Innholdsfortegnelse for 15th October 2021 i Guardian Weekly

It’s safe to say that Facebook has had better weeks. It began with a six-hour global outage and finished with one of its most strident critics, the American-Filipino journalist Maria Ressa, being awarded a Nobel prize. And in the middle of it all, the social network’s inner secrets were laid before the US senate by a whistleblower, Frances Haugen, who revealed how Mark Zuckerberg’s brainchild routinely and knowingly puts profits before the public good. In our big story this week, global technology editor Dan Milmo looks at the fallout from Haugen’s explosive testimony, while columnist Jonathan Freedland makes the compelling case that, in knowingly concealing the societal damage caused by its own products, Facebook has become the tobacco industry of the 21st century. The big story Page 10 → The sense…

ZOOLOGY Māori tribe gives name to newly discovered pipehorse A tiny candy cane-coloured pygmy pipehorse, discovered off New Zealand has been given a Māori name by the local iwi (tribe) – in what is believed to be the first time an indigenous group has formally named a new species of animal. The 6cm fish is closely related to the seahorse, and inhabits rocky reefs off the north-east coast. It is the first pygmy pipehorse discovered in New Zealand. The Ngātiwai tribe worked with biodiversity scientists Dr Thomas Trnski from Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland Museum and Graham Short of the California Academy of Sciences to name the pipehorse Cylix tupareomanaia. Cylix is derived from the Greek and Latin words for a cup or chalice; it refers to the cup-like crest on…

The journey from disillusioned ex-employee to modern-day heroine took Frances Haugen less than five months. The 37-year-old logged out of Facebook’s company network for the last time in May and last week was being publicly lauded a “21st-century American hero” on Washington’s Capitol Hill. That journey was paved with tens of thousands of documents, taken from Facebook’s internal system by Haugen, that formed the backbone of a series of damning revelations first published in the Wall Street Journal last month. They revealed that Facebook knew its products were damaging the mental health of teenage girls, resisted changes that would make the content of its main platform less divisive and knew its main platform was being used to incite ethnic violence in Ethiopia. The ensuing public backlash tipped Facebook into its…

For the past 18 months, hunkered down in his apartment in Tel Aviv, Ariel Karlinsky has scoured the internet for data that could help him calculate the true death toll of Covid-19. The 31-year-old economics student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem had never worked on health matters before but he was troubled by rumours early in the pandemic that Israel was not experiencing higher than expected death rates. “This was, of course, not true,” Karlinsky said. “Excess mortality was definitely there and it was definitely very visible.” He pulled up the numbers to prove it: Israel has a sophisticated vital registration system. Other rumours followed. One was that countries that had put in place minimal containment measures or none at all were not experiencing significant excess mortality. Again it…

For more than 30 years the Morettino family had been trying to produce their own coffee on a piece of land in Sicily. And for 30 years they had failed. But last spring 66 seedlings produced about 30kg of coffee, in a development that could turn the Italian island into the northernmost coffee plantation in the world. Experts say the climate emergency is irremediably tropicalising the Mediterranean agriculture of Sicily, where in August a monitoring station in south-eastern city of Syracuse recorded a temperature of 48.8C, the highest ever in Europe. But for Andrea Morettino, whose family has been in the coffee business for a century, it is the realisation of a dream. “In the 90s, after many trips across the world, my father decided to try planting some coffee…

It was a stifling July afternoon when the crowd moved into the small district of Lakholi, in the Indian state of Chhattisgarh, and gathered outside the house of Tameshwar Sahu. A 55-year-old volunteer with the home guard who had begun following Christianity more than five years previously, Sahu had never had issues with his neighbours. But more than 100 people had descended from surrounding villages and were shouting Hindu nationalist slogans outside his door. As the men entered the house, they shouted death threats at Sahu’s wife and began tearing posters bearing Bible quotes down from the walls. Bibles were seized from the shelves and brought outside where they were set alight. “We will teach you a lesson,” some people were heard to shout. “This is what you get for…

Football has always been an expression of the country and times, so the takeover of Newcastle United by a Saudi Arabian investment fund radiates the widest of reflections about the state that England is in. On the day last week that Prime Minister Boris Johnson hailed the collapse of the European Super League breakaway earlier this year as a triumph of sporting values, the Premier League was preparing to approve a fund financed by a murderous state as a fit and proper owner for a great English club. The Premier League’s questionable reasons for approving the deal, after so much delay and dispute, appear to spring partly from a desire to end the exhausting, bruising legal challenge brought by Newcastle’s owner, Mike Ashley. The breakthrough came last week when the…

