Innehållsförteckning för 2nd April 2021 från Guardian Weekly

A grim inevitability hangs over news of another American mass shooting. From the anguish of victims’ families to the intransigence of gun rights supporters, the sense prevails that nothing can, or will, ever change when it comes to US gun laws. It’s a reality writ large since the horrifying 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre, an event so shocking yet one that still failed to break opposition to gun law reform, despite the best efforts of the then-vice president Joe Biden. Now Biden is in the Oval Office with a fresh mandate and a weakened pro-gun lobby before him. In the light of two recent mass shootings in Georgia and Colorado, Ed Pilkington traces the Groundhog Day nature of America’s gun reform debate. Then, Guardian US gun crime reporters Abené Clayton…

ARCHAEOLOGY Archaeologists identify a spider god painting in Peru Archaeologists in Peru have identified a 3,200-year-old mural painted on the side of a temple that is thought to depict a zoomorphic, knife-wielding spider god associated with rain and fertility. The mural – applied in ochre, yellow, grey and white paint to the mud brick structure in the Virú province of Peru’s La Libertad region – was discovered last year after much of the site was destroyed by local farmers. Experts believe the shrine was built by the pre-Columbian Cupisnique culture, which developed along Peru’s northern coast more than 3,000 years ago. NEUROSCIENCE Scientists pinpoint why the human brain is so large Scientists have shed light on why humans have relatively large brains, by collecting cells from humans, chimps and gorillas…

In December, two weeks before the European Medicines Agency authorised the first vaccine against Covid-19 for use across the European Union, Berlin unveiled a plan to rocket-fuel its immunisation drive with German precision engineering. Jabs would be mass-administered in purpose-built vaccination centres where patients could be shuttled through like cars through a car wash. A Lego display demonstrating the complex system’s efficiency impressed journalists at a press launch, but set off alarm bells in the head of Janosch Dahmen, a former doctor turned Green party MP. “It all looked very logical in theory,” said Dahmen. “But looking at it as a doctor, I thought: that’s not how vaccinations work in practice. “You want your grandmother to get a call from the family doctor who has been treating her for 20…

It’s not often that ornithological conservationists draw comparisons to wild west sheriffs, but extreme times call for extreme measures, and a group of committed New Zealand volunteers are hoping for a miracle. Kōkakos – large, long-legged songbirds with a haunting call – once flocked through New Zealand’s ancient forests, but their numbers plummeted catastrophically after human settlement. Numbers of the North Island Kōkako, which has a blue wattle, have to some extent recovered, but ecologists are anxiously searching the South Island for its orange-wattled relative which many fear is lost for ever. A NZ$10,000 ($7,000) reward is being offered for a sighting. The most recent accepted sighting of a South Island Kōkako was in 2007, near Reefton and, before that, at Mt Aspiring in 1967. The Department of Conservation (DOC)…

A little after 7.30 on Wednesday night, a small crowd gathered in a dark bar in central Madrid to sit at candle-lit, socially distanced tables and lose themselves for an hour in the sweat, shouts and blurred hands, hems and heels of a flamenco show. The 16 people in the audience at the Cardamomo tablao, or flamenco venue, were in luck – but then so were the eight performers on stage. Neither flamenco’s iconic place in Spanish culture nor its global status as part of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity has spared it the pains and penalties of the Covid pandemic. Starved of the tourists on whom they depend for 80% of their income, Spain’s tablaos are now facing an existential crisis. “Before the pandemic started, there were 93…

Fleets Introduced by Twitter in November 2020, Fleets allow users to post photos, videos or reactions to tweets, in a format that will delete 24 hours after posting. As Twitter noted when it launched the format – “This format may sound familiar to you!” – it is a fairly straightforward copycat of rival features Instagram Stories and Snapchat Stories. Spaces Spaces is Twitter’s rival to a much more recent standalone competitor, Clubhouse. Both offer the ability to create ad hoc moderated chat rooms, which work with audio only. Users can elevate participants in the rooms to speakers, demote them to the audience or kick them out entirely. It has not yet launched to the general public. Super Follows Not yet launched, Super Follows will allow people to pay a monthly…

Every woman has a story of sexual harassment The safety of young women is quite rightly the subject of much concern at the moment (Big story, 19 March). But let no one think this problem is new. For us older women, life has included a catalogue of harassment and “near misses”. From a serious sexual assault at age 10 by a boy my own age, to university in London where a journey by bus or tube often involved groping of some kind. (The city gents were the worst.) Most disempowering was contact with doctors who misused their trusted position. Maybe women reading this will be thinking “Yes, me too.” So has nothing changed in 65 years? It’s about time it did. Name and address supplied Lifting the nuclear cap makes…

