Innehållsförteckning för 12 September 2025 från Guardian Weekly

Decades of hard-won progress against the climate crisis is being dismantled at a frightening pace by political and corporate forces. Each time you buy the paper, you’re powering factual, pro-science reporting that is committed to exposing those who are threatening, undermining and sabotaging our planet. One of the most impactful ways to support our journalism is with a print subscription. Support our annual climate support campaign by subscribing to the Guardian today. Go to theguardian.com/paper-subs…

It is easy to imagine how it could happen. A petrel, flying east from the Indian Ocean at the end of the Austral winter, makes landfall at New Zealand’s southern Codfish Island/Whenua Hou. Tired from its long journey, the petrel seeks refuge in the burrow of a green kākāpō: a critically endangered flightless species that is the world’s fattest parrot. If the seabird intrudes when the kākāpō is primed to breed, the male parrot may try to mate with the smaller petrel, smothering it in the process. In this case, there are two victims. The petrel harbours a deadly agent: H5 avian influenza. Soon after, bird flu begins to rip through the imperilled parrot population, pushing the waddling bird – which numbers fewer than 250 individuals – to extinction. This…

One day this summer, the Ukrainian artist Stanislav Turina took two of his books to his garden near Kyiv. One was a volume of poems by Alexander Pushkin. But Turina – a voracious reader, never without a couple of books in his backpack – had no plans to pick it up again. The 19th-century Russian has acquired a troubling resonance in Ukraine since the 2022 full-scale invasion of the country. He is frequently used by the invaders as a symbol of Russianness: huge posters depicting the writer were for example erected in the southern city of Kherson during its occupation. For many in Ukraine, it shows Pushkin is being co-opted as a cultural weapon in Russia’s war. Some would also argue that Pushkin’s poetry reinforced, and even helped form, Russia’s imperial…

SPINAL TAP ARE REMEMBERING THE OLD DAYS. It was 1966, and the young beat group from Squatney in east London – still, at that point, the Thamesmen – were honing their act in the tough clubs of the Benelux circuit. A young band from Britain could learn a lot, facing up to riotous crowds of Dutch, Flemings, Walloons and Luxembourgers. What lessons did Tap take from that year? “If you speak really loudly, it’s all right if you don’t have any of the local language,” says David St Hubbins, Tap’s leonine lead singer. “The Belgian beer is very good,” offers Nigel Tufnel, the lead guitarist who inspired legions. “And if you’ve had enough of them, you can pretty much speak the language.” Is it true what they say about women…

FILM Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale Dir: Simon Curtis Grand finale? Oh please. Let’s get real; there is no reason why this brand of gibbering, wittering, blithering and surreally enjoyable nonsense shouldn’t go on for ever. There is something entertainingly outrageous in the tongue-in-cheek craziness of this film’s opening; it almost counts as a dadaist dream sequence. I don’t think anything in the TV show or the movies had anything as mickey-takingly bizarre. Life at Downton is as eventful as ever, with Lord Grantham (Hugh Bonneville) brooding on whether to accept Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) as mistress of the house. Harold (Paul Giamatti), American brother of Lady Grantham (Elizabeth McGovern), comes to stay with his financial adviser Gus Sambrook (Alessandro Nivola). Below stairs, housekeeper Elsie Hughes (Phyllis Logan) calms the…

The Two Roberts By Damian Barr What if the protagonist of a novel was not a single person but a couple? Damian Barr takes on this challenge, and he’s found the ideal real-world source material. Working-class Scottish artists Bobby MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun were rarely apart after they met in 1933. They lived and worked together, became famous together and then declined into desperate squalor together – even poorer than when they began. Barr knows what it’s like to conquer Glasgow from a small, working-class town on its outskirts; he knows what it’s like to find yourself feted for your portraits of the place you’ve left irrevocably behind. His memoir, Maggie and Me, was a hard-hitting yet rambunctious tale of growing up gay near Motherwell under Thatcher, uneasily aware that…

