Innholdsfortegnelse for 25th June 2021 i Guardian Weekly

Eye of the storm Bridget Casey sits outside her severely damaged home with her teenage son and daughter after a tornado swept through the south-west Chicago suburb of Woodridge last Sunday night. Around 130 homes were damaged and at least five people were taken to hospital, one in a critical condition. The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 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…

Major powers convened again in Vienna this week in an eff ort to revive the Iran nuclear deal, a process complicated by the election as Iranian president of Ebrahim Raisi, a hardline conservative cleric deeply antagonistic towards western values. Israel denounced the incoming Raisi government as a “regime of brutal hangmen” over his involvement in mass executions in 1988 and predicted it would be a pawn in the hands of the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. “Raisi’s election is, I would say, the last chance for world powers to wake up before returning to the nuclear agreement, and understand who they are doing business with,” said the Israeli prime minister, Naftali Bennett. “A regime of brutal hangmen must never be allowed to have weapons of mass destruction. Israel’s position will not…

Traditional parties on the left and right are likely to keep control of most regions in mainland France after a historically low turnout in last Sunday’s first-round vote and disappointing scores for both Emmanuel Macron’s ruling centrist party and Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National (National Rally). Lists of candidates from the mainstream right topped the vote in six out of 13 regions in mainland France, leaving Nicolas Sarkozy’s old party, Les Républicains, as the dominant force, while left lists, where the Socialists dominate, finished first in five. But after decades of growing abstention and disillusionment with the political process, only about 33% of the electorate turned out to vote in the regional and local départmentales elections. The abstention rate in the 18-24 age group was over 80%. It was…

Edwin Poots last week resigned as leader of the Democratic Unionist party (DUP) after just 21 days in the job. What prompted the latest dramatic development in the leadership of Northern Ireland’s biggest party? Why did Poots resign as DUP leader? Poots quit last Thursday because colleagues revolted over a deal he had agreed with Sinn Féin and the British government about Irish language legislation. The deal clinched Sinn Féin’s agreement to revive the stalled Stormont executive and to install Poots’s protege Paul Givan as first minister. Why is the legislation so controversial? Unionists say they have nothing against the Irish language. Most parties, including the DUP, agreed to the legislation in a 2020 agreement. It would create an Irish language commissioner and an office of identity and cultural expression.…

They were pointed questions, not personal criticisms. But they will have conveyed a warning to Joe Biden that the patience of the left of the Democratic party and its leaders in “the Squad” of progressive politicians is not infinite. “Are we passing the deal that helps working people the most?” asked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the firebrand New York congresswoman and best known member of the squad. “Are we passing the deal that makes the most jobs? Are we passing a deal that brings down the most climate emissions? Are we passing a deal that raises wages and actually improves our infrastructure for the next generation?” Ocasio-Cortez’s appearance on the influential TV programme Morning Joe last week came with the US president weeks into negotiations with Republicans over a massive infrastructure spending…

Military retreats from Afghanistan are problematic, as the British (1842) and the Red Army (1989) discovered to their cost. The cliffs of the Khyber Pass feature many memorials to departing or defeated foreign forces. The 2021 withdrawal is less fraught – the US is not yet retreating under fire. But the march to the exit has nonetheless turned into an undignified sprint. Most Americans will welcome this accelerated end to an unpopular war. Yet it spells catastrophe for Afghans who pinned their hopes and their country’s future on western support in fighting Taliban and Islamist terrorism and who believed the nation-building promises made by George W Bush and others. Fighting is currently spreading like a bush fire from district to district. There is no peace deal in place, no power-sharing,…

Tokyo is that most modern of cities, the microchipped metropolis where vending machines and lavatory seats seem to have enough artificial intelligence to beat a Russian grandmaster at chess. What’s interesting about this hypermodernity is that it has arrived alongside an extraordinary renunciation of violence by a society for so long considered synonymous with it. The samurai class, once hailed around the world as the paragon of martial virtue, has given way to slick, suited salarymen. In place of the shoguns who pretty much invented military dictatorship, Japan now has the longest-serving democratic regime in Asia. The army has, by law, no offensive weapons, while Tokyo, according to numerous metrics, is the safest city in the world. David Peace’s Tokyo trilogy can be read as an allegory of this transformation.…

My new Guardian podcast, Comfort Eating, in which I talk to famous folk about their food secrets, is my dream opportunity for an honest chat. Interviewing celebrities is always a bit of a tussle: they arrive bearing lists of things they don’t want to talk about, or don’t want to be there at all. Many times, the most exhilarating part of any TV interview comes right before the cameras roll. That’s when the audio person asks, “OK, quickly, just tell me what you had for breakfast?” It’s not a real question even; it’s just the time-worn way audio people nudge celebs to make a noise so they can tinker with the sound levels. But it’s the bit when famous people are most off-guard. “Two Cre me Eggs … I can…

