Innholdsfortegnelse for 5th November 2021 i Guardian Weekly

The world in focus A giant globe of the Earth acts as a backdrop to a communal television news studio at the Cop26 talks in Glasgow. The conference, convened to forge a global response to the climate emergency and attended by more than 120 world leaders, opened last Sunday and is set to continue through to 12 November. 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…

It was early morning when Achintya Das, a 55-year-old teacher in the city of Cumilla in Bangladesh, was woken by the ringing of his mobile phone. On the other end of the line was a fearful, stricken voice. Come quickly, the local told him, something very grave had happened. A Qur’an had been found in the shrine they had erected for the upcoming Hindu festival of Durga Puja. The Islamic holy book had been placed on a statue of the Hindu god Hanuman Das, a Hindu who organised the festival, felt dread rise up in him at the news of the desecration of Muslim holy scripture in their shrine. “It didn’t even take me a second to understand the gravity of the situation. I rushed there immediately,” he said. The…

No one in France ever lost votes by bashing the English. General de Gaulle – a Macron role model – knew that well To publicly accuse a long-time friend and ally of lacking credibility and breaking his word whenever its suits him is disobliging at the best of times. To do so on the eve of a watershed global summit, Cop26, which your “friend” is hosting and where trust is vital, looks like a verbal act of war. Whether the accuser, Emmanuel Macron, France’s centrist president, deliberately sought to escalate a confrontation with Boris Johnson over French fishing licences around the UK crown dependency Channel islands of Jersey and Guernsey is unclear. He probably did. He knows his words are potentially deeply damaging as Britain struggles to achieve a breakthrough…

An international aid worker has warned of more deaths at Poland’s border with Belarus, describing how desperate and often dangerously weakened migrants, including very young children, are being pushed back across the frontier. Crystal van Leeuwen, a medical emergency manager with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), said NGOs must urgently gain access to a secure militarised zone on the Polish side and that migrants’ claims for international protection must be respected. “People are being treated like weapons,” said Van Leeuwen, who recently returned from a week-long assessment with local groups, including the Ocalenie Foundation and Grupa Granica. “It’s hard to believe this kind of crisis is unfolding in the EU.” At least eight people have died as thousands of migrants, mostly from Iraq, Iran and Syria, have tried to cross from…

It was a fabled kingdom known in ancient times as the Island of Gold, a civilisation with untold wealth that explorers tried in vain to find long after its unexplained disappearance from history around the 14th century. The site of Srivijaya may finally have been found – by fishing crews carrying out night-time dives on the Musi River near Palembang on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Their extraordinary catches are treasures ranging from a life-size eighth-century Buddhist statue studded with precious gems to jewels worthy of kings. Dr Sean Kingsley, a British maritime archaeologist, said: “In the last five years, extraordinary stuff has been coming up. Coins of all periods, gold and Buddhist statues, gems, all the kinds of things that you might read about in Sinbad the Sailor and…

It was a pleasant, breezy day in late September 2020 when the FBI showed up outside the home of a man named Baimadajie Angwang. A community liaison officer with the New York police department, where his role was to build relations with the neighbourhood in the 111th precinct in Queens, Angwang lived in Long Island with his wife and two-year-old daughter. He had arrived in the US in 2005, a 17-year-old asylum-seeker from a Tibetan enclave in China. He joined the marines in 2009 and served one tour in Afghanistan. And then, in 2019, he showed up at the Tibetan Community Center in Queens. He wanted to be part of the community, he told people. He was there to help Tibetan immigrant youth. He was also, according to the charges…

Hwang Dong-hyuk is laughing at me from his office in Seoul. I’ve just asked the creator of Squid Game, Netflix’s smash hit show, if its astonishing success has made him rich. In the dystopian survival drama, a mysterious organisation challenges 456 players from all walks of life – each deeply in debt – to play a series of children’s games. Win and they go home with 4.6 bn won ($38m). Lose and they get a bullet in the head. Perhaps Hwang is now as rich as the contestant who wins the top prize? “I’m not that rich,” he says. “But I do have enough. I have enough to put food on the table. And it’s not like Netflix is paying me a bonus. Netflix paid me according to the original…

