Innholdsfortegnelse for 14th May 2021 i Guardian Weekly

Last week was a picture of two pandemics. Among the world’s richest nations, lockdowns and well-resourced vaccine campaigns, which have monopolised the early global supply of doses, have brought down infections and deaths. Economies have slowly opened. Restrictions have been lifted. Life has crept closer to normal, giving the false impression of an end in sight to the global pandemic. In reality, as Tedros Adhanom, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO), pointed out, more cases were reported in the two weeks up to 7 May than in the entire first six months of the pandemic, with south Asia bearing the brunt. This was echoed by the UN children’s agency Unicef last Friday. “The pandemic is far from over,” it said. “Covid-19 cases are rising at an alarming rate…

SPAIN Pablo Iglesias revitalised Europe’s left Page 19 → Brexit is done. Long live Brexit. The long election weekend started badly for Sir Keir Starmer and Labour, and got worse from there, as the aftershocks of the 2016 referendum decision continued to reverberate through the English electorate. At 7am last Friday, a massive Conservative victory was announced in the Hartlepool by-election, Peter Mandelson’s former seat and Labour’s for decades hitherto. Even before the Hartlepool result was declared, the evidence from early council results was looking bad for Labour. Under Starmer, the party has sought to move on from Brexit. This, it seems, is not yet something English voters are willing to do. In seat after seat in leave-voting parts of England, the Conservatives surged and Labour slumped. Leave voters, it…

‘If glaciers are what you are after, that’s the place for you.” The speaker was a prospector passing through Fort Wrangell, Alaska, in 1879. The subject was a remote bay, flanked by rugged walls of ice and filled with floating bergs. The listener was the Scottish-American environmental philosopher John Muir, who needed no further encouragement to set out in a canoe soon after with a large stock of provisions, blankets and a determination to visit the frozen wonderland. It was October and winter was approaching. The territory ahead was largely uncharted. His travelling companions – four members of the Hoonah Tlingit people and a missionary – were warned the dangers were so great they would never return. Muir was undeterred. “The icy regions burned in my mind,” he noted. “I…

She is a champion of the hawkish foreign policy espoused by her father, a former US vice-president dubbed “Darth Vader”. She is a hardline conservative whose opposition to gay marriage pained her lesbian sister. Now, Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney is likely to be a martyr of her resistance to ex-president Donald Trump, appearing certain to be ousted by fellow members as the sole woman in Republican leadership in the House of Representatives this week. Elise Stefanik, a pro-Trump congresswoman, has been touted as her successor. Cheney’s sin is to reject Trump’s “big lie” that last year’s election was stolen from him, increasingly the definitive loyalty test within the party. She has spoken out in public, tweeted that the false claim was “poisoning our democratic system” and published a newspaper column…

WHEN THEY WAKE UP ON A SATURDAY morning to find rain coursing down the windows of their Gothenburg apartment, four-year-old Enja Bäckström and her six-year-old brother Charlie often still want to go out to play. That’s because their local playground has been designed to be particularly fun when it’s wet. There are dips in the ground to make the puddles deeper and more satisfyingly splashy, and water gushes down channels from lilypad-shaped rain shelters into a sandpit where children can make pools, rivers and dams. “The kids love to go on their bicycles through the puddles, and my son likes to dig the sands, so some parts of the playground are really nice when it rains,” says their mother, Jessica Bäckström. The Regnlekplatsen, or “rain playground”, is part of Rain…

As often is the case, Donald Trump gets to the heart of the problem. On 6 January, he was the president of the United States: probably the most powerful man in the world. He should be free to speak his mind, and voters should be free to listen. But he was also a habitual liar who, by the end of his term, had edged into repudiating the very democracy that had elevated him. And then came his inflammatory words on that day, uttered even as rioters were breaking into the Capitol. At 5.41pm and 6.15pm that day, Facebook removed two posts from Trump. The following day, it banned Trump from its platform indefinitely. Twitter also moved to ban the president – permanently. The classic defence of free expression is that…

While researching this book, Henry Mance worked briefly in an abattoir, or “a disassembly line”, as he aptly terms it. As he watched sheep being stunned, their throats slit and then hung up, still twitching, from metal hooks on a motorised track, Mance asked himself: “How did humans come to this?” His book is an attempt to answer that question, as well as an exploration of how our attitudes to pets, livestock and wild animals have changed through history: “I wanted to know whether my love for animals was reflected in how I behaved, or whether – like my love for arthouse films – it was mainly theoretical.” To understand the popularity of zoos, he talked to Damian Aspinall, owner of two UK safari parks. Every year in the UK…

I took a test. A fun test. Its overarching question: are you a tourist in your own home? Absolutely not, I thought. Almost three decades in Sydney makes me a local. But when I tried to answer the questions, I couldn’t pass. Because it’s not about “where to eat, play, and stay”. The tourist test is a kind of belonging barometer that explores how much we participate in our home environment. Author and rewilding facilitator Claire Dunn adapted the test from the Kamana independent naturalist study course then dropped some of the 133 questions to city dwellers at her workshops. “Hopefully, it sparks the desire to bring ourselves back to a more intimate way of knowing our place in the world,” she says. Here are some questions from Dunn’s test,…

