Innholdsfortegnelse for 3rd September 2021 i Guardian Weekly

Lines down More than 1m homes and businesses were left without power in and around New Orleans as residents and authorities assessed “catastrophic” damage from Hurricane Ida, a 240km/h storm that passed through Louisiana on Monday. At least two people were killed. The death toll was expected to rise. The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol 205 | Issue № 11 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…

ENGLAND Vial shortage forces NHS to order fewer blood tests GPs in England have been told to stop performing most blood tests until mid-September, and hospitals told to cut down by 25%, as the NHS grapples with an acute shortage of sample bottles. The problem had already forced hospitals and GPs to start limiting the number of blood tests being carried out on patients. But in guidance issued last Thursday, NHS England warned that the shortage would get worse over the next few weeks and last for “a significant period”, which may be months. In its guidance letter, NHS England told GPs and hospital bosses: “The supply position remains constrained and is forecasted to become even more constrained over the coming weeks. While it is anticipated that the position will…

They arrived shoeless and shivering, with some toddlers wearing the same nappies they wore when fleeing their homes days earlier. Volunteers have described the extraordinary dignity and stoicism of the Afghan refugees, including about 2,200 children, who were airlifted to the UK out of the clutches of the Taliban. Some of the new arrivals were passing out from exhaustion in airport terminals, said Dara Leonard, a team leader for the British Red Cross. Others, including pregnant women and “the sick and incredibly frail” were rushed straight to hospital. “These were people on the far side of exhausted,” said Leonard, who was among the first to meet the Afghan families arriving at Heathrow airport last week. “My word, they are so stoical, so dignified but they were literally putting one foot…

Gaps on supermarket shelves. Fast food outlets pulling milkshakes and bottled drinks from their menus. Restaurants running out of chicken. Empty vending machines. Fruit and vegetables rotting in the fields. These are some of the most visible signs of Britain’s supply chain crisis, which has led to stocks in shops and warehouses slumping to their lowest levels since the Confederation of British Industry began surveying in 1983. There are dire warnings that the UK’s food system, which has been hit hardest by delivery delays and labour shortages, is in danger of reaching breaking point and may not meet Christmas demand. Customers may have only noticed this crisis in recent weeks but it has been building for months, with businesses, road hauliers and transport unions telling ministers at the start of…

In locked-down New Zealand, life orbits around the 1pm briefing. The director general of health – frequently alongside the prime minister, Jacinda Ardern – takes the stage behind a socially distanced podium and updates the country. In the middle of a Covid outbreak, as the country is, those briefings occur almost every weekday. They are so clockwork-regular, so predictable in their essential structure, that certain sentences have become memes: “Kia ora koutou katoa [Hello everyone]. There are X cases of Covid-19 in the community,” each begins. After the last outbreak, media outlet The Spin off spliced together the director-general of health saying it 44 times. “It became a cultural phenomenon,” science communication expert Rebecca Priestley said. “We were getting information directly from the prime minister and from the director general…

Litha María de Los Angeles slaps two cheese-filled pupusas – the El Salvadoran cornmeal flatbread – on the griddle. With a camera click on the QR code, she receives her payment: four hundred-thousandths of a bitcoin. Then, as the rain pelts the corrugated iron roof and a gust of wind lifts the blue plastic table cloths, the power cuts out. A tumultuous few weeks awaits El Salvador as it prepares to become the first country to adopt bitcoin, the world’s most popular decentralised digital currency, as legal tender on 7 September. With that deadline looming, a host of challenges – technological, financial and criminal – threaten to sink the plan of the president, Nayib Bukele, to ride the Central American economy out of its choppy waters on the back of…

Alaser-initiated experiment at the United States National Ignition Facility, based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, made a significant breakthrough on 8 August in reproducing the power source of the stars, smashing its own 2018 record for energy released from nuclear fusion reactions 23 times over. The nuclear energy that was released was equal to 70% of the laser energy used to create the reaction. A pulse of light, focused to tiny spots within a vacuum chamber, triggered the collapse of a capsule of fuel from roughly the size of the pupil in your eye to the diameter of a human hair. This implosion created the extreme conditions of temperature and pressure needed for atoms of hydrogen to combine into new atoms and release, kilogram for kilogram, 10m times…

My preconceptions about trans people came from the media, and I certainly hadn’t heard of trans children. So it just flummoxed me having an assigned male child who didn’t have especially ‘feminine’ interests and yet was saying consistently: ‘I’m a girl.’” Kate was telling me about her eldest daughter, Alex. (Names of all trans young people, and of their parents, have been changed for their privacy.) It was a warm July evening, and we were sitting in the kitchen of their family home, in a comfortable British suburb populated by middle-class couples with young families. Alex, still at primary school, is trans. A few years ago, her mum assumed she was a boy who was clumsily trying to ask for typically feminine things. “I remember I used to have conversations…

