Innehållsförteckning för 2 December 2022 från Guardian Weekly

The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol 207 | Issue? 23 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.…

Just five weeks after being elected to a historic third term, President Xi Jinping suddenly faces cracks in the facade of unchallenged authority that he so successfully presented to the world at the 20th national congress of the Chinese Communist party. For groups of protesters, apparently without central coordination, to take to the streets across China and to social media, and for some then to call for Xi and the Communist party to stand aside, is a seismic shock. The echoes with Iran are superficially present, even if the two political cultures and the proximate causes of the unrest are entirely different. Equally the rush to compare these protests with those of 1989 is tempting, but wrong, as it has been previously during numerous bouts of dissent over the last…

Wet and bedraggled on a rainswept November day, Badr is one of dozens of men who have arrived to pick up a tent and a sleeping bag from a charity operating out of a van in a car park in Calais. The 22-year-old from Syria has been in Calais more than a week, and his previous tent was taken by police four days ago. After that he slept under a footbridge, huddled with six others for warmth. It is a year since at least 27 people were drowned when their boat capsized in the Channel, the worst disaster for 30 years. But while such a tragedy has mercifully not been repeated, partly thanks to better coordination between French and British coastguards, at first sight there is little other change in…

Along a windswept ridge line on Wellington’s south coast, above the pounding sea and in the shadows of whirring wind turbines, 11 kiwi – New Zealand’s treasured national bird – are making themselves at home for the first time in generations. The flightless birds endemic to the country have been busy in the week since their arrival. They have each moved out of their temporary human-made homes and begun digging burrows into the hillsides with their strong claws. Soon they will line their dens with leaves, soft moss and feathers in preparation for their enormous alabaster-like eggs. The kiwi, who will be monitored closely, are the first cohort of 250 that will be introduced to the wilds around the capital over the next six years. It is difficult to know…

The clip-clop of hooves marked the start of the morning rubbish collection in the Brittany town of Hennebont, as Dispar, a Breton draft horse, pulled a small cart towards the waste bins. “This job is so much nicer with an animal,” said Julien, who usually worked emptying bins on to a motorised rubbish-truck but was training in horse-drawn techniques. “People see you differently, they say hello instead of beeping. This is the future, it saves on pollution, petrol and noise. And it makes people smile.” Faced with climate breakdown, the energy crisis and modern stress levels, there is a growing movement in French towns to bring back the horse and cart. Florence, an estate agent in Hennebont, stepped out of her office to watch the horse-drawn bin cart pass. “When…

The House January 6 select committee’s final report into its investigation is expected to focus heavily on Donald Trump’s involvement in the Capitol attack and his potential culpability, opening a rift on the panel weeks before the report’s scheduled release in the middle of December. The nature of the final report – alongside criminal referrals to the justice department – is expected to be the defining legacy of the investigation that brought into sharp relief Trump’s efforts to stop the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s election win and return to the White House for a second term. As the final report is currently drafted, an overwhelming focus is on the findings of the “gold team” that has been examining Trump and White House advisers’ roles in orchestrating a multi-part strategy…

1 Costa Rica In the 1990s, Costa Rica had one of the world’s highest deforestation rates. The tiny but biodiverse country introduced a scheme to pay landowners to care for the environment. It has reversed deforestation and leads the way with green initiatives – including awarding citizenship to bees in a suburb of the capital, San José. 2 Technology Researchers have discovered a way to detect environmental DNA in the air, enabling them to find animals hundreds of metres away, a breakthrough that could help monitor biodiversity in a non-invasive, safe manner. 3 Rewilding Legal protection, habitat restoration and reintroductions can drive species recovery, say researchers who looked at 50 wildlife species in Europe whose population size and distribution have expanded over the past 40 years. Among the success stories…

The new gods are running into a bit of trouble. From the soap opera playing out at Twitter HQ, the too-big-to-fail bankruptcies in the cryptocurrency space, to mass tech layoffs, the past month has seen headlines declaring a litany of woes facing the bullish tech boyos in Silicon Valley and beyond. Coverage of Elon Musk’s escapades and the interest in the FTX collapse go well beyond what you’d expect from a business story. This fixation has little to do with an interest in software engineering; rather it is the personalities who inhabit these spaces, and the philosophies propelling them. What is their end goal, we wonder. What drives them? It is easy to assume that money is all that motivates the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Musk and Jeff Bezos. Except,…

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Discontent over China’s continuing policy of zero-Covid suppression came to a head last weekend in a series of unprecedented protests across the country. Remarkable just for happening at all in a state where such behaviour is rarely tolerated, the civil disobedience seemed to have been smothered by police within a couple of days. Even so it revealed to the world signs of a hitherto unseen fracture in China’s totalitarian political system. Helen Davidson and Verna Yu report on the protests and the creativity used to express anger – but diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour warns that China’s strongarm leader, Xi Jinping, is unlikely to tolerate damage to his reputation for long. The big story Page 10 ➝ From one Cop to another: hot on the heels of the recent climate conference comes…

