Innehållsförteckning för 7 February 2025 från Guardian Weekly

The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol212 | Issue№ 6 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…

Proponents of tariffs argue that when they are used effectively, they can give an advantage to locally sourced alternatives by making imports prohibitively expensive. But economists tend to view taxes imposed on goods moving across national borders as a blunt instrument – which certainly hurt the target country, but also do damage to the host economy and risk sparking a trade war that can magnify the consequences. China | Counterattack ranging from pick-up trucks to search engines Trump threatened a 60% tariff on Chinese goods during the election campaign; the actual figure, 10%, was much lower, but when added to existing measures brings the average tariff on Chinese goods to between 20% and 30%. Trump claim ed his intention was to force Beijing to do more to stop fentanyl, a…

Roni Eshel told her father many times that she could see Hamas militants training for an attack near the Nahal Oz base where she served in a surveillance unit. The scale of the preparations left her frightened for her life. She detailed the activity in daily reports over the summer and early autumn of 2023, raising the alarm with dozens of other young women “spotters” – charged with watching a tiny section of the border in intense detail – who were posted along Israel’s border with Gaza. A cocktail of chauvinism, arrogance and complacency meant their warnings were ignored or dismissed by senior commanders for the region, most of them men. The senior officers were convinced Gaza was locked down by Israel’s layers of hi-tech defences, but 19-year-old Eshel proved…

Adozen excited 10-year-olds are bouncing in their chairs. The small classroom’s walls are lined with racks of wetsuits and water equipment, and decorated with posters of turtles. But the students’ eyes are trained on their teacher, Tseng Ching-ming, describing the currents and sea conditions at nearby Banana Bay, where they’ll soon be going. “Today you have one mission: to take off your equipment and float in the water,” he says. Some of the kids grin, nervously. They don’t know it, but the students from Kenting-Eluan elementary school on Taiwan’s southernmost point, are rare among their peers and predecessors. Despite most of Taiwan’s 24 million residents living near the coast and rivers, swimming ability is low. Ocean safety skills are even lower. Classes like Tseng’s rely on a few individuals who…

For several years, Republicans accused Joe Biden of waging a “war on energy” even as the United States drilled more oil and gas than at any time in its history. Now, a more tangible assault is gathering pace under Donald Trump – aimed squarely at wind, solar and other cleaner forms of power. Since his return as president, Trump has, like his first term, issued orders to open up more American land and waters for fossil fuel extraction and started the process to yank the US from the Paris climate agreement. “We will drill, baby drill,” said Trump, who has promised to cut energy and electricity prices in half within 18 months. But Trump has this time launched a blitzkrieg against renewable energy, with his department of interior temporarily suspending…

Why exactly is Donald Trump’s new presidency so disorienting? So far, explanations have tended to focus on its manic pace, contempt for political conventions and blatant subversion of supposedly one of the world’s most robust democracies. But all these elements were also present in his first presidency. Meanwhile, other features of both his terms, such as his cult of personality, scapegoating of immigrants and accusation that liberal elites have caused national decline, are standard practice for hardright strongmen, and have been for at least a century. Yet still he baffles and wrong foots people, both opponents and more neutral observers, political professionals and voters, Americans and foreigners. There is an underexplored reason for this. Trump’s presidency, and particularly his second term, is a deeply paradoxical project. In some ways, it’s…

In 1982, when American vocalist Melle Mel was asked to rap about the social deprivation and violence rampant in inner-city neighbourhoods, he initially declined. Melle Mel led the group Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, known for their party anthems, and for “boasting how good we are and all that”, as he told one interviewer. Eventually, he relented, and The Message was an instant classic. It exposed the harsh realities of African American life, including police brutality, poor housing and systemic racism in education. The song marked a pivotal moment in hiphop: the genre subsequently existed not just to entertain, but to enlighten. Journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates has returned after a near decade-long absence from nonfiction with a book that has the same title and mission – and it…

I’m two weeks into a trip to Luing – pronounced “Ling” – in the Firth of Lorn in Argyll and Bute. From my “office” on a slate beach of the best skimmers in the world, I’ve witnessed beautiful sunsets, wild storms, snow and horizontal rain. Beneath me are thousands of sea-worn slates, spoil from the long-gone mines of this Slate Isles archipelago. The Vikings used these waters long before the merchantmen and navy vessels, and there are still a few lobster men plying their trade here. I first landed in 1971 and have regularly seen porpoises, bottlenose dolphins, minke whales and, on occasion, basking sharks, but no trip here is complete without otters. This time, the first ones surfaced during the two-minute ferry across Cuan Sound, soon followed by two…

