Innholdsfortegnelse for 14 July 2023 i Guardian Weekly

The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol 209 | Issue№ 2 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 fight for the common good, and to build hope. Our values, as laid out by editor CP Scott in 1921, are honesty, integrity, courage, fairness, and a sense of duty to the reader and the…

‘Out of control’ UN warning after record temperatures Page 13 → Fatima Bhutto People are dying trying to flee crises Page 14 → ‘Very unusual”, “worrying”, “terrifying”, and “bonkers” – the reactions of veteran scientists to the sharp increase in north Atlantic surface temperatures over the past three months raise the question of whether the world’s climate has entered a more erratic and dangerous phase with the onset of an El Niño on top of human-made global heating. Since April, the warming appears to be on a new trajectory compared with the past. Meanwhile global sea ice has crashed down by more than 1m sq km below the previous low. “If a few decades ago, some people might have thought climate change was a relatively slow-moving phenomenon, we are now witnessing…

SPAIN Can Yolanda Díaz fend off the far right? Page 22 → Four days after Wagner group mercenaries marched on Moscow, a Russian envoy flew into Benghazi to meet a worried warlord. The message from the Kremlin to Khalifa Haftar, the selfstyled general who runs much of eastern Libya, was reassuring: more than 2,000 Wagner fighters, technicians, political operatives and administrators in the country would be staying. “There may be some changes at the top but the mechanism will stay the same: the people on the ground, the money men in Dubai, the contacts, and the resources committed to Libya,” the envoy told Haftar in his palatial residence. “Don’t worry, we aren’t going anywhere.” The conversation, relayed to the Guardian by a Libyan former official, underlines the degree to which…

In December, amid sub-zero temperatures, thousands of Mongolians turned up in Sükhbaatar Square in the capital, Ulaanbaatar, to protest about rampant corruption, and for a moment the Asian democracy, sitting uneasily between China and Russia, looked as though it might crumble. That this would have mattered to the west is shown by the number of European politicians who since have travelled to the capital, including Emmanuel Macron, the French president, the Polish president, Andrzej Duda, the German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, and her French counterpart, Catherine Colonna. Mongolia, with a population of more than 3 million, is not strategically important, but is rich in coal, copper and critical minerals, including the uranium that France needs for its nuclear energy. Hundreds of international investors were in the capital last weekend for…

‘It’s not happening.” This is the blunt verdict on efforts to turn Canary Wharf into a shopping and leisure destination. “Mondays and Fridays are dead,” said the frank shop worker. “This shop used to take a fair bit before Covid but now everything’s changed.” It’s an assessment that appears to be shared by other tenants in the vast east London financial hub. HSBC’s decision to leave its “tower of doom” in the docklands and move back to the City of London after more than two decades has dealt a hammer blow to Canary Wharf’s standing as a global financial centre. The move has left onlookers examining landlord Canary Wharf Group (CWG)’s plans to raise the appeal of the former wasteland, at a time when hybrid working has reduced the throng…

The yacht Diversity leaves the harbour of Aqaba, the only coastal town in Jordan. To the right is the Israeli resort of Eilat; in the Red Sea, a boxfish makes leisurely circles in absurdly clear, turquoise water. The boat soon anchors just offshore, directly in front of Aqaba’s electricity plant, and suddenly everything happens quickly: the passengers donned wetsuits, passed around gloves and cloth bags, and then, one by one, dive in. They all have one mission: to collect as much rubbish as possible in 30 minutes. Led by 34-year-old Beisan AlSharif, these are the women of Project Sea – an initiative born two years ago when AlSharif, a keen diver, and her friend, Seif Al Madanat, began to collect rubbish every time they dived. It is now a community…

When Merrick Garland was nominated to the US supreme court by Barack Obama, Republicans refused to grant him a hearing. Now that Garland is the top law enforcement official in America, the party seems ready to give him one after all – an impeachment hearing. Republicans on Capitol Hill are moving up a gear in a wide-ranging assault on the justice department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation that would have been unthinkable before the rise of Donald Trump. The party that for half a century claimed the mantle of law and order has, critics say, become a cult of personality intent on discrediting and dismantling institutions that get in Trump’s way. “I often think, what would Richard Nixon say?” observed Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at…

