Innehållsförteckning för 25 October 2024 från Guardian Weekly

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A discrepancy in the official Israeli account of Yahya Sinwar’s final moments has emerged that appears likely to add fuel to the martyr’s cult fast developing around the Hamas leader. The autopsy carried out on Sinwar concluded he died from a gunshot wound to his head, at odds with the initial Israel Defense Forces (IDF) version, which implied he was killed by a tank shell fired into the building where he made his last stand. The IDF released footage of a tank firing at the building in Rafah’s Tel al-Sultan refugee camp, and the military spokesperson, R Adm Daniel Hagari, said: “We identified him as a terrorist inside a building, fired at the building and then went in to search.” However, according to Chen Kugel, the director of Israel’s national…

Sasha Ustenko has survived three attacks by the Russian drones that stalk the streets of Kherson carrying fragmentation grenades to drop on anything that moves. The first, in late July, targeted a parked police car in central Kherson just as Ustenko walked past, throwing him to the ground. The second, in mid-August, hit a drinking water tanker as he queued for supplies, killing the driver. Ustenko was concussed, and came round to see a man lying in a pool of blood. The third time, in late September, he heard the drone buzzing above and sprinted for shelter under the branches of a cherry tree. He hoped its leaves would hide him but the grenade tumbled through the canopy and landed barely a metre away. The explosion ripped his left index…

It’s 25 years since Australia voted “ no” in a referendum to become a republic – but to suggest that the negative 1999 result symbolised an enduring commitment to the values of monarchy would be a grave error. The nuances of this rejection should have been explained to whomever was responsible for planning King Charles III’s royal visit this week. The British-born king of Australia, accompanied by Queen Camilla, was making his 17th trip to Australia, his first as king, with stops in Sydney and Canberra during a six-day visit. And yet precisely none of our state government premiers deigned to meet him. The premier of Victoria had a cabinet meeting. So, too, did the premiers of New South Wales and South Australia. The premier of Queensland has been fighting…

Grinding spices by hand is hard work, and sometimes they don’t come out as finely ground as I’d like. While a spice grinder may be the answer, I worry that I’d spend too much time cleaning it between different spices. Cosima, Berlin, Germany I do use a spice grinder, which I originally bought to grind coffee, so my advice is just to go for it. True, a pestle and mortar is a great tool (particularly if you have a granite one, with some texture, rather than a smooth one in which you end up chasing the spices around the bowl), but the spices don’t always come out finely ground, however much elbow grease you put in. After all, ready-ground spices come nowhere near toasted and ground whole spices such as…

✱ All solutions published next week Across 1 Sweat blood! A new rallying cry (6) 5 In which Dashing White Sergeants may follow Gay Gordons? (8) 9 Writing in Afghan province curtailed by the one in charge (8) 10 See 11 11/10 Seek election fast? Not with error included in May’s 1 (6,3,6) 13 See 21 Down 14/16 Oxbridge set, lacking suitable leader, take Ten by storm with Johnson’s 1 (3,6,4) 18 Tag line (4) 19 Preferred to welcome soggy dew: he’ll wake up damp (9) 22 Hostility when vying for the part (4) 24 Times includes set classifications by birth (3,6) 26 Mafia’s come to conceal calamity (6) 27 Cool clue for face (4-4) 28 Mortice plugged by centre of key turns fast (8) 29 Cheap and fishy? (6)…

Across 1 Bruce Wayne’s Alfred for instance (6) 4 ____ of a Thin Man, 1965 Bob Dylan song (6) 8 Gentle push (5) 9 One’s shot or thrown (7) 10 Setting agent (7) 11 Covering (5) 12 Horizontal (9) 17 Advance (an idea) (5) 19 It’s entirely inconsequential (7) 21 ____ Moses, American folk artist (7) 22 Congratulate (oneself) (5) 23 Three successes (6) 24 Full of beans (6) Down 1 Harmless (6) 2 One’s small fry (7) 3 Forcibly remove (5) 5 Clear of blame (7) 6 Group who aren’t members of the clergy (5) 7 Dull (6) 9 Sole preoccupation (9) 13 Salvation Army HQ (7) 14 Upper arm muscle (7) 15 Tap on a cask (6) 16 One provides services to other businesses (6) 18 Sedimentary rock…

1 UNITED STATES Cheney urges conservatives to back Harris over abortion Liz Cheney, a former Republican congresswoman and longtime opponent of abortion rights, on Monday condemned Republican-imposed bans on the procedure and urged conservatives to support Democrat Kamala Harris for US president. Cheney spoke during a series of joint events with the vice-president in three swing states aimed at prising suburban Republican voters away from party nominee Donald Trump. She has become the Democrat’s most prominent conservative surrogate and is rumoured to be in contention for a seat in a potential Harris cabinet. In Waukesha, Wisconsin, Cheney, 58, suggested Republicanled states have overreached in restricting abortion since the supreme court’s 2022 decision ended it as a constitutional right. “I’m pro-life and I have been deeply troubled by what I have watched…

