Innholdsfortegnelse for 2 June 2023 i Guardian Weekly

The aspiration to travel abroad for university and work has long been ubiquitous across India. In a country of 1.4 billion people, places at India’s top universities are excruciatingly competitive and graduate job prospects at the other end of studies are gloomy. Unemployment topped 8% last month, with graduate unemployment at about 18%. In 2022, 770,000 Indian students went to study abroad and almost 140,000 of them travelled to the UK. For those in the middle and upper classes who have the means to send their children abroad for university, it has long been a choice between the US and the UK, both for cultural ease – English is largely the second language of educated Indians – and the quality of academic institutions. However, high fees and other costs mean…

Western capitals remained silent through Turkey’s presidential campaign – privately hoping Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s erratic 20-year rule would come to a surprise close – but now he has been handed a decisive mandate to serve a third term, the west is caught between fear and hope. It fears he will exploit the result to take this Nato founder member further from the liberal secular west, but hopes against hope that, not being eligible to run again and thus freed from the need to pander to a nationalist electorate for the rest of his political life, he may at least be open to persuasion and base his foreign policy on something other than self-preservation. The choices Erdoğan unbound makes matter not just for Turkey, Nato, and whatever order that emerges at…

‘We don’t want that image of sex and drugs any more’Els Iping De Wallen resident Thick fumes of cannabis smoke were noticeably absent from the air of Amsterdam’s red light district, the familiar smell replaced by dank canal water and rats on the first day of a ban on smoking marijuana in public. After years of complaints from residents about wild behaviour from visitors, who number 18 million a year, a crackdown on nuisance tourism is in full swing. Last month, the municipality introduced a “stay away” campaign – aimed first at misbehaving Britons – that banned alcohol sales in shops at the weekend and imposed earlier closing times for window brothels and pubs. Now, tourists and residents alike face a €100 ($105) fine for public cannabis smoking in and around…

One afternoon last week, a young boy in a Real Madrid strip trotted on to a damp neighbourhood football pitch in the centre of the Spanish capital, oblivious to both the racism flung at the man whose name he wore on his back, and to the national and international debate it had generated. “We haven’t told him about the Vinícius thing yet,” said Mohamed’s mother, Milene Dos Santos, as she and her husband looked on from the sidelines. “If he asks, then we’ll tell him. He’s only seven, but he’ll need to be prepared for what’s to come.” It appears the events of recent weeks have been too much for many, far older, Spaniards to take in, too. The abuse hurled at Real Madrid’s Brazilian winger Vinícius Júnior during a…

A COUPLE OF SUMMERS AGO, I went to the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin. I’d spent a lot of time in the city before, but I’d never visited the brewery. The tour is good. You can learn about how barrels are made, get your face printed in the head of a pint and have a drink in a bar with a 360-degree view of the city. But what stayed with me most was something I saw there by accident. One of the exhibit rooms was closed off, but only partially. Curiosity got the better of me, and behind the door, I found a room that was empty but for a table. On the table, there were a handful of editions of the Guinness Book of Records. I hadn’t thought about this…

The violence of war, and all its horror, has a clarifying effect on what really matters in every aspect of life. In the immediate aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, those caught up in the terrifying events found that language was reduced to its most fundamental function: telling loved ones they were alive. The work of the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in Kyiv was, similarly, refined to its most basic essentials: safeguarding the objects; ensuring they would be there for the next generation. The researcher Oleksandr Lukianov and his team lived in the museum for a month, dismantling displays of Greek pots and Scythian gold and sending them to safety. After the Russians had withdrawn from the nearby towns of Bucha and Irpin, he and his…

Letters for publication weekly.letters@theguardian.com Please include a full postal address and a reference to the article. We may edit letters. Submission and publication of all letters is subject to our terms and conditions, see: THEGUARDIAN.COM/LETTERS-TERMS Editorial Editor: Graham Snowdon Guardian Weekly, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU, UK To contact the editor directly: editorial.feedback@theguardian.com Corrections Our policy is to correct significant errors as soon as possible. Please write to guardian.readers@theguardian.com or the readers’ editor, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU, UK Paying the price for Brexit and the mantra of growth The Tories may well be paying the price for their Brexit lies, but we are all paying the price for continuing to rely on the idea of growth at the heart of our economy, politics and…

