Indholdsfortegnelse for 6 June 2025 i Guardian Weekly

True colours Thousands of people joined the Bangkok Pride parade last weekend, the first held in Thailand after the country legalised same-sex marriage earlier this year. Under the theme ‘Born This Way’, the 3km parade is the highlight of Thailand’s celebration of Pride Month, with prime minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra joining in the festivities. The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol212 | Issue№ 23 Guardian Weekly is an edited selection of some of the best journalism found in the Guardian’s digital editions in the UK, US and Australia, and the Guardian newspaper in the UK. The weekly magazine has an international focus and four editions: global, Europe, Australia and North America. The Guardian was founded in 1821, and Guardian Weekly in 1919. We exist to hold power…

In mortarboards and crimsonfringed gowns, thousands of students were last week joined by smiling families for the centuries-old ritual of graduation day. But this year was different. Alan Garber, the president of Harvard University, received a standing ovation and welcomed graduates “from down the street, across the country and around the world”, drawing applause for the last words: “Around the world – just as it should be.” It was a nod to the international students who are part of the lifeblood of Harvard but a target for Donald Trump, whose administration is seeking to revoke the institution’s ability to enrol overseas students. It is just one front in an escalating battle between a US president with authoritarian ambitions and the county’s oldest, wealthiest and most prestigious university. Trump has used…

A Ukrainian drone attack on Russian airbases destroyed billions of dollars worth of Russian aircraft stationed at bases across the country, including locations as far away as Siberia, in what Kyiv said was its longest-range assault of the war. The spectacular operation, known as Spiderweb, was prepared in secret over 18 months. Ukraine’s agents moved short-range drones and explosives inside Russia before they were launched remotely for a coordinated attack last Sunday that was intended to strike a blow against Moscow’s air superiority. Vasyl Maliuk, the head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), said drones had been smuggled into Russia and placed inside containers, which were later loaded on to trucks. With the trucks positioned near Russian bases, the roof panels of the containers had been lifted off by…

A young woman wearing a black abaya is pictured in a city in north-west Saudi Arabia standing precariously on a second-floor window ledge. A second photograph shows a group of men escorting her down with the help of a crane. The woman’s identity is unknown, but she was allegedly being held at one of Saudi Arabia’s notoriously secretive “jails” for women banished by their families or husbands for disobedience, extramarital sexual relations or being absent from home. It was a rare glimpse of the plight of hundreds or more girls and young women believed to be held in such facilities, where they are “rehabilitated” so they can return to their families. Speaking out in public or sharing footage of these “care homes”, or Dar al-Reaya, has become impossible in a country…

There is nothing unusual about records being broken on Mount Everest. But last month, two sets of climbers turned heads with ascents that many had never thought possible: they went straight up from sea level to the world’s highest summit in less than a week. On 21 May, a team of four UK exspecial forces soldiers summited Everest having landed from London just over four days earlier. The next day, US-Ukrainian climber Andrew Ushakov said he had gone from New York to the top of Everest in under four days. With Everest standing at a staggering 8,849 metres, scaling safely usually requires spending several weeks acclimatising at a lower altitude, normally Everest base camp, so the body can adjust to the lower level of oxygen. Without this acclimatisation, most climbers…

It requires an effort to keep reminding yourself of the sheer oddity of monarchy’s healthy survival into the modern democratic age. Yet so rooted is it in the mental furniture of Britain that most people in our politics barely think about it. Last week, however, the modern British monarchy stood up and demanded to be counted, doing something new and perhaps genuinely consequential. Judged by any yardstick, Charles III’s visit to Canada was an audaciously disjunctive event. The idea that a democracy such as Canada, with a highly sophisticated sense of its own complex identity, might summon an elderly hereditary monarch to provide a focal point for its resistance to Donald Trump’s existential threat takes some believing. Yet that was what played out when the king travelled to Ottawa to…

