Innehållsförteckning för 18 August 2023 från Guardian Weekly

The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol 209 | Issue№ 7 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…

The Office is back. Not just the Ricky Gervais sitcom, which is getting an Australian makeover with a female lead. No: the office is back. Amazon has issued a warning to staff who are not spending at least three days a week in the office. Meta wants its workers to do the same from next month. And if further proof were needed that working from home has officially been replaced by return to office, it was provided by Zoom. The firm, whose revenues jumped 300% during the first year of the pandemic, last week asked employees to come in for at least two days a week. If only it were so simple for the UK’s David Brents. People still like working from home and forcing them to return can have…

Amazon workers in the US are being tracked and penalised for not spending sufficient time in the company’s offices, an email sent to employees revealed, as tech companies push back against work-from-home practices that flourished during the pandemic. Some staff members were alerted last week they were “not currently meeting our expectation of joining your colleagues in the office at least three days a week”, according to emails shared with the Financial Times. The emails were also discussed on the anonymous work-related message board Blind. The email was intended for workers who went into their office fewer than three days a week for five or more of the past eight weeks, according to a follow-up message to employees that Amazon shared with the Guardian. Some employees reported receiving the email…

A new campaign of drone strikes has targeted the Russian capital as Kyiv has demonstrated its ability to hit Moscow and to keep the Kremlin’s war in the hearts and minds of the Russian elites and others seeking to ignore the invasion of Ukraine. Video last Friday showed a drone slamming into the ground and exploding near a residential area in the north-west of the city, as rowers nearby took part in a national championship in Krylatskoye. Russia’s defence ministry claimed to have downed other drones last week. Earlier waves of drone strikes have hit military and energy infrastructure, the Moscow financial centre, other residential buildings, or targeted areas in the wealthy western suburbs of the Rublyovka district, near Vladimir Putin’s Novo-Ogaryovo residence. Video from earlier this year also showed…

At least 99 people have died in the fire that consumed the historic town of Lahaina on the Hawaiian island of Maui, and officials warned that the effort to find and identify the dead was in its early stages. Meanwhile, residents raised questions over aspects of the government response, from warnings during the fire to aid distribution in the days since. At a press conference on Monday evening, Hawaii’s governor, Josh Green, said the scale of destruction was “incredible”. Hundreds of people were still missing, as firefighters continued battling flare-ups and rescue teams scoured the scorched remains of Lahaina. The rapidly moving fire, which was propelled by hurricane winds, spread “one mile every minute”, said Green in an interview with CBS News. “It’s impossible to guess” what the final death…

Arace is under way in Florida to rescue corals being bleached at alarming rates as a result of historic heatwaves and rising water temperatures. Marine rescue organi-sations and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) have partnered to save coral and preserve the reefs. Since the late 1970s, the Florida Keys have had a 90% decline in healthy coral cover, a loss which experts have described as “unprecedented”. Several factors have accelerated the decline in healthy coral including rising water temperatures and acidity, in addition to pollution, over-fishing, storms and disease. The Noaa foresees widespread bleaching in southern Florida and some mortality. One of the main reasons behind the mass bleaching event – which is usually expected around late August and September – is record temperatures, which have been arriving…

BIBI HASENAAR HAS HAD TWO LIVES. One began in November 1976, when she was about four, arriving in the Netherlands to meet her adoptive parents. “I remember it vividly. There’s a photo of us at the airport with other children arriving from Bangladesh – it was published in a Dutch paper.” Her older brother Babu was there, too. Her other life appears only in fragments. She remembers being in a children’s home with another older brother and having her food stolen by older children. “It was not a nice place to be,” Hasenaar says. Her only memory of their mother is her long black hair. But of the flight out of Bangladesh, she remembers every detail. At her kitchen table in the village of Muiderberg, 30 minutes’ drive east of…

