaders prepared for a post-pandemic battle over pay, but not one that would probably end in strike action. The Ukraine war changed all that. By March, inflation had reached 7% from the previous October’s 4.2%. In July, the consumer price index had rocketed to 10.1% It is possible that as many as…

Campaigners who have fought for decades for Germany to confront its colonial past celebrated the renaming of a square and a street in Berlin last Friday in tribute to figureheads who resisted forced rule in Africa. Manga-Bell-Platz in the so-called African Quarter of Berlin’s Wedding district was renamed in memory of Rudolf and Emily Duala Manga Bell, a king and queen of Duala in Cameroon who fought against German colonialism. Rudolf Duala Manga Bell, who had been educated in Germany, was executed along with about 100 other people by German authorities in August 1914 after a sham trial. The square, a central part of the African Quarter, had until Friday been known as Nachtigalplatz since 1910, after Gustav Nachtigal, the German empire’s commissioner for west Africa who had a key…

In his Pensées, published posthumously in 1670, the French philosopher Blaise Pascal appeared to establish a foolproof argument for religious commitment, which he saw as a kind of bet. If the existence of God was even minutely possible, he claimed, then the potential gain was so huge – an “eternity of life and happiness” – that taking the leap of faith was the mathematically rational choice. Pascal’s wager implicitly assumes that religion has no benefits in the real world, but some sacrifices. But what if there were evidence that faith could also contribute to wellbeing? Scientific studies suggest this is the case. Joining a church, synagogue or temple even appears to extend your lifespan. These findings might appear to be proof of divine intervention, but few of the scientists examining…

The Saudi prince was detained all night. As daylight broke, he staggered out of the king’s palace in Mecca. His personal bodyguards, who tailed him everywhere, were missing. The prince was led to a waiting car. He was free to leave – but he would soon discover that freedom was not very different from detention. As his car pulled out of the palace gates, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef fired off a series of panicked text messages. “Be very careful! Don’t come back!” he wrote to his most trusted adviser, who had quietly slipped out of the kingdom weeks earlier. When Nayef reached his own palace in the coastal city of Jeddah a few hours later, he found new guards at the property. It was obvious that he was being put…

‘Where are you from?” is a question that every person in my family has been asked, from my parents in the 1960s to my little nephew, crying on his way back from school. I’ve faced the question from school teachers who want to know if I speak English, dates trying to exoticise me – and a manager who laughed afterwards, knowing he should not have asked. “Where are you really from?” is the follow-up, if you don’t give someone what they want. While the question can come from a place of curiosity, it is hard to ignore the sinister undertones. So, when I read that Ngozi Fulani, the head of a domestic abuse charity, was questioned where she was from while in Buckingham Palace, I wasn’t surprised. What did surprise…

The tide encroaches on a sunset football match at Yoff beach in the capital, Dakar. Senegal’s men’s national side are Africa’s reigning champions, but went out of the World Cup in Qatar last weekend after a 3-0 defeat by England. The tournament’s knockout stages continued this week, with the final to be played on 18 December. The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol 207 | Issue № 24 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.…

IT WAS A HUNTING SHOTGUN LIKE THE ONE used to murder Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira – and it was pointing straight at Julia Kanamari’s chest. “You’ll be next,” she remembers the bleary-eyed gunman snarling after being caught smuggling a boat-load of illegally poached river turtles out of the Javari Valley Indigenous territory in the Brazilian Amazon. The Indigenous leader, whose name has been changed to protect her identity, had confronted the man one November morning after spotting him and two accomplices on the Itaquaí river – the same waterway where the British journalist and Brazilian Indigenous expert were shot dead last June. “I was defending our territory. I didn’t care what might happen,” said Kanamari. “I told him I didn’t fear being killed.” Yet six months after the two…

Winter has arrived. Temperatures in the frontline Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, under remorseless attack from the Russians, plunged to -11C last weekend, and at no point got above freezing. Gradually the mud and rain of late autumn will give way to snow and cold of -20C or lower. Yet both sides have their reasons to carry on fighting. The weather is a neutral party to the near-10-month war but, in winter, it inevitably acts as a constraint. Simple operations take far longer, cover from foliage is reduced or eliminated, white camouflage is required when snow has arrived and more rations are needed because soldiers eat more. Armies have to ensure soldiers can dry once they get wet, or they will risk hypothermia or frostbite. “Training, morale and leadership become critical,”…

