Innehållsförteckning för 12 December 2025 från Guardian Weekly

The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol213 | Issue№ 24 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…

When Jumaa and Fadi Abu Assi went to look for firewood their parents thought they would be safe. The brothers were aged nine and 10 and, after all, a ceasefire had been declared in Gaza. Their mother, Hala Abu Assi, was making tea in the family’s tent in Khan Younis when she heard an explosion, a missile fired by an Israeli drone. She ran to the scene – but it was too late. Since the US-brokered ceasefire was announced on 10 October, Israeli forces have killed more than 360 Palestinians in Gaza; according to a UN official, at least 70 are children – like Jumaa and Fadi. They were killed, their mother said, at “a time when bloodshed was supposed to stop”. “After the ceasefire was announced, I felt a…

Two distinctive heads could often be spotted in the front row of recent Reform UK press conferences: Danny Kruger, the party’s head of policy, and James Orr, now a senior adviser to Nigel Farage. As well as guiding the policy programme for what could be the UK’s next government, the pair are both devout Christians who have trenchant views on social issues such as abortion and the family. Kruger, an MP who defected from the Conservatives in September, and Orr, who is a Cambridge academic, also sit on the advisory board of a rightwing thinktank called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), led by Philippa Stroud, a Conservative peer who is strongly religious. One of the main shareholders in the ARC is Paul Marshall, the hedge fund millionaire who owns…

It was only when huge areas of Iceland started turning purple that authorities realised they had made a mistake. By then, it was too late. The Nootka lupin, native to Alaska, had coated the sides of fjords, sent tendrils across mountain tops and covered lava fields, grasslands and protected areas. Since it arrived in the 1940s, it has become an accidental national symbol. Hordes of tourists and local people pose for photos in the ever-expanding fields in June and July, entranced by the delicate cones of flowers that cover the north Atlantic island. “The tourists love it. They change the dates of when they come to time it for the lupins. The flowers have become a part of Iceland’s image, especially in the summer,” said Leszek Nowakowski, a photographer based…

The Trump administration looks ever more like a criminal enterprise – and now it seems to have added war crimes to its repertoire. Though even that may be too generous a description. Last Thursday, word came that the US military had launched yet another deadly strike on a small boat moving through international waters. This time the attack killed four people, bringing to at least 87 the number of people the US has killed in a series of 22 such strikes on what it says are drug boats – vessels carrying illicit narcotics. This has been happening for months, but the issue has only just drawn political heat, thanks to a Washington Post investigation of the first such attack on 2 September. The paper reported that US forces hit the…

Lugma: Abundant Dishes & Stories from My Middle East Noor Murad One of the greatest tests of a cookbook is not just whether the recipes appeal on first glance, but whether they have the power to weave themselves into your regular cooking life. By this measure, Lugma is my top food book this year. Noor Murad is a young Bahraini-British food writer who has previously worked with Ottolenghi. It is a delight to find her writing here in her own voice about the Middle Eastern ingredients that mean so much to her (you’ll need black limes!). The recipes hit a sweet spot between ease and specialness. Alongside a pantheon of rice dishes for celebrations, there are simpler midweek hits: Noor’s deeply fragrant Middle Eastern bolognese is now the recipe against…

✱ All solutions published next week Across 8 Deduce gold found across island is substandard (8)  9 Market unpopular permit (6) 10 Let’s rise up with unlimited energy (8) 11 Brigand put rodent in dish (6)  12 Cellists forking out for small gifts (8,7) 15 Jerk succeeded in plans to return (5) 16 Main setter’s disreputable (5) 20 Ignored cyclist cycling around back of van alarmingly (15) 21 God of love following a vote (6) 23 Hotel with concept and means to provide refuge (8)  25 Sense one unit changed with time (6)  26 Sorted out and replaced bottoms of shoes worn by Victor (8) Down 1 After eleven alien enters some concern (7) 2 Rearrange Colt pieces to be capable of retraction and protrusion (10)  3 Awful funeral song…

