Innehållsförteckning för 11 July 2025 från Guardian Weekly

Reclaim the Seine Swimmers take a dip in the Paris river last weekend following a €1.4bn ($1.6bn) clean-up programme to enable it to be used for public swimming for the first time in more than a century. About 1,000 people a day will be allowed access to three bathing sites for free until the end of August. The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol213 | Issue№ 2 Guardian Weekly is an edited selection of some of the best journalism found in the Guardian’s digital editions in the UK, US and Australia, and the Guardian newspaper in the UK. The weekly magazine has an international focus and four editions: global, Europe, Australia and North America. The Guardian was founded in 1821, and Guardian Weekly in 1919. We…

He doesn’t look like the innovative type, but Keir Starmer is staging a radical experiment. He is testing out a theory of politics just months after it was seemingly – and spectacularly – disproved, hoping for a turnaround so stunning it borders on resurrection. The theory in question is that if you deliver practical improvements to the lives of voters, they will reward you at the ballot box. Its guiding principle is “show, don’t tell”, with the emphasis on results. He’s not the first to try it: this was also the animating creed of Joe Biden’s presidency – and we know how that worked out. So far, the approach seems to be bearing similarly sour fruit. As Starmer marks one year since his landslide victory, Labour has suffered the biggest…

Benjamin Netanyahu told Donald Trump that he would nominate him for the Nobel peace prize as the two leaders met on Monday, for the first time since the US launched strikes on Iran’s nuclear programme as part of a short-lived war between Israel and Iran. Trump was expected to press Netanyahu to agree to a ceasefire in Israel’s 21-month-old war against Hamas in Gaza amid an outcry over the humanitarian cost of an offensive that has led to nearly 60,000 deaths, most of them Palestinian. Netanyahu arrived in Washington in a strong political position, observers have said, potentially giving him the diplomatic cover he would need to end the war in Gaza without facing a revolt from his rightwing supporters that could lead to the collapse of his government. Hamas…

In 1999, the anthropologist Beatriz Huertas ventured into the Peruvian Amazon to investigate reports of uncontacted Indigenous peoples. Along the Las Piedras River, people in Monte Salvado, a Yine village, described how every summer, aislados – those avoiding sustained contact with outsiders – would appear across the river. Huertas followed the trail north into Brazil’s Acre state, collecting evidence – footprints, tools, local testimonies. Her findings, compiled in a 2001 report for the Native Federation of the Madre de Dios River and Tributaries (Fenamad), recommended protecting 2m hectares for the Mashco Piro, the world’s largest uncontacted Indigenous group. Twenty-five years later, the Mashco Piro face growing threats from logging, drug trafficking and the climate crisis in the Brazil-Peru borderlands. Despite legal protection and international agreements, cooperation between Brazil and Peru…

Dr Yousuke Kaifu was working at an archaeological site on the Japanese islands of Okinawa. The pieces unearthed in the excavation, laid out before him, revealed evidence of humans living there 30,000 years ago, arriving from the north and the south. But how did they get there? “There are stone tools and archaeological remains at the site but they don’t answer those questions,” Kaifu, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Tokyo, said. In the Palaeolithic era, or the old stone age, technology was rudimentary, he said. “It was great they reached those islands with such simple technology. I wanted to experience it.” So Kaifu devised a plan that would see a team of researchers take a 225km canoe trip from Taiwan to Japan’s Yonaguni island. Yonaguni is the closest…

It is impossible not to feel a deep sense of pain, sadness and shared heartbreak at news of the sudden death of Diogo Jota and his brother André Silva in a car crash in Spain. Jota was 28, father to three young children and a husband to his long-term partner, whom he married 1 1 days before his death. Jota was blessed with the talent, heart and will that qualified him to live the extraordinary public life of a modern-day elite footballer. Within that nexus he was able to do so with the grace, humour and commitment that made him a beloved teammate and fan favourite, and also a fine sporting figure, an athlete who poured energy, life and love into providing moments of uplift and connection in the shirts…

