Innehållsförteckning för 12th March 2021 från Guardian Weekly

Bunny Wailer The musician who, alongside Wailers bandmates Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, helped popularise Jamaican music worldwide before embarking on a respected solo career. He died on 2 March, aged 73. Olivier Dassault The French billionaire and conservative member of parliament. He died in a helicopter crash in Normandy on 7 March, aged 69. Carla Wallenda The American high-wire walker, a founding member of the Flying Wallendas act. She retired in 2017 at 81 after appearing on a TV special, doing a headstand atop an 24-metre sway pole. She died on 6 March, aged 85. Leon Gast The American documentary maker who won an Oscar for 1996’s boxing film When We Were Kings. He died on 8 March, aged 85.…

A seldom remembered fact about the royal family is that, before the death of Diana, it was not normal to be interested in them. Tabloids were fascinated, but it was more of a convention than news. The family survived while there was nothing to see. They were caught between two irreconcilable forces – their own culture of discretion, on one side, and intense, 24-hour scrutiny on the other – and they navigated that with a studied blandness. Whatever curiosity surrounded them, they simply did not reward it. The death of Diana changed all that, but in a counterintuitive way. Curiosity had driven a woman into a pillar, so you might expect a generalised reflection on the nature of it – what were the paparazzi hoping to see? A divorcee, going…

The arrival of Covid-19 vaccines promises a return to more normal life – and has created a lucrative market for some pharmaceutical companies. Among the biggest winners will be Moderna and Pfizer, which both charge more than $30 per person for their two-dose vaccines. Other drugmakers, such as the British-Swedish AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson, of the US, have pledged to provide their vaccines on a not-for-profit basis until the pandemic comes to an end. We look at who is in line for the biggest gains – and which shareholders have already made a fortune. Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA vaccine Pfizer’s Comirnaty vaccine, developed with Germany’s BioNTech, is based on reengineered messenger RNA. It was the first to be approved and has to be stored at -70C. Governments have ordered about 780m…

The village of Okere Mom-Kok was in ruins by the end of more than a decade of war in northern Uganda. Now, just outside Ojok Okello’s living-room door, final-year pupils at the early childhood centre are noisily breaking for recess and a market is clattering into life, as is the local craft brewery, as what has become Okere City begins a new day. “I think what I’m doing here is radical,” said Okello, who is behind an ambitious project to transform the destroyed village of 4,000 people into a thriving and sustainable town. Okere City began in January 2019. Its 200 hectares feature a school, a health clinic, a village bank and a community hall that also serves as a cinema, a church and a nightclub. Electricity is available to…

As they call themselves living sculptures, I can’t resist asking Gilbert and George what they think of all the statue-toppling that took place last year. When I ask for their verdict on the removal of public works that have been accused of celebrating slavery and colonialism, they are sceptical. “We would call that shameful behaviour,” says George. “And it’s very odd – because normally those statues are totally invisible. Nobody ever looks at them. I remember, very near my home town, there’s a statue of Redvers Buller, the hero of the Boer war, surrounded by dying Zulus and things. And if you asked people in Exeter, ‘Where’s Buller’s statue?’, none of them knew. It’s a bit silly. Rewriting history is very silly.” Actually, Exeter’s equestrian statue of Buller doesn’t have…

It would be easy to dismiss the fallout between the royal family and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex as nothing more than a soap opera. But the royal family remains – despite its frequent crises and dramas – at the centre of Britain’s idea of itself. The accusations by Meghan and Harry of racism and mistreatment have ignited a global debate and shone a light on the reality of how multicultural modern Britain really is. As the fallout from the Sussexes’ incendiary interview continues, Zoe Williams asks how anyone can stand to be part of the royal circus, while historian David Olusoga wonders why the UK found it so hard to live up to an image of multiculturalism. Finally, Aamna Mohdin talks to black British women about what the…

SPACE Chance encounter captures Venusian landscape A newly released image from Nasa’s Parker Solar Probe unexpectedly shows surface features on Venus, including Aphrodite Terra, a highland region near Venus’s equator. It is a surprising result because Venus is permanently covered in clouds that should block out any view of the surface at optical wavelengths. The image was taken in July 2020 when the spacecraft flew by Venus en route to the sun. Scientists think that either the camera is registering infrared light, even though it was not designed to do so, or there is a window in the Venusian clouds that lets out certain faint wavelengths of visible light. CO2 EMISSIONS Lockdown every two years to meet Paris agreement Carbon dioxide emissions must fall by the equivalent of a global…

