Innehållsförteckning för 23 September 2022 från Guardian Weekly

End of the road A resident inspects the damaged Gaoliao bridge that collapsed after a magnitude 6.9 earthquake hit Yuli Township, in Hualien County, last Sunday. At least one person died after a series of earthquakes and aftershocks caused structural damage, left 400 tourists stranded on a mountain and derailed a train in eastern Taiwan. The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol207 | Issue№ 13 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…

No US trade deal in sight, admits prime minister Britain may not strike a free trade deal with the US for years, Liz Truss admitted ahead of her first bilateral meeting with Joe Biden. The new prime minister conceded that talks were unlikely to start in the “medium term” as she travelled to New York on Monday night for her first foreign trip since entering Downing Street. She downplayed expectations that any trade agreement was imminent amid concerns that overpromising but then failing to get talks off the ground would damage her nascent administration. Truss told reporters: “There aren’t currently any negotiations taking place with the US and I don’t have any expectation that those are going to start in the short to medium term.” It is the first time…

The rout of the Russian army in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region seems likely to be a turning point in Kyiv’s battle to kick Russian troops out of the country, but it may also cause much broader fall-out for Moscow in the wider region, as other former Soviet countries wit-ness what appears to be the limits of Moscow’s capabilities. “The power of the Russian flag has declined considerably, and the security system across the former Soviet space does seem to be broken,” said Laurence Broers, an associate fellow at Chatham House. With attention focused across the Black Sea in Ukraine, fighting on the border between Azerbaijan and Armenia last week killed about 100 troops after Azerbaijan shelled towns in Armenia, with both sides accusing each other of “provocations”. Analysts said Azerbaijan had…

China faces a health emergency from “hidden epidemics’’ of diseases such as cancer, heart trouble and diabetes that could have far-reaching social, economic and demographic consequences for the world’s most populous nation, experts have warned. Although China imposed the world’s strictest lockdowns to protect its people from Covid-19, the deadly impact from non-communicable diseases is much less well understood and threatens to kill tens of millions of Chinese in the coming decades with-out tougher public health policies. China has been transformed in recent decades by an economic miracle that has seen rapid industrialisation and the transfer of hundreds of millions of people from the countryside to towns and cities. This enormous change has lifted multitudes out of poverty and given them a better standard of living. But along with higher…

The vast collections of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington contain two wooden chairs. Their backs have labels explaining they were used by John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon in “the first face-to-face discussion between presidential candidates” at the CBS television studio in Chicago in 1960. In short, the first televised debate of presidential candidates. But heading into the US midterm elections, the debate appears to be in decline. For many Republicans, ducking debates is a way to express disdain for a national media that the former president Donald Trump has derided as peddling “fake news” and “the enemy of the people”. Some Democrats refuse to share a platform with Republican election deniers peddling baseless conspiracy theories. In Arizona, for example, Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Katie Hobbs has declined a debate with…

GEORGE MONBIOT Truss preaches a toxic gospel of economics Page 48 → The Ukrainians have (again) done what nobody believed they could. They have (again) defeated the supposedly mighty Russia on the battlefield, and shown up the underlying incompetence and moral rot of the Putin system. It took them just six days to take back whole swathes of territory in north-eastern Ukraine that it took Russia six months to conquer. The Russian military, political and propaganda elites are all blaming each other: rifts that usually rumble under the surface are now visible to all. Putin looks shaken. Now it’s time for us to act as well. Not just by increasing help to Ukraine on the battlefield, but also by advancing along the other fronts in this conflict: energy, information, finance…

The last great 20th-century modernist is dead. Jean-Luc Godard was at first hero-worshipped and adored and then shrugged at and yawned at: as unthinkingly mocked and jeered at as he was once unthinkingly swooned over. He was influential in the sense that the French New Wave shook up Hollywood and all film-makers. Godard, who died on 13 September aged 91, exploded on to world cinema with À Bout de Souffle, or Breathless, in 1960, from a treatment by François Truffaut, the story of a young American girl in Paris, played by Hollywood star Jean Seberg, and her doomed affair with a sexy tough guy on the run, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo. Godard tore up the rule book without troubling to read it: his wild digressions, offbeat dialogue scenes, vérité location…

