Innehållsförteckning för 12 April 2024 från Guardian Weekly

The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol210 | Issue№ 15 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…

For Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, the first week of April has perhaps been the worst since the Hamas attack on 7 October, six months ago, that triggered the current war in Gaza. Protests against the leader by hostage families and the opposition returned with a vengeance as he spent two nights in hospital for hernia surgery. His major political rival, Benny Gantz, undermined the unity of the wartime government by calling for early elections; Netanyahu’s ultra-Orthodox coalition allies are already angry with him over military conscription. His initial, glib explanation for the drone killings of six foreign aid workers – “this happens in wartime’’ – was met with anger worldwide. And the week ended with a telling off from Joe Biden over the killings, which may even signal the…

Battersea powerstation offered no prospect of luxury living when Tony Belton became a local councillor in 1971. The coal-fired behemoth was nearing closure after 40 years of belching soot over London, and would spend almost as long in dereliction and blight as a result of false starts at redevelopment. By 1991, most people visiting the area were there for the dogs’ home or council rubbish dump. Squatting pigeons were the power station’s only residents, and steel bracing protected its 48-metre-high brick walls from collapse. “It was largely completely flat, derelict land … It was a desert, really,” says Belton, strolling through the glitzy shopping centre and apartment complex that now fills the old boiler rooms, where penthouses can change hands for more than £30m ($38m). “It’s unimaginable.” However, 1991 is…

Homeowners in the UK are being urged to be extra vigilant of Japanese knotweed growing on their properties after the invasive species emerged six weeks earlier than usual this year after unusually warm weather. The distinctive red stems were spotted throughout February and March, a development that has been linked to climate change. Hundreds of millions of pounds are spent tackling the spread of the extremely resilient plant every year. Homeowners can face large bills for its treatment, which can last for years, and the value of a property, or its potential for sale, can be affected. England and Wales had their warmest February on record this year, with mild and wet conditions common. The Property Care Association (PCA), a trade body of building professionals, reported that stems had been…

In the heart of Addis Ababa, the historic, ramshackle district of Piassa once teemed with shops and cafes. People would come from across Ethiopia’s capital city to buy anything from jeans to jewellery. Today it lies in ruins. Its distinctive stone houses, with their wooden balconies and slanting metal roofs, are almost all gone. In their place are jagged fields of rubble, picked over by workers with sledgehammers. People stop to stare at the wreckage. Some take pictures. But they do not stay long: the ruins are guarded by police carrying clubs. “I’m angry,” said a former resident. “It’s my heritage that’s been destroyed in front of my eyes, without any consultation at all. We were never told the plan.” For years there had been vague talk of demolishing Piassa,…

When trade ministers gathered in the Moroccan city of Marrakech 30 years ago this month to sign the agreement creating the World Trade Organization (WTO), the mood was celebratory. The Berlin Wall had come down only recently, communism had collapsed, and there was optimistic talk of how the body would prise open new markets and act as the arbiter when disputes broke out between countries. The atmosphere today is much darker than it was in April 1994. Any enthusiasm for groundbreaking trade liberalisation deals disappeared decades ago and has been replaced by covert – and often overt – protectionism. Relations between the US and China are at a low ebb, and likely to get worse. Late last month, China formally opened a WTO case against the US in which Beijing…

There is a tiny new elite at the frontier of money-making and they are known as the centibillionaires. These titans of the universe have personal assets of at least $100bn, and there are now 14 of them in the world – up from six last year. You will find them listed, compared and celebrated by the Bloomberg billionaires index and the Forbes world’s billionaires list, which has just been published. Thanks to these annual tallies of the superwealthy, we know that 2,781 people worldwide – 141 more than last year – have personal wealth of $1bn or more. And that Taylor Swift is now one of them. And that their collective wealth – $14.2tn – is more than the GDP of any country except the US and China. But centibillionaires…

On the first track of Beyoncé ’s new album, she seems to state the impetus behind the project: “They used to say I spoke too country / Then the rejection came, said I wasn’t country ’ nough.” That rejection is assumed to be her performance of her song Daddy Lessons with the Chicks at the 2016 Country Music awards. It prompted a racist backlash from parts of the country establishment. Cowboy Carter is Beyoncé’s 27-track response. In the few details she has shared about the album, she said she “did a deeper dive into the history of country music and studied our rich musical archive”. As she became the first Black female artist to have a US country No 1 and top the Billboard Hot 100 with a country song,…

