Innholdsfortegnelse for 28th May 2021 i Guardian Weekly

Spider senses Dancers dressed in Spider-Man costumes entertain commuters on a St Petersburg metro train. The city is preparing to host thousands of football fans for matches in next month’s Euro 2020 tournament, which has been delayed from last year. The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol 204 | Issue № 23 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 of the public interest, to uphold…

‘George Floyd’s murder felt like everything was the same and nothing was the same,” said Miski Noor, an activist in Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed by a white police officer a year ago on 25 May. “How many times have we seen Black death go viral?” asked Noor. The high-profile murder of Floyd, who was pinned under the knee of a police officer for nine minutes and 29 seconds, captured the parallels between police violence against Black people across the globe, and evoked in some way the deaths of Adama Traoré in France and Mark Duggan in the UK before him, even though the circumstances of those deaths differ. And the killing reflected a history of violence against Black people, from slavery to colonialism, that united protesters in a global…

With a giant Stars and Stripes and two gleaming cars at his back, Joe Biden turned to focus his remarks on one member of the audience. “From my heart, I pray that your grandmom and family are well,” he told Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress. “I promise you, I’m going to do everything to see that they are, on the West Bank. You’re a fighter.” It was a characteristic peace offering, even as Tlaib challenged Biden over his unyielding support for Israel. But last Tuesday’s gesture, and even a Middle East ceasefire declared last Thursday, appears not to have healed a growing rift. On Monday, more than 500 Democratic party staffers and alumni of Biden’s 2020 campaign signed an open letter calling for the president to do…

Scaling the wall A migrant climbs the border wall by throwing a rope with the help of another person in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta on 21 May. More than 8,000 migrants last week crossed into the 18-sq km territory – many of them swimming or piling into flimsy inflatable rafts to skirt the breakwater that marks the border with Morocco – amid reports that Moroccan officials had relaxed controls over the border. At least two people died attempting the crossing. About 7,000 of those who crossed into Spain have since been sent back over the border, according to Spanish officials, but the city has identified at least 438 children and teenagers who arrived unaccompanied by adults and more are being rounded up as social services workers scour the city’s…

Brazil can be rescued after being turned into a Covid-stricken global outcast by its “psychopath” president, Jair Bolsonaro, the politician best placed to defeat him in next year’s presidential election has insisted. In an interview with the Guardian, Brazil’s leftist former leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – widely tipped to challenge Bolsonaro for the presidency after regaining his political rights – stopped short of confirming he would run. But Lula, who rose from rural poverty to become Brazil’s first working-class president, left no doubt he was plotting an extraordinary finale to his political career “I ran 8km before this interview … and I usually run 9km a day, Monday to Friday, because walking around Brazil is going to be very tough, very tiring, and I need to get my…

Donald Trump’s presidency was capricious and chaotic, but there was one issue on which he focused with laser-like discipline: tilting the judiciary to the right. Now America is about to reap that harvest. In the next year the supreme court is set to consider healthcare, voting, LGBTQ rights, guns and, most explosively, abortion. “Next year’s supreme court term is shaping up to be the revenge of Donald Trump,” said Edward Fallone, an associate professor at Marquette University Law School. It was always said Trump’s judicial legacy would endure. He appointed 234 judges, including 54 appellate judges, outpacing Barack Obama’s first term total of 172 and George W Bush’s 204. The blitz included three supreme court justices, most recently Amy Coney Barrett, a devout Catholic, who replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg following…

’It brings indescribable sadness,” ran Prince William’s statement on the damning report into Panorama’s interview with his mother, “to know that the BBC’s failures contributed significantly to her fear, paranoia and isolation that I remember from those final years with her.” When Martin Bashir’s Diana interview aired in 1995, the MP (and friend of Prince Charles) Nicholas Soames was roundly attacked for describing Diana as in “the advanced stages of paranoia” and in the grip of “mental illness”. It’s fair to say his verdict didn’t come from a place of total support. Soames has since expressed regret for it, adding that he wasn’t a doctor. Now Diana’s elder son uses the same word – with few these days disagreeing how cruelly she was driven to it. The conclusions of the…

What a strange, uniquely illusive figure the doctor is. The art of medicine is so manifestly a higher purpose – the safe guarding of human life itself – that its practitioners enjoy a kind of immaculate moral authority. Yet these doctors are also the front line vendors in an industrial complex, which includes hospitals, equipment-makers, insurance companies and drug firms, with eyes all fastened on their profit margins. The industry relies on the doctor’s unimpeachable image. In the US, in particular, the gap between saviour and salesman is a chance to make money offthe most captive of markets: the sick hoping to get well again. One of the people to recognise this most clearly was Arthur Sackler, the patriarch of a pharmaceutical dynasty that is the subject of Empire of…

