Innehållsförteckning för 2 September 2022 från Guardian Weekly

The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol207 | 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 progressive values, to fight for the common good, and to build hope. Our values, as laid out by editor CP Scott in 1921, are honesty, integrity, courage, fairness, and a sense of duty to the reader and the community. The Guardian is…

Weeping Cross fish bar, Stafford “I just don’t know how I can stay in business,” said John Evans of the WeepingCrossfishbarinStafford. “We are a small 5 metre by 10 metre takeaway-only premises. The renewal on our gas has just come through. It has gone from £9,000 ($10,500) to £32,000 a year. I can’t sleep at night.” Before the rise in gas bills, chip shops had already been hit after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused a doubling in the price of some fish and cooking oil. Meanwhile, the UK drought has pushed up prices of potatoes by 25%. “I’d have to charge £12.95 for a fillet of haddock just to break even,” said Evans. The industry is demanding help from the government, such as a cut in the VAT rate, which…

Every energy shock has its winners and losers. Countries that export more oil and gas than they import do well while those that import more than they export suffer. That was the case when the price of oil surged in late 1973 and it is the case now. Saudi Arabia is one country that benefits from rising fossil fuel prices, and Russia is another. The Kremlin’s gas revenues have been two to three times greater than normal in the first half of this year, increasing the country’s ability to withstand a long economic siege. According to the consultancy Capital Economics, if gas prices stay at current levels, Vladimir Putin could keep exports to Europe at 20% of normal levels for the next two to three years, and could cut off…

A Russian missile slammed into Valentina’s garden on a residential street in Kramatorsk at about 6pm on a warm August evening, landing among the squash and cabbages to the rear of the pensioner’s house, smashing windows, destroying the roof, scattering glass, tiles, bricks and rubble everywhere. Valentina, 75, was sitting outside under a grapevine, just far enough from the blast to escape only with cuts and bruises. But while the wounds will heal, the trauma will linger. “All my life I worked hard. Why? Why? What did I do?” Valentina cried as she surveyed the wreckage, with no prospect of help with the clear-up. Perhaps it was time to relocate to relative safety elsewhere in Ukraine? “How can I go? I have nothing to go with,” she asked. As the…

As the sun beat down in Belgrade, coaches came and went outside the Museum of Yugoslavia, an imposing mid-century block in the Serbian capital. A steady trickle of people emerged, some carrying flowers and a few waving the old flag. They had come to visit the mausoleum that houses the grave of Josep Broz Tito, the founder of socialist Yugoslavia. Many of the visitors were there to mark the dictator’s birthday, which was a public holiday before Yugoslavia’s disintegration. Some belonged to far-left political parties, and sported kitsch-looking T-shirts and banners. But there were also a few younger people. Outside an exhibition examining the Tito years via posters, artworks, artefacts and the recorded memories of “common people”, I met 18-year-old Milos Tomcic wearing the hat and scarf of the “pioneers”,…

In the 31 years since Anuara Begum’s family moved into their bamboo shelter in the Nayapara refugee camp, the only improvement they have been able to make was replacing its tarpaulin roof with tin sheeting – less flimsy but hammerloud when the rains come. After they had run from Myanmar’s military, their new home was built to be temporary, and so it proved when it took only 30 minutes for a fire last year to incinerate a whole block of the camp near Cox’s Bazar. Fires in the camp have become commonplace since more than 700,000 Rohingya people fled to Bangladesh in August 2017, joining approximately 300,000 already there, living in fragile shelters, banned from education, work and travel. Begum, 23, was born in Bangladesh without any prospect of a…

YOU HAVE TO MAKE TIME FOR AWE AND WONDER. When you’re working in space, you’re so mission-focused, you can almost forget your environment. It can be hard to process the remoteness and isolation until you get back to Earth. The cover image of Apollo Remastered (seen above), a new book of restored images from the Nasa archive billed as the ultimate photographic record of humankind’s greatest adventure, is of Commander Jim McDivitt looking up on Apollo 9 in 1969. I think a lot of people read awe and wonder in his face, but I see immense concentration; he’s docking the lunar module. When you’re docking, you’re using a robotic arm to grab another visiting vehicle, and it’s the most intense 90 seconds of your life. Everything depends on you. Where…

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” So wrote American author Henry David Thoreau in 1854. It’s a fate that is rapidly overtaking Vladimir Putin as he struggles to escape the disastrous trap he set for himself in Ukraine. Russia’s president keeps understandably schtum about his “special military operation”. But indefinite stalemate is not what he expected. He didn’t expect car bombs in Moscow and humiliating attacks on fortress Crimea, either. Least of all did Putin anticipate 80,000 Russian soldiers dead or wounded. Dying with them is his Peter the Great pipe dream of a “greater Russia”. Extinct already is his reputation as anything other than a killer and a crook. So what are his options? He could declare a specious victory, claim the Nato “threat” is neutralised…

