Indholdsfortegnelse for 9 June 2023 i Guardian Weekly

Imran Khan has cut an increasingly isolated figure in recent days. Since Pakistan’s former prime minister was released from jail, after a brief but explosive attempt to arrest him last month, his return has been marked by a mass exodus of the top leadership of his party. Pervez Khattak, the former chief minister and defence minister, became the latest high-profile resignation from Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party, last week. He followed Khan’s former finance minister, his former human rights minister, information minister and shipping minister, who all left PTI in recent weeks. Dozens of other federal and state ministers have followed suit. Most of those who have not defected are behind bars, including Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi, the president of PTI, who was arrested at his home in Lahore last Thursday.…

If you close your eyes and imagine an archetypal true blue Tory heartland, there is a good chance your mind’s eye will conjure up something close to the quaint Surrey town of Godalming. Boutique bakeries and inviting tea rooms dot the immaculate high street, still festooned with union flag bunting from its coronation celebrations. It comes as no surprise to discover the MP is the UK chancellor of the exchequer, Jeremy Hunt. Yet this seeming cliche of a Conservative fiefdom is under concerted electoral attack. Suddenly, no Tory stronghold in the area is deemed out of bounds. “If you didn’t know any of the politics, you would probably assume this was a hardcore Tory place,” conceded Paul Follows, the Liberal Democrat candidate, as he took his latest tour of Godalming…

A group of second hand clothes dealers from Ghana have visited Brussels to lobby for Europe-wide legislation to compel the fashion industry to help address the “environmental catastrophe” of dumping vast amounts of textiles in the west African country. The traders from Kantamanto in Accra, one of the world’s largest second-hand clothing markets, met Alice Bah Kuhnke, an MEP with Sweden’s Green party, environmental organisations and representatives from the European Commission and the European Environment Bureau to argue that proposed extended producer responsibility (EPR) regulation should ensure Ghana receives funds towards managing the 100 tonnes of clothing discarded at the market every day. Producers are obliged by EPR policies to contribute to the disposal of waste generated by their products. France is the only country in Europe with an EPR…

Kristina Bozanich knew that this year’s Pride month event in the Florida town of St Cloud would have to be modified to comply with a new law approved by Governor Ron DeSantis last month. One in a series of bills signed by DeSantis this year that escalated his assault on LGBTQ+ rights, the Protection of Children Act prohibits minors from attending “sexually explicit performances” and authorises the fining of businesses that allow children to attend and suspending or revoking their alcohol licences. The inaugural Pride month event Bozanich organised in St Cloud last year featured an open-air parade and a drag show. This year, the 30-year-old photographer scheduled a private event at a gym that would include a drag show and would be open only to adults who had bought…

Electric motoring is a subject about which I should, in theory, know something. My first university degree was in electrical and electronic engineering, with a subsequent master’s in control systems. Combine this, perhaps surprising, academic pathway with a lifelong passion for the motorcar, and you can see why I was drawn into an early adoption of electric vehicles. I bought my first hybrid 18 years ago and my first pure electric car nine years ago and (notwithstanding the UK’s poor electric charging infrastructure) have enjoyed my time with both. Electric vehicles may be a bit soulless, but they’re wonderful mechanisms: fast, quiet and, until recently, cheap to run. But increasingly, I feel duped. When you drill into the facts, electric motoring doesn’t seem to be quite the environmental panacea to…

What are the best drinks for a picnic? Rosie, London, England, UK Picnic drinking (in moderation, of course) is a tricky business. First off, says Zoe Burgess, the founder of drinks consultancy Atelier Pip and author of The Cocktail Cabinet, there are the logistics, guests and food to contend with. Then, warns Mark Diacono, the author of Herb, Spice and Sour, “you don’t want to premix something in which one element is fizzy and another sharp [think lemon or lime juice], because it will totally lose its sharpness over time”. And you really don’t want anything too potent, Burgess says. For these reasons, shrubs (or drinking vinegars) are good, especially when the summer fruit glut arrives, Burgess says: “Pick your fruit, then heat it with caster sugar and verjus, which…

Across 1 Poisonous plant — edible marine snail (10)7 Country completely surrounded by South Africa (7)8 Goliath (5)10 Chinese currency unit (4)11 Hand-held firework (8)13 Revolving (6)15 Framework of stakes interwoven with branches to form a fence (6)17 Second largest Channel Island (8)18 Obscene stuff (4)21 Recurrent theme (5)22 Shakespeare’s Moor (7)23 Trouble spot (10) Down 1 Conchiglie, Tagliatelle etc (5)2 Swiss creator of a chain of elegant hotels, d. 1918 (4)3 Loud hooting cries (6)4 From Lagos? (8)5 Pamphlet (7)6 Ibsen, Miller or Chekhov? (10)9 Early 20th-century American dance to ragtime music — try UK torte (anag) (6,4)12 Royal female (8)14 Plant of the pea family with clover-like leaves (7)16 Recover (6)19 Extract money by deceit (5)20 From Bangkok? (4) Solution No 16,550…

