Innehållsförteckning för 11 August 2023 från Guardian Weekly

The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol 209 | Issue№ 6 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…

Jack Smith Who is the special counsel prosecuting Trump? Page 12 → ‘Diehard people’ The former president’s backers shrug off the indictments Page 13 → It was hardly the triumphant return to Washington that his camp had imagined. Donald Trump was back in the capital last week, not as president but an accused criminal. “Not guilty,” he pleaded in a hushed courtroom to four charges stemming from the effort to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election. Outside the court, not far from the Capitol where lethal violence erupted on 6 January 2021, a follower of the former US president waved a giant flag: “Trump or death.” The former president is twice impeached and thrice indicted but his support base is holding firm. Indeed, each negative in a court…

SCIENCE Chemists hunt for skeletal editing keys Page 30→ An intrepid traveller would now be hard-pressed to traverse the African continent at its widest point, passing from the Red Sea to near the Atlantic, while staying within a country that is not being torn apart by a civil war or recovering from one, has not suffered a military coup since 2021, or is not a failed state occupied by a toxic mix of rapacious politicians, militia and Russian mercenaries. The traveller’s route would take them from the northern Ethiopian region of Tigray, at war until last year, then across Sudan, where an internal power struggle within a repressive regime has metastasised into violence, and into the Central African Republic, now seen by many as the best example of the worst…

The first casualty of the Ukrainian counteroffensive was wishful thinking. Any hope that Russian troops would abandon their trenches has been left far behind on the battlefield. The occupying forces held firm, absorbing one attack after another, often counterattacking to recover lost ground, and mounting offensives of their own. Ukrainian assaults got mired in dense, overlapping minefields. For all the focus on the delivery of Leopards and other western tanks before the launch of the offensive on 4 June, Ukrainian armour failed to help breach the lines. Tanks were not a solution on their own. Without air superiority and overwhelming artillery support, they were vulnerable to Russian anti-tank missiles fired from the trenches and from gunships. The Ukrainians had mine-clearing vehicles but not enough. They were priority targets for the…

For those living in the urban centres of India – and increasingly in the country’s smaller cities and towns – almost anything can be delivered via shopping apps, many of which can deliver groceries and other essentials in the time it takes to hard boil an egg and for less than 50 cents. While only 6% of India’s $900bn retail market comes from e-commerce, the sector is one of the fastest growing in the world. In 2022, 200 million people in India bought something online. But in a country of 1.4 billion people, with the economy growing faster than almost anywhere else, companies and analysts say these numbers still only scratch the surface. By 2027, the number of online shoppers is predicted to rise to 500 million in a market…

Three pickup trucks lined up on a highway in front of a Tesla in Phoenix, Arizona, to form a rolling roadblock. The Tesla driver, a computer scientist, moved lane to wait for them to let him past. What came next was unexpected: a video on social media from the incident in June shows a belch of acrid black smoke from the engine of one of the trucks, enveloping the electric car following behind. The Tesla driver had been caught by a “rolling coal”, a deliberate modification of a diesel engine to increase the engine’s horsepower – while also increasing pollution. It is also illegal: Sinister Diesel, one of the companies selling “defeat devices” used to roll coal, agreed to pay a $1m fine last week for breaking environmental laws. Since…

NESRINE MALIK People are kinder than our leaders realise Page 48 → European governments are beginning to panic about migration again. So far this year there have been nearly 120,000 “irregular” arrivals. Most of these people travelled through Tunisia and Libya and on to Italy. It is the highest number since 2017, the year after the EU – fearing a populist backlash – did a morally questionable deal with Turkey, channelling €6bn ($6.6bn) to Ankara in exchange for the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s, agreement to prevent 3.5 million refugees, most of them displaced by the war in Syria, from reaching EU territory. This time, leaders in some countries, such as Austria and Germany, fear another nationalist backlash. The farright Freedom party is leading opinion polls in Austria and the…

