Innholdsfortegnelse for 31st December 2021 i Guardian Weekly

Ride on time Jockeys compete in a traditional Gayo horse race in the Bener Meriah district of Aceh province. The races, in which children ride a local breed of horse without saddles, date back to at least the Dutch colonial period and have become a Gayo highland tradition held at significant times of the year. 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 hold power to…

On New Year’s Day the UK will have been fully out of the European Union for a year: out of its political and legal structures, single market and customs union. This was what Boris Johnson and Michael Gove – who led the Leave campaign – had wanted. No awkward halfway house like Theresa May had negotiated. No Brexit-lite. Out completely. Gone. Brexit well and truly done. Only with a clean break, they said, could the UK unleash its full potential, and wrestle free from the chains of EU regulation and bureaucracy. Liberated, Britain could take back control of its borders, money and laws. Britons could look outwards in a new age of discovery, striking trade deals far from the EU, creating fresh levels of prosperity for Global Britain. So a…

1 MAY 1937 • 12 AUGUST 2021 January, 2009. We were making the pilot episode of Sherlock. A long night shoot lay ahead of us. Fortunately, for company I had Una Stubbs. It was pretty much the first time I’d met her. She was funny, naughty and incredibly warm and generous. Oh, and very stylish too. I had watched Una all my life, off and on. She’d been famous before I was born, from being the dancing girl in the Dairy Box ads, one of Cliff’s gang in Summer Holiday, and as Rita in Till Death Us Do Part. I was a massive fan of Till Death … from an early age; about the time that I was watching her on Worzel Gummidge (a fantastic performance as Aunt Sally), Give…

17 AUGUST 1968 • 16 APRIL 2021 I first met Helen in the late 90s, when I attended an audition for a play at the Donmar Warehouse in London – I think Colin Farrell got the role. I was just starting out, really nervous, and I think she picked up on that. We went outside at one point to smoke a rollie and she was really kind and supportive. I mentioned it to her when we started doing Peaky Blinders and she actually remembered it. Helen had this genuine compassion. It was part of her DNA. She wasn’t an actor who turned up, did the gig and went home. All the way through Peaky Blinders, she would chat to members of the crew as well as the actors. She knew…

AWelsh schoolgirl with a bipolar mother and an abusive father might not sound like the most promising basis for must-see television. But the second series of In My Skin (BBC/Hulu) was tragic, funny and poignant. Expect to see much more of its lead, Gabrielle Creevy, in 2022. Two outstanding US dramas shone different lights on contemporary America. In Mare of Easttown (HBO/Sky), Kate Winslet’s downtrodden detective dug up dark secrets in the Pennsylvanian rust belt. At the other end of the social spectrum, The White Lotus (HBO/Sky), set in a Hawaiian luxury hotel, skewered the moneyed middle-classes. I also got hooked on the absurdist comedy I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson (Netflix) – often excruciating, but mainly just painfully funny. Graham Snowdon, acting editor Loosely based on events…

In the days after the Taliban took Kabul, more than one correspondent shared clips from its streets, marvelling at how fast the city had returned to “surprisingly normal”, with shoppers back out and a sudden sense of quiet in a place that had been constantly braced for the next suicide bombing. The correspondents were men, who apparently didn’t register one stark difference; it was also largely men in their videos. Most of the city’s women had vanished into their homes, terrified of what Taliban rule would mean for them. It could have been a momentary slip of attention, at a time of intense pressure. But in the weeks that followed, this kind of blindness to the particular tragedy unfolding for Afghan women would play out again and again, first in…

When Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, gave her lengthy “state of the union” speech in September, there were mentions aplenty of the EU’s vital relationships with Turkey, the western Balkans and Africa. The continent’s security and economic prosperity depended on nurturing and deepening ties with its neighbourhood, explained Von der Leyen, a former student at the London School of Economics. Britain did not register in the speech. The year 2021 has been marked by a remarkable level of petulance in the UK-EU relationship. The reality is that 2022 doesn’t offer much hope of redemption. France will hold the presidency of the EU for the first six months, during which Emmanuel Macron will have an election campaign to fight. Boris Johnson is on his uppers, with a large…

Brexit has forced Northern Irish businesses to deal with new barriers, while the delicate political balances have been strained. Yet close observers warn that the combination of Northern Ireland elections in May and the potential for a Tory leadership challenge mean further pitfalls await Months of negotiations with the EU over the workings of the protocol governing the special treatment of Northern Ireland after Brexit have led to both sides giving ground. However, talks have also resulted in the resignation of Lord Frost, the government’s chief negotiator, and provoked growing agitation from the Democratic Unionist party. Business figures in Northern Ireland said some of the early teething troubles had dissipated and their impact was now split. Some companies continue to be hit by the checks taking place in the Irish…

