Innehållsförteckning för 8 September 2023 från Guardian Weekly

The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol209 | Issue№ 10 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 community.…

Ukrainian forces have decisively breached Russia’s first defensive line near Zaporizhzhia after weeks of painstaking mine clearance, and expect faster gains as they press the weaker second line, the general leading the southern counteroffensive has said. Brig Gen Oleksandr Tarnavskiy estimated Russia had devoted 60% of its time and resources into building the first defensive line and only 20% each into the second and third lines because Moscow had not expected Ukrainian forces to get through. “We are now between the first and second defensive lines,” he said, speaking to the Observer in his first interview since the breakthrough. Ukrainian forces were now pushing out on both sides of the breach and consolidating their hold on territory seized in recent fighting, he said. A vast minefield trapped Ukrainian troops for…

A school buildings crisis was threatening to engulf Downing Street this week, with Rishi Sunak accused of slashing the budget for repairs while his education secretary was caught claiming colleagues had done nothing to stop it. As pupils began returning to schools around England on Monday – or in some cases took lessons from home or in temporary classrooms – the prime minister faced claims he had failed to grasp the gravity of the situation as chancellor. The issue caused dismay and chaos as millions of pupils started the academic year. Former Department for Education (DfE) officials, meanwhile, said staff in the department had been shocked when a request to fund work on 300 to 400 schools at risk from crumbling concrete panels was pared down, to 100 and then…

Alone in the Arctic, surrounded by disappearing sea ice … few fables of the climate crisis are better known than the plight of the polar bear. The marine mammals are heavily dependent on sea ice for hunting, and as the Arctic warms, scientists warn they will become extinct across much of the region. Long term declines have been recorded in three of the 19 polar bear subpopulations found across the Arctic, including those in the western part of Hudson Bay in Canada – among the most southerly populations – whose numbers dropped from an estimated 842 to 618 between 2016 and 2021. But some researchers warn that this “accidental” symbol of the climate crisis is unhelpful and not universally true so far, and can undermine conservation efforts by driving mistrust…

The earthquake that struck the Tokyo region two minutes before noon on 1 September 1923 was so powerful that it destroyed the central weather bureau’s seismometers. Over almost two days, fires triggered by household gas burners, chemicals and overhead wires raged through the wooden buildings of eastern Tokyo’s low-lying neighbourhoods. By the time the blazes had been extinguished or burned themselves out, an estimated 105,000 people were dead or missing and most of the city’s buildings had been destroyed, including 290,000 homes. The damage was estimated at ¥5.5bn, equivalent to 37% of Japan’s gross domestic product at the time. As the Japanese capital marked the 100th anniversary of what became known as the Great Kantō earthquake, it is bracing for another “big one”. Seismologists believe there is a 70% chance…

Kenneth Smith is one of two living Americans who can describe what it is like to survive an execution, having endured an aborted lethal injection during which he was subjected to excruciating pain tantamount, his lawyers claim, to torture. Nine months later, Smith has been singled out for another undesirable distinction. If the state of Alabama has its way, he will be submitted to a method that has never been used for execution and which veterinarians consider unacceptable for animals – death by nitrogen gas. Alabama’s attorney general has asked the state supreme court to set a fresh execution date for Smith using the untested system. The method, known as “nitrogen hypoxia”, theoretically works by replacing air with nitrogen, reducing oxygen levels to fatally low levels and leading to suffocation.…

I can’t help thinking of the title of that old David Lodge novel, The British Museum is Falling Down. The much-beloved institution is teetering beneath the weight of scandal. The museum’s chair has been forced to admit that as many as 2,000 objects have gone missing from the collection over the past decade. Public attention has turned towards an ex-curator allegedly removed from his post last year (his son has said he has done no wrong). The director of the museum, Hartwig Fischer, has resigned, and his deputy, Jonathan Williams, has stepped aside pending an independent review. An antiques dealer-turned-whistleblower has given interviews about the museum’s apparent complacency when he alerted managers to the fact that items he had seen listed on eBay seemed to have originated from the BM’s…

