Innholdsfortegnelse for 4th June 2021 i Guardian Weekly

Paulo Mendes da Rocha Brazilian architect, whose 60-year portfolio of tough, austere concrete buildings marked him as one of the greats of Brazil’s modernism. He died on 23 May, aged 92. Eric Carle German-American author and illustrator, best known for classic children’s books including The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? He died on 23 May, aged 91. David Foot English cricket writer and biographer whose work graced the pages of the Guardian for 40 years. He died on 25 May, aged 92.…

Last Tuesday started off like any other day on the campaign trail for José Alberto Alonso, a union leader running for mayor in the Mexican beach resort of Acapulco: he kissed his family goodbye, boarded his Nissan Extreme SUV and headed off to start knocking on doors. But barely 200 metres from his home, a motorcycle closed in and the pillion passenger pulled a handgun, peppering the car with bullets. Alonso’s bodyguard returned fire, and the attackers fled. The candidate had escaped injury, but was later sent to hospital suffering from stress. “When you get into politics, you know there could be repercussions, but never to this degree,” said Alonso, 36, from his sickbed. Mexico has suffered an especially bloody and violent campaign season ahead of midterm elections on 6…

We are devouring the planet’s resources at a rate 1.7 times faster than it can regenerate I fear I’m in JB MacKinnon’s bad books. Halfway through our Zoom interview, I tilt my camera to adjust to the setting sun – but from this new angle, an e-commerce box can be spotted over my shoulder. Its barcode glows in the fading light, a totem of 21st-century materialism presiding over our call. MacKinnon is too polite to say anything, but he can’t be thrilled by my cardboard companion. After all, the Canadian bestselling author and journalist is on a mission to get us to buy a lot less stuff. The Day the World Stops Shopping, his new book, explores what might happen if the world transformed into a society that does not…

Sinéad O’Connor has been pretty much invisible for the past few years. There’s a good reason, though, she tells me with her usual disregard for social niceties. “I’ve spent most of the time in the nuthouse. I’ve been practically living there for six years.” She pauses, takes an intense drag on her fag, and warns me off being similarly politically incorrect. “We alone get to call it the nuthouse – the patients.” O’Connor is a music great – her 1990 version of Prince’s Nothing Compares 2 U is one of the most transcendent five minutes in pop history, the solitary tear falling from her eye in the accompanying video one of its most beautiful images. The single topped the charts worldwide, as did the album it was taken from, I…

Last August, thousands took to the streets of Belarus to bravely protest against rigged elections, in a mood of defiance and hope that the arm of the nation’s old strongman ruler, Alexander Lukashenko, could finally be bent. Instead, 10 months on, many of Lukashenko’s opponents have either fled the country or – in the shocking case of the journalist Raman Pratasevich last month – been detained in brutal circumstances. In our big story this week, Andrew Roth looks at how Belarus has deployed a 21st-century reboot of the Sovietera playbook to crush internal dissent, while Will Hutton reflects on why people power is failing, from Minsk to Hong Kong, and why we should all be concerned. The big story Page 10 Often seen as the brains behind Britain’s vote for Brexit,…

ARCHAEOLOGY Burial mound in Syria may be world’s oldest war memorial A burial mound in Syria has been identified by researchers as perhaps the world’s oldest known war memorial. The site, known as the White Monument, in the town of Tal Banat, had previously been thought to be an ancient mass grave of enemy fighters. However, a report published in the journal Antiquity suggests it was a memorial for the community’s battle dead from the third millennium BC. The authors of the report say the systematic placement of the dead suggests the mound was likely to be a memorial to a state army that had used chariots in battle. Similar sites in northern Syria are thought to be monuments to conquests in battle, with vanquished armies buried haphazardly in mass…

The videos are formulaic: Raman Pratasevich and his girlfriend, Sofia Sapega, each sit alone in front of a camera in a police station and deliver their “confessions” as though a loaded gun is pointed at their heads. “I’m also the editor of the Telegram channel Black Book of Belarus that publishes personal information about employees of the interior ministry,” said Sapega, quickly repeating a memorised statement in a video released last week that could lead to years in jail. The words are barely to be believed. Pratasevich has bruises over his eye and acquaintances said they believed his nose was broken as well. Sapega was not known to be involved in the protest movement, much less to run one of the most effective operations to “name and shame” riot police.…

President Joe Biden last week ordered US intelligence agencies to conduct a 90-day review of what is known about the origins of Covid-19 and whether it could have escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. What does this mean for the lab leak theory? Has new evidence emerged? Surprisingly little has changed in terms of good quality evidence – at least in the public domain. The most striking recent claim, before Biden’s announcement, was in the Wall Street Journal, which reported that US intelligence agencies had been told that three unnamed staff at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) were sick enough to go to hospital in November 2019 with symptoms that might have been coronavirus. How reliable is the evidence? The intelligence relating to the three staffat WIV has…

