Innehållsförteckning för 28 February 2025 från Guardian Weekly

The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol212 | Issue№ 9 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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Friedrich Merz, a former banker who has never been a minister, appears likely to be the next chancellor of Germany after his conservative CDU/CSU alliance won the most votes in Sunday’s crucial federal election. Merz, a keen aviator and married father of three, whose wife prevented him from buying his own private plane until his children were out of the house (he now reportedly owns two), will want to make his mark early on. Here’s a brief look at his in-tray. Relations with the US Having presented himself early on in the election campaign as an assertive businessman who would be well equipped to make deals with Donald Trump, Merz was forced to switch his stance within hours after the US president flipped the narrative on Russia’s war in Ukraine.…

After three years of war and western isolation, Russians are starting to hope that the recent flurry of US-Russia diplomacy could offer a path to peace in Ukraine – and restore the sense of normality lost when their leader sent tanks across the Ukrainian border. Last week’s US-Russia talks in Saudi Arabia have sent the country’s propagandists and political establishment into euphoria, celebrating what they see as a real chance of achieving Russia’s goals in the war at the expense of Ukraine and its European allies. Polls indicate that support for Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine remains strong. Yet they also show that many Russians – especially in major cities like Moscow and St Petersburg – appear to yearn for the pre-war days when they could easily fly to Europe…

Dr Issam Abu Ajwa was in the middle of an emergency procedure at al-Ahli Arab hospital in central Gaza when soldiers came for him. “I asked them what they were doing coming into the operating theatre. One of them pointed at me and said: ‘Are you Dr Issam Abu Ajwa? ’ I said: ‘Yes, that’s me. ’ And then the beating began.” Still in his surgeons’ scrubs, the 63-year-old Abu Ajwa, who had come out of retirement to volunteer at the start of the war, said he was dragged from the operating room, handcuffed, blindfolded and stripped. Then, along with at least 17 other terrified doctors, nurses and medical staff from the hospital, he was put in a military truck and driven away. He said that less than 24 hours…

The sound of a flute floats towards five young men in the 1,000-seat Bidi Bidi Performing Arts Centre theatre in Uganda – the country that hosts the highest number of refugees in Africa. The music carries past them to the shrubs that surround the circular majestic building and the neighbours going about their lives, the more than 250,000 refugees who live in the 250 sq km Bidi Bidi refugee settlement, the largest refugee camp in Africa. The young men – gathered for a chance to play a musical instrument or record music – welcome visitors. They are seated under the oldest fig tree, where the dream of building a place for the creative young people of Bidi Bidi to commune and nurture their talents was born. “People always gathered under…

Painted with the support of the city council in 2017, a mural spanning the entire side of a six-storey building in Guayaquil’s financial district went largely unnoticed for more than a year in Ecuador’s most populous city – until it triggered outrage. The painting showed two men grappling over money: one dressed in a suit, tie and shoes, with fair skin; the other shirtless, in shorts, flip-flops and a stocking mask. He was dark-skinned. For Black activists, the artwork’s message left no room for doubt: it implied a robbery and reinforced racist stereotypes, smearing Ecuador’s African-descendant minority, which suffers the worst outcomes in areas such as unemployment and gender-based violence. “It was an offence to the Black people of Guayaquil,” said Guillermo Leones Pacheco, 62, president of the Pueblo Negro…

At the height of Jair Bolsonaro’s haywire presidency, Brazilian activists projected their deepest desire on to the Tower of London, where Guy Fawkes once languished after plotting to blow up parliament and assassinate the king. “Jail Bolsonaro,” their word s read. Last week, after Brazil’s ex-president, 69, was formally accused of masterminding a murderous conspiracy of his own – to allegedly overthrow the government and assassinate foes with bullets and poison – his critics felt that day was finally drawing near. “I’d be extremely worried if I were in his shoes,” said Cesar Calejon, the author of critical books about Bolsonaro and his political project. “I think it’s highly unlikely this process won’t end with Jair Bolsonaro in jail,” Calejon said, celebrating a momentous “inflection point” he believed would seal…

