Innehållsförteckning för 27 September 2024 från Guardian Weekly

The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol211 | Issue№ 13 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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Israel’s foreign intelligence service, usually known as the Mossad, has scored many spectacular victories in almost 80 years of undercover operations, earning a unique reputation for audacious espionage and ruthless violence. But even former agents admit the service’s history is “chequered” with many failures that have embarrassed Israel, dismayed allies and led to accusations of disregard for international law. Israel has not formally commented on last week’s simultaneous explosion of thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon that killed 37 people and injured about 3,000 others. Experts believe that the Mossad, an abbreviation of the Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations in Hebrew, was responsible. The Mossad may have provided the intelligence allowing the assassinations in July of Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas political leader killed by…

The Marxist leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake has won Sri Lanka’s presidential election, in what was viewed as a widespread rejection of the old political elite who are blamed for the country’s ongoing economic woes. For the first time in Sri Lanka’s history, the election went into a runoff last Sunday after no candidate managed to get more than 50% of the votes. However, after second-choice votes were counted, Dissanayake was declared the winner in the evening. “This victory belongs to all of us,” he said, writing on X. Dissanayake, 55, defeated the incumbent, Ranil Wickremesinghe, who was installed as president in 2022 after Gotabaya Rajapaksa was forced to resign and flee the country amid a popular uprising. The win by Dissanayake, the leader of the hardcore leftist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna…

It is tricky in modern Britain to defend the existence of hereditary peers, but the Earl of Devon will have a very good go. The 49-year-old earl – Charles Peregrine Courtenay, an affable, 1.98-metre-tall intellectual property lawyer who lives in a medieval castle – entered the House of Lords in 2018 when he was working for a US firm. His bosses did not like the idea of employing a litigator who was also a legislator, until he used American history against them. “I pointed out, if I was a Native American tribal chief, my father died, and I was called into the council of elders, it would not be fair to fire me just because I’m playing some traditional cultural role within my community,” he said. “The Earl of Devon’s…

There is no one at reception when I arrive at the hotel in a small town about 50km from Dublin, so I go to the bar and, as instructed, ask for the duty manager. “Miša, do you know where James is?” the young waiter calls to a colleague – in Slovak. I had been interviewed online for the hotel cleaning job I applied for through an agency in my home country, the Czech Republic. Did I mind that the hotel was in a secluded location with nothing to do in the evening, they’d asked in the interview. I’d said no, that I like solitude. Now I’m being shown around the hotel and the kitchen, where I meet the cook and two other guys – all of them Slovaks. I feel…

ORNA GURALNIK AND CHRISTINE met on the docuseries Couples Therapy in 2022. While they both live in New York, Orna, the programme’s couples therapist, is Israeli, and Christine, who participated in the series, is Palestinian. They kept in touch, and since 7 October, they have spent more than 30 hours discussing their views and applying the frameworks of couples therapy to engage with difficult subjects without the conversation breaking down. In the process, they have also developed a friendship. This conversation is drawn from two of these exchanges, recorded in January 2024. Christine: When I discovered you were Israeli while we were shooting the first episode of Couples Therapy – even though I was caught off guard and pretended I already knew – I wasn’t sure if we should continue.…

What a great feeling it is when a study by actual scientists comes along and validates something you’ve been saying for years. A team from the behaviour and health research unit at the University of Cambridge has recommended that the traditional British pint be abandoned in favour of the two-thirds measure. After a trial in a dozen pubs, bars and restaurants in England, the study leader, Prof Theresa Marteau, concluded that the change – which led to nearly 10% less beer being sold and consumed – could reduce the impact of alcohol-related harm. I’m entirely in favour of the idea, but only partly because of the potential benefits to population health. Ever since I moved to the UK in 2017, I’ve felt that the British pint is simply too big…

