Innehållsförteckning för 26 July 2024 från Guardian Weekly

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

Legend has it that when King George III heard that George Washington, the first US president, had decided to retire after his second term, he remarked: “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.” Joe Biden, 81, holed up at a Delaware beach house with a bad cough after a Covid-19 diagnosis, ended his presidential re-election campaign last Sunday. It was a selfless decision that put the country’s interests before his own – an act of grace that many see as vividly contrasting with the narcissism of his opponent Donald Trump. It also sets the stage for a completely different sort of election in November as top Democrats rapidly rushed to endorse Kamala Harris, which the president himself did. Now the Republicans will have to…

Israel’s army, the country’s preeminent secular institution for much of its seven decades, is increasingly coming under the sway of a national religious movement that has made bold moves across Israeli society in recent years. About 40% of graduates from its infantry officer schools now come from a national religious community that accounts for 12% to 14% of Jewish Israeli society and is politically more aligned with Israel’s right and far-right political parties and the settler movement. Critics say its growing influence, including from the more orthodox group Hardalim, is pursuing its own agenda within the army. The views of the national religious community are shaped by the teachings of Abraham Isaac Kook, the chief rabbi during the pre-state British Mandatory Palestine, who saw the foundation and settlement of the…

The UK is probably less well-equipped to cope with a pandemic than it was before Covid because of deteriorating health inequalities, the crisis in the NHS and pressures in care homes, leading experts have warned. The first report of the official Covid inquiry, published last week, pointed to major failures in government planning and warned that more must be done to improve preparedness. Pat McFadden, the Cabinet Office minister, whose department heads up emergency planning, told the Commons that while there was more to be done, “progress had been made” under the Conservatives in improving pandemic measures. But a series of experts say this might be fruitless given declining public health and increasing inequalities, much of it a result of austerity policies. Sir Michael Marmot, professor of public health at…

The Hsinchu Science Park, on Taiwan’s west coast, is lush and green, with streets neatly planned and clearly signposted. The buildings are modern and well maintained – from the outside most visitors wouldn’t know that they are among the world’s most important factories. Hsinchu used to be famous for its fishball street snacks, but now it’s referred to as Taiwan’s Silicon Valley, a tech-focused microcosm pipelining workers from school to university and into the semiconductor industry that is crucial to global supply chains. Semiconductors, also called chips, are tiny pieces of tech that power everything from computers to phones and cars. A chip can carry tens of billions of transistors required to make electronic goods work, with the most advanced ones, mostly made in Taiwan, carrying more. Last week, Taiwan’s…

I DIDN’T KNOW I WAS DEAD UNTIL I SAW IT ON GOOGLE. When I searched my name, there it was: a picture of my smiling face next to the text “Tom Faber was a physicist and publisher, and he was a university lecturer at Cambridge for 35 years”. Apparently I died on 27 July 2004, aged 77. This was news to me. The problem was the picture. When you search the name of a notable person, Google may create what it calls a “knowledge panel”, a little box with basic information taken from Wikipedia. Somewhere along the way, the algorithm had confused pictures of my face with the biography of another man who shared my name. According to his obituary, he was “a distinguished physicist with a literary hinterland”. Google…

For a politician who has avoided high-flown rhetoric, Keir Starmer is sounding remarkably ambitious. As he addressed the House of Commons after last week’s king’s speech, he said his government’s aim was “nothing less than national renewal”. But there was an even bigger story he wanted to tell, aimed not just at hard-right Tories and the chancers of Reform UK, but their political soulmates across the world. At that point, Donald Trump had just survived an assassination attempt and Joe Biden was still clinging on to his declining hopes of another presidential term, and it seemed as if Starmer wanted to do his bit to fill the moral breach: his government’s agenda, the Labour leader said, represented “a rejection, in this complicated and volatile world, of those who can only…

In the absence of a machine, the obvious solution to frozen dessert needs is granita. “That’s the easiest,” says Kitty Travers, owner of La Grotta Ices in London. “All you need is a tray and a fork.” Berries will always be delicious in granita, but Travers suggests going off-piste and infusing a bag or two of jasmine tea in a simple sugar syrup, then combining that with fresh watermelon juice. Alternatively, “soak almonds in water, then blend with sugar and lemon peel. Make a simple syrup with coffee beans, add to the whizzed-up almonds and freeze.” Half-frozen slab desserts (think semifreddo and parfait) also come into their own here. “Semifreddo is easy, it can be flavoured with fruit, nuts or chocolate and, most importantly, it provides the lovely, smooth texture…

