Innehållsförteckning för 20 May 2022 från Guardian Weekly

China has been central to the story of globalisation over the past 30 years, but now it is struggling. More than two years after Covid-19 cases were discovered in Wuhan, the world’s most populous country has yet to get on top of the virus. Draconian lockdowns have been imposed because China’s vaccines are less effective than western ones, and immunity levels are lower too. Growth is slowing, and not just because of the tough restrictions insisted upon by President Xi Jinping. Flaws in China’s economic model, coupled with a more hostile geopolitical climate, mean the days of explosive expansion are over. Unlike the US, the UK or the euro area, China is not facing the inflationary problem that has prompted central banks to raise interest rates. On the contrary, the…

Violence and arrests will not deter Sudan’s young activists from resisting the military who “stole our revolution”, says one man who faces down the teargas and bullets in a blue and red superhero costume. Featured in a new Guardian documentary, “the ‘Spider-Man’ of Sudan”, who cannot be named for his safety, has become a symbol of protests that began in October. Dressed in his increasingly frayed suit and mask, he and other demonstrators confront teargas canisters, water cannon and often live bullets. During the protests his childhood friend was killed by security forces, who have also been accused of sexually assaulting women and hunting down activists. It was as a homage to his friend that he picked up the suit, less as a disguise than as a symbol of both…

At an age where many of his contemporaries are winding down, the man they call the Grey Kenyan is speeding up. On 8 May Jo Schoonbroodt, 71, from Maastricht, ran a marathon in a staggering 2 hours 54 minutes and 19 seconds to become the fastest septuagenarian in history. A few days later, his achievement is still sinking in. “I only started jogging at 36 because my doctor told me I had high cholesterol,” he says, chuckling. “But last year I ran 7,242km, which is more than double what I did in my car.” It also turns out that Schoonbroodt’s new 70+ world record, set at the Maasmarathon of Visé in Belgium, was partly inspired by an unlikely source: the Dutch crooner Eddy Wally. With a few kilometres remaining, he…

Few places in Afghanistan are run by women, and since the Taliban’s takeover even more women have vanished from view. While some say they are stuck in conservative societal structures that rarely let them take control, others fear draconian new rules and the travel and education bans. But behind the walls of several female-run hospitals in Kabul, a different reality exists. Here, women save lives on a daily basis, offer marriage advice, and care for and adopt abandoned children. Many of the doctors and nurses working here have raised children and often remain their family’s sole financial supporters. And they all agree: things work better when women run the show. “We had a few men working here before the Taliban took over, but since this is mostly a maternity hospital,…

Oh the irony! Boris Johnson, the Brexit ringleader who turned his back on the EU, now boldly leads the defence of Europe in the face of Russian aggression. An exaggeration? Yes, but behind the hype lies an intriguing story. Even as he risks another major rift with Brussels over Northern Ireland, Johnson is using the Ukraine crisis to mend fences with some old European allies. His aim: to re-establish the UK as a continental power. The signing last week of bilateral defence pacts with Nato aspirants Sweden and Finland was the latest manifestation of an apparently concerted British drive to revive political ties with eastern and central European and Nordic countries that were natural UK allies before the Brexit rupture. Britain’s rapid deployment of extra troops and equipment along Nato’s…

Late afternoon, Friday 27 January 1922. The sky unzipped and snow began to fall in Washington DC. It came down steadily all night and right through the next day. Trains were evacuated, cars abandoned in the street. By 8pm on Saturday, 70cm had fallen. Undaunted, 300 citizens braved the streets to see the silent film Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford at Crandall’s Knickerbocker theatre, a luxurious picture house. The audience howled as Wallingford sat on a tack. A second later the entire roof collapsed under the accumulated weight of snow, coming down in a single slab of stone and steel and crushing the people below. Ninety-eight died and more were mutilated or injured. This sounds like the definition of an act of God, but the coroner’s hearing concluded that the disaster was a…

Upper Teesdale, England Away across the valley, the cliffs of Cronkley Scar rise up, a sombre grey wall of dolerite columns. We cross the Tees by Cronkley Bridge, the river running low in this dry spring. Then it’s up through a forest of twisted junipers and across the moor to join the Green Trod. This ancient drover’s road is a wide green band that climbs up to Cronkley Fell in the Moor House-Upper Teesdale national nature reserve. As the path gains height, it fragments into a mass of boulders. On the flat hilltop is the first of several exclosures fenced against grazing. We edge round it, using binoculars to spot treasures growing among straw-coloured grasses. There are tiny bird’s-eye primroses, Primula farinosa, their heart-shaped petals a startling sugar pink. Emerald…