The cold, tired and desperate relatives camped outside the Barrio Obrero general hospital in Asunción don’t need charts or datasets to confirm what they can see with their own eyes. As Paraguay records the world’s highest daily proportion of Covid deaths relative to population, the huddled families wait for news of their loved ones – and for sudden pleas to search out the medicine and supplies that their country’s chronically underfunded health system cannot provide. “There’s really so little support from the government – it’s a disaster,” said Jessica Ortigosa, whose father was being tended in a chair instead of a bed. “They should have prepared for all this from the start of the pandemic.” On Wednesday last week, Paraguay registered 18.09 deaths per million, compared with 2.71 in India,…

If Joe Biden thinks Vladimir Putin deserves to be called a killer, his description of Ebrahim Raisi, the president-elect of Iran, is likely to be unprintable. The youngest member of the 1988 Tehran death committee, 60-year-old Raisi has been accused of systematically sending as many as 3,000 people to slaughter. When he was head of the judiciary, floggings and executions flourished, yet many see his election as a staging post to his becoming supreme leader when Ayatollah Khamenei dies. Raisi was 28 at the time of the massacres – a Tehran deputy prosecutor who stood in for Morteza Eshraghi, Tehran’s chief prosecutor, on the death committee. Acting under orders from an ailing supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, and with the war against Iraq ending in a truculent truce, the committee agreed…

The socially distanced places were set and everything was ready for the EU’s most ambitious attempt to debate with citizens … except most of the citizens who were supposed to be involved. The Conference on the Future of Europe, an 11-month consultation whose centrepiece will be citizens’ assemblies across the EU, held its first working session at the European parliament in Strasbourg last Saturday. While a full complement of EU politicians and officials attended in the Rhine city, only about 27 citizens took part – a quarter of the usual total, according to the conference website. That might seem odd for a project billed by the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, as one where citizens “play a leading and active part in building the future of our union”.…

Kimiko Hirata has fought a long, often lonely, battle against coal in Japan for more than 20 years but, for the first time, the climate activist believes the dirtiest fossil fuel is on the run across the world. Like several other winners of this year’s Goldman environmental prize, the frontline campaigner sees a shift in the political winds that has created a rare – and perhaps final – opportunity to reduce emissions and rebuild the planet’s natural life support systems. This optimism is based on local victories that prove positive change is possible, along with global shifts driven by activists such as Greta Thunberg, Joe Biden’s victory in the US presidential election and a flurry of major UN environmental conferences. For a country such as Japan, which is strongly influenced…

Young alligators swam in the water or lazed on artificial rocks as a waterfall cascaded nearby. “Alligators are found primarily in freshwater and swamps and marshes,” noted a nearby sign. “Alligators are opportunistic feeders.” The “Gator Springs” exhibit greeted religious conservatives last week as they made their way through the vast atrium of the Gaylord Palms Resort & Convention Center in Orlando, Florida, to regroup after Republicans’ loss of power in 2020 and test early contenders for the presidential nomination in 2024. After riding up an escalator, attendees at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s annual Road to Majority conference were met with a registration sign slapped with two additional labels: “Trump: Take America Back, 2024” and “Trump Store, Vendor Exhibits”. Beside it was a T-shirt that said: “Jesus is my…

Meeting last week, the US and Russian presidents issued a joint statement declaring: “a nuclear war should never be fought and could never be won”. This consciously echoes what Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev said in a landmark summit in 1985, when the US and USSR started to step up nuclear arms control, and gradually reduced the world’s fear of nuclear catastrophe. Many reports of the Biden-Putin summit have not even mentioned this joint statement, because it sounds like simple common sense. Who wants a nuclear war? Yet getting these words into a joint US-Russia statement has been surprisingly controversial. Experts who work on arms control, along with former world leaders, have been advocating for years for the “P5” – the five states that are legally recognised as nuclear powers,…

The question of how British prime ministers should and shouldn’t behave after leaving office has recently become a hot one. Property magnate and policy guru Tony Blair has refused to step out of the limelight, though at least seems aware that he will never be thanked for it. Theresa May has cashed in, reportedly charging more than £100,000 ($140,000) for a speech: not bad for a woman who was said to read from a script during private one-to-one meetings. And, of course, there is David Cameron, harassing civil servants during the darkest days of April 2020, begging them to throw his failing venture a bone, with reports that he stood to make £200m had Greensill Capital made it to flotation. By contrast, the post-Westminster career of Gordon Brown has been…

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1 UNITED STATES Supreme court upholds provisions of Obamacare The supreme court upheld the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, after Republicans attempted to gut an important provision of the law during the Trump era. In a 7-2 decision, the court ruled Republican states did not have “standing” or the right to sue. The ruling avoided the issue of whether the tax provision of the law called the “individual mandate”, and therefore the entire law, was unconstitutional. The ACA was the most important health reform law in generations and was Barack Obama’s signature legislative achievement during his time in the White House. However, the provision over which Republican states sued, the individual mandate, has long been a sore spot for many Americans. It required tax authorities to penalise Americans with…

