Innehållsförteckning för 16 June 2023 från Guardian Weekly

PLUS In preparation for the fall of Putin Russian exiles plan their next move Page 14 → Last weekend, four-and-a-half days after Ukraine’s Kakhovka dam burst, the longer-term scale of the flooding disaster was gradually becoming apparent. In the station at Mykolaiv, the first city inland, pensioner Olena Lysiuk said she had no choice but to quit her apartment in Kherson, even though it was too high up to be flooded. “It’s not just that we don’t have any water, gas or electricity. We have also got used to not having those during the Russian occupation. But now the sewerage doesn’t work. That’s the new problem,” Lysiuk said. She planned to stay in Mykolaiv with relatives, with the state having given her about 10,000 hryvnia ($270) in support. Vasyl Chornyi…

Looking back, so much of it was already there on that night in Diriyah when the British boxer Anthony Joshua made history – and $75m – by retaining his world heavyweight title belts. Not just the good, the bad and the ugly of Saudi Arabia’s sporting ambitions, but the accommodations of those willing to take the money and look the other way. One moment from the fight in December 2019 lingers: Joshua absorbing the cheers from the young crowd, many of them women in western clothes, before averting his gaze towards the kingdom’s ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, and giving him a fist-pump. It felt disconcerting yet no one was surprised. Days earlier, Joshua had insisted the Saudis were “trying to do a good job politically”, before adding: “I just came…

The beaches are white sand and cruise ships meander through its warm azure waters. But there is trouble in Barbados’s 430 sq km of paradise. You could call it obesity, you could call it heart disease, diabetes and high blood pressure. Or you could call it the postcolonial predations of Big Food and Big Sugar. Barbados, like other small island developing states, is fighting for its people’s survival. On this beautiful island, people wander daily into danger, swinging two-litre flasks of sugary drinks such as Coca-Cola as they step out of their cars, buying local fast food from the back of a van for lunch and queueing at KFC in the evening. The blessings of the modern convenience world have been visited upon small islands, with the result that more…

Plans to introduce bilingual road signs have become a political battleground, as arguments over racial politics become prominent in the country’s election race. New Zealand opened public consultation this month on plans to create bilingual road signs in English and te reo Māori, the indigenous language of Aotearoa. Transport agency Waka Kotahi said the signs were “an opportunity for te reo Māori to be seen in our communities and support language learning and revitalisation” and that “making te reo Māori a part of our everyday lives promotes cultural understanding and social cohesion”. Bilingual road signs are the norm in many countries, including Scotland, Wales and parts of Europe. The plans immediately came under fire, however, from the centre-right National party, with spokesperson Simeon Brown saying the signs would be confusing:…

Former US president Donald Trump’s stunning criminal charges have triggered a fierce counterattack from Republicans, putting America on a collision course between partisan politics and the rule of law ahead of a potentially explosive election. Last Friday, prosecutors unsealed a devastating 37-count indictment against Trump, accusing him of risking some of the country’s most sensitive security secrets after leaving the White House in 2021. He mishandled classified documents that included information about the secretive US nuclear programme and potential domestic vulnerabilities in the event of an attack, the indictment said. Trump is the first former president in US history to be charged with federal crimes. But he is also the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. Last week’s indictment – and other cases against him – raise the…

He’s gone. Again. Ducking and swerving, crashing and picking himself up, Boris Johnson is a political wrecker. He smashed David Cameron’s leadership with his mendacious Brexit campaign, and then retuned it to smash Theresa May. When he won and reached Downing Street, he made it a music-hall turn. The government was reduced to a shambles over Partygate, and was found to have broken the law during lockdown. Like any talented comedian, Johnson can well command a public stage. His is a likable personality whose performances are amusing to those who find most politicians tedious and the spectacle of politics dull. But out of sight, Johnson is a mess quite unsuited to high office. Those who worked with him and knew him best told him a year ago that he had…