Christopher Martin lived above a grocery store in south Minneapolis, with a maroon awning and bold red signage that reads “Cup Foods”. So when a cashier’s job came up last year, he took it without thinking. He quickly learned the regulars’ orders by heart – their favourite tobacco and snacks. The job was more than just a pay packet. “A family, community base,” he remembered. “A lot of jokes and laughs.” But on 25 May last year he served a customer he had never met before, igniting a chain of events that rippled around the world and changed Martin’s life irreversibly. The customer was George Floyd, who had come to buy cigarettes. He handed Martin an allegedly counterfeit $20 bill. Martin accepted it, and then told his managers. A co-worker…

EU leaders triggered new economic sanctions against Belarus and punitive measures against its national airline as a dissident taken from a “hijacked” Ryanair flight was paraded on the country’s television news apparently confessing to crimes against the state. In a summit communique swiftly agreed in Brussels on Monday night, the EU’s 27 heads of state and government condemned the previous day’s forced landing of flight FR4978 in Minsk and called for the immediate release of opposition blogger Roman Protasevich and his Russian girlfriend, Sofia Sapega Late on Monday, Joe Biden condemned “in the strongest possible terms” the operation to arrest Protasevich, calling it “a direct affront to international norms” Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, spoke to Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhan-ouskaya about the “brazen and dangerous grounding” of the…

Ministers pledged last weekend to intervene to restore trust in the BBC by conducting a wider-than-anticipated review of its operations next year, as recriminations grew over its Panorama interview in 1995 with Diana, Princess of Wales The fallout from an independent report by Lord Justice Dyson into the programme 26 years ago prompted the dramatic resignation last Saturday of the corporation’s former director-general, Tony Hall, from his post as chair of the board of trustees of the National Gallery. That came a day after Princes William and Harry made public their fury at the BBC’s behaviour. A government minister said: “When you have a future king of England attacking in a pretty strong fashion the state-owned broadcaster, then the government needs to be seen to be taking that seriously. While…

A convoy of brightly painted buses descended from Colombia’s westernmost mountain range, heading for the city of Cali, where tens of thousands had taken to the streets demanding a shake-up of the country’s deeply unequal status quo. Along the way, well-wishers cheered on the caravan and drivers honked horns in approval. But as the procession approached Cali’s prosperous southern fringe, it reached a roadblock set up by men in civilian clothing, believed to be from wealthy neighbourhoods nearby. Then the shooting started “Men in white shirts were firing on us,” said Robert Molina, a leader from the indigenous Nasa community, who was in the convoy. “They were firing from armoured 4x4 trucks, straight out of the windows.” Footage of the incident – recorded and shared by victims, bystanders and perpetrators…

After a three-year investigation into two organised crime groups in Italy’s Campania region that included wire taps, surveillance and nearly 100 suspects, police cracked down with a dozen arrests in March – not for offences linked to drugs or prostitution, but for the illegal harvesting of a small mollusc. Known as date mussels, Lithophaga lithophaga are cigar-shaped shellfish that make their homes inside limestone, secreting an acid that slowly carves out a tunnel in the rock. They take decades to grow – 18 to 36 years to reach 5cm in length – and can live for more than 50 years. But it takes a few seconds, using sledgehammers or explosives, to pry them loose; ecosystems can take more than 50 years to recover. “What’s left after a date mussel harvest…

Steven Ngo had stopped at a traffic light in a residential neighbourhood in the eastern part of Vancouver when passengers in another car tossed garbage at him, shouting racial slurs as they sped off. The lawyer, a lifelong resident of the city, was stunned – but not surprised. “The racism has never been as overt and apparent,” said Ngo. “I’ve never seen it so brazen.” Over the last year, Vancouver, a cosmopolitan metropolis, has experienced a 717% increase in anti-Asian hate crimes. The grim figures, which experts believe underreport the problem, reflect a legacy of discrimination in a city and country widely seen as welcoming of newcomers. Since coronavirus first reached Canada last year, Asian residents across the country have reported a surge in hate incidents, ranging from racist abuse…

How is it that we live in a world that is awash with our personal information, where most of us would be shocked if we knew exactly how much we give away about ourselves each day – and yet, when a crisis came along in which that information could have made all the difference, it didn’t? If we take one lesson from Covid-19, it should be that our information needs to work harder for us – and not just in a pandemic, but all the time. You may remember hearing, early on in this pandemic, that efforts to get contact tracing up and running were faltering. In November 2020 they were still faltering, which meant that many governments lacked a detailed picture of infected people’s movements and contacts. If you…