Keir Starmer this week moved to ease Labour party tensions with an address to staff and shadow cabinet members praising his deputy, Angela Rayner, after a bitter briefing war. The Labour leader emerged from a bruising weekend during which he reshuffled his shadow cabinet – including removing Rayner as party chair – and was warned by left wing MPs he could face a leadership challenge. Speaking on Monday, Starmer said the party was “too internally focused” rather than concentrating on winning votes. Addressing his new shadow cabinet – with former shadow chancellor Anneliese Dodds replaced by his close ally Rachel Reeves – Starmer explicitly praised Rayner, saying she would have a far more high-profile role “taking the fight to the Tories”. Rayner’s allies have briefed that she has emerged more…

It was strikingly clear that the most dangerous moment in Jerusalem’s worst unrest for years would arrive on Monday. After weeks of mounting anger, a series of provocative events were set to spiral together at once, creating a tinderbox that world powers warned needed delicate handling. The European Union had called on authorities to “act urgently to de-escalate the current tensions in Jerusalem” while the US said the Israeli government should “pursue appropriate measures to ensure calm”. But even before dawn broke, tensions had been raised another notch. Fierce confrontations had erupted overnight as Palestinians launched fireworks and rocks at police, who returned fire with rubber bullets and stun grenades. By morning, heavily armoured officers stepped up the crackdown, storming the sacred Jerusalem site that holds the Dome of the…

‘There are still women in the Middle East trying to push these same boundaries’ The birth of the women’s movement in Egypt is not usually associated with music hall singers, dancers and actresses. But it was on the stages of theatres and nightclubs in Cairo, in the roaring 20s, that early feminists first asserted themselves, a new book argues. The capital’s biggest stars were independent, transgressive Arabicspeaking women who were seeking to redefine their place in the world, according to Raphael Cormack, the author of Midnight in Cairo. One example was Badia Masabni, who ran and owned one of the most famous cabarets in Cairo. “She was a well-known singer and dancer, so every night she would always perform. But she was also famous for going around the world finding…

ON WEDNESDAY 3 AUGUST 1938, a short advertisement appeared on the second page of the Manchester Guardian, under the title “Tuition”. “I seek a kind person who will educate my intelligent Boy, aged 11, Viennese of good family,” the advert said, under the name Borger, giving the ad dress of an apartment on Hintzerstrasse, in Vienna’s third district. The small ad, costing a shilling a line, was placed by my grandparents, Leo and Erna. The 11-year-old boy was my father, Robert. It turned out to be the key to their survival and the reason I am here, nearly 83 years later, working at the newspaper that ran the ad. In 1938, Jewish families under Nazi rule were scrambling to get their children out of the Reich. Newspaper advertisements were one…

The use of rape as a weapon of war is as old as warfare itself. In Bosnia in the 1990s, thousands of Muslim women were brutalised by Bosnian Serb forces, who set up “rape camps” as part of a policy of “ethnic cleansing”. In 2001, the UN’s Yugoslav war crimes tribunal redefined mass rape as a crime against humanity. Yet there have been many similar atrocities since then. Now the world looks on – or rather, looks away – as it happens again. Today, in Tigray, in northern Ethiopia, large numbers of women and girls are again being subjected to “unimaginable” suffering as a result of pervasive sexual violence. The word “unimaginable” is taken from a disturbing new report on Tigray by the UK parliament’s i nternational development committee. Reporting…

If you wanted to locate a defining preoccupation in the consistently remarkable, formally daring fiction of Rachel Cusk, you might well alight on the issue of property. Cusk is obsessed with houses. Her revelatory Outline trilogy, completed in 2018 with the publication of Kudos, faltered on the awkward class politics of its central volume, in which the narrator’s efforts to renovate an ex-council flat are undermined by the inconvenient working classes living below. In her first novel since the trilogy’s reimagining of novelistic form, Cusk gives us a dream home with a second home attached – the “Second Place” of the novel’s title. It is, says the narrator, “a place of great but subtle beauty, where artists often seem to find the will or the energy or just the opportunity…

1 UNITED STATES Black families seek action by UN over police violence The families of 165 victims of police brutality are calling on the United Nations to set up an independent inquiry into the ongoing scourge of police killings of Black men and women. With the support of more than 250 civil society groups from around the world, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the families are hoping to engage the UN in efforts to rein in police violence against African American communities. The call comes in the wake of last year’s nationwide and international protests after the murder of George Floyd by the former police officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis who was convicted of the crime last month. In a letter sent on Monday to the UN high commissioner…