The city itself is the star of all great London novels, and plays whatever role is required by the tale or the times. It was a semi-sentient organism in Dickens’s Bleak House, wrapped in fog and thick with mud. It was rancorous and gone to seed in Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square; gauche and adventurous in Colin MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids cast it as a city of the blind, prowled by carnivorous walking plants. That probably remains fictional London’s lowest ebb. But at times, for dark stretches, Andrew O’Hagan’s seventh novel runs it close. This is in no way to suggest that Caledonian Road is a drag. Quite the opposite: it’s an addictively enjoyable yarn; a state-of-the-nation social novel with…

The eight potential challengers who began the Candidates tournament in Toronto last Thursday have an unfamiliar feeling. Whoever wins will be a firm favourite to capture the crown from the struggling world champion, Ding Liren, instead of being the outsider of two against Magnus Carlsen, who abdicated his title while at his playing peak. It is an open Candidates, and at least half the field are realistic contenders. My hesitant selection is Ian Nepomniachtchi for a third victory, although I would not be shocked if Fabiano Caruana, Hikaru Nakamura or Alireza Firouzja won. The women’s Candidates – being held simultaneously for the first time – looks easier to forecast. Russia’s Aleksandra Goryachkina and China’s Lei Tingjie are the two highest-rated players and both have won the Candidates previously, and both…

1 UNITED STATES House Democrats urge Biden to halt arms to Israel More than three dozen Congress Democrats – including representative Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker and a key Joe Biden ally – signed a letter to the president and the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, urging a halt to weapons transfers to Israel. “In light of the recent strike against aid workers and the ever-worsening humanitarian crisis, we believe it is unjustifiable to approve these weapons transfers,” the letter said. It was signed by Pelosi and 36 other Democrats, including Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The letter also calls on the US to withhold future arms transfers pending a US investigation into the airstrike on the World Central Kitchen humanitarian workers or if Israel “fails to sufficiently mitigate…

Not long ago a picture circulated from inside Gaza showing smoke billowing from the explosion of a US-supplied bomb, and discernible in the background was the outline of eight black parachutes dropping US aid in precisely the same neighbourhood. It was suggested that the picture would make an ideal cover for any book about the confused world disorder that the six-month war in Gaza has spawned – a disorder that as yet has no dominant player, value system or functioning institutions. The great powers compete, coexist or confront one another across the region but none, least of all at the UN, is able to impose its version of order any longer. “Forget talk of unipolarity or multipolarity,” the journalist Gregg Carlstrom recently wrote in Foreign Affairs. “The Middle East is…

In the biggest Ukrainian onslaught inside Russian territory since Vladimir Putin’s fullscale invasion two years ago, Ukraine has in recent weeks carried out a series of drone attacks on Russian oil refineries and ports. On 2 April, it hit a refinery and drone factory in the industrial region of Tatarstan – more than 1,300km from the border. The Ukrainian spy agency behind these drone strikes has its eyes on another target: the 20km-long Kerch bridge connecting occupied Crimea with Russia. Senior officials from Ukraine’s HUR military intelligence service indicate it is plotting a third attempt on the bridge, after two previous attempts to blow it up, claiming its destruction is “inevitable”. For Putin, the bridge is a tangible reminder of what he sees as one of his greatest political achievements:…

It was a “bonkers gig”, pairing heavy metal with a pipe organ – a musical curiosity that the bands thought would surely seldom be repeated, if ever. But Pantheïst and Arð, the doom metals bands who performed the concert at Huddersfield town hall last year, have been inundated with requests to repeat the performance – with churches leading the way. “We thought that churches would look at it as slightly heretical – having a metal band playing in church – but that wasn’t the case at all,” said Mark Mynett, a senior lecturer in music production at Huddersfield University. “They really embraced this bold new world – some of them talked about bringing a new audience into church.” Last August saw Pantheïst and Arð accompanied by David Pipe, the cathedral…

PATIENT ONE WAS 24 YEARS OLD and pregnant with her third child when she was taken off life support. It was 2014. A couple of years earlier, she had been diagnosed with a disorder that caused an irregular heartbeat, and during her two previous pregnancies she had suffered seizures and faintings. Four weeks into her third pregnancy, she collapsed on the floor of her home. Her mother, who was with her, called 911. By the time an ambulance arrived, Patient One had been unconscious for more than 10 minutes. Paramedics found that her heart had stopped. After being driven to a hospital where she couldn’t be treated, Patient One was taken to the emergency department at the University of Michigan. There, medical staff had to shock her chest three times…