On 11 August 1973, Clive Campbell (popularly known as Kool Herc), an 18-year-old DJ, hosted a party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx. Unbeknown to the men and women dancing the night away, they were witnessing the birth of a socioeconomic and political miracle, which came to be known as hip-hop. If you consume rap music in a fleeting manner then you may find the point above easy to scoff at. Indeed, you may consider hip-hop a problematic phenomenon, typified by bling, violent beefs, exaggerated drug tales and bikini-clad women, all set to banging beats. There are elements of all these things; it would require a Trump-sized dishonesty to pretend otherwise. But if they are all you focus on, you will misunderstand what has been one of the most…

What jars and pastes can I rely on for instant flavour? Jo, Stroud, England, UK There’s a fine line between basic and brilliant, and the secret is often in the sauce – or paste or condiment, for that matter. “There are a few things I keep handy to inject quick flavour: umami and seasoning,” says Pippa Middlehurst, author of Simple Noodles: Everyday Recipes, from Instant to Udon. One case in point is miso. While the Japanese fermented soya bean paste “has many traditional uses, such as miso soup or to season ramen or nabe”, Middlehurst also adds a tablespoon to spaghetti with chopped garlic and butter “for a super-quick meal with high-impact flavour”, and also tosses some through tomatoes before roasting. Another shortcut to building flavour is Japanese curry roux.…

ORMEAU South Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK I can hear the chick whistling from the garden behind ours. My own breath is a steady plead that nothing happens to it. Not now, just when it’s on the edge of flight. They say it takes a village to raise a child. In this case, the child is a lesser black-backed gull, and the village is two rows of urban redbrick semis. For weeks now we’ve lived with the parents erupting as we hang out our washing or empty the bins. Pulling back the curtains has drawn a hard yellow stare. Outside, our violations have been punished by swoops and dives – sometimes accompanied by a dreaded “shitover”, or being eyeballed by the shrieking gull. The pair are less hyper now. When I…

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For those whose jobs allow and homes are spacious, the working from home revolution was seen as a real benefit that came out of the pandemic and a cultural change that workers want to continue. But is the tide now turning back in favour of the office? We head to the City of London, still eerily empty on a typical Friday, to find out how employers and employees view the move to get more of us back in the office more of the time, look at attitudes in the US tech sector and find out how countries around the world regulate hybrid working patterns. The big story Page 10 → One woman’s quest to find her birth family and trace how she was taken from a children’s home in Bangladesh to new parents in…

Working from home is a seismic shift in employment patterns that has rocked charities, businesses and public sector organisations across the world. From Hong Kong and Singapore to London and Toronto, white collar workers have changed the way they work, shop and pursue culture and recreation, shifting many local economies on their axes. For many towns and cities it’s as if the sun shines at a different point in the day, such is the transformation in how 60% of people conduct their lives. Britain is one of the most affected countries, according to a study of hybrid working by the German economic thinktank Ifo. Office space lies empty and unproductive, with mostly skilled and professional workers refusing to sit at a desk in an office as they did before the…

When two core indicators of Chinese inflation turned negative last week, alarm bells rang as the world’s second-largest economy started sliding into deflation. According to Joe Biden, China’s economy is a “ticking timebomb”. The US president’s comments followed official data from China showing that July’s consumer prices index fell by 0.3% compared with 2022, while the producer prices index fell by 4.4%. It is the first time that both figures have been negative since November 2020, when the global economy had all but juddered to a halt during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic. It is not all bad news. Analysts at Trivium China, a consulting firm, pointed out that consumer prices in July had crept up compared with the previous month, a sign that the fall may have bottomed…

Calls this week mounted in the UK and France for the introduction of safe routes for refugees crossing the Channel after a French organisation said it had received multiple distress calls from people making the crossing. At least six people lost their lives last Saturday trying to cross the Channel in a small boat and the organisation issued warnings that more lives would be lost unless there were significant government policy changes. The French authorities led on the incident as it happened in French waters with support from the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, alongside RNLI, in conducting a search and rescue operation. The NGO Utopia 56, which works to support migrants in northern France and operates an emergency number for people to call if they get into distress in the…

