Innehållsförteckning för 25 February 2022 från Guardian Weekly

1 UKRAINE Vladimir Putin has ‘torn up international law’, says UK Russia faced western sanctions and bitter condemnation at the UN after Vladimir Putin ordered troops over the Ukrainian border into Moscow-controlled territories in the east of the country, which he had recognised hours earlier. The UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, said that Putin had “completely torn up international law” by his actions in Ukraine and that, if he launched a full-scale invasion, it had to fail. The UK said on Tuesday it would immediately impose hard economic sanctions. The US also imposed some limited sanctions and warned more would come. In co-ordinated statements leaders of the EU institutions referred to “sanctions against those involved in this illegal act”. EU foreign ministers were due to decide on the level of…

PM unveils ‘living with Covid’ strategy for England Free Covid testing will end for the general public in England from 1 April and people with positive cases no longer legally have to isolate, Boris Johnson has announced. Unveiling his “living with Covid” strategy on Monday, the prime minister told the House of Commons it was time for the pandemic response to be wound down and for people to “get our confidence back”. Johnson emphasised “personal responsibility” for Covid in future, rather than using government restrictions to control it. He said “pharmaceutical interventions”, such as antivirals and vaccines, would be the primary line of defence from now on. Some symptomatic people who are elderly or vulnerable will still be able to get free lateral flow tests, but the age limit for…

Sitting alone at a desk in a grand, columned Kremlin room, Vladimir Putin looked across an expanse of parquet floor at his security council and asked if anyone wished to express an alternative opinion. He was met with silence. A few hours later, the Russian president appeared on state television to give an angry, rambling lecture about Ukraine, a country that in Putin’s telling had become “a colony with a puppet regime”, and had no historical right to exist. Putin’s double bill, which was immediately followed by the signing of an agreement on Russian recognition of the two proxy states in east Ukraine as independent entities, is likely to go down in history as one of the major turning points in his 22-years-and-counting rule over Russia. This was not a…

Last month, Yoichi Yatsuda slept in his home for the first time in more than a decade. As a resident of Futaba, a town in the shadow of the wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, there was a time when simply spending the night in his family home had seemed an impossible dream. The 70-year-old was one of tens of thousands of people who were forced to flee and start a life when the plant had a triple meltdown in March 2011. As Japan reeled after the earthquake and tsunami that killed more than 18,000 people and triggered the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, Yatsuda and his wife, Analisa, and an estimated 160,000 other residents of Fukushima prefecture left, believing they would be back within weeks. “If you had…

They don’t want electric cars in Kawasi, just clean and safe water. The plywood buildings and sporadic street lights in the village on the remote Obi Island in Indonesia couldn’t feel more distant from glitzy city showrooms acclaiming fossil fuel-free travel. When we think of electric cars, raw materials like lithium and cobalt may immediately spring to mind – both have been the subject of investigations exposing alleged human rights abuse and environmental risks. Nickel, in contrast, has remained in the shadows. A largely unreported supply chain despite its emergence as a key material for the batteries powering the shift to electric cars. Indonesia is home to the world’s largest nickel reserves, and Kawasi hosts one of the country’s largest mines. Yet what could be transformational for a country where…

After news of Prince Andrew’s settlement with his accuser Virginia Giuffre, the question of who or what the Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell sex-trafficking conspiracy will envelop next remains. New York attorneys believe it is unlikely any more will be said by the parties involved in Andrew’s case. Attention will now return to a slew of other unfinished business stem-ming from the sex-trafficking ring run by the disgraced financier Epstein, his one-time girlfriend Maxwell and pos-sibly others. Certainly the nature of the circles that Epstein moved in – power-ful, elite, famous and wealthy – make continued interest by media and law enforcement inevitable. But the release of the names of 16 “John Does” – in effect, potential clients of the conspiracy – that were redacted from depositions in Virginia Giuffre’s…

George Santayana’s aphorism “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” doesn’t make an appearance in this book. But it could well serve as the subtitle. For if ever a field should heed the lessons of history, it is the making of policy on alcohol and other drugs, and their associated addictions. Carl Erik Fisher takes the reader on a vivid tour over several thousand years of science, medicine and literature, woven together by the thread of the author’s alcohol and amphetamine addiction and treatment. It is made even more emphatic and moving because he is also a psychiatrist who treats such patients. At the end of 2021, the British government set out a “once in a lifetime” policy for tackling drug crime and drug use. It…

