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49 Articles

Eyewitness India

The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol212 | Issue№ 3 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.…

Eyewitness India

1 UNITED STATES Biden urges Congress to ‘step up’ on California aid Hours after House speaker Mike Johnson said he believed there should be conditions on disaster aid to California, Joe Biden said Congress “needs to step up” and provide funding. In a briefing at the White House on Monday, Biden said the federal government is covering most costs associated with the fires for the next 180 days, but that Congress will need to cover additional costs to rebuild Los Angeles. Meanwhile Gavin Newsom has accused the tech billionaire Elon Musk of “encouraging looting” in an escalation of a row over disinformation surrounding the deadly Los Angeles fires. The California governor lashed out after Musk reposted a message on X that falsely accused the governor and his fellow Democrats of decriminalising…

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Starmer seeks to inject AI into Britain to aid growth Artificial intelligence will be “mainlined into the veins” of the nation, ministers have announced, with a multibillion-pound investment in the UK’s computing capacity. Keir Starmer plans to increase 20-fold the amount of AI computing power under public control by 2030 and deploy AI for everything from spotting potholes to freeing up teachers to teach. Labour’s plan to “unleash” AI includes a personal pledge from the prime minister to make Britain “the world leader” in the sector. The government plan features a potentially controversial scheme to unlock public data to help fuel the growth of AI businesses. This includes anonymised NHS data, which will be available for “researchers and innovators” to train their AI models. The government says there…

SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENT

MEDICAL RESEARCH Old heart tests did not account for sex differences Diagnostic tests for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), a potentially deadly heart condition, are biased against women because tests rely on outdated studies, research funded by the British Heart Foundation and published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology found. HCM is a genetic condition where the muscular wall of the heart becomes thickened, making it harder for the heart to pump blood. Measuring the thickness of the wall of the left ventricle is used to test for it, and the threshold for diagnosing HCM has been 15mm or thicker for everyone. But a new method, which included AI reading thousands of heart scans, was particularly beneficial for women, increasing identification of HCM by 20 percentage points. Women made…

SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENT

10 TRUTH TO POWER

Meta is shifting to the right, following the prevailing political winds blowing through the United States. A more partisan era now looms for the social media giant and its corporate leaders, though Mark Zuckerberg himself has few personal politics other than ambition. Meta has disbanded Facebook and Instagram’s third-party factchecking programme. The company will also recommend more political content across its social networks. Its CEO Zuckerberg announced the changes as he attempts to curry favour with Donald Trump’s incoming administration, demonstrating just how far he will go to win the presidentelect’s approval. “Recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritising speech,” he said in a video posted on Instagram. “Factcheckers have just been too politically biased.” Zuckerberg’s decision has been condemned as a “major step…

10 TRUTH TO POWER

Testing grounds

Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that Meta would scrap fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram in the United States marked a strange and unexpected inversion. For the first time in the company’s history there will be fewer checks on content in its home country than in the rest of the world. For over a decade, as activists and journalists pushed Facebook to control the proliferation of misinformation, disinformation and outright fake news, countries from the “global south” were at the front of the battle. The platform was accused of fuelling violence across Africa, Asia and Latin America that far outpaced any fallout from false or misleading posts in the United States or Europe. Leaked internal documents showed that in 2020, Facebook teams spent over 3.2m hours moderating content, but 87% of that was…

Testing grounds

Turning the tide

In early 2017, Mark Zuckerberg was on what might be termed an “apology tour” of the United States. In the tumultuous few months since Donald Trump won his first presidential victory, the young chief executive of Facebook was reeling from his company’s part in serving US voters Russian disinformation, and widespread accusations that the social media platform had disseminated a vast spray of “fake news”. Fighting a rearguard action, Facebook announced changes to its algorithms, and a major initiative to include “third-party factcheckers” as part of the content moderation efforts. Two election cycles later, a transformation has taken place. With Facebook rebranded as Meta, Zuckerberg has become part of a major Silicon Valley realignment behind the second Trump presidency. Last week, Zuckerberg announced the abrupt dismantling of the third-party factchecking…

Turning the tide

Spotlight ‘There’s literally nothing’

