Innehållsförteckning för 15 July 2022 från Guardian Weekly

The final frontier The first full-colour image from Nasa’s James Webb space telescope shows the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, picturing stars as they were up to 13bn years ago. Images from the most powerful telescope ever launched into space promise to reshape our understanding of the dawn of the universe. 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…

JAPAN Nation reels after killing of Shinzo Abe A leaked trove of confidential files has revealed the inside story of how the tech company Uber flouted laws, duped police, exploited violence against drivers and secretly lobbied governments during its aggressive global expansion. The unprecedented leak to the Guardian of more than 124,000 documents – known as the Uber files – lays bare the ethically questionable practices that fuelled the company’s transformation into one of Silicon Valley’s most famous exports. The leak spans a five-year period when Uber was run by its co-founder Travis Kalanick, who tried to force the cab-hailing service into cities around the world, even if that meant breaching laws and taxi regulations. During the fierce global opposition, the data shows how Uber tried to shore up support…

The palatial colonial-era home was once frequented only by Sri Lanka’s elite. But by last Sunday morning, Temple Trees, the formal residence of the prime minister, was “open to the public”, according to a large sign graffitied at the entrance. In the aftermath of the dramatic events of last Saturday, when tens of thousands of anti-government protesters stormed the state residences of the president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, and the prime minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, it was among the political properties now defiantly occupied by ordinary Sri Lankans. Sri Lanka’s government has since said Rajapaksa would resign this week, paving the way for the appointment of a successor, amid reports that the beleaguered leader had attempted to flee the country on Monday. Sri Lanka’s parliament was due to reconvene this week and elect…

There is an adjective that all too invitingly describes the wildly optimistic endeavours of the American book collector, the Hungarian-British explorer and the two Kashmiri pandits who, almost a century ago, took it upon themselves to translate Don Quixote into Sanskrit for the first time. The same word might equally be applied to the efforts of the Bulgarian-born Indologist and Tibetologist who rescued that text from decades of oblivion. In 1935, the wealthy book collector Carl Tilden Keller – whose shelves held Japanese, Mongolian and Icelandic translations of Cervantes’s masterpiece – embarked on a quest for an Indian language version. He enlisted his friend, Sir Marc Aurel Stein, an eminent orientalist, archaeologist and explorer who knew India well. “I am frank enough to admit that while I recognise the childishness…

At an Independence Day barbecue, crises swirling around him, Joe Biden declared that he had “never been more optimistic about America than I am today”. Of course there were challenges, grave ones, the US president told the military families assembled at the White House. But he gave a hopeful speech that reflected his often unshakeable faith in the American experiment on the 246th anniversary of its founding. Yet many Americans, even his own supporters, no longer share the president’s confidence. To many observers, Biden appears to be at a moment of profound crisis in his presidency: and one he is struggling to address. The spectre of Jimmy Carter – a one-term Democrat whose failure to win the 1980 election ushered in the Ronald Reagan era – is starting to haunt…

Italy’s longest river, the Po, was once called the “king of rivers” (“fluviorum rex”) by Virgil. It was considered mighty less for its length – it’s only about 652 k m long – than for its expanding girth: the countryside next to the river, the Padanian plain, was so flat that the Po was often less of a river than a slow-moving marsh, always flooding land dozens of kilometres either side of its porous banks. Since it flows entirely in Italian territory – rising a few hundred metres inside the French-Italian border in the Cottian Alps and heading east until it reaches the Adriatic Sea just south of Venice – the Po is part of the national psyche. The poet Guido Ceronetti once wrote: “You need to understand the Po…

In most successful revolutions, there comes a moment when the dictator is ushered out of office by a powerful figure within their inner circle. During the Arab spring, the formula became familiar: a military commander would claim they could no longer stand by as a despotic president brutalised protesters. They would speak up, jettisoning their career for the sake of the nation, and would give a pious address about their love of country. Yet as the bitter aftermath of the Arab spring demonstrates, the person who deposes the dictator often helped to create them. They are not a saviour. In fact, they may be the next dictator. The Tory party is now home to an entire cast of these protagonists, who all claim they did the right thing for the…

