Innehållsförteckning för 17 February 2023 från Guardian Weekly

France Return of the street party The illuminated Corso Carnavalesque (day and night) parade of the Nice carnival on Promenade du Paillon. The carnival, which celebrates its 150th anniversary this year, is the first held since the Covid pandemic and runs until 26 February. It claims to be one of the three largest carnivals in the world, attracting around 200,000 spectators.…

Dancing feat A troupe of morris dancers accompany Wet Leg’s performance at the Brit awards last Saturday. The Isle of Wight duo won the best British group and new act awards, although Harry Styles towered over the British music industry’s annual bash, winning four categories. A spokesperson for the Brit awards acknowledged that the lack of women and non-binary acts in the best artist category was “disappointing”, as critics pointed out 60% of winners on the night were male.…

Anatoly Salmin, a convicted thief and murderer, is home from prison years ahead of schedule – his reward for volunteering for a suicide mission in Russia’s war in Ukraine and then managing to survive. Hundreds of convicts recruited into the ranks of Wagner, a private military company tied to the businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, have been killed or severely wounded in Ukraine, where mercenaries are tasked with some of Russia’s most desperate campaigns. But a video released last month showed several dozen former convicts – among them murderers, drug dealers and domestic abusers – heading home to northern Russia, supposedly having earned pardons by surviving six months in Wagner’s ranks in Ukraine. In interviews, those who knew Salmin said they feared running into the same man who once terrorised their home…

India has inaugurated the first stage of its longest expressway, a 1,386km route linking Delhi and Mumbai, in a push to catch up with its geopolitical rival China. The $13bn project will halve road travel time between the country’s two biggest cities, to 12 hours. India is the world’s fastest-growing major economy, but its infrastructure is decades behind China’s. The prime minister, Narendra Modi, opened the 246km first stage on 11 February, linking the capital with Jaipur. He said: “Such investments in railways, highways, subway lines and airports are a key to pushing the country’s growth rate, attracting more investments and creating fresh jobs.” Asia’s third largest economy has made a renewed push to decouple itself from China’s supply chains and build up its economic capacity since a deadly military…

Elaíze Farias’ phone is buzzing. Sitting at a restaurant in central Manaus, the capital of Amazonas state in Brazil, just weeks before the presidential election, Farias is in demand. She is fielding requests from domestic and international organisations to comment, give lectures and speak on panels about her work as a journalist in the Amazon. Amid the election buzz, Farias is committed to ensuring her less highprofile stories do not get forgotten. “We want to tell the stories of people who are excluded from mainstream media,” she says. Farias is the editor of Amazônia Real, a digital outlet dedicated to telling stories about the violation of Indigenous, environmental and human rights in the Brazilian Amazon. Frustrated by the way traditional journalism perpetuates colonialist mentalities, they created Amazônia Real with the…

It’s been almost 10 years since Areli Hernandez received her first US government work permit in her mailbox. Hernandez remembers staring at her photograph and touching the scripted name on the card in disbelief, feeling that a longsought dream had finally materialised. But the programme that gives temporary deportation relief to Hernandez and hundreds of thousands of other immigrants known as Dreamers, allowing them to live and work legally in the US, is under threat once again. Nine Republican-led states last month asked Judge Andrew Hanen in Texas to halt the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) policy, a request that if successful would stop nearly 600,000 undocumented children from being able to renew their work permits and continue to be protected from deportation. “I can’t plan ahead because my…

It can sometimes be difficult to appreciate special achievements in real time, but such a moment came last week after LeBron James broke a record long believed to be unbreakable: passing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s mark of 38,387 points to become the NBA’s all-time leading scorer. “He’s 38!” is a refrain that’s become almost a cliche to NBA viewers in this, James’s 20th season of dominance. It’s mentioned pretty much every time he steps on the court. With good reason. He’s been one of the best (for many seasons, the best) players in the league in every year of his storied career. He was drafted to the NBA in 2003, directly out of high school, to unprecedented hype, gracing the cover of Sports Illustrated with the headline “The chosen one” at the…

Blake Morrison has long made a habit of getting to know his closest relatives better only after their death. I don’t mean this unkindly; in life, I’m sure he’s as dutiful and devoted (or not) as the next person. But the grave seems to release him, spurring his deepest thinking, his best writing and (perhaps) his most assiduous, open-hearted loving. In 1993, he published And When Did You Last See Your Father?, in which he exhumed his dad. In 2002, he gave us Things My Mother Never Told Me, about the several lives of his late mother. And here is his third volume. “If you’re reading this, my sister is dead,” he writes on page seven, for the avoidance of doubt. Morrison turns his attention to his younger sister, Gill,…

