Innehållsförteckning för 3 November 2023 från Guardian Weekly

The heavy fog that cloaked Gaza’s agony on the morning after Israeli troops arrived was burned away by the sun – only to be replaced by the smoke of hundreds of bombs, and between the blasts, there was a new sound: machine gun fire. The taking of Gaza territory had begun. It was not an all-out invasion, at least not yet, but nor was it the sort of in-and-out incursion of the sort the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) had performed on the preceding nights. The ratchet has been turned up, and Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, made clear last weekend that it would continue to turn. “We attacked above the ground and underground, we attacked terror operatives of all ranks, everywhere,” Gallant said in a video statement. “The instructions for…

Sitting in a basement studio hidden in the centre of Yerevan, Artyom reflected on his decision to desert the Russian army after a year spent fighting in Ukraine. Just two weeks earlier, the former platoon commander was living in a trench. He has since abandoned his post and fled to the Armenian capital. “I wanted no part in the imperialistic habits of our ruler,” he said. “But I do feel guilt in front of Ukraine … I could have said no, I just didn’t know what the consequences would be.” Artyom, who asked for his last name to be withheld out of fear for his safety, is one of the growing number of Russian combatants who have fled the army over the past 20 months of war. Coming from a…

Hyginus Tagira is singing to an appreciative crowd of metalheads at a festival in Kokopau, a bustling township in Bougainville. He is the flamboyant frontman of Conscience – pronounced Con Science – a four-piece metal band. He’s dressed the part, swaddled in a leather cape despite the fearsome afternoon heat. It’s still early in the festival but hundreds of Bougainvillea ns are here, most wearing lurid heavy metal T-shirts. Conscience is one of dozens of metal groups in the autonomous region of Bougainville, located on the far eastern fringes of Papua New Guinea and still haunted by the ghosts of a conflict that officially ended more than 20 years ago. The civil war that began in the late 1980s was the most violent conflict in the Pacific since the second…

An unassuming industrial town in Japan, far from the busy tourist hubs of Tokyo and Kyoto, is in the middle of an unprecedented social transformation. Ōizumi, rather than the country’s capital, is at the forefront of Japan’s foreigner-friendly future. The northern Kant? plain is an unlikely setting for an experiment in multiculturalism, but this is provincial Japan with a twist. Signs at the local railway station are written in six languages. At the ticket office, a member of staff deals patiently with a customer struggling to speak Japanese. The main street is an eclectic mix of supermarkets selling food and drink from Brazil, Peru and Colombia, kebab shops, Nepalese and Indian restaurants, halal butchers and karaoke bars. The sense that this is no ordinary Japanese town is supported by demographic…

Trick or treat but don’t cross the picket line. In the run-up to Halloween, the union representing Hollywood actors issued its striking members with fashion advice. “Choose costumes inspired by generalized characters and figures (ghost, zombie, spider, etc),” it said, anxious that they did not dress as characters that might be seen as promoting the content of major studios. The effective ban on dressing up as Barbie, Marvel superheroes and Wednesday Addams did not go down well. Actor Ryan Reynolds tweeted sarcastically: “I look forward to screaming ‘scab’ at my eight-year-old all night. She’s not in the union but she needs to learn.” The union was forced to hastily clarify that the guidelines did not apply to children. A summer of labour unrest has left almost no corner of Hollywood…

JASON BURKE Why is it so hard to quash terrorism? Page 48 → It starts slowly. A food bank crops up inside your local mosque. You notice more sleeping bags on the walk to work. Over time, the signs seem to grow. A donation bin appears in the supermarket for families who can’t afford soap or toothpaste. Terms such as “bed poverty” emerge in the news because we now need vocabulary to describe children who are so poor that they have to sleep on the floor. Then one day you read a statistic that somehow feels both shocking and wearily unsurprising: about 3.8 million people experienced destitution in the UK last year. That’s being unable to meet their most basic needs to stay warm, dry, clean and fed. The research…

