Innehållsförteckning för 15 December 2023 från Guardian Weekly

The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol209 | Issue№ 24 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. The Guardian is…

For Almaza Owda, in Gaza’s besieged second city of Khan Younis, thoughts have turned to how she might die. Last Thursday night, four days into the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) assault on the southern city, Owda – who is living in a tent in the grounds of a UN school turned shelter – described her feelings. “I keep asking myself how will I die?” Owda posted on social media. “Is it possible that shrapnel will hit me in the head and I die straight away? Maybe it penetrates the tent while I am sleeping and enters my body and I die from the bleeding. What might happen? There are a thousand scenarios in my head right now. “The bombardment is very, very violent and intense nearby. The clashes never stop.…

The world’s most ambitious climate target is under threat, both from physics and politics. But what would it mean for the planet and its inhabitants if humanity were to abandon the goal to limit global heating to 1.5C above preindustrial levels? The inclusion of 1.5C was hailed as a triumph of the Paris climate agreement of 2015. Until then, international ambition had been limited to 2C, much to the frustration of small island states and others on the frontline of climate disruption. Eight years on, the only real change has been in the severity of the climate crisis. Oil companies are racking up record profits and plan to expand production. Emissions have reached record levels. In the first 10 months of 2023, global heating was already running at 1.4C above…

There was growing anger last weekend over the government’s “love only for the rich” plans that would force thousands of British families to choose whether to split or go into exile. James Cleverly, the home secretary, announced last week that a British citizen who wants to sponsor their foreign spouse to live with them in the UK will need to earn at least £ 38,700 ($48,550) a year to qualify for a family visa. The changes are expected to cut the number of family visas by about 10,000, according to reports of government briefings, adding to the thousands of “Skype families” who have already been separated by the previous rules where the British partner needed to earn an £18,600 salary. Campaign group Reunite Families UK said that hundreds of people…

Refugees and migrants are being buried in unmarked graves across the European Union at a level unprecedented outside war. The Guardian can reveal that at least 1,015 men, women and children who died at the borders of Europe in the past decade were buried before being identified. They lie in stark, often blank graves – rough white stones overgrown with weeds in Sidiro cemetery in Greece; crude wooden crosses in cemeteries in Italy’s Lampedusa. In northern France faceless slabs of concrete say simply “Monsieur X”, in Poland, Lithuania and Croatia plaques read “NN” or name not known. The European parliament passed a resolution in 2021 that called for people who die on migration routes to be identified, and recognised the need for a coordinated database to collect details of the…

In August this year Agnes Chow crossed into mainland China filled with fear. The young activist was in the company of five national security police, taking her from her home in Hong Kong, on what she said was a “propaganda tour” organised by authorities in return for her being allowed to study overseas. Police had told her the tour was mandatory if she wanted them to return her passport, which was confiscated years earlier as part of her bail conditions. Chow is a key figure in Hong Kong’s most significant pro-democracy movement in the past decade, pushing back against Beijing’s increasingly authoritarian rule in Hong Kong. Chow said she was informed of the alarming demand to cross into mainland China – made outside any known regulation or law – in…

Hunter Biden’s defence attorney Abbe Lowell has condemned prosecutors who charged the US president’s 53-year-old son with tax fraud last week, accusing special counsel David Weiss of “bowing to Republican pressure”. “Based on the facts and the law, if Hunter’s last name was anything other than Biden, the charges in Delaware, and now California, would not have been brought,” Lowell said. Lowell accused Weiss, who is also the US attorney for Delaware, where Joe Biden was a senator from 1973 to 2009, of failing to meet him before filing the nine-count indictment. If convicted, Hunter Biden could face 17 years in prison. “I wrote [to] US Attorney Weiss days ago seeking a customary meeting to discuss this investigation. The response was media leaks today that these charges were being filed,”…

