Innholdsfortegnelse for 2 January 2026 i Guardian Weekly

The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol214 | Issue№ 1 Guardian Weekly is an edited selection of some of the best journalism found in the Guardian’s digital editions in the UK, US and Australia, and the Guardian newspaper in the UK. The weekly magazine has an international focus and four editions: global, Europe, 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…

While pundits and pressure groups have raised concerns over falling fertility rates, highlighting the challenges for economies and healthcare systems, others are more upbeat, arguing the rise of the “silver economy” brings new opportunities for growth. Prof Sarah Harper, director of the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, said two-thirds of the world’s countries already had fertility rates below the replacement level needed to maintain the same size population in the next generation, and that the ageing of most populations was inevitable. But she said that brought with it certain positives. Harper said: “This is a success in so much as every baby that is born will have the opportunity – or should have the opportunity – to be highly educated, healthy and live a long, healthy life.” While acknowledging there…

In 1916, Daher Nassar, a Christian Palestinian farmer living south of Bethlehem, bought a 42-hectare stretch of farmland on the slopes and valleys of Wadi Salem, and formally registered the purchase with the Ottoman authorities, who then ruled the region. Nassar then re-registered the deed under each successive administration – the British mandate, then the Jordanian government, and finally, after 1967, under Israeli occupation. Today, that ageing, yellowing document is one of the family’s few shields against the loss of their land – a plot that lies near the town of Nahalin in the so-called Area C of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, coveted by settlers and by far-right Israeli ministers eager to see it annexed. In 1991, the Israeli authorities began a legal battle to declare the Nassar’s farm Israeli…

South Korea’s entertainment dominance appears unshakeable. Exports driven by the country’s arts hit a record $15.18bn in 2024, cementing the country’s reputation as a cultural superpower. But inside the country the two industries that helped build the Korean Wave – cinema and K-pop – are now experiencing fundamental transformations, with their survival strategies potentially undermining the creative foundations of their success. The decline in cinema is the most dramatic. Admissions – for Korean and international films – have fallen 45% since 2019, from about 226m to 123m, while box office revenue has dropped from $1.3bn to $812m. With investment slowing sharply, Korean distributors that once released more than 40 locally produced films a year put out about only 20 in 2025, and warn that 2026 could be “even more serious”…

Claims that Christians face religious persecution overseas have become a major motivating force for Trump’s base. In September, the Republican senator Ted Cruz pushed for sanctions against Nigerian officials who “facilitate violence against Christians and other religious minorities, including by Islamist terrorist groups”. Last year the president appeared to act on some of these concerns by designating Nigeria as a “country of particular concern” under the US International Religious Freedom Act, which followed weeks of lobbying by American lawmakers and conservative Christian groups. Is there religious persecution? In the past, Nigeria’s government has responded to Trump’s criticisms by saying that people of many faiths, not just Christians, suffer at the hands of extremist groups. Nigeria is officially secular but is divided between Muslims (53%) and Christians (45%), with the remaining…

Perhaps you are searching for reasons to be cheerful at the end of a particularly dispiriting year and the start of a new one that may well offer more of the same? In that case, read on. In November, I was on a train travelling into London. When I got off the train and headed for the ticket barrier, I realised I didn’t have my wallet. I knew I had it when I boarded. I made an undignified search through my coat, jacket and trouser pockets. There was no mistake. I had left my wallet on the train. A nice station attendant took the details and said he would pass the message down the line. I left him my mobile number. But it was rush hour, the man pointed out,…

I’ve always loved catching up with friends and family over a meal out. Not only is it a chance to find out what everyone’s up to, but it’s also an opportunity to try out new foods together. But I’ve realised that I’ve been guilty of contributing to food waste by leaving meals unfinished. Sometimes, I didn’t realise how big portions would be or I’d get so focused on chatting to everyone that I would forget to eat everything until it was time to go. Just before the pandemic, I decided things had to change and started taking my own takeaway box with me. It debuted at my yearly birthday afternoon tea with friends. I wanted to get my money’s worth and bring my dessert home, as I had always struggled…