Diane Arbus was drawn to people who reminded her of important figures in her life, such as her flamboyant maternal grandmother or her lover Marvin Israel. More generally, she was fascinated to the point of obsession by the discrepancy between who we are and how we want to be seen – what she called “the gap between intention and effect”. Her list of favourite subjects includes female impersonators, lobby murals of sylvan scenes and dioramas of murderers. As the scrutiny of her camera disclosed, they were not quite what they first appeared to be. Diane Arbus: Constellation, an exhibition at the Luma Foundation in Arles, France, is the largest display of Arbus prints ever mounted. In 2011, Maja Hoffmann, the Swiss pharmaceutical heiress who founded Luma, purchased all 454 artist…

There is a tone to Chinese official propaganda that is worthy of Professor Pangloss and his irrefutable case that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds”. Beijing’s favoured phrases, such as “winwin cooperation” and “community of common destiny for all mankind”, are designed to evoke an image of China as the fountainhead of conflict-free benevolence. A similar if much more sophisticated feeling runs through Keyu Jin’s book. Jin teaches economics at the LSE in London. She is the Harvard-educated daughter of a former deputy minister of finance who now heads up China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. She is well placed to compare key features of western and Chinese economic systems, as she does to good effect. She is perhaps less well placed – or less…

Across 1 Elements doing no good – time for a dire warning? (9) 6 Zone being hit (4) 10 English physicist – backward-looking character, one gathered (5) 11 In bit of money I have to find motivation (9) 12 British soldier newly decorated journalist ignored (7) 13 Something hairy that bespeaks busy activity (7) 14 Debasement of grown-up needs mate finally helping (12) 17 A daring exploit, maybe (12) 22 Bring back stock again (7) 23 Tenants more trouble, we hear? (7) 24 Go, say, with directors showing enthusiasm (5,4) 25 Clamour created by ex-PM in speech (5) 26 Youngster with male chromosome is not male! (4) 27 Suffering from Covid, maybe, being flat (9) Down 1 New deal underwritten by loveless Italian official (8) 2 Spooner’s awful solicitor is…

A grand jury indicted Donald Trump on 1 August on charges of trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The 45-page indictment against Trump – which includes one count of conspiracy to defraud the US, one count of conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights – was filed by special counsel Jack Smith in federal district court in Washington DC. Smith, appointed as special counsel by the attorney general, Merrick Garland, in November 2022, has brought two indictments against Trump, the first surrounding Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents that were discovered at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. After his appointment by Garland last November, Smith vowed to carry out the criminal investigations as thoroughly…

Retreats from crumbling empires are inevitably characterised by hastily arranged evacuations. Panicked civilians make their way to rickety airport terminals in the hope of an emergency flight out of the chaos. This was the postcolonial scene in Niamey, the capital of Niger, last week, as hundreds of French nationals joined other EU citizens in scurrying away from the west African nation. Sections of the military had staged a coup against Mohamed Bazoum, Niger’s democratically elected president, just before 3 August, the country’s National Day, when it marked 63 years since gaining nominal independence from France in 1960. Crowds were chanting “Down with France” as they targeted the country’s embassy, smashing windows and setting fire to perimeter walls. As Bazoum remained under house arrest, his allies in Paris feared the safety…

People seeking refuge who were ordered to live on a controversial giant barge have been reprieved after legal challenges claimed the vessel was unsafe and unsuitable for traumatised people. As the first 15 people were moved on to the Bibby Stockholm in Portland, Dorset, on Monday lawyers said they are intervening to halt the transfer of dozens more on to the vessel. The developments came as the Home Office fulfilled Rishi Sunak’s promise to use barges and former military bases to accommodate asylum seekers after the cost of housing them in hotels rose to £1.9bn ($2.4bn) last year. But their use has been condemned by refugee organisations for being costly, cruel and inhumane. The Fire Brigades Union has described the barge as “a deathtrap”. The Home Office faces legal action…

