Innehållsförteckning för 23 August 2024 från Guardian Weekly

The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol211 | Issue№ 8 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…

When video footage of the Ukrainian incursion into Russia’s Kursk region began appearing on social media, a joke started doing the rounds with Vladimir Putin asking Stalin what he should do about the German tanks rolling towards Kursk. Stalin’s ghost says the recipe for victory is simple: send the best Ukrainian divisions into battle, as he did in 1943, then ask the US for tanks and money. But neither of these options is available to Putin. He is now facing the Ukrainian army on his own soil, and regards the US as his primary enemy. Every year since the Russian invasion, Ukraine has surprised the world. First, at the start of the war in 2022, its forces repelled a Russian assault on the capital, Kyiv. Then, in 2023, they liberated…

When Londoner Amber Tallon, 30, started learning German at the age of 12, she “took to it like a duck to water”, she said. An A-level in the language and modules in German at the University of Oxford, where she studied history, have helped her to her “dream job”, working as a Blue Badge Guide in London, where some of the large range of tours she offers are in the German language. “[In England] we have such a bad rap for not learning languages, assuming that everyone is going to speak English. I think it’s just polite to learn even the basics of the language … it puts you on the right foot,” she said. She volunteers a few of her favourite German compound words, to illustrate “how creative a…

‘I used to talk to them every day.” Dimitris Petrou takes in the creatures that were once his fluffy chicks but now look like coal. The buckled cage with its carbonised birds are part of the cataclysmic scenery left by the fire that barrelled towards Athens after raging across the Attica plains consuming everything in its path. The 72-year-old and his wife, Frosso, though red-eyed and fatigued, are “somehow still going”, but they were profoundly shocked, just a few days after flames engulfed everything they owned in Nea Penteli, a suburb of the Greek capital. “We stayed until we thought we would melt; we did everything we could to save it,” said Dimitris. The Petrou family are among the untold number of Greeks left homeless by the inferno that began on…

The last thing Raquel Rodriguez remembers of that afternoon is that she was playing with her neighbour’s baby outside her home in the Trinidad and Tobago neighbourhood of Barataria in San Juan. Then came a piercingly loud explosion. “The noise was very, very close. It was very loud,” she said. “So I stood there, frozen, with my left hand on my temple. And then I started to wonder what was going on. Then I realised that my eyes were turning dark. Then it went totally blank.” She had been hit by a stray bullet that penetrated her left temple and tore its way diagonally to her right cheekbone. She survived the attack in September 2022. But although the mother of three has regained her speech and mobility, both eyes were…

Far-right thuggery. Marauding mobs. The prime minister’s descriptions of those who brought one of the worst episodes of violence on to the country’s streets captured their actions but not their motivations or origins. Where did the rioters come from? Why now? Why are they attacking those they are attacking? If many people in this country are now, in Keir Starmer’s words, feeling “targeted because of the colour of your skin, or your faith”, how does such a colossal violation come about, and how will it be addressed? The only answers we have been given treat the problem as one of security, of a troublesome minority who “do not represent” the country, and which will be stamped out by a heavy security response and prison sentences. A freak event triggered by…

Houston, we have a billionaire problem. There are 2,781 individuals in the world worth more than a billion dollars, according to Forbes, and together these people have a net worth of $14.2tn, roughly the GDP of the Eurozone. The context is auspicious, then, for Anupreeta Das’s book Billionaire, Nerd, Saviour, King. Das, the former finance editor of the New York Times, has investigated the life and wealth of the totemic founder of Microsoft, documenting Bill Gates’s rise from boy computer whiz to world’s richest man to greatest living philanthropist to – well, we’ll come to that. First, a little disclosure. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has supported the Guardian’s global development coverage for many years. Following this newspaper’s tradition of editorial independence, I was primed, therefore, to cheer every…

