Innehållsförteckning för 16 December 2022 från Guardian Weekly

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1 EUROPEAN UNION MEPs arrested as European parliament offices searched Belgian police have searched European parliament offices as part of a growing investigation into alleged bribery and corruption, as senior EU leaders warned the credibility of the bloc was at stake. Belgium’s federal prosecutor announced on Monday it had carried out 20 searches since last Friday, including 19 at private homes and one at the European parliament offices. Earlier in the day, Greek authorities ordered the seizure of assets belonging to an MEP implicated in the bribery investigation. Four people have been charged with participation in a criminal organisation, money laundering and corruption as part of a major investigation into attempts by a Gulf State, named in the Belgian media as Qatar, to buy influence with large sums of money…

ENERGY Backlash over government approval for new coalmine Senior steel industry figures rejected claims that their demand for coal drove the government’s divisive decision to sanction the first new UK coalmine for 30 years. Levelling up secretary Michael Gove’s decision to approve the mine at Whitehaven in Cumbria last week has already faced a backlash in the UK and beyond, with John Kerry, Joe Biden’s special envoy for climate, warning he was examining the decision. Government officials have insisted that the coal produced by the mine will be used to make steel, while other supporters said the steel industry will need a domestic source of coal Mark Jenkinson, a local Tory MP backing the project, said there was “no way of making new steel without it”. He added: “Steel underpins…

The victory lap in Moscow began even before the An-148 jet carrying the notorious arms dealer once dubbed the “merchant of death” touched down at Vnukovo airport. Viktor Bout, arrested in 2008, had been returned to Russia more than 14 years after his arrest, much of that time spent incarcerated in the US. “The game is over,” he had said as US Drug Enforcement Administration agents and Thai police burst into a hotel conference room where he thought he was meeting members of Farc, the Colombian rebel group. Since that day, he has been something of an obsession among Russian officials, a person they claimed was framed, but who also seemed oddly important. Russia and Bout had long denied suspicions that he was an asset for the Russian spy services…

The surveillance plane eased off the runway and banked west towards the frontline of one of Brazil’s most dramatic environmental and humanitarian crises. Its objective: a clandestine 120km road that illegal mining mafias have carved out of the jungles of Brazil’s largest Indigenous territory in recent months, in an audacious attempt to smuggle excavators into those supposedly protected lands. “I call it the Road to Chaos,” said Danicley de Aguiar, the Greenpeace environmentalist leading the reconnaissance mission over the immense Indigenous sanctuary near the border with Venezuela. He said such heavy machinery had never before been detected in the Yanomami territory, a sweep of mountains, rivers and forests in the north of Brazil’s Amazon. “We believe there are at least four excavators in there – and that takes mining in…

There are two extraordinary facts about the COP15 convention on biological diversity, whose members have been meeting in Montreal to discuss the global ecological crisis. The first is that, of the world’s 198 states, 196 are party to it. The second is the identity of those that aren’t. One is the Holy See (the Vatican). The other is the US. This is one of several significant international treaties the US has refused to ratify. Among the others are crucial instruments such as the Rome statute on international crimes, the treaties banning cluster bombs and landmines, the convention on discrimination against women, the nuclear test ban treaty and the convention on the rights of persons with disabilities. In some cases, it is one of only a small number to refuse: the…

SPURN POINT East Yorkshire, England, UK It’s possibly odd to suggest this 5km-long finger of sand, marram grass and buckthorn spine pointing toward oblivion in the North Sea is my key foundational landscape. In truth, I’d neglected to visit for 45 years. Throughout my youth, this rather unloved fragment of Holderness was the map on which most of my dreams were fixed. It’s where I recorded a first whimbrel, and heard my first grey plover, that exquisite note coming like liquid melancholy out of the Humber mist. I recall clearly the moment, aged 13, when I laid first eyes on a golden oriole. It’s now stranger to describe Spurn as foundational, given that it’s the most rapidly eroding British coastline. For many of us, favourite places are the fixed points…

Nasa’s uncrewed Orion capsule is towed away by US navy divers after it landed safely in the Pacific ocean, west of Baja California. It brought to completion the first flight of Nasa’s new lunar programme, which aims to return astronauts to the surface of the moon by 2025. The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol 207 | Issue № 25 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…

A woman waves a smoke flare as striking mail workers and supporters gather in Parliament Square, London, to listen to speeches by union leaders and representatives. Royal Mail workers are staging strikes throughout December in an escalating row over pay, jobs and conditions. Nurses, paramedics, rail employees and Border Force officials are also staging walkouts in a wave of winter industrial action. The army has been drafted in to cover some key functions during the strikes.…

Perhaps it was the tweed jacket and cravat. Or the medieval title: Heinrich XIII, Prince of Reuß. Either way, the man at the head of a suspected plot to overthrow the German government, exposed in a series of raids last week, was easy to dismiss as a joke. The country’s late night TV talkshows went right ahead, mocking the 71-year-old aristocrat and his deluded dreams, along with his wardrobe. A week earlier, the sartorial derision was aimed at Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, his face entirely obscured by a ski mask, praising Hitler and the Nazis on the set of Infowars as a guest of the bankrupted conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Some of Ye’s rantings were too much even for Jones’s stomach, prompting an online chuckle –…

