Innholdsfortegnelse for 16th July 2021 i Guardian Weekly

December 2014 Isis proclaimed its ‘caliphate’ in June after seized Mosul. By the end of the year the self-declared state was at its territorial peak June 2015 By the middle of 2015 Isis had lost most of its territory on the Syria-Turkey border to Kurdish forces, but had taken the historic city of Palmyra May 2017 Isis lost Falluja in 2016 and Mosul in July 2017. Raqqa was taken in December 2017, dealing a highly symbolic blow to the group March 2019 Five years after the caliphate was declared, Isis was driven out of the last pocket of land it held in the Syrian desert town of Baghuz…

A round midnight on a freezing night in March, Jess Chowdhury had just finished her shift in a supermarket in Clapham, south London, when she realised her bus home had been diverted. The 23-year-old wasn’t annoyed, she was frightened. It was the week that Sarah Everard had disappeared while walking home from a friend’s house. Posters with her face asking for any information were everywhere. “The streets were completely empty,” she says. “I called my mum and she rushed to meet up with me.” The fear she felt that night shivered through women around south London in the days after the 33-year-old’s disappearance on 3 March. It spread across the city, then the country. When Everard was found dead a week later, it turned to fury, as it emerged she…

A seemingly endless lake of cardboard and tin shacks surrounds the perimeter of a former airport runway in Colombia’s desert-like city of Maicao. Known locally as La Pista, the area is home to more than 2,000 families, and is one of 44 informal settlements to have emerged around the city in the past two years. Maicao is in La Guajira, the most northern region of Colombia, and sits on the border with Venezuela. The old airport has become a landing strip for desperate migrants and bi-national indigenous Wayuu people fleeing the economic and political crisis in Venezuela, where the basic essentials of life are hard to come by. The stench of urine fills the air inside the roasting hot tin shack where Elaine Rojas lives with her family. There is…

India Walton was 14 when she had her first baby. After leaving a home for young mothers, and quitting high school at 19 when her twins were born, she went on to sit the general educational development test (for those who did not complete their schooling), have a fourth child and become a nurse Now she’s firmly on the path to becoming the mayor of Buffalo, New York – the first socialist mayor elected to a US city since 1960, when mayor Frank Zeidler of Milwaukee, Wisconsin left office. The winning ticket Under Walton’s watch, police would no longer respond to most mental health calls and stop enforcing low-level drug possession offences. This is alongside a push for leave for officers under investigation for police brutality to not be paid.…

When at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic China placed 45 million people under lockdown, the immediate response was that it could never happen elsewhere. Even though quarantines have been employed in Europe since the 14th century, few of us thought the citizens of mature western democracies could be persuaded to accept similar restrictions. It seemed like a measure from the dark ages. That imaginative failure arguably lay at the heart of Britain’s decision to pursue a herd immunity strategy during the early weeks of the pandemic by letting the virus run through the population, rather than locking society down tightly in an effort to suppress infections and prevent hospitals being swamped. Today, we know better. In the absence of vaccines, quarantines were our only realistic option. By and large…

At the end of July Jeff Bezos, the second richest man in the world, will achieve another second, following Richard Branson into orbit in a billionaire space race. Bezos’s announcement prompted a satirical global petition asking him to stay there. If the history of human space exploration ends there, it would be a bathetic endpiece to a remarkable story that began with Nazi weaponry and has encompassed arguably the greatest achievement to date of human civilisation. It is nearly 50 years since people last walked on the moon – the moon! – in an age with no internet or smartphones, driven there in tin cans at unimaginable speeds by controlled explosions. Boosters of the modern app economy claim that right now the pace of technological change is the fastest it…

1 CUBA Protests are a US-backed plot, claims Díaz-Canel The Cuban president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, attacked the “shameful delinquents” he claimed were trying to “fracture” his country’s communist revolution after the largest anti-government protests on the Caribbean island in nearly three decades. As Cuban officials blamed the United States for last Sunday’s demonstrations, Joe Biden called on the island’s leaders to hear its citizens’ “clarion call for freedom”. Díaz-Canel, who recently succeeded Raúl Castro as the Communist party’s top figure, painted the protests as part of a US-backed, social media-driven plot to stir up public discontent and overthrow the Cuban regime. “The approach wasn’t peaceful,” the 61-year-old politician claimed, criticising the “completely vulgar” behaviour of some demonstrators whom he accused of throwing stones at police and destroying cars. Díaz-Canel conceded other…

CORONAVIRUS Prime minister presses on with England re-opening Boris Johnson will press ahead with lifting most remaining Covid restrictions on 19 July, despite warnings from the government’s scientific advisers that the “exit wave” could result in more than 200 deaths a day and thousands of hospitalisations. Speaking at a Downing Street press conference on Monday, the prime minister urged “extreme caution” as he gave confirmation that step four of the roadmap for England would go ahead. Nightclubs can reopen, social-distancing rules will be abandoned and mask-wearing will no longer be legally enforceable, in a “big bang” approach that the shadow health secretary, Jonathan Ashworth, called “pushing down on the accelerator while throwing off the seatbelt”. But in a marked shift of emphasis from a week earlier, when he said mask-wearing…

Hundreds of foreign women with links to Islamic State in Syria’s sprawling al-Hawl detention camp have “married” men they met online, and several hundred have been smuggled out of the facility using cash bribes gifted by their new husbands. The camp’s inhabitants have been sent payments totalling upwards of $485,000 according to testimony from 50 women inside and outside al-Hawl, local Kurdish officials, a former Isis member in eastern Europe with knowledge of the money transfer network and a foreign fighter in Idlib province involved in smuggling. The practice is a significant security risk inside Syria and for foreign governments who refuse to take their nationals home – but according to many of those interviewed, getting married is both easy and an increasingly popular escape method. “Every day I get…

Up in flames The Beckwourth Complex, the largest wildfire in the state this year, broke out last weekend and quickly consumed more than 362 sq km of land. It grew so fast and with such intensity that it whipped up a rare fire tornado – a swirling vortex of smoke, ash and fire. Meanwhile, the Bootleg fire in southern Oregon engulfed more than 621 sq km and doubled in size three times over the weekend. Firefighters are battling blazes burning with a worrying ferocity from Arizona to Washington state, while officials say California has already outpaced last year’s record-breaking fire season. Smoke from the fires was expected to carry across the US, reaching up into Minnesota and into central Canada. The fires came as the US National Weather Service measured…

Women have taken up guns in northern and central Afghanistan, marching in the streets in their hundreds and sharing pictures of themselves with assault rifles on social media, in a show of defiance as the Taliban make sweeping gains nationwide. One of the biggest demonstrations was in central Ghor province, where hundreds of women turned out earlier this month, waving guns and chanting anti-Taliban slogans. They are unlikely to head to the frontlines in large numbers any time soon, because of both social conservatism and lack of experience. But the public demonstrations are a reminder of how frightened many women are about what Taliban rule could mean for them and their families. “There were some women who just wanted to inspire security forces, just symbolic, but many more were ready…

Before 17-year-old Duvan Barros left his home in a downtrodden neighbourhood in Bogotá to attend an anti-poverty demonstration, he asked his mother, Dolores Barros, to make him a fruit juice. She said no, but there would be one waiting when he got back. That was 5 June, and Barros hasn’t seen him since. “He went to the protests to support the cause, to fight for his rights, and that’s the last I know,” she said, in her rented home in the El Amparo neighbourhood of western Bogotá. Since protesters took to the streets of Colombia’s cities in late April, calling on the government to address entrenched inequality, hundreds of people have been reported missing. Some eventually reappeared after being held for days in extra judicial police custody. But others have…