Wildfires had crept close to the Pacific Palisades before. In 2018, the Woolsey fire wreaked havoc in nearby Malibu. There had been other close calls: evacuations because of a brush fire in 2019. A blaze chewing through steep remote terrain nearby the following year. And yet even as flames roared through hillsides flanking the neighbourhood and trees thrashed in ferocious winds, people couldn’t fathom what was coming. This firestorm, one of several major blazes that have exploded across Los Angeles since 7 January, fanned by extreme winds, fuelled by parched landscapes, would unleash unexpected horrors. It swept in and left little in its wake. More than 12,000 structures have been lost, while as of Monday at least 24 people had been confirmed dead – a figure officials say is sure…

Spotlight ‘There’s literally nothing’

“The fires are a watershed moment, symbolic of a new era of complex climate disaster An exceptional mix of environmental conditions created a firestorm without known precedent across southern California last week. The ingredients for these infernos in the Los Angeles area, near-hurricane strength winds and drought, foretell an emerging era of compound events – simultaneous types of historic weather conditions, happening at unusual times of the year, resulting in situations that overwhelm our ability to respond. The Palisades fire ranks as the most destructive in Los Angeles history, with hundreds of homes and other structures destroyed. In Pacific Palisades, wealthy homeowners fled on foot after abandoning their cars in gridlock. In Pasadena, quickly advancing fire prompted evacuations. Early estimates of the wildfires’ combined economic impact are in the tens…

Hottest year on record sends planet past 1.5C for first time

Climate breakdown drove the annual global temperature above the internationally agreed 1.5C target for the first time last year, supercharging extreme weather and causing “misery to millions of people”. The average temperature in 2024 was 1.6C above preindustrial levels, data from the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) shows. That is a jump of 0.1C from 2023, which was also a record hot year and represents levels of heat never experienced by modern humans. The heating is primarily caused by the burning of fossil fuels, and the damage to lives and livelihoods will continue to escalate until coal, oil and gas are replaced. The Paris agreement target of 1.5C is measured over a decade or two, so a single year above that level does not mean the target has been…

Hottest year on record sends planet past 1.5C for first time

Caretaker government offers a deal to Assad’s ex-personnel

The filthy corridors inside the headquarters of the general intelligence service lie dark and empty. Towering piles of boxes and plastic sit near the steps leading up to the imposing building, as well as torn posters of the former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. On the road outside, hastily abandoned cars with smashed wind-screens and bullet casings litter the ground – a reminder of the looting and destruction that took place a month ago as Syrians vented their anger at symbols of the Assad regime’s fearsome security state, built up over decades. Today, the intelligence building is where the new Syrian authorities are asking those who served inside it to turn in their weapons and themselves. Lines of men wait in the courtyard to receive slips of paper saying they have…

Caretaker government offers a deal to Assad’s ex-personnel

The call that would lead to one of the most poignant images of the humanitarian emergency in the deadly waters off the Canary Islands came at 4am. In the early hours of 6 January, the Las Palmas command centre of Spain’s maritime rescue service, Salvamento Marítimo, told Domingo Trujillo, the captain of the search-and-rescue vessel Talía, that a small inflatable boat, packed with people, was adrift 180km off the coast of Lanzarote. Among those onboard, they added, was a woman who was due to give birth at any moment. As soon as the alert was received, the 32-metre-long Talía and its crew of eight left the Lanzarote port of Arrecife, bound for the drifting boat. When they arrived, five hours later, Trujillo and his colleagues found the small inflatable packed…

Politicians’ speeches banned at Auschwitz ceremony

Monarchs, presidents and prime ministers are expected among the attendees at a commemoration event for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz this month, but none of them will be let near a microphone. In a first for a “round” anniversary of the liberation, the Auschwitz museum has banned all speeches by politicians at the event on 27 January, which will mark 80 years since Soviet troops liberated the camp in 1945. Only Auschwitz survivors will speak, in what is likely to be the last big commemoration when many are still alive and healthy enough to travel. “There will be no political speeches at all,” said Piotr Cywiński, director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial and museum. “We want to focus on the last survivors that are among us and on…

