Innholdsfortegnelse for 18th June 2021 i Guardian Weekly

Edward de Bono Maltese author, doctor and inventor of the term “lateral thinking”, who wrote more than 60 books on his original and unorthodox theories. He died on 9 June, aged 88. Ned Beatty Character actor who starred in many Hollywood movies including Deliverance, Network and Superman. He died on 13 June, aged 83. Georgina Kirby New Zealand Māori leader and women’s rights advocate. She died on 11 June, aged 85. Ruben Sergeyev Consultant, fixer and friend to Guardian correspondents in Moscow. He died on 10 June, aged 65. Noel Conway Campaigner against the UK ban on assisted dying after being diagnosed with motor neurone disease. He died on 9 June, aged 71.…

Vaccines The G7 pledged over the next 12 months to secure a further 1bn vaccine doses either through donating surplus supplies or providing further finance to Covax, the UN-backed scheme charged with distributing vaccines to low- and middle-income countries. The main new pledges came from the US, UK and Germany. The communique also set out plans to reduce roadblocks to production in Africa and on the controversial issue of enforced temporary waivers of patents said they will support manufacturing in low-income countries. They said they would engage constructively on the issue of intellectual property waivers in discussions at the World Trade Organization. The United Kingdom’s 100m-dose pledge is “entirely new”, according to a spokesperson. The United States has already donated $2bn to Covax, according to a White House official. In…

‘Cannabis cleans the air, water and soil. Alcohol is more dangerous’Abdurrahman Dilipak Journalist and pro-legalisation advocate Abespectacled, well-dressed Islamist recently expelled from the Turkish Journalists’ Association for comparing campaigners against domestic violence to prostitutes is perhaps not the most likely candidate for ardent cannabis advocate. But Abdurrahman Dilipak, 72, is one of Turkey’s loudest voices in favour of legalisation as attitudes change and the country experiments with reintroducing the once widespread crop. “Cannabis has a thousand benefits … This plant is generally a blessing of Allah. It cleans the air, water and soil,” he wrote in his column for Yeni Akit, a conservative newspaper. “Alcohol is more dangerous.” Industrial hemp was cultivated in Turkey’s humid Black Sea region until strict anti-narcotics laws were introduced in the 1970s: many people today attribute…

Knowledge of medicinal plants is at risk of disappearing as human languages become extinct, a new study has warned. Indigenous languages contain vast amounts of knowledge about eco system services provided by the natural world around them. However, more than 30% of the 7,400 languages on the planet are expected to disappear by the end of the century, according to the UN. The impact of language extinction on loss of ecological knowledge is often overlooked, said the study’s lead researcher, Dr Rodrigo Cámara-Leret, a biologist from the University of Zurich. “Much of the focus looks at biodiversity extinction, but there is a whole other picture out there, which is the loss of cultural diversity,” he said. His team looked at 12,000 medicinal plant services associated with 230 Indigenous languages in…

A potent view of Palestine from a Jewish perspective Congratulations on publishing the true history of the Nakba (A Jewish case for Palestinian refugee return, 28 May), particularly convincing since written by a Jewish editor. The British are also responsible for this historical injustice. As the mandatory power, Britain effectively gave away a land that didn’t belong to them, to a people to whom it didn’t belong either (although understandable at the time) with scant or no regard for the resident Arab population. Elizabeth Keating Orcemont, France • We do seem to have had a big leap happen in the level of support for Palestine, which gives me hope, especially as more Jewish people become aware and criticise and oppose Israeli policies. I really feel very deeply for the Palestinians…

Arifa Akbar’s memoir begins with the death of her sister from a mysterious illness. Fauzia had already been rushed to hospital twice, the cause of her symptoms unknown. She had complained of chest pains, shortness of breath and night sweats, but still doctors were clueless. Later, as her speech started to slur and her behaviour became erratic, she was put in an induced coma and subsequently had a brain haemorrhage. Eventually there was a diagnosis: she had died of tuberculosis. Akbar was left with questions, among them: why hadn’t Fauzia been diagnosed earlier? How, in 2016, does a person contract TB? Her sister’s death also prompted a broader reflection on her life and the ways she had been failed by others. Along with telling the story of a sibling, Consumed…

