Innehållsförteckning för 14 October 2022 från Guardian Weekly

On a crisp morning in Copenhagen, Amalienborg has the same air of stately permanence it must have had more than two centuries ago, when Christian VII became the first of Denmark’s rulers to make it his home. A crowd watches the changing of the guard. In the museum, an exhibition of Queen Margrethe’s jewellery marks her 50 years on the throne. It seems all is well in the House of Glücksborg. But behind the classical façades, Denmark’s popular royal family has been plunged into what experts describe as its most serious crisis in decades after Margrethe stripped the royal titles from her youngest son’s children. “It’s revealed a side of the family no one had ever seen,” said Helle Jørgensen, 66, visiting the museum. “They don’t actually seem able to…

For almost three decades it appeared to have been consigned to the scrap heap of history, a relic of East German communism considered redundant and unsightly, and destined to fall victim to the wrecking ball. But a former terrace cafe in the city of Potsdam, just west of Berlin, is being lauded as a showpiece of socialist realist architecture having been saved from demolition by a billionaire German businessman who has recast it as an art gallery. The Minsk Kunsthaus, or art house, will display Hasso Plattner’s extensive collection of East German art, a genre that has often been sidelined since the collapse of the GDR in 1989, but which is enjoying something of a revival. Elegant in its simplicity, the modernist construction – which was once a popular local…

There is good news and bad news. The good news is that, as you may have noticed, the world didn’t end on 4 July 1999. Hence the headline in the Guardian on Monday 5 July 1999: “Nostradamus wrong (please ignore if the world ended yesterday).” Writing 450 years earlier, the French astrologer seemed to have predicted the end in, for him, unusually date-specific terms: The year one thousand nine ninety-nine seven month/From the sky shall come a great King of terror/[Shall be] revived the great King of Angolmois. Before and after, Mars [shall] reign as chance will have it. The king of terror, Nostradamus’s interpreters suggested, was the antichrist. Others argued that, because Angolmois is a (near) anagram of Mongolais, the 16th-century French term for Mongolians, invasion of Europe from…

QUIZ Thomas Eaton 1 Which novel’s title alludes to the start of 15 August 1947? 2 The Sixth Yamaguchigumi is the largest group of what? 3 Which tennis player inspired the Bum Bum ice-cream? 4 Which writing system was once called “letters of the birds”? 5 Amália Rodrigues was the “queen” of which Iberian music style? 6 Bonxie is another name for which seabird? 7 What is the oldest university in Belgium? 8 A baby’s caul was said to protect against which fate? What links: 9 Ross; Filchner-Ronne; Amery; Larsen; Riiser-Larsen? 10 Lunatic; jovial; martial; mundane; venereal? 11 Commanders; Nationals; Capitals; Wizards? 12 Chevalier Rebsomen; Paul Wittgenstein; Rick Allen? 13 Martello; Palmerston; Maunsell? 14 WordPress; Wix; Squarespace? 15 Dunfermline Palace (I); St James’s Palace (II); Buckingham Palace (III)? Answers Quiz…

COMINS COCH Ceredigion, Wales The overnight rain was heavy but ceased abruptly, leaving only the sound of dripping trees as the cloud moved slowly away. In the early morning light, the hills beyond the valley are crisply outlined, the suddenly cold air washed clean to give clarity and contrast. Lines of dense mist drift in complex shapes across the valley floor, lifting and fading only as the sun rises. In the low sunshine, the points of dew scintillate on every blade of grass and spider’s web. Yet, however picturesque this might be, dewed grass still gives you cold, wet feet, along with a grumpy assertion that autumn’s approach is undeniable. Crossing into the next valley, I head across the hillside on the edge of the beech wood that abuts the…

Last Monday night, 16-year-old Elnaz sat at home in the Iranian city of Karaj and wept with shock and rage as she scrolled through social media posts about the death of Nika Shakarami. The 17-year-old schoolgirl was allegedly tortured and killed by Iran’s security forces as they try to suppress the protests that erupted after the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, allegedly beaten by police for infringing the hijab regulations. The next morning, Elnaz arrived at school to find a small group of friends gathered in the playground, pulling off their hijabs and shouting: “Death to the dictator.” “I was in tears when I saw the other girls standing together in protest and felt like I betrayed the memory of Nika by not doing more to express…

