Innholdsfortegnelse for 26th March 2021 i Guardian Weekly

All-terrain Putin Russian president Vladimir Putin and his defence minister Sergei Shoygu spent an outdoorsy weekend in Siberia. Earlier in the week Putin had confirmed a new period of post-Trump US-Russian hostility by shrugging off Joe Biden’s suggestion that he was a “killer”, saying that it “takes one to know one”. The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Guardian Weekly is an edited selection of some of the best journalism found in the Guardian and Observer newspapers in the UK and the Guardian’s digital editions in the UK, US and Australia. The weekly magazine has an international focus and three editions: global, 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…

For Stacey Harris, the hardest part of organising vaccinations over the last couple of months has been fending off patients. “They’d be ringing up, coming into the surgery saying ‘I want my vaccine,’” she said. But that popularity has evaporated. Last Thursday, Harris – a healthcare assistant receptionist at the Faversham Medical Practice in Kent – found she could no longer find enough people willing to come in for their jabs. “They want to know what vaccine they will be given,” Harris said. “And when you say it’s the AstraZeneca, they say: ‘I’ll wait for the next one.’” It is a story being repeated across the nation in the wake of decisions by European nations to suspend the use of Oxford/AstraZeneca jabs over worries they could cause blood clots. Just…

In the old Senegalese port city of Saint Louis, 12 women step off the sun-baked street and through a doorway draped with pink silk into a dim room beyond. After greetings are over, one by one they recount their stories. Recent memories of husbands, sons and brothers they have lost at sea, revealing precious pictures on smartphones of moments when they last cradled children or kissed their families. “He was helping me every day, caring for me,” 51-year-old Sina Ndiaye said of Omar, her 19-year-old son. In October last year, a boat carrying 200 migrants exploded off the coast of Senegal, killing him and 139 others. “Now he is gone, I have no hope left.” Their anguish has a common thread – their families were lost on one of the…

It was November 2019, just days after Evo Morales had abandoned Bolivia’s presidency and fled into exile, and the newly installed interior minister was making no effort to hide his glee. “Any terrorist should spend the rest of their life in prison,” Arturo Muril lo gloated during an interview, vowing to put the runaway leftist behind bars for the next 30 years. “It’s not about whether you’re an ex-president. In fact, it’s even worse when it’s an ex-president. An ex-president should be sentenced twice over because people trust in their president.” Last week, an ex-president was indeed jailed in Bolivia; not Morales, but Murillo’s former boss, Jeanine Áñez, who was seized by security forces early on 13 March. “We’re seeking a 30-year sentence,” Bolivia’s justice minister, Iván Lima, announced, as…

The US Senate is rapidly hurtling towards a high-stakes showdown over the filibuster, a once arcane procedural manoeuvre that stands in the way of Democratic eff orts to pass sweeping voting rights legislation. A fight over the filibuster, which sets a 60-vote threshold to move legislation forward, seemed inevitable after Democrats narrowly took control of the Senate in January. But urgency has escalated in recent weeks as Republicans in state legislatures across the country aggressively push new voting restrictions. The Senate last week introduced S1, a vast voting rights bill that already passed the US House. With the filibuster fully in place, it doesn’t stand a chance of passing. And the problem for Democrats is that there is no consensus in the Senate caucus about what, exactly, they should do…

Flying into Egypt in early February to make the most important presentation of his life, Ties van der Hoeven prepared by listening to the podcast 13 Minutes to the Moon – the story of how Nasa accomplished the lunar landings. The mission he was discussing with the Egyptian government was more earthbound in nature, but every bit as ambitious. It could even represent a giant leap for mankind. Van der Hoeven is a co-founder of the Weather Makers, a Dutch firm of “holistic engineers” with a plan to re green the Sinai, which connects Egypt to Asia. Within a couple of decades, the Weather Makers believe, the Sinai could be transformed from a dry, barren desert into forests, wetlands and farm land. A regreened Sinai would alter local weather patterns…

