Opinion Will
anti-
abortionists use
‘uterus
surveillance’
against women
in the US?
Arwa Mahdawi
page 16
Wednesday 8 June 2022
theguardian.com/us
Published in New York, United States
Arnulfo Reyes speaks about being wounded and surviving the 24 May 2022 school massacre in Uvalde, Texas. Photograph: ABC's Good Morning America
‘It all happened too fast’: injured Uvalde
teacher recounts school shooting
Ramon Antonio Vargas
Arnulfo Reyes, an elementary teach-
er in Uvalde, Texas, was watching a
movie with his students. It was two
days before their summer break. When
the loud bangs erupted, some of the
children asked: “What is going on?”
“I don’t know what’s going on,”
Reyes replied. “But let’s go ahead and
get under the table. Get under the table
and act like you’re asleep.”
It was the training that teachers and
students at Robb elementary school
had been given, as recently as a few
weeks earlier, in the case of an armed
attack – and according to Reyes, it was
worse than useless.
Feeling a presence behind him, he
turned to see a man holding a rifle. The
intruder shot Reyes twice, including
once in the lung, dropping him to
the ground. Then he sprayed bullets
indiscriminately at the 10- and 11-year-
old students in the classroom, as well
as children in an adjacent room, while
police waited in the hallway.
When the shooting stopped, 19
children – including 11 of Reyes’ stu-
dents – were dead. So were two of his
fellow teachers.
“I feel so bad for the parents [of
the slain students] because they lost
a child,” Reyes told ABC’s Good Morning
America on Tuesday. “But they lost one
child. I lost 11 that day, all at one time.”
His televised description of the
mass killing at Robb elementary is one
of the most harrowing first-hand ac-
counts to emerge from the deadliest
school shooting in the US since 26 were
killed at Sandy Hook elementary in
Connecticut in 2012.
Speaking from the bed of a hos-
pital in San Antonio, where he has
undergone five surgeries and had his
blood replaced twice, Reyes added to
a growing chorus of voices criticizing
the police’s response in Uvalde that day,
calling them “cowards”.
The school district police chief, Pete
Environment Clover Moore urges Sydney renters
to take up green energy to meet net zero target
page 39
Arredondo, ordered more than a dozen
of his officers to wait in a campus hall-
way as students and teachers trapped
nearby begged 911 operators to save
them from the intruder, who had shot
his grandmother earlier that day.
Arredondo, who reportedly arrived
at the scene without his police radio,
mistakenly believed the intruder was
merely hiding in a classroom rather
than killing the people inside, state offi-
cials said. Arredondo held his officers
back more than an hour until border
patrol agents from a specialized tactical
team breached the classroom and killed
the gunman.
Following repeated mass killings
nationwide, police have been trained to
take down active shooters as quickly as
possible, rather than cordon them off
and wait for backup. Uvalde school dis-
trict officers had received that training.
Yet, on the day of the slayings at Robb
elementary, Reyes said he got a tragi-
cally close look at how officers failed
their training after an initial confron-
tation with the shooter.
“One of the students … was saying,
‘Officer, we’re in here, we’re in here,’”
Reyes said. “But they had already left.”
Reyes said his students bravely car-
ried out his instructions, even as the
intruder directed his first volley of gun-
fire at them.
“I prayed that I wouldn’t hear none
of my students talk, and I didn’t hear
any talk for a while,” Reyes said. “But
then, later on, he did shoot again. So, if
he didn’t get them the first time, he got
them the second time.”
Reyes said he pretended to be
unconscious after he was hit. It didn’t
stop the gunman from shooting him a
second time, “just to make sure that I
was dead,” Reyes said.
Time passed incomprehensibly
slowly after that, Reyes said, comparing
his leaking blood to “an hourglass”.
Eventually, he heard the tactical border
patrol team gun down the intruder, and
officers yelled: “Get up, get out!”
But, Reyes said, “I couldn’t get up.”
After he is released from the hos-
pital, Reyes said he intends to advocate
for measures restricting access to rifles
like the one used at Robb.
He said the various drills and
precautions that are meant to pre-
pare students and teachers for active
shooters – including the advice to stay
motionless under desks, and the school
district’s emergency alert program –
failed utterly when a killer actually ar-
rived.
“There was no announcement. I
did not receive any messages on my
phone,” Reyes said. “No training would
ever prepare anybody for this. It all hap-
pened too fast.”
Neither school or police officials
immediately responded to Reyes’ re-
marks. But, he said there is only one
conclusion for him.
“We trained our kids to sit under the
table,” Reyes said. “And [so] that’s what I
thought of at the time. But we set them
up to be like ducks.”

2 Headlines
Fake Trump electors told to operate in
‘complete secrecy’, email reveals
Martin Pengelly in New York
Donald Trump’s campaign directed
Republican party operatives named
as “alternate” electors in Georgia to
operate with “complete secrecy and
discretion” as the then president at-
tempted to overturn his defeat by Joe
Biden.
The startling direction was con-
tained in an email which is part of a US
justice department investigation, CNN
and the Washington Post reported.
Trump lost to Biden by more than
7m ballots in the popular vote and by
302-236 in the electoral college – the
same margin Trump called a landslide
when it was in his favour over Hillary
Clinton (who won the popular vote by
nearly 3 million) in 2016.
Pursuing the lie that Biden’s win
was the result of fraud, the Trump cam-
paign sought to overturn its electoral
college defeat in part by appointing its
own electors in seven key states.
On 13 December 2020, a Geor-
gia campaign official, Robert Sinners,
emailed alternate electors due to gather
the next day.
He wrote: “I must ask for your com-
plete discretion in this process. Your
duties are imperative to ensure the end
result – a win in Georgia for President
Trump – but will be hampered unless
we have complete secrecy and discre-
tion.”
The alternate electors were to
gather at the statehouse in Atlanta.
Sinners told them: “Please, at no
High-stakes California races will decide LA
mayor and San Francisco recall
Lois Beckett in Los Angeles
High-stakes primary races taking place
on Tuesday in California are expected
to have major consequences for police
reform, incarceration and the state’s
growing homelessness crisis.
The most closely watched race is
the mayor’s contest in Los Angeles,
where voters are deciding between a
tough-on-crime real estate developer,
Rick Caruso, who has already poured
nearly $40m of his own fortune into
his primary campaign, andthe former
community organizer and Democratic
congresswoman Karen Bass.
In San Francisco, the city’s pro-
gressive prosecutor, Chesa Boudin, is
facing a recall election that could have
a major impact on movements for crim-
inal justice reform across the US.
Midway through a tense midterm
elections year, the races are likely to
serve as a litmus test for Democrats
and progressives. Analysts are watch-
ing to see if the majority of voters in
some of America’s most ostensibly lib-
eral cities decide to reject attempts to
reduce mass incarceration and address
the stark racial disparities in the crim-
inal justice system.
But one of the starkest takeaways
Donald Trump at a pre-election rally in Rome, Georgia. The Trump campaign sought to overturn its defeat in part by appointing its own
electors in seven key states. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
point should you mention anything to
do with presidential electors or speak
to media.”
The meeting did not take place in
secret as local media filmed it.
