Innehållsförteckning för 30 September 2022 från Guardian Weekly

As Vladimir Putin’s war effort in Ukraine faltered badly, the Russian president turned decisively away from any hope of peace. A sudden mass mobilisation of Russian men led to rare instances of protest across the country and long queues of would-be conscripts at the borders. Simultaneously, Russia sought to legitimise its territorial gains in Ukraine with hastily arranged “referendums” and nuclear threats against the west. It feels like Putin has staked everything on triumph or disaster, as depicted by Pete Reynolds’s cover art this week. “With Putin it seems to become all about the eyes,” he says. “His nose, mouth, the arrangement of the features all seem to be the obvious descriptors of his face but his eyes always end up being the focus and challenge. And they insist on…

ARCHAEOLOGY Traces of opium found in 3,500-year-old pottery Israeli archaeologists have discovered opium residue in 3,500-year-old pottery pieces, providing evidence to support the theory that the hallucinogenic drug was used in ancient burial rituals. Excavations in the central Israeli town of Yehud revealed a series of late bronze-age graves. Vessels at the site that resembled poppy flowers – from which opium is derived – dating to the 14th century BC and found “opium residue in eight vessels”, the researchers said. SPACE Asteroid dust found to contain drop of water Specks of dust that a Japanese space probe retrieved from an asteroid about 300m km from Earth have revealed a surprising component: a drop of water. The discovery offers new support for the theory that life on Earth may have been…

As the European political elite responded with shocked silence, and then horror, to the stunning Italian election victory of Giorgia Meloni, congratulations poured in from resurgent nationalists, hailing a decisive and irreversible turning point in European politics that spells deep problems for the European project. For the Hungarian president, Viktor Orbán, and for Vox, the Spanish far-right party that can only dream of emulating Meloni’s victory in the Spanish polls next year, a path to a sovereign Europe had been opened. Marine Le Pen, her party installed as the leaders of the opposition in the French parliament, said the Italian people “have decided to take their destiny in their hands by electing a patriotic and sovereign government”. In Stockholm, Jimmie Åkesson, the leader of the far-right Sweden Democrats, with 62…

More than 4,000km and an ideological abyss separate the capitals of Nicaragua and Brazil, where an acrimonious race for the presidency is under way. But the Central American country has found itself at the centre of Brazil’s election debate as its far-right incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, seeks to weaponise Daniel Ortega’s authoritarian crackdown on the Catholic church to attack his leftist challenger, the former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Bolsonaro has repeatedly cited Ortega’s anti-clergy offensive in the run-up to Brazil’s 2 October vote, hoping to convince God-fearing voters Lula’s return to power would result in similar persecution. Last week Bolsonaro hammered home his message at the UN general assembly, declaring: “I want to announce that Brazil will open its doors to receive the Catholic priests and nuns who have…

On a small stage in Tulkarm, a city in the north of the occupied West Bank, Sherihan El Hadwa emerges from the wings to a Palestinian pop song. Dancing and waving the long white cane she uses to navigate the world, the visually impaired comedian already has her audience laughing and clapping along to the music. Hadwa did not have an obvious route into standup comedy, and the many difficulties of life as a disabled woman in the Palestinian territories are not, on the face it, funny. But in her mostly autobiographical debut show, No Cherie, Hadwa challeng es lazy narratives about victimhood – and has won fans and accolades all over Palestine in the process. Jokes and anecdotes mainly focus on the absurdities of getting around Palestinian society as…

Hours after the arrest earlier this month of a fugitive wanted in connection with the stabbing deaths of 11 people, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police hastily called a press conference to announce that Myles Sanderson was “no longer a threat” to the public. But as RCMP assistant commissioner Rhonda Blackmore described the four-day manhunt, she omitted a critical detail: Sanderson, who had been taken into custody alive, was already dead. It was nearly five minutes after announcing his arrest that Blackmore added that Sanderson had died after he went into “medical distress” and was transported to hospital. Reporters covering the press conference were in disbelief. “I have never seen a more egregious case of burying the lede,” tweeted Siobhan Morris of CTV News. After two mass killings in two years…

Since 1978 Ray Fair, professor of Economics at Yale University, has been using economic data to predict US election outcomes. His bare-boned, strictly-by-the-numbers approach has a fairly impressive record, usually coming within 3% of the final tally. Sadly for Democrats – if Fair’s on track again this time – the Biden administration will struggle to keep control of Congress in November’s crucial midterm elections. Elections are noisy events and this year’s is no different. Recent polling suggests Joe Biden is on a roll, reclaiming some of the ground he lost earlier in his presidency. The Democrats have passed major legislation. There has been a surge in women registering to vote after the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade. Abortion rights drove voters to the polls in deep-red Kansas. Petrol prices,…

JUNGLE IS NOT THE MOST CONVENTIONAL TV SHOW YOU’LL EVER WATCH. In one sense, it’s is a spiritual successor to the likes of Top Boy, given its gun-toting storylines and cast whose crime-based livelihoods circle London’s drug trade. But it’s also a musical – British TV’s first drill musical, in fact – and the bulk of the actors are prominent UK drill and grime MCs. It’s also set in a sci-fi alternate reality where England’s capital is full of fictional technology like under-skin watches, cars with barcodes for licence plates and cops armed with electrified billy clubs. If you had to give it a genre, it would be crime-fi-rap-opera. “We didn’t just want to make a typical gangster drama,” says Jungle co-creator Junior Okoli. “Congratulations to all the productions before…

This six-part series doesn’t have it easy. How do you make the 18-day Tham Luang Nang Non ordeal captivating when the story of a dozen adolescent to teen soccer players and their coach trapped deep inside the flooded cave system in 2018 has been told over and over? The drama series, created by Michael Russell Gunn and Dana Ledoux Miller, is not quite as elegant and gripping as Ron Howard’s movie, Thirteen Lives, but is the more exhaustive, melodramatic and occasionally heavy-handed telling. It has one crucial ingredient the movies don’t: it’s told from the soccer team’s perspective. We get to know the players, their families and the emotional baggage they carried with them deep into that cave. And the story is told with a sensitivity to local nuances thanks…

Since retiring, I’ve been a volunteer in a museum. Nearly seven years ago, I started a relationship with one of the other volunteers, X, who is a bit younger, not married but living with someone for a long time, and has no children. I have two wonderful adult children, and have not been in an intimate relationship since my painful divorce 20 years ago, after a difficult marriage. X and I share many passions and intellectual interests and our relationship has become intense and sexually adventurous. His partner must be aware of the affair, but they continue to stay together. He says they don’t have sex. Over the years X has been thoughtful, loving and generous, but guarded. He only expresses his emotions during sex or when prompted. We have…

Prep 30 min Soak 12 hr+ Cook 2hr 25 min Serves 4-6 • GLUTEN FREE You need to soak the chickpeas, so plan ahead. If you like, make the feta without the parsley, cover it with more oil, and keep in a sterilised jar in the fridge for up to a week, for spooning over salads or soups. To make the dish vegan, swap the feta for a non-dairy alternative. Ingredients 300g dried chickpeas, soaked overnight in cold water with 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda1 onion, peeled (150g)6 garlic cloves, peeled25g fresh ginger, peeled1 large green chilli4½ tbsp (15g) fresh coriander, chopped2 tbsp olive oil1½ tsp ground cumin1½ tsp ground cinnamon2 medjool dates skinned, pitted and chopped (40g)1 tbsp tomato paste4 carrots (500g) peeled and cut at an angle into…

The sky was intermittently blue and weak sunshine sparked a faint chorus of grasshoppers. Otherwise, this was a landscape wrung dry of all summer and the grasses were grey, the thistles dead. The only sounds were the notes of young buzzards, suffused with a sense of melancholy. There were seven birds – adults and immatures – careering at one another in mock squabbles, or they would flap with deep rhythmic wingbeats, before paddling up on the bluffs of warm air. Perhaps it was the way their movements perturbed the currents, but 50 house martins and swallows circulated among them. It was a glorious gyre of different flight modes. Then I spotted the swift. It must have been a lone Scottish breeder or a Scandinavian migrant drifted to these islands, alone…

In a secluded valley in southern Chile, a lone alerce tree stands above the canopy of an ancient forest. Green shoots sprout from the crevices in its thick, dark trunks, huddled like the pipes of a great cathedral organ, and water streams down its lichen-streaked bark on to the forest floor from bulbous knots in the wood. “It was like a waterfall of green, a great presence before me,” said the climate scientist Jonathan Barichivich, 41, of the first time he encountered the Gran Abuelo, or “great-grandfather”, tree as a child. Barichivich grew up in Alerce Costero national park, 800km south of the capital, Santiago. It is home to hundreds of alerces, Fitzroya cupressoides, slow-growing conifers native to the cold, wet valleys of the southern Andes. “I never thought about…

When Qatar’s national football team kicks off the World Cup finals against Ecuador at Al Bayt stadium on 20 November, fans watching around the world will get their first glimpse of a stunning 60,000-seat arena built to resemble a nomadic tent. The stadium, arguably Qatar’s finest, will host matches through to the semi-finals, including group stage games involving the likes of England, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands. Just as impressive is the pristine park surrounding the stadium. Manicured lawns are dotted with fountains, streams and a lake. Ducks play in the cool water. A running track winds its way around the stadium passing immaculate training pitches with grass like a putting green. Yet the men who labour day after day in the relentless heat and humidity to maintain this remarkable…

The death of Dame Hilary Mantel brings an end to one of the most remarkable literary careers of the past half century. Her great historical trilogy, Wolf Hall, earned her two Booker prizes, dominating the cultural landscape of the early 21st century – on page, stage and television – for almost as long as her protagonist, Thomas Cromwell, reigned over the political one of the 16th. She gave readers permission to look afresh at this most overworked period of history: not only at Cromwell himself, who was previously mainly known as the portly subject of a sombre Holbein portrait, but Henry VIII and all of the courtiers who surrounded him. Her scepticism about the saintliness of Sir Thomas More ruffled more than a few feathers. However, nobody could fault the…

Astonishments and violences fill the Royal Academy’s survey show of Johannesburg-born artist William Kentridge. Glimpses of hangings and torture, sex in the pool, old footage of a white hunter skipping towards the rhino he has just downed. Snatches of crackly operatic aria, lilting African song and paranoid voices on the telephone fill the air, along with the regular chink of a miner’s hammer against a rock. Kentridge’s show is filled with sounds and furies. Now in his late 60s, Kentridge spent more than half his life living under apartheid. The system itself, and the complications of its aftermath, have been his key subjects. The show includes animations, filmed performance and sculpture. Some motifs recur throughout – the megaphone, the stove-top coffee pot, the old-fashioned typewriter, the camera, trees and leaves…

Orhan Pamuk likes to play new games. Every one of his books differs markedly from the others, yet each shares a capacity for disconcerting the reader. This one is long and intellectually capacious. It tackles big subjects: nationalism and the way nations are imagined into being; ethnic and religious conflict; the decline of an empire; the political repercussions of a pandemic. It includes many deaths. Yet, for all the weight of its subject matter, its tone is lightly ironic, arch, even flippant. It has many flaws. It is repetitive; it contains far too much exposition. All the same – in terms of content – it is one of the most interesting books I’ve read this year. In 1901, a man in a major’s uniform steps on to the balcony of…

QUIZ Thomas Eaton 1 Who inspired the Daily Worker headline “A Communist in Space”? 2 Which society was divided into jarls, karls and thralls? 3 Whose earnings would be paid into a Coogan account? 4 What is Europe’s largest wild cat? 5 Tropicália was a 1960s artistic movement in which country? 6 Who has co-written thrillers with Bill Clinton and Dolly Parton? 7 What Basque game is the fastest moving ball sport? 8 What was officially opened by pilot Amy Johnson in Skegness in 1936? What links: 9 Rex Ingram; Robin Williams; Will Smith; Idris Elba? 10 Bulbasaur (1); Pikachu (25); Vulpix (37); Golem (76)? 11 Cy Young; Hank Aaron; Gold Glove; Silver Slugger? 12 Ascending; transverse; descending; sigmoid? 13 Simien; Rwenzori; Atlas; Drakensberg? 14 Pink; Anderson Paak; HearSay; Godspeed…

Hilary Mantel Celebrated author of the Wolf Hall trilogy and double Booker prize-winner. She died on 22 September, aged 70. The Guardian View, page 49 Louise Fletcher Actor who won an Oscar for her role as Nurse Ratched in the 1975 film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. She died on 23 September, aged 88. John Hamblin Host of Australian TV’s children’s show Play School for nearly 30 years. He died on 21 September, aged 87. Pharoah Sanders Jazz saxophonist known for his unique playing style and collaborations with John Coltrane. He died on 24 September, aged 81. Valery Polyakov Cosmonaut who holds the record for the longest single stay in space – 437 days aboard the Mir space station. He died on 7 September, aged 80.…

The opening of a new big-name Bollywood film was once a national event across India, greeted by weeks of fanfare, long queues outside cinemas and halls packed to the rafters with audiences cheering and singing along. But this year, with 77% of releases flopping at the box office, cinema halls have been left eerily quiet and Bollywood’s once unshakeable domination of the Indian film industry has begun to look uncertain. “This year has been extremely poor for the Hindi film industry as far as the box office is concerned,” said Sumit Kadel, a film trade analyst in India. He said there had been only three or four hit films, while everything else had bombed – a disaster for an industry that relies on at least 10 big box office smashes…

What is salient is not important. What is important is not salient. Most of the time, most of the media obsesses over issues of mind-numbing triviality. Much political journalism is little more than court gossip: who’s in, who’s out, who said what to whom. Issues of immense, even existential importance are largely or entirely ignored. With the exception of all-out nuclear war, all the most important issues that confront us are environmental. None of our hopes, none of our dreams can survive the loss of a habitable planet. And there is scarcely an Earth system that is not now threatened with collapse. Let’s begin with the ground beneath our feet. Soil is biological, created by the organisms that inhabit it. When conditions become hostile, the structure collapses, and fertile lands…

Penalties being sought in the civil fraud suit brought last week by the New York state attorney general’s office against Donald Trump and three of his adult children could result in the end of the Trump Organization, his real estate empire, in its current form. The former US president, as well as Donald Trump Jr, Ivanka Trump and Eric Trump, were named as defendants in a sprawling 214-page complaint filed by New York attorney general Letitia James for allegedly falsely inflating his net worth by billions to enrich himself and secure favourable loans. The restrictions being sought by James include permanent bans on Trump and his three children from serving as executives in any company in New York, a move that would tear the Trump Organization away from his personal…

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Margo Price was 19 when she decided to drop out of college and make music instead. She had taken some mushrooms and had a psychedelic epiphany about her future that she likens to “a conversation with God”. Full of optimism, she moved from small-town Illinois to Nashville. It would take 14 years for Price to land a record deal. In that time, she busked, worked as a waitress and taught dance to children. She endured grinding poverty, often subsisting on one meal a day and, at one point, slept in a tent. So what kept her going? “I was pretty stubborn,” the alt-country star recalls. Price, 39, has documented her struggle in a vivid and poignant memoir, Maybe We’ll Make It. She was inspired, in part, by Patti Smith’s book…