Innholdsfortegnelse for 21 February 2025 i Guardian Weekly

The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol212 | Issue№ 8 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…

European leaders have been asked by the US to provide security guarantees, including a military force, for Ukraine in the event that Donald Trump is able to strike a peace or ceasefire agreement with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. Though an end to the three-year war in Ukraine had been considered a way off, Trump’s announcement last Wednesday that he was willing to talk to Russia has led to a scramble to work out how to respond. What could a military force in Ukraine look like? Matthew Savill, director of military sciences at the UK’s Royal United Services Institute thinktank, argues there are several levels of force that could be deployed after a ceasefire in Ukraine. The first is a large land deterrence force, able in theory to fight, if…

One month after the announcement of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, the Palestinians of Gaza have begun improvising a new life amid the wreckage of the old. Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and Hamas are still playing a game of nerves, even though the schedule laid down in the ceasefire agreement went ahead last Saturday. Three more hostages, Iair Horn, Sasha Troufanov and Sagui Dekel-Chen, were released by Palestinian militant groups in return for the release of 369 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel on 15 February. Now there is an unanticipated blot hanging over Gaza’s already clouded future. Donald Trump’s bizarre plan for the US to “own” Gaza, empty the territory of its 2.2 million people, and build a “Riviera of the Middle East” on their land. The reactions of everyone…

When Rachel Reeves stood up in the Commons on budget day on 30 October as Britain’s first woman chancellor, she was brimming with pride: “To girls and young women everywhere, I say: let there be no ceiling on your ambition, your hopes and your dreams.” Four months on, however, there are few at Westminster who would envy Reeves’s lot in charge of the country’s finances. Things, broadly speaking, have not gone to plan for Reeves since the end of October, at home or abroad. Growth has stalled – the Bank of England said earlier this month that it had reduced its growth forecast from the 1.5% it was expecting in November to 0.75% – and borrowing costs have risen. This has meant less money in to the exchequer in taxation…

The startling contempt for Europe’s intensifying security concerns displayed by Donald Trump and his henchmen has brought an old, controversial question back to the fore: should Britain and France pool their nuclear weapons capabilities and create a Europe-wide defensive nuclear shield to deter Vladimir Putin’s Russia, if the US reduces or withdraws its support? Trump has not explicitly threatened to cut US nuclear forces based in Europe. But last week, the president said he wanted to halve the US’s defence spending, especially on nuclear weapons. Trump often denigrates Nato, the keystone of European security. Last year, he encouraged Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to member states that, in his view, spend too little on defence. Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, warned Nato defence ministers in Brussels…

It is expected that a book review will be written with some degree of critical distance, but, in this case, distance is not possible. On 27 June, 2023, Victoria Amelina was in a restaurant in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk when it was hit by a Russian missile. She died of her injuries a few days later, leaving the book she was working on unfinished. Shock and grief at her killing continues to reverberate among those close to her, and among her wider circle of friends, of whom I was one. She was 37 and the mother of a young son. The full-scale Russian invasion transformed every aspect of Amelina’s life. She had previously been a writer of fiction, but it was not a time for novels. She began…

Across 1 Involving more than one (6) 4 Circus setting (3,3) 8 The pub down the road (5) 9 It’s deceptive when pulled (4,3) 10 One’s done a bunk (7) 11 Like a feather (5) 12 Feelings of intense longing (9) 17 Film industry bigwig (5) 19 Party, wedding or town (7) 21 Declare unfit (for use or consumption) (7) 22 Unfairly hike prices (5) 23 Guarantee (6) 24 High (6) Down 1 Insignificant (quantity) (6) 2 Mysterious and hard to explain (7) 3 Let (something happen) (5) 5 Blood sugar-regulating hormone (7) 6 Revealing underwear (5) 7 Sitting this way, one’s very comfortable (6) 9 Equipment used on the stove top (6,3) 13 What’s wrong with you? (7) 14 Damage caused by ultraviolet radiation (7) 15 Hits (6) 16…

1 EUROPE Russian and US officials hold talks in Saudi Arabia Leading Russian and US officials met in Saudi Arabia this week for high-stakes talks aimed at ending Moscow’s nearly three-year war in Ukraine, with Kyiv and Europe excluded from the negotiations. The swift push to organise the talks came after last week’s call between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, where the two leaders discussed opening negotiations on the war. The meeting in Riyadh marked the first in-person discussions between top officials from the countries in years, after a sharp downturn in relations following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It was expected the talks could lay the groundwork for a Trump-Putin summit. The talks followed a tumultuous week for European officials in which Trump revealed he had held a 90-minute conversation with…