• 2003 Article 23 After the 1997 handover, Hong Kong was meant to pass laws that would prevent subversive acts against the Chinese central government. This is enshrined in a provision, article 23, of Hong Kong’s de facto constitution, known as the basic law. In early 2003, the government proposed a new national security law. On 1 July an estimated half a million people took to the streets. The bill was eventually shelved. • 2012 Patriotic education A “moral and civic education” curriculum was proposed, to be implemented in all public schools by 2016. Guidelines criticised multiparty democracies and described the Communist party in glowing terms. Organisers said at least 90,000 people came out to oppose the plan. The law gave rise to a group of student leaders, including the pro-democracy…

As Joe Biden vowed, in late 2019, to make Saudi Arabia a pariah if he was elected president, a little-known former aide was examining what exactly a “progressive” post-Trump stance towards the oil-rich kingdom might look like. Daniel Benaim, who had worked for Biden as a speechwriter, and for Hillary Clinton and John Kerry before that, first travelled to Saudi Arabia and then began interviewing dozens of Democratic and progressive policy experts to come up with a blueprint. The former US diplomats, political appointees, academics and activists he spoke to were divided: was the US relationship with Saudi Arabia and its obviously murderous and unstable de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, worth salvaging? For so-called “rethinkers”, as Benaim called them, the partnership was unreliable, unpalatable, outdated and overrated. The “resetters”,…

There’s a joke doing the rounds in France: how do you get a Frenchman to have the Covid vaccine? Tell him he can’t have it. My dentist – who is French – recounted this and found it hilarious. My doctor – who is not French – was not so amused. Like other GPs she has been trying, and not always succeeding, to persuade her patients to have the AstraZeneca jab. Yes, you read that right, trying to persuade. While Britons have been giving their right and left arms for a Covid-19 vaccine with more than a third of adults having had their first dose, here in still-sceptical France, people are turning it down. And not just the Anglo-Swedish AstraZeneca jab, though it hasn’t helped that after being given such an…

One year into the pandemic, women had little cause to celebrate International Women’s Day on Monday, and less energy to battle for change. Men are more likely to die from Covid-19. But women have suffered the greatest economic and social blows. They have taken the brunt of increased caregiving, have been more likely to lose their jobs and have seen a sharp rise in domestic abuse. In the UK, women did two-thirds of the extra childcare in the first lockdown, and were more likely to be furloughed. In the US, every one of the 140,000 jobs lost in December belonged to a woman: they saw 156,000 jobs disappear, while men gained 16,000. Previous experience suggests that the effects of health crises can be long-lasting: in Sierra Leone, over a year…

“I went to university in 2007. On my first day, every fresher had their photo taken; the pictures were pinned to a bulletin board in my halls. That evening, older male students scrawled on the photographs of the girls, rating our attractiveness. No one got in trouble. Later, the same men published a gossip magazine that Photoshopped images of female students on to porn stars, dissected our sex lives and made rape jokes. The magazine was printed using university funds. No one got kicked out. None of this seemed particularly objectionable to me, an 18-year-old girl. This was just the way things were. Internalised misogyny ran deep in the 2000s. Hell, I was just happy I got a high score on my photograph. I had largely forgotten about these incidents…

This powerfully bleak Mexican debut examines motherhood through the prism of a child’s abduction. It’s narrated by two unnamed women in Mexico City. The first – middle-class – tells us that her three-year-old son, Daniel, hasn’t been seen since he went missing in a playground while she was absorbed in her phone: the man she was having an affair with had just texted to break things off. Now unable to get out of bed, she’s dead-eyed with self-loathing, her agony intensified by having to care for her husband’s niece, Nagore, of whom they took custody after the girl’s father murdered her mother. This is a novel in which violence is endemic. Empty Houses starts in the vein of fiction about put-upon women whose circumstances tip them into misanthropy; think of…

In the introduction to his new manual on how to live a meaningful life, Jordan Peterson sets the tone by recounting the hellish sequence of health crises that afflicted his family during 2019 and 2020. They included his wife’s diagnosis with a rare and usually lethal form of kidney cancer, and his own downward spiral from severe anxiety and dangerously low blood pressure into benzodiazepine dependency and an acute withdrawal response, near total insomnia, pneumonia in both lungs, and “overwhelming thoughts of self-destruction”, culminating in his waking from a medically induced coma in a Russian intensive care unit with no memory of the foregoing weeks. Conventional wisdom might envisage little appetite for a self-help book so relentlessly focused on what Peterson calls “the catastrophe of life” and “the horror of…

The speed and scale of the crackdown on the prodemocracy camp has shocked even the most experienced politicians. Many had anticipated that the national security law would initially only target those involved in violent protests, or advocates of independence, and believed China would tolerate some pro-democracy politicians for the sake of window-dressing. “It was a big surprise to be charged with subversion,” said 79-year-old American lawyer John Clancey, who came to Hong Kong over 50 years ago as a Catholic priest. “I never foresaw this.” “Obviously they are saying clearly they only want patriotic people to govern Hong Kong … they want to rule out anyone from the democratic camp,” said Clancey, who was the first foreign national detained under the national security law. He was serving as the treasurer…

