Innehållsförteckning för 14 January 2022 från Guardian Weekly

Sidney Poitier Oscar-winning actor who broke down racial barriers in Hollywood. He died on 6 January, aged 94. Tribute, page 33 Peter Bogdanovich Film-maker known for The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon. He died on 6 January, aged 82. Marilyn Bergman Oscar-winning lyricist who, with husband Alan, wrote The Way We Were and Windmills of Your Mind among other hits. She died on 8 January, aged 93. Michael Lang Co-creator of 1969 Woodstock music festival. He died on 8 January, aged 77. Craig Ruddy Artist known for his paintings of leading Indigenous Australian figures. He died on 4 January, aged 53. Lawrence N Brooks The oldest second world war veteran in the US and believed to be the oldest man in the country. He died on 5 January, aged…

LAW Statue protesters cleared but case may be referred Anti-racism campaigners hailed a jury’s decision to clear protesters responsible for toppling a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston as a huge step in getting the UK to face up to its colonial past. Jake Skuse 33, Rhian Graham, 30, Milo Ponsford, 26, and Sage Willoughby, 22, did not dispute the roles they had played in pulling down the statue and throwing it in the River Avon in Bristol during a 2020 Black Lives Matter protest but all denied criminal damage. The defence had urged jurors to “be on the right side of history”, saying the statue, which stood for 125 years, was so indecent and potentially abusive that it constituted a crime. However, the attorney general, Suella Braverman, said…

The problem with coverage of this month’s anniversary of the events of 6 January 2021 is that too much of it was written in the past tense. True, the attempted insurrection when a violent mob stormed Capitol Hill to try to overturn a democratic election was a year ago, but the danger it poses is clear and present – and looms over the future. For the grim truth is that, while Donald Trump is the last US president, he may also be the next. What’s more, the menace of Trumpism is darker than ever At the time, Republican politicians were clear that the outgoing president had crossed a line, that he was “practically and morally responsible” for the rioters who had marched on Congress and built gallows for those politicians…

Burkina Faso fans get in the party mood at last weekend’s opening ceremony of the Africa Cup of Nations at the Paul Biya stadium, Yaoundé. The tournament is being hosted by Cameroon for the first time for 50 years. For many in a football-loving nation, the tournament is a proud moment, where Cameroon start as underdogs behind the favourites Algeria, Egypt and Senegal. But for others in the English-speaking parts of Cameroon, the tournament is a sideshow to an ongoing crisis. Behind the celebrations – tempered by strict pandemic restrictions – are tensions from a security crisis spreading from anglophone regions, potentially affecting the event. Authorities in the west African country have ramped up security, particularly in the capital, Yaoundé, and other host cities across five of Cameroon’s 10 regions.…

On 4 January 2002, Brigadier General Michael Lehnert received an urgent deployment order. He would take a small force of marines and sailors and build a prison camp in the US-run military enclave on Cuba’s south coast, Guantánamo Bay. Lehnert had 96 hours to deploy and build the first 100 cells, in time for the first plane load of captives arriving from the battlefield in Afghanistan on 11 January. The job was done on time: a grid of chain-link cages surrounded by barbed wire and six plywood guard towers manned by snipers. There were five windowless huts for interrogations. It was named Camp X-Ray. Camp X-Ray was built in three days, but the sprawling Guantánamo Bay prison camp that grew out of it has proved very hard to dismantle. About…

Olly Alexander bounds down the stairs of his flat to greet me with a hug. It’s a big flat, stretched over two floors, huge windows overlooking a pretty London park. There are books everywhere, in scattered piles. There’s a Joni Mitchell songbook propped up on his piano, and there are massive houseplants all over the place. Alexander is lively and charming and clearly very sensitive. His trademark red hair is tucked under a baseball cap. He is fun and chatty and acutely self-aware: he was in the audience for the Adele ITV live special recently, among an extraordinary buffet of celebrities, and he serves up good gossip about a couple of them. Fame fascinates Alexander, and also seems to repel him. Throughout our conversation, he treats it like a puzzle…

The word Demerara may mean little to you, other than being the name of a large-grained golden brown sugar. But Demerara is a place, or it was. Now called Guyana, Demerara was, in the 19th century, a British colony of sugar plantations. It was one of the most lucrative colonies, owing to the high yield of the land and high productivity of the enslaved people who worked on it The enslaved outnumbered the white colonists significantly, and had not been indentured for as long a time as others in the Caribbean, so it was thought that their treatment needed to be particularly harsh, so as not to encourage rebellion. It came anyway, in 1823. Thomas Harding tells the story of one of the lesser-known uprisings of the colonial enslavement era,…

