Indholdsfortegnelse for 24 November 2023 i Guardian Weekly

Tamal Sikurel pats her belly, swollen with her sixth child, and smiles. “It is part of the war effort,” she said. Behind her is a school empty of pupils and homes empty of their former inhabitants. Beyond the buildings are dry hills sloping down to the Jordan valley. “For thousands of generations we have always had to fight to justify our existence … I feel the power of that history every day. We have all the biblical rights, historical rights and moral right to keep ourselves safe here. ” This 35-year-old, and the other 500,000 Jewish settlers on the West Bank, are now at the centre of a growing storm of violence and controversy as the war between Israel and Hamas moves into its seventh week. Some are motivated by…

Smoke alarm Albania’s opposition set off smoke bombs and started a small fire in the middle of parliament in a failed attempt to stop the chamber from voting on the 2024 budget. MPs involved in the protest on Monday piled chairs in the centre of the chamber and smoke filled the air as security kept protesters back from the seat of the prime minister, Edi Rama. One MP appeared to light a small fire that was passed forward in a container before flames briefly spread and were doused by surrounding politicians. The de facto leader of the opposition Democratic party, Sali Berisha, a former prime minister who was also Albania’s first post-communist president from 1992 until 1997, has accused the government of trying to silence the opposition in parliament, where…

Cyprus has vowed to tighten controls on its financial sector as an investigation published by the Guardian and its reporting partners reveals oligarchs transferred hundreds of millions in assets while sanctions loomed after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The role of the blue-chip accountants PwC Cyprus and other advisers in managing transactions as Vladimir Putin’s forces launched their assault has emerged from Cyprus Confidential, a cache of 3.6m files leaked by an anonymous source to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and Germany’s Paper Trail Media, which shared access with the Guardian and other partners. The largest ever financial data leak from Cyprus also sheds light on how opaque offshore structures managed by accountants and corporate service providers in the EU member state may have enabled undisclosed payments to…

Theblogheadlinewasanodyne – “OpenAI announces leadership transition” – but the consequences for Silicon Valley were seismic. Last Friday the company behind the hit AI text-generating system Chat-GPT announced that Sam Altman, figurehead for the business and the artificial intelligence revolution that has enthralled and alarmed the world in equal measure, had been fired as chief executive. OpenAI’s non-profit board, which oversaw a commercial subsidiary run by Altman, said the 38-year-old “was not consistently candid in his communications” with its members. Last Thursday night, Altman was invited by colleague and fellow board member Ilya Sutskever to a Google Meet call with the whole board at midday the next day. “Ilya told Sam he was being fired and that the news was going out very soon,” wrote Altman’s close colleague, the OpenAI president…

IT HAS BECOME A CLICHE THAT EVERYONE OF A CERTAIN AGE COULD TELL YOU where they were when they heard President John F Kennedy was dead. Clint Hill spent decades trying to forget. The Secret Service agent was in the Dallas motorcade as a member of the first lady’s detail when Kennedy was assassinated on 22 November 1963. Hill leaped on to the back of the presidential limousine to use his body to shield the Kennedys from any additional shots. For a long time he remained silent, stalked by guilt and gnawed by doubts that he could have done more to save the president. He drank himself into depression before turning his life around. In recent years he has published memoirs, taken part in public forums and, at 91, is…

As the leaders of the world’s two superpowers, the US and China, held a summit meeting in San Francisco last week, many observers have harked back to grand bipolar simplicities. A new cold war! The west versus the rest! Democracy versus autocracy! Let’s woo the global south! But the great Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt warned us always to beware of the terribles simplificateurs, the frightful simplifiers. The beginning of wisdom is to understand that we now live in a world fragmented between multiple great and middle powers who do not divide simply into two camps. The results of an ambitious new round of global polling help us to understand this new world disorder. Conducted for the European Council on Foreign Relations and an Oxford University research project on Europe in…