In July 2018, just before Donald Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh to the US supreme court, the then president promised his judge of choice would have nothing to do with “judicial activism”. “Judges are not supposed to rewrite the law, reinvent the constitution, or substitute their own opinions for the will of the people expressed through their laws,” Trump said. But in July 2021, Trump’s three picks for the nation’s highest court joined the three other conservative justices in delivering a majority ruling steeped in judicial activism. The 6-3 opinion, drawn along ideological lines, effectively rewrote the hallowed 1965 Voting Rights Act, that guarantees equal access to the ballot box for American citizens of every racial group. It was a dramatic climax to the first supreme court term that engaged all…

Fertility rates are falling everywhere – even in places they remain high, such as sub-Saharan Africa. This is good for women, families, societies and the environment. So why do we keep hearing that the world needs babies, with angst in the media about maternity wards closing in Italy and ghost cities in China? The short-range answer is that, even though this slowdown was predicted as part of the now 250-year-old demographic transition – whose signature is the tumbling of both fertility and mortality rates – occasional happenings, such as the publication of US census data or China’s decision to relax its two-child policy, force it back into our consciousness, arousing fears about family lines rubbed out and diminishing superpowers being uninvited from the top table. The longer-range answer is that…

In a smart gallery in Paris last month, the back of a sculpture was removed and a man was lifted out. He looked around, disorient ed, as his body slowly unfurled. A doctor rushed to his side and, after inspecting him, announced he was in good health. The crowd cheered. He’d been in there for seven days. Abraham Poincheval, possibly France’s most extreme performance artist, specialises in surreal feats of endurance, often in tight spots. He has lived inside a rock for seven days, and a stuffed bear for 13. For this latest work, Hartung, he decided to look at a painting by abstract artist Hans Hartung for seven days straight. He built an aluminium shell of a man sitting on a block, looking down a large square funnel. “It’s…

A long convoy of Humvees, trucks and troop carriers moved slowly through the countryside to the south of the city of Kirkuk, ferrying dozens of Iraqi special forces. Their target was a string of hideouts used by Islamic State militants in the rough terrain of hills and lowlands crisscrossed by canals and long-dried seasonal river gullies, or wadis as they are called in Arabic. In the lead vehicle sat the commanding officer, a young lieutenant-colonel, Ihab Jalil, with a clipped moustache and hazelnut-coloured eyes. He charted the routes of the convoy on his tablet. At the same time, switching between three radio sets, he talked to the pilots of two helicopters that circled over the convoy, scouting the road ahead. The night before, Jalil, the commander of the Kirkuk regiment…

Alix Pierre was watching television at his home in Port-au-Prince’s moneyed hillside suburbs when he heard strange voices in the night. It was about 1am last Wednesday when the insomnia-stricken salesman heard prowlers outside, speaking in a mishmash of Spanish, English and Haitian Creole. Ten minutes later, he heard shots. But in a gang-plagued city all too used to the crackle of gunfire, Pierre shrugged off the disturbance and returned to his film. “I wasn’t afraid,” he said. “I live in the same neighbourhood as the president. I said everything would be under control.” As the sun rose over the seaside capital, it became clear that it was not. While Pierre had watched his late-night movie, a brutal and bewildering crime was unfolding just around the corner within the supposedly…

Five gunshots blasted like fireworks on a sunny evening, just behind Amsterdam’s busy Leidseplein. To the horror of the Netherlands, a cold-blooded shooting on 6 July has left prominent Dutch crime journalist Peter R de Vries fighting for his life in hospital. Within hours, the Dutch police arrested two men and are now holding a 21-year-old from Rotterdam and a 35-year-old Polish national. The younger man has been named in Dutch media as rapper Delano G, the Polish man as Kamil Pawel E. But many are speculating whether it is coincidence that De Vries, who made his name reporting on the kidnap of brewing magnate Freddy Heineken in the 1980s, has recently been involved in a high-profile gangland drug and murder court case, known as the Marengo trial. The 64-year-old…

