Innehållsförteckning för 4 March 2022 från Guardian Weekly

Learning on the go Soda Najhand, a high school graduate, takes a free class for children working as street vendors in Kabul. Many of these children work and have been denied an education owing to financial difficulties. The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol 206 | Issue № 10 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…

Natalia Balasynovych, the mayor of Vasylkiv, woke up at 5.13am last Thursday and thought there was a fireworks display outside. She quickly realised that, in fact, Vladimir Putin had launched an assault on Ukraine. Missiles were raining down on her town. Vasylkiv is a quiet town of 36,000 people about 30km outside Kyiv. But it contains a military airfield, and is home to one of Ukraine’s four air defence control centres. This meant it was an early target for the Russians, who want control of the airfield to land troops and launch an advance on Kyiv from the south. Balasynovych had read all the specu lation, and as mayor had gone over drills of what to do if the invasion really happened. But “in her soul”, she said, she never…

More than 500,000 people had fled their homes in Ukraine by Monday, according to the UN refugee agency, and more than 4.5 million could follow, Ukrainian authorities said. The majority of people are fleeing to one of 12 border crossings Ukraine shares with its neighbour Poland, which by last Sunday morning had registered 156,000 arrivals. Others are crossing at one of nine border points with Romania, or into Hungary, Slovakia or Moldova, according to figures collected by the UNHCR. An internal report by EU officials said there were lengthy waits at most borders, including up to 70 hours to cross into Poland. The hold-ups were said to be linked to the sheer numbers trying to leave, and delays on the Ukraine border, with officials ordered to stop men between the…

As Boris Johnson told parliament that Europe must wean itself off Russian gas – to loosen Vladimir Putin’s “grip on western politics” – the Nikolay Zubov tanker was making its way back from British waters to the port of Sabetta, in northern Siberia. The 300-metre-long vessel had recently dropped off a consignment of liquefied natural gas (LNG) at the Isle of Grain terminal, in the Thames estuary, operated by the National Grid. Steaming north under a Cypriot “flag of convenience”, it charted a course for Russia’s Arctic coast, near the vast $27bn Yamal gas facility, inaugurated by Putin in 2017. Britain gets less than 5% of its gas from Russia, either flowing through subsea interconnector pipelines or arriving by boat. In the EU, whose gas market is so intermeshed with…

Iwas a 14-year-old schoolboy when the rapper 50 Cent released Get Rich or Die Tryin’. The most precocious kids in class declared the debut hip-hop album an instant classic and hailed the rapper’s legend: “He’s been shot nine times, you know?” The failed attempt on 50 Cent’s life was at the centre of his sales pitch as the bulletproof king of gangsta rap. My friends and I were easily sold. His debut was the bestselling album of 2003, selling 12m copies worldwide. Curtis Jackson may have been born black and poor in New York but, as 50 Cent, he was now worth $30m. There are few things we find more compelling than a fable of overcoming the odds and achieving self-made success. Everyone loves an outsider, because deep down most…

The History Channel is broadcasting live. The US commentator who made that quip meant that events currently unfolding in Ukraine will be remembered for many decades to come, that future generations of schoolchildren will be called to memorise the date of 24 February 2022. But it’s true in another, darker sense too. For this is a grimly retro war. Russian troops marching across an international border, their objective a European capital? Families sheltering in underground stations, children parted from their fathers, civilians donning uniforms and reaching for rifles, vowing to fight to the death for their homeland? An actual invasion of one European country by another? Footage of such events looks strange in colour: it should be in grainy black and white. Because Europe was meant to have left such…

I love paneer but only ever use it in curries. What else am I able to do with it? Claire, Sheffield, UK One of the advantages of paneer, homemade or shop-bought, is that it doesn’t melt, so you get that satisfying, almost meaty texture. Meera Sodha, in Fresh India, uses it to stuff romano peppers, but her skewers are “one of the finest ways to eat paneer”. She starts by heating oil in a pan, then adds chickpea flour, cooking until “nutty brown”. She tosses this with cubed paneer, grated ginger, crushed garlic, chilli powder, mango chutney, turmeric, tomato puree, chopped coriander, seasons, and marinates. The paneer is threaded on skewers with red pepper chunks and grilled. Chef Maunika Gowardhan, who wrote Thali, began her love affair with paneer when…

When the air raid sirens wail, Natalya Tyshchuk feels relatively lucky. She only has to get herself and her daughter Mia – born three months premature in December – down to the basement that serves as a bomb shelter for the Okhmatdyt children’s hospital in central Kyiv. Racing down the stairs beside them are nurses and families of premature babies in intensive care. Tyshchuk is glad that her first born will have no memories of these traumatic days. “I am happy that she is super - super-young and she won’t remember this,” she said in a phone interview from the shelter. At least 10 children have been killed in the fighting. The first one named is a fourth grade girl from Kyiv, called Polina; a photo shared online showed a…