Politicians’ speeches banned at Auschwitz ceremony

Man leaves €10m to town he never saw

Throughout Roger Thiberville’s long life, he never once visited the Normandy town that gave him his last name. Descended from a family of vineyard owners, he inherited property in Paris from his parents and worked as a meteorologist. But when Thiberville died in August at the age of 91 leaving no descendants, the mayor of the town (population 1,773) received a phone call. Thiberville, the man, had left Thiberville, the town, most of his €10m ($10.2m) fortune. Guy Paris, the mayor of Thiberville, said astonished and delighted locals and officials were considering how to spend the windfall, which is five times the municipality’s annual budget. “It’s an exceptional sum of money. Obviously the amount is beyond imagination,” Paris told the local radio station, France Bleu. “We don’t yet know what…

Man leaves €10m to town he never saw

Streeting warns of violence over grooming gang claims

The use of inflammatory language over grooming gangs risks vilifying entire communities and could lead to atrocities such as the mosque massacre in New Zealand that killed more than 50 people, the UK health secretary has warned. Wes Streeting said he had “no difficulty or qualms” in calling out “sickening” crimes of sexual abuse gangs, criticising “well meaning, but fundamentally misguided and warped views of political correctness” for letting down thousands of children. But in an interview with the Guardian, the Ilford North MP said: “At the same time, there are people in my community who have either Pakistani heritage or look different, who are now more fearful today than they were before.” After a week in which Elon Musk’s erratic tirades against the UK government dominated the news agenda,…

Streeting warns of violence over grooming gang claims

Labour’s first budget was supposed to end 14 years of austerity without inducing the kind of shock associated with Liz Truss. Yet within months, Rachel Reeves’s mix of spending increases, higher taxes on business and extra borrowing for investment has begun to unravel. Not so much in response to the bond market jitters of last week, when panicky traders raised the cost of government borrowing to a level not seen since the financial crash of 2008 – this reaction was sparked in part by a lack of confidence in Donald Trump’s economic plans and could prove short-lived. The unravelling relates more to domestic issues and how Reeves, when she delivers her next financial statement in March, will be forced to admit that the financial leeway she gave herself in October…

How the Taliban forced a teenager to marry her employer

It was a normal summer morning in July last year, when 19-year-old Samira* made her way to the carpet-weaving shop where she worked in Kabul to pick up her wages. She had no way of knowing that in a few hours, her life as she knew it would be over. She would end the day in a Taliban police station, a victim of forced marriage with her future decided for her by a group of strangers with guns. That morning, as she waited alone outside her employer’s shop to collect her salary, the Taliban’s “morality police” were on patrol nearby. “I had to wait because [my employer] was busy eating lunch and the workshop was an hour’s walk from home,” she said. “The shop was near a main road. Unluckily,…

How the Taliban forced a teenager to marry her employer

Drawing a line?

‘There’s all types of lines you can draw. We’ve drawn a line.” So explained Mike Baird, the chair of Cricket Australia, last month in explaining the governing body’s stance on playing against Afghanistan, the country that has just banned women from looking out of windows. According to a new decree from the Taliban government, new buildings must not be constructed with windows through which women can be seen. Existing buildings with windows must be walled up or covered. At present Cricket Australia – in common with the England and Wales Cricket Board – is refusing to schedule bilateral series against Afghanistan out of concern for “the deterioration of basic human rights for women in Afghanistan”. Both countries are, however, happy to play them in global competitions – Australia at last…

Drawing a line?

Medics fear the impact of Milei’s chainsaw budget cuts

The Garrahan paediatric hospital in Buenos Aires swarms with patients, parents and medical workers. Families stand shoulder-to-shoulder waiting for appointments, while staff race between dozens of operating rooms. In wards decorated with cartoon characters, mothers and fathers rest cheeks on their children’s. The Garrahan treats more than 125,000 patients each year, including 40% of Argentina’s paediatric cancer patients and 70% of children with complex congenital heart diseases. It also performs 50% of child organ transplants. But, despite being the country’s largest and most important paediatric hospital, doctors and nurses fear for its survival. Medical workers say they are facing “financial suffocation”, and have staged protest marches to draw attention to the public health sector’s dire financial situation. “It’s becoming impossible to continue providing the quality of care patients deserve,” said…