By 7.30 on a summer night, Lisbon’s beautiful streets are beginning to fill with visitors taking selfies, trailing from bar to bar and wrestling with the conundrum of where to have dinner. Margarida Custódio, who sits at home with her three-year-old daughter, Pilar, has more pressing matters on her mind. Like so many people in Portugal, where rental prices make a mockery of the low salaries, Custódio lives through a monthly agony when it comes to covering the costs of her flat. Despite a good job in human resources, she earns €930 (£795) a month after tax – of which €700 goes on rent. “Here, you spend almost 90% of your salary on rent each month,” she said. “Whatever you have left over goes on gas, water, electricity and food.…

Ask Mark Levin what excites him about his work, and the associate professor of chemistry at the University of Chicago could double as a poet. “We’re one of the only fields of science that at its core is about making things that have never existed anywhere else in the universe, and would never have existed if we didn’t intervene,” he says. “We get to manipulate matter at the atomic level to shape it to whatever purpose we can think of.” Some of those things that would never have existed are of immense value to humanity. From synthetic dyes to celluloid, materials to medicines, synthetic chemistry has made our world a richer place, and helped us live longer to enjoy it. With effort, chemists can synthesise almost any molecule imaginable, but…

ONE DAY IN MID-March 2017, I had just finished giving my weekly lecture on film directing at the Xinjiang Arts Institute in Urumqi when my wife called. She told me that our friend Dilber had arrived from Kashgar, in south-west Xinjiang, and that she was headed to the front gate of the Arts Institute to meet her. Dilber was the hospitality director of a famous Kashgar hotel. While shooting the television series Kashgar Story the year before, our film crew had stayed at the hotel for two months. We chatted often with Dilber and had a number of meals together; by the time we left Kashgar, we had got to know each other well. Over the phone, my wife, Marhaba, told me that Dilber’s son, who was studying acting at…

I was shocked. Scrolling through my Twitter feed, I stopped at an exchange between a women’s rights activist I know and a troll in which the activist, someone who often talked to me about the gendered nature of our cuss words, responded using maa-behen ki gaali (misogynistic abuse). My mind went round and round, trying to decipher if this was hypocrisy or an unconscious expression of rage. I settled for the latter, as gendered slurs are so embedded in our everyday speech that we use them without stopping to think. My father would direct all sorts of sexist curses at my mother, generally in anger. My mother would tell him: “Don’t use these abuses, they are demeaning.” I was too young to understand this Bengali swearing. My first language at school…

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 Africa’s value outweighs cost of western sanctions Blocking and destroying Ukrainian grain will cause hunger in many African and Arab countries (Egypt calls on Putin to revive Black Sea grain deal, Spotlight, 4 August). And there will also be a lot of Russian propaganda. Putin is…

Belfast is in many ways still a deeply divided city, but young people from Catholic and Protestant communities – who live apart and go to faith-segregated schools – played music together last month at Belfast Summer School of Traditional Music, as part of the weeklong Belfast TradFest. From the sound of bagpipes echoing in St Anne’s Cathedral, to the first concert of Irish and Scottish music in Protestant east Belfast and primary school-age banjo players holding their own in an afternoon pub performance, the city is buzzing with the sound of traditional music. More than 500 people of all ages are taking classes in music, song and dance, and there are thousands more attending talks and concerts. Fiddle player and summer school tutor Martin Dowling, who has written about traditional…

Adam Thirlwell’s first novel in eight years is set in Paris in the period around the French Revolution. When we first meet Celine, she is a peripheral figure at the court of the dauphin; at 19, she has recently been married off to Sasha, a 46-year-old minor government official and ruthless “fascist”. She has also become the focus of a series of pamphlets, provenance unknown, containing pornographic fictions based on her life. In the early pages of the novel, Celine has been made into a kind of symbol of all that is rotten at the heart of French high society, and is attempting to deal with the fallout from her unjust erotic infamy – most pressingly its effects on her thuggish and abusive husband. Along with her friends Marta and…