Even people around President Biden now accept that pulling out of Afghanistan in the way the US did two years ago was an utter disaster. It ruined the lives of millions, destroyed the social and economic advances of 20 years, and returned the country’s women to a state of slavery. The result was to make the US look weak and pathetic; no wonder Vladimir Putin decided he could safely invade Ukraine only six months later. The suffering of ordinary Afghans as they tried to escape the Taliban shocked the entire world. The scenes in the approaches to Kabul airport on those 17 boiling hot August days were unbearable. People tore at one another and trod the dying underfoot in order to get to the barbed wire that separated them from…

Across 5 Uncommunicativeness (9) 8 Academic qualification in England, Wales and Northern Ireland (initials) (4) 9 Blessed using oil (8) 10 Church changing room (6) 11 (In times of stress) with self-possession (6) 13 William ___, English motor manufacturer, later Lord Nuffield, d. 1963 (6) 15 Leave (6) 16 Rabid owl (anag) – animal from which most domestic pigs are descended (4,4) 18 A horse’s gait (4) 19 One looks on (9) Down 1 Mine, metal or smoke? (8) 2 Long catalogue (6) 3 Courageous (6) 4 Once-over (4) 6 Hardening of tissue or a body part (9) 7 Noted pile (anag) – exhaustion (9) 12 Placement (8) 14 Walk in a slovenly way (6) 15 Using the spoken word (6) 17 Trick (4) Solution No 16,628…

8 September 2023 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s explosive entrance on to the US political scene at the age of 29, as the youngest woman ever to be elected to the House of Representatives, was a beacon of hope for the progressive left during the dark days of the Trump presidency. Five years on, AOC is established as an influential figure in the Democratic party, known for her advocacy of green policies and efforts to engage marginalised groups. In a wide-ranging interview, she talks to Washington bureau chief David Smith about the climate crisis, misogyny in US politics and the potential – one day – for a presidential run of her own. The big story Page 10 → This time of year often marks a new term for school and college students. But in England, a major…

Whenever Nello Scavo returns from Ukraine, he is overcome with frustration. As a war correspondent for the Italian national paper Avvenire, he knows people will ask him: “Is it really as bad as they say?” “Sometimes I think that only if I come back badly injured will people start taking me seriously,” he said. “It’s as if they don’t believe that Russia is massacring civilians. The problem is that Vladimir Putin has always enjoyed wide sympathy in Italian politics and public opinion.” Although Italy’s far-right government is one of Ukraine’s staunchest European supporters, Russian propaganda and disinformation permeates the Italian media, with pro-Russian guests invited on popular talkshows. A survey by Ipsos in April revealed that almost 50% of Italians prefer not to take sides in the conflict. Matteo Pugliese,…

Tā Tipene O’Regan, 84 years old, leaned into his carved walking stick and reached down to a large wooden box. He paused a second, then slowly lifted the lid. Out shot the hefty body of a bright turquoise bird, legs windmilling, launching from its cage like a football from a slingshot. “I am now largely blind, but I still saw them,” O’Regan said: a flash of blue feathers and bright red legs racing for the tussocks. That streak of colour was the takahē: a large, flightless bird that was believed for decades to be extinct. Eighteen of the birds were released last month in the Lake Whakatipu Waimāori valley, an alpine area of New Zealand’s South Island, on to slopes they had not been seen roaming for about 100 years.…

Teenagers deciding their future this year have a lot to contend with. In England, those who sat their A-levels suffered the biggest results drop on record while the top grades in GCSEs taken by most 16-year-olds also fell. And now they face the question: will the career I choose to pursue even exist by the time I enter the workforce? Artificial intelligence has hit the mainstream with the popularity of generative AI programs driven by large language models such as ChatGPT. Businesses are increasingly adopting the technology. A study, which was published last month by the cybersecurity firm Kaspersky, suggests 57% of workers are using such tools to save time in the office, especially for summarising meeting notes and long documents. Yet the automation of such tasks also means the…

The Chilean government has announced its muchanticipated plan to search for the victims of forced disappearance and political execution under Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, which began with a coup 50 years ago this month. The national search plan will seek to establish the circumstances and conditions under which each person was forcibly disappeared, guarantee access to government records and provide reparations and guarantees for victims’ families. It is the first time the Chilean state has assumed responsibility for the search for victims of the Pinochet dictatorship, which ran from 1973 to 1990, despite families’ tireless efforts and hundreds of legal cases taken on by the judiciary. President Gabriel Boric announced the plan in a ceremony outside La Moneda, Chile’s presidential palace, on International Day of the Victims of Forced Disappearances last…

