Innehållsförteckning för 30 August 2024 från Guardian Weekly

The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol211 | Issue№ 9 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…

1 Thomas Young Great Britain, athletics Young is the current T38 100m Paralympic champion and one of the faces of the GB team. The 24-year-old from Croydon, London, was diagnosed at the age of 12 with neurofibramotis, a condition that affects co-ordination and balance but is not always visible. He has been mentored by Usain Bolt, is currently starring in campaigns for Adidas and Aldi and is the recipient of an MBE for services to athletics. 2 Jessica Long US, swimming This will be Long’s sixth Games, in which time she has won an astonishing 29 medals, making her one of the US’s most decorated Paralympic athletes of all time. The 32-year-old made her Games debut in 2004 at the age of 12 and has since become a high-profile advocate for the…

Library books are piled in the street, waiting to be removed in a truck. Two men across the road take down a super-market sign. The grocery store shut a couple of weeks ago. Less than a kilometre away an evacuation train waits to depart. People crowd at the station, preparing to flee. Pokrovsk, a mining city in eastern Ukraine, is packing up fast. The Russians are 11km away, after a remorseless advance that has taken the invaders close to a place that had been considered safe. Fearing the worst, Ukrainian officials have given people two weeks to leave. Maryna, 33, waits outside the station with her three children. Their destination is Rivne, far off in western Ukraine. She said she had little choice but to abandon the place where she…

On a summer morning in the Swiss city of Basel, groups of commuters bob merrily down the Rhine. They’re not on boats but in their trunks, clutching fish-shaped waterproof bags that double as floats as they drift to work alongside cargo ships. At lunchtime in Copenhagen, the harbour walls are packed with bronzed bodies tanning on tiered decks, and launching themselves into the water from daring wooden platforms. After work in Vienna, the grassy banks of the Danube throng with swimmers lounging in the dappled shade. After a century of ignoring the very arteries that allowed them to grow in the first place, cities are learning to love their rivers again. Around the world, as global heating causes summer temperatures to soar, people are reclaiming urban waterways. Last month, the…

Judy Blume’s novel about early female puberty, Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, depicts a group of 12-year-old girls eagerly willing their first periods to arrive, impatient to be in on the unfathomable mystery of monthly bleeds. Little do they know that the mysteries surrounding their ovaries and wombs will only ever deepen, in ways unique to each of them. The mood swings, the cramps, the headaches, the pimples, the energy dips, the secretions, the libidinous peaks and troughs – right up to the perimenopause. Doctors won’t be much help, because there is scant precise science on much of this. And then, at about 50, when the ovaries have run out of eggs, it all goes quiet. I have heard middle-aged women express profound relief at reaching this moment.…

My father used to tell us a story from when he supervised students training to be teachers. He was sitting in a school staff room when a teacher came in, collapsed into a chair, and said: “Well, I’ve taught it to them. Whether they know it or not is another matter. ” I was about 16 at the time, and I couldn’t see why my father found this even worth commenting on. He tried to explain himself, asking what would be the point of teaching something if the pupils weren’t learning it? I didn’t get what he was on about. I had by then had about 11 years of school, and a lot of it had involved teachers talking at us, and if we didn’t “get” it, that was our…

When Antonin Stahly was nine years old, his mother took him to the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris to see a production of the Indian epic The Mahabharata, which translates loosely as “the great story of mankind”. More than 20 actors from 16 countries performed on a stage steeped in red earth and scarred by a water-filled trench; fire also played a leading role. Directed by Peter Brook, whom the Royal Shakespeare Company founder Peter Hall called “the greatest innovator of his generation”, and adapted by Luis Buñuel’s former co-writer Jean-Claude Carrière, this spectacular Mahabharata weighed in at nine hours, plus intervals. Even at that length, it represented a massive compression of its source text, which runs to 1.8m words. Brook and Carrière’s version has been likened to…

Like making barrels or thatching roofs, writing about the royal family is one of the traditional craft skills of the UK. It involves raking over yellowing newspaper cuttings and polishing old chestnuts about “majesty” and “radiance”. But books about the royals sell, including a recent clutch of glum ones, some ostensibly written by members of the family themselves, so they keep on coming. Just when you think you can’t face another one, a book appears that makes you wonder if you’ve ever read a proper account of the queen and her relations before. Paradoxically, it has taken a humorist, Craig Brown of the Daily Mail and Private Eye, a man who supposedly trades in throwaway wise-cracks, to tell us something thought-provoking, perhaps even deep, about the British monarchy. But before…

