Innholdsfortegnelse for 17th September 2021 i Guardian Weekly

New York, New York The Tribute in Light shines into the sky during a test on 7 September in New York City. The light, honouring the victims of the 11 September 2001 attack that killed 3,000 people, is a public art installation that was first presented six months after 9/11 and then every year since on the anniversary. The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, 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…

BORIS JOHNSON appeared, on the surface at least, super-confident as parliament returned last week to tackle the vast backlog of challenges that Covid-19 has left piled high in ministerial in-trays across Whitehall. On a visit to a care home in east London, the prime minister cheerfully clasped a mug saying Love Social Care before heading to the House of Commons to make a statement on how he proposed to fund the health and care systems out of the crises in which both are mired. But his characteristic ebullience hid a new determination in government, a new calculation. The aim was to showcase a prime minister determined to govern, lead and finally tackle head-on the issue that his predecessors David Cameron and Theresa May, and Labour prime ministers before them, had…

When he was pelted with a handful of gravel by anti-vaccine protesters last week, the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, joined an illustrious list of political leaders who have had things hurled at them by disgruntled citizens. His father, the former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, had stones (and tomatoes and eggs) thrown at his train carriage in the 1980s. But the gravel incident has thrust the image of prime minister on the defensive to the forefront of an election that, for many, is both unwanted and has so far lacked a coherent theme. Trudeau called the snap election in late August, prompting grumbling that the country would be casting ballots during the fourth wave of the coronavirus pandemic. He defended the move, saying that after weathering a deadly pandemic, Canadians…

The Taliban has announced that women in Afghanistan will only be allowed to study at university in sex-segregated classrooms and Islamic dress will be compulsory, stoking fears that a gender apartheid will be imposed on the country under the new regime. The international community has been keeping a close watch on how the new, all-male, Taliban regime is treating Afghan women in order to gauge just how much the Taliban’s pledges of moderation are a reality. In one of the first policies announced by the Taliban, the higher education minister, Abdul Baqi Haqqani, laid out rules that will govern women’s access to higher education. At a press conference, Haqqani said women would be allowed to continue their university education, but it would be compulsory to wear a hijab. It was…

Most fledging British stars spend years trying to crack America. Emma Raducanu did it in three giddy weeks. And such was the skill and breathtaking scale of her first US Open and grand slam victory – which ended with her blitzing an ace before collapsing to the floor and rubbing her eyes, as if to make sure she was not in some impossible dream – it felt entirely natural to immediately speculate where it ranked in the pantheon of Britain’s great sporting triumphs. High, for sure. Perhaps even highest of all. Certainly for an individual. After all, never in tennis history has anyone fought through three qualifying rounds of a grand slam before winning the entire tournament, let alone an 18-year-old who the bookies rated as a 400-1 outsider. What’s…

Nando’s put it succinctly on its Twitter feed last month: “The UK supply chain is having a bit of a mare right now.” Getting things on to supermarket shelves, through your letterbox or into a restaurant kitchen has certainly become problematic of late. It’s hard to know exactly where to pin the blame, though Covid and Brexit have surely played a part. What we can do is give thanks for algebra, because things would be so much worse without it. It’s likely that you have mixed feelings about algebra. Even if you could manage it in school, you probably wondered why it was important. You might even feel that your scepticism has been vindicated: chances are you have never used algebra in your post-school life. But that doesn’t mean algebra…

The 20th anniversary of 9/11 was always going to be a moment of deep soul searching about what has been lost and learned. But until a few weeks ago, it risked having a historical quality, as the attention of political leaders moved to a more contemporary set of threats – health pandemics, climate emergencies, big tech and great-power competition, including the rise of China. The “war on terror”, after all, looked if not won, at least drawn. It was even possible Islamist terrorism was a temporary manageable phenomenon, increasingly confined to Africa and some lethal loners in European shopping centres. Instead, the end to the US’s 20-year stay in Afghanistan – with the anniversary coinciding with the start of a second Taliban emirate – has injected a thousand volts into…