Medics fear the impact of Milei’s chainsaw budget cuts

Every year, the world loses some of its 7,000 languages. Parents stop speaking them to their children, words are forgotten and communities lose the ability to read their own scripts. The rate of loss is quickening, from one every three months a decade ago to one every 40 days in 2019 – meaning nine languages die a year. The UN’s culture agency, Unesco, said predictions that half of the world’s languages will have died out by the end of the century are optimistic. Some are disappearing with their last speakers, but thousands are endangered because they are not being spoken widely enough or used in formal settings such as schools or workplaces. A quiet fightback is under way in communities that feel their traditions are drowned out. Tochi Precious, a…

Why is Trump looking to annex Greenland?

Hours after his son Donald Trump Jr touched down in the Greenlandic capital, Nuuk, last Tuesday in a Trump-branded plane, the US president-elect, Donald Trump, held a press conference in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, where he refused to rule out using military force to make Greenland part of the US, and threatened to impose “very high” tariffs on Denmark, of which Greenland is an autonomous territory, if it gets in his way. Why is Donald Trump so fixated with Greenland? Trump has said the US needs control of Greenland – and the Panama canal – for “economic security” and has described ownership and control of the territory as an “absolute necessity”. Greenland has long been on Trump’s radar as a target for purchase and in 2019 he confirmed reports that he had…

Why is Trump looking to annex Greenland?

Threats over Panama Canal reopen old wounds

For Isabel Corro, Donald Trump’s suggestions that the US could use military force to take control of the Panama Canal evokes painful memories. The 79-year-old vividly recalls 20 December 1989, when US army helicopters and fighter jets screamed over Panama City, turning buildings to piles of rubble with rockets and gunfire. Corro’s stepfather, a police officer, was killed in the invasion; his body was not found until it was hauled from a mass grave the following year. “It was an extremely violent and tragic night,” she said. “One that unfortunately I will never forget.” Washington had once backed then president Manuel Noriega – an ally who had spied for the CIA – but George HW Bush sent in 10,000 troops to oust the dictator as his role as an international…

Threats over Panama Canal reopen old wounds

Who is the rightwing firebrand tipped to be future PM?

He is the abrasive leader who has taken his party from the conventional right to the populist flank. He paints a dark vision of a “broken” nation and promises to put his country first. He is fond of hurling insults at his political opponents, says he wants to take back control of the border – and Elon Musk loves him. His name is Pierre Poilievre, and he is the favourite to win Canada’s next election. In the first Trump term, Justin Trudeau’s Canada was widely viewed as a liberal counterweight to its southern neighbour. How would Poilievre want to change that? Who is Pierre Poilievre? Poilievre was born in 1979 in Calgary, Alberta. His 16-year-old mother gave him up for adoption, and he was raised by two schoolteachers in the…

Who is the rightwing firebrand tipped to be future PM?

A musical about a Mexican cartel boss who fakes their death, transitions and is reborn as a heroine searching for the forcibly disappeared is sweeping international film awards, but has prompted amusement and outrage in Mexico. Emilia Pérez, directed by Jacques Audiard, has been largely praised by international critics, though some noted it risked trivialising extremely sensitive issues. It scooped the jury prize at Cannes before winning four Golden Globes last Sunday, including those for best musical or comedy and best non-English language film. Most people in Mexico were unaware of it until clips started circulating online of the American actor Selena Gomez, who plays Pérez’s wife, delivering bizarre sexual lines in stilted Mexican Spanish. Eugenio Derbez, a Mexican actor, described Gomez’s acting as “indefensible”, before apologising when his comments…

‘It’s a long process, mourning someone who’s alive’

FOUR YEARS AGO, Caroline Darian thought she had a normal life. She was in her early 40s, she had a home in the Paris area, a job as a communications manager, a husband who worked for a TV breakfast show and a six-year-old son. She got on well with her parents, who had retired to the picturesque village of Mazan in Provence in the south of France, to a house with pastel-blue shutters where they would all often spend long summers together in the garden under the mulberry tree and splashing in the pool – with barbecues and music, board games on the patio and country bike rides with her dad. Darian remembers the exact moment that this all shattered. It was 8.25pm according to the clock on her kitchen…