Bees returning to their cosy hives next to the fertile allotments here have much to waggle their tails about. Within their foraging radius there is a wide range of habitats sporting spring flowers, plus the hives are free from two pests found in “the adjacent isle” – mainland Britain. Ballabeg means “small place” in Manx Gaelic, but it is surrounded by big nectar sources. Behind the sleepy village overlooking nearby Castletown lie the upland pastures of Arbory and the controversial moorland site of a proposed windfarm. In front of the hives are the lowland fields of Great Meadow, Scarlett Headland and Ballawhetstone Farm, where crops of sunflowers will provide summer pollen. Dandelions have been plentiful this year – an essential food supply early in spring. Bees direct their co-workers to…

Across 1 Dark or dismal (6) 4 Foot the bill (4,2) 8 World record? (5) 9 Bag for books and pencils (7) 10 Atlantic island – wine or cake (7) 11 They may develop on a ‘dadbod’ (5) 12 Bound together, as of communities (5-4) 17 Old hat (5) 19 Style of Glasgow’s Luma Tower (3,4) 21 Veranda or line of houses (7) 22 Online offender (5) 23 Ball bowled so as to pitch just under or beyond the bat (6) 24 Turn off and on again (6) Down 1 Oleaginous – obsequious (6) 2 Tuneful (7) 3 Wise fellow – or prime minister until 2024 (5) 5 Backless chair – member of dynasty (7) 6 Early web portal – yobbo – cry of joy (5) 7 Like John Paul…

1 UKRAINE/RUSSIA Latest talks end with PoW deal but no ceasefire Negotiations between Ukrainian and Russian delegations in Istanbul ended without agreement on a ceasefire on Monday, but with both sides agreeing to exchange more prisoners. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said the two sides had agreed to exchange 1,000 prisoners of war each, with the possibility of swapping an additional 200 PoWs. He said an agreement had also been made to return the remains of killed service personnel, but added this would take careful preparation. He said his negotiators had given their Russian counterparts a list of nearly 400 abducted Ukrainian children that Kyiv wanted returned home, but that the Russian delegation agreed to work on returning only 10 of them. Ukrainian officials said the Russians rejected Kyiv’s call for…

For weeks the weight had sat above the village, 9m tonnes of rock precariously resting on an ancient slab of ice. A chunk of Kleines Nesthorn mountain’s peak had crumbled, and its rubble hung over the silent, empty streets of Blatten, held back only by the glacier. The ice groaned beneath the pressure. Last Wednesday afternoon, in an instant, it gave way. The ice cracked, then crumbled. The entire mass descended into the Swiss valley below, obliterating the village that had existed there for more than 800 years. “Blatten has been wiped away. Erased, obliterated, destroyed, stamped into the ground,” the village’s mayor, Matthias Bellwald, said. “The memories preserved in countless books, photo albums, documentation – everything is gone. In short, this is ground zero for Blatten.” Looking down from…

When Renato Oliveira boarded a bus down Brazil Avenue one morning last October it should have been a normal commute. Travelling along Rio’s most important motorway, it usually took the 48-year-old meat packer just under an hour to reach his factory – enough time for a nap. “Don’t let me miss my stop,” Oliveira told a friend. They were his last words. Unbeknown to passengers on the number 493 bus, up ahead rifle-toting police were storming one of the scores of favelas that line the road, hoping to capture a notorious drug lord. A gun battle broke out, sending motorists scattering for cover behind the concrete central reservation. Oliveira was hit by a stray bullet as he dozed. Soon after, a neighbour broke the news to his family. “We thought…

On a heat-dazed afternoon in Culiacán, the capital of Mexico’s Sinaloa state, a speaker by the cathedral was droning through an advert for the judicial elections on a loop when a plume of smoke appeared in the sky. A flicker of agitation ran through the plaza. After months of cartel conflict, Sinaloa is on edge. Yet last Sunday, it and the rest of Mexico began the process to elect every judge in the country, from local magistrates to supreme court justices, by popular vote. It is a world-first democratic experiment, but one that prompted warnings of low turnout, a political power grab and infiltration by organised crime. The reform is the most radical move by the governing Morena party and its allies since they won a congressional supermajority last year…

I can’t believe that Elon Musk has left Doge, the government department he named after a tired and basic meme that most of the internet had moved on from around a decade ago. “As my scheduled time as a Special Government Employee comes to an end,” Musk wrote last week (capital letters: model’s own), “I would like to thank President @realDonaldTrump for the opportunity to reduce wasteful government spending.” Oh man. “Thank you for the opportunity”?! At some level you have to salute Donald Trump’s ability to turn even the world’s richest man into an Apprentice candidate who leaves in week four after wiping out in the hotdog stand task. Musk arrived in government promising to slash spending by $2tn. He leaves it a mere $1.86tn short of that target.…