There is a shadow-life to things. From the iron rail at the edge of the aqueduct, the abyss plunges through trees down to the river. Low winter sunlight casts shadows of the piers (pillars) like the ribcage of some great creature straddling the gorge. This massive shadow seems to move, to have a life, an animus free of the stone and iron that make this wonder of the industrial age. At 38 metres above the River Dee, Pontcysyllte is the highest navigable aqueduct in the world. Its 18 piers span 307 metres, carrying the “stream in the sky” – the Llangollen canal – across the Vale of Llangollen. Yes, it is an engineering feat worthy of its Unesco world heritage site status, but it is not just the genius of…

SOCIETY Political attacks boosted public support for charities Attacks on “woke” charities by right-wing politicians have backfired instead of generating public support, say campaigners. An annual survey of social campaigning by the Sheila McKechnie Foundation suggests many charities feel increasingly emboldened to speak out on contested issues despite attacks they feel are intended to intimidate them into silence. The findings come as charities report concern over proposed legislation designed to restrict public protest and legal challenge. Campaigners said they have faced an increasingly hostile political environment, while a majority said attacks by politicians and the media threatened charities’ rights to speak out and campaign. A number, including the National Trust and Barnardo’s, have faced coordinated attacks for stances on issues such as racism and inequality at odds with their core…

Patrick Langmaid was among the first to feel the full ferocity of Storm Eunice. Perched above the sea near Cornwall’s Trevose Head, his campsite was battered by the record-breaking storm last Friday. Tiles were torn from his holiday cottages. Soon, caravan 311 had its roof ripped clean off. Langmaid ordered staff to stay put. “We just let it go. It was not worth risking anyone’s safety.” Langmaid has run Mother Ivey’s Bay holiday park near Padstow for 34 years and said he had seen nothing to rival the intensity of the storm. It was an observation repeated throughout the country last weekend. As a major clear-up got under way, the full scale of the damage steadily became evident, symbolised by London’s O2 arena wh ere a sizeable section of the…

On a hillside an hour from Madrid lies a sprawling, tropical-hued complex crammed with 1950s Mexican film posters and prowled by the odd decorative monkey and jaguar. It is the home of the Gladys Palmera collection, the largest private archive of Latin American music in the world In its numerous niches and cabinets and on its many, many shelves sit 60,000 records, 50,000 CDs and countless cassettes and digital audio tapes, from bolero and garage rock to salsa and reggaetón. However, the woman who has spent the past 30 years amassing this treasure trove is considering donating its riches to a worthy – preferably noisy – new home. Among the archive’s highlights are a rare green vinyl LP by the Cuban musician Arsenio Rodríguez, a pink-and-silver sequinned dress worn by…

The Mars weather is beautiful today, and an astronaut is about to suffocate to death under the cloudless blue sky. The trouble starts after three crew members leave the safety of the Hab, their pressurised six-person living station, and venture outside to do some routine work. They trudge along in 16kg spacesuits, breathing air pumped in by a fan and watching the jagged red landscape through their fishbowl-like glass helmets. As they head back to the station, one astronaut, Aga Pokrywka, begins acting strangely. Her movements are sluggish. She stops walking. The radio crackles. The Hab is only a few dozen yards away, but Pokrywka can’t seem to go further. She collapses on to the red clay. Robert Turner, the crew’s medical officer, radios the Hab: “Astronaut down, astronaut down!”…

At the police headquarters compound in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif, a large crowd waited in front of a wire mesh door. The entrance was guarded by a young Taliban fighter with long shaggy hair and a beard, who sat on a broken plastic chair. Beside him was a large pile of shoes and flip-flops belonging to those who had been admitted to meet the newly appointed Taliban police chief. It was mid-October 2021, seven weeks since the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the Taliban were in charge. In a large office, Abu Idrees, the police chief – who has since been promoted to deputy governor of Balkh province, of which Mazar is the capital – sat on a sofa, shunning the large desk that stretched nearly the width…

We are living in the age of the scammer. If you weren’t aware of it, just turn on your TV: there’s a rash of real-life dramas about master con artists. Netflix’s Inventing Anna – a fictionalised account of the fake heiress Anna Delvey (real name Sorokin) – is topping the streaming service’s popularity chart while, in March, Disney+ is releasing The Dropout, which dramatises the tale of health-tech fraud Elizabeth Holmes. It’s no wonder that the New Yorker’s Rachel Syme has declared a “scam spring”. Each of these stories is stranger than fiction, and has spawned podcast series and investigative magazine features. But the drive to turn them into glossy, high-end TV dramas with star-studded casts suggests that we view their protagonists as more than mere tricksters: we are intrigued,…

jaculated is a tough word to place in a novel, these days. Nobody uses it to describe dialogue any more and in a sexual context it seems a little functional. So the reader really does notice when Sheila Heti’s narrator says that something has been ejaculated into her “by the universe” and that something, which is now “spreading all the way through her, the way cum feels”, is the spirit of her much-loved, just-dead father. But each to her own – you have to admire the leap. I was pulled into Pure Colour, Heti’s followup to 2018’s Motherhood, by a description of life before the internet that held a nostalgia I needed to name. Mira begins the novel in a world lost to us: it was a time when choice…

