Innholdsfortegnelse for 21 January 2022 i Guardian Weekly

Bodies of work A view from below of Renascimento (Rebirth), an installation by the artist Siron Franco, at the Casa das Rosas cultural cent re, in Sao Paulo. The work is formed of 365 mannequins suspended by wires, paying tribute to the victims of the Covid-19 pandemic while also celebrating life. 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 account in the name of the public interest, to uphold liberal and progressive values, to…

SECURITY MI5 alert over Chinese agent with Westminster links A comprehensive review is to be held into how a suspected Chinese agent was able to get so close to senior British politicians, the security minister, Damian Hinds, has said. MI5, the domestic intelligence agency, took the unusual step last week of circulating a warning to MPs accusing Christine Lee – a prominent London-based solicitor – of being engaged in “political interference activities” on behalf of China’s ruling communist regime. The Chinese embassy rejected the claims, accusing the authorities of “smearing and intimidation” against the Chinese community in the UK, while a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said the British were “too obsessed with James Bond 007 movies”. However, Hinds said the security services had been aware of the activities of Lee–pictured…

The question was being asked with increasing urgency last week: where is Nursultan Nazarbayev? Kazakhstan’s leader from 1991 until 2019, Nazarbayev has long been the arbiter of all business and political decisions in the central Asian nation, and the purveyor of an all-encompassing personality cult. In 2019, he handpicked a successor, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, while retaining power behind the scenes. But after the worst unrest since independence broke out earlier this month, Nazarbayev was absent from public view. Official figures say 225 people died in the unrest and crackdown. Meanwhile, the man who personified Kazakhstan for so long se emed to have simply disappeared. Some said he was hiding out on the shores of Lake Geneva or in Dubai. According to a number of sources, he remain ed in Kazakhstan, probably…

Two years ago, Qi Jiayao visited his mother’s hometown of Shaoxing in eastern China. When he tried to speak to his cousin’s children in the local dialect, Qi was surprised. “None of them was able to,” recalls the linguist, who teaches Mandarin in Oaxaca, Mexico. The decline in local dialects among the younger generation has become more apparent in recent years, as China’s president, Xi Jinping, has sought to strengthen a uniform Chinese identity. But the popularisation of a standard national language is often at the expense of regional ones, including Han majority dialects and ethnic languages such as Mongolian and Uyghur. In 2016, Inner Mongolia’s local laws allowed ethnic schools to use their own language to cultivate linguistic skills and bilingualism. But four years later these were reversed to…

A convoy of trucks laden with huge black granite rocks trundles along the dusty pathway as a group of villagers look on grimly. Every day more than 60 trucks take granite for export along this rugged road through Nyamakope village in the district of Mutoko, 150km east of Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare. The air reverberates with blasts and heavy machinery noises as the mountain above the village is slowly reduced, slab by slab. Quarrying has been happening here since the 1980s. Mutoko stone is sought after for its lustre. It is a popular material for tombstones. An extension to the Danish royal library in Copenhagen, known as the Black Diamond, is clad in Mutoko granite. The Buja people who live here say that as mining companies extract wealth from the mountain,…

THE CLIMATE CRISIS IS SET TO PROFOUNDLY ALTER THE world around us. Humans will not be the only species to suffer from the calamity. Huge waves of die-offs will be triggered across the animal kingdom as coral reefs turn ghostly white and tropical rainforests collapse. For a period, some researchers suspected that insects may be less affected, or at least more adaptable, than mammals, birds and other groups of creatures. With their large, elastic populations and their defiance of previous mass extinction events, surely insects will do better than most in the teeth of the climate emergency? Sadly not. At 3.2 C of warming, which many scientists still fear the world will get close to by the end of this century (although a flurry of promises at C op26 have…

Stefanos Tsitsipas learned to listen to Covid science the hard way. Not the really hard way, of course. The world’s No 4-ranked tennis player didn’t find himself laid low by the virus or on a ventilator in hospital – he just found himself publicly rebuked by his own government. While Tsitsipas’s father-cum-coach, Apostolos, gave interviews claiming that “athletes have a strong enough immune system to deal with any challenge”, Greece’s government spokesman was pointing out that a 23-year-old tennis player, however successful in his field, had “neither the knowledge, nor the studies, nor the research work” to offer valid opinions on vaccination. The story had a happy ending, though: Tsitsipas stopped spouting poorly informed conjecture and got himself jabbed. Last Friday, just three days before the Australian Open was due…