ONE DAY, when Lea Ypi was a child, an empty Coca-Cola can appeared in her house. This was communist Albania, in the 1980s, and the country, run by Enver Hoxha along Stalinist lines, was reputed to be the hardest to enter or exit in the world. So a Coke can was a rare and enviable sight. Her mother had put this new ornament in pride of place, on an embroidered doily. Then it disappeared – only for a Coke can to appear on top of the TV next door. Was it the same one? Perhaps. The neighbours, who had been close, fell out. Finally, after a chilly stand-off, peace was brokered. At a party to celebrate the rapprochement, people were expansive, praising each other’s food, drink, generosity, when a young…

We have been promised a “new kind of Hamlet” with Cush Jumbo’s melancholy prince. Her gender-blind casting in Greg Hersov’s sleek production contains real fireworks. She cuts an androgynous figure when she first appears, and is a magnetic force from thereon in. Jumbo brings teenage energy to Hamlet’s strops, intelligent wit to his feigned madness and shows a shining clarity in the soliloquies There is superb chemistry between Hamlet and Ophelia, instantly sparking romance and tenderness. Norah Lopez Holden is magnificent as Ophelia. The production makes it clear this is a play about family grief, from Ophelia’s unravelling to Laertes’ helplessness at her death Hersov’s vision of Elsinore is a contemporary one, though the production wavers between faithfulness and irreverence: there are modern interludes of reggae and rap; Rosencrantz and…

What if the virus had been more deadly, more infectious? What if every country had experienced millions of deaths? These are questions most of us have asked ourselves, imagining scenarios in which, as philosopher Srećko Horvat puts it in his book After the Apocalypse, Covid is a revelation of deadly viruses to come, fuelled by scientific experiment and ecological collapse. Sarah Hall has turned those imaginings into a novel, at once epic and miniature, the story of two lovers cut off from a disinte grating world. Edith is a sculptor, raised by a single mother who was disabled by a stroke. She has overcome the fragility of her upbringing by making vast, often violent works of public art. She became famous with Hecky, a 12-metre witch squatting by the side…

I had a lockdown romance with someone I met through online dating. He was the first man I’d dated after coming out of an abusive relationship, and it was refreshing to chat to him. He was open and relaxed, and made me feel really good. We met up when we could, given the various lockdowns, and earlier this year I found out I was pregnant. We hadn’t been very careful, but it was a complete shock to me, as it was to him. Having said that, I realised that, at my age, this was my chance to have a child, and I realised I wanted it very much. He refused to talk about how he felt with me keeping the baby, and I got used to the idea of probably…

Prep 30 min Prove 1 hr 45 min Cook 45 min Makes 12 Ingredients 7g dried yeast60g caster sugar300ml lukewarm milk70g unsalted butter500g plain flour Oil, for deep frying For the filling 3 egg yolks50g caster sugar25g plain flour25g cornflour350ml stout beer100g good-quality dark chocolate, chopped into pieces For the glaze 30g butter100g honey100g good-qualitydark chocolate, chopped into pieces3 tbsp stout To garnish 1 handful cacao nibs These wonderful over-inflated orbs are filled with a rich creme patissiere enhanced by stout. Method For the dough, stir the yeast, a tablespoon of sugar and the milk in a jug until the yeast dissolves, then set aside for 15 minutes, until frothy. Combine the butter, remaining sugar and flour in a large bowl and rub in the butter. Pour in the yeast…

Oliver Co ghlan embodies Facebook’s problems with teen and young adult audiences – a growing number of them do not like it. The 23-year-old says he stopped using Facebook regularly three years ago and he is considering deleting the app. “I haven’t deleted it yet but I might do soon – I really don’t like the company’s monopolistic behaviour,” said Coghlan, a British student based in the Netherlands. He added that the EU referendum and the 2016 US presidential election, and the online anger that accompanied those polls, convinced him that he wanted to spend less time on Facebook’s main platform. Facebook’s problem is that Co ghlan is not alone. According to internal documents leaked by whistleblower Frances Haugen, who delivered hard-hitting testimony to US senators last Tuesday, the company…