Towards the end, Boris Johnson looked exhausted. He was a boxer slumped against the ropes. Though perhaps that’s no surprise, judging by what the Covid inquiry had just heard about his woeful inability to focus forensically on the detail of policy or follow a scientific argument. Two whole days of being repeatedly confronted by evidence of his own inadequacies – plus accounts of his rage at having to shut down the economy just to save what he reportedly dismissed as old people “who will die anyway soon” – were always going to be a struggle, and yet he was still not the biggest loser from this unedifying episode. That would be his hapless successor Rishi Sunak. Whatever the Covid inquiry concludes, Johnson can’t be sacked from anything much now. He…

❆ All solutions published next week Across 1 Man in power-sharing arrangement with former dictator reveals Guardian (8) 6 Lose example of big road kill (6) 9 Prolific in French, occasionally and in German (6) 10 Fish bone inside loaf initially leads to court (8) 11 Psychedelic rock band on front of stage for opener (9) 13 Humble sailor sea swimming (5) 15 Two partners in firm using prime locations exclusively for introductions (6) 17 Sunak briefly embracing Musk without touching stomach (6) 18 Musk’s company invested in city with tightwad eschewing banks and tax (6) 19 Comic holding in good ad-lib (4,2) 21 Small market for drink (5) 22 A more primitive type of project getting support (9) 25 Model soldier first to march on trench (8) 26 Group…

1 US / UKRAINE Zelenskiy meets Biden in bid to break deadlock on aid Volodymyr Zelenskiy met the US president, Joe Biden, in Washington in an attempt to rescue a critical $61bn military aid package. His meeting on Tuesday came after the White House warned it would run out of money for Ukraine in weeks unless feuding US lawmakers act. Shortly after arriving in the US capital, Zelenskiy said Ukraine was counting on the US, and that delays to future rounds of military aid were “dreams come true” for the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. “Putin must lose,” Zelenskiy said in a speech at the National Defense University. “You can count on Ukraine, and we hope just as much to be able to count on you.” Republican senators last week blocked $106bn…

The UN secretary general, António Guterres, has vowed he will not give up on seeking a ceasefire in Gaza after the US vetoed the move at the security council last Friday, leaving the UN without a clear route to prevent the conflict from lasting many months. Speaking at the Doha Forum in Qatar, Guterres did not directly criticise the US, but said the security council was “paralysed by geostrategic divisions”. He added that world institutions were “weak and outdated”. Guterres spelled out why he had employed article 99 of the UN charter to use his extraordinary powers to force the security council to address the crisis in Gaza. “I urged the security council to press to avert a humanitarian catastrophe and I reiterated my appeal for a humanitarian ceasefire to…

Middle-class fears of losing a high standard of living because of green policies is driving the rise of the far right across the world, the president of Colombia has warned. In an interview with the Guardian at Cop28, Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s first leftwing president, said the world had to find carbon-free ways of being prosperous, and that his country’s rich biodiversity would be the basis of its wealth after phasing out fossil fuels. The South American country has joined an alliance of states calling for a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty, with Petro saying he was trying to prevent the “ omnicide of planet Earth”. The 63-year-old former guerrilla fighter, who won power in 2022, said Brazil needed to “transform its mindset” on the Amazon. Petro has disagreed with the Brazilian…

When the Zimbabwean editor Irene Staunton and her husband Murray McCartney set up their publishing business in 1998, it seemed natural to call it Weaver Press. Their modest HQ, in the back garden of their home in Emerald Hill, a northern suburb of Harare, looked out on the many intricate nests of the weaver bird that peppered the landscape. Last week the company celebrated its 25th birthday. The location has not changed and the team has rarely exceeded the staff of two. But in the words of one distinguished Zimbabwean scholar at the University of Oxford, Weaver Press has “quietly shaped post-independence Zimbabwean literature”. Weaver Press’s early days coincided with the country’s economy going into an accelerated decline just before a series of strikes and a constitutional referendum that dealt…

When Sheynnis Palacios was voted Miss Universe last month it came as a bolt of good news in Nicaragua. Joyous crowds took to the streets of Managua for the first time since mass protests in 2018 that were put down with lethal force. The Nicaraguan regime, paranoid about any hint of dissidence, initially congratulated Palacios, but has since cracked down on celebrations – not least because Palacios herself took part in the 2018 demonstrations, and opponents of the regime have taken her up as a symbol of hope and defiance. Palacios, 23, became the first Miss Universe from Central America at this year’s competition, held in El Salvador on 18 November. “It came as a surprise, and triggered spontaneous expressions of delight,” said Elvira Cuadra, a Nicaraguan sociologist who lives…