The Strand is a swathe of grassland made famous by Seamus Heaney’s poetry. It’s part of the floodplain of Lough Beg, the “little lake” pinched off from its much larger neighbour, Lough Neagh. At the end of the soggy Strand is Church Island – they became attached about 80 years ago when the River Bann was dredged. Hidden among the island’s trees is the remnant of a pre-Viking monastic settlement. Wildfowl come here to escape harsher winters elsewhere. I head to Longpoint Wood at the edge of the Strand. I hear the waough-waough of buffeting wings. Those are mute swans, a resident species. Whooper swans, which overwinter in large numbers, have softer wingbeats with a barely-there echo of hiss. More tellingly, they whoop and whoop as they fly. Calling to…

World leaders have agreed a deal that aims to halt and reverse global deforestation over the next decade as part of a multi-billion-dollar package to tackle human-caused greenhouse gas emissions Xi Jinping, Jair Bolsonaro and Joe Biden were among the leaders who committed to the declaration at Cop26 in Glasgow to protect vast areas, ranging from the eastern Siberian taiga to the Congo basin, home to the world’s second-largest rainforest. Land-clearing accounts for almost a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions, largely for agricultural products such as palm oil, soy and beef. Boris Johnson unveiled the Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forest and Land Use at an event attended by the US president, Joe Biden, the Prince of Wales and the Indonesian president, Joko Widodo. The agreement came as more than 120…

‘It’s part of this BJP imperative to have Hinduism bleached clean of any Islamic or Muslim influences’ Released just as festival season was kicking off across India, it looked like your average advert for celebratory attire. Models posed, resplendent in red and gold, showing off the newest collection by Fabindia that was said to “pay homage to Indian culture”. Yet, in a matter of hours, the poster had sent convulsions through India. A boycott was called against Fabindia, a staple brand in the country, and by the end of the day the advert had been taken down after it was deemed offensive to Hinduism by members of the ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) and right wing Hindu groups. The vehement objections to the Fabindia advert were in response to the…

When Denis Ovchinnikov read the news this summer that the Russian Sputnik V vaccine he had received would not be recognised in Europe, he took matters into his own hands and planned a trip to Belgrade. “I contacted a travel agency that sorted everything out. It was very easy. I made a little holiday out of it too, in between getting the two Pfizer shots,” Ovchinnikov, who works at a PR agency in St Petersburg, said. When Russia became the first country to register and mass-produce a vaccine at the end of 2020, President Vladimir Putin hoped it would allow the country to open up more quickly than its western rivals. But Sputnik V has struggled to get international approval, effectively barring Russians from travelling to the west, where only…

Japan’s ruling conservative party defied expectations in last Sunday’s general election, with a comfortable victory that will boost the prime minister, Fumio Kishida, as he attempts to steer the economy out of the coronavirus pandemic. Kishida’s Liberal Democratic party secured 261 seats in the 465-member lower house, the House of Representatives – the more powerful of Japan’s two-chamber Diet – slightly down on its pre-election 276 seats. The party and its junior coalition partner, Komeito, together won 293 seats, more than the 261 required for an “absolute stable majority” that gives them command of parliamentary committees, making it easier to pass bills. Japan’s Nikkei share index rose 2.3% on Monday to a one-month high. Kishida said his administration would attempt to compile an extra budget this year that would support…

A series of security, political and economic crises has left Nigeria facing its worst instability since the end of the Biafran war in 1970. With experts warning that large parts of the country are, in effect, becoming ungovernable, fears that the conflicts in Africa’s most populous state were bleeding over its borders were underlined last month by claims that armed Igbo secessionists in the south-east were now allies with militants fighting for an independent state in the anglophone region of neighbouring Cameroon. The mounting insecurity from banditry in the north-west, jihadist groups such as Boko Haram in the north-east, violent conflict between farmers and pastoralists across large swathes of Nigeria’s “middle belt”, and Igbo secessionists in the southeast calling for an independent Biafra once again, is driving a brain drain…

