Innehållsförteckning för 7 June 2024 från Guardian Weekly

The posts are ominous. “Pick a side, or YOU are next,” wrote conservative talk-show host Dan Bongino on the Truth Social media platform in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s 34 felony convictions. The replies were even more so. “Dan, seriously now,” one user responded. “I see no way out of all this mess without bloodshed. When you can rig an election, then weaponise the government and the courts against a former president, what other alternative is there? I’m almost 70 and would rather die than live in tyranny.” That’s a common version of how many people on the US right reacted to the ex-president’s verdict, drawing on a “mirror world” where Trump is seen as the selfless martyr to powerful state forces and Joe Biden is the dangerous autocrat wielding…

The White House insisted that the “ball was in Hamas’s court” on whether to accept a new Gaza peace proposal, despite mixed signals from Benjamin Netanyahu reflecting turmoil within his governing coalition in Israel. The US national security spokesperson, John Kirby, insisted on Monday that it was an Israeli proposal – despite the fact it had been unveiled by Joe Biden last Friday, during the Jewish Sabbath, and Netanyahu had appeared to challenge it. The Israeli prime minister said any deal that did not lead to the complete destruction of Hamas’s military and governing capacity would be a “non-starter”. The Israeli prime minister told the Knesset on Monday: “The claims that we have agreed to a ceasefire without our conditions being met are incorrect.” “I’ve heard different statements coming out…

On a Wednesday afternoon, despite the pouring rain, Alum Rock Road is buzzing with activity. The busy thoroughfare in Birmingham is clogged with cars, and families flit in and out of shops that are selling bowls of fruit, colourful fabrics and sizzling kebabs. Every few metres a Palestinian flag is pinned in a shop window or draped from a lamp-post. The area has become a hub for pro-Palestine protests in the city, with hundreds of people attending a march and rally that takes place here every Saturday. “It is literally the only issue that will decide how I vote in the general election,” said one woman working in a dress shop on the road. “I used to watch the videos on social media every night but now I can’t, I…

TAYLOR SWIFT’S NEW ALBUM, The Tortured Poets Department, is not one of her best. Critics have complained about its exhausting length (31 songs, two hours), subdued tone and lyrical wound-rubbing. Her decision to announce it at the Grammy awards, months before its release on 19 April, was widely seen as tacky, snatching the media spotlight from other winners. For any other artist, this might be a perilous moment of bubble-bursting hubris, but 34-year-old Taylor Alison Swift is not any other artist. The album set a streaming record on Spotify – 300m in one day and 1bn in five – and made her the first artist in history to secure the top 14 spots on the Billboard Hot 100. In the US, it sold 2.6m copies in the first week, second…

The results came in last weekend, and the message was stark: the ruling African National Congress (ANC) was humbled in the country’s general election. South Africa is going through the biggest shift in its political landscape since the end of apartheid 30 years ago. The party fell below the 50% required for a parliamentary majority for the first time since the end of minority white rule in 1994. It must now share power. And its political leaders will have to forge a coalition with their opponents. It’s a new low for the ANC. This is the party, born out of Africa’s most famous liberation movement, that freed Black South Africans from white minority rule, avoided the country descending into civil war and, in Nelson Mandela, gave the country its first…

AFTER SPLITTING UP WITH DIANE KEATON in the film Annie Hall, Woody Allen’s lugubrious Alvy hooks up with a hippy-dippy music journalist for a one-night stand that does neither of them any favours. “Sex with you is really a kafkaesque experience,” says Pam, over a postcoital cigarette. “I mean that as a compliment.” Given that Pam (a fabulously drifty Shelley Duvall) is a self-confessed Rosicrucian, with a chat-up style that leans heavily on the word “transplendent”, it’s clear that finding a philosophical vocabulary for life’s highs and lows is not her strongest suit. Annie Hall was released in 1977 – 30 years after the first usage of the adjective “kafkaesque” was recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary. One might have thought that such a resounding satirical takedown in an Oscar-winning…

Here are some of the events that are not described in Claire Messud’s ambitious novel about the lives of three generations of a Franco-Algerian family: the Algerian war of independence, as a result of which the Cassar family lose their home and national identity; the two years the family’s most promising scion spends as a student in Paris, during which he endures something (racist bullying? Mental collapse?) that blights his adult life; his sister’s broken-hearted suicide attempt; the courtship of a couple who have been held up throughout the novel as exemplars of married love and yet whose relationship – as we discover in the final pages – was shockingly transgressive. Any of these developments could have provided more than enough material for the plot of a lesser novel.…

