Innehållsförteckning för 11 October 2024 från Guardian Weekly

The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol211 | Issue№ 15 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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The White House moved last weekend to quash claims that government officials control the weather, including a far-fetched rumour circulating on social media that Hurricane Helene was an engineered storm to allow corporations to mine lithium deposits. “We have seen a large increase in false information circulating online related to the federal response to Hurricane Helene,” a statement said, pointing to a “number of scam artists, bad-faith actors, and others who want to sow chaos because they think it helps their political interests”. The White House said the rumours, which include claims that emergency disaster money had been spent housing immigrants and that relief funds would be limited to $750 per claim, were “wrong, dangerous” and said “it must stop immediately”. The warning, which speaks to the intense political environment…

The view from the decaying jetty on the atoll of Peros Banhos takes in a vast lagoon surrounded by palm trees and sun-bleached beaches. From there, more than 50 years ago, some of the last Chagos Islanders were forcibly deported by British colonial administrators. Clearance of about 2,000 people from the remote but strategically important archipelago in the middle of the Indian Ocean was complete by 1973. The central island of Diego Garcia became a US military base leased from the UK government. In return for expelling everybody from their homeland and an extended lease, Washington gave the British government a $14m discount on the purchase of American Polaris nuclear weapons. What became the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) had, in contravention of UN laws, already been detached from Mauritius…

For the average Indian, the working week is now longer than ever – totalling almost 47 hours. According to recent labour data, India now has one of the most over-worked labour forces in the world, enduring longer hours than in China, Singapore and even Japan, a country renowned for its relentless work culture. On average, Indians work 13 hours longer every week than an employee in Germany. Almost 90% of those working in India are employed in the informal sector, which is largely unregulated and exploitative. However, concerns have also begun to be raised about the working conditions of those in formal employment, particularly those in India’s corporate sector where working practices have remained largely unchanged in decades and critics say pursuit of profit remains king. In July, Anna Sebastian…

‘Twas 85 nights before Christmas when the decorations went up – at least in Venezuela, where President Nicolás Maduro has decided festivities should start early in an apparent attempt to lift spirits and distract minds after the recent election scandal. A month after Maduro announced that Christmas 2024 would begin in October, residents of Caracas left home on 1 October to find the capital’s boulevards and plazas decked with LED light strings and sculptures declaring: “Feliz Navidad.” At Caracas’s Paseo Los Próceres – a monument to South American independence heroes near the military base where Venezuela’s leader lives – authorities have erected a Christmas tree and wrapped palms in lights. Christmas concerts and events were reported across the country, including in Barinas state, the birthplace of Maduro’s mentor, Hugo Chávez,…

AT THE BEGINNING of September, the discovery that six Israeli hostages had been killed by their Hamas captors as troops operated near the tunnel where they were being held propelled crowds onto the streets of Tel Aviv and other cities. The focus of the dismay and anger: the government of Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel’s main trade union, the Histadrut, called a short-lived but significant strike. Opposition politicians spoke of their dismay at the prime minister’s handling of the hostages-for-ceasefire negotiations he has widely been accused of undermining. Senior military officers and the defence minister, Yoav Gallant, let it be known in private and in public that they preferred a compromise that would prioritise the release of the remaining hostages over Netanyahu’s deal-breaking insistence on keeping military control of the Gaza border…

Certain creative works possess such an endless ability to ricochet, that they become embedded in the culture. One such book is Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. Published more than two decades ago, it explored a dazzling range of topics, from crime rates in New York to shoe sales, all through the lens of epidemiology. “[T]he best way to understand […] any number of mysterious changes that mark everyday life,” he wrote, “is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviours spread just like viruses do.” It became a kind of testament to its own thesis, a viral work about viral phenomena. Like an indiscreet magician, Gladwell presented his readers with a series of stories, mysteries and puzzles, and then proceeded to decode them, revealing his…

Across 1 Desperate Dan or Mickey Mouse, say (12) 9 Drawing one gets you nowhere (5) 10 Large sailing ship used for trade and warfare (7) 11 Surge (of emotion) (4) 12 Lou or Elvis? (8) 14 Salesperson (6) 15 This will make the balloon go up (6) 18 Resident of Tirana or Berat (8) 20 Close together (4) 22 Whip, camera or coffee (7) 23 Middle Eastern sweet made with ground sesame seeds (5) 24 System for naming things – no numeral etc (anag) (12) Down 2 Go-between (7) 3 Signs (a contract) (4) 4 Drink at Christmas (6) 5 Agitated (8) 6 Perfect (5) 7 Vague (12) 8 eg, eg (12) 13 High spot? (8) 16 Breathing aid (7) 17 Shelf over a fireplace (6) 19 Old-fashioned sweeper…