An extraordinary wave of protests against the Chinese government’s rigid zero-Covid policy spread across multiple cities last weekend, prompted by the death of 10 people in a building fire in Urumqi in Xinjiang. Much of the region had been under lockdown for more than three months, and people blamed the lockdown for the deaths. Gatherings to protest or to mourn the victims were held in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu and other major Chinese cities last Saturday and Sunday, as well as dozens of university campuses, with some police clashes and detentions in Shanghai. On Monday, Chinese police launched a show of force in an effort to head off further demonstrations. Protesters demanded an end to lockdowns, while some groups decried censorship and called for democracy and an end to the rule…

A niece of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has called on foreign governments to cut all links with Tehran’s “murderous and child-killing” regime in a video posted online two days after she was arrested. The video of a statement by Farideh Moradkhani, a well-known rights activist, has been circulating online after it was shared by her France-based brother Mahmoud Moradkhani last Friday. Mahmoud said his sister had been arrested after going to a prosecutor’s office following a summons. Farideh Moradkhani condemned the “clear and obvious oppression” Iranians have been subjected to, and criticised the international community’s in action. Moradkhani is an engineer who comes from a branch of Ayatollah Khamenei’s family that has a record of opposition to Iran’s clerical leadership, and has been jailed previously. Speaking out “This…

About an hour before dawn, Lt Mahi Landry and his team of rangers find the illegal gold mine they’ve been looking for deep in Téné forest, in south-central Ivory Coast. It has been raining heavily for most of the night and the only light is from the beams of a few torches. The team, accompanied by the Guardian, has to dodge felled branches, taking care not to fall into holes that have been dug in the earth. Cigarette packets, empty bottles of alcohol and the odd shoe are strewn across the forest floor. A couple of rangers start uncovering a pit that has been sealed with wood overlaid with material and sand. They throw a rock into the hole and it takes about three seconds to hit the bottom. “It’s…

When Ram Yadav fled India’s strict countrywide lockdown imposed in March 2020, he was one of the lucky ones, managing to hitch rides from Delhi on trucks going in the direction of his village near Kanpur, 400km away. An estimated 10 million workers were forced to walk home, travelling via fields, forests and highways in the scorching sun. Yadav, 34, a construction worker, vowed never to return to the city. “I felt betrayed twice : by society, because no one around me lent a hand – my landlord kicked me out – and by the state. I trusted [the prime minister Narendra] Modi to help me in a once-in-a-lifetime crisis,” he said. But when he failed to find work in his village, he had no choice but to return to…

Gun control returned as a leading topic over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, with Joe Biden and other prominent Democrats issuing fresh calls for a ban on assault weapons for the general public. At the same time, questions were raised about the funding of law enforcement agencies in places that refuse to enforce so-called red flag laws, after shooting tragedies in Virginia and Colorado in the past few weeks. “If you passed an assault weapons ban you would see less mass shootings in this country,” Connecticut’s Democratic Senator and leading gun control advocate, Chris Murphy, said last Sunday. “You are not going to magically eliminate mass-shootings, but an AR-15, or AR-15 style weapon, is generally the choice of mass shooters.” Such a military-style rifle was used in the shooting at an…

It slipped out quietly last month in the brouhaha of the approaching budget. The regulations listing acceptable ID documents that will allow people to vote at UK elections were not included in the shameless voter-suppression bill that passed through parliament this year. Are you surprised that the list includes all kinds of acceptable ID held by older voters, but that ID the young might have has been struck out? The whole purpose is to make it harder for young people, poor people and those who often move home to vote. So many outrageous things have happened recently that indignation fatigue is a risk. We grow weary, blase and cynical. But warping the voting system in the right’s favour is a permanent harm, copied from the US. First-past-the-post already gives the…

I don’t know what the world’s coming to. You denude one bullying high-school jock of a testicle (at a swim meet, with piranhas) and then you’re packed off to a boarding school full of weirdos and outcasts. This is the fate of Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega, above) in the opening scenes of the latest Addams Family reinvention, part horror story and part murder mystery but mostly a coming-of-age tale with classic tropes of high-school drama. Wednesday is sent to Nevermore Academy, where preppy roommate Enid Sinclair (Emma Myers) gives her a tour of the school’s cliques and introduces some characters that will become central to the mysteries Wednesday will investigate. The show’s main director, Tim Burton, gives the whole thing the eldritch-tinged aesthetic it needs. It loses something by not…

I remember my first taste of butter chicken. I must have been about 10 years old. My dad’s cousins used to marinate a whole chicken from their farm in yoghurt, spices, ginger, garlic and chilli, before cooking it over an open fire. Everything they used was from their own land: delicious tomatoes, homemade yoghurt, white makhan (a cultured butter). It was such an experience – and such a beautiful dish – that throughout the long train journey home after visiting them, I hassled my mum to make it for us at home. But those delicate spices, and the smoky flavour from cooking over an open fire, are impossible for me to replicate, even now. My understanding of regional food came partly from holidays, partly from the fact that my dad…