The cycle of biomass energy Thick dust has been filling the air and settling on homes in Debra David’s neighbourhood in North Carolina, ever since a wood pellet plant started operating nearby in 2019. The 64-year-old said the pollution was badly affecting the health of the population . “More people are having breathing problems and asthma problems than ever before,” David said. She started suffering from asthma for the first time two years ago and other people in Hamlet have been getting nosebleeds, which she also puts down to the dust. The plant, owned by Maryland-headquartered Enviva, the world’s largest biomass producer, is one of four such companies that operate in the state, turning trees into wood pellets, most of which are exported to the UK, Europe and Japan to…

EVERY YEAR on 1 May, portraits of Stalin were carried by the workers through the streets of Tirana to celebrate socialism and the advance towards communism. On Workers’ Day, TV programmes started earlier: you could follow the parade, then watch a puppet show, then a children’s film, then head out for a walk wearing new clothes, buy ice-cream and, finally, have a picture taken by the only photographer in town, who usually stood by the fountain near the Palace of Culture The first of May 1990, the last May Day we ever celebrated, was the happiest. Or perhaps it just seems that way. Objectively, it could not have been the happiest. The queues for basic necessities were getting longer and the shelves looked increasingly empty. Meanwhile, Europe continued to be…

After a brief deliberation – fist bump? quick, slappy handshake? standoffish salute? – the actor Jodie Comer abandons 18 months of professional caution around hellos, spreads wide her arms, and gathers me in for a big, swaying bear-hug. We’ve never met or spoken before. “But I’m quite a tactile person,” says Comer, who grew up in a suburb of Liverpool and whose scouse accent, which sharpens or softens depending on the circumstances and her level of comfort, is in full, glorious evidence The 28-year-old has knocked off early from rehearsals for season four of TV drama Killing Eve, in which she plays an assassin called Villanelle. She recently got back from an Italian film festival where her second proper Hollywood movie (an epic called The Last Duel) had its premiere.…

Abdul Qadeer Khan Atomic scientist considered to be the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme and later accused of smuggling technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya. He died on 10 October, aged 85. Abolhassan Bani-Sadr Iran’s first president after the 1979 Islamic revolution before fleeing into exile in France. He died on 10 October, aged 88. Sir John Chilcot British civil servant who chaired the Iraq war inquiry which lasted seven years and gave a damning verdict on Tony Blair. He died on 3 October, aged 82. James Brokenshire British Conservative MP who served as secretary of state for Northern Ireland. He died on 7 October, aged 53.…

Will we one day think of Facebook the way we now think of cigarettes? Or is the company more akin to the gun lobby? Perhaps the alcohol industry is the closer fit. As we shall see, there’s merit in all three comparisons, given the lethal harm this company is inflicting. Except those parallels actually understate the problem. For none of them quite gets at the sheer scale and power of this single corporation. That reality was made especially vivid last week, when a six-hour outage confirmed that 3 billion people around the globe have come to depend on Facebook, along with its properties WhatsApp and Instagram, as the place to do business and find out about the world. Facebook might like to pretend that it’s simply a place where friends…

Scientists have long warned climate change is coming for our morning coffee, and a recent spike in global bean prices could be the first sign it’s actually happening. Global coffee prices are forecast to jump to $ 3.32 per kg this year – an increase of 21.6% from 2020 – according to market research firm IBISWorld, after a July cold snap in a major arabica coffee-producing region of Brazil wiped out a third of the crop. Suzy Oo, a senior industry analyst with IBISWorld, said the cost of freight had contributed to making the recent coffee bean price spike the largest since 2014. She predicts prices will fall over the coming months and doesn’t expect a rise in the cost of a flat white, owing to competition between cafe owners.…

Chief Patricia Ogbonnaya walks through her Nigerian farm on a July afternoon, a light drizzle coating her umbrella while she examines what should have been ripe fruit trees and thriving fish ponds. She points to dark stains on tree trunks that stop abruptly at the same level across her land. “That’s how high the oil reached during the flood,” she said, touching the bark, her hand coming away with sticky residue. Last autumn, a Shell pipeline burst and saturated the surrounding area with crude oil. A heavy downpour swept the oil over Ekpeye land, drenching farms and swampland Ogbonnaya points to a massive hole in the ground, a fish pond drained of water, where a rainbow sheen at the clay bottom reflects the palm trees above, showing how deep the…

It was a classic TV doorstep. After doing the morning media round, Boris Johnson emerged from a booth and set off with his minders across the main hall of the Conservative party conference in Manchester. What was his reaction to the Pandora papers? And would the Tories give back the money they had accepted from certain donors? The British prime minister professed not to have read the detail. “At the moment we are getting on with building back better,” he said. Asked whether the revelations of “corrupt deals” were embarrassing for the Tories, he replied: “You mean Tony Blair?” Johnson laughed at his own joke and scuttled off, as his aides looked furiously on. The encounter was telling. Last week the Guardian and media partners published an extraordinary financial leak.…

