Innehållsförteckning för 17 October 2025 från Guardian Weekly

Eyewitness Mali Mud larks Volunteers scale the walls of the Djinguereber mosque in Timbuktu to apply repairs during its annual restoration. Originally built by Emperor Moussa I after his return from Mecca in 1327, the mosque is mainly constructed from mud brick and plastered with layers of wet soil, a method which is durable but requires regular maintenance. The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol213 | Issue№ 16 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.…

A meeting chaired by Trump on the sidelines of the UN general assembly became the turning point for Gaza It is a well-known adage in politics that success has many parents, but failure is an orphan. Except when Donald Trump is involved, in which case there is only one parent. Nevertheless, many countries and individuals have a right to step forward to claim an authorial role in the deal that it is hoped will bring an end to the two-year war in Gaza. But it is a sign of the collective nature of the effort of the past few months that so many can credibly claim a role, including the US president, who after many false starts was finally persuaded to focus, end the fantasy of driving tens of thousands…

Where Donald Trump leads, Europe’s nationalists and far right follow. After a Truth Social post last month, when Trump announced the US would designate antifa, the decentralised anti-fascist movement, “a major terrorist organisation”, his international allies swung into action. That same day, the Dutch parliament, where the largest party is Geert Wilders’ far-right PVV, passed a resolution, noting the US decision and calling on the government to declare antifa a terrorist organisation in the Netherlands. Then the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, said his country would follow suit. Next, in the European parliament, a far-right MEP from the Flemish nationalist Vlaams Belang party drafted a resolution with the same request. Tom Vandendriessche announced last week that 79 MEPs from 20 countries supported his proposed text. In a video he described…

Argentina’s “rock star president” Javier Milei has been struggling to get much satisfaction of late, as his pledge to lead the country into a new era of prosperity foundered amid a wave of economic strife, scandal and public discontent. But last Monday night the South American populist and former frontman in a Rolling Stones tribute band took to the stage in Buenos Aires hoping to sing his way out of the funk. “Olé, olé, olé, olé! Milei! Milei!” thousands of diehard supporters chanted as the 54-year-old libertarian kicked off a concert at the city’s 15,000-seat Movistar Arena. Milei basked in the adulation, throwing his leatherclad arms into the air. “I’m human,” he told the packed stadium. “It might not seem like it, but I am.” Milei won power almost two…

Yopougon, the largest of Abidjan’s 13 communes, with a population of 1.5 million, is known for its entrepreneurial grit, its bubbly nightlife and, in pop culture, as being the birthplace of Francophone Africa’s most popular comic character, Aya de Yopougon. It is also home to another taboo-busting pioneer: 49-year-old Adjoua Catherine Tano, a hairdresser who has spent two decades offering mental health advice, or just listening quietly as she cuts her clients’ hair. A school dropout who tried out as a bank cashier before becoming a hairdresser, Tano’s resilience came in handy when speaking to a teenager worried about failing her exams. “I told her: ‘ Don’t think negatively,’ ” Tano said. “‘Even if you fail, how can you think that you have failed in life?’” Mental health remains a…

In March 2019 as a nationwide blackout plunged Venezuela into darkness, hundreds of citizens huddled on a basketball court in the city of Maracaibo to hear their leader promise to guide them out of the gloom. “We are, quite literally, living through our darkest hour. But these are also the brightest of times,” María Corina Machado told supporters as they used mobile phones to illuminate the night. Six and a half years later, last Friday Machado used almost identical words to celebrate winning the Nobel peace prize for her “extraordinary” – yet incomplete – struggle against Venezuela’s “brutal, authoritarian state”. “We are … living the darkest hours. But at the same time there is enormous hope,” Machado declared after hearing the news, before vowing: “Venezuela will be free.” But was…

