Innehållsförteckning för 12 July 2024 från Guardian Weekly

The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol211 | Issue№ 2 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…

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The Liberal Democrats plan to use their best-ever contingent of 72 MPs to push Keir Starmer to begin cross-party talks on a new plan for social care, saying the issue was raised repeatedly by voters during their election campaign. Lib Dem insiders said Ed Davey’s party, which unseated four cabinet ministers as well as dozens of other senior Conservatives, would also seek to make sure the position of unpaid carers was considered properly by the Labour government. The party’s tally is 10 seats above the previous record of 62 in 2005. The last time they won more than this was as the Liberal party in 1923. Among the Tories they removed were: Gillian Keegan, the education secretary; Alex Chalk, the justice secretary; and Lucy Frazer, the culture secretary. They also…

THERE WAS MUCH TALK about Ming vases during the election campaign. Instead, in these Euros-dominated days, here’s a football metaphor. Keir Starmer’s task amounted to getting to full-time without serious mishap against a team that was 5-0 down within 40 minutes, all own goals, whose captain left the field early for half-time, and whose players started butting heads well before the game’s end. But you can only beat what’s in front of you. Now the hard part starts. The domestic challenges look bad: the NHS crisis, bankrupt local governments, crumbling infrastructure, a flat economy. But the foreign policy in-tray looks worse: war in Europe, conflict in the Middle East, friction with China and Donald Trump’s possible return. It makes for the most fragile and dangerous time for a generation. Business…

‘With fear for our democracy, I dissent.” So wrote the supreme court justice Sonia Sotomayor in a minority opinion last week. She was far from alone in the view that, with Donald Trump threatening an “ imperial presidency”, American democracy is at a moment of maximum peril. Millions are pinning their hopes on the Democratic party as the last wall of defence. Surely, they believed, Democrats would field their best and brightest, led by a dynamic presidential candidate and demagogue slayer. Instead the party is offering 81-year-old Joe Biden and an internal civil war. Biden’s career-worst debate performance against Trump last month has triggered acrimony, angst and panic among Democrats just four months from election day. There are growing calls for the oldest president in US history to step aside.…

The reformist Masoud Pezeshkian has pulled off a stunning victory in the Iranian presidential runoff, reflecting deep dissatisfaction with the direction of the country in recent years and opening potential new avenues of cooperation with the west. Pezeshkian won 16,384,403 votes to defeat the ultra-conservative Saeed Jalili, who received 13,538,179 votes, on a turnout of 49.8% – an increase on the record low turnout of 39.9% in the first round. In the first round, Pezeshkian came top, defeating three Conservative rivals. The turnout included more than 1m invalid votes. Pezeshkian has been an advocate of letting women choose whether to wear the hijab and ending internet restrictions that require the population to use VPN connections to avoid government censorship. He said after his victory: “The difficult path ahead will not…

The pupils are mostly school-children, aged from seven up to teenagers. The teacher is an 82-year-old woman known to all as Sword Granny. Inside her martial arts school – with walls adorned with trophies and mementoes – in Vatakara, in the southern Indian state of Kerala, the session begins with prayers and warm-up exercises. Then Meenakshi Raghavan takes the class through the precise movements of kalaripayattu, India’s oldest martial art, their bare feet padding across a floor of red dust mixed with medicinal herbs. Every day, this formidable woman teaches kalaripayattu to youngsters and the older men and women of the town alike. Raghavan has built a team of teachers who work alongside her at the Kadathanad Kalari Sangham school, but she has become especially renowned in this region not…

“He’s a very polarising person. But polarising also means some people will show up for you A Canadian prime minister who has outstayed his welcome, persistent inflation, a government bumped and bruised by scandal and a fired-up opposition leader itching for a showdown. It was against this backdrop, four decades ago, that Pierre Trudeau took his apocryphal “walk in the snow” and decided not to contest the next federal election. After a shocking upset in a “safe” electoral district and with a looming possibility of a blowout in the next federal election, Justin Trudeau’s predicament closely mirrors that of his father. But the incumbent prime minister says he has no intention of stepping down, despite evidence the public is growing increasingly weary of both his tenure – and of his…

I am not usually one to offer diagnoses of people I’ve never met, but it does seem like the pundit class of the US media is suffering from severe memory loss. Because they’re doing exactly what they did in the 2016 presidential race – providing wildly asymmetrical and inflammatory coverage of the one candidate running against Donald Trump. They have become a stampeding herd producing an avalanche of stories suggesting Joe Biden is unfit, will lose and should go away, at a point in the campaign in which replacing him would probably be somewhere between extremely difficult and utterly catastrophic. They do this while ignoring something every scholar and critic of journalism knows well and every journalist should. As Nikole Hannah-Jones of the New York Times put it: “As media…