There is a difference between being shocked and being surprised. I thought of that as I read the news that disabled children had been “erased” from their class photo in a primary school in Aberdeenshire in Scotland. A photographer is said to have taken separate pictures: one with the children with “additional needs” and one without. Parents were then given both versions to choose from. Reportedly, a set of twins was split up. The child who uses a wheelchair was excluded from one photo, while their twin, who isn’t disabled, was photographed with the rest of the class. If that feels somewhat chilling, it is because it should. Few of us cannot understand the connotations of wanting to pretend disabled children don’t exist. Indeed, in recent days the incident has…

In the 14th century, King Charles VI of France suffered from a curious delusion. He believed his body was made entirely of glass. A relatively new material, both fragile and transparent, glass captures the hypochondriac’s acutest fear – brittle vulnerability – with their greatest desire: visceral omniscience. This human longing to peer inside our “meaty vessel” was answered in the 20th century by medical technologies, including blood testing, microscopy and imaging, which became widely available. Rather than soothe the hypochondriacal itch, however, this intimate access – along with Google’s democratisation of medical knowledge – has fuelled health anxiety to new heights. Caroline Crampton describes herself as a hypochondriac, but one with impostor syndrome because she previously had a severe “real” illness. She thinks back to the naivety of her 17-year-old…

With six buzzards and a pair of red kites circling over the relatively small stand of trees that I call Badger Town 2, there is likely to be great competition here for both nesting facilities and food. The wood is a mixed stand of thoughtfully planted larch, pine, oak, birch and beech, surrounded by a frontage of holly, hawthorn and gorse. The whole thing is only 400 metres x 40 metres, and I have recently also watched jays, woodpeckers and nuthatches disappear inside to join the 30-strong badger clan. On one wet afternoon recently, at least 500 rooks deserted the fields and took shelter beneath the canopy. It was a dreich day, and as the sun caused a light steam to rise from the treetops, I was privy to the…

Across 1 Datum (4) 3 Eliciting strong emotions (8) 8 Jazz pianist – religious devotee (4) 9 Protesting strongly (2,2,4) 11 Dynamism (3-2-3-2) 14 Tread lightly (6) 15 Mischievous (6) 17 Biggest part (5,5) 20 Respite (8) 21 Tread heavily (4) 22 With rigour (8) 23 Watered-down rum (4) Down 1 Disinfect with gas (8) 2 Whitehall monument (8) 4 Be contrite (6) 5 Person with only one partner (10) 6 Legal wrongdoing (4) 7 Legal proceeding (4) 10 Like a maxim (10) 12 Clever schemer – finer gal (anag.) (8) 13 Farmer’s assistant (8) 16 Ailing (6) 18 Wading bird (4) 19 Prophet (4) Solution No 16,813 Guardian Puzzles & Crosswords Access over 15,000 puzzles on our app. Download from the App Store or Google Play. Read more: theguardian.com/puzzles-app…

SECURITY More pressure for Tory MP caught in phishing scam William Wragg, the Conservative MP who divulged colleagues’ personal phone numbers to someone he met on a dating app as part of a parliamentary sexting scandal, has stepped down from two Commons roles. Wragg has resigned as chair of the Commons’ public administration and constitutional affairs committee and quit as vicechair of the 1922 Committee of Conservative backbenchers after admitting to giving the information to a man he met on Grindr. The Hazel Grove MP, who has already announced he is standing down at the next election, apologised last week and said he had given the numbers of other politicians for fear of intimate images of himself being leaked. The Metropolitan police and Leicestershire police are investigating after it was…

Late one night in March, Ahmed Abu Jalala rose quietly, trying hard not to wake his family, sleeping around him on the floor of a UN-run school in northern Gaza. The 54-year-old father knew his six children needed food, but after months of war there was none. Little aid reached Jabaliya, where they had been staying since fleeing their home in the early weeks of the conflict, and his children had been reduced to eating wild plants. So Abu Jalala went out into the darkness to search for flour being brought by a humanitarian convoy. “We would never have let him go if we’d known … We’ve not seen or heard of him since,” said Etemad Abu Jalala, the missing man’s uncle. After six months of war, tens of thousands…

