Innehållsförteckning för 19 July 2024 från Guardian Weekly

LABOUR Starmer promises UK will be at the heart of Europe Keir Starmer promised a new era of closer relations with Europe to ensure future generations can look back “on what our continent achieved together” before a meeting at Blenheim Palace of the European Political Community this week. Starmer said Europe as a whole faced security crises and linked problems over migration, and that Britain should be at the heart of the continent’s efforts to confront them. In his most positive comments about the UK and Europe since he campaigned against Brexit and for a second referendum, the prime minister said that Europe was “at the forefront of some of the greatest challenges of our time”. As the government prepared for the king’s speech on Wednesday, which sets out its…

In the shadow of the Republican national convention in Milwaukee, where Donald Trump officially became the party’s nominee, two days after surviving an attempt on his life, Joe Biden was still confronting a question he thought he’d answered: will he be the Democratic nominee in November? “1,000%,” the president said in an interview, which aired on Monday but was recorded before a would-be assassin shot at Trump during a rally in Pennsylvania last Saturday. In the roughly 36 hours that followed, the presidential contest was suspended. Biden condemned the attack as “sick”. He called Trump to let him know he and the first lady were praying for him. Then, on Sunday, Biden addressed the nation from the Oval Office, pleading with Americans in a heartfelt speech to “lower the temperature”.…

La Roja on a roll And fade to red. The Euro 2024 trophy will not, it turns out, be coming back with the players to England after all. But it at least headed to a very good home as England’s footballers were eased aside in Berlin’s Olympiastadion on Sunday by a supremely coherent and gifted Spanish team. A 2-1 victory means Spain are now four-time winners of Europe’s elite competition. Having just turned 17, Lamine Yamal, (pictured facing fans, centre), was one of the stories of the tournament, cutting a clean path through Europe’s elite teams. At the final whistle England’s players were distraught, drained after seven high-drama games en route to a first overseas final in the men’s national team’s history. Berlin had managed to dish up all the…

‘Guess what I found?” Darma Budi Pinem asked the women gathered round to see what he had in his hands. “My instincts tell me this is Opung’s faeces,” said Nayla Azmi as she studied the clump of hair, broken eggshells and bones. “Opung” in Batak – Azmi’s language – means grandparent, the term used when referring to tigers. The Batak people are Indigenous to the island of Sumatra, the third-largest, westernmost island of Indonesia, and many of their legends involve ancestors who formed friendships with tigers that became part of the family. Azmi, 35, is leading a training session with Pinem, 47, a former ranger for the Gunung Leuser national park (GLNP). She is with the four other members of the Nuraga Bhumi Institute, the all-women Indigenous patrol team she…

Reports that a powerful Rio drug lord known for his extremist religious beliefs ordered Catholic churches near his stronghold to close have spooked worshippers and security experts and exposed the advent of a “narco-pentecostal” movement made up of heavily armed evangelical drug traffickers. Claims have emerged in the Brazilian press that Álvaro Malaquias Santa Rosa – a notorious gang boss known as Peixão (Big Fish) – had determined that three places of worship should shut down in and around the favelas he controls in northern Rio. Peixão – whose nickname comes from the ichthys, a fish symbol for Christ – took control in 2016 of five favelas that have become known as the Complexo de Israel, or Complex of Israel, an allusion to the evangelical belief that the return of…

When Alec Baldwin set out to make the western Rust in 2021, it was a passion project for the veteran actor. He co-created the story, served as a producer and starred as the film’s lead Harland Rust, an outlaw with a bounty on his head. Nearly three years on, the 66-year-old had assumed the role of criminal defendant, standing trial in New Mexico for involuntary manslaughter in the death of the cinematographer Halyna Hutchins during a rehearsal on the film’s set. As Baldwin entered a Santa Fe courtroom last Wednesday, the day the trial began, he was staring down the prospect of 18 months in prison. By the week’s end, in a dramatic twist fit for a Hollywood drama, he was walking out a free man after a judge found…