POLITICS Tory heartlands at risk after shock byelection defeat Senior Conservatives have told Boris Johnson a swathe of seats in the “blue wall” across the south of England could be at risk, as his party was gripped by recriminations after the Liberal Democrats’ shock victory in the Chesham and Amersham byelection last week. Downing Street came under pressure to ditch Johnson’s controversial planning reforms, which many backbenchers blamed for the humiliating loss of the Buckinghamshire seat. The byelection result represented a 25% swing to Ed Davey’s Liberal Democrats, enabling their newest MP Sarah Green to overturn a 16,000-majority in a constituency that had been Conservative since it was created in 1974. A Tory MP representing a south-eastern seat said the upset was worrying, and that the Lib Dems had shown…

Leyla Çelik woke up with butterflies in her stomach. For weeks, the 22-year-old student at Berlin’s Freie Universität had tried in vain to get an appointment for her first Covid-19 vaccine shot so she could volunteer as a polling station administrator at federal elections in September. “I’d given up hope.” But last week her university off ered her a chance to get a first dose of the Moderna vaccine on campus within a few days. “It’s such a relief,” said the native Berliner. “At last I can catch a train or a bus without feeling anxious.” Millions of Europeans are experiencing similar delight. Earlier this year, they had stared enviously at Britain and the US, where vaccines were being delivered at remarkable speed while their governments couldn’t shift out of…

Possibility people When he isn’t working on the farm or making things out of jute, Gobinda Majumdar likes to walk to a tea stall near his home in Assam to buy sweets for his nieces. All this he explains with tactile signing, the only means of communication for the 37-year-old, who cannot speak and has no hearing or sight. Born deaf, Majumdar then went blind at the age of two after contracting rubella. Life has its challenges but he hopes to find a wife. “My younger brother is married so why not me?” he told the photographer Vicky Roy, who visited him in Kamrup district as part of a project to share stories of people with disabilities in rural India. “I aim to highlight ordinary people with disabilities so their…

A month on, Adam Romain is still traumatised by the violence that took place on the doorstep of his Swansea home. Rioters set fire to cars outside his terrace house, and hurled bricks through his windows. Delivery driver Romain turned on a head-cam and captured the screams of his partner and children as glass smashed and the flames danced outside. He dialled 999 and told the operator: “They’ve targeted my house. They are throwing bricks at my house. I have two children inside, please come.” Romain, 34, has spent hours mulling the causes of the Mayhill riot, in which scores of people took to the streets, pushed a car down the dizzyingly steep Waun-Wen Road and attacked police vans after a vigil for a local teenager turned sour. He believes…

It is the story of a global superpower, an illicit smuggling operation, pestilence and a small hairy fruit. Ubiquitous on supermarket shelves and in lunchboxes, the humble kiwi is New Zealand’s most valuable horticultural export. Recent battles for control of the fruit, however, have shone a light on tensions in New Zealand’s relationship with China. In the mid 2010s, a kiwi grower took the secret of a New Zealand strain and smuggled it to China. Thousands of hectares of illicit orchards have since sprung up, and New Zealand has spent years scrambling to protect its intellectual property. Now the stark choices facing the country’s growers also reveal wider challenges for the country’s relationship with its largest trading partner. Kiwis are big business for New Zealand. Zespri, the country’s giant kiwi…

This month, two space-faring billionaires have tussled again in their futuristic game of cosmic oneupmanship. And this time, for once, Elon Musk was not at the party. The declaration that Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and world’s richest man, was heading into space next month on the first crewed launch of his Blue Origin New Shepard rocket was followed quickly by an apparent leak from within Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic empire that the British tycoon might look to upstage him with a Fourth of July Independence Day spectacular of his own. Branson’s team was quick to downplay the possibility, insisting a date for his first spaceflight had yet to be determined. But beyond what some might see as vain billionaires using real-life rockets as playthings, the episode underscored how close…

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs…” So goes the opening sentence of Sylvia Plath’s 1963 novel The Bell Jar, referring to the Jewish American couple Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage and sent to the electric chair 68 years ago. Their execution casts a morbid shadow over Plath’s book, just as it did over the United States, and it is seen by many as the nadir of America’s engagement with the cold war. The Rosenbergs are still the only Americans ever put to death in peacetime for espionage, and Ethel is the only American woman killed by the US government for a crime other than murder. During their trial, Ethel in particular was vilified for prioritising communism over…

It has taken two years, several delays, and involved no meaningful survivor engagement, but the British government has finally issued an apology to victims and published its findings and recommendations from the “end-to-end” review of how rape cases are handled in the criminal justice system in England and Wales. The figures are stark: the latest Home Office data shows 52,210 rapes were recorded in England and Wales in 2020, but only 843 resulted in a charge by the end of the year, that’s fewer than 1 in 60 cases. And those are the cases that make it to court – some women drop out of the system, and many fail to report at all. In particular, there are significant obstacles to justice for those most poorly served by the criminal…