Indholdsfortegnelse for 26 April 2024 i Guardian Weekly

The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol210 | Issue№ 17 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 Guardian…

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Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defence minister, described the conflict Israel was engaged in as a “multi-front war” this month. Israeli forces were fighting Hamas inside Gaza and engaged in daily exchanges of fire with Hezbollah on the northern border with Lebanon. A low-level conflict, mainly consisting of airstrikes, was continuing with Iranian-backed forces in Syria. Israel had also been targeted – albeit ineffectively – by drones fired by the Houthis in Yemen. But the date of Gallant’s comments was significant. He was speaking on 2 April, the day after Israel had bombed an Iranian diplomatic facility in the Syrian capital, Damascus. Within two weeks, Israel would add another front to the conflict after Iran launched 300 missiles and drones at Israel in retaliation for that attack. The opening of a new…

With more people set to vote in elections than at any time in history, 2024 is being touted as a test of democracies’ strength around the world. But one thing remains in noticeably short supply – female leadership candidates. Analysis from the Guardian shows that of the 42 elections – both presidential and parliamentary – in which the country’s leader is being selected and where candidates have been declared, just 18 have women in the running to be leader. With a combined population of more than 2 billion, elections in the world’s biggest democracies – the US, Indonesia and India – have, or had, no female frontrunners. The challenges faced by female politicians are perhaps best exemplified in the US, where female representation in politics still lags behind many other…

Her biggest fashion statement as first lady was a green jacket emblazoned with the words, “I really don’t care, do u?” More recently Melania Trump has given the impression that she doesn’t care whether her husband, Donald, returns to the White House. That is about to change. Last weekend, Melania, 53, hosted an LGBT+ Republican fundraiser at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. It was her first appearance at a political event since Trump launched his bid to regain the presidency – an absence that has been a potentially worrying sign for Trump. It came at the end of a week that saw the 77-year-old become the first former US president in history to stand criminal trial. The case, involving a hush money payment by Trump to an adult…

ONE OF THE BIGGEST BATTLES over Colorado River water is being staged in a small rural enclave in the American west. Tucked into the bends of the lower Colorado River, Cibola, Arizona, is a community of about 200 people. Maybe 300, if you count the weekenders who come to boat and hunt. Dusty shrublands run into sleepy residential streets, which run into neat fields of cotton and alfalfa. Nearly a decade ago, Greenstone Resource Partners LLC, a private company backed by global investors, bought about 200 hectares (500 acres) of agricultural land in Cibola. In a first-of-its-kind deal, the company recently sold the water rights tied to the land to the town of Queen Creek, a suburb of Phoenix, for a $14m gross profit. River water that was once used…

There’s more to life than money, but societies can struggle to express it. When we talk about the state of nations and their citizens, we tend to boil it down to a few economic indicators. These can tell us a great deal, but don’t quite tell us everything. The untouched stretch of woodland, the arts in education, the close-knit community, the healthy childhood: there are plenty of things that cannot always be weighed on this scale. And this is a problem, particularly for people who want to hang on to those valuable things. Here’s a rule of thumb: if you can’t measure how much something is worth, it becomes tricky to protect it. Those who do not want to see a bluebell wood destroyed or another humanities subject ditched can…

As staff read out fire safety precautions and evacuation procedures before a 35mm nitrate print screening of Black Narcissus at the British Film Institute (BFI), the packed crowd titter in excitement and anticipation. How often do you go to the cinema with an awareness that the film you are watching is being physically unspooled, live, with a possibility of combustion due to the ultra-flammable material it contains? The desire to watch films projected on film is on the rise across the UK – and the number of repertory film clubs dedicated to analogue screenings is ballooning. Sheffield-based Reel Steel seek out rare gems – “doing the detective work to find 35mm prints … can be a year-round task”, says founder Joseph Harris. Manchester-based Certificate X Cult Film Screenings and Bristol’s…