‘It’s a long process, mourning someone who’s alive’

The deadliest beings on the planet

HUMANS HAVE BEEN VISITING MERRI CREEK FOR MILLENNIA. The waterway snakes from Wallan, north of Melbourne, Australia, down through the suburban sprawl and flows into the Yarra River. The Wurundjeri, the traditional owners, once camped on Merri’s banks, dug up yam daisy and collected shellfish from the creek bed. When the Melbourne founder, John Batman, stumbled upon the creek in 1835, he scribbled a note in his diary describing it as a “lovely stream of water”. Almost 185 years later, Trevor Lithgow, a biochemist at Monash University, and a student in his charge, visited that same lovely stream, bent down at its bank with an empty flask attached to a broom pole, and retrieved a double shot of water. They bundled the sample into a bag and drove it back…

The deadliest beings on the planet

Sudan’s war, which began in April 2023, is closing in on its second year. No one expects or becomes accustomed to war, but it is striking that the most common sentiment I hear among Sudanese people – and even some outside observers – is that they still can’t believe this is happening. Since the calamitous falling out between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a militia that was previously the army’s partner in power, the speed at which the country has unravelled, and the overlapping crises that the war has caused, have been hard to fathom. Millions are displaced, both within and outside the country. Famine is blighting hundreds of thousands. Sexual violence is taking place on a “staggering” scale, according to the United Nations. In areas…

A few years ago, I started looking at the underside of logs and it changed my life. I found a secret carnival of the most bodacious and interesting organisms I had ever seen. Bubbles of candy-pink gloss on stilts (Comatricha nigra), bunches of rainbow iridescence on toffee strings (Badhamia utricularis), bouffants of raspberry parfait (Arcyria denudata) – and those are just a few that have appeared on bits of wood in our urban garden. Slime moulds, or myxomycetes, spend part of their life cycle as what are known as fruiting bodies – once classified as fungi, they’re actually in the kingdom Protista. Often you will find them, at this stage, in a colony – or, well, I’d suggest galaxy, sweetshop or funfair would be more accurate for a collective noun.…

It has taken a man of Elon Musk’s influence to drag this into the light,” claims the Reform UK MP Rupert Lowe. The US tech entrepreneur’s discovery of Britain’s grooming gangs scandal, and his tirade of derogatory tweets directed at Keir Starmer, Jess Phillips and others, has turned Musk into a supercharged hero for certain sections of the right. And in this hero worship, his acolytes are rewriting history. Long before Musk started lobbing X-shaped bricks, journalists and campaigners, often women on the left, had turned the spotlight on “grooming gangs” – better described as rape gangs and sex traffickers – and called out the failures of the authorities. In 2004, Anna Hall made Edge of the City, an investigation into Bradford grooming gangs, for Channel 4. The broadcast was…

The GuardianView

Founded 1821 Independently owned by the Scott Trust A persuasive case can be made that Magnus Carlsen is the greatest chess player of all time. The 34-year-old Norwegian is no longer world champion – bored with classic (long-form) chess, he chose not to defend his title in 2023 – but his name resonates with the public more than ever. This is not due to his expertise in the Sicilian Defence but because chess’s world governing body, Fide, recently barred him from playing in a tournament for wearing jeans. “Jeansgate” illustrates that while the public may care little for the niceties of chess openings, they are captivated by the eccentricities of the chess world. The fabulous costumes in Netflix’s drama hit The Queen’s Gambit made style magazines swoon. But in real life,…

Opinion Letters

WRITE TO US 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 A dramatic combination of politics and the media Elon Musk’s role in Donald Trump’s team and his intervention into UK politics makes the discreet kitchen-supper relationships of UK editors and politicians of the early 2000s seem beyond innocent (European leaders hit back at…

Opinion Letters

AS THE WORLD TURNS TOWARD another fractured year, Doris Salcedo, the Colombian artist, is at work trying to fathom how to create a house out of human hair. Salcedo, 65, has long made herself a channel of collective trauma, her art expressing profound anger at political crimes and atrocities at home and abroad – as well as creating imaginative spaces for mourning. Her hair project, she says, comes in response to what she has come to think of as “domicide”: the calculated bombing and destruction of places that people call home. “Most of my work is a response of some kind to war,” she says. “And we have all witnessed – of course for decades in Colombia – but also now in Ukraine and Syria and Sudan and in Gaza,…