It’s been a rocky few weeks for the company formerly known as Facebook. First came the Facebook papers, a series of blockbuster reports in the Wall Street Journal based on a cache of internal documents leaked by Frances Haugen, a former employee turned whistleblower. Then Haugen shared the documents with a wider consortium of news publications, which have published a slew of stories outlining how Facebook knew its products were stoking real-world violence and aggravating mental health problems, but refused to change them. Now the regulatory sharks are circling. Haugen recently testified before US and UK lawmakers, heightening calls to hold the company to account. Facebook, meanwhile, appeared to be living in another universe. Its rebrand to Meta last week has prompted incredulity that a company charged with eroding the…

It started with a mysterious image on billboards all over the world (and the internet). The sun rising above four dark planets; the only words Abba: Voyage. By the time an announcement was made on 2 September, it had fair claim to call itself the most anticipated comeback in pop history. And the details exceeded expectations. There was a new album, Voyage, the first in 40 years: 10 new songs that brought the original band together in the studio for the first time since a split that had been precipitated by the couples in the band divorcing. Not only that, but there was to be a new “immersive live experience” in a bespoke stadium in London – nobody seemed to have noticed the planning application being published online – featuring…

‘Facebook”. The word paints a thousand pictures, every one of them a portrait of some element of the human condition I could happily live without. Message requests from veterans in Montana that read, “Hello beautiful Lady.” A friend’s mum reposting an announcement about the increased risk of dog-napping in a town 300km from where she lives. Suggested posts for things I have no interest in: classic cars, muay thai and the Duchess of Cambridge. Pages where guys can share pictures of their sportfishing equipment and views on immigrants, if that also comes up. A distant relative’s attempts at winning a cottage in a staggeringly fake-looking contest. A helpful infographic about how vaccines can cause brain polyps. Yet it seems we are at the end of an era. After 17 years,…

What’s the point of curly parsley? It does seem that recipes always specify the flat-leaf variety. “Curly parsley is not seen as glamorous, like Italian or French flat-leaf parsley, but as the garnish of the 1960s,” says Jane Scotter, who runs the revered biodynamic farm Fern Verrow in Herefordshire. “It’s just gone out of fashion, but it is by far the better tasting of the two.” And she’s in good company, with Fergus Henderson, the chef and founder of St John in London, also firmly on #teamcurly. “It has substance. When chopped, it retains a bounce, a fluff, whereas flat-leaf parsley chops down to sharp shards that take over a dish in a swishing sort of way.” Fighting talk, indeed. Curly has a green, iron-like flavour, but it’s the texture…

1 UNITED STATES Biden unveils pledge to slash global methane emissions President Joe Biden tried to underscore his green credentials by unveiling an action plan to control methane, regarded by the administration as the single most potent way to combat the climate crisis in the short term. Leading an alliance of 90 countries, he set out new regulatory measures to limit global methane emissions by 30% from 2020 levels by the end of the decade. The alliance includes two-thirds of the global economy and half of the top 30 major methane-emitting countries. China, India and Russia have not joined Global Methane Pledge. The pledge was announced in September but Biden’s officials have been working hard to increase the number of signatories. The detailed US proposals may prove to be one…

Bridge of skies People across Scotland and the north of England were treated to a display of the northern lights more typically enjoyed by Arctic inhabitants. The sky turned green above Belhaven bridge in Dunbar, near Edinburgh, in the early hours of Sunday as a break in cloud combined with an unusually powerful solar flare to reveal the aurora borealis in all its glory. The show was the result of a Coronal Mass Ejection - an eruption of particles that took just three days to reach and illuminate Earth’s atmosphere.…

When things look especially bleak for humankind, it’s worth reminding ourselves who we are – what makes us such a special species. Beyond our machines and buildings, beyond our fiery conquests, we’re exceptional because we are capable of love. And not just one to one and within families, but on a massive scale. This is especially pertinent as we face the climate crisis. Our technologies will be vital in solving this crisis: windmills to decarbonise our energy systems, flood defences against rising seas, and air conditioners to survive heatwaves. We will need many more technological fixes, and much faster. Just as essential to our survival, however, are social fixes. Love is often seen as a charming but irrelevant characteristic in our species’ story, the remit of poets. But love is…