A lawyer for the chairman of the
Georgia Republican party, David Shafer,
told the Post and CNN: “None of these
communications, nor his testimony,
suggest that Mr Shafer requested or
wished for confidentiality surrounding
the provisional electors.
“Quite to the contrary, Chairman
Shafer invited TV news cameras into
Voters in California will have the opportunity to make an impact on police reform, incar-
ceration and the state’s growing homelessness crisis. Photograph: Apu Gomes/Getty Images
so far is that voters simply are not
very engaged in California’s primary
election, despite multiple measures de-
signed to make it easier for them to
participate. Early turnout so far has
been abysmal, even though every regis-
tered voter in California was mailed a
ballot.
“Even if you make it extremely
easy to vote, like in California, but the
political culture, candidates and issues
aren’t there, you aren’t going to in-
crease the turnout,” political scientist
Fernando Guerra said. “We have ex-
treme generational issues, with home-
the proceedings and both issued a
statement and gave a televised news
interview immediately afterward.”
At the time, Schafer said the meet-
ing was necessary in case Trump won
any legal challenges in key states.
But Trump failed in his attempt
to hold on to power, whether through
slates of alternate electors, court chal-
lenges or the deadly attack on the US
Capitol by his supporters on 6 January
2021, an attempt to stop certification of
electoral college results.
Speaking to the Post, Norm Eisen,
lessness and crime and the cost of
housing, and I think we have the candi-
dates. There’s a lack of political culture.”
Lower turnout is likely to be a
particular challenge for “a lot of the
young progressive candidates”, who
might end up losing to an incumbent
by a small margin of votes, Guerra said.
Turnout was reportedly lagging in
other states also holding primaries on
Tuesday, including New Jersey and
New Mexico.
Voters in California and nationwide
are concerned about gas prices and the
cost of living. A recent poll found that
The Guardian Wednesday 8 June 2022
a former ethics tsar under Barack
Obama, counsel to House Democrats
in Trump’s first impeachment and now
a senior fellow at the Brookings Insti-
tution, said of the email to Georgia
alternate electors: “If there was noth-
ing wrong with it, why go through such
extraordinary lengths to hide what
you’re doing?”
Sinners told CNN and the Post he
worked at Shafer’s direction, and “was
advised by attorneys that [secrecy] was
necessary in order to preserve the
pending legal challenge”.
only a third of Los Angeles voters ap-
proved of the city’s police department,
a lower approval rating than in 1991,
after the police beating of Rodney King,
but that nearly half of voters surveyed
wanted to increase the size of the force.
The role of the police in public safe-
tyis one of the key issues up and down
the ballot, with younger progressive
candidates who support defunding the
police challenging older centrist Demo-
crats in several Los Angeles city council
races.
Bass, the former chair of the
Congressional Black Caucus, supports
police reform and a modest increase in
Los Angeles police department staffing;
Caruso has pledged to put an additional
1,500 officers on the street.
Both Bass and Caruso have prom-
ised to put an end to people sleeping
on the street in Los Angeles. Caruso
has expressed willingness to arrest un-
housed people who refuse to move to
a city-provided shelter bed, and has
also praised an army camp for undocu-
mented children at the Texas border as
a good model for how to deal with the
city’s homelessness crisis.
For some Los Angeles progres-
sives, Bass’s more centrist positions
on policing and homelessness have
been a disappointment. Two years
He added: “Following the former
president’s refusal to accept the results
of the election and allow a peaceful
transition of power, my views on this
matter have changed significantly from
where they were on 13 December” 2020.
Sinners now works for Brad
Raffensperger, the Republican sec-
retary of state who resisted Trump’s
demand he “find” enough votes to over-
turn Biden’s win in Georgia – a win re-
counts confirmed.
Trump’s call to Raffensperger is
under criminal investigation in Geor-
gia. The district attorney in question is
also investigating the alternate electors
scheme. So is the House January 6 com-
mittee, which will hold public hearings
this week.
In the federal investigation, Jason
Shepherd, a former chairman of the
Republican party in Cobb county, Geor-
gia, told the Post he had been inter-
viewed by the FBI.
“They seem the most interested in
Shafer’s role and any communications
from the White House or members of
Congress,” he said.
Trump advisers under scrutiny in-
clude Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor
of New York who became Trump’s per-
sonal attorney.
Patrick Gartland, a would-be alter-
nate elector who ultimately did not
take part in the scheme, told the Post
he too had been questioned by FBI
agents.
“They wanted to know if I had
talked to Giuliani,” he said.
Karen Bass and Rick Caruso participate
in a mayoral candidate debate on 22 March.
Photograph: Genaro Molina/EPA
after George Floyd’s murder by police
sparked worldwide protests, some
activists see Bass’s endorsement of
putting more police on the street as a
step backwards.
“She’s losing the enthusiasm of folks
on the left, and I think that is a miscal-
culation,” said Melina Abdullah, a co-
founder of Black Lives Matter, Los An-
geles, who endorsed Gina Viola, a local
activist running to Bass’s left, for mayor.
Progressive groups in LA have also
organized to oust the incumbent LA
county sheriff, Alex Villanueva, who
has been at the center of multiple scan-
dals related to abuse and misconduct
cases within the department. His crit-
ics, however, have not rallied behind
one opponent among his eight chal-
Continued on page 3
Wednesday 8 June 2022 The Guardian
Continued from page 2
lengers.
The role of massive personal for-
tunes in public elections has also
become a central issue in California’s
primary campaigns. The attempt to
recall Boudin, a central figure in the
movement to elect prosecutors who
want to make the legal system less
punitive and racist, is reportedly being
funded by ultra-wealthy donors, many
of them in the tech industry, including:
Ron Conway, an early DoorDash inves-
tor; Garry Tan, an Instacart inves-
tor; and David Sacks, a former PayPal
executive.
The result of the attempt to recall
Boudin in San Francisco will “affect
Pelosi and other top Democrats subpoenaed
over Bannon contempt case
Hugo Lowell in Washington
Top House Democrats, including speak-
er Nancy Pelosi, and the members
of the House select committee inves-
tigating the January 6 Capitol attack,
have been subpoenaed to testify in
court in connection with the criminal
contempt case against Donald Trump’s
one-time chief strategist Steve Bannon.
The subpoenas – which were ac-
cepted by the House counsel, Doug
Letter, last Friday, according to a source
familiar with the matter – compel the
handover of documents and testimony
about internal decision-making that led
to Bannon’s contempt case.
But whether the subpoenas stand
depends on how Judge Carl Nichols
rules at a hearing next week, where
he will asses pre-trial motions. Nichols
could decide the testimony of mem-
bers of Congress, for instance, is inad-
missible because of protections like the
so-called speech and debate clause.
Bannon’s lawyers are seeking coop-
eration from top Democrats including
Pelosi, the House majority leader Steny
Hoyer, the House majority whip Jim
Clyburn, all members of the select
committee and three select committee
counsels, as well as Letter.
The subpoenas request materials
that Bannon’s lawyers believe will pro-
vide evidence that the select com-
mittee did not follow House rules in
issuing its subpoena to Bannon last
Missing British journalist’s wife pleads with
Brazil to find ‘love of my life’
Tom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro
The wife of the British journalist who
has vanished in a remote corner of the
Amazon with a celebrated Indigenous
expert has issued an emotional plea for
Brazilian authorities to work harder to
find “the love of my life”.
