Innehållsförteckning för 22 December 2023 från Guardian Weekly

Andre Braugher US actor who played Captain Raymond Holt in Brooklyn Nine-Nine and starred in Homicide: Life on the Street. He died on 11 December, aged 61. Sheikh Nawaf al-Ahmad al-Sabah Emir of Kuwait. He died on 16 December, aged 86. Zahara Platinum-selling South African singer-songwriter. She died from liver disease on 11 December, aged 36. Richard Hunt Sculptor whose public works across the US explored civil rights. He died on 16 December, aged 88. JGA Pocock New Zealand historian of political thought, known for his studies of early republicanism. He died on 13 December, aged 99. Kenpachiro Satsuma Actor who played Godzilla in the eponymous series of movies. He died on 16 December, aged 76.…

The US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, held talks with Israeli officials about shifting away from large-scale aerial and ground operations in the Gaza Strip to a new phrase in the war focused on the precise targeting of Hamas leaders. “Hamas should never again be able to project terror from Gaza into Israel. This is Israel’s operation; I’m not here to dictate timelines or terms,” Austin said after meeting with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his defence counterpart, Yoav Gallant, in Tel Aviv on Monday. He added that protecting Palestinian civilians in Gaza was “both a moral duty and a strategic imperative”. Austin’s comments were followed by remarks from Gallant, who said the new phase would allow some of the 85% of people in Gaza displaced from their homes…

As the Duke of Sussex claimed victory in his hacking case against Mirror Group Newspapers, it was clear he felt vindication for his tortuous, long-running legal battles against sections of the British media. “I’ve been told that slaying dragons will get you burned,” he said in a statement, before adding a defiant: “The mission continues.” Prince Harry has long despaired of the royal family’s failure to take on the press. His father, King Charles, had told him it would be a “suicide mission”. And he does seem to have been burned. When he appeared in the witness box in June, the first senior British royal for 130 years to do so in court at a trial, he was asked about the toll his fight was taking. He fell silent, his…

• 25 AUGUST 1949 • 19 MAY 2023 At the end of the 1980s, when I was appointed books editor at the Irish Times, my predecessor urged me to pop over to London for a couple of days, stay at a nice hotel, have a couple of good dinners, pay my respects to some counterparts, and call in on a few publishers. The jaunt turned out more of an embarrassment than anything else, since half the people I spoke to were baffled why I was there, while the other half were trying not to laugh. To salvage something from the debacle I decided I should meet at least one writer. So I phoned Martin Amis – how did I have his number? – and suggested lunch. We ordered wine, and…

• 17 FEBRUARY 1934 • 22 APRIL 2023 I became aware of Barry in the early 1960s, through the comic strip he wrote for Private Eye [The Wonderful World of Barry McKenzie]. I met him soon afterwards. He was a very charming man with a little edge that you had to watch out for. There was a genius to characters like Dame Edna and Les Patterson. Barry wasn’t a mimic or an actor. He inhabited these people. As Les, he was suddenly this hilariously horrible person, and when he got on stage as Edna, he felt unlicensed. He could be cruel, but you had to ride with it, and of course, it was very funny at the same time. He gauged how far he could go by the reception he…

• 1 APRIL 1929 • 11 JULY 2023 Milan Kundera would often repeat to me that life is “a conspiracy of coincidences”. In his case, fate had seen him born on 1 April, and he was convinced that this had had “a profound metaphysical influence” on him. Indeed, one only has to look at his oeuvre: from his first novel, The Joke, to his last, The Festival of Insignificance, all of his books feature the jocular, the lighthearted. Which doesn’t stop them from combining mischievousness with great depth and great lucidity – not to mention melancholy, the renowned Czech lítost! He must have thought it was a joke, that day I invited him to appear in a TV programme I was presenting, alongside my work at Le Monde. He’d laughed…

WRITE TO US 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, U K 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 Australia has already hit the 1.5C climate limit Jonathan Watts asks: “What happens if the 1.5C target is missed?” (Spotlight, 15 December). According to the report State of the Climate 2022, Australia’s climate had warmed by 1.47 ± 0.24 C since…

“GUTS FEELS INDEBTED TO A SNARLY HOLLYWOOD VERSION OF PUNK 10 Olivia Rodrigo Guts Olivia Rodrigo imagines punk as it seemed when you were a kid: loud, angry, melodic – the kind of music that Lindsay Lohan played in Freaky Friday. Rodrigo’s firecracker second album, Guts, draws from beloved pop-rock both classic and contemporary, but it feels most indebted to this Hollywood version of punk, which somehow seemed snarlier and snarkier than anything that existed in the real world. Unlike her one-time mentor Taylor Swift, romance is not life-or-death in Rodrigo’s world, but losing a friend, or losing your sense of self, might be. Guys, on the other hand, are just grist to the mill: Get Him Back!, Guts’s galvanising peak, is destined to close Rodrigo’s live show for as…

