Innholdsfortegnelse for 11th June 2021 i Guardian Weekly

Linked in Older people waiting for Covid vaccinations in Caracas hold hands to discourage queue jumping, after Venezuela finally overcame payment problems and political disputes to join the global Covax programme. Reuters data showed that as of last month, only 1.1% of the population had received at least one vaccine shot. 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 of…

Joe Biden was due to make his first overseas trip as US president this week, determined to convince allies and adversaries “America is back” after four years under Donald Trump. Having laid out a vision of the 21st century as a struggle between democracy and autocracy, Biden’s one-on-one meetings will include the prime ministers of Britain and Belgium and strongmen from Russia and Turkey. The 78-year-old, whose foreign policy experience runs deeper than any US president before him, steps into an arena where China is on the rise and where Trump forced once unthinkable questions about whether Washington can be trusted. “What Biden and many of the other members of his team will have been hearing from those countries who they are trying to persuade to do this or that…

A new wave of repression in Uganda has led to the abductions of dozens more opposition activists by security forces and at least one alleged death. Several hundred people are thought to have been detained without trial in the east African country in secret prisons, where they are subjected to a brutal regime of mistreatment. The country has suffered a series of crackdowns since campaigning began for presidential elections late last year. The trigger for the recent repression by security services appears to have been the swearing-in ceremony of Uganda’s veteran president, 76-year-old Yoweri Museveni, last month. Museveni won a sixth term in office in January in an election denounced as fraudulent by the opposition. Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu – the singer-turned-politician known by his stage name, Bobi Wine – who…

Hong Kong police arrested a prominent barrister for promoting an unauthorised assembly on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, as thousands of officers were deployed to enforce a ban on protests and gatherings across the city. ng, vice-chairwoman of the group that organises annual vigils for the victims of China’s 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters, had been arrested. A 20-year-old man was detained on suspicion of publicising an unlawful assembly through social media posts. “Their online remarks involved advertising and calling on others to participate or attend banned public activities,” senior superintendent Law Kwok-hoi said. Discussion of Beijing’s brutal military crackdown on the evening of 3 June and morning of 4 June 1989 is all but forbidden on the mainland. And Hong Kong’s traditional status as the only place…

The silence is so complete it is easy to forget you are only a few minutes’ drive from the centre of Barcelona. Just the sough of the willows in the sea breeze, the splash of a fish surfacing and a heron’s cry – until the serenity is obliterated by a plane taking off. The Delta del Llobregat, one of the most important wetlands in the western Mediterranean, is being eroded on one side by the sea and on the other by the city’s land-hungry airport. As travel to Spain is still restricted, there are few flights and it is possible to revel in the delta’s almost mesmeric tranquillity. But before the pandemic there were already close to 90 flights an hour and, if the airport authority has its way, this…

If Donald Trump’s inaugural address can be summed up in two words – “American carnage” – Joe Biden’s might be remembered for three: “Democracy has prevailed.” The new president, speaking from the spot where two weeks earlier a pro-Trump mob had stormed the US Capitol, promised that the worst was over in a bruised yet resilient Washington. But four-and-a-half months later, the alarm bells are sounding again. With Republicans still in thrall to Trump and odds-on to win control of the House of Representatives next year, there are growing fears that his presidency was less a historical blip than a harbinger of systemic decline. “There was a momentary sigh of relief but the level of anxiety is actually strangely higher now than in 2016 in the sense that it’s not…

The writer, the fighter, the doctor and the widow all look down into the darkness and damage of boxing. They understand the previously untold story of brain trauma in the ring and, as they talk to me, their testimony underpins a shared belief that change has to come. There is a measured urgency to their words for they love the fighters and they want to offer their knowledge to help make this brutal sport a little safer. Damage and death have always framed boxing. This harsh truth means that, despite the chaos outside the ring, boxing is shockingly real. It can maim and even kill but, in a strange paradox, boxing also makes most fighters feel more intensely alive than anything else. Tris Dixon has written the book that boxing…

In the hot summer of 1840, the young orientalist Henry Rawlinson arrived in Karachi and began anxiously searching for his mentor, the pioneering archaeologist of Afghanistan, Charles Masson. The rumours he had heard profoundly alarmed him. Rawlinson had recently made his name by helping decipher ancient Persian cuneiform script; but he looked up to Masson as a far greater scholar. For more than a decade, Masson had wandered, alone and on foot, exploring Afghanistan, collecting coins and inscriptions, studying ruins and making sketches. The bilingual Hellenistic coins Masson had sent to Calcutta had been like miniature Rosetta stones. They had provided the key for scholars to understand the profoundly hybrid, Greco-Buddhist ancient history of the region. Masson had also been the first western archaeologist to visit the ancient cities of…