‘I live Gregor, 59, from Trier, a in Germany’s oldest city, founded by the Romans over 2,000 years ago,” said town of about 110,000 inhabitants in the country’s affluent south-west. A short distance from the borders of Luxembourg, Belgium, France and the Netherlands, Trier is often described as being “in the heart of Europe”. “When I walk the dog,” Gregor said, “I see old people looking for food in rubbish bins. It hurts me. Twenty years ago, I never saw anything like this.” Gregor worked in finance for about 40 years until he lost his job last summer. He is looking for a new job, but in Luxembourg, not Germany, because “the pension system is much more attractive there, the roads are better, public transport is free”. He will be among…

More than a decade after the triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, Japan is again turning to nuclear power as it struggles to reach its emissions targets and bolster its energy security. In a draft strategic energy plan due to be approved by the cabinet this month, the trade and industry ministry said it was ditching attempts to lessen Japan’s reliance on nuclear power in the wake of the Fukushima disaster – the world’s worst nuclear accident since Chornobyl 25 years earlier. The document dropped a reference to “reducing reliance” on nuclear energy that had appeared in the three previous plans, and instead called for a “maximisation” of nuclear power, which will account for about 20% of total energy output in 2040, based on the assumption that 30…

Years before he became US vice-president and advocated defiance of the courts over the Trump administration’s blitz through the federal bureaucracy and constitution, JD Vance revealed his contempt for legal constraints. In 2021, he predicted that Donald Trump would again be elected president and advised him to “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people”. “When the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it,’” he told the Jack Murphy Live podcast. Whether the seventh president actually said that remains disputed, but the sentiment is alive and well as the Trump administration defies federal court orders to at least pause its subversion of the…

Arab states are in a bind. King Abdullah of Jordan squirmed in the Oval Office last week, as the press asked him and Donald Trump about the US president’s Gaza plan. He is in a tight spot, wanting to keep Trump onside while at the same time not agreeing to the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Immediately after, anonymous Egyptian “security sources” said that President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi would not accept an invitation to visit Washington as long as the Gaza displacement plan was on the agenda. Now, this was probably more for the Egyptian public’s consumption than for Trump’s benefit – Egypt is in no position to make an enemy of the new administration – but it nonetheless shows how hard it is for Trump to secure the acquiescence of…

In 1977, the punk band Buzzcocks released a single called Orgasm Addict, with a record sleeve as jolting as the song’s title. It depicted a lean and muscular, oiled-up naked woman with an iron for a head and smiling, lipsticked mouths for nipples. The collage was scary, sexy and shocking – especially since it was mass produced, seen in record shops and on the streets, rather than confined to a gallery. “Buzzcocks had just signed to United Artists, so there was quite a large publicity budget,” Linder Sterling, the creator of the collage, remembers. “So that poster was in cities everywhere. It was unmissable. There was no social media, so the effect was hard to track, but years later people say to me ‘I saw that poster in Glasgow, or…

Picture a farm that has been in a family for generations and can no longer be made to pay; there’s an orchard of beloved trees that may have to be chopped down. It’s a hot, dry summer and two estranged brothers decline into middle age while their adolescent children wait desperately for their lives to begin. This is a world we’d expect to find in a play by Chekhov, rather than a novel by Tash Aw, who has made his name with exuberant, heavily plotted portraits of life in Malaysia and China, the characters edging between makeshift grifting and actual criminality. But now he has distilled his vision of the novel into something smaller and more intense. The South takes place on a single farm in rural south Malaysia over…

Sunday afternoon, and we have gathered between the churchyard of St Andrew’s and the River Wye to mark time. We are here to celebrate St Brigid’s Day and Imbolc (the first day of Gaelic spring) with meditation and a hedgerow communion. In the sun we walk in silence to the old fish ponds and the ancient settlement. I have walked this way many times, past the chestnuts and out into the opening backed by oak trees leaning down to the river. Out of the silence, I hear the “tseep-tseep” of a redwing amid the “chack-chack” of fieldfares. I glimpse its quizzical eye and cream eyebrow; the mottled, lynx-like feathers and the red flash. The redwing reminds me of last year, when we took red ribbons – called brat bríde –…

LABOUR More than 900 party figures condemn migration policy A group of more than 900 Labour members and trade unionists, including MPs and peers, accused the government of copying the “performative cruelty” of the Conservatives in its migration and asylum policy. In a joint statement, they singled out the Home Office’s decision, revealed last week, to refuse citizenship to anyone who arrives in the UK via “a dangerous journey” such as a small boat over the Channel. The statement also criticised ministers for highlighting the number of people being deported from the UK, with a Home Office publicity blitz last week using footage and images showing people being removed on planes. The statement was signed by seven serving MPs as well as four ex-Labour MPs who now sit as independents,…