It all started – or stop-started, perhaps – with some tiny pterodactyls. As 1924 drew to a close, Marcel Delgado was putting the finishing touches to 50 model dinosaurs. For months, the sculptor had been meticulously constructing a range of Tyrannosaurus rexes, brontosauruses and pterodactyls. Now he was getting ready to pass them on to pioneering animator Willis O’Brien, who would painstakingly move each creature an almost imperceptible amount, shoot another frame, and then repeat the process. A year later, The Lost World – the first feature film using “stop-motion” – was released, transforming Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel of the same name into an action-packed spectacle. Audiences were astounded by its seemingly supernatural special effects. To modern eyes, the film itself is a bit of a dinosaur. Its technology is…

There is a sense of poetic justice in seeing Diane Abbott back in the UK’s parliament after the 2024 election. She is now Mother of the House – the title given to the longest serving female MP – and all those who plotted to block her from standing must watch as she receives the respect she deserves. After enduring so much racism, and at a time of few political wins for the left, we have to ask: how did Abbott end up having the last laugh? Her autobiography offers some clues. Born to working-class Jamaican parents in 1953, she was clearly always both strong-willed and intellectually gifted. Which is not to say she didn’t have to work hard: early signs of her determination include insisting to her teachers that she…

There are four lynx species on Earth: Canadian; North American bobcat (the most abundant, with a population of possibly 1.5 million); Eurasian, the largest species, with males in some Asiatic populations weighing as much as 35kg; and the Iberian, the smallest and rarest, with an average weight of 8kg-9kg. Surveys in the 1990s showed that the world population of Iberian lynx, confined now to Spain and Portugal, was fewer than 100 individuals, with most in the Parque Natural de Sierra de Andújar in Andalucía. With legal protection, public awareness and intensive captive breeding, this has risen to more than 2,000. Lynx are easiest to see in spring when mating, but to encounter even one is a matter of great patience or profound luck. Ours came as I scanned where grasses…

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1 UNITED NATIONS UN assembly opens as fears grow of all-out war The 79th United Nations general assembly opened on Tuesday amid a massive bombing campaign in southern Lebanon that has brought Israel and the Shia militant group Hezbollah closer than ever to all-out war, despite fevered diplomatic efforts to de-escalate the conflict. On Monday, diplomats huddled behind the scenes for bilateral and ministerial meetings on issues from Atlantic Ocean ecology to Ukraine’s energy supply. At the same time, media livestreams showed Israeli shells and bombs raining down over southern Lebanon in strikes that killed almost 500 people and displaced thousands, according to the country’s health minister. The Lebanese prime minister, Najib Mikati, urged “the United Nations and the general assembly and influential countries … to deter the [Israeli] aggression”. But…

So serious were the exchanges of fire between Israel and Hezbollah last weekend, it is hard to be sure that the two sides have not already crossed the threshold of “all-out” war. Israel’s air force said it struck 290 targets in southern Lebanon last Saturday, killing at least three. Hezbollah responded by launching 150 missiles, rockets and drones into Israel, the deepest attack since hostilities broke out when the Iranaligned group began rocket attacks in support of Hamas after 7 October. Missiles reached the suburbs of Israel’s northern city of Haifa, and while casualties were modest – rescue teams treated a number of wounded – residential buildings were hit in Kiryat Bialik. Thousands of civilians were forced to seek shelter. Hezbollah said it had used shortrange Fadi 1 and 2…

Like so many of Sheikh Hasina’s political rivals, Amir Chowdhury was in jail the day that the prime minister fled Bangladesh. Chowdhury, a senior leader in the opposition Bangladesh National party (BNP), had been picked up by police three weeks earlier, in July, as mass protests began to engulf the country and a violent crackdown began in response. It was his third stint in prison since Hasina took power 15 years ago and began a campaign to destroy his party. This time it was university students, not opposition parties, who started the protests. As their movement gathered momentum and public anger swelled against Hasina, the BNP and other parties also took to the streets, alongside garment workers, farmers, lawyers and intellectuals. The state hit back at protesters, using beatings, teargas,…

