Innehållsförteckning för 6 December 2024 från Guardian Weekly

The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol211 | Issue№ 23 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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Joe Biden’s announcement last Sunday that he had pardoned his son Hunter, who was facing sentencing in two criminal cases, is likely to have been the product of a Shakespearean struggle between head and heart. On the one hand, Biden is one of the last great institutionalists in Washington. “From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making,” he said on Sunday. On the other hand, Biden is nothing without family. As a senator, he once took a train from Washington to Wilmington, Delaware, so he could see his eight-year-old daughter, Ashley, blow out the candles on her birthday cake at the station, then cross the platform and take the next train back to work. Hunter was convicted this summer of lying…

The restoration of Paris’s Notre Dame after its partial destruction by fire five years ago will give the world a “shock of hope”, Emmanuel Macron has said as he marked the medieval cathedral’s imminent reopening with a televised walking tour. Alongside his wife, Brigitte, and the archbishop of Paris, Laurent Ulrich, the French president was shown around the rebuilt medieval cathedral last Friday morning by Philippe Villeneuve, the chief architect of France’s national monuments. Macron took in the Clôture Nord du Chœur, a sculpted wall depicting scenes from the life of Jesus Christ, and marvelled at the rose windows, cleansed of the grime that had amassed over generations. Inside Notre Dame’s most recognisable feature, the spire, Macron’s attention was drawn to marks in the wood that showed the craftsmanship that…

The world’s largest cruise line company is responsible for producing more carbon dioxide in Europe than the city of Glasgow, a report has found. Analysis by the Transport and Environment (T&E) campaign group, provided to the Guardian, found Carnival to be the most climate-polluting cruise company sailing in Europe in 2023. The data covered all Europe-bound cruise ships last year, including 53 that belonged to Carnival. The second most climate-polluting cruise company in Europe was MSC, followed by Norwegian Cruise Line, the group found. Carbon emissions for Carnival’s Europe-bound ships totalled 2.55m tonnes last year. The latest emissions figures for the city of Glasgow, from 2021, with a population of 620,700, were 2.43m tonnes, according to the city council. MSC emitted 1.4m tonnes and Norwegian 0.84m tonnes of CO2. Analysts…

Last Tuesday, I bought lunch on the go. I fancied something hot, tasty but healthy, so I chose a vegan ramen from the Japanese-inspired chain Wasabi. The soup was packed with turmeric noodles, vegetable gyozas, mushrooms, bean sprouts, pak choi, pickled ginger and sesame seeds, in a soy and miso broth. It was delicious. In fact, it was so delicious, I was suspicious. I checked out its nutritional information online. Only 342 calories, low in saturated fat … Aha! Salt: 5.07g a portion. The World Health Organization recommends that adults eat less than 5g of salt a day. One noodle soup had exceeded my entire daily intake. What’s the big deal? Well, this ramen illustrates how easy it is to exceed your recommended salt intake. In fact, it is nigh-impossible…

France might not be broke, but the state of its public finances is, well, definitely not good. Total debt stands at €3.2tn ($3.4tn) – 112% of GDP. Interest payments on that debt are the second largest public expenditure after education (which includes everything from crêche, or preschool, to universities) and are higher than the amount spent on defence. And this year’s budget deficit is projected to be 6%, three points above the EU’s 3% limit. If it weren’t for the euro, France might very well be in the throes of a fiscal crisis – as it is, interest rates on some French debt are higher than for Portugal or Spain. In response, the prime minister, Michel Barnier, has proposed €20bn of tax rises (on large companies and the wealthiest 0.3%…

The elegiac quality of Haruki Murakami’s new novel, his first in six years, was perhaps inevitable considering its origins. The City and Its Uncertain Walls began as an attempt to rework a 1980 story of the same title, originally published in the Japanese magazine Bungakukai, which Murakami, unsatisfied, never allowed to be republished or translated. “I felt that this work contained something vital for me,” Murakami writes in the novel’s afterword, “at the time, though, unfortunately I lacked the skills to convey what that something was.” Five years later, his first attempt at a revision developed into the novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, a narrative that ran “parallel” to the original – “like two crews digging a tunnel, one from each end, breaking through and meeting…

We leave the farm track, the truck bumping into the open field. The headlights scan the grassland. For a moment, I’m 10 years old again – transported back to a night-time safari with Dad. This evening, I’m helping with his podcast. And by helping, I mean saying as little as I can get away with, while he talks about the farm and wildlife. There’s a small white glow in the distance – tapetum lucidum, the reflective layer behind mammal retinas. As we approach, several pairs of eyes return the glare of our headlights, revealing six roe deer. They skitter away, bounding across the open meadow, white rumps flashing. Our headlights now illuminate a little owl perched on a young oak. It stares for a moment before whirring off into the…

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1 UKRAINE/GERMANY Scholz seeks to reassure Ukraine on surprise visit The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, made an unannounced visit to Kyiv, his first trip to Ukraine since the early months of full-scale war in 2022, ahead of a package of military aid to Ukraine worth €650m ($68 0m) later this month. The visit appeared designed to reassure Ukraine of German support, after Scholz faced criticism for a recent phone call he initiated with Vladimir Putin, and with much of Europe braced for the uncertainty of a Donald Trump presidency and what it may mean for the war in Ukraine. Scholz also has one eye on his domestic political situation, where he faces a confidence vote this month and is hoping for re-election in a February ballot called after his coalition government…

As Democrats think about how to counter the Trump administration, they need to accept a very simple lesson from the past eight years. Big tech and big business are part of the political opposition working on behalf of Donald Trump, not the Democrats’ allies. It shouldn’t seem necessary to point out what seems to be an obvious fact. Nonetheless, there are some Democrats trying to stay close to big tech, or downplaying the importance of anti-monopoly policy when it comes to authoritarian risks. For example, last month, Priorities USA, the largest Democratic party Super Pac, held a big resistance strategy session hosted by “ our friends at Google”. As another example, Adam Jentleson, a political writer and a former chief of staff for US senator John Fetterman, wrote a recent…

Eight years ago, indiscriminate Russian airstrikes helped the forces of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, drive rebels from Aleppo – a crucial turning point in the country’s civil war, which has largely been in a state of stalemate since 2020. Last weekend a stunning rebel offensive seized Aleppo again – and the Assad regime now faces its greatest threat in years. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened in Aleppo? The new offensive in Syria began last Wednesday when rebel groups claimed to have swiftly seized control of a military base and 15 villages held by government forces in north-western Aleppo province. The rebels, led by the jihadist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), cut off the main highway from Damascus to Aleppo. Assad’s ally Russia launched airstrikes in response.…

It is hard to think of a better MP to take on the cause of assisted dying than Kim Leadbeater. She is energetic, engaging, persuasive and speaks like a normal human being. She has no tribal reputation, so there is no barrier to winning over Conservatives, and she has experience of personal tragedy: her sister, the MP Jo Cox, was murdered. But it would be wrong to say it was Leadbeater who won this initial push to legalise assisted dying, which MPs voted for by 330 to 275 votes last Friday. Under the surface, the most important contribution has been the one made by ordinary people, an experiment in participatory democracy by stealth. Downing Street may sneer at the idea of citizens’ assemblies, but there have been small-scale ones happening…

Saplings from the felled Sycamore Gap tree are to be planted across the UK, including next to one of London’s most famous roads, at a rural prison and at a motor neurone disease centre opening in the name of the late rugby league star Rob Burrow. The National Trust last Friday announced the recipients of 49 saplings it has called “trees of hope”. Other recipients include a charity set up by the family of murdered Northumberland schoolgirl Holly Newton, who was killed by her jealous ex-boyfriend; and Alder Hey children’s hospital in Liverpool. Nearly 500 applications were received after the trust announced a scheme for the saplings to be gifted across the UK. There are 49 – one for each foot (30.5cm) of the sycamore’s height – and all were…

Spray paint and protest banners cover the walls and pavements of Dongduk women’s university in Seoul. “We’d rather perish than open our doors,” reads one slogan. Since 11 November, students have staged a sit-in, initially occupying the main building and blocking access to classroom buildings across campus, forcing classes to move online. The outcry was sparked by plans for some departments to admit male students but have since spiralled into a wider clash over the future of womenonly spaces in a country that is grappling with the issue of gender equality. “The university’s unilateral decision, made without any input from the students who actually study and live here, left us with no choice but to raise our voices,” one member of Dongduk’s student council said, speaking on condition of anonymity.…

European companies were wondering whether they had dodged a harmful blow to their US sales after Donald Trump promised to slap trade tariffs on Mexican, Canadian and Chinese goods in social media posts last Monday. They could congratulate themselves for avoiding the incoming president’s gaze – so far – and watch as he turned his anger on Beijing and Washington’s nearest trading partners. Trump was in belligerent mood, just as he was in 2016 when he first used tariffs as a tactic to extract concessions on a string of foreign policy objectives. Then, the tariffs were justified as elements of US national security policy aimed at limiting immigration and stymieing Chinese attempts to access American government databases. This time, Trump’s tirade against Mexico, Canada and China went a step further,…

