Innehållsförteckning för 9th April 2021 från Guardian Weekly

G Gordon Liddy Mastermind of the Watergate burglary who became a popular radio talkshow host after being released from prison. He died on 30 March, aged 90. Nemam Ghafouri Kurdish-Swedish humanitarian who dedicated the last years of her life to helping Yazidi victims of Isis terrorism. She died from Covid on 1 April, aged 52. Bibian Mentel Dutch champion snowboarder who lost her lower right leg to cancer, but returned to the sport soon after and dominated it for 16 more years. She died on 29 March, aged 48. Doreen Lofthouse A pioneering businesswoman who turned Fisherman’s Friend cough sweets from a small UK firm in Lancashire into a global brand. She died on 30 March, aged 91.…

A wall of heartache A volunteer paints one of nearly 150,000 red hearts – one for every person in Britain who has died of Covid-19 thus far – on a wall facing the Houses of Parliament in Westminster. The mural is expected to stretch for hundreds of metres along the southern bank of the River Thames outside St Thomas’ hospital, where Boris Johnson was treated for a severe case of Covid last year. Last week some Covid restrictions began to be lifted across the UK’s four nations.…

The vaccine developed by Pfizer/BioNTech protects against symptomatic Covid for up to six months, an updated analysis of clinical trial data has found. The companies recently reported efficacy of 91.3% against any symptoms in participants assessed up to six months after their second shot. The protection is only marginally lower than the 95% achieved soon after vaccination. The findings are the first to demonstrate the vaccine remains effective for many months, an outcome doctors and scientists hoped for because it suggests people being vaccinated now should be protected at least until the autumn when boosters may be ready. Ian Sample…

In August 2011, Ahmet Davutoğlu, Turkey’s then foreign minister, made a “mercy dash” to Damascus. He appealed to Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, to stop killing his people and talk to his opponents after months of protests. Davutoğlu spoke for Turkey but also, indirectly, for the west. His message: it’s not too late to call a halt; the alternative is civil war. But Assad turned him down flat. In Istanbul the following year, he urged the US, Britain and other countries to prevent a humanitarian “disaster”. The west failed to act decisively, 500,000 or more Syrians are dead, 13.3 million are displaced. Meanwhile, half a world away, history repeats itself. Is Myanmar the new Syria? Once again, those who could stop it don’t. Once again, UN alarm bells ring, warning of…

Joe Biden, the oldest US president ever elected, seems keenly aware of the sentiment expressed in the Broadway musical Hamilton: “History has its eyes on you.” Before taking office he reportedly read biographies of Franklin Roosevelt, who steered the nation through the Great Depression. Recently, at an eerily quiet White House, he hosted presidential historians to explore the virtues of thinking big – or more precisely, the perils of thinking small. And promoting a suitably audacious $2tn infrastructure package, Biden made clear last Wednesday that he has an eye on posterity. “I’m convinced that, if we act now, in 50 years people are going to look back and say this was the moment that America won the future,” he said. The 46th president faces a tough political grind to turn…

The Bard made a fool out the likes of Boris Johnson The Shakespearean analogies to the Boris Johnson stance in government are very apposite in Edward Docx’s brilliant long read (Send in the clown, 26 March). But we can draw other analogies, showing the deeper decay of truth brought about by the clown/fool role that Johnson adopts – Richard III, Iago in Othello and Edmund in King Lear. These tragic antiheroes/villains use the stance of the fool as a subverter of the social order, and intermediary and interpreter of the action for the audience. They do it not to reveal truth, like the classic fools Feste and Lear’s Fool, but to gain power for themselves in the most cynical way – revealing their manipulation as they exercise it, daring the…

Elizabeth Knox is the recipient of a multitude of literary honours in her native New Zealand, with the kind of popular following that befits the luminous quality of her writing. That international success has thus far been denied her is something of a scandal, but with her latest work the tide could be about to turn. The Absolute Book has the feel of an instant classic, a work to rank alongside other modern masterpieces of fantasy such as Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series or Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell When Taryn Cornick is a teenager, her older sister Beatrice is killed in a hit-and-run. The perpetrator, Timothy Webber, is sentenced to six years in jail; Taryn remains convinced that her sister’s death was not an accident, but…

As the picture to the left illustrates, the northern spring is well on the way. Will it bring renewed grounds for optimism as the world wrestles with the pandemic? Many nations still face difficult weeks ahead as cases surge and vaccination rates lag. But in others, normality is returning fast as infection rates fall to negligible levels. This week’s big story focuses on more successful efforts to tackle the pandemic. Oliver Holmes considers how Israel’s trailblazing but controversial vaccine programme has forced Covid into retreat. From Auckland, Tess McClure reveals how New Zealand’s tight virus controls helped it become a pioneer in Covid genome research. And in England, where shops are set to reopen after a three-month lockdown, Sarah Boseley talks to the scientific team who identified and tracked the…