Capitalism is on a collision course with human life and the future of our planet. Each year, air pollution takes more lives than smoking: the last estimate suggests 8.8m deaths across the world, compared with 7m from cigarettes. As documents seen by the Guardian reveal, the oil industry has known for half a century that pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels poses severe threats to human health. By the late 1960s, Shell’s internal documents warned air pollution “may, in extreme situations, be deleterious to health”, while by 1980, Imperial College was warning of “birth defects among industry worker offspring”. And yet the same industry actively lobbied against clean air regulations proposed to protect health and save lives. This may cause moral revulsion, but the behaviour is perfectly rational.…

One of the most striking passages in Walter Isaacson’s book comes towards the end. It is 2019 and a scientific meeting is under way at the famous Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York State, but James Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, is banned from it because of the racist and scientifically unfounded views he has expressed on intelligence. Isaacson, who is to interview Watson, therefore has to make his way to the house on the nearby campus that the scientist has been allowed to keep. When the conversation sails dangerously close to the race issue, someone shouts from the kitchen: “If you are going to let him say these things, then I am going to have to ask you to leave.” The 91-year-old Watson shrugs and…

When the first vaccines started to be approved around the world three months ago, many thought the end of the pandemic was within reach. Few, however, had anticipated the vast logistical problems involved in mass-producing and delivering billions of doses globally. This has been underlined by the high-profile political squabbles between the UK and EU over who should get which deliveries of vaccines from which factories amid shortages of doses. What is behind the holdups? Mass-producing the new vaccines is complicated There have been two broad approaches to production of Covid vaccines. The Oxford/AstraZeneca jab relies on a well-tested approach in which lab-produced cell cultures are created in large bioreactors – a bit like brewing, but for vaccines. The second, newer technique for producing mRNA vaccines, such as the Pfizer…

Some will call it a tilt, others a rebalancing and yet others a pivot, but, either way, the new big idea to emerge from the UK government’s foreign and defence policy review last week was the importance of the Indo-Pacific region; a British return east of Suez more than 50 years after a cash-strapped UK announced its retreat in 1968. Boris Johnson and his admirals are billing the focus on a zone stretching through some of the world’s most vital seaways – east from India to Japan and south from China to Australia – as Britain stepping out in the world after 47 years locked in the EU’s protectionist cupboard. Others warn Johnson is indulging a hubristic and militarily dangerous imperial fantasy. Either way, the British public is startlingly ill-prepared…

The Champs-Élysées may be empty, with a strict curfew in place across France, but the shops have been leaving their signs on all the same. So a few months ago a parkour collective decided to take matters into its own hands. With members using their gymnastic abilities to climb walls and scaffolding to turn off the illuminated signs, the Paris-based On the Spot collective is just one of a number of parkour groups around France trying to raise awareness about light pollution and energy consumption as part of the Lights Off movement. “Turning off the lights is a symbolic message about the basic efforts that businesses should be making,” said Kevin Ha, a 28-year-old completing his PhD in oceanography and the leader of On the Spot. “It’s not the efficiency…

‘My generation is still carrying the same hopes for justice and freedom’Sarah Kasem Student Sarah Kasem was 12 when Arab Spring protesters began to fill the streets and squares of Syria 10 years ago. She remembers the hope and excitement vividly; it seems so divorced from the horrors that followed. Kasem’s teenage years were spent under siege in the city of Homs, where friends and relatives disappeared and her family lived much of the time without electricity, struggling to secure food and medicine. All the while, Bashar al-Assad’s air force dropped barrel bombs and cluster munitions on their neighbourhood. When the city fell, the Kasems were faced with a choice millions more would make during the course of the war: stay and face Assad’s troops, who would treat them like terrorists,…