ON THE EVENING OF 7 DECEMBER 2010, in a hushed San Francisco auditorium, former Google engineer Patri Friedman sketched out the future of humanity. The event was hosted by the Thiel Foundation, established four years earlier by the arch-libertarian PayPal founder Peter Thiel to “defend and promote freedom in all its dimensions”. From behind a large lectern, Friedman – grandson of Milton Friedman, one of the most influential free-market economists of the last century – laid out his plan. He wanted to transform how and where we live, to abandon life on land and all our decrepit assumptions about the nature of society. He wanted, quite simply, to start a new city in the middle of the ocean. Friedman called it seasteading: “Homesteading the high seas,” a phrase borrowed from…

Japan will soon have a new prime minister. Not because there is a general election coming up – although there is – but because the leader of the ruling Liberal Democratic party (LDP), the deeply unpopular Yoshihide Suga, abruptly resigned earlier this month. After a series of local election defeats, an Olympics staged against the public will, and a related fifth Covid wave that has pushed Japan’s medical system into “disaster mode”, Suga’s approval rating plummeted to its lowest since the LDP’s return to power in 2012 One might imagine that Suga’s replacement – almost certainly a man – would have his work cut out to avoid catastrophe in the general election, but that’s not how Japanese democracy works. The country has largely avoided the polarising populist extremism seen elsewhere.…

The parliamentary vote on social care passed pretty comfortably for the prime minister, but a nasty war over the funding of his social care reforms rages on in the Tory-leaning press. Accusations of treachery and “disgrace”, of addiction to tax hikes, of being an ideological void – and even of murdering Conservativism – are all being laid at Boris Johnson’s door. And this from the closest he has to friends in the media. • In the Daily Telegraph, Allister Heath, editor of the Sunday title, attacked the PM’s reputation with a frenzy. “Shame on Boris Johnson, and shame on the Conservative party. They have disgraced themselves, lied to their voters, repudiated their principles and treated millions of their supporters with utter contempt.” The headline said: “Boris’s shameful Tory betrayal guarantees…

Orange march Personnel in orange hazmat suits marched last Thursday during a paramilitary parade held to mark the 73rd anniversary of the founding of the republic. The Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported that fighter jets flew in formation above the midnight parade at Kim Il-sung Square, in Pyongyang, and some conventional weapons were on display, including multiple rocket launchers and tractors carrying anti-tank missiles. But no ballistic missiles were seen or mentioned in the reports, and leader Kim Jong-un did not deliver a speech. However, last weekend North Korea carried out successful tests of a new long-range cruise missile, KCNA announced, sparking fresh criticism from the US amid a protracted standoff over denuclearisation. The missiles are “a strategic weapon of great significance” and flew 1,500km before hitting their targets…

When she heard on the radio just weeks after floods had devastated her family-run restaurant and her home town that German authorities no longer classed it as a disaster zone, Paddy Amanatidis felt like she had been punched in the stomach. “It’s hard to be told that everything is supposedly OK when you have no electricity, no clean water, no heating,” she said. It is now almost two months since western Germany experienced catastrophic flooding after the River Ahr – a tributary of the Rhine – rose by seven metres and enveloped everything as it spread far beyond its banks. At least 133 people died in the Ahr valley alone, and about 50 more elsewhere. Amanatidis recently stood in the courtyard of her restaurant, La Perla, in the town of…

Lilian, six years old and alone, still asks when her mother will return from the market on the edge of Les Cayes in southern Haiti, a port badly affected by the earthquake. When last month’s earthquake struck, Lilian was at home as her mother, Genieve, was selling fruit a few blocks away. When the ground began to convulse, the market partly collapsed. Genieve was hit by falling concrete and buried under rubble. Her death has left Lilian without anyone to care for her. “I don’t see my mum,” Lilian would repeat, according to Ketia Loraus, 40, a social worker who has been overseeing her case. “It was heartbreaking to hear her say that.” The human tragedy of the 7.2-magnitude earthquake has yet to be fully counted. More than 2,200 people…