On Monday, Sharm el-Sheikh played host to the most high-profile gathering of global leaders in the Middle East of recent years. Donald Trump, Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, Pedro Sánchez and others met “to end the war in the Gaza Strip, enhance efforts to achieve peace and stability in the Middle East, and usher in a new era of regional security and stability”. If the ceasefire holds, this language is an augur of the future. One where there is no reckoning, no addressing of root causes. Only a hurtling into the imperatives of cleanings-up and workings-out. All the while illegal occupation continues, and another chapter of Israel’s violations is furtively closed without accountability. There is an Arabic expression, hameeha harameeha – meaning “ its protector is its thief” – that comes…

We all know the familiar story of art in the 1960s – pop art, conceptualism and minimalism ruled the decade, dominated by the likes of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Sol LeWitt and Jasper Johns. Bringing a welcome dose of counter-narrative to this calcified story, the Whitney’s bold new show Sixties Surreal aims to introduce a new cohort of 60s artists who channelled the chaotic id of the decade but only got a fraction of the acclaim. “A generation of artists who were young in the 60s increasingly looked for artistic vocabularies that they could use to explore the weird and wild time they were living in,” says show curator Scott Rothkopf, who has longed to curate this exact show since his student days in the 1990s. “The 60s…

Jilly Cooper, who has died at the age of 88, sold 11m copies of her books over her half-century of writing. Beloved of anyone with any sense over a certain age (45), she was introduced to a new generation last year with the Disney+ adaptation of Rivals. Cooper purists would have preferred to watch the Rutshire chronicles in order: starting with Riders, published in 1985, in which Rupert Campbell-Black – cad, heartbreaker, rider – is introduced. But what was striking about seeing Rivals as a box set was how well Cooper’s universe had aged. The chronicles distilled the 80s: the shoulder pads and puffball skirts; the obsession with class, aristocrats sneering at the nouveau riche; the sexual politics, with harassment and assault so routine they were practically characters in their…

Across 1 Hotel vegetable? (5,7) 9 Foretell from signs (5) 10 Using more words than needed (7) 11 Herb (4) 12 What in the US is called a sidewalk (8) 14 Frantically busy (6) 15 Buzz cut, bun or braids perhaps (6) 18 Support and strengthen from below (8) 20 Precious stone (4) 22 Willingly fulfilling obligations (7) 23 Taylor or bird? (5) 24 Happy and significant occasion (3-6,3) Down 2 Kind and beautiful – like Gabriel, perhaps? (7) 3 Man-eating giant (4) 4 Warning (6) 5 Canal boat crew bloke (8) 6 Regained complete consciousness (5) 7 Coat metal using current to transfer ions (12) 8 Emergency motorway stopping area (4,8) 13 Rail fire (anag) (3,5) 16 Very accurate copy (7) 17 Flower – colour (6) 19 Old-fashioned –…

1 FRANCE Macron blames ‘political forces’ for latest crisis President Emmanuel Macron has accused rival political parties of fuelling instability as he brushed aside calls by the opposition for him to resign amid the worst political crisis in decades. He said rival “political forces” were “solely responsible for this chaos” after they “instigated the destabilisation” of the prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu. Lecornu, a Macron ally, on Monday held his first meeting with the new government after he appointed a mix of stalwarts from Macron’s centrist grouping, as well as a few faces from the civil service and civil society. It was France’s second government in a week: Lecornu’s first administration collapsed after 14 hours amid backlash over a lack of fresh faces, and he dramatically resigned on 6 October. Lecornu was…

Ghali Khadr spent two days pleading with his parents to flee with him to southern Gaza, warning them it was too dangerous to stay. His father, known for being stubborn, refused. Their argument was never finished – an Israeli airstrike hit his parents’ home, burying them beneath the rubble. Last Sunday, two days after the ceasefire came into effect, Khadr returned to search through the ruins of his parents’ home. All he managed to find were some shards of their skulls and parts of their hands. “My father, a retired ambulance driver, was known for his strong will and patience. He did not know fear and was always optimistic,” said Khadr, 40, of Jabaliya in northern Gaza. Khadr took the remains of his parents to the graveyard, but found that…

