Innehållsförteckning för 17th December 2021 från Guardian Weekly

Surf’s up The Brazilian surfer Lucas Chianca rides a towering wave during the Tudor Nazare tow surfing challenge. With a large swell and favourable wind conditions, waves were between 12 and 18 metres. The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 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…

Christmas partygate Reports emerged of a Christmas party held in Downing Street on 18 December 2020, at a time when strict Covid measures were in place. Johnson’s spokesperson denied any party had taken place, and the prime minister told the House of Commons that “all guidance was followed completely in No 10”. But after a video of his former press secretary Allegra Stratton (below) laughing and joking with colleagues about a non-socially distanced wine and cheese party, the prime minister changed tack. He told the Commons he had been “repeatedly assured” there was no party but had asked the cabinet secretary, Simon Case, to establish “all the facts”. Wallpapergate The ministerial standards adviser, Lord Geidt, said in a report that Johnson had told him he knew nothing about who made…

The mighty forces that created our planet’s mountains got some unexpected help, scientists at Aberdeen and Glasgow universities have discovered. Their research shows some of Earth’s greatest ranges got a boost from primitive lifeforms whose remains lubricated movements of rock slabs “Mountains are formed by slabs of rock piling up on each other,” said lead author Professor John Parnell of Aberdeen University. “But piling on that scale would have been impossible because of the friction between the rocks. Something had to help those rocks slide over each other.” Parnell and his colleagues have discovered that the source of this lubrication came from an explosion in the growth of primitive plankton around two billion years ago. This took place in the wake of a major climatic change that affected Earth and…

Nine-month-old Ruataupare Te Ropuhina Florence Whiley-Whaipooti will grow up speaking the names of her ancestors. She will learn she comes from a line of strong Ngāti Porou women, and that her ancestor, who was a staunch tribal leader, is her name sake. She will grow to understand that her Māori name links her to whenua (land), her whakapapa (genealogy) and her Māoritanga (culture). Ruataupare is one of an increasing number of babies in New Zealand to be given a Māori name. While Māori have never stopped giving their children indigenous names, there has been a marked increase over the past 10 years – a near doubling of Māori names registered since 2011. Parents Julia Amua Whaipooti, who is Ngāti Porou descent, and Emma Whiley who is Pākehā (New Zealand European)…

For more than 70 years, 10 December has been celebrated around the world as Human Rights Day, a way of commemorating the anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proclaimed in 1948 by the UN. In Chile, my country, the date took on a special meaning after the 1973 coup by General Augusto Pinochet that overthrew the democratically elected government of socialist president Salvador Allende. During the 17 years of dictatorship that followed, it was an occasion to publicly rally for those rights that were being egregiously violated, as the regime arrested, tortured, executed or exiled opponents, and abrogated free speech and the right to assemble peacefully. In such an atmosphere of terror, the very congregating of citizens to protest was considered by our rulers to be an act…

£2.1m Amount raised for motor neurone disease charities by Rob Burrow’s former Leeds Rhinos team-mate Kevin Sinfield, after he ran four back-to-back marathons in one day Barça: The Rise and Fall of the Club that Built Modern Football by Simon Kuper The rise of Barcelona over the last four decades was one of the glories of modern sport. Wonderful playing allied to a philosophy that saw the club as something more than just a sports team within Catalan life and culture. But what happens when the philosophy is lost? When the virtuous circle of a seemingly endless supply of great players from its youth system, ensuring vast amounts of money to buy in whatever other talent was needed, is broken? Through perceptive portraits of key personnel such as Johan Cruyff, Pep…

In a bonanza year for memoirs, Ruth Coker Burks got us off to a strong start with All the Young Men, a clear-eyed and poignant account of her years spent looking after Aids patients in Arkansas in the 1980s. Her book reveals the love and camaraderie of a hidden community fighting for its life. Sadness and joy also go hand-in-hand in What It Feels Like for a Girl, an exuberant account of Paris Lees’s tearaway teenage years in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire, where “the streets are paved wi’ dog shit”. Her gender nonconformity is just one aspect of an adolescence that also features bullying, violence, prostitution, robbery and a spell in a young off enders’ institute. Miriam Margolyes’s This Much Is True traces her path from cherished child of an Oxford GP…

The citizens of Margate, according to TS Eliot, are “humble people who expect nothing”. That seems to include their expectations of prime minister Boris Johnson. After weeks of revelations about lockdown Christmas parties, accusations of lying about his Downing Street flat refurbishment, and claims that he ordered dogs and cats to be given priority in the Afghanistan evacuation, Johnson’s popularity has slumped in the polls. Yet this seaside town is surely where he can rely on support. Voters in the constituencies of North Thanet and South Thanet were solidly in favour of leaving the European Union in 2016, and gave the two Tory MPs, Sir Roger Gale and Craig Mackinlay, substantial majorities in 2019. The icy wind ripping across Margate sands may be coming for the prime minister though. His…

