Innholdsfortegnelse for 20 September 2024 i Guardian Weekly

The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol211 | Issue№ 12 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 community. The Guardian…

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Every evening, for two hours, Asma Mustafa sits down with the small children of Nuseirat camp in central Gaza for what now passes as school in the beleaguered strip. Sometimes there are pens and paper for basic maths and literacy, but most of the time is taken up with storytelling, singing and play. “I ’ve been doing this since November,” said Mustafa, 38, who taught at a girls’ high school in Gaza City before the war. “Many children are now working or helping their families find basic things like food during the day, but I try to give them a little bit of structure and normality in the evenings.” Last week was supposed to mark the beginning of the new school year, but in Gaza 625,000 children are now entering…

At 11.45 last Thursday morning, six white-gloved pallbearers carried a coffin holding the body of the most divisive, beloved and reviled Peruvian politician of the past four decades. Behind the coffin, dressed in black under a pale but warm spring sky, came its occupant’s eldest daughter and youngest son. A crowd of ministers, political allies and military top brass awaited them at the double doors of Lima’s culture ministry. So began three days of national mourning to honour Alberto Fujimori, the upstart who served as president of Peru from 1990 to 2000 and who, nine years later, was ordered to serve a 25-year sentence for authorising kidnappings and murders during his government’s “war against terrorism”. Last Saturday, after a state funeral at the ministry, supporters gathered as he was buried…

Zhanna Yaroslavska showed off a barrel-shaped stove in the middle of a tropical green-house. Nearby was a pile of logs. “It’s a pretty neanderthal arrangement,” she said. “When the power shuts off, we feed the stove with wood. In winter we do this round the clock. Our plants require constant temperatures. They don’t like cold and hot.” Inside the glass nursery were dozens of rare specimens. All were bromeliads native to the Americas. Silvery wisps of Tillandsia descended from a pipe. A pineapple poked out of a stem. A screen next to the stove protected a group of starfish-like earth stars. The collection needed a minimum temperature of 10C, Yaroslavska – a senior researcher – said. Below that everything would die off. The greenhouse is one of eight in the…

In a corner of Covent Garden, well-heeled Londoners and tourists browse the range of frankincense products sold by a leading cosmetics brand. Amid the aromatic resin sheathed under glass, shoppers can buy “age-defying” serums, creams and essences, and tablets to strengthen brittle nails and hair. At one counter, a sales assistant is advising customers on how much of the essential oil to add to their nebuliser to make guests feel relaxed “without overwhelming them”. Another explains frankincense’s “hydrating and rejuvenating” properties. In terms of popularity, she says, it outstrips lavender, tea tree and other botanicals. It also fetches high prices. Here, a 50g bottle of frankincense firming cream costs upwards of $100. Frankincense has been harvested in the Horn of Africa and across the Red Sea in the Arabian peninsula…

Kathryn started taking Ozempic “off label” in April 2023 on her doctor’s advice. The Illinois resident had been diagnosed with gestational diabetes while pregnant and was struggling with her weight after the birth of her daughter. Following a short break from the drug in July because of side-effects, she started taking it again in August. In September, she found out she was pregnant. Although Kathryn wasn’t using contraception, the pregnancy still came as a surprise. She had been told by doctors that she was unlikely to conceive naturally, and had been through several unsuccessful rounds of intrauterine insemination (IUI) before giving birth to her first child via IVF. “It was completely unexpected,” Kathryn told me. “We hadn’t really planned to grow our family quite so soon – my first daughter…

THEY TRAVELLED AT NIGHT, for what seemed like hours, but it was difficult to tell. Yonas was blindfolded and drowsy from the Xanax he had been given. He wasn’t sure where he was, but he could smell salt in the air when the car stopped. Yonas heard Ali, the other passenger, wind down his window and light a cigarette. The driver sat, breathing heavily. Several minutes passed in silence. Then Yonas heard a pinging noise. Someone’s phone had received a message. The door next to Yonas was opened, and two men escorted him into a building. After they took off his blindfold, the men walked down a long corridor and took the stairs to the basement. There, Yonas entered a room where a man dressed in blue scrubs was talking…

