Innholdsfortegnelse for 21st May 2021 i Guardian Weekly

The X-factor Brood X cicada nymphs crawl through a tree well in Washington DC, prior to shedding their exoskeletons after having spent 17 years underground during their long and remarkable life cycle. Trillions of the bugs are set to hatch and mate across the northeastern and midwestern US in the coming weeks. The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol 204 | Issue No 22 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…

Abd al-Fattah Iskafi, 71, has lived in his house on a tree-lined street near the historic Damascus Gate entrance to Jerusalem’s Old City since he was six years old. But he has spent decades locked in a court battle with hardline Jewish settlers over whether he has the right to stay. Families in his Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood who also face losing their homes have been “destroyed psychologically” by the long legal fight, he says. But as lawyers prepared this month for a showdown in Israel’s highest court, fallout from the case spread far beyond their neighbourhood. For many Palestinians, the battle has become emblematic of what they see as a campaign to force them out of East Jerusalem. Anger at potential evictions fuelled broader tensions that last week exploded into…

Shaken, shoeless and with a gaping bullet wound to one of his feet, the young man staggered through Flávia Luciana’s front door around 8am. “Help me! For the love of God! Help!” she remembers him pleading as he sought shelter inside It would be one of his last acts. About half an hour later, witnesses say a small group of police special forces appeared outside on Saint Manuel lane, a narrow alleyway at the heart of Jacarezinho, one of the city’s largest favelas. Rifles raised, the police advanced up two flights of stairs to Luciana’s door. One barged inside, pursuing the injured – and apparently unarmed – man into her nine-year-old daughter’s pink-walled bedroom, where a sign above the bed reads: “Here sleeps a princess.” The girl’s father, André Franklin,…

Sixteen minutes and out. The purging of Liz Cheney from Republican leadership in the House of Representatives did not even go to a secret ballot. A voice vote was all it took to confirm the party’s capitulation to Donald Trump and his “big lie” about a stolen election. But Cheney went down swinging, vowing to reporters on Capitol Hill: “I will do everything I can to ensure that the former president never again gets anywhere near the Oval Office,” then using a high-profile TV interview to say of would-be challengers for her seat in Wyoming: “Bring it on.” Cheney’s public defiance instantly turned her into one of the leaders of the “Never Trump” movement of disaffected Republicans. But it also raised questions over the direction of that movement and whether…

Uganda is experiencing its worst wave of political oppression in decades. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of supporters of opposition parties to President General Yoweri Museveni have been abducted, detained and tortured in recent months. Like many, I bear the scars of the baton, have felt the sting of teargas and endured unlawful detention. But I know that this is not personal. It isn’t about me. Many others, whose only offence is to exercise constitutionally entrenched rights and freedoms, have been clobbered, abducted, tortured and put on show trial. The atrocities are numerous: the unresolved carnage of the Kayunga shootings in 2009 that left 40 dead, the massacres in Rwenzururu where police and the military killed more than 150, or the killings last November in which more than 50 protesters lost their…

As she wanders the immense backlot of Rome’s Cinecittà film studio – “Hollywood on the Tiber” – the heroine of Maylis de Kerangal’s Painting Time is struck by how unreal the sets seem up close, how patently confected. “A set doesn’t have to be real,” her guide explains, “it has to be true.” There is something magnificently true about De Kerangal’s fiction, which braids technical fluency with winged prose. A meticulous researcher, she draws immensely humane stories out of niche vocational knowledge: the worldbending muscle of mechanical engineering (Birth of a Bridge); the hermetic brutalities of transplant surgery (Mend the Living, which won the Wellcome science book prize in 2017); the explorations of haute cuisine (The Cook). In Painting Time, translated by Jessica Moore, the French author turns her granular…

You are more powerful than Gwyneth Paltrow. Of course you are. In a recent interview, Paltrow revealed that she had gone “totally off the rails” during the Covid pandemic by drinking two alcoholic drinks a night and eating some bread. “I mean, who drinks multiple drinks seven nights a week?” she said. “Like, that’s not healthy.” If there was ever a time to be proud of your constitution, fellow non-Paltrows, this is it. I think I ate pasta four times last week, and washed it all down with multiple loaves of bread, and I was basically drunk for the lot of it. And look at me, I’m not off the rails at all. These are my rails. True, it’s a lifestyle that has left me looking like a sad potato…

Violence erupted again last week between Israelis and Palestinians, sparked by a (since delayed) court ruling over Jewish land rights in the east of Jerusalem. While the roots of this seemingly interminable cycle of conflict go back to Israel’s foundation in 1948, the current tensions also look suspiciously expedient for ruling politicians in Israel, Gaza and Iran, while the new Biden administration in Washington seems to have been caught completely off-guard. Our team of Middle East reporters recount how the region spiralled into violence, while on our Opinion pages Jonathan Freedland says the futile normality of attrition between Israelis and Palestinians must be challenged. The big story Page 10 ➔ England’s great leap forward from lockdown had the uneasy feel of two steps back, as an outbreak of the India variant…