At 4.54pm last Tuesday, a Hyundai SUV pulled up outside Young’s Asian Massage parlour in the Atlanta suburb of Acworth. Earlier that day the driver, a white man, had popped into Big Woods Goods, a gun store that prides itself on being “fast and friendly”. The man was able to buy a 9mm firearm on the spot. Surveillance camera footage captured the man entering Young’s at 4.54pm. There is no film to record what followed inside. For that, police will have to rely on the scorched memories of the few survivors. A key survivor and potential witness for investigators will be the husband of Delaina Ashley Yaun, a 33-year-old employee of a local Waffle House. The couple had gone to Young’s together on the evening of 16 March – it…

Abaleful silence attends one of the most talked-about figures in British history. You may enthuse endlessly about Winston Churchill “single-handedly” defeating Hitler. But mention his views on race or his colonial policies, and you’ll be instantly drowned in ferocious and orchestrated vitriol. In a sea of fawningly reverential Churchill biographies, hardly any books seriously examine his documented racism. Nothing, it seems, can be allowed to complicate, let alone tarnish, the national myth of a flawless hero: an idol who “saved our civilisation”, as Boris Johnson claims, or “humanity as a whole”, as David Cameron did. Make an uncomfortable observation about his views on white supremacy and the likes of Piers Morgan will ask: “Why do you live in this country?” Not everyone is content to be told to be quiet…

Sebastian Stan, AKA Bucky Barnes, AKA The Winter Soldier, is attempting to characterise his relationship with his on-screen partner Anthony Mackie, AKA Sam Wilson, AKA The Falcon: “I grew up with buddy comedies like 48 Hours, Coming to America, you know, Lethal Weapon, Turner and Hooch. All those movies I grew up with. So for me, it was like I was making an 80s film with Anthony Mackie.” By this stage, Mackie is laughing his head off in a separate Zoom window: “We’re definitely the Turner and Hooch of the Marvel Universe. That’s the perfect description of who we are.” Old superheroes never die; they just get recast. Or they miraculously survive the incident that supposedly killed them off. Or, increasingly, they come back for their own small-screen spin-off. The…

1 CLIMATE CRISIS Oil firms knew fossil-fuel health risks 50 years ago The oil industry knew at least 50 years ago that air pollution from burning fossil fuels posed serious risks to human health, only to spend decades aggressively lobbying against clean air regulations, internal documents seen by the Guardian reveal. Oil and gas companies released material aimed at raising uncertainty over the harm caused by air pollution and used this to deter US lawmakers from placing further limits on pollutants. “The response from fossil-fuel interests has been from the same playbook – first they know, then they scheme, then they deny and then they delay,” said Geoffrey Supran, a researcher at Harvard University. In internal memos and reports, Imperial Oil, an Exxon subsidiary, acknowledged in 1967 the petroleum industry…

POLICE Revealed: grim list of sex abuse claims against police An extraordinary catalogue of sexual misconduct allegations against Metropolitan police officers, including claims that one had sex with a rape victim, have been revealed. The disclosures will intensify pressure after Met officers manhandled women at a recent vigil for Sarah Everard where hundreds demanded the right to be safe on London’s streets. Organisers of the vigil accused the force of losing the faith of women and being unable to tackle its “institutional misogyny”. According to the documents, the rape victim complained that the investigating officer “took advantage of her vulnerability and had sex with her on two occasions”. The officer was subsequently dismissed. There was a total of 594 complaints against Met employees between 2012 and 2018, of which 119…

While western Europe’s “vaccine war” has been a struggle to prevent doses from being exported, in another part of the world, the battle is to give vaccines away. Last week, a Bahraini prince and his retinue arrived in Nepal to climb Mount Everest. They brought climbing gear, provisions and – in an apparent surprise to regulators in Kathmandu – enough Covid-19 vaccines to inoculate 1,000 people. Bahrain intended the vaccines as a “friendly gesture” to the residents of a village that had recently renamed some hills in honour of the Gulf state’s royals. It coordinated the trip with Nepal’s embassy in Manama, but health ministry officials in the Himalayan country had other ideas, confiscating the Sinopharm doses at the airport. “It wasn’t coordinated properly,” a spokesperson for the ministry said.…

