Innehållsförteckning för 13 January 2023 från Guardian Weekly

Off pistes A young tobogganist cuts a forlorn figure on thin patches of snow at the Pyrenean ski resort of Luchon-Superbagneres. Record-breaking warm winter weather in Europe has forced many ski resorts to open summer trails or close altogether, with eight countries having recorded their hottest January days on record. 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…

Joe Biden has presided over legislative deals that American presidents have sought for years, struggled with unpopularity yet led the Democrats to a historically strong performance in last year’s midterm elections, all before turning 80. Now, in the coming months, Biden will probably answer a simple question: would he still want to be president at the age of 86? And, if so, is he prepared to take down Donald Trump, 76, – or perhaps another, possibly much younger, Republican candidate – to win a second term in 2024? Should the answer be yes, Biden will make clear that despite many Americans’ wariness and the fact that he is the oldest president ever to occupy the White House, he is ready to continue leading the Democrats. But if the answer is…

When Ben Stiller walked into the office of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in June, he embraced the wartime leader telling him, “You’re my hero.” Stiller is one in a line of stars from the entertainment world who made the long journey to Kyiv to meet Zelenskiy – himself a former actor and comedian. A journey that involves an overnight train journey from Poland as commercial flights – let alone private jets – cannot fly in Ukraine’s airspace for safety reasons. Before Stiller came the actor Sean Penn, who has visited three times since the invasion, and is making a documentary about the war, in which Zelenskiy will no doubt feature. On his last visit, Penn gave Zelenskiy one of his Oscars to keep until after Ukraine’s victory. It was Penn’s…

Must we, really? I’m afraid there is no avoiding the great crown soap opera as this finely crafted Prince Harry publicity spectacular engulfs the news. However nugatory the revelations about scenes of brotherly rivalry, beards and broken dog bowls, it’s no use pretending it hasn’t been happening or that the country isn’t dividing into Harryites and Williamists. I doubt last weekend’s angry and contrary ITV interview will restore Harry’s sliding ratings. That interview landed as a neatly choreographed step in the ace publicity machine of Prince Harry’s publishers. After the 2021 Oprah interview, six episodes of the Netflix series, teasers for this week’s four TV interviews and the early leaking of his book, was there anything new for him to say or for us to think? Nothing, beyond the painful…

As he sat around a fire lit deep in the forests covering the hills of Dima Hasao in Assam, a shadow of sadness came into the eyes of Lallura Darnei. Now in his 70s, Darnei was one of the oldest members of the Biate community, an ancient hill tribe living in north-east India. The songs he sang around the flames, speaking of great floods and the birds that flap their wings at sunset, dated back so many generations the tribe said they were as old as time. But, said Darnei, when he died these songs would probably die with him, and with it the history, the knowledge, and the culture of the Biate would be gone for ever. The younger generation of the tribe had fallen in love with guitar…

Galicia has long been one of Spain’s poorest regions, and since the mid-19th century Galicians have emigrated in their tens of thousands to seek a brighter future in the Americas. But now they’re coming back. The Galician regional government says that returnees – the majority are Argentinians – are settling in the area at a rate of three a day. After more than 150 years of steady depopulation, in 2019 more people arrived than left, while, for the first time in its history, the reverse was true for Argentina. Far from discouraging immigration, the Galician government has set up offices offering the returnees help with jobs, schools and housing, as well as financial support. “For us, these new arrivals are a boon,” said Antonio Rodríguez Miranda, the head of migration…

As dusk fell, a helicopter hovered menacingly over a dusty football field where several hundred police officers stood in formation, waiting for the clock to strike six – and the imposition of a state of exception partially suspending constitutional guarantees in Honduras. When the time came, the police departed in caravans to gang-infested neighbourhoods throughout the capital city, as part of an effort to combat an apparent rise in extortion. “I’m nervous,” repeated a young police officer driving a pickup truck crowded with heavily armed special forces officers. “It’s dangerous there.” His unit was headed to the Hole – a labyrinthine neighbourhood of narrow streets, whose nickname was originally coined because of its location between sharp hillsides, but which has taken on a new meaning as a place where gang…