✱ All solutions published next week Across 8 Miserable young guy pocketing nothing for transfer of documents (8)  9 Pick up chaps for appearance (5) 10 Hit hard (after reversal) in tie (4)  11 Trick, say, with art deal that’s corrupt (4,6) 12 Sharp techies are experts at this in Google’s rival (6) 14 Explanatory words in top case shortly for analysis (8) 16 Contend with favourite in climax? (7)  18 Son with mettle ignoring a cause of trouble? (7)  21 This person’s friend touring old city is lacking sophistication (8)  23 Amount of money (not half) to break rule possibly makes one melancholy (6) 24 A nationalist to acclaim somehow having ousted Conservative with regard to a body? (10)  26 Way of working drained sensuous supermodel (4)  27 Absurd…

1 UKRAINE/RUSSIA Alleged sab otage sets back ‘progress’ in peace talks Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia on Monday of trying to sabotage peace talks and preparing to bomb government buildings after the Kremlin said it had foiled a Ukrainian drone attack on Vladimir Putin’s residence. Zelenskyy described the Russian claim as “another lie”. He said he was “expecting” some kind of scandal following his two-hour meeting last Sunday with Donald Trump in Florida, where “progress” was made towards ending the conflict. “They do not want to finish this war,” he said. Earlier, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, claimed Ukraine had tried to hit Putin’s residence in the Novgorod region, south of St Petersburg. As a result, Moscow’s negotiating position would be reviewed, he said. Lavrov claimed Russian air defences shot down 91…

It has played a star-ring role in one of the worst periods of political turmoil in France since the 1960s. In Germany, it threatens the future of the coalition government. In Spain, thousands have taken to the streets to demand change. The right to a decent state pension has been a central plank of the European social contract for decades, but people are living longer, birthrates are falling, and the continent’s pension systems are, increasingly, unsustainable. A six-country YouGov poll reveals the extent of the public-opinion problem governments face. Many people acknowledge state pension schemes are in trouble: majorities of between 61% and 52% in Italy, France, Germany and Spain said theirs was already unaffordable, as well as 45% of respondents in Poland. In the UK the figure was 32%.…

A depleted – but far from defeated – Ukraine looks to 2026 with few good military options, even though a critical €90bn ($105bn) loan from the EU has been agreed. The financing will help Kyiv to continue defending at its current intensity until late 2027, but it will not lead to a transformation of its battlefield prospects. On land, Russia has held the initiative since 2024, but only gaining territory incrementally, largely because it constantly throws people into the “meat grinder” of the front-line. During 2025, Russian advances amounted to 455 sq km a month to the end of November, but at an estimated cost of 382,000 killed and wounded. The White House has argued, in the latest run of peace negotiations, that Ukraine is fated to lose the remaining 22%…

Chile’s government is poised to create the country’s 47th national park, protecting nearly 200,000 hectares of pristine wilderness and completing a wildlife corridor stretching 2,800km to the southernmost tip of the Americas. “I have been to many exceptional places, and I can tell you that the Cape Froward project is the wildest place I have walked through,” said Kristine Tompkins, the renowned US conservationist at the heart of the project. “It’s one of the few truly wild forest and peak territories left in the country, and the richness of the Indigenous history in the region makes a case for these territories to be preserved for all time.” It is the 17th national park created or expanded in Chile and Argentina by Tompkins Conservation and its successor organisation, Rewilding Chile. The…

Tobias Mupfuti was eight years old when he found himself homeless and living on the streets of Victoria Falls after his father had rejected him and his mother was too poor to be able to feed or clothe him or send him to school. He survived on food handouts from tourists shopping in the resort town. Four years later, sick of being bullied and threatened, he asked a boxing coach to teach him the sport for self-defence. Decades later, Mupfuti is running the Victoria Falls boxing academy, training underprivileged children and sending them to school in a story that has inspired the first Zimbabwean film to be considered for an Oscar. The short film, Rise, starring the Zimbabwe-born Hollywood actor Tongayi Chirisa, is inspired by the story of how Mupfuti’s…