The ceasefire between Hamas and Israel has been met with joy and relief across the Middle East and beyond. Over the past two years, outrage at Israel’s war in Gaza has erupted across Europe and the US, manifesting itself in university campus protests, massive marches through countless capitals and the disruption of major sporting events. Even as hopes rise of an end to the war, international anger over Israel’s actions in Gaza, which have been deemed a genocide by a UN commission of inquiry, remains raw. While the fury that fuels them has been shared and ubiquitous, the protests – and authorities’ responses to them – have varied considerably from country to country. In the US, growing pro-Palestinian activism has been met with arrests, legal action and mounting threats, offering…

London is no longer a safe place to live, at least in the eyes of some of its richest residents – and the 47th president of the United States. “I think he’s done a terrible job,” Donald Trump said during his state visit to the UK last month in his latest broadside at London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan. “Crime in London is through the roof.” Trump’s view is increasingly accepted wisdom in rightwing circles and is gaining traction more widely. Crime is even being blamed – along with rising taxes – for an apparent exodus of the super-rich from the UK. A prime property agent recalls a client’s Rolex being stolen off his wrist the first night he moved into Kensington, the west London neighbourhood that is one of the city’s…

Microplastics have been found almost everywhere: in blood, placentas, lungs – even the human brain. One study estimated our cerebral organs alone may contain 5g of the stuff, or roughly a teaspoon. Now, researchers suspect these particles may meddle with our gut microbes. When Dr Christian Pacher-Deutsch at the University of Graz in Austria exposed gut bacteria from five healthy volunteers to five common microplastics, the bacterial populations shifted - along with the chemicals they produced. Some of these changes mirrored patterns linked to depression and colorectal cancer. "While it’s too early to make definitive health claims, the microbiome plays a central role in many aspects of wellbeing, from digestion to mental health," said Pacher-Deutsch, who presented his work at the recent United European Gastroenterology conference inBerlin. "Reducingmicroplastic exposure where…

On 16 October 2023, a young man and woman sat down in the back row of the second-floor reading room of the university library of Warsaw, Poland. Their reading cards carried the names Sylvena Hildegard and Marko Oravec. On the desk in front of them were eight books that they had ordered up from the library’s closed-storage 19th-century collection: rare editions of classic works of poetry, drama and fiction by two greats of the Russian canon, Alexander Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol. They studied the books closely, taking photographs on their phones and measurements with rulers. When the duo did not return from a cigarette break and the invigilators checked their desk, they found that five of the eight books had gone. One of the missing Pushkin works was a narrative…

Another day, another cute story about how dogs can grasp elements of human language and use them to communicate with us. First, there was Mr Waffles, the Yorkshire terrier that “talks” to his owners by pressing electronic buttons pre-programmed with words and phrases. In one of his videos, the pint-sized pooch stares at the camera and responds to an empty packet of treats by pressing the “I don’t give a damn” button. Followed by the “bitch” button. Bad dog, Mr Waffles. Then, last month, researchers reported that some dogs can mentally categorise their toys depending on their use. “Fetch toys” can be distinguished from “tug of war toys”, and retrieved appropriately. I’m a dog owner. At first glance, the study seems to confirm what I already knew – that my…

So were we wrong? By “we” I mean the overnight critics, myself included, who gave largely negative reviews to the musical of Les Misérables when it opened at London’s Barbican in October 1985. All the statistics suggest we misjudged popular taste. Since it began, the show has been seen by more than 130 million people, has played in 57 countries and has been sung in 22 different languages. Faced with such daunting figures, I am reminded of George Bernard Shaw’s comment when he was accused of damning a Parisian boulevard comedy that had been a huge popular hit: “Forty million Frenchmen,” said Shaw, “can’t be right.” But as Les Mis celebrates its 40th birthday, it seems a good time to reassess the show. The first thing to say is that…