✱ All solutions published next week Across 1 First of garments confined to waste, put something with a jumper on top (4,5) 6 Shrink lowerer? (5) 9 See 26 10/3 Topping items in fare for broadcast (4,4) 11 Tirade I gathered filled with bitterness, primarily? (8) 14 ‘e called after blast, returning weapon (9) 15 Easy clue (5) 16 Suggest viewing Cervantes’ vampire in the mirror? (5) 18 Lovely bearing a newspaper in mind (4,5) 20 Warwickshire town where plate left untouched by auditor? (8) 21 See 5 Down 25 Criminal evidence of no cooking! (11,4) 26/9 Move mountains, Everest one, undulant on moving (5,2,5,8) 27 Record of extra time after taking circuitous route? (9) Down 1 Carthaginian related to wordplay? (5) 2 Try holding head up having embraced Satanism…

Across 1 Few and far between (6) 4 Beginning (6) 8 Small pancake (5) 9 Spoof (7) 10 It provokes an immune response – gentian (anag.) (7)  11 Member of the clergy (5)  12 Person to emulate (4,5) 17 Peer Gynt writer (5) 19 Combination of diet and exercise (7) 21 Military gestures (7)  22 Page on the left side (5) 23 E.g. Thomas More or Thomas Becket (6) 24 Chemical reaction catalyst (6) Down 1 Underground passage (6) 2 Earhart or Lindbergh, say (7) 3 Benny Goodman’s jazz style (5)  5 Emotionally unaffected (7) 6 Zeno of Citium, e.g. (5) 7 Arctic plain (6) 9 Very recognisable buildings, perhaps (9) 13 Extensive (7) 14 Fish which reportedly did for Henry I (7) 15 Chinese dumplings (3,3) 16 Catnap (6)…

1 UNITED STATES Biden upbeat in address to Democratic convention Just one month after withdrawing from the presidential race, Joe Biden opened the Democratic national convention on Monday to deliver a reflective and optimistic address, urging the nation to elect new candidate Kamala Harris to protect American democracy. “I can honestly say I’m more optimistic about the future than I was when I was elected as a 29-year-old United States senator,” he said. Biden said selecting Harris as his vice-president was “the best decision I made my whole career”, and he drew a sharp contrast between her and Republican candidate Donald Trump. “Violent crime has dropped to the lowest level of more than 50 years, and crime will keep coming down when we put a prosecutor in the Oval Office instead…

More than two weeks after its surprise incursion into Russia, Ukraine finds itself struggling to find a balance between seizing territory across the border in Kursk and losing it at the heart of the eastern front in central Donetsk. Last Friday, Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi, claimed advances were being made of up to 3km a day inside Russia, but Moscow’s forces have gained about 5km this month as the Kremlin bets heavily on capturing the hub of Pokrovsk. In the minds of many Ukrainians, the two struggles are related and the ultimate result uncertain. Russia had been expected to shift significant forces from the east to defend Kursk. But Hanna Shelest, a senior fellow with the Center for European Policy Analysis, said that while the daring Ukrainian attack had “gone…

Dalia Hawas was 24 years old when in February an Israeli airstrike flattened the apartment building where she lived, burying the young mother with her 10-month-old daughter, Mona. They are not listed among Gaza’s war dead, because their bodies were trapped too deep beneath the rubble for rescue teams to reach them. Ten months into Israel’s war on Gaza, the death toll has passed 40,000, according to health authorities there. Most of the dead are civilians. The total represents nearly 2% of Gaza’s prewar population. But even that figure does not tell the full story of Palestinian losses. “This number, 40,000, includes only bodies that were received and buried,” said Dr Marwan al-Hams, the director of field hospitals at the Palestinian ministry of health. “New procedures are being tested to…