By the mid-2000s, Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of teen girls was routine. From 2002 to 2005 alone, the late financier victimised “dozens” of underage teens by luring them into sex acts for payment under the auspices of massage work, some as young as 14, prosecutors said. Epstein leaned on a coterie of employees and associates – including British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell – to secure a “steady supply of minor victims”. He also enlisted his victims to recruit other girls under the false pretence of providing massages, prosecutors said. Papers in recently unveiled investigative files from the Department of Justice have put into sharper relief how he and his associates had an almost assembly line-like process for procuring victims. These documents also make clearer how girls and young women were perceived…

For those who lived through the cold war, the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 was an unforgettable moment. The sinister watch towers with their searchlights and armed guards, the minefields in no man’s land, the notorious Checkpoint Charlie border post – all were swept aside in a popular lunge for freedom. Less than a month later, on 3 December 1989, at a summit in Malta, US president George HW Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev declared that after more than 40 years, the cold war was over. Yet fast forward to January 2026, and one question persists: did the cold war – the west’s many-fronted, global confrontation with Moscow and its allies – ever truly end? Led by Vladimir Putin for the past 25 years, Russia…

If there is one thing we can rely on in this world, it is human hubris, and space and astronomy are no exception. The ancients believed that everything revolved around Earth. In the 16th century, Copernicus and his peers overturned that view with the heliocentric model. Since then, telescopes and spacecraft have revealed just how insignificant we are. In 1995, the Hubble space telescope captured its first deep-field image: this showed us that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in our known universe, huge wheeling collections of stars dispersed through space. Let’s take the International Astronomical Union’s definition of space as everything in the universe apart from our planet and atmosphere. Asking the question “ who owns space?” seems laughable. Hubris at a whole new level. The idea that…

Across 1 Bankrupt (4) 3 Smart cow (anag) – tiny heap of earth (8) 8 Food – thick-coated dog (4) 9 Gaseous element (8) 11 These can be vital (10) 14 Minnie or Baby (6) 15 Mussolini (2,4)  17 List of words (10)  20 Hitchcock film (3,5) 21 Disreputable place (4) 22 Favourite food of silkworms (8) 23 Count votes (4) Down 1 Posterior (8) 2 Landlocked European country (8) 4 Substance with sedative properties (6) 5 Unbelievably amazing (10) 6 Seaweed, e.g. (4) 7 Hue – change or influence slightly (4) 10 Dolly’s eight hour day? (4,2,4) 12 Commonly supposed to be (8) 13 OK – in excellent health (4,4) 16 Look or glance (6)  18 Stalk (4) 19 Greenish-blue (4) Solution No 17,346…

UK NEWS Rising number say Britons must be born in the UK The number of people who believe “Britishness” is something you are born with has almost doubled in two years, according to research that warns of a rising tide of ethno-nationalism in Britain. Although a majority of the public still believe being British is rooted in shared values, a growing proportion see it as a product of ethnicity, birthplace and ancestry, according to analysis carried out by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) and shared with the Guardian. About one in three people, (36%) thought a person must be born in Britain to be truly British, up from one in five (19%) in 2023, a YouGov poll carried out last month for the thinktank found. Supporters of Nigel…

France Minimum state pension retirement age: 62 Monthly state pension (average): €1,500 ($1,760) Share of GDP represented by state pension: 13.4% Population over 65: 40.2% France’s pensioners earn, on average, fractionally more than people in work, thanks in part to a generous mandatory state pension that, for those with full contributions, pays out a maximum of 50% of previous salary (up to a certain limit). In practice, that averages out at about €1,500 a month or €18,000 a year. A relatively early retirement age and high life expectancy mean French men can expect to enjoy almost 23 years in retirement and women 26, near the very top of the OECD league. The scheme has the lowest qualifying age – 62 – of the main EU economies, and French pensions from…