QUIZ Thomas Eaton 1 Which singer/songwriter is known as the “mother of the MP3”? 2 What is the largest arboreal mammal? 3 Sandra Mason is the first president of which country? 4 Which UK charity is named after a New York bar? 5 In global investment, what is an SWF? 6 Which monarch had a 325-volume stamp collection? 7 Which Lloyd Webber musical borrowed a title from Elgar? 8 The sports paper L’Auto founded which race? What links: 9 Abertawe; Caerdydd; Casnewydd; Llanelwy; Tyddewi? 10 Hudson; Crichton; Pennyworth; Carson? 11 Betelgeuse; Peter the Great; plague rodents; music, dance, etc? 12 Aspartame; isomalt; lactitol; steviol glycoside? 13 Thyssen-Bornemisza; Reina Sofia; Prado? 14 Canton; charge; field; fimbriation; fly, hoist? 15 Little Albert; Asch Conformity; Stanford Prison; Milgram? PUZZLES Chris Maslanka 1 Jack…

It couldn’t happen again … could it? Reflections on last year’s 6 January Capitol riot in the US – amid a trenchantly divided political landscape between Democrats and Republicans – have led many observers to wonder whether the country could seriously be on the path to another civil war. Washington bureau chief David Smith asks the experts, while columnist Jonathan Freedland ponders the sinister influence of Donald Trump and a make-or-break year for democracy in the US. The big story Page 10→ Startling unrest in Kazakhstan last week led to hundreds of people being killed and several thousand detained by authorities. An information blackout in the authoritarian central Asian nation meant that much remained unclear about the circumstances. But, as Shaun Walker and Peter Leonard write, it was probably born from…

WILDLIFE Room at the stables for rare bats to breed Rare bats that are breeding in southeast England for the first time in a century will be encouraged to rear their young in an innovative maternity unit. A derelict stable block at a secret location in Sussex is due to be purchased for greater horseshoe bats by the Vincent Wildlife Trust and Sussex Bat Group. The protection of the stables comes after the return to Sussex of Britain’s rarest bat. The only known greater mouse-eared bat in the country has been rediscovered in a railway tunnel, two years after it was previously spotted. Greater horseshoe bats and the greater mouse-eared bat are benefiting from climate change but may also be thriving in Sussex because of the spread of vineyards, experts…

For many Kazakhs, the full story behind the unrest of last week remains as murky as the mist that enveloped Almaty, the country’s largest city and the centre of violence, at the same time. People were unable to access accurate information, as an internet blackout froze almost all access to the outside world during a tragic few days in which military vehicles rolled through the streets, government buildings burned and state television carried threats that “bandits and terrorists” would be eliminated without mercy. By last weekend, both order and the internet had been largely restored, but there are still more questions than answers. One thing that is clear is many of the old assumptions about Kazakhstan, the resource-rich Central Asian state, have been overturned. Just last month the country celebrated…

As the trickle of tourists slowly returns to Egypt, the floating nightclubs along the Nile are back in business. And belly dancers are once again in high demand. Glitzy late-night shows attract visitors from all over the world, and especially from the Gulf’s Arab states, with dancers in revealing outfits performing with full traditional musical backing But while many dancers are happy to be getting back to work, there is growing disquiet that the artform is becoming closely associated with drinking and nightclub culture. They feel that the belly dance, which is deeply rooted in Egyptian history, has been increasingly seen as more akin to strip dancing, and that this association is making life difficult for the dancers. “What we’re seeing more and more of is this dance being hidden…

For postwar America, Sidney Poitier became something like the Black Cary Grant: a strikingly handsome and well-spoken Bahamian-American actor. He was a natural film star who projected passion, yet tempered by a kind of refinement and restraint that white moviegoers found reassuring. Poitier, who died last week aged 94, was graceful, manly, self-possessed, with an innate dignity and a tremendous screen presence. He also had a beautiful, melodious voice – the result of his childhood spent in the Bahamas, and then struggling early years in New York, trying to make it as an actor and privately studying the voices of mellifluous white radio announcers. He was a traditional, classical actor in many ways, following in the footsteps of Paul Robeson and Canada Lee, but eminently castable in a new generation…

If the Tory party could be summed up in a word, it would be power. The Conservatives have dominated the 19th, 20th and – so far – 21st centuries. Their most successful leaders have anticipated the national mood and shaped their party to profit from it. For example, Boris Johnson on Brexit. But there is a fundamental disagreement at the heart of the Tory party as to what the UK economy outside the EU should look like. This question urgently needs an answer. In the next six months Britain will almost certainly face a cost-of-living crisis. High inflation may go even higher. Mr Johnson is in denial while people go cold and hungry in their homes. Prices are driven up by global cartels such as Opec or gas producers such…