‘WE USED TO HAVE SOMETHING CALLED SOCIAL HOUSING,” you will be able to tell your grandchildren, should you ever take them to V&A East Storehouse, the Victoria & Albert Museum’s new outpost in east London. High up in the atrium, at the centre of this huge open-access repository of 250,000 objects, hangs a chunk of Robin Hood Gardens, a brutalist council estate in nearby Poplar that was recently bulldozed to make way for less affordable housing. Deftly suspended from the gantry, the poignant fragment now seems as much a relic of a bygone age as the 15th-century Islamic dome from a Spanish palace that is displayed across the hall. The estate’s precast concrete panels have been reassembled with just the same care as the dome’s intricate wooden marquetry, with doorhandles…

Is it always better to make your own dips, or can I just buy them? Dips are a great unifier, whether they’re married to a big bowl of crisps or a companion for a picnic spread. If there’s hummus, cacik or borani in the picture, then it’s a party. Happily, says David Carter, founder of Smokestak, Manteca and Oma in London, “you can get a lot of good stuff in stores these days”. That said, he adds, anything involving vegetables is “always going to be best when made fresh”. If your dip needs lead you to the shops, the trick is to create contrast. “If you put some shop-bought hummus in a pan with a bit of hot water and maybe some lemon juice, then whisk, the hummus will loosen,…

✱ All solutions published next week Across 1 Curious way to row (7) 5 Compartment in 16 where birds fight (7) 9 Loud isn’t very soft (5) 10 Say a word such as “it” at church (9) 11 Ruthless traders like places with tourists (5-9) 13 God’s sign of the end of winter, reportedly (4) 14 Intellectual bookworm initially gripped by Le Carré novel (8) 17 Non-metric standard for beard and paper (8) 18 Area of land when returning from Dover-Calais (4) 21 Ethical procedure affecting cod-piece factor (4,2,8) 23 It may ‘elp to seal (9) 24 Wine temperature fine (5) 25 Plastic cups material from messy home at the heart of the Pyrenees (7) 26 Introduction of policy agreements suits everyone (7) Down 1 Very loud, but ultimately quiet…

DEFENCE AND SECURITY Starmer unveils plan to make Britain ‘battle-ready’ Keir Starmer promised to make Britain “battle-ready” as he unveiled a defence review designed to counter threats from countries such as Russia, which he warned directly threatened the UK every day. The prime minister promised to spend billions more on weapons factories, drones and submarines – even if it meant raiding welfare or the aid budget once more to do so. Amid an ongoing row over how the government will fund Starmer’s “ambition” to spend 3% of gross domestic product on defence in the next parliament, the prime minister argued defence had to be prioritised above other public services. “Russia is already menacing our skies and our waters, and threatening cyberattacks, so this is a real threat we’re dealing with,”…

On a sunny April afternoon in Budapest, a handful of reporters crowded around the back entrance of the Dorothea, a luxury hotel tucked between a Madame Tussauds waxworks museum and a discount clothing store. Most had spent hours outside the hotel, hoping to confirm reports that Donald Trump Jr was inside. News of his visit had leaked two days earlier, but much of his agenda remained shrouded in secrecy, save for a meeting with the Hungarian foreign minister. Reports had also circulated of a closed-door speech the US president’s eldest child and Trump Organization executive was slated to give on bridging governments to the private sector at the five-star hotel reportedly owned by the son-in-law of Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán. Few other details emerged. But it was a hint…

At about 3pm on 23 May, Dr Alaa al-Najjar, a paediatrician at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, received the charred remains of seven of her 10 children, killed in an Israeli airstrike. The remains of two others were buried beneath the rubble. A few kilometres away, 11-year-old Yaqeen Hammad, known as Gaza’s youngest social media influencer, was killed after heavy Israeli airstrikes hit the house where she lived with her family. She was watering flowers when she died. Her cousin, 16-year-old Eyad, was gravely wounded. Even by the terrible standards of the Gaza conflict, the deaths had the power to shock. But they were also a reflection of a daily reality in the territory: the killing and maiming of its very youngest citizens and the destruction of a young generation.…