When we rejoin Nella Oortman, the heroine of Jessie Burton’s blockbuster 2014 debut The Miniaturist, we find her almost as we left her. She still lives in her dead husband Johannes Brandt’s home on the Herengracht canal in Amsterdam, along with Cornelia the cook, Johannes’s once-enslaved manservant Otto, and Thea, the child Otto fathered with Johannes’s steely sister, Marin. So far so familiar, but 18 years have passed: Nella is now 37 and baby Thea a young woman. The three unrelated adults have bonded into a family after the deaths of Marin and Johannes, but their fortunes are dwindling and the once lavish house has been stripped bare. The family is a curiosity – “the black man who lives on the Herengracht, his mixed daughter, and the widow of the…

"Retail price varies by country in ROW market Subscribe now, Visit: theguardian.com/gw-press-2022 Subscription rate is a monthly subscription payment of £12.50/€21, or annual rate of £150/€245.20. In the Rest of World, monthly subscription is $27.50. and annual subscription is $325.20. Currency will vary outside these regions. For full subscription terms and conditions visit theguardian.com/guardian-weekly-subscription-terms-conditions.…

Candidates to replace Boris Johnson line up Britain’s new prime minister will be confirmed on 5 September, it has been announced. The party’s Westminster MPs will whittle the list of leadership hopefuls to two before a vote by Conservative members across the country. The contest follows the resignation of Boris Johnson as party leader last week after a mass resignation of ministers who lost confidence in his error-strewn premiership. To streamline the competition, the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers on Monday opted to increase the number of backers that a candidate needed from eight to 20, and ruled that they would need at least 30 votes to get past the first round. Former chancellor Rishi Sunak had secured the backing of nearly 40 MPs by Monday evening, while trade minister…

Shortly after Boris Johnson struggled through prime minister’s questions last Wednesday, as the list of resignations from his government grew, a senior Tory MP sat down in a quiet corner of the House of Commons and agonised alone over what to do. He had been loyal to Johnson until then but could see the way the wind was blowing. “I really don’t know,” he said, grimacing and shaking his head when asked where he stood on the great question of the moment. “I know we can’t go on like this. But I can’t think of anything worse right now than a leadership contest.” Others preferred to consult colleagues. The corridors close to the Commons chamber were lined with small groups of Conservative MPs holding hushed conversations. They were all agreed…

What do the files reveal? The cache of more than 124,000 internal confidential documents from the tech firm, which were leaked to the Guardian, lays bare ethically questionable practices through which the company barged its way into new markets, often where existing laws or regulations made its operations illegal, before lobbying aggressively for those laws or regulations to be altered to accommodate it. As economy minister, Emmanuel Macron went to extraordinary lengths to support Uber and its campaign to disrupt France’s closed-shop taxi industry, even telling the company he had brokered a “deal” with its opponents in the French cabinet. Senior executives at Uber ordered the use of a “kill switch” to prevent police and regulators from accessing sensitive data during raids on its offices in at least six countries.…

Sorrow and disbelief descended on Japan after the violent death of the former prime minister Shinzo Abe, the country’s most influential politician of recent decades, who was shot while making a campaign speech in the western city of Nara last Friday. Abe, 67, was pronounced dead early in the evening, prompting a flood of tributes from current and former world leaders, and anger that a ician could be gunned down in broad polit-daylight in one of the world’s safest societies two days before an election. The suspect was named as Tetsuya Yamagami, a 41-year-old resident of Nara who spent three years in the maritime self-defence forces until 2005. Police believe he had crafted a homemade gun. Japan’s longest-serving leader will be remembered primarily for his political staying power, having returned…