The beat goes on, but the shift gets harder

At 69 years old, Rat Scabies isn’t the same man who erupted into the public consciousness as the flailing, destructive drummer of the Damned in 1976. “I’ve got this thing called viking disease [Dupuytren’s contracture], where your whole hand claws up, and some lumps, and arthritis. And I was always a heavy hitter, so I don’t think that helped.” But still he tours – he is speaking from a hotel room in Glasgow, ahead of a 22-song, 105-minute show, including a drum solo, at Barrowlands – and he knows it is going to hurt. “The aches and pains get incredibly frustrating, because there are some things you want to do that you can’t any more. But as long as I’m still playing New Rose properly, and I can still make…

The beat goes on, but the shift gets harder

Woman of substance

Maybe she was just acting, but Demi Moore seemed genuinely surprised to win a Golden Globe earlier this month. “I’m just in shock right now,” she gasped. “I’ve been doing this a long time, like over 45 years, and this is the first time I’ve won anything as an actor.” It’s an odd thing to hear from a woman who has been one of the most famous actors on the planet for much of that 45 years. It reflects the fact that Moore has often been recognised for everything except her acting: her beauty, body, dress sense, salary, box office and love life. All of which makes her rehabilitation and recognition truly satisfying. In her acceptance speech, she spoke of having been branded a “popcorn actress” by a producer 30…

Woman of substance

FILM A Complete Unknown Dir: James Mangold Not Judas – Jesus. Timothée Chalamet’s hilarious and seductive portrayal of Bob Dylan makes him the smirking, scowling and unwilling leader of his generation, whose refusal to submit to the crucifixion of folk-acoustic purity is his own crucifixion. Chalamet gives us a semi-serious ordeal of someone who is part Steinbeck hero, part boyband star, part sacrificial deity. James Mangold’s biopic, coscripted by him and Jay Cocks, is based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night That Split the Sixties; it’s the story of Dylan’s musical and personal adventures in the first half of the decade as he electrified the world of folk in every sense. Elle Fanning is gentle and sensible as Dylan’s first girlfriend in…

Humans are unrealistically optimistic about the world and the future; we systematically underestimate our chances of experiencing unpleasant diseases, going through a divorce, or losing a loved one. About the only people who don’t see the world through the lens of this “optimism bias” are the clinically depressed. Depressive realism – the name given to the relative immunity of the melancholic to this illusion – suggests that we see reality clearly only at the cost of our mental health. This presents psychologists with a dilemma. We are always caught between the delusion of wearing rose-tinted spectacles, and the debilitating affect of taking them off. Should we prioritise accuracy or happiness? Sumit Paul-Choudhury comes down firmly on the side of optimism in this lively exploration of glass-half-full thinking and its relationship…

Oromay begins as it means to go on, at hurtling speed. A television journalist wakes late, with 20 minutes to catch a plane. And not just any plane: a plane carrying most of the leadership of Ethiopia. Tsegaye finds himself in first class, receiving orders. There is to be an all-out push to bring the northern province of Eritrea into line with the revolution. He is in charge of hearts and minds, which must be changed. At once. Oromay is set in the first months of 1982, seven years after emperor Haile Selassie was killed by a military junta led by Mengistu Haile Mariam, who by then had eliminated almost all opposition. A security agent in Oromay describes Eritrea immediately after the coup: beatings, jailings, extra-judicial killings, “corpses in the…

Calling the tune

The fact that Joseph Stalin loved music and believed it mattered was both a blessing and a curse for the men and women who made it. If your work found favour you were treated as a secular god with all the trimmings – palatial apartment, good food and freedom to roam as far as the decadent west (assuming you came back when called). But for those who offended Stalin’s arbitrary and shifting tastes it was another matter. The Father of Nations regularly took time out from his busy killing schedule to vet each new classical music record that came across his desk, noting on the sleeve whether it was “good”, “average” or “rubbish”. A bad rating could earn you a stint in the gulag or, if there were aggravating circumstances…