✱ All solutions published next week Across 9 British musical rejecting No.1 from Robert Plant (5) 10 Clear forecast is a feature of the Caribbean (5,4) 11 Winger from Bristol set about on westbound tube (4,5) 12 City business pursuing lead from Captain America (5) 13 Hitler’s deranged move like 16 (7) 15 Spooks occasionally risk ringing abrupt PM (7) 17 Wimbledon champion’s trophy (5) 18 Start to drive gold Beetle (3) 20 Board of European Rights? (5) 22 Squeeze with bit of music that can give you the shakes (4,3) 25 Aunties swimming in Serpentine (7) 26 Sound check cut short by leader of orchestra (5) 27 Truss with point about pound showing lack of vision (9) 30 Teenagers mixing drinks (5,4) 31 16 bored by a bishop in…

1 UNITED STATES Harris wins majority backing for nomination Kamala Harris was due to meet Benjamin Netanyahu during his visit to Washington this week, after she became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. Late on Monday night, less than 36 hours after Joe Biden announced that he was stepping aside, the Harris campaign released a statement confirming that she has received the support needed to become the Democratic party’s nominee and that she looks forward to formally accepting the nomination soon. “When I announced my campaign for President, I said I intended to go out and earn this nomination,” she said in a statement late Monday. “Tonight, I am proud to have secured the broad support needed to become our party’s nominee, and as a daughter of California, I am proud that…

Airports, healthcare services and businesses could take weeks to fully recover from an IT failure that has wreaked havoc worldwide, experts say, after the “largest outage in history” disrupted the lives of millions. Flights and hospital appointments were cancelled, payroll systems seized up and TV channels went off air after a botched software upgrade hit Microsoft’s Windows operating system. It came from the US cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, and left workers facing a “blue screen of death” as their computers failed to start. Experts said affected PCs may have to be fixed manually. As recovery continues, experts say the outage underscored concerns that many organisations are not well prepared to implement contingency plans when a single point of failure such as an IT system, or a piece of software within it,…

In the months before the Israeli invasion, Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah was a lifeline, a place where thousands sought shelter or scrabbled to raise funds to cross into neighbouring Egypt. Now satellite images and social media video uploaded by Israeli soldiers stationed around the city show roads widened for armoured vehicles surrounded by total destruction, including buildings razed to the ground in the once bustling city. Other images show the destruction of the Rafah crossing point, previously the last remaining passenger route out of Gaza, after Israeli forces seized control of the area in early May. Soon afterwards, Israel said it had “operational control” of the entire Philadelphi corridor, a slim strip of land that runs next to the border with Egypt, where an Israeli presence is prohibited by…

Competing against a Russian is not something Zhan Beleniuk, an Olympian and Ukraine’s first black member of parliament, says he can afford to think about now. He has ideas on what his fellow athletes might do, and even what they should do: it might be best not to compete at all if defeat is on the cards. For Beleniuk, 33, the sole Ukrainian winner of a gold at the last Olympics, in Tokyo, the prospect of facing a Russian competitor at the Paris Games in his discipline of greco-roman wrestling has to be a matter for that moment. “It will be a great responsibility for any Ukrainian athletes who decided to compete against a Russian,” he said from the Koncha-Zaspa Olympic training centre near Kyiv. “Because it is sport, we…

A tall, slim fin slashes the Mediterranean’s surface for a split second and the bait fish is gone, provoking a few gasps and some nervous laughs from the 40 or so snorkellers lined up to enter the open-water pen. Some have already had a beer or a glass of wine. The midday sun is out, The Trammps’ Disco Inferno is playing from the catamaran’s speakers and now people are climbing down a stepladder into a ring of netting that stretches 35 metres down into the sea near the Spanish port of L’Ametlla de Mar, about 130km from Barcelona. Inside the pen are about 500 bluefin tuna. Caught from the wild, they are being fattened for slaughter, a process known as ranching. The snorkellers, who have paid for a tour run…

As a professional ballet dancer, Julia Christensen knew the flow state well: a total absorption in her body’s movements, without the constant chatter that typically accompanies our waking lives. The hours could fly by without her even registering the time that had passed. A back injury put an end to her career, and alongside the other life changes this brought on, she missed the mental calm that had accompanied her practice and performances. “I became aware that I couldn’t control my thoughts,” she said. “And I’d never had to deal with that before.” Christensen is now a senior scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, Germany, and her latest book, The Pathway to Flow, charts her attempts to regain that blissful feeling of being fully immersed…

Plus Oliver Wainwright examines the claim these will be the greenest Games yet You can sense the fire and ambition in Paris as the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad draws close. It’s on the faces of the athletes, and the lips of those running the show. But there’s something even more fundamental too: a yearning for the Olympics to be spectacular and carefree again. It’s been a while. But after the corruption-soaked chaos of Rio, and the crowd-free Ghost Games of Tokyo, the hope is that Paris will rekindle an old flame. As Étienne Thobois, Paris 2024’s chief executive, puts it: “We want a huge party. And we want that party to be extraordinary.” It will certainly start with a bang. As the sun goes down on Friday 26 July,…