NOTES & QUERIES How we got here is neither one thing nor the other How does one reconcile creation and evolution? The same way one reconciles a fish and a bicycle. Eric Welch Freeport, Illinois, US • It’s cause and effect. Evolution is the cause and creation the effect. Declan Houton Melbourne, Victoria, Australia • By learning to enjoy the mystery. Jodie Mathies Oakland, California, US • Birth and growing up? James Beckford Saunders Coburg, Victoria, Australia • In the beginning there was potential. Barney Smith Bristol, England, UK • God only knows! Alasdair Gardiner Penn, England, UK • Just as one does with death and eternal life, science and miracles, determinism and free will: opting for the right one and discarding the other. Anton Digon Vitoria, Spain It’s tricky…

From statues to sport, a fervent jostling for the moral high ground is dominating British life. The so-called “culture wars” seem to encompass a wide range of social and political touchpoints – yet most Britons in a recent survey claimed to have no idea what the term actually means. In this week’s big story, the Observer’s Andrew Anthony delves into the culture wars and asks what exactly is behind them. Then, associate editor Julian Coman reflects on an intervention by England’s football manager on the question of multiculturalism and national pride, and asks what lessons the political left can learn from Gareth Southgate’s moving open letter to the nation. The big story Page 10 G7 leaders converged on Cornwall last weekend for their first face-to-face meetings for many months. The summit…

ARCHAEOLOGY Medieval footwear fashion linked to rise in bunions Medieval men and women could become martyrs to fashion, linking a trend in poulaines or pointy shoes in the 14th century to a rise in the prevalence of bunions. Writing in the Journal of Paleopathology, Dr Piers Mitchell of the University of Cambridge and colleagues report analysis of the remains of 177 adults from four cemeteries in Cambridge, including a rural parish cemetery, an Augustinian friary inside town, and a hospital. The team found that 31 of the individuals, 20 of them men, had skeletal signs of bunions. Analysis of remains that could be dated revealed bunions were significantly more prevalent during the 14th and 15th centuries and were more common among town dwellers. ASTRONOMY Giant blinking star found near heart…

With some notable exceptions – including the UK – where confirmed infections have begun climbing again, the number of confirmed new coronavirus cases appears, once more, to be fading in many countries around the world. But that situation may not last. What happens next will depend mainly on two factors: whether (or when) the far more transmissible, and possibly more dangerous, Delta variant takes hold as it has in Britain; and how fast populations get vaccinated. As Hans Kluge, the World Health Organization’s Europe director, put it: “We have been here before.” Infections ebbed last summer, too, only for a new strain to send them soaring again. Vaccinating urgently, and maintaining public health measures, will be key, he said. As the UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, postponed England’s final step…

As thousands of people gathered outside Canada’s second-largest mosque in London, Ontario, Reina Persaud was watching her niece and other children chalking brightly coloured hearts all over the road. The “pathway of hearts” was a tribute to the Afzaals, a Muslim family, who every evening would take a walk around the neighbourhood, greeting everyone – and who were killed on Sunday 6 June in what police have described as a premeditated attack motivated by Islamophobia. Members of three generations of the family died when a 20-year-old man ploughed his pickup truck into them: Salman Afzaal, 46, his wife Madiha Salman, 44, their daughter Yumna Afzaal, 15, Salman’s mother, Talat Afzaal, 74. The couple’s son, Fayez, nine, was last week still in hospital. Last Tuesday night, crowds of mourners – including…

Iran’s beleaguered voters do not have much of a choice in the 18 June presidential election. The regime, dominated by the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a fiercely anti-western conservative, has cynically manipulated the contest to ensure a like-minded hardliner, most probably Ebrahim Raisi, head of the judiciary, wins. While the result is hardly likely to be a cliff-hanger, its impact may nonetheless be far-reaching. The possibly negative consequences for talks on curbing Iran’s nuclear programme, for peaceful relations with Israel, Saudi Arabia and the west, for the wars in Syria and Yemen, for the geopolitical balance and for Iran’s citizens are alarming. Iranians have never been well served by the fundamentalists who hijacked the 1979 Islamic revolution. This extraordinary country, rich in talent, culture and resources, is woefully misgoverned.…

FORCE OF NATURE On a video call from Paris, Angélique Kidjo, 60, shifts and leaps in her seat with the restive energy of a teenager. “I’m always changing and innovating and this album is no different,” she says. “Change brings life to things; it keeps me going. In life, you never know what to expect.” Over a career that spans five decades, the Beninese artist has crossed paths with everyone from Gilberto Gil and Tony Allen to Talking Heads, Bono and Vampire Weekend. On her new album, Mother Nature, her 15th, she takes on sounds that she has touched before – Cuban salsa, Congolese rumba, soul, jazz and west African musical traditions – and blends them with modern African pop, in collaboration with a younger generation of stars including the…