When I was young, I was entranced by the mysterious figures who appeared on the sleeves of vinyl albums. Where did Roxy Music find their inexhaustible supply of glamorous women? Who was the weather-beaten fisher on the front of the Cure’s Standing on a Beach? I assumed that the nine celebrities on the sleeve of Band on the Run by Paul McCartney and Wings – including Michael Parkinson, entertainer Kenny Lynch and Liberal MP Clement Freud – represented the actual line-up of Wings, which would have made for a challenging studio environment. In the Google era, one can answer these questions in seconds. Roxy Music knew a lot of models, and Bryan Ferry dated half of them. The fisher (retired) was called John Button. (“The man featured on the album…

Perthshire, Scotland, UK Few soles trample this upper glen and the dwindling track as it skirts the Wharry Burn’s gorge. Those that do are rewarded with a ravine of surprising drama. At the head of the chasm, where fallen trees and gravel bars accumulate, the burn is placid. But here, at the lip of the first cascade, the water squeezes between two sandstone boulders, accelerating into a white flume, hissing with second thoughts. I leap the gap between the boulders, to where the only trails belong to the deer; to where the only prints are cloven. They trace secretive routes, brushing through bracken fronds and around the silent trunks of the broadleaved woodland – beech, elm, ash and birch. One veteran beech spreads its aged and weighty branches like an…

Across 1 Countenance (6) 4 Sculpture (6) 8 Queen, king and ace, say (5) 9 Improvising music (7) 10 Perspective (7) 11 Financial backer (5) 12 Garment worn as penance (4,5) 17 Roof edges (5) 19 Pose questions (7) 21 Thorough (2-5) 22 Distribute (5) 23 Ticks off (6) 24 Motionless (6) Down 1 Champion (6) 2 Elongate – prison time (7) 3 Relish (5) 5 Kettledrums – I’m inapt (anag.) (7) 6 Fastening (with string) (5) 7 Overwhelm (6) 9 Gag writer (9) 13 Dull or flavourless (7) 14 Child with two siblings all the same age (7) 15 Neglectful (6) 16 Frantically busy (6) 18 Recording on tape (5) 20 Two pints (5) Solution No 16,694 Guardian Puzzles & Crosswords Access over 15,000 puzzles on our app. Download…

1 CLIMATE CRISIS ‘Hellish’ 3C climate heating, UN warns ahead of Cop28 The world is on track for a “hellish” 3C of global heating, the UN has warned before the crucial Cop28 climate summit that begins on 28 November in the United Arab Emirates. The report found that today’s carbon-cutting policies are so inadequate that 3C of heating would be reached this century. Temperature records have already been obliterated in 2023 and intensifying heatwaves, floods and droughts have taken lives and hit livelihoods across the globe, in response to a temperature rise of just 1.4C to date. The UN Environment Programme report said that implementing future policies already promised by countries would shave 0.1C off the 3C limit. Putting in place emissions cuts pledged by developing countries on condition of receiving…

Twelve of the world’s wealthiest billionaires produce more greenhouse gas emissions from their yachts, private jets, mansions and financial investments than the annual energy emissions of more than 2m homes, research shared exclusively with the Guardian reveals. The tycoons include the Amazon boss, Jeff Bezos, the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, the tech billionaires Bill Gates, Larry Page and Michael Dell, the inventor and social media company owner Elon Musk and the Mexican business magnate Carlos Slim. Analysis by Oxfam and US researchers of their luxury purchases, and the impact of their financial investments and shareholdings, reveals they account for almost 17m tonnes of CO2 and equivalent greenhouse gas emissions annually. This is the same as the CO2 and equivalent emissions from powering 2.1m homes or the emissions from 4.6 coal-fired…

There is a subtle yet unmistakable sense of gloom in Kyiv at the moment, and not only because of the dark afternoons and plunging mercury of an eastern European November. A number of factors have combined to create perhaps the most downbeat mood about the prospects for a swift and decisive Ukrainian victory over Russia since the first weeks of the full-scale invasion. “At the end of last year and beginning of this one, there was such euphoria. Now we see the other extreme, the down, and I guess we will see some ups and downs for some time to come,” said Bartosz Cichocki, who last month finished a four-year posting as Poland’s ambassador in Kyiv. There are rumours of tensions in Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s team, and of a rift between…

