Indholdsfortegnelse for 2 February 2024 i Guardian Weekly

You’d think a week spent in the snow and ice of New Hampshire, watching Donald Trump stroll to a double-digit victory over his last remaining Republican rival, would have left me filled with angst about the presidential election in November. Sure enough, given that a second Trump presidency would have a truly disastrous impact on the US and the world, the fact that the now near-certain rematch of Trump and Joe Biden remains a “coin flip”, in the private assessment of one of America’s foremost electoral analysts, still makes my palms go clammy. But to my surprise, I left the frozen American north-east not hopeful, exactly, but lifted by the thought that Trump is weaker, and Biden stronger, than last week’s headlines – or the latest polls – might suggest.…

The United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, has appealed to the 10 donor countries that have with-drawn funding from the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) to reconsider. Guterres said nine UNRWA staff had already been dismissed for their alleged involvement in Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October and any UN employee involved in acts of terror would be held accountable, including through criminal prosecution. He said the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), the highest investigative body in the UN system, had been asked to mount an inquiry. Israel’s foreign ministry has vowed that UNRWA will play no role in Gaza when the conflict ends. The organisation has 13,000 staff in Gaza and educates 30,000 children. Israel formally handed information to the UNRWA commissioner…

A spectator wearing a traditional mariachi hat watches the resumption of bullfighting at the cavernous Plaza de Toros México in Mexico City, following a two-year suspension of the bloodsport. The practice had been suspended indefinitely in the capital on animal welfare grounds, until Mexico’s supreme court temporarily revoked the ruling in December. Hundreds of people gathered to protest outside the arena, which is the biggest bullring in the world. Bullfighting remains legal in many parts of Mexico, with the president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, having proposed a referendum on the future of the sport in Mexico City.…

When Dublin erupted in a riot last November, masked youths looted shops, set fires and shouted slogans against immigrants and refugees. “Ireland is full,” said one banner. “Ireland for the Irish,” said another. Resentment at asylum seekers, demographic changes, a housing crisis, crime and the cost of living had boiled over, turning O’Connell Street, the capital’s main thoroughfare, into what looked like a war zone. Two months later, on another cold night, a different scene unfolded: hundreds of people queued at a soup kitchen run mostly by women wearing hijabs. In place of shouts there were warm greetings, including as-salaam alaikum, Arabic for peace be upon you. “The food here is unbelievable – falafel and chicken burgers, curry, salad, you name it, they’re one of the best groups around,” said…

As Marlene Engelhorn made her way through Davos last month, she was greeted a handful of times with expletives. The frosty welcome was not necessarily aimed directly at the millionaire heiress, but rather the message emblazoned on the metrehigh placard she was lugging around with her: “Tax the Rich.” Since 2021, Engelhorn, whose wealth traces back to the German chemical company BASF and pharmaceutical company Boehringer Mannheim, has called for taxes to be raised on herself and her peers in the 1%. She’s now taking matters into her own hands. “I’m basically creating the tax that I would want to pay,” the 31-year-old said. Earlier last month, she launched an initiative whereby 50 randomly chosen people in Austria, where she lives, decide how best to spend the €25m ($27m) Engelhorn…

Whatever the on-field result of the current Test cricket series between India and England, which began last week, off the field India will still be the winner. Indian money now rules the game. India generates more than 80% of cricket’s international income. And in international cricket, what India says always goes. While for an English cricket fan nothing will match an Ashes series with Australia, England – which once sent B teams to India, captained by players who had never before played for their country – now sends its best teams to India. It also loves India to visit the UK. This is a historic turnaround. While there were only 13 Indian tours to England in 64 years between 1932 and 1996, there have been eight since 2002. The reason…

The last time I met Abel Ferrara, he dozed off in the middle of our interview then woke up and asked me to score him some coke. It was 1996, and he was in the UK promoting his gangster drama The Funeral – which the actor Vincent Gallo alleged Ferrara had been too blitzed on crack to direct properly – and his vampire horror The Addiction. He was on a roll, his reputation fortified by King of New York, starring Christopher Walken as a flamboyant crime boss, and the gruelling Bad Lieutenant, with Harvey Keitel as a bent junkie cop. But no matter how celebrated Ferrara became, he never shed the patina of grime from his early days as the star and director of porn film The Nine Lives of…

The day of the title is a composite of three days: a morning in 2019, a locked-down afternoon in 2020, and an evening in 2021, when it is possible to travel and gather again. On 5 April in each of these years, Michael Cunningham takes his samplings, or specimen hours, minutely observing the lives of the people he finds in a Brooklyn apartment. A quarter century after The Hours, with its three Mrs Dalloways in different times and cities, Cunningham returns to a solidly tripartite structure across which contrasts and connections build. And he returns, with undiminished faith, to the project that united modernists as different as his heroes Joyce and Woolf: the effort to articulate the vast inner lives of a few unexceptional people on a single day. Before,…