Elon Musk has notified Twitter of his intention to back out of an agreed $44bn takeover. The move sets the stage for a legal battle between the world’s richest man and the social media platform. What is Musk’s game, and will he succeed? Here’s what could happen next. Why is Musk walking away? The core of Musk’s case centres on his belief that the number of spam bot accounts on Twitter’s platform is much higher than the company’s assertion of fewer than 5% of its daily active users. The letter from lawyers for Musk, whose shares in his electric car business, Tesla, were going to help fund the deal, argues that under-representing the number of spam accounts on the platform – something Twitter denies – constitutes a “company material adverse…

SAM VENIS Could new countries be built online? Promoting his latest book, 99-year-old Henry Kissinger, the controversial former doyen of US foreign policymaking, bemoaned the low calibre of present-day political leadership. That’s a bit stiff, coming from a man who was close to Richard Nixon, the only US president ever to resign in disgrace. Yet Kissinger’s rose-tinted praise for “strong” postwar leaders – Margaret Thatcher, France’s Charles de Gaulle and West Germany’s Konrad Adenauer are among his all-time greats – does not mean he was wrong in his pronouncement. With notable exceptions, the west’s current crop is weak, uninspiring and untrustworthy. This matters more than ever. If western democracies are to survive, let alone win, the global struggle against a rising authoritarian tide, personified by ruthless figures such as Vladimir…

A rapturously received breakout hit at the Cannes film festival in 2021, Hit the Road, the debut film of Panah Panahi (the 38-year-old son of Iranian director Jafar Panahi), has had quite a journey since its premiere. The film, a tender, tragicomic road trip that crams a mother, a father, a brooding older son, a hyperactive six-year-old and an ailing dog into a people carrier travelling towards Iran’s north-west, has accumulated prizes and glowing reviews globally. But one place it has yet to be shown, officially at least, is Iran. Panahi, speaking from his home in Tehran, says: “I know that it won’t have a [cinema] release in Iran and I have to give up on that dream. But they [the censors] keep you in limbo.” Points of contention include…

Thor: Love and Thunder Dir: Taika Waititi Taika Waititi has directed, and co-written with Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, an entertaining followup to his 2017 Marvel Cinematic Universe masterpiece, Thor: Ragnarok. Like the first film, it’s a tongue-in-cheek cosmic spectacular, with some nice gags, big cameos and Chris Hemsworth returning as the great flaxen-haired Norse god. In this instalment Thor has to confront evil Gorr the God Butcher, played by Christian Bale, who with his terrifying necro-sword is slaying divinities all over the shop. The movie is effectively ruled by one cameo, the figure of Zeus, which it would be unsporting to reveal: our A-list guest star unveils one of his strangest accents yet, but also gets serious laughs, as the upstart Thor deprives him of his lightning bolt. And yet it…

Given that the blue part of blue cheese is mould and OK to eat, is it OK to eat other cheese, such as cheddar, if it’s gone mouldy? Peter, Whitestone, Devon, England The thing is, cheese is basically mould. Take your example of blue: yes, the blue bits are mould, but so are the white ones. What we’re really talking about is intentional mould versus mould that grows on the cheese, and for this, Dan Bliss, cheese buyer at Paxton & Whitfield, suggests thinking of your cheese as a petri dish: “It’s alive with mould, whatever style of cheese it is.” Those moulds aren’t necessarily going to do you harm, but they might affect the cheese’s taste, Bliss says. “If it’s surface mould, it’s fine to cut off, but if it…

1 THE UBER FILES EU seeks clarification over lobbying revelations The EU executive said it would write to its former vice-president Neelie Kroes “for clarification” following revelations that she secretly helped Uber lobby the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, and a string of other politicians. The European Commission faced calls to open an inquiry and “defend the EU’s integrity” in the wake of the reports, which showed that Kroes called Dutch government authorities about Uber less than six months after leaving her post as the top EU official on internet policy. The calls were part of the growing fallout from the Uber files, a trove of 124,000 documents exposing ethically questionable practices that allowed the cab-hailing company to barge into new markets around the world. The leak shines a light on…

