Indholdsfortegnelse for 24 May 2024 i Guardian Weekly

The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol210 | Issue№ 21 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…

The shooting of the Slovakian prime minister, Robert Fico, has dramatised the increasingly angry and polarised landscape of European politics. With just weeks to go before the European parliament elections, it is time to step back from the brink. Little is known about the 71-year-old alleged gunman or his motives so far. But social media conspiracy theorists were quick to blame Europe’s liberal elites for creating an environment of hate against Fico. It comes against a backdrop of growing political violence and threats against candidates, mayors and officials that have led some to abandon politics. Suspected far-right thugs beat up a Social Democratic MEP candidate in eastern Germany last month, putting him in hospital, and several Greens have also been attacked. French mayors quit last year after attacks on their…

Fuelling up Displaced Palestinian children line up to receive food in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, last Sunday. Humanitarian assistance began to arrive in Gaza last week along a US-made pier, but the US aid chief said the new sea corridor could not be a substitute for land crossings, and warned that deliveries of food and fuel entering Gaza had slowed to “dangerously low levels”. The White House national security spokesperson, John Kirby, confirmed that truckloads of humanitarian aid, including food from the United Arab Emirates, sent by ship from Cyprus, had been unloaded on the Gaza coast and handed over to the control of the UN. Last Saturday, images were released of Palestinians carrying boxes of humanitarian aid after rushing the trucks transporting the international aid from the…

The army of riot police had finally retreated from Tbi-lisi’s Rustaveli Avenue, the broad thoroughfare in front of the parliament building, back into the barricaded parliamentary estate. The last hour on the streets of the Georgian capital had been violent as officers, beating their shields with truncheons, surged forward to push the chanting crowds away from the graffiti-scrawled parliament building. It was the afternoon of 14 May and the MPs inside needed to get out after passing the hated “foreign agents” law – which they did. But the police retreat, under a shower of plastic bottles and eggs, was raucously cheered. Then the crowd started to sing: “So praise be to freedom, to freedom be praise.” It was the Georgian national anthem, Tavisupleba, or Freedom, a bittersweet reminder to some…

From the outside, Asria Mohamed’s tent in a refugee camp in south-west Algeria could be mistaken for a typical nomadic dwelling used by Sahrawis, people from Western Sahara, though it is smaller in size. Inside is a series of QR codes attached to 19 melhfas, traditional clothing worn by Sahrawi women, that have been stitched to the tent’s interior walls, forming a colourful tapestry. Visitors are invited to scan the QR codes to dive into the stories of the women behind each melhfa. Jaimitna (Our Tent) is a collaborative artistic project, led by Mohamed, to highlight the plight of Sahrawis and their homeland on the northwest coast of Africa, which has been occupied by Morocco since 1976, when Spain’s rule over its last foreign territory ended. “You approach Jaimitna and…

How will technology change us as a species? In Silicon Valley, all prophesies seem to have converged into one: that it will usher in some sort of planetary Buddhist revolution. To read its mission statements and watch its Ted talks is to hear phrases such as “connectedness”, “common understanding” and “overcoming barriers”. You could probably pitch a social media platform and a spiritual handbook simultaneously these days: “This will lead humanity to smiling, peaceful enlightenment.” The soothsayers in Hollywood, meanwhile, see it differently. Introduce new tech within a blockbuster film and things tend to go one of two ways. Awe and then terror, as the product wreaks havoc on the planet; or alternatively, the rise of an emotionless new society, where, surrounded by intelligent machines, people start behaving a bit…

Taking a casual glance at the elegant Kyivans queueing outside the lemon-yellow neoclassical theatre perched above Independence Square, an onlooker would have few hints that there was a war on. But the opera that premiered at the International Centre of Culture and Arts earlier this month is inextricably bound up with the deadly events of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Gaia-24 was inspired by the destruction last year of the Kakhovka dam on the Dnipro River, and the resulting human and environmental disaster as waters from the 2,150 sq km reservoir flooded vast areas downriver. The two-hour work is a musical collage of folk song and cabaret tunes; classical works such as Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and Schubert’s Winterreise; chunks of techno and death metal; and even snippets of Dua Lipa.…