DEVI SRIDHAR Social media is damaging to kids’ health Page 47 → Should public policy be “race conscious” or “colour blind”? Should it target the specific inequalities faced by minority groups or treat all citizens equally without any reference to individuals’ racial and cultural backgrounds? The contrast between these two approaches has often been seen as that between Anglo-Saxon multiculturalism and French assimilationism, the one “based on the right of ethnic minorities, of communities”, the other “based on individual rights”, as Marceau Long, then the president of France’s Haut Conseil à L’Intégration, put it in 1991, adding that the Anglo-Saxon approach, unlike that of the French, was that of “another way of imprisoning people within ghettos”. Thirty years on, we can see the issues as less given to simple binary…

At Bruce Springsteen’s recent show in Edinburgh, a fan managed to hand the 73-year-old rock icon a copy of his dissertation about masculinity. Pondering the masculinity of the Boss is logical: his themes include brotherhood, father-son conflict and the trials of physical labour; his songs are populated with downtrodden blue-collar workers, suicidal firefighters, forgotten soldiers returning from various wars, and economically disempowered men driven to murder. Indeed, he’s seen as one of the quintessential writers of the male experience. So why does he appeal to so many women? A new book by Lorraine Mangione and Donna Luff, Mary Climbs In: the Journeys of Bruce Springsteen’s Women Fans, explores the reasons why. Both authors were aware of the stereotypes of female fans, be it the groupie or infatuated screaming teen, and…

The sudden rise of India over the past few years has taken many western observers by surprise. The Indian economy has quadrupled in size in a generation. Its ancient reputation as a centre for mathematics and scientific skills remains intact, and Indian software engineers increasingly dominate Silicon Valley. India now has the largest population in the world and is clearly on its way to becoming the third economic superpower. Its economy overtook the UK last autumn and will overtake Germany and Japan within the next decade. The only questions are whether it is the US, China or India that will dominate the world by the end of this century, and what sort of India that will be. Little of this would have surprised the Britons who first sailed to India…

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, America’s voice at the United Nations, usually chooses her words carefully. “We have seen videos of Russian forces moving exceptionally lethal weaponry into Ukraine, which has no place on the battlefield,” she told the general assembly last year. “That includes cluster munitions and vacuum bombs – which are banned under the Geneva conventions.” The speech can be read on the official website of the US mission to the UN. But it comes with a neat metaphor for how messy diplomacy can be. The transcript of Thomas-Greenfield’s remarks now has the words “which has no place on the battlefield” crossed out, and the word “banned” comes with an asterisk: she should have said “the use of which directed against civilians is banned under the Geneva conventions”. Few asterisks carry…

Demonstrators hold banners displaying the slogans “resist” and “the main thing is not to be afraid at all” in Hebrew during huge anti-government protests in Tel Aviv last weekend. The protests came in opposition to a bill that would remove the “reasonableness” standard, which allows the supreme court to overrule government decisions it deems too political, implausible, or that undermine the public’s trust in government. On Monday night the bill won initial approval by parliament, with the full support of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-right ruling coalition. On Tuesday, footage showed crowds of flag-waving protesters stopping morning traffic in central Israel, Tel Aviv and near Jerusalem. The drive by Netanyahu’s nationalist-religious coalition to change the justice system has sparked unprecedented protests, stirred concern for Israel’s democratic health among western allies…

Emmanuel Macron is facing the biggest domestic challenge of his fraught second term in office, after the police shooting of a teenager of Algerian origin at a traffic stop last month led to night after night of urban unrest. The president last week announced crisis funding to help the reconstruction of burned-out buildings and public services. But questions remain over deep divisions in French society. Teenagers as young as 13 clashed with police as hundreds of public buildings were set alight, more than 5,000 cars torched, 3,400 people arrested, scores of schools damaged, 150 post offices attacked, more than 11,000 fires started and 2,000 shops looted, with an estimated €1bn ($1.1bn) damage to businesses. More than 800 police officers were injured and some of the poorest estates in the country…