There was a brief time, from the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, when even quite sensible people wondered whether major wars might become a thing of the past. This proved to be ludicrously wrong, of course. Since the late 1990s our age has been largely defined by war, beginning with Chechnya and the former Yugoslavia and intensifying with 9/11 and the decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Now, after Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine, we’re experiencing the scary feeling that nuclear war might be a real possibility, once again. And the Ukraine war is forcing us to ask the old, old question: whose finger is really on the trigger? Are the politicians or the generals in charge? The dictators…

Small, sensitive of constitution and with only 130 breeding pairs surviving locally in the wild, the lesser spotted eagle of the Oder delta lives up to its name. In Germany, questions over energy generation hang on whether artificial intelligence systems can do a better job of spotting the reclusive bird of prey than birdwatchers. Lesser spotted eagles (named after the drop-shaped spots on their feathers) are fond of riding thermals over many of the flatlands earmarked for a mass expansion of onshore wind-farms by a government under pressure to compensate for the loss of nuclear power, coal plants and Russian gas. Because lesser spotted eagles in mid-flight are unused to vertical obstacles, and keep their eyes focused on mice, lizard or frog-shaped prey below, conservationists say, they are known to…

The Ōse Winery sits in pristine forest carved into a hillside, surrounded by fields. On a recent afternoon, a gentle breeze took the sting out of the late summer heat, and the vines were heavy with ripening grapes. As Japanese terroir goes, it is hard to imagine a more idyllic location. The winery’s products have won awards, yet it faces an unenviable marketing challenge: every grape, apple, Asian pear and peach that goes into its wine, cider, calvados and liqueurs is grown locally, in Fukushima. In the aftermath of the March 2011 disaster at Fukushima Daiichi, more than 50 countries and regions stopped importing produce from the region. Fishing near the stricken nuclear plant was banned, and farmers were told not to grow rice and to euthanise their cattle. It…

'Helg… seger!” shouts Rebecka Fallenkvist, raising one arm in a seeming salute to the camera. It is the evening of Sunday 11 September, and the 26-year-old politician from the far-right Sweden Democrats is being interviewed, champagne glass in hand. Her party had just become the second-largest in parliament, gaining more than 20% of the votes. A few days later the Social Democratic prime minister, Magdalena Andersson, resigned, conceding defeat to the rightwing bloc. Although its partnering parties have said they wish to keep the cabinet seats to themselves, a far-right party will have considerable influence over government for the first time ever in Swedish history. And these are hardly your “ordinary” anti-immigrant populists. The Sweden Democrats has its roots in the neo-Nazi movement from only 30 years ago. Fallenkvist called…

WRITE TOUS Letters for publication weekly.letters@theguardian.com Please include a full postal address and a reference to the article. We may edit letters. Submission and publication of all letters is subject to our terms and conditions, see: THEGUARDIAN.COM/LETTERS-TERMS Editorial Editor: Graham Snowdon Guardian Weekly, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU, UK To contact the editor directly: editorial.feedback@theguardian.com Corrections Our policy is to correct significant errors as soon as possible. Please write to guardian.readers@theguardian.com or the readers’ editor, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU, UK Royal handover should prompt debate on reform The death of the Queen is a momentous event. She was a great lady and rightly respected the world over (16 September). Now, inevitably, we must look to the future – for the monarchy and our…

A sulphurous drollery animates Shrines of Gaiety, Kate Atkinson’s ensemble portrait of Soho’s underworld between the wars. It continues a run of novels – Life After Life, A God in Ruins, Transcription – that put a quirkily self-conscious spin on period drama, their focus much sharper on the intricacies of character than the forces of history. But Atkinson is an expert juggler of both. The year is 1926. Nellie Coker, matriarch and nightclub proprietor, has just been released from a six-month stretch in Holloway. Educated in Paris, widowed in Edinburgh, Nellie flourished in London after an ill-gotten windfall from a deceased landlady who happened to be a gangland fence. She manages her six children with the same impersonal efficiency as she runs the business, the Amethyst being the “gaudy jewel”…