Aresonant phrase during Donald Trump’s first administration was the advice to take him “seriously, but not literally”. It was a singularly detrimental expression, widely quoted by politicians and the media. Its adoption fitted with the position many felt most comfortable taking: Trump was bad, but he wasn’t smart. He wasn’t intentional. He wasn’t calculated and deliberate. He sounded off, but rarely followed up with action. He was in essence a misfiring weapon that could do serious damage, but mostly by accident. The residue of that approach still persists, even in analysis that describes Trump’s first executive orders as a campaign of “shock and awe”, as if it were just a matter of signalling rather than executing. Or that his plan for Gaza is to be taken – you guessed it…

Ellen Kane is on a roll. When we speak, the choreographer and movement director has two shows running, Ballet Shoes at London’s National Theatre and Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 at the Donmar Warehouse across town. She has just finished Why Am I So Single?, the follow-up from the writers of Six, the smash hit about Henry VIII’s wives, and she’s in rehearsals for the revival of Dear England, James Graham’s funny and stirring depiction of Gareth Southgate’s tenure as England football manager. If you watched all those shows you would have no idea the same person had a hand in them all, such is the art of the movement director, a job many may not even realise exists. But it’s an essential one. “Outside actually directing…

‘Where’s the Palestinian Martin Luther King?” Journalist and novelist Omar El Akkad has heard this question a lot lately, “the implicit accusation [being] that certain people are incapable of responding to their mistreatment with grace, with patience, with love, and that this incapacity, not any external injustice, is responsible for the misery inflicted upon them”. But far more than loving or patient, King was eloquent. Palestine has many eloquent defenders, and El Akkad is one of them. Born in Egypt, raised in Qatar and Canada, and now a US citizen, he has reported from the Middle East, Afghanistan and Guantá namo. His new book is a response to events in Gaza after 7 October 2023. It is his voice spilling out after decades of having to keep quiet for the…

1 GERMANY Merz issues AfD warning as he sizes up SPD coalition The doubling of support for the far right in Germany’s federal election was “the last warning” to the country’s mainstream parties to provide effective leadership, Friedrich Merz, the leader of Germany’s victorious conservative alliance, has said. Speaking on Monday after his CDU/CSU alliance came first with 28.5% of the vote, the man who is on course to become the next German chancellor said centrist parties needed to heed the surge in support for the anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The AfD won more than 20% of the vote, about twice the share it garnered at the last election three years ago. But it will not be part of negotiations to form a coalition government because of the “firewall” between…

When I think of German democracy, I think of the Larsen B ice shelf: a vast Antarctic structure that remained stable for 10,000 years until – in just over a month, to the horror of shocked onlookers – it collapsed catastrophically. Before last weekend’s election, the coalition led by the centre-left Social Democratic party (SPD) fell apart thanks in no small part to the continual attempts at sabotage by the Free Democratic party (FDP), its most junior member. Yet the other two coalition parties were also culpable – the Greens, who failed to articulate a compelling enough vision for a future with clean energy, and the SPD itself, whose leader, Olaf Scholz, the chancellor, was mostly as invisible as his predecessor, Angela Merkel, was imposing. Having lived and worked in…

What do you give the man who has everything? A ballroom of conservative activists found out last week when Elon Musk was presented with a chainsaw by Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, who has used it as a symbol of his push to impose fiscal discipline. Wearing sunglasses, a black Maga baseball cap and a gold necklace, Musk giddily wielded the chainsaw, which had the words “Long live freedom, damn it” written on its blade. “This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy!” he declared. Members of the audience shouted: “We love you!” Musk replied: “I love you guys, too!” The head of Tesla and SpaceX was embraced by the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a window on the soul of the Republican party and Donald Trump’s support base. This year’s conference at…