My wife tells me off for adding salt to my pasta water, and seasoning my food during cooking. How do I keep to sensible salt levels? Nick Something tells me I’m going to get into bother for wading into a marital debate, but according to the NHS, adults should consume no more than 6g salt a day (that’s about a teaspoon), but Action on Salt says we are eating about 8.1g a day on average. So, Nick’s wife is right that we have a problem with salt. To answer his question, though, you need to look at what you’re eating as a whole. “Overall, ultra-processed and shop-bought, precooked foods have a relatively large amount of salt in them,” says Dr Saliha Mahmood Ahmed, author of The Kitchen Prescription and former…

Watching Vesuvius, waiting for a sign. Seen from the rooftops and cliffs of the Amalfi coast, the most active volcano on the European mainland is suspiciously silent. We’re in Sorrento for our granddaughter’s wedding. But every now and then, a space opens into the place itself, into its poppy-punctuated story of olive groves and the psychedelic zest of Sfusato d’Amalfi lemon orchards between sheer cliffs and the sea. Watching a storm – during the wettest, weirdest May here for over 20 years – haul over the mountains as if in pursuit of some adversary, the focus switches to a random question: could some tiny ripple in the ecology of moments spark Vesuvius’s cataclysmic potential? For here are a few such unstill lives: a hornet, Vespa crabro, the predatory motor scooter…

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1 UKRAINE Armed forces claim to have recaptured frontline areas Ukraine’s armed forces claimed to have liberated several frontline villages in western Donetsk, almost a week after the launch of counteroffensive operations. Soldiers were shown in video footage raising the Ukrainian flag over the village of Blahodatne, south of Velyka Novosilka, one of the main axes of the counteroffensive. Other troops filmed themselves with their unit’s banner in Neskuchne. Later on Sunday, the deputy defence minister Hanna Maliar said a third village, Makarivka, had been taken. The advance south from Velyka Novosilka represented the most significant gains of the counteroffensive up to that point, but Ukrainian forces still have some way to go before they reach Russia’s main fortified defensive line. “The fighting is tough, but we are moving forward.…

CONSERVATIVES Sunak and Johnson at war over ex-PM’s honours list Rishi Sunak would block Boris Johnson from standing again as a Conservative MP before the next election, sources told the Guardian, as the two men engaged in an extraordinary war of words. The prime minister clashed publicly with Johnson over his failed attempts to elevate several allies to the House of Lords, accusing him of having lobbied to overturn due process. Johnson dismissed his claims as “rubbish”. The former PM unexpectedly announced last Friday he would resign as an MP immediately after learning that the House of Commons privileges committee was to recommend he be suspended for at least 10 days for lying to MPs about Partygate. However, he hinted at a return to frontline politics, saying he was “very…

Is Russia about to experience a period of dramatic political change? If so, can exiled democratic forces unite into a coherent bloc and is there any way for them to force themselves on to the political scene? Nearly 300 exiled Russian opposition politicians and activists gathered to discuss these questions in the European parliament last week, the congress coming as news broke of the Kakhovka dam destruction, the latest grim episode in Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine. The Brussels forum, convened by four MEPs, was the first such gathering to be given official status by a European parliamentary body, as some in Europe start thinking about how the contours of a post-Putin Russia would look. “EU countries thought that Putin would be president for years and years if not decades…

Best known for his perma-tan, gaffes, “bunga bunga” parties and outsized ego, Silvio Berlusconi was a proto-Trumpian populist, the man to beat in Rome for more than two decades, and one of European politics’ most controversial figures. Italy’s longest-serving postwar prime minister, Berlusconi, who has died aged 86, held the job on three occasions, amassing along the way a fortune ranked by Forbes magazine last year as the country’s fourth-biggest. Skilled in the art of not just weathering scandal but emerging from it with his profile and popularity enhanced, he faced prosecution more than 30 times on charges including embezzlement, false accounting and bribing a judge. Many cases failed to go to trial, sometimes because Berlusconi changed the law under which he had been charged. Only once was he convicted,…