Christina McAnea is the general secretary of Unison, the UK’s biggest union. Brought up on Glasgow’s Drumchapel estate, McAnea left school at 16 to join the civil service The no-nonsense McAnea has couched Unison’s demands for better pay and conditions for NHS workers, who include paramedics and ambulance staff, as a battle for the health service. The result of a ballot of its 300,000-plus NHS members was disappointing, however, with the tough 50% minimum threshold for strike action reached at only eight employers. Sharon Graham, below, runs Unite, which was heavily involved in Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party under her predecessor, Len McCluskey Graham, who left school at 16 and led her first strike a year later, focuses on industrial battles instead of Westminster politics. Unite has claimed…

While Ukraine lives in fear of the next mass bombing of its energy infrastructure by Russian missiles and Iranian drones, and constantly monitors the actions of troops located in Belarus, there are still small forms of normality, small forms of resistance. A blitz chess championship was recently held in Zhytomyr, a city 140km west of Kyiv and a regular target of missile attacks. Blitz chess – because slow chess is impossible in today’s Ukraine, where everything has to be done quickly or very quickly. If in peacetime a person appreciates every hour of tranquillity, during a war we appreciate every minute. Forty-four amateur chess players took part in the tournament, which was dedicated to the birthday of the local chess federation’s former president, Artem Sachuk, who is now fighting at…

Decades before Thatcher declared there was “no alternative” to the dominance of free markets and privatisation, Britain was home to several progressive, utopian experiments in how to build a society that centred human flourishing and collective need. But the story of these experiments, and the ideals that underpinned them, doesn’t have a particularly happy ending. There were momentary triumphs, but the overall arc is clear. Time after time, high-minded principles of public luxury were diluted and ultimately washed away by the twin tides of individualism and profit. The Peckham Experiment, the deeply impressive fourth novel by Guy Ware, tells this story of compromise and decline via the fractured re collections of building surveyor Charlie, 85 years old and trying to write a eulogy for his recently deceased twin brother, JJ.…

THE MARCHES Shropshire, England, UK The thin swift of a new moon rises through cirrus. Sunlight flashes oak-gold, bracken-rust. Many birches are fiery yellow, but some of the older trees are already stark against the sky. In the architecture of silver birches, Betula pendula, are curious structures. They look like birds’ nests, or what happens if birds and their nests become one thing. These clusters of twigs are witches’ brooms – however, this spell was not cast by human agency but by a yeast-like fungus, Taphrina betulina. Perhaps carried by an aphid, mite or other leaf-biter, the fungus enters a birch leaf bud in spring. It carries growth regulators, which penetrate the bud’s cells and cause a gall – a tumour. The bud goes haywire and, instead of a single…

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Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s victory over President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil’s October elections was hailed as the potential salvation of the Amazon, after four years of destruction that have brought the rainforest close to a tipping point, threatening the very survival of the Indigenous populations whose lives depend upon it. Lula has vowed to reverse the environmental destruction wreaked under his far-right predecessor and work towards zero deforestation by tackling crime in the Amazon and guaranteeing the protection of Indigenous rights. But the president-elect, who takes office on 1 January 2023, faces an uphill battle to meet these big promises. “Lula is going to face the challenge of how to be ambitious on climate issues, and at the same time be effective, meet the pledges that are being made,”…

With anti-lockdown convulsions gripping China, the authorities in Beijing have responded by easing some restrictions in big manufacturing centres as they map out a “new stage and mission” in their unpopular zero-Covid policy. There are concerns that more freedom of movement could allow the virus to rip through a population in which immunity is lower than in the west. Those health risks mean a difficult winter ahead, casting a shadow over the prospects for international trade. Apple has warned of Christmas shortages. Analysts have told the Guardian that the shutdown at Foxconn’s iPhone factory in Zhengzhou could have cost Apple a third of its Christmas inventory. “The Chinese supply chain is the Grinch that stole Christmas,” said Dan Ives, a data researcher Apple is not the only company affected: logistics…

People gather in Hawaii to watch the lava flows of Mauna Loa from a distance. The world’s largest active volcano erupted late last month for the first time in nearly four decades and continued to spew lava into this week, though its flows were slowing to a crawl. Fissure three in the volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii remain ed active and was feeding a lava flow advancing at an average rate of 50 metres an hour last weekend. Fissure four was “sluggish”, the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory said, while fissures one and two were no longer active. Officials warned that lava advances could be variable over coming weeks. But the volcano continued to release gas plumes high into the atmosphere before being blown west towards Japan. That is generating…