Across 1 Laugh – or cry (4) 3 Unambiguous (5-3) 8 Zero (4) 9 Powered flight (8) 11 Muscle and tissue at the back of the roof of the mouth (4,6) 14 (A) long way (3,3) 15 Luxuriate (in a bath, say) (6) 17 Nancy cedes (anag) – sway (10) 20 Not expressed (8) 21 Sit here (4) 22 British breakfast dish of fish, rice and egg (8) 23 Scottish hillside (4) Down 1 Don’t interfere! (5,3) 2 Electricity generator (4,4) 4 Pleasing (6) 5 Experimental – VAT a danger (anag) (5-5) 6 (Old-fashioned) copy (4) 7 Look after (4) 10 Overbearing (10) 12 Loud banging or ringing (8) 13 It’s not played at home (4,4) 16 Worship (6) 18 Done for (4) 19 Enthusiastic (4) Solution No 16,849 Guardian…

1 US/ISRAEL Biden attacks ICC call for Netanyahu arrest warrant Joe Biden attacked as “outrageous” an application by the international criminal court for warrants seeking the arrest of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, along with senior members of Hamas, for actions carried out in Gaza. The US president sided with Israel after the ICC’s prosecutor, Karim Khan, announced he was pursuing arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, the Israeli defence minister. Khan is also pursuing the arrests of three leading Hamas figures, Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri – better known as Mohammed Deif – and Ismail Haniyeh, over Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October last year. Biden accused the ICC of drawing a false moral equivalence between the country and Hamas, a militant Islamist group that has…

The death of the Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi, in a helicopter crash comes at a time when the country, faced by unprecedented external challenges, was already bracing itself for a change in regime with the expected demise in the next few years of its 85-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In the country’s hydra-headed leadership where power is spread in often opaque ways between clerics, politicians and army, it is the supreme leader, not the president, that is ultimately decisive. Indeed, in some ways the posts of president and prime minister became overwhelmed in the drafting of Iran’s constitution in 1979, leading to advocates of a more powerful presidency to claim the role was being subsumed in a form of autocracy created in the name of religion. The presidency, however…

Evacuating the last remaining residents of Vovchansk, the town at the centre of Russia’s recent offensive in Kharkiv region, becomes more dangerous with every passing day. As fierce street battles between Russian and Ukrainian forces continue in the northern part of the town, local police and volunteers have been journeying in daily to evacuate the last, terrified residents out of a place that was once home to 18,000 people. “We don’t know how many people are left now, but we hope it’s not more than 200,” said Oleksiy Kharkivskyi, head of the Vovchansk police force, speaking last Friday morning in a nearby village. The road into Vovchansk was under artillery fire at that very moment, he said. Dressed in military-style fatigues and with a pistol tucked into his body armour,…

“We have been gaslit for generations,” was the reaction of Andy Evans, chair of the campaign group Tainted Blood, in response to the final report into the contaminated blood scandal, which was published on Monday. More than 30,000 people in the UK, 3,000 of whom have died, were infected with tainted blood from the 1970s through to the early 90s, either from receiving transfusions during surgery, or through products created using blood plasma and imported to treat haemophiliacs. To many who were infected, or whose parents, children, partners or other loved ones were, the report – the long-awaited conclusion to a five-year public inquiry – merely confirmed what they already knew. They have long maintained that this was a preventable tragedy, compounded by persistent attempts to evade accountability. In that…

After 362 years of frankly horrendous treatment at the hands of her husband, Mr Punch, Judy has had enough. For the first time, the female half of history’s most famous puppet double act has been taking centre stage at a brand-new contemporary version of the British seaside favourite, Punch and Judy, at London’s Covent Garden. The show has been developed by a team at the University of Exeter as part of the Judy Project, a three-year investigation into the roles women have played in the puppetry tradition and how gender is portrayed. The man in the booth – or “professor”, as Punch and Judy puppeteers are known – is Spike Lidington. Aged 20, he is part of an emerging scene of younger people who are getting interested in the art…