CHARLOTTE HIGGINS Why I fear for the British Museum Page 48 → Should governments ban the “improper treatment of objects of significant religious importance to a religious community”? That is what the Danish government is suggesting in a new law it announced last month that could result in offenders being imprisoned for two years. The proposed ban comes after a spate of incidents in Sweden and Denmark in which Qur’ans have been publicly burned, provoking an outcry across the Muslim world. The answer to the question is both simple and complex. It is simple because any law outlawing blasphemy is unacceptable and should be opposed. Having abolished its blasphemy law in 2017, for Denmark to seek to reintroduce it in a new form is retrogressive. It is complex, though, because…

John Wayne, looking great in a battered old Stetson, emerges through a door on to a wood-panelled landing. The iconic screen cowboy looks cautiously around before pushing another door, which is opened by a young Brigitte Bardot. The French star barely has time to say “Oh, pardon” before she disappears back through the door, only to be replaced by a grizzled butler figure. With a palpably sinister sense of purpose, he walks across a small room towards a black and white door – from which he emerges, having been transformed into a full-colour Antonio Banderas, bristling with sensitive intent as he approaches yet another door. “There’s so much symbolism attached to a door,” says Christian Marclay. “Why would you want to show it – if not to create an element…

The Irish offspring of The Handmaid’s Tale and Nineteen Eighty-Four, Paul Lynch’s Booker-longlisted fifth novel is as nightmarish a story as you’ll come across: powerful, claustrophobic and horribly real. It exerts a grim kind of grip; even when approached cautiously and read in short bursts it somehow lingers, its world leaking out from its pages like black ink into clear water. Lynch has form when it comes to dark subjects, having previously written about violence and revenge in fledgling America (Red Sky in Morning, his debut), a deadly blaze at a rural farm (The Black Snow), the Irish famine (Grace) and men adrift on the Pacific (Beyond the Sea). Even so, Prophet Song is likely to go down as his most frightening book. We are in Dublin, a shadow version…

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1 UKRAINE Defence minister resigns on being removed from post The country’s defence minister submitted his resignation letter after Volodymyr Zelenskiy removed him from his post last Sunday, in the biggest reshuffle by the president of his government team since Russia’s invasion. Oleksii Reznikov, whose ministry has been hit by corruption scandals, said he had written to the chair of Ukraine’s parliament, Ruslan Stefanchuk, confirming he was stepping down. “It was an honor to serve the Ukrainian people and work for the #UAarmy for the last 22 months, the toughest period of Ukraine’s modern history,” Reznikov posted on X, formerly known as Twitter. In his nightly video address, Zelenskiy said he was replacing Reznikov with Rustem Umerov (below), an ex-businessman and former parliamentary deputy. Umerov, a Crimean Tatar, is a representative…

NORTHERN IRELAND Data breach among reasons behind fall of police chief The chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland resigned after weeks of pressure over a series of issues including a serious data breach involving the personal information of more than 10,000 officers and support staff. Policing board members accepted the resignation of Simon Byrne on Monday, it was announced at a press conference. His resignation, discussed at an emergency meeting, came after a court ruled last week that the force unlawfully disciplined two junior officers to placate Sinn Féin. In a separate crisis it emerged that a data handling mistake led to the publication of personal information of more than 10,000 officers and staff. Both issues prompted calls from political leaders for Byrne to go. The seemingly…

YEMEN How the public averted an oil catastrophe Page 24 → Antonina Sanina’s last two nights in Kupiansk were spent hiding in the basement of her apartment block. She survived six and a half months of Russian occupation last year, but the renewed shelling of the Ukrainian town finally prompted her to abandon home. “I couldn’t take it any more,” she explained simply after volunteers drove her to safety. Eight neighbours had been hiding in the cellar with her as the Russians targeted what they thought, wrongly, was a barracks nearby. “You could barely sleep,” she said. “Then you’d just wake up and you wouldn’t know – was that an actual hit or was it a dream?” Ukraine’s counteroffensive, beginning in June, was intended to put Russia on the defensive.…

