Innehållsförteckning för 28 June 2024 från Guardian Weekly

The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol210 | Issue№ 26 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…

They make an odd couple. One is smiley-faced and chubby. The other is thin-lipped and scowls a lot. Both are dictators, sinister, brutal and unaccountable in their different ways. Both have made it their mission to overturn the post-1945 global order, defying the US, its chief patrolman. And both are sanctioned, ostracised and a little bit feared by the west. Those fears are likely to intensify after last week’s Pyongyang summit, both symbolic and substantive, between this unofficial Laurel and Hardy tribute act. North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un – the plump one – and Russia’s Vladimir Putin – the skinny one – have a shared aim: consolidating their place in a bullish anti-western, anti-democratic alliance, ostensibly representing a “new world order”, reaching from China to Iran. Like most world leaders,…

The posters strung across the street in Montreuil, east of Paris, were still fluttering in the breeze days after the stage, the microphones and the politicians at the launch of France’s newest political force had gone. Here, out of the smouldering ashes of the country’s bickering left, a coalition had risen to take on the far right. The Nouveau Front Populaire (New Popular Front; NFP) is a tetchy alliance of Socialists (PS), Greens (EELV), Communists (PCF), hard left Insoumises (Unbowed; LFI), and other red-banner candidates that polls suggest is the country’s best – if not only – hope of staving off a Rassemblement National (National Rally; RN) majority government in the final round of legislative voting. For France’s Socialists, allying with LFI after its outspoken leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s insults and…

A warning from Israel’s foreign minister, Israel Katz, that a decision on “all-out war” with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon is coming soon is almost certainly an attempt at deterrence – not least because both sides understand how devastating full hostilities would be. Hezbollah, an ally of Iran, is a more powerful adversary than Hamas. It is estimated to have between 30,000 and 50,000 fighters and a similar number in reserve, between 120,000 and 200,000 unguided missiles and rockets, plus attack and reconnaissance drones. Assaf Orion, a former brigadier-general in the Israel Defense Forces and its chief of strategy between 2010 and 2015, estimates that Hezbollah has “10 times the arsenal of Hamas” and implies that any conflict would be a similar order of magnitude greater than the hostilities in Gaza…

In a remote village in northern Papua New Guinea’s Enga province, the community has set up a haus krai, a traditional mourning house. It is located about 200 metres from the landslide that buried people while they slept on 24 May. The house honours those killed in a tragedy that has affected thousands of people. Earlier this month authorities brought an end to the official recovery operation. Estimates of the number killed vary widely and few bodies have been recovered. The UN initially said 670 villagers died, though locals say the number is lower. Kopen Kongo, a police reservist, lives in Mulitaka, Enga province, where the disaster hit. He says many men, women and children remain buried under the debris. Kongo’s mother, two sons, and wife were trapped inside their…

The devil arrived at Andrew Walker’s laboratory in a cardboard box. Its fluorescent green body, covered in a thicket of menacing spikes, was adorned at both ends with a pair of black horns. For residents of north-east Queensland, this devil – scientific name Comana monomorpha – is known as the electric caterpillar. Its sting, typically received while tending to shrubs in the garden, is exceptionally painful. The venom causes a nasty welt and a considerable rash that can last for a week. It is so bad that some victims have spent a night in an emergency department. Health professionals treating afflicted people were seeing swelling, blood-filled boils and welts – but they could find nothing to help ease the pain. According to one poster to a Townsville community group on…

You don’t have to be a Barbie girl to be interested in Black Barbie: A Documentary, the history of the first Black Barbie in 1980 and the doll’s significance for Black girls in a world that still questions their natural beauty. The film is a tribute to the Black women who advocated for and designed the doll and a discourse on representation. To explain why Black Barbie matters and how a blond-haired, blue-eyed Barbie, the embodiment of an unrealistic white beauty standard, can strike at the self-image of Black children in America, the writer-director Lagueria Davis uses the landmark doll tests from the 1940s. Psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark conducted the tests to determine the effects of segregation on Black children’s self-esteem. They gave the children, aged three to seven,…

On the east coast of the Isle of Man there exists an extraordinary little bay that supports a wealth of wildlife. Today, flowering thrift bobs among the breeding gulls and a gannet plunges in the bay, gathering food for a chick that is, almost unbelievably, in Scotland. I have seen 99 different species of bird here; eiders now breed, joining black guillemots, choughs, oystercatchers and peregrines. We have nesting gulls that winter in Africa, replaced each year by a pod of bottlenosed dolphins that migrate up from Wales. Under the waves, an eelgrass meadow is recovering after bottom trawling was banned in 2009. The sandy bottom is home to spectacular small-spotted cat sharks as well as the venerable ocean quahog, a type of edible clam that can live to 500…