What to do with a problem like Paul Gauguin? The 19th-century French master’s radical experimentations with colour, space and syncretic symbolism have made him a canonical artist. Yet it is “Gauguin the monster” – not “Gauguin the artist” – who takes up the most oxygen in discussions today. It is Gauguin – purveyor of primitivist fantasies, emblem of French colonialism in the Pacific, and paedophilic, syphilitic sex tourist who took child brides as young as 13 – who looms large in the public consciousness. The National Gallery of Australia has clearly grappled with this legacy in the lead-up to its blockbuster, Gauguin’s World: Tōna Iho, Tōna Ao. The curator of the show, Henri Loyrette – a former director of the Musée d’Orsay and Musée du Louvre in Paris – has…

‘Operators like me oil the machines that prop up authoritarian power all over the world,” writes the Washington PR man Phil Elwood in All the Worst Humans. “I help those machines function by laundering the sins of dictators through the press.” He may be overselling himself – he’s a publicist, after all – but not by much, if we are to believe his romping memoir of a career spent manipulating the media on behalf of the bad guys. It’s no shock that the obscenely wealthy pay large amounts of money to PR companies to “change the narrative” in their favour. What’s more surprising is who these companies will work for, and what they are prepared to do. In 2018, the Washington firm Qorvis took $18.8m from the Saudis in what…

1 UNITED STATES Biden ultimatum fails to silence campaign critics Joe Biden came out swinging on Monday against critics of his calamitous June debate performance, telling Democrats in an open letter and Americans in a live TV interview he is staying in the presidential race – rejecting growing calls to concede that at 81 he is too ineffective to beat Donald Trump and should drop out in favour of a younger candidate. Biden lashed out at “elites in the party” in a live telephone interview with the MSNBC show Morning Joe, saying they were behind calls for him to quit. He added: “If any of these guys don’t think I should run, run against me. Go ahead. Announce for president – challenge me at the convention!” However, Biden’s position among congressional…

The asteroid hit at dawn. The seats of four Tory former prime ministers – David Cameron, Theresa May, Liz Truss, Boris Johnson – fell in an hour at around 6am on Friday, capping a historically unprecedented collapse for the Conservative party. The defeat of Truss provided this election’s biggest schadenfreude moment, as the political career of the country’s shortest-serving PM ended with her defeat by the largest swing to Labour ever recorded. The loss of those four seats epitomised the message sent by voters – an emphatic rejection of the party these PMs had led over the past 14 years. The 2024 election saw the Conservatives fall to their lowest ever vote share and lose 252 seats – more than any government has ever lost before. And more than half…

The independent voter is the elusive prize in any election. This year, Democrats are hoping that widespread support for abortion rights will draw in women who might have previously shied away from the party. But polling shows independent female voters, a critical group for any candidate, are unenthused about the prospect of choosing between the same guys who ran last time. Now, with some Democrats publicly mulling replacing Joe Biden in the wake of his catastrophic debate performance, a key question is whether a Kamala Harris-topped ticket would provide them with some much-needed excitement. Over the past two decades, the share of voters who identify as “independent” has crept up to roughly 30%, according to April data from the Pew Research Center. But that number masks a divide among independents:…

On 21 April 2006, the president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – then in his first term – stood in front of the cameras with a broad smile on his face and his hands dirty with oil during the inauguration of Platform P50, located in Campos, Rio de Janeiro. Petrobras, a state-controlled national company, had discovered immense oil and gas deposits in the Atlantic Ocean’s depths. “Today we are celebrating another independence,” said Lula. “We are witnessing a milestone that will mark a new era to Brazil’s development.” Eighteen years later, Latin America and the Caribbean are about to become major exporters of “black gold”: at least 16 of the 33 Latin American and Caribbean countries are involved in about 50 major new oil and gas onshore and…

In his early 20s, Prince William was often seen stumbling out of nightclubs after a night of grooving. But now, as though a clock has struck 12, this youthful cavorting appears to have transformed into something more cringeworthy: dad dancing. In a viral video captured at a recent Taylor Swift concert, the heir to the throne was filmed with arms aloft, chest shimmying swiftly – and somewhat stiffly – to the beat. At Glastonbury last month, tens of thousands of men were “shaking it off” in similar energetic fashion. But while scientific studies have confirmed that older men do indeed dance differently from their younger counterparts – and this may have evolved as a way of signalling their declining biological fitness – experts argue that dad dancing should be celebrated,…