The year 2020 was supposed to be a “super year for nature”, “a major opportunity to bring nature back from the brink”. But then the coronavirus pandemic set in and long-held plans to tackle the environmental crisis were postponed for a year. It was to begin at the Swiss ski resort of Davos in January 2020, where the financial elite would underscore the risks of global heating and biodiversity loss to human civilisation. An intense spring and summer of negotiations would follow, ahead of an autumn of never-seen-before ambition. First, at Cop15 in Kunming, China, in October, world leaders would strike a deal to reverse the destruction of ecosystems by reaching a Paris-style agreement for nature. Then they would head to Glasgow for Cop26, taking the hard-but-necessary decisions to limit…

22 NOVEMBER 1966 • 6 SEPTEMBER 2021 I met Mike in a club called Club One in Baltimore. I’d heard about The Wire and I’d seen them shooting around the city but I’d never watched it. I didn’t know who he was. I told my homeboy: “This man keeps looking at me. He’s looking hard with a scar on his face. He’s looking mean.” My homeboy told me: “Nah, that’s Omar off The Wire. He’s not nobody to be worried about.” That’s when Mike comes over and starts asking me questions. He thought I was a boy at first. He was like: “Wow, your charisma, your swag, everything about you is so dynamic and crazy, I love that.” I don’t know how because I was drunk. He called me the…

Our critics choose their best films and albums of another Covid-disrupted year. Plus, the Weekly team reveals its must-see TV of 2021 10 The Tragedy of Macbeth Joel Coen’s solo take on Shakespeare is a stark mono chrome nightmare, refrigerated to an icy coldness. The text has been whittled; the drama is framed in theatrical, stylised ways: an agoraphobic ordeal in which bodies and faces loom up with tin-tack sharpness out of the creamy white fog. Frances McDormand is Lady Macbeth, a role she was born to play, bringing a hard-won domestic authority and her own sort of military determination to the plan to kill King Duncan. Macbeth is Denzel Washington, who portrays the Thane as already exhausted by his great triumph in the king’s cause at the very beginning,…

Theatre Romeo and Juliet Sky Arts Does Simon Godwin’s hybrid creation count as film or theatre? Who knows. Shot on the National Theatre’s Lyttelton stage turned studio, this was one of the most astounding mashups of lockdown. Infused with intelligence and beauty, it contained both the intimacy of cinema and an overt sense of theatricality. Jessie Buckley and Josh O’Connor were inspired as the star-crossed couple, with a powerhouse of an accompanying cast. Arifa Akbar Dance Matthew Bourne’s The Midnight Bell An unexpected source of inspiration – Patrick Hamilton’s booze-soaked novels of 1930s Soho – made for one of Bourne’s meatier works, harking back to his Play Without Words from 2002. A set of finely tuned character studies were brought to life by an experienced cast including Michela Meazza and…

CAISTOR ST EDMUND Norfolk, England He stumbles badly, right down on to one knee, lurching me forward. Will we fall? A tangled mess of limbs and hooves? He rights himself just in time. The early winter air is in our lungs, and soon his stiffjoints will loosen. He has various ailments that come with being an elderly horse, and ours has been a partnership of 23 years. I know that each ride could be the last. We amble. Ears pricked forward, mane scruffy. The sky belongs to birds today. A small murmuration of starlings scuds by, then a flock of wood pigeons, fast and agile. The noisiest of all are the jackdaws. They are everywhere, chack, chack, chacking that hard, pinging call. Hopping from branch to branch or swooping in…

1 RUSSIA Talks scheduled as Putin voices anger at Nato US and Russian officials will take part in security talks on 10 January as the countries confront rising tensions over Ukraine, a spokesperson for the Biden administration said. Russia and Nato are also likely set for talks on 12 January, while a broader regional meeting including Moscow, Washington and several European countries is set for 13 January, the spokesperson added. This month Vladimir Putin accused the west of “coming with its missiles to our doorstep” as he reiterated demands for no further Nato expansion in Europe. The Russian president said he would be prepared to launch an intervention if he felt Ukraine or its western allies were preparing an attack on Russia’s proxies in the country Analysts have said Russia…