1 Wordpool Find the correct definition: MALACOLOGY a) pommology b) folly in ancient Greece c) study of molluscs d) blandishment 2 E pluribus unum Rearrange IRISH GARDENS to make a single word. 3 Dropouts Identify the word(s) in which asterisks represent a missing letter: P*I*T*S 4 Same Difference Identify the words that differ in the letters shown: 5 Cryptic Student meets alien on the network (8) © CMM2025 Maslanka 1 Wordpool c). 2 EPU HAIRDRESSING. 3 Dropouts PLINTHS. 4 Same Difference TOGO, TOGA. 5 Cryptic INTERNET (INTERN + ET).…

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Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol 213 | Issue № 11 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 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…

Xi Jinping’s choice of suit was as carefully selected as the uniforms of the synchronised soldiers. Xi presided over the 50,000 spectators in Tiananmen Square in an instantly recognisable “Mao suit”. The simple, tunic-style jacket was first adopted by Sun Yat-sen, the nationalist revolutionary who helped to overthrow the Qing dynasty in 1911. Blending Chinese and western elements, the utilitarian jacket symbolised a rejection of imperial decadence. In Chinese, the suit is still known as a “Zhongshan suit”, after the name Sun is known by in China. But to the outside world the outfit is better known as the Mao suit.…

As the French president, Emmanuel Macron, faces a crucial moment on the world stage this month, with the recognition of a Palestinian state at the UN assembly and diplomacy over Gaza and Ukraine, he has once again been shaken by a damaging political crisis at home. The toppling of centrist prime minister, François Bayrou, leaves Macron scrambling to appoint his third PM in a year, and the fifth since his second term as president began in 2022. Since Macron’s gamble of calling a snap election in June last year, parliament remains divided between the left, the centre and the far right. This has created deadlock on economic policy and divisions over the most basic political task: setting a budget for 2026. Bayrou fell because of his unpopular austerity budget to…

There was nothing remarkable about the middle-aged couple who lived in the villa on a quiet residential street in Argentina’s best-known seaside town, Mar del Plata. Patricia Kadgien, 59, was born in Buenos Aires. Her social media described her as a yoga teacher and practitioner of biodecoding, an obscure alternative therapy. Her husband, Juan Carlos Cortegoso, 61, built and raced go-karts. Like many in this neighbourhood, the couple were comfortably off, and discreet. “Patri was an excellent person,” one neighbour said. “Nice, well educated,” said another. Then, last month, they put their house up for sale. And their quiet existence came crashing down. The fifth photograph on the estate agency’s online listing showed the villa’s living room. Hanging on the wall, above a green velvet sofa, was a highly distinctive…

Founded 1821 Independently owned by the Scott Trust More than five decades ago, Richard Nixon launched a “war on drugs”. The drugs won. Now Donald Trump is turning a failed metaphor into a worse reality. Last Tuesday the US president claimed that the military had killed 11 drug traffickers from Venezuela, posting footage of the strike that US officials said took place on a speedboat in international waters in the Caribbean. The administration supplied no evidence for its claim that the boat contained Tren de Aragua members, or drugs, and gave varying accounts of its destination. It also warned that there was more to come, with the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, arguing that intercepting boats had not curbed the drugs problem: “What will stop them is when you blow them…

A Short History of Stupidity By Stuart Jeffries Stupidity, no question, can be just as rich and subtle as its opposite. Three and a half decades on, I still sometimes meditate on what a school friend of mine said in a here’s-a-profound-thought tone of voice: “I’d rather be stupid than happy”. In this clever book, Stuart Jeffries starts out at a double disadvantage, though. First: he has an excellently snappy title but it’s open to question whether stupidity can be said to have a history in any meaningful sense. The quality of stupidity is just, sort of, there; and there’s lots of it. You’d be on firmer ground, as he recognises, historicising the concept of stupidity: a short history, in other words, of “stupidity” – how successive societies and thinkers…