In the ballroom of the five-star Savoy hotel on the Strand in central London, the super-rich and their advisers were last month advised that they may soon need to watch out for people with “pitchforks and torches” unless they do more to use their fortunes to help the millions struggling with the cost of living crisis. At an investment conference organised by Spear’s wealth management magazine, members of the global elite and their financial teams were told by progressive advisers that there was a “real risk of actual insurrection” and “civil disruption” if the inequality gap between rich and poor was allowed to widen as a result of energy and food price hikes hitting households. Julia Davies, a founding member of Patriotic Millionaires UK, a group of super-rich people calling…

At a recent “hoarding panel” meeting in east London, Daniel Pearson, commander for Shadwell and Whitechapel fire stations, played attenders a recording of a 999 call in which a panicked resident reported a fire at their home. A team of firefighters was dispatched immediately, but couldn’t access the property. Pearson displayed photographs from the scene, taken after the event: the doorways and corridors were blocked by heaps of possessions, now charred and unrecognisable. The person who made the call died. Pearson told me this kind of case is seen regularly. Last year, the London fire brigade attended 1,036 hoarding-related fires, which led to 186 injuries and 10 deaths. It now logs the properties of identified hoarders on a database, so fire stations know to send out extra firefighters if a…

WhatsApp is for old people. At least that’s what my first-year medical students tell me. Young people, especially teenagers, communicate through Snapchat, an app that reaches 90% of 13-to 24-year-olds and 75% of 13-to 34-year-olds across the UK. It has more than 21 million active users in Britain per month, which is almost one-third of the population, and each accesses the app on average more than 50 times a day. If we go back to the 1980s and 1990s, parenting was often about keeping children physically safe. A moody 14-year-old wanting to be alone in their room was a normal thing–in fact this was sufficient to protect them. Parents had clear oversight over who their kids were with at home, and the physical materials they were consuming. Fast-forward to 2023…

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 The NHS is paying the price for the legacy of PFI Your article (NHS at 75, Spotlight, 7 July), in suggesting that the NHS was healthy under New Labour and gravely sick under the Tories today, ignores the toxic legacy of the private finance initiative (PFI),…

We live in divisive times. Opinion is more tribal and entrenched than ever, the value of reasoned argument and compromise plummeting by the day. This volatility could spread to the multiplex this month, where a battle of the blockbusters is destined to make previous cinematic standoffs – Mothra v Godzilla, Alien v Predator, Kramer v Kramer – look like playground games. Get ready, then, for Barbie v Oppenheimer. Directed by celebrated auteurs (Greta Gerwig and Christopher Nolan respectively), and hyped by multiple trailers over the past year, both movies are scheduled to open on the same crowded day. This is one time to buy a physical ticket and save the stub to show your grandchildren. Future generations will want to know where you stood on 21 July 2023 when Barbie…

Tessa Hadley presents everything as fine at the front while it comes apart comprehensively at the back. The dozen short stories that comprise After the Funeral, her absorbing and thoroughly readable fourth collection, manage with a quiet dexterity the emotional situations that promote this kind of undoing. Lynette, central character of Dido’s Lament, bumps into – or is bumped into by – Toby, her ex of many years. The collision, and what they make of it, will maintain a certain ambivalence. Who actually bumped into whom? Which of them, if either, has recovered from the damage they did one another in the past? Elsewhere it’s a different story, although Old Friends occupies the same kind of space: Christopher and Sally are made for one another – “she fitted into the…