Never let your opponents define the terms of a debate. All too often, Labour has allowed the Conservatives and the billionaire press to demonise the notion of “tax and spend”. It went to great lengths before the election to assure voters it had no such intention. Now it drives home the message: instead, our needs will be met by “growth, growth, growth”. But tax and spend is the foundation of a civilised society. Few of the changes Britain requires can be achieved while adhering to the “tough spending rules” the new government has imposed on itself. We urgently need massive public investment in the NHS, social care, schools, environmental protection, social housing, local authorities, water, railways, the justice system and virtually all functions of government. We need a genuine levelling…

I love reading your recipes, but there is a big gap between reading and cooking. Why always so many ingredients? Giampiero, Vienna, Austria The short answer is, I’m with you: the older I get, the simpler I want my cooking to be and, believe it or not, I spend much of my time in the test kitchen asking whether a dish could do with at least one or two fewer ingredients or steps. It’s a challenge to share my thinking without sounding defensive, but here goes … There are many ways to write a recipe. Some are quite vague – suggestive, rather than prescriptive, say: a pinch of this, a slosh of that – while others, such as many of my own recipes, tend to be more specific. My thinking…

Across 1 Easy, trouble-free (5,7) 9 Expression of a universal truth (5) 10 Sound measurement (7) 11 Brown seaweed (4) 12 Floating frozen mass (3,5) 14 Coming (6) 15 Silently forms words (6) 18 Bookplate (2,6) 20 Suddenly take hold (4) 22 Deep indignation (7) 23 It connects muscle to bone (5) 24 PA insisted on (anag) – permission to be excused (12) Down 2 Circular (7) 3 Wild mountain goat (4) 4 Lead astray (6) 5 Surgeon’s opening move? (8) 6 Inspire (with feelings or ideas) (5) 7 Situation lacking in privacy (8,4) 8 (The) middle of nowhere (4,2,6) 13 Card (and board) game (8) 16 Ontario’s capital city (7) 17 Muscle at the front of the upper arm (6) 19 Sports car – and yoga position (5) 21…

Demands for answers have been mounting as to how an armed man was able to get into position on a roof overlooking a rally and fire shots at Donald Trump – the 2024 presumptive Republican nominee – despite federal and local law enforcement presence and witnesses reportedly alerting police. National lawmakers expressed shock at the apparent security lapses. Mike Johnson, the speaker of the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, said the chamber would conduct a “full investigation”. The incident is being investigated as an attempted assassination and is the first time a president or leading party candidate for the White House has been shot since Ronald Reagan in 1981. It has triggered fears of political violence and more attacks as America endures one of the most contentious periods of its modern…

On the wall of the living room of Zohair Rajabi’s house is a map showing his neighbour-hood: the stepped alleys winding down the steep slopes facing Jerusalem’s Old City, and the flat roofs of houses. The 54-year-old’s own home is marked by a yellow sticker. Rajabi fervently hopes he will never have to replace it with a red one – signifying that Jewish Israelis live in the building. “We are living in constant anxiety. It’s very difficult,” he said. About 20 houses in Batn al-Hawa, a Palestinian neighbourhood in East Jerusalem, are marked on Rajabi’s map with a yellow sticker and only six are marked in red. This may be about to change. A recent ruling by Israel’s supreme court ended the legal battle of one local family against eviction…

Prisons could hit full capacity within weeks, despite new emergency measures announced by Labour to release some prisoners early. An unprecedented move to cut the time served in custody for most sentences to 40% will not come into effect until September, and officials fear that capacity will be overwhelmed by the end of August. The justice secretary has described the situation as a “ticking timebomb”. A senior prisons source said they were “very worried” about an expected increase in inmates after the late August bank holiday, warning that, with just 700 adult male prison places left in England and Wales, the estate was “very vulnerable to shocks”. The official added: “That can be big, high-profile shocks, like the 2011 civil disorder or a prison riot, or it could actually be…

Hajer Sulaiman, a 32-year-old communications specialist, was living in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, when a power struggle that had been simmering for months between the regular army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) burst into the open on 15 April last year. “My mother was telling me she wanted to head to the market that morning,” Sulaiman said. “We could hear loud explosions, but we thought it was to do with protesters, not that the entire country had slipped into a civil war. It was just too overwhelming to process.” She didn’t expect the fighting to last a long time, believing the country’s generals would be hauled around the table to thrash out a deal. But the sound of mortars, fighter jets and gunfire did not cease, and a…