In 2018, the film-maker Paul Schrader made some controversial remarks about how the business had changed since his 1970s heyday, when he wrote Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. “There are people who talk about the American cinema of the 70s as some halcyon period,” Schrader said at a Bafta Screenwriters event in London. “There’s probably, in fact, more talented film-makers today than there was in the 70s. What there was in the 70s was better audiences.” The director added: “We now have audiences that don’t take movies seriously, so it’s hard to make a serious movie for them.” Just five years later, Schrader’s words seem like a grim portent of an era when art films and character-driven dramas struggle to find an audience in cinemas. Though much of the blame…

Readers of David Diop’s previous novel, which won the International Booker prize, probably won’t have forgotten the experience. At Night All Blood Is Black is narrated by a young Senegalese soldier recruited to fight for France in the first world war and brutalised in the trenches. Now Diop has brought his capacious mind to bear on an earlier period of encounter between Europe and Africa. Beyond the Door of No Return is the story of a French Enlightenment botanist who travels to Senegal to study plants and finds himself overwhelmed by love for an African woman. Michel Adanson is an old man by the time he writes this tale of passion in a leatherbound journal, hoping that his daughter will find it. Releasing emotions that have been guarded for 50…

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1 RUSSIA US dismisses Moscow’s claims over antisemitic riot The United States dismissed Russia’s attempt to blame Ukraine and the west for an antisemitic riot at an airport in Muslim-majority Dagestan. President Vladimir Putin accused Ukraine and “agents of western special services” after a mob descended on Makhachkala airport in Russia’s North Caucasus last Sunday in search of Jewish passengers on a plane that arrived from Israel. Maria Zakharova, the Russian foreign ministry spokesperson, said the riot was the result of a “provocation” orchestrated from outside Russia, with Ukraine playing a “direct and key role”. No evidence was provided to support the claims Asked about the accusations at a White House briefing, US national security council spokesman John Kirby said: “Classic Russian rhetoric, when something goes bad in your country,…

CONSERVATIVES Sunak sees green agenda as wedge issue with Labour Rishi Sunak’s government will use next week’s king’s speech to advance expansion of North Sea oil and gas exploration, as well as pro-car policies, in the hope of opening up a clear divide over the green agenda with Labour Energy industry sources and senior figures in Whitehall say they expect ministers to announce legislation to usher in a new annual system for awarding oil and gas licences, despite the UK’s commitments to move away from fossil fuels and reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050. The king’s speech, on 7 November, the final legislative programme before the next general election, is also expected to include measures that will explicitly favour motorists, including making it more difficult for local authorities to…

Will it destroy us, or will it save us? An age-old debate between tech optimists and tech pessimists that has played out over centuries as the steady march of human progress delivers new technologies, from the wheel to the printing press to the smartphone. Today it is a conversation being conducted with increasing urgency about artificial intelligence. The optimists point out that history has proved the doomsayers wrong countless times. Take the printing press: the 15th-century Catholic church worried that the spread of information would undermine authority and stability across Europe; some intellectuals worried that information would be dangerous in the hands of the plebs; craft guilds opposed the democratisation of their skills via manuals. In the end the printing press did enable harms – the publication of a witch-hunting…

In audio released by the Israel Defence Forces, a member of the Military Intelligence Directorate can be heard calling a Palestinian man in Gaza urging him and his family to evacuate south. But the man says it is hard to comply because Hamas is blocking roads, and “sending people back home”. He adds that Hamas is shooting at Palestinians trying to leave the area. The audio is one of numerous pieces of alleged evidence released by the IDF to support claims that Hamas uses the civilian population of Gaza as human shields. What is a human shield? The international criminal court defines the war crime of using human shields as “utilising the presence of a civilian or other protected person to render certain points, areas or military forces immune from…

Ukrainian officials seeking to oust Russian actors from the country’s gambling industry are going to emulate the methods of the US authorities in the 1980s when they rooted out the Italian mob from the casinos of Las Vegas. Mob rule  The Italian mafia played a key role in the development of the casinos and hotels in Las Vegas, but a turning point came in the 1970s, when the FBI launched investigations along with the regulatory bodies into the involvement of organised crime. The mob also faced pressure when Nevada passed the Corporate Gaming Act, which made it easier for corporations to run casinos. Gambling was legalised in Ukraine after a 10-year ban shortly before the full-scale invasion in February 2022 and has been a profitable avenue for Russians who want…