Calling the tune

BOOKS OF THE MONTH

Aerth By Deborah Tomkins Joint winner of the inaugural Weatherglass Novella prize, chosen by Ali Smith, this is the story of Magnus, who is born on Aerth, a planet rapidly approaching a new ice age. The small population, decimated by earlier pandemics, seeks to spread kindness. Magnus hopes for adventure and as an adult joins a team trying to establish a colony on Mars. But he longs for the forests of home, and takes the opportunity to join the first expedition to another world: Urth, a crowded, polluted planet that’s a distorted, dark-mirror version of Aerth. These other worlds come to life through a series of beautifully composed vignettes. Moving and thought-provoking, this is a memorable debut from a writer to watch. Witchcraft for Wayward Girls By Grady Hendrix The…

BOOKS OF THE MONTH

Should we just accept our home is destined to be dirty for ever?

My wife asked for a new stair carpet for Christmas, which made things easy for me: all I had to do was print out a picture of some stairs with carpet on them, put it in an envelope and stick a bow on it. Basically I was saying: order some carpet in January, and I will pay. But with the arrival of the new year I discover a problem: we simply aren’t done ruining the old stair carpet. Yes, the cat has sharpened its claws on it, and the old dog has peed on it, and the new dog has peed on it in imitation of the old dog, and moths have attacked it. But as yet we have no practical strategy that would stop the same things happening to…

Should we just accept our home is destined to be dirty for ever?

Boxing clever: tasty vegetarian lunch ideas to entice young eaters

Where there are picky eaters, there needs to be a gameplan. For Alissa Timoshkina, author of Kapusta (published next month), that means slipping vegetables into an existing favourite, be that pasta, pancakes or muffins. “You can’t go wrong with a veg-rich pasta sauce or pasta salad with roast vegetables [courgette, peppers and tomatoes, say] and mini mozzarella balls,” she says. Meanwhile, courgette, pea and sweetcorn pancakes, and cheddar and courgette muffins are other firm favourites round at Timoshkina’s. Failing that, she goes for colour: “Think something that would be appealing and exciting to the eye, and therefore likely to entice children to dig in.” Give them options and keep things customisable: “Offer a platter-style selection of fruit and veg, and pair it with cheese, a dip and crackers.” More practically,…

Boxing clever: tasty vegetarian lunch ideas to entice young eaters

№ 300 Lentil fritters with quick coconut chutney

Prep 20 min Soak 2 hr Cook 30 min Makes 24 • VEGAN Ingredients 200g chana dal200g skinned peanuts, coarsely chopped1 red onion, peeled and finely chopped2 green chillies, finely chopped1 thumb ginger, peeled and grated1 tsp toasted fennel seeds, coarsely crushed1 tsp toasted coriander seeds, coarsely crushed½ tsp coarsely ground cinnamon1 large handful coriander, finely choppedA pinch of asafoetida4 tbsp grated coconut4 tbsp gram flour Rapeseed oil, for deep-frying For the chutney 250g vegan coconut yoghurt100g unsweetened desiccated coconut1 tsp caster sugarJuice of ½ lime For the tempering 2 tbsp rapeseed oil1 tbsp urid dal1 tsp brown mustard seedsPinch of asafoetida1 dried red kashmiri chilli, torn in two (optional)20 curry leaves, roughly chopped My pantry is stocked with an abundance of lentils: tiny red ones, which I throw into…

№ 300 Lentil fritters with quick coconut chutney

1 Which film, according to Barry Norman, featured the “oldest bunch of teenagers in the world”? 2 What is burned at the culmination of the Up Helly Aa festival? 3 Spanish civil war heroine Dolores Ibárruri popularised which slogan? 4 Which predators have worn dead salmon “hats”? 5 The rivers Trent, Don, Calder and Aire are crossed by which UK motorway? 6 Which cathedral is home to the Church of England’s Diocese in Europe? 7 What were designed by Humphrey Paget and Christopher Ironside? 8 Which firm is the world’s biggest asset manager? What links 9 Shirley Bassey; Lulu; Tina Turner? 10 Robert Aske; Francis Bigod; Robert Kett; Thomas Wyatt? 11 Grasshopper pie; Rocky Mountain oyster; Welsh rabbit? 12 Hadleigh, Essex; Dorney, Buckinghamshire; Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire; Isle of Portland, Dorset?…