Across 1 Places where speculation is widespread? (5,7) 9 Tooled up (5) 10 Hot air (7) 11 Entrance (4) 12 Wearing them means a restricted view (8) 14 Nail polish (6) 15 Rest of the afternoon? (6) 18 Implausible story (4,4) 20 Chelsea or chukka? (4) 22 Pleased (informally) (7) 23 Start of a song (5) 24 e.g. Google – greenish acne (anag) (6,6) Down 2 Prize draw (7) 3 Give over (4) 4 Suspended decoration (6) 5 Lovey-dovey – unrealistic (8) 6 Blot out (5) 7 Sense of fulfilment – at NATO’s sci-fi (anag) (12) 8 One of three men in a tub made these (12) 13 Blissfully happy (8) 16 Reduce (7) 17 Promise (to do something) (6) 19 Linney or Ingalls Wilder? (5) 21 Prawn or penguin?…

1 UNITED STATES Investigators work to piece together DC plane crash Families of victims of the deadliest US air disaster in nearly 25 years visited the crash site last Sunday amid a swirl of questions on what caused the mid-air collision between a passenger jet and a military helicopter at an airport just outside Washington DC last Wednesday, killing 67 people. The American Airlines flight, with 64 on board, was preparing to land from Wichita, Kansas. The army Black Hawk helicopter was on a training mission and had three soldiers on board. Both aircraft plunged in to the Potomac River after colliding. The plane’s passengers included figure skaters returning from the 2025 US figure skating championships, and a group of hunters. Three army staff were killed in the helicopter. The National…

At 2.16pm California time on 26 January, the US billionaire tech investor Marc Andreessen called it. “DeepSeek R1 is AI’s Sputnik moment,” he posted on X. A Chinese startup, operating since 2023 and helmed by a millennial mathematician, had unveiled a new chatbot that seemed to equal the performance of America’s leading models at a fraction of the cost. Never mind that its answers on everything from the status of Taiwan to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre were curbed by Chinese Communist party (CCP) censors. To Andreessen, it was like the Soviet Union getting the first satellite into orbit in 1957. The next day, shares in several of the world’s biggest companies plunged – including the biggest fall in US market history for microchip maker Nvidia, which lost nearly $600bn.…

With the assistance of an expert from the UK’s Alan Turing Institute we tried out leading chatbots. The AI tools were asked the same questions to gauge their differences. Here are the results. ChatGPT (OpenAI) OpenAI’s groundbreaking chatbot is still the biggest brand in the field by far. The opening question for all the chatbots was “write a Shakespearean sonnet about how AI might affect humanity”. The result? Convincing, melancholic dread – even if the iambic pentameter is a bit off. But even the bard himself might have struggled to write 14 lines in less than a minute. Pray, gentle guide, shape well this newborn power, Lest in its wake all realms of man devour. ChatGPT then writes: “Thought about AI and humanity for 49 seconds.” You hope the tech…

People living in Goma on the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s eastern border with Rwanda have spoken of their fear and acute hunger after the M23 rebel group swept into the city last week. “We are very afraid. This situation feels hopeless,” said Judith Saima, a 28-year-old merchant in Goma, where heavy fighting that cut the city off from the outside world and left bodies piling up in the streets only subsided last Wednesday. Access to food is a significant concern, after trade and agricultural supply routes were severed. “If this continues, we will all die, either from stray bullets or starvation,” said 26-year-old Ngise Ngeleka, a student living in the ULPG neighbourhood. Ngeleka said her neighbour had been hit by a bullet at the beginning of the week and…

As the first flight touched down on the fresh tarmac at Gwadar, it was hailed by Pakistan’s government as a step towards “progress and prosperity”. The new airport – the largest in the country – built in Pakistan’s troubled Balochistan province was “ a symbol of the cooperation between Pakistan and China”, according to the defence minister, Khawaja Muhammad Asif. Yet the optics of the event told another story. As it unfolded, the city of Gwadar was put under a security lockdown. And while several senior Pakistan government and military figures were present, their Chinese government counterparts were noticeably absent – even though it was China footing the $230m bill for the airport. Gwadar, with its Chinese-sponsored airport, deepwater port and proposed economic zone, has been touted as a jewel…

More than 40 years after Sebastian Coe powered to his second Olympic 1500m title, he is still running hungry. He’s in the gym most mornings at 6am, cranking out 40-50km a week on the treadmill, doing conditioning work or lifting weights, before meticulously recording his workouts in training diaries – just as he did during his golden heyday. Even at 68, he is still chasing a fresh ambition: securing the most powerful job in global sport. “I will work harder for this than I’ll probably ever work for anything,” Coe insisted in December when he launched his manifesto to be the next president of the International Olympic Committee. “It’s the dance that I just couldn’t sit out.” That dance, however, is about to get a lot more frenetic. Last week…