It is a crisis that would have sent a shiver down Ernest Hemingway’s drinking arm. Cuba’s communist government is struggling to process enough sugar to make the rum for his beloved mojitos and daiquiris. As summer rains bring the Caribbean island’s 2025 harvest to an end, analysis by Reuters suggests that Cuba’s state-run monopoly, Azcuba, is likely to produce just 165,000 metric tonnes of sugar this year. That compares with harvests of 8m tonnes in the late 1980s. Michael Bustamante, chair of Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami, described the situation as “dismal”. “You have to go back to the 19th century to find numbers this low,” he said. Cuba is in the grip of an all-encompassing economic crisis, and for the past few years has been…

As the lead singer of a Bruce Springsteen cover band, Brad Hobicorn had been looking forward to performing at Riv’s Toms River Hub in New Jersey last Friday. Then came a text message from the bar’s owner, saying the gig was cancelled. Why? Because the real Bruce Springsteen had lambasted Donald Trump. “He said to me his customer base is redder than red and he wishes Springsteen would just shut his mouth,” Hobicorn recalled. “It was clear that this guy was getting caught up in that and didn’t want to lose business. The reality is we would have brought a huge crowd out there: new customers that are Springsteen fans that want to see a band locally.” The culture wars have arrived in New Jersey. Springsteen – revered for songs…

If Nigel Farage has a secret weapon, it is his seeming refusal to take things seriously. His habit of repairing to the pub at any opportunity – though in private, he’s said to barely drink now – and the cheerfully unabashed amateurishness of his operation have long made other politicians look stuffy by comparison. But the chaos is also, as it was for Boris Johnson, a means of defence. Since he makes no pretence of professionalism, it’s less expected of him, enabling him to slip past standards applied to others. Rival parties often avoid attacking him, for fear of reminding voters he exists. Even now Reform UK has opened a substantial poll lead over Labour, treating this outfit as a potential party of government still feels faintly ridiculous. Prime Minister…

In Saint Etienne, it is usually Bob Stanley who suggests the band’s tightly defined album concepts. What if you graft folk melodies to dance music? Make vaporwave about early New Labour? Last winter, Stanley pitched an even starker one: the end of their band. “I didn’t think I was saying anything uncomfortable or shocking,” says Stanley, in a park near his Bradford home. “When you’ve known each other for so long you have a psychic thing anyway. It felt like we would all agree.” I meet Pete Wiggs and Sarah Cracknell in a London bar, separate from Stanley. “Once I got used to it, I thought it was a great idea,” says Wiggs. “We’ve not split up acrimoniously, and have some control over it.” International, out in September, will be…

Charles Darwin suggested that humans learned to speak by mimicking birdsong: our ancestors’ first words may have been a kind of interspecies exchange. Perhaps it won’t be long before we join the conversation once again. The race to translate what animals are saying is heating up, with riches as well as a place in history at stake. The Jeremy Coller Foundation has promised $10m to whichever researchers can crack the code. This is a race fuelled by generative AI; large language models can sort through millions of recorded animal vocalisations to find their hidden grammars. Most projects focus on cetaceans because, like us, they learn through vocal imitation and, also like us, they communicate via complex arrangements of sound that appear to have structure and hierarchy. Sperm whales communicate in…

Magnus Carlsen arrived in vintage form at the start of the Norway Chess tournament. The encounter began inconclusively with the six stars – in ranking order Carlsen, Hikaru Nakamura, Fabiano Caruana, Arjun Erigaisi, Gukesh Dommaraju and Wei Yi – all launching a win or two. Gukesh, who has just turned 19, won in round three against Nakamura. Carlsen’s version of one of Bobby Fischer’s favourite openings set the tone last week for another clean sweep. Carlsen’s comprehensive victory in the chess.com Speed Championship, which this year also acted as a qualifier for the Esports World Cup, included mini-match victories over three important rivals. His win against France’s Maxime Vachier-Lagrave was a rare venture into a classical Sicilian Defence with Bc4, like Fischer used to play in his pomp. The individual…