At last year’s Cop26 conference, when nations grappled with closing the gap between emissions and targets to limit global heating to 1.5C, one key variable was unclear. Major oil and gas firms had numerous large-scale extraction projects planned or under way, but measurable data on the problem was not available. So, with several other journalists, the Guardian’s environment editor, Damian Carrington, set about finding it. There simply wasn’t room to fit all of his remarkably detailed investigation into this week’s magazine but you can find much more from the carbon bombs series on our website, detailing the impacts from Australia to the US. The big story Page 10 → Another mass shooting shook the US this week, made all the more shocking by the gunman’s openly racist motives. Edward Helmore finds grief…

Filled with lustful murderers, dishevelled streetwalkers and hollow-eyed wartime amputees, George Grosz’s jagged sketches of Berlin street life during the Weimar Republic never sought to capture the German metropolis at its most beautiful. Only fitting, then, that Berlin’s first museum dedicated solely to its master chronicler should not be in the gilded neoclassical halls of the German capital’s Museum Island but a seedier part of the city in which the satirist and Dada artist was born and died. The Little Grosz Museum opened last Friday inside a former petrol station on the dusty Bülowstraße thoroughfare, a stone’s throw from the German capital’s red-light strip around Nollendorfplatz. It began as a privately funded initiative started seven years ago by Ralph Jentsch, the managing director of Grosz’s estate. It will present works…

In early February 1814, an elephant walked across the surface of the Thames near Blackfriars Bridge in London. The stunt was performed during the frost fair, when temperatures were so cold that for four days the top layers of the river froze solid. Londoners promptly held a festival, complete with pop-up shops and a lot of unlicensed alcohol. This was the last of the Thames frost fairs. They had taken place every few decades, at wildly irregular intervals, for several centuries. But the London river has not frozen over since 1814. The frost fairs are perhaps the most emblematic consequences of the “little ice age”, a period of chilly weather that lasted for several centuries. But while Londoners partied on the ice, other communities faced crop failures and other threats.…

Jeff Bezos knew this day was coming. In April, the Amazon boss warned of an impending market slowdown, tweeting that the epic tech boom experienced during the last two years could not last for ever. “Most people dramatically underestimate the remarkableness of this bull run,” he said. “Such things are unstoppable … until they aren’t.” For years, the tech industry has led the stock market with bust-out profits, fuelled by a pandemic that moved much of the world online. Now all that has changed, with trillions in market value lost in recent weeks. Once-hot startups are being ditched by investors, and even the tech giants seen as stable investments have faltered. Apple is no longer the most valuable company in the world, after losing $200bn in market value last week.…

Last Saturday, 18-year-old Payton Gendron shot 13 people in Buffalo, New York, killing 10 of them. Eleven of the people he shot were Black, and two were white. As the manifesto he left behind makes clear, this was intentional. His first listed goal was to “k ill as many blacks as possible”. Gendron was a meticulous planner. He live-streamed his massacre, and the video begins with him following to the letter the beginning of the plan he lays out in the manifesto. But the manifesto – which is meant to inspire and instruct subsequent attacks – also outlines the ideology that inspired the murders. Gendron was motivated by a classic version of white replacement theory, the view that a cabal of global elites is trying to destroy white nations, via…

My husband and I have been married for seven years, and we have three young children. Before we got married, we talked about having kids and both agreed we wanted three. However, when I got pregnant with our first, he didn’t seem to care. He showed me no consideration when I felt unwell, and when our first baby was born he barely interacted with her, sleeping in a different room so as not to be bothered by her at night, and refusing to take her out in the pram during the day so I could rest. He came home from work late and insisted on a significant amount of alone time at weekends. Getting him to do a nappy change was a huge fight. It was as if he thought…

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NORTHERN IRELAND Plan to shed parts of protocol is insurance – PM Boris Johnson said a legal move to ditch parts of the Northern Ireland protocol was only an “insurance” policy, as it emerged that the controversial legislation has been delayed for some weeks. Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, was this week expected to threaten to bring forward the draft legislation. She has prepared a bill giving the government the right to suspend elements of the Brexit deal relating to Northern Ireland, a move which the EU has warned could spark a trade war. Measures are expected to include a new “green lane” for goods for sale only in Northern Ireland and stronger penalties for those smuggling into the EU via the Republic. However, the timetable for the draft laws…

Shot after shot pounded into the Russian missile battery hidden by the lighthouse on Snake Island, a Black Sea rock 35km from the Ukrainian coast. The edited video, released by the Ukrainian military, showed the strike and its aftermath – all taken from a Turkish-designed Bayraktar TB2 drone. Until then, evidence of the TB2 – a remotely piloted killer drone with a range of up to 300km – had largely disappeared from the conflict. The assumption was that the two dozen or so that Ukraine had bought from Turkey had been shot down and Ankara, not wanting to upset Russia, had declined to supply more. Yet the battle for control of Snake Island suggested the picture had changed. A day later, another TB2 video, accompanied by the pumping music typical…