“I want to make an appeal to the
federal government and the relevant
organs to intensify their search efforts,
because we still have some hope of
Headlines
whether prosecutors elsewhere feel
emboldened to take new approaches
or whether they will perceive that as
a political risk”, said Sandra Mayson,
a University of Pennsylvania law pro-
fessor. Boudin has reduced the jail
and prison population, prioritized alter-
natives to incarceration, and filed
charges against officers for misconduct.
He said in a recent interview that the
recall campaign was using a “Repub-
lican- and police union-led playbook”.
The city’s mayor, London Breed,
a moderate Democrat who has been
critical of Boudin’s policies, would ap-
point his successor if he is recalled,
though she has not announced a
choice. Possible appointees, according
to the San Francisco Chronicle, include
Steve Bannon outside court in Washington in March. Whether the subpoenas stand depends on how Judge Carl Nichols rules at a hearing
next week. Photograph: Bryan Olin Dozier/Rex/Shutterstock
year, and that federal prosecutors vi-
olated justice department rules in filing
charges.
It was not clear on Tuesday whether
Letter, the House counsel, would move
to quash the trial subpoenas. Letter,
through a spokesman for the select
committee, could not be reached for
comment.
Letter could also move to reach an
arrangement with David Schoen, the
lead lawyer defending Bannon in his
finding them,” Alessandra Sampaio, the
wife of longtime Guardian contributor
Dom Phillips, said in a tearful video
message.
“Even if I don’t find the love of my
life alive, they must be found, please
– intensify the search,” Sampaio im-
plored, breaking down as she spoke.
Phillips, 57, was last seen on Sunday
morning travelling by boat through
the remote Javari region with an Indi-
genous advocate, Bruno Araújo Pereira.
Days earlier, Pereira, who has spent
former prosecutors and DA candidates
who have supported the recall and
have advocated for a return to harsher
punishments and tough-on-crime poli-
cies. Early ballot data on Tuesday sug-
gested low voter turnout in the city.
Political spending on the Los An-
geles mayoral primary has already
topped $50m, with Caruso’s campaign
spending more than $40m of that.
Bass’s campaign has spent $3m, in con-
trast, and a local police union has spent
a similar amount on advertisement
opposing her candidacy.
On Friday, Elon Musk, one of the
richest men in the world, tweeted his
public endorsement of Caruso, who
himself is ranked No 261 on Forbes’
list of richest Americans. “He’s awe-
contempt case. Schoen told the Guar-
dian he would be prepared to discuss
the matter in the hope that Letter
would not move to dismiss the sub-
poenas.
“The subpoenas are asking for
materials that belong to the Amer-
ican people. It would be pretty ironic
for the committee to quash the sub-
poenas when they issued a subpoena
demanding materials from Bannon,
where Trump asserted executive pri-
years defending the region’s isolated
tribes for Brazil’s Indigenous protection
agency, reportedly received a written
threat stemming from his opposition
to illegal fishing gangs plundering the
Javari’s rivers. “We know who you are,
and we’ll find you to settle the score,” it
warned, according to the newspaper O
Globo.
The pair were also threatened on
Saturday, when a group of armed men
brandished firearms at a patrol by
members of the Univaja Indigenous
some,” Musk wrote. “Executive compe-
tence is super-underrated in politics –
we should care about that a lot more!”
Caruso, a real estate developer with
an estimated net worth of $4bn, has
used at least $38m of his own money
to move to the front of a crowded
non-partisan primary field, a number
that has already broken every previous
record for mayor’s races in Los Angeles,
local experts said. The billionaire’s per-
sonal fortune has funded a barrage of
attractive television ads and mailers
touting his candidacy, even as Caruso
has skipped some mayoral debates, and
largely avoided engaging with the press
or holding open public events.
Bass and then Caruso took an early
lead in mayoral polls, leading other
vilege,” Schoen said.
Bannon’s lawyers are making a mul-
ti-pronged defense to try and save
Bannon from being convicted of crim-
inal contempt of Congress after he was
referred to the justice department for
prosecution for failing to comply with a
subpoena in the congressional January
6 inquiry.
The main thrust of Bannon’s argu-
ment is that he cannot be held in wilful
contempt because he could reasonably
association, according to the asso-
ciation’s president Paulo Marubo. Phil-
lips photographed the men at the time,
Marubo told the Associated Press.
Brazilian police on Tuesday opened
a criminal investigation into the men’s
disappearance.
Forty-eight hours after the two men
were last seen heading towards the
river town of Atalaia do Norte by speed-
boat, Phillips’s sister, Sian, said she was
trying to stay positive despite the lack
of news.
3
mayoral primary contenders to drop
out of the race, though some, such as
Kevin de Leon, a current city council
member, fight on.
Heading into Tuesday, polls showed
Bass and Caruso closely matched in
terms of voter support, setting up the
possibility that neither would surpass
the 50% vote threshold needed to win
outright. In that case, the top two
candidates will advance to a runoff
election in November, a result that is
expected to generate millions more
in political spending from Caruso and
from Bass’s progressive backers in Hol-
lywood.
believe the subpoena was invalid when
the select committee failed to allow
a Trump lawyer to attend his depo-
sition, after Trump asserted executive
privilege.
The argument rests on a 2019 jus-
tice department office of legal coun-
sel opinion that says congressional sub-
poenas that prevent executive branch
counsel from accompanying executive
branch employees to depositions are
“legally invalid” and not enforceable.
Bannon’s lawyers are also making
the case that the select committee
in violation of House rules made no
effort to grant a one-week extension to
reply to the subpoena after his attor-
ney asked for time to review Trump’s
related lawsuit against the panel.
The defense that Bannon is ad-
vancing – using broad readings of parts
of the justice department’s own posi-
tions and amalgamating them into a
wider argument – is controversial, but
it underscores the complexities facing
federal prosecutors in pursuing the
case.“Bannon’s trying to use the OLC
opinions as a shield that doesn’t quite
cover him, but gives him enough of a
defense to fend off the DoJ’s necessity
of proving criminal intent,” Jonathan
Shaub, a University of Kentucky law
professor and a former OLC attorney-
adviser, previously told the Guardian.
She urged the international com-
munity to pressure Brazil to do more
to find a man she called “a bright star”
whose work illuminated the devas-
tation of the world’s largest tropical
rainforest.
“Time is crucial, because we know
there are situations where they could
be abducted – but there’s also situa-
tions where they had a mechanical
fault and they’re stuck and they have
Continued on page 4

4 Headlines
Continued from page 3
short supplies,” Sian Phillips said amid
growing concern authorities had dep-
loyed insufficient resources.
“So it’s crucial that [Brazilian
authorities] are searching with all the
equipment and local knowledge and
resources that the army has,” Phillips
added from her home in Lancaster.
Late on Monday, Brazil’s navy said
seven of its officials were involved in
the search, while the army said mem-
bers of a jungle infantry division had
been sent to the men’s last known loca-
tion by speedboat.
Earlier in the day, the army had
faced criticism after announcing that
it had yet to deploy since orders had
not been sent by the defence ministry
in the capital, Brasília. Only on Tues-
day morning is a helicopter believed to
have joined the mission. Official photo-
graphs of the army deployment, show-
ing a single vessel, did not point to
a massive operation given the impres-
sive military resources available in the
Amazon region.