‘ I must shouts – his favourite go back to a woollen vest, a woollen vest with sleeves!” my husband parody of the John Masefield poem “I must go down to the seas again” – as we carefully pick our way down the seaweed-slippery steps to the creamy sand beach at Rhyl. Climate change means massive winter storms scour away the sand to reveal another instance of climate change that struck this coast in the Mesolithic period. Huge brown tree stumps’ roots crawl like giant-fingered hands out of the sand, at least 6,000 years old. They have been preserved here all this time thanks to waterlogging and periodic covering by sand in summers. Larger examples are at Borth and Trearddur. There are many legends all around Britain’s coastlines of drowned fertile…

1 UNITED STATES Drone attack kills three troops on US base in Jordan US defence secretary Lloyd Austin vowed on Monday to take “all necessary actions” to defend US troops after Iran-backed militants killed three US troops and wounded dozens more in a drone attack on a US base in Jordan. “The president and I will not tolerate attacks on US forces, and we will take all necessary actions to defend the US and our troops,” Austin (pictured) said. The statement came as US officials told the Associated Press that the enemy drone – which also wounded dozens of people at the desert outpost – might have been confused with an American drone returning to the US installation. The Pentagon named the three troops killed in the attack as army reservists…

IT WAS A MOMENT for Donald Trump to be gracious, magnanimous, perhaps even presidential. Instead he lashed out at his opponent’s clothes. “When I watched her in the fancy dress that probably wasn’t so fancy, I said, ‘What’s she doing? We won,’” he said of rival Nikki Haley in New Hampshire last Tuesday night. Trump had just won the first primary election of 2024 and all but clinched the Republican nomination for US president. Party leaders and campaign surrogates are now eager to banish Haley to irrelevance, move on from the primary and unify against Democrats. They want Trump to pivot to an almost inevitable rematch with Democrat Joe Biden in November. Yet the 77-year-old remains consumed with rage over Haley’s unwillingness to quit the race. His petulance offers a…

In seeking a provisional order from the international court of justice restraining Israel from committing potentially genocidal acts in Gaza, South Africa put not just Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the dock but also the whole post-second world war rules-based order, including the authority of the ICJ itself. Never has there been such a high-profile case brought in the middle of such a bloody conflict. In the words of the Irish barrister Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh, who set out part of South’s Africa case to the court, “the imminent risk of death, harm and destruction that Palestinians in Gaza face today, and that they risk every day during the pendency of these proceedings, on any view justifies – indeed compels – the indication of provisional measures. Some might say that the…

Last week, a motorist driving in Russia’s Leningrad region came across something unusual. Men had blocked off the road. In front, a large olive-green military vehicle with cigar-shaped missiles on the back was reversing and then parked up on a snowy verge. “Fuck! It’s an S-300,” the driver exclaimed, before adding: “So guys, let’s prepare for the worst.” This surreal roadside encounter took place outside St Petersburg, more than 1,000km from the border with Ukraine and Russia’s near two-year all-out war. The Kremlin’s security services were apparently taking no chances. They were deploying the S-300 air defence missile system in order to protect Peter the Great’s imperial capital from drone attacks. So far this year, Ukrainian drones have struck at least four Russian oil and gas terminals across the country.…

The largest cruise ship in the world, which embarked on its first public voyage from Miami last Saturday, was launched amid a fanfare of superlatives. Longer than the Eiffel tower is tall, the Icon of the Seas towers 20 decks above the waves, can accommodate 10,000 passengers and crew, and, at a quarter of a million gross tonnes, could swallow five Titanics for breakfast. Coloured slides on the upper deck of the Icon of the Seas mark out “Thrill Island”, the largest waterpark at sea, and it boasts a 17-metre indoor water-fall. The president of Royal Caribbean, Jason Liberty, told reporters it was the “biggest, baddest ship on the planet”, though it quickly became known on social media as “human lasagne”. Yet the launch of the giant vessel has refocused…

Negotiations over a trade deal between the UK and Canada have been halted after disagreements on beef and cheese tariffs. The two countries have been negotiating for the past two years in the wake of Britain leaving the European Union. The ability for the UK to secure its own global free trade deals was sold as one major benefit from the UK’s decision to leave the EU but progress has been mixed. Here we look at what agreements have been struck so far, and which other deals are still on the negotiating table. Trade deals agreed so far Japan When in late 2020 the then international secretary, Liz Truss, signed the UK’s first major post-Brexit free trade agreement, she said it would boost trade between the two countries by billions…