‘Sweat with an odour of freshly plucked feathers could suggest a case of rubella’ ‘Did you ever try to measure a smell?” Alexander Graham Bell once asked an audience of graduands at a high school in Washington DC. He then quizzed the probably confused class of 1914 as to whether they could tell when one scent was twice the strength of another, or measure the difference between two distinct odours. Eventually, though, he came to the point: “Until you can measure their likenesses and difference, you can have no science of odour,” Bell said. “If you are ambitious to find a new science, measure a smell.” At the time, scientists could describe sound and sight in terms of vibrations in the air and wavelengths of light, but there was no…

LOOKING BACK NOW, IT IS HARD TO PINPOINT THE MOMENT WHEN THINGS GOT TOTALLY OUT OF CONTROL. It might have been when council contractors teamed up with police for an operation that Nick Clegg – then the MP for Sheffield Hallam, now president of global affairs at Facebook – later described as “something you’d expect to see in Putin’s Russia”. It might have been when the council received a letter from the environment minister, Michael Gove, demanding that it halt the scheme – and chose to ignore it. It might have been when South Yorkshire police had to pay out more than £2 4,000 ($29,000) for wrongful arrests that they had made to defend the council’s work. But by the time a public inquiry was commissioned in 2021, chaired by…

Want to guess the most dangerous animal in the world? When my team asked children in Edinburgh during a public outreach event with schools, they said sharks, alligators, spiders and lions. All good guesses, but none on target. The deadliest animal is the mighty mosquito, which kills more than 1 million people a year. Almost 700 million people contract a mosquito-borne illness each year. Mosquitoes carry serious diseases like malaria, dengue fever, West Nile virus, Zika virus and chikungunya that not only kill, but also result in pain, disability and prolonged illness. Among mosquito-borne diseases, malaria is the most deadly. Scientists believe it has killed more people than any other disease spread by insects in history. And it remains stubbornly present in the modern world: there were 619,000 deaths and…

Trying to catch the wind may seem a futile task, but inside the Bora museum in the Italian city of Trieste, there is proof that it can be done, as long as you have the right container. On the shelves, you can find an off shore breeze from Barcelona in a perfume decanter, a Bohemian downwind in a mustard jar, an angry mistral in a plastic water bottle and a humid Swiss fohn in a test tube. Pride of place is taken by a vintage year of the wind that gives the museum its name, captured in a paint-sample tin: a bora from February 1954, when cold gusts dive-bombed from the karst hills into the Adriatic sea at a record speed of 171km/h. The collection of 400 bottled winds is…

Professional rugby branded Sam Peters a troublemaker. He was the writer and journalist who spearheaded the Mail on Sunday’s concussion campaign against the sport’s ruling bodies in 2013. A decade later, the shadow of a mass lawsuit concerning concussions continues to hang over World Rugby. As a reporter, Peters interviewed former players whose lives had been irrevocably altered by concussions and other injuries that were aggravated or outright caused by lax rules, regulations and attitudes encouraged from the top down. The Rugby Football Union (RFU) and other prominent organisations in the sport shot down any attempt to question the status quo – rather bullishly, it seems. Peters makes the case for how professional rugby has become more dangerous. He explains how the risk to players’ health has increased dramatically since…

PLUS Explained What is AI – and what is all the fuss about? Page 13 → Sonia Sodha Why the AI revolution needs guardrails Page 14 → Demis Hassabis says he is not in the “pessimistic” camp about artificial intelligence. But that did not stop the CEO of Google DeepMind signing a statement in May warning that the threat of extinction from AI should be treated as a societal risk comparable to pandemics or nuclear weapons. That uneasy gap between hope and horror, and the desire to bridge it, is a key reason why the UK prime minister Rishi Sunak convened this week’s global AI safety summit in Bletchley Park, a symbolic choice as the base of the visionary codebreakers – including computing pioneer Alan Turing – who deciphered German…