Three weeks ago, Abdullah, a Pakistani-born man living in the UK, was watching the news in fear. Far-right riots had spread across the country, with mosques being attacked and hotels housing asylum seekers set alight. After a horrific knife attack on children in Southport, disinformation spread quickly on social media falsely claiming the perpetrator was a Muslim seeking asylum in the UK. “Everyone was concerned, scared. They were scared of going to the mosque. They were not able to do their religious obligations,” said Abdullah, a security guard who lives in London. Little did Abdullah know that just days after the riots had appeared to subside, he would be at the centre of another appalling story involving an attack on a child. But the 29-year-old was not to be a…

Climate records are tumbling at a galloping pace. The world has just experienced its hottest ever single day on record, amid a string of record-breaking months that followed the planet’s hottest recorded year. But how does this cascade of new highs in the era of modern record-keeping compare with the Earth’s deeper history? Those who piece together what past climates were like – a practice known as palaeoclimatology – find that today’s temperatures are, when narrowly viewed, unremarkable. For example, the Eocene, an epoch lasting from 56m years to 34m years ago, was “screamingly hotter” than today, by about 10-15C, according to Matthew Huber, an expert in historical climates at Purdue University in the US. But, crucially, in the timespan in which humans evolved and formed organised societies, today’s global…

‘I don’t expect to be identified as Coloured outside South Africa. I understand the weight of that word’Tyla Singer When Tyla exploded on to the global music scene with her hit Water, the South African singer did not just gain attention for her R&B vocals and dance moves. Tyla’s proud description of herself as “coloured” has also caused controversy, particularly in the US, where the word has a painful racist history. The debates have highlighted the difficulties of discussing and dealing with race and identity issues in a globalised world, with words that can be deeply offensive in some countries reclaimed with pride in others. Many Black and Coloured South Africans have stepped in online to defend the Grammy-winning singer’s right to define her own identity. At the same time, younger…

‘Being on @Threads this week has been a bit like sitting on a half-empty train early in the morning whilst it slowly starts to fill up with people jumping on with horror stories about how bad the service is on the other line,” posted the actor David Harewood on Meta’s Twitter/X rival, which from the volume of new joiners asking “Hey, how does this work?” appeared, in the UK, to be having a post far-right riots bounce last week. To which some might ask, what’s taken the Threads newbies so long? To say Elon Musk’s tenure as the owner of the social network formerly known as Twitter and now renamed X has been unconscionable – recent highlights include unbanning numerous far-right and extremist accounts and his one-man misinformation campaign about…

‘I was handing out jelly beans to kids because there was nothing else’ Kirsty Paterson, the sad Oompa-Loompa IN FEBRUARY THIS YEAR, Kirsty Paterson was, she says, “a bit lost”. At 29, she had worked for an estate agent for five years and hated it. When she was diagnosed with ADHD, she realised a nine-to-five office job was never going to be a good fit. “It’s quite hard, because you try to do things like everyone else, and you think: ‘Why can I not be as organised?’ or ‘ Why can I not just sit still?’ That’s the big thing for me.” Paterson retrained as a yoga teacher and was building a clientele, doing bits and bobs on the side. She’s always loved performing. “I need creativity, I need stimulation,…

If you’ve ever spent £40 ($50) and a whole weekend trying to paint out the scrawling of your young children from your rental walls in the futile hope that this will save your £1,300 deposit, you may greet the following news as I did: with a noise somewhere between a hot-water bottle being emptied and a cry of pain. A Bavarian toddler, known already within the art world as Laurent Schwarz, has reportedly just landed himself a hefty brand deal with the German paint manufacturer Relius to create a range of colours, and another, separate deal with a wallpaper company – worth, presumably, thousands – all inspired by his own artwork. Some of Laurent’s acrylic paintings have sold for more than £5,000, with his mother, Lisa, promising that every penny…

‘It’s a kind of addiction,” says Karen Kain, “to be in an art form like this. Sometimes you wonder why you’re doing it. You have to get past so much physical pain, sometimes emotional pain. But those of us who do it and love it know why.” And director Chelsea McMullan’s documentary Swan Song shows us what an addiction to ballet means, with all the sweat, scars, artistry and exaltation. Swan Song tells the story of Kain’s final production of Swan Lake in 2022, after 16 years as artistic director of the National Ballet of Canada. Kain is Canada’s most famous ballerina: she was a favourite of Rudolf Nureyev and danced all over the world; Andy Warhol made a screen print of her. McMullan follows her and the company on…