Late one night in November 2005, a small group of plain-clothed police officers pulled over a bus in western India. They escorted a man named Sohrabuddin Sheikh off the vehicle, who was joined on the side of the road by his wife, Kausar. Sheikh and Kausar were put into separate police cars and driven 1,000km away, across state lines, into Gujarat. They would never see each other again. Sheikh had not been charged with anything. On reaching Ahmedabad, Gujarat’s most populous city, Sheikh and Kausar were not taken to a police station. They were detained in separate bungalows in a residential neighbourhood. Two days later, on 26 November, Sheikh was driven to a highway intersection in south Ahmedabad and shot dead. Police claimed Sheikh was a member of an Islamist…

For the first time since 1980, parties opposing Catalonia’s independence from Spain have the support of a majority of voters in the region. Elections on 12 May saw around 54% of the electorate return candidates from non-separatist parties across the political spectrum. The Socialist party scored a momentous victory for the first time. The vote appears to draw a line under a tumultuous decade marked by a 2017 rush to independence that led to an illegal referendum, a unilateral declaration of independence, mass protest and the worst constitutional crisis since the restoration of democracy in 1975. The result shows most Catalans don’t want a separate Catalan republic, but this is the first time the shift in opinion will be reflected in the Catalan parliament. The Catalan autonomous region was created…

Asked recently why he had chosen to write a sequel to his much-loved 2009 novel, Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín said: “The answer is why not? The other answer is that there are very good reasons not. I mean, leave it alone – why interfere with people’s imaginations about what happens to the characters? Also, and this is not true for Hilary Mantel or The Godfather, but in general sequels tend to be pale.” Not this one. While Tóibín’s palette may be rather lighter on vermilion than Puzo’s – or indeed Mantel’s – Long Island is anything but pale. As for the characters, it is pure pleasure to be back in their absorbingly complex company. Twenty years have passed since Eilis sailed for America for the second time, leaving Enniscorthy barman Jim…

Adunnock is burbling from the tangled hedgerow. Across the field, a blackbird serenades. My mind turns to a snippet from an old book … “ Look at the birds of the air”. I look up to see the raven winging towards Glynn Woods. My gaze drops to the cerulean waters of Larne Lough as Nuala points to the button of land that supports a tern colony. Behind us, Geoff and Martin are scrutinising species of solitary bees on the dandelion-spattered lawn. Then Matt, who coordinates Jubilee Farm’s wildlife and wellbeing project, strolls across the yard to lead us on a walk. This farm welcomes allcomers and is a living commitment to the inseparability of caring for people and caring for the environment. The community-owned farm was established in 2019; it…

HEALTH Infected blood scandal was avoidable, inquiry finds The scandal in which thousands of people in the UK became infected or died from contaminated blood was avoidable and inflamed by a “subtle, pervasive and chilling” cover-up by the NHS and government, a report has found. In the conclusion to a five-year public inquiry, Sir Brian Langstaff, who chaired the investigation, said the calamity could “largely, though not entirely, have been avoided” – but successive governments and others in authority “did not put patient safety first”. More than 30,000 people in the UK, 3,000 of whom have died, were infected with tainted blood from the 1970s through to the early 90s, either from receiving transfusions during surgery, or through products created using blood plasma and imported from the US to treat…

Activists in Iran have said there is little mood to mourn the death of the president, Ebrahim Raisi, who was killed in a helicopter crash near the border with Azerbaijan on Sunday. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, announced a five-day public mourning period after the deaths of Raisi, the foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, and other passengers on the helicopter. However, Iranians who spoke to the Guardian refused to lament the death of a man who they said was responsible for hundreds of deaths in his political career. Hours before Raisi’s death was confirmed by state media, videos circulated on Telegram showing celebratory fireworks. Iranians shared posts reminding the world of Raisi’s brutal presidency and his repression of political dissidents. Speaking of the president’s death, a family member of a teenager…