Agentle autumn glow saturated the RSPB’s wetland reserve at Cors Ddyga, illuminating the reeds and sparkling the pools that were excavated just a few weeks ago. Perhaps “scrapes” would be a better word to describe these slivers of liquid light, harbouring organic treasure waiting to be snatched. Daylight robbers gleaned soft bodied prizes from the shallows and soft turf. Teals zipped this way and that, redshanks demonstrated a pacy but ordered pick-and-go routine, while black-tailed godwits stalked, knee-deep in open water. Amid such busy, watery company there came a catwalk couple, their feathered dress an iridescent deep maroon, flecked through with tints of bronze, flashes of violet and speckles of emerald – glossy ibis indeed! Their sickle-shaped bills gracefully extracted the delicacies of the marshland: insects and their larvae, molluscs…

SECURITY Minister says Powell had no role in dropping of spy case The government made “every effort” to support the trial of two men accused of spying for China, a minister said, as he accused the Tories of claiming the case was deliberately abandoned “without a shred of evidence”. Dan Jarvis, the security minister, issued a robust defence of Jonathan Powell (pictured) in the Commons after reports that Keir Starmer’s national security adviser played a role in the collapse of the case. His intervention prolonged a blame game between ministers and prosecutors over the abandonment of charges against two men, including a former parliamentary researcher, who were accused of spying for Beijing. Charges were dropped against Christopher Cash and Christopher Berry, who had always maintained their innocence, last month after…

The estimated 65,000 people in “hostages square” in Tel Aviv heard it before they saw it. Their faces turned up to search the sky for the source of the sound. Then it swept into view from the west, from the direction of Gaza. A helicopter, military brown, was on the way to Ichilov hospital a few hundred metres away. But it diverted, circled around the crowd and then tilted to its right, in an apparent salute to the cheering, smiling faces below. At the door of the helicopter, the keen-eyed will have seen what appeared to be one of the final 20 live hostages released that morning after two years in Hamas captivity. He used his hands to make a shape: a heart. About eight helicopters in all swept by,…

Flanked by farmland and nestled among the deep valleys of central Spain, few in Villamalea, a town of 4,200 people, expected to find their tranquil home splashed across Spanish media this summer. “I’ve never been contacted by so many media outlets in my life,” said José Núñez Pérez, the conservative mayor of Villamalea. With a laugh, he added: “It made me question, just what have we done here?” Everyone wanted to speak to him about the same thing; a town council motion, approved unanimously and across party lines, calling on the central government to push forward with a stalled proposal to regularise undocumented migrants in Spain. “To us, it was the most natural thing in the world,” said Núñez Pérez, as he greeted residents in the town’s central plaza. In…

When Shelby Riskin was handed disc-shaped samples of century-old soil from Toronto’s waterfront, the ecosystem ecologist was hopeful she might find trace evidence of plants – cattails, bulrushes, water lilies and irises – that had once populated a long-destroyed wetland. But when she and a graduate student peered through a microscope, they watched in astonishment as a brown wormlike creature greedily munched through green clumps of algae as if more than 130 years hadn’t passed since its last meal. Equally oblivious, a host of life – water fleas, worms, plankton – danced and spun around it. “We’ve been able to resurrect some of the ancient life that shows what this wetland was like prior to urbanisation,” said Riskin, a soil expert at the University of Toronto who was called in…

Despite working full-time for a company in Tokyo, Shoki Moriyama manages to eke out eight hours a day to devote to his smartphone. “I need my phone to navigate my way through the information wars,” said Moriyama, who at 25 is part of a generation that can’t imagine life without scrolling through news and social media, messaging apps and off-the-wall video clips. While excessive smartphone use is a worldwide phenomenon, authorities in Japan are taking action, amid growing concern over its physical and psychological toll, particularly on children and young people. This month, the town of Toyoake in central Japan introduced a measure limiting smartphone use among its 69,000 residents to two hours a day, in what officials say was an attempt to tackle evidence of online addiction and sleep…