Beijing’s abrupt dismantling of zero-Covid controls has been welcomed by economists, even as the country braces itself for the human impact of letting the disease spread through a vulnerable population. The leadership’s U-turn on how it handles the pandemic appears to have been triggered by protests against controls that began last month, a nationwide show of discontent on a scale China had not seen in decades. That unrest came after growing concern about the toll that isolation and regular harsh lockdowns were having on the economy. China has been an engine for regional growth since last century. However this year it is forecast to lag behind its neighbours for the first time since 1990, with disastrous implications for its people. Nearly one in five young people in cities are unemployed.…

For decades, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner dominated Argentina’s political landscape: as a senator, first lady, president and then vice-president. But last week she was sentenced to six years in prison in a verdict which, if upheld on appeal, will ban her from holding public office for the rest of her life. Fernández de Kirchner immediately announced that she would not run for the presidency, or any other elected office, in 2023. The ruling appeared to have abruptly sidelined the country’s most powerful – and polarising – politician since Juan and Eva Perón. Because of her role as senator and vice-president, Fernández de Kirchner enjoys immunity from arrest and cannot be sent to jail until she has exhausted her appeals – a process that could take years. The judges who found…

FOR THE PAST THREE MONTHS, revolutionary sentiment has been coursing through the cities and towns of the Persian plateau. The agitation was triggered by the death of Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman, on 16 September after she was arrested by the morality police in Tehran. From the outset the movement had a feminist character, but it has also united citizens of different classes and ethnicities around a shared desire to see the back of the Islamic Republic. Iran has known numerous protest movements over the past decade and a half, and the nation’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has comfortably suppressed each one with a combination of severity and deft exploitation of divisions within the opposition. This time, however, the resilience and unity shown by the regime’s opponents have…

Although it would be hard to reach this conclusion from reading any of the thousands of negative articles the couple have generated, when Prince Harry and Meghan Markle fell in love, the royal family – and Britain more broadly – was gifted manna from soft-power heaven. As well as her vast, obvious qualities, Meghan also brought something less obvious: Blackness – a quality that could not have been more historically potent, given the circumstances. Suddenly the royal family, the human embodiment of British history and tradition, went from white and medieval to modern and multicultural. It became more reflective of modern Britain than practically any establishment institution you could name. “And we all lived happily ever after” is how stories like this are meant to end. Yet the first volume…

One of the year’s most gripping works focused on a family glued to the TV. Oxygen Mask charts a boy’s panicked thoughts as the pandemic and George Floyd’s death dominate the news. American YA writer Jason Reynolds lets his stream of consciousness unspool over three long sentences and 384 pages, while artist Jason Griffin shows blotches, bricks, buildings, masked faces and scenes of incarceration and apocalypse. It’s a brilliant collaborative effort: you can inhale it at speed or linger over every startling page. This year also saw two great full-length debuts from writers who had previously excelled with shorter work. In Alison, Lizzy Stewart uses sketches and prose to relay the life of a woman who falls for a self-regarding painter before finding her own way as an artist. This…

This has been an outstanding year for children’s literature, with conservationist, comic, reflective and adventurous books all finding enthralled readers. In picture books, Britannica’s Baby Encyclop edia by Sally Symes, illustrated by Hanako Clulow, is aimed at 0-3. Filled with topics such as numbers, shapes, animals and food, this is a big, bright, thoughtfully curated board book. A gorgeous fable of self-acceptance, The Midnight Panther by Poonam Mistry follows small, shy Panther as he tries to emulate Lion’s mane and Tiger’s stripes before finding the courage to climb into the treetops. Mistry’s simple story and stunning geometric artwork make this a picture book to remember. A thematic departure for Oliver Jeffers, though illustrated in his characteristic luminous style, Meanwhile Back on Earth uses a car trip and a sibling squabble…

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The time to forgive and forget had passed, the grey-bearded man said, his back to the turquoise Adriatic sea as he gesticulated towards the camera. “Those people who bullied us, who locked us up”, he said, were about to face a reckoning in an “epochal upheaval” that would usher in a new judicial and political order. Change was imminent – a matter of weeks “If everything goes to plan, we’ll do it before Christmas,” the man, who calls himself “General Eder”, promised in a video uploaded last month to a website popular among far-right conspiracy theorists Last Wednesday, 64-year-old Maximilian Eder was arrested in the Italian city of Perugia, as part of Germany’s series of raids against rightwing extremism. Along with 2 4 co-conspirators, Eder is accused of hatching a…