China’s decision to abstain last week at the end of the UN security council vote condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine may be a source of deep frustration in the west, but it will also send a nervous tremor through the Russian ministry of foreign affairs that China’s protection is not unconditional. UK-based diplomats, looking at the stance adopted by China, were expecting Beijing to join Russia in voting against the US-sponsored motion, but in common with the United Arab Emirates and India, it abstained, leaving Russia isolated in deploying its veto power as a permanent member of the security council. At one level, the vote represents the line of least resistance for China and can be seen as a reversion to the safety of China’s long-standing support for the…

There’s a strand of thinking, from sci-fifilms to Stephen Hawking, that suggests artificial intelligence could spell doom forhumans. But conservationists are increasingly using it to tackle the biodiversity crisis and climate change. They say it helps protect species and supports researchers and rangers in tasks from anti-poaching patrols to monitoring populations as diverse as koalas and pangolins. Here are five such projects: 1 Stopping poachers Zambia’s Kafue national park is home to more than 6,600 African savanna elephants and covers 22,400 sq km, so stopping poaching is a big logistical challenge. Illegal fishing in Lake Itezhi-Tezhi on the park’s border is also a problem, and poachers masquerade as fishers to enter the park undetected, often under the cover of darkness. The Connected Conservation Initiative, from Game Rangers International (GRI), Zambia’s…

The mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan are edged with a tangerine glow. We are on our way from Erbil to Shaqlawa, a historic city about 50 minutes away, to hike up Safeen mountain. Inside the minibus, a group of teenage girls play their favourite songs. They live with their families in one of Erbil’s two main camps for internally displaced people (IDPs), Baharka and Harsham, having fled Mosul and surrounding towns such as Tal Afar and Sinjar, when the area was captured by Is lamic State (IS) in 2014. The hike is organised by Free to Run, an NGO support ing women and girls in regions of conflict through sport with life-skills training, the chance to make friends, build confidence and reclaim public space in a country where women’s rights are…

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has exposed a schism in the Republican party between “hawks” who condemn Vladimir Putin and “America first” followers who express admiration for the strongman. But what has united the two wings so far is an opportunity to cast Joe Biden as weak and paying the price of failure in Afghanistan. The split was evident last week as Republicans in Washington condemned Putin as a “war criminal” while many grassroots conservatives at a conference in Florida agreed with former president Donald Trump that the Russian autocrat is “savvy”. Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, described Putin as a “thug” and criticis ed Biden for being too slow to impose tough sanctions. “Sadly, deterrence after the fact is not deterrence at all,” he said. Senator Lindsey Graham, who…

Portraits by Shaniqwa Jarvis BERNARDINE EVARISTO PORTRAIT BY SUKI DHANDA WHEN AN EMAIL FROM BEYONCÉ’S office landed in Warsan Shire’s inbox, she assumed it was some kind of prank. It wasn’t. Beyoncé was inviting Shire, a British-Somali poet from London, to collaborate. The result was the revolutionary 2016 visual album Lemonade, on which Shire is credited with “film adaptation and poetry”; her verses are read aloud between songs. Shire has since contributed work to Beyoncé’s 2020 film Black is King and wrote a commissioned poem, I Have Three Hearts, to announce the singer’s 2017 pregnancy with twins. But even before Beyoncé came knocking, Shire was starward bound. After a responsibility-laden adolescence, spent combining writing with co-parenting her three younger siblings, Shire published her debut chapbook of poems, Teaching My Mother…

She has always wanted this. Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Joe Biden’s nominee to fill the supreme court seat left vacant by the retirement of Stephen Breyer at the end of this term, said she wanted to become a judge one day in her Miami school’s yearbook. By then she was already a champion in national oratory competitions. Her parents – an attorney and a school principal – saw their daughter’s potential, and helped her to hoist herself from her middle-class origins on to the path followed by ambitious lawyers. She went to Harvard and then to Harvard Law, eventually as a clerk for Breyer himself – a justice known to be picky with his clerkships. Her legal career took her to places most supreme court justices’ careers have not: she…

The last time I visited my ancestral home, in a typical Bengali village, no roads led there; we made our way on foot, crossing bamboo bridges at night, our path lit by fireflies. Twenty years later, I am there again, having arrived via a motorway whizzing through the village, or what’s left of it. Now with electricity and plumbing, my neighbours have mastered the smartphone and the WC simultaneously: two centuries traversed in two decades The Indian writer Pankaj Mishra is fascinated by these transformations, first observing them in travelogues written in south Asian backwaters, then analysing their philosophical underpinnings and psychological reverberations in book-length essays. He has also tackled the subject polemically, especially in the Modi era, with op inion pieces in almost every major newspaper, including the Guardian.…