When Le Corbusier developed his proportional system Le Modulor in the 1940s, the great architect had in mind a handsome British policeman. His system would go on to shape the entire postwar world, dictating everything from the height of a door handle to the scale of a staircase, all governed by the need to make everything as convenient as possible for this 6ft (1.8-metre) ideal man. Its influence extended to city blocks, since these responded to the size and needs of the car our imaginary hero drove to work. The Swiss-born, Paris-based architect had originally proposed 1.75 metres, based on the average height of a Frenchman, but that standard later grew taller. “In English detective novels,” said Le Corbusier of his switch, “the good-looking men, such as policemen, are always…

1 ENVIRONMENT G7 nations pledge to end support for overseas coal The world’s richest nations have agreed to end their financial support for coal development overseas, in a major step towards phasing out the dirtiest fossil fuel. At a meeting of the G7 environment and energy ministers hosted virtually by the UK last week, all reaffirmed their commitment to limiting global heating to 1.5C, and committed to phasing out coal and fully decarbonising their energy sectors in the 2030s. The G7 members – the UK, the US, France, Italy, Germany, Japan and Canada – along with other major economies such as China and South Korea, have played a major role in financing fossil fuel development in poorer countries. South Korea has already agreed to end the practice. That leaves China…

INTERNATIONAL TRADE Farmers’ anger over Australian deal proposal The UK government faced a backlash over its plans for a trade deal with Australia, which have led to anger from farmers and environmentalists. Farming unions said that proposals for a zero-tariff and zero-quota trade deal would drive farmers out of business, while green groups said allowing Australian hormone-treated beef would breach the Conservatives’ manifesto commitments. The Scottish National party added to the clamour for a rethink by calling on Alister Jack, the secretary of state for Scotland, to “fight back or resign” if he failed to stand up for farmers. Opponents of Scottish independence fear that the row over farming may fuel support for a new referendum in rural areas where there has previously been pro-union support. Farming leaders were taken…

As they emerge from hiding, people living in Gaza City have had to adapt their memories. So deformed is this small place on the coast that a mental map of its roads and landmarks from two weeks ago has become largely useless. Shortcuts no longer work, as craters dot back streets and rubble blocks roads. High-rise landmarks no longer exist. Eleven days of bombardment have buckled the city. Air attacks shook the ground so violently that some buildings appear to have been pulled into the earth rather than hit from above. On one street, the bent walls of kindergarten descend at an angle until they disappear completely. Israel’s latest war with Hamas, which ended in a ceasefire last Friday, killed 248 Palestinians, including 66 children as well as scores of…

Belarus’s president, Alexander Lukashenko, has unleashed a brutal campaign against his opponents. More than 35,000 people have been arrested, thousands have been tortured or abused, and 400 political prisoners are behind bars. A 50-year-old opposition activist, Vitold Ashurok, died in a penal colony last week. The official cause of death was “heart attack”. His widow believes he was murdered. It is against this repressive backdrop that the extraordinary events of last Sunday took place. According to state media, Lukashenko authorised the forced downing of a Ryanair plane as it flew over Belarusian airspace between Greece and Lithuania – a real-time hijacking. He even dispatched a MiG-29 fighter jet to ensure the pilot complied after being informed of a fake bomb threat. The target of Lukashenko’s fury was a 26-year-old passenger…

At the end of this exhilarating journey through a century’s struggles over the human body, Olivia Laing invites her reader to “imagine, for a minute, what it would be like to inhabit a body without fear”. This simple hope comes to sound like a radical demand for the impossible; after such a vivid catalogue of the humiliations and cruelties a body can be made to bear, it isn’t easy to imagine. Laing’s impassioned commitment to the promise of bodily freedom, of every body’s right to move and feel and love without harming or being harmed, shines through every sentence of the book. But she is too canny to miss the rich and bitter irony in which efforts to realise this promise so often get caught: every movement to liberate the…

I am in the kitchen, ministering to a steaming pot of pork and chorizo stew, much as a parent might attend to their baby in the bath. I know this dish intimately. I understand its rhythms, the way the garlic and smoked paprika, the pork and tomatoes will first shake hands and then drop into a deep hug if properly introduced. As a result, I never deviate from the set method, because that would feel like choosing to walk in the wrong direction in the misguided hope of eventually finding my way home. Except this time. Today I am making adaptations. Usually, the stew contains a tin of drained butter beans. Usually, the pork is cut into one-inch dice. Neither is true today, because this bubbling pot is not for…