BOSSINGTON Somerset, England, UK The January storms that boomed over Exmoor shed so much rain that the River Barle washed away a section of the ancient stone clapper bridge at Tarr Steps. And at Bossington Beach near Porlock, the combined forces of the usually mild Horner Water and River Aller blasted through the pebble bank, carving a deep, curving route roaring redbrown into the sea. It will be weeks until the huge rock slabs at Tarr Steps are recovered and replaced, but the breach at Bossington is rapidly repairing itself as the tides re-sweep the shingle. Since 1996, when a large section of beach collapsed in a storm, the shoreline of Porlock Bay has been allowed to evolve naturally. A tidal lagoon has developed, and what were once grassy fields…

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At the Nurdağı cemetery in the Turkish province of Gaziantep, on the Syrian border, there will soon be no more room for the dead. The freshly dug graves are marked with blank headstones, with only pieces of ripped cloth from clothing to identify victims. The frayed ends of the cloth flutter slightly in the frigid air. On the street outside, dozens of bodies lie piled on a row of pickup trucks, waiting to be buried. At least five imams have rushed to Nurdağı to officiate a rush of mass funerals, sometimes for as many as 10 victims at once. Officials brought in deliveries of coffins to provide a final resting place for the overwhelming numbers of corpses arriving in the town. The death toll has continued to surge and towns…

A Syrian rebel leader with a $10m US government bounty on his head has appealed for urgent international aid to help the province of Idlib after the earthquake that killed thousands and brought the last opposition-controlled area to its knees. “The United Nations needs to understand that it’s required to help in a crisis,” said Ahmed Hussein al-Shara, better known by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, amid a humanitarian crisis that had already reached critical levels in Idlib before the twin earthquakes last week. Jolani was designated a terrorist by the US in 2013 because of his former leadership of the al-Nusra Front, a splinter group of al-Qaida. Jolani heads Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a group that claims to have made a break with its past in an…

An extraordinary crossparty summit bringing together leading leavers and remainers – including Michael Gove and senior members of Keir Starmer’s shadow cabinet – has been held in high secrecy to address the failings of Brexit and how to remedy them in the national interest. The two-day gathering of some of the UK’s most senior Labour and Tory politicians from both sides of the Brexit debate, together with diplomats, defence experts and the heads of some of the biggest businesses and banks, was held at the historic Ditchley Park retreat in Oxfordshire last Thursday and Friday. Documents from the meeting, obtained by the Observer, describe it as a “private discussion” under the title: “How can we make Brexit work better with our neighbours in Europe?” Those attending from the pro-Brexit side…

When the manuscript of Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends first arrived in Peng Lun’s inbox, he hesitated. It was 2017, and Peng had just started his own publishing house in Shanghai, Archipel Press. He had heard about the heated auction for the rights to the young author’s first novel and thought it might be worth having it translated into simplified Chinese. “Her writing is simple but very, very fresh,” he said. He acquired the rights, commissioned a translation and watched as an Irish author in her mid-20s became one of the most beloved novelists in the world. In 2019, Conversations with Friends was published in China. Chinese readers have since bought 150,000 copies of Rooney’s novels, a high number for any author – for translated fiction, more than 30,000 is…

The dolphins are more playful than us,” says Diego Cifuentes, a co-founder ‘The of Villa Lilia Agroecoturistico, a community dolphin-watching project on Colombia’s Lake Nare. “If you give off good energy, they may even touch you.” Cifuentes is sitting on a boat in the middle of a lake surrounded by thick forest, a two-hour boat ride from San José del Guaviare. In the water, a dozen tourists bob in fluorescent lifejackets, waiting for the chance to meet a boto, the local name for the pink Amazon River dolphin (Inia geoffren sis). Soon enough, a plume of steam bursts from the water and the humped backs of three botos break the surface. The tourists giggle and squeal at the momentary encounter. Rural communities, former guerrillas of the Farc (Revolutionary Armed Forces…

Nigeria’s upcoming elections have been described as pivotal to the progress of democracy in Africa, where military coups and attempts by longstanding rulers to cling to power have raised fears of a “democratic retreat” from advances made since the end of the Cold War. More than a dozen African countries go to the polls in the coming 12 months, but experts agree that the vote in the continent’s most populous nation is the one that matters the most. Nigeria is “a bellwether country”, said Nick Cheeseman, a professor of democracy at the University of Birmingham and an expert on African politics. “If the election is successful and seen to be democratic that is going to be a big shot in the arm for democracy more generally across Africa … but…

I have a file on my desktop titled Mansplaining Olympic Tryouts, mostly screenshots of some of the most epic specimens I’ve come across on social media or that people have steered my way. They’re grimly hilarious: a man explaining vaginas to a noted female gynaecologist, a man telling Sinn Féin adviser Siobhán Fenton to read the Good Friday agreement (she replied with a picture of herself with the book she wrote on that agreement) and the famous incident with Dr Jessica McCarty, about which she tweeted: “ At a Nasa Earth meeting 10 years ago, a white male postdoc interrupted me to tell me that I don’t understand human drivers of fire, that I def needed to read McCarty et al. I looked him in the eye, pulled my long…