QUIZ Thomas Eaton 1 Won by Bradford that year, what did local jeweller Fattorini make in 1911? 2 What was once defined as the length of three grains of barley? 3 Who was the subject of the 1978 documentary To Mrs Brown, a Daughter? 4 What is the world’s largest unfinished Catholic church? 5 How did Jacob Chansley achieve notoriety on 6 January 2021? 6 The Bitter Lakes are part of which waterway? 7 Which mammals have the thickest fur? 8 Julia Margaret Cameron was a pioneer of which artform? What links: 9 Aureus; ducat; florin; guinea; noble; unicorn? 10 DH Lawrence; USS George HW Bush; Stalker; Where Eagles Dare? 11 Shadow; persona; anima/animus; self? 12 Albert Dieudonné; Marlon Brando; Rod Steiger; Joaquin Phoenix? 13 1, 2, 6 and 10;…

We look forward and back in this, our final edition of 2023, a year overshadowed by war and conflict. In a special essay, Patrick Wintour reflects on how a perception of US double standards over Ukraine and Gaza has damaged the west in the minds of the global south, and whether it might lead to a reckoning of sorts for Washington in 2024. A world in flux Page 22→ Still, there are plenty of reasons for hope. Having been expected to deliver little, the Cop28 climate summit turned out to be full of surprises – but was the final deal on fossil fuels just a ruse, asks Fiona Harvey Writers from the Guardian’s global development team reflect on the inspirational figures they met in 2023, from leaders to dancers to dads,…

MEDICAL RESEARCH Morning sickness discovery could lead to a potential cure Scientists have uncovered why many women experience morning sickness during pregnancy, raising the prospects of a cure for the condition experienced by 80% of women during their pregnancy and which for 2% results in an extreme form, hyperemesis gravidarum, which can lead to hospitalisation. The study, published in Nature, revealed that a hormone, GDF15, produced by the foetus is the trigger for nausea and vomiting. Crucially, women who have low levels of GDF15 tend to be more sensitive to the surge of the hormone in the first trimester, the research suggests, and that lowering the hormone, or blocking its action, could prevent sickness. Another approach could be “priming” women by exposing them to the hormone before pregnancy. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE…

• 26 NOVEMBER 1939 • 24 MAY 2023 A few weeks before I met Tina Turner in 1982, I saw her playing in London. I was a big fan. Even though I was known for making electronic music, River Deep, Mountain High was my favourite song. But back then, she didn’t have a recording contract. The only way she could earn money independently was by doing what they called the chicken-in-a-basket circuit in America, touring her old hits. How I got involved was like an alignment of the stars. I’d been putting together an album of old songs reframed in new contexts and James Brown had just backed out at the last minute – or, rather, his lawyers had. So there I was in the Virgin Records office, wondering who…

• 14 DECEMBER 1946 • 16 JULY 2023 Jane and I were contemporaries. Born the same year, 1946. We had the same kind of upbringing too – we were pretty girls living in London in the 60s, enjoying free love and new ideas. We were so much freer than our parents. Our first film was the same one [Richard Lester’s 1965 film, The Knack … and How to Get It], but I identified with Jane more after we had both landed in France. We’d bump into each other around town, and I’d often go to Jane’s shows. I liked that we were the English girls in Paris. Through the years, we’d send messages to each other. I remember her saying she’d named [her daughter] Charlotte after me. Jane was a…

• 9 MAY 1936 • 15 JUNE 2023 Politicians love it when they become celebrities. Rarely do celebrities aspire to be politicians. Glenda Jackson was the exception in British public life. Far more acclaimed as an actor than other notable actors turned politicians, Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and having won the kind of awards (two Oscars, three Emmy awards and a Tony) of which they could only dream, she never traded, as they did, on stage and film success for political advantage. Yes, you knew her theatrical skills when you heard her singing her way through the corridors of power after her election in 1992. But her parliamentary and political speeches never contained anecdotes about Hollywood and film stars, which she could have used to her benefit. For Glenda…

• 12 MAY 19 28 • 8 FEBRUARY 2023 My musical curiosity began with the comical bassoon on Perry Como’s version of the Burt Bacharach/Hal David song Magic Moments, playing on the radio in 1958. Bacharach’s collaboration with David from that time until 1973 gave the world more songs than anyone can sing in one evening, perhaps a week of evenings. This was the man who wrote Walk On By, The Look of Love, A House Is Not a Home, I Say a Little Prayer. His music is sometimes blandly labelled “easy listening” because of its restraint. In truth, it can be exacting, employing uneven time signatures. From 1995 until just a few weeks before Burt’s passing, we wrote more than 30 songs together. Burt’s collaborations with his third wife,…