1 Bert was born in year x2 (x an integer!); how old will he be this year? 2 Wordpool Find the correct definition: SCHORL a) black variety of tourmaline b) type of scarf from Zschorlau c) dark tower d) waterspout 3 E pluribus unum Rearrange GIANT BEANO to make a word. 4 Cryptic Fate of Polish airline (3) It’s only fish! (4) 5 Enigma What has many, many keys but only one lock? © CMM202 5 Puzzles 1 Bert was born in 1936 (442) and so will be 89 this year. 2 Wordpool a). 3 EPU ABNEGATION. 4 Cryptic LOT, SOLE. 5 Enigma A PIANO.…

Magnus Carlsen, the 34-year-old world No 1 and candidate for the greatest of all time, married Ella Victoria Malone two weeks ago in Oslo, where the congregation included a film crew from Netflix. Carlsen’s stellar chess career was set to resume last weekend, with the Norwegian leading the newly promoted St Pauli team in the German Bundesliga. St Pauli’s team, which has scored only a single point out of eight from its four matches so far, prepared a welcome for the No 1, who was scheduled to compete against Düsseldorf and Solingen. Online qualifiers have taken place for the first leg of the five-event $3.75m Freestyle Grand Slam, to be staged at Weissenhaus, north Germany, from 7-14 February. Subsequent legs will be staged in Paris in April, New York in…

COUNTRY DIARY ROTHIEMURCHUS

It’s a crisp and deeply cold morning, the sun not yet risen above the Cairngorms. The Rothiemurchus forest is captive to a white hoar frost as we crunch on the path to Lochan Mor. We’re on the beaver trail and my guide is Jonathan Willet, beaver project manager for the Cairngorms National Park Authority. After being hunted to extinction in Scotland in the 16th century, beavers have been reintroduced in various sites. The winding rivers, lochs, marshlands and forests of the upper Spey are ideal habitat. Consultations and careful management are integral to the reintroduction and, to date, the signs are good, with the 10 pairs thriving. So much so, that at least two have produced kits. When we reach the loch, the sun is just appearing through the trees…

COUNTRY DIARY ROTHIEMURCHUS

The Weekly cryptic No 29,585

✱ All solutions published next week Across 1 State of Britain boosted with a victory song (7) 5 Chap needs a support of course – a ‘cow’ mainly! (7) 9 Stew of sheep’s head and flounder (7) 10 Career Oscar? Not finalised – go berserk! (3,4) 11 Silly novel ‘Four’ is at heart only half a book (9) 12 Heading off for relative release (5) 13 Dash off genuine short (5) 15 Don’t be so appreciative – it’s unrewarding (9) 17 No star fouled a sporting opponent (3,6) 19 Supplier, in quotes, ‘Corporation’ (5) 22 Apple disheartened by this device? (5) 23 New, albeit fancy, consumers’ drink (5,4) 25 Musical bag, lock container (7) 26 Hill in position above city (7) 27 South, if not cloud-covered (7) 28 Supermarket workers…

The Weekly cryptic No 29,585

Quick crossword No 17,058

Across 1 E.g. LOL or OMG (12) 9 Surpass (5) 10 Ask for (7) 11 Stepped (4) 12 One filling the state coffers (8) 14 Group, e.g. of soldiers or students (6) 15 Write badly (6) 18 Possessor of a non-hereditary title (4,4) 20 Long-billed wader (4) 22 Mythical equine (7) 23 Poetic feet (5) 24 Resourceful (12) Down 2 Engage to marry (7) 3 Origin – England cricketer (4) 4 Optical (6) 5 Caribbean berry often ground into a powder (8) 6 Like the feet of someone feeling restless? (5) 7 True to life (12) 8 The cultivation of plants (12) 13 Opening in a floor – kind of spider (8) 16 Egg white (7) 17 Note currently featuring Jane Austen (6) 19 Behave amorously (5) 21 Make a…

Quick crossword No 17,058

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