Innholdsfortegnelse for 2nd July 2021 i Guardian Weekly

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 the public interest, to uphold liberal and progressive values, to fight for the common good, and to build hope. Our values, as laid out by editor CP Scott in 1921, are honesty, integrity, courage, fairness, and a sense of duty to the reader and the community. The Guardian is wholly owned…

On the morning of 23 June, the Apple Daily reporter Angel Kwan was at a government press conference for the Hong Kong census when her phone started buzzing with notifications. Six days earlier, hundreds of police had raided her workplace, arrested her bosses and seized dozens of computers. On Monday, the board had said it would have to shut the paper unless authorities unfroze its finances. As she stood holding her microphone towards the government official, Kwan did not dare look at her phone and the news it heralded: Apple Daily was shutting down. Today. “I had the mic and I said, ‘This is a question from Apple Daily.’ And then I stopped for a second or two, just thinking: this is my last time saying this.” Speaking to the…

The lights dimmed further in Lebanon in May when two giant barges that had boosted its electricity grid were switched off. The result was six hours less power a day for most homes, or more need for generator fuel for those who could afford it. However, fuel is also in short supply in the crisis-hit nation. Giant queues clog roads near filling stations and top-ups are limited to 20 litres, making most journeys precarious. Last weekend, troops deployed in the northern city of Tripoli, surrounding key state institutions after a night of protests and riots against worsening living conditions left several protesters and 10 soldiers injured. Drugs and medical supplies are scarce too. As Lebanon disintegrates, diplomats, aid chiefs, global officials and even some local leaders are pondering the very…

Matt Hancock was always going to have to resign, after the notorious pictures of him embracing a colleague on taxpayers’ time emerged last Friday morning. The question troubling senior Tories last weekend was, why didn’t Boris Johnson sack him? Johnson had weathered several previous scandals by sending his spokesman out to say “the prime minister considers the matter closed”, including Priti Patel’s alleged bullying and Robert Jenrick’s relations with a Tory-supporting property developer. Yet this time was always going to be different: not only had Hancock been pictured breaking the very rules he had been urging the public to obey, but he was the government’s main communicator of public health messages. Had he again appeared at the podium in the Downing Street briefing room, Hancock would have been peppered with…

To escape the Berlin bustle on a summer afternoon, Derek O’Doyle and his dog, Frida, skirt the noisy building site outside their inner-city apartment, weave their way through the queue in front of the ice-cream van, and squeeze between two gridlocked lorries to cross over Baerwaldstrasse. Bordered by a one-way traffic system lies a bucolic 1,720 sq metre haven: blue cornflowers, red poppies, white cow parsley and purple field scabious dot a sea of nettles and wild grass as armies of insects buzz through the air. Two endangered carpenter bees, larger than their honey bee cousins and with pitch-black abdomens, gorge themselves on a bush of yellow gorse. The mini-wilderness on Baerwald-strasse is one of more than 100 wildflower meadows planted in Germany’s largest cities over the past three years…

Islamic State’s affiliates in Africa, buoyed by significant victories, new alliances and shifts in strategy that have reinforced their position, are expanding across much of the continent. After gains in Nigeria, the Sahel, in Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Isis propaganda published by the group’s leadership in its Middle East heartland is increasingly stressing sub-Saharan Africa as a new front, which may compensate it for significant setbacks elsewhere. Detailed accounts of internal debates in Nigeria, where Islamic State West Africa Province (Iswap) recently routed Boko Haram, suggest a new emphasis by Isis in Africa on providing security and basic services. Though strategies differ according to local conditions, the bid to create zones of “jihadi governance” could, analysts fear, pose a challenge to weak, corrupt and inefficient national…

Food carts lined what is usually sterile stretch of pavement in lower Manhattan’s financial district. Vendors doled out free burritos and ice cream to the mingling sun-kissed bankers – folks who had begrudgingly traipsed back to their physical desks last month after a year of remote working, following the stern orders of moneyed overlords. Free lunch is entry-level when it comes to corporate perks, a trusted staple many businesses have fallen back on as a means of convincing workers to resume their pre-pandemic working habits and arduous commutes. Elsewhere, on both sides of the Atlantic, some companies have demonstrated a little more creativity. From Peloton bikes to house-cleaning vouchers and meditative gong baths, the name of the game seems to be to conjure up the wackiest perk possible, to keep…

Martha Wainwright All I Want Joni came along when few women wrote their own songs. They were marginalised and surrounded by men, but she was never defined by that. Her songs are her own story – and she just happens to be a woman. All I Want is incredibly hard to sing because the melodies are all over the place. It’s a pretty song about an idyllic love that unravels. “I am on a lonely road and I am travelling, travelling, travelling.” There was so much sadness around her relationships, but also freedom from them too. As if she’s saying, “I won’t let you destroy or hurt me. I will triumph in the end with my songwriting and my freedom.” Fran Healy, Travis My Old Man The piano on My…