Established in 2001, Wikipedia is an “old man” by internet standards. But the role it plays in our collective knowledge of the world remains astonishing. Content from the free internet encyclopedia appears in everything from high-school term papers and pub trivia questions to search engine summaries and voice assistants. Tools like Google’s AI Overviews and ChatGPT rely heavily on Wikipedia, although they rarely credit the site. And therein lies the problem: as Wikipedia’s visibility diminishes, reduced to mere training data for AI applications, it also loses prominence in the minds of readers and potential contributors. When someone notices a topic that is poorly described on Wikipedia, they might feel motivated to correct it. But this can-do spirit goes away when the error comes through an AI summary, where the source…

Sitting at the end of the wooden jetty, I watch the line of longboats ease out of the harbour towards the start of the race. I don’t envy the crews – each with four rowers and a cox – who will tackle this triangular opensea course of about 5km. They are an amiable bunch who have travelled with their longboats, all built to the same basic design, from coastal settlements across west Wales. The support for the exhausted crews is enthusiastically vocal. Many of the folk here know each other well and the sport seems more collaborative than competitive – often loaning gear, boats or even crew members to other teams. I chat with a friend, who asks if I had seen the otter that was spotted weaving between the…

1 UNITED STATES Trump assassination attempt suspect charged The suspect in the second apparent assassination attempt of Donald Trump in as many months was charged in federal court on Monday with two gun-related crimes, as urgent investigations began into how he was able to get so close to the former president. Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, a pro-Ukraine activist from Hawaii who is registered to vote in North Carolina, was detained after a secret service agent spotted the barrel of an AK-47-style rifle poking through a chain link fence on the outskirts of Trump International Golf Club West Palm Beach last Sunday, where the former president was playing. Routh was later arrested speeding north from Palm Beach in his car. As the US continued to react in shock to the latest apparent…

It has happened again. Another serene and sunny weekend. Another lone suspect wielding a rifle. Another apparent bid to assassinate Donald Trump. And a nation hurtling into uncharted territory 50 days from a presidential election. Last Sunday, Secret Service agents opened fire after seeing a man with a rifle near Trump’s West Palm Beach golf club in Florida while he was playing. The suspect fled and was later apprehended by local law enforcement. The FBI found in the bushes two backpacks, an AK-47-style firearm with a scope and a GoPro camera – suggesting a plan to kill the Republican presidential candidate and film it for the world to witness. On Monday, federal prosecutors brought charges against the suspect, Ryan Wesley Routh, related to improperly possessing a gun. The incident was…

Keir Starmer travelled to Rome this week for bilateral talks about immigration with Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni. The British prime minister, under pressure to tackle irregular migration across the Channel from France, wanted to examine how Meloni’s hard-right government has cut the number of people arriving in dinghies across the Mediterranean. What policies has the Meloni government pursued? Last September, Lampedusa was once again inundated with people after more than 11,000 arrived on the tiny southern Italian island, mostly from Tunisia, within a week. The emergency highlighted Meloni’s struggles to keep her election campaign pledge to curb irregular migration to Italy, but it also marked a turning point. With Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, by her side, the Italian leader vowed to get tough.…

Within a week of being inaugurated in April as Senegal’s youngest president, Bassirou Diomaye Faye named his political mentor, Ousmane Sonko, as prime minister and announced his 25 cabinet appointments. Faye had swept to power on a leftist, anti-establishment and pan-African agenda promising radical reform, and said in his victory speech that his administration would focus on national reconciliation, easing the cost of living crisis and fighting corruption. His first-round victory in March over Amadou Ba, who represented the ruling administration, was all the more remarkable because Faye and Sonko were released from prison only 10 days before the vote, under an amnesty announced by the previous president, Macky Sall. Sall, in power for 12 years, had tried to delay the vote, and left office with his country facing widespread…

Canada’s westernmost province has been gripped by a chaotic provincial election campaign, rife with political backstabbing, abrupt resignations and unexpected allegiances. As an unpopular premier squares off against a climate crisis sceptic, the 19 October vote could have profound consequences for British Columbia, a province seen as being in the vanguard for progressive climate policy. Until recently, voters were split between the governing New Democratic party (NDP, a left-leaning party in power since 2017) and the insurgent British Columbia Conservative, or BC United, a rebranded incarnation of a party that has long dominated the province’s politics. But the campaign has descended into chaos after the BC United leader, Kevin Falcon, announced he would withdraw his party from the election, over fears it could split the rightwing vote with the separate…