When I first moved to Istanbul in 2010, knowing almost no one and grappling with an unfamiliar language, it was the local street dogs who first drew me into my new life. Chico, an elderly alsatian, and Herkül, a labrador mongrel, lived on a corner near my apartment where they watched life pass by with a vigilant serenity. Locals fed them and some even clubbed together to pay the dogs’ vet bills. Greeting them became a daily ritual, and when I went to a pet shop to buy treats, using my halting Turkish to explain I was getting them “for dogs, but not my dogs”, the shopkeeper replied: “Ah, for the street dogs,” as though nothing were more natural. This culture in which street animals are accepted and socialised into…

Anita Desai’s riddling and haunted new novel is set in motion when Bonita, a young Indian woman, meets a tricksy figure in a park in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. A student of Spanish, Bonita is leafing through local newspapers when she is approached. “The Stranger” – elderly, overfriendly and peculiarly dressed “in the flamboyant Mexican style that few Mexican women assume at any other than festive occasions” – claims to know Bonita’s dead mother, whom she calls “Rosarita”. She says they met and became friends when the latter came to pursue art under the tutelage of Mexican maestros. Bonita has no recollections of her mother painting or travelling to Mexico. She remembers, however, “a sketch in wishy-washy pale pastels that had hung on the wall above your bed at…

✱ All solutions published next week Across 1 Ely desperately after pen to house college transport (7) 5 Scotsman broken by onset of injury and hard suffering (7) 9 Musical piece produced by new department’s head in jumper (5) 10 Burn wayward lazy daughter? Wild! (9) 11 Sanctimonious little girl in car plant (10) 12 See 24 Down 14 Winner shouts out ‘There’s no merit in it!’ (12) 18 Admonition, it seems, about breaking into song (12) 21 Mechanical routine giving balls energy (4) 22 Maybe London’s joint originator of written work (10) 25 Dash, it’s rough being an ambitious type! (9) 26 Mark 2? (5) 27 Backing positive, steadfast youth leaders to undertake major journey (7) 28 Level of society needing pluck to restrain a totalitarian leader (7) Down…

ECONOMY Chancellor requests urgent review of public spending Rachel Reeves is to provide an emergency assessment of the government’s spending inheritance before MPs leave for their summer break as she attempts to pin the blame for looming tough tax and spending decisions on the defeated Tories. The new chancellor used her first speech at the Treasury to insist there would be no deviation from Labour’s hardline stance on reducing the national debt despite being bequeathed the “worst set of circumstances since the second world war”. Reeves said one of her first decisions in post had been to ask officials to provide an assessment of the UK’s public spending position so that she could understand the challenge ahead. The assessment will be presented to MPs before the end of the month.…

Conservatives have suggested that former home secretary Suella Braverman is losing support as a potential party leader, as some who lost votes across southern England privately urged colleagues to resist a lurch to the right. A number of MPs now see Robert Jenrick, Priti Patel and Kemi Badenoch, all of whom have ruled out a deal with the hard-right Reform leader Nigel Farage, as more viable candidates. The Conservative party board is expected to meet to begin to draw up plans for a leadership contest to replace Rishi Sunak after the Tories’ devastating general election defeat. No decision will be made on the timeline until a meeting of the backbench 1922 Committee of remaining Tory MPs. Three potential candidates appeared to discuss the postmortem in the Sunday papers and TV…

For more than 50 years, whenever France held a parliamentary election, voters would know the next morning which party would be in government and with what political agenda. This time it is different. After Emmanuel Macron called a snap election, and after the shortest campaign in modern history, French people delivered a spectacular rush of tactical voting to hold back a surge of far-right support. The resulting political landscape is divided and the outcome is complicated. Macron will take time to let the dust settle, his entourage has said. An alliance of parties on the left, the New Popular Front, surprised pollsters by coming first with a strong result of 182 seats. But it fell significantly short of the absolute majority of 289 that would allow it to instantly form…

Earlier this month, under the blazing summer sun, a crowd marched through central Amman, waving placards and flags. Watched carefully by a double row of police officers, the several hundred protesters chanted slogans and repeated the words crackling through the microphones mounted on the truck leading the procession. “We will burn Israel! We want the head of Netanyahu,” they shouted. Not far away, the same sun beat down on the pavements of Rainbow Street, once the bustling tourist centre of the capital of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Eight months into the war in Gaza, and with no end to the conflict in sight, there were no visitors. “It’s the worst I’ve known … Nothing will improve until the war stops in Gaza,” said Usra Qadr, 38, a trader. Such…