1 UKRAINE Progress made to support Kyiv, European leaders say European leaders rallied behind Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Monday amid hopes they could finally achieve a breakthrough to allow Ukraine access to billions of dollars of frozen Russian assets. Despite vociferous support for the Ukrainian president, who has come under heavy pressure from Donald Trump to cede territory in order to bring the war to a speedy end, there was still no agreement on turning immobilised assets into a loan for Kyiv. But Downing Street said “positive progress” was made on the issue during crisis talks hosted in London with Zelenskyy, France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Friedrich Merz. They were joined on a call by the leaders of seven other European countries, a senior representative from Turkey, and Nato and EU chiefs.…

IN LATE 2023, the South Australian premier’s wife put down a book she had been reading. It was Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation. “[She] said to me you better bloody do something about this … and then we got to work,” Peter Malinauskas later recalled in an ABC interview. Haidt, an American social psychologist, prescribed a social media ban for those aged under 16 as the solution to the mental health ills he believes are caused by the platforms. In Australia, he found a willing test subject. Its ban prohibiting under-16s from holding social media accounts began this week, nationwide. It has generated interest around the world as regulators wrestle with the potential dangers of social media. Malaysia has indicated it is planning to block children under 16 from signing…

Martin Parr, the British documentary photographer who captured the peculiarities of Britain with clarity and hilarity, has died aged 73. He had been diagnosed with cancer in May 2021. Known for his acute observations of the English class system, Parr’s images covered sunbathers and Conservative clubs, village fetes and coffee mornings, often in vivid colour and with more than a dash of humour. His famed 1986 photobook The Last Resort: Photographs of New Brighton captured working-class holidaymakers in Wirral, Merseyside, and helped mark a sea change in British documentary photography, from the gritty, black and white style of the past towards a cheekier and more colourful style. Throughout the 90s Parr’s work became more international, with critiques of the tourist industry and global consumerism. There was controversy when he joined…

The scourge of ultra-processed foods (UPFs) is global. While their consumption is particularly high in the west, forming more than half the average diet in the UK and the US, for example, UPFs are replacing fresh food in diets on every continent. Last month, the world’s largest review on the health threats of UPFs was published in the Lancet. Earlier this year Unicef revealed that more children around the world were obese than underweight for the first time, as junk food overwhelms diets, with the steepest rises in low- and middle-income countries. Carlos Monteiro, professor of public health nutrition at the University of São Paulo, and one of the Lancet series’ authors, said that profit-driven corporations, not individual choices, are driving the change in habits. For parents, it can feel…

I like year-end list season. I like an opportunity to remember and reflect on the records that stuck with me over the course of a year – especially when there is a chance to recommend something that others may have overlooked. I like looking through friends’ favourites for albums that I missed completely, and making a big listening queue. I like following along as critics attempt to determine the year’s “best”, even when I end up yelling into a group chat about how wrong they all are. I like it because it all requires looking back, racking your brain and processing your year in listening. This year, as Spotify Wrapped takes over social media feeds again, I am struck by how the concept seems to discourage that critical practice for…

This felt like the year that AI really arrived. But the unchecked rush to go faster and further could extinguish humanity, according to the chillingly plausible If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, by computer scientists Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, which argues against creating superintelligent AI able to cognitively outpace Homo sapiens. Not exactly cheery Christmas reading, but you’ll finally grasp tech bro lingo about tokens, weights and maximising preferences. Human extinction is not a new idea, muses historian Sadiah Qureshi in Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction. Colonial expansion and the persecution of Indigenous peoples implicitly relied on Darwinian theories about some species being fated to outcompete others. Extinction, she points out, is a concept entwined with politics and social justice. The idea of the landscape, as well as…