There were taxis before there was Uber, just as there were bookshops before Amazon and friends before Facebook. A large part of innovation is new ways to deliver old ideas. Technology gives the innovator an edge by lowering costs, enabling nimbler delivery and outcompeting established traders who are stuck with obsolescent methods. That is the foundational myth of Silicon Valley folklore. It was the story that Uber propagated about itself in the years of its most explosive growth from a service for hailing rides around San Francisco to a global tech powerhouse. Here was the archetypal digital disruption – an app to match demand to supply with a slickness that blew competition off the road. When those competitors (licensed taxi drivers) complained, their objections were dismissed by the newcomer as…

Warm winter plan On a local level, as authorities battle with rising energy costs and the challenge of how to cope if households are left in the cold this winter, contingency plans are in place including shutting swimming pools, turning off street lamps and traffic lights, and housing citizens in industrial-scale dormitories. Erected for coronavirus patients, the makeshift wards have been described as “warm rooms” or “warmth islands”. Germany is braced for a potentially permanent halt to the flow of Russian gas with maintenance work having started on the Nord Stream 1 pipeline that brings the fuel to Europe’s largest economy via the Baltic Sea. The work, which started on Monday, is an annual event and requires the gas taps to be closed for 10 to 14 days. But never…

The mother of the man accused of assassinating Shinzo Abe is a member of the Unification church, which the suspect has cited as a motive for his fatal shooting of the former Japanese prime minister last week. The church, whose members are colloquially known as Moonies, confirmed on Monday that the mother of Tetsuya Yama gami, who was detained moments after he shot Abe from behind during an election campaign speech last Friday, attends meetings about once a month. Yamagami, 41, has told investigators he initially intended to target the church’s leader, but that he had also intended to kill Abe, whom he claimed had promoted the church in Japan. H is mother had made a “huge donation” to the church more than 20 years ago that had crippled the…

ON THE FIVE-HOUR DRIVE TO THE DOCKS OF BUENOS Aires, Claudia Osiani thought hard: do I board the cruise ship or cancel my birthday voyage? With her husband, Juan, she discussed the recent spate of deadly virus outbreaks on cruise ships in Japan and California. “This cruise is different; it will be packed with locals,” Juan reassured her. He had sacrificed so much to provide Claudia with this fantasy of a 14-day voyage through the wilds of South America, and she loved him too much to let on that she was petrified at the thought of embarking. It was early March 2020, and the first wave of the Covid-19 virus was spreading in Wuhan, China, and in Italy and Spain. In A rgentina there were fewer than a dozen cases…

In The Network State, a buzzy new book by Balaji Srinivasan, the former chief technology officer of Coinbase, poses a devious question: how do you L arp (Live action role play) a country into existence? Released provocatively in the US on 4 July, the book presents Srinivasan’s case for a new model of digital statehood run and managed in the cloud. A network state, as he describes it, is a group of people who get together on the internet and decide that they’re going to start a country. With a social network to connect them, a leader to unite them and a cryptocurrency to protect their assets, Srinivasan says a country can be born with laws, social services and all. A network state is a country that “anyone can start…

There was one day in each of the springs of my childhood when we moved the ewes and lambs from the fields around the house to land at the top of the farm. Neighbours, friends and sheepdogs as well as us kids were called on to help – the lively lambs would sometimes escape through fences or take wrong turns, needing to be rounded up or caught. Birds called all around us – bubbling curlews with their long-legged chicks running in the verges, a colony of arctic terns swooping above. In the earth of one of those fields, Dad found a sharpened stone tool, evidence of land worked for thousands of years. Those days come to mind reading two books that challenge us to think again about farming – what…

A pair of polka dot eyes on stalks peered out from the dark refuge, watching me through the shallow seawater. Several times this shy little creature had darted back from the open mouth of the shell I remained as still as I could, meeting the gaze of these black and white spotted discs. Bit by bit they emerged into the light, with thin antennae the colour of candied orange peel, claws flecked with light blue, and jointed legs, their pointed tips striped as if clad in sports socks. The tiny crustacean stretched forwards, tilting its periwinkle home, finally righting itself, before trundling off like a clockwork toy beneath swags of seaweed. This colourful hermit crab is a West Country rarity, which, until a few years ago, was thought to have…