India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, will have the unenviable task of forging agreement between the world’s biggest developed and developing countries when G20 leaders gather in Delhi for their annual summit on 9 September. The scale of the challenge will be reflected in two significant no-shows. Vladimir Putin will not be leaving Moscow and nor will Xi Jinping be flying in from Beijing. The theme of the meeting is One Earth, One Family, One Future, but in truth the G20 is riven by conflict and struggling to remain relevant. It wasn’t always this way. The group dates back to the late 1990s but came of age a decade later during the global financial crisis, when rich and poor countries worked together to mitigate the impact of the slump that followed…

In the small Swedish city of Örebro, guns are so easy to come by that social services say most of the high-risk young people they work with in relation to youth crime could get hold of one in a day. “The contacts are there if you want them. Drugs they could get even faster,” said Sabrina Farlblad at the city’s social services offices, where two years ago her team formed support groups for young people deemed at risk of becoming involved in violence. So far the preventive approach appears to be working but fears remain while illegal guns – largely from the Balkans, according to police – are relatively accessible. As younger children – some as young as 10 – are recruited into the drug trade, the number using guns…

It has been touted as an existential risk on a par with pandemics. But when it comes to artificial intelligence, at least one pioneer is not losing sleep over such worries. Prof Michael Wooldridge, who will be delivering this year’s Royal Institution Christmas lectures, said he was more concerned AI could become the boss from hell, monitoring employees’ email, offering continual feedback and even deciding who gets fired. “There are some prototypical examples of those tools that are available today. And I find that very, very disturbing,” he said. Wooldridge – a professor of computer science at the University of Oxford – said he wanted to use Britain’s most prestigious public science lectures to demystify AI. The lectures will include a Turing test, a challenge first proposed by Alan Turing.…

ON 24 JUNE 2022, around 1,700 people, most of them asylum seekers from Sudan and South Sudan, filed down the wooded slopes of Mount Gurugu in north-eastern Morocco. They were headed to the enclave of Melilla, a Spanish city of some 85,000 people, perched on the coast of mainland Africa. At first, the migrants met no resistance. That was strange. In the months leading up to that day, Moroccan police had repeatedly raided settlements on the mountain, where thousands of people had taken refuge. The authorities had also prevented local shopkeepers from selling food to the migrants and stopped taxi drivers from transporting them to the Spanish consulate in the nearby city of Nador. By mid-June, the migrants were feeling trapped. They couldn’t stay where they were for fear of…

While Rhodes burned, tourists kept flocking in. Homes were being turned to ash, thousands of holidaymakers were being evacuated, and still the visitors came. In the wake of the Hawaii wildfires, which have killed at least 115 people, the island of Maui experienced the same phenomenon. These images played on my mind as I set off on my own holiday abroad soon after. They niggled at me as I fumbled my way through Turkish thank-yous and waited dutifully in line to see Istanbul’s Blue Mosque. Why did they do it? There were partial explanations: a lack of funds to book alternate trips, the question of whether refunds would be issued, the quest to escape the grim British summer. But none of these felt enough to explain why people would walk…

What’s the secret to making brilliant hummus, and are there any variations to try? Jenny, Birmingham, England, UK “As there are so few ingredients in hummus, everything matters,” says Itamar Srulovich, whose latest venture, Honey & Co Daily, opens this month. “You have some easy wins: juicing the lemon yourself, fresh garlic, and you can buy good tahini now.” Where it “gets a bit murky” is the chickpeas. “It’s hard to find good ones – it took us five years to find our supplier.” Jarred chickpeas are a good (albeit pricey) option if you’re in a rush. “They’re smooth, salty, and produce amazing hummus,” says Noor Murad, co-author of OTK Extra Good Things. However, if time isn’t an issue, Murad and Srulovich recommend dried, which, of course, require soaking in…

Across 1 Issue is open, if Conservative becomes quiet (7) 5 A short report on ground is refreshing stuff (4,3) 9 Stand out function held outside hotel (5) 10 Small sports car won’t accommodate a third wheel? (3,6) 11 Tell us all you know of fool meeting with success … (3,4,2) 12 … although this fool is reportedly busier! (5) 13 Team in loss? Occasionally, it’s a result of the toss (5) 15 Flatter setting for third rate flower (9) 18 Urge safer cooking - it’s a healthier style (5,4) 19 Regressive US city removes latitude for green growth (5) 21 Come back to accept a solution for unresolved contest (5) 23 Powerful accessories bring society to the fore (9) 25 It ran Nato ragged as an expression of frustration…