As Prince Charles step ped up to welcome world leaders to the Cop26 climate summit, the Queen appeared in a recorded video from Windsor to address delegates in Glasgow. It could well have been a defining moment. With the Queen’s advanced years, there has been a gradual devolving of some of the more arduous public engagements to younger members of the royal family. The Duke of Edinburgh’s death in April at 99 and the Queen’s recent cancellation of public engagements to rest on medical advice after undisclosed tests, which necessitated an overnight hospital stay, has focused attention on the inevitable transition – and what it entails. Buckingham Palace announced last Friday that she had been advised by doctors to rest for at least the next two weeks and refrain from…

Everything in Muhammet şahin’s garden is dead: the plants, his chickens, the bees. This year’s unusually ferocious wildfires in south and west Turkey swept down on to his restaurant in the village of Osmaniye from two directions. As the flames rushed down the hillside, he and his wife had to flee, leaving their home and livelihood behind. The couple have managed to pay for a new roof and fixed windows that shattered in fires over two devastating record-breaking weeks in August. But for şahin and many of his neighbours there is still a lot of repair work to do, and serious questions remain. “I should have extinguished it myself but the electricity was out, the water was out. That’s why we had to leave,” he said. “If it happens again…

They are often seen wearing a red armband patrolling residential neighbourhoods of Chaoyang, the biggest district of Beijing, which is home to nearly 3.5 million people. On a sunny autumn afternoon, they sit with a group of retirees in the sun and chat away. But when an individual of interest turns up, their attention quickly shifts. In Chinese media and official police statements, they are called the “Chaoyang masses”. Last week, the state-owned Global Times went a step further, quoting internet users as saying the mysterious group “could match four famous intelligence [agencies], the CIA, MI6, KGB and Mossad”. Some jokingly called it “the fifth largest intelligence agency in the world”. Volunteers in the Chinese capital have been a part of its daily social fabric for years. They pick up…

Towering over a woodland playground in the northern outskirts of Berlin, the Triitopia climbing frame can cause worry in any anxious paren Children aged six and upwards wind their way through four stacked steel-wire buckyballs and scramble up rope ladders until they reach a platform about 10 metres above the forest floor. Parents can try to keep up with their young mountaineers, but may get left behind in the tightly woven mesh. If scaling the Triitopia looks risky, that is the point: built in 2018, the climbing tower in Berlin-Frohnau’s Ludwig Lesser Park is emblematic of a trend that has accelerated in Germany over the past five years. Playgrounds, a growing number of educators, manufacturers and town planners argue, must stop striving for absolute safety and instead create challenging microcosms…

For nearly a year, Canada’s military has been engulfed in crisis, as one senior officer after another has come under investigation over allegations of sexual misconduct or cover-up. Seven generals have been implicated so far in the snowballing scandal, which has undermined public trust in the institution and morale within the ranks – and highlighted a lack of transparency over how the military handles allegations of sexual assault. Last Tuesday, the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, removed the defence minister, Harjit Sajjan, replacing him with Anita Anand, the former procurement minister. Sajjan had served as defence minister for six years, but his tenure was marred by criticism that his office failed to fully address sexual harassment in the military. The scandal erupted in February when the former chief of defence staff…

Move aside, Donald Trump: there’s a new American for the world’s progressives to hate. What’s more, he’s not even a Republican, but rather a member of Joe Biden’s Democratic party. He’s Joe Manchin, who represents West Virginia in the US Senate – the body that’s split 50-50, and which Democrats only control if every single senator stays onside. It’s thanks to him – abetted by the Arizona Democrat senator Kyrsten Sinema – that Biden cannot, at the Cop26 summit in Glasgow, proudly point to a raft of measures, signed and sealed, by which the US government will tackle the climate crisis. Biden had a whole plan worked out, and most Democrats backed him. But Manchin refused to say yes. He insisted that Biden drop perhaps the most powerful element of…

A young Gambian man, let’s call him D, waits in Syracuse. He arrived in Italy eight months previously, having been smuggled into the country by boat from Libya. D has an easy-going, intelligent manner – an unexpected grace given what he has endured. At a rendezvous with his companion for the afternoon, Teju Cole, D confesses that he has never set foot in a church: he was raised Muslim. As the two of them enter Santa Lucia alla Badia together, he is amazed that no one questions his presence. The pair gaze in awe at Caravaggio’s early 17th-century painting Burial of Saint Lucy. It is enormous. Centuries have passed and the effects of time show in the damage to large areas of paint, but the work is no less magnificent…