When he sat down to talk about the US government shutdown last week, Chuck Schumer sounded as if he were relishing his standoff with the Republicans. “Every day gets better for us,” he told Punchbowl News. As the shutdown got under way, Schumer explained, the Republicans believed that Democrats would quickly fold and vote to reopen the government, but instead they had stuck to their guns for a week and a half, demanding an concessions on healthcare and other issues. Outrage followed from Republicans, who printed out the Senate minority leader’s remark on posters and condemned it before press conferences. The shutdown has prompted federal agencies to close or curtail operations nationwide, and forced hundreds of thousands of employees to stay home without immediate pay. Schumer, Republicans argued, was being…

I am at the shed where Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai smoked her first bong. No, there’s no punchline – it’s not that kind of anecdote. “My life has changed for ever,” Yousafzai says sadly, as we gaze at the semi-derelict structure. “Everything changed for ever, after that [night].” The shed is tucked away from the prying eyes of Oxford’s college life. Yousafzai leads me through quadrangles and out into a hidden garden. Inside are dusty pint glasses and spiderwebs, and board games with the pieces missing. We are meeting ahead of the release of her memoir, Finding My Way, a sequel to her 2013 bestseller I Am Malala. Dressed in a blue shirt, jeans and a headscarf, Yousafzai is accompanied, at a discreet distance, by two close-protection officers. The college…

Emmanuel Macron sounded not angry, not defiant, just a little triste. Europe, he lamented, was suffering a “ degeneration of democracy ”. Many threats emanated from Russia, from China, from US tech companies and social-media entrepreneurs, France’s president said. “ But we should not be naive. On the inside we are turning on ourselves. We doubt our own democracy … We see everywhere that something is happening to our democratic fabric. Democratic debate is turning into a debate of hatred.” Squeezed between extremes of right and left, Macron knows of what he speaks. But “ungovernable” France is not alone. Across Europe, in the UK and the US, distrust and grievance daily deepen political dysfunction and social discord. Macron’s words apply, in fact, to almost any country espousing democratic principles. In…

On a humid morning in Macau, a blue-and-orange phoenix embellished with more than 60,000 flowers is hatching from an enormous pink Fabergé egg in the lobby of the Wynn Palace hotel. Chancing upon this spectacle, you think to yourself, “How lucky that I was passing at that precise moment!” Stick around and you will be disabused of your sense of good fortune: the hatching occurs every 15 minutes without fail. It is summer 2024, and Colin Farrell and Tilda Swinton are guests here while shooting Ballad of a Small Player, directed by Edward Berger (Conclave) and based on Lawrence Osborne’s clammy 2014 novel. Farrell plays Brendan Reilly, an Irish thief who affects an English accent, goes by the name Lord Doyle and hides out at the Wynn Palace. Having fled…

What’s the best way to prep and cook mushrooms? Olivia, by email “I could witter on about mushrooms all day,” says fungi fan Will Murray. The chef and co-founder of Fallow, Fowl and Roe, all in London, advises his chefs to clean them “at least three times in cold water”, which brings us straight to the washing debate. Writing in the Guardian in 2003, Heston Blumenthal called advice against washing mushrooms in water in case they become waterlogged “nonsense”. He cites Harold McGee, who tested this theory in his book The Curious Cook: “McGee weighed 252g fresh mushrooms, submerged them in water for five minutes, then removed them, blotted the surface moisture and reweighed them.” The result was 258g, which, as McGee noted, is a 16th of a teaspoon of…

* All solutions published next week Across 8 Sparkling wine left by one former monarch for knight (8) 9 Taped broadcast for expert (5) 10 Girl liaises regularly (4) 11 Navy vessel’s independent logbook assistant (10) 12 Frail magical creature holding buzzer sent back (6) 14 Given financial penalty after swindle and imprisoned (8) 15 Stout stem (7) 17 College graduate getting axe (7) 20 Fruit from a very old citrus added dash of spice at first (8) 22 Signals British general and police sergeant (6) 23 Defiant about promises to hold ring (10) 24 Unconvincing period of time for auditor (4) 25 Spare from complex trap (5) 26 Engineered roads in Cuba to be dry (8) Down 1 A garden implement held by favourite bird (8) 2 Acquires receptacles…