Craggy, grey-haired and 80 years old, Harrison Ford might seem a bit beyond donning his brown Fedora-style hat or cracking his whip as Indiana Jones. But a trailer for his upcoming film Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny offers a flashback to Indy’s swashbuckling glory days. “That is my actual face at that age,” the actor explained on CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. “They have this artificial intelligence (AI) programme. It can go through every foot of film that Lucasfilm owns because I did a bunch of movies for them and they have all this footage including film that wasn’t printed: stock. They could mine it from where the light is coming from, the expression. But that’s my actual face. Then I put little dots on my…

Halfway through Paul Harding’s latest novel, a reporter, a photographer, two doctors and three local councillors visit an isolated island somewhere along the coast of Maine. They travel there as part of an official survey committee, escorted by a white missionary, Matthew Diamond, who wants to teach Latin and Shakespeare to the island’s racially diverse residents but also feels a “visceral, involuntary repulsion … in the presence of a living Negro”. The story is set in the early-20th century US, when anti-black prejudices were frequently mistaken for scientific truths, and the two doctors in the surveying group could brazenly become members of the “Section on Eugenics in the American Breeders’ Association”. The doctors go about measuring every inch of the islanders’ breathing bodies with calipers and metal rulers, as if…

1 US/CANADA Mystery objects shot down by US military planes The US military shot down a third flying object over North American airspace in three days, as the air force general overseeing the airspace said he would not rule out any explanation for the objects yet. The high-altitude unidentified object, described as an “octagonal structure” with strings attached to it, was shot down over Lake Huron in Michigan on 11 February. It is understood to have been the same item that was picked up by radar over Montana the day before. At the point it was struck by an air-to-air missile launched by F-16 fighter jets, it had been flying across the Great Lakes region at about 6,00 metres. The Pentagon said the object appeared to have travelled near US military…

Shortages of healthcare workers are fuelling near-record numbers of job vacancies, with the lack of nurses, carers and other staff serving as the biggest recruitment challenge in almost every local authority area. According to analysis by the Office for National Statistics, more than one in 10 job vacancies posted online in December were in healthcare – more than any other sector. Highlighting the pressures on the NHS and social care, the government statistics agency said healthcare was the job category with the highest share of adverts in almost 90% of local authorities in the UK. The figures came as Rishi Sunak’s government faces increased pressure over its refusal to offer a bigger pay rise to NHS workers. The Royal College of Nursing (RCN), the UK’s biggest nursing union, is preparing…

After more than 17,000 people were killed in an earthquake near the Turkish city of Istanbul in 1999, authorities promised stricter building regulations and introduced an “earthquake tax” aimed at improving preparedness in a country that sits on two major geological faultlines. After another quake in 2011 in which hundreds died, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, then the prime minister, blamed poor construction for the high death toll, saying: “Municipalities, constructors and supervisors should now see that their negligence amounts to murder.” On paper, Turkish building safety standards are among the best in the world, and they are regularly updated with specific rules for earthquake-prone regions. Concrete must be reinforced with steel, and load-bearing walls and pillars must be distributed in such a way to avoid “pancaking”, when floors stack up on…

The government’s new science minister has said the UK is “more than ready to go it alone” if there is no resolution to the stalemate over taking part in the EU’s flagship research programme. Brussels has so far blocked Britain’s requests to join the €100bn ($107bn) Horizon Europe programme because of a dispute over the Northern Ireland protocol, leading UK ministers to draw up contingency plans for collaborations outside the bloc. Michelle Donelan, the secretary of state for the newly created Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, said she was prepared to push ahead with an alliance with the US, Switzerland and Japan. Uncertainty over funding has driven some UK scientists to relocate to countries where they still qualify for Horizon Europe grants. Meanwhile, institutions such as Oxford and Cambridge…

The residents of the Swiss canton of Valais are used to seeing their mountainsides covered with snow in winter and edelweiss flowers in summer. But as global heating intensifies, they are increasingly finding an invasive species colonising the slopes: cacti. Cactus species belonging to the genus Opuntia, or prickly pears, are proliferating in parts of Valais, posing a biodiversity threat as they encroach on nature reserves. “A lover of dry and hot climates, this invasive and non-native plant is not welcome in the perimeter of prairies and dry pastures of national importance,” the municipality of Fully in the Rhone valley said in a press release announcing an uprooting campaign in late 2022. Opuntia species and similar cacti have also proliferated in some of the hills around the capital of Valais,…