US drone and airstrikes have killed at least 22,000 civilians – and perhaps as many as 48,000 – since the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, according to analysis published by the civilian harm monitoring group Airwars. Based on the US military’s assertion that it has conducted almost 100,000 airstrikes since 2001, the analysis represents an attempt to estimate the number of civilian deaths across the conflicts that have comprised aspects of the “war on terror”. Since taking office, President Joe Biden has reduced the US reliance on airstrikes amid a formal review of US drone policy, and has withdrawn from many of the foreign interventions that marked the presidencies of George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump after the 2001 attacks. The US said it had conducted at least…

When Kabul fell last month, almost the first reaction of European leaders was fear of another wave of refugees arriving on the continent. “We must anticipate and protect ourselves against major irregular migratory flows,” said the French president, Emmanuel Macron. Armin Laschet, the Christian Democrat candidate hoping to succeed Angela Merkel as German chancellor in the election that takes place this month, said there could be no repeat of the refugee crisis of 2015, when Germany received more than a million asylum seekers. By the end of the month, the European Council had agreed to “act jointly to prevent the recurrence of uncontrolled largescale illegal migration movements faced in the past”. The focus on “protecting” Europe from an influx of asylum seekers reflects a troubling transformation of the European Union…

Even in these accelerated times it seems bewildering: was it really only four years ago that Sally Rooney made her debut? The ecstatic welcome given to Conversations With Friends, a deadpan comedy of arty Dublin millennials, was a mere curtain-raiser to the escape velocity achieved a year later by her cross-class teen love story, Normal People. Amid the strenuously cerebral to-and-fro of the online Sallyology industry, arguing over how far the books reflected or betrayed the author’s avowed Marxism, it could be forgotten how purely and straightforward ly enjoyable Rooney is to read, which isn’t to say, as Will Self has, that Normal People represents “very simple stuff with no literary ambition”. Rooney’s publisher recently announced the opening of a pop-up shop to sell copies of her latest novel. She’s…

I cannot swim very well. This is something that I have had to come to terms with in the last couple of weeks, and I have been contemplating how best to deal with it. When I was a child, I was a great swimmer. My mum booked me regular lessons, and I remember her watching from up in the gallery as I earned my 50-metre swimming badge. I demanded it be sewn on to my trunks immediately, so other swimmers seeing me in the pool would know that I hadn’t come to play: I had once swum 50 metres. I remember swimming a lot as a kid, and finding it very easy, so it was hardwired into my self-image that I was a strong swimmer. This did not diminish as…

1 UNITED STATES Biden and Xi agree not to ‘veer into conflict’ in call Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, spoke in their first phone call for seven months amid continuing tensions between the world’s two largest economies. During the 90-minute call, which was initiated by the US president, the two leaders discussed their shared responsibility to ensure competition does not “veer into conflict”, according to a readout from the White House. The statement said the two leaders had “a broad, strategic discussion” including on “areas where our interests converge, and areas where our interests, values and perspectives diverge”. It said Biden and Xi agreed to engage “openly and straightforwardly”. A Chinese readout said the conversation was candid and in-depth. Xi allowed his officials to work with their…

IMMIGRATION France rejects UK plans to turn around migrants at sea The home secretary, Priti Patel, was accused by France’s interior minister of plotting “financial blackmail” and a violation of international maritime law in a deepening diplomatic row over efforts to prevent migrants from crossing the Channel by boat. Gérald Darmanin rejected UK plans, released last Wednesday, to return boats into French waters. “France will not accept any practice that breaks maritime law, nor any financial blackmail,” Darmanin wrote on Twitter. Patel who is under pressure from Boris Johnson and fellow Conservative MPs to halt the crossings, claimed to have secured legal advice for Border Force vessels to start redirecting migrant boats away from UK waters and towards France, where authorities would have to return them to shore. Patel also…