SCOTLAND Referendum ‘a matter of when, not if ’, says SNP Nicola Sturgeon told Boris Johnson that a second independence referendum is “a matter of when, not if” after the Scottish National party secured a historic fourth term at Holyrood with a pro-independence majority of MSPs returned despite tactical voting by pro-union supporters in last Thursday’s elections. Scotland’s first minister made the assertion in a telephone call with the prime minister last Sunday evening, despite senior Conservative figures questioning her mandate. Sturgeon has already signalled her readiness for a constitutional battle, saying her government would legislate for the vote “and if Boris Johnson wants to stop that he would have to go to court”. The leader of the Scottish Conservatives, Douglas Ross, accused her of forcing a legal battle over…

If you look out to sea from the Christian Dior museum on the cliffs above Granville, you see the grey outline of what appears to be another part of the Norman coast. It is. But it isn’t. The island of Jersey, straggling along the horizon to the north-west, is one of the last fragments of the ancient dukedom of Normandy. Over there, 65km away, the people don’t speak French and are wealthier (twice so, on average) as the people over here. Dior, the great fashion designer, was born in the grey, unglamorous town of Granville in 1905. He quickly moved to Paris. His birthplace makes its living from tourism and, for the time being, fishing. If the Norman cousins over the water (and their millionaire-migrant fellow citizens) have their way,…

In the summer of 2015, a businessman in the Syrian province of Latakia was approached by a powerful security chief, seeking a favour. The official wanted the merchant, an importer of medical supplies, to source large amounts of a drug called fenethylline from abroad. The regime, he said, would buy the lot. After an internet search, the merchant made a decision. He left his home that week, first sending his wife and children into exile, before following them, taking what he could from his businesses for a new start. “I know what they were asking me to do,” he said, from his home in Paris. “They wanted the main ingredient for Captagon. And that drug is a dirty business.” Other businessmen do not share his reservations. The manufacture of the…

Five hundred years after Hernán Cortés and his men conquered Mexico, a small boatload of indigenous Zapatistas are crossing the Atlantic to “invade” Spain, rail against capitalist oppression, and perhaps throw the odd cumbia party. The two men and five women set out on the evening of 2 May from Isla Mujeres, Mexico’s most eastern point. Although Subcomandante Galeano said their message was “the invasion has started”, their mission was one of solidarity and rebellion rather than belated conquest. “We’re following the route that they came from 500 years ago,” Subcomandante Moisés, another Zapatista leader, said at the departure ceremony. “In this case, we’re following the route to sow life, not like 500 years ago. It’s completely the opposite.” The group explained that their rusty vessel, named La Montaña, would…

When the human population hit 7 billion, in 2011, economist David Lam and demographer Stan Becker made a bet. Lam predicted food would get cheaper over the next decade, despite continuing population growth. Becker predicted that food prices would go up, because of the damage humans were doing to the planet, which meant that population growth would outstrip food supply. Becker won, and following his wishes, Lam has just written out a cheque for $194 to the Vermont-based nonprofit the Population Media Center, which promotes population stabilisation internationally. The sum equates to the increase in price of a basket containing five food types – cereals, dairy, meat, oils and fats, and sugar – from $1,000, on average, in the decade to 2010, to $1,194 in the next 10 years. The…

My grandfather died on 25 August 2020, Chinese Valentine’s Day. I believe it was peaceful. He had been in hospital in a vegetative state for several months, and had been declining from dementia for three years. He was 95; he had always said he would live to be 100. Fifty-three days before he died, my grandmother died. She was eating a sweet rice ball at the dinner table and her heart suddenly stopped. Mid-bite, she simply stopped moving. Froze, like a buffering video clip. By the time they got her to the hospital it was too late. She had been in good health. I was alone in New York when I heard about my grandfather’s death. Because of the pandemic, none of the family in the US could travel. We…

It didn’t take long for confident predictions of a Covid baby boom to emerge last spring. Locked up together, with only Netflix for company, what else are couples going to do? (Nudge, wink.) This puerile “more or less sex?” approach too often serves as a substitute for a proper debate about fertility. There is a paradox at the heart of population politics. There is no decision more intensely personal and life-changing than whether and when to have children. Yet the aggregate of all those intimate choices is the fertility rate: a dry, wonky statistic that tells you how many children women have on average, which policymakers in affluent countries have been sounding alarm bells over. That’s because fertility rates have been falling in the UK and elsewhere as women have…

Which great artist of the 20th century has been most influential on the 21st? Neither Picasso nor Matisse, as they have no heirs. And not Marcel Duchamp, however much we genuflect before his urinal. No, the artist of the last century whose ideas are everywhere today was a wine merchant who took street art and fashioned it into something extraordinary more than 75 years ago. After four years of Nazi occupation, you would think Parisians would have been unshockable. But in 1944, the newly liberated city was sorely provoked by the antics of Jean Dubuffet. Even as the last shots were fired, he was creating newspaper collages bearing the graffiti messages he saw in the streets: “Emile is gone again”, “Always devoted to your orders”, “URGENT”. In the next couple…