Looked at in a certain way, one of history’s most famous photographs is rather dull. It’s a bunch of men, sitting in a line. Some are holding lunchboxes, one is lighting a cigarette, another is holding a glass bottle. No one is planking or pulling a funny face. But, the remarkable thing about Lunch atop a Skyscraper, which has inspired a new ride above the Rockefeller Center, is the men are sitting on a metal construction beam about 260 metres above the streets of New York City without safety equipment. It’s that death-defying aspect that the Rockefeller Center’s new ridecum-photo opportunity, Top of the Rock: The Beam, is hoping to re-create. Billed as the area’s “premier new attraction”, the Beam allows people to sit on a big metal beam and…

Last Wednesday President Biden gave a speech from the White House urging Congress to pass aid for Ukraine. He tried every trick in the book: pointing to the domestic economic benefits of military spending, highlighting the national security implications of aid, and accusing Republicans in Congress of giving “ Putin the greatest gift he can hope for”. Hours later, every single Republican senator voted against the bill that would have given more aid to Kyiv. It’s just the latest setback for Ukraine, as something that had until only months ago been considered almost inevitable – continuing US funding for the war – has become highly uncertain. It’s a signal of the extent to which Ukraine aid has become a political football in the US, and a sign that it is…

It’s unsurprising that our appetite for cosy crime continues unabated, with the latest title in Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series, The Last Devil to Die, topping the bestseller lists. Janice Hallett’s novels The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels and The Christmas Appeal are phenomenally popular, too. Hallett’s books, which are constructed as dossiers – transcripts, emails, WhatsApp messages and the like – are part of a growing trend of experimentation with form, ranging from Cara Hunter’s intricate Murder in the Family to Gareth Rubin’s tête-bêche The Turnglass. Books that hark back to the golden age of crime, such as Tom Mead’s splendidly tricksy locked-room mystery Death and the Conjuror, are also on the rise. Notable debuts include Callum McSorley’s Glaswegian gangland thriller Squeaky Clean; Jo Callaghan’s In the…

Across 1 Gamble (4) 3 Over-the-top luggage holder? (4,4) 8 Fixes – TV equipment (4) 9 What the referee wants to see (4,4) 11 Attitude to life (10) 14 Cause annoyance (6) 15 Repudiate (someone) (6) 17 The reverse – is hesitant (anag) (10) 20 Amateurish (8) 21 Mistral or monsoon? (4) 22 Heart attack (8) 23 Principal – advantage (4) Down 1 PS, pastor (anag) – means to go abroad? (8) 2 Substance which promotes growth (8) 4 Public speaker (6) 5 Frank (10) 6 Supportive partner (4) 7 Find them on a ring, piano or computer (4) 10 Pastry cook’s device (7,3) 12 Scheme (with others) (8) 13 Partisan (3-5) 16 Reflect (6) 18 Thin, circular shape (4) 19 How to start a letter? (4) Solution No 16,712…

When will it end? Some ask that question in despair, willing an end to the pictures of crushed buildings and destroyed lives, the succession of bleak images that come out of Gaza every day. Some asked the question to exert pressure when the UN security council was debating a call for a ceasefire last week. Others wonder if the answer rests on Washington, detecting a new urgency in secretary of state Antony Blinken’s repeated call for Israel to close the “gap” between its declared intention to protect civilians and “ the actual results that we’re seeing on the ground ”. Put the question to senior military figures, Israeli and American, as I did last week, and you hear a variety of responses. Some predict an end to the intensity of…

Tipping point Argentina’s new president, Javier Milei, has vowed to lead his country out of decades of “decadence and decline” but said its punishing economic crisis would intensify over the coming months, as a “who’s who” of the global far right assembled in Buenos Aires to celebrate the radical libertarian’s inauguration. Addressing tens of thousands of supporters outside Argentina’s copper-domed neoclassical congress, Milei – a mercurial former TV celebrity known as El Loco – or the Madman – compared his shock election with the start of the Soviet Union’s collapse. “Just as the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of a tragic era for the world, these elections represent a tipping point in our history,” he declared, promising to “fight tooth and nail” to drag his country into…