A year ago, when the World Health Organization published a report showing that China had shut down a highly contagious virus in a city of 11 million people, epidemiologist Michael Baker assumed that the international body would advise the rest of the world to follow China’s example. When to his amazement it didn’t, he decided that New Zealand (population 5 million) should go its own way, and started lobbying the government to pursue an elimination strategy. He found some unexpected allies in New Zealand’s billionaires who, hearing what he was proposing, got on the phone to cabinet ministers too. On 23 March, New Zealand shut down and seven weeks later, its citizens emerged into a virus-free country. Baker, who estimates that the move saved about 8,000 lives, later asked the…

With the Australian government scrambling to deal with the fallout over its handling of an allegation of sexual assault against a minister’s staffer – alleged to have occurred only metres from the prime minister’s office in 2019 – a rape allegation levelled against the attorney general has sent it sprawling. Christian Porter has emphatically denied allegations he raped a fellow competitor when, as teenagers, the pair attended a debating competition in Sydney in 1988. The alleged victim died in 2020. The woman, who remains unnamed to protect her legacy and her family, had gone to police in early 2020, but the pandemic, and her mental health, delayed an interview. She withdrew the complaint in June that year, for medical and personal reasons. She died the day after doing so. Without…

Elizabeth Kolbert’s favourite movie is the end-of-the-world comedy Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. For those who need a quick recap, Stanley Kubrick’s cold war film features a deranged US air force general who orders a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union using weapons developed by a mad Nazi scientist played by Peter Sellers. A last-minute glitch almost forestalls an apocalyptic war, but a gung-ho B-52 pilot has other ideas. He opens the bomb doors and mounts the H-bomb as if it were a horse, waving his hat and whooping as he rides the missile towards the world’s oblivion. No heroism could be more misguided. No movie could end with a blunter message: how on Earth can we humans trust ourselves with planet-altering…

Scott Morrison needs to face up to bad news too I find it difficult to accept that Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison knew nothing of an alleged rape in a ministerial office until almost two years after the event (Spotlight, 5 March). Amy Remeikis’s report paints a picture of an Australian prime minister with a split personality. When there is good news to announce, Scott Morrison I is eager to bask in the spotlight. When the news is bad, Scott Morrison II runs for cover and leaves one of his ministers to face the fla k. Douglas E Mackenzie Canberra, ACT, Australia Britain has form for its humanitarian record Britain has cut its support for humanitarian efforts in Yemen by 50%, while half a million children face starvation (Global report,…

1 What is X, if: 3/(X/7 - 1) = 7/(1 - X/3)? 2 Wordpool Find the correct definition: MOELLON a) musical instrument b) Dutch composer c) large gemstone d) building rubble used as filler COBBLE a) sedimentary particle of intermediate size b) zig-zag c) hem d) plunder 3 Jumblies Rearrange the letters of ORCHESTRA PITS to make a single word. 4 Dropouts Replace each * with a letter to make a word: B*O*N*E 5 Same Difference Identify these words that differ only in the letters shown: ***T** (impermanent) ***** (good) 6 Missing Links Find a word that follows the first word in the clue and precedes the second, in each case making a fresh word or phrase. Eg the answer to fish mix could be cake (fishcake & cake mix)…

The former first minister of Scotland, Alex Salmond, has alleged that there is a “malicious and concerted effort” to denigrate him, causing others to accuse him of throwing around “conspiracy theories”. But what is a conspiracy, exactly? Our English word comes from the Latin conspirare, which literally means “to breathe together”; apart from the sense of people whispering among themselves to plot crimes, it could also describe musicians playing horns together or people acting in other kinds of positive harmony. In modern times the phrase “conspiracy theory” is, oddly, applied only to purely factitious or imaginary conspiracies, ones about alien lizards or paedophile rings run out of pizza joints, for which we might want to blame Karl Popper’s description of “the conspiracy theory of society” in 1952.…

NOTES & QUERIES One query forward, two notes back When and why did the expression “going forward” start appearing in conversation when it serves no purpose? Never mind where it came from; it has such momentum that there’s no going back. John Read Auckland, New Zealand • So, “‘going forward” appeared in the same week that everyone on BBC Radio 4 began their sentences with “So”. Peter Mourant Jersey, UK • During the pandemic, used by those who could see they had no future. Penny Boydell Stroud, England, UK • It started when we began moving backward in our language proficiency. Warren Thorpe Melbourne, Victoria, Australia Talk to the hands Is time more or less valuable today? It depends on personal perspective. As I progress through my ninth decade I…