Sian Phillips’s partner, Paul Sher-
wood, said: “We think it is evident that
there is not a wholehearted response to
this, and we want them to look as ac-
tively as they can because that is the
only hope we’ve got.”
Pereira’s partner, Beatriz de Al-
Janet Yellen tells Congress US faces
‘unacceptable levels of inflation’
Lauren Aratani in New York
Janet Yellen told Congress that the US is
facing “unacceptable levels of inflation”
on Tuesday as the treasury secretary
defended herself from criticism of her
previous comments that rising prices
were “transitory”.
Although the hearing with the
Senate finance committee was cen-
tered on Joe Biden’s budget for 2023,
Yellen was forced to answer questions
on inflation, including some on how
she once said that inflation would be
“transitory”, or temporary.
In response to a question about
how she had initially framed inflation,
Yellen said: “When I said that inflation
would be transitory, what I was not
anticipating was a scenario in which we
would end up contending with multiple
variants of Covid that would be scram-
bling our economy and global supply
chains.
“I was not envisioning impacts on
food and energy prices we’ve seen from
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
Yellen said she and the Federal Re-
serve chair, Jerome Powell, “could have
used a better term than transitory”.
She said: “There’s no question that
we have huge inflation pressures, that
inflation is really our top economic
problem at this point and that it’s crit-
ical that we address it. I do expect infla-
The veteran foreign correspondent Dom Phillips talks to two Indigenous men in Aldeia
Maloca Papiú, Roraima State, Brazil, in 2019. Photograph: João Laet/AFP/Getty Images
meida Matos, told the Folha de São
Paulo newspaper: “I have a three-year-
old son and one who is two. All I can
think about right now is that he comes
up safe, for the sake of the boys.”
In a letter to the Guardian, Brazil’s
ambassador to the UK, Fred Arruda,
said he had contacted the federal
police, army and navy and been reas-
sured “they were sparing no effort in
their search and rescue operation”.
Brazil’s foreign ministry expressed
“great concern” over the disap-
pearances and said the federal police
were doing everything possible to find
the men as soon as possible.
“The federal police have conducted
Janet Yellen said at the hearing: ‘I do expect inflation to remain high, although I very much hope that it will be coming down now.’
Photograph: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images
tion to remain high, although I very
much hope that it will be coming down
now.”
Last week, Yellen drew headlines
for making similar comments to CNN,
during an interview in which she had
been “wrong then about the path infla-
tion would take”.
At the hearing on Tuesday, Yellen
said: “We currently face macroe-
repeated incursions, with support from
the navy,” it said on Tuesday. “If the
disappearance turns out to have been
the result of criminal activity, all meas-
ures will be taken to bring the perpe-
trators to justice.”
Sian Phillips called on the UK and
US governments to lobby Brazil’s pres-
ident, Jair Bolsonaro, who is due to
meet his US counterpart, Joe Biden, at
this week’s Summit of the Americas in
Los Angeles, to do more.
“He’s not going to do anything
without having pressure put on him,”
Phillips said of the Brazilian leader,
whose presidency has overseen soar-
ing deforestation and the dismantling
conomic challenges, including unac-
ceptable levels of inflation, as well
as the headwinds associated with the
disruptions caused by the pandemic’s
effect on supply chain and the effects
of supply-side disturbances to oil and
food market.”
The Biden administration has
been delicately walking the inflation
tightrope over the last few months
The Guardian Wednesday 8 June 2022
of environmental protection agencies
and laws.
In his first official comments on
the disappearance, Bolsonaro criticised
what he called an inadvisable “adven-
ture”.
“Quite frankly, two people in just
one boat, in that kind of region, abso-
lutely wild, is an adventure that isn’t
recommendable for anyone. Anything
might happen. It could have been an
accident. They could have been ex-
ecuted,” he added, prompting imme-
diate outrage.
In a letter to the British foreign
minister, Liz Truss, the environmental
group Greenpeace urged her “to use
all diplomatic channels to urgently
communicate to the Brazilian govern-
ment the importance of mobilising all
necessary federal and local resources to
find the missing pair”.
David Lammy the British shadow
foreign secretary said: “I urge the Bra-
zilian authorities to do all they can to
find them as soon as possible and for
the foreign office to use all the diplo-
matic channel at its disposal.”
Friends and relatives of the miss-
ing journalist, who was born in Be-
bington, near Liverpool, described him
as a caring and intrepid reporter who
saw it as his mission to expose the
environmental crisis playing out in the
Amazon – and seek possible solutions.
as they try to push an aggressive re-
sponse while also emphasizing other
indicators that prove the economy is
still improving, particularly in the jobs
market.
Biden celebrated the figures shown
in May’s jobs report, released last Friday,
which showed that 390,000 new jobs
were created that month.
“Because of the enormous progress
A photograph of a rainbow over the Bra-
zilian Amazon sent by Dom Phillips to his
sister Sian on 1 June, four days before he
and Pereira went missing. Photograph: Dom
Phillips
When he disappeared, Phillips was
gathering material for a book about
conservation, which had also seen him
report from Costa Rica.
“He wanted … to make it a main-
stream book so that it alerted eve-
rybody to the problems with the
destruction of the Amazon,” his sister
said, before adding: “Dom is a bright star
leading the lights of the world to this
area – to spotlight this area right now.”
She said she last heard from her
brother last Wednesday as he set off
for the rainforest from his home in Sal-
vador, where he lives with his wife. “He
sent us a picture of the Amazon with
a rainbow over it from the plane,” she
said.
we’ve made on the economy, Amer-
icans can tackle inflation from a posi-
tion of strength,” Biden said in remarks
following the release of the jobs report.
Republicans in Tuesday’s hearing
repeatedly pointed to the passing of the
$1.9bn American Rescue Plan, which
was passed in March last year and deli-
vered further coronavirus aid, as a key
driver of inflation.
In response, Yellen noted that Biden
“inherited an economy with very high
unemployment”.
“We had to address the possibility
that this could be the downturn that
could match the Great Recession,” she
said. “In the policy, there were var-
ious risks taken into account. Of course,
inflation was one of them. But the over-
whelming risk was that America would
be marred by a deep and long reces-
sion.”
Yellen pointed to the expansion of
child tax credit, which gave extra assis-
tance to families, in the stimulus pack-
age that “resulted in a dramatic reduc-
tion in childhood poverty and financial
insecurity for American families and
contributed little to nothing to infla-
tion”.
She also said the US is “not the
only country that’s experiencing infla-
tion – you can see that in virtually every
developed country around the world”.
Wednesday 8 June 2022 The Guardian
Rebel Tories plan ‘vote strikes’ to capitalise
on PM’s weakened position
Aubrey Allegretti
Rebel Conservative MPs are drawing up
plans for “vote strikes” to paralyse law-
making and capitalise on the dramatic
Boris Johnson no-confidence vote.
Some of the 148 MPs who voted
to oust the prime minister on Monday
said they would try to stymie his
government’s legislative agenda, as
happened at the end of the Theresa
May era, by abstaining on key laws.
They plan to start with a showdown
over a bill to override sections of the
Northern Ireland protocol, to be pub-
lished within days.