I need a new chef’s knife – any recommendations? Nothing too expensive, though. Alex, Quebec, Canada First, I would buy it in person, not online. The feel of a knife, its weight and the shape of the handle are crucial, so nothing beats handling a few to see what “fits” your hand best. Also bear in mind when trying out a few different types how much time you want to spend maintaining your knife. Japanese knives, for example, are amazing – their thinner, steel blades make them the best for precision cutting and their beautiful wooden handles feel great in the hand – but they will require a whetstone to keep the blade sharp without causing it damage. As with pots and pans, you need a knife that matches the…

Across 1 Crossing (12) 9 A great deal (5) 10 Discharge (7) 11 Interrogate (4) 12 Orchestral piece (8) 14 Piece of one’s mind – all contents of shell-like? (6) 15 Daub (6) 18 Contraption(s) (8) 20 Molten rock (4) 22 Church house (7) 23 Besom (5) 24 Sudden remark (12) Down 2 More snazzy (7) 3 Ne’er (anag.) – bird (4) 4 Absolutely true (4,2) 5 Underground burial chamber (8) 6 Riled (anag.) (5) 7 Fairfax’s force in the English Civil War (3,5,4) 8 Herby tied bundle (7,5) 13 I’m off – across France? (2,6) 16 Top game? (7) 17 Knitwear pattern (6) 19 Old European coin (5) 21 Final notice? (4) Solution No 16,825 Guardian Puzzles & Crosswords Access over 15,000 puzzles on our app. Download from the…

1 UNITED STATES Trump’s criminal trial opens in New York court Donald Trump “orchestrated a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election” in his efforts to cover up an alleged affair with the adult film star Stormy Daniels, the prosecution said on Monday in its opening statement in the former president’s criminal trial. Over the coming weeks, a jury of seven men and five women living in Manhattan will weigh whether Trump’s alleged efforts to conceal an affair with Daniels, which he feared would damage his bid for the White House, were illicit. Trump was charged in the spring of 2023 with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. The case, brought by the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, hinges on a $130,000 payment that Trump’s former lawyer and fixer,…

Israel’s retaliation was surprisingly limited. Iran minimised the significance of last Friday’s air attacks on a military base near Isfahan and other targets, denying they were externally directed. Usually voluble Israeli spokesmen fell strangely silent. It was as if a tacit bilateral agreement had been made to play down the affair – to quietly de-escalate. Both countries required that honour be satisfied – but wanted to avoid another noisy public row. Each has fired directly at the other, causing symbolic damage. Now they are signalling it’s over – at least for the time being. If true, it’s a huge, though possibly temporary, relief. It suggests that intense US pressure on Israel to exercise restraint, abetted by Britain and others, paid off. President Joe Biden had urged Israel to “take the…

After months of stalling, the US House of Representatives last weekend approved more than $61bn of military assistance to help Ukraine in its fight against Russia, as well as billions for other allies including Israel and Taiwan. What difference could more US weapons make to Ukraine? Ukraine has been struggling against Russian aggression since US military aid essentially dried up at the end of last year, suffering from a serious shortage of artillery. Its military was forced to abandon the Donbas town of Avdiivka in February and is now under pressure in Chasiv Yar. Moscow’s forces have been able to outshell Kyiv by a ratio of at least five to one, rising to 10 to one, meaning that Ukrainian artillery have been increasingly unable to prevent Russian forces from massing…

The local elections on 2 May ha ve long been regarded as a moment of high peril for Rishi Sunak, with the results likely to anticipate his party’s fate at the next election. The Tories have already priced in heavy losses in the council elections, with experts predicting they face defeat in as many as half of their contested seats. Loyalists point out that many were last fought in 2021, when a still relatively popular Boris Johnson was in No 10 and the government had not yet been rocked by the Partygate scandal or Liz Truss’s emergency budget. The party was also 10 points ahead of Labour in the national polls – now they are 20 points behind. But one senior Tory suggests that council losses could push some Tory…