The United Nations and its agencies have long struggled with funding shortfalls. Now an entrenched problem is becoming an acute crisis in the shadow of Donald Trump’s executioner’s axe. The US is the biggest contributor, at 22%, to the UN’s core budget. In February, the White House announced a six-month review of US membership of all international organisations, conventions and treaties, including the UN, with a view to reducing or ending funding – and possible withdrawal. The deadline for decapitation falls next month. Trump’s abolition of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and scrapping of most aid programmes, has already badly damaged UN-led and UN-backed humanitarian operations, which rely on discretionary funding. Yet Trump’s axe symbolises a more fundamental threat – to multilateralism and the much-battered international rules-based order.…

My veg gie burgers are so often underwhelming. Where am I going wrong? Beth, Newark, England, UK “Veggie burgers are often lacking in everything that’s good about food,” says Melissa Hemsley, author of Real Healthy. For her, that means texture, flavour and satisfaction. “They also tend not to have those key flavour highs – the fat, the salt – that you’re after from a homemade version.” For Lukas Volger, author of Veggie Burgers Every Which Way, texture is the complaint he hears most: “The patty is too moist, and glops out of the other side of the bun when you bite into it.” Veggie burgers often behave like this, Volger says, because vegetables contain water, so you’ll either need to cook the veg in advance or add something to the…

It would have been inconceivable in the glory days of the Soviet chess empire. For the first time since 1971 when Fide, the world chess body, began publishing its rating lists, there are no Russians ranked in the classical world top 10. Bobby Fischer was No 1 in the first Fide list, published on the eve of his Reykjavik match with Boris Spassky. In 1970, when the USSR team defeated the Rest of the World, or in the decades when Mikhail Botvinnik, Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov were the game’s supreme masters, it would have been a joke to suggest that Russian supremacy would disappear within half a century and be replaced by a rivalry between India and the United States. There is a caveat. Sergey Karjakin, the 2015 world…

1 UNITED STATES White House delays tariff hikes again amid confusion Donald Trump revealed plans to step up his trade wars on Monday but delayed tariffs hikes on goods from key economies until next month, amid widespread confusion over his controversial economic strategy. The president announced countries including Japan, South Korea and South Africa will face tariffs of up to 40% as part of a fresh wave of levies to kick in on 1 August rather than 9 July, extending a previous pause. White House officials signalled that new blanket rates would incorporate, rather than be imposed on top of, existing duties charged on certain sectors, such as cars. Meanwhile, Trump signed his sweeping spending package into law, cutting back on federal safety-net programmes and increasing funds for aggressive immigration enforcement.…

Before Israel launched its war on Iran last month, its security service uncovered an extensive network of its own citizens spying for Tehran. Since Iran’s first missile barrage on Israel in April 2024, more than 30 Israelis have been charged with collaborating with Iranian intelligence. In many cases, it began with anonymous messages offering money for information or for small tasks. The payments were then ratcheted up with ever more dangerous demands. Judging by court documents, the surge in Iranian espionage efforts over the past year achieved little, falling short of Tehran’s aspirations of carrying out high-level assassinations of Israeli officials. However, so many Israelis were prepared to carry out modest missions that the spying campaign may have been successful in crowdsourcing data on strategic sites that would become targets…

Few celebrations set the hills of Dharamshala abuzz like the birthday of the Dalai Lama. But this year, as monks and devotees flooded into the mountainous Indian city ahead of the Tibetan spiritual leader’s 90th birthday last Sunday, the anticipation was palpable. For years, the Dalai Lama had promised that around his 90th birthday he would make an announcement about his reincarnation. Finally, in a video broadcast to Tibetan monks and leaders on 2 July, he laid out what the future would hold. It came amid fears of a ruthless succession battle between the Tibetan community and the Chinese government, which for decades has sought to control the institution of the Dalai Lama, revered as the highest teacher in Tibetan Buddhism. Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, confirmed he would…