1 UNITED STATES Trump returns to site of attempted assassination Donald Trump returned to the site where he narrowly escaped assassination in July, pushing the emotional buttons of his supporters and suggesting that his political opponents “maybe even tried to kill me” to stop him regaining the White House. The Republican presidential nominee – and perennial showman – was joined in Butler, Pennsylvania, by billionaire Elon Musk, who made the baseless claim that if Trump’s supporters fail to turn out, “this will be the last election”. Their joint appearance before an enthusiastic crowd of thousands capped hours of programming seemingly intended to mythologise the 13 July shooting for the Trump base exactly one month before the presidential election. Kamala Harris, meanwhile, embarked on a week-long media blitz, hurtling from TV studios…

When Leonid Volkov, a longtime associate of the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, was brutally attacked with a hammer outside his home in Lithuania in March, it initially seemed yet another case of the Kremlin hunting down its enemies abroad. The assailant smashed open Volkov’s car window and struck him repeatedly with a hammer, breaking his left arm and damaging his left leg. Western officials and opposition figures assumed the attack, which took place a few weeks after Navalny’s mysterious death in prison, had been orchestrated by the Kremlin. Last month, Navalny’s team released an explosive investigation casting doubt on that version of events. In the video, Maria Pevchikh, the head of Navalny’s investigation department, accused the wealthy businessman and outspoken Kremlin critic Leonid Nevzlin of hiring the men…

Rather than feeling the pain of loss, many of those who attended the Conservative party conference in Birmingham last week said they felt another emotion in the aftermath of July’s cataclysmic general election defeat: one of overwhelming relief. “To be honest it feels like a weight off my shoulders,” said a senior MP who narrowly retained his seat. “We knew for two years we were going to lose, so it wasn’t exactly a shock. Now I don’t have to spend all my time answering emails from constituents complaining about all the dreadful mistakes we were making.” As for the future, MPs and party members mostly agreed, in their serious private moments, that the Conservative party needed to bide its time. Many seemed genuinely humbled. “On several of the most important…

At 6am on 1 October 1964, two trains set off in opposite directions in a daring experiment that would turn them into symbols of Japan’s transformation from militarist pariah to global economic powerhouse. Footage shows smartly dressed men, women and children marvelling at the countryside whizzing past their windows, some perhaps trying to calm their nerves at being whisked along at speeds unheard of in rail travel. Crowds gathered on platforms to watch the two trains reach their destinations, Tokyo and Osaka. Then, like now, they arrived exactly on time, at 10am, depositing their passengers after a 515km journey that had once taken almost seven hours but which they had just completed in four. Six decades on, it is hard to believe that many then viewed the shinkansen – now the…

ISRAEL’S FIRST PRIME MINISTER, David Ben-Gurion, famously said: “Our future does not depend on what the gentiles will say, but on what the Jews will do.” His argument was that the Jewish people could no longer be dependent on others as they had been for 2,000 years. Instead they were independent, self-reliant and creators of their own destiny. Today, faced by mounting diplomatic isolation over its war in Gaza – to the extent that Israel is now seen by some nations as a pariah state – Ben-Gurion’s maxim has gained renewed traction for many Israelis. These include the far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who quoted it when rebutting an international court of justice (ICJ) ruling ordering Israel to cease its military operation in the southern Gaza city of Rafah. A…

ON THE MORNING of 7 October, Neama al-Barawi got up early to prepare her children for school and make bread. At 6.29am, the 36-year-old heard the howl of rockets being launched towards Israel from close to her home in Beit Lahia, one of the northernmost communities of Gaza. Soon rumours began to spread that Hamas, the militant Islamist organisation that had ruled Gaza for almost all al-Barawi’s adult life, had broken through the perimeter fence built around the territory by Israel. Scared, she decided to keep her five children at home. Next door, Youssef al-Barawi, her nephew, was getting ready for a day at Beit Lahia’s university, where he studied medicine, when he heard the rockets. “That was the moment our whole life changed. Even now, we still do not…