It’s a country where children are imprisoned, tortured and sexually abused. Hundreds have been killed since the military coup two years ago. More than 2,600 people have been murdered and nearly 17,000 detained by a brutal regime led by a genocidal war criminal. In case you’re wondering, this isn’t Ukraine and it isn’t Vladimir Putin. The criminal in question is Myanmar’s junta boss, Gen Min Aung Hlaing, who struts about in a uniform adorned with meaningless decorations and gaudy gold braid. As a general rule, the more medals a dictator wears, the more absurd and dangerous they are. This bomber of villages, schools and hospitals is up there with the worst of them. Min Aung Hlaing “celebrated” Myanmar’s 75th independence anniversary from Britain last week with a big military parade…

Carla Coutinho da Rosa rode her mud-caked bicycle to Brazil’s day of chaos, joining thousands of far-right militants as they marched on congress with a clear objective in their minds. “The idea was to get rid of Lula,” the 60-year-old businesswoman said of Brazil’s democratically elected president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who defeated her preferred candidate, Jair Bolsonaro, in October’s election. Like millions of devoted Bolsonar-istas, Rosa rejects the outcome of that vote and after lunch last Sunday she took to the streets of the capital, Brasília, joining a mass protest that she said aimed to overturn the result. “He’s a corrupt thief,” Rosa fumed of the veteran leftist, claiming marchers had planned a peaceful demonstration as they made the 8km hike from their encampment outside Brasília’s army headquarters…

On the roads leading to Ukraine’s frontlines, a striking change has become visible recently. Where once the armoured vehicles being ferried in were familiar from the Soviet era – T-model tanks, BMPs and post-Soviet Ukrainian-built BTRs – they have in recent months been joined by a growing array of western-supplied vehicles. Bushmasters from Australia can be seen alongside Polish Dziks and British-made Spartans, soon to be joined by even more impressive vehicles: US Bradley and German Marder infantry fighting vehicles and French AMX-10 tank destroyers. While Kyiv has been pushing hard for its allies to supply main battle tanks, such as the US M1 Abrams and the German Leopard II, demands so far resisted, the armoured vehicles now pouring into Ukraine are in many ways a better fit for the…

The British Museum has confirmed for the first time that it is involved in “constructive discussions” with Greece over the return of some of the Parthenon marbles. Speculation has been intensifying in recent months that a deal could be struck to return some of the sculptures, which have been on display in the British Museum since 1832 after being controversially stripped from the Parthenon by British diplomat Lord Elgin. Senior Greek ministers confirmed last month that secret talks between the museum’s chairman, George Osborne, and the Greek government have been ongoing for more than a year. Last week, the Telegraph reported the two parties had drawn up an agreement that could lead to some items returning on loan early this year. However, Greek sources have indicated that the two parties…

Walk for about a kilometre along a rugged stretch of beach at Port Fairy, in Victoria’s south-west, and you will come across a sand dune. It is indistinct to the dozens of others along the coast. But should you decide to clamber up and over it, fighting your way through marram and sword grass, your eyes will fall on something peculiar: a marble headstone, almost 170 years old, appearing to be sucked into the undergrowth. There were as many as 200 people buried in what was known as the sandhill or new cemetery after it opened in 1855. Now, there’s only a handful of headstones that can be seen without hacking through metre-high scrub. It was once a 240 sq-metre site divided into two separate plots, with a row down…

As the sun plunges into the Oslofj ord on a winter evening, passersby stop outside Norway’s new €620m ($653m) national art gallery, the new €300m Munch Museum, the new €240m public library and the €550m opera house to take in the dying light. Thanks to oil and gas reserves in the waters off its coast, Norway is extremely rich – and getting richer. Already the World Bank’s seventh wealthiest country by GDP per capita at the start of last year, the resource-rich Scandinavian country’s profits ballooned to record levels over the past 12 months, as prices on the energy markets tripled due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Norway replaced Moscow as Europe’s largest supplier of gas. But the nation’s wealth can be an intangible affair. Hakon Midtsundstad, 33, his…