Lilac-flowering creepers engulf an abandoned house on a street corner in Medellín, spilling from the roof and smothering most of the upstairs windows. A giant fan palm is visible through one opening, while a knotty tangle of aerial roots cascades down to the pavement from another. Step through the doorway of this overgrown ruin, and you find not a scene of desolation but a sleek steel frame holding up the crumbling facade, which forms an unusual entrance to an enchanting new public park. “We behaved more like archaeologists than landscape architects,” said Edgar Mazo of Connatural, the firm behind the Parque Prado, in the working-class neighbourhood of Aranjuez. He leads me through a series of planted terraces; fountain grasses and trumpet trees sprout from where a derelict car park and…

Even your own language can have the capacity to surprise you. I recently joined a panel at a journalism conference with a reporter and a lawyer, both from Colombia. I found myself captivated by some of the words they used that aren’t – or rather weren’t – so common in Spain. The investigative journalist Diana Salinas referred to her craft as la filigrana, the filigree. I wouldn’t have used the term in that context, and yet it struck me as perfect to describe the intricate work that investigative reporting requires. Filigrana is not even considered a Latin Americanism – it comes from Italian – but it has somehow been forgotten in everyday speech in Spain. As is often the case with Spanish in Latin America, usage and context enrich the…

When Julia Roberts gets in Richard Gere’s Lotus Esprit on Hollywood Boulevard in the 1990 film Pretty Woman, Germans heard Daniela Hoffmann, not Roberts, exclaim: “Man, this baby must corner like it’s on rails!” In Spain, Mercè Montalà voiced the line, while French audiences heard it from Céline Monsarrat. Hollywood’s sweetheart sounded different in cinemas around the world but to native audiences she sounded the same. The voice actors would gain some notoriety in their home countries, but today, their jobs are being threatened by artificial intelligence. The use of AI was a major point of dispute during the Hollywood actors’ strike in 2023, when both writers and actors fought for federal legislation to protect their work. Not long after, more than 20 voice acting guilds, associations and unions formed…

Energy is the great enabler of the modern world. It connects the globe by moving people and hauling goods. It loosens the grip of the weather by warming our homes in winter and cooling them in summer. It forges the steel that raises our cities and synthesises the fertilisers that keep half the world’s population from starvation. And it empowers us by electrifying the technologies we rely on daily. It is also the great enabler of socioeconomic development. Monetary wealth and energy abundance move in lockstep: plot a graph of GDP per capita against energy consumption per capita, and you’ll draw a straight line. Low-energy, high-income nations do not exist. Prosperity and energy are inseparable. GDP per capita isn’t a perfect measure of socioeconomic development. It says nothing about how…

The constant droning of the nearby road fights against the increasing wind gusts as I venture further on to the heath. As sirens blast out in the town below, stonechats zip from gorse bush to gorse bush, and southern wood ants, otherwise known as red wood ants, rampage across the sandy paths. It’s an overcast but mild day. I’ve decided to come for an afternoon walk at Canford Heath nature reserve near Poole in Dorset. The site covers more than 344 hectares – one of the largest heaths in Dorset. UK lowland heathland is an important habitat, now rarer than tropical rainforest due to its degradation and destruction, with only 16% left of the area that existed in 1800. Scanning across a sea of gorse and heather, I can see…

LABOUR Tax rises can’t be ruled out, says chancellor Reeves Rachel Reeves said it is impossible for her to rule out tax rises in the autumn budget and insisted she never thought about quitting despite a turbulent week for her and the government. In an interview with the Guardian, the chancellor said “there are costs” to the watering down of the welfare bill and acknowledged last week was “damaging” for Downing Street. The chancellor’s tears in the Commons last Wednesday, which she said were due to a “personal matter”, spooked the financial markets and raised questions about her future in the job, but No 10 quickly weighed in behind her, saying she and the prime minister were in lockstep. Her challenging moment in parliament came in the same week that…

Exposed as divided and marginalised during the Iran crisis, European nations are scrambling to retrieve a place at the Middle East negotiating table, fearing an impulsive Donald Trump has diminishing interest in stabilising Iran or the wider region now he believes he has achieved his key objective of wiping out Tehran’s nuclear programme. On 1 July, the EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, was the latest European figure to phone the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, offering to be a facilitator and urging Tehran not to leave the crisis in a dangerous limbo by keeping UN weapons inspectors out of Iran. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has even broken a three-year silence to speak to Vladimir Putin about the risk of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, including how a deal…

