Innholdsfortegnelse for 10th December 2021 i Guardian Weekly

📷 Rivers of dust Trucks lie submerged beneath volcanic ash in the village of Sumberwuluh, east Java, after last Saturday’s devastating eruption of Mount Semeru. At least 15 people were killed, with dozens more missing, after the volcano spewed thick columns of ash and hot gas as high as 12,000 metres in a sudden eruption triggered by heavy rain s. The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol 205 | Issue № 25 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,…

About 11 minutes into last week’s hearing on abortion rights at the US supreme court, Sonia Sotomayor, one of the three liberal-leaning justices left on the court after its sharp rightward shift under Donald Trump, took the floor. Sotomayor began by noting that, in the past 30 years, 15 justices from varying political backgrounds had supported the right to abortion up to the point of foetal viability. Only four had objected. Now, after so many years of relative consensus, the legality of abortion enshrined in the landmark 1973 ruling Roe v Wade and reaffirmed in 1992 in Planned Parenthood v Casey was on the line. Politicians in Mississippi, Sotomayor remarked (leaving it unsaid that they were rightwing Republicans), had devised legislation to ban abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. By…

Last Sunday morning, a small group of protesters walked together in Kyimyindaing township, Yangon, waving bunches of eugenia and roses. They carried a banner reading: “The only real prison is fear and the real freedom is freedom from fear.” The words are those of ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyi, whose sentencing by the junta to two years in detention was announced on Monday Minutes after they had gathered, witnesses told local media that a military vehicle rammed into the group. At least five people were killed, according to independent outlet Myanmar Now. Those who survived were arrested – some of the more than 10,700 people to be detained since the February coup. The generals have arrested thousands, including the country’s elected leaders, and unleash ed terror across the country,…

The 1940s and 50s are often seen as a golden era for democracy, when Britain and its allies triumphed against fascism before the postwar consensus powered the formation of the welfare state and National Health Service. Britain was a nation broadly content with itself and its values, and almost completely unquestioning of its system of government. Even in those patriotic times there was, however, a good deal of cynicism about the motivations of politicians among a significant proportion of the population. A landmark Gallup poll in 1944 found that 35% of voters believed politicians were merely “out for themselves”. But the same poll found slightly more – 36% – believed their political leaders were largely selfless people, focused primarily on advancing the interests of their country, while 22% said they…

For decades, more than a hundred mouse-nibbled fruit boxes, tea chests and old leather suitcases sat untouched in a 3-metre pile in the backyard shed of Frances Newell’s home in suburban Melbourne. They were stuffed with thousands of letters – some in German, others in English – that she had kept when her father moved out of their family home in Castlemaine in the 1990s. The 73-year-old knew she was taking in a trove of heirlooms, as the family had dragged the “mountains of letters” across their many homes in regional Victoria over the years. But the size of the task meant she continually put off sorting through them The retired academic and teacher was aware that her late mother, Evelyn Parker, had been involved in progressive causes in her…

The graphic testimony presented to jurors in the opening days of Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal sex abuse trial last week seemed at times to echo broader theories – criminal, conspiratorial or both – about Jeffrey Epstein’s world. For the prosecution, their case against the 59-year-old former British socialite is to separate the criminal charges she faces from broader conspiracy theories about wealth and power that envelop the disgraced financier and sex trafficker Epstein. For Maxwell’s defence, the task may be to shift Maxwell so deeply into Epstein’s shadow that jurors are simply unable to find her guilty. “Many people have come to me with wild conspiracy theories about this case,” said Lisa Bloom, the victims’ rights attorney, outside the Manhattan courthouse that has become a scene for Q-Anon demonstrations. “The Q-Anon…

THE ASSAULT WAS ALREADY UNDER WAY in September when, having hastily collected her youngest child from a neighbour, Baraa Hamamda, 24, ran home to find her three-year-old son, Mohammed, lying in a small pool of blood and apparently lifeless on the bare floor where she had left him asleep. “I thought that’s it, he’s dead,” she says. “He won’t come back.” Mohammed wasn’t dead, though he wouldn’t regain consciousness for more than 11 hours, having been struck on the head by a stone thrown through a window by an Israeli settler, one of dozens who had invaded the isolated village of Al Mufakara, in the West Bank’s rocky, arid south Hebron hills. At about 1.30pm, settlers from the two outposts, Havat Maon and Avigayil – illegal even under Israeli law…

Jack Dorsey is resigning from Twitter to spend more time with his other company, Square. In some ways, the choice between Twitter and Square is a straight choice between political clout and profit. Square, a payments platform co-founded by Dorsey in 2009, is worth almost three times Twitter’s current value at about $97bn. But Square will never be credited with the equivalent of the “Twitter revolution”, or make headlines by banning a former president. Venture capital is pouring money into cryptocurrencies and payment platforms. Twitter, by contrast, having only started to become profitable since 2018, has always been more notable for its political impact than its commercial pull. However, Twitter may be experiencing the limits of its growth. In terms of commercial reach, Twitter is no competition for the likes…