Eruption watch At 3.22am on 17 March, for the 14th time in less than a month, Mount Etna had sent another reminder that it is one of the world’s most active volcanoes. Etna, 3,300 metres above sea level, has been in explosive form in recent weeks, spewing incandescent magma, while ash showers have reached as far as Catania. Since 16 February, with precision, every 48 hours the volcano has put on a firework display with lava flowing down the volcano to heights of a round 2,000 metres. The Guardian had access to the rooms of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV) in Catania, where day and night 100 Italian scientists monitor Etna’s movements in an attempt to explain these recent phenomena. “The recent activity is part of a…

Judith Machaca was last seen on her way home from work in her home town of Tacna in southern Peru. The student had been working part-time at a mobile phone shop and would always send a message if she was going to be late. The last text message from her phone was sent at 11pm on 28 November and the next day her distraught father reported the 20-year-old’s disappearance to the police. They sent him away. Machaca never came home. When the police continued to do nothing, her family began to protest, holding vigils outside the police station. Two months later, excavators uncovered her body next to that of 14-year-old Noemí Escobar, 80 metres down a well on a farm belonging to the parents of a police officer. Machaca’s killing…

Elephants, pangolins and sea turtles – as well as thousands of gorillas – have been handed a lifeline by amateur investors who played the stock market at its own game. Hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent adopting endangered animals by users of a Reddit trading tips community, giving conservation organisations across the world a much-needed financial boost. The money came from users of the WallStreetBets subreddit, who earlier this year bought small volumes of shares in the retailer GameStop en masse. This inflated the company’s share price, raising value for themselves and withholding it from professional investors such as hedge funds and big Wall Street firms who had hoped to profit from its failure. Instead of splurging on cocaine, yachts or political donations, many of those small investors…

Wildfires burned nearly 4.2m hectares across the US last year. The most costly thunderstorm in US history caused $7.5bn in damage across Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota. As the climate crisis swept the globe on a biblical scale, it left in its wake a record number of billion-dollar disasters. Yet out of these ashes has emerged an unlikely saviour: Wall Street. After decades of backing polluters and opposing legislation to rein them in, finance says it’s going green. A steadily growing trend in investment went fully mainstream in 2020 as a record number of corporations pledged to go “net zero” and move to cancel out the carbon emissions they produce to halt a catastrophic rise in global temperatures. The tectonic corporate shift is being led by a strategic detour…

The long-running German satirical show Extra 3 recently featured a sketch with the following voiceover: “From the people who brought you The Crown – the epic saga of the Queen – now comes the ridiculous story of this guy, a notorious buffoon at the head of a country … The Clown.” The word “clown” has often been used in a flippant or dismissive way with regard to Boris Johnson. But the underlying paradox is that it is only as a clown – a fool in the oldest and deepest sense of the word – that his character can truly be understood. What happens when you make the clown king is what we in the UK have been witnessing in real time. With the success of the vaccine, though, a new…

On 10 March, Brazil’s former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva gave a rousing comeback speech at the metalworkers’ union headquarters in São Bernardo do Campo, an industrial centre in the São Paulo metropolitan region from where Lula first emerged as a national figure in the 1970s. The day before, in a shocking turnaround that surprised even those convinced of his innocence, a justice on the supreme court annulled the criminal convictions against Lula, rendering him eligible to run for a third term next year. The ruling would have been a big story even if Lula’s popularity had faded since he left office in 2011. But he remains strikingly electable, ahead of the far-right incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, who won the 2018 election. It’s notable given that Lula has not even…

Publishing, like politics and like comedy, is all about timing. The timing is not right for this book, which is a damning assessment of how the UK government of Boris Johnson mishandled almost every aspect of the coronavirus crisis, so that Britain suffered both the highest death toll in Europe and an economic slump more devastating than in any other G7 nation. The timing is off because of the one thing the government got right. At this moment, polls suggest a nation grateful to be vaccinated efficiently and at speed, with case numbers and deaths falling daily, schools open once more and the first sound of the key being turned on a lockdown that has seemed to last for ever. The time to work out what went wrong and who…