The synagogue’s metal gate had been ripped from its hinges and a smell of petrol lingered in the air. The skeletons of what had been palm trees stood charred, while inside parents prayed in a small room filled with colourful books for their children. “Those animals destroyed and burned,” said Eytan Schnur of his Arab neighbours, who he said torched the synagogue last Thursday. The synagogue was the fifth to have been burned in a week in Lod, a city in central Israel that has become the focal point of a vicious surge in communal violence Far-right Jewish Israelis, often armed with pistols and operating in full view of police, have moved into mixed areas. In messages shared by one online Jewish supremacist group, Jews were called to flood into…

At the border between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, in a vast territory that ranges from the lofty Rwenzori mountains to the lush rainforest of the Semuliki valley, one of the world’s most active militant groups is responsible for the massacre of hundreds of civilians. The ADF (Allied Democratic Forces) was originally an opposition rebel group from Uganda rooted in a radical agenda of religious militancy. Taking advantage of the regional power vacuum, the group fled to Beni territory in neighbouring DR C to find shelter from the Ugandan army. Founded in 1995 by radical preacher Jamil Mukulu, a Ugandan Christian who converted to Islam, the ADF has been able to survive repeated attempts to eradicate it by establishing cross-border networks. After fleeing to DRC, the militants…

Two tree stumps signalled to Larry Pynn that something was wrong. Jutting from a mossy forest floor in western Canada, the fresh stumps were the remnants of two western red cedars that had been cut down by chainsaw. Nearby, a set of deep tyre tracks ran for nearly a kilomet re in the mud before terminating at the main road. “I immediately suspected that this is the work of poachers,” said Pynn, a journalist who lives nearby. “These are clearly valuable trees and they were likely cut because of that.” Since January, local officials on central Vancouver Island say at least 100 trees have been illegally felled. As lumber prices across the continent soar, ecosystems full of valuable old-growth trees have increasingly become a target for thieves. Pynn found the…

I’m playing online Pictionary while chatting with five people I’ve never met. This is not at all how I usually spend my Thursdays. We’ve all dropped into a virtual meeting space on a site called gather.town, which provides free customisable spaces for anyone who wants to organise a get-together without using Zoom. Gather is a virtual world and you choose an avatar before entering: imagine a mid-80s Super Mario game in which, instead of jumping over his enemies, Mario has to go to the office. There are pixelated potted palms dotted about my screen, a couple of banks of desks and a sofa area, all rendered in a style common to early computer games. I’m represented by a tiny, blocky avatar: a collection of dots arranged to look a bit…

Hauled before two select committees to answer for his Greensill lobbying role, David Cameron claimed last week that his text to the Treasury mentioning a “rate cut” might in fact have meant to say “VAT cut”. As the former UK prime minister put it: “I think I’m a victim of spellcheck here.” A what now? Still, you’ll have nothing but respect for this excuse, which is basically: “I fear that I, a stand up guy, have been autocorrected into a complete chancer.” And yet … on which phone does VAT autocorrect to rate? I’m afraid I found it difficult to watch this section of the hearings and not think: can you ducking believe this aunt? I say “this section of the hearings”. In fact, Cameron’s appearances provided, if not an…

‘I think it looks terrific,” says David Hockney. “It’s all on one theme, isn’t it? And there’s not many exhibitions like that, really, a show all about the spring.” The 83-year-old artist is taking a look around his new exhibition at the Royal Academy in London for the first time. He seems happy with it – and rightly so, for it is hypnotic and ravishing. But while I am getting a sneak preview in person, Hockney is here virtually, his face appearing on two screens: a giant TV and a laptop. He is at home, at what he calls his “seven dwarves house” in Normandy, wearing a red, black and white check jacket, a checkerboard tie, a blue-green pullover and round, gold-framed glasses. His kaleidoscopic choice of clothing, challenging the…

It is hard to think of a writer who has had more success than Mich ael Lewis at turning forbiddingly complex situations into propulsive non fiction narratives. His first book, the semi-autobiographical Liar’s Poker, drew on his own experience as a bond salesman in the 1980s to tell a vivid story about the predatory culture of Wall Street. He has since repeated the trick, though with fewer autobiographical elements, with an impressive range of subjects, from statistical analysis in baseball (Moneyball) to the credit default swap market and the 2008 financial crisis (The Big Short). His success derives from an ability to take incredibly wonkish-sounding premises and turn them into the kinds of stor ies that get made into films starring, respectively, Brad Pitt and Christian Bale. His new book,…