Jack Geerlings crouches down at the shoreline to sift through a bed of stones. He picks up a small rough rock and turns it over. “This one is too coarse,” he said, flicking it back to the pile. Geerlings is after something more interesting. Slowly, he walks along the vast sweep of beach, his gaze rarely lifting from the ground. “The sunlight helps to reveal the stones,” he said, picking up and inspecting rocks one by one. Further on, he turns over a small red-brown stone, the colour and texture of a chestnut. “This one could be jasper,” he said, with more enthusiasm. At a distance, the stones look like any others found along New Zealand’s rugged Southland coast, but here, at Orepuki – or Gemstone Beach – a closer…

With its glass frontage and portico, Fuchū prison could be mistaken for a municipal government office. But stepping through a heavy, guarded door reveals that this is unmistakably a place of incarceration. Its walls house 1,700 inmates, including a large number serving sentences of less than 10 years but who, in the words of the prison literature, have “advanced criminal tendencies”. The atmosphere is one of calm and order: cells with neatly folded bedding, piles of books and spotless mint-green walls. The silence is broken by the sound of a guard greeting the prison’s chief, Hiroyuki Yashiro, as he chaperones the small group of reporters who have been granted rare access to the frontline of Japan’s criminal justice system. About a third of the men imprisoned at Fuchū, Japan’s biggest…

The queue down the centre of the Rose Goute Creole restaurant on Springfield’s South Limestone Street is halfway out the door. It’s been like this ever since former president Donald Trump falsely accused immigrants in the Ohio city of eating cats and dogs during a televised debate on 10 September. Kitchen staff take orders and load plates of herring patties, rice and beans, and barbecued chicken legs on to serving trays. Outside, cars with plates from Georgia, Wisconsin and Indiana – diners who have stopped off the highway to show support for the Haitian community – fill the car park. It’s a partly chaotic scene, as Dady Fanfan, a 41-year-old from Plaisance in northern Haiti, stands inside the door, greeting diners as they enter, before slipping away to clear nearby…

ON A BALMY FRIDAY AFTERNOON earlier this month, the most feared group of people in Europe breached the 13th-century defensive walls of Wrocław and poured into the town square. Some wore blue berets, others cowboy hats, straw boaters and, in one instance, a three-tiered cake stand adorned with kitchen sponges and pompoms. Resistance was futile: less than an hour after their arrival, the mayor ceremonially handed over the key to the Polish city’s gate to the flamboyantly dressed couple they had chosen as their queen and king. Baby boomers are often talked of as an existential threat to Europe’s economic prosperity and welfare state model. The population of men and women born in the mid-1940s to mid-60s, who are now in their 60s, 70s and 80s, is calculated by the…

When I heard about the death of the 94-year-old billionaire businessman and former Harrods boss Mohamed Al Fayed last year, my response wasn’t exactly charitable. Good riddance, I thought, to my one-time employer who had presided over a workplace rife with misogyny and abuse. I was 18 and had just finished my A-levels when I worked at the store in the 1990s. Having grown up in the sticks in Devon, I was desperate to move to London and knew the store employed school leavers in the run-up to Christmas. I got a job as a waitress and catering assistant working across Harrods’ many restaurants. I was delighted. What I didn’t know was that Harrods was a nightmare for scores of its female employees. In a new BBC investigation, Al Fayed:…

Besides steaming them open, what else can you do with mussels ? And what’s the best sauce or side to accompany them? Liz, London, England, UK It’s so tempting to default to steaming, but there’s so much more you can do with mussels. One option is to cook them in a sauce, perhaps to serve with pasta, which works especially well if you head off in a tomato and fresh herb direction, though they’re also great with just garlic, chilli and parsley. I also love taking mussels down an Asian route, cooking them in coconut milk and any or all of lemongrass, Thai basil, makrut lime leaves, chilli and ginger. Rice is another great option, with the mussels served on top in a broth spiked with those Asian flavourings or…