As the drones flew over western Myanmar’s Chin hills, the junta did not know what was about to hit them. Their operators were hidden a few hundred metres away in the dense forest. As the images on their screens indicated the drones were hovering above the target – a military base in the town of Lailenpi – they hit the button on their controllers and bombs began to fall. “We had precise hits,” said Noah, 20, one of the specialist drone fighters in the Chin National Army (CNA), one of the ethnic rebel groups that have been fighting Myanmar’s military for almost three years. “It took them by surprise. We killed many, including the second-in-command of the base.” After three days of fighting, the rebels hoisted their tricolour flag over…

Henry Earls dresses up to go to the library. He picks out cosy knitted sweaters and accessories with well-worn copies of classic books. Earls looks like an adjunct English professor – or an extra in the movie Saltburn. “I want to cultivate an aesthetic when I go to the library,” the 20-year-old Cooper Union art student said. “And, honestly, I dress up to see if someone will come up to me and say hi.” When Earls isn’t studying at the New York Public Library, he cruises the reading room for friends – or more than friends. Last week, he (respectfully) slipped his number to a young woman sitting near him, which led to a flirty text exchange. Gen Z seems to love public libraries. A November report from the American…

In the coming days, we are told, the deadline will fall on policy submissions for Labour’s draft manifesto. Reports last weekend highlighted senior party people insisting that a May election is still a big possibility, and fretting about a contest that could be called as early as 16 March. And besides, Keir Starmer’s accelerated timetable suits his marketing as the kind of leader keen on preparedness, prudence and technocratic efficiency. At which point, an inevitable warning: the content of Labour’s plan for government, in all likelihood, is not going to be terribly spectacular. To no one’s surprise, Starmer’s advisers have been briefing journalists that “financial discipline will run through the document ”. Proposals that have come out of Labour’s policy forums will seemingly be ruled in or out depending on…

I often don’t have the required size of cake or tart tin called for in a recipe. How many tins does a person need? If I don’t have the right size, should I go smaller or larger? Nicky, Norwich, England, UK “You know Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? Well, I think of baking kit a bit like that,” says pastry chef Nicola Lamb, whose first book, Sift, is out in May. At the bottom of the pyramid, you’ve got basic needs, such as food and safety, then, at the top, there are life’s luxuries. “So, while a 15cm tin would be nice for layer cakes, it’s not necessary,” she says, whereas a round 20cm springform tin is essential. Guardian Feast baker Benjamina Ebuehi agrees (she prefers a loose-bottomed tin), while Sarah…

NORTHERN IRELAND Stormont power-sharing in sight as DUP accepts deal The Democratic Unionist party has endorsed a deal with the UK government to restore power-sharing, paving an end to two years of political deadlock. Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, the DUP leader (pictured), said the party would revive the Stormont executive and assembly once the government tabled promised legislation. The DUP collapsed Stormont in February 2022 in protest at post-Brexit trading arrangements that it said undermined Northern Ireland’s position in the UK. The impasse left civil servants to run Northern Ireland on a form of auto-pilot amid a fiscal crisis and doubts about whether devolved government would ever return. However, the boycott proved popular with DUP supporters and bolstered its electoral position, complicating Donaldson’s effort to abandon the protest. The breakthrough paves…

The last Republican who occupied the job of US vice-president ended up the target of a violent mob calling for him to be hanged. Even so, as Donald Trump closes in on the Republican nomination for 2024, there is no shortage of contenders eager to be his deputy. It is safe to assume that Mike Pence, who was Trump’s running mate in 2016 and 2020, will not get the job this time. His refusal to comply with his boss’s demand to overturn the last election caused a permanent rift and made Pence a perceived traitor and target of the January 6 insurrectionists. Undeterred, Trump’s campaign surrogates in the recent Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, both of which he won handily, have been trying to outdo each other with extravagant…

Awave of anxiety has gripped European defence ministers and armed forces as politicians and military leaders believe Nato-sceptic Donald Trump could be elected as the next president of the US – and that Russia may not be forced out or defeated in Ukraine. This febrile mood has prompted growing warnings that Europe could find itself involved in a war in Russia, even though at present Russia is embroiled in Ukraine. At the same time, tensions in the Middle East have continued to rise. Israel’s assault on Gaza continues; hostilities with Iran-aligned Hezbollah in Lebanon increase; and the US and the UK launched bombing raids on Houthi-controlled areas in Yemen to halt raids on shipping in the Red Sea. What are politicians and generals saying? Adm Rob Bauer, the chair of…