Prep 15 min Cook 45 min Serves 4 • GLUTEN FREE Ingredients For the polenta 250ml whole milk150g coarse cornmeal30g butter For the sweet-and-sour figs Olive oil2 red onions, peeled and thinly sliced10g rosemary (2-3 sprigs), leaves stripped and finely choppedSea salt and black pepper20g brown sugar20ml aged balsamic vinegar6-8 ripe figsPecorino romano, to serve As the warmer months come to an end, I like to cook with both comfort and freshness in mind. Combined with salt, savoury ingredients and a little vinegar, a good fig will bring a gorgeous sweet-sour note to your dinner table. Rich, buttery, warming polenta is offset with a vibrant, bright, jammy topping of onions, rosemary and torn figs. Shave over some pecorino for a funky, savoury twang and you’ve got a dish that’ll scratch…

The Fide Grand Swiss, which began last Thursday in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, will decide two of the eight qualifiers for next year’s world title Candidates. India has a strong hand in Samarkand. The world champion, Gukesh Dommaraju, who is ineligible to qualify for the Candidates, is joined by world No 4, Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu, world No 5, Arjun Erigaisi, and world No 27, Vidit Gujrathi, who won the 2023 Grand Swiss in Douglas, Isle of Man. The world No 2 and No 3 respectively, Hikaru Nakamura and Fabiano Caruana, are almost assured of qualification, as is Praggnanandhaa. Samarkand will decide two qualifiers, and the remaining three will come via the World Cup knockout in Goa, India, in the first half of November. 3988 GM Pentala Harikrishna v Harry Bryant, Fide world teams,…

SPACE Primordial black hole could upend theory of the universe An ancient and “nearly naked” black hole that may have been created in the first fraction of a second after the big bang has been spotted by the James Webb space telescope. If confirmed as a so-called primordial black hole, a theoretical class of object predicted to exist by Stephen Hawking but never before seen, the discovery would upend prevailing theories of the universe. The mainstream view is that stars and galaxies appeared first and black holes were created only when the earliest stars ran out of fuel. But the latest observations, which reveal a gargantuan black hole with only a sparse halo of surrounding material dating back to the dawn of the cosmos, appear incompatible with this sequence of…

At 9.30am last Monday, as MPs made their way back to Westminster, Keir Starmer gathered the entire staff of No 10 in the Pillared Room of Downing Street to tell them they were about to enter the next, delivery stage of government. “We go into phase two in good spirits, confident and with conviction,” he told them, as some of those gathered shuffled awkwardly. His remarks, after all, followed a difficult summer during which Labour vacated the pitch to Reform UK and ahead of what is likely to be an even more turbulent autumn. With Starmer desperately needing to show he could get a grip on government, the rest of his big reset week could not have gone worse. The departure of Angela Rayner as his deputy is the most…

Earlier this year, pamphlets fluttered down from a helicopter over Culiacán, capital of the state of Sinaloa, accusing an array of influencers and musicians of serving organised crime. Four of the 25 faces on the pamphlet already had “ELIMINATED” stamped across them. Since then, at least two more have been picked off. One of the latest was Camilo Ochoa, a narco-turned-You Tuber shot on 17 August. In a war between factions of the Sinaloa cartel, influencers have become targets, reflecting their alleged role in money laundering and their place in cartel propaganda, and the parallel war being waged online. The conflict in Sinaloa erupted after Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, who founded the Sinaloa cartel with Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, was detained by US authorities along with one of Guzmán’s sons…

September 1955. The dying embers of one era, the dawning of another. It’s been five months since Sir Winston Churchill retired as prime minister. In another four Elvis Presley will release Heartbreak Hotel. Food rationing is over. Frozen fish fingers, courtesy of Clarence Birdseye, have just arrived. Change is also in the air at the Manchester Guardian. On 8 September a young chess master from Croydon, Leonard Barden, writes his first column. His subject is a Russian teenager, Boris Spassky, whose games, Barden notes, “all show the controlled aggression characteristic of a great master”. The writing is lively and accessible. The judgment impeccable. Spassky will go on to become world champion. Meanwhile, Barden is on the foothills of a journey that, 70 years, 14 prime ministers, and nearly 4,000 articles…