I was 13 when Pokémon cards exploded on to the UK scene in 1999. I tried to be too cool and mature for the instantly popular collectibles, born from a blockbusting video game. I hid my starter pack from friends and played with my younger sister and cousins. I was just humouring my relatives – that was the line anyway. But I would watch the animated series or play Pokémon Blue on my Game Boy Color in our council flat, away from the critical eyes of teenage friends. Short for Pocket Monsters, Pokémon was first launched on the Nintendo Game Boy in 1996. Players became Pokémon trainers, tasked with travelling through a fictional world to collect, develop and evolve the 151 original Pokémon, battling them, and competing to earn badges that…

It’s natural to feel about your place in human history that these are the twilight years. Hundreds of millennia of human activity stretch back behind us, whereas our mental image of our species’ future tends either to be hazy or, in the event of an extinction-level catastrophe, terrifyingly short. But there is another way to see things. Even if the world population were to fall by 90%, and if humans survive no longer than the average mammalian species, a million years in total, then 99.5% of all human experience has yet to be lived. If we can dodge the aforementioned catastrophe, then a staggeringly huge proportion of humanity’s time on Earth is almost certainly yet to come. “Strange as it may seem, we are the ancients,” writes the Oxford University…

The spiralling cost of living has been an increasingly urgent topic of conversation in the UK. But for many people, huge rises in energy prices are about to turn a difficult situation into an impossible one. Political inertia, caused by a lengthy Conservative leadership contest, has only added to a deepening sense of national frustration. The likely new British prime minister, Liz Truss, has spent the summer promising tax cuts to her Tory party supporters – but her pitch may soon be upended by a crisis demanding urgent financial intervention from the government. We survey the stark consequences for Britain, while economics editor Larry Elliott says Europe must look to history in response to the crisis. The big story Page 10 → In Pakistan, devastating flooding caused by unusually strong monsoon rains have affected…

Liz Truss is considering whether to reduce VAT by five percentage points across the board, which could save families £1,300 ($1,500) a year, it was reported. The foreign secretary is understood to have discussed the move with her advisers but no final decisions will be taken until the Conservative leadership contest concludes. Truss is widely expected to be declared the UK’s new prime minister when the results of a ballot of Tory party members is announced on 5 September. The Treasury is expected to present the new prime minister with plans modelled on Gordon Brown’s response to the 2008 financial crisis, where VAT was reduced from 17.5% to 15% for a year, as part of a series of proposals amid soaring energy bills. Energy bills for a typical household will…

For months, everyone in government had known that last Friday was energy cap day, and at 7am the bad news duly dropped. Phones pinged as the nation woke to Ofgem’s confirmation that typical gas and electricity bills were to rise by a frightening 80%. Millions of people would be unable to cope, said charities. Even those on low or middle earnings who had some savings could see them entirely wiped out. It was a full-on national crisis, albeit long predicted. Consumer champion Martin Lewis tore around central London giving breathless interviews, starting on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme at 7.30am. Lewis appeared on 11 separate outlets before 2pm, raging at government failure to act on his warnings, first issued back in March. But while Lewis was everywhere, and Labour’s…

A Pakistani minister has called the country’s deadly monsoon season “a serious climate catastrophe” and “a climate dystopia at our doorstep” as officials said deaths from widespread flooding in Pakistan had passed 1,000 since mid-June. Flash floods, which intensified last week, swept away villages, roads, bridges, people, livestock and crops across all four provinces. Last weekend, Pakistan appealed for international help as soldiers and rescue workers evacuated stranded people to relief camps and provided food to thousands of displaced people. The country’s disaster management authority said that the death toll from the monsoon rains had reached 1,033, with 119 killed in the previous 24 hours. It said this year’s floods were comparable with those of 2010 – the worst on record – when more than 2,000 people died and nearly…

The long-awaited counter-offensive by Ukrainian troops appeared to have started this week in the southern region of Kherson, with the president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, saying: “If they want to survive, it is time for the Russian military to flee.” Ukrainian troops broke through Russian defences in several areas of the frontline near the city of Kherson, a senior adviser to Zelenskiy claimed. Oleksiy Arestovych said in a video interview that Ukrainian forces were also shelling the ferries in the Kherson region that Moscow is using to supply Russian-occupied territory on the west bank of the Dnieper river. But he cautioned Ukrainians against expecting a quick win in the south. In a post to his official Telegram account, Arestovych described the offensive as a “slow operation to grind the enemy”. “Of course,…