A deal to end the war between Russia and Ukraine was “95% done”, Donald Trump claimed after his meeting last weekend with Volodymyr Zelenskyy at Mar-a-Lago. Unfortunately, the 5% remaining includes the small matter of getting Vladimir Putin to agree to a deal – and there are precious few indicators of that being any closer. Instead, Trump’s claim seems to be the latest in a long line of overoptimistic statements anticipating a swift end to the conflict, starting with his campaign promise that he would end the war in 24 hours. Indeed, a sober observer looking at what is still left to achieve before a lasting and durable peace can be declared might react to the “95%” claim the same way Zelenskyy reacted to Trump’s insistence last Sunday that “Russia…

In January 2025, Donald Trump took the oath of office, declared himself “saved by God to make America great again” and issued a barrage of executive orders. In the ensuing months the US president and his allies moved at breakneck speed and seemed indomitable. But as 2025 drew to a close, with Trump struggling to stay awake at meetings, the prevailing image was of a driver asleep at the wheel. Opinion polls suggest that Americans are turning against him. Republicans are heading for the exit ahead of congressional contests in November that look bleak for the president’s party. “He came into office and, like a blitzkrieg, was violating laws and the constitution,” said Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of…

In Budapest, it was a call to flout the Hungarian government’s ban on Pride that catapulted the city’s mayor into the headlines. In Barcelona, it was a bold plan to rid the city of tourist flats by late 2028. And in Paris, it was a drastic makeover; one that included making the Seine swimmable and turning its car-clogged river-banks into pedestrian-friendly areas. The mayors’ actions – and the global conversation they elicited – hinted at how, in much of the world, the role of mayor has been recast. Gone are the stereotypes of endless ribbon cutting ceremonies and flesh-pressing events; instead mayors are increasingly being thrust on to the frontlines of some of society’s thorniest challenges. “I think mayors around the world have started to realise we have a new…

During a golden sunset in Memphis last May, Sharon Wilson pointed a thermal imaging camera at Elon Musk’s flagship datacentre to reveal a planetary threat her eyes could not. Free from pollution controls, the gas-fired turbines that power the world’s biggest AI supercomputer were pumping invisible fumes into the Tennessee sky. “It was jaw-dropping,” said Wilson, a former oil and gas worker from Texas who has documented methane releases for more than a decade and estimates xAI’s Colossus datacentre was spewing more of the planet-heating gas than a large power plant. That same week, the facility’s core product was running riot on news-feeds. Musk’s maverick chatbot Grok repeated a conspiracy theory that “white genocide” was taking place in South Africa when asked about topics as unrelated as baseball and scaf-folding.…

One of the worst bugbears to possess is one that is shared by hardly anyone else. It’s lonely being the only person who cares about something. It’s even lonelier when the thing you care about makes you want to stamp your feet, tear your hair out and run naked into the streets while making the face of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. And so it is for me whenever I see a film poster, headline, book cover or screen caption featuring the incorrect use of the Cyrillic alphabet. You might think this is a niche preoccupation. But you would be surprised how many times the name of “ST LIN” pops up in poster designs, supposedly representing “STALIN”. This phenomenon annoys me most when the entity depicted is not fictional. If you…

The idea was always a ludicrous one: to reduce millennia of human musical history into a book of 50 pieces of music. And yet that’s the challenge I decided to take on. The most pressing question was: why? To which my answer was: the inevitable failures and gaps of the project are precisely where its interest lies. The next concern was how. Called A History of the World in 50 Pieces, the book is not a digested history of music, nor a list of my favourite songs, performances or recordings. Instead, it’s centred on the definition of a “piece of music”. This is a democratic principle – a belief that works don’t belong only to their creators but are shared and reinterpreted by generations of musicians at distances of time,…

The way to Neath Abbey Quarry is a perfect stranger to me this morning. It’s been three years since my last visit, and the maze of the path has shifted; old tree trunks have turned to mulch and the brook carves a different channel. My companion and I shoulder big bouldering pads, poorly proportioned for tight manoeuvres, yet we bump, turn and pivot our way through. Thanks to the late sunrise, we’re gifted a lingering coda of the dawn chorus, coming from a holly thicket heavy with berries. A goldcrest fizzes around, seeking bugs startled by our approach. Like every old quarry, this place has been host to much change. Once it was a source of building blocks for monks and their abbey. Much later, it was extracted again for…