Can Bears Ski? by Raymond Antrobus and Polly Dunbar A small bear is baffled by people asking “Can bears ski?” until he visits an audiologist, and discovers they were really saying: “Can you hear me?” Drawing vividly on poet Raymond Antrobus’s childhood experience with undiagnosed deafness, this new paperback edition comes Polly Dunbar’s inimitably cuddly illustrations. It Fell from the Sky by the Fan Brothers When a curious object falls from the sky, the garden insects all have a theor y, while Spider detects a business opportunity and begins charging for viewings. With few words and gorgeous illustration – intricate monochrome enlivened by touches of colour – this sophisticated picture book will prompt lively discussion among readers of 5+. The Boy Whose Wishes Came True by Helen Rutter Archie’s mum…

1 UKRAINE ICC prosecutor plans to probe possible war crimes The prosecutor of the international criminal court (ICC) in The Hague announced that he will launch an investigation into possible war crimes or crimes against humanity in Ukraine. Karim Khan said that although Ukraine was not a member of the ICC, it had awarded jurisdiction to the court. He said there were grounds to open an investigation based on a previous preliminary investigation on Crimea and the Donbas published last year, and on current events in Ukraine. He said he could go to ICC judges to approve the inquiry, but it would be faster if a member state referred the case to his office. Lithuania called for an investigation into possible war crimes committed by Russia and Belarus in Ukraine.…

ECONOMY Grim outlook as inflation rises to a 30-year high Households could suffer the biggest annual decline in their living standards since the 1950s as the Russian invasion of Ukraine pushes up global energy prices, experts have warned. With inflation already at the highest rate for 30 years, analysts said a sustained rise for wholesale oil and gas markets would further add to the squeeze on families from soaring utility bills. Analysts at Bank of America said that under such a scenario household real income could plunge by 3.1% in 2022 compared with a year earlier, in the biggest annual drop since at least 1956, the year of the Suez crisis. In what would mark a worse squeeze than during the oil shock of the 1970s, it comes after wholesale…

At the ticket windows in the railway station in Lviv in western Ukraine, 60 km from the Polish border, there are two kinds of tickets for the refugees wanting to flee the violence of the Russian invasion. First, the free tickets for the evacuation trains. The catch is, these are almost impossible to get. The alternative is a ticket for the regular service. The catch this time is that tickets are unavailable until well into March. And even then, men of military age are not allowed travel. Standing on his own is 43-year-old Alexei Lutaev, a building site manager from Dnipro. He is waiting to get tickets for a train to Poland for his 16-year-old son, who is waiting in a car nearby with his wife. “I can’t go myself…

T his is not the third world war. It is, however, already something much more serious than the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. The wars in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s were terrible, but the international dangers that flowed from them were not on this scale. In Ukraine today we have a sovereign state with a large army and a people who declare themselves determined to resist. If they don’t resist, at scale, this will be an occupation. If they do, this could be the largest war in Europe since 1945. Against them is arrayed the overwhelming force of one of the strongest military powers in the world, with well-trained and equipped conventional forces and some 6,000 nuclear weapons. Russia is now the world’s largest…

Two years ago exactly, Joe Biden stood on a debate stage in Charleston, South Carolina, his candidacy on the ropes, and made a promise: if elected president, he would nominate the first Black woman to the supreme court. Days later, Biden won the South Carolina primary on the strength of his support among Black voters. The victory propelled him to the Democratic nomination and then to the presidency. Last month, Justice Stephen Breyer announced his retirement, presenting Biden with an opportunity to fulfil that campaign commitment. Biden has nominated Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the supreme court, declaring that the highest court in the land should reflect “the full talent and greatness of our nation”. If eventually confirmed by the Senate, she will be the first Black woman to serve…

There’s nothing like parenting to open your eyes to how you were parented, and I’ve discovered that I have an avoidant attachment style. As a mother of two, I know I’m passing on the damaging legacy of being emotionally distant. I push my older child away, keeping them at arm’s length. With the youngest, who is still a baby, it’s completely different: I know they are securely attached to me … for now, at least. My mum had to retire at the age I am now (40s), as she was ill – she was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Despite having had counselling before lockdown – and having read about all possible attachment styles in books – I feel patterns repeating themselves. I want to be a warm, loving mother,…

DINORWIG Gwynedd, Wales The ravens are back and displaying. A blue-sky morning, frost on the ground, and they arrow in from the west, returning from Ravenopolis, the huge forest roost behind Malltraeth Bay. Rock walls amplify the creak of wings as they rise to a ramshackle nest. For days they’ve been flying back and forth, fetching sticks and heather stems, weaving them in to shore up their nest’s tottering structure. Derek Ratcliffe notes that the raven “is generally believed to pair for life”, and considers 25-30 to be their potential maximum age. These two may well be the ones I could approach in my garden years ago. They became used to my presence. Each morning at my front door, I’d hold out food and call them. One or both would…