Across 1 Cinders’ lost property (5,7) 9 Salutation (5) 10 Ox (7) 11 Cloudy darkness (4) 12 Rebel (8) 14 ‘And …?’ (2,4) 15 A hound (6) 18 Trashy (8) 20 Swallow drop? (4) 22 Temporary stay (7) 23 First few notes (5) 24 Charged cumulonimbus (12) Down 2 Uncultured (7) 3 Portree’s Scottish isle (4) 4 Placate (6) 5 Damned (8) 6 Paler (anag.) (5) 7 John Braine novel – attic? (4,2,3,3) 8 Science kit for kids (9,3) 13 Tired (8) 16 Kneading and stretching Japanese therapy (7) 17 Black eye – light? (6) 19 Snug and elegant – chic (5) 21 __ pickle, herby cucumber (4) Solution No 16,879…

1 UKRAINE Zelenskiy replaces leading commander in Russia war President Volodymyr Zelenskiy replaced the commander of the Joint Forces Command of Ukraine’s military, after a well-known soldier accused the commander of causing mass casualties in the war with Russia. In a video address on Monday, Zelenskiy said Lt Gen Yuriy Sodol (below) had been replaced by Brig Gen Andriy Hnatov, without giving a reason for the shake up. Sodol was removed shortly after Bohdan Krotevych, the leader of Ukraine’s revered Azov regiment, accused the general of causing significant military setbacks and major losses in personnel. In a post on the Telegram messaging app, Krotevych did not identify Sodol by name, but said an unnamed general “has killed more Ukrainian soldiers than any Russian general”. “All the military personnel now understand who…

A quarter of a century ago, Vladimir Putin flew to Pyongyang to sign a “friendship treaty” with Kim Jong-il that helped revive Russia’s relations with North Korea without obliging the two sides to come to each other’s aid in case of a military attack. With his visit last week, Putin has in effect gone further into the past, signing a deal with Kim Jong-un reminiscent of the 1961 security pact that existed under the Soviet Union during the cold war. But today Russia is engaged in a hot war in Ukraine that Putin has made his foreign policy priority, and a nuclear North Korea has become a crucial lifeline of munitions for his military. “The treaty that Putin signed with Kim Jong-un was a return to the cold war, but…

It sounds odd to describe a well-to-do village with neat privet hedges, freshly mown lawns and three cars on each driveway as a no-go area. Yet for almost three decades, the pretty parish of Silkstone, on the edge of the Pennines, was un-welcoming territory for Labour folk. The village, centred around a 12th-century church 6km outside Barnsley, was a bastion of Conservative blue surrounded by Labour red. But last May, Silkstone elected its first Labour councillor in a generation. A second followed a year later. The electoral tremors from this little blue enclave may not have been felt in Westminster. But they help explain why Keir Starmer looks set to win a historic parliamentary majority on 4 July. Not only is Labour winning back supporters in the “red wall”, but…

‘We have to give a vision that works for everyone’Olaf Scholz German chancellor The best way to win back young voters from the far right is to give them hope, security and respect so that everyone “from an untrained Amazon worker” to “Elon Musk’s son” can live without fear of the future, the German chancellor has said. After young people voted for the far right in large numbers at the European parliamentary election, Olaf Scholz said it was necessary to closely address their anxieties. These included labour rights, global security, climate protection, a world shaped by artificial intelligence and an “international order … which is something you can rely on”. Scholz was speaking at a summit of progressive politicians and think-tanks in Berlin last Friday, chaired by the Guardian’s editor-in-chief, Katharine…

From a distance, the colourful beach at Ovahe seems a postcard-perfect mosaic of natural beauty. Craggy volcanic boulders, pockmarked from bubbling lava, jut from the sand, garnished by a necklace of pastel-coloured corals and seashells pounded to pieces by the wild, crashing surf. As the waves pull back, however, another reality emerges. The sand holds few corals or shells. Instead, the high-tide mark is a carpet of plastics polished into an array of bleached Coca-Cola reds and Pepsi blues. “Look at all this,” says Kina Paoa Kannegiesser, 22, using a kitchen sieve to scoop up bottle caps, shampoo bottle shards and disposable razors. The ocean rubbish is crammed into every nook and cranny along this remote beach on Easter Island, a 163 sq km speck of land. About 3,700km west…

When 42-year-old Myrthe Boss gets on her bike to go shopping in the Dutch town of Ede, she pops on a helmet. This act, considered essential in many countries, marks out Boss as something of a radical in the Netherlands, where helmet-wearing is rare. Now, however, faced with a rising number of traffic deaths linked in particular to older riders and ebikes, the Dutch government and provinces – not to mention neurologists such as Boss – are inviting cyclists to think again. “I’m a huge fan of cycling, but it’s important to protect ourselves,” Boss said. “The brain is a very vulnerable organ with limited capacity to recover. If you fall from a bike and sustain a brain injury, this has long-term consequences. And a large proportion of people who…