A price shock on the global natural gas markets brings down several small UK energy providers, leaving customers without heating and facing rising fuel prices. A fire knocks out the huge cable sending electricity from France to the UK, threatening homes with darkness and increasing power bills. The container ship Ever Given, bound for Felixstowe from Malaysia, gets stuck in the Suez canal for six days, backing up shipping traffic at an estimated cost of $1bn and delaying that electronic gadget you ordered from Amazon Prime. What these incidents have in common is the speed at which a single event can disrupt the supply chains that criss cross the world. Almost every time you order something online, it is transported via a network of factories, rails, roads, ships, warehouses and…

Chinese president Xi Jinping’s menacing declaration that reunification with Taiwan is a “historical task [that] must be fulfilled and definitely will be fulfilled” came at the end of a fraught week. Provocative sorties by Chinese combat aircraft inside Taiwan’s air defence zone are at record levels. Defiant statements by Tai pei “to do whatever it takes” to repel invasion have acquired a new intensity. Is war coming? Most analysts think not, not yet at least. Xi’s speech in the Great Hall of the People last Saturday avoided an overt threat of force to defeat those he calls “independence separatists”. China is building amphibious assault ships and landing craft needed for an invasion. Chiu Kuo-cheng, Taiwan’s defence minister, predicts Beijing will be ready to attack by 2025 Xi seems to be…

When Georgina Pazcoguin was 19 years old, she went to see a doctor about her thighs. A dancer at the New York City Ballet, Pazcoguin had previously had what was known among dancers as “the fat talk” with the company’s then leader, Peter Martins. During their meeting Martins had told her she didn’t “fit in”, silently indicating the area between her backside and her knees. And so, following a recommendation from a friend, she visited the office of one Dr Wilcox, who told her she should consume no more than 720 calories a day – the recommended number for the average woman is closer to 2,000 – and gave her some sealed packets of powder. For the next four months, she subsisted on the powder, plus a chicken breast and…

American-Canadian author Ruth Ozeki is a film-maker, a Zen priest and a teacher of writing. Her third novel, A Tale for the Time Being, was shortlisted for the 2013 Booker prize. In this, her fourth, everything possesses – everything is made up of – language. Every single thing is, in some sense, writing a book. Benny Oh is still a boy when his father Kenji, a Korean-American jazz musician at the time a little the worse for wear from drink, is run over by a chicken truck in an alley behind their house on the edge of Chinatown. At the crematorium, all Benny can think to ask his mother, Annabelle, is: “You going to burn his clarinet too?” Even though the body in the coffin is not really his father,…

Happiness is a well-made cheese toastie. The XXL Stove Top 3 Cheese Toastie with mustard at the Wigmore in London is so much more than that. It is bliss. It is a beautifully engineered, lusciously executed, burnished and bronzed tribute to the carnal love affair between toast and cheese. It was not what I expected. The Wigmore, which opened in 2017, is a pub as imagined by Michel Roux Jr of Le Gavroche, a temple to French classicism, where the devoutly greedy go to worship the gods of butter, cream and demi-glace. Le Gavroche is a kind of French embassy, only with better catering. Could the culinary Roux really understand the culinary Britishness of a food pub? My answer is a firm yes, albeit with a glutton’s honed sensibility. The…

QUIZ Thomas Eaton 1 Whose coffin arrived for his state funeral by Underground? 2 O Fortuna starts and ends which choral work? 3 Creswell Crags contain Britain’s only example of what? 4 Which company’s motto was “get big fast”? 5 Eating which meat is avoided by superstitious cricketers? 6 In 2000, Uttarakhand became which country’s 27th state? 7 Which shoes are named after a ship’s load line? 8 School bus is a shade of which colour? What links: 9 Kristen Stewart; Emma Corrin; Naomi Watts? 10 Edinburgh (N); Nashville (S); Lexington (W)? 11 0; 1; 16; 81;256; 625; 1296? 12 Christine Sinclair and Cristiano Ronaldo? 13 Tsar Pushka; Pumhart von Steyr; Faule Mette; Mons Meg? 14 Anansi; Aragog; Charlotte; Shelob? 15 Abu Dhabi (2017); Lens (2012); Paris (1793)? PUZZLES Chris…