Before Covid, few people had heard of respiratory syncytial virus. Increasingly, though, this common cause of pneumonia and bronchiolitis (airway inflammation) is filling up hospital beds In its latest report, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) said several countries had experienced unusually early increases in detections of RSV, with rising paediatric hospital admissions in France, Ireland, Spain, Sweden and the US. “With the continued impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and the circulation and health impact of other respiratory pathogens, it is challenging to predict how the new winter period will develop,” a joint statement by the ECDC, European Commission and World Health Organization said. The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) issued a similar statement last month, as the virus burdens healthcare systems across Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Uruguay,…

It was about zero degrees celsius as families piled into Gas Street St Luke’s church cafe, one of Birmingham city council’s designated “warm spaces”, to escape the December cold. Staff said the cafe, just outside the city centre, had been busier than ever as winter weather set in and people are reluctant to turn on the heating at home because of rising costs. “Being at home with the children, you’re burning through gas and electric, so coming here, it’s not just letting the kids have a play; we’re saving so much money too,” said 34-year-old Stacey, a mother of five, who visited the cafe after the afternoon school run. Next to her was Charlene White, 42, who said she was especially feeling the strain as she tried to save for…

A cavernous conference centre in Johannesburg has been prepared for the elective conference of the African National Congress (ANC) party, and the political forecasts are as bad as the meteorological ones. The conference, which runs from 16-20 December, is a five-yearly event at which delegates will elect a new leader of the ANC – and so, as the party has been in power for 28 years, of South Africa too. In charge of both is Cyril Ramaphosa, an affable if currently embattled 70-year-old. Until recently, Ramaphosa’s re-election as head of the ANC was a foregone conclusion. In recent weeks, the president has been forced on to the defensive after a parliamentary inquiry reported that he might have committed gross misconduct and even criminal offences after the theft of cash worth…

Rupert Murdoch rarely has to answer for the alternative realities presented by his hugely profitable US cable network, Fox News. Its conspiratorial claims of a parade of cover ups from the 2012 Benghazi attack to the climate crisis and Covid have been lapped up by Fox viewers and scorned by much of the rest of America, and then the world moved on. But this week, the 91-year-old billionaire media mogul was due to answer difficult questions under oath about the inner workings of Fox. Dominion Voting Systems is suing the cable station and its Murdoch-owned parent company, Fox Corp, for $1.6bn over repeated claims that it rigged its voting machines as part of a conspiracy to steal the 2020 presidential election from Donald Trump. The suit shines a spotlight on…

WHAT A DIFFERENCE A YEAR MAKES. Last October, Facebook supremo Mark Zuckerberg could barely wait to show the world what he was up to. “Today, we’re going to talk about the metaverse,” he enthused in a slick video presentation. “I want to share what we imagine is possible.” Transitioning almost seamlessly from his real self into a computer-generated avatar, Zuckerberg guided us through his vision for the virtual-reality future: playing poker in space with your buddies; sharing cool stuff ; having work meetings and birthday parties with people on the other side of the world; customising your avatar (the avatars had no legs, which was weird). Zuckerberg was so all-in on the metaverse, he even rechristened his company Meta. This month, we saw a more subdued Zuckerberg on display: “I…

It’s official. Brexit has caused lasting damage to the UK economy and, with the Tories in denial, Labour needs to lead the way with a new policy agenda. Yet it’s almost a taboo topic: the Conservative government won’t admit it is the case and Labour is understandably reluctant to rekindle old Brexit flames. The governor of the Bank of England, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development all agree that, notwithstanding Covid or the Ukrainian war, Brexit is the main reason why the UK is the only economy in the G7 still below its pre-pandemic size. Real wages fell by 2.9% after Brexit, according to the Resolution Foundation. London School of Economics researchers found Brexit triggered food price rises of 6% in the…

Some of the year’s biggest books were the most divisive. In her follow-up to A Little Life, To Paradise, Hanya Yanagihara split the critics with an epic if inconclusive saga of privilege and suffering in three alternative Americas: a genderqueered late 19th century, the Aids-blasted 1980s, and a totalitarian future degraded by waves of pandemics. I was impressed by its vast canvas and portrayal of individual psychic damage set against seismic historical change. There were mixed reactions, too, to Cormac McCarthy’s jet-black brace of novels The Passenger and Stella Maris, his first in 16 years; and to Ian McEwan’s Lessons, seen as self-indulgent and richly humane. Setting the protagonist’s life against the arc of postwar politics from the cold war to Brexit, it can be read as an indictment of…

There is nothing cautious about Cooking: Simply and Well, for One or Many by Jeremy Lee. More stories, more illustrations, more wit, more advice, more recipes. The abundance feels contained, though, as does the gregarious, expert and tender writing, in an exquisitely well-crafted volume. This is the most complete collection of recipes, including a dish of potato, butter and cabbage called Rumbledethumps. It is also a biography ; a meditation on ingredients and eating; and a celebration of food writers past and present. Lee notes that time spent in the kitchen is “something to cherish and celebrate”. This book is, too. “I was the kid you saw running behind the counter,” says Angela Hui. Her memoir Take Away: Stories from a Childhood Behind the Counter is an exhilarating delight even…