Johnson suffered a worse-than-ex-
pected rebellion on Monday, with 40%
of MPs voting to remove him. Under
current rules, he is protected from
another no-confidence vote for a year.
Having used up their most power-
ful tool, rebels on Tuesday said they
wanted to “flex our muscles” and “prove
we’re not going away”.
Those who declared no confidence
in the prime minister spanned dif-
ferent factions of the party – from soft
left, “One Nation” Conservatives un-
happy with his policies on deporting
asylum seekers to Rwanda and priva-
tising Channel 4, to those who believe
his high-tax, high-spend approach is
too leftwing.
Given the uncoordinated way the
vote was triggered, rebels jokingly re-
ferred to themselves as a “coalition of
chaos”. Several said they had not been
contacted by anyone encouraging them
to vote Johnson out, claiming the swell
of opposition was “organic”.
Johnson called the result, which he
won with the backing of 211 MPs, “really
good” and on Tuesday urged people to
move on, saying it was time to “draw
a line” under the row about his leader-
Florida cop’s hunch links six cold cases to
accused 80s ‘pillowcase rapist’
Associated Press
Advanced DNA technology helped
detectives link the cases of six women
to a man accused of being the “pillow-
case rapist” for a string of rapes in the
1980s.
Robert Koehler is currently jailed in
Miami-Dade county in Florida, where
he faces charges for assaulting a woman
in the early 80s, the sheriff of neigh-
boring Broward county, Gregory Tony,
said in a Tuesday morning news confe-
rence.
Authorities believe Koehler, 62, may
have committed 40 to 45 rapes, terri-
fying victims by breaking into their
homes at night, the sheriff said. The
assailant used a pillowcase or other
fabric to cover his face – or the face
of his victims – before assaulting them,
tying them up and stealing items from
their homes.
The assaults by the pillowcase
rapist attracted extensive media atten-
Headlines
Boris Johnson at a cabinet meeting on Tuesday after narrowly surviving a no-confidence vote the night before. Photograph: Leon Neal/PA
ship and the Partygate scandal.
However, some rebels vowed to
keep up their efforts to oust him by
going on “vote strikes” – abstaining on
key pieces of legislation they might
have otherwise felt strong-armed into
supporting.
Several gave the Northern Ireland
bill, expected to be published this or
next week, as an example and predicted
there would be a “huge backlash” given
Johnson and the government whips’
authority had been so publicly under-
mined.
While some rebels were happy
to give No 10 until party confe-
rence season in September to prove
he understood their concerns, others
were less convinced drastic change was
coming.
Nikki da Costa, director of legis-
lative affairs when May was in No 10,
Sgt Kami Floyd of Broward county sheriff’s office: ‘It was a hunch based specifically on this
case, that he used a pillowcase to cover his face.’ Photograph: Wilfredo Lee/AP
tion in south Florida and the creation
of a taskforce to investigate the sex
crimes, sheriff’s officials said.
But the trail eventually turned cold
and the cases ended up in the cold case
unit. However, sheriff’s officials said the
meticulous record-keeping on the orig-
inal cases provided detectives with the
said Johnson was unlikely to face wide-
spread opposition on “the main sub-
stance of policy … but on detail of
policy, you will see a real push for
concessions”.
There “isn’t a clear policy ground
that unites” the 148 rebels, she told BBC
Radio 4’s World at One, comparing the
likely logjam to that suffered by May in
the dying days of her administration.
“It becomes a bit like whack-a-mole,
and that’s really time-consuming and
very arduous for any parliamentary
operation,” Da Costa said.
Other rebels suggested Johnson
would be forced to avoid tabling contro-
versial legislation in a bid not to face
embarrassing mass defiance by Tory
MPs.
One likened the situation the prime
minister faced to a scene from The
Simpsons, in which the character Side-
ability to test the evidence decades
later.
They dug through 500 boxes of evi-
dence and thousands of sexual assault
cases to link the cases to Koehler, said
Sgt Kami Floyd.
Floyd began looking through the
files in 2019 and found the case of a
show Bob is encircled by rakes and
continually hit by them as he steps in
different directions.
Some rebels also believe ministerial
colleagues are likely to quit if the
Conservatives lose two crucial byelec-
tions, due to be held on 23 June in the
seats of Wakefield, and Tiverton and
Honiton, in an effort to pile more pres-
sure on Johnson.
They are also keen to bide their
time until the privileges committee
inquiry begins into whether Johnson
misled parliament by repeatedly de-
nying Covid laws were breached in
Downing Street.
Some are unfazed about having a
lack of levers to force Johnson out, be-
lieving he will “blow himself up”.
Tory MPs also believe a reshuffle
will be carried out to promote those of-
fered jobs in exchange for their loyalty
woman who was assaulted in her Pom-
pano Beach apartment in June 1984.
That led her to several other similar
crimes in Broward county.
“It was a hunch,” Floyd said of link-
ing the first case she found to Koehler.
“It was a hunch based specifically on
this case, that he used a pillowcase to
cover his face, and at no point was she
able to identify who he was because she
didn’t know what he looked like.”
Around the same time, in 2020,
prosecutors in Miami-Dade county an-
nounced Koehler’s arrest and said he
was thought to be the “pillowcase
rapist” whose knifepoint attacks put
women across south Florida on edge
beginning in 1981.
Floyd got a search warrant for Koeh-
ler’s DNA and testing done by the she-
riff’s office crime lab found it matched
the evidence in the cases she was inves-
tigating, she said.
Detectives worked with prosecutors
to bring six sexual assault charges
against Koehler.
5
and axe those who refused to publicly
support Johnson – but that those who
are demoted and passed over again
could swing against him.
But sources said the chief whip,
Chris Heaton-Harris, was opposed to a
speedy reshuffle, and that any attempts
at a government “reset” now would be
overcome by events if the Tories lose
both byelections.
One MP on the government pay-
roll critical of Johnson said: “He already
used the card that he was reshaping No
10. There’s nothing practical he can do
to help bring 148 people onside. It’s ob-
vious the game is up; it’s just a matter of
when.”
After attention grew in No 10 on
those frontbenchers who had not de-
clared public support for the prime
minister, a flurry were forced to clarify
their position.
George Freeman, a minister,
tweeted he was “NOT going to get
drawn into a Twitter outing/Witch
Hunt”. Nicola Richards, a ministerial
aide, said that “although I share the
anger of many of my constituents”, she
“gave him my support on his reassur-
ances and promises to deliver”.
While there was little appetite for
immediately slashing the length of time
Johnson is immune from another no-
confidence vote from 12 months to six,
some rebels are eyeing elections in the
autumn to the 1922 Committee execu-
tive, which oversees such contests, as
a de facto decision about whether that
has changed.
Mark Harper, a former Conservative
chief whip, gave Johnson a matter of
weeks to “see the fruits” of the prom-
ises of reform. In a speech at the Adam
Smith Institute, Harper said that de-
spite the government’s nearly 80-seat
majority “we’re not using it to deliver
Conservative policies”.
Robert Koehler, 62, may have committed
40 to 45 rapes, authorities believe. Photo-
graph: Tim Shortt/AP
“When I found my first case, it ac-
tually saddened me to have to reach
out to that victim and have her relive
what had happened so many years ago,”
Floyd said.