Across the UK and in other parts of the world, A Christmas Carol is everywhere this year, raising the question of why Charles Dickens’ novella remains so haunting 180 years after it was written. Dickens was just 31 when he conjured up the old misanthropist Ebenezer Scrooge and his parade of ghosts as a quick money-spinner. The book was published on 19 December 1843 – and by Christmas Eve all 6,000 copies had sold out. By February, eight adaptations had been staged, only one sanctioned by the author. Not all his contemporaries were impressed. “There is no heart. No feeling – it is nothing but glittering frostwork,” said Mark Twain when Dickens toured his own staged reading to America two decades later. But for every detractor, the novella accumulated legions…

When the news first broke of the Hamas attack early on 7 October, Itai Reuveni and the other reservists in his paratrooper battalion packed their bags and arrived at their muster point well before their call-up came from the army. The paratroopers did not head south to Gaza but to the northern border, where they believed a far greater threat than Hamas was poised to join the fight: Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia movement backed by Tehran. “We’re here to make sure that no one does to us in the north what they did to us in the south,” said Reuveni, 40, a master sergeant who in his civilian life does thinktank research on terrorist financing. “We understand that Hezbollah is much more sophisticated [than Hamas]. We understand it’s not 3,000…

In the end, he folded when everybody thought he would dig in … and dug in when everybody thought he would fold. Either way, Viktor Orbán has left himself plenty of opportunities to continue playing havoc with EU decision-making. Before last week’s summit, Hungary’s illiberal, nationalist prime minister had sworn to block EU plans to open accession talks with Kyiv. Admitting Ukraine to the bloc would have huge consequences, he said. Starting the process now would be “a terrible mistake”. Diplomats and leaders were braced for 48 hours of fraught negotiations over enlargement – and unsure of winning. There was more optimism over the summit’s other main aim: agreeing to another €50bn ($55bn) in aid for Ukraine. But to EU watchers’ surprise, the bloc’s 26 other leaders agreed to start…

The forensic pathologist helping Philippines’ ‘war on drugs’ victims Raquel Fortun is one of only two forensic pathologists in the Philippines. Earlier this year, I interviewed her about her mission to discover the truth, and hopefully win justice, for the victims of former president Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs”. Her crusade came about through unlikely circumstances. The victims of Duterte’s crackdowns were overwhelmingly from the poorest backgrounds, and many families could not afford to extend temporary leases on their graves. As families began to face eviction from cemeteries five years on from the killings, Fortun offered to carry out investigations to collect evidence about their deaths. Known to many as just Doc, Fortun does the work for free. She has a no-nonsense manner, and spoke frankly about the risks she…

• 1 MARCH 1927 • 25 APRIL 2023 For me, growing up in the 1970s in inner-city London, there were a few black American global figures that entered your life and just brought so much colour and vibrancy. And I only now understand this as an adult, but my parents came alive too. Our parochial existence became so much bigger at these moments. And there were only a handful of people who could do that: Sidney Poitier, the Jackson Five and Diana Ross. And then there was the singer and actor Harry Belafonte. His music would have taken my parents back to village life in the Caribbean. It was a backdrop to that Windrush era. So for me to meet him, when he came to the UK in summer 2012,…

• 15 APRIL 1958 • 7 DECEMBER 2023 Benjamin Zephaniah has appeared at really pivotal points of my life, either in person or through his work. The first memory I have of him was in the early 1990s when my parents took me to an anti-apartheid demonstration in Parliament Square. Benjamin addressed the crowd through a red-and-white megaphone. I can’t remember the poem he read out, but he kept saying: “Open up your mind,” and my dad, who had me on his shoulders, was repeating it. Seeing someone on the stage who resembled members of my Jamaican family, who was taking a stance for peace and justice, had a huge impact on me. When I was 11 and had just started in a deaf school, my mum gave me Benjamin’s…

• 11 OCTOBER 1937 • 21 OCTOBER 2023 Sir Bobby Charlton first got in touch with me after I came out of hospital in 2012. He had returned from a visit to Cambodia with a charity that campaigned on removing landmines, and had been very moved. He set up a charity of his own, now called the Sir Bobby Charlton Foundation, focused on how to speed up the process of de-mining, technological advances and so on. The charity had heard my story [Duley was blown up by a landmine while working in Afghanistan, resulting in catastrophic injuries] and invited me to be an ambassador. Over the years, I’ve met a lot of famous people, and they all had a kind of awe for him. Some of that was to do…

Since Nigella Lawson called out Christmas cake as a festive food that should be forgotten (an opinion with which I wholeheartedly agree), I’ve been thinking about re-evaluating our festive food choices. It’s time to accept that letting go of the traditions that no longer suit our appetites or lifestyles is perfectly OK. We should reinvent Christmas traditions not only for the joy of welcoming in a melting pot of delicious-yet-different foods, but because there’s a necessity to do so. Energy and food costs, and time spent, are factors we’re increasingly mindful of when preparing for Christmas. In supermarkets, discounts on the most common food items lure us towards the familiar – but there’s more value in going off the beaten track. My social media feeds offer me a charcuterie board…