IT WAS AROUND 1AM WHEN I DISCOVERED MY IMPOSTOR was watching me. I was sitting up in bed, scrolling on my phone through the list of people who had viewed my Instagram story. The audience was the same as it always was: friends, family and a smattering of followers I had picked up over the years. But a tug from my subconscious told me, this time, something was wrong. I scrolled back up and there it was: an account I had never seen before. Their profile photo was a selfie I had taken in a bookshop basement years ago. Have you ever walked by an unexpected mirror and jumped at your own reflection? That’s how it felt as I stared back at myself, unnerved by my sudden appearance. I brought…

Politics in Romania can be a bloody business, especially on the right. The excesses of the Iron Guard, an insurrectionary, violently antisemitic, ultranationalist 1930s political-religious militia, stood out even at a time when fascist parties were wreaking havoc in Germany, Italy and Spain. Given what is happening in Europe today, the events of that period are instructive. Iron Guard founder Corneliu Codreanu, a ruthless assassin who was himself assassinated in 1938, and his ally turned enemy, the pro-Nazi general Ion Antonescu, who was executed for war crimes in 1946, are back in the news. That’s because both men have been lauded as national heroes by Călin Georgescu, shock winner of last month’s first round of Romania’s presidential election. No mere throwback, Georgescu is a man of our times – a…

Please give foolproof advice on how to cook a soft poached egg.  Anne Marie, County Donegal, Ireland I’m here for you, Anne Marie, so let’s do this thing! Step 1 Don’t be afraid. Remember: it’s just an egg cooked in water. Step 2 Use fresh eggs. The older the egg, the looser its white will be and the scrawnier it will be when cooked. If your egg is a little old, add a drop of vinegar to the water before dropping in the egg (older eggs are more alkaline, and the acid offsets this and keeps things in line). Fresh eggs don’t need any vinegar, and no egg needs a great big slosh of the stuff (unless you like the taste of vinegary poached eggs). Step 3 Bring a pan…

✱ All solutions published next week Across 1 A scream from hospital colleague? (7) 5 Cowboy film actress? (7) 9 Notes exactly as quoted by Greek character (5) 10 Vacuous really, there’s McGonagall’s initial, shocking versifier (9) 11 Auntie introducing brother-in-law, bighead in two minds? (10) 12 Branch in tree cut down with blade, originally (4) 14 If for film, almost all of the data falsified (8,4) 18 Flighty type introducing bishop to area of jazz? (12) 21 Review of current depravity (4) 22 Pretty essential publishing material in backward filthy gossip – OK for Rupert Murdoch? (4,6) 25 European part of 23 down in reversible collars (9) 26 Complete trash (5) 27 Winger heading for Everton put on Liverpool strip, say? (3,4) 28 Blunted article buried in prehistoric material…

MIGRATION ‘Red days’ blamed for record Channel crossings The number of small boat arrivals since Keir Starmer took power passed 20,000, with the Home Office claiming a record number of calm autumnal days in the Channel was responsible. A 31-day period in October and November had the highest ratio of so-called “red days” – when weather conditions make crossings likely or very likely – since records began in 2018, according to a leaked analysis. In that time, 6,288 people crossed the Channel, compared with 768 over the same period last year. The data was used by the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, to explain why the number of crossings by small boats carrying people seeking refuge has jumped in recent weeks. After a fortnight when bad weather prevented any crossings, two…

Mohammed Bzeeh spent the first hours of the ceasefire cleaning. After the Hezbollah-Israel agreement last Wednesday appeared to have brought 13 months of fighting to a close, Bzeeh and his family found their home in the village of Zibqeen-Zibqin ruined by an Israeli airstrike. Bzeeh set to work, the wiry 18-year-old hefting concrete and metal scrap off his driveway using a rusty shovel. His family watched on, overlooking the street they had left two months earlier, now lined by the burnt-out husks of their neighbours’ homes. “I feel overwhelmed. We came back to our land, our motherland, and there is so much damage here. But we will resist and stay here and fix our homes,” Bzeeh said. He was not alone. His neighbours were already picking through the remains of…

Béatrice Zavarro, a diminutive figure in a long black robe and heavy red glasses, who has described herself as the “devil’s advocate”, stood up in a packed courtroom in Avignon last week to sum up the defence for Dominique Pelicot, on trial for drugging his wife, Gisèle, and arranging more than 50 men to rape her. What could his lawyer say about the man who has admitted to the charges in the notorious mass rape trial, and whose perversions and depravity have been played out in words and pictures around the world since proceedings opened three months ago? For the next hour and 15 minutes, Zavarro trod a fine legal line. She did not try to defend the indefensible; she did not seek to mitigate the actions of the man…