Continued on page 6

6 Headlines
Continued from page 5
It was heartbreaking in many cases,
she added, because some women had
not even told their families what had
happened to them. She said some of
the victims told her they would need
to talk it over with their families before
discussing it with her.
Dozens tumble as Mexican footbridge
collapses during opening ceremony
Associated Press in Mexico City
The mayor of the Mexican city of
Cuernavaca was proudly inaugurating
a footbridge over a scenic stream on
Tuesday when the bridge collapsed,
sending him and about two dozen
other people plunging into a gully.
The hanging bridge made of
wooden boards and metal chains had
recently been remodeled. Video of the
collapse suggested the boards sepa-
rated from the chains supporting them.
Local officials, including city coun-
cil members, fell about 10ft (3 meters)
on to rocks and boulders in the stream
bed.
Cuauhtémoc Blanco, the governor
of Morelos state, where Cuernavaca is
located, said the wife of Mayor José Luis
Israel’s coalition on brink of collapse after
losing settler law vote
Bethan McKernan and Quique
Kierszenbaum in Jerusalem
Israel’s coalition government is tee-
tering on the brink of collapse after a
dramatic Knesset showdown over legis-
lation to extend legal protections for
settlers in the occupied West Bank.
In what was variously described by
Israeli media as “one of the most sur-
real votes in Israeli history” and “polit-
ical suicide”, the first reading of a bill
renewing civilian legal rights for Jewish
settlers in the West Bank failed to pass
on Monday night.
Members of the Knesset had to
weigh up their positions on both the
bill, and whether it was more important
to strengthen or weaken the ideolog-
ically diverse coalition, which recently
lost its razor-thin majority.
Elements of the government op-
posed to the bill were cajoled into
voting in favour over fears that fail-
ing to pass it could help bring down
the coalition that ousted long-time
prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu,
just under a year ago.
Meanwhile rightwing opposition
members voted against, even though
they support settlement building,
meaning the bill failed by a 58-52
margin.
“Yesterday shows how fragile the
government is now,” said Naama Lazimi,
a new member of the Knesset (MK)
for the government’s centre-left Labor
party, in her Knesset office on Tuesday.
“I knew my task: support the law, don’t
“But when they did decide to come
back and were brave enough to discuss
it with me, I was very proud of them,”
she said.
Their stories were all similar. They
lived alone. They were assaulted at
night, and the attacker apparently
knew their habits, including in some
cases the layout of their apartments.
The bridge in Cuernavaca collapsed as it was being inaugurated by the local mayor.
Composite: Twitter
Urióstegui and reporters were among
those on the bridge when it fell.
The Cuernavaca city government
Israel’s prime minister, Naftali Bennett, right, and the foreign minister, Yair Lapid. Photograph: Gil Cohen-Magen/AFP/Getty Images
destroy the government. Even if they
kill this bill they’ll pass it in a different
configuration.”
Under different circumstances, the
two-state solution activist said she
could have voted against. “But not sup-
porting this government is a position
only the very privileged can take. The
choice is between this government and
the far right, neo-liberals and [the reli-
gious]. We need to give this govern-
ment time to achieve.”
Emergency regulations in place
since the occupation of the Pales-
tinian territories began in 1967 and re-
Now, those victims are very relieved
to know the man who attacked them
may be brought to justice, she said.
“Several of them have commented
that they hope more women will come
forward,” Floyd said.
Floyd explained there are so many
sexual assault cases in the cold case
files, many from a time before records
said in a statement that four city coun-
cil members, two other city officials and
a local reporter were injured and had
newed by the Knesset every five years
have created two parallel legal sys-
tems in the West Bank, where about
500,000 Jewish settlers live in breach of
international law but have Israeli citi-
zenship. The 3 million Palestinians in
the same area have been subject to
Israeli military law for decades, a situ-
ation that three major human rights
groups have said amounts to apartheid.
If the legislation is not renewed, or
a modified version passed by the end
of June, Israeli settlers will automat-
ically become governed by military rule
– a development that could throw into
The Guardian Wednesday 8 June 2022
were computerized, making it difficult
to match them.
“For those who haven’t come for-
ward yet, this will bring you some clo-
sure,” she said.
• Information and support for
anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse
issues is available from the following
organisations. In the US, Rainn offers
to be extracted on stretchers from the
gully and were taken to local hospitals.
There was no immediate information
on their condition.
The city said Mayor José Luis
Urióstegui was taken to a hospital and
he had “light injuries and is out of
danger”.
The crush of officials and journalists
on the bridge during the inauguration
may have exceeded its planned capac-
ity.
Cuernavaca, located just south of
Mexico City, has long been a weekend
getaway for capital residents due to its
abundance of water and balmy climate.
The footbridge was part of a river
walk along one of the city’s many
streams. Cuernavaca has undergone
explosive growth and has largely ig-
nored or polluted many of its water-
chaos the tax and policing system for
Israelis in the West Bank, bring into
question the status of Palestinian in-
mates being held in Israeli prisons and
almost certainly lead to the collapse of
the government.
The governing coalition of eight
parties, sworn in a year ago, encom-
passes leftists who oppose settlement
building; rightwingers, such as the
prime minister, Naftali Bennett, who
previously led a settler lobbying group;
and, for the first time, members of an
Arab party.
Initially united by their desire to
support on 800-656-4673. In the UK,
Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 802
9999. In Australia, support is available
at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other
international helplines can be found at
ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
Mayor José Luis Urióstegui. Photograph:
José Luis Urióstegui Salgado/Facebook
ways. The river walk was intended to
be part of a revival of the city’s natural
attractions.
remove Netanyahu and end years of
political deadlock, an agreement to
maintain the “status quo” by focusing
on areas of common ground has proved
very difficult in practice.
“This coalition experiment was a big
mistake. It’s paralysed,” Ahmad Tibi, the
leader of the opposition’s Arab-majority
Ta’al party, said on Tuesday. “Everyone
is voting against their conscience. Last
night we even had Ra’am [the Arab
party in the ruling coalition] voting for
apartheid.
Everyone else is always calling us to
find out how we’re voting. We brought
this bill down … because we’re the only
faction in the Knesset actually voting
for what we believe in.”
As it lurches from crisis to crisis –
many triggered by the rightwing oppo-
sition, led by Netanyahu’s Likud party,
which is determined to vote against
every single bill in order to bring down
the government – Israelis have been left
wondering how long a coalition torn by
divisions can last.
“As always after we lose, we will
return stronger and win in the next
round,” said the foreign minister, Yair
Lapid, the chief architect of the go-
verning alliance, in a statement on
Twitter.
Nationalist party New Hope, part of
the coalition, has already threatened to
exit the arrangement if the government
cannot pass the West Bank settler legis-
lation.
If New Hope leaves, it could give the
Continued on page 7
Wednesday 8 June 2022 The Guardian
Continued from page 6
US networks to air January 6 hearings – but
Fox News sticks with Tucker Carlson
Ed Pilkington in New York
The public hearings by the House com-
mittee investigation into the January 6
insurrection at the US Capitol, which
start on Thursday, will be broadcast
live by all main TV networks and cable
channels in America bar one – Fox
News.