The best time for Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential race would have been several weeks ago, in the panicked days after his disastrous debate performance. The American public saw on that stage a man incapable of prosecuting a vigorous campaign against Donald Trump, a would-be dictator, and who was either unable or unwilling to make a reasoned, principled defence of abortion rights, the Democrats’ strongest issue. The weeks that followed have been filled with hand-wringing from pundits, backbiting and duelling leaks to the press from the president’s allies and those Democratic party insiders who wanted him to drop out, and anxiety from the party base and the public, who saw the Democrats descending into infighting rather than posing a meaningful alternative to Trumpian authoritarianism. Biden could have…

Superlatives cluster around Yunchan Lim. At 18, he was the youngest pianist ever to win the prestigious Van Cliburn International piano competition in Texas. The webcast of his performance of Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto went viral as “the pianist whose playing was so beautiful it reduced a conductor to tears”. Watch the Korean musician’s gold medal-winning performance, which now has amassed 15m views on YouTube, and you can indeed see Marin Alsop wipe her eyes at the end. British pianist Stephen Hough, who was on the jury with Alsop, says: “People complain about piano competition winners all sounding the same. This was spectacularly not true about Yunchan Lim. He caught in a remarkable way the many facets of this hugely challenging piece: the need for control but also to feel…

Until around 2015, I tended to be moderately positive about the world. There were far more democracies than when I started at the BBC in 1966, I would tell myself, and markedly fewer dictatorships. Africa and Latin America were now mostly run by elected leaders. The terrible threat of nuclear war had receded. A billion people were being lifted out of poverty. Yes, what Vladimir Putin had done in Crimea in 2014 was worrying, and Xi Jinping was starting to make disturbing speeches about Muslims and Uyghurs; but given that I’d seen Soviet communism melt away across eastern Europe and in Russia itself, I still felt there was reason for optimism. That pretty much ended in 2016. Brexit damaged the European project, and Donald Trump shook the columns of American…

Across 1 Lose one’s job (3,3,4) 7 Traditional field boundary (8) 8 Grey (anag.) – spiral movement (4) 9 Put one’s foot down (4) 10 Nutrient found in meat, fish, eggs and beans (7) 12 The years 1649–1660 in England (11) 14 Taken (with someone or something) (7) 16 (True) strength of character (4) 19 Spur of the moment (4) 20 Service charge? (8) 21 Not finished (10) Down 1 Visitor (5) 2 Ship’s tower? (7) 3 Damage (avoided by doctors?) (4) 4 Colleague (2-6) 5 Should (5) 6 Common observation (6) 11 Notes of a chord played in succession (8) 12 Disease-resistant (6) 13 Help (something) to flourish (7) 15 Footballer’s goal scored from close range (3-2) 17 Legal ownership (5) 18 Affected – temporary shelter (4) Solution No…

PUBLIC SECTOR PAY Reeves hints workers could get above-inflation pay rises Rachel Reeves indicated that the government could agree above-inflation pay rises for teachers and other public sector workers, saying there is “a cost to not settling” pay negotiations. The chancellor, who did not dispute reports that independent pay review bodies for teachers and NHS staff had advised increases of about 5.5% – higher than the 2% inflation rate – said she would set out full details later this month. While Reeves’s tone will be welcomed by unions, the cost of such rises – with the Institute for Fiscal Studies estimating a 5.5% increase across all public sector professions would cost about £10bn ($13bn) – would place huge pressure on the government’s tight fiscal rules. Speaking to BBC One’s Sunday…

After last Sunday’s bombshell decision not to seek re-election, Joe Biden still has six months left as the US president and commander-in-chief, and foreign leaders could be expected to write him off as a lame duck. Around the world, heads of government and top diplomats had been preparing for a sea change in US policy under a potential Donald Trump administration, guided by his America First views that are broadly sceptical of Europe, unsympathetic toward Ukraine, hawkish on China and pro-Israel. But by abandoning a losing campaign, Biden may have a chance to pass on his legacy to a next Democratic administration – if his party can quickly regroup around a new ticket that can make it competitive in November. “I actually think the announcement puts [Biden] in a stronger…

Petra Fleming will turn 54 next year. That is not usually considered a milestone birthday but for her it carries huge emotional significance: it’s the age her brother was when he died of Covid during the pandemic. “In terms of impact, it really threw us into family trauma. You can’t hug each other, just FaceTime, it’s very unnatural, very surreal. It’s a very unique situation, which could have been completely avoided with more competent politicians. They failed spectacularly,” she said. Sharing her story at the publication of the first report from the UK Covid-19 inquiry, she underlined its importance: “I hope other people don’t have to go through the same thing that myself and my family went through. Whatever we can do in the future to ensure this doesn’t happen…