Statistics from Haiti’s earthquake on 14 August are stark: at least 2,207 people have been confirmed dead and more than 12,000 injured. More than 130,000 homes have been damaged or destroyed. Aftershocks, and landslides in the wake of Tropical Storm Grace mere days after the earthquake, mean those numbers are expected to rise. But the most dispiriting number is 11. That is the number of years since Haiti’s last big earthquake – years in which corruption has hollowed out the state, armed gangs have expanded their territorial control, and political turmoil has intensified, culminating in the assassination of the president, Jovenel Moïse, in July. The 2010 earthquake, while marginally weaker than this year’s, became the deadliest seismic event recorded in the western hemisphere, with more than 200,000 people killed. That…

New friends and old enemies Jason Burke, page 14 → On Tuesday, the last US troops left Kabul and the day had broken on a country entirely controlled by the Taliban, the last shadow of American threat banished. It is still uncertain what this second iteration of the caliphate will look like, but with foreigners finally gone, the shape of the new Afghanistan will come into sharper focus. The Taliban have made clear they want to avoid a repeat of their 1990s rule when they presided over an international pariah state, mismanaged the economy and increased repression as discontent spread. What is less clear is whether they can achieve that, or how they will attempt it. The pivot from fighting an insurgency to managing the government was always going to…

It all began so beautifully, with the ruler of Dubai photographed planting the first tree of his ambitious environmental initiative, as smiling officials applauded. In 2010, the One Million Trees initiative was announced by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the vice-president and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates and ruler of Dubai. The aim was to increase green areas in Dubai through afforestation, while contributing to overall beautification of the city. There would be a nursery for the young trees on land, contributed by the Dubai Police Academy, and a company called Green Land partnered with a government-backed environmental organisation to develop the nursery and beg in planting the trees. “This is our attempt to stop desertification, and to add to the aesthetic appeal of Dubai,” said Lt Gen…

Jackson Mason, a barber, was at Cavaillon’s bustling market when last month’s catastrophic earthquake struck southern Haiti. “The earth below me started to shake – people were thrown into the air, others yelled, praying to Jesus to save them,” Mason, 35, said. “Everything flew in the air, even the wallets in people’s hands.” Nearly two weeks later, with aftershocks still being felt, Mason, his wife and two children – aged 13 and one – were in a makeshift shelter, a few paces from his cracked house, in a camp on the perimeter of a football pitch. Support from the government has been non existent, with two charities providing the only help by installing a water tank. Without food or medicine, the displaced residents club together to buy supplies when they…

For Republicans it was a day of thoughts and prayers – and political opportunity. When a suicide bombing in Kabul last Thursday killed 13 US troops and dozens of Afghan civilians, Republicans were careful to begin their official responses by paying tribute to the fallen. Some, however, went on to demand the resignation of the commander-in-chief. “It’s not a day for politics,” said Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary. But in truth the politicking had already begun, indicating how Republicans intend to exploit the Afghanistan crisis to diminish Joe Biden and defeat him at the polls. Biden’s decision to withdraw US forces by the end of August precipitated the collapse of the Afghan government far quicker than he predicted. The president has expressed no regret, noting that, after 20…

SALLY ROONEY APPEARS before a stark, white background, stripped of even the most incidental feature. It makes me laugh: in 18 months of Zoom meetings, I’ve encountered people in their bedrooms and home offices, in front of book cases and windows – situations that, no matter how bland or contrived, still betray some minor, contextualising detail. The empty staging today is, evidently, something that Rooney, after two hit novels and the rapid onset of an unwelcome fame, clearly wishes might extend further than a video call. Later in our conversation she will tell me celebrity is a condition that, in many cases, “happens without meaningful consent – the famous person never even wanted to become famous”. There are some good reasons for the 30-year-old’s reticence. Her first two novels –…

Green politics in Britain has always had a problem with scale. The disparity between the damage being done to the planet and the forces mobilised against that, in electoral politics and on the streets, has so far been painfully stark. The first British Green party (originally called the People party) was founded in the early 1970s, when anxiety about the environment was almost as widespread as it is now. Yet it took another 37 years, until 2010, for Britain to elect its first Green MP, Caroline Lucas. The representative for Brighton Pavilion still remains the only Green in the Commons. Our electoral system’s hostility to new parties has obviously held the Greens back. But so has the tendency of environmental emergencies to leave voters feeling overwhelmed and paralysed, or in…

Troy has fallen. Its warriors are all dead. The mutilated body of the sacked city’s king, Priam, has been left lying in the dunes by the Greek camp, stinking and covered all over – as Pat Barker’s narrator horribly notes – with “flies, thousands of them … like a fuzz of black bristles”. Now somebody has tried to bury Priam. The Greek Pyrrhus, who hacked him to death at the foot of an altar, is displeased. Who has attempted this act of respect? It must have been a Trojan. But which one? Alcimus, Pyrrhus’s chief lieutenant, points out that there are “only two Trojans in the camp”. He is thinking of Calchas, the priest, and Helenus, the Trojan prince who – under torture – revealed the information that enabled the…