The historic proceedings kick off at
8pm New York time, and in Watergate
style will attract near-blanket live cov-
erage on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC
and more. By contrast, the most-watch-
ed TV news channel, Fox News, will
stick with its primetime show, Tucker
Carlson Tonight.
The decision pits Carlson’s intro-
ductory monologue against the open-
ing remarks of the January 6 com-
mittee’s chairman, Bennie Thompson,
as the latter outlines how Donald
Trump tried to undermine the 2020
election in order to hang on to power.
Carlson has used his platform consis-
tently to belittle the investigation and
to downplay the significance of the Ca-
pitol attack that led to the deaths of
seven people and forced the then vice-
president, Mike Pence, to flee a violent
mob.
On the anniversary of the attacks,
Carlson said on air that the insurrection
“barely rates as a footnote”. He has
championed false conspiracy theories
about it, including the claim that the
attack was a “false flag” operation spear-
headed by federal officials to discredit
Michigan widens investigation into voting
system breaches by Trump allies
Reuters
State police in Michigan have obtained
warrants to seize voting equipment
and election-related records in at least
three towns and one county in the past
six weeks, police records show, widen-
ing the largest known investigation
into unauthorized attempts by allies
of Donald Trump to access voting sys-
tems.
The previously unreported records
include search warrants and inves-
tigators’ memos obtained by Reuters
through public records requests. The
documents reveal a flurry of efforts by
state authorities to secure voting ma-
chines, poll books, data storage devices
and phone records as evidence in an in-
quiry launched in mid-February.
The state’s investigation follows
breaches of local election systems in
Michigan by Republican officials and
pro-Trump activists trying to prove his
baseless claims of widespread fraud in
the 2020 election.
The police documents reveal,
among other things, that the state
Headlines / News
opposition the votes it needs to trigger
new elections or form a new govern-
Tucker Carlson speaks at a Turning Point USA event in Phoenix, Arizona, in December 2021. Photograph: Brian Cahn/Zuma Press Wire/
Rex/Shutterstock
conservatives.
News coverage of the hearings will
be relegated from Fox News to its
sister channel, Fox Business Network.
As CNN’s Brian Stelter pointed out, Fox
News is the leading cable news network
at prime time with more than 3 million
viewers while Fox Business on average
attracts fewer than 100,000.
The scheduling is dramatically dif-
ferent to the blanket coverage Fox
News gave to the 2014 Benghazi hear-
ings which were staged by the then
The state’s investigation follows breaches of local election systems in Michigan by Republican officials and pro-Trump activists trying to
prove his baseless claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. Photograph: Matt Slocum/AP
is investigating a potential breach of
voting equipment in Lake Township,
a small, largely conservative com-
ment – potentially paving Netanyahu’s
path back to office despite the corrup-
Republican-controlled House to look
into the attack in Libya in which the
US ambassador was killed. The chan-
nel ran 1,098 primetime segments on
Benghazi between the attack in 2012
and the hearings, according to Media
Matters for America, with hours of pro-
ceedings broadcast live.
Hillary Clinton, who as US secretary
of state at the time of the attack was a
main target of the Republicans’ Beng-
hazi investigation, caustically remarked
on Tuesday: “Fox News won’t air the
munity in northern Michigan’s Mis-
saukee county. The previously unre-
ported case is one of at least 17
tion cases against him.
January 6 hearings because they prefer
their sedition made fresh on-site.”
The scheduling plan drew fire from
members of the January 6 committee.
Adam Kinzinger, one of two Repub-
lican members of the committee who
are participating in the hearings in de-
fiance of their party, accused Fox News
of hiding the truth “if it disagrees with
your narrative”.
Kinzinger, a representative from Illi-
nois, made a direct appeal to Fox News
staff: “If you work for Fox News and
incidents nationwide, including 11 in
Michigan, in which Trump supporters
gained or attempted to gain unautho-
7
want to maintain your credibility as a
journalist, now is a good time to speak
out, or quit. Enough is enough.”
The relentless efforts of Fox News
stars to diminish the significance of
January 6 stands in contrast to what
some of them said on the day itself.
As hundreds of Trump supporters were
storming the Capitol building, Laura
Ingraham sent a text to the then White
House chief of staff, Mark Meadows,
saying “the president needs to tell
people in the Capitol to go home. This
is hurting all of us. He is destroying his
legacy.”
Later that night, Ingraham used her
show, The Ingraham Angle, to blame
the violence on antifa.
Brian Kilmeade, co-host of the
morning show Fox & Friends, and pri-
metime star Sean Hannity, privately
made similarly frantic appeals to Mea-
dows as January 6 unfolded.
Fox News’s response to the congres-
sional hearings forms part of wider
counter-programming against the pro-
ceedings being waged by the right.
Top Republicans including the House
minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, are
planning aggressive pushback, in-
cluding a rapid response unit and
talking points that describe the pro-
ceedings as “rigged”.
Republican leaders and others who
remain loyal to Trump are also hoping
that “January 6 fatigue” will have set in,
and that large sections of the American
public will fail to tune in.
rized access to voting equipment.
Many of the breaches have been
inspired in part by the false assertion
that state-ordered voting-system up-
grades or maintenance would erase evi-
dence of alleged voting fraud in 2020.
State election officials, including those
in Michigan, say those processes have
no impact on the preservation of data
from past elections.
The search warrants also autho-
rized state police to seize election
equipment in Barry county’s Irving
Township and have it examined. Local
officials acknowledged publicly last
month that state police raided the
township office on 29 April, a day after
the warrant was issued.
Additionally, the records shed new
light on election-equipment breaches
in Roscommon county. One official in
the county’s Richfield Township told
investigators that he gave two vote-
counting tabulators to an unauthorized
and unidentified “third party”, who kept
them for several weeks in early 2021.
The county’s clerk acknowledged that
Continued on page 8

8 News
Continued from page 7
she, too, handed over her equipment to
unauthorized people.
Taken together, these documents
depict a statewide push by pro-Trump
activists to access election machinery
in search of evidence for debunked
theories that equipment was rigged in
a crucial swing state that voted for
Trump in 2016 and for Democrat Joe
Biden in 2020.
The Michigan secretary of state, Jo-
celyn Benson, told Reuters that the
state was investigating whether the
election system breaches are coor-
dinated.
Activists hail Biden’s use of security powers
to boost clean energy
Oliver Milman
Environmental groups have welcomed
Joe Biden’s invoking of national secu-
rity powers to rapidly expand the
production of clean energy technology
as a significant advance in the effort to
curb dangerous climate breakdown.
Biden has triggered the Defense
Production Act, a cold war-era law
used to compel businesses to ramp up
production of certain materials to aid
national security, to boost the output
of solar panels, building insulation,
transformers for power grids and heat
pumps, which are used to efficiently
heat and cool homes.
The US president has also provided
a two-year exemption to solar panel
companies from tariffs on imported
parts, easing the flow of technology
from China and other countries for use
in the US, a country where only 2.8% of
electricity comes from solar power.
The moves have been applauded by
climate activists who have pressed for
Biden to use the breadth of his presi-
dential powers to act on the climate
crisis. Activists have sharply criticized
the president in recent months over the
continuing failure to pass major climate
legislation through an evenly divided
Senate, as well as Biden’s calls for bols-
tered oil production to offset gasoline
prices that have risen amid the war in
Ukraine.