The far right across Europe used to dream of seeing their countries leave the European Union. In France, they called for a Frexit; in Germany, it was Dexit. But recently these calls have quietened. The reason is not that far-right parties have become enamoured of the EU, but rather they now understand that instead of quitting, they can reshape the EU into a collection of “strong” nation states that will each enact their own rightwing anti-migration agenda. As Jordan Bardella, president of the National Rally (RN) in France, recently remarked in explaining why his party no longer called for France to quit the EU: “You don’t leave the table when you are winning the game.” That the far right is being allowed to “win the game” is abundantly clear in…

Sometimes, only toast will do, whether it’s thickly cut and slathered with butter, popped under a mound of sauteed mushrooms (take Guardian Feast columnist Meera Sodha’s lead and stir in some brown and white miso), or bulked up with cheesy curried butter beans à la Yotam Ottolenghi. Toast can do it all, and at any time of day. That said, I think we can all agree that toast is often best under some lovely, bubbly cheese. Patrick Williams, chef-owner of Kudu Collective in south-east London, does this “the South African way, to snack on with a beer at a braai [barbecue]”. It’s serious business, too: “There’s competition between my brother and I about who makes the best,” Williams says, and success relies on using only “decent stuff”, which means good-quality…

✱ All solutions published next week Across 1 Criticism of crowd after benefits rejected (8) 5 Boo trio of women barking – like this (3,3) 9 Steep harbour with three sides (8) 10 One who fuelled interest in central European bloodsucker (6) 12 Damaged label on load? It goes down like this (4,7) 15 Wipes unduly costly lists from the centre (5) 17 Praise a fight that’s reportedly close enough (2,2,5) 18 Immediately left home when opposed (5,4) 19 Tennis champion is fifty-fifty to clinch final (5) 20 Obscure definition of ignorance (6-5) 24 Harsh having American agents return to arrest British detectives (6) 25 Barred us frolicking and being more silly (8) 26 Part of course raised facilitating removal of lab’s waste? (3-3) 27 Distressing condition includes evidence about…

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MIGRATION Starmer explores Italy-style irregular migration plan Keir Starmer has shown “great interest” in the Italy-Albania migration deal, the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has said, as the UK vowed to send £4m ($5.3m) to support her crackdown on irregular migration. Speaking at a press conference in Rome, the UK prime minister indicated that he was more interested in Italy’s strategy for stopping migrants from reaching the country than its deal with Albania, which is a few weeks away from completion. The money the UK will send to Italy will contribute to the Rome process, which is the Italian government’s project to tackle the root causes of irregular migration. A Downing Street spokesperson said Starmer and his new border security commander, Martin Hewitt, had “agreed to take immediate steps to…

A GROUP OF ISRAELI HOSTAGES werehuddled in a tunnel in Gaza a few days after they had been dragged from their homes on 7 October, when the man who had plotted their abduction appeared out of the subterranean gloom. His hair and beard were grey and his dark-ringed eyes stared out from under thick black brows. It was a face familiar to them from a thousand broadcasts and newspaper stories: Yahya Sinwar. The Hamas leader in Gaza was the most feared man in Israel, even before he ordered the October raid in which 1,200 people – two-thirds of them civilians – were killed and 250 taken hostage. In fluent Hebrew, perfected over more than 22 years in an Israeli prison, Sinwar reassured them that they were safe and would soon…

As gleeful Democrats spent days circulating video clips of Kamala Harris ridiculing and riling Donald Trump in last week’s presidential debate, the candidates got back to the brutal grind of winning over the tiny proportion of voters who will decide November’s election in a clutch of swing states. Last weekend, Harris continued her tour of pivotal areas to exploit the momentum from her humiliation of Trump. At the end of last week she was in Pennsylvania, perhaps the most crucial state, to push the themes she hit hard in the debate in painting the former president as a threat to democracy, women’s rights and the US’s international standing. Trump was in Arizona before heading to Michigan, both states he narrowly won in 2016 then lost four years later, as he…

Picturesque towns across central Europe were inundated by dirty flood water this week after heavy rains turned tranquil streams into raging rivers that wreaked havoc on infrastructure. The floods killed at least 16 people and destroyed buildings from Austria to Romania, and came amid devastating floods elsewhere around the world. Entire villages were submerged in Myanmar, where at least 113 people have died and hundreds of thousands more were displaced. In Nigeria nearly 300 prisoners escaped a collapsed jail following flooding caused by a dam burst after heavy rain, which affected more than 1 million people. Climate scientists say they are troubled by the damage but not surprised by the intensity. “The catastrophic rainfall is exactly what scientists expect with climate change,” said Joyce Kimutai, of Imperial College London’s Grantham…