1 ITALY Anger over illegal buildings following landslide deaths Rescuers continued to search for five people still missing after a landslide in Ischia, as anger grew on the southern Italian island over years of illegal construction that contributed to the disaster. At least seven people, including a three-week-old baby and a pair of young siblings, died in last Saturday’s landslide, which was triggered by a violent storm that sent mud and debris from Monte Epomeo crashing into the hamlet of Casamicciola Terme. The same hamlet was hit by a landslide in 2009 and damaged again by an earthquake in 2017. Dozens of homes were destroyed, trees uprooted and cars swept into the sea in the latest tragedy. The storm, which followed days of heavy rain across much of Italy, is…

FOREIGN POLICY ‘Golden era’ of relations with China is over, says PM Rishi Sunak has signalled the end of the “golden era” of relations between Britain and China, using his first major foreign policy speech to warn of the creeping authoritarianism of Xi Jinping’s regime. As police in China launched a show of force in an attempt to contain the highest levels of civil disobedience seen in decades, the prime minister threw his support behind protesters by condemning Beijing’s crackdown, as well as the assault on a BBC journalist. Sunak suggested a hardening of diplomatic relations and called China a “systemic challenge to our values and interests”, while also confirming the UK’s defence and security strategy for the next decade, known as the Integrated Review, would be updated in the…

How did we get here? Frustrations with the zero-Covid policy have been rumbling for a while. As the rest of the world returns to something resembling normal life, China’s population is still being subjected to sudden harsh lockdowns of areas ranging from individual shops to entire counties, often over just a few cases. In September, a bus carrying people to a Guizhou quarantine centre at night crashed, killing 27 people. The death toll dwarfed the two Covid-related deaths reported by the province since the pandemic began. Last month in Zhengzhou, thousands of workers in an Apple iPhone factory clashed with riot police and tore down barricades, in part due to Covid restrictions. Across locked down cities, residents shared rumours and reports of suicides and other deaths they linked to the…

Kim Jong-un has said North Korea intends to have the world’s most powerful nuclear force, as the leader was again last weekend pictured with his daughter while inspecting troops and an intercontinental ballistic missile. North Korea’s “ultimate goal is to possess the world’s most powerful strategic force, the absolute force unprecedented in the century”, Kim said in an order promoting dozens of military officers involved in the launch last month of a new ballistic missile, state media reported. He described the Hwasong-17 intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launched on 18 November as the “world’s strongest strategic weapon” and said it demonstrated North Korea’s resolve and ability to eventually build the world’s strongest army, which would protect the dignity and sovereignty of the state and the people. Kim was also shown accompanied…

The elaborately prepared feast at uber-exclusive restaurant Hawthorne, the setting of new gourmand-culture thriller The Menu, is so photogenic that snapping pictures is forbidden; food in general, however, doesn’t come off looking so good. The dishes whipped up by self-serious celebrity chef Julian (Ralph Fiennes) and his fleet of obedient kitchen staff aspire to profundity. As foodie douche Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) mansplains to his unimpressed date Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy), the sequencing of courses tells a story, elevating foodstuffs to an artistic medium. She’s mostly just hungry, and so she’s disappointed when each plate bears a couple of bites’ worth of what she can only assume is edible material. A couple of tables over, a catty food critic and her editor concur that one culinary creation has been “tweezed to fuck”,…

Famously, she was the first British prime minister to be outlasted by a lettuce. More pertinently for the book industry, however, Liz Truss was also the first to unravel almost faster than a biographer can type. She quit eight days before the Sun’s political editor Harry Cole and Spectator diarist James Heale were due to deliver a portrait already being written at breakneck speed, and for a book to emerge at all in the circumstances arguably represents something of a heroic technical achievement. True, the writing is clunky in places. But nobody will buy this book for its literary elegance; the point is to rubberneck at what remains of the crash site, and if that isn’t what Cole, Heale or most of their interviewees originally intended to deliver – well,…

CLOPTON Cambridgeshire, England, UK A horse-fearing dog led and followed us towards a village that was no longer there. On either side of us were ploughed chalk and clay fields, from which in baked summer we had collected shards of pottery, turned them over, then dropped them for other dreamers to find. Bare soil became grassland and we stopped, overlooking bumps, humps, mounds and criss-crossing waterless streams. On these sculpted foundations, a sizeable community had lived during the reign of Richard II, whose emblem was a white hart. All four of us heard medieval chatter from below, sniffed woodsmoke in our nostrils, grew a church, a manor house, peasant dwellings, and pictured open fish ponds in the hollows where willows and sallows now grew tall. Scout the Irish terrier appeared…