For most homeowners, a request from a passerby to touch the exterior of their property would probably raise their eyebrows. But for the owner of Nina’s House, which is covered with unusual and striking cork insulation panels, it is not only a common occurrence but it is very much welcomed. The conversations may start with curiosity but often lead to lengthy, passionate discussions on how to make homes more energy efficient, says the house’s owner, Nina Wood-croft. “We are new to the neighbourhood and it has been a really nice way to engage with our new community. A lot of delivery drivers will be like, ‘ What’s this?’and we’ll have a chat for 10 minutes about cork instead of just this transactional ‘ Thank you, bye.’ ” Woodcroft and her…

On a chilly evening in late 2016, a few kilometres from the Turkish city of Adana, a Kurdish farmer named İzzettin Akman was sitting on the second-floor balcony of his concrete ranch house when a construction truck backed up to the edge of his citrus groves, paused, then dumped a great load of rubbish along the roadside. Before he pulled away, the truck’s driver set a paper bag on fire and tossed it on top of the garbage, triggering an outpouring of flames blacker than the night sky into which they ascended. Akman leapt up, put on his sandals and sprinted out along his dirt driveway toward the crackling trash pile. The trash, by the time Akman got to it, was a hissing mass of fire. Plastic is less flammable…

Two days after Christmas, the Atlas sky survey team discovered a new rocky object in Earth’s astronomical neighbourhood. Atlas discovers near-Earth objects all the time: in 2024, the team discovered 167 of them. They also codiscovered comet Tsuchinshan–Atlas, which dazzled sky gazers last autumn. But this discovery was special: there’s a chance the 40- to 90-metre object, known as 2024 YR4, will hit Earth in 2032. In January, the impact probability was just over 1%, then it was raised to 2.3% in early February. Last week, the Nasa JPL Center for Near Earth Object Studies raised that to 3.1% – or about a 1-in-32 chance of impact. There are four reasons I’m not worried just yet. First, the possible impact would be in December 2032, so we’ve got time to…

Stephen Graham is red-faced and fidgeting in a London hotel alongside Malachi Kirby and Erin Doherty, his co-stars in A Thousand Blows. I explained how my partner had initially dismissed the gritty period drama on account of all the brutal boxing bouts. But after seeing a glimpse of an extremely hench, shirtless and sweating Graham, she decided that she probably would be able to join me in watching after all. “I don’t know what to say,” says Graham, as Kirby and Doherty tease him. “ If that’s what it takes to get bums on seats, I’ll go with it.” The physical transformations – Kirby says he lost his “lockdown belly” and he looks like a mean, lean fighting machine in the show – took them about six months, training five…

It’s some measure of the extent of urbanisation that the bookends to our day may not be birdsong but the sound of a kettle as the water in it reaches boiling point. That “tock” is made by a miniature device, a small disc consisting of alternating strips of two different metals. When exposed to heat, the metals expand at different rates, the disc gradually curves, and a switch is tripped, cutting off electricity to the kettle. Few of us know this; we write odes to nightingales, not thermostats, even though it is the latter that provides our morning soundtrack, those sonic notches that mark the passing of each day. Tock, tock, tock. I thought little about those metallic notes until I read Tim Minshall’s new book, an ambitious exploration of…

Magnus Carlsen’s dominance of online chess continued last week with the world No 1 in pole position for the concluding stages of the Chessable Masters, the first leg of the Champions Tour that the Norwegian has won every year since it was launched in 2020. In the final against the world No 2, Hikaru Nakamura, Carlsen’s endgame skills wobbled. He won the first game and was ahead in the second, until a shocking blunder at move 89, which allowed the American to reach the draw of king against rook pawn and wrong-coloured bishop, and the game was halved by stalemate. Carlsen obviously knows the bishop and rook pawn rule, so how did this happen? The clue is in the time control, which for this online Champions Tour is 10 minutes…