Across 1 Act too soon (4,3,3) 7 Tad (7) 8 Provide with something specifically required (5) 10 Whip (4) 11 Short contest to test acceleration (4,4) 13 Protest (6) 15 Joint author with Karl Marx of The Communist Manifesto (1848) (6) 17 African antbear (8) 18 Thread (4) 21 Level odds (5) 22 Do a bunk (7) 23 Mathematical function – mainly loop (anag) (10) Down 1 Betrayer who acts like a friend (5) 2 Dirt (4) 3 Voice quality (6) 4 Budding (8) 5 Emit long loud cries (7) 6 Make better (10) 9 Agreeable remark (10) 12 Caricature (8) 14 Cause to sink without trace – poor Ted (anag) (7) 16 Noble (6) 19 Horrify (5) 20 West African country (4) Solution No 16,604…

1 UKRAINE Arrest over ‘Zelenskiy assassination plot’ The security service claimed to have foiled a plot to assassinate Volodymyr Zelenskiy after the arrest of a woman suspected of gathering intelligence about his movements. The unnamed woman was said by the security service of Ukraine, known as the SBU, to be gathering information about Zelenskiy’s visit to the southern Mykolaiv region, on which it was said Russia was planning to unleash a major air assault. On his Telegram channel, Zelenskiy said the head of the SBU had updated him on the “fight against traitors”. A drone attack on Moscow earlier this year, attributed to Ukraine’s military, had been described by the Kremlin as an attempt to assassinate Vladimir Putin, for which it was claimed there would be reprisals. At the start…

POLITICS MPs paid £10m for second jobs and freelance work MPs have been paid £10m ($12.7m) from second jobs and freelance work over the past year. The figure is largely driven by the size of Boris Johnson’s earnings as well as former Tory ministers taking up highly paid roles, a Guardian analysis has found. Almost 18 months after the furore around second jobs led to promises of a crackdown, MPs’ earnings from work outside parliament have continued to rise. The analysis looked at all MPs who made more than £1,000 in the past year, excluding income from completing surveys. Even stripping out Johnson’s £4.8m, about 90 other Conservative MPs brought in approximately £4.75m – an increase from a figure that was nearer to £4m in 2021. A much smaller number…

From his corner of rural Iowa, Neil Shaffer did more than his fair share to put Donald Trump in the White House and to try to keep him there. Shaffer oversaw the biggest swing of any county in the US from Barack Obama to Trump in 2016, and increased the then president’s share of the vote four years later. But the chair of the Howard county Republican party is not enthusiastic at the prospect of yet another Trump presidential campaign, and he blames the Democrats for driving it. “Honestly, the Democrats are shooting themselves in the foot with these prosecutions,” he said. “Why is Trump doing so well? Because people feel like they are piling on him. If this is the Democrats’ effort to make him look bad, it hasn’t.…

After weeks of local strife and national buildup, the sparsely filled coaches entering the Dorset port where the Bibby Stockholm is moored were a boost to pro-refugee demonstrators. “Should we cheer just in case?” asked Heather, a local campaigner and member of Stand Up to Racism Dorset as a fifth, seemingly empty, coach drove into the port. About 50 refugee supporters were welcoming asylum seekers arriving at the Bibby Stockholm. “It was a really good mood. It just filled your heart that so many people came out to support them and that there are members of the community that do care and do welcome them,” said Heather. At about 4pm on Monday, demonstrators outside the port claimed that 15 asylum seekers were onboard the barge. One local campaigner who was…

74% Increase in the price of mozzarella to reflect factors such as fertiliser run-off polluting waterways and the effect of pesticide use on the long-term health of farmers Aleading discount supermarket in Germany temporarily raised prices to reflect products’ real cost on people’s health and the environment. In a week-long experiment in all 2,150 branches of the Penny chain, nine products were priced at what experts from two universities had deemed to be their true cost, in relation to their effect on soil, climate, water use and health. The price of wiener sausages rose from €3.19 ($3.50) to €6.01, mozzarella went up 74% to €1.55, and fruit yoghurt increased 31% from €1.19 to €1.56 for the “wahre Kosten” or “real costs” campaign. Academics from the Nuremberg Institute of Technology and…