What do you do when your sworn enemy insists on wearing your clothes? The question looms large after Boris Johnson once again dressed himself up in deepest red recently, introducing a new tax that aims to raise £12bn a year to tackle the NHS backlog and fix social care, the sort of high-tax, high-spend move that was once anathema to the Conservative party and the exclusive preserve of Labour. But it’s a question Johnson has been posing for his opponents for much longer. In the 2019 election, he won seats that had historically voted Labour with promises of “levelling up” that were premised on a big, active state, ditching Margaret Thatcher’s blue twinset for a slash of Labour red. Indeed, ideological cross-dressing has been a thread through Johnson’s career. He…

A cement plant in Syria at the centre of a terror financing investigation in France was used by western intelligence agencies to gather information on hostages held by Islamic State, sources connected to the operation have said. A Jordanian intelligence officer who was central to the spying effort has confirmed that the Lafarge factory, which continued operating after the terrorist group overran eastern Syria, was the regional hub of a failed effort to rescue up to 30 hostages. Those IS held included the US journalist James Foley, the British photographer John Cantlie and a Jordanian pilot, Moaz al-Kasasbeh, two of whom were later confirmed to have been killed. France’s highest court ruled last week that Lafarge could yet be investigated over allegations of complicity in crimes against humanity over its…

On the second floor of a non-descript concrete building in north-east Beijing, the Youyou internet cafe is less than half full. It’s quiet and dark, and the customers are all adults, sitting on brown sofas in front of screens set up for hours of comfortable online gaming. Minors aren’t allowed in, and a poster on the glass entrance reads: “The whole society together cares about the healthy growth of underage teens.” Under new regulations from the Chinese government, minors are limited to just a few hours of gaming a week, with tech platforms ordered to enforce it. The intervention is just one of a recent rush of directives from Beijing aimed at reshaping society. The slew of regulatory overhauls has been swift and dizzying. In recent months, Chinese authorities have…

‘We in Germany are still good at building cars, planes or satellites’Olaf Scholz The new frontrunner to win Germany’s national vote at the end of this month says he believes he can reawaken Europe’s centre-left from its decade-long slumber with a two-fold promise: to guarantee his country’s continued economic success, while at the same time putting an end to the myth that individual success is always self-made. Germany’s vice-chancellor and finance minister, Olaf Scholz has this summer surprisingly lifted his Social Democratic party (SPD) above Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in opinion polls, in large part due to a reputation for rational decision-making and fiscal prudence that mirrors that of the outgoing chancellor. Scholz said he would also use the political victory within his reach to kickstart a fresh…

For 131 years it loomed over Richmond, Virginia, once the capital of America’s slave-owning south, sending a chilling message about the resilience of white supremacy to generations that passed beneath. But at 8.55am on 8 September, a giant statue of the Confederate general Robert E Lee and its granite pedestal, now covered with Black Lives Matter graffiti, was hoisted by work crews and lowered to the ground amid cheers, songs and whoops. No one believed that this was going to fix systemic racism overnight. But, in the moment, there was elation after a decades-long campaign galvanised by last year’s racial justice protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd in faraway Minneapolis. “It’s a beautiful day for democracy,” said a 47-year-old man who gave his name as Rig and…

Cancel culture jeopardises the freedom of art to disturb. #MeToo has stopped people experimenting with the erotics of passivity. Sobriety is freer than drug taking. It’s probably appropriate, in a book about freedom by one of our most radical and forward-looking thinkers, that the conclusions should be at once so adventurous and so unexpectedly old fashioned. The question of freedom preoccupies many of our most ambitious thinkers. As the pandemic and climate crisis encourage increased state control, as freedom becomes a buzzword of the right, how can we keep faith with the liberation movements and liberal humanism that shaped us? Maggie Nelson has written a tremendously energising book wrestling with freedom in four realms: art, sex, drugs and climate. For centuries, people have grappled with whether freedom from is preferable…