✱ All solutions published next week Across 8 414 causing disgust? (5,3) 9 Becks has run out in reserves (5) 10 Vlad’s constituents discussed award (4) 11 Cream cracker? Yes and no (6,4) 12 Trick revealed by husband ‘disappearing’ (6) 14 Relocate – it’s good in Abu Dhabi? (8) 15 After exercise one man climaxing (7) 17 Nearly sleep with old flame inside (extremely hot) (7) 20 Almost reaching accord over retirement drink (8) 22 Secured but ran away (6) 23 Driving away American politician involved – it’s part of the clean-up (10) 24 Mate’s encouraging words (2,2) 25 Lawman whose sombre features repelled (5) 26 Hear a top’s unsuitable attire for seeing Lulu? (5,3) Down 1 What in bar I’m due to order? (8) 2 See kind of intuitively,…

DEFENCE Starmer delays defence spending announcement Keir Starmer was unlikely to set out a plan this week for when the UK would increase its defence spending to 2.5% of GDP, a cabinet minister indicated. The education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, said the target was ambitious, despite Labour previously claiming it would set out a path to meeting the spending goal after the strategic defence review due in the spring. The prime minister was due to meet Donald Trump at the White House this week amid strained relations between Washington and the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Peter Mandelson, the UK’s ambassador to Washington, has reportedly been urging Starmer to set a firm timeline for when the UK will increase its defence spending from 2.3% of GDP. Phillipson blamed the last Conservative administration…

For more than 150 years, the symbolism of the Siegessäule, or Victory Column, in Berlin’s Tiergarten, has shifted along-side German identity: from emblem of the empire to strategic relocation by the Nazis and, finally, its adoption as an icon of Berlin’s legendary love parade. On Sunday, as throngs of people gathered in its shadow, the golden statue bore witness to yet another shift – an election that had yielded an emboldened far right in a result that was unprecedented in Germany’s postwar history. “I’m devastated,” said David, 32. “And I’m scared and sad.” Although the conservative CDU/CSU bloc won the largest share of the vote (28.5%), the second force in the parliament was the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which garnered just under 21% of the vote, nearly doubling its…

Drawing in the snow with his finger, Mykola Hrechukha sketched out how Ukraine’s new lithium mine might look. It would have a deep central shaft, with a series of side tunnels, he said. “The lithium is good every-where. The biggest concentration is at a depth of 200-500 metres,” he said. “We should be able to extract 4,300 tonnes a day. The potential is terrific.” For now, though, there is little sign of activity. The deposit is buried under a large sloping field, used in communist times to grow beetroot and wheat. The mine’s proposed entrance is in an abandoned former-Soviet village, Liodiane, today a scruffy grove of acacia and maple trees. The only inhabitant is a security guard, who lives on the 150-hectare site in an ancient Gaz-53 truck. Wild…

The splendours of the Parthenon, Colosseum and Great Pyramid of Giza were in stark contrast to the utilitarian conference centre in London’s docklands, but they were there to make a point. As 4,000 people from dozens of countries filed in for a three-day jam-boree of rightwing discourse last week, the images of the monuments were a reminder that great civilisations of the past had risen, declined and fallen. A commentary warned that western civilisation was at a tipping point, in crisis because it had lost touch with its “Judeo-Christian foundations”. The message greeted those attending the sold-out conference for politicians, policymakers, business people and “culture formers” organised by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (Arc) at east London’s ExCeL centre, where non-discounted tickets cost £1,500 ($1,900). The leader of the Conservatives,…

The earliest version of the Swedish semla was a 16th-century plain bread bun served in a soup of warm milk eaten only on Shrove Tuesday in preparation for the 40-day fast of Lent. It is a far cry from this year’s hit varieties, which include Dubai chocolate (the chocolate bar with a knafeh and pistachio filling that became a TikTok trend) and chokladboll (based on a Scandinavian oat, cocoa and butter ball – a popular fika or coffee time item). Social media has turbocharged the popularity of the traditional buns but also transformed them almost beyond recognition. The whipped cream-filled, almond paste-stuffed Instagram-friendly semlor that fill the windows of Sweden’s bakeries and patisseries in the run-up to Lent this year are more of a celebration of decadent eating than fasting.…