For Nina Huang, it was the shaking that jolted her awake. “The first thing I did when I woke up was to hold the cupboard next to my daughter. I was afraid that it might fall down on her,” she recalled. Then her phone buzzed with a warning about a tsunami. The biggest fear for Huang and her husband was that the bridge connecting their waterfront village of Yanliao to the city of Hualien would collapse, leaving them stranded. So they drove to the city with their one-year-old daughter and waited in a car park for the tremors to stop, away from any buildings that might collapse on them. But the bridge did not collapse. And despite the fact that the 7.4 magnitude earthquake, which struck along the east coast…

Tineke Menalda sits in the sun on her front step, nursing a cup of coffee and idly plucking out the odd weed. Three years ago, the front of her terrace house in Amersfoort was completely paved. But now, sitting in a lush garden of trees and green, she is an official ambassador for the strangest new sport in the Netherlands: tegelwippen, “tile whipping”, or “whipping away” the paving stones. “A lot of people think that tiles are easier, but actually when you have larger trees, you get very few weeds underneath them and you can make it really easy,” she said. “When I had paving I would never sit here, but now it’s a garden, it’s cooler in summer and in the spring, it’s lovely.” In March, the starting gun…

Gliding down pristine, mountain runs, Olga Shpalok said she was “getting 100% satisfaction”. After a full day of skiing, the designer from Vladivostok relaxed with a visit to her hotel’s well-equipped spa and sauna. Shpalok was part of the first group of tourists to visit North Korea since it shut its borders at the start of the pandemic in 2020. In early February, she travelled to the country with 100 fellow Russian tourists on a four-day skiing trip. In total, more than 200 Russian tourists have visited North Korea this year across three trips in February and March. Their accounts give a rare insight into life in Kim Jong-un’s regime. Closely watched by government “minders”, who restricted what they could see and where they could go, the Russian tourists described…

For once showbusiness royalty – Queen Latifah, Lizzo, Ben Platt, Cynthia Erivo, Lea Michele and Mindy Kaling – was not the main attraction. Instead it was a trio of US presidents that enticed people to pay up to half a million dollars for New York’s hottest ticket. Last month Joe Biden was joined onstage by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama at a sold-out Radio City Music Hall. At more than $26m, it was the most successful political fundraising event in history. It was also an “Avengers assemble” moment for Democrats seeking to bury their differences ahead of November’s presidential election. Obama, 62, remains the Democratic party’s biggest star with books, media appearances, civil society work, plans for a presidential library and campaign speeches each electoral cycle. Clinton, 77, by contrast,…

“AFTER THE GENOCIDE, PEOPLE CAME TO APOLOGISE,” says 70-year-old Liberatha from the Karongi district in Rwanda, where nine out of 10 Tutsis were murdered, including her family. “I said, ‘I will never forgive you.’ I never expected to exchange a word with those people again.” Yet now, after going through a process of community-based sociotherapy, she feels “a hint of joy”. Every genocide eventually comes to an end. The survivors bear their scars and bury their dead. The murderers, looters and rapists either face consequences for their actions or get away with them. And people have no choice but to try living side by side again. How do you do that when mutual distrust smoulders? It is a painfully slow and challenging, yet inspiring process. No country in history has…

For many people reading this, the analogy will seem ludicrous, but hear me out: if the Conservative party was one of your friends, you’d be very worried about them. You can maybe imagine it: a privately educated pal from university, perhaps, who seems to have fallen on hard times and bad company. Ten or 15 years ago, they seemed urbane, clever and super-confident. Even if some of it went only skin deep, they professed to be green, socially liberal and culturally switched on. Now, though, they tend to look dishevelled and saggy-eyed. After a few drinks – and sometimes before – they speak an increasingly hysterical language of conspiracy theory and political paranoia. They also seem to be furtively spending some of their time with thugs and bigots. Last week,…

I’ve often read about cooking meat briefly over high heat to sear it and “seal in the juices”, but I suspect this is unscientific because, as I understand it, high heat constricts the meat fibres and squeezes out the juices. Norman Kliman, Spain There have been several, often conflicting theories about searing meat. When I was a young cook, I often heard the phrase “sear the meat to keep in the juices”, and just assumed it to be true. Only after many years of research, and of reading the great food scientist Harold McGee, did I realise this is, in fact, not the case. Whole books have been written on the subject, but there is no evidence that browning meat has any effect on the juiciness of the end product.…