One of the UK’s biggest food companies said ministers should consider taxing products high in fat, sugar or salt to combat the obesity crisis. James Mayer, the president of Danone UK & Ireland, said: “We’ve reached a point where meaningful intervention from the government is a necessary course of action.” It is the first time an industry player has called for urgent government action in the face of rising rates of obesity. The Health Survey for England for 2021 reported 64% of adults were overweight or obese. Mayer’s statement comes after Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, said last week that the latest drugs to combat obesity could be a “gamechanger”. Henry Dimbleby, the government’s former adviser on food, resigned this year, saying ministers had failed to impose the required regulations.…

Some prominent experts have expressed growing scepticism over whether the US is harbouring UFOs, as the government whistleblower who made the extraordinary claims has gone on to suggest the US had also recovered alien bodies. David Grusch, a former intelligence official who led analysis of unexplained anomalous phenomena (UAP) within a US Department of Defense agency, caused headlines around the world with his assertion that the US had been collecting non-human craft for “decades”. That prompted the US House of Representatives to announce an investigation into Grusch’s allegations, with a hearing on the issue expected to be announced in the next few weeks. But Grusch’s whistleblowing claims have grown more dramatic and are facing scepticism. After initially telling the Debrief website that the government had possession of “intact and partially…

One of the great unwritten rules of show-business could be: never write off La Minogue. As she turned 55 last month, Kylie Minogue was back at the top of the charts with the single Padam Padam, inspired by Édith Piaf’s 1951 song of the same name. It topped the UK Big Top 40, becoming Minogue’s highest-charting single since 2014’s Into the Blue. It could be on track to bother the upper reaches of the US Billboard Hot 100, like her 2001 global smash Can’t Get You Out of My Head. “Thank you, thank you,” said Minogue in her birthday Instagram post: “My heart is bursting with joy.” What’s more, young people are driving the Padam Padam phenomenon. On its release, the single was targeted at older audiences – it wasn’t…

I blame Yuval Noah Harari. Since the Israeli historian’s bestselling Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, in 2011, there has been a trend for thick tomes proposing to explain our humanity through one or other lens across deep time. Now Lewis Dartnell, author of the brilliant The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch, offers a new take on the same old same old. Are there any surprising angles left? Despite the relentless news of war and mass murder, for one thing, it is good for someone to remind us that we are actually unusually peaceful, for apes. In Dartnell’s intriguing opening argument, our prehistoric forebears suppressed reactive aggression in favour of “planned proactive aggression”, used only to punish normviolators, and so constructed a civilisation built on amazing levels of…

Blue heaven A bare-chested Jack Grealish celebrates as Manchester City’s footballers take part in an open-top bus parade through Manchester on Monday. Thousands of fans braved the rain to mark the club’s treble of Premier League, FA Cup and Champions League titles – the latter coming in a 1-0 victory over Italian side Internazionale in Istanbul last Saturday. It was City’s first Champions League trophy and their third Premier League title in a row.…

As more details emerged about four children’s incredible feat of survival in the Colombian Amazon, it became clear that the ancestral knowledge of the eldest child played a vital role in keeping her younger siblings, including a baby who turned one during the ordeal, alive for 40 days. Lesly Mukutuy, 13, identified edible fruits, found suitable water and avoided dangerous plants and animals thanks in part to knowledge handed down from her grandmother, Fatima Valencia. “We have to recognise not only her bravery but also her leadership,” the minister of defence, Iván Velásquez, said last Sunday after a visit to Bogotá’s military hospital, where the children were being treated for malnutrition and minor injuries. “Her three younger siblings could survive by her side, thanks to her care and her knowledge…

It was the day his life changed for ever. When Edward Snowden blew the whistle on mass surveillance by the US government, he traded a comfortable existence in Hawaii for indefinite exile. Ten years after Snowden executed the biggest National Security Agency (NSA) leak in history, it is less clear whether America underwent a profound transformation in its attitude to safeguarding individual privacy. Was his act of self-sacrifice worth it? Did Snowden make a difference? “I wish things had changed more than they have,” said Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University in New York. “I would say that the Snowden disclosures made a huge difference to how informed public debate is about the government’s surveillance activities.” Snowden grew up in North Carolina and…