AT THE START OF ISRAEL’S WAR on Gaza, when the intensive bombing of civilians began, the thought in my mind was: how will we Palestinians live with the Israelis after this? A year later, the question has only become more pertinent. Many atrocities have been committed, starting with the killing by Palestinians of 1,200 Israeli soldiers and civilians, followed by the Israeli army killing more than 41,000 Palestinians, including more than 17,000 women and children, 287 aid workers and 138 journalists and media workers. This does not include those who remain under the rubble of the two-thirds of Gaza’s buildings that have been damaged or destroyed. Here is just one detail from this 12-month war: On 25 September, Israel returned a truck containing 88 bodies with no identifying details to…

Some TV projects have the power to make or break everyone involved. Producer Sophia Zachariou knows that her latest is one of them. “I remember when we were first pitching it, people were like, ‘you want to do an Australian version of The Office – why the fuck would you want to do that? That’s a career killer.” The eight-episode season will be released in full on 18 October, arriving with the potential to be either one of the biggest homegrown TV shows ever, or a global laughing stock. Already, the world is watching. The show’s trailer amassed more than 2m views in its first two weeks, along with plenty of comments from fans of the original series determined to hate the adaptation before seeing it. “The problem with a…

Signs are taken for wonders,” TS Eliot’s speaker observes soberly in Gerontion. But what is the difference between a wonder and a sign – and which do we prefer? Such questions flow through Karl Ove Knausgård’s Morning Star series of novels, an ongoing effort to open up fiction into a kind of vast Book of Revelation in which visions of red deer, landlocked crabs and devils stream across a rural Norway populated by Knausgård’s familiar hotel bars and supermarkets. In the first volume, 2021’s The Morning Star, a disparate group of characters – a jaded academic with a manic-depressive wife, a doubting vicar with a jealous husband – found their lives illuminated and sent off kilter by a new, preternaturally bright star in the sky. The vicar buried a man…

The echoing screech of swifts hurtling between the houses is a distant memory. Some swallows and martins have hung around, wittering away on telephone wires over the Cheshire Lines, or hunting flies above the salt marsh north of Southport’s defunct pier. Our summer visitors have largely flown, but autumn has its magic. The recent harvest moon coincided with the annual spectacular provided by large numbers of noisy, feathered visitors. They arrive from breeding grounds in Greenland, Iceland and Norway. In dribs, drabs and then droves. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of honking pink-footed geese flying in huge V formations. At any moment, geese will be flying towards all points of the compass. In the mornings they travel inland to graze the fertile, peaty fields of the west Lancashire plain. At dusk they…

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LABOUR Starmer reshuffles top team after Sue Gray ousted Keir Starmer moved to shore up his top team after his chief of staff Sue Gray quit following months of sniping and criticism that she acknowledged had undermined the new Labour government. Gray resigned less than a week before the Labour government was due to mark its first 100 days in office, after becoming embroiled in a political storm at the heart of Downing Street. Gray will be replaced by Morgan McSweeney, who masterminded Labour’s election victory, and with whom she is said to have found herself at odds in government. One cabinet minister predicted Gray’s future weeks ago, saying: “One or both of them will have to go. It’s not going to be Morgan.” The top civil servant had been…

One year ago, nearly 400 young Israelis were massacred at the site of the Nova music festival during the 7 October Hamas attack. As mourners gathered at the site of the festival to commemorate the victims on Monday, their sobs and prayers were punctuated by the sound of artillery and machine guns being fired by soldiers into nearby Gaza. Perhaps no single scene across Israel more expressly exhibited the violence meted out against hundreds of civilians by Hamas, and the sub-sequent ferocity of the Israeli response against that organisation and millions of people inside of Gaza that has killed more than 41,500 people, according to Palestinian health authorities. Just days before relatives gathered here, Israel sent tanks back across the border into northern Gaza for the first time in months…

After keeping vigil all night, Jason Fesperman, 32, decided it was finally safe to sleep. By 6am on Friday 27 September, he figured the worst of the rain from Hurricane Helene had passed. Jonathan Creek, the normally ankle-deep stream that runs through his backyard in Maggie Valley, North Carolina, had stayed within its banks. Just over two hours later, his wife, Dan, woke him in a panic. Heavy rain continued past 9am in Maggie Valley, and by 8.30am, floodwaters were rising fast. Their home was under-water up to the windows. “Water was filling up, I would say, probably about an inch a minute,” he said. “I mean, it was pouring in, from the toilets, the windows, both doors.” Blindly stuffing clean laundry into a bag, he joined his wife and…