The marriage of the son of India’s richest man, billionaire Mukesh Ambani, to the daughter of a millionaire was never going to be a humble affair. The industrialist is now worth an estimated $120bn and over the years the Ambani family has not shied away from flashing its cash extravagantly, whether on the world’s most expensive home – a 27-storey skyscraper mansion that towers over Mumbai – or on what was previously India’s most expensive wedding, spending almost $100m on their daughter’s nuptials back in 2018, where Beyoncé performed. Yet even for the Ambani family, the months-long celebrations that have built up to the wedding of youngest son, 29-year-old Anant Ambani, to Radhika Merchant, daughter of a pharmaceutical tycoon, have surpassed even the wildest of imaginations in terms of opulence,…

The amount of wind and solar power under construction in China is now nearly twice as much as the rest of the world combined, according to a new report. Research published last Thursday by Global Energy Monitor (GEM), an NGO, found that China has 180 gigawatts (GW) of utility-scale solar power under construction and 159GW of wind power. That brings the total of wind and solar power under construction to 339GW, well ahead of the 40GW under construction in the US. The researchers only looked at solar farms with a capacity of 20MW or more, which feed directly into the grid, meaning the total amount could be much higher, as small farms account for about 40% of China’s solar capacity. The findings underscore China’s leading position in global renewable energy…

Was it last week that Ukraine lost the war? Or to put it another way, was it the week the west lost Ukraine? Heroic battlefield resistance continued, Ukrainian citizens struggled on in the teeth of pitiless atrocities such as the missile strike on Kyiv’s Okhmatdyt children’s hospital – but in Washington, risk-averse Nato leaders stuck stubbornly to a route map to defeat. Ultra-cautious US president Joe Biden says the 32-country alliance is the strongest the world has ever seen. But what use is an alliance that is afraid of a fight? Rarely has the gap between the rhetoric of solidarity and a dismaying political refusal to directly confront Russian brutality yawned so wide. This chasm may prove fatal to Ukraine and Nato. Alliance chiefs agree that repulsing Moscow is vital.…

It’s 1.30am and the band El Guajiro y su Changüí, led by freestyling lyricist Celso Fernández, are cooking on all burners. They’re onstage at an open-roofed venue in the city of Guantánamo in Cuba – 30km from the infamous US-owned prison – and playing changüí, the region’s hyperlocal music. Changüí is reportedly a mashup of a Congolese word meaning “jump for joy” and the Guantánamo slang for “party”, and this is some of the most exuberant, party-starting music imaginable. Changüí is not for spectators – anybody can be part of the show. Havana star Elito Revé jumps on stage and joins in on the scraped-metal guayo and vocals, soon followed by Yarima Blanco, a hotshot on the guitar-like tres. On the first day of the 11th edition of the festival…

We need lessons from history now more than ever. Mothers with young children sit isolated in their own homes, oblivious to 1970s experiments in communal child-rearing. Broadcasters justify populist content on the grounds that it’s what “ordinary people” want, despite the rich 19th-century tradition of working-class intellectualism. The current Labour leadership’s adherence to strict “fiscal rules” disregards past successes of borrowing to invest and taxing the highest incomes at 90%. These histories allow us to see that contemporary evils such as austerity and inequality are contingent, not inevitable. History for Tomorrow could not, therefore, be timelier or more welcome. Roman Krznaric’s books include The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long-term in a Short-term World, and this latest is similarly focused on addressing global heating, social division and runaway AI; this…

1 UNITED STATES Trump makes public return after assassination attempt Donald Trump, wearing a bandage partially covering his right ear, appeared in public for the first time since surviving an assassination attempt last weekend. Trump made a dramatic entrance to loud cheers on Monday during the first night of the Republican national convention in Milwaukee. Trump was joined by JD Vance, who he named his running mate earlier in the day. “He has proven to be one tough SOB,” Sean O’Brien, the president of the Teamsters union said to thunderous applause. His appearance came after a slew of speakers including Marjorie Taylor Greene, the congresswoman from Georgia, called Trump a “founding father” of the “America First movement”. Trump received a further boost as the criminal case on charges that he illegally…