WRITE TO US Letters for publication weekly.letters@theguardian.com Please include a full postal address and a reference to the article. We may edit letters. Submission and publication of all letters is subject to our terms and conditions, see: THEGUARDIAN.COM/LETTERS-TERMS Editorial Editor: Graham Snowdon Guardian Weekly, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU, UK To contact the editor directly: editorial.feedback@theguardian.com Corrections Our policy is to correct significant errors as soon as possible. Please write to guardian.readers@theguardian.comor the readers’ editor, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU, UK Time for truthful talk about migration Rafael Behr is right to decry Nigel Farage’s continued blowing of the immigration dog-whistle (There’s an obvious way to challenge Farage. But Starmer won’t do it, Opinion, 5 September), but one does need to take into account the…

Thirty-eight million people and counting have watched Hbomberguy’s near four-hour video Plagiarism and You(Tube), in which the YouTuber – real name Harry Brewis – forensically dissects intellectual theft across the platform in a work of investigative journalism worthy of a Pulitzer. To put that into perspective, 32 million people in the UK tuned in to watch Princess Diana’s funeral broadcast live on the BBC. If you’re not familiar with the work, video essays may just be the biggest cultural phenomenon you’ve never heard of. Early versions of video essays – thoughtful deep dives that filter cultural analysis through the personality of the creator – emerged in the early 2000s, but it was the converging currents of the “online left” and the creativity that flourished under lockdowns that saw the format…

Book of the week Mother Mary Comes To Me By Arundhati Roy Twelve minutes into an interview with Allen Ginsberg for the BBC’s Face to Face, Jeremy Isaacs asks him about the extraordinary long poem he wrote about his mother: “In Kaddish, you mourn your mother. What was the effect on you of living with a mother who was mad?” Ginsberg’s answer, mildly inflected by a laugh, is: “It gave me a great sort of … tolerance for eccentric behaviour.” Arundhati Roy, whose memoir is partly an account of her life with her mother Mary Roy, might recognise this insight. Arguably, all mothers appear to their children as mad: madness here meaning an unbounded force, at odds with what society imagines normal parenting to consist of. The manifestations of this…

I am on holiday, standing on a coastal headland under a bright blue dome of sky, the wind light and warm, looking at the weather app on my phone. The forecast and the scene are in agreement: it’s a nice day. I scroll through all the locations where I’ve felt the need to check the weather – Exeter, Marseille, York – until I get to London, where, it turns out, it’s also pretty nice. Normally when I’m on holiday I only check the weather in London to gloat. To justify the trouble and expense of travel, you want it to be 17C and raining at home. But we’ve pushed back a meeting with a roofer in order to go ahead with our holiday, so my mood is doubly weather dependent.…

1 Which German state sent its own team to the 1952 Olympics? 2 Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece is what storytelling genre’s all-time bestseller? 3 Which halogen is widely used as an antiseptic? 4 Which band was formed by Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers? 5 What type of beetles are categorised as rollers, tunnellers or dwellers? 6 Who sits on the Woolsack? 7 Nicknamed the “big hoose”, what is Scotland’s largest prison? 8 Who appeared in both film versions of West Side Story? What links: 9 Australia; Canada; Eastern Caribbean; Jamaica; New Zealand; US? 10 Northern; southern; Masai; reticulated? 11 Dorothy Ashby; Alice Coltrane; Brandee Younger; Amanda Whiting? 12 Korea, 1945; Vietnam, 1954; Aldi supermarket, 1960? 13 John Hannah; Ken Stott; Richard Rankin? 14 Castello; Cannaregio; Dorsoduro; San Marco; San Polo;…