1 In this aesthetic sum the squares of 1, 2 and 3 appear along a diagonal: - - 1 + - 4 - 9 - - If each of the digits from 1-9 appears exactly once fill in the missing digits 2 Wordpool Find the correct definition: EDAPHOLOGY a) ecological study of soil b) collection of edifying sayings c) art of comminution d) scientific fallacy 3 Jumblies Rearrange the letters of GENERATE to make another word. 4 Dropouts Replace each * with a letter to make a word: S*I*N*E 5 Same Difference Identify these words differing only in the letters shown: M**** tooth? P**** bear? S**** flare? 6 Missing Links Find a word that follows the first word in the clue and precedes the second, in each case making a…

NOTES & QUERIES The Earth’s smell is nothing to be sniffy about Does the world in general have an odour? And is it getting more potent? God only nose. Hartmann Doerry Tübingen, Germany • Nonscents! John Ralston Mountain View, California, US • In Germany in 1946 there was still an odour of war. We had it in our Leipzig refugee camp for people from the Baltic countries. I was six and still remember it. Reiner Jaakson Oakville, Ontario, Canada • Our planet is currently in a state of rapid decay, with the stink of corruption triumphing over the rare scent of truth. This is reflected in the popularity of demagogues like Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Boris Johnson and others, set against rare exceptions such as Jacinda Ardern and Greta Thunberg.…

We write about gun violence in America as our full-time jobs. We see that America’s endless gun debate does not treat shooting victims and their families equitably. It is not driven by a focus on what actually works to save lives. It rarely includes the voices of the majority of the victims or any of the people who have a track record of successfully preventing shootings. It is not just biased; it is actively harmful and racist. We are sad, frustrated and angry. Here’s why: We focus on “mass shootings ”, but that obscures the violence that really drives America’s gun violence crisis. Last year, gun violence in the US killed an estimated 4,000 more people than it did in 2019. More than 500 people died in shootings that included multiple…

Forging unity within the European Union is rarely easy for a president of the European commission but Ursula von der Leyen managed at least to bring together two strange bed fellows in recent days. When Jean-Claude Juncker, her predecessor, took aim at the EU’s error-strewn vaccine strategy last week, it prompted a tweet from Dominic Cummings, former chief adviser to Boris Johnson and key architect of Brexit. “Juncker no dummy, he right,” the ex-Vote Leave strategist wrote. Juncker’s comments have been seen by many as a reflection of the growing exasperation at Von der Leyen’s performance. Since January, she has been engaged in a row with the Anglo-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, and the British government, over a shortfall in EU vaccine supplies. Others, too, are questioning the tone of the…

Thailand’s Phuket island used to vibrate with life. Before the pandemic, the resort’s long white beaches were packed with tourists from Europe, Australia, North America and China. At night, backpackers would flock to beach front bars, and on the hills stretching inland wealthy tourists would eat at five-star restaurants. Today, Phuket is a ghost town. The shockwaves of Covid-19 have reduced daily visitor numbers from 50,000 down to just hundreds. But there is hope that plans to bring tourists back could change the fortunes of the beach town, and the country. “If visitors come, we’ll all make more money,” said Tow Jaturaput, a 30-year-old taxi driver whose main job is shuttling visitors to their hotels from the airport. “Tourists have a lot of money, and we benefit from it too.”…

“It’s gonna take a hundred years before they understand me!” Bob Dylan once claimed, “they” being the cohorts of fans, critics and Dylanologists who have dogged his tracks ever since Robert Zimmerman, chippy teen of Hibbing, Minnesota, became Bob Dylan, world-famous singer, songwriter and pop’s most enduring enigma. “That’s exactly the quote James Joyce made about Ulysses,” points out Sean Latham, professor of English at the University of Tulsa and head of the institute for Bob Dylan Studies recently established there. “Joyce said: ‘I put so many puzzles and enigmas in Ulysses it will take the scholars a hundred years to solve them.’” With the centenary of his masterwork arriving in 2022, Joyce has perhaps been proved right. Whether it will take as long to decipher Dylan’s extensive oeuvre –…

Kitchenly Mill is the idyllic East Sussex retreat of Marko Morrell, guitar hero with 70s rock band Fear Taker. It is a seriously moated Elizabethan mansion, with Arts and Crafts restorations and contemporary architectural additions. It’s a work of love, and clearly an object of love for Morrell’s pre-fame sidekick, Crofton Clark, who narrates. Alan Warner’s ninth novel, like his earlier work in Morvern Callar or The Sopranos, layers together music, culture and individual psychology so they seem to become a single, composite material; and it does so under a biblical epigraph – Luke 16.2: “Give an account of thy stewardship.” If Clark loves Kitchenly, he worships Morrell, whose Fender Strat makes the “mighty noise of consequence and of economic empowerment”. He’s been around Fear Taker since the beginning, deriving…

Beverly Cleary US children’s author whose memories of her Oregon childhood were shared with millions through the likes of Ramona and Beezus Quimby and Henry Huggins. She died on 25 March, aged 104. Martin Woollacott Former Guardian foreign editor and correspondent, who covered the Vietnam war, the Lebanese civil war and the Iranian revolution. He died on 24 March, aged 81. Larry McMurtry Pulitzer prizewinning author and screenwriter who examined the reality of the American west in novels including Lonesome Dove. He died on 25 March, aged 84. King Goodwill Zwelithini Chief of the Zulu ethnic group in Kwa Zulu-Natal who remained a key figure in democratic South Africa. He died on 12 March, aged 72.…