If you could drop a pin on the map of your grief, where would you travel to? In the early days of mine, I would have motioned you to the toilet in my bathroom where I heaved on my knees, again and again, into the bowl below. Six months later, I would have swapped that room’s lino flooring for grass, walking you down to the banks of the River Thames. We’d head to the bend in the water where I scattered my husband’s ashes in a boat, marvelling at the patterns he made, watching him spiral and swirl. These days, four years on from his death, the question of “where” to locate my grief isn’t an easy one to answer. There isn’t a cursor to follow, nor is there a…

Letters for publication weekly.letters@theguardian.com Please include a full postal address and a reference to the article. We may edit letters. Submission and publication of all letters is subject to our terms and conditions, see: THEGUARDIAN.COM/LETTERS-TERMS Editorial Editor: Graham Snowdon Guardian Weekly, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU, UK To contact the editor directly: editorial.feedback@theguardian.com Corrections Our policy is to correct significant errors as soon as possible. Please write to guardian.readers@theguardian.com or the readers’ editor, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU, UK AI’s real threat comes from humans themselves Regarding Jonathan Freedland’s article about AI (Humankind must act together to fight the chilling evolution of AI, Opinion, 2 June), isn’t worrying whether an AI is “sentient” rather like worrying whether a prosthetic limb is “alive”? There isn’t even…

In a former railway repair shop in the southern French city of Arles, flasks of lurid green algae are bubbling away, in a room that looks like a cross between a laboratory and a witch’s potion-brewing den. Nearby, a 3D printer spews out objects made from algae-based bioplastic and algae-dyed textiles hang on a rack. Some of the walls appear to be made of rice cakes, others look like Weetabix, while some are daubed with a coat of porridgy gloop. All are natural byproducts of the local sunflower industry redeployed as acoustic insulation. There are antibacterial door handles made of salt, from the region’s salt marshes; thermal insulation made from bales of local rice straw; and bathroom tiles made of waste clay from a nearby quarry. “We call it bioregional…

Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos is one of the bleakest and most beautiful novels I have read. On one level, it is a love story, or rather a story about the loss of love. It begins with a woman, Katharina, hearing about the death of her former lover. Boxes of his papers are delivered to her apartment, and when she sits down to open them the past rises before her like a pack of playing cards thrown into the air. The book then moves back to their first meeting, tracing the contours of a relationship that is not only intellectually and emotionally complicated in itself, but whose difficulties are compounded through its relationship to the collapse of East Germany. Katharina and Hans meet in East Berlin in 1986, and they live out…

QUIZ Thomas Eaton 1 What is the world’s most widely used psychoactive drug? 2 What does the GPT of ChatGPT stand for? 3 Which construction did IK Brunel call “my first child, my darling”? 4 Where, in the late 19th century, did the Meiji Restoration take place? 5 Katherine Johnson famously made calculations for which organisation? 6 Which UK city has Linen, Cathedral and Titanic quarters? 7 Tudor Close in Rottingdean is said to have inspired what board game? 8 What ended on Black Tot Day in 1970? What links: 9 Barbz; Beyhive; Little Monsters; Lizzbians; Swifties? 10 Connor (1895); Ruth (1921); Aaron (1974); Bonds (2007)? 11 Anne of Denmark; Henrietta Maria; Elizabeth II? 12 Light yellow; muscular; aficionado; to polish? 13 Belmont; Emley Moor; Winter Hill; Crystal Palace; Mendlesham?…

Across 5 Tact (9) 8 Turned-up part of a sleeve (4) 9 Long traffic jam (8) 10 Crush – fruit eaten as a vegetable (6) 11 Rent all or part of a leased property to another person (6) 13 Bath scrubber (6) 15 Filthy (6) 16 Totally alone (8) 18 Flick (4) 19 Of greatest importance (9) Down 1 Rabble (4-4) 2 Bug in the works? (6) 3 Internet messages (6) 4 Blackleg (4) 6 Greenish-blue gemstone (9) 7 Eccentric (9) 12 Hairstyle – nub of fat (anag) (8) 14 Professional killer (6) 15 No dogs (anag) (6) 17 Give temporarily (4) Solution No 16,556…