Shehbaz Sharif, the prime minister, has said Pakistan should not be forced to go out with a “begging bowl” to rich polluting nations after the floods that have devastated the country and said he would be seeking “climate justice” from the international community. Sharif warned that Pakistan faces an unprecedented crisis of health, food security and internal displacement after “apocalyptic” monsoons put a third of Pakistan’s regions under water. Some areas were hit by 1.7 metres of rainfall, the highest on record. Scientists have determined that the floods were due to climate break-down. But with Pakistan responsible for 0.8% of global carbon emissions, Sharif said it was the “responsibility of the developed countries, who caused these emissions, to stand by us”. “I’ve never seen this kind of devastation, inundation and…

Liz Truss is hoping her conference speech on “growth, growth, growth” last week will have set a new agenda for her party, drawing a line under the disastrous week of her U-turn over the 45p tax rate and 10 days of market turmoil after the mini-budget. However, there are multiple potential crises on the horizon. Here are some of the most difficult and intractable problems. The public finances Draft figures from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) on the state of the public finances should by now have landed on the desk of Kwasi Kwarteng, the chancellor. These will shine a light on whether and when it is realistic that promised tax cuts are likely to lead to higher growth. And they will give an indication of the impact of…

Every Sunday, about 100 or so women from teens to middle age meet in Parque Olímpico in Buenos Aires. Using flour, they mark out a court on the grass, to play a sport that brings them a little bit of home in their adopted country. Kickingball, a blend of football and baseball, is common across Venezuela, and the refugees who left the country during the political and economic implosion of Nicolás Maduro’s government are bringing it to Argentina. “This is like having a little piece of what’s yours here,” said María Gabriela Pratto, 29, one of the crowd watching Jacarandá take on Académicas. The financial analyst left Venezuela in 2020 because there was no work. She was 10 when she started playing kickingball, a variation of the US sport kickball,…

In late November, a top-level meeting of European science ministers will convene in Paris. Their job is to decide the next priorities for the European Space Agency (ESA), of which the UK is still a member, and one of the items on their list to consider is a proposal for testing the feasibility of building commercial power stations in orbit. These huge satellites would bask in the sunlight, converting it to power and beaming it down to Earth to be fed into the power grid. The proposed project, known as Solaris, would determine whether the idea can contribute to Europe’s future energy security – or if it is all still pie in the sky. If the study gets the go-ahead, it will be like coming home for the space industry,…

So King Charles won’t be going to Cop27, by order of Liz Truss; an inauspicious start for a monarch with pretensions to remain an influencer and be known as the first “green” king. But he should take heart: Truss may not be long for No 10, and Charles may look at recent events and conclude that no one listens to her anyway. If so, there are plenty of opportunities for him to turn the House of Windsor into an institution fit for an age of climate breakdown, poverty and deep inequalities. Ascent to the throne means no more speeches about emissions or off-the-cuff remarks about nature destruction. But his new position actually makes it easier for him to lobby prime ministers, even Truss while she lasts, at confidential weekly meetings…

What can we use beansprouts for, apart from in stir-fries? We never know what to do with the remaining beansprouts in a bag and usually end up composting them. Robin and Catherine, Leatherhead, England The downside to beansprouts is that they don’t last long. Happily, that crisp texture and grassy flavour is welcome in many more dishes than stir-fries. Before we get into that, it’s perhaps worth addressing how best to keep beansprouts, to prevent them from ending up in the compost bin prematurely. “The key is water, so the drier [the beansprouts], the better,” says Thuy Diem Pham, author of The Little Viet Kitchen. Beansprouts are grown in moist conditions where bacteria can grow, so you want to wash them thoroughly first, then leave to air dry (“for about…

1 RUSSIA Putin is making strategic errors, claims UK spy chief Vladimir Putin has made strategic errors in his pursuit of the war in Ukraine partly because there are so few restraints on his leadership, the head of the British spy agency GCHQ said in a speech on Tuesday. Russia’s soldiers are running out of supplies and munitions and initial gains are being reversed, Jeremy Fleming said. “Far from the inevitable Russian military victory that their propaganda machine spouted, it’s clear that Ukraine’s courageous action on the battlefield and in cyberspace is turning the tide,” he said. Focusing on Putin directly, Fleming said “with little effective internal challenge, his decisionmaking has proved flawed” and he has engaged in “a high-stakes strategy that is leading to strategic errors in judgment”. On…

‘Complete wipeout’ looms for party at next election Nadine Dorries has warned that the Conservatives could face “complete wipeout” at a general election and urged Liz Truss to stop being a “disrupter”, while a cabinet minister called on warring MPs to back the prime minister. After a week of bitter feuding overshadowed last week’s Tory party conference, Dorries, below, a former culture secretary under Boris Johnson, said Truss should “start engaging with the parliamentary party”. Despite some MPs plotting to oust their leader before Christmas, Dorries said there was “no process for that to happen” and that Graham Brady, the head of the 1922 Committee of backbenchers, should instead go to see her carrying an olive branch. It came as a major push by cabinet ministers to encourage unity was…

Shevchenko Park in central Kyiv is a tranquil public garden, where the trees are turning golden against the city’s blue, autumnal skies. Presiding over the park is a statue of Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine’s national poet, persecuted by the Russians in the 19th century for writing in Ukrainian. But on Monday that sense of calm was violently shattered when a series of missiles hit the city centre. War had returned to what had been, for several months, a mostly peaceful – if anxious – city. Russia had launched a massive wave of strikes targeting cities across Ukraine, including key civilian infrastructure, in what the Kremlin said was a response to an attack on the Kerch bridge linking Russia and Crimea. Ukraine’s emergency services said 1 9 people were killed and 105…

The 3Arena in Dublin has hosted U2, Mariah Carey, Britney Spears and Arcade Fire, but on 1 October, 5,000 people streamed in to watch a very different spectacle. The performers on stage were Irish politicians, from ruling and opposition parties, and all they did was talk. An energy pulsed through the auditorium because each speech articulated a collective wish, a wish once dismissed as hopeless fantasy, a pipe dream for sad ballads, and declared it alive with exhilarating possibility. The wish for a united Ireland. “Together, we look to an Ireland beyond partition,” Mary Lou McDonald, the leader of Sinn Féin, told the crowd. “We reimagine the future of our country, discuss our ideas for a united Ireland and a tomorrow that captures all the potential and immense opportunities for…

Hopes for quick relief for millions of civilians threatened by malnutrition, disease and attacks in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region were dashed last weekend as longawaited peace talks were postponed without any new date set. The meeting between the warring sides in the two-year-old conflict in Tigray would have been the first since a ceasefire broke down in late August. However, poor organisation, logistical issues and a failure to consult key participants in advance appear to have derailed the initiative by the African Union (AU), a body representing more than 50 countries on the continent. The conflict between the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), a political organisation that has ruled the region for decades, and Ethiopian central government forces began in November 2020. Federal forces are supported by troops from neighbouring…

Raucous music was played, bellicose speeches were given and big lies were told. Donald Trump held his 20th and 21st campaign rallies of the year in Nevada and Arizona last weekend, urging voters to support Republican candidates in the midterm elections. Joe Biden was relaxing at home in Delaware. The 45th and 46th US presidents have always been like chalk and cheese, and those differences extend to how they approach next month’s crucial vote to determine control of Congress and three dozen state governorships. Trump is pressing on with the mass rallies in small towns or rural areas that have been a hallmark of his political career since 2015. Biden is likely to hold rallies of his own as election day approaches but has so far focused on smaller, more…

Last week, having whiled away two joyous days at the Tories’ conference in Birmingham, I spent a long afternoon an hour’s drive away, in the cathedral city of Worcester. The plan was to sample the mood of the kind of place once considered to hold the key to British elections. But I was also there to gather more evidence of how much the UK’s current woes are affecting the kind of average-to-affluent places that might once have weathered any economic storm. Not entirely surprisingly, people said they were worried and scared. Some talked about grownup children suddenly terrified that a mortgage is beyond their reach; others described a new and unsettling habit of using sparing amounts of gas and electricity. The increasingly awful mood music – from talk of cancelled…

The impressive control room A feels like Chornobyl crossed with the Titanic IN 1983, THE YEAR BATTERSEA POWER STATION WAS DECOMMISSIONED, the radical architect Cedric Price drew up a provocative proposal for what to do with the gargantuan brick hulk. The London building’s silhouette of four slender white chimneys rising from the stepped art deco brick rooftop was the real icon on the skyline, he reasoned, so why not just save that and do away with the rest? He christened his surrealist proposition the Bat Hat and sketched out how it could all be held aloft on great steel supports, freeing the land below for housing. “We have divested the existing building of all that froze the immediate site,” Price wrote, “leaving only that which is considered important – its…

The protagonist of William Boyd’s new novel claims he is “not a gregarious traveller”. But like his creator – the author of 16 previous novels, five shortstory collections, some nonfiction and several stage plays – Cashel Greville Ross covers great distances. His inclinations towards aloneness mingle with his restless, romantic nature to send him from his birth in County Cork, Ireland, in 1799 to Oxford, London, Brussels and Zanzibar. As part of the East Indian Army in Sri Lanka, Cashel finds himself questioning his own ethics. As a guest of the Romantic poets in Pisa, he finds himself adrift in his own libido. Along the way, trapped by “the vocabulary of sightseeing”, Cashel sometimes succumbs to every travel writer’s worst fear: “He was finding it hard to be original.” But…