The journalists who nowadays report on happenings in Washington work at a frantic, flustered tempo, racing to catch up with the chaos of breaking news. Jonathan Karl, a correspondent for ABC News, seems to be permanently breathless. In Betrayal, he runs for cover during an emergency lockdown at the White House, with grenades detonating in the distance. He is roused after midnight by the announcement of Trump’s Covid diagnosis; later, he has to rush to the hospital, ditch his car and scramble into place before the presidential helicopter lands on a strip of road that is suddenly “the centre of the broadcast universe”. And on 6 January Karl keeps up a live commentary as the Capitol is invaded by a mob determined to lynch vice-president Mike Pence – reviled as…

In the early 1970s, law enforcement leaders in Chicago decided the practice of illegal abortion was intolerable in their city and undertook a campaign to root out those who performed the procedure in secret. On a tip, police turned their attention to “Call Jane”, a feminist collective of young women who, since 1965, had provided safe but illegal abortions to roughly 3,000 Chicagoans per year. A Chicago homicide detective traced “Jane” to the South Shore neighbourhood. Police raided an apartment and arrested nearly 50 people for questioning. Seven women were charged with 11 counts of performing an abortion and conspiracy to commit abortion. But the Call Jane members protected people they served. Then, in 1973, the “Abortion Seven” had a reprieve. Prosecutors abandoned the case when supreme court justices issued…

They began heading for the shopping mall exit when they saw the police. One of the four gang members, a rapper called Lelo whose music videos venerate handguns and violence, turned to exchange pleasantries with Mike, an officer with the Swedish police. Lelo and Mike have history. During a riot outside the mall that prompted a killing that could easily have led to another six, Lelo was among 32 arrested. In his court appearance, Mike had to intervene as Lelo’s posturing threatened to boil over. “Now we get along, say a few words to each other. It’s important because you don’t know when you’re going to bump into them next. Here, everyone knows everyone,” Mike smiled. Here is Hj ällbo, a grid of tower blocks and flats on the outskirts…

When the X-Press Pearl container ship caught fire and sank in the Indian Ocean in May, Sri Lanka was terrified that the vessel’s 350 tonnes of heavy fuel oil would spill into the ocean, causing an environmental disaster for the its pristine coral reefs and fishing industry. Classified by the UN as Sri Lanka’s “worst maritime disaster”, the biggest impact was not caused by the heavy fuel oil. Nor was it the hazardous chemicals on board, which included nitric acid, caustic soda and methanol. The most “significant” harm, according to the UN, came from the spillage of 87 containers full of lentil-sized plastic pellets: nurdles Since the disaster, nurdles have been washing up in their billions along hundreds of kilometres of coastline, and are expected to make landfall on beaches…

Thirteen camels amble across the dusty, drought-stricken landscape, accompanied by seven men in bright yellow T-shirts and three nurses. The camels are loaded with trunks full of medicines, bandages and family planning products. It’s a mobile health clinic on legs. When the camels arrive at their destination, men, women and children form a line as they wait for the handlers to unload the boxes and set up tables and tents Among those waiting is Jacinta Peresia, who first encountered the health visitors six years ago after she nearly died giving birth to her 11th child, a daughter called Emali. Peresia’s husband had been hesitant to allow her any reproductive health care but the near-death experience prompted him to encourage her to speak to the nurses, and she was given contraception.…

On 4 November 1981, five Black men in matching shirts filed into a narrow, well-lit room at a police station in Syracuse, New York, and turned to face a one-way mirror. On the other side, a 19-year-old white student stepped towards the glass, and tried to identify which of them was her rapist. The student, Alice Sebold, would go on to a celebrated literary career. She had been the subject of a horrific attack late one night in May that year, dragged into a tunnel from a path in a public park. More than 40 years later, the events that changed the course of two lives have come to prominence, and the story of a woman’s reclamation of her life from her rapist has been vastly complicated by a court’s…

The far-right journalist and polemicist Éric Zemmour went on trial in Paris on 17 November on charges of incitement to racial hatred. In September 2020, he had said on the French news broadcaster CNews that unaccompanied foreign minors were “thieves, they’re murderers, they’re rapists, that’s all they are. We must send them back.” He did not appear at the trial and was represented by his lawyers, who said the charges were unfounded. The verdict is expected to be delivered next year. Zemmour has previously been convicted of incitement to racial hatred and religious hatred and been tried and acquitted in several other cases. But the stakes are different this time: the defendant is now a candidate for president of the French republic. In early November, polls indicated that up to…

When it comes to outsized projects with geopolitical undertones, Walter Smerling has form. Between 2015 and 2017, the chairman of the Stiftung für Kunst und Kultur (Foundation for Art and Culture) in Bonn organised the largest ever exhibitions of Chinese art in Germany and German art in China. And when tensions between western Europe and Russia started rising around th at time, he envisaged a continent-spanning exhibition: “A dialogue,” as he puts it, “about what unites people in Europe. About democracy, about solidarity, about personal and political freedom.” The result is Diversity United, a travelling group exhibition comprising over 150 artworks by around 90 living artists, from 34 countries, chosen by 10 curators. It is not, mercifully, about Brexit, but it does aim to highlight “the importance of a united…