This year’s standout works for children include joyous picture books, gloriously bizarre nonfiction and stories of courage, companionship and rapturous flight – testament to the human need for connection, justice and freedom. In picture books, Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury, the author-illustrator team behind We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, collaborate again on the exuberant Oh Dear, Look What I Got!. Oxenbury’s joyfully expressive huddles of animal and human characters heighten the sense of mayhem in this bouncy, cumulative delight, boasting all the ingredients of a perennial read-aloud favourite. Annie Booker’s The Great Bear is a lyrical, haunting story of the polar bear spirit that protects the oceans, and the human greed that threatens their rich life. This beautiful debut is both urgent and hopeful. In nonfiction for 6+, the…

Last week’s XTX London Classic at Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium took place in an elegant arena with a full view of the football pitch. The English players suffered for most of the event, but hit back in style last Thursday when all four won their eighth-round games. The four English eighth-round victories transformed what had been a difficult event into a demonstration of sustained national strength at the board. The event winner, Uzbekistan’s Nodirbek Abdusattorov, 21, demonstrated his skills with a dominant 3000+ tournament rating performance and a feat of memory in a key game. By round five, Abdusattorov’s lead over his main rival Alireza Firouzja had already stretched to a full point. The Frenchman, who Magnus Carlsen had predicted back in 2022 to be his successor as world champion, lacked…

Across 1 Delicate (6) 4 Exist in large numbers (6) 8 Duck (5) 9 Unfair – and unfinished (7) 10 Guts (7) 11 Way of doing something (5)  12 Rescue (from) – Crete taxi (anag) (9) 17 Spiral shape (5) 19 Early stages (7) 21 Thug (7) 22 Confusing sound of many voices (5) 23 Infuriate (6) 24 Vegetable with long, crunchy stalks (6) Down 1 Unfair (treatment) (6) 2 Luxury material with a raised design (7) 3 Soup server (5) 5 Coffee server (7) 6 Consensus (5) 7 Sweet-sounding (6) 9 I panic shy (anag) – medic (9) 13 Meaningful (7) 14 Give (someone) a title (7) 15 Suddenly change direction (6) 16 Subsidiary bit of drama (6) 18 Discount – marriage proposal (5) 20 Animal Farm, for instance…

REFORM UK Party denies claims that it breached electoral law Police were this week looking into allegations Reform UK breached electoral law during its campaign to win Nigel Farage’s Commons seat at last year’s general election. Political opponents urged the party’s leader to “come clean” over a former aide’s claims that Reform falsely reported election expenses in the Clacton constituency he represents after his 2024 electoral win. Richard Everett, a former Reform councillor and member of Farage’s campaign team, reportedly submitted documents to police showing the party spent more than the £20,660 ($27,500) limit in the Essex constituency. On Monday, Essex police said they were assessing an allegation of misreported expenditure by a political party, understood to be Reform. The news came as Farage faced increasing pressure to apologise over…

‘I don’t think I’ll be affected much, but I still don’t like it’ Pia Mont i, 13 I only have accounts on WhatsApp and Pinterest so I won’t be directly affected by the social media ban, but I still don’t like it. I know people whose main support networks are on social media, so if that’s being taken away they will be left with nothing. I’ve had a really positive experience on the social media I use, so I don’t see why it should be banned for everyone. I don’t keep my phone in my room overnight. I use it mostly to take a break from study, my daily screentime average this week was 49 minutes. I mostly use social media to look at cooking videos on YouTube or Pinterest;…

LYING IN BED, recovering after his latest surgery, Ayman Ali retells the story of Syria’s revolution through his wounds. His right eye, lost in an attack on a rebel observation post he was manning in 2012, is covered by yellow medical tape. A cane he uses to walk is propped against the wall, after a rocket attack in 2014 left him with a limp. For 14 years, Ali dreamed of freedom and justice. A year after the ousting of President Bashar al-Assad, he has his freedom but not his justice. The man he was dreaming of holding accountable – a member of his extended family who was a part of an Assad militia – had already fled the country by the time Ali returned to his home in Damascus. A…

