Innholdsfortegnelse for 1st October 2021 i Guardian Weekly

Wish you were here A selfie taken by Nasa’s Perseverance rover shows the vehicle’s tyre tracks in the Martian landscape, which it has been exploring since its arrival on 18 February. A rock in the foreground contains two holes drilled by the rover’s robotic arm during its search for mineral deposits that might indicate whether life ever existed on the red planet. 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.…

Vigil for teacher Jebina Yasmin Islam, the sister of Sabina Nessa, the 28-year-old primary school teacher who was found dead in a south-east London park on 18 September, speaks at a vigil to honour her in Kidbrooke last Friday. The killing has reignited concerns about the level of danger women face in Britain. ‘There are no words to describe how we are feeling as a family at the moment,’ Islam said. A 36-year-old man, Koci Selamaj, has been charged with Nessa’s murder. UK Spotlight p22 →…

The centre-left contender to fill Angela Merkel’s shoes has announced his intention to forge a “social-ecological-liberal coalition” following last Sunday’s knife-edge German national vote, as momentum slip ped from the outgoing chancellor’s own designated successor. “The voters have made themselves very clear,” Olaf Scholz of the Social Democratic party (SPD) said at a press conference on Monday. He pointed out that his centre-left party, the Greens and the pro-business Free Democratic party (FDP) had all picked up significant numbers of new votes in the election, while the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) suffered a loss in support of almost nine percentage points. “And that’s why we have a visible mandate that the citizens of this country have formulated,” said Scholz, who is vice-chancellor in the outgoing government. The Greens and…

For almost a decade he was a pariah who struggled to get a meeting abroad or to assert himself on his visitors. Bashar al-Assad presided over a broken state whose few friends demanded a humiliating price for their protection, and weren’t afraid to show it. During regular trips to Syria, Vladimir Putin arranged meetings at Russian bases, forcing Assad to trail behind him at functions. Iran too readily imposed its will, often dictating military terms, or sidelining the Syrian leader on decisions that shaped the course of his country. But with the din of war and insurrection receding and a tired region recalibrating from an exhausting 10 years, an unlikely dynamic is emerging: Assad the outcast is in demand. Foes who opposed him as Syria unravelled increasingly view Damascus as…

Boris Johnson has ordered the army to remain on standby to help fuel reach petrol stations hit by panic buying. No 10 said army drivers would be ready to help deliver petrol and diesel on a short-term basis, but on Monday stopped short of an immediate deployment, even though some essential workers have not been able to carry out their jobs without fuel. The decision was taken at a meeting of cabinet ministers, as the industry said consumer panic – rather than real shortages – was the main driver of the problems, and predicted that it would ease within days. People have continued to queue at fuel stations in spite of government warnings that drivers trying to top up were making the situation worse. Last Sunday, at one of the…

Justin Trudeau went into last month’s Canadian federal election with one of the world’s highest Covid-19 vaccination rates, billions spent on pandemic aid and the hope that he could convert the earned goodwill into a majority government. He fell short of that aim: after a 36-day campaign and a C$610m ($480m) election, the makeup of parliament remained largely unchanged, with the Liberals holding roughly 158 seats – short of the 170 needed for a majority. The Liberals received a smaller share of the popular vote than any other winning party in the country’s history – suggesting that the prime minister’s popularity is waning, despite his party’s electoral advantages. And while the maths in parliament remained largely the same, three of Trudeau’s cabinet ministers didn’t win re-election. Trudeau will be forced…

Is Joe Biden failing? Less than nine months into his presidency, rising numbers of Americans and not a few foreign allies appear to think so. Polls last week by Gallup and Rasmussen put his national approval rating at minus 10 points. His overall poll average is minus 4. That compares with a positive approval rating of 19 points in January when he took office. These figures suggest one of the steepest ever early falls in presidential popularity is under way. Jolting, too, is a new Harvard-Harris survey giving Donald Trump a 48% favourability rating to Biden’s 46%. Among independent voters and in battleground states, the outlook for Democrats appears grim. In Iowa, 62% disapprove of Biden’s performance while 70% say the country is “on the wrong track”. Michigan and Virginia…