Constellation prize The Milky Way photographer of the year competition features the best photos of our galaxy as chosen by Capture the Atlas, a photography travel and tutorial site. This year’s images were taken from around the world by 25 photographers of 14 different nationalities. The best time to photograph the Milky Way is between May and June with maximum hours of visibility in both hemispheres…

Nanaia Mahuta is sitting in her office at New Zealand’s parliament. The bookshelf behind her is filled with artefacts and mementoes, many of them gifts from around Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific. “Ask about any of them,” she said. “There’s a story behind each.” On the lower shelf rests the carved walking stick that belonged to her late father, Sir Robert Mahuta. She says her earliest political memories are of her father battling the construction of the Huntly power station. “I was grown and nurtured in an environment where tribal politics, and tribal aspirations, tribal development and opportunity through economic development was very much the norm,” Mahuta said. It was a David and Goliath battle – one of many that Mahuta bore witness to. Later, her family was at…

Nick Pope spent the early 1990s investigating UFOs for the British Ministry of Defence. Sequestered in a rarely visited government office – the “metaphorical basement” – he well remembers how his field of work was regarded. “I would walk down the corridor and people would whistle the theme music to either Close Encounters of the Third Kind or the Twilight Zone,” Pope said. Towards the end of his spell at the MoD, a show featuring a pair of FBI alien hunters was growing in popularity. “I do recall the X-Files theme tune being whistled, too,” he said. Attitudes towards UFOs have slowly been changing, especially in the US where the subject has gone from the margins to the mainstream. Rebranded by governments and enthusiasts as “UAPs”, or unidentified aerial phenomena,…

History was made in the Hague district court last week. A judge ruled that Shell, one of the world’s biggest oil companies, must cut its emissions by 45% by 2030 relative to 2019 levels. Before this ruling, courts in the Netherlands, France and Germany had concentrated on holding governments to their commitments under the Paris climate deal of 2015. States were found guilty of denying basic rights to future citizens, triggering more ambitious climate plans. The landmark Hague decision shows that corporations can now be ordered to comply with the goals of the Paris agreement. Governments are supposed to design regulatory frame-works and laws so that companies and households steadily reduce carbon emissions. But this relies on private entities playing their part. If they do not, hiding behind slick PR,…

Arobotic arm twitches above a lumpy landscape of compacted earth, pockmarked with little hollows from which pink tufts of fungus emerge. This is an “ecosystem of empathy and coexistence”, a caption tells us, the fungal flora and limb living together in perfect harmony. Nearby, bubbling tanks of green algae are apparently busy cultivating an “urban microbiome” while a cloud of feathery acrylic creatures hovers above a mysterious constellation of columns emitting an eerie hum. Welcome to the Venice Architecture Biennale, pandemic edition, an exhibition as confusing as it is confused. Filling the main exhibition in the city’s former rope-making factory, and every room of the central pavilion in the Giardini nearby, are installations attempting to answer the momentous curatorial question: “How will we live together?” In the current context of…

‘ All writers go through a Thomas Bernhard phase, sooner or later,” said Geoff Dyer. His authority was offhand but absolute, like the pope telling you where to get the best cannoli. A Thomas Bernhard phase is not hard to spot. First, no paragraphs (or very long ones). Second, repetition. Last, rage played for comedy. Dead Souls is Sam Riviere’s Thomas Bernhard phase: a single-paragraph novel, written in raging, recursive prose, about the small world of English poetry. Within a couple of pages, I thought, “Oh God, why bother?” But a hundred pages later, I was thinking, “Why bother with anything else? ” This is a brilliant and brilliantly entertaining novel. The writing is merciless; the rage is genuine. I’d say it was satire, but it’s also meticulous analysis coming…

‘I smell like an old Soviet woman and I love it,” wrote Florence, a satisfied online customer reviewing her purchase of a bottle of Red Moscow perfume. Its fragrance was, she added, “some-what reminiscent of Chanel No 5 and powerful – and significantly cheaper.” Florence makes a good point. Not only is Red Moscow roughly five times cheaper than Chanel No 5, but Red Moscow (Krasnaya Moskva) smells similar and shares a common olfactory heritage. Oh come on, you might well counter. Surely Russian scents smell of cabbage and disappointment, while Chanel No 5 has typified sexualised glamour ever since Marilyn Monroe revealed that in bed she wore nothing else. The truth, as revealed in Karl Schlögel’s gripping olfactory history of the 20th century, is that both perfumes have roots…