Great things were expected of the 2020s. After the disappointments of the previous decade, this was to be the time when the global economy powered up and got going again. There would be a flowering of new technologies and a colossal boom. It would be the roaring 20s all over again. It hasn’t worked out like that. Instead, the world faces the grim prospect of a second recession in three years. The three biggest economies – the United States, China and the European Union, which between them account for roughly half of all global output – are slowing at the same time. That’s unusual and troubling. Kristalina Georgieva, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, says a third of the world economy will be in recession in 2023, and…

The growl of high-street traffic had barely faded as we walked uphill and saw the kestrel. She was sitting on a leafless branch of a cherry tree, feathers fluffed, her back turned towards the icy wind. She seemed reluctant to fly as we drew closer. Then her head swivelled and our eyes met; mirrors of polished jet glared down at us. A shimmy of plumage, to smooth ruffled feathers, and she was away, chestnut wings scything across the grassy hillside. Willington grew around a coalmine that closed in 1967. For 120 years, a jagged mountain of colliery waste, known locally as Twin Peaks, stood on this spot. Earlier generations called it Dante’s, a reference, some say, to coal spoil tips’ potential to spontaneously combust and become an inferno. Many would…

1 BELARUS Joint drills with Russia stoke fears over Ukraine Russia and Belarus have expanded their joint military training exercises, the country’s defence TV channel said last Sunday, as concern grows that Moscow is pressuring its closest ally to join the war in Ukraine. The two countries added weapons, soldiers and specialised equipment to the exercises and were doing drills, Reuters reported. Last Friday the Belarusian leader, Alexander Lukashenko, visited a military base where Russian troops are stationed. Unofficial Telegram channels monitoring military activity in Belarus reported that between 1,400 and 1,600 Russian troops arrived in the city of Vitebsk, in north-east Belarus, last Sunday. Reuters could not independently verify the information. A unilateral Russian ceasefire – announced for the Orthodox Christmas – drew to an end last weekend but…

Prince Harry launched a broadside at the king, the queen consort, his brother and other royals in a furious ITV interview in which he defended his revelatory memoir, claiming that remaining silent “only allows the abuser to abuse”. In excerpts from his book, Spare, read aloud during an interview with Tom Bradby on Sunday night, Harry wrote that his interests had been “sacrificed” to Camilla’s “PR altar”. Asked if he was “pretty consistently scathing” about his stepmother and the press, Harry replied: “Scathing? There’s no part of any of the things that I’ve said are scathing towards any member of my family, especially not my stepmother. There are things that have happened that have been incredibly hurtful, some in the past, some current.” He accused the royal family of “a…

Two years after the January 6 insurrection, fresh fears are being raised over safety for lawmakers and staff at the US Capitol, especially as Republicans have stripped away some of the security measures installed in the wake of the deadly attack on Congress. House Republicans, who secured a narrow majority in the 2022 midterm elections, removed the metal detectors outside the House chamber ready for the first day of business of the 118th Congress on Tuesday 3 January. The Democrats installed the equipment after a mob of extremist supporters of Donald Trump had stormed the Capitol in 2021 in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to prevent lawmakers from certifying Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election. The magnetometers’ removal came not just at a symbolically significant time heading up to…

Clad in canary yellow football shirts or draped in the colours of the Brazilian flag, pro-Bolsonaro activists applauded a line of heavily armed police march ing into their midst in Brasília. Hundreds of extreme rightwing followers had been gathering in Brazil’s modernist capital since late last Friday. On Sunday afternoon they breezed past security cordons and trashed the elegant buildings that host Brazil’s most important democratic institutions – the presidential palace, the supreme court and the two houses of congress. Surely, they seem to have thought, these police were moving in to help them secure control, overturn the alleged fraud that had deprived Jair Bolsonaro of a second term, and oust what they described as a leftwing dictatorship. Just a few minutes later though, the same officers, units of the…