I’m in my secret place. Shhh. Don’t tell anyone. You can’t see it from the road. You can’t see it from the old warehouse where I work. It’s tucked around the corner, behind a line of outhouses on the site of a Victorian textile mill. I come here most lunchtimes. It’s a bit treacherous, picking your way across the yard, random debris underfoot and the wreckage of last year’s flood still lying around. Plenty of snags to get caught on, too – brambles and clumps of the aptly named bristly oxtongue in among the Viking-horned spires of teasel. There’s a scaffolding pole at waist height to stop you falling into the river, and a stone ledge just the right height to sit on. The Fox Brothers factory grew up around…

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1 UNITED STATES Harris accepts nomination after whirlwind month Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic presidential nomination with a speech to the party’s national convention in which she vowed to carry the country to a fairer future. “On behalf of everyone whose story could only be written in the greatest nation on Earth, I accept your nomination for president of the United States of America,” she told the gathering in Chicago last Thursday evening. Harris would make history if elected – as the first woman, first Black woman and first Asian American woman to serve as president – but she instead focused on the history that the country could change in November. Her speech came just one month after the US vice-president launched her campaign, following Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential…

When the athlete Marie-Amélie Le Fur was hit by a car while riding her scooter and had her left leg amputated beneath the knee aged 15, her swift return to the running track saved her mental health and changed her life. “Sport was so important in those first few weeks after the accident because it allowed me to rebuild myself psychologically and construct an identity,” she said. “While I was doing sport, I wasn’t being seen only as my disability or for what I had lost – there were bigger hopes, projects and ambitions.” Before the accident, Le Fur had planned to become a fire officer rather than an elite athlete. But after her amputation, she went on to become one of France’s best-known Paralympians (pictured above): winning nine athletics…

Like every morning, Ali Abu Khudoud woke up just before dawn last Sunday to perform the fajr prayer. His daily ritual, however, was interrupted when the windows began to rattle and his house shake. As the sound of dozens of low-flying war planes and airstrikes grew louder, it became clear that this was more than the occasional bout of shelling he had got used to. “It was a very hard night and an even harder morning … It feels like it’s too near, nobody could sleep,” Abu Khudoud, a shopkeeper in the city of Nabatieh in south Lebanon, said. Last Sunday, Israel carried out its most intense aerial barrage on Lebanon since the war in Gaza began in October, launching more than 40 airstrikes across nearly 30 locations. Israeli officials…

As pop stars fly on private jets and haul stage sets around the world, with fans generating significant emissions via their own travel to gigs, Massive Attack’s Robert Del Naja has said “it’s time to act” and address the environmental damage wreaked by live music. A home-town Bristol show last Sunday, titled Act 1.5 – a reference to the 2015 UN climate treaty that asked countries to keep global heating to under a 1.5C threshold – was 100% powered by renewable energy, in what the band said was a “world first” for an event of its scale. Around 30,000 fans attended the one-day festival, which also featured the US rapper Killer Mike, the Irish folk group Lankum and the actor Samantha Morton’s solo music. Del Naja described Act 1.5 as…

It was a phone call that has become all too common for counsellors at Childline, a confidential support line for children in the UK. The 17-year-old boy said he was scared and did not know what to do. He had been contacted by a “girl” on social media claiming to be his own age and, after an exchange of messages, had sent her an intimate image. And then the blackmail demands started. This is financial sextortion, a distressing trend in internet fraud that is targeting teenagers in many countries. Rebekah Hipkiss, the Childline supervisor who took the call, said the frequency of these contacts with financial sextortion victims is daily and has increased “enormously” over the past 12 months. In the past year, Childline has encountered more than 100 cases…

Even some of Donald Trump’s supporters are now asking the question that was the undoing of Joe Biden: is the former president fit for office? But while Biden’s run for re-election was largely sunk by a single disastrous televised debate before a national audience, Trump is ramping up doubts with each chaotic, disjointed speech as he campaigns around the country. While rambling discourse and outrageously disprovable claims, interspersed with spite and vitriol, may seem nothing new to many of Trump’s supporters and critics, the former president appears to have been driven to new depths by suddenly finding himself running against Kamala Harris a month ago. Trump has only grown more infuriated as his poll lead evaporated as Harris opened up a clear, if narrow, lead. Her tactic of mocking Trump…

IT WAS THE FIRST WEEK OF JULY. News of the presidential election had been mired, for eight days, in alarming assessments of Joe Biden after his disastrous debate with Donald Trump. The president had started but not finished sentences, slurred words and at points stood with his mouth slightly agape. Now, at the Essence Festival of Culture in New Orleans, Kamala Harris was set to speak. The attendees – mostly Black women – were talking about the possibilities: did her future lie at the top of the Democratic party’s ticket? “Who is Kamala Harris?” host Caroline Wanga asked her guest. “The vice-president of the United States,” Harris responded. “I am a wife. We have children. I am a god-mommy. I am an auntie. I am a best friend. I am…