I wish I could have a better relationship with my grandmother. She has been recognised as a difficult person, a liar and highly critical for as long as I remember. She pits family members against each other, picks fights, says what she wants. If we act offended, she gets defensive and tries to make us believe we misunderstood. She has lived a difficult life; my grandfather was always cheating on her, and left her with no money. She built her own life from scratch, gave my aunt money after her divorce, and welcomed me into her house after I was kicked out of my own. I try to act grateful, but the best I can do is help her financially, as spending time with her kills me inside, and can…

Russia faced western sanctions and bitter condemnation at the United Nations after Vladimir Putin ordered troops over the Ukrainian border into Moscow-controlled territories in the east of the country, which he had recognised hours earlier. The decision by the Russian president to dispatch his troops to perform “peacekeeping duties” was viewed in Ukraine and by other western allies as an occupation of the region and seemed certain to trigger tough sanctions and a Ukrainian military response. Both the US and UK believe that the Russian entry into the eastern tip of Ukraine is a precursor for a more sweeping invasion. “This is the moment – the moment to stand up and defend the United Nations and our international order as we know it,” Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador to the…

The first stop for Ella Fyodorova after she fled her home in eastern Ukraine was a windblown tent camp just across the Russian border, part of a mass evacuation effort that observers fear ed was the pretext for Russia to launch a formal intervention in Ukraine. “I wanted to stay, but my husband came home, and said: ‘Get your things together, we’re going,’” she said as she wrestled her two-year-old son into a blue snowsuit to walk to the public toilets nearby. The escalation in fighting had not touched her home city of Starobesheve, she said, but warnings from the Russian-backed separatist government of an imminent attack by Ukraine had driven many families to flee. Her husband, who dropped her at the border, had to turn back. Now she sat…

Standing in the hospital room, Rosemonde Bertin looked around in despair. The roof had collapsed, trees grew through the floor and a rusting, bedpan lay half concealed by ferns. “I had my baby here,” Bertin said. “He was born in 1972.” That was shortly before everyone on Salomon atoll was forcibly deported by the British to Mauritius and Seychelles. Beside the hospital stood St Bridget’s chapel. Creepers and roots penetrated the roofless walls; decaying coconuts littered the floor. “My church is abandoned,” wailed Bertin, 67. “I was baptised here. I made my first communion here. All the families came to church every Sunday.” On a previous occasion, escorted by British officials on a “heritage” visit, she had not been able to explore. This time she had returned on a Mauritian-chartered…

One day in 1958, Brion Gysin had a transcendental experience on the way to Marseille. The flickering of sunlight through avenues of trees along the roadside and the speed of the bus he was riding proved optimal, or so he thought, to put him in a hallucinatory dreamlike state. “An overwhelming flood of intensely bright patterns in supernatural colours exploded behind my eyelids: a multidimensional kaleidoscope whirling out through space,” Gysin recalled. “I was swept out of time. I was out in a world of infinite number. The vision stopped abruptly as we left the trees.” Gysin, an avant-garde artist and poet, was determined to create a gizmo that could induce others to experience what he had during his bus trip. After conversations with the novelist William Burroughs and Cambridge…

There are two lines of attack in the culture wars. The first is slow, steady and discreet, marching by stealth through Britain’s institutions. The second is a brazen, loud artillery attack armed with cliches and buzzwords that are fired across the media. A recent speech by the Conservative party chair is an example of the latter. Addressing the Heritage Foundation in Washington, Oliver Dowden dished up a word salad into which he lazily and dispassionately (repeating this stuff really must get very boring) tossed a target list of vague and intangible concepts such as “cancel culture”, “woke psychodrama”, “obsessing over pronouns” and attempts to “decolonise mathematics”. If the purpose of this kind of quick-fire attack is recruitment, then the slower, more covert attacks are for annexation. An example of which…

Why do some recipes specify selfraising flour and others plain flour and baking powder? Can I replace one with the other? Lily, Manchester “I’ve often wondered why people select self-raising flour,” says John Lister, founder of British miller Shipton Mill. His conclusion? A combination of convenience, tradition and classic recipes (hello, sponge cake) that call for it. “It’s a uniquely British thing,” agrees Edd Kimber, author of One Tin Bakes Easy. “We’re not the only country that uses the stuff, but we are the only country that seems to have such a unique relationship with it.” Let’s get a quick refresher on what self-raising flour actually is. All-round baking guru Dan Lepard explains: “It’s a mixture of plain flour with bicarbonate of soda [sodium hydrogen carbonate], plus an acid powder…