It was a school competition to build a radio that set Kemisola Bolarinwa on her path to becoming the inventor of a bra that can detect cancer. “My physics teacher brought the idea of coming up with a radio transmitter and a receiver. “We went for the competition,” she said. “And we came second out of the many competitors from other schools. That was when I discovered myself to be an innovator – that was how the passion started.” Now a robotics entrepreneur, Bolarinwa set up Nextwear Technology in the Nigerian capital, Abuja. The company will soon launch what is believed to be the first trial of a wearable, battery-operated device to detect breast cancer – the Smart Bra. Bolarinwa has also developed a GPS necklace that helps track the…

Donald Trump and some of his closest confidantes have been indicted on state racketeering and conspiracy charges over efforts to reverse Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election in Georgia. This indictment makes the former US president a criminal defendant in a fourth case as he campaigns to recapture the presidency. The sprawling 41-count indictment, handed down by a state grand jury in Atlanta late on Monday night, charges Trump himself with 13 counts and accuses him of orchestrating a criminal enterprise. In addition to Trump, prosecutors in the office of the Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis charged 18 other defendants, including his former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows as well as his 2020 election lawyers Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis and Kenneth Chesebro. The charges mark…

I ENDED UP AT THE YMCA AS A LAST RESORT. Years of chronic neck and back spasms had stolen all the variety and fun I used to find in working out, especially that amped-up endorphin high. By my early 50s, I had spent thousands of dollars trying to mitigate this pain with alternative treatments, after burning through one routine after another: running, kickboxing, spinning, kung fu, weight training, aerobics, Zumba, walking, children’s karate, even alternative therapy such as the Feldenkrais Method. And yet knots clung to my spine like barnacles and flared up after such innocuous activities as doing the dishes or just sitting funny. Once strong enough to propel me through the air in handsprings, sprint down a track and dodge oncoming players in rugby, my muscles had begun…

In Britain and beyond, anti-environmentalists have a new favourite argument. No longer able to claim the climate crisis isn’t happening, they have switched from denial to class warfare. They argue that green policies and innovations from electric cars to heat pumps, low emission zones to ecotaxes and levies, are all unaffordable for working-class and many middle-class people, yet are being imposed regardless by an out-of-touch elite of politicians, bureaucrats and wealthy “woke capitalists”. Most of the people making these arguments in the rightwing media were never previously troubled by the financial struggles of what they piously call “ordinary people”. But shamelessly shifting position is a familiar activity for the modern right. Meanwhile, the cost of living crisis has given its anti-green message more force. Climate populism is gaining strength through…

‘It can’t have been fun for the Buddha’s wife, Left on her own for the rest of her life.” Ruth Silcock’s poem bemoans the fate of the wives of Great Men, sidelined or neglected while their busy husbands are exalted. By the 1990s, the idea that the role of wife represented an aspect of patriarchal oppression was uncontroversial. In 2017, the writer Anna Funder, best known for Stasiland, found herself cognisant for the first time that she as a wife had taken up the lion’s share of parenting and housework. She turned to George Orwell for insight into her oppression, only to discover lurking in the shadows the emblematic figure of his wife, Eileen, whose story she seizes on as a way of exorcising her feelings. Eileen O’Shaughnessy was a…

Across 9 Bush envoy opening Republican art venue (5) 10 Name Spike (after farewell) as sweetheart (9) 11 Old store of brine that fermented (5,4) 12 Progress easily in Disney zone? (5) 13 I say Gable’s last seen with Garland in Fatal Attraction! (7) 15 Glass makes blubber last – weird! (7) 17 Marsh transformed in Goa? (5) 18 Bell, British soldier: well out of it (3) 20 Stop working for an aristocrat (5) 22 In torment, as I survey columnar distortion (7) 25 Actor’s assistant of no use in a strip club? (7) 26 Trust it to enter note (5) 27 Miracle worked – Sheeran’s won from evil! (9) 30 Inject new life into right sort of rest cure (9) 31 Two sides missing from Lewis’s song (5) Down…