Last month a visitor to The Great British Bake Off set was on the phone to her mother in South Africa. “She was having her hair done at the time, and she said to the hairdresser, my daughter is on the set of The Great British Bake Off,” says its co-creator, Richard McKerrow. “And quick as anything the hairdresser said: ‘Does she know Paul Hollywood? I love him!’” The story is testament to the extraordinarily successful international reach of the programme, which returns to UK screens this week. It’s now licensed for home-baked productions in no fewer than 35 countries, with Morocco, Mexico and Uruguay the latest in the line up; in Morocco, the series premiere achieved a lip-smacking 40% audience share. Denmark, France and Sweden all celebrate their 10th…

Merkel’s moments Her highs and lows, page 12 → Scholz enters, stage left Coalition talks begin, page 14 → The filmmaker and gay rights activist Rosa von Praunheim once confessed that he loved Angela Merkel, but hated her Christian Democratic Union party. This sense of Merkel as a morally attractive, quasi-presidential figure above petty partisan ship is widely shared within Germany and abroad: during the Donald Trump years she was lauded as the last defender of the liberal international order; Boris Johnson described her recently as a “titan” of diplomacy; and even Alexis Tsipras, the hapless leftwing Greek prime minister who was forced by Merkel into years of austerity, cannot help but admire her “sincerity”. A contrasting narrative of Merkel as an opportunist with no real political convictions but a…

The deal allowing Meng Wanzhou to return home to China nearly three years after her arrest will come as a relief to all the participants in a saga that rapidly turned from a narrow legal dispute into an escalating geopolitical battle. After the Huawei finance chief was detained on a US warrant in Vancouver airport in December 2018, Canada, China and the US soon found themselves locked into a court case which they would all – at least in political terms – lose. Meng’s case was never going to turn on the idiosyncrasies of Canadian extradition law or the frankness with which she had told Huawei’s bankers HSBC about the relationship between her company and a subsidiary accused of violating US sanctions against Iran. Even though the justice department may…

A second winter of discontent could lie ahead, senior Tories fear, with people’s personal finances pushed to breaking point, the health service at risk of being overwhelmed and the threat of Covid restrictions returning. Energy price rises UK gas prices have quadrupled to reach record levels and are expected to remain elevated through the colder months. These have also raised the cost of carbon dioxide, which is in short supply because high energy prices forced two fertiliser plants that produce CO2 for the food industry to temporarily shut down. The rise in the price of gas has seen several companies go bust, as they cannot pass on the full increase to customers because of the energy price cap, which is not reviewed until next spring. For now, consumers should be…

It could be a village festival. Pop music blares from loudspeakers competing with screams of children playing. Only a few dozen local people have turned out but they listen with interest This is Biłgoraj, a small town in south-eastern Poland not far from the Ukrainian border. The event, its organisers claim, is part of the last battle to save Polish democracy. In a T-shirt, jeans and sports shoes, Igor Tuleya moves through the crowd. Again and again, he stops and hands someone a booklet from a bundle under his arm: the slim document with a crowned eagle on the red and white cover, is Poland’s constitution. Tuleya is a judge in Warsaw; the constitution the foundation of his work. For now. As the governing Law and Justice party (PiS) steps…

For centuries, shepherds from the village of Aas in the French Pyrenees led their animals to mountain pastures for the summer. To ease the solitude, they would communicate with each other or with the village below in a whistled form of the Gascon dialect, transmitting and receiving information accurately over distances of up to 10km They “spoke” in simple phrases – “What’s the time?”, “Come and eat” – but each word and syllable was articulated as in speech. Outsiders often mistook the whistling for simple signalling, and the irony, says linguist and bioacoustician Julien Meyer of Grenoble Alpes University in France, is that academia only realised its oversight around the middle of the 20th century, just as the whistled language of Aas was dying. Around 80 whistled languages have been…