✱ All solutions published next week Across 1 Being green will involve experiencing some dampness there (6,3,4) 10 Lord gets a treatment from experienced performer (3,6) 11 Whip is extremely keen – when available (5) 12 Host project launch (5) 13 Plant which could discharge boron to cause intoxication (9) 14 Casual type of relationship old queen has available (2,5) 16 Kick around family that’s failing (7) 18 Shoot short camp routine (7) 20 Disagreement voiced on the way down (7) 21 Tackle defender – it will avoid embarrassment (4,5) 23 Only some of Mughal alphabet is permitted in Islam (5) 24 Very good case for one in Scotland being competitive (5) 25 Strike spoils travelling around in hills (4,5) 26 Bizarre BBC rant sealed extra coverage (4,3,6) Down 2…

1 UNITED STATES Trump praises Republican support over ‘scam’ verdict Donald Trump lauded the Republican party for rallying behind him in the wake of his conviction on 34 felony charges in a hush-money case aimed at influencing the 2016 election. A guilty verdict returned on 30 May found that Trump falsified business records linked to an affair with adult actor Stormy Daniels. The former US president appeared last Sunday in a taped interview on Fox & Friends – a friendly forum on the rightwing channel. “People get it. It’s a scam,” he said. “And the Republican party … they’ve stuck together in this. They see it’s a weaponisation of the justice department of the FBI and that’s all coming out of Washington.” Most senior Republicans have echoed Trump’s claim that the…

After three military checkpoints, several security screenings, and a walk along long, carpeted corridors past windows blocked with sandbags, the instantly recognisable figure of Ukraine’s president materialised, looking particularly slight alongside his bulky security detail. Dressed in green military trousers and a black T-shirt, Volodymyr Zelenskiy strode across the parquet floor of the grand, ceremonial room inside Kyiv’s presidential compound, and sat down to speak for nearly an hour with a Guardian team, including the editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner. The interview came at perhaps the toughest moment for Ukraine since the early days of the war. Zelenskiy insisted, however, that it was too early to write off the country, and that he remained positive despite all his frustrations. “I’m not in despair at all … I don’t feel like we are…

Final results from last week’s seismic South Africa elections confirmed that the African National Congress (ANC) party has lost its majority for the first time in 30 years of full democracy, firing the starting gun on unprece-dented coalition talks. The ANC, which led the fight to free South Africa from apartheid, won just 159 seats in the 400-member national assembly on a vote share of just over 40%. High unemployment, power cuts, violent crime and crumbling infrastructure have contributed to a haemorrhaging of support for the former liberation movement. The pro-business Democratic Alliance (DA) won 87 seats, uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK) – a new party led by President Cyril Ramaphosa’s bitter rival, the former president Jacob Zuma – took 58, and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), a Marxist-Leninist party led…

When she became Italy’s prime minister in October 2022, Giorgia Meloni looked like Brussels’ worst nightmare. Until then, the fiery leader of the Brothers of Italy – a party with neofascist roots – had seemed anything but EU-friendly. For years, railing against the bloc had been Meloni’s stock in trade. “Bring down this European Union!” she urged the 2019 conservative CPAC conference in the US. As she took up office, far-right parties across Europe hailed her victory, expecting the new leader in Rome to promote their nationalist agenda and join the likes of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán in battling Brussels bureaucracy. To the surprise of many, she didn’t. Meloni has proved, at least superficially, to be a constructive European, partly because Italy needed billions in post-Covid EU recovery funds, and partly…

Asked two years ago about the advancement towards gender equality in surfing, Australia’s Tyler Wright told the New York Times that “it takes a lot of minor, small, minute shifts for progress to really happen”. But sometimes, those incremental steps culminate in a decisive moment. Change, to paraphrase Ernest Hemingway, can come gradually and then all at once. Last week, that moment came for women’s surfing. In a heaving 2.5- to 3-metre swell at Teahupo’o in Tahiti, renowned as one of the most fearsome waves in the world, the best female surfers put on a spectacular show. “Teahupo’o is for the women after all,” exclaimed event winner Vahine Fierro. The World Surf League (WSL) has been on a journey towards gender equality in recent years, shaking off its reputation as…