ENVIRONMENT Damage caused by invasive species trebl es every decade Mosquitoes, rats, ragweeds and termites are among the invasive species that have hitched a ride on globalised trade routes, and are bringing disease, crop destruction and damage to buildings at a cost that is trebling every decade, a study has found. Scientists calculated the damage at $1.3tn since 1970 and said global action was limited as impacts are poorly understood by the public and politicians. “The economic costs of invasive alien species since 1970 are tremendous, steadily increasing, but still massively underestimated,” said Christophe Diagne, at the Université Paris-Saclay, France, and who led the research, which was published in the journal Nature. ASTRONOMY Light pollution from space junk is a threat to star gazing Artificial satellites and space junk orbiting…

It was mid-spring when residents of the wasteland behind Guadalajara’s international airport noticed a dog roaming their community with an unusual object in its mouth: a human forearm. Search teams in the neighbourhood of La Piedrera entered a roofless red brick shack flanked by trees decked with bright orange mistletoe. Under several layers of earth they made an even more grotesque discovery. “There were 26 of them here. We found them wrapped in plastic sheets,” said Guadalupe Aguilar, a local activist, as she stood beside the shallow grave. “And they’d thrown something on them – acid or something – because it hadn’t been long [since their murders] and the bodies were already in a real state of decay.” Aguilar, 63, said there were dozens of such clandestine burial sites across…

ABIGAIL DISNEY has always been very, very rich, or, as she describes it, “too rich”. The money came with her name: she is the granddaughter of Roy Disney who, with his brother Walt, founded the Walt Disney Company in 1923. Disney, 61, refuses to say how much she has, but acknowledges she would have been a billionaire in her own right had she not realised in her 20s that it was her fortune that was making her miserable, and decided to start giving it away. She has been donating to good causes ever since – $72m and counting, mostly to groups helping women in prison, women living with HIV and victims of domestic violence. But giving it away is no longer enough. She wants the tax collector to take more…

And the award for weirdest awards season ever goes to … well, there’s no competition, is there? Looking back, Parasite winning the best picture Oscar last year feels like a) half a century ago, and b) the last normal thing that happened before the pandemic turned the entertainment industry upside down. It’s still in the Covid Upside Down, as anyone who sat through this year’s awkward Golden Globes and Grammys ceremonies might have noticed. There is also the fact that it’s early April and we are only just talking about awards season. Usually it’s all over by February, but thanks to this year’s two-month delay, we are barely in the home straight for the Baftas (10 and 11 April), the Oscars (25 April) and the Brits (11 May). It feels…

Steve Davis is waving a modular synthesiser at me. He’s 10 minutes early for our scheduled chat, and his music-and-book-writing compadre, Kavus Torabi, hasn’t logged on to Zoom yet, so Davis is showing me his favourite toy: a synthesiser without a keyboard. There are a lot of knobs and switches, and holes where you slot in sound modules. “It’s not lost on me that this is a bit of a blokey hobby,” he says cheerfully. “I was checking out online demos about how to use these synths and I ended up watching soldering. A bloke soldering modules. But there was nothing else to do, so I watched it for quite a bit.” Ah, Steve “Interesting” Davis. Though I’m interviewing Davis, 63, because of his second life in music (hence the…

A male cyclist is just a bloke on a bike, but a woman appears political, independent, a bluestocking, egregiously sporty, or suspiciously saucy. In this lik able, informative and barnstorming book, Hannah Ross tells the story of how such meanings – sometimes eagerly adopted, sometimes patriarchally imposed – have become attached to what is often just the most efficient way of getting from A to B. Women were active participants in the new cyclomania that began with invention of the bone shakers of the 1860s and penny farthings of the 1870s: the American feminist Susan B Anthony called bicycles “freedom machines” that did “more to emancipate women than anything else in the world”. Clarion cycling clubs, linked to the socialist weekly newspaper of the same name, admitted women from the…

Should entry to pubs be restricted to people with vaccine passports? Some UK government figures have argued this would be a strong “nudge” to youngsters to get jabbed. But why a nudge rather than an incentive, or blackmail? “Nudge” possibly originated from Norwegian nugge, to push, but it first appears in English via Thomas Hobbes’s translations of Homer in 1675: “When a third part of the night was gone, I nudg’d Ulysses (who did next me lie),” says Ulysses himself, cunningly disguised. Thenceforth it could also mean to move gradually, or to remind. Here, though, a “nudge” is conceived as a way of influencing someone’s choice without their knowledge. Happily, in Australian English “to nudge” can also mean “to drink”, so let us hope there will be “nudging of the…

Prep 20 min Marinate 2 hr+ Cook 40 min Serves 4 Ingredients 2 large free-range chicken breasts1 tbsp thyme leaves2 garlic cloves, peeled1 lemon, peel cut away in strips, then half juiced and the rest cut into wedges2 tbsp olive oil300g spaghetti150g butter, cut into cubes18 sage leaves3 tbsp baby capers To serve Freshly grated parmesan Roughly chopped parsley When buying chicken, I usually go for the whole bird. For this recipe, the breasts are perfect: flattened, tenderised and flash-fried in a pan. The marinade here is good, but it is the absurdly delicious combination of brown butter, crisp sage and capers that gives the dish heft. Method Halve the chicken breasts by slicing horizontally and opening out the meat like a book. Put the chicken between two pieces of…