For 10 months in Kuwait, everything was upside down. Daytime was full of darkness from thick smoke, and the nights were bright from the distant glow of burning oilwells. When Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, ordered the occupation of Kuwait in August 1990, in a bid to gain control over the lucrative oil supply of the Middle East and pay off a massive debt accrued from Kuwait, he was forced into retreat by a US coalition, which began an intensive bombing campaign. As Iraqi forces pulled out, they set more than 700 oilwells ablaze. Thirty years on, Kuwait is still scarred by one of the world’s worst environmental catastrophes – and the billions set aside for remediation are still waiting to be spent. “The sound of gushing oil and roaring fires…

From whoops to purrs, snaps to grunts, and foghorns to laughs, a cacophony of bizarre fish songs have shown that a coral reef in Indonesia has returned rapidly to health. Many of the noises had never been recorded before and the fish making these calls remain mysterious, despite the use of underwater speakers to try to “talk” to some. The reef had been devastated by blast fishing, where explosives are used to stun or kill everything in the area. The corals are being restored, but the scientists wanted to know if the many other creatures that inhabited reefs were also returning. Visual surveys miss camouflaged animals and those that come out only at night, so the researchers turned to the noise of the reef. They found the vibrant soundscape was…

‘They ordered everyone to come around, saying if you run, if you cry, you will die,” said Bala Pada, recalling the moment in April when jihadists rounded up people at a market in his home town of Kaure to witness the execution of two alleged vigilantes. Hundreds of jihadists have settled over the past year in Kaure and other remote communities in Niger state in Nigeria, according to displaced residents and local government officials. They began to arrive in November 2020, hoisting flags and declaring the communities under their control. “They said this is what will happen to anyone that tries to stop them,” Pada, 45, said from a classroom in a primary school in Gwada, where he, his family and about 400 others displaced by violence now live. “Everyone…

‘Hang Mike Pence!” was the chilling chant of the mob at the US Capitol on 6 January. Can the same constituency be persuaded to vote for Mike Pence on 5 November 2024? He, for one, appears to think so. The former vice-president has taken one of the first traditional steps of a presidential campaign, travelling across New Hampshire, which hosts the first primary in the 2024 vote, to meet activists, raise money and deliver a speech attacking Joe Biden. Pence, who has nursed White House ambitions since his teens, has also visited the early-voting states of Iowa, South Carolina and Nevada, implying that a run is more likely than not. But there is one problem: Donald Trump. The ex-president, whom Pence served faithfully – or obsequiously, in the eyes of…

The emergence and rapid spread of the Omicron variant feels like a flashback to last year’s grim festive season when much of the world went into lockdown to avert the worst of the Alpha variant wave. But though the sense of eerie, impending doom feels familiar, the epidemiological and political situations are different from one year ago. The Omicron wave represents a key turning point in the pandemic. But no plausible outcome looks particularly auspicious – it feels largely like a lose-lose deal. If turns out to be roughly as severe as previous pandemic waves, it might normalise harsh mitigation measures and render the prospect of a return to postpandemic normality fairly remote. If it turned out to be milder than feared, this could spell the end of lockdowns with…

46k Sally Rooney’s third novel sold 46,065 copies in the UK in the first week of its publication The most anticipated, discussed and accessorised novel of the year was Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You. It’s a book about the accommodations of adulthood, which plays with interiority and narrative distance as Rooney’s characters consider the purpose of friendship, sex and politics – plus the difficulties of fame and novelwriting – in a world on fire. Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s magnum opus The Books of Jacob reached Englishlanguage readers, in a mighty feat of translation by Jennifer Croft: a dazzling historical panorama about enlightenment both spiritual and scientific. In 2021 we also saw the returns of Jonathan Franzen, beginning a fine and involving 70s family trilogy with Crossroads; Kazuo…

Early in the pandemic it was the blunt tools of past centuries that saved the most lives. Until Proven Safe, by Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley, dives into the crudely effective and widely abused strategy of quarantine, the separation of those feared to be sick from those deemed healthy. The authors trace formal quarantine back to 14th-century Dubrovnik, in response to the Black Death. With emerging diseases on the rise, quarantine is back for good, the authors warn, and it must be radically overhauled. From the moment coronavirus took hold in China, the race was on to make a vaccine. That researchers designed, manufactured, trialled and received approval for jabs in a record 12 months is extraordinary. In Vaxxers, two key members of the Oxford Vaccine Group, Prof Sarah Gilbert…

1 UNITED STATES Capitol attack panel votes to charge Mark Meadows The House select committee investigating the Capitol attack voted on Monday to recommend the criminal prosecution for former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, punishing Donald Trump’s most senior aide for refusing to testify about the 6 January insurrection. The select committee advanced the contempt of Congress report for Meadows unanimously, sending the matter to a vote before the full House of Representatives. Bennie Thompson, the chair of the select committee, said in an opening statement before the panel recommended Meadows’s referral to the justice department that Trump’s former White House chief of staff displayed wilful noncompliance in his defiance of his subpoena. “Mr Meadows started by doing the right thing: cooperating,” Thompson said. “He handed over…