1 Whose only tennis singles defeat in 1983 was to Kathy Horvath? 2 Radioactive element americium is used in what household device? 3 Which list of vices was enumerated by Pope Gregory I? 4 Which US president grew up speaking Dutch? 5 What literary genre is cli-fi? 6 Which animals float on their backs in “rafts”? 7 Lamarckism is a discredited theory of what? 8 What chimes can sound for no more than 12 seconds at a time? What links: 9 Wu-Tang Clan’s Once Upon a Time in Shaolin; Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind, 2022? 10 Harvard University; British Museum; Millennium Dome? 11 Grave; macron; ogonek; tilde? 12 Mary’s room; veil of ignorance; trolley problem; brain in a vat? 13 Japanese spider; coconut; red king; Tasmanian giant? 14 Jean…

At the onset of autumn, the pinks and purples of bell heather and ling, with the bright yellow of gorse, continue to colour rough land on Kit Hill. Below and all around this vantage point, cattle and sheep are scattered across the patchwork of pastures, interspersed with pale brown stubble of valuable grain and straw, taken back to barns for winter keep; enclaves of fodder beet and maize have still to be harvested. The ferns here, including bracken, withered in the summer heat, hazel dropped yellowing leaves early, and bushy growth was subject to powdery mould. Undersides of fading oak leaves are studded with spangle galls (like miniature flying saucers), awaiting leaf-drop and the next stage of development into tiny wasps. Before the first deluge of proper rain, a few…

Across 1 The Indian film industry (9) 8 One thirty-sixth of a yard (4) 9 Church gallery for a large keyboard instrument (5,4) 10 Indistinct representation (4) 13 Subdued (5) 15 Shout aimed at the umpire (6) 16 Comfy and warm (6) 17 Short light sleep (6) 19 Light clear red colour (6) 20 Gum boot (informal) (5) 21 Hurt (4) 24 Observance of proprieties (9) 25 Tizzy – exasperated sigh (4) 26 Sleeping policeman (5,4) Down 2 Brute (4) 3 Common sense (informal) (4) 4 Hard dark-brown wood used in making furniture (6) 5 Counteract (6) 6 Cite snail (anag) (9) 7 A fruity colour? (6,3) 11 Latin American dance (3-3-3) 12 Deactivate, eg an engine (6,3) 13 Large and showy Central and South American parrot (5) 14 Youngest…

1 CORONAVIRUS End of the pandemic is ‘in sight’, say WHO and Biden The end of the Covid-19 pandemic is “in sight”, the World Health Organization declared, after revealing that weekly deaths from the virus around the world were at the lowest level since March 2020, when national lockdowns began in many countries across the globe. The weekly global deaths figure on 5 September was 11,118, according to the WHO’s website. The WHO also estimated that 19.8m deaths were averted in 2021 due to Covid-19 vaccines being administered and that 12bn doses had been given around the world. Joe Biden also said “the pandemic is over” in an interview broadcast last Sunday, though he admitted “we still have a problem with Covid”, as the US continues to grapple with infections…

The men digging in the dusty ground looked visibly sickened by the gruesome task they had been given. The rotted bodies were mangled and the smell poisoned the fresh forest air. One corpse had a rope around the neck. Those on a break mostly stood with their spades and goggles, looking on at their colleagues from the state rescue services who were red in the face from the hard labour of tugging the bodies out of the graves and sweating in their blue plastic overalls. In woods a few kilometres from the centre of Izium, the north-eastern Ukrainian town recaptured by Kyiv earlier this month, hundreds of police detectives, prosecutors, forensic doctors and journalists gathered at the site of burials revealed after the Russian retreat. “We have found 445 graves…

It was a scene that could have been plucked from Brazil’s history books: an enraptured crowd, a sea of flags and, on stage above them, a bearded leftist in a bright red shirt. “The president of hope is here!” the master of ceremonies roared as the star of the show arrived in a police convoy to address the people whose country he is promising to save. As their champion came into view, the throng chanted a refrain from old times: “Olê, olê, olê, olá, Lula, Lula!” Virtually identical spectacles played out two decades ago as Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva prepared to claim a momentous election victory in 2002 that would make him the first working-class president of one of the world’s most unequal nations. But this was September 2022…