✱ All solutions published next week Across 8 Approach a singer in duet to play (8) 9 Type of green salad (5) 10 Top current setter (4) 11 Slow seeing this garden tool used during scourge (5,5) 12 Hold up basket (6) 14 From the East, water containing medicine that’s sweet (8) 16/18 On his own, Simon somehow secures Pacific nation (7,7) 21/23 Last two to score when roaring started? (8,6) 24 The Guardian may be awfully bad, so there! (10) 26/26D Your health features (4,4) 27 Only setting for sculptor’s second bust? (5) 28 Look at ship’s make-up (8) Down 1 Toccatas played in a halting style (8) 2 When rising, change current (4) 3/17/25 Star player to be insensitive or see need to change (6,3,4) 4 Specifications for…

LABOUR Honesty is best policy says Starmer, despite criticisms Keir Starmer tried to cast off the gloom that has dominated his early days in power and pledged to “build a new Britain” as the Treasury examined tweaking fiscal rules to allow more capital spending. Sources said the government could use next month’s budget to change the way its five-year debt rule is assessed, which could allow more spending on housing, roads and hospitals. After a bruising build-up to Labour’s party conference in Liverpool this week, the prime minister told the country there was “light at the end of the tunnel” but that they must first join a “shared struggle” to get there. In his first conference speech in power, he again warned there were no easy answers to the country’s…

The Lebanon-based militant Shia Islamist organisation Hezbollah said it had entered an “open-ended battle of reckoning” with Israel as world powers implored both sides to step back from the brink of all-out war. In a significant escalation of the conflict, a wave of Israeli airstrikes on more than 1,300 alleged Hezbollah targets early this week killed at least 492 people, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. Tens of thousands of people fled from south Lebanese towns and villages along the main road towards the capital, Beirut, after Israel’s most intense barrage in nearly a year of cross-border clashes. Sunday and Monday’s strikes left Lebanon with its highest daily death toll since the end of the 1975-90 civil war. There was rising tension in the country and a collective bracing to see…

When she saw them at the checkpoint, Marie sensed the situation might turn ugly. Four officers in the combat green of Tunisia’s national guard. For weeks Marie had traversed the Sahara, travelling nearly 5,000km from home. Minutes from her destination – Africa’s north coast – she feared she might not make it. An armed officer lunged towards her. Another grabbed her from behind, hoisting her into the air. By the road, on the outskirts of the Tunisian city of Sfax, the 22-year-old was sexually assaulted in broad daylight. “It was clear they were going to rape me,” said the Ivorian, her voice wobbling. Her screams saved her, alerting a group of passing Sudanese refugees. Her attackers retreated to a patrol car. Marie knows she was lucky. According to Yasmine, who…

Residents of Mazan were appalled that their picturesque village in Provence was being referred to in the media as “the village of the rapists”. France was shaken to its core last week by the trial of Dominique Pelicot, a former estate agent, who had moved from the Paris area to this southern village in retirement, where he is accused of drugging his then wife, Gisèle Pelicot, and recruiting men online to rape her when she was unconscious over a period of nine years between 2011 and 2020. Fifty other men are on trial for alleged rape alongside Pelicot. They are accused of travelling to commit rape at night at the Pelicots’ house, which sits tucked away on a dead-end lane at the edge of the village. Aged from 26 to…

Last week in London, Lara Maiklem climbed down to the foreshore of the River Thames at low tide to spend several hours gently scrabbling at its surface in pursuit of a 20-year obsession. Known on social media as the London Mudlark and the author of three books on larking, Maiklem is at the forefront of a growing number of people spending their spare time combing through the mud of the capital’s river searching for historical artefacts. Maiklem said: “I’ve spent the last 20 years trekking down to the muddy, cold, smelly foreshore. It’s addictive, hypnotic. Once you start, it just draws you back. “I go down there to time-travel. You get this sense of the past that’s been locked away in the mud, sometimes for thousands of years.” Maiklem started…