Seagulls shriek, boats bob and the morning sun silvers the waters off the Coast of Death as two sailors take a break from winding up their conger eel lines to ponder the sudden interest in precisely what, and how, people here have eaten for centuries. Like many in the small Galician fishing town of Fisterra, Sito Mendoza and Ramón Álvarez are a little puzzled by all the fuss over the Atlantic diet. The traditional diet, which survives in this north-western region of Spain and across the border in northern Portugal, has been hailed as an exciting and sustainable alternative to its better-known and more tanned southern cousin, the Mediterranean diet. A recent analysis of a clinical trial conducted almost a decade ago found that eating the Atlantic diet – which…

At about 1pm last Monday, a 35-seater bus arrived in Pikine, a city east of the Senegalese capital, Dakar. A portable screen, projector, sound system and generator were unpacked to set up a temporary cinema in a lively neighbourhood where the scent of hibiscus and orange blossom fill the air. Pikine’s cultural centre was the first stop for Cinemovel, a travelling cinema that is showing the Oscar-nominated Italian film Io Capitano in the streets and villages of Senegal. It is part of an initiative run by the Cinemovel Foundation, an Italian group that has been bringing a touring cinema to remote parts of Africa since 2001. Io Capitano, directed by Matteo Garrone, follows teenage Senegalese cousins – Seydou (played by Seydou Sarr) and Moussa (Moustapha Fall) – as they risk…

Stopped at the border, interrogated on national security grounds, laptops and mobile phones checked, held for hours, plans for research shattered. Many western scholars are nervous about travelling to China in the current political climate. But lately Chinese researchers working at US universities are reporting interrogations – and in some cases deportations – at US airports, despite holding valid work or study visas for scientific research. Earlier this month the Chinese embassy in Washington said more than 70 students “with legal and valid materials” had been deported from the US since July 2021, with more than 10 cases since November 2023. The embassy said it had complained to the US authorities about each case. The exact number of incidents is difficult to verify, as the US Customs and Border Protection…

The 2020s are almost halfway over and are on course to be the most difficult decade for the global economy since the 1930s. Every finance minister and central bank governor at the spring meeting of the International Monetary Fund in Washington last week knows that, even if they were not prepared to admit it publicly. The IMF likes to look on the bright side. It revised up slightly its forecast for global growth and now thinks scarring from the coronavirus pandemic and the cost of living crisis will be less severe than it originally feared. Interest rates have risen without triggering the recessions that were predicted. A soft landing has been finessed. The performance of some countries – the US and India to take two examples – has been strong.…

The story of expressionist art, with its bold colours, off-kilter figures and unsettling atmosphere of pre-first world war Germany, is usually told through the prism of two groups of artists: Die Brücke (The Bridge), operating out of Dresden and featuring Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Erich Heckel; and Der Blaue Reiter (the Blue Rider) in Munich, led by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. But a new exhibition at London’s Tate Modern focusing on the Blue Rider – the first major show on the subject in the UK for more than 60 years – seeks to expand that established narrative. A clue to the show’s thesis comes in its title, Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider. Gabriele Münter was a wealthy photographer, painter and partner of Kandinsky who had undertaken part…

A couple of nights before he was almost killed by a stranger with a knife, Salman Rushdie dreamed about being attacked by a Roman gladiator with a spear. He’d had similar dreams ever since Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa after publication of The Satanic Verses, in 1989, imagining “my assassin rising up in some public forum or other and coming for me”. When on the morning of 12 August 2022, in Chautauqua in upstate New York, on stage to talk about the importance of keeping writers safe from harm, he saw a figure rushing towards him, his first thought was “So it’s you. Here you are”, and his second was “Really? It’s been so long. Why now, after all these years?” In his 2012 memoir Joseph Anton, Rushdie expressed his post-fatwa disorientation by…

After 14 rounds, India’s Gukesh Dommaraju won the closely contested Candidates in Toronto, the tournament to decide who will challenge China’s Ding Liren for his world crown later this year. Gukesh, aged 17, was a revelation and is now in contention to become the youngest ever world champion, a record held by Garry Kasparov at age 22. He excelled in complex positions at Toronto, and his best win featured his queen and rook infiltrating White’s queen’s side before his mating attack against the white king on the other flank. The teenager had been considered an outsider due to his youth and his unstable performances in the months leading up to the event. At the London Classic in December, he finished third behind England’s Michael Adams. 3916 Sam Collins v Tiger…