The Ukrainian government accused Russia of blowing up the Nova Kakhovka dam on the Dnipro River, as the evacuation began of people living downstream in the face of potentially catastrophic flooding. Aerial footage on social media on Tuesday showed most of the dam wall washed away and a massive surge of water heading downstream. The governor of Kherson, Oleksandr Prokudin, said that about 16,000 people were in the “critical zone” on the Ukrainian-controlled right bank of the river. The disaster happened on the second day of Ukrainian operations likely to mark the early stages of a mass counteroffensive. It could affect any Ukrainian plans for an assault across the river. “The purpose is obvious: to create insurmountable obstacles on the way of the advancing [Ukrainian army] … to slow down…

In the end, the attention was on the man who wasn’t there. All two metres of Ben Roberts-Smith was glaringly absent from the packed, anxious room in Sydney’s federal court building, as a judge quietly explained that the man once revered as the most famous soldier of his generation was, on the balance of probabilities, a murderer who callously killed unarmed civilians while serving in Australia’s military in Afghanistan. As the judgment came down, the Victoria Cross winner was far away on the Indonesian resort island of Bali. Roberts-Smith had sued three Australian newspapers – the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Canberra Times – for defamation, alleging stories they published in 2018 had falsely portrayed him as a murderer and a war criminal, a man “who broke the…

‘We fled here to Niamey with nothing. We don’t even know how to feed ourselves,” said Amadou as he sat outside a tiny concrete home on the fringe of Niger’s capital, recounting an attack on his village by government forces late last year. According to Amadou, several members of his family, and others from their village near the border with Mali and Burkina Faso, the Nigerien military executed several village elders and local leaders during the attack. They said it wasn’t the first time that people from their village had been killed or injured by government troops. Amadou and others provided their full names and that of their village, but the Guardian has withheld those details for fear of potential retribution. Amadou and the others are all members of the…

Sometimes presidencies are about things that don’t happen. Joe Biden will be breathing a sigh of relief that the economic asteroid hurtling towards planet Earth turned into a near miss: America is not going to default on his watch. After a bipartisan deal to suspend the $31.4tn debt ceiling passed the Republican-controlled House and the Democrat-controlled Senate, Biden could claim that in the age of polarisation, it takes an apostle of bipartisanship and a 36-year veteran of the Senate to reach across the aisle and make deals with his opponents. Only Biden, the argument goes, can bridge divides that seem unbridgeable in the age of Donald Trump. Such deals come at a price, of course. For sure, there will be plenty of time to debate how Biden and Democrats could…

This Cannes has turned out to be mostly about love – about how love is thwarted, denied, misinterpreted, but also nurtured and how it survives. Justine Triet’s courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall was not my choice for the Palme d’Or but what an excellent film it is: deeply intelligent and very grownup, and given an arrowhead of emotional force by its German star: Sandra Hüller, playing a writer in a dysfunctional relationship. It absorbed and gripped me. Hüller’s character is a woman whose unsatisfactory husband lies dead on the snowy path just outside their Alpine chalet having apparently fallen from the top window and hit his head on the way down. Was he pushed? Did he get his head wound before he fell? The movie wants to anatomise that…

Paul Murray’s second book, Skippy Dies, was one of the standout novels of the previous decade: a riotously entertaining tragicomedy, set in a posh Dublin boys’ school, in which bone-deep sorrow and pathos cut through the teenage hilarity and fart jokes. The Mark and the Void, 2015’s tricksy satire of both the banking crash and the difficult novel-writing business, strayed into metatextual noodling but, with The Bee Sting, Murray is triumphantly back on home turf – troubled adolescents, regretful adults, secrets signposted and exquisitely revealed, each line soaked in irony ranging from the gentle to the savage. At more than 600 pages, it is the story of a wellto-do Irish family in financial, emotional and existential trouble: Dickie Barnes, who has taken over his father’s car showroom; his wife, Imelda,…

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1 UKRAINE ‘No immediate nuclear risk’ after collapse of dam Ukrainian and UN experts said there seemed to be no immediate safety threat to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant from the collapse of the Nova Kakhovka dam, about 200km downstream. The Ukrainian nuclear energy corporation, Energoatom, said in a statement that the situation at the plant was “under control”, and the International Atomic Energy Agency said its experts at the site were monitoring the situation and there was “no immediate nuclear safety risk”. But there are long term concerns over safety and the possibility the plant could be operated again. The Ukrainian government accused Russia of blowing up the dam on the Dnipro River, and called for people living downstream to evacuate in the face of catastrophic flooding. The governor of…

Covid inquiry challenge to be heard ‘very soon' The high court will decide “very soon” whether ministers should be forced to hand over all unredacted files demanded by the Covid inquiry, MPs have been told. In an attempt to allay concerns of a cover-up, the Cabinet Office minister Jeremy Quin faced down fractious MPs on Monday and denied any political involvement in the scrutiny of such material. Legal action launched by the government last week had been expedited, he said, with the first hearing to go ahead “on or shortly after 30 June”. He claimed the government’s motive for the unprecedented move to try to limit the Covid inquiry’s powers had been “misinterpreted”. A judicial review is being sought by the Cabinet Office because it wants to avoid handing over…