The Darién Gap’s isolation and formidable reputation has shielded the Indigenous communities who live there from the outside world for centuries. Spanish conquistadors died trying to settle in the sliver of dense rainforest connecting Colombia with Panama, and in recent decades only the most intrepid outsiders have undertaken the 100km trek. Now, however, with half a million people slogging through the rain-forest on migration routes to the US each year, Darién’s Indigenous groups say their ecosystem and way of life are under threat. “It’s something that we did not expect, as the migration took off from one day to the next and suddenly we found ourselves flooded with trash,” said Yenairo Aji, a community leader, or “noco”, in Nueva Vigía, a village close to the Darién’s northern frontier where about…

There’s a need for another strategy that keeps their movement alive Against all the odds, they pulled off a once-inconceivable democratic victory against one of the world’s most unyielding authoritarian regimes. Even more astonishingly, Venezuela’s opposition activists managed to prove it, gathering a vast cache of voting data that offered concrete proof of their success. Yet six weeks after Venezuela’s presidential election, it was the candidate widely believed to have won, Edmundo González, who flew into exile in Spain, while the apparent loser, Nicolás Maduro, looks set to keep power. “Is this game over?” one of the country’s top journalists, Luz Mely Reyes, asked of the opposition challenge in El País – a question now on many people’s lips. Opposition leaders are adamant their campaign to remove Maduro – widely…

If one town could be emblematic of the vicissitudes of blue-collar life in America, Springfield, Ohio, might be as good a pick as any. At the heart of the midwest, Springfield’s prosperity was built on manufacturing and publishing. But its decline began early. The giant Crowell-Collier publishing plant closed on Christmas Eve 1956. Three decades later, in 1983, Newsweek dedicated an issue to Springfield. Entitled “The American Dream”, it concluded sadly: “The times have not been hospitable to dreaming.” The years that followed proved even less hospitable as manufacturers deserted the town and wages plummeted. A 2016 Pew Research report found that Springfield had lost more high-income earners and gained more low-income earners than any other metropolitan area in America. The town became stalked by the diseases of despair, from…

Neither The Poet nor The Lover, whose portraits open this heart-stopping Van Gogh exhibition, were quite what they seem. The Lover’s eyes gazes dreamily from a face of blue-green tints, wearing a red cap flaming against an emerald sky, in which a gold moon and star twinkle. In reality, he was an army officer called Paul-Eugène Milliet, whose affairs were less ethereal than the painting suggests. “He has all the Arles women he wants,” wrote Van Gogh enviously. The Poet’s face, meanwhile, is anxious and gaunt, its ugliness badly hidden by a thin beard. He was a Belgian painter called Eugène Boch, whose work Van Gogh thought so-so. But beggars can’t be choosers. They were among the few friends Van Gogh had in Arles, after he arrived in February 1888…

The oceanographer Evie Beaulieu stumbles on her heart’s desire while surveying the wreckage of a second world war naval battle. Thirty metres down in the waters of Micronesia’s Truk lagoon, past the Japanese submarines that have become kelp gardens and the sunken warships teeming with fish, she alights on the skeletons of two sailors that have long since become coral sculptures. Momentarily starved of oxygen, Evie foresees her own death and her ideal resting state. She decides she wants to die at sea, become a reef and thereby secure a rich and strange afterlife. Themes of transformation, loss and regeneration abound in Richard Powers’ Play-ground, a transcendentalist deep dive of a novel that at times almost caves under the weight of its ambitions. Ostensibly, it spins the tale of Makatea,…

Across 1 Dickens novel serialised in the 1850s (6,6) 9 Bulbous plant (5) 10 Perfumed liquid (7) 11 Von Bismarck, e.g. (4) 12 Worker (8) 14 Drink of the Olympian gods (6) 15 Like this clue? (6) 18 Mediterranean islander – chess opening in which black’s first move is pawn to c5 (8) 20 Level (4) 22 Moves faster than (7) 23 Inferior (5) 24 Performer of a folk art with e.g. handkerchiefs and sticks (6,6) Down 2 Asinine (7) 3 Strong flavour – Chinese dynasty (4) 4 Pitch one’s tent (6) 5 Disaster at sea (3,5) 6 Sport named after a school (5) 7 Something wonderful (3,4,5) 8 Get a hugely enthusiastic reception (2,4,1,5) 13 Cypriot cheese (8) 16 ‘Heads’ side of a coin (7) 17 Gave rise to…