Across 1 Philosopher who wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra (9) 8 Large bound bundle (4) 9 Tightwad (9) 10 It’s bent in genuflection (4) 13 Casual trousers (5) 15 ___ Bergman, screenwriter, film and theatre director (6) 16 Slum area (6) 17 Hired (6) 19 Item of stationery (6) 20 Go with the flow? (5) 21 Russian, Pole or Serb, for example (4) 24 Prepared to consent (9) 25 Locate something lost (4) 26 Incorporate (9) Down 2 Angers (4) 3 Dye (4) 4 Fuse together (6) 5 Perfecting (6) 6 Appealing quality – G-man emits (anag) (9) 7 Person (or thing) that one strongly dislikes (4,5) 11 US tech giant (9) 12 Person giving advice to readers with problems (5,4) 13 Exhausted (5) 14 English grandmaster, Nigel, Kasparov’s challenger for…

1 RUSSIA Prigozhin ‘met Putin five days after Wagner mutiny’ The Kremlin said the Wagner group head, Yevgeny Prigozhin, met Vladimir Putin on 29 June, five days after his mercenary fighters marched towards Moscow in an aborted rebellion. The Russian president’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters that Putin invited 35 senior Wagner commanders including Prigozhin to the Kremlin. The statements reveal Prigozhin has travelled to Russia at least once since the deal brokered by the Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko, under which the warlord abandoned his military march on Moscow in exchange for safe passage to exile in Belarus. According to Peskov, Prigozhin assured Putin during the meeting that his Wagner troops were loyal to the country and the president. Peskov did not comment on Prigozhin’s whereabouts, which remained unclear. Last…

UK NEWS Claims about BBC presenter mired in confusion The young person at the centre of a scandal over a BBC presenter reportedly paying for explicit pictures issued a statement on Monday in which they claimed the key allegations are “rubbish”. A prominent male BBC presenter was suspended last weekend after allegations he spent £35,000 ($45,000) buying explicit images from the young person, who was allegedly 17 years old when they started talking online. The young person’s mother made the allegations in the Sun newspaper, which published her claim that payments from the BBC presenter helped fund her child’s crack cocaine habit. Yet in a dramatic turn of events, on Monday evening the young person’s lawyer issued a statement saying the mother and the Sun had made false claims. The…

Before the Adriana, an overcrowded trawler, left Libya on 9 June, Sajjad Yousef spoke to his father. His family had begged him not to make the treacherous journey from Pakistan to Europe. But Yousef wouldn’t listen. He wanted to leave the desolation of life in Pakistan far behind. He knew the journey would be rough. His family had borrowed the millions of rupees to buy him space on that trawler, and Yousef was ready to take his chance. Most of the 750 people on board the trawler were Pakistani. They were migrants, fleeing poverty and lack of opportunity but also the ravages of the climate emergency, which is felt acutely in Pakistan. Those who risked their lives on the Mediterranean were escaping floods, droughts, glacial melt, crop damage and locust…

When Janet Yellen left Beijing last Sunday after four days of talks, the US treasury secretary in effect admitted that the delegation achieved its main objective simply by sitting down with top Chinese officials. After years of dangerous and deepening separation between the people running the world’s two biggest economies, they were finally back in a room together. At a brief press conference, Yellen listed her hopes. They included something that a decade ago would have been taken for granted: regular “senior-level diplomacy” between Washington and Beijing. The meetings between Yellen and Chinese financial officials were particularly urgent, given there is a changing of the guard in Beijing. Personal relationships between the US political elite and outgoing Chinese decision makers are being rendered obsolete. Yellen’s visit is part of a…

Just over a year ago, Yolanda Díaz gave a newspaper interview that appeared under the pleasingly provocative headline: “No basta con gestionar, a este Gobierno le falta alma” – “Running things isn’t enough; this government lacks spirit.” While alma could also be translated as soul, heart or enthusiasm, the thrust of Díaz’s comments to El País was perfectly clear. Despite being a key figure in Pedro Sánchez’s Socialist-led minority administration – she serves as labour minister and second deputy prime minister – Díaz believes governing is about more than just delivery. For her, politicians are there to improve people’s lives, to defend and increase hard-won rights, and to leave their country in a better state than they found it. Still, as she told the paper, the odd “happy policy” never…