Barbara Walter does not expect a civil war in the US of the order of the conflict that tore the nation apart in the 1860s, but that’s chiefly because civil wars are fought differently these days. And it’s about the only comfort a reader can take from this sobering account of how civil wars start in our time. Walter is a professor of international relations at the University of California, San Diego, and a consultant to government and international agencies. In this book she draws on her work and that of other researchers to produce a typology of the descent into organi sed domestic violence. The key concept is “anocracy”, a stage between autocracy and democracy. The transition can be made in either direction, and it is during the transition…

UNITED STATES How has Joe Biden’s first year gone? The mood last week in Ukraine was eerily calm, despite talk of war. The first winter snow blanketed Kyiv. Many were still celebrating Orthodox Christmas – which falls on 7 January – or had left town for the holidays. Sure, Russia might invade at any moment. But, as Ukrainians wearily point out, the country has already been at war for eight long years, ever since Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea and kickstarted a brutish conflict in the east of the country, which has claimed nearly 14,000 lives. Last Friday’s dawn cyber-attack on government websites was the latest in a series of hostile acts. What to do in the event of a military operation by Moscow, and whether to stay, flee or fight?…

No one knows what awaited Kim Woo-joo when he arrived back in North Korea, just over a year after he had fled the world’s most oppressive regime for freedom in the South. Earlier this month, the 29-year-old former gymnast approached the border separating the two Koreas, scaled a tall barbed-wire fence and walked the 4km across the heavily armed demilitarised zone (DMZ), dodging landmines but not security cameras, which captured his escape no fewer than five times. His decision to cross the DMZ back was the latest chapter in an extraordinary series of journeys. In November 2020, Kim fled his homeland, shunning the route used by almost all defectors across the border with China. Having denied that he was a spy, embarrassed officials in Seoul were forced to acknowledge that…

In the final months of Robert Durst’s life, it seemed as if the walls were at last closing in on the disgraced multimillionaire and real estate heir. He was sentenced to life in prison in October for the murder of a longtime friend and, shortly afterwards, New York officials charged him with the murder of his missing first wife. But his death in a California hospital on 10 January has upended the cases against the 78-year-old. The murder case over the death of his ex-wife, Kathleen McCormack Durst, will come to a halt and, thanks to a legal technicality, the murder conviction for the killing of his friend, Susan Berman, will soon be voided. Authorities believe Durst was behind three killings in three states over four decades, which were the…

RORY KINNEAR No 10 partied while we buried my sister Things are not looking good for Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the Queen’s second son formerly known as His Royal Highness. Last week, a judge in New York rejected his attempt to get the sexual abuse lawsuit Virginia Giuffre has filed against him thrown out. Giuffre is suing him for damages, claiming that she was forced to have sex with him three times in 2001 by the late convicted sex off ender Jeffrey Epstein, and his sex trafficker accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, allegations that Andrew denies. The royal family responded by announcing that he has been stripped of his military honours, royal patronages and the use of his HRH title Any praise for the monarchy for depriving him of his titles is misplaced. The…

How does a song by an unknown band get to be listened to 6.5m times? It was hard enough to determine in the olden days, before streaming existed, when we still said “popular” instead of “viral”; it is absolutely baffling now. If anyone knew, Facebook would have written an algorithm for it. That hasn’t stopped critics twisting and turning to account for the success of Chaise Longue, by the Isle of Wight duo Wet Leg, which was hotly followed by their astronomically successful follow-up singles, Wet Dream and Too Late Now. They haven’t even released an album yet. Is it because they are, as one reviewer put it, witty and sexy, and indie rock normally isn’t? Everyone loves them, from Florence Welch to Iggy Pop. Is it because they have…

In the first chapter of this novel a hitman remarks to himself: “No one realises how much hit men owe to Hollywood scriptwriters.” But how does the author know? The throwaway joke, along with an unashamed obsession with verbally recreating and namechecking the mise -en- scène of streaming TV drama, is typical of the book’s effervescent playfulness. Hervé Le Tellier, after all, is president of Oulipo, the French “workshop of potential literature” whose past masters included Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec. And what he has done here would delight his forebears with its paradoxical nature: he has written an Oulipan bestseller, a Prix Goncourt-winning novel that has already shifted a million units on the continent. Each chapter of the first section introduces a different cast member, mainly French or American,…

I left my husband last summer. We have three young children, who live with me but see their dad regularly. Things are cordial and he is financially supporting us. However, the separation has highlighted the distance there’s always been between us in our decade-long relationship. My husband is a hard worker but emotionally distant and can be blind to my needs and those of the children. We’d been living abroad, rurally, for nine years, doing up a house – and I home-educated the children. I have become increasingly depressed and am kicking myself for decisions I’ve made and gone along with. During our relationship, I kept trying to convince my husband that we should move to a town, but he was adamant we couldn’t afford it. Eventually I cracked, moved…