On a bright winter’s day last week, a group of protesters fanned out along a palm tree-lined thoroughfare in the picturesque city of Palm Desert to demand that their Republican congressman stand up to Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s slash-and-burn effort to reshape the US government. “You work for us, not Musk!” read one sign. “Remember your oath,” another warned, as a mobile billboard circled nearby, featuring the president and the billionaire tech mogul, with the message: “When he’s snooping through your bank accounts, you dump him.” A smaller contingent of constituents had attempted to secure a meeting with the congressman, Ken Calvert, but found the door of his regional office locked and the blinds drawn. “He needs to hear from us, we the people,” said Colleen Duffy-Smith, 71, who…

I first heard about my friend Adam’s curious new habit in a busy pub. He said he’d been doing it for over a year, but had never spoken to anyone about it before. He had a furtive look around, then took out his phone and showed me the product of his burning obsession: a spreadsheet. This was not a record of his annual tax return or numbers he was crunching for work (Adam is a data scientist). Instead, it was a spread-sheet recording the minutiae of his life, with dozens of columns tracking every element of his daily routine. It all started, he told me, because of a recurring argument with his boyfriend. His partner didn’t think they spent enough time together, but Adam thought that they did. There was only…

Roses are red, violets are blue. Rightwing politicians around the world want women to have more babies, and if you find this idea the opposite of romantic – well, me too. Pronatalism’s cause is not exactly helped by having as its best-known figureheads JD “childless cat lady” Vance and Elon Musk, seemingly on a personal mission to reverse what he calls the “underpopulation crisis”. Even Nigel Farage, a twice-divorced father of four who takes the firmly libertarian view that private lives are no business of the state, squirmed when tackled on the subject last week, before eventually venturing that the west had “kind of forgotten that what underpins everything is our Judeo-Christian culture” and that “of course, we need higher birthrates, but we’re not going to get higher birthrates in…

How can I make a tin of baked beans tastier? “One of my most popular recipes ever was jazzed-up beans on toast, ” says food writer Melek Erdal. When it comes to injecting flavour into baked beans, it’s all about the base, and for Erdal that means toasting spices (cumin seeds, ground coriander, aleppo chilli) in an ovenproof pan, then adding ginger, garlic and chilli, and some oil. “Add the beans, crumble feta on top, then pop it in the oven until the top caramelises.” Erdal might also add a drizzle of tahini, “for a take on shakshuka, and a lovely brunch or lunch”. Eleanor Maidment, author of Pulse, makes a base of chorizo and red peppers, then adds beans and poaches some eggs in them. Cured meat is, of…

Suddenly, out of the margins of a thorn thicket that surrounds the common, a flock of long-tailed tits, 20- or 30-strong, erupts into darting, swirling flight, borne along on a soft and eager susurrus of liquid call-notes. I love these little birds, so active, so tribally cooperative in their nesting and breeding. This tiny bird might well rank as our smallest avian species, but the tail, which it folds over its head in the nest, gives a misleading impression of one of our absolute featherweights. The peasant poet John Clare is as perfectly observant as ever in providing an exquisite vignette of their fidgety presence in his poem Emmonsail’s Heath in Winter: “ And coy bumbarrels, twenty in a drove, / Flit down the hedgerows in the frozen plain /…

Across 1 Short of a bob or two (4-8) 9 Angrily reproach (5) 10 Naughty creature causing failure in electronic devices? (7) 11 Putsch (4) 12 Denigrate (8) 14 Rules of behaviour (6) 15 Blackcurrant liqueur (6) 18 Wrong (8) 20 Hairline – acceptable – penalty (4) 22 Plush (7) 23 Eyed veg? (5) 24 Equally adept with both hands (12) Down 2 Astronomical bearing (7) 3 Mind (4) 4 Christopher Robin’s bouncing friend (6) 5 Nebraska native? (8) 6 Guide (5) 7 Many many moons – for an equine beast? (7,5) 8 Cold treat served in a tall glass (3-5,4) 13 Thin part of mutton neck (5,3) 16 Tibetan ‘owl-headed’ dog (4,3) 17 Summit (6) 19 Small firework (5) 21 Night twinkler? (4) Solution No 17,088…