Human rights abuses committed by security forces and economic deprivation are among the most important drivers of recruitment to extremist groups in Africa. Researchers working for the UN Development Programme (UNDP) interviewed more than 1,000 active or recent militants across eight countries in Africa in a pioneering study. Their report – Journey to Extremism in Africa: Pathways to Recruitment and Disengagement – is one of the biggest anywhere on the motivations of militants. It comes against a background of increasing extremist violence across a swathe of the continent. Though deaths worldwide from terrorism have declined over the past five years, attacks in sub-Saharan Africa have more than doubled since 2016, and in 2021 they comprised almost half of the global total. The Sahel region has been particularly badly hit, with…

When Joe Biden accused some Republicans of wanting to “take the economy hostage” and slash social welfare entitlements, the US’s State of the Union address turned into a verbal brawl akin to the UK’s House of Commons. “No!”, “Boo!”, “Liar!” came the response. The US president took on the hecklers. “So, folks, as we all apparently agree, social security and Medicare is off the books now, right?” he sparred. “They’re not to be touched? … We got unanimity!” He gave Republicans an offer they could not refuse: to rise from their seats in support of the elderly. At a stroke, Biden had bested his opponents and partially assuaged doubts that, at 80, he has the fight for a gruelling re-election campaign next year. It was an important victory at a…

Nearly a decade ago, Canadian political leaders, environmental activists and Indigenous nations came together to shelter a sprawling 6.4 m-hectare area of trees, sea wolves, salmon and grizzly bears – a project that was named, with some branding acumen, the Great Bear Rainforest. The plan has been hailed as a triumph. Last week, Indigenous nations in British Columbia were hoping to replicate that success with a new network of protected marine zones called the Great Bear Sea. But amid the fanfare, the project’s branding is a reminder for some First Nations of the challenge of having their voices reflected in major conservation agreements. At the Fifth International Marine Protected Areas Congress, being held in Vancouver, leaders from 15 First Nations, alongside delegates from British Columbia and the federal government, announced…

‘The dead leave empty spaces’ I was holding the belt and we were lowering her down. Mum was in her coffin. There were two pairs of hands holding on to each of the four grey straps. We were her pall bearers: me, my elder brother, her nephews through marriage, and her cousin – her maternal uncle’s son. We slid the straps through the faux-metal handles on the oak coffin. I can’t remember if it was veneer or solid, but we began moving the wooden slats the casket had been sitting on. Mum was suspended now. I was worried. I had recently hurt my shoulder, but had been doing exercises routinely, so when the time came my grip would be steady. She came to rest on a mixture of wet clay…

What do you do when you discover your family got rich through slavery? For Laura Trevelyan, the BBC correspondent whose ancestors owned more than 1,000 enslaved people in Grenada, the answer was simple. She and her family started discussions with people on the island, and now she has given £100,000 ($121,000)towards an economic development fund. The Trevelyans will apologise formally for the lives ruined and wasted by their ancestors’ greed. So why doesn’t everyone – and there are hundreds of thousands in Britain with the same history – do a little digging and say sorry? The digging, as I found when I began looking at my own family’s story of plantation owning and slave trading, is the easy bit. You start with the compensation records, organised by University College London’s…

Can you make good pizza at home without a pizza oven? Joe, Preston, Lancashire Yes, but it’s more a question of which style of pizza you’re going to have the most success with. “ The biggest thing is the temperature of the oven,” says Rich Baker, co-owner of Flat Earth Pizzas in east London, “because domestic ovens simply aren’t hot enough to achieve what a pizzeria does.” Joe might, he suggests, fare better with a grandma pizza, which is cooked on an oiled baking tray for about 15 minutes – “It’s ideal for the oven,” he says. But if you’re hankering for a floppy Neapolitan or crisper, New York-style slice, construct it in a hot cast-iron frying pan. Once it has some colour on the base, pop it under a…

Across 1 Expectation of failure (9) 8 Food intake (4) 9 Internecine conflicts (5,4) 10 Sound of something small falling into water (4) 13 Dress up (5) 15 Optimistic (6) 16 Fertiliser deriving from potassium (6) 17 Quite (6) 19 Wilful damager of another’s property (6) 20 Interior design scheme (5) 21 It’s made of horsehair (4) 24 Newspaper’s leader? (9) 25 Metropolis (4) 26 Closeness (9) Down 2 The Odyssey, for instance (4) 3 Iniquity (4) 4 Stymie (6) 5 Steal apples from a tree on private land (6) 6 Indoor ball game (9) 7 Partner’s offspring (9) 11 Dominant position (9) 12 Intransigent – beat it, son (anag) (9) 13 Walked up and down (5) 14 Opposite, bear or expedition? (5) 18 Apply cement or plaster to a…