‘We occasionally greet each other, but that’s all. If one of my neighbours died, I’m not sure I would notice,” said Noriko Shikama, 76. She lives alone in a flat in Tokiwadaira, in Tokyo’s commuter belt, and has come to the Iki Iki drop-in centre to catch up with residents over coffee served by volunteers. Here, amid the everyday discussions, people also share news about the latest lonely death, or kodokushi – officially defined as one in which “a person dies without being cared for by anyone, and whose body is found after a certain period”. This time it was a woman who was discovered after neighbours noticed they had not seen her on her balcony. She had been dead for five months. “The smell is overpowering … it stays…

The road from Caracas to Guatire is lined with propaganda billboards glorifying President Nicolás Maduro and likening his political rivals to gangsters from the country’s most infamous criminal group. “They won’t defeat us,” the slogan declares. But as the economically fractured South American country prepares to hold its long-awaited presidential election on 28 July, some people are not persuaded. “Yes we can! Yes we can!” opposition supporters chanted as they gathered in Guatire, a city to the east of the capital, to champion the duo hoping to end the 11-year rule of Hugo Chávez’s unpopular heir – and more than a quarter-century of Chavismo. The two politicians in question are María Corina Machado, one of Venezuela’s most prominent and outspoken opposition leaders, and Edmundo González Urrutia, a softly-spoken former diplomat…

It’s impossible not to congratulate the Labour party on its historic victory. Keir Starmer has taken his party on a journey back into government. He has brought Labour back from the fringes of British politics and made it a mainstream party that has gained a huge electoral majority from all parts of our country. When I was appointed education secretary in 2016, I was the first person in the job to have been educated at a comprehensive school. It is welcome to see a cabinet where state-educated ministers are finally the norm, not the exception. When the nation’s decision-makers have shared the lived experience of the vast majority of the population, this surely makes for a stronger, better and fairer government. Everyone in the country should wish Labour well with…

‘Strawberries are the masterpiece of summer,” says Ravinder Bhogal, Feast columnist and chef/owner of Jikoni in London. At their peak, you’d be hard pushed to better eating them straight from the punnet, but, Bhogal adds, pairing strawberries with floral waters such as rose or elderflower comes a very close second. “I love a strawberry and rose sorbet, or a traditional Victoria sponge made with strawberry and rose jam, cream and fresh strawberries macerated in rosewater,” she says. Chef Lorcan Spiteri, of Caravel in north London, slices his fruit thinly, then adds icing sugar and lemon juice and leaves for 20 minutes. “We then use them as a topping,” he says, of which there are many options: “Puff pastry and frangipane with creme diplomat [creme patissiere mixed with chantilly cream] and…

The small trailer I’ve borrowed from Pete is perfect for this job. I’ll return the favour tomorrow, helping to move his sheep preparatory to shearing. My cargo is two eight-week-old gilts and my destination is Jamie’s Farm, a charity based just outside Bath. It’s a journey I make routinely, but usually in unfamiliarly clean clothes, as a member of the housekeeping team preparing the accommodation for school visits during the week and funds-generating guests at the weekend. Like most people who cross paths with this place, it’s impossible not to take it to your heart. As I drive into the yard, I can see small groups going about their chores. Each day starts in this practical way before everyone joins together for breakfast around a large table in the barn.…

Across 1 Gaulle (anag.) – space in wine bottle (6) 4 Sensual – kingdom member (6) 8 Steps for two? (5) 9 Coffee maker and server (7) 10 Unwind (7) 11 Tones (anag.) (5) 12 Clever devices (9) 17 Picture riddle (5) 19 Thaw (7) 21 Man-horse? (7) 22 Rule (5) 23 Heavy and high in carbs (6) 24 Down the hatch! (6) Down 1 Slight improvement (US) (6) 2 Area at top of flight – end of flight! (7) 3 Bogeyman (5) 5 County of Cromer and King’s Lynn (7) 6 Prophet and teacher (5) 7 Shed (4-2) 9 Bridge-building beam (3,6) 13 Wild steed (7) 14 Yo, Auden! (anag.) – capital of Cameroon (7) 15 Spring bloom (6) 16 Rank (6) 18 Stringed instrument (5) 20 Bring back…