Indholdsfortegnelse for 17 November 2023 i Guardian Weekly

The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol 209 | Issue№ 20 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. We exist to hold power to account in the name of the public interest, to uphold liberal and progressive values, to fight for the common good, and to build hope. Our values, as laid out by editor CP Scott in 1921, are honesty, integrity, courage, fairness, and a sense of duty to the reader and the community. The…

It is a cold day in Washington. A crowd is gathering on the National Mall for the swearing-in of the 47th president of the United States. At noon on 20 January 2025, Donald Trump places his hand on a Bible, takes the oath of office and delivers an inaugural address with a simple theme: retribution. THIS IS THE NIGHTMARE SCENARIO for millions of Americans – and one that they are increasingly being forced to take seriously. Opinion polls show Trump running away with the Republican presidential nomination and narrowly leading Democrat Joe Biden in a hypothetical match-up. Political pundits can offer caveats, but almost all agree that the race for the White House next year will be very close. The fact there is a more than remote chance of the…

Inside a darkened operating theatre in Gaza’s largest hospital complex, staff swaddled dozens of tiny premature babies seven or eight to a bed, in a desperate effort to keep the infants warm – and alive. With no oxygen supplies or power for incubators, nurses attempted to provide what little care they could for 39 babies who had been transferred from the neonatal unit following a strike on Dar al-Shifa’s intensive care unit. “The neonatal unit is not connected to the main surgical units; it was dangerous to go from the main building to get the babies,” said Dr Marwan Abu Sada, the head of surgery at al-Shifa, which has been operating under fire. “We called the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Israelis to ensure the passage…

Just five weeks ago Rishi Sunak pledged to be the candidate of change, telling activists at the Conservative party conference that he would shake up three decades of political consensus. Instead, on Monday he brought back David Cameron, the former prime minister who was in charge for six of those 30 years and who, through Brexit, ushered in the biggest schism in British politics for a generation. Sunak has been on the back foot for months, trailing in the polls and casting around for something – or, as it turns out, someone – to help him reassert his authority. Suella Braverman’s increasingly inflammatory remarks – most recently accusing the police of bias over pro-Palestine marches – were retoxi-fying the Tory brand and ultimately forced his hand. Braverman, who many believe…

Behind a music stand in his grey school uniform, Khanya Mtala takes a deep breath. The shy teenager locks eyes with his teacher sitting at the piano and releases his powerful baritone voice. “You my soul, you my heart,” he sings in German, the melody of Robert Schumann’s Wid mung (Dedication) resonating in the small room. His vibrato suggests years of training, but the 17-year-old took up classical singing 10 months ago. Mtala, from Philippi township, south of Cape Town, is one of 13 singers selected by the city opera’s Foundation Studio – a training programme for the next generation of South African soloists. The teenagers, chosen from among 100 applicants from under resourced high schools, share the same aspiration: to sing at the world’s most distinguished opera houses. Mtala…

For a quarter of a century, Gerry Fialka, an experimental filmmaker from Venice, California, has hosted a book club devoted to a single text: James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, one of the most famously difficult in literary history. Starting in 1995, between 10 and 30 people would show up to monthly meetings at a local library. At first they read two pages per month, eventually slowing to just one page per discussion. At that pace, the group – which now meets on Zoom – reached the final page in October. It had taken them 28 years. That amount of time “could well be a record”, said Sam Slote, a Joyce expert at Trinity College, Dublin, and one of the editors of How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake. His own weekly Wake group…

Suella Braverman, queen of the anti-woke, is gone, again. The now-former UK home secretary’s grandstanding infuriated many colleagues, yet most share the same sinking life-raft of Tory thinking. “I wouldn’t use her words,” each minister says, but they share her thoughts. Reshuffle from what to what? The tide is going out on the conservatism they were bred on, the last ripples of Thatcherism that nurtured them leaving them marooned. Braverman’s backers in the UK press, such as the Daily Mail, Telegraph and Sun, which 20 years ago seemed to have a direct line to the beating heart of Tory middle England, are now adrift and floating out to sea with them. Braverman’s final provocation was to attack the police as politically biased for refusing to ban a lawfully organised protest…

Chances are you have already heard Miguel Atwood-Ferguson’s work. You may not know who the LA-based composer and strings player is, but if you’ve listened to contemporary American music or watched recent TV and film from the US, you will have likely heard the sound of his bow sweeping across orchestral strings. Softly spoken and typically dressed down in a washed-out T-shirt and sweatpants, Atwood-Ferguson, 43, is the unassuming presence behind orchestrations for everyone from Ray Charles to Stevie Wonder, via Quincy Jones, Rihanna, Dr Dre and the Roots. In the past decade, he has become a key part of the west coast beats and jazz scene that coalesced around artists such as the producer Flying Lotus, saxophonist Kamasi Washington and bassist Thundercat, all releasing on Flying Lotus’s label Brainfeeder.…