IMMIGRATION & ASYLUM Sunak’s flagship Rwanda bill passes final hurdle Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda deportation bill was expected to become law this week after peers eventually backed down on amending it, opening the way for legal battles over the potential removal of dozens of people seeking asylum. After a marathon battle over the key legislation between the Commons and the Lords, the bill finally passed when opposition and crossbench peers gave way on Monday night. The bill was expected to be granted royal assent this week. Home Office sources said they have already identified a group of asylum seekers with weak legal claims to remain in the UK who will be part of the first tranche to be sent to east Africa in July. Sunak has put the bill, which would…

IRAN’S MISSILE AND DRONE ATTACK ON ISRAEL had by the end of last week already become one of the most interpreted events in recent modern history. And then, in the early hours of last Friday, came Israel’s riposte. As in 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated in a moment that led to the first world war, these were shots that were heard around the world, even if few can agree conclusively on what they portend. By one de minimis account, Tehran was merely sending a warning shot with its attack on 13 April. The maxi-malist version is that this was a state-on-state assault designed to change the rules of the Middle East. By this assessment, Iran was prepared to risk turning Israel into a mini-Dresden in…

In a live television interview from Paris’s Grand Palais – the centrepiece of this year’s Olympic Games, which open on 26 July – Emmanuel Macron set out his ambitions for the country’s athletes in much the same way he might outline a political manifesto. They had one goal: to take enough medals to be among the Games’ top five Olympic and top eight Paralympic nations. He was putting pressure on them, he said this month – previously described as “healthy pressure” – but the goal was “absolutely attainable”. The economics magazine Challenges reported Macron as going further, saying: “The success of these Olympic Games depends first and foremost on the success of our athletes.” It was the French president in full Jupiterian mode – his nickname is the all-powerful, all-controlling…

Every night, for weeks at a time last year, Saad al-Mukhtar put a small group of people in the back of his Toyota Land Cruiser and drove them under the cover of darkness from his home in the Sudanese city of Geneina across the border and into Chad. The operation was an extraordinary act of bravery and selflessness: Mukhtar is an Arab, and the people he was smuggling to safety were members of the darker skinned Masalit community who were being targeted in a vicious wave of ethnic violence perpetrated by Arab militias. “I helped everybody who knocked on my door,” Mukhtar said. “I didn’t know the majority of them.” The name is a pseudonym – he said if his real name was used, his life and those of his…

Smoking, smacking, smart-phones for kids: never mind the “nanny state”, today’s national debate seems crowded with demands for decisive action from politicians to save us – or our children – from ourselves. Rishi Sunak’s ban on selling cigarettes to under-15s for ever once they come of age is supported by 59% of the public, according to one recent poll. He has been unabashed about defending the tough policy, despite some of his more libertarian colleagues claiming it is an infringement on personal freedom, and one, Don Valley MP Nick Fletcher, fretting that “nanny states do not raise warriors”. Meanwhile, the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, whose MPs backed the tobacco bill in the House of Commons last week, previously embraced the term “nanny state” when confronting objections to Labour’s policy of…

Emanuela Reccia has lived in London for almost a decade. She was a teenager when she left her home city of Naples to become a waitress in the UK, bringing her expertise and love of Italian cuisine to the capital. But the 27-year-old, like thousands of other Italians working in the UK hospitality industry, now feels she has no option but to leave and return to Europe after the latest round of post-Brexit rules. The new Brexit-driven regulations, which came into effect this month, raised the minimum salary threshold for a skilled work visa from £26,000 ($32,000) to £38,700 ($48,000), far higher than many restaurant employees earn. The average wage for waiting staff in London in 2024 is £28,000, according to recruitment site Glassdoor. The Italian press has lamented the…