The difference between six and seven is slight but, in the mouth of Joe Biden, it meant everything. “I have seven grandkids,” the US president said in a recent podcast interview. That was Biden’s way of acknowledging his four-year-old grand-daughter, Navy Joan Roberts. His son Hunter has said he fathered Navy during a period when he was struggling with alcohol and drug addiction and does not have a relationship with her. The episode illustrated the political sensitivities around Hunter – and Biden’s efforts to navigate them ahead of another bruising re-election campaign. It came in a week when Hunter was again at the centre of a legal storm that made him a target for Republicans. The scrutiny is testing whether the family of a politician is fair game. Hunter has…

THE RAINBOW-CHECKED SCARF arrives on time, by post, in a Ziploc bag. The tag reads Acne Studios, a high-end Swedish label, but the wording looks … off. I send a photo to a typographer friend. “It’s pretty obvious it’s fake,” she says. “Look at the e and s – they’re different fonts.” Inside, the washing label advises “dry cean only”. I squeeze it. It feels genuine – not unlike the £ 250 ($320) bouncy wool and mohair real thing. But it’s not. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, for the £22 I spent. I email the seller and point out the discrepancies. There’s no reply. This was not my first fake. In my 20s, I went to Vietnam and returned with a “Chanel” 2.55 handbag and two “Kipling” holdalls bought from Ho Chi Minh…

An expiring Tory party lashing about for electoral resuscitation by doubling down on pugnacious policies. A Labour opposition that has straitjacketed its pledges and ambitions with its fears of blowing its strongest chance in years to gain power. That is the slim space that now defines Westminster, making the preoccupations and tones of our politicians seem more remote than ever. The result is a widening gulf between people’s reality and what they are told they actually care about. Take immigration – a topic that is firmly established as something many should have “concerns” about. But attitudes among the public are flexible, dependent on the type of immigration and the political mood. Whatever these attitudes are – hard, soft or indifferent – they have coexisted for a long time now with…

MUSIC A toe-tapping remedy for the sectarian divide Page 55 → Matthew Broderick’s last screen performance for the foreseeable future takes place over Zoom from his house in the Hamptons for an audience comprising a Netflix assistant and me. It’s the day before the Screen Actors Guild goes on strike, putting a halt to TV shows, feature films, press junkets, the lot. Broderick can’t imagine how this particular drama plays out. He gestures at the clock on the wall and the door to the garden. He says: “Here we are. This scene could be it.” He’s had a good innings, 61-year-old Broderick, and appears to be ageing at a slower rate than the rest of us. The actor was already in his mid-20s when he played the truant hero of…

What movie snacks can I make for my children in the school holidays? Helen, Stroud, England, UK “When it comes to kids and movies, there is no greater combination than chocolate and popcorn,” says Tom Kerridge, the chef and restaurateur behind the Full Time Meals campaign against child hunger. His “amazing chocolate popcorn bars” keep up to a week so are perfect “when the kids invite friends over at the last minute”. Dark chocolate is non-negotiable – “and at least 70% cocoa” – and you’ll also need some puffed rice cereal, salted popcorn, dried cranberries (“for a bit of chew”) and quartered large marshmallows. “Melt the chocolate, add all the other ingredients, then pour into a lined tray and pop in the fridge for two hours – it’s that easy,”…

St Peter’s Pool, a wide bay lining the isthmus that connects mainland Orkney to its Deerness peninsula, doesn’t look like much to shout about. In comparison with Dingieshowe, the glamorous, silk-sand beach it backs on to, it presents as a muddy-looking flat made untidy with worm casts. I’ve never paid it much attention before. But I joined three marine conservationists as they donned masks and wetsuits and waded out at 7am. Dr Esther Thomsen, Lyle Boyle and Nathan Tsang are snorkelling as part of the Restoration Forth initiative that will collect seagrass seeds for relocation to the Firth of Forth’s ailing ecosystem. As the water rose over our knees, we came upon the meadow’s sharp edge. From above, in the dull light of a dreich summer day, it appeared a…

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