A month ago in Chiapas, a Mexican state caught in a bloody battle between criminal groups, a car carrying the frontrunner to be the country’s next president was stopped by a group of masked men. They filmed Claudia Sheinbaum as they begged her to do something about the violence. It was a tense, off-script moment in a carefully planned campaign: the men claimed to be locals, but they could have been anyone. Sheinbaum kept her cool. After hundreds of events and three debates where rivals tried to rattle her, Sheinbaum emerged almost without a slip-up and was confirmed as Mexico’s president on Monday. She becomes the country’s first female leader, and its first from a Jewish background. “We imagine a plural, diverse and democratic Mexico. Our duty is and will…

No rest for political cartographers. It turns out that what lay beyond America’s uncharted waters was some more uncharted waters. The unanimous verdict in Donald Trump’s hush-money trial found the former president guilty, making him the first US president to be convicted of a crime. Forgive me: 34 crimes. A potential bar to security clearance, voting and owning a gun – but not, apparently, a bar to running for president. “I am a political prisoner,” ran an instant campaign fundraising message from Trump, probably typed on the same gold toilet he once pretty much ran the world off. And might well again. Previous polls have indicated some Trump voters would switch in the event of a guilty verdict, but last Friday the betting markets had Trump’s chances above 50% for…

When Nemonte Nenquimo was little, she and siblings would hear planes flying over their village in the Amazon and race one another to the nearby landing strip to see who was arriving. Only white people – known as cowori – travelled by plane, and they would bring gifts of candy, clothes, earrings and dolls with blond hair. Over the years, they brought other things too: God, polio, alcohol and oil executives waving contracts allowing them to plunder Indigenous land for its oil reserves. One village elder reported signing papers with his thumbprint after being given bread and Coca-Cola and assured that the oil companies would build schools and medical clinics. In her richly detailed memoir, written with and translated by her American partner Mitch Anderson, Nenquimo documents her path from…

Spring arrived early this year; my best guess is three weeks early. Inevitable, I suppose, considering the months of unremitting rain and very little frost. The resident bees cottoned on to the unseasonal mildness and busied themselves among the blooms of camellias, hellebores, snowdrops and snowflakes. Great Comp Garden is a paradise for pollinators; this feast is supplemented by the adjacent farm, where oilseed rape was sown last autumn. The floral spectacle next door coordinates beautifully with our magnolias, rhododendrons and azaleas. Some say that oilseed rape is a mixed blessing for bees due to the sudden disappearance of the food source once the plants start to set seed. However, right now there is much bee activity on our cotoneasters. Another couple of weeks and it will be salvias that…

Across 1 One after another – where Logan Roy appears? (2,10) 9 Brownish dye (5) 10 “Sweet” number? (7) 11 Commercial transaction (4) 12 Glove synonymous with challenge (8) 14 State categorically (6) 15 Functional (6) 18 Omit (8) 20 Opponent (4) 22 Artless girl (7) 23 Dressing material (5) 24 Spanish farewell (5,2,5) Down 2 Befuddle (7) 3 The Beehive State (4) 4 Insouciant (6) 5 Attractive quality (8) 6 Unimprovable (5) 7 Still in a state of confusion or ignorance (4,3,5) 8 Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk composer (12) 13 Ceylon, as was (3,5) 16 Event gatecrashed by a ghost in Macbeth (7) 17 City associated with balsamic vinegar (6) 19 Borders (5) 21 Citrus fruit (4) Solution No 16,861 Guardian Puzzles & Crosswords Access over 15,000 puzzles on…

ELECTION 2024 Farage to stand for Reform in potential blow to Tories The Conservative party’s faltering general election campaign suffered a potentially damaging blow when Nigel Farage announced he intended to stand as an MP and lead the Reform party for the next five years. The former Ukip and Brexit party leader said he would stand in Clacton, Essex, after changing his mind while spending time on the campaign trail. He claimed that he did not want to let his supporters down. Farage will also take over as leader of Reform UK from Richard Tice, pledging to stay in post for a full parliamentary term. While his announcement poses an direct threat to the Tory candidate in Clacton, it may also energise his party’s national campaign, splitting the right wing…

Leaked internal papers have exposed the activities of a Russian state-backed legal defence foundation that European intelligence agencies and analysts say is in fact a Kremlin influence operation active in 48 countries. Documents from Pravfond (the Fund for Support and Protection of the Rights of Compatriots Living Abroad) indicate that the foundation finances propaganda websites and helped pay for the legal defences of convicted arms traffickers and assassins. The group has spent millions of euros to finance propaganda and legal campaigns. Public data also shows that Pravfond’s local partners have received millions in state subsidies from European countries where it operates local branches, raising questions about the use of public funds and national security concerns. More than 40 Pravfond documents, obtained by the Danish public broadcaster DR from a European…