All by myself: the joys of being alone Film Fear Eats the Soul Following the 2008 financial crash, the movie business found a creative way to cut budgets – a series of movies with a single actor on screen. (See Ryan Reynolds in a coffin in Buried; Sandra Bullock in Gravity.) But the purest expression of loneliness I’ve ever seen on film came with a love story made long before that: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s aching 1974 German melodrama. The solitude of the 60-year-old widow Emmi was the everyday kind: a sad, subtle pang you sense she only registered herself when it was ended by Ali, a younger Moroccan man with whom she starts a relationship. But isolation still has a way of gnawing even as a couple. The film is…

1 CORONAVIRUS Omicron variant soon ‘likely to outcompete Delta’ A leading infectious diseases specialist who monitors variants for a research collaboration led by Harvard Medical School believes the world is seeing “what appears to be a signal of exponential increase of Omicron over Delta”. “It’s still early days, but increasingly, data is starting to trickle in, suggesting that Omicron is likely to outcompete Delta in many, if not all, places,” Dr Jacob Lemieux said in an interview with the Associated Press on Tuesday. Omicron, the variant first identified in South Africa last month, has been detected in at least 38 countries but no deaths had been reported as of earlier this week. The World Health Organization has said it could take weeks to determine how infectious Omicron is, if it…

Public opinion on abortion in the US has changed little since 1973, when the supreme court in effect legalised the procedure nationally in its ruling on the case Roe v Wade. According to Gallup, which has the longest-running poll on the issue, about four in five Americans believe abortion should be legal, at least in some circumstances. Yet the politics of abortion have opened deep divisions in the last five decades. In 2021, state legislators have passed dozens of restrictions to abortion access, making it the most hostile year to abortion rights on record The religious right in the US has been laying the foundations of this decisive challenge to abortion rights for years. According to historians and researchers, it has taken decades of political machinations for the campaign to…

Trust in politicians to act in the national interest rather than their own has fallen dramatically since Boris Johnson became prime minister, according to figures in a disturbing study of the state of British democracy. The polling data from YouGov for the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) shows a particularly sharp fall in trust in the few weeks since the Owen Paterson scandal triggered a rash of Tory sleaze scandals. In 2014, when David Cameron was prime minister, 48% of voters believed politicians were “out merely for themselves” as opposed to their country or party. This had increased to 57% by May 2021 after nearly two years of Johnson in No 10, and leapt to 63% last week in the wake of the Paterson affair. The opposition believes the…

Rain will become more common than snow in the Arctic as the climate crisis heats up the planet’s northern ice cap, according to research. Today, more snow falls in the Arctic than rain. But this will reverse, the study suggests, with all the region’s land and almost all its seas receiving more rain than snow before the end of the century if the world warms by 3C. Pledges made by nations at the recent Cop26 summit could keep the temperature rise to a still disastrous 2.4C, but only if these promises are met. Even if the global temperature rise is kept to 1.5C or 2C, areas around the Greenland and Norwegian seas will still become rain-dominated. Scientists were shocked in August when rain fell on the summit of Greenland’s huge…

In a warehouse laboratory in Berkeley, California, Nicholas Flanders stands in front of a shiny metal box about the size of a washing machine. Inside is a stack of metal plates that resembles a club sandwich – only the filling is a black polymer membrane coated with proprietary metal catalyst. “We call the membrane the black leaf,” he says. Flanders is the co-founder and CEO of Twelve, a startup founded in 2015, which received a $57m funding boost in July. It aims to take air – or, to be more precise, the carbon dioxide (CO2) in it – and transform it into something useful, as plants also do, eliminating damaging emissions in the process. Taking the unwanted gas wreaking havoc on our climate and using only water and renewable electricity,…

My son is 15 and causing no end of trouble. He is a good kid, pushing against the boundaries and learning to grow up. But getting caught (not for the first time) with an e-cigarette at school has really brought everything to a head. He has now been excluded for two days, and my husband and I have been called in to be (what feels like) shamed for being bad parents. What has become apparent is the constant lying, not only about the big things but also stupid, silly little things that are inconsequential. I accept that lying to parents is normal – I still remember being a teenager myself. However, the lies on top of lies have destroyed all trust – not only at home, but also at school.…

As Laura Whitmore, the elegant, highly aspirational TV presenter, squirted cold mayo into an upturned, raw mushroom cap, I realised that my Comfort Eating podcast had reached new levels of unfettered honesty. “It’s fancy, like an hors d’oeuvre!” she said, popping the whole slimy, slightly soil-laden, fridge-cold shroom brimming with bottled mayonnaise into her mouth, then chewing with a real sense of joy. Then it was my turn. I gingerly lifted the mushroom to my mouth and took a hesitant bite, causing mayo to rise over the sides of the cap: it tasted exactly as I’d imagined. But th at’s the whole point of Comfort Eating, for which I’d previously tasted the private penchants of the likes of Stephen Fry, Russell Tovey and Rafe Spall. Our secret snacks are deeply…