It’s an uncomfortable thing to admit, but in the countercultural movements where my sympathies lie, people are dropping like flies. Every few days I hear of another acquaintance who has become seriously ill with Covid, after proudly proclaiming the benefits of “natural immunity”, denouncing vaccines and refusing to take the precautions that apply to lesser mortals. Within these circles, which have for so long sought to cultivate a good society, there are people actively threatening the lives of others. It’s not just anti-vax beliefs that have been spreading through these movements. On an almost daily basis I see conspiracy theories travelling smoothly from right to left. I hear right-on people mouthing the claims of white supremacists, apparently in ignorance of their origins. I encounter hippies who once sought to build…

I haven’t yet caught any of Jamie Oliver’s new TV series Together, in which he cooks the kind of stuff you can rustle up for groups of family and friends without experiencing a total nervous collapse. But I love its title – few words are to me more lovely than “together”, and all the more so following months of painful, enforced separations. In the grind of lockdown, there were moments when the sight of my kitchen made me feel physically ill. No wonder that the great opening up induced in me a state of ecstasy that could only end in near bankruptcy. Having sworn on a copy of Jeffrey Steingarten’s It Must Have Been Something I Ate never again to let a certain pasta dish pass my lips, I duly…

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1 UNITED STATES R Kelly found guilty of sex trafficking and racketeering A jury found the R&B superstar R Kelly guilty of being the ringleader of a decades-long racketeering and sex trafficking scheme that preyed upon Black women and children. The disgraced singer was found guilty on all nine counts on Monday after decades of avoiding criminal responsibility for numerous allegations of misconduct, in a major #MeToo victory for Black women and girls. The panel of seven men and five women had begun deliberating the charges last Friday at the end of a gruelling six-week trial in Brooklyn, New York, that often presented shocking testimony detailing Kelly’s abuse of women, girls and boys. He remained motionless, eyes downcast as the verdict was read. “To the victims in this case, your…

POLITICS Labour’s divisions lead to resignation at conference After a rocky run-in to Labour’s conference in Brighton, Keir Starmer was hoping Monday would be the moment his party set internal divisions aside and turned to face the voters. Chatting to journalists in the press room, he said his package of rule changes passed by delegates on Sunday would allow Labour MPs to focus on the public instead of looking over their shoulders at angry grassroots members. He praised Rachel Reeves for her speech setting out her stall as Labour’s next chancellor: radical but responsible. Little more than an hour later, however, the show of unity was shattered when Andy McDonald, the last remaining Corbynite on Labour’s frontbench, abruptly resigned. McDonald, who had been shadow secretary of state for workers’ rights,…

June 2011 Nuclear phase-out In the wake of the nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima, Japan (📷), Merkel’s government decides to shut down eight nuclear plants and limit the operation of the remaining nine to 2022. The decision, which has wide-ranging ramifications for energy supplies across Europe, is criticised by international observers as an over-reaction brought by German angst. But the decision remains popular domestically, and leads to a growth spurt in the country’s renewable energy sector in the coming years. July 2015 Greek debt drama Already vilified in Athens as the enforcer of draconian austerity measures, Merkel faces pressure from her own finance minister to temporarily kick Greece out of the eurozone for failing to keep its reform programme up to speed. In the tense, marathon negotiations in Brussels that follow,…

In other times, Mirwais Samadi would have welcomed a campaign to deter his compatriots from opting to become illegal migrants and embarking on the often dangerous trek from Afghanistan to Europe. By far the worst part of his job as Afghanistan’s ambassador to Athens – apart from the strange limbo he has found himself in representing a nation whose leaders he refuses to recognise – is notifying families back home of loved ones who died along the way. Invariably they are the victims of smuggling networks motivated by profit. But Greece’s announcement of a media blitz to discourage “illegal migrant flows” from Afghanistan only weeks after Taliban militants seized power has left the ambassador appalled. In the face of European hostility to Afghans heading west – and as the new…

Island in the stream A house cut off by pyroclastic flow on the Spanish island of La Palma from the Cumbre Vieja volcano, which has spewed thousands of tonnes of lava, destroyed hundreds of houses and forced the evacuation of thousands of people since it began erupting on 19 September. It is the first eruption since 1971 on the island, which is part of the Canary Islands archipelago off north-west Africa. An ash cloud caused the closure of the airport last weekend. Scientists said another volcanic vent had opened up, exposing islanders to possible new dangers. The eruption increased in intensity last week, prompting the evacuation of three more villages on La Palma.…

It’s lunchtime at a workplace cafeteria in Birmingham, England, and employees returning to work after months away during the coronavirus pandemic are noticing something has changed. Next to the sandwiches and hot and cold dishes is a small globe symbol, coloured green, orange or red with a letter in the centre from A to E. “Meet our new eco-labels”, a sign reads. Researchers at Oxford University have analysed the ingredients in every food item on the menu and given the dishes an environmental impact score, from vegetable soup (an A) to the lemon, spring onion, cheese and tuna bagel (an E). “It probably does help you to start making some choices,” said Natasha King, while eating a plant-based hot meal. She is an employee in the UK division of the…

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez cannot have been surprised that wearing a “Tax the Rich” dress to New York’s Met gala last month would trigger performative outrage from the right. But it also earned blowback from closer to home. Eric Adams, a Black police veteran who won the party’s mayoral primary by appealing to its centre, argued that “when you talk about just blanketly saying ‘tax the rich’ in this city”, it would potentially drive away fire fighters, teachers and other tax payers on whom the city depends. He advocated cutting wasteful spending instead. The pro-business Adams and the democratic socialist congresswoman are two faces of a 193-year-old Democratic party confronting fundamental questions about what it stands for and what it wants to be. While Democrats have moved left on both economic and…

The idea looked brilliant. In January 1969, the Beatles were working up new songs for a televised concert, and being filmed as they did so. Where the event would take place was unclear – but as rehearsals at Twickenham film studios went on, one of their associates had the idea of travelling to Libya, where they would perform in the remains of an amphitheatre, part of a Roman city called Sabratha. As the plan was discussed amid set designs and maps one Wednesday afternoon, a new element was added: why not invite a few hundred fans to join the band on a specially chartered ocean liner? In previous days, John Lennon had been quiet and withdrawn, but now seemed brimming with enthusiasm. The ship, he said, could be the setting…

Is the UK’s government’s fabled Nudge Unit on a paddleboard somewhere in Crete? You have to ask, after Downing Street urged people not to panic-buy petrol, a piece of behavioural science almost guaranteed to make people panic-buy petrol. If only there’d been some kind of rehearsal event last year, when telling people not to fight over bog roll generated counterintuitive scenes of Andrex-fuelled violence in the supermarket aisles. Having said all that, calls for the army to step in to assist with driving petrol tankers feel like dressing for the Global Britain we are, rather than the Global Britain we want to be. There’s a certain inevitability to a country without a foreign policy deploying highly trained soldiers to sit in traffic between BP forecourts. Is it OK to try…

Rarely do we see the thinking of the other side of a negotiation so quickly. Michel Barnier’s new book helps explain why Britain ended up being comprehensively out-negotiated over Brexit and saddled with a flawed withdrawal agreement and a deeply disadvantageous future relationship, both of which will cause us major problems for decades to come. Barnier may be an excellent haute fonctionnaire, but judging by the stilted prose of this “secret diary” he is definitely not an author. We learn little about the newly declared French presidential candidate. There are no startling revelations and there is more technical detail than most people will want. Nor does this read like a genuinely contemporaneous diary Nevertheless, five basic reasons for the EU’s success and the UK’s failure jump out of these pages,…

University challenges Theatre Educating Rita I first read this book at school although, ironically, I wasn’t taught it brilliantly. It’s the perfect play for students heading off to university – a place that should encourage freedom of thought but often winds up promoting conformity. Every student should be more Rita. Willy Russell’s hugely popular play sees Liverpudlian hairdresser Rita sign up for an Open University English literature course. There she meets middle-aged, middle class professor Frank. Gradually, the two help each other look at life a little differently. But above all, Rita reminds us just how instinctive and exhilarating education can be. Miriam Gillinson Film Starter for 10 David Nicholls adapted his novel Starter for 10 for this adaptation directed by Tom Vaughan in 2006. It is a very entertaining…