Kneeling on the seabed a few metres underwater, I pick up a giant clam and begin cleaning its furrowed, porcelain smile with a toothbrush. It’s a young one and only a handful. In Fiji, giant clams, or vasua, were so heavily overfished that, by the 1980s, they were thought to be extinct locally. Australian clams were imported to start a captive breeding programme, and subsequent generations of their off spring have been released on coral reefs across Fiji. They’re still vulnerable to fishing but, if carefully guarded, the giant clams do well and have become symbols of healthy coral reefs inside well-managed, marine-protected areas. A key to their early survival is rearing them in cages to keep them safe from predators. However, the cages also exclude herbivorous fish, so the…

A fleet of robot spaceships is to descend on Venus in a few years and begin probing the most inhospitable world in the solar system. One craft will drop through the planet’s crushingly dense – and searingly hot – atmosphere while two others will orbit over the thick, acidic clouds that cover Venus and use sophisticated radar telescopes to survey the terrain beneath them. Such scrutiny represents a remarkable renewal of interest in Earth’s nearest planetary neighbour. For more than a decade, US and European space agencies have ignored the planet – only for three new Venus missions to be announced within days of one another at the beginning of June. Håkan Svedhem, former project manager for Europe’s previous probe to the planet, Venus Express, told the science journal Nature…

After years of starting the day with a tall morning coffee, followed by several glasses of green tea at intervals, and the occasional cappuccino after lunch, I quit caffeine, cold turkey. It was not something that I particularly wanted to do, but I had come to the reluctant conclusion that the story I was writing demanded it. Several of the experts I was interviewing had suggested that I really couldn’t understand the role of caffeine in my life – its invisible yet pervasive power – without getting off it and then, presumably, getting back on. Roland Griffiths, one of the world’s leading researchers of mood-altering drugs, and the man most responsible for getting the diagnosis of “caffeine withdrawal” included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), the…

Decades ago, when I was a ranger in Alaska’s Glacier Bay national park, each cruise ship that entered the bay carried hundreds of passengers. Today, they carry thousands. They don’t look like ships. They look like the boxes the ships came in, huge floating milk cartons – ponderous and white. But once they get moving, they’re a force. One that occasionally strikes whales. In 2001, the carcass of a humpback whale known as “Snow” (due to the white markings on her fluke) was found floating in the bay. An investigation concluded she had died of massive trauma to her skull and cervical vertebrae, consistent with a vessel collision. Princess Cruise Lines (purchased by Carnival in 2003) eventually pleaded guilty to failing to operate its vessel, the Dawn Princess, at a…

One afternoon in mid-June, the playwright Katori Hall glanced at her phone. A text had come in from a former agent. “OMG,” it read. Hall was confused. Then her agent phoned, telling her she had just won this year’s Pulitzer prize for drama. “And I was like, ‘Whaaat?!’” Hall recalls. “I started screaming and running around in circles in my house.” Her young son was less impressed. “He was like, ‘Mom, be quiet. I’m looking at YouTube.’” The Hot Wing King, was described in the citation as “a funny, deeply felt consideration of Black masculinity and how it is perceived, filtered through the experiences of a loving gay couple and their extended family as they prepare for a culinary competition”. (The runners-up included Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley’s Circle Jerk,…

The first time I remember someone telling me not to overthink was when I was trying to suss out breastfeeding. “Don’t overthink it,” said my friend, “just go with it.” “Just going with it” is not something I do. I have to really understand what I’m doing and then I think through almost every possibility and eventuality. And I plan. When people say things like: “Who could have imagined XYZ would happen?” about some entirely predictable outcome, my most common response is “I could”. I have realised that, to most people, I am an over thinker but, for me, it is others who under think. I just think. I didn’t realise how much until someone asked me what I was thinking. It was a different thought for each second. The…