For days before the explosions began, the business park had been emptying out. When the bombs went off, they took down empty office blocks and demolished echoing, multi-cuisine food halls. Dynamite toppled a four-storey hospital, silent karaoke complexes, deserted gyms and dorm rooms. So came the end of KK Park, one of south-east Asia’s most infamous “scam centres”, press releases from Myanmar’s junta declared. The facility had held tens of thousands of people, forced to relentlessly defraud people around the world. But the park’s operators were long gone: apparently tipped off that a crackdown was coming, they were busily setting up shop elsewhere. More than 1,000 labourers had fled across the border, and 2,000 others had been detained. But up to 20,000 labourers, most likely trafficked and brutalised, had disappeared.…

When the history of Donald Trump’s second presidency is written, 26 November 2025 may well go down as a particular landmark. On the eve of Thanksgiving, a lone gunman shot two West Virginia national guards, Sarah Beckstrom, and Andrew Wolfe, as they were on patrol outside Washington DC’s Farragut West metro station, a short walk from the White House – and thereby opened the floodgates to a wave of racist and anti-immigrant invective that seemed extreme even for Trump. Beckstrom, 20, died from her injuries the following day, while 24-year-old Wolfe is said to be slowly recovering from “critical” wounds. But Trump seemed to focus less on the fates of the two guardsmembers whose deployment he had ordered to combat a supposed “crime wave” than the origins of the suspected…

White flowers at makeshift shrines and messages of support posted in a public square. A rainbow of folded paper cranes. Boxes of donated goods for those in need. Hongkongers’ responses to the Tai Po fire disaster – in which at least 159 people died and 31 are still unaccounted for – have resembled similar community expressions of solidarity last seen during the 2019 protests. But beneath the surface, Hong Kong civil society is struggling to respond to this latest collective trauma in a city that has deeply changed in the past five years. The cauterisation of Hong Kong’s civil society that has occurred under Beijing’s national security crackdown has meant that the types of grassroots activism that would traditionally have occurred in response to such a tragedy are no longer…

We live in a hyper-political yet curiously unrevolutionary age, one of hashtags rather than barricades. Perhaps that’s why so many writers this year have looked wistfully back to a time when strongly held convictions still made waves in the real world. In The Revolutionists, Jason Burke revisits the 1970s, when it seemed the future of the Middle East might end up red instead of green – communist rather than Islamist. It’s a geopolitical period piece: louche men with corduroy jackets and sideburns, women with submachine guns. Many were in it less for the Marxism than for the sheer mayhem. Owen Hatherley turns to a gentler kind of insurgency in The Alienation Effect – a group biography of the architects, designers and directors from Mitteleuropa who washed up on Britain’s shores…

If we get the heroes we deserve, then Jackson Lamb, foul-mouthed and slovenly ringmaster of a circus of failed spies, is truly the man for our times. With Clown Town, the ninth book in Mick Herron’s state-of-the-nation satire/thriller mashup series, Lamb and his stable of “losers, misfits and boozers” are well up to the mark as secrets about an IRA double agent threaten to come to light, exposing the seamier side of state security for a story of loyalty and betrayal. Complicity and culpability, as well as class and professional ethics, are the subjects of Denise Mina’s The Good Liar. When the creator of a revolutionary blood splatter probability scale realises that its flaws may have led to an unsafe conviction, she has to decide what to do about it.…

There are thrushes on the wind today. A redwing has just landed in the veil of shrubby seablite between the tidal ooze of Blakeney Pit and the shingle where I’m standing. Exhausted by its crossing from Scandinavia, this handsome bird sits in a seablite’s wind-torn tips and lets me watch. Mottle-chested, creamy-browed, it is exquisite. I have made the 6km, shingle-crunching pilgrimage from Cley to near the end of Blakeney Point to visit my great-great-grandfather. To visit his memory, at least. He was Martin Fountain Page, co-owner of Page and Turner, last of the River Glaven shipping companies in 700 years of documented navigation here. Beneath the doormat in the north porch of Blakeney Church lies a slab of polished stone, engraved to his eternal memory. In the 1890s, when…