The BBC needed to restore trust in itself, said the British government, after an inquiry found that Diana, Princess of Wales, had been persuaded to appear on TV by lies and forged documents. The princess, stormed a minister, had been “inveigled” into her interview. That is a corruption of the French aveugle, meaning “blind”: so if you inveigle someone you restrict their sight, perhaps by pulling the wool over their eyes. The verb is first attested in Robert Fabyan’s 1516 chronicle, where the future Richard III inuegelyd the archbishop of Canterbury into persuading the Queen to let him, er, “protect” her sons. (They later died in the Tower of London.) If one is not metaphorically blinded by inveigling, one might still be ensnared: as in the web of a tropical…

Prep 25 min Cook 50 min Serves 2 • VEGAN Ingredients 2 large aubergines, halved lengthwaysOlive oil1 large brown onion, peeled and finely chopped2 garlic cloves, peeled and finely chopped100g shelled walnuts, finely chopped2 tbsp tomato puree300g jarred red peppers (drained weight), finely chopped1½ tsp ground cinnamon1 tsp ground cumin1 tsp sweet paprika1 tsp fine sea salt50g breadcrumbsLeafy salad, to serve The aubergine has an air of mystery until it hits the oven. Food writers over time have argued about it should be salted to remove any bitterness (no) and whether it needs drenching in oil to cook (no) but, when cooked in the oven, there’s only one way it will go, and that is creamy – and, because of that, a baked aubergine is as popular in my house…

NOTES & QUERIES Game of the name won’t mend your trousers Do people’s names affect their personality? I’m not sure, but in college in Oregon I lived in a house with five Sarahs. Confusing when people phoned: “Which Sarah? ” “The Sarah in my Spanish class. ” Three of us took Spanish. But fun! Twice in my life I’ve had dear friends named Sarah and the shared name made us even closer. Sarah Klenbort Toowong, Queensland, Australia • Well, I asked Taylor Swift to alter a pair of trousers for me three weeks ago and she still hasn’t done it, so no. Decdub via theguardian.com • My name is Brian and I am a boring, middle-class, middle-aged man. So, in my case, yes. Romead via theguardian.com • Would Alexander Boris…

In 2001, if you listened to digital music, you did it with a large folder of MP3 files. How you acquired them is probably best left between you and a priest, but you may have ripped them from a CD, downloaded them from a file-sharing service, or bought them from one of a few nascent download sites. Whichever option you picked, you’d play them on your computer with a program built for the task. And if you were lucky enough to have an early standalone MP3 player, it was probably made by yet another company. Whether or not MP3s interested you, you probably bought music on CD, and had a couple of players in the house – maybe a portable and a hi-fi. Your headphones, of course, connected to whatever…

Falling birthrates could be a reason to celebrate Your leader on falling birthrates was needlessly pessimistic (The declining numbers of children is an alarm bell for western societies, 21 May). The UK has a large population in a small country causing a big environmental impact, but with diminishing means of support. A gradual decline in population is what’s needed to make it sustainable. Fewer children will mitigate the increased dependency ratio caused by more people living longer and automation may well reduce the demand for labour (and any shortage of labour will be good for workers’ pay). Indeed, falling populations in most rich countries may well be what the planet needs. Edmund Dunstan Lancaster, England, UK • The stabilisation and slow decline of the world’s population would be a reason…

Questions thunder down on anyone who writes about music. How to describe abstract sounds in words is the first hurdle. Once every synonym for loud, soft, fast, slow has been exhausted, where next? While the story of a composer’s life is a helpful way in for most of us, others bang their spoons for hermeneutics. Until well into this century, volumes described as “a history of music” habitually began with the births of Bach and Handel in 1685 and petered out around Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (1913), thus bookending the music most audiences expected to hear in concerts. As for female composers, apart from Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn, they did not exist. We have moved backwards and beyond, though with some resulting confusion. Check out the muddle in university…

1 Given x > 0, solve x + 4/x = 5, in your head. What if, more generally, x – 1 = n(1 - 1/x)? 2 Wordpool Find the correct definition: COTO a) fancy waistcoat b) medicinal bark c) one of a band of Piedmontese highwaymen d) coconut husk 3 Two of a Kind Use each of the letters of SNOWFLAKE once and once only to spell out two words belonging to the same category. 4 Dropouts Replace each asterisk with a letter to make a word: T*R*E*E*S 5 Ga-Ga The G in GAOL is pronounced as a J, which is unusual as G followed by an A in English is generally hard. In what other word is the G of GA pronounced as a J? 6 Missing Links Find…