Few people know the sea better than Guillaume Picard. He grew up on a boat moored in the port of Hyères in southern France after his parents left 1960s Paris. His first job was on a sailing boat. Then he spent 30 years in the merchant navy before becoming a commercial captain, ferrying tourists and containers across the Mediterranean for more than two decades. Now aged 65, his grey hair in a ponytail, it is with no small note of sadness that he says, increasingly, it is the land that calls him. “To be completely honest, I want to go to sea less and less,” he said. “I go hiking a lot in the mountains with my wife, and we’ve found an environment that is much more preserved. The mountains…

Felicity Nelson recalls her 17-day detention in September vividly. The 34-year-old activist was one of 53 people arrested at a junction in Accra, the capital, after protesting with hundreds of others against illegal mining. In detention, the group found a 54th person in their midst who had not been at the demonstration but was apprehended after visiting Oliver Barker-Vormawor, the protest’s organiser, in hospital. Nelson, who is asthmatic, was denied access to inhalers in her cell. “No light, no air, just holes in the ceiling for ventilation,” said the activist. The west African state, led by Nana Akufo-Addo, a human rights lawyer, has long been seen as a beacon of democracy. However, rights groups say civil freedoms are being eroded by officials reluctant to tackle illegal mining, known as galamsey,…

Colombian authorities working with dozens of other countries have seized 225 tonnes of cocaine in the space of six weeks, a global record for any single anti-narcotics operation, finding some of that haul on a “narco submarine” travelling on a new drug trafficking route to Australia. In the six-week Operation Orion, law enforcement agencies and other organisations from 62 countries halted six semi-submersible vessels stuffed with cocaine and confiscated 1,400 tonnes of drugs in total, including more than 1,000 tonnes of marijuana. The interception of 225 tonnes of cocaine marks a significant dent in the operations of Latin America’s cartels given that the UN estimates 2,700 tonnes are produced globally each year and Colombia’s record for annual seizures was the 671 tonnes confiscated in 2022. “This is an important chunk…

For the past few months, there has been a grim new ritual whenever I meet people from some Arab countries. It’s a sort of mutual commiseration and checking in. How are things with you? Where is your family? I hope you are safe, I hope they are safe. I hope you are OK. We are with you. There is a comfort to it, and also an awkwardness. Comfort because the words are earnest, the solidarity almost unbearably meaningful. Awkward because the scale of what many are enduring is too large to be captured in those words. Everything feels shot through with survivor’s guilt, but also with a little bit of resolve in the knowledge that the calamities tearing apart our nations have closed the distances between us. At the heart…

Countless flowing green wigs risked spontaneous combustion on a 36C Melbourne evening as thousands of J-pop fans queued outside John Cain Arena on a recent Friday night. But the heat was irrelevant to the night’s headline pop attraction, Hatsune Miku. She can’t sweat because she’s a digital animation – a 16-year-old “Vocaloid” virtual pop-star on her first Australian tour. Miku, as she’s known to fans, is a 157cm-tall avatar of a teenage girl with green pigtails. She represents a digital bank of vocal samples created by the ominous-sounding Crypton Future Media using Yamaha’s Vocaloid voice synthesiser technology. Users input lyrics and melodies that are “sung” by the bank’s sampled voice (Hatsune Miku is voiced by the actor Saki Fujita); some Vocaloid producers “tune” the software to be convincing, while others…

Towards the end of her 16-year tenure, former German chancellor Angela Merkel was garlanded with superlative titles: the “queen of Europe”, the “most powerful woman in the world”. In reality, her role was always more that of a mediator than a sovereign. Born and brought up for 35 years in an anti-church, Moscow-allied socialist command economy but politically active for 31 years in a Christian, staunchly pro-Nato and pro-market conservative party, Merkel’s unique political calling card was her ability to see eye-to-eye with politicians from opposing camps, because she understood their ideological hinterland. And so Freedom, released three years after she left office, was never going to be a score-settling kind of autobiography. Meetings with politicians as different as George W Bush and former leftwing Greek prime minister Aléxis Tsípras…

Across 1 Repudiate one’s association with (someone) (6) 4 Hamper (6) 8 Flower part (5) 9 Sleeveless underwear (7) 10 Outline (7) 11 Spinning part of a machine (5) 12 One sings in the stalls (9) 17 Abdominal pain, particularly in infants (5) 19 Wishy-washy (7) 21 Planet or prize? (7) 22 Beautiful ____ title track of a Neil Diamond album (5) 23 Half-a-dozen musicians (6) 24 Positive (6) Down 1 Portray (6) 2 Like the devil (7) 3 Response from the cockpit (5) 5 Tower of a mosque (7) 6 Brilliance (5) 7 Get (money, usually) by threats or violence (6) 9 Submissive fawning (9) 13 Block (7) 14 Animal with scales (7) 15 Rascals (6) 16 Breaktime viewing on TV (6) 18 Fabric made with metallic thread (5)…