‘Russian speakers love living here, they like to be in a community and ours is growing all the time,” said Ruslan Ibrayev, the salesman greeting customers at the head office of the Hub property investment firm in Iskele in Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus. The area, he beams, has become a magnet for buyers from the former Soviet Union. “Business is good,” said the young Kazakhstani. “Very good.” Developers would agree. Construction activity in the island’s self-proclaimed republic is booming. Tower blocks are multiplying thanks to an influx of roubles and Iranian rials that have led to cash-flows increasing and foreign currency reserves soaring to about 80% of the value of bank holdings. It is clear that after Anglo-US sanctions were slapped on individuals and entities for “enabling” oligarchs to manage assets…

White water rafting guide Hamish Watters stands in a garage, a 30-minute drive north of Wellington city, hosing down an inflatable raft and hanging lifejackets up to dry. The owner of Wellington Rafting has just taken five tourists down the rapids of the Te Awa Kairangi/Hutt river. It has been a good morning for it – rain the previous day has lifted the river levels, giving customers a thrilling ride as they flew over gushing white water. It can be a dangerous sport, with potential problems around every bend, but Watters has his safety protocols down pat. “That stuff we can mitigate, by studying the environment … we find ourselves very, very connected to the elements,” Watters said. Customers are given a full run-down of the hazards before they go…

Luminaries of the global far right are in raptures over Javier Milei’s thumping election victory in Argentina, which experts predict will turn Buenos Aires into a new stomping ground for the populist radical right. Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro led the merrymaking after their Argentinian ally trounced his rival, the Peronist finance minister Sergio Massa, by nearly 3m votes in last Sunday’s presidential election. The former US president predicted Milei would “truly make Argentina great again” while Brazil’s ex-president applauded a victory for “honesty, progress and freedom”. Bolsonarista and Mileísta activists predicted Milei’s win would be the first in a trio of rightwing conquests that would see Trump and Bolsonaro reclaim power in 2024 and 2026. In his first post-victory interview on Monday, Milei announced he would travel to the…

Know thine enemy – and know thine ally, too. Too many of those pushing for one outcome or another in the war between Israel and Hamas misjudge the parties involved. They make mistaken assumptions about one side or the other – or both – that lead them to draw flawed, even dangerous, conclusions. There is no monopoly on these mistaken assumptions. They can be made by those calling on western leaders to demand an immediate ceasefire – and by the very western leaders they seek to persuade. Start with those who look at the havoc wreaked in Gaza – at the many thousands killed, at the pile of rubble that was once Palestine’s largest city – and decide that, whatever horrors Hamas committed on 7 October, surely it has now…

I was seduced by a Nigella recipe, and now have bags of rice flour, desiccated coconut and panko breadcrumbs. What can I make with them? Bridget, Hertfordshire, England, UK Oh, Bridget, we’ve all been seduced by Nigella and her recipes at some point in our lives. I’m assuming we’re talking about her coconut shrimp, and if that’s the case, you could apply the same principle to other fish. Fillet of cod or salmon, say, would welcome a coconut crust, says Jun Tanaka, chef-patron of The Ninth in London. “Mix the coconut and panko in a bowl. In another bowl, combine the rice flour, salt and pepper.” Dip the fish in the flour, then in beaten egg and, finally, the panko mix. “Put on a tray, spray lightly with olive oil…

In the first weeks that followed 7 October, when Hamas’s killing of 1,400 people in Israel triggered war with Israel, about a quarter of the pro-Palestine marches registered with the authorities in Germany’s main cities were banned. According to the magazine Der Spiegel, 90% of those that went ahead had conditions imposed upon them. In France, it took the intervention of the highest administrative court to stymie a plan by that country’s interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, to prohibit all protests organised by those calling for a ceasefire. Since then, local prefects are making an assessment on a case-by-case basis. Elsewhere in Europe, protests have been prohibited in countries including Austria, Switzerland and Hungary, while a row in the UK over a pro-Palestine march in London on Armistice Day led to…