“Bruno and Dom have become part of the oral history of all the peoples of the valley Among my people, the Marubo, knowledge is transmitted through oral history, passed down by elders throughout the centuries. For many generations these stories described the approach of people we call nawas – outsiders who always brought misfortune, usually in search of natural resources from the forests we inhabit. My ancestors spoke of Catholic missionaries from Spain and Portugal, of Peruvian rubber barons and logging companies. The stories my generation tells are of fundamentalist evangelical missionaries, illegal miners and fishing gangs bankrolled by drug trafficking networks. This situation has made the Javari valley Indigenous territory, where the Marubo and six other contacted Indigenous peoples live, as well as 16 isolated groups, a dangerous place…

It reads like a pitch for a thriller. A group of tourists board a boat on a beautiful lake at the foot of the Alps. The boat capsizes in a sudden storm. Four drown as others swim to safety. In the days that follow, as authorities struggle to trace hotel bookings for the passengers, it emerges all were affiliated with the Italian and Israeli secret services. In the days since Gooduria, a 16-metre house boat, was swallowed up by Lake Maggiore, there has been growing speculation over what its passengers were doing in this corner of northern Italy. Last Thursday, a police source working on the investigation confirmed that eight of the boat’s 21 passengers either currently or formerly served with Italy’s secret service, and 13 had ties with Israel’s.…

With a federal court judge finding that Ben Roberts-Smith, Australia’s most decorated soldier, either murdered or was complicit in and responsible for the murder of unarmed civilians while serving in Afghanistan, Australia must turn its attention to the real victims of this conflict. The judge in Roberts-Smith’s failed defamation case found that, on the balance of probabilities, the newspapers that the former army corporal was suing had proven in their defence that Roberts-Smith kicked a handcuffed prisoner off a cliff in Uruzgan province in 2012 before ordering a subordinate Australian soldier to shoot the injured man dead. The dusty province of Uruzgan where Australian armed forces served for more than a decade is one of the poorest in Afghanistan. The case has been a reminder of the failures of foreign…

Guzzling water has become something of a badge of honour among celebrities, with Jennifer Aniston and Gwyneth Paltrow revealing they drink up to three litres a day. But not everyone finds it so easy. Florence Pugh, for one, announced that she found water “too boring”. As well as the lack of flavour, the constant toilet breaks were “a waste of time”. Pugh prefer s orange juice, elderflower presses and tea. What do the experts say? How much water should we be drinking every day – and is it just as healthy to get your hydration from other beverages? Chester-based GP Chris Ritchies-on says NHS guidelines suggest drinking about six to eight glasses of water a day, which is roughly two litres. “Although this is the general guidance, there is very…

Giraffes will eat courgettes if they have to, but they really prefer carrots. A team of researchers from Spain and Germany recently took advantage of this preference to investigate whether the animals are capable of statistical reasoning. In the experiment, a giraffe was shown two transparent containers holding a mixture of carrot and courgette slices. One container held mostly carrots, the other mostly courgettes. A researcher then took one slice from each container and offered them to the giraffe with closed hands, so it couldn’t see which vegetable had been selected. In repeated trials, the four test giraffes reliably chose the hand that had reached into the container with more carrots, showing they understood that the more carrots were in the container, the more likely it was that a carrot…

Should we update classic stories with modern morals? Two film-based kerfuffles have reopened the question. Reports that the next James Bond “won’t be white” have provoked a backlash, as did the launch of Disney’s The Little Mermaid, which features a black Ariel. Negative “review bombing” of the film, which has been the target of criticism since its lead actor, Halle Bailey, was announced, caused the Internet Movie Database to make a rare intervention and change its ratings system. There is abhorrent racism on show here, but alongside it is a broader argument that 21st-century mores – diversity, sexual equality and so on – should not be shoehorned into old stories. General outrage greeted “woke” updates to Roald Dahl books this year, and still periodically erupts over Disney remakes, most recently…

Punch-ups in the stalls. Drunken audience members singing and shouting over songs. Theatregoers filming performances – or just watching something on their phones instead. These are just some of the examples of bad behaviour recently reported in theatres. What on earth is it like for actors to contend with such unruliness? “I was in Dreamgirls and there would be fights in the audience,” recalls the West End actor Marisha Wallace. “It was wild. It happened so often they had to get more security … It’s distracting when you’re trying to sing, act and dance.” For Wallace, the Dreamgirls experience is a contrast to how audiences are responding to her current show, Guys and Dolls, at London’s Bridge theatre. It’s an immersive promenade production where some of the theatregoers crowd around…

Though he worked for the BBC for two and a half years and often spoke on air, no recording of George Orwell’s voice has been found. Many friends and memoirists have described it, and his struggles to make himself audible (all the more so after a sniper’s bullet went through his throat in Spain), but their accounts vary: was his voice high-pitched or husky, Old Etonian or a cockney drawl? DJ Taylor settles for calling it deadpan, but its elusiveness seems apt. Orwell was one of the great voices of the 20th century. But the voice of the early novels isn’t the voice of Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-Four. And the voice of the reporter, down and out among Kentish hop-pickers isn’t the voice of Tribune’s “As I Please” columnist.…