A few hundred metres from the shoreline – where the Gulf of Mexico meets the small town of Cameron in south-west Louisiana – my feet crunch over four-year-old detritus. I am standing among the battered pews of a Baptist church, on shards of glass and wood that are strewn across the floor, gazing at its partly collapsed roof. The relics of the back-to-back hurricanes that pummelled this community in 2020 are still scattered here and throughout much of Cameron. Residents have long referred to this distant part of the US as “the end of the world” – but the adage feels more prescient now than ever. The population has dwindled from nearly 2,000 to a few hundred since the storms; empty foundations mark the locations of many homes that were…

Moscow’s ambassador to London has said the UK is waging a proxy war against Russia while predicting the “end of Ukraine”. In an interview with the BBC, Andrei Kelin said Ukraine continued to fight but claimed “the resistance is more feeble and feeble”. Russian troops, he said, were gaining more terrain every day, adding: “The end of this phase will mean the end of Ukraine.” Russia is thought to control about 18% of Ukraine and has been making slow but steady advances over the past year. Kelin also described the conflict as “a proxy war led by the United Kingdom’s government”, which by providing weapons is “killing Russian soldiers and civilians”. The comments came as Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, renewed his appeal to western countries for air-defence systems. Ukraine is…

It was 2am when parish priest Giovanni Samorì was woken by a phone call from the mayor of Traversara ordering him to start ringing the church bells. The pealing now forms part of the civil protection procedure deployed by many Italian towns to warn residents of impending calamity. It worked: the evacuation of Traversara’s 480 residents was swift and, despite the priest’s foreboding, there were no deaths. But, a few weeks on from the flooding of 19 September, the northern Italian region of Emilia-Romagna was struck by its third devastating storm in less than 18 months. This time the hamlet on the banks of the Lamone River, about 40 minutes from the regional capital of Bologna, was all but wiped out. In its place is a debate about insurance coverage…

An international network of “race science” activists seeking to influence public debate with discredited ideas on race and eugenics has been operating with secret funding from a multi-millionaire US tech entrepreneur. Undercover filming has revealed the existence of the organisation, formed two years ago as the Human Diversity Foundation. Its members have used podcasts, videos, an online magazine and research papers to seed ideology about the supposed genetic superiority of certain ethnic groups. The anti-racism campaign Hope Not Hate began investigating after meeting the group’s English organiser, a former teacher, at a far-right conference. Undercover footage was shared with the Guardian, which conducted further research alongside Hope Not Hate and reporting partners in Germany. HDF received more than $1m from Andrew Conru, a Seattle businessman who made his fortune from…

THE OTHER DAY, I was plodding away on the treadmill at the gym when I overheard two blokes chatting. “I had a great night last night,” said one. My ears pricked up. A juicy story? “Scored 96.” I yawned. “That’s insane,” his companion gasped. “My average is 67 and I can’t seem to get it much higher.” “Ah, but how’s your HRV?” “Never check that, but I know my REM score’s been all over the place this week.” It was only the mention of REM, AKA rapid eye movement, that made me realise they were comparing notes on their sleep performance. Welcome to the world of orthosomnia, the medical term for an unhealthy obsession with attaining perfect sleep, usually driven by a wearable device. The term was coined by US…

No one in Britain really saw it coming, but here we are, in the midst of what passes for a watershed debate about assisted dying, centred on the Labour MP Kim Leadbeater’s terminally ill adults (end of life) bill, and the huge moral and practical questions that swirl around it. The news has been full of the views of people who can speak loudly enough to be heard: three former directors of public prosecutions (in favour), a former archbishop of Canterbury (ditto) and the healthcare professionals grouped into the Association for Palliative Medicine (against, because allowing assisted dying risks ignoring “the lack of adequately funded specialist palliative care services”). Meanwhile, Leadbeater’s backers stick to their basic point: that after years of failed legislation and awful human suffering, the bill opens…

Tim Winton and speculative fiction may seem an odd combination. His novels excel at the here and now, depicting lives at the margins, young love and young parenthood, violence at the hands of fathers. But the harsh beauty of the western Australian landscape has long been a presence in his work, and Winton has also long highlighted his country’s fragility in the face of climate chaos, and been fiercely critical of the exploitation of Australia’s mineral wealth. So the cli-fi premise of Juice could be a perfect Winton fit. Set in an unspecified future, some centuries from now, the book opens on a man and a girl driving across a landscape blackened by ashes. The hellscape is worthy of the Mad Max franchise, with slave colonies springing up from the…