America is an increasingly strange place these days, but perhaps the strangeness was always lurking in the things that made its culture seem familiar, even comforting, to those who were reared elsewhere. Take, for example, the use of the word “God”, who is always blessing America. He is not much invoked by politicians on this side of the Atlantic (except in Ulster, where He also did a great job), because we would find that specious. Nor do we have religious novelists, like the great Marilynne Robinson, who writes from a place of belief and teaches theology in her spare time. Even the bloody sacramentalism of Cormac McCarthy can feel religious, if only by opposition. Like Robinson, Joy Williams is acquainted with the devil and she knows what it is to…

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PRISONS Police cells used to detain rioters amid jails crisis Ministers have activated emergency measures to ease prison overcrowding as more rioters are sentenced for their role in the recent unrest. Operation Early Dawn allows defendants to be held in police cells until prison beds become available and could mean their court dates are delayed or adjourned at short notice. The system was activated on Monday and means some defendants across the north of England waiting for a court appearance will be kept in police cells until prison space is available. The government said that its action to “tackle violent thuggery on our streets” had “exacerbated longstanding capacity issues in our prisons”. James Timpson, the prisons minister, said: “We inherited a justice system in crisis and exposed to shocks. As…

Lyubov Antipova last spoke to her elderly parents more than two weeks ago, when she first heard rumours of a Ukrainian incursion, and begged them to leave their village in Russia’s Kursk region. The threat seemed unreal – Russian soil had not seen invading forces since the end of the second world war – and Russian state media initially dismissed the invasion as a one-off “attempt at infiltration”, so Antipova’s parents, who keep chickens and a pig on a small plot, decided to stay in Zaoleshenka. The next day, Antipova saw photographs online of Ukrainian soldiers posing next to a supermarket and the office of a gas company. She recognised the place immediately: her parents live about 50 metres away. “All those years my parents didn’t think they would be…

With the most recent round of talks over, hopes of a ceasefire in Gaza in the immediate future look to have been dashed. Further discussions assisted by the US secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, were expected to be held this week, but it felt like a desperate attempt to keep the process alive. It is not the first time there has been disappointment. A dozen or more rounds of mediated negotiations, a UN resolution, pressure from Washington and other powers, and much else have failed to push the leaders of Israel or Hamas to make the concessions needed to stop the war. Days of argument over the exact parameters of any agreement obscure the fact that a deal can be done only when the most influential decision-makers on each side…

The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared the latest mpox outbreak in Africa a “public health emergency of international concern”, the category used in the past for Ebola outbreaks and Covid-19. As fears of a global spread grow, this is what we know. What is mpox? Mpox, formerly known as monkeypox, is an infectious disease caused by a virus. Flu-like symptoms including fever, chills and muscle aches are typically followed by a rash that starts as raised spots, which turn into blisters and then form scabs. There are broadly two different types, known as “clades”. Clade I was once known as the Congo Basin clade, and clade II as the West African clade. Both can be fatal, although clade I historically has a higher death rate. What does the WHO…

An unprecedented 15 national heat records have been broken since the start of this year as weather extremes grow more frequent and climate breakdown intensifies. An additional 130 monthly national temperature records have also been broken, along with tens of thousands of local highs registered at monitoring stations ranging from those in the Arctic to the South Pacific, according to Maximiliano Herrera, a climatologist who archives extreme events. Herrera called the unprecedented number astonishing: “This amount of extreme heat events is beyond anything ever seen or thought possible before. The months from February 2024 to July 2024 have been the most record-breaking for every statistic.” 28 February Cocos Islands tied its all-time record with 32.8C, reached again on 29 February and 7 April. 6 March Costa Rica broke its national…