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has had some tough days in the past three years, but the last two weeks may be up there with the worst of them. Back on 10 February, in an hourlong interview with the Guardian at his Kyiv offices, the Ukrainian president was in a cautiously optimistic frame of mind. He said he had received “positive signals from the Americans” over upcoming negotiations. His team was working to fix a date for a meeting with Donald Trump, he said, and he was sure that the US president understood the importance of coordinating his position with Kyiv before talking to Russia. Zelenskyy’s main message was that it was vital for the US to play a key role in enforcing any potential peace settlement. If Ukraine was to be denied…

Outside the deserted political security directorate in Homs, freshly recruited armed guards are engaged in a heated debate about justice. Sado Junaid, whose sister and brother-in-law were held and tortured in the building’s underground prison, sides with Mahmoud al-Bashar, who holds the coil of wire and black-and-white rod that were used to beat him and other detainees. They clash with another young recruit about whether they should be allowed to torture officers from the deposed regime of Bashar al-Assad before those accused of crimes face trial – or whether suspects should be handed over to Syria’s nascent justice system. “I just want to meet one of them and torture them as they did me,” said Mahmoud al-Bashar. Junaid added: “If you saw someone who tortured your father, your brother, your…

Across Guinea’s capital, Conakry, billboards proclaim the people’s loyalty to Mamady Doumbouya, the general who has led the west African country since a coup in 2021. The iconography is omnipresent. Along the Fidel Castro highway, posters hang on poles that rise out of piles of rubbish. Near the grand mosque, one poster is accompanied by the gnomic inscription: “Your silence is precious, your eyes reassuring.” Another, an image of him shaking Xi Jinping’s hand at a meeting in Beijing in September, has the caption: “Welcome back Mamady Doumbouya, our pride.” For many in Guinea’s political opposition and civil society, the reverential messaging is a distraction from the junta’s increasingly authoritarian exercise of power and an ominous sign that Doumbouya has no intention of relinquishing power. “Each of us is afraid…

Alone figure takes to the stage, a giant maple leaf flag rippling on a screen behind him as he gingerly approaches the microphone. “I’m not a lumberjack, or a fur trader,” he tells the crowd. “I have a prime minister, not a president. I speak English and French, not American. And I pronounce it ‘about’ – not ‘a boot’.” The crowd grows increasingly enthusiastic as the man works his way through a catalogue of Canadian stereotypes, passing from diffidence to defiance before the climactic cry: “Canada is the second largest landmass! The first nation of hockey! And the best part of North America! My name is Joe! And I am Canadian!” The ad, for Molson Canadian beer, was immensely popular when it aired in 2000. And now, with Canada’s identity…

Iremember making pearls of balsamic vinegar, my first and only foray into what is known as “molecular gastronomy”, in 2013. It was already a bit passe at that time, but the science experiment aspect – using a pipette to drop balls of agar-stiffened vinegar into oil – of creating a simple acidic garnish for a chocolate and strawberry cupcake was undoubtedly fun. I’d go on to use agar-agar, a vegan gelatine, in dishes like panna cotta, but I never made the pearls again. They were a novelty, and now I have a fond memory of cosplaying as Ferran Adrià, a Spanish chef who popularised these sorts of processes through the restaurant El Bulli. The pearls came to mind while reading about an experiment conducted by Ernesto Di Maio at the…

I rarely use a whole tin of coconut milk in one go. What can I do with the leftovers? Happily, the warming sweetness of coconut milk is welcome in many dishes, meaning leftovers are no bad thing. When Mandy Yin, chef-owner of Sambal Shiok in north London, is faced with this same predicament, it usually means coconut rice: “ It’s so straightforward, too; just replace half the water you’d need to cook the rice with coconut milk.” Otherwise, the excess milk could make an appearance in stews, even bolognese, or creamed spinach, she adds: “Replace the cream with coconut milk and a dash of fish sauce, and that’s really delicious.” Coconut milk is a fundamental ingredient in Sri Lankan cooking. “You’ll find kiri hodi, a coconut milk-based sauce infused with…

* All solutions published next week Across 1 Pull old-fashioned woman over for being a slowcoach (7) 5 Have gangs taken over society? (7) 10 Colour at the heart of nebula that’s exploding (4) 11 Publicises actors moving into Norfolk area (10) 12 Metal device Apple might make for Reagan? (4) 13 Labour leader’s suppressing rage following Conservative mistakes (8) 14 Young people take drugs into strange building (9) 16 Supporters welcome end of power plants (5) 17 Treatment of waste 50% removed for you and me (5) 19 Playwright: I see Earnest initially getting cold feet (9) 23 Queen’s champion backing artificial intelligence (8) 24 Low centre of pants to reveal some flesh (4) 25 Bring tea baked in tin with vegetable (6,4) 26 Starter’s delightful, they say, in…