The Danza de los voladores (Dance of the flying men) is a prehispanic Indigenous ceremony that begins with performers dancing around a 30-metre pole before climbing to the top. After securing themselves with a rope around their hips, they launch off headfirst, spinning around the pole towards the ground with their arms open wide. “There are normally five participants. Four represent the natural elements: fire, water, air and wind. The fifth participant is a representation of the sun,” said Irene García, a 33-year-old voladora who started performing when she was 15. But until recently, the ceremony was only ever performed by men. “It’s difficult to tell where the dance first originated. I think the tradition of the flying dance was born in different parts of Mexico at the same time,”…

Bubbles stream furiously behind Frank Hurd as he gently parts the curtains of giant kelp. Green and gold ribbons reach upwards through the cold waters of the Pacific Ocean towards the sun. Hurd, a marine biologist with environ mental organisation the Nature Conservancy, is diving in a kelp forest off Anacapa Island, one of the protected rocky volcanic islets that form the Channel Islands national park, an archipelago off the coast of southern California. This thick, healthy kelp – a type of seaweed – forms a small part of underwater forests that blanket the coastline of nearly every continent. Some are relatively well-studied, including the Great African Sea Forest, a rich stretch of giant bamboo kelp spreading north from Cape Town, South Africa, to the Namibian coastline that was the…

Standing in line at the maternity ward of the Sanatorio Finochietto hospital in bustling Buenos Aires, Polina Cherepovitskaya suddenly overheard the familiar sound of the Russian language. “It was crazy, there were at least eight pregnant Russian women waiting in front of me,” Cherepovitskaya, a jewellery designer previously based in Moscow, said in a phone interview. Cherepovitskaya, who gave birth in the past month, is one of the estimated hundreds of Russian women who travelled to the Argentinian capital to give birth. Since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the South American country has experienced a boom in Russian birth tourism – the practice of travelling to another country for the purpose of giving birth and obtaining citizenship for the child. While the concept of birth tourism isn’t new,…

Glancing up and staring directly into the camera, the suspect who broke into the centuries-old Jerusalem cemetery appears to spot the CCTV equipment recording his hate crime. Seemingly unfazed, he looks down again, focusing on the task at hand – pushing over a stone cross and smashing it to pieces. The two young males who vandalised more than 30 Christian graves at the start of the year showed little concern about hiding their identities while carrying out a religiously motivated attack. They did not cover their faces as they systematically destroyed headstones on a bright Sunday afternoon in the heart of the holy city. Such is the confidence with which the suspects, believed to be teenage Israeli extremists arrested last Friday, now operate. And why not? The new ultranationalist religious…

Each episode of Bret Easton Ellis’s long-running podcast begins with a monologue – sometimes a review, sometimes a mildly provocative essay, pillorying the culture’s supposed new puritans. His opening in September 2020 felt different. For 20 years, Ellis said, he’d been haunted by a book he longed to write but was terrified to begin: a memoir of sorts, detailing “what happened to me, and a few of my friends, one year at the end of high school”. His last false start – a few rough pages written with “trembling hands” – triggered “an anxiety attack so severe that it sent me to the emergency room”. Ellis’s delivery was so perfectly pitched that it took a few moments to register the blurring of form. This wasn’t a podcast monologue; it was…

We live in extraordinary times. The worst of the pandemic appears to be over, attitudes towards the climate crisis are changing and our investigative reporting continues to shed light on corruption and expose injustice and incompetence. But there is still a long way to go: in Ukraine, civilians’ lives are on the line, while in Russia, protestors are continually censored and silenced. Editorial independence has never been more important. The Guardian’s unique funding model means we’re free from the influence of shareholders and billionaire proprietors. We can hold the powerful to account and follow the truth wherever it leads. But to do this we need the support of our readers. Guardian Patrons are supporters who give a little more towards helping make our vital work possible - and are offered…