It will be the new must-have for every Donald Trump acolyte. The indelible image of the former US president, ear bloodied and fist raised as Secret Service agents try to rush him away from a would-be assassin’s bullets, has already been turned into a $35 T-shirt with a simple legend: “Fight! Fight! Fight!” The words are taken from Trump’s entreaty as he was bundled off stage in the aftermath of the shooting which left one man dead at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, last Saturday. His supporters responded with chants of “USA! USA!” and by angrily turning on the media. In an instant the 2024 presidential election, at that point just 115 days away, and the future of America had been transformed. A polarised nation faces the threat of…

About 6,400 Palestinians reported as missing to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) since the outbreak of the war in Gaza on 7 October are yet to have been found, the group has said. Many are believed to be trapped under debris, buried without identification, or held in Israeli detention while others have been separated from their loved ones, who have been unable to contact them. Approximately 1,100 new cases of missing people have been registered and remain unsolved since April, the ICRC said. “Each week we can receive anywhere between 500 and 2,500 calls to our hotlines, and the majority of these are requests for missing family members,” said Sarah Davies, an ICRC spokesperson. “The level of requests fluctuates, sometimes depending on the situation in areas of…

Earlier this year, before he became the UK prisons minister, James Timpson described how Britain should follow the Dutch example of mild sentencing to help solve the prisons crisis. “They have shut half their prisons not because people are less naughty in Holland,” he told Channel 4. “It’s because they have a different way of sentencing, which is community sentencing so people can stay at home, keep their jobs, keep their homes, keep reading their children bedtime stories, and it means they are far less likely to commit crime again. A custodial sentence is not always the right thing.” But in the Netherlands, those comments evoked surprise in some quarters. The country has experienced an escalation in drug-related crime and has a new rightwing government keen to be seen as…

Last year, 200 composting bins were rolled out in New York City, with a unit on every other corner you could open and close via an app. This was exciting for those of us who have hit an age when rubbish disposal is something we think about. For a while, my kids indulged me in my need to discuss composting – whether our bag would fit in the bin; how good the exercise made us feel; whether it actually did anything useful or not – before pointing out I was talking about it too much. Last week, a new fleet of wheelie bins was introduced across the city, and the excitement has been almost too much to bear. The “trash revolution” as Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, put…

The first line of Long Island Compromise sets the tone: “Do you want to hear a story with a terrible ending?” A self-aware narrator commands our attention. It’s an instant connection, which shouldn’t be a surprise because this is New York Times journalist Taffy Brodesser-Akner, whose intelligent and supremely engaging debut, Fleishman Is in Trouble, was an international hit and became a Disney+ TV series. Second books can be fatal, of course, and clearly Brodesser-Akner has decided to go big with a novel about that curse of contemporary America – serious wealth. Apple TV+ has already bought the rights. The story kicks off in 1980 with a kidnapping. Super-rich polystyrene foam factory owner Carl Fletcher is swiped from the driveway of his enormous Long Island waterfront home, where his pregnant…

The ferry ride takes just five minutes, crossing the sound from the island of Tjörn to the smaller, car-free Härön. Red-roofed wooden houses stand grouped along the shoreline, with rounded bluffs of rock rising behind them. With few garden boundaries here, the island’s wild plants – among them the dusky purple sand leek – mingle with the cultivated. Our path leaves the strand for cow pastures, before we reach boardwalks that brush past bog myrtle. It is a place of contrasts, a mixture of dry ground and bog, creating varied habitats: vast curving slabs of rock where thin grasses and flowers sprout along the cracks or in hollows; wet places bright with bog cotton and silver lichen; the occasional quiet lochan, cradled in the land, its calm surface holding bog…

✱ All solutions published next week Across 8 Second-rate 5s, they’re annoying after the bubble bursts (8) 9 Entire opening from chess champion’s letter? (5) 10 ‘Finally About Us’ from The Rolling Stones (4) 11 Putting up with the French in time, otherwise giant outburst (10) 12 One dropping off fish? (6) 14 Tool to gently boil Thai rice, primarily to be eaten (8) 16 Robot with head of rubber, heart of foil and rear of lead (7) 18 Ancient follower of cricket match isn’t excited (7) 21 One running small peripheral device (8) 23 Drunk, refuse third of vodka (6) 24 Gain pardon playing instrument (5,5) 26 Over £501 billion in account? (4) 27 Grumpy, say, from battle between Germany and France (5) 28 Hit record swapped on hard…