CORONAVIRUS England alone in holding off extra Covid curbs Boris Johnson did not introduce further Covid restrictions in England this week, giving mass events the go-ahead and leaving nightclubs open for New Year’s Eve – unlike the rest of the UK. Scientists criticised the decision, which came as England recorded its highest number of Covid infections. They said it was the moment of “the greatest divergence between scientific advice and legislation” since the start of the pandemic. Advisers had told Johnson that significant pressure on the NHS came from staff absences rather than overcrowded intensive care units. One model predicted that in London, where Covid rates are highest, up to 40% of staff could be absent because of sickness. Ministers are expected to continue to focus efforts on vaccination –…

Britain’s economy heads into the new year weighed down by a decline in trade and falling business and consumer confidence. Exports were 14% below their 2018 average level in the third quarter of 2021, and there are many economists who doubt sales of UK products abroad will return to 2018 levels until 2024. UK car manufacturing output declined by more than a quarter in November as Brexit and the after-effects of the Delta variant forced factory owners, struggling with job vacancies and component shortages, to cut production. December, marred as it is by the Omicron variant, is not expected to provide a lift to an industry that exports 80% of what it makes. The Bank of England, worried about the effect of inflation, became the first major central bank to…

Twitter might actually get its act together Twitter has an unfortunate reputation as the punchbag of social media. It has failed to deliver the huge returns of bigger rivals such as Facebook, it hasn’t been the cool new network for more than a decade and even its own most dedicated users love to drag it to oblivion. Investors have been similarly wary of the 300m-strong social network – it has lagged behind rivals in terms of features, revenue per user and for monetisation tools. Lots of people rely on Twitter to make at least part of their income, but tend to monetise it off the network, with no cut for Twitter. That might be starting to change. Twitter is trialling a “super follow” feature for people to support users they…

27 OCTOBER 1931 • 21 MARCH2021 I first met Nawal El Saadawi in Cairo in the early 1990s, to interview her as a journalist, and she was just as dynamic and electrifying as the woman I saw on TV aged 13. I will never forget her saying that her grandmother had told her that religion was very simple: it was justice, freedom and love. That has stayed with me ever since. Soon after I interviewed her, she went into self-imposed exile in the US. She had been imprisoned by Anwar Sadat in 1981, not long before he was assassinated, because he felt she was threatening his reputation, but in 1993, she left Egypt for the US because the militant Islamists felt that she was ruining their reputation too and they…

20 MARCH 1936 • 29 AUGUST 2021 As a boy, one of the first records I bought was a single called Upsetting Station by Dave Barker, a Jamaican singer. Back then, I didn’t know what a producer did, but I recognised there was something special going on with this record. Soon after, I heard the Wailers’ Small Axe and I noticed that it was also produced by Lee Perry. Then, around 1974, there was an album called King Tubby Meets the Upsetter at the Grass Roots of Dub, which was really popular. It had some serious musicians playing on it – Vin Gordon, Tommy McCook, Bobby Ellis. That’s when I started to take more notice and realised that the role of the producer was to shape the sound. The sound…

10 Mdou Moctar Afrique Victime In Mdou Moctar’s world, riff and rhythm count but the solo is king. His grounding in the nomadic Tuareg style of assouf (desert blues) made him a popular option on Niger’s wedding circuit, but the guitarist breaks from convention by doggedly following his fingertips to some place new. The young Mahamadou Souley–mane was not just self-taught, but self-assembled: he fashioned his first instrument from bicycle wires and junk wood and discreetly maintained his passion for music in defiance of his family. His early recordings crossed the Sahel via Bluetooth and pricked ears for their application of AutoTune and drum machines Two theoretically opposing rock impulses combine in Mdou’s music. On one hand, the band’s adaptability has a clear connection to the no-frills enterprise of punk…

Victory is sweet. The hundreds of thousands of Chileans who took to the streets to celebrate the victory of Gabriel Boric, a left wing former student leader, in Chile’s presidential runoff elections certainly thought so. Boric won with a 12-point margin and a historic number of votes, imposing a convincing defeat on the right wing candidate José Antonio Kast that few would have predicted only a month ago. Yet Boric’s victory speech was anything but gloating. Nodding towards the years of polarisation and protest leading up to the election, he stressed the need for “social cohesion, re finding ourselves, and sharing common ground” Earlier in his campaign he vowed to “bury neoliberalism”, sounding like the same revolutionary politician who led the social protests of 2011 and frustrated many parliamentary colleagues…