Here’s a question for you: since the last general election, has the British government been tough or soft on immigration? Depending on your political inclination, the answer might seem obvious – but the reality is more complicated. On the one hand, the Johnson and Sunak governments have brought an end to EU free movement and promised to deport unwanted asylum seekers to Rwanda. On the other, net migration – the difference between the number of people coming to live in the UK and the number of people leaving – reached a record high of more than 600,000 last year. The paradox arises, argues the sociologist and migration expert Hein de Haas, because governments in the west – committed, as they are, to forms of economic liberalism – are trying to…

Across 1 Native of Managua? (10) 7 Skullcap (8) 8 Suddenly understand; what’s on a tree? (4) 9 Abandoned ship that might be ‘Incredible’? (4) 10 Haughty; as poster on wall? (5-2) 12 Wrapper of fragile articles (6,5) 14 Particular (7) 16 Floating muck (4) 19 Doleful canine cry; Ginsberg poem (4) 20 Facing; enemy (8) 21 Show expression of contempt (4,1,5) Down 1 Under; Welsh town (5) 2 Fluffy heaped cloud (7) 3 Depend (4) 4 Primate? (5,3) 5 Montezuma, say (5) 6 ‘Candy is dandy, but ____ is quicker’ (6) 11 Genre of the Damned and Buzzcocks (4,4) 12 Three-legged contraption (6) 13 Girl Before a Mirror and Guernica painter (7) 15 Frozen home (5) 17 Belarusian capital (5) 18 Musical work (4) Solution No 16,688 Guardian Puzzles &…

1 UNITED STATES White House condemns Trump’s ‘vermin’ comments The Biden White House condemned Donald Trump for promising, if re-elected president, to “root out” opponents within US society he called “communists, Marxists, fascists and radical left thugs that live like vermin”. “Employing words like ‘vermin’ to describe anyone who makes use of their basic right to criticise the government ‘echoes dictators’ like Hitler and Mussolini,” the White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said, quoting Washington Post coverage of Trump’s remarks. Trump is the frontrunner to face Joe Biden in an election next year, despite facing 91 criminal charges and assorted civil trials. The former president spoke in Claremont, New Hampshire, last Saturday, in the middle of the Veterans Day weekend. “The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave…

Republicans beware – abortion retains its saliency. As a corollary, Joe Biden is down but not out. On election day last week, voters in Ohio, Virginia and Kentucky embraced individual autonomy and reproductive rights. Looking forward, the US supreme court’s decision in the Dobbs case and the Trumpian majority’s rejection of privacy as a fundamental constitutional right stand to haunt Trump and his party as they enter the 2024 election season. Buckeye voters enshrined abortion rights in Ohio after having twice backed Donald Trump. Meanwhile, in the purplish Old Dominion, both houses of the Virginia legislature swung Democratic, a rebuff to the efforts of Glenn Youngkin, the state’s Republican governor, to enact a 15-week abortion ban. In Kentucky, Andy Beshear, the Democratic and pro-choice governor, handily defeated Daniel Cameron, the…

The Ukrainian counteroffensive has stalled, with progress on the two principal axes on the southern front modest since it began on 4 June. Kyiv’s forces have advanced about 10km south of Velyka Novosilka and 9km south of Orikhiv and there appears no prospect of a breakthrough as the weather turns. Earlier this month, the reality was acknowledged by Gen Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the commander-in-chief of Kyiv’s military. “Just like in the first world war, we have reached the level of technology that puts us into a stalemate,” he said in an interview with the Economist. “We all hoped we would make more progress than we have,” said Yuriy Sak, a former adviser to Ukraine’s defence ministry. “By now we were hoping we would be in control of Tokmak,” a strategic town…

A collection of pressed flowers taken from the hillsides of Bologna 500 years ago is unlocking knowledge about how the climate crisis and human migration is changing landscapes in northern Italy. Picked between 1551 and 1586 by the Renaissance naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi, the 5,000 delicately cut and dried plants form one of the richest collections of its time. Aldrovandi’s original purpose was to identify plant species and understand which could be used for pharmaceutical purposes. Nearly half a millennium later, his carefully pressed specimens are helping botanists document the enormous changes that have taken place in the surrounding landscapes, according to new research published by the Royal Society. In Aldrovandi’s time, Bologna’s hills were rich in species that are threatened or have even disappeared today, such as motherwort, which was…

