Innholdsfortegnelse for 6th August 2021 i Guardian Weekly

Life on the edge Displaced people ride on the roof of an overcrowded bus back to their homes in the conflict-strewn region of Ituango, north-west Colombia. More than 4,000 people have fled the violence of militias in the region in recent months, with flooding and landslides having complicated efforts to get essential supplies to the area 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…

China’s appointment of a new ambassador to the US has shone a light on the ongoing debate among analysts about how Beijing communicates with its biggest competitor, the future of its “wolf warrior” diplomacy and how Xi Jinping’s call to “tell a good China story” may work in practice. Qin Gang, who is one of Xi Jinping’s most trusted senior diplomats, struck a conciliatory tone on arrival in Washington DC last week, saying he would “endeavour to bring [bilateral] relations back on track”. The debate over the “wolf warrior” style – under which he said, as the Chinese ambassador to Sweden on Swedish public radio in 2019, “we treat our friends with fine wine, but for our enemies we have shotguns” – comes amid a burst of positive publicity that…

The Royal National Lifeboat Institution last week hit out at accusations it is operating a “migrant taxi service” by rescuing people at risk of dying in the water as they cross the Channel in small boats, which the charity says is its moral and legal duty. Responding to accusations from Nigel Farage that it is facilitating illegal immigration, the RNLI, a volunteer lifeboat charity, said it was “very proud” of its humanitarian work and it would continue to respond to coast-guard calls to rescue at-risk Channel migrants in line with its legal duty under international maritime law. “Imagine being out of sight of land, running out of fuel, coming across incredibly busy shipping lanes when you’re frightened and you don’t know which direction you’re going in. That is by anyone’s…

There are pigs’ trotters, auber-gines, clams and oysters. Peaches, radishes, a skinned hare flanked by a knife, a squirrel on a bed of hazelnuts and a plate of lemons across which a small snake slithers. There is a dish of peppers from Mexico, which had fallen to Hernán Cortés just over a decade before the masons who carved this incredible feast in Seville cathedral set to work. Surrounding the arch that leads to the sacristy in the world’s largest Gothic cathedral, these 68 intricately carved plates of food reveal the social upheaval rippling through Spain 500 years ago. The plates, obscured when the huge doors of the sacristy are open, are the subject of a new book by a Spanish art historian who has spent 11 years trying to unpick…

When a legion of Texans descended on their state capitol last Saturday morning, the signs they carried conveyed raw terror about the erosion of their democracy. Slogans included “Protect Voting Rights”, “End the Filibuster” and “Say No to Jim Crow”. Some had just concluded a days-long, 43km march from Georgetown to Austin, praying with their feet in a desperate attempt to safeguard access to the vote. For hours, they withstood blistering heat to rally round a casket – a reference to lawmakers they say are trying to bury voting rights. “When you look out here today and see the thousands, and you look at the diversity in this crowd, this is the America they are afraid of,” cried the Rev Dr William J Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People’s…

Was it worth it? That is what many of us who served in Afghanistan are quietly asking as we watch with bewilderment and horror at what is unfolding. A total of 457 British servicemen and women never made it home from the war. Among them was Corporal Kevin Mulligan, a fearless young Scot with whom I had the honour of serving. He was the epitome of a paratrooper and one of our best and brightest commanders. At the time of his death, Kev’s fiancee was carrying their unborn child. It is impossible to quantify the price paid over the past 20 years but whenever I think about Afghanistan, the human cost is at the forefront of my mind. The pain felt by Kev’s loved ones. The thousands of veterans who…

The French-Moroccan author Leïla Slimani’s second novel, published in France in 2016 and translated into English as Lullaby, is about a nanny who works for a bourgeois professional Parisian couple, and murders the two children in her care. It caused a huge stir globally, won the Prix Goncourt (she was the first Moroccan woman to win the prize), and caught the attention of Emmanuel Macron, who appointed Slimani his representative for the “promotion of French language and culture”. Lullaby is a shocking and affecting book but, in the end, confusing. Suspenseful tension depends too much on our helpless fascination with the facts of the crime; the children’s deaths are pitiable and terrible, but have no political meaning. In an interview with the New Yorker, about a short story she wrote…

Last month we reported on how Britain – trusting in its high vaccination rate to lift Covid restrictions despite surging Delta variant cases – was increasingly seen by the world as a test case for pandemic control. It’s early days and the data is not yet full enough to paint a clear picture, but as cases suddenly began to fall last week, scientists and politicians were asking if the country might have made a significant breakthrough. Observer science editor Robin McKie examines what is happening, looks at what the coming months might hold and hears cautionary warnings from many experts. Then, for another perspective, Helen Sullivan reports from Australia, faced with many more weeks of tough restrictions as the country seemingly pays a price for its sluggish vaccination programme. The big…