When the Russian defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, was removed from his post and appointed head of the security council last week, there were two big questions on everyone’s mind. What would his successor, Andrei Belousov, bring to the table, and what would happen to the former head of the security council, Nikolai Patrushev – seen by many as a potential successor to Vladimir Putin? The second question has a straightforward answer. Patrushev, it seems, is being sidelined. The Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said he had been appointed to the grand position of presidential aide for shipbuilding – barring any further surprise moves, this is a considerable downgrade in role. What Shoigu’s removal will mean is a bit trickier, but it may also be a case of Putin neutralising an ally…

Oil is inescapable in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. The smell of it greets visitors on arrival, and from the shores of the Caspian Sea on which the city is built the tankers are eternally visible. Flares from refineries light up the night sky, and you do not have to travel far to see fields of “nodding donkeys”, small piston pump oil wells about 6 metres tall, that look almost festive in their bright red and green livery. It will be an interesting setting, in a few months’ time, for the gathering of the 29th UN climate conference of the parties. Mukhtar Babayev, Azerbaijan’s minister of ecology who will chair the two-week summit, likes to position the country at the crossroads of the world. He says it can provide a…

Nine hours and countless bullets after gunmen began bombarding Stanley’s police station in Port-au-Prince, the twentysomething officer started fearing he would not make it out alive. “If you don’t hear from me, it’s because I’m dead,” he wrote on a family WhatsApp group. The officer’s sister shivered as she read her sibling’s parting text and – when he didn’t answer her messages – rang one of his closest friends desperate for news. “I’m going out of my mind,” she sobbed. Contrary to his prediction, Stanley* did survive the recent assault on his fortress-like base but was left badly shaken. “What scared me the most was the idea of a needless death – that I might die and it would change nothing,” the police officer said as heavily armed gangs continue…

With less than six months to go before America chooses its next president, the US supreme court finds itself in an unenviable position: not only has it been drawn into a volatile election, but swirling ethical scandals have cast doubt on its impartiality. The court’s discomfort worsened dramatically last week when the New York Times published a photograph of an upside-down American flag being flown outside the Alexandria, Virginia, home of the hard-right justice Samuel Alito. The photo was taken on 17 January 2021, days after the insurrection at the US Capitol and days before Joe Biden’s inauguration. At the time, upside-down flags were proliferating as a symbol of Donald Trump’s false claim that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from him. That one of the nine most powerful…

Sitting at his dining room table, Kelsey Klausmeyer, 41, looks at a picture of his late husband, Enrique Klausmeyer-Garcia, known to most as Ricky. He died almost exactly a year ago, at the age of 37. Kelsey can’t make sense of it. When they met, Kelsey was awed by Ricky’s story: his long battle with addiction, his years of sobriety, his advocacy for recovery. Now, after his death and in the midst of a nationwide addiction crisis, the narrative around Ricky’s life is less tidy. Ricky is the inspiration for a Washington state law – known as Ricky’s law – passed in 2017 that enables loved ones and public safety officials to compel people experiencing substance abuse to undergo treatment, even if they are unable or unwilling to consent to…

A key turning point in British politics was Tony Blair’s famous priorities: “education, education, education”. A giant step was his 1999 conference speech: “Today I set a target of 50% of young adults going into higher education in the next century.” By 2017-18 that threshold had been crossed in England, with more than half of young people taking that leap forward. In 1980 it was just 15%. But universities are falling into severe financial crisis. Unsurprisingly, the Tories are not unduly bothered. They attack universities all the time, calling for cuts in student numbers. Now they are plunging the knife into vital funding from foreign students. They ignore pleas from major companies, which wrote to the government last week, to stop a migration policy that is threatening investment in the…

So many recipes rely on chilli for flavour, but unfortunately I cannot eat spicy food. It numbs my mouth and I then can’t taste anything, so it’s a wholly unpleasant experience. What ’s a good substitute to ensure that such dishes still pack a punch, but not in a painful way? Yvonne, Netherlands Just fresh chilli or all chilli? Lots of dried chillies are much more about their smoky depth and the chocolatey, sweet notes they bring to a dish rather than being all about their kick – ancho and pasilla, for example, are wonderful. Also, if a recipe calls for chilli flakes, try red bell pepper flakes instead, or smoked paprika rather than smoky chilli: both bring the colour and depth you don’t want to miss out on, without…