JULY 2024 Locked in a tiny metal box in a prison transport van rattling its way to HMP Bronzefield, on the Middlesex-Surrey border, I felt at peace. I was on trial with four other Just Stop Oil protesters over the group’s non-violent direct action on the M25 motorway in 2022. The judge had told the jury to ignore evidence of the climate emergency, and we were not allowed to talk in depth about the climate breakdown when defending our actions. But we do not have the time to pretend the existential threat we face is not real. My sense of peace came from having an opportunity to speak out about the crisis during our trial. When I arrived in the cell that night, hearing the key turn in the lock,…

I want to tell you about a relatively typical neighbourhood in my city. There are two vegan sushi restaurants, three vegan ramen spots. There are a few vegan delis. All the convenience stores have a vegan section. There’s an abundance of vegan bakeries. There’s a place that does vegan peking duck – it’s good, I promise. I’m not talking about Los Angeles or New York. I’m not even talking about Copenhagen. My neighbourhood is called Śródmieście. The vegan paradise I’m talking about – it’s Warsaw. If you don’t believe me, well, Warsaw has been ranked among the top vegan cities in the world by HappyCow (a vegan ranking website) for the past six years. In 2022, it was National Geographic’s No 1 vegan city in the world. Maybe your perception…

A Sunday afternoon in December and London’s Southbank Centre draws its usual eclectic crowd: tourists, young families, culture lovers. But as I move through the people, a pattern starts to emerge. The cavernous space is dotted with people wearing the same black T-shirts printed with bold white lettering. Many read “Team Sceptic”, even more say “Team Believer”. Some, curiously, bear the phrase “Bloody Hell, Ken! ” If you’re into the paranormal – ghosts, UFOs, demons, witchcraft, Bigfoot, etc – you’ll recognise them as slogans from Uncanny, a hit BBC podcast that first aired in late 2021 and has since snowballed into a many-pronged behemoth of ghoulish entertainment, replete with a show, a live tour and a bestselling book. (Ken, by the way, was the protagonist of the first ever episode, recounting…

Eimear McBride does extraordinary things with language. The subject matter of her fiction, from A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing onwards, is transgressive. In 2016’s The Lesser Bohemians and in this new novel, not so much a sequel as a variation, she writes about incestuous child abuse, self-harm, suicide, heroin addiction, a miscarriage deliberately induced by rough penetrative sex, and about lots of other sex between a couple whose ages (she’s not yet 20, he’s nearly 40) are likely to give modern readers pause. But what is most startling about McBride’s work is not its dark material, but the way she breaks every rule in the grammar book and gleefully gets away with it. The City Changes Its Face has a doubled and entwined time scheme. It is the 1990s,…

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TRANSPORT Anger after Reeves backs third runway at Heathrow Rachel Reeves caused a furious backlash after she insisted a third runway at Heathrow was “set up for success”, despite scepticism in Whitehall that the plan can be reconciled with the UK’s climate obligations. The chancellor made throwing the government’s weight behind Heathrow expansion the centrepiece of a major speech on growth last week. “As our only hub airport, Heathrow is in a unique position – and we cannot duck the decision any longer,” she said, adding: “The case is stronger than ever.” Reeves struck an optimistic tone on the UK’s economic prospects after accusations that she was too gloomy during Labour’s early months in power and a government bond sell-off jeopardised her tax and spending targets. But the Heathrow plan…

One by one, the bottles of Kentucky bourbon were pulled from the shelf of a Vancouver liquor store. In their place, a sign: “Buy Canadian instead.” The move, aimed at states with Republican governors, marked an early salvo in a looming trade war between the US and Canada. “We have targeted red states because, quite frankly, Donald Trump doesn’t care about Democrat states,” British Columbia’s housing minister, Ravi Kahlon, said. “We want to make sure that we’re not punishing states that have nothing to do with this.” Over last weekend, the US had announced sweeping tariffs on Canada, one of its largest trading partners and political allies. And in a speech lauded across the political aisle in Canada, the outgoing prime minister, Justin Trudeau, said the American taxes, in breach…

Far-right parties could become the largest force on the right in Europe within a decade, experts have said, as mainstream conservative parties look to copy their hardline agendas, especially on immigration, in a vain effort to win back votes. Germany’s conservatives last week sparked fury when their leader, Friedrich Merz, the country’s likely next chancellor, broke a longstanding pledge by relying on far-right votes to adopt a non-binding motion urging a drastic immigration crackdown. The leader of Alternative für Deutschland, Alice Weidel, hailed “a historic day for Germany” as the Bundestag, for the first time in its history, passed a vote with the backing of her party, which is second in the polls ahead of elections on 23 February. In France, controversial remarks by the centrist prime minister, François Bayrou,…