The B117 (or Kent) variant discovered in the UK is circulating widely in other parts of the world. It is thought to be more transmissible, and emerging evidence suggests it may be more fatal. A variant detected in South Africa, B1351, blunted the efficacy of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine there. And a third variant, identified in Brazil and known as P1, could reinfect people who previously were immune to the coronavirus. So what do these competing ideas mean as vaccine deployment battles the spread of the variants? Duelling trends are causing uncertainty In the US, cases and hospitalisations increased last week. There were especially pronounced rises in Florida, Michigan, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania that experts attribute to the B117 variant. Nationally, cases increased 10% from the previous seven…

Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to remain in power face a double-pronged challenge, with Israel’s prime minister back in a Jerusalem courtroom this week for his corruption trial, while at the same time critical talks on his political future were being held after last month’s inconclusive election. The witness testimony and evidence stage of a trial assessing whether the 71-year-old leader is guilty of bribery, fraud and breach of trust – repeatedly delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic – began on Monday morning. Meanwhile, across town, President Reuven Rivlin started key consultations at his residence with parliamentarians on how to form a government that could help save, or end, Netanyahu’s career. “The fact that the two formative events are going to happen simultaneously on a split-screen is unbelievable … I do know…

Greensill’s demise has plunged big employers like Liberty Steel into crisis In the wake of the 2009 expenses scandal – in which MPs were found to have submitted claims for, among other things, a £1,600 ($2,200) floating duck house and £2,200 for cleaning a moat – the then-Conservative leader David Cameron warned political lobbying was “the next big scandal waiting to happen”. Cameron took it upon himself to reform “the far-too-cosy relationship between politics, government, business and money”, which he said had “tainted our politics for too long”. More than a decade later, the former prime minister is caught up in what could turn out to be exactly the kind of lobbying scandal he once sought to eradicate. It involves the collapse of a $7bn bank, text-message lobbying of the…

On the banks of the Buriganga, Old Dhaka’s boatmen only ever rest a moment before making their return journey, endlessly ferrying passengers back and forth across the river. They pick them up at the Sadarghat docks, the historical trading hub that helped build the city, and row them towards the sprawling suburbs that have crept across what was open farmland two decades ago. Old Dhaka is no longer the economic and political heart of the city, but Sadarghat is still the defining image of its perpetual movement and growth, of commuters living and working across the Buriganga, and new migrants arriving from the countryside. Dhaka reflects the trajectory of Bangladesh in the 50 years since independence. At that time it was a small city of a million souls in an…

Lizeth Iturrieta, a journalist in the small town of La Victoria on Venezuela’s western border with Colombia, was woken by armoured vehicles rolling past her home. Hours later the sounds of gunfire and explosions shook the walls, and she and her husband dived for cover. “Out of nowhere we were in the middle of a war zone,” Iturrieta said in a video call from a refugee camp on the Colombian side of the frontier. “After a day of hiding at home in absolute silence, we ran for our lives to the boat to Colombia.” More than a week later Iturrieta was one of nearly 5,000 refugees holed up in Arauquita, a small town on the Colombian side of the Arauca River, having fled intense armed clashes between Venezuela’s armed forces…

Boris Johnson’s race review reported last week, although one might be forgiven for thinking that its conclusions were written out long ago. Setting up the commission last summer, the prime minister described its job as to “change the narrative so we stop the sense of victimisation and discrimination”. The head of his policy unit, Munira Mirza, has attacked what she calls “the anti-racism lobby and … its culture of grievance”. The personnel have been appointed accordingly. Before a single scrap of evidence had been gathered, the verdict had been handed down. No 10 has not investigated the realities of racism but exploited them to fuel a culture war. If it is data on ethnic inequalities that Mr Johnson seeks, Whitehall has published report after report proving “overt discrimination” in the…

1 Double me and subtract 1, then reverse my digits and you are back where you started. What number am I? 2 Wordpool Find the correct definition: GRUINE a) ogre’s wife b) utter destruction c) to do with cranes d) form of lever 3 Cracker Barrel Why is a hill like a sleepy dog? 4E pluribus unum Rearrange the letters of IGNORE TONIC to make a single word. 5 Dropouts Replace each * with a letter to make a word: T*R*I*M 6 Same Difference Identify these words differing only in the letters shown: F**** (blow?) **** (pluck?) 7 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…

NOTES & QUERIES Barking out the same old tune is a creature comfort Do animals like music? • Dogs: Bach. Cats: Byrd. Pythons: rap. Kangaroos: hip-hop. Possums: middle of the road. Nigel Smith Auckland, New Zealand • It depends on the species. Felines love Rossini’s Duet for Two Cats, insects delight in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee. Dino Bressan Heidelberg, Victoria, Australia • Cows do. It’s been proven that languid classical music increases their milk yield, though sacred cows may enjoy Gregorian chant. Richard Orlando Westmount, Quebec, Canada • Dogs, Off enbach. Marilyn Hamilton Carine, Perth, Western Australia Keeping food shipshape Why must the three meals we eat each day be square? So we don’t end up being too round. Doreen Forney Pownal, Vermont, US • Meals used to be…