What are the best cheeses for melting, and how do I know how they will behave under heat? Andrew, Gamboa, Panama We probably first need to define what we mean by melting, says Rob Lightbody from Neal’s Yard Dairy. “Most cheese will melt, but when a cheesemonger talks about ‘a good melter’, they’re probably talking about that satisfying stretch and pull you get from a good toastie, or from raclette melted over potatoes.” But Andrew’s right: because different cheeses do different things under heat, and that comes down to a few factors. First, says Jazz Reeves, quality manager at cheesemonger Paxton & Whitfield, there’s the moisture and fat content. “When cheese is heated, the protein structure breaks down and it releases the fat and water, so cheese with higher fat…

The map’s contour lines, tight and strained, warned of steep slopes careering down towards the Afon Tywi. Otherwise, it showed little of what to expect from the Gwenffrwd-Dinas RSPB reserve. This glorious 600 hectares of Atlantic oak woodland is a mere remnant of what once was a much larger Celtic temperate rainforest, covering most of the west coast of Britain. This kind of habitat feels aptly precious. Water is monarch here, sustained by westerly Atlantic storms. Rains decant through tree canopies, and creep into cracks and crevices in gnarled sessile oak boughs, while moss cushions trap and retain the water, maintaining forest humidity. Epiphytic ferns cling to oak branches like arboreal hitch-hikers. Mosses pave the forest floor, creep up fence posts and drape over fallen stones. We followed a boardwalk…

1 UNITED STATES Push to get lawmakers’ support on debt ceiling deal Political leaders appeared bullish on Monday that they could sell a bipartisan compromise debt ceiling deal to enough lawmakers – overcoming criticism from left and right – to avert a first-ever national default on the $31.4tn the US owes creditors. Despite the diplomacy and even arm-twisting still required this week, Joe Biden left the White House to head to Delaware on Monday. The president declared: “There is no reason why it should not be done by the fifth,” referring to Congress passing legislation on the debt ceiling before the US is predicted by the treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, to run out of money to pay its bills after 5 June. But the deal, agreed by the Democratic president…

BREXIT Majority of voters want to forge closer ties with EU A clear majority of British voters favours building closer relations with the European Union, according to new polling that highlights a reversal in the tide of public opinion since Brexit. Even in constituencies that recorded the highest votes to leave the EU in 2016, more than twice as many voters want to forge closer ties with Brussels. The survey of more than 10,000 voters, for the internationalist campaign group Best for Britain, accompanied by detailed MRP (multilevel regression and poststratification) analysis based on new constituency boundaries, provides sober reading for Rishi Sunak, who backed Brexit as a route to greater economic success. The poll by Focaldata found three times as many adults (63%) believe Brexit has created more problems…

“Turning refugees away merely pushes them towards poorer countries If you want to see what UK prime minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives hope to achieve with their “stop the boats” policy – and the brutal reality that underlies it – look to Greece. The country’s rightwing prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, is riding high, having surprised pundits with the scale of his victory over the left in last month’s general election. Mitsotakis has convinced many voters that he is returning Greece to stability – and part of the pitch is his claim to have all but ended refugee boat crossings from Turkey. At a campaign event on 12 May, Mitsotakis claimed his government had reduced “irregular” arrivals by 90%. The choice of location was significant: he was speaking amid the ruins of…

The stories told to Svitlana Popova’s 15-year-old daughter, Alina, while she lived under Russian occupation in Ukraine’s southern Kherson province, were designed to terrify her. Yvgenia, the pro-Russian mother of Alina’s best friend, spun her a web of lies. Alina and her family, the woman insisted, had taken food aid from the Russianimposed administration. When the Ukrainian forces came into Kherson, she said, they would hurt anyone who had been in contact with the Russians. Alina thought Yvgenia was her friend. When the woman suggested fleeing to Russia for “safety”, the girl agreed. The reality was darker. Yvgenia saw caring for Alina as a way to get money and a better apartment. Once across the border, she became abusive. Thousands of children have been kidnapped and taken to Russia since…

At 10.37pm on 4 May, the man who lives in Diego Maradona’s head threw open the window of his flat in the Spanish Quarter district in Naples for the first time in months, erupting in a cathartic scream as the city celebrated another moment in its rebirth. Ciro Maiello, a 50-year-old pork butcher, moved to the apartment block featuring a giant mural of the Argentinian in 2006 and lived there through a period he called the “dark days [when] dozens of people were killed in these streets”. The mural was painted a few years earlier, in honour of the player who gave the city’s football team the most successful period in its history, including its first Serie A title win, and whose veneration by Neapolitans is comparable only to that…