Standing in a scene of shimmering green, Vadym Maniuk pointed to a young white willow tree. “What happened here is a miracle,” he said. “Some of the saplings are already 4 metres tall. There is nowhere else like this on the planet.” Maniuk, an ecologist, picked his way through a jungle of new branches. The sky above was scarcely visible. In the mud – cracked after days of sweltering temperatures – were the remains of molluscs. The scientist showed off black poplars, also racing upwards, reeds and a small mulberry. Under the leaves it was pleasantly cool. Just over a year ago, the spot where Maniuk stood was under several metres of water. In the 1920s Stalin ordered the construction of hydroelectric power stations along the Dnipro river. The area…

When Yang Li* turned 30, she gave herself three years to decide if she wanted children. But as the years ticked by, working a busy job in Beijing, Yang remained unsure. So last year, a month shy of her 34th birthday, she decided to freeze her eggs. The problem was, as a single woman in China, no fertility clinic would help. Despite China’s push to boost the birthrate, only married couples with fertility problems can use any kind of assisted reproductive technologies. “I talked to a doctor, and she told me that to freeze my eggs in China, I either need a husband or I need to have cancer. And I told her, I don’t want either,” Yang said. After researching various options online, Yang travelled to the Czech Republic…

‘He was spared by the hand of God!” a man wrapped in a flag chanted as he walked past a line of people outside the 12,000-seat Van Andel Arena in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan. The display prompted a smattering of loud cries of “USA! USA!” but the general tone of the packed-in crowd who gathered last weekend to see Donald Trump’s first rally since a would-be assassin opened fire on him at a campaign event in Pennsylvania a week earlier was more laid-back. Indeed, despite the impact of the shooting on US politics, it felt like back to business-as-usual for the Trump campaign roadshow. Trump – wearing a smaller bandage on his ear than he had at the recent Republican National Convention in Milwaukee – said his Democratic opponents called…

PARIS’S PLACE DE LA CONCORDE is no stranger to scaffolding, as the site of more than 1,000 beheadings during the French Revolution. Two centuries on, the scaffold has returned. Teetering mountains of metal poles now fill the ceremonial square, forming a dozen gigantic tribunes – awaiting not executions, but an extravaganza of urban sports. Where royal heads once rolled, athletes’ heads will soon be spinning, as the site gears up to host almost 40,000 spectators for the breakdancing, BMX and skateboarding competitions of this year’s Olympics. It is one of the chief examples of how Paris hopes to host the leanest Games ever, using temporary staging to turn the city’s famous landmarks into photogenic backdrops for the televised spectacle – and leave as few new permanent structures as possible in…

‘Whose head could I give you that would satisfy this fury?” asks Denzel Washington’s crafty Macrinus in the long-awaited trailer for Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II. With its aquatic gladiatorial games and charging rhinos, a vengeful Paul Mescal, a wearied Pedro Pascal, imperial Rome’s answer to Tweedledum (Joseph Quinn) and Tweedledee (Fred Hechinger), and Connie Nielsen providing a link to the previous film, the trailer looks and sounds epic. So of course some viewers have come out in a fury. A chief complaint appears to be Washington’s use of his natural New York accent, with one observer asking: “How did Ridley Scott … allow Academy Award-winning actor Denzel Washington to do a NY accent in a movie set in Ancient Rome?” Conversely, there seems to be little furore over the English…

Max, a thirtysomething creative writing tutor, has died, and now haunts the second-floor flat in London’s Tulse Hill where he once lived with his Australian girlfriend, Hannah. This is inconvenient, as Max doesn’t believe in ghosts, and yet here he is, watching Hannah grieve, “floating about like a jellyfish, my tendrils … sweeping up the lint and hair from the floor. Sometimes when I come forth I take up the whole of a room, like a balloon slotted between ribs and blown up to make a space for breath.” Notice that funny, mysterious “come forth” : this is not going to be a quirky-sad love story, all poignant memories and hard-won insights. We are in Evie Wyld’s precise and unforgiving hands, and she knows exactly where she wants to take…

I’m walking through Ravenscraig, once the site of the largest steelworks in Europe, which was closed and demolished more than 30 years ago. While there has been some redevelopment, the bulk of the site has been left. The skylarks that soar to become nothing but song will look down on the circles where once were cooling towers and gas towers, the rectangular templates of the buildings, strip mills and coke ovens, and roads leading to them, edges now fringed with birch and willow. From a distance, the oxeye daisies intermingling with the lush grasses look like a smattering of snow; close up, thick swards of grass are peppered with St John’s wort, yellow rattle, tufted and yellow vetch, and red clover – little pings of colour amid the subtle pinks,…