Implicit in western support for pro-democracy movements and transitions around the world is an assumption that, given a free choice, a system of elected, representative government is what people will prefer. But what if a majority believes democracy doesn’t work for them? Emerging testimony from Tunisia, the latest country to face a crisis over how it is run, suggests many citizens welcomed the forceful suspension of a democratically elected parliament that had failed to address people’s problems and was widely reviled as a self-serving oligarchy. Mohammed Ali, 33, from Ben Guerdane, seems to typify this view. “I think what happened is good. I think that’s what all the people want,” he said after last week’s surprise move by Kais Saied, Tunisia’s president, to seize power and impose a state of…

Lost resort Tourists in the Aegean Sea resort of Icmeler, near Marmaris, look on while wildfires rip through a nearby forest, as one of south-east Europe’s worst heatwaves in decades intensified this week. The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was criticised over the country’s lack of firefighting planes, as authorities in Istanbul were promised water-dropping planes from the European Union. Turkey is suffering its worst fires in at least 10 years, with nearly 95,000 hectares burned so far this year and at least eight people killed. Wildfires also broke out across much of southern Europe, including Greece, Spain and Italy, with temperatures rising above 40C, forcing hundreds to evacuate. A major blaze broke out early last Saturday near Patras in western Greece and five villages have been evacuated. Eight people…

Diamonds have long been in the debt of marketing genius. Until the 1940s they were not a popular choice for engagement rings. Then, in 1947, a stroke of brilliance: De Beers’ “A Diamond is Forever” campaign. The slogan was a hit. The market trans-formed. Today diamond engagement rings are ubiquitous, winking from the windows of upmarket jewellers. Earlier this year came another glittering moment in diamond PR. Pandora, the world’s largest jewellery retailer, announced it would be switching entirely to lab-made diamonds. The move generated positive headlines around the world as an “ethical stand against mined diamonds”. Pandora is not alone. In 2020 De Beers invested in a lab-grown line, launching a facility to churn out up to 400,000 diamonds a year. Other retailers tout their laboratory stones as “100%…

Anazir Maria de Oliveira has a simple message for the man they call Lula. “Comrade, I want you back,” said the 88-year-old union veteran and black activist as she celebrated the return of her “guru” to Brazil’s political fray. Until just a few months ago, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva seemed to have reached the melancholy twilight of a mythical political career. The former factory worker rose to become one of the world’s most popular leaders before, in a dramatic fall from grace, he was jailed and barred from office. But the quashing of corruption convictions against Brazil’s first working-class president has scrambled the South American country’s politics and given believers the tantalising hope that the septuagenarian politician could make a comeback. Five months after Lula’s political rights were restored,…

Over the past 18 months, the world has been amazed at how slippery an enemy Covid-19 has proved to be. The virus first detected in China at the end of 2019 has mutated on a regular basis. Vaccines need to evolve because the virus is changing to survive. The shock to the global economy from the pandemic has been colossal, but things are now looking up – especially for advanced countries. Some are surprised by the pace of recovery, but they perhaps shouldn’t be, because alongside new variants of the virus there has been a new variant of global capitalism. This matters. For decades the Austrian variant of political economy – the small state, non-interventionist, trickle-down, free-trade, low-tax model based around the ideas of Friedrich von Hayek – was dominant.…

After the discovery of hundreds of Indigenous children’s unmarked graves at former Canadian residential schools, Drezus grew unsure about his longstanding plans to release his music video, Bless. The rapper, who is of Cree and Ojibwe heritage from the Muskowekwan First Nation in Saskatchewan province, starts the song by calling the atrocities his people have faced “an act of war”, then follows that with bar after bar of Indigenous empowerment. Unsure if that would be appropriate while his people grieved, he turned to his mother, who had attended one of those schools. Her advice? “Release it, son. We need it now.” The boarding school system – government-funded, Christian church-administered – was established in Canada in the late 1800s. Its founders’ intent: to forcibly remove Indigenous children from their “savage” parents…

1 UNITED STATES Trump told officials to ‘just say it was corrupt’ Donald Trump has insisted that when he told senior justice department officials to “Just say that the election was corrupt [and] leave the rest to me”, he was not attempting to subvert US democracy, but to “uphold the integrity and honesty of elections and the sanctity of our vote”. The former president’s restatement of his lie that his defeat by Joe Biden was the result of electoral fraud came after Washington was rocked by news of his December call with acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen and Richard Donoghue, a senior Department of Justice official. Trump’s pressure on federal and state officials to overturn his national defeat and state losses to Biden has been well documented. Cases mounted by…

European citizens who have applied for settled status are being detained and threatened with deportation, a development that contradicts assurances from ministers and appears to contravene the Brexit withdrawal agreement. The Home Office has served EU nationals with removal directions even though they could prove they had applied for settled status, which should protect their rights to remain in the UK. Ministers have repeatedly promised that anyone who had applied by the 30 June deadline would have their existing rights protected while their case was heard. The apparent failure to honour that agreement has prompted accusations of either “administrative incompetence” by Home Office officials or a “wilful” attempt to deport as many EU nationals as possible on the assumption they are easier to remove, for instance, than asylum seekers. A…

During a meeting of Tibetan leaders in Dharamshala in India a couple of years ago, Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, was asked about his reincarnation. Addressing the room of monks, religious teachers and Tibetan politicians, the Dalai Lama asked them: “Do you think it’s time now?” It was a meeting that would end with the Tibetan leaders agreeing the issue of reincarnation was one to be decided only by the Dalai Lama him-self. But China, which annexed Tibet in 1951 and has since retained tight control over the region, has other ideas. It insists the choice of the next Dalai Lama lies only with China, and has enshrined this right into Chinese law. The Dalai Lama, who recently turned 86, has insisted discussions of his death are premature (according…

Mbeubeuss is one of the biggest rubbish tips in Africa and Senegal’s largest open cemetery for murdered children. In the past three years, the bodies of 32 infants have been recovered from the site by the waste-pickers who work there. Looking at the high rate of infanticide in Senegal, it seems the main reasons are shame about pregnancy outside marriage and a loss of traditional support for young women. Religious conservatism, economic hardship and a lack of access to contraception and sex education are leaving many women I talk to feeling isolated. Speaking with some of the women who have been jailed for infanticide and photographing the work being done in prisons by the NGO Tostan, which aims to train as many women as possible through workshops so inmates can…

In 2017, Mikael Sodergren, a liver and pancreatic cancer surgeon at Imperial College healthcare NHS trust, was becoming increasingly interested in the potential role of medical cannabis in treating pain, especially the discomfort experienced by patients after complex operations. “I hope that I do a lot of good, but unfortunately in the short term, I inflict a lot of pain with cancer sur-gery,” he said. “So we’re reliant on pretty nasty painkillers, such as high-strength intravenous opioids, which we’re trying to move away from. ” Over the past 15 years, an increasing number of scientists have become interested in the potential benefits of medical cannabis for treating all kinds of illness, from multiple sclerosis to anxiety, sleep disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder. The reason is that phytocanna-binoids – chemicals that…

I have been fascinated by insects all my life. One of my earliest memories is of finding, at the age of five or six, some stripy yellow-and-black caterpillars feeding on weeds in the school playground. I put them in my empty lunchbox, and took them home. Eventually they transformed into handsome magenta and black moths. This seemed like magic to me – and still does. I was hooked.In pursuit of insects I have travelled the world, from the deserts of Patagonia to the icy peaks of Fjordland in New Zealand and the forested mountains of Bhutan. I have watched clouds of birdwing butterflies sipping minerals from the banks of a river in Borneo, and thousands of fireflies flashing in synchrony at night in the swamps of Thailand. At home in…

Despite increasing global concern, Jair Bolsonaro is determined to expand his exploitation of Brazil’s crucial natural resources. His latest project would rapidly deforest large areas of the Amazon. Bolsonaro’s plan? To construct a 1,000km railway system right into the heart of the Amazon rainforest – with trains passing within 500 metres of 726 official environmentally protected areas. The new railway, called Ferrogrão, would also entail construction within 10km of another 18 priority conservation areas. The pretext for Bolsonaro’s plan is a problem that, while real, could be addressed through far less harmful measures. Currently, soybeans and other crops grown in the Brazilian midwest must travel at least 2,000km to reach seaports in the states of São Paulo and Paraná. The proposed railway would reduce transport costs and increase the competitiveness…

What was it like to be Mrs Paul Theroux? If a person’s interest in this vexed subject depends on the extent of their fascination with the author of The Mosquito Coast, then I’m riveted. In my childhood, Theroux, novelist and travel writer extraordinaire, was one of our household gods, celebrated by my father not only for his books, but also for his exploits: manly behaviour to which he inadvertently gave licence in the eyes of some of his fans. But there are, I think, other reasons to read this strange, sad book by his first wife. What is it like to be married to the brilliance in the room? Answering this question used to be the work of feminist literary historians such as Diane Johnson, whose marvellous 1972 book about…

When I was a young girl, a fabulous woman called Pam who lived opposite would come to do my mum’s hair once a week. Pam was a retired hairdresser and beautician who had been taught partly by Vivien Leigh’s mother. I knew this because I listened as she and my mother talked. My mum would sit under the hairdryer, and Pam would talk and talk. Neither woman really listened to the other. My mother would wait for a gap so she could say, “Exactly”, and then launch into her own, often unrelated, anecdote. I thought of all the information that was missed like dropped balls: wasted opportunities for further exploration. Thus, having observed how not to do it, I resolved to be different. It was only when I was appointed…