Some of the trees in Akkar province are more than 100 years old, says Mohammed Abdallah. A refugee from the war in Syria, Abdallah has come to know the forests of northern Lebanon well and has recently spent days putting out a persistent blaze that threatened ancient woodland near Qabeit. He is one of 80 men and women of the First Responders team of Jurd al-Qayteh, drawn from 15 villages in Akkar, the region’s largest volunteer firefighting unit. Wildfires have been responsible for 26% of the tree lost in Lebanon over the past 20 years. Rising temperatures and poor forest management have contributed to an increase this year in a season that lasts about 18 weeks through to late September. With the country in economic crisis, emergency services are in…

It’s 1am on the west coast of America, but the Emerald Cloud Lab, just south of San Francisco, is still busy. Here, more than 100 items of high-end bioscience equipment whirr away on workbenches largely unmanned, 24 hours a day and seven days a week, performing experiments for researchers from around the world. I’m “visiting” via the camera on a chest-high telepresence robot, being driven round the 1,400 sq metre lab by Emerald’s CEO, Brian Frezza, who is also sitting at home. There are no actual scientists anywhere, just a few staff in blue coats quietly following instructions from screens on their trolleys, ensuring the instruments are loaded with reagents and samples. Cloud labs mean anybody, anywhere, can conduct experiments by remote control, using nothing more than their web browser.…

Harry Jho worked out of a 10th-storey Wall Street office, in which one corner was stacked with treadmill desks and another was filled with racks of colourful costumes and a green screen for filming nursery rhymes. He worked as a securities lawyer. With his wife, Sona, Jho also ran Mother Goose Club, a YouTube media empire. Sona had produced short children’s segments for public-access TV stations before the couple decided to branch out on their own. As educators – the Jhos once taught English in Korea – they saw television’s pedagogical flaws. To learn words, kids should see lips move, but Barney’s mouth never did. Baby Einstein mostly showed toys. The Jhos, who were Korean American, had two young children, and noticed how few faces on kids’ TV looked like…

Soon, the focus will return, and the collapse of many people’s economic prospects will dominate once more. As winter approaches, it will become clear that our politics is spectacularly lacking in answers. Why? Because the doctrine destroying our condition of life is the doctrine Liz Truss has promised to extend to new extremes. She is fanatically devoted to an ideology misleadingly called Thatcherism or Reaganism (as if they invented it), but more accurately described as neoliberalism. This doctrine insists that politics submits to “the market”, which means, when translated, that democracy must submit to the power of money. Any impediment to the accumulation of wealth – such as public ownership, regulation, unions and protest – should be torn down. For 40 years or so, neoliberalism in the UK has been…

What kitchen tasks are microwaves useful for? Mark, Durham, England, UK According to a study by energy firm Utilita, microwaves at current UK energy prices typically cost 8p a day to use, compared with 87p for an electric cooker, so they are a wise choice in these tight-belted times. Besides defrosting, reheating and melting things such as butter and chocolate, you could also cook veg in one. “It’s my preferred method,” says chef Tim Anderson, whose latest book, JapanEasy Bowls & Bento, is out next month. “You retain flavour, colour, texture, and can fine-tune the cooking to the second. Green vegetables such as broccoli, green beans, asparagus, mange tout and spinach are fantastic,” he says. Ben Tish, chef director of the Cubitt House group in London, agrees: “Put green, leafy…

Across 1 City diner hosting retirement of current medic (7) 5 Physical border, which the sun doesn’t cross (3,4) 9 Feel cargo gets damaged by such wind (4-5) 10 Spotted returning, carrying daughter’s essentials (5) 11 One way to get slimmed down parliament (4) 12 County stores let rector inside (10) 14 One may be roasted from exercise with a fanatic (6) 15 Eccentric uncle working to find subatomic particle (7) 16 Not many screwed up? Quite the opposite (7) 18 In the middle of town, diners cursed the proprietors (6) 20 Will plot fail if it doesn’t go off? (6,4) 21 Loose violin section repels composer (4) 24 Tip for cooking tough vegetable (5) 25 It stores images showing popular pair of beastly males (9) 26 Prove setter perhaps…