Rupert Murdoch, so the aphorism goes, doesn’t sue. But his eldest son, it appears, is cut from different cloth. Lachlan Murdoch is headed to Sydney’s federal court, launching a defamation action last week over a news article, not involving his considerable Australian media empire, but instead Fox News’s reporting of the febrile denouement to the Trump presidency and the January 6 insurrectionist storming of the US Capitol. In what is being portrayed as a David and Goliath clash between the billionaire and Crikey, a small Australian independent news website, Murdoch’s 40-page statement of claim alleges Crikey has falsely impugned he had illegally conspired with the former US president Donald Trump to “incite a mob with murderous intent” to march on the US Capitol on 6 January, and that he should…

THE ORIGINAL NASA PHOTOGRAPHIC FILM from the Apollo missions is some of the most important in existence. To maintain its condition, it is securely stored in a freezer in Building 8 at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. It never leaves the building – in fact, it rarely leaves the freezer. The images it contains include the most significant moments in our history, as humankind left our home planet for the first time. As the original film lay in its frozen vault for half a century, almost all the Apollo images made publicly available have been copies of master duplicates, or copies of copies, leading to a gradual degradation in quality that has only accelerated with the prevalence of digital representations online. In recent years, however, the original film has…

The property sector in the Chinese economy has always been a puzzle. At its peak, it accounted for a quarter of the nation’s economic output, broadly measured. And it sees people in Beijing and Shanghai paying house prices similar to those in San Francisco and New York, despite having just a quarter the income of US buyers. Now many believe we are about to see a violent contraction of the property market in China. The government wants to intervene to rein in what it calls the “three high” problem: high prices, high debt and high financialisation. The approach has been dramatic. Financing for property developers has tanked. Earlier this year, property sales declined by as much as 20-30%, in-progress developments are not being completed and people have taken to the…

In the paintings of Waanyi artist Gordon Hookey, armies of tough kangaroos and other native animals, such as possums, goannas, crocodiles and snakes, represent Australia’s Indigenous peoples. Invasive species such as cane toads and camels, meanwhile, “represent the ugliness of invasive peoples to our lands, country and culture”. The 61-year-old’s art is funnier than that might suggest and startling in its rowdy satire. Politicians are pigs in his paintings, which tend to be visual commentaries on land rights, deaths in custody and environmental degradation. English, to Hookey, is the colonisers’ language, and he takes liberties with playful puns and misspellings: “terrorists” become “terra-ists”, invoking the colonial myth that Australia was an unspoiled terra nullius, or land belonging to no one. “I don’t take my art seriously at all,” he says.…

Here is a novel inspired by a poem describing a painting portraying a young woman who actually lived. Art and artifice are intrinsic to it. In Maggie O’Farrell’s imagining of 16th-century Italian courtly life, manners make the man, clothes make the woman, and an image is more durable than a person. In 1558, Lucrezia, daughter of Cosimo de’ Medici, was married to Alfonso d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara. A year after entering her husband’s court in 1560, aged just 16, she died. Poison was suspected. Several portraits of Lucrezia survive. Nearly 300 years after her death, Robert Browning wrote My Last Duchess, a dramatic monologue in which Duke Alfonso displays a portrait of his late wife and allows the reader to deduce that – insanely jealous – he murdered her.…

1 CLIMATE CRISIS Sea-level rise caused by ice cap melting is ‘inevitable’ Major sea-level rise from the melting of the Greenland ice cap is now inevitable, scientists have found, even if the fossil fuel burning that is driving the climate crisis were to end overnight. The research shows the global heating to date will cause an absolute minimum sea-level rise of 27cm from Greenland alone as 110 trillion tonnes of ice melt. Billions of people live in coastal regions, making flooding one of the greatest long-term impacts of the climate crisis. If Greenland’s record melt year of 2012 becomes a routine occurrence later this century, the ice cap will deliver a “staggering” 78cm of sea-level rise, the scientists said. Previous studies have used computer models of ice cap behaviour to…

Steve Wilson is a little wind-swept after stepping off a rocking boat in choppy North Sea waters. Wilson is programme director of Seagreen, Scotland’s largest offshore windfarm, which last week began producing power. Wilson has just sailed an hour out to sea from Montrose, on the east coast of Scotland, with other local, interested parties. There, they witnessed a technician hop aboard one of the first turbines to feed power back to the mainland. The £3bn ($3.5bn) Seagreen project, a joint venture between SSE Renewables and France’s TotalEnergies, is located 27km off the Angus coast. It promises to generate 1.1 gigawatts of electricity – enough to power about 1m homes – in its first phase. That’s equivalent to about 60% of Scotland’s current offshore wind output. Its debut provides a…

In the midst of swamps of flood water, hundreds of people who fled one of the worst-hit districts of Pakistan pitched tents on the only high ground they could find – on the banks of the Saifullah Magsi canal. They had left the Jaffarabad region of Pakistan’s impoverished Balochistan province as a monsoon deluge swept away their homes and liveli-hoods. The Pakistani prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, visiting Jaffarabad on Sunday, was told that at least 75% of Balochistan, which covers half of Pakistan’s land area, was partially or completely affected by flooding. He called for help from the international community, and said: “We are facing devastation.” One of those on the banks of the canal was Jamali, 32, a student from Islamabad, who a few weeks ago had returned to…

Sanna Marin has been the focus of unusual – by Finnish standards – international attention ever since she became the world’s youngest prime minister at the age of 34 in December 2019. Not every Finnish prime minister makes the cover of Time or has their holidays reported on in Italian newspapers. Raised in modest circumstances by her mother and her mother’s female partner, Marin worked in her 20s as a cashier in a department store. Now, as well as prime minister, she is mother to a young child, has a social life and occasionally goes to festivals and parties. For the more conservative parts of society, all that seems hard to combine in one person. It was not only Marin who made headlines when she took office, but her whole…

Syrians across the opposition and in the Kurdish north of the country have reacted with alarm to Turkish moves to normalise relations with Damascus amid claims the overtures will lead to mass demographic swaps and the forced return of millions of refugees. The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, late last month added his voice to a growing chorus of officials who had markedly shifted rhetoric on the Syrian leader, Bashar al-Assad, claiming: “Political dialogue or diplomacy cannot be cut off between states.” He was followed by Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, who said Ankara would not set “conditions for dialogue” with Syria, being guided instead by achieving its goals. “The country needs to be cleared of terrorists … People need to be able to return.” The remarks were the clearest…

She travels Canada in a flagdraped RV with an entourage. She greets supporters in small towns, who eagerly film the encounters on mobile phones. She’s called on her disciples to execute healthcare workers and politicians who support mass vaccination campaigns. To her more than 60,000 followers online, she’s the newly installed Queen of Canada. But to law enforcement and national security officials, she represents the threat that online conspiracy theorists may be all too capable of inflicting real-world harm. Romana Didulo, a leader within a fringe QAnon-linked movement, has claimed sovereignty over Canada, gaining limited but growing popularity amid an erosion of trust in the country’s democratic and civil institutions. Last month, Didulo made headlines after her disciples attempted to make a “citizen’s arrest” of police officers in Peterborough, 300km…

In 1989, a group of Chinese government urban planners came to Europe on a fact-finding mission. They were praised for curbing car use – the country of 1 billion people had just a few million vehicles; the bicycle was king; its city streets were safe and the air mostly clean. How did they manage to have so few cars, asked their hosts, grappling with chaotic British streets, traffic jams and pollution. “But you don’t understand,” replied one of the delegation. “In 20 years, there will be no bicycles in China.” He was nearly right. China’s breakneck development has been led by mass car ownership. It now has 300m cars – and what was once the kingdom of bikes is now the land of 20-lane motorways, more than 100,000 petrol stations…

I used to have quite a lot of friends when I was younger, but for some reason I find friendships very difficult these days. I feel let down constantly. I feel I’m always there for other s, but get nothing in return. I have noticed that if I do not ask them questions, the conversation falls silent. I saw a good friend last week and told her that my partner and I are going through difficult times. She put her arm around me – but didn’t say or ask anything about it. I was stunned. When she was widowed we spent endless hours talking about her situation. I would not dare compare the death of one’s partner with my problems, but I never really talk about mine to her, precisely…

Make hay while sun shines: what foods can I cook now and store? What can I batch cook now and freeze to brighten mealtimes as the northern hemisphere heads into autumn? Steph, Stroud, England “Summer is really about fruit and veg, that’s what’s exciting at this time of year,” says Oli Brown, chefowner of Updown, a restaurant near Deal in Kent. And this can continue into the winter dearth if you stew (then freeze). “ You could make a big batch of caponata,” Brown suggests. “That would freeze for months. All you have to do is defrost, heat and maybe add a little more vinegar, olive oil and fresh herbs.” A good caponata hinges on “everything [the veg] being cut roughly the same size, so it all cooks at the…