Gym classes, massages, mood boosting hobbies; it’s no secret that staying “well” can be prohibitively expensive. But not necessarily in Sweden, where many employers offer their workers a “wellness allowance”: up to 5,000 SEK ($460) tax-free a year to spend on pre-approved wellbeing based activities. First introduced in 1988, the allowance can be used for endeavours ranging from horse riding to smoking cessation programmes, and many employers have increased their offering over the years. But the allowance is just the tip of Sweden’s workplace wellbeing iceberg. In fact, when it comes to ideal countries to be employed in, Sweden sets the pace. “It’s pretty amazing,” sa id Maja Wessel, acting CEO of Region Stockholm’s Patient Advisory Committee (Patientnämnden) of the wellness allowance. Her organisation was named Sweden’s best small workplace…

I do not want to ever hear western democracies lecture the rest of the world on human rights ever again. As I write this, more than 10,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza – almost half of them children. One child is being killed every 10 minutes in Gaza. Those numbers, it should be noted, only count the kids who are dying as a direct result of Israel’s indiscriminate bombing. The kids who were “lucky” enough to die instantaneously in an airstrike. And the not-so-“lucky” ones: innocent children buried under rubble, dying painful and protracted deaths as they are suffocated by the eviscerated remains of their home. Those numbers don’t count the kids slowly dying of hunger and thirst. The kids getting sick from drinking sewage and…

WRITE TOUS 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 The parallels between the Middle East and Ukraine I searched for a half-remembered quotation of Tony Benn’s and found it on your website: “There is no moral difference between a stealth bomber and a suicide bomber. Both kill innocent people for political reasons.” That…

From Eddie Izzard’s comedy we expect the incongruous. But was anything ever odder in the 61-year-old’s standup than the climax to her 2019 show Wunderbar: “ My last tour before politics,” she said then. As the jokes fell away, the audience was confronted with a near-messianic oration about the ways Izzard intended, through politics, to heal the world. It’s a dream that may inch closer to reality this winter, as Izzard runs for the Labour candidacy in the seat of Brighton Pavilion. At the same time, she gets back on stage for a global standup tour, Remix, revisiting routines from her 35 years in comedy. Coincidence? Or a cunning plan on Izzard’s part, making a soapbox of the standup stage and star-powering her way to Westminster? The latter seems unlikely:…

If you locked Shirley Jackson and David Wojnarowicz in a room together, they might invent the kind of mouldering dreamworld that Justin Torres conjures in his new novel, Blackouts: a queer-gothic version of the Hotel California. My review notes are full of these pop-cultural thought experiments: imagine Scheherazade plucking her stories from the Kinsey Report; Kiss of the Spider Woman restaged in a psychiatric hospital; the Old Testament rewritten by Tennessee Williams. Blackouts is both a tale and a product of queer inheritance. It is a book that honours its ghosts. The most insistent spectre in Torres’s novel is Jan Gay, AKA Helen Reitman (1902-1960), the pioneering queer sociologist (“specimen and expert both”). In the 1920s and 30s, Gay conducted hundreds of interviews in the hope of demystifying and normalising…

I am walking back into the 1980s on a mission to find a farm of my formative years. There, I attended an on-a-shoestring riding school. It was in Whitchurch-on-Thames, on the opposite bank of the River Thames to my childhood village, the other side of a magnificent, white-painted ironwork toll bridge that cost tuppence to cross on foot. With a deepening scent of autumn in the air, we begin along Hartslock Bridleway, part of the modern Thames path and the ancient Tuddingway packhorse route, heading to the inland ports of Wallingford, Goring and Crowmarsh. Much of the view is now blocked by a fence around Coombe Park estate. The path enters the wood on a cliff above the river. Either side are numerous shouty “Private – Keep Out” signs that…

There is a danger that Lord Cameron, with six years’ experience as prime minister and umpteen world summits under his belt, as opposed to Rishi Sunak’s single year, will be tempted not just to dominate foreign policy but to stray out of his lane and give very broad advice to his boss. But with only a year to go till the next election and two of the biggest foreign policy crises to face the UK since the Iraq war, Sunak will hope that Cameron’s major contribution will be to bring an air of stability and authority to the UK’s foreign policy. The perception overseas has been that Britain has been a country at best suffering strategic drift and at worst on the verge of a nervous political breakdown. Only the…

When Ukraine’s then president, Viktor Yanukovych, abandoned a deal with the EU in favour of stronger ties with Russia in November 2013, hundreds of protesters came to Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square). Soon, those hundreds became thousands, eventually hundreds of thousands, forming a protest camp where EU flags flew defiantly. The Euromaidan movement that ultimately forced Yanukovych to flee the country powerfully showed the desire of young Ukrainians to join their western neighbours, but until the full scale Russian invasion of February 2022, Ukrainian membership of the EU seemed a distant dream. Last week, however, it came a little closer when the EU recommended that formal negotiations on accession should begin. Those recommendations will go to member states for a final signoff in December. Even if they are approved, accession…