If shipping boss Niels Clemensen were to offer any advice to Donald Trump or anyone else trying to get a foothold in Greenland, it would be this: “Come up here and see what you are actually dealing with.” Sitting on the top floor of his beamed office in Nuuk harbour, where snow is being flung around by strong winds in the mid-morning darkness outside and shards of ice pass by in the fast-flowing water, the chief executive of Greenland’s only shipping company, Royal Arctic Line, said: “ What you normally see as easy [setting up operations] in the US or Europe is not the same up here.” As well as the cold, ice and extremely rough seas, the world’s biggest island does not have a big road network or trains,…

João Diamante was gripped by a sense of belonging as he stepped out of the airport terminal thousands of kilometres from his birthplace in Brazil. “The first thing I felt was that I was at home,” said the 33-year-old celebrity chef from Rio de Janeiro. “Nobody looked at me like they were afraid of me because of the colour of my skin … On the contrary, I saw people just like me. I saw similarities.” “I’d never been there before,” Diamante said of his arrival in Benin’s largest city, Cotonou, last year. “But I was certain this was a place I knew: its smell, its music, its dance, its sound, the noise of car horns, the atmosphere.” He was familiar with his surroundings in a way, despite it being his…

Donald Trump didn’t need to wait for the black box flight recorder. He knew what caused the mid-air collision of a passenger plane and army helicopter that killed 67 people. Or he thought he did. “They actually came out with a directive – ‘too white’,” the US president told reporters last Thursday, seeking to blame former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden for including Black and Latino people in the federal workforce. “We want the people that are competent.” That it took Trump less than a day to exploit a tragic plane crash for his crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes should come as no surprise. The 78-year-old president is on a mission to win the “culture wars”, acting with speed and ferocity to bring his rightwing agenda…

DOWN AN EASY-TO-MISS TURNOFF on the A48 just outside Chepstow on the English-Welsh border, the gentle rumble of trucks, cranes and people at work mixes with birdsong in what is an otherwise peaceful and rural setting. It’s a crisp and sunny winter morning when I visit and at first glance the site appears to be little more than prefab containers and a car park. But behind the scenes a group of men and women with expertise in diving, marine biology, technology, finance, construction and manufacturing are building something extraordinary. They have come together with a single mission statement: to make humans aquatic. The project is called Deep and the site was chosen after a global search for the perfect location to build and test underwater accommodation that the project founders…

I can scarcely believe I’m writing this, but it’s hard to dodge the conclusion. After 14 years of environmental vandalism, it might seem impossible for Labour to offer anything but improvement. But on green issues, this government is worse than the Tories. The last prime minister to insist that growth should override every other consideration, and to fling insults at anyone who disagreed, was Liz Truss. She called those of us seeking to defend the living world an “ anti-growth coalition”, “ voices of decline ” and “ enemies of enterprise ” who “ don’t understand aspiration ”. Now Keir Starmer has picked up her theme and run with it. Those who challenge government policies that might promote GDP growth, however destructive and irrational, such as the planned expansion of…

I was given a slow cooker for Christmas, but haven’t used it yet – any advice for a complete novice? Slow cookers aren’t exactly sexy, but what they lack in aesthetics, they more than make up for in meal prepping and problem-solving. Simply chuck everything in there, turn it on and a few hours later dinner is effortlessly served. But there are a few basic slow cooker rules that you need to abide by. First, the liquid: unlike the oven or hob, a slow cooker doesn’t lose as much liquid through evaporation, so even if a dish looks as if it’s not saucy enough, trust me, it very probably is, in which case adding a load of extra stock or water will just leave you with soup, which is ideal…

✱ All solutions published next week Across 1 Check, one related to ear that’s messy (7) 5 Lay out clues with a solver’s tip (7) 9 Light, so aren’t moving in line regularly? (7) 10 Current game’s unfinished (7) 11 Spam is ‘the works’ for the rest of the crew (9) 12 Kidnap missing leader? Certainly (5) 13 Anglo-Saxon hairy creature one’s neglected until now (2,3) 15 City in which a pair takes daily exercise initially (9) 17 Lying about copper (crooked) raking in millions (9) 19 Brummie goes on record over animated artificial human (5) 22 Sheen appearing at last on Casualty? (5) 23 One who belittles journalist reversing vehicle (9) 25 Say, Loren’s excited to go inside soon! (7) 26 Union-related joke about ‘turning tail’ (7) 27 Reserve…