Despite mounting the world’s fastest per-capita Covid-19 vaccination campaign, Chile has been forced to announce strict new lockdowns as it plunges deeper into a severe second wave of cases that is stretching intensive care capacity. Chile trails only Israel and the UAE in vaccine doses per 100 inhabitants worldwide, but new cases have risen quickly amid mixed health messaging, travel over the southern hemisphere summer holidays and the circulation of new variants. Nearly half of the country’s population has received at least one vaccine dose, but last Friday, Chile recorded 7,626 new cases over a 24-hour period – the highest number at any point during the pandemic – and it is now approaching 1m cases in total. More than 80% of the country’s 19 million inhabitants, including all residents of…

Some campaigns take years, even decades to achieve change. Not for Skye Neville, a 10-year-old from Fair-bourne in Wales who in November became outraged at the plastic toys attached to her favourite magazines. Four months on, her campaign against throwaway toys has won plaudits from politicians, environmental activists and children’s champions – and has now prompted action from UK supermarket chain Waitrose, which has vowed to stop selling children’s magazines with “disposable” toys. Skye said she was “very pleased” at Waitrose’s actions. “It would be good if they [publishers] took it seriously without having to be told by 10-year-olds like me.” Skye subscribes to a number of magazines such as The Week Junior and Eco Kids Planet. She also likes the Horrible Histories magazine – but not the plastic toys…

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we never had to face another pandemic? As we reflect on the past year, the words that come to mind are “never again”. Never again should millions of lives worldwide be lost to a contagious virus. Nor should we endure another year of lockdowns, and the pain of job losses and unemployment that followed. And nobody ever wants to see children taken out of school for large chunks of the year again, unable to learn in classrooms or see their friends. But scientists are clear that we will face another pandemic in the future. Most agree the question is when, not if. In 2018, I gave a talk at the Hay festival in England, outlining a scenario loosely based on recent news reports: a farmer…

The return of Alex Salmond to frontline politics is a symbol of decay, not renewal, in Scottish politics. His decision to launch a new political party to contest upcoming elections for the Holyrood parliament will not highlight a new shared idea of an independent country that nationalists could unite behind. It will instead provide the stage for Mr Salmond’s revenge on his successor as Scottish National party leader, Nicola Sturgeon. For two years Scottish politics has been consumed by this rivalry. The scorched-earth politics of Scottish nationalism has been brutal. The shabby way in which serious matters pertaining to allegations of sexual harassment leading to acquittal in a court case have become part of hyper-partisan politics revealed the depths to which politicians were capable of sinking. Ms Sturgeon is an…

For years, I’ve kept interesting pictures I discover online in a folder entitled Images on my desktop: a fox sauntering through an art gallery; a pixelated rendering of a Tokyo streetscape; Jon Bon Jovi doing yoga. They’re sentimental reminders of things I’ve seen online, but I am under no illusion that I own these images. They come from the internet and can be copied, shared and experienced by many people all at once. My collection is worthless to anyone but me. Recently, however, I became aware that I can own a digital image all for myself, and then potentially sell it for a profit. This class of image is called an NFT, which stands for non-fungible token. A fungible item, like a $10 note, can be traded one for another.…

Have you checked whether you’re shedding lately? It’s reported that “viral shedding” of Sars-CoV-2 is strongest in the afternoon. The Oxford English Dictionary notes it can also mean “a collection of sheds”, such as David Cameron might compose his memoirs in. The verb “to shed” derives from Old English scēadan, meaning “to divide or separate”. An early sense in English was agricultural, as farmers would shed sheep into separate pens, or shed calves from cows. From there, “shed” acquires other senses, of parting hair, pouring forth (as fishes do their spawn, observed a 16th-century commentator), spilling liquid or emanating sound or heat. Companies speak of “shedding jobs” instead of firing people, as though human beings are dead leaves or pet hair. Shedding virus does not, lamentably, rid us of it.…

Prep 15 min Cook 40 min Serves 2 Ingredients 800g baby newpotatoes, unpeeled and cut into 2cm pieces2 tbsp olive oil, plus extra to serve2 tsp lime juice3 spring onions, trimmed and finely sliced (40g)Salt For the spicy, sticky seeds 100g pumpkin seeds1 tbsp olive oil2 tsp ground cumin2 tbsp maple syrup For the charred salsa 500g datterini or cherry tomatoes3 large red chillies (50g)3 tbsp olive oil1 tsp orange zest3 tbsp orange juice1 tsp ground cumin2 tsp maple syrup The salsa with these potatoes is inspired by sikil p’ak, a Mayan paste made from toasted pumpkin seeds, charred tomatoes and chillies, orange and cumin. Any extra pumpkin seeds will keep in an airtight jar for two weeks. Method Heat the oven to 180C (160C fan)/350F/gas 4. Mix the ingredients…