Sheltered in the shade of a mango tree entwined with peppercorn vines, a vast clay pot sits on top of a fire, its lid sealed tight with mud. Distilling within is India’s oldest alcoholic spirit, said to date back almost 500 years. This spirit, known as feni, was the liquor that lubricated life here in India’s small, verdant state of Goa for centuries; sipped gently in the evenings, uproariously knocked back at festivals, and given as a medicinal pick-me-up for aches and fevers. While a potent, locally brewed jar – made either from coconut wine freshly tapped from palm trees or fermented cashew fruit – could be found in almost every Goan home, it was never drunk outside state borders. For a decade, Hansel Vaz, a geologist turned second-generation Goan…

It’s 10pm on a weeknight in Palermo, Buenos Aires, and business in the Nuevo D’accordo restaurant is doing well. There are families savouring steaks, lads drinking beer, people picking up takeaway orders. But it doesn’t take much effort to see the devastating effect that one of the highest inflation rates in the world – close to 140%, according to the latest official figures – is having on daily life in Argentina. Prices on the menu are written on peel-off stickers so they can be easily updated – at least once a week, the manager says. The same happens in most restaurants and shops. “We update prices every week,” said Manuel, who owns a market vegetable and fruit stall. “ It’s like trying to do magic to get to the end…

NAVIGATING YOUR WAY THROUGH LIFE CAN OFTEN FEEL LIKE PLAYING A COMPLEX BOARD GAME. Every scenario you encounter has a set of rules that represents some sort of obstacle to you arriving at your destination. Indeed, it has been suggested that the human species started playing games as a safe space for experimenting with the best way to plan a strategy to get to our goals in life. As soon as we began to realise that the universe was governed by rules, we started to create games to explore those rules. Many animals play games when they are young, but our species is probably unique in continuing to play games into adulthood. The role of games in the evolution of our species has even led to the proposal that we…

This week, Britain’s supreme court was due to give its verdict on the Rwanda deportation scheme. The decision will clearly have a major impact on those who face deportation. It will have an impact, too, on the political debate about immigration. But, whatever the decision, it will have little bearing on the “immigration crisis”. The government itself has acknowledged that, even were the court to deem the scheme legal, and deportation flights to Kigali take off, Rwanda could take only “small numbers” of deportees, possibly 300 a year across the four years of the trial period. Given that there were almost 46,000 people crossing the Channel on small boats last year, and that by August this year the asylum backlog stood at 175,000, the deportation scheme amounts to little more…

MY FEET ARE NUMB. I’ve been trapped in an awkward squat for several minutes, lactic acid eating through my thighs. The 6-metre-tall mechanical doll stares mercilessly, her dress orange, her head full of motion sensors, laser precise. At the edge of my vision, a competitor falls with a scream. I’m wondering how it feels for a squib-rigged vest to explode on your chest. I’d seen Red Light, Green Light (a twisted version of Grandmother’s Footsteps) in the Korean TV phenomenon Squid Game. I had no idea the real-life version would be so painful. The day before, hundreds of competitors in this freezing aircraft hangar held poses for nearly 30 minutes at a time. I hear that some, against all advice, dived dangerously over the finishing line. Variety reported that many…

Why do people put Guinness in chocolate cakes and stews, and what else is it good in? Tony, Birmingham, England, UK “Guinness brings sweet, savoury, malty notes with an addictive bitterness,” says chef and restaurateur Robin Gill. Just like Marmite, he says, “people who like it absolutely love it”, and it’s not hard to see why. When deployed in those cakes and stews, Guinness adds a great depth of flavour, which is why Dee Rettali, co-founder of Fortitude Bakehouse in London, includes it in her chocolate cake. “It also helps with the fermentation, because we keep the prepared batter for two days before baking,” she says. “The batter is then bubbly and stouty, which gives the cake a rich, slightly bitter, coffee taste that is beautifully offset by a sweet,…

* All solutions published next week Across 1 The limit starts to need adjustment in principle (4,5) 6 Father of poetry? (4) 8 With last of goulash consumed, have too much stew (8) 9 On the same page, I stay calm, ultimately (6) 10 Gold on key, little time for lead (6) 11 Less in order? (8) 12/24 26 19’s bottle-opener applied to thin bottle (6,6) 15 Forecasters recalled problems in storms (8) 16 Dabbler teases swingers (8) 19 See 26 21 Doctor of Literature endlessly circled by European ballerina (8) 22/3 26 19’s tart? (6,5) 24 See 12 25 Sovereign on flag, an individual from western Europe (8) 26/19 Chicken expecting turkey, perhaps – to wit? (4,6) 27 Once ref roughed up by Royal Engineers, impose rule again (9)…