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HEALTH NHS delays mean ‘death sentence’ for some patients Some National Health Service patients have received a “death sentence” due to delays, the health secretary, Wes Streeting, said, as Keir Starmer stressed the need for more use of technology. Streeting was speaking on Monday alongside the prime minister at the launch of what they described as the “biggest national conversation about the future of the NHS since it was founded 76 years ago”. But while Starmer tried to strike an optimistic tone, alluding to the benefits that could arise from a public conversation, Streeting warned that the NHS is in “such a poor state, I’m amazed we’re not still using carrier pigeons”. Streeting said: “The NHS is going through what is objectively the worst crisis in its history, whether it’s…

After they burned down his family home in northern Gaza, Israeli troops separated Ramez al-Skafi from his family and detained him. They had a job in mind for him, he said. For the next 11 days in early July, the 30-year-old Palestinian said he was sent into one house after another in his home district, Shuja’iya, watched by his Israeli military minders. According to the account he gave the Guardian, they turned him into a human shield against booby-traps and Hamas gunmen. “I tried to resist their proposal, but they started beating me and the officer told me it was not my choice to make and that I have to do whatever they want,” Skafi said. “He told me that my work would be searching the houses and telling them…

When Lam Wing-kee ran his bookshop in Hong Kong, filled with controversial and political titles banned in mainland China, many of his customers were Chinese Communist party officials. Back then, in the early years of Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s reign, and before Lam was detained by Chinese authorities for his work, the officials would load up boxes of books on CCP politics, Chinese economics and scandal, often taking them back over the border. “CCP officials would look for books about what’s going on in China, about changes in the top rank officials, who gets the most power, changes in the power and the struggle between them, etcetera,” Lam said, suggesting officials were often buying the books to learn about what was going on inside their own party. “Some of my…

She has been hailed as a feminist hero across France, commended for her courage at rallies across the country and applauded by supporters each time she has entered or left the courtroom in the southern city of Avignon. But the tributes to Gisèle Pelicot – the woman at the centre of a horrifying mass rape trial that has shaken France to its core – also come from far beyond the country’s borders. Since the trial began in September, solidarity has been expressed around the world, hinting at the role she has played in galvanising a global conversation around sexual violence. From Australia to Austria, many have closely tracked the news emerging from the courtroom, where Pelicot’s ex-husband, Dominique, is accused of drugging her for nearly a decade and recruiting men…

These are not easy days for supporters of American democracy. But what twists my innards is not the prospect that in less than two weeks’ time, the majority of voters could hand the reins of power to a vengeful authoritarian demagogue. Instead, I’m sickened by the prospect that the electoral college can do that for us – that Kamala Harris could win the national popular vote, but come up short where it counts. We know the popular vote winner has already twice lost in this young century, in 2000 and again in 2016. But few realise how narrowly we missed a catastrophic result in 2020 when Biden won the national popular vote by a substantial margin – over 7 million votes. In every other democratic nation, such a result would…

Part history lesson, part crime scene, Hew Locke’s What Have We Here? is filled with beauty and horror. At the heart of the show, in the Great Court gallery of the British Museum in London, are looting and vandalism, the destruction of societies, the erasure of cultures and the enslavement of their peoples. All are embedded in the British Museum’s own history and holdings. And that’s without even touching on the frieze of sculptures from the Parthenon in Athens, and the sorry story of their acquisition, or to whom exactly many of the other objects in the museum might be returned, even if there was a will to do so. Where are the pre-Columbian Caribbean Taino people now, whose hardwood spirit-figures of a birdman and of Boinayel the Rain Giver…

Al Pacino, whose nickname “Sonny Boy” comes from the Al Jolson song of that title, begins this fine memoir in 1943 when he is three and his mother, Rose, a pretty, sensitive factory worker, starts smuggling him into the local picture house. Together they drink in the stories unspooling from the silver screen, doubly delicious since their own lives are so bleak. Rose’s impossibly handsome boy-husband has already skedaddled to another marriage and Rose has taken little Alfredo back to the South Bronx to live with her parents. Sonny delights in the role of provider and protector, buying his mother Kotex from the drugstore and shouting at the construction workers who dare to leer. Pacino’s account of New York’s postwar mean streets is startlingly cinematic. He introduces us to his…

As the ferry returns us to Corran, my gaze lingers over Loch Linnhe’s glassy surface. “These peninsulas take the water between thumb and finger / like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods,” wrote Elizabeth Bishop in her poem The Map. While she didn’t mean precisely here, between the water’s sheen and my revised grasp of local geography, I can see exactly what she meant. This is our second attempt to get to Ardnamurchan lighthouse, which stands on the most westerly point of mainland Britain. Our first had been from the head of Loch Eil, where its marine waters are finally exhausted by the mountains’ rise. We’d turned off the main road. Fourteen kilometres of single-track brought us to the inflection point that reveals Loch Eil to be a finger’s…