Our hearts beat 100,000 times a day, but we tend not to worry about their maintenance unless there is a problem. What should we know about how to keep this vital organ pumping? Four cardiologists give their advice on how to keep our hearts healthy. Exercise is key “If you put exercise into a pill, it would probably be better than anything a doctor could give you to improve heart health,” says Prof Dan Augustine, a cardiologist at Royal United hospitals Bath. The NHS recommends 150 minutes a week of moderately intense activity, such as brisk walking “that gets you a bit breathless”, says Augustine, or 75 minutes of higher intensity exercise, such as running or cycling. Be aware of what your body can do “If you have done no…

1 IT WAS THE WORST TRAFFIC JAM IN THE HISTORY OF THE NETHERLANDS. From Amsterdam to Eindhoven, Rotterdam to Roermond, more than 2,000 tractors lumbered along clogged high ways during the morning rush hour of 1 October 2019. Their spinning beacon lights shining amber through the dark and the rain, they caused more than 1,000km of backups on their way to the seat of government in The Hague. Other tractors made their way slowly through the sand of North Sea beaches. They converged at the Malieveld, a park close to parliament and the primary royal residence, and a traditional scene of protest. Authorities had said that only 75 tractors would be allowed in the park, but wanting to avoid a direct confrontation, they quickly lifted the restriction. Within hours, 2,200…

Was there ever a Christmas tradition so universally despised as turning on the lights in mid-November? Well yes, actually, there was. Do you remember the round robin – the self-consciously casual family newsletter to be sent indiscriminately to cousins, ex-colleagues and strangers met on holiday? Those double-sided sheets of A4 first fluttered out of Christmas cards some time in the mid-1980s, around the point that the home computer began conquering the world. Boasting, once costly and laborious, could suddenly be mass produced. Jenny and Crispin’s two weeks skiing in the Dolomites, Ed’s promotion, Margot’s 10 A*s – all this could be broadcast widely, along with a photo of the family in identical snowflake jumpers. Oh, how we laughed at these deluded solipsists. Up sprang a cottage industry of symbiotic traditions,…

Culture Stage DANCE ‘All around me are familiar faces/worn out places, worn-out faces” goes the song, and a man on stage in a voluminous skirt jerks his body with the beat as Mad World fills the auditorium. Love-Train2020 is the new show from Marseille-based Israeli choreographer Emanuel Gat, set entirely to the music of Tears for Fears. Not the usual soundtrack for contemporary dance, but if Birmingham Royal Ballet can dance to Black Sabbath, then why not? Gat, 54, never owned a Tears for Fears album when he was growing up near Tel Aviv in the 1980s as a shaggy-haired surf-mad teen. “I was listening to a lot of progressive rock, Pink Floyd, Genesis, Jethro Tull,” he tells me in the green room after a show in Bruges. “But everybody…

Six astronauts are bobbing about in a spacecraft, looking out at their planet as they circle it. From up here, 400km above the surface, Japan is a wisp. The Philippines appear “scarily frail”. Though the views are on a planetary scale, the object of their mesmerised observation is as intricate as a Fabergé egg. All of Europe is “outlined with fine precision”, ringed by a golden thread of night-lit roads. Autumn blooms in the Jiuzhaigou valley, Tunisian salt flats glow in cloisonné pink. The astronauts who turn and turn through Samantha Harvey’s finely crafted meditation on the Earth, beauty and human aspiration are in the process of understanding themselves in new ways, too. Harvey has long been a fearless explorer in wild places. She started with The Wilderness, accompanying a…

* All solutions published next week Across 1 Like lightning strike: power cuts (5) 4 Brilliant person standing to perform (5,3) 8 Deals in these clubs: Chelsea missing Abramovich, ultimately in arrangement with Arsenal (9,5) 10 Nonsense to members? Conservative backtracking (8) 11 Check mirror: learner driver in place to practise religiously? (6) 12 The Lion after game: weak spot in order (4,2,3) 15 Pull to get sex, specifically? (2,3) 17 Checked out patient before doctor’s introduction (5) 18 Awareness of time, I must go in (9) 19 Crazy state of uniform: note frilly edging (6) 21 Weight on American, mostly comfort eating? It goes up and down (8) 24 Surgical procedure: model figure receiving it for partner? (8,6) 25 Learning timetable as friend’s coming back by coach (8) 26…