1 UNITED STATES Abortion rights face major rollback by supreme court The US supreme court agreed on Monday to consider a major challenge to reproductive rights, saying it will take up Mississippi’s bid to enforce a ban on almost all abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy. It will be the first abortion case to come before the court since the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a devout Catholic, gave conservatives a 6-3 majority. It could lead to the landmark Roev Wade precedent being stripped back after nearly half a century. The court will hear arguments in the case in its next term, which starts in October, and may not arrive at a decision until the spring or summer of 2022 – setting up a politically explosive showdown. Progressives…

CORONAVIRUS MPs call for Covid inquiry to be fully independent A cross-party group of MPs called on Boris Johnson to ensure that the chair and panel of the public inquiry into Covid-19 is not “hand-picked” by the government, in order to avoid accusations of “political bias”. The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Coronavirus also warns the prime minister that the current timetable under which the inquiry will not begin until spring next year will mean vital lessons go unlearned ahead of a potential third wave. Johnson announced last week that the public inquiry would be launched next spring to investigate “rigorously and candidly” what mistakes the UK government made during the coronavirus pandemic. The inquiry must also examine whether Boris Johnson’s decision to delay adding India to the travel “red list”…

The World Health Organization said last week that the India Covid-19 variant was a global concern, with some data suggesting the variant has “increased transmissibility” compared with other strains. Outside India, the UK has been recording the highest number of cases of the India variant, with 1,587 cases as of 14 May. By then, the US, Singapore and Germany were the only other countries to have sequenced more than 100 cases of the B.1.617.2 variant, according to the Gisaid Initiative There are national disparities in sequencing rates. The UK sequences a large proportion of its positive Covid-19 cases and records a higher number of variants as a result. Recorded cases of the variant have been found on every continent, with Asia recording the highest total. US By 14 May, the…

Walk of life Performers and volunteers operate a giant puppet named Mocco, created by the puppeteer Noriyuki Sawa in conjunction with local children, that will travel from Japan’s northern Tōhoku region along the Pacific coast to Tokyo, as part of events to mark 10 years since the earthquake and tsunami that killed more than 18,000 people and triggered a nuclear meltdown in Fukushima. It is hoped Mocco’s journey will draw attention to the reconstruction of the Tōhoku region.…

When the mouse plague began in regional New South Wales and Queensland, residents spoke like generals in a war. It was all about strategy, setting the cleverest traps, fortifying houses to keep the enemy out and outsmarting wave after wave of the tiny creature. But, six months on, with rodent numbers surging again despite thousands of tonnes of poisons being deployed and devastating floods, conversations about mice have changed. They aren’t foes to be bested any more, they’re more like a giant dark cloud hovering over each town. “Nobody understands a mouse plague until you’ve lived through it,” said John Southon, principal at the Trundle Central School in rural NSW. “Nobody understands the absolutely pungent smell, the fact that your furniture is eaten, it’s just horrendous. The mice have eaten…

At first, the theft of wooden fence posts seemed like a crime of opportunity – amid soaring lumber costs, stacks of wood have gone missing from construction sites across North Ameri ca. But officers in the Canadian prairie community of Porcupine Plain, Saskatchewan, soon identified the culprit: local beavers had stolen the posts to build their dam. The semiaquatic rodents were also recently blamed for an internet outage in British Columbia, which left an entire town without access to the web after beavers chewed through a cable. Adding insult to injury, the animals had also pilfered the telecom company’s marking tape to line their dam. The beaver is often seen as emblematic of Canada, but the two incidents – and a third episode in February when a beaver wandered into…

If Groundhog Day were a horror movie, it would look like this. The deadly violence shaking the Middle East – Israeli airstrikes on Gaza, Hamas rocket attacks on Israel – seems to play out the same way, again and again, as if on some macabre repeat cycle. We saw it in 2009 and we saw it again in 2014. Each element is familiar: the lopsided death toll, Palestinian deaths outnumbering Israeli ones; the flattened buildings; the tears of the bereaved. And outside the region, the same armies of keyboard warriors, each parroting the talking points of their side, insistent that only their own pain counts. It usually goes like this. The violence escalates, Israel moving from airstrikes to artillery fire to some action on the ground. (Israel seems to be…

Although it was a Saturday night, there were fewer than a dozen people in Paper Dress Vintage in east London when a 17-year-old singer arrived on stage. The clothes shop by day turned live music venue by night had the unknown Arlo Parks second on the bill, where she performed with a band made up of schoolfriends. Most of the audience were mates from sixth form. But there was also a scout from Transgressive Records; he spent the first half of the show in total dismay. “It just wasn’t very good,” said Mike Harounoff apologetically. As the artists and repertoire manager for Transgressive, Harounoff’s job is to find talent. He had high expectations for Parks – her manager was a friend – and he had already hyped up the teenager…