Before MPs had entered the chamber, rumours had been circulating that Johnson and his cabinet were about to do what they had suggested would not be necessary before Christmas, a return to tighter restrictions with vaccine passports in nightclubs, more mask-wearing and other new rules. Some suspected new rules were an attempt to divert attention away from “partygate”. Tory MP William Wragg stood up and said as much: “Very few will be convinced by this diversionary tactic,” he told his leader, in an intervention that drew gasps from all sides. Outside the chamber, Tory MPs were in despair. One Johnson loyalist said he thought the prime minister could rescue the situation, but added: “Unlike Labour, we are good at getting rid of liabilities. If this goes on, we act.” What…

CORONAVIRUS Why boosters are the best prevention Page 18 For Misha Novitskyi, the question of whether Russia will invade Ukraine is not theoretical. The enemy is just 50 metres away behind a concrete slab. From time to time Russian voices float eerily across a wintry no man’s land of ragged trees and scrub. “When they light their stoves you can see the smoke,” Novitskyi – a senior lieutenant in the Ukrainian army – said, speaking from what is in effect Europe’s eastern front with Russia. He added: “Every day they shoot at us.” The conflict between Kyiv and pro-Russian separatists has gone on for nearly eight long years. There are first world war echoes. Both sides face off along a fixed 400km “border” or line of contact that snakes across…

The speed at which scientists worked to develop the first Covid jabs was unprecedented. Just nine months after the UK went into lockdown, 90-year-old Margaret Keenan officially became the first person in the world outside a trial to receive the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. But the virus is mutating, and the emergence of the Omicron variant last month is already focusing attention on the next generation of jabs. So what do we know about the new Covid-19 vaccines? One change is with delivery mechanisms, such as San Francisco firm Vaxart’s vaccine-ina-pill, and Scancell’s spring-powered injectors that pierce the skin without a needle. But the biggest development is in T-cell technology. Produced by the bone marrow, T-cells are white blood cells that form a key part of the immune system. While current vaccines…

It is surrounded on all sides, regularly bombed, and plagued by shortages of vital medicines. Yet in the lead-up to Christmas, the isolated Gaza Strip has had ample supplies of something the rest of the world craves but can rarely find: a brand new PlayStation 5. Sony’s flagship video game console is hot property this holiday season, although most people who have asked for one will be disappointed on Christmas morning. A global supply-chain crisis twinned with a shortage of semiconductors – vital computer chips used in the console – has kept stock scarce. While secondhand, resold and stolen PS5 scan be found, they are rare and often cost much more than the retail price tag of about $ 500. In Gaza City, the price is also way above the…

Through the rain and steamy heat of November, Anupama SChandran sat by the gates of the Kerala state secretariat day and night. She refused to eat, drink or be moved, her single demand written on a placard: “Give me my baby.” The story of Chandran’s fight to get back her child – put up for adoption without her knowledge – is one that has been greeted with horror and a sad familiarity in India. In a country where society remains divided down the indomitable faultlines of caste and family, Chandran’s ordeal exposed the cruelties still inflicted on women who dare to cross those lines. Chandran, the daughter of a local leader from the Communist Party of India (CPM), was a 19-year-old student when she fell for Ajith Kumar, while both…

FRANCOIS BALLOUX The Omicron wave looks like a lose-lose deal The Lufthansa stewardess on the flight from London to Munich handed me one very small, yellow-wrapped bar of chocolate: the usual ration. When she saw that I was working my way through a long German document she gave me one more, exclaiming: Sie sind so fleissig! (“You’re so hardworking!”) I explained that this was actually the 177-page coalition agreement between the three parties forming her new government. Excitedly, she showered me with a whole handful of the miniature chocolate bars, followed by yet another handful. A few days later, I presented one to a key minister in the “traffic light” government of Social Democrats, Greens and Free Democrats that formally took office in Berlin last Wednesday Some chocolate is called…

Silverview John le Carré Le Carré’ final complete novel was published in October, in the week of what would have been his 90th birthday. The cast of characters, including several husband- and-wife spy pairings, are compromised by secrets, loyalties and allegiances, and no one is innocent. This is a satisfying coda to the career of the finest thriller writer of the 20th century. Riccardino Andrea Camilleri, translated by Stephen Sartarelli Written in 2005, Camilleri’s final Inspector Montalbano novel was kept in a safe for publication after the author’s death, in 2019. Like its much loved predecessors, Riccardino is set in the fictional Sicilian town of Vigata, but this time the increasingly tetchy detective is joined by the author himself, who makes ever more far-fetched suggestions as to how the investigation…

After months of sadness and uncertainty, there is pure enchantment to be found in the year’s best children’s books. For picture-book lovers, Scissorella: The Paper Princess by Clare Helen Welsh, illustrated by Laura Barrett, is an extra-special story full of delicate filigree art. Mill worker Lotte, scorned by her siblings, cuts elegant puppets out of paper, trusting hard work over happy endings – until she’s invited to a ball, and meets a prince who loves puppets too. In the luminous fairytale Frindleswylde by Natalia O’Hara, illustrated by Lauren O’Hara, a capricious winter spirit steals the light from Grandma’s lamp, and Cora must go to his icy kingdom to retrieve it – but will Frindleswylde freeze her heart first? Filled with pastel sweetness and frosty aquamarine light, this has a flavour…