Millions of people will starve to death unless Russia allows the export of Ukrainian grain from blockaded ports, foreign ministers from the G7 have said. As Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, warned that Vladimir Putin was intransigent during their bi lateral call last Friday, the ministers from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and US condemned Moscow for stoking a food crisis. The G7 governments said the Russian president was pushing 43 million people towards famine by refusing to allow cereals to leave Ukraine via Black Sea ports. “Russia’s unprovoked and pre meditated war of aggression has exacerbated the global economic outlook with sharply rising food, fuel and energy prices,” they said in a joint statement. “Combined with Russia blocking the exit routes for Ukraine’s grain, the world is now…

Nahed Araf Imran and her husband Jamal were exhausted but excited on the morning of 11 May: Nahed was in labour with their third child at a local hospital in Nablus, in the north of the occupied West Bank. But when Jamal’s mother arrived at the hospital, crying, he knew something was wrong. “I asked her what happened and she told me that Shireen Abu Aqleh had been shot dead by the Israelis. Shireen had visited us in our town, Bureen, and covered demonstrations here many times. Everybody knows her,” the 29-year-old construction worker said. “My mum was heartbroken. I said to myself, when the baby comes, we will call her Shireen, and my wife agreed.” Israeli officials said they believed Abu Aqleh, 51, a dual Palestinian-American citizen, had died…

The hit Colombian singer J Balvin had to abandon recording sessions and filming in London with Ed Sheeran last month because his visa never arrived. The reggaeton star, who has sold 35m records worldwide, is the latest musician to be caught out by long delays at UK visas and immigration. Agents and tour managers are having to cancel British performances because visas for performers that used to be turned around within a fortnight are now taking up to two months. Balvin applied in March for a visa as he was meant to be in Britain from 3 to 8 April, for recording sessions with Sheeran and a video shoot. When the visa had still not arrived by 12 April, he withdrew the application. Balvin has been waiting a fortnight for…

Despite everything that has happened to her country since the Taliban seized power last August, 29-year-old Nafisa still never believed there would come a day when she would be unable to feel the sun on her face as she walked the streets of Kabul. Yet on 7 May, the Taliban’s sinisterly named ministry for the propagation of virtue ordered that millions of women across Afghanistan should ideally not leave the house at all. If they do, they must be fully veiled and never show their faces in public. “The Taliban have no plans for Afghanistan other than imposing restrictions on women,” says Nafisa, who says she rejects the latest attempts to push women into the shadows. “I do not accept the obligatory hijab and I will never wear a burqa.”…

I WAS STANDING IN FRONT OF AN IMPOSING TOWNHOUSE IN THE SWISH 16TH ARRONDISSEMENT OF PARIS. Its classical lines, marble staircases and delicately wrought iron balustrades belied the fierce sense of purpose inside. The Musée de la Contrefaç on is an unusual museum – it specialises in counterfeits. I hoped that my visit would help me understand a problem that luxury brands have been battling for decades: that of mass-market knock-offs and blatant counterfeits. According to some estimates, the trade in fake products is worth $600bn per year. As many as 10% of all branded goods sold may be counterfeit. It is estimated that 80% of us have handled fake or falsified goods (whether wittingly or not). Sales of luxury goods have soared in recent decades, but fakes have grown…

It’s the end of the iPod era. The news that Apple is pulling the plug on the iPod Touch, and thus the entire 21-year-old line, is curiously timed for me because I only recently retired my iPod Classic. Every month for the past 30 years, I’ve made a compilation of my favourite songs. It’s a time capsule of musical memories. For the first decade I used cassettes to make my compilations. This required a lot of creative editing, tense retakes and hovering over the pause button like a predator. After that, the simple drag-and-drop of an iTunes playlist felt miraculous. Even once Spotify arrived, I kept this up for years as an act of commitment: love a song, buy a song, own a song. But for boring technical reasons, the…

What’s the most useful style (or styles) of knife? Kate, Swansea, Wales, UK “A good knife is the most important part of any kitchen,” says David Carter, founder of London barbecue joint Smokestak. But that’s not to say you need many; as the inimitable Anthony Bourdain wrote in Kitchen Confidential: “Please believe me, here’s all you will ever need in the knife department: one good chef’s knife, as large as is comfortable for your hand.” And a Japanese gyuto or santoku will fit the bill for “about 90% of kitchen tasks”, says Tom Saunders, cofounder of knife emporium Kitchen Provisions in London. “The santoku is 16cm or 18cm; the gyuto 18cm to 21cm or 24cm, though I normally push people to the longer size.” Chef John Chantarasak, whose book Kin…