God’s army is on the march. And many of its foot soldiers are wearing Make America Great Again regalia, sensing that their unlikely standard-bearer, former US president Donald Trump, is once again close to the promised land. “I do not believe that America can survive another four years of Joe Biden,” Ralph Reed, founder and chair of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, told a gathering of the religious right in Washington last Friday. “I haven’t felt this way since Jimmy Carter was president.” The audience burst into knowing laughter. Reed promised they would knock on 10m doors of Christian and conservative voters in every battleground state, make 10m phone calls, send 25m text messages and put 30m voter guides in 113,000 churches, producing “the biggest turnout of Christian voters in…

BEFORE DAWN ON A JUNE MORNING in 2010, police burst through the high security gates of a palazzo belonging to a notable mafia family on the edge of a small town in Calabria. As agents swarmed through the building, turning the place over, family members moved frantically to hide any evidence. Maria, the family’s 12-year-old daughter, was given a page ripped from a notebook. It was a list of debts owing. She was told to hide it: “Put it in your knickers, they won’t touch you.” Her brother Cosimo, 14, watched in helpless rage as his father, mother, even his grandmother, were handcuffed and led out to the waiting police cars. After the arrests, Cosimo was the only male family member outside prison, and it became his responsibility to collect…

This month, the highest ranking bureaucrat of the state of Delhi, Vinai Kumar Saxena, permitted the Delhi police to prosecute Arundhati Roy (pictured), and Sheikh Showkat Hussain for remarks they made at a public event 14 years ago. The opposition Aam Aadmi party governs Delhi, but the capital’s police reports to the central government’s home ministry. While the prime minister, Narendra Modi, lost his parliamentary majority in the recent elections, the prosecution of Roy shows that those who expected a chastened government willing to operate differently are likely to be disappointed. Hussain and Roy are to be tried for making speeches at a conference called Azadi [Urdu for “freedom”]: The Only Way, which questioned Indian rule in the then state of Jammu and Kashmir. Hussain is a Kashmiri academic, author…

It’s hard to deny the transformative power of a good salad dressing, but you don’t need much oil, if any. Honey, for example, will give “a natural stickiness that helps adhesion to your salad, while the sweetness balances the acidity of vinegar”, says Tony Rodd, head chef at Pomus in Margate. He favours the heather variety, whisking it with balsamic vinegar and wholegrain mustard – this is magic when tossed with blanched greens, grilled peaches, and torn burrata. He advises adding toasted nuts and seeds for texture. Chris Shaw, head chef at Toklas in London, suggests yoghurt, garlic and vinegar or lemon juice. “You can achieve the same consistency as a caesar dressing, but with the sourness of yoghurt, which I prefer,” he says, and although he’d normally then loosen…

ELECTION 2024 Pressure on PM as election betting scandal grows As general election campaigning entered the final week, Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives were engulfed in a growing scandal over a number of bets placed on the timing of the election. The Guardian originally revealed earlier this month that Craig Williams, who was Sunak’s closest parliamentary aide, was being investigated by the Gambling Commission for betting £100 ($125) on a July election three days before Sunak surprised the country by naming the date. Since then at least five people linked to Sunak or the Conservatives have been identified as being part of the watchdog’s inquiries. Senior Conservatives called for candidates and officials to be suspended pending the result of investigations. Last weekend the veteran Tory cabinet minister Michael Gove said the betting…

Polls that use large-scale polling data to extrapolate individual seat tallies, or MRPs– an acronym for multilevel regression and poststratification – have become popular in UK politics. Three such polls published last week all gave pretty different results. What would the scenarios illustrated mean for the Conservatives if they were replicated on 4 July? Solid Labour majority More in Common poll: 155 Tory MPs Amazing as it might sound, a lot of Tory party officials and candidates would probably accept this result if it was offered now: a Labour majority of 162. Even with this scenario there would be some high-profile casualties; understandably, given it would be a cull of 210 Tories from the 2019 election. Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, would lose his seat to the Lib Dems, with his…

Beneath the 800-bed Galilee medical centre in the northern Israeli city of Nahariya, treatment is being conducted in an underground complex. About 7km from the border with Lebanon, a frontier visible from the hospital’s car park, the doctors are aware that in the event of an escalating war their facility will be on the frontline. A suite equipped with monitors and screens will act as the nerve centre in the event of a full-scale war between Israel and Hezbollah, a prospect that looms ever larger amid rising hostilities and exchanges of fire across the border. In charge of the emergency preparations is Dr Tsvi Sheleg, an ophthalmologist whose unit was hit by a missile during the 2006 war. His planning reflects a crisis that has long been building to this…

When New Zeal and opened its borders after the pandemic, the departures began immediately. For Kirsty Frame, then a 24-year-old journalist for the country’s national broadcaster in Wellington, the sense of loss was constant. “It was goodbye dinner after goodbye dinner, leaving drinks after leaving drinks, and it started to take a toll.” For her, the city’s beauty came from its people. “If what made Wellington so great as a place to live and work was my community, and I feel I don’t have that here now and there’s a lot less people my age, what do I want to do?” She considered moving to Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, but heard it felt empty too. She mulled London, but Britain seemed too distant. Finally, in the middle of 2023,…

Since the pandemic, Lola Pedro has been spending a lot of time at an eco-tourist hamlet in Badagry town, on the outskirts of Lagos, surrounded by coconut and African apple trees next to chalets with showers open to the sky. The hamlet’s beach house serves as operations base and brainstorming centre for “Nigeria’s first premium spirit”, as the 42-year-old researcher, who was raised in London, describes the brand she co-founded in 2018. “I found a level of affinity with the ethos of the space – a farm-to-table eco resort,” she said. Inside the facility are maturation tanks and a giant neon logo for Pedro’s Premium Ògógóró, which owes half its name to a Nigerian nickname for distilled palm sap, a west African favourite until its colonial-era ostracisation a century ago.…

The release from a UK prison of Julian Assange is a victory for him and his many supporters around the world, but not necessarily a clear win for the principle underlying his defence, the freedom of the press. Assange, 52, agreed to plead guilty to a single criminal count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified US national defence documents, according to filings in the US district court for the Northern Mariana Islands. The full details of the deal between Assange and US authorities that led to his release were not immediately made public, but the charges, for which he was expected to be sentenced to time served, were drawn from the 1917 Espionage Act, for “conspiring to unlawfully obtain and disseminate classified information related to the national defense of…

TikTok Water slides Nigel What’s been on your minds this election campaign? Shaniya Odulawa, 23, graduate, Bexleyheath, London: The major parties are failing to engage with what people really want. They’re constantly missing the mark. Hassan Ali, 19, student, east London: So true. It shows they’re either lazy, or avoiding the real issues. Daniel Cadel, 23, student, Cheshire: It does concern me that Labour are more centre-right at the moment and the only leftwing parties are Lib Dem and Green. Niall Hignett, 21, student, Durham: The arguments about Labour lurching to the right are a bit overhyped. Labour’s manifesto seems fairly convincing. SO: What part is convincing to you? For me, many policies seem unfunded or not feasible. Paris Haigh, 22, student, East Kilbride: On the environment they sound OK,…

A handful of Spanish conquistadors fight through thick undergrowth to emerge in the ivy-clad ruins of a fallen civilisation during a rehearsal of Austrian playwright Thomas Köck’s Your Palaces Are Empty. Premiered last month at the Hans Otto theatre in Potsdam, south-west of Berlin, the bleak and unforgiving drama probes the wounds of a shattered capitalist world that has exploited its people and the planet’s resources. But it is not just the play that is embracing the subject of the climate crisis. The production itself has been declared climate neutral under a €3m ($3.2m) pilot project launched by Germany’s federal ministry of culture. The project, called Zero, is sponsoring the Potsdam theatre and 25 other cultural institutions, from dance companies to museums, to restructure their creative modus operandi. “It leads to…

Do individual losses still matter in a world in its final stages? This is the question asked by Agnes, Isla and Irene, three queer, volatile daughters who congregate uneasily to view the corpse of their divisive, megalomaniac architect father Stephen Carmichael, while the rain pours down outside – as it has poured down for several years. Carmichael has been both a contributor to this state of affairs – his gleaming masterpieces defied the early signs of climate crisis – and a saviour for the rich. His own house, which he has gifted provocatively to his youngest daughter alone, is a modernist folly-cum-masterpiece built high on ingeniously floating pylons. This rainy city, where people live makeshift lives on the top floors of flooded tower blocks, travelling by ferry, is natural territory…

✱ All solutions published next week Across 7 Moralist turning up in front of train wreck (7) 8 Singer’s entertaining dad dancing in Somerset village (7) 9 Start of silly season for Rishi? (4) 10 Wrecked boat at sea captured by revolutionary French artist (9) 12 Might some garden warblers return? (5) 13 No.7 in club team (8) 15 Supplies side-splitting joke (4) 16 Fellows invested in Spanish couple’s tips (5) 17 One Republican in US showing a bit of flex (4) 18 Mike goes inside to make a meal for PM (5,3) 20 Spooner’s subdued fish (5) 21 Four contrary aliens welcoming a conversation (4-1-4) 22 OXO rejected fine (4) 24 What Jack Sprat’s wife did on counter holding fine cloth (7) 25 Staggering tax rise for comic character…