Several hours after a person eats death cap mushrooms and becomes violently unwell, there is a period of relief. They feel as if they are improving. They are not. This pause soon gives way to “a relentlessly progressive and quite frightening rapid deterioration into multiple organ failure”. “The body’s different organ systems essentially shut down and the patient is extremely unwell, at a very high risk of dying,” the director of intensive care at Austin Health, Dr Stephen Warrillow, told Erin Patterson’s triple murder trial. At times it seemed almost an afterthought, during an extended trial subject to ghoulish fascination, that Don Patterson, Gail Patterson and Heather Wilkinson died terrible deaths. Ian Wilkinson barely escaped the same fate, but he was watching in court as Warrillow gave his evidence. Not…

For decades, Republicans have argued that the US would be better off if taxes were low and programmes to help low-income Americans were harder to access. With Donald Trump’s marquee tax and spending bill now enacted into law, the country will find out what it’s like to live under that sort of system. The massive legislation that Trump signed last Friday will make his campaign promises a reality by extending tax cuts enacted during his first term, and creating new deductions aimed at the working-class voters who backed his reelection. But it will also fundamentally reorder two major social safety net programmes, slashing funding and imposing new work requirements that nonpartisan estimates say will cost millions of people their benefits. The ripple effects, experts say, will be felt across the…

On 6 September 2022, Liz Truss entered No 10 with a clear vision for the country; the country asked her to leave less than 50 days later. But nearly three years on, even though all that remains of her premiership at Downing Street is a portrait she didn’t stick around long enough to see hung, it is she who really runs Britain. Not through her influence – which has been reduced to poorly attended speeches at far-right conferences in the US – but through the fear she left behind. Truss may be gone, but what remains is the shadow her failure cast, and the rigid fiscal caution that grew out of it. Last week’s benefits bill fiasco is a case in point. While all the talk from the current government…

As Los Angeles county’s new $720m art museum building nears completion, it’s still haunted by a single, vexing question: how do you hang art in a gallery where every single wall is made of massive slabs of concrete? Designed by Peter Zumthor, a prizewinning Swiss architect, the new building at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma) has sparked controversy in the art world since its initial designs were made public in 2013. The monolithic concrete structure, which has been compared with a freeway overpass and an “amoebic pancake”, was built to replace four older Lacma buildings, which were torn down. The building will hold a rotating selection from Lacma’s permanent collection of more than 150,000 art objects from around the globe. The creation of the new gallery space…

✱ All solutions published next week Across 7 Hagrid confused over pressure and pH in this solution? (7) 8 Supermodel in endless pain after knockabout (7) 9 Leave out captain (4) 10 Soap to turn off bloke (9) 12 Romance from a special one – not half! (5) 13 Spooner’s bottom tortures 3s (8) 15 Row involving Bond and Q’s successor (4) 16 I tucked into my bread (5) 17 Issue returning for predator (4) 18 Diver succeeded opening his knife? (8) 20 Article reduced in M&S for little kids (5) 21 Small man from BP? (5,4) 22 Take it easy in nature study (4) 24 fifteensquared.net is one place to see Arachne’s work? (7) 25 Former husband more generous claims old wife (7) Down 1 Mark moment (4) 2…

Across 1 Bring a boat in (4) 3 Bird that can climb down trees headfirst (8) 8 Say that again? (4) 9 Unwavering (8) 11 Upside-down (5-5) 14 Sing (6) 15 Excellent (meal) (4-2) 17 Breakfast maker (6,4) 20 Trousers material? (8) 21 Hailed vehicle (4) 22 Act of beseeching (8) 23 Sea bird (4) Down 1 Lower in the city, or in the central business district (8) 2 Bubbly (8) 4 Like fake news? (6) 5 Shot just after the bounce (4,6) 6 8 Across (anag.) (4) 7 Loathe (4) 10 I’m delighted to help! (2,8) 12 Run-in (8) 13 ___ new – corporal punishment (8) 16 Successfully launched (6) 18 Came (anag.) (4) 19 Walk briskly (4) Solution No 17,202…