Tim Bergling – the Swedish DJ and producer known as Avicii – killed himself in Muscat, Oman, in April 2018 at the age of 28. The successful but troubled electronic dance music star had retired from relentless touring in 2016 to focus on his wellbeing. He had weaned himself off opioids – prescribed by doctors when bouts of alcohol-induced pancreatitis led to debilitating pain and, later, surgery. He had a therapist, friends, donated to charities. He meditated. Having crossed over from pure party music to making tracks alongside stars such as Coldplay and Nile Rodgers, Bergling was working on new material he was excited about. A documentary about his meteoric rise and stress levels – Avicii: True Stories – was broadcast in 2017, seemingly with a happy ending. Stardom has…

Reports in the UK last Sunday that free lateral flow tests could be axed within weeks under a strategy of living with Covid were met with a swift backlash. The British government promptly denied the suggestion that people would soon have to pay for the tests. The story highlights a gulf in opinions on what “living with Covid” might look like, with some saying it will only be achieved through continued caution and others equating the phrase to ditching all Covid measures and partying like it’s 2019. It is not surprising – or even undesirable – that the mass testing of asymptomatic people is being reviewed. The policy was rapidly brought in when it made sense to throw everything at Omicron to slow transmission and minimise disruption caused by essential…

‘It’s the final nail in the coffin for the Chaco and all its peoples. They’ve been duped’ In 1972, Catholic missionaries entered the Chaco forest of northern Paraguay and forced Oscar Pisoraja’s family, and their nomadic Ayoreo people, to leave with them. Many died from thirst on the long march south. Settled near the village of Carmelo Peralta on the Paraguay River, dozens more died from illnesses. Still, the survivors kept up some traditions – hunting for armadillos; weaving satchels from the spiky caraguatá plant. “We felt part of this place,” says Pisoraja, now 51. Today, his community – and other indigenous peoples across the Chaco, a tapestry of swamp, savanna and forest across four countries that is South America’s largest ecosystem after the Amazon – are confronting a dramatic…

Isaac Newton apocryphally discovered his second law – the one about gravity – after an apple fell on his head. Much experimentation and data analysis later, he realised there was a fundamental relationship between force, mass and acceleration. He formulated a theory to describe that relationship – one that could be expressed as an equation, F=ma – and used it to predict the behaviour of objects other than apples. Contrast how science is increasingly done today. Facebook’s machine learning tools predict your preferences better than any psychologist. Alpha-Fold, a program built by DeepMind, has produced the most accurate predictions yet of protein structures based on the amino acids they contain. Both are silent on why they work: why you prefer this or that information; why this sequence generates that structure.…

English cricket needs to regain its youthful appeal In his analysis of the state of English cricket (Opinion, 7 January), Martin Kettle cites multiple causes, both social and structural, referring to “the pathways to cricket’s renewal and growth” having been “cut off, closed and neglected”. He also alludes to the stratum of white upper-middle-class support. The contrasting place of cricket in youth culture in England and Australia seems relevant here. Until the 1960s, cricket equalled soccer in terms of its heroic figures. Cricket has been edged to the fringes not only by soccer, but because playing the game is seen to be detrimental to “street cred”. In Australia, cricket sits comfortably at the heart of youth culture. To bring cricket back to anything approaching its former status would require vision,…

Refractive Africa by Will Alexander This visionary act of “transpersonal witness” to a continent is an Afromodernist epic. It is first of all an act of repossession, as in the opening section’s dialogue with Nigerian novelist Amos Tutuola and closing homage to the Malagasy Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, often considered Africa’s first modern poet. At the heart of the book is a 50-page poem, The Congo, on that country as a site of colonial pillage, “vertiginous with derangement”. An incantation against “Eurocentric stultification”, Refractive Africa embraces an aesthetic of sprawl and overreach, summoning free-flowing visions of grandeur and desolation. The Vulture by Gerard Woodward We begin with the discovery of a dead vulture at the foot of a cliff; slicing open its belly reveals “nothing in there / but the usual unspeakable…

Prep 30 min Cook 15 min Serves 4 Ingredients 2 hispi cabbage, cut through the stem into 4-6 wedges5-6 tbsp olive oil, plus extra to drizzleSalt and black pepper2 garlic cloves, peeled6 anchovies1 tsp dijon mustard1 tbsp white-wine vinegar4 tbsp buttermilk4 tbsp grated parmesan, plus extra, to serve4 pieces sourdough toast, to serve For the salad 1 banana shallot, peeled and finely sliced2 big handfuls parsley leaves2 tbsp capersJuice of ½ lemon This outrageously good supper came about when I was craving the anchovy and parmesan dressing of a classic caesar salad. But it was cold outside and I needed substance so, instead of the crisp lettuce, in came wedges of char grilled hispi cabbage, all sweet and smoky, which I laid on garlic-rubbed toasts. I have made this dish…