Ukraine has said that its forces have withdrawn from the eastern city of Vuhledar, a defensive bastion that had resisted repeated attacks since Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion. The military command in Kyiv said its troops left late last Tuesday. They had retreated in order to preserve personnel and combat equipment, it said, adding that Russian combat units had attacked from three directions and were close to “encircling” the city. The fall of Vuhledar is a boost for the Kremlin and comes as Russian troops advance across the eastern Donetsk oblast. In February they captured the city of Avdiivka, outside the regional capital of Donetsk, occupied in 2014. Since then the Russian advance has swallowed up towns and villages and come to within 10km of the city of Pokrovsk, a logistics…

‘Blue, our sky is for ever blue!” effuses the official anthem of Rondônia, a chunk of the Amazon in the western reaches of Brazil. But the “pure crystalline” heavens celebrated by those lyrics have vanished in recent months. Huge tracts of South America have been blanketed in smoke from largely man-made wildfires that are raging from Ecuador’s drought-stricken capital to Paraguay’s Chaco forest to the backlands of the greatest tropical jungle on Earth. The smoke has been so dramatic that passenger planes have been unable to land in Rondônia’s capital, Porto Velho, and schools have been closed. The government polyclinic run by Dr Lilian Samara de Melo Lima has seen a surge in patients suffering respiratory complaints, migraines and eye inflammation. “These days we can’t even see the other bank…

At around midday on 19 August 1949, wreathed in thick mist, a British European Airways DC-3 going from Belfast to Manchester flew into a hillside on Saddleworth Moor in the Peak District, near Oldham. All the crew and 21 of the 29 passengers died on impact or soon afterwards. Eight passengers survived, including a young boy and his parents, although, devastatingly, their younger child was one of the fatalities. That surviving boy became my friend and statistical colleague, Prof Stephen Evans. I think we would agree that Stephen was lucky. But what do we mean by “luck”? We might say that someone has been lucky, or unlucky, if they have benefited or been harmed by something that was unpredictable and beyond their control. Luck has been called “the operation of…

THIS SUMMER, the Nobel laureate Prof Aaron Ciechanover joined a group of prominent Israelis gathered at Nir Oz kibbutz to demand a hostage release and ceasefire deal. Nir Oz was the worst hit of the communities targeted by Hamas on 7 October, with a quarter of its residents kidnapped or killed. Twenty-nine are still in Gaza. If the hostages were not brought back, the basic social contract that underpinned Israeli society would unravel, the 77-year-old professor of medicine warned. He cited an accelerating “brain drain” of professionals as a worrying sign that some of Israel’s elite feel they no longer have a future in the country. And without them, Israel itself might struggle to have a future. Ciechanover is a long-term critic of Benjamin Netanyahu and joined protests before the…

The People’s Story Museum in Edinburgh is a part of the city’s cultural fabric whose name says it all: a museum and archive, opened in 1989 and located in the 16th-century Canongate Tolbooth, that takes in just about every aspect of working-class life in the Scottish capital from the 18th century to the late 20th century. Its exhibits include recreations of a bookbinder’s workshop, a wartime kitchen and a jail cell; the artefacts it looks after span work, leisure, politics, protest and more. In a city long since transformed by gentrification and tourism, there is something brilliantly defiant about what the museum does. But after months of erratic opening hours, the People’s Story was recently closed without warning, thanks to what one councillor called “staffing pressures and a need to…

I’ve tried cooking polenta the traditional way, but always end up with a burn ed hand from the hot lava glooping away in the pan. Now I whisk the cornmeal into the desired amount of cold water, then cook it on a moderate heat until it thickens to a nice, smooth finish, and the result is pretty much the same. Which method do you think is the best? Martin, Alberta, Canada If the method you’re using works for you, both for taste and texture, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Sometimes – actually, all the time – what counts as “right” in the kitchen depends mostly on the person cooking and eating it. The theory behind the traditional method is that cooking cornmeal is similar to cooking arborio rice for…

✱ All solutions published next week Across 8 Religious organisations need to tour biblical hill (8) 9 About 100 left over individual giving latitude (6) 10 Subatomic particle finally seen after smoke disperses (1-5) 12 Effort of flowing into two rivers to begin with (8) 13 Soldier’s command – drop war game (3) 14 Groups on boats discussed voyage (6) 16 Drink-k? (8) 17 Cook has break over trays by fire (3-4) 20 Tin storing yen, not European funny money or similar word (7) 23 In America, one making piece for Joe? (8) 24 Unrestrained social worker now dancing outside (6) 26 Country captured by Marcus Aurelius (3) 27 Old black cat eating 6 in limbo (8) 28 Article on wine (6) 31 Golfer losing 1-0 takes sides in areas…