A historic agreement has been reached. For decades, multinational corporations have abused gaps in an international tax system that has barely changed since agreements made at the League of Nations in the 1920s. After meetings in London last weekend, the message from the G7 group of wealthy nations is clear: time has been called on tax havens. In a landmark move, a global minimum rate of corporation tax has been agreed, alongside measures forcing large companies and online corporations, such as Facebook, Apple and Google, to pay more tax in the markets where they make their money, regardless of physical presence. Much remains to be hammered out – in a process likely to take several years, before a single extra pound, dollar, euro or yen is handed over – but…

They have been tested, examined, judged and graded since childhood; told they must excel, compete and succeed. But thanks to Covid-19, across Europe a generation of school and college leavers face a bleak present and an uncertain future. When the Guardian asked Europeans in their late teens and early 20s how the pandemic has made them feel, you might have expected an outpouring of frustration. What arrived was a critique of capitalism. Like their predecessors in the uprisings that followed the 2008 crisis, this generation is ready to draw systemic conclusions from the way political elites have handled the pandemic. They know they will be paying higher taxes, carrying bigger personal debts and facing more uncertainty than any generation since the second world war. They understand that, on top of…

Cargo catastrophe Navy personnel clear debris and other materials that washed ashore from the container cargo vessel MV X-Press Pearl on to the beach of Negombo, north-west of Colombo. Marine and coastal protection authorities warned about an environmental crisis from Sri Lanka’s worst maritime disaster as tonnes of plastic waste and pellets from the ship washed ashore. The vessel had been on fire for almost two weeks before it started sinking last week, threatening an oil spill. Authorities fear possible threats to the fish-breeding lagoons in the area, which is well known for its crabs and jumbo prawns as well as for its tourist beaches.…

If Solomon Islands continues logging at its current rate, natural forests in the country will be exhausted in 15 years. The South Pacific nation, and its neighbour Papua New Guinea, are striking examples of the enormous cost of the logging industry on small island nations. In the last few decades, foreign-owned companies have moved in to the Pacific region, clearing huge swathes of lush forest, exporting vast quantities of timber and sometimes leaving environmental devastation and social destruction in their wake. Papua New Guinea (PNG), the largest exporter of wood products in the Pacific, exported 3.3m tonnes of wood – equivalent to 326 Eiffel Towers – in 2019, a haul worth US$690m – 90% of these logs are exported to China. But even as forests are destroyed, Pacific countries are…

At a glance, Dr Cristina Cattaneo assessed the lifeless body on the floor of an abandoned Sicilian hospital – a thin, young Eritrean refugee about 180cm tall. While most of the corpse was intact, his face and hands were skeletonised, probably the work of sea animals. It was the morning of 3 July 2015, and this was the first body to be recovered by a navy robot after a shipwreck on 18 April that year, which left more than 1,000 people dead. They came from Eritrea, Senegal, Mauritania, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Mali, the Gambia and Somalia. They had been trying to reach Europe from north Africa on board a fishing boat with a capacity of about 30 passengers, which sank in the night after colliding with a Portuguese…

When they came to take Jonnish Saganash away, he was only five years old. It was 1954, and the Canadian government had decided he was to be sent to a residential school in Ontario – hundreds of kilometres from his Indigenous community in Quebec. “He was just a child, a gentle child born on the land of his ancestors,” his brother Romeo recalled last week. Just a year after arriving at the school, Jonnish contracted rheumatic fever and died far from his family. He was buried in an unmarked grave near the school. Last month, news broke at the other end of the country that would bring all those painful memories back. It was “devastating – again”, said Romeo. People of Tk’emlúps te Secwé pemc, an Indigenous nation in British…

It would be encouraging to think that the massive upheaval afoot in Israeli politics with the unseating of Benjamin Netanyahu also signals a seismic shift in political culture. Perhaps a turning point in its democratic decline, even a move towards ending its rule over millions of Palestinians. Unfortunately, it signals none of these things. The burning desire to depose Israel’s longest serving leader is certainly the driving force behind the disparate eight-party coalition that hopes to replace him. But another factor also unites them – by default, if not by design: the consensus that in determining the future of the Jewish state, the conflict with the Palestinians can be managed in perpetuity. Netanyahu, more than any other Israeli leader, has promoted this idea, cementing it so fast within the national…

1 UNITED STATES Joe Biden details plan to share vaccines with world Joe Biden outlined how the US plans to share 80m Covid-19 vaccine doses with other countries, saying the first 25m doses will be dis tributed across Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and Africa. After months of pressure from the international community, the Biden administration said last month that it intended to send the doses of US-approved coronavirus vaccines overseas by the end of June, but did not outline which continents or countries would benefit until now. Of the first 25m tranche to be sent overseas, Biden said 19m will be shared through Covax, the global vaccine-sharing initiative, with about 7m doses going to Latin America and the Caribbean, some 7m going to south and south-east Asia, and approximately…