In 2008, two years after Ebenezer Smith graduated from high school with no means to go on to university, he ventured into Ghana’s culinary industry hoping to become a world-renowned chef. For years, life moved at a slower pace than he had envisioned. So last October, he left his job as a beach resort chef earning about 1,800 cedis ($115) a month to pursue a new dream: dislodging 27-year-old Nigerian chef Hilda Baci as the world record-holder for the longest cooking marathon. Smith, a 40-year-old father of two, said watching Baci set the record last year “boosted my confidence”. “When I witnessed [her marathon], I said I’m going to take this challenge and make my society, my community and my nation proud,” he said. Baci’s 93-hour, 11-minute stint in August…

The last time the Commonwealth Games was staged, two years ago in Birmingham, the BBC was so worried about enough big names showing up that it put in an unusual clause in its contract with the organisers. An insider said: “It was loosely worded, but it stated that if the big stars didn’t show up the BBC had the right to claw back some of its fee. But it was never used as once we had Dina Asher-Smith and Adam Peaty, the concerns went away.” That vignette says a lot about the reduced status of the Commonwealth Games. Can you imagine athletes skipping any other major competition? Or a broadcaster wanting a similar clause for, say, the Olympics or Champions League? While Birmingham 2022 ended up being a huge party,…

Last week, I started a 3,000km, two-day journey back from the other end of Europe, where I witnessed Ukrainian resilience against Russian terror in the besieged city of Kharkiv. A university lecturer told me that from a 12th-storey balcony in a north-eastern suburb she had seen the flashes of missiles taking off from launchpads just across the frontier, in the Russian city of Belgorod. An S-300 missile can reach Kharkiv from Belgorod in about 30 seconds, so you have no time to hide. If it’s not a missile, it’s a glide bomb launched from a Russian warplane – and so, day after day, death rains indifferently down. After more than 900 days of the largest war in Europe since 1945, Ukraine is approaching a perilous moment of truth. The Ukrainian…

Adam Lowe has created extraordinary replicas of great works from around the world, including one of Tutankhamun’s tomb and a full-size bronze replica of Dippy the diplodocus at the Natural History Museum in London. But he has now taken on a very different challenge: a barn in Cumbria, northern England. More specifically, he wants to recreate and preserve the legacy of Kurt Schwitters, the great German dada artist, nonsense poet and experimenter in sound, who died in exile in the nearby Lake District in 1948. Lowe, through his non-profit Factum Foundation, has taken over the Cylinders Estate in luscious Elterwater, where Schwitters created his final unfinished masterpiece: the Merz Barn. This enigmatic work is a unique mixture of dry-stone walling and biomorphic plaster forms, encapsulating the private art that Schwitters…

If any few pages of Sally Rooney’s fourth novel blew through the streets on an autumn wind, many a chance reader would be sure who wrote them. They’d recognise the sentences precision-engineered for weight distribution like wide-span bridges. They’d find moment-by-moment emotion, coolly itemised; monosyllabic dialogue occasionally breaking the surface while immense currents of introspection flow beneath; breathtakingly intimate and properly sexy sex, felt from the inside and piously revered as a moral force. Here again, in short order and at great length, are qualities familiar from Conversations with Friends (2017), Normal People (2018) and Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021). Intermezzo is an accomplished continuation of the writing that made Rooney a global phenomenon. It’s also more philosophically ambitious, stylistically varied, disturbing at times and altogether stranger. Two brothers…

Across 1 Something you shouldn’t tempt? (4) 3 Semolina dish (8) 8 Silly me! (4) 9 Erudite people (8) 11 Equal (5-5) 14 Take up – take over (6) 15 Froth – agitation (6) 17 Excessively well-behaved person (5-5) 20 Someone who has overcome danger or trauma (8) 21 Blacken (4) 22 New York prison (4,4) 23 French author of Germinal (4) Down 1 Ornamental frills (4-4) 2 Design of letters etc. (8)  4 Plant with showy flowers (6) 5 Like e.g. missiles which can’t travel far (5-5) 6 Good but not great … (4) 7 … a bit meh (2-2) 10 Orchestral works (10) 12 Train (for Chattanooga?) (4-4) 13 Ambiguous situation (4,4) 16 Lie next to (6) 18 Egyptian goddess (4) 19 Small, insectivorous bird (4) Solution No…