For many locals and visitors alike, the seaside village of Polzeath is the Cornish dream. By day, holiday-makers eating ice-creams and pasties wander barefoot down its one main street. On the large sandy beach, the distant sea is the canvas to a mass of black dots, as children in wetsuits ride the waves with bodyboards and surfboards. Yet now, as hordes of wealthy teenagers from independent schools across the country descend for their annual two weeks of partying before state schools break up, locals have been braced for the darker side of tourism. This time last year, police imposed a two-day 10pm curfew after drunken late-night beach parties of around 200 teenagers got consistently out of hand. Frustrated residents woke up each day to broken prosecco bottles littering the sand;…

If Threads truly is going to upstage Twitter, then it claims it is going to do it with “kindness”. Mark Zuckerberg, whose company Meta launched the social media platform last week, said positivity would be a big difference in a product that looks remarkably similar to its rival. “We are definitely focusing on kindness and making this a friendly place,” he wrote on Threads. However, one amicable exchange between the Meta chief and a mixed martial arts professional last Thursday reminded users that Zuckerberg recently accepted Elon Musk’s offer of a cage fight. The focus on positivity, from a company well used to content controversies of its own, is a telling indication of how the tech industry views Twitter’s performance under Musk’s ownership. When Musk took over Twitter in a…

THE GOOD NEWS ‘More intell igence will lead to better everything’ In 1999, I predicted computers would pass the Turing test [and be indistinguishable from human beings] by 2029. Stanford University found that alarming, and organised an international conference – experts came from all over the world. They mostly agreed that it would happen, but not in 30 years – in 100 years. This poll has been taken every year since 1999. My guess has remained 2029, and the consensus view of AI experts is now also 2029. Everything’s going to improve. We will be able to cure cancer and heart disease, and so on, using simulated biology – and extend our lives. The average life expectancy was 30 in 1800; it was 48 in 1900; it’s now pushing 80.…

It’s a paper ticket, from before the age of the QR code, and it announces the Rolling Stones at Wembley Stadium on Saturday 26 June 1982. I was 15, but I still remember the buildup – the papers full of jokes about the band needing Zimmer frames to reach the stage and, perhaps, more frequent bathroom breaks. They called them “the Strolling Bones”. On that day, Mick Jagger was 38 years old. The joke turned on the notion that rock’n’roll was the music of the young. It had arrived in the mid-1950s in an eruption of hormones and rebellion, its themes teenage lust, longing and a future that stretched ahead, vast and mysterious. For men knocking 40 still to be singing of such things seemed ridiculous. And yet, the Stones…

What can I do with overripe berries? Emma, Bradford, England, UK Sweet, juicy berries are one of the best things about summer, but they can quickly turn squishy. Providing there’s no mould, Emma’s first option is to bake them. “You absolutely want to be throwing them into the likes of financiers, friands, a bakewell tart or even a berry tart topped with crème pâtissière,” says Philip Khoury, author of A New Way to Bake, published next month. The reason being, as berries age, “the fibre that gives them their tight and regular structure starts to give, but their flavour becomes sweeter, because the carbohydrates break down into sugar”. So, while the fruit’s texture might be compromised, “it is sweeter and, once baked, will turn nice and jammy”. By the same…

Having lived in north Suffolk for almost five years, I’ve come to see the River Waveney as a beloved friend. It flows from its source near Redgrave to the sea at Great Yarmouth, winding through some of East Anglia’s iconic landscapes, forming the boundary between Norfolk and Suffolk. This is my favourite spot, along the Angles Way near Brockdish. It is a bright day, the river sparkling. With sketchbook in hand, I feel my artistic senses heighten. The path leads me across a wooden bridge, where a grey wagtail flits among the limbs of a willow tree. By the path adjacent to the bank is a carpet of greater stitchwort (Stellaria holostea); a chiffchaff calls from ahead. The heat is perfumed with elderflower. The path widens and narrows, like the…

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