With its senior executives arrested, companies charged, and accounts frozen, Apple Daily survived for less than a week after hundreds of officers raided the newsroom, accusing the city’s most vocal and pro-democracy newspaper of foreign collusion. A reporter from the 26-year-old paper describes the final days. Thursday 17 June I was woken up by a call from my colleague at 7am. I knew these early morning calls are never good, and I was right. He said five of our senior management had been arrested by the national security department and, as we spoke, hundreds of police officers were at the gates of our office. “Not again,” I thought to myself. This routine – arrests followed by a raid – had already happened once, last August. Our livestream was the first…

The continued detention of former Islamic State fighters in Iraqi and Syrian camps is untenable, and more of them must be repatriated to their home countries, the US secretary of state said at a summit of the international coalition against I sis, held in Rome. In remarks aimed mainly at France and the UK, Antony Blinken said: “This situation is simply untenable. It just can’t persist indefinitely. The United States continues to urge countries – including coalition partners – to repatriate, rehabilitate and, where applicable, prosecute its citizens.” France and Britain have resisted calls to bring back their citizens, fearing they have no way of reliably prosecuting them. They fear the courts will require the former I sis fighters to be given their freedom, and so impose a burden on…

About 10 billion-trillion-trillionths of a second into the start of creation in the big bang, the universe is believed to have had a brief but absurdly fast growth spurt. This episode, called inflation, was so cataclysmic that the very fabric of space and time was set juddering with gravitational waves (GWs). By comparison, the GWs that were first detected six years ago to much fanfare were small-scale affairs caused by black holes colliding. But now scientists at the European Space Agency (Esa) are setting their sights on grander targets – they might soon be able to detect the faint echoes of the universe’s inflationary birth throes, almost 14bn years after the event, using the largest instrument ever built. Hundreds of times bigger than the Earth, Esa’s planned gravitational wave detector…

As the car with the blacked-out windows came to a halt in a side street near Tübingen’s botanical gardens, keen-eyed passersby may have noticed something unusual about its number plate. In Germany, the first few letters usually denote the municipality where a vehicle is registered. The letter Y, however, is reserved for members of the armed forces. Military men are a rare, not to say unwelcome, sight in Tübingen. A picturesque 15th-century university town that brought forth great German minds including the philosopher Hegel and the poet Friedrich Hölderlin, it is also a modern stronghold of the German Green party, thanks to its left-leaning academic population. In 2018, there was growing resistance on campus against plans to establish Europe’s leading artificial intelligence research hub in the surrounding area: the involvement…

In Damon Galgut’s 2008 book, The Impost or, a man named Adam loses his job and moves to a shack in the Karoo to try to write poetry. Like Galgut himself, who wrote his debut novel, A Sinless Season, when he was 17, Adam’s first collection – “poems about the natural world, ardent and intense and romantic” – was published when he was a young man. But Adam has become aware of the weight of history since then, and wonders whether such poetry is acceptable in contemporary South Africa. The fall of apartheid promised to give South African novelists licence to write, as Galgut said in an interview in 2003, about “things like love … which would have been considered slightly immoral as a theme until apartheid crashed”, but his…

Apparently – brace yourselves – we can’t stop ageing. A newly published study has concluded, in essence, that biological factors will continue to constrain our attempts to prolong life. “The trajectory towards death in old age has not changed,” said José Manuel Aburto, part of the team that analysed mortality data. I could have told you that these flesh envelopes of off al have a sell-by date, simply from watching my husband (51) hobble around last weekend in a doleful cloud of pain relief gel, having swapped his desk chair for an inflatable exercise ball in an attempt to strengthen his “core”. For me (46), a new orthopaedic chair was supposed to sort out my seized-up shoulder but inexplicably gives me aching buttocks in exchange No one under 90 should…

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1 UNITED STATES Trump peddles baseless election conspiracy in Ohio Donald Trump returned to the campaign trail with a rally in Ohio last Saturday, campaigning against a Republican who voted for his impeachment and promoting his own presidential run in 2024. Trump repeated his baseless 2020 election grievances and painted a dystopian picture of the country under Democratic control, while the crowd chanted “Lock her up” at the mention of Hillary Clinton, the Democrat he defeated in 2016. The rally outside Cleveland was to support Max Miller, a former White House aide challenging Anthony Gonzalez, a former college football and NFL star censured by his state party for voting for Trump’s impeachment. “The 2020 presidential election was rigged,” he told the crowd, which at one point broke into a “Trump won!”…

CONSERVATIVES Inquiry to investigate leak of Hancock video The government will investigate how the footage of Matt Hancock kissing an aide in his office that triggered his downfall ended up in the public domain, a cabinet minister said. Brandon Lewis, the Northern Ireland secretary, said the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) would undertake an internal investigation into the leaking of the CCTV pictures to the Sun. Several media reports have said a DHSC employee was the culprit. The tabloid’s publication of footage recorded on 6 May by CCTV in Hancock’s office of him embracing Gina Coladangelo (both pictured below, on a different occasion) led to his resignation as health secretary last Saturday and replacement by Sajid Javid, the former home secretary and chancellor. Speaking on Sky News, Lewis…