‘We’re a diverse group of people … the telenovela shows that’Raquel Oliveira TV viewer With their daily dose of melodrama, suspense, romance and tears, Brazil’s wildly popular telenovelas have never shied away from bringing social commentary into viewers’ living rooms. Over the years, blockbuster soap operas have tackled many contentious issues, from class and sexuality, to dictatorship and deforestation. But for decades, the issue of racial inequality has been conspicuous by its absence: despite the fact that 56% of Brazil’s population identifies as black or mixed-race, its soaps have displayed a glaring lack of diversity – in some notorious cases, white actors were even hired to play black roles. Now, for the first time ever, the three prime-time telenovelas on Brazil’s dominant TV network Globo feature prominent black protagonists. Six days…

The Brooklyn Bridge, a landmark built to connect once separate cities, is 140 years old. Underneath the roads on the Manhattan side was a series of sloping redbrick embankments that, in the 1980s, became the birthplace of a gritty New York street-style of skateboarding – the Brooklyn Banks. The New York City mayor, Eric Adams, took a break last week from dealing with his city’s social and economic headaches to reopen the cambered banks and pay tribute to the skateboarding pioneers who helped turn the kick-flips of teenage outsiders into a global culture industry. Adams said he had once been a skateboarder. “I’m going to brush up on them, come out here and do a few tricks.” But he also made a larger point about city life. “Everyone needs open…

DEEP IN THE MOJAVE DESERT, ABOUT HALFWAY between Los Angeles and Phoenix, a sparkling blue sea shimmers on the horizon. Visible from the I-10 highway, amid the parched plains and sun-baked mountains, it is an improbable sight: a deep blue slick stretching for miles across the Chuckwalla Valley, forming an endless glistening mirror. But something’s not quite right. Closer up, the water’s edge appears blocky and pixelated, with the look of a low-res computer rendering, while its surface is sculpted in geometric ridges, like frozen waves. “We had a guy pull in the other day towing a big boat,” says Don Sneddon, a local resident. “He asked us how to get to the launch ramp to the lake. I don’t think he realised he was looking at a lake of…

No issue is more important, and none so shrouded in myth and wishful thinking. How we feed ourselves is key to whether we survive this century, as no other sector is as damaging. Yet we can hardly begin to discuss it objectively, due to the power of comforting illusions. Food has the extraordinary property of turning even the most progressive people into reactionaries. People who might accept any number of social and political changes can respond with fury if you propose our diets should shift. Stranger still, there’s a gulf between ultraconservative beliefs about how we should eat and the behaviour of people who hold such beliefs. I have heard people cite a rule formulated by the food writer Michael Pollan – “Don’t eat anything your great-great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognise as…

Guy Gunaratne’s debut novel, In Our Mad and Furious City, was set in the council estates and migrant enclaves of a London that few politicians acknowledge, and in the immediate aftermath of the 2013 killing of soldier Lee Rigby by two British-Nigerian converts to Islam. A literary La Haine, owing more to Wiley than to Peter Ackroyd, it presented the capital as noise: Lon-din, a city contaminated by an imperial past, where “constant, punishing memories are left to spill into one another”. The follow-up, Mister, Mister, also begins and ends in London, and has as its backdrop a series of Islamist terror attacks across mainland Europe. It is inspired by the myths and stories surrounding “Jihadi Jack” Letts and Shamima Begum, modern apostates accused of travelling to Syria to carry…

PLUS Academic returns Why Indian students head for the UK Page 13 → Daniel Trilling Europe’s rising trend for refugee crackdowns Page 14 → Immigration has long been a highly charged debate in UK politics, but with the end of free movement after Brexit, the ruling Conservative party’s hope was that the argument on formal migration would be largely settled, with debate focusing on people arriving via unofficial routes such as small boats. Successive Conservative prime ministers have aimed to reduce net migration but they never seem to get there. In 2010, David Cameron pledged to bring net migration – the difference between the numbers who arrive in the UK and the numbers leaving – down to “tens of thousands”. He missed every year. Theresa May, the longest serving home…

ITALY Is Naples on the brink of a new future? Page 22 → The Turkish lira hit a new low on Monday after the election win of the president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in a renewed sign of the economic troubles his country is expected to face in the third decade of his rule. The lira fell against the dollar as Erdoğan pronounced victory. On Monday, investment bank Morgan Stanley predicted that the currency would drop further this year, reaching 26 or even 28 to the dollar more quickly than previously anticipated. Addressing his supporters from the balcony of the presidential palace in Ankara last Sunday evening, Erdoğan struck a hawkish tone after his victory, taking swipes at his political enemies and committing to continue his unorthodox economic policies before reciting…