POLITICS Tory rebels fail to table amendment on foreign aid An attempt by rebel Conservative MPs to reverse foreign aid cuts was thwarted after the House of Commons Speaker ruled their amendment was out of scope, but said the government must bring a vote on the issue. Andrew Mitchell, the former international development secretary who led the rebel push, said the rebels would have won by a majority of at least nine. Now, it appears Boris Johnson has set himself on a collision course with scores of his own MPs as No 10 suggested it would defy an order by Lindsay Hoyle to bring a vote on cutting aid to some of the world’s poorest countries by 42% in the pandemic. Between 40 and 50 Conservative MPs were said to…

Is it too late to halt the slide towards all-out confrontation between China and the western democracies? An apparently conciliatory speech last week by Xi Jinping led some observers to suggest China’s president may want to mend fences. But a change of tone in Beijing will not cut much ice in Washington unless Xi’s aggressive policies change, too. Since coming to power in 2012, Xi has overseen a marked shift towards authoritarianism at home and increased “assertiveness” – a polite word for bullying – abroad. He has established the type of personal, almost cultish dominance over the Chinese Communist party (CCP) not seen since the days of Mao Zedong. So when Xi talks, as he did last week, about the need for arrogant CCP spokespeople and the country’s antagonistic “wolf…

Strolling along Padstow harbour, Grace Kent and Dr Robert Hayford are tumbling into each other’s eyes over fish and chips, paisley scarves blowing in the breeze. Yet in spite of the quintessentially English setting, they whisper their sweet nothings in German. This is a scene from Wie verhext, which translates as Bewitched, a German TV production that premiered in national broadcaster ZDF’s Sunday prime-time slot last month. Inspired by the short story Tea With a Witch by the British novelist Rosamunde Pilcher, it is the latest instalment in one of the most enduring cross-cultural links between the two European nations, entering its third decade in spite of Brexit, Covid-19 and the author’s death in 2019. Pilcher’s books have sold more than 12m copies in Germany, been turned into more than…

Portable microwave weapons capable of causing the mysterious spate of “Havana syndrome” brain injuries in US diplomats and spies have been developed by several countries in recent years, according to leading American experts in the field. A US company also made the prototype of such a weapon for the marine corps in 2004. The weapon, codenamed Medusa, was intended to be small enough to fit in a car, and cause a “temporarily incapacitating effect” but “with a low probability of fatality or permanent injury”. Scientists with knowledge of the project said that ethical considerations preventing human experimentation contributed to the project being shelved – but they said such consideration had not hindered US adversaries, including Russia, and possibly China. “The state of that science has for the most part been,…

Having been a black leftwing Guardian columnist for more than two decades, I understood that I would be regarded as fair game for the kind of moral panics that might make headlines in rightwing tabloids. It’s not like I hadn’t given them the raw material. In the course of my career I’d written pieces with headlines such as “Riots are a class act”, “Let’s have an open and honest conversation about white people” and “End all immigration controls”. I might as well have drawn a target on my back. But the only time I was ever caught in the tabloids’ crosshairs was not because of my denunciations of capitalism or racism, but because of a statue – or to be more precise, the absence of one. The story starts in…

Regular attendees of press conferences at Arsenal football club – in the before-times, when these things still happened – will tell of a mysterious character by the name of First Question Man. Nobody ever discovered who FQM worked for, or if he was even a journalist. His only real talent, if you can call it that, was to sit in the front row and make sure he asked the first question, usually by barking it while everyone was still taking their seats. Why FQM did this was never clear. It can’t have been ego: I never met anybody who knew his real name. Nor was it an attempt to glean some sort of privileged insight: indeed, most of his questions were actually statements: banal bromides beloved of press conferences the…

After Jimmy Carter’s glum diagnosis of national malaise in 1 979, Ronald Reagan supposedly restored the customary swagger of the US by making the country “feel good about itself”. That folksy blessing didn’t extend to his wife: on the evidence of Karen Tumulty’s biography, Nancy Reagan spent his presidency in a state of seething anxiety that frequently tipped over into hysteria. Aides in the White House came to dread her passive-aggressive silences on the phone and her basilisk glare when she allowed them face time. Likening her to a missile, a friend tells Tumulty “she was good at going stealth”. She monopolised Ronnie, and staff members who had to relay her phone calls to the Oval Office said they were on the “Mommy Watch”. Her own life was also about…

There are currently three computer games occupying the house: the 13-year-old (M), sometimes in conjunction with the 11-year-old (F), plays Fortnite, a game mainly about shooting people; the 13-year-old (F), also sometimes with the collaboration of the 11-year-old, plays Genshin Impact, a whimsical, open-world environment game, whatever the hell that means. Avatars dressed as pirates or fairies wander about the place, doing chores, occasionally fighting giant warthogs. Mr Z plays Hitman, another shooting game with very densely layered storylines, though he always skips them so never knows what’s going on beyond that; the aim is to leave everyone else dead in a laundry hamper. Observing all this, I feel like the manager of a hi-tech sweat shop. Everyone is locked in concentration, shouting over headphones at other people who may…

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