INDONESIA Jokowi’s son has an appetite for high office Page 24 → Last Sunday morning, phones belonging to the 2.3 million people trapped in the besieged Gaza Strip slowly came to life again, inundated with updates, messages and missed calls after the lifting of a 36-hour near - total communications blackout imposed by Israel. Nights in Gaza now are completely dark. At the same time as communications were lost last Friday evening, Israel intensified its aerial bombardment and launched its initial ground operation into the strip. A fresh wave of anguish swept the territory as communications returned for those with charged phones and news of friends and relatives killed since last Friday arrived all at once. “It was the worst night of bombing so far, but the worst part was…

‘I was a Labour party member for 31 years. The Palestine crisis was the end of the tether for me. I cannot tolerate Keir’s policies any more,” said Waheed Akbar, the former mayor of Luton. Akbar said many people locally had said he made the right decision to leave Labour. “This party is no longer working for the Muslim community especially. They will not be voting for the Labour party,” he said, blaming Keir Starmer’s handling of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. “People perceive that he is backing the Israeli government blindly,” he said. He is not alone in this opinion in this Bedfordshire town that has the fourth highest Muslim population in England. Its two MPs, Sarah Owen and Rachel Hopkins, are facing calls locally to resign from the…

Indonesia’s next vice-president could be a familiar face. Gibran Rakabuming Raka, 36, is the son of the current president Joko Widodo and his swift rise to the top of the country’s political echelons is proving controversial, raising questions about dynasty-building and the strength of the country’s democracy. Born in 1987 in Central Java, Gibran was educated in Indonesia and in Singapore. His father ran a furniture company for much of his childhood, and Gibran was 17 when Jokowi – as the president is widely known – took office as mayor of Solo, his first position before he became governor of Jakarta and, later, in 2014, president. Gibran has run food businesses. But by 2020, he was following in his father’s footsteps by running in a mayoral election in Solo. He…

Squint a little and you could be in a town in the Tirolean Alps: red gabled roofs top elegant, wood-fronted houses, set against green mountains. But open your eyes fully and the palm trees and passing parrots betray the fact the scene is more than 10,000km away from Austria, in a valley in Peru where the Andes meets the Amazon basin. With its neatly fenced front gardens and orderly avenues, it is clear the Austrian and German emigrants who settled here in the 19th century wanted to make a home away from home, and Pozuzo is an impeccably well-preserved enclave of Austro-German culture in the most unlikely of places. Every year, the descendants of those emigrants, now four or five generations on from the first arrivals, celebrate their unique history…

Following 2023’s deadliest mass shooting in the US that occurred in Lewiston, Maine, last week, young gun control activists are once again speaking up against the failures of lawmakers amid an all too familiar tragedy. Last Wednesday night, a gunman opened fire at a bowling alley and a restaurant in Maine’s second most populous city, killing 18 people including a 14-year-old boy. Robert Card, a suspect in the killing s, was found dead late last Friday after authorities had issued arrest warrants for multiple counts of murder and launched a huge manhunt for him. The shootings have prompted widespread outcry from young activists including David Hogg and Trevon Bosley, co-founder and board chair of the March for Our Lives organisation. As members of the youth-led gun control movement born out…

FOR MUCH OF HER EARLY 20S, CASTER SEMENYA FELT PHYSICALLY SICK. The South African runner had risen to sudden global acclaim in 2009, when she won gold in the 800m at the World Athletics Championships in Berlin at the age of just 18. It was her first major world competition. But her win was marred by questions of her sex and gender. Given her speed, muscular build and husky voice, some quietly asked whether she was a man. The sport’s governing body, the IAAF (known since 2019 as World Athletics), had required Semenya to take gender verification tests the day before the race, with a spokesperson telling the press “the rumours, the gossip was starting to build up”, and needed investigating. Semenya’s subsequent victory would mark the start of a…

How do I achieve a rich, moist, fluffy chocolate cake that Bruce Bogtrotter in Matilda would be proud of? Katie, London, England, UK “The key to most fluffy cakes is adding oil,” says Phil Khoury, author of A New Way to Bake. That could come, he says, via replacing “up to 50%” of the butter in a recipe with neutral oil or substituting it entirely, the reason being “oils are liquid at both fridge and room temperatures, whereas butter has to go above 25C for it to take on the attributes you associate with a moist cake”. There is, of course, no butter involved in Khoury’s vegan take on the theme. “I use olive oil, but not a lot, especially when you’re in the business of not using eggs.” Typically,…