1 UNITED STATES Fourth indictment against Trump handed down Former president Donald Trump was hit with a fourth set of criminal charges when a Georgia grand jury issued a sweeping indictment accusing him of trying to overturn his 2020 election loss to the Democrat Joe Biden. The charges, brought late on Monday by Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis, add to the legal woes facing Trump, the frontrunner in the race for the Republican nomination for the 2024 presidential election. The 98-page indictment listed 19 defendants and 41 criminal counts. The defendants were all charged with racketeering, which carries a penalty of up to 20 years in prison. Mark Meadows, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, and lawyers Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman were among those charged. “Rather than abide…

POLICE Document ‘from police data leak’ posted on Belfast wall A document purportedly from last week’s Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) data leak appeared on a wall in Belfast alongside a threatening message. The document, which had the names of police officers redacted, was posted overnight beside a Sinn Féin office on Falls Road, suggesting dissident republicans had obtained material from the data breach, Gerry Kelly (pictured below), the party’s policing spokesperson, said on Monday. A photo of Kelly was also posted. “This is a very obvious attempt by dissident republicans to intimidate me,” said Kelly, a Stormont assembly member. “ This is a very public indication that the dissidents do have access to the sensitive information in the data leak document. It therefore represents a very real threat…

ECUADOR Assassination casts shadow over election Page 33 → Oleksandr Slyusar, a Ukrainian sapper with a ready smile, had spent the past 30 hours under Russian shelling in the recently liberated village of Staromaiorske in the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine. A rocket fired at them from a Grad system had peppered the legs and back of a fellow landmine-clearer with shrapnel. Slyusar, 38, had taken his friend west to hospital in Zaporizhzhia city that morning, before arriving back at a secret military base. He was preparing to brief an assault unit heading to the frontlines on what perils were awaiting them. “I have just come from the shit,” he said. Slyusar had back pain, but his commander in the 128th brigade could not afford for to him to take…

Ariel Lo spends a couple of hours most weeks sharing anime art and memes on Chinese apps, often chatting with friends in China in a Mandarin slightly different from the one she uses at home in Taiwan. “People use English on Instagram, and for Chinese apps they use Chinese phrases. If I am talking to friends in China, I would use them,” Lo said as she picked up a bubble tea at a street market in central Taichung city. The 18-year-old Earth sciences student, who creates art in her spare time, is part of a generation whose online life is increasingly influenced by content from China. That is worrying politicians and experts who fear young Taiwanese drawn to shop and entertain themselves on apps ultimately controlled by Beijing may be…

The number of people taking the world’s deadliest migratory route – across the central Mediterranean – to reach the EU has more than doubled, driving irregular crossings at the bloc’s external borders to their highest level in seven years. As migration returns to the top of Europe’s political agenda, Europe’s border and coast guard agency said last Friday that irregular arrivals had risen by 13% between January and July to 176,100, the highest number for the period since 2016. Frontex said the increase was entirely driven by a 115% rise in the number of people using the “central Mediterranean” route, which is now the main migratory route into the EU and accounts for more than half of all EU border detections. Many, however, do not make it. According to data…

When the Taliban moved closer to Kabul in the early days of August 2021, a series of advert-isements flooded the shopping pages on Afghan social media. Musicians were putting their instruments and equipment up for sale. Many were being offered for a fraction of what they were worth. Yet, even in a country with an immense love for music, there were few buyers. “I knew from past experience what they would do with people like us [musicians], and our instruments. They have a dislike for our art and culture,” a 49-year-old singer from Afghanistan’s north who asked to be identified as Farhan, said. Farhan was a sought-after musician in his town during festivals, weddings and social gatherings for his mesmerising renditions of folk songs played on a damboora, a traditional…