At 35, I’m younger than many things – such as the internet or Apple computers. And yet I’m older than my country’s independence. For most people, the independence of their birth state is so ironclad they rarely get to really think about it. Others won independence centuries ago and mark it as an occasion for a fun celebration, rather than one focused on thinking about what they as a nation sacrificed to be free. I believe there are few, if any, nations in the modern world where independence means as much today as it does in Ukraine. Ukraine’s fight for independence took centuries. And when we finally got it after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, its successor, Russia, soon tried to subjugate Ukraine again. For my generation, an independent…

What’s the best way to cook greens so they stay bright green and don’t turn a dull, browny-green colour? Does it depend on the type of greens, do I have to add salt to the water, and should the water be boiling or just hot? Arti, Italy The conventional wisdom is that we salt the water to prevent discolouration and “fix” the colour, but Heston Blumenthal, after numerous controlled experiments, says it’s more to do with the quality of the water itself. What salt does do, however, is raise the boiling temperature of the water, which is especially helpful if you’re cooking green beans, say, because if the temperature comes down too far, this activates an enzyme that destroys chlorophyll and, hence, the colour. Salting also helps to enhance the vegetable’s flavour.…

✱ All solutions published next week Across 9 Penny wears fake Rolexes to impress Romeo, Cook and Drake? (9) 10 Demo initially lost 950 in wood (5) 11 Soldiers detain king over communist supporters (7) 12 Engineers uranium inside remains? (7) 13 You ignoramus! Her reckless budget ends in disaster (5) 14 Thinks about fireman’s red – is no Chippendale revealed? (9) 16 Joining record set to be broken following European investment opportunities (8,7) 19 Trial by fire axed to protect independent witness (9) 21 College fellow left out of story in telegram (5) 22 I don’t know the answer to strikes – make void? (5,2) 23 Stained fabrics in draw starting to discolour, of course (3-4) 24 Change the last word down (5) 25 Language earns poet bucks (9)…

POLITICS Starmer promises to ‘root out years of rot and decline’ Keir Starmer delivered a heavily briefed speech on Tuesday in the gardens of Downing Street ahead of parliament’s return next week. The prime minister vowed to “reverse a decade of decline” and to “fix the foundations” of the UK economy. The prime minister promised his government will do the “hard work” to “root out 14 years of rot” under the Conservatives. Ministers have been criticised for ending winter fuel payments for millions of pensioners. Starmer is also under pressure to end the two-child benefit cap and extend the £1bn ($1.3bn) household support fund, which is due to end in September. The prime minister used his speech to warn that “frankly – things will get worse before we get better”…

The Paris Paralympics are here – the first games in Europe since London 2012. I’m intrigued as to how it will go, because I believe these Games will provide an important gauge of where the Paralympic movement is at, testing both the awareness of disability sport and of disability issues in general. I still think London 2012 was a bit of an anomaly because of what Seb Coe did with LoCog and Channel 4 with the broadcasting. There was a lot of clever advertising around it, using the fact that we in the UK love a touch of cheeky humour. It pushed at taboos, asking: what can we say about disability? Do we have to tiptoe around it? And it allowed disabled people to have a voice, to relay our…

If Israel and Hezbollah wanted an all-out war it would have happened a long time ago. Each side would welcome the destruction of the other, but the time has not been right so far for either of them to plunge into a full-scale conflict. The intense exchange of hostilities across the Israel-Lebanese border last Sunday once more took the parties to brink of such a war, but once again they paused and pulled back. Israel conducted sorties over seven hours and struck more than 40 sites with missiles, but killed only three people, according to the count as of Sunday evening. According to its own version of events, Hezbollah launched 320 rockets and a large number of drones, but caused only a small handful of injuries. The only Israeli fatality…

Three fishers sit around a bare table in Pātea Boating Club, a few hundred metres back from New Zealand’s South Taranaki coastline. Pigeons have left droppings on the floorboards, and through the salt-dusted windows the ocean pounds against the black sand. “This is one of the best fishing areas in the country,” the club’s commodore, Steve Corrigan, said of the South Taranaki bight, which sweeps along the vast west coast of the North Island. “And it’s at risk of being ruined.” Aside from its abundant fish species, the bight is home to rocky reefs, New Zealand pygmy blue whales and is visited by endangered species such as the Māui dolphin, the world’s rarest. But over the past 11 years the region’s seafloor has generated global interest and become a bitter…