As someone who likes to pretend they are above Love Island, but follows the stories on social media and gets updates from friends, I think one of the most interesting things about the latest UK series was the relationship between the men. They were exceptionally supportive and huggy, telling each other they loved them; they’d got their back; offering counselling and advice. My male friends and I have always said we love each other, but only recently when sober. Previously, it was isolated to the final half hour at the pub, which would always consist of going up to each other, putting arms around necks, then saying that you loved them – and why. They would accept that love, then respond by telling you why they loved you. The next…

1 AFGHANISTAN Taliban triumphant as last US plane leaves Kabul The Taliban held full control of Kabul’s international airport on Tuesday after the last US plane left its runway, marking the end of America’s longest war and leaving behind a now-quiet airfield and Afghans outside still hoping to flee the insurgents’ rule. Vehicles raced back and forth along the Hamid Karzai International Airport’s sole runway on the northern, military side of the airfield. Before dawn broke, heavily armed Taliban fighters walked through hangars on the military side, passing some of the seven CH-46 helicopters the State Department used in its evacuations before it had rendered them unflyable. After a night when Taliban fighters had fired triumphantly into the air, bleary-eyed guards kept out the curious and those who still hoped…

AFGHANISTAN Foreign Office ignored email pleas to help Afghans Thousands of emails to the Foreign Office detailing urgent cases of Afghans trying to escape from Kabul were not read. Amid accusations of government incompetence over elements of the evacuation effort, the Observer was shown evidence that an official email address used to collate potential Afghan cases from MPs and charities regularly contained 5,000 unread emails. In many cases, emails appear to have been unopened for days. An email from the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, sent last Monday was still unread last Thursday. There also appeared to be unread messages from the offices of the home secretary, Priti Patel, and the Tory chair of the defence select committee, Tobias Ellwood. The revelation calls into question the suggestion from ministers that the…

As Maren Heinzerling crossed hands with the most powerful woman in the world, leaned backwards and started to spin her dance partner in a circle, she began to worry. “What are you doing?” the retired railway engineer recalled thinking. “You are spinning around the room with Angela Merkel.” Heinzerling had to grip the chancellor’s hands tighter. “I realised I couldn’t let go or the chancellor would have careered across the hall and smashed into a wall.” The scene dates back to 17 May 2017, when Heinzerling, then 78, was invited to Merkel’s chancellory in Berlin to pick up an award for her volunteering work, teaching physics to refugee children. Heinzerling had improvised their little dance number after Merkel, who has a PhD in quantum chemistry, had been too quick on…

Nordelta is the best-known of the gated communities in Argentina. It is an enclave of spacious homes for the rich amid a landscape of lakes and streams north of Buenos Aires. But environmentalists question its very existence because it is built on the wetlands of the Paraná, the second most important river in South America after the Amazon. Nature, however, is fighting back. In recent weeks, the area has been invaded by capybaras, which have destroyed manicured lawns, bitten dogs and caused traffic accidents. “They not only destroy gardens but their excrement has also become a problem,” one local man told the daily La Nación, complaining that wildlife officials had prohibited residents from touching the large rodents. Many Argentinians have defended the rodents – known locally as carpinchos. In the…

In a Politburo group study session on 23 November 2015, China’s president, Xi Jinping, recommended the book Capital in the Twenty-First Century by the French economist Thomas Piketty. “The rich data he used demonstrated that … unrestrained capitalism accelerates wealth inequality … [His] conclusion is worth us pondering on.” Back then, Piketty’s work on in equality was reported all over the world and sparked soul-searching among financial elites. Some were surprised that Xi was paying attention, too. Since his ascent to power in 2012, Xi has discussed the issue of inequality on several occasions. Early this year, he told his provincial ministerial-level cadres that achieving common prosperity was “not just an economic issue, but a significant political one that matters to the party’s basis to rule”. In the four decades…

Days after the statues of two British monarchs were toppled in the province of Manitoba amid growing fury over the legacy of Canada’s residential school system, where Indigenous children were forcibly sent for much of the 20th century, the website Walking Eagle News had its own take – not so much on the grief and outrage, but on the fixation with statues. “Country was ‘mere seconds’ from reconciliation before the statue toppled: Manitoba premier,” ran the Walking Eagle News headline. In another: “‘Fading from history’: Members of royal family appear translucent as statues toppled in Manitoba”. As Canada is forced to make sense of its dark colonial past, and the inequities and injustice that persist today, Walking Eagle News has quickly become a force used to skewer powerful institutions and…

US intelligence services have briefed the president, Joe Biden, on the results of their 90-day investigation into the origins of Covid-19. They were asked to test two hypotheses: that it had a “natural” origin, or that it escaped from a lab. Preliminary reports suggest that their findings are inconclusive. Biden ordered the latest investigation partly because of widespread dissatisfaction with one set up by the World Health Organization, which reported in March that a lab origin was “extremely unlikely”. Many saw the WHO’s efforts as compromised because China used its influence within the organisation to set restrictive terms of reference. It’s hard to see why the new investigation, from a single nation locked in a trade war with China, should be accorded any more credibility. A coalition of national science…