Asiege of herons flies unperturbed above the futuristic curvature of an oddly solitary white concrete building in Mbodiène, a coastal village in Senegal. In theory it will become the “ welcome centre” of Akon City, a $6bn metropolis inspired by Wakanda, the fictional African country from the Black Panther films. The plans were unveiled five years ago by the US-Senegalese R&B singer Akon, and the first phase of construction was due to be completed by the end of 2023, but the project has been riddled with delays and controversy. Since childhood, Jean Charles Édouard Sarr, a 55-year-old maintenance engineer and self-confessed cryptocurrency aficionado, has visited his ancestral village of Mbodiène, where his mother is buried. As a graduate, Sarr left Senegal to establish his career in France, where he lived…

According to the latest estimates, Covid-19 may be responsible for more than 18 million deaths worldwide. While infectious diseases like this have devastated humanity, it may be wrong to assume they are always antithetical to our survival and flourishing as a species. Otherwise, why would ancient pathogens such as malaria (of the falciparum type), cholera, typhoid, measles and influenza A persist as human-only diseases – and why have we not evolved immunity to them? That is a question professors Ajit and Nissi Varki (a husband and wife team) and colleagues at their lab at the University of California, San Diego, have been asking for several decades. The answer, they believe, lies in the complex array of sugar chains called glycans that decorate the surfaces of cells, and the sugar molecules…

THE PROBLEMS BEGAN WHEN LINDA WAS ABOUT 18 MONTHS OLD. For a year, she had lived in harmony with a Swedish couple and their three young children in Liberia. Hers had not been an easy start in life. As a baby, in 1984, she saw her family shot by poachers in the Liberian jungle. Adult chimpanzees are sometimes sold as food in bushmeat markets in central and west Africa, but the poachers knew that they could get a higher price by offering the baby chimpanzee to westerners as a pet. They took Linda to the town of Yekepa, where there was a base for a US-Swedish mining company. The company’s director initially bought the baby chimpanzee, but it was soon decided that Linda, as she had now been named, would…

One blistering April afternoon in Kolkata, I was walking home from a reporting assignment when I felt a tap on my shoulder. “Fold your umbrella!” a man instructed me, his index fingers mimicking a closing motion, “You’re taking up the space of three people.” The Kolkata summer is savage – burning hot, witheringly humid. An umbrella is a basic, effective safeguard in this heat. I pointed to the cars parked by the road, and the street hawkers. “Why don’t you tell them to move?” “They aren’t blocking the way,” he said. I was furious: a parked car has more right to public space than me? Why are women so begrudged for taking up “undue space”? And what is our “due space”? At the time, I was in the early stages…

Do you often find yourself dancing the “ reasonable tango”? This is what the sociologist Kirsty Sedgman, in On Being Unreasonable, calls the kind of polite argument that acknowledges the opponent’s point with a “ Yes, but …” and carries on indefinitely, with no mutual agreement in sight. In this bracing manifesto for being just a little less civilised, she considers subjects such as what should count as bad behaviour in the theatre, what “reasonable” means in law, and why we should not “debate” with fascists. What more reasonable way to investigate the weird misogyny of popular culture in the 2000s than via case studies of famous women? That is Sarah Ditum’s gambit in Toxic, a furious and funny book about the public discourse around Paris Hilton, Britney Spears and…

In the saltmarsh fringing the Ballyboe River, a little egret wears its plumage like a windblown stole. Our car swoops across the 10 arches of Malin bridge and we park along the village green. Malin is almost as far north as you can get on the island of Ireland. It was a “planned settlement” that emerged from the Ulster plantation, a colonial project that “planted” the region with people from England and Scotland. Along the base of the green’s triangle are the tree-lined grounds of the local Church of Ireland (Anglican) church. Jackdaws spill from the bell tower, which is oriented towards Malin Hall, the former landowners’ home. Driving north-west, the estuary appears trapped between low-slung hills and high dunes. On a narrow lip of land is the splash of…