It was election night in Venezuela in 2013, and at Caracas city hall the Chavista activists’ nerves were jangling as early results showed their candidate, Nicolás Maduro, trailing his charismatic rival for the presidency, Henrique Capriles. “We were totally surprised. We never thought Capriles would come so close,” said Andrés Izarra, a former minister for Maduro’s deceased mentor, Hugo Chávez, who recalls overhearing a disturbing conversation between two powerful Maduro allies. “They said: ‘We are not going to surrender power under any circumstances,’” Izarra claimed, adding: “I was surprised when I heard that … [I thought:] What the fuck do you mean, ‘We’re not going to give up power’?” In the end, Maduro narrowly won the 2013 election. He has governed ever since, in increasingly authoritarian style. But 11…

Tens of thousands of Democrats descended on Chicago this week for their party’s convention, bubbling with a feeling few had anticipated: pure joy. By the end – barring unforeseen circumstances – Kamala Harris will have become the first woman of colour in US history to accept a major party’s presidential nomination, following the vice-president’s sudden ascent to the top of the ticket in a development that has galvanised a party once resigned to a rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. In the month since Biden’s decision to abandon his re-election bid, Harris has united most Democrats and restored the party’s dominance among young voters and people of colour. Two new polls at the weekend found Harris leading Trump nationally, by four and five points respectively: 49 to 45 in…

Audrey Tang didn't have the easiest of starts in life. The Taiwanese hacker turned government minister was told at the age of four that she had a 50-50 chance of dying unless she had a major operation to fix a hole in her heart. Her doctor told her she could drop down dead at any moment if she got overexcited – and she had to wait eight more years for the op. This kind of news might bring out someone’s selfish side – if your life is going to be so truncated, live for yourself. Not Tang, though. She was a tiny child with a whopping IQ and a precocious capacity to think. She decided she wanted to learn everything she could and share it with the world. At five,…

Everything is going right for her and wrong for him. Kamala Harris has the encouraging poll numbers and the momentum. Donald Trump has the serial errors, the maudlin introspection and wobbling campaign team. In little over a month, the Democrats have pulled off one of the most extraordinary turnarounds in US political history, replacing a candidate who was shuffling towards near-certain defeat with one soaring towards possible victory. Yet contained within is a lurking danger. The sources of joy are not mysterious. Democrats this week headed to Chicago for a convention that felt like a party but everyone had imagined would be a wake. Before 21 July, they were tied to Joe Biden, a man who was on course to lose, and lose badly, in November. The campaign has switched…

One of halloumi’s greatest assets is that no matter what you do to it – grill it, bake it, fry it – this Cypriot cheese maintains its structure. Sure, slicing and grilling halloumi to top salads or nestle inside a breakfast sandwich is always going to be a good idea, but there’s so much more you can do with your slab. “I like to criss-cross one side of the halloumi, rub it with olive oil and seasoning, put it in a snug dish and pop it under a medium grill for eight minutes,” says Georgina Hayden, author of Greekish. You could, of course, grill it in slices, too. “For the best flavour, pop it on the barbecue,” Hayden adds. “There’s nothing better than finely sliced halloumi with watermelon.” Another thrill…

The English Maelor! It’s the appendix to Wales that dangles off the bulge of the Welsh north-eastern border and reaches almost as far as Whitchurch in Shropshire. DH Lawrence regarded this as a Welsh-flavoured county, and some of the earliest Welsh poetry, dating back to the sixth century, locates here. The great Welsh warrior chieftain Owain Glyndŵr, at the end of the 14th century, also rode this way, past the deep and phragmites-fringed lake, to marry Margaret Hanmer. Six centuries later, the outstanding feminist literary critic Lorna Sage (1943-2001) was brought up in nearby Hanmer, and her award-winning memoir Bad Blood (2000) leaves a vivid impression of the place and her childhood there. This country around Ellesmere is a haunting, fascinating place, terrific for birds, and not just for the…