Intimacies is the perfect title for a collection in which 10 of the 11 stories are about mothers and babies or children. It is a relationship too close for comfort – sometimes literally, as on the red-eye flight Belfast author Lucy Caldwell depicts so expertly, a mother enduring seven hours of toddler on lap, “heavy and warm and limp and sprawling”. She is caught at a vulnerable moment, when exhaustion, love and grief combine to offer a flash of enlightenment. Caldwell specialises in this exposure of vulnerability: not the gradual peeling away of a character’s emotional layers, but the heart-stopping second when a potential future gapes before them. It’s particularly powerful in the first story, Like This, whose narrator, in a moment of desperation, has left her baby in the…

The politics of naming plague variants was fraught even before Donald Trump began talking about ‘the China virus’. Spaniards weren’t thrilled at being nominally blamed for the 1918 pandemic of ‘Spanish flu’, or H1N1. Just because a nasty new bug is first noticed in a place doesn’t mean it originated there. So biomedical officialdom has decided to start using more neutral names for what are euphemistically called ‘variants of concern’. The ‘Indian variant’ of the Sars-CoV-2 virus, now the most prevalent in the UK, has been renamed Delta, being the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet. (Kent was Alpha, South Africa Beta and Brazil Gamma.) Sadly, more xenophobic sections of the press haven’t really entered the spirit of this new practice, continuing to refer to ‘the Indian ‘Delta’ variant’.…

An aerial view of a giant sinkhole, measuring up to 1 25 metres wide, which first appeared in late May in a field near the city of Puebla. Some residents have suggested that the sinkhole is the result of excessive ground water extraction by factories or a water bottling plant in the area. But the bottom of the hole is filled with water that appears to have strong currents, and Mexico’s national civil defence office said it was more likely to have been caused by subterranean river flows.…

In Goa’s capital, Panaji, on Rua São Tomé, not far from the main post office, is a shop that offers packaging services. For a small fee, they will wrap your parcel in a sheet of muslin sewn with precise stitches to protect its contents from being damaged in the post. It started as a sideline to the main business, but now it is the biggest earner for Luis Francisco Miguel de Abreu as he struggles to maintain one of the last typewriter repair shops in the state. Inside, several typewriters sit in various states of repair looking like museum pieces. There is a Hermes, a Remington and a Godrej Prima, from the Indian manufacturer that was the last company in the world to make typewriters. Abreu, 78, sits in a…

In June 2020, as the first reports of long Covid began to filter through the medical community, doctors attempting to grapple with this mysterious malaise began to notice an unusual trend. While acute cases of Covid-19 – particularly those hospitalised with the disease – tended to be mostly male and over 50, long Covid sufferers were, by contrast, both relatively young and overwhelmingly female. Early reports of long Covid at a Paris hospital between May and July 2020 suggested that the average age was around 40, and women afflicted by the longer-term effects of Covid-19 outnumbered men by four to one. A similar gender skew has become apparent around the world. From long Covid patients monitored in Bangladesh and Russia to the Covid Symptom Tracker app, a picture has emerged…

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1 In a string of 2s and 3s only, the 3rd digit after a 3 can’t be a 3 and the 2nd digit after a 2 can’t be a 2, what is the longest possible unextendable string of finite length? 2 Wordpool LIMULUS a) vertically challenged Roman b) an oblique mark in printing c) horseshoe crab d) off spring or simulacrum 3 E pluribus unum Rearrange the letters of STUPID TALE to make a single word. 4 Dropouts In each case replace each asterisk with a letter to make a word: S*I*L*T *S*I*L*T* 5 Cryptic One voice or three? (6) Aquatic mammals like human chilling, we hear (8) 6 Missing Links Find a word that follows the first word in the clue and precedes the second, in each case making…

Prep 50 min Cook 45 min Makes 23cm tart Serves 8-10 Ingredients For the pastry 175g unsalted butter, cold and diced275g plain flour80g icing sugar1 lemon zest¼ tsp salt1 large egg, beaten For the frangipane 180g caster sugar1½ tbsp finely chopped thyme, plus extra to decorate180g unsalted butter, softened3 large eggs160g ground almonds30g plain flour250g blueberries2 tbsp flaked almonds Fresh thyme might just be my most used herb in the kitchen. More often than not, I use it in sweet recipes – for flavouring custards, infusing syrups for cakes or in this tart, which would also be wonderful with rosemary or tarragon. Method To make the pastry, put the butter, flour, icing sugar, lemon zest and salt in a food processor and pulse until the mix resembles fine breadcrumbs. (Or…