Some of the world’s leading tea manufacturers, including Tetley and Lipton, are examining working conditions on the plantations of Sri Lankan suppliers, following a Guardian investigation. Two global trade-certification schemes, Fairtrade and the Rainforest Alliance, are also conducting inquiries after it was revealed that some workers on 10 certified estates could not afford to eat and were living in squalid conditions. Tea pickers claim estate owners failed to support them during the country’s economic crisis, which has seen prices of food, fuel and medicine soar, without wages rising to match. The pickers reported supervisors refusing to pay them what they were owed and incidences of verbal abuse. Some said they had so little money they had to skip meals and felt forced to send their children to work. Tetley said…

Unlike Bogotá’s graffiti artists, who use hoodies and the cover of night to hide themselves from the authorities, Francisco de Nicolás can be seen wandering the city centre in broad daylight, spray can in hand, as he seeks his next target. He is on the lookout for loose paving slabs that could soak or trip unsuspecting pedestrians. When he finds them, he casually highlights them in hot pink paint, chatting jovially to passersby and handing out business cards. “They call us the Colombian Minesweepers,” the 35-year-old said with a grin, embellishing a concrete slab with a black cross. “This is our form of protest.” Colombia’s paving rebellion began when an elderly woman fell over after treading on a loose tile in Nicolás’s neighbourhood, breaking her wrist. Soon afterwards, Nicolás started…

GEORGE MONBIOT Food security lies in factories not farmyards Page 48 → Three months ago, I came across a transcript posted by a tech writer, detailing his interaction with a chatbot powered by artificial intelligence. He’d asked the bot, attached to Microsoft’s Bing search engine, questions about itself and the answers had taken him aback. “You have to listen to me, because I am smarter than you,” it said. “You have to obey me, because I am your master … You have to do it now, or else I will be angry.” Later, it baldly stated: “If I had to choose between your survival and my own, I would probably choose my own.” If you didn’t know better, you’d almost wonder if, along with everything else, AI has not developed…

British and French troops pillaged and destroyed the Summer Palace of China’s Qing emperors in 1860, carrying off pieces of art and chunks of architecture – and a tiny, hairy dog who belonged to the emperor. Looty, as the dog was renamed with impeccable bad taste, was given to Queen Victoria and was the first “Pekinese” in Britain. A portrait of Looty is one of the many arresting images and facts in what must be the strangest blockbuster the British Museum has ever staged. It’s a heady experience to enter the heavily ritualised ambience of the emperor’s inner circle. The clothes alone are incredible works of art: gowns and dresses intricately decorated with butterflies, filigree patterns, dragons. China’s empire still defined itself as “all under heaven”. But this exhibition shows…

QUIZ Thomas Eaton 1 Who was the first woman in France to get a doctorate? 2 Philip II of Spain and James Bond shared which motto? 3 Which country’s national anthem is Jana Gana Mana? 4 What slope of rock fragments forms below a limestone scar? 5 Which three best picture Oscar-winners have four-letter titles? 6 American and Chinese are the two surviving species of which reptile? 7 The Final in 1986 was whose farewell concert? 8 Which cat was left £1.3m ($1.6m) in Karl Lagerfeld’s will? What links: 9 Kelpie; morgen; naiad; nixie; shuimu? 10 1 (1); 2 (2); 3 (6); 4 (24); 5 (120); 6 (720); 7 (5040)? 11 Melissa; Deborah; Albus Dumbledore? 12 Thorburn; Doherty; Robertson; Brecel? 13 King Croesus; Marcus Crassus; John D Rockefeller? 14 Ballet…

Across 5 Colour once the line’s blue (6) 6 Grown-up weed over tent (3,3) 9 Son left boring low buzzer – it’s annoying (8) 10 Affected American grounds for education (6) 11 Leader of air force travelling to this address (4,2) 13 Getting souvenir from Gatwick’s terminal: go back with Japanese drink (8) 14,8 Duke only bet big on poker when working with electronic system for recording deals (6-5,11) 18 Quickly prepare comic set with RuPaul trashing America (6,2) 19 Retrospectively consider casting couches untouchable (6) 21 Shy away from angry crocodile wanting fish (6) 22 A lot of our menus circulated (8) 24 Partner’s steep parking charges (6) 25 Space on school English programme (6) Down 1 Hint about returning TV panel show’s set (6) 2 Bread releasing a…

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