There may now be more Hamas militants in the north of Gaza – supposedly cleared by Israel’s forces many months ago – than in Rafah, the southern city described by Israeli officials as the Islamist organisation’s “last stronghold”, analysts believe. More than a million people have fled Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, after instructions from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), the biggest wave of displacement since the early months of the conflict. The IDF has said repeatedly that four Hamas brigades – the militant group’s biggest remaining force – are based in Rafah. But though Israeli forces have now invaded Rafah, it was fighting in Jabaliya, the second most populous town in northern Gaza, that was described last month by IDF officials as “perhaps the fiercest” yet seen in the conflict.…

It’s Delaney Mack’s first time pulling crab traps and she is unsure what to do. Mack, the newest member of the Nuxalk Guardian Watchmen, has had months of training for the job, which might include rescuing a kayaker, taking ocean samples or monitoring a logging operation. But winching crabs up 30 metres from the sea floor was not in the manual. Soon, the four-person operation is humming along. The crab survey is a vital part of their work as guardians of this Indigenous territory in the province of British Columbia. It was started more than 15 years ago in response to heavy commercial crab fishing in an area where the federal government had done little independent monitoring to determine if a fishery was sustainable. It is the quintessential guardian assignment:…

For visitors to Lagos, the gentle plea begins with immigration officials at the airport and is echoed across the streets of Africa’s most populous city: “Show me love.” It is a familiar request for tips in a city of omnipresent hustle, but residents say the requests have intensified in the past year as people struggle under the crushing weight of Nigeria’s underperforming economy. Last Wednesday marked the completion of the first year in office of the president, Bola Tinubu, after the disputed election of February 2023. It was also the 25th anniversary of Nigeria’s return to democracy, a promising point in a region where six out of eight coup attempts since 2020 have been successful. On the eve of the landmark date, the national mood in the capital, Abuja, was…

The Bournemouth footballer Dominic Solanke twice thought he had scored the opening goal in a Premier League game against Brentford last month. Each time he wheeled away to celebrate, he put on an orange mask with a spiral pattern and one eyehole before posing in front of the cameras. The goal was ruled out by VAR but the celebration went viral, as journalists wrote about “masked mayhem” and others wondered what this “bizarre” celebration could mean. It was the latest in a string of hand gestures and poses that Solanke has struck this season which are inscrutable for the uninitiated but for fans of anime – Japanese animated dramas – it’s obvious the mask was a character, Obito Uchiha, from the Naruto series. With its roots in 80s manga comics…

IN THE SUMMER OF 1947 IT WOULD HAVE TAKEN GWEN CHANDLER just 15 minutes to cycle home from the textile factory in Bletchley where she worked as a machinist. Her route went east out of town, straight past the county cinema and up the hill into the Buckinghamshire village of Little Brickhill, where she lived at 9 Watling Street with her mum, Lottie, her aunt, uncle and grandparents. It’s easy to imagine Gwen pausing in the heart of the village and glancing apprehensively to her right down the tree-lined drive to the large manor house there. Requisitioned during the second world war, it was home to 105 German prisoners. Held captive since Hitler’s defeat, these men – along with hundreds of thousands of their compatriots scattered across Britain in dozens…

A question I perennially encounter when I tell people that I am a professional spelling bee tutor is: “Why bother with spelling bees when we have spell check?” It’s an understandable response, especially when it comes from people who have never watched a bee. Cell phones and computers have no problem storing the entire corpus of the English dictionary and consulting it at a moment’s notice. Like all games and sports, spelling bees aren’t strictly speaking necessary or useful – at least not in an immediately practical way. Yet questions about spelling bees’ utility (or lack thereof) miss what makes them so beloved – why it broke spellers’ and logophiles’ hearts when the Scripps National Spelling Bee was cancelled in 2020 amid the pandemic; why the Bee was revived in…

I have never seen an Ottolenghi recipe for a burger, be it meaty or vegetarian. How would you construct and garnish your perfect hamburger? David, Winnipeg, Canada To be honest, traditional burgers are something I seek out from others – passionate people who flip burgers all day, every day – and my must-have condiments are proper burger sauce (two parts mustard, one part mayo and one part ketchup), American cheese, pickles, raw white onion and iceberg lettuce. And on those rare occasions when I do make a burger at home, I follow similar principles. Buy the best meat you can afford. I love lamb in my burger patties, but I’ve also been known to use minced turkey thigh. For a lighter, springier patty, breadcrumbs are the obvious choice, but coarsely…