In the late 90s and early 2000s, as internet connectivity began penetrating west Africa, young people soon realised that individuals in North America and Europe with access to more money than them – and potentially susceptible to blackmail – were now reachable by the click of a button. Along came the “Nigerian prince” letters, a famous scamming technique employed by online fraudsters – known as Yahoo boys in Nigeria, Sakawa boys of Ghana and the brouteurs of Ivory Coast – preying on unsuspecting targets across the web. The emails typically involved someone pretending to be Nigerian royalty and asking for money, a claim so outlandish that victims presumed it couldn’t be a lie. On and off school campuses, cybercafes were the only way for most of the population to surf…

From the outside, it looks like a typical primary school in the multi-island Caribbean nation of St Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG), with children’s voices echoing behind the distinctive green walls. But inside, washing lines sag with the weight of towels and clothes, and there are people of all ages: a baby frets on her mother’s hip, children squeal as they chase each other, teens play basketball, and elderly people sit chatting. This school in the district of Calliaqua is one of 20 on the country’s mainland, St Vincent, which were converted into shelters as Hurricane Beryl, a category 4 storm, tore through the region in early July with winds up to 190km/h. Some of the 30 people at this shelter arrived with nothing but the clothes on their backs.…

The world is on fire. At no time since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 has the world looked so dangerous, nor has an end to its 56 conflicts – the highest number since the second world war – seemed so distant and so difficult to achieve. Distracted by domestic election campaigns, preoccupied by internal divisions and blindsided by the seismic geopolitical shifts, the world is sleepwalking into a “one world, two systems”, “China v America” future. And the cooperation needed to firefight is proving so elusive that an international agreement to prepare for and prevent global pandemics remains beyond our grasp. Nor, even up against the existential problem of climate change, can many hold out hopes that Cop29 in Azerbaijan will be equal to the challenge. We are at…

Banksy is back, and his nine graffitied works around London in nine days have prompted the usual questions. Is it art? Vandalism? And what does it mean, anyway? All featured wild animals – among them a horned mountain goat perched atop a narrow column, a trio of acrobatic monkeys swinging across a bridge, pelicans eating fish on a wall above a fish bar, a randy rhinoceros mounting an abandoned grey car with a horn-like traffic cone on its hood and, at London zoo on the last day, a gorilla lifting a curtain to release a sea lion, birds and butterflies to freedom. Meanwhile, in contrast to the public’s enthusiasm, the critics’ reaction, as is their wont regarding Banksy, was hardly hospitable. The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones wrote, “At his best he’s…

Why the plural? There’s only one Munich in David Peace’s new novel, and we see very little of it: the slushy runway where British European Airways flight 609 crashes on 6 February 1958; the hotel room where two survivors spend their first bewildered night; the hospital where their fellow passengers recover – or don’t. This is surely the story of one accident, one time, one team: the air crash that killed 23 out of 44 passengers, including eight of Manchester United’s players, three of its staff, and eight journalists. But Peace’s reasoning becomes clear over the several hundred pages of this relentless, electrifying, harrowing novel. The Munich air disaster, so integral a part of how the football club developed, might easily not have happened had takeoff been aborted. And what…

Magnus Carlsen, no longer the world champion but still ranked the global No 1, will meet the controversial rising talent Hans Niemann, 21, across the board next Friday for the first time since the 2022 Sinquefield Cup, when their fateful third-round game, won by Niemann, sparked cheating allegations and a $100m lawsuit. The view now is that the incident involved no cheating, and certainly no anal beads. Niemann won again last week on his European tour as the American defeated France’s No 3, Étienne Bacrot, 4.5-1.5 in the classical section of their match in Paris. He has reached No 19 in the live ratings, following convincing victories against the Netherlands No 1, Anish Giri, in Utrecht and the England No 1, the former Russian, Nikita Vitiugov, in London. 3934 Sergey…

Across 1 Anticyclonic disturbance on Jupiter (5,3,4) 9 Iron block – small bone (5) 10 Hauts-de-France port (7) 11 Fleur-de-lis’ representation (4) 12 Greenland floating platform? (3,5) 14 Play (6) 15 Pacifist (6) 18 Onesie (8) 20 Mock (4) 22 Yellow, as opposed to white (3,4) 23 Lubricated (5) 24 Knocking ship (anag.) (8,4) Down 2 Whirl (7) 3 Car shaft (4)  4 Lessen (6) 5 Old fossil (8) 6 Reward (5) 7 Swindle – give a lift? (4,3,1,4)  8 Manicurist’s tool (4,8) 13 Savings account pamphlet (8) 16 Russian fortified complex (7) 17 Nine imperial gallons (6) 19 Hostilities (5) 21 Magnificence (4) Solution No 16,933…