The Netherlands is expected to formally apologise for its role in 250 years of slavery but the planned move is threatening to cause a split, with some critics calling it “complete nonsense”. The prime minister, Mark Rutte, will deliver a public message on 19 December that will aim to “do justice to the meaning and experience of past slavery”, according to a parliamentary briefing. It is widely anticipated that this will be an apology for the 250 years in which the Dutch funded an economic and cultural “Golden Age” by exploiting more than 600,000 people from Africa and Asia – about 5% of the 12 million enslaved by Europeans from the 17th to the 19th century. According to broadcaster NOS, plans include €200m ($210m) for awareness projects and €27m for…

After years of farming rice, Houn Chenda finally fulfilled her ambition of opening a shop at Angkor Wat last year, renting wedding outfits and costumes to tourists who pose for photos at the ancient temple complex. “I love it,” Chenda said. “I’m keeping cultural traditions alive.” She pawned the family jewellery and pooled her savings – about $3,965 – in the hope the business would provide a better income than rice. But by the end of the year, the shop will be knocked down. Chenda’s family is one of nearly 10,000 across the Angkor archaeological park being evicted by the government, which says it is necessary to preserve the famous site. “I sold all my possessions to start this business, but now it’s going to be gone,” said Chenda, 33.…

A boy in rural Canada learns the forest he loves will be chopped down, so he scales one of the trees and refuses to leave. As an adult, he scales the CN Tower in Toronto – then the world’s tallest building – to protest against the destruction of the climate, and is escorted down in handcuffs. He rejects owning a car, cycling through the pounding rain, sleet and ice of a Quebec winter. A local newspaper calls him “Green Jesus”. Fast forward to April 2022 and that same Steven Guilbeault greenlights an oil-drilling project off Newfoundland in his role as Canada’s minister of environment and climate change. Guilbeault is cast as an enigmatic figure – a man who has attended environ mental conferences as government official and frustrated activist. He…

In the past few weeks a photograph of Tony Blair and his buddy Bill Clinton sharing a panel with a scruffy kid wearing a T-shirt, baggy shorts and trainers has been doing the rounds. The April event was in the Bahamas and funded by an outfit called FTX – a “user-friendly crypto exchange” – owned by the scruffy kid, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF from now on). Blair and Clinton look pleased to be there, providing confirmation of the aphrodisiac effect of great wealth, because the lad who was playing host was apparently as rich as Croesus, or at any rate worth $32bn. And this was real wealth, it seemed. After all, the venture capitalists at Sequoia – who had backed Silicon Valley success stories such as Google and PayPal – had…

The first thing you see is a framed portrait of Vladimir Putin propped against a table. The Russian leader looks like a secular icon, like Lenin in his mausoleum, seemingly incapable of human expression. But this being a video installation, there is more. Standing on the table is figure in a long gown and balaclava, like Rasputin in women’s clothes, or a very unorthodox priest. The figure raises their skirts and a jet of urine spurts over the portrait. Welcome to Reykjavík and to Velvet Terrorism, an exhibition tracing the decade-long history of Russian art collective Pussy Riot. “Is that you?” I ask Maria Alyokhina, AKA Masha, pointing at the masked urinator? The Pussy Riot co-founder has been showing me, over a video conferencing app, around the exhibition she and…

Noah Baumbach’s terrifically stylish movie, adapted from the 1985 novel by Don DeLillo, is a deadpan comedy of catastrophisation, a meditation on western prosperity and its discontents, its intellectual satiety. His film amplifies the book’s richness as a period piece that is prescient about the fears of the present day. And it tackles an obsession with the ubiquity of information and interpretation, the white noise of ersatz fact: the fizz of bad television reception in which conspiracy and fake news take root Adam Driver plays a middle-aged academic called Jack Gladney ; Greta Gerwig plays Babette, his amiable distracted wife. Jack is America’s leading light in the preposterous discipline of Hitler studies. And then the great crash happens – an environmental disaster caused by a Jack Daniel’s-swigging truck driver transporting…

When I was growing up, my family didn’t so much have Christmas traditions as Periods. Our festive celebrations reflected where we were as a family at any given time. The Scallop Period was probably my favourite. A couple, Colin and Anne, moved into the house next door to my childhood home in Weymouth, on the south coast of England, and every now and then, Colin, a trawlerman, would leave a massive bag of scallops on our doorstep. Dad would clean and freeze them, ready for Christmas, when we would feast on a starter we’d otherwise never have been able to afford : scallops seared and served with bacon and pea puree. There was also the Foraging Period, which saw the table groan with jars of chutney and jelly and bottles…