In Chicago’s Field Museum, behind access-controlled doors, are about 1,500 dinosaur fossil specimens. The palaeobiologist Jasmina Wiemann walks straight past the bleached leg bones – neither does she glance at the fully intact spinal cord. She only has eyes for the deep chocolate-brown fossils: these are the ones containing preserved organic matter – bones that offer unprecedented insights into creatures that went extinct millions of years ago. Wiemann is part of the burgeoning field of conservation palaeobiology, where researchers are looking to the deep past to predict extinction vulner-ability. At a time when humans could be about to witness a sixth mass extinction, studying fossil records is useful for understanding how the natural world responded to problems before we arrived: how life on Earth reacted to environmental change, how species…

WHEN HARRY HARRISON FIRST SAW THE WHITE PAPER for the criminal justice and public order bill at the end of 1993, he couldn’t believe what he was reading. Harrison was the 27-year-old co-founder of Nottingham’s DiY sound system, so-called house music anarchists, who were known for throwing joyful free parties in fields and forests, quarries and squats. Now those gatherings could be criminalised and, for the first time, the music he played was being legally codified as “sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”. “It was almost like a surrealist prank,” he says now. “I said: ‘Is this real?’ It was a crazy mixture of the sinister and the absurd.” The 179-page bill was a hotchpotch of measures, from updating obscenity law and…

The need to tax rich people like me has never been so dire. Extreme wealth concentration in the hands of a few oligarchs is a threat to democracy the world over. Meanwhile, we are cooking our planet and irreversibly damaging our biosphere. Last summer was the hottest on record, and we’re also seeing historic wildfires, biblical floods, devastating droughts and rising sea temperatures. It is only right that the funds to mitigate further damage and develop green energy systems come from those most able to pay – and who, by the way, are the ones disproportionately driving it with their jet-setting, gas-guzzling lifestyles. Last week, finance ministers and central-bank governors from G20 countries met in Washington DC at the spring meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund…

The Tortured Poets Department Taylor Swift, Republic You could hardly describe Taylor Swift’s 11th studio album as long awaited – it’s barely 18 months since her last album, Midnights. As The Tortured Poets Department underlines, Swift is an authentically skilled songwriter: melodically gifted, thoughtful, witty and willing to take risks. Its sound, co-produced by Jack Antonoff and the National’s Aaron Dessner, splits the difference between the glossy 80s-influenced pop-rock of 1989 and the small-hours understatement of Midnights. It occasionally nods towards Swift’s Nashville past: the shivering wisps of slide guitar on I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can), a fiddle buried deep in But Daddy I Love Him. Florida!!! contains one of the album’s scant handful of big choruses. More often, the album deals in unexpected tangents. So Long,…

The proximity of the publication of David Nicholls’s sixth novel, You Are Here, to the screening of the superb Netflix remake of One Day gives the new book an added sense of poignancy. If One Day (2009) saw Nicholls as a writer in his mid-40s looking back nostalgically on the loves and losses of twenty somethings, here we find him approaching 60 and turning his attention to a couple either side of 40. If One Day was angst and high drama, the setup here is softer and, initially at least, more obviously comic. But the shadow of the earlier novel, of Dexter and Emma’s will-they-won’t-they romance, hangs over this book. Michael Bradshaw, a geography teacher reeling from a series of personal setbacks, most painfully his separation from soon-to-be ex-wife Natasha,…

There’s a hissing noise, then a peal of nervous laughter. The grey gander is on the rampage again, chasing anyone who comes within a few metres of him and his goose. Usually the pair are sedate, waddling around together, orange beaks grazing the grass. They’re just another couple of farmyard characters among a bunch of dogs, horses and a tailless cat. But spring is here, and aggression levels have risen with the sap. This pair of geese have been here for a quarter of a century. Back in his youth, the male would block the lane, then as the cars tried to edge past, he’d attack the moving tyres. Like swans, these geese, weighing up to 10kg, can injure people. For this old boy, it is all bluster. The female…