1 UNITED STATES Texas hostage taker had criminal record in UK A British man who flew to the US, acquired a gun and took hostages at a Texas synagogue had a criminal record and an extensive history of mental health issues, the Guardian understands. Malik Faisal Akram, a 44-year-old from Blackburn, was killed after a tense 11-hour hostage standoff at the Congregation Beth Israel synagogue in the Dallas suburb of Colleyville last Saturday evening. All four hostages were unharmed. President Joe Biden declared the incident an act of terror and the British foreign secretary, Liz Truss, said the UK government condemned “this act of terrorism and antisemitism”. In a statement to Sky News, Akram’s brother Gulbar asked how he had been able to acquire a visa to enter the US.…

I fit is a political truism that a cabinet is all smiles when the ruling party is well ahead in the polls, it is equally the case that nothing highlights ministerial ambitions more than a vulnerable PM. With Boris Johnson on the ropes over lockdown party allegations, all eyes are now on his cabinet colleagues and other senior Tories. Most have offered him support – so far. But who will break cover, particularly if there are any new revelations? Here are the ones to watch: Rishi Sunak The chancellor’s endorsement of Johnson was one of the latest, and perhaps the most equivocal. Having spent last Wednesday 350km from the Commons on a visit to Devon, Sunak waited until eight hours after Johnson’s apology to tweet that this had been the…

The US has alleged Russia has positioned saboteurs in Ukraine for a “false flag” operation as a pretext for a Russian attack, which Washington says could begin in the coming month. The allegations came on the same day as a large-scale cyber-attack on Ukrainian government websites, and amid reports of Russian military hardware on the move heading westwards. This follows a week of failed diplomacy with abortive talks in Geneva, Brussels and Vienna, which did nothing to defuse the crisis provoked by Russia’s massing of more than 100,000 troops near Ukraine’s borders. Moscow has portrayed the crisis as a military threat from Ukraine against Russia, without providing any evidence. Pentagon spokesman, John Kirby, said Russia was preparing “an operation designed to look like an attack on… Russian-speaking people in Ukraine,…

Aerial images prepared by the New Zealand defence force in a report for the Tongan government were leaked online on Tuesday, showing some areas experienced “catastrophic” devastation inflicted by last weekend’s tsunami and volcanic eruption while others were relatively unscathed. The aerial pictures showed some areas blanketed with ash, with damaged buildings, while others showed parts of the country that appeared unscathed. The Guardian has confirmed the provenance of the photos. After the reconnaissance flight, the New Zealand defence force shared a handful of photos with the media, most of them showing defence personnel at work, rather than shots of the islands. Many areas were assessed as having limited damage, such as ash on building roofs, pools of surface flooding or debris. But others were judged to have sustained “catastrophic”…

On 11 May 2021, I was sitting with a small group in a cafe in southern Tel Aviv, studying Arabic. Our teacher, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, had been telling us that he and his pregnant Jewish wife kept getting turned down by landlords who would not rent their property to a “mixed” couple. We were almost at the end of the three-hour class when air raid sirens sounded. A few days earlier, missiles had been launched from Gaza into Israel, but this was the first time they had hit Tel Aviv. Beyond the fear of an airstrike, I had a sad, heavy feeling. I had recently returned to live in Israel after 15 years studying and working abroad. I remembered a time, in the mid-1990s, when I had believed…

In the winter of 1996, I almost lost my job because of the acclaimed management sim Civilization II. I was supposed to be reviewing it for the video game magazine Edge, where I was a fledgling staff writer. But I got so hooked, playing it was all I did for three weeks. During that period I ate, slept and drank Civilization II. At the end, I handed in my extremely thorough two-page review: the only thing I had submitted for the entire issue. I was supposed to be writing 25 pages a month. My editor was … displeased. Last week, video game publisher Techland proudly tweeted that if players hoped to fully complete its forthcoming apocalyptic adventure Dying Light 2, they would need around 500 hours – “almost as long…

There is only one thing worse than having to thumb your smartphone torch into life so that you can read a restaurant menu: the youthful twentysomething waiter noticing you do so, and bringing you one of those LED clip-on lamps. Short of wheeling in a Zimmer frame to use while popping to the loo, there’s nothing better calculated to make you feel like an old git. It’s profoundly irritating, partly because it’s so unnecessary and it’s a huge own goal. It makes any restaurant seem exclusive; as in it was designed to exclude those of us not in the very first flush of youth. The restaurant business is generally a younger person’s game. Running them requires the sort of long hours that those of us with a few years on…