As evening draws near, Bashir Ahmad Bhat is still waiting for his first customer of the day. Seven years ago, Bhat, 34, gave up his job as a driver to work in Gulmarg’s tourism sector. January is peak season at India’s premier ski resort, attracting amateur and professional skiers from around the world. The father of two usually earns good money during the four months when Gulmarg, in the Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir region, is covered in a thick layer of fine powder snow. This season, however, has been a disaster. There was only light snowfall in late January and just one day of snow in December. “It has been a complete loss,” said Bhat. “We have never seen such a situation in our lifetime. ” Gulmarg is a picturesque…

Four years after the UK officially left the European Union, you can still be taken aback reading about Brexit’s self-defeating, if sometimes unintended, consequences. On 26 December, a Spanish woman was detained at Luton airport and denied re-entry after a Christmas visit to Spain, even though she had been living and working in the UK with her family for years. A French woman, married to a British citizen, had to give up her job after an apparent paperwork mix-up. Trapped in the grey area of backlog and conflicting rules, like tens of thousands of EU citizens after Brexit, these cases are a recurring tale in post-Brexit Europe. Asked by the Guardian about the plight of the Spanish woman, the Home Office said: “Border Force’s number one priority is to keep…

The gunmen came for Alemetu when she was sleeping. They marched her out of her home in Ethiopia’s Oromia region and took her to a disused school in the countryside, where she was held hostage for four weeks. About 40 fighters were living at the school, although hundreds of men passed through. Alemetu, who was pregnant when she was taken, said her captors beat her with a horsewhip. On one occasion, she was tied up and suspended upside down from a tree for several hours. She was released only after her family paid a ransom of 110,000 birr ($1,950), a huge sum in rural Ethiopia, which they raised by selling livestock and borrowing from friends. When Alemetu was kidnapped, the family was already struggling to pay a 90,000 birr ransom…

Joe Biden has, at least for a while, defused a ticking carbon bomb. Climate activists and the fossil fuel industry are now left wondering how long it will last. The decision last week by the Biden administration to pause all pending export licences for liquified natural gas (LNG) to consider the climate impact of the projects has been hailed as a momentous shift in the status quo by those concerned by the unfolding climate crisis. “World leaders agreed to transition away from fossil fuels at the Cop28 climate negotiations last year and president Biden’s decision today to pause new permits for LNG exports shows that he is taking that pledge seriously,” Al Gore, the former US vice-president, said. From nothing a decade ago, the US now has eight LNG export…

Europe is heading for dark waters, and its leaders are dozing at the tiller Democrats fear Joe Biden is sleepwalking to disaster in a November rematch with Donald Trump. Tories level similar criticism at dozy Rishi Sunak as Labour dreams of an autumn landslide. But for a truly world-beating slumber party, EU leaders take the bedtime biscuit. The way it’s going, 2024 could turn into a nightmare for the 27-country bloc – an all-time annus horribilis. A daunting slew of challenges is coming to a head. Is the EU ready to meet them? Definitely not. Take the crisis in the Red Sea. Iran-backed Houthi militants have been attacking shipping there since the Israel-Hamas war began. Citing threats to global trade and free navigation, the US and the UK struck back…

‘ I like I needed to be an artist.” This visit took to say,” says Angela Gheorghiu confidentially, “that the fairies visited me when I was born and gave me what place 58 years ago in a town called Adjud, when little Angela became first child to a seamstress mother and train driver father. Her parents must have been surprised since in Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania, fairies, like political dissent, did not officially exist. Even fairies could not have foreseen how Gheorghiu would turn out. The woman sharing a sofa with me in the Royal Opera House is one of the world’s leading sopranos. She is back in her beloved London to sing Mimi in Puccini’s La Bohème. She has sung Mimi, she reckons, several hundred times since her professional debut in…

* All solutions published next week Across 1 Vocal practice: feed into the endless calling (6,7) 10 The first to look away, due to star exploding (9) 11 Sound of ignominious defeat, unholy alliance originally having done U-turn (5) 12 Maiden voyage by small destroyer leaving America (5) 13 See 8 Down 14 Tempers are initially absent where unmarried couples live together? (5,2) 16 Arm broke, then leg, ultimately in shock (4,3) 18 Players in Irish barony once defeated competitor (4-3) 20 Merit a couple of eggs from French waiter? (7) 21 Umpteen converts set about Catholic, small proportion (3,6) 23 Am I less than friendly guy? (5) 24 Classic line in game of cricket effective, at first (5) 25 An Italian city’s – one in the US? (9) 26…