For months, Father Tesfaye* has taken his battered Land Cruiser and shuttled secretly between his home district of Irob and Mekelle, the capital of Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region, ferrying sick people, medicines and small amounts of desperately needed food. Eritrean troops block the one good road into Irob, preventing aid agencies from bringing in humanitarian supplies, so the Roman Catholic priest must take a treacherous route through the mountains to avoid checkpoints. The Irob are a small community of about 35,000 people who speak their own language – Saho – and mostly live in the north-eastern pocket of Tigray to which they give their name. It is a remote border area that has long been claimed by Eritrea. When war broke out in Tigray in November 2020, Eritrea’s military swept…

Millions of Ecuadorians will have seen the footage showing the last seconds before the presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was killed, shot through the windows of a white pickup truck after being escorted by unarmed policemen who were helpless to save him. The images that followed showed chaos as screaming supporters dropped to the ground. Another clip filmed inside the campaign meeting, which Villavicencio had just left last Wednesday, showed panicked followers fleeing or ducking for cover and bloodstains on the tiled floor. Ecuador, a South American nation of 18 million people, has been the scene of mass protests, autocratic governments and economic meltdowns. But the country’s first political assassination seems to be a defining sign of the times. The Ecuadorian government has said six suspects arrested after the killing were…

NELS ABBEY After 50 years, hip-hop is due some respect Page 47 → A“coup belt ” now extends across the African continent, running along the Sahel region that bisects north and sub-Saharan Africa. Niger, where the democratically elected president was deposed by a military junta, has now become the last link that completed the corridor of countries run by coupsters. It is the ninth coup or attempted power grab in west and central Africa since 2020. This might appear at first as a retrenchment, the thrusting of African countries back into military rule and weak democratic cultures, with a dash of Russian mischief to complete the picture of a fragile region at the whim of local strongmen and meddling. The reality is more complicated, and perhaps even oddly hopeful. Much…

Last month, the southern US rock band Molly Hatchet played to more than 10,000 bikers at Berlin’s annual Motorcycle Jamboree, 45 years after their debut album was released. There’s nothing too unusual about that – plenty of veteran rock bands still play to huge audiences. What is unusual, though, is that no one who played on that first album – in fact, no one who was on any of their first six albums – was on stage in Berlin. Not that Bobby Ingram – guitarist and owner of the trademark to the name Molly Hatchet – is bothered. “I’ve been in the band longer than any original member was,” he says (he joined in 1987). “I have tenure. I am the only one that can say I never quit, or…

est Cork is a place apart. In the last third of the last century it became something of a refuge for those hoping to forge – a suitably ambiguous verb – what used to be known as an “alternative lifestyle ”. There are still quite a few antiquated hippies down there, as well as a few artistic types and the odd retired media tycoon. Something of the old magic survives; step into the market in Skibbereen on a Saturday morning and, despite the rain and the grey hair all round, it could be Berkeley, 1968. But something survives too of an older magic, one that goes back to the pre-Christian Ireland of the sídhe, or fairy folk, and Yeats’s sorcerer queens and tragic warriors, and it pervades The Well of…

Across 5 Ruthlessly competitive (3-3-3) 8 Vitality (informal) (4) 9 Small low house (8) 10 Ta-ra! (informal) (2,4) 11 Like egg yolk (6) 13 Bagged (anag) – complete rotter! (3,3) 15 Hard to bear (6) 16 Nutty (informal) (8) 18 Mislay (4) 19 With the order reversed (4,5) Down 1 Small tropical animal that eats snakes, rats and birds’ eggs (8) 2 Leaves holder (3,3) 3 Sharply painful (6) 4 Goya (anag) (4) 6 Extinct terrestrial reptiles (9) 7 Spaghetti dish (9) 12 Protestant opposed to Northern Ireland ever joining a united Ireland (8) 14 North American name for a ground squirrel — a resident of Minnesota (6) 15 Giggle (6) 17 Elegance (4) Solution No 16,610…