“We are in a climate emergency,
Wage gap between CEOs and US workers
jumped to 670-to-1 last year, study finds
Dominic Rushe
The wage gap between chief executives
and workers at some of the US com-
panies with the lowest-paid staff grew
even wider last year, with CEOs making
an average of $10.6m, while the median
worker received $23,968.
A study of 300 top US companies
released by the Institute for Policy Stu-
dies (IPS) on Tuesday found the av-
erage gap between CEO and median
worker pay jumped to 670-to-1 (mean-
ing the average CEO received $670 in
“If there is coordination, whether
it’s among those in our state or reach-
ing up to a national level, we can
determine that and then we can seek
accountability for all involved,” Benson,
a Democrat, said in an interview.
On 10 February, Benson announced
that she had asked Michigan’s attor-
ney general, Democrat Dana Nessel, to
begin a criminal investigation, citing
information that state authorities had
received about unauthorized access
to voting machines and data in Ros-
common county. In separate inquiries,
state or local law enforcement officials
have investigated security breaches in-
volving voting equipment in Cross Vil-
Joe Biden provided solar panel companies a two-year exemption from tariffs on imported parts. Photograph: Al Drago/Getty Images
an emergency we can only con-
front when our government steps up
and launches a second-world-war scale
mobilization to justly transition to
renewable energy,” said Varshini Pra-
kash, executive director at the youth-
led Sunrise Movement. “This is a great
step by the administration, and we ur-
gently hope to see even more signif-
icant executive actions follow.”
Biden has declined to declare a
climate emergency, as has been done
in countries such as the UK, or to
Amazon, the second-largest federal con-
tractor in the sample, amassed $10.3bn in
federal contracts. Last month shareholders
approved a $212m pay deal for Amazon’s
CEO, Andy Jassy, 6,474 times the company’s
median pay. Photograph: Frederic J Brown/
AFP/Getty Images
lage Township in Emmet county and
Adams Township in Hillsdale county
last year.
Representatives of the state police
and attorney general’s office declined
to comment on the investigations de-
tailed in this story.
Trump won all of the counties
where breaches or attempted breach-
es in Michigan have been alleged. The
results in those jurisdictions were af-
firmed by multiple audits and an inves-
tigation by the Republican-controlled
state senate, which found no evidence
of widespread fraud. But some activ-
ists and officials pushing election-fraud
conspiracy theories claim that Trump’s
set a phase-out of fossil fuels. But
his administration said use of national
security powers to create a “strong-
er clean energy arsenal” was evidence
of “bold action to build an American-
made clean energy future”.
The use of the Defense Production
Act will allow the US Department of
Energy to invest in companies that can
build renewable energy facilities and
manufacture parts for technology such
as solar panels. The administration ex-
pects domestic solar manufacturing
compensation for every $1 the worker
received). The ratio was up from 604-
to-1 in 2020. Forty-nine firms had ratios
above 1,000-to-1.
At more than a third of the com-
panies surveyed, IPS found that median
worker pay did not keep pace with
inflation.
The report, titled Executive Excess,
comes amid a wave of unionization
efforts among low wage workers and
growing scrutiny of the huge share buy-
back programs many corporations have
been using to inflate their share prices.
US companies announced plans to buy
The Guardian Wednesday 8 June 2022
margin should have been larger in
these areas, and their efforts are roil-
ing communities across the state.
In rural Barry county, the Repub-
lican sheriff, Dar Leaf, has teamed with
proponents of the debunked claim that
voting machines were rigged against
Trump. Leaf is pursuing his own inves-
tigation, despite being urged last year
by the Republican county prosecutor to
suspend it for lack of evidence. Trump
won the county by a 2-1 margin.
In recent weeks, Leaf’s office has
sent expansive public records requests
to the county’s township and city
clerks, seeking an array of election-re-
lated records. The requests were con-
will now triple by 2024, allowing more
than 3.3m homes each year to switch to
solar energy.
A shift to cleaner sources of elec-
tricity would also help protect against
energy bill volatility and provide effi-
ciency to households, say proponents
– heat pumps, for example, can save
homes $1,000 each year from space
heating alone. The administration has
also sought to stress the benefits of
weaning the US off the supply of fossil
fuels from countries such as Russia.
back more than $300bn of their own
shares in the first quarter of the year
and Goldman Sachs has estimated that
buybacks could top $1tn in 2022.
Share-related remuneration makes
up the largest portion of senior execu-
tive compensation and as buybacks
generally boost a company’s share
price, they also boost executive pay.
Senator Elizabeth Warren has called
buybacks “nothing but paper manipu-
lation” designed to increase executive
pay.
The report found that two-thirds of
low-wage corporations that cut worker
demned by clerks and local officials
in Reuters interviews and public state-
ments as baseless and burdensome. An
editorial in the local newspaper, the
Hastings Banner, called Leaf’s inves-
tigation “a waste of time and an affront
to our citizens”.
Leaf did not respond to requests
for comment. In an interview with Reu-
ters in February, he defended his inves-
tigation. He said he was “concerned” by
theories that voting machines nation-
wide were rigged to favor Biden, and
“we need to know if that happened in
Barry county”.
“Reducing America’s dependence on
gas and oil is critical to US national
security,” saidKathleen Hicks, deputy
secretary of defense.
Jean Su, director of energy justice
at the Center for Biological Diversity,
said Biden’s latest actions represented
a “tremendous sea change” in his ap-
proach to tackling the climate crisis.
“Biden’s executive moves give crit-
ical momentum to the needed tran-
sition to solar energy,” said Su. “We hope
this use of the Defense Production Act
is a turning point for the president, who
must use all his executive powers to
confront the climate emergency head
on.”
Scientists have said the world must
cut planet-heating emissions in half
this decade, and zero them out by
2050, to avoid even more disastrous
heatwaves, floods, drought and other
damaging climate impacts.
Biden, who shares this target, won’t
be able to achieve it, however, though
executive action alone. The US has
never passed major climate change
legislation and the president’s attempts
to do so have been stymied by Joe Man-
chin, the pro-coal Democrat who has
been a crucial swing vote in the Senate.
It’s unclear whether any climate bill will
be able to succeed ahead of November’s
midterm elections, which are expected
to deprive Democrats of control in Con-
gress.
pay in 2021 also spent billions inflating
CEO pay through stock buybacks.
The biggest buyback firm was home
improvement chain Lowe’s, which
spent $13bn on share repurchases. That
money could have given each of its
325,000 employees a $40,000 raise, ac-
cording to IPS. Instead, median pay at
the company fell 7.6% to $22,697.
“CEOs’ pandemic greed grab has
sparked outrage among Americans
across the political spectrum,” said
report lead author Sarah Anderson,
Continued on page 10
 No billionaire
owner
pulling
our strings,
or
stories
We’re free to ask the questions others
can’t - and to hold the rich and powerful
to account. But producing our independent
journalism is expensive.

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10
Continued from page 8
director of the IPS Global Economy
Project. She cited one recent poll that
showed that 87% of Americans see the
growing gap between CEO and worker
pay as a problem for the country.
IPS noted that many of the com-
panies in its sample were also the reci-
Video of apