Innholdsfortegnelse for 27th August 2021 i Guardian Weekly

Grain check Sacks of rice are thrown into a crowd of people clamouring for food supplies in Les Cayes, Haiti’s third-largest city. The powerful earthquake that struck on 14 August has killed more than 2,200 people and directly affected nearly 600,000 others. Authorities say that gangs are hijacking aid convoys, hampering the rescue effort. 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…

The first time the Taliban took Kabul, 25 years ago, they tortured and killed former president Mohammad Najibullah, dragged his body behind a truck through the streets, and hung it from a lamp-post. Last week, with Kabul surrounded and a second victory almost inevitable, the Taliban ordered their troops to hold back from entering the city, to ensure a peaceful transfer of power. When they did march in, their commanders offer ed an “amnesty” for anyone who had opposed them over the past two decades. Last Tuesday brought the extraordinary spectacle of the Taliban’s spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid taking to the stage at the briefing room of a purpose-built Government Media and Information Office. The previous week, when they were still insurgents, the group had assassinated its director. A man who…

‘Blue hydrogen”, which has been touted as a potential clean energy source, could be more polluting than the carbon fuels it would replace. In some cases, blue hydrogen, which is made by splitting fossil gas, could be up to 20% worse for the climate than gas because of the emissions that escape when gas is extracted from the ground The process leaves CO2 and methane byproducts, which fossil fuel companies plan to trap using carbon capture technology. However, even the most advanced schemes cannot capture all the emissions, leaving some to enter the atmosphere and contribute to global heating. Professors from Cornell and Stanford universities have calculated that these “fugitive” emissions from producing hydrogen could eclipse those associated with extracting and burning gas when multiplied by the amount of gas…

This month, the award-winning make up artist Bjørg Serup made her bitter public farewell to the Danish film industry. “I am on sick leave with a work injury due to serious stress and cannot expect to be able to return to the film industry or any other fulltime job again,” she wrote in an article published in Ekko, the country’s film industry magazine. The reason? Stress-related cognitive impairment, which she blamed on the way production times and budgets have been slashed to meet the near-bottomless demand for Danish drama. This year, Serup started working on the return of director Lars von Trier’s 90s cult hospital comedy The Kingdom, and last year she did the make up for the award-winning real-life crime miniseries The Investigation, and the Norwegian royal drama Atlantic…

Until she was detained at Vancouver airport in December 2018, Meng Wanzhou was not a household name. But the Huawei executive has become the face of a high-stakes dispute between China, Canada and the US. Last week, a marathon extradition hearing wrapped up in Vancouver, after months of legal arguments over whether Meng should be sent to the US to face charges of criminal fraud. Prosecutors allege Meng knowingly misled HSBC bankers about the relationship between Huawei and an affiliate, Skycom, in breach of sanctions against Iran. Should the judge agree to extradition at the next hearing in October, the case will be sent to Canada’s justice minister for a final decision. The case is complicated and has sent China’s relations with the US and Canada plummeting with accusations of…

One year ago, I did not die from poisoning by a chemical weapon, and it would seem that corruption played no small part in my survival. Having contaminated Russia’s state system, corruption has also contaminated the intelligence services. When a country’s senior management is preoccupied with protection rackets and extortion, the quality of covert operations inevitably suffers. A group of FSB agents applied nerve agent to my underwear just as shoddily as they incompetently dogged my footsteps for three and a half years – in violation of all instructions from above – allowing civil investigating activists to expose them at every turn. To be fair, a regime based on corruption can perform more elementary tasks to perfection. The judicial system functions perfectly on a quid pro quo basis. That is…

For former president Donald Trump, beating the drum of “America first” was an obsession. “The future doesn’t belong to the globalists,” he once told the UN. “The future belongs to patriots.” Last year, he was rejected by voters in favour of Joe Biden, a committed internationalist who vowed: “America is back.” Yet the past week has led some to question whether a strain of the “America first” mantra lives on. In a speech last week, a defiant Biden expressed no regret for America’s chaotic and humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan. The president insisted he was following the will of the people and could not justify spending more American blood and treasure. The president also announced that Americans who had received two vaccine doses would be eligible for a third. There was…

A huge new Exxon Mobil project in Guyana faces charges of a disregard for safety from experts who claim the company has failed to adequately prepare for possible disaster Exxon has been extracting oil from Liza 1, an ultra-deepwater drilling operation, since 2019 – part of an expansive project spanning more than 2.4m hectares off the coast of Guyana By 2025, the company expects to produce 800,000 barrels of oil a day, making Guyana Exxon’s largest single source of fossil fuel production But experts claim that Exxon in Guyana appears to be taking advantage of an unprepared government in one of the lowest-income nations in South America, allowing the company to skirt necessary oversight. Worse, they also believe the company’s safety plans are inadequate and dangerous. A top engineer who…

“HE WAS A TESTAMENT TO THE SUCCESS AND FAILURE OF THE STRUGGLE THAT PRECEDED HIM From the beginning, Obama’s team was invested in constructing a certain image of what would be deemed a “historic” presidency. During Obama’s campaign, the artist Shepard Fairey, who designed the famous “Hope” poster, was widely acknowledged as his key iconographer. But, in retrospect, who Obama was and what he represented endures in the public imagination thanks to the work of the White House photographer Pete Souza, a longtime photojournalist who first had the assignment under Ronald Reagan. Over time, Souza helped create an image of a postracial nation, where postracial didn’t mean liberation – it meant a US where race was solely affect and gesture, rather than the old brew of capital, land and premature…

The human tragedy is that there is no connection between what we know and what we do. Almost everyone is now at least vaguely aware that we face the greatest catastrophe our species has ever confronted. Yet scarcely anyone alters their behaviour in response: above all, their driving, flying and consumption of meat and dairy. During the most serious of all crises, the UK elected the least serious of all governments. Both the Westminster government and local authorities continue to build roads and expand airports. An analysis by the conservation charity WWF suggests that, while the last UK budget allocated $198m for environmental measures, it dedicated $55bn to policies that will increase emissions. Astonishingly, it is still government policy to “maximise economic recovery” of oil and gas from the UK’s…

Alexei Navalny boarded a flight to Moscow in January. Russia’s most famous dissident had spent five months in Germany recovering from the effects of novichok poisoning. Surrounded by journalists who travelled with him, he was under no illusions as to what would happen once he swapped Berlin for home. The Russian authorities would arrest him, for sure. He would spend months, years, in prison. Probably he would never emerge. On the plane, Navalny shrugged off these concerns with his usual dark humour. “I am not afraid,” he said. Was Navalny’s decision to face down Vladimir Putin an act of courage, a modern-day echo of the doomed revolt by the Decembrists against autocratic rule? Or was it suicidal folly? After all, he embodies the best chance for democratic change inside Russia…

Swiss researchers have spent 108 days calculating pi to a new record accuracy of 62.8tn digits. Done by a computer, their approximation beat the previous world record of 50tn decimal places, and was calculated 3.5 times as quickly. It’s an impressive and time-consuming feat that begs the question: why? Pi is, of course, a mathematical constant defined as the ratio between a circle’s circumference and its diameter. The circumference of a circle, we learn at school, is 2πr, where r is the circle’s radius. It is a transcendental, irrational number: one with an infinite number of decimal places, and one that can’t be expressed as a fraction of two whole numbers. Jan de Gier, a professor of mathematics and statistics at the University of Melbourne, says being able to approximate…

1 GREECE Greeks finish border wall on fear of Afghan migrant rush Greece has completed a 40km wall on its Turkish border, below, and installed a surveillance system to prevent migrants from reaching Europe. The Taliban victory in Afghanistan has sparked fears that Europe could face a migration crisis similar to that in 2015 Michalis Chrisochoidis, the citizen protection minister, said the wall was to stop a repeat of six years ago. A 12km fence was already in place, he said, adding: “We cannot wait passively. Our borders will remain safe and inviolable.” Athens said last week it would turn people back. Notis Mitarachi, the migration minister, said: “Greece will not be a gateway to Europe for illegal Afghan migrants.” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Turkish president, raised the issue last Friday…

BREXIT Plea to extend deadline to register EU spouses Ministers have been accused of breaching their promise to secure the post-Brexit rights of thousands of British nationals who settled in the EU and married foreigners. Campaigners at British in Europe (BiE) have written to the Foreign Office minister Wendy Morton and the immigration minister Kevin Foster telling of the “heartbreak” and “distress” endured by British citizens who are facing problems with the Home Office over their rights to return home to the UK. Before Brexit, all EU nationals – including the British – were free to move between member states with family members, regardless of where they were from. But, since Brexit, UK citizens’ non-British spouses have needed to apply for pre-settled status before 29 March next year. However, they…

Few doubt that the Taliban victory in Afghanistan will give violent Islamist extremists a historic boost, encouraging them in their campaigns to overthrow and replace local regimes – but it has also revealed the deep faultlines that have weakened the jihadist movement in the past decade. Sunni militants in the Middle East and beyond have made clear they believe the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan vindicates their own strategies and ideology. Coming just weeks before the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the events in Kabul have a powerful resonance. Many statements have been jubilant. But there has been one notable exception among jihadist groups: the Islamic State (Isis), which considers the Taliban “apostates” because of their willingness to negotiate with the US, their apparent pragmatism and their failure to apply…

Forty years ago a small group of women, along with a few men and children, left their homes in Wales to protest against the arrival of US nuclear warheads at RAF Greenham Common in Berkshire. The steps they took that day would lead to the establishment of the Greenham women’s peace camp, which at its height gathered more than 70,000 women in direct action and became the biggest female-led protest since the demand for women’s suffrage. Now hundreds more are marching 210km to mark the 40th anniversary of the camp’s foundation and are calling for the original women who led it to be remembered and respected as much as the suffragettes. The coordinator, Rebecca Mordan, whose mother took her to Greenham Common as a child, said she wanted to raise…

This row of brick sheds, locked away down overgrown country lanes in Bedfordshire, about 100km north of London, feels a long way from the glossy boardroom presentations about sustainable aviation. But it was recently the backdrop, in the search for greener flying, to a remarkable scene. “Anyone passing would have wondered why these people were staring at a pipe and laughing,” says Bobby Sethi, associate professor of gas turbine combustion at Cranfield University. “But we were almost certainly the only people in the world right then burning anything without producing CO2.” In testing whether hydrogen could replace paraffin as a fuel for global aviation, Sethi and team were celebrating a breakthrough. “We were able to demonstrate successful ignition and safe combustion of pure hydrogen and air at high temperature and…

A month after a Hungarian bookshop chain was fined for selling a children’s story about a day in the life of a child with same-sex parents, the same picture book has been published in Russia – but with an “18+” label on it in deference to the country’s so-called gay propaganda law. The picture book by American author Lawrence Schimel and illustrator Elīna Brasliņa is about a morning and an evening in the lives of two children with same-sex parents. It is published as two titles in English – Early One Morning, about a young boy’s morning with his two mothers; and Bedtime, Not Playtime!, which follows a girl with two fathers at bedtime. The Russian translation, by Dmitriy Kuzmin, combines both books under the title Mothers, Fathers and Kids…

An old party with an ageing membership, fronted by a politician with all the charisma of a middle-ranking bank clerk, following the humiliating descent from national institution to electoral also-rans already suffered by its comrades across Europe. The obituary of Germany’s Social Democratic party (SPD) had already been written. Yet as Germany’s election campaigning is about to enter its home stretch, it is the centre-left party of Olaf Scholz that is enjoying a surge of energy as its rivals start to lag behind. The SPD has been overtaking the Greens, who were on course to be contenders for the top spot in the spring. In a survey published by pollster Insa last Sunday, the SPD pulled level with the Christian Democratic Union of the outgoing chancellor, Angela Merkel, for the…

In August 1998, two weeks after a little-known terror outfit called al-Qaida announced itself to the world with bomb attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, President Bill Clinton retaliated with missile strikes against a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. Khartoum was rocked by the impact of a dozen Tomahawk missiles, which destroyed the plant, killing a night watchman and wounding 11 others. The US claimed the factory – which was the largest provider of medicines in a country under sanctions – was secretly producing nerve agents on behalf of al-Qaida, but it didn’t take long for its officials to admit that the “evidence … was not as solid as first portrayed ”. The attack, in other words, was simply an act of retaliation against a random target, without…

WG Sebald’s mother, Rosa, once said that her son had been born without a skin, so that he was unable to protect himself from being overwhelmed by the suffering of others, and even normal experience was traumatic for him. For Carole Angier, the author of this unauthorised biography, something about this acute sensitivity made Sebald “the most exquisite writer”, a man oppressed by experience and the burden of his mind, who believed that the remembering of great injustices was an attempt, however small, at what he called “restitution”. In Janet Malcolm’s memorable dictum, biographers are burglars, robbing the lives of their subjects. But what Angier realised, as she embarked on her own pattern of theft, was that she was dealing with the most light-footed of all burglars. For Sebald’s books,…