• June 2019 Millions protest in Hong Kong against an extradition bill which critics fear will lead to trials in mainland China. • 8 July Jimmy Lai travels to the US to discuss the bill. China’s foreign ministry denounces “Hong Kong sinners”. • 1 June 2020 Apple Daily launches in English. • 30 June National security law (NSL) imposed on Hong Kong. • 10 August Lai and Next Digital media executives are arrested. Apple Daily newsroom is raided for the first time. • 3 December Lai and two executives are charged with fraud, and denied bail. • 11 December Lai is charged with foreign collusion • 13 April 2021 Lai writes to staff from prison, telling them to “stand tall”. “Freedom of speech is a dangerous job,” he wrote. “Please be careful not…

Less than a decade after Europe’s night trains appeared to have reached the end of the line, a French start-up has announced plans for overnight services out of Paris from 2024. Midnight Trains hopes post-Covid interest in greener travel will generate demand for its proposed “hotels on rails” connecting the French capital to 12 other European destinations. The founders say the aim is not to match the famous – and expensive – luxury of the Orient Express but an alternative to the basic, state-run SNCF sleepers and short-haul flights. Three years ago, Europe’s night trains were being consigned to the economic sidings, driven out of business by low-cost flights and long-distance buses. Since then, however, public concerns over the climate emergency have led to a surge of interest in reviving…

The mystery of UFOs seen in American skies is likely to continue after the release of the US government’s highly anticipated Unidentified Aerial Phenomena report. The report released last Friday afternoon made clear that while American intelligence officials do not believe aliens are behind the UFOs – or what scientists prefer to call UAP – that were observed by navy pilots, they cannot explain the flying objects. It does confirm that the observed phenomena are not part of any US military operations. The Pentagon studied more than 140 incidents reported by navy pilots over the past two decades, many from the summer of 2014 to the spring of 2015. While the report said that some incidents could be the result of technological errors in sensors or observers, it noted that…

For 2,000 years, Jones Hotch’s ancestors have fished Alaska’s Chilkat River for the five species of salmon that spawn in its cold, clean waters. They have gathered berries, hunted moose and raised their families, sheltered from the extremes of winter by the black, saw-toothed peaks of the Iron Mountain. Now Hotch fears a proposed mining project could end that way of life. Hotch has an infectious, boyish laugh – but there is no mistaking how worried he is about plans to build a mine where millions of pounds of zinc, copper, lead, silver and gold are buried, beneath the valley’s mountains. We are just a few kilometres from the headwaters of the Chilkat, the glacial river that serves as the main food source of the Tlingit, the region’s Indigenous people,…

After five years, the biggest casualties of Brexit are in plain sight. Integrity and decency in public life are crumbling. Because so much of the case for Brexit is false, the political modus operandi of the Brexiters, now dominating the UK’s political culture, has become a refusal to accept responsibility for mistakes, deceit and sometimes outright lies. Once the electorate can no longer trust what they are told, democratic debate is denied. We have been robbed of a core right. It is a form of coup, but with a cloud of nationalist hyperbole disguising the threat to parliamentary democracy. To hold power, or challenge it, in a democracy requires continual argument and discussion, the precondition of which is a commitment to a shared acceptance of facts, however differently they may…

Leslie Caron and her companion, Jack, greet me at the front of their apartment. They make a well-matched couple – slight, chic, immaculately coiffured. Caron, the legendary dancer and actor, is 90 this month. Jack, her beloved shih tzu, is about nine. Caron heads off to make the tea, with Sidney Bechet’s summery jazz playing in the background. I am left alone with Jack to explore the living room. It feels as if I am tunnelling through the history of 20th-century culture. Here is a photo of a pensive François Truffaut; below is a smirking Warren Beatty. The centrepiece on the wall is a huge watercolour of Caron’s great friend Christopher Isherwood, painted by his partner, Don Bachardy. To the left is Louis Armstrong, to the right Rudolf Nureyev, with…

The language around the climate crisis, the journalist Anne Karpf writes in How Women Can Save the Planet, can conceal as much as it reveals. Take “natural disaster”. There is nothing “natural” about the disasters that have struck our planet owing to global heating. They are, Karpf says, the culmination of long-term environmental degradation caused by human activity. Then again, consider “human activity”. When speaking about the crisis, campaigners in the west commonly invoke a universal “we”, setting up an abstract notion of “humanity” harming a vulnerable planet. David Attenborough famously warned last year: “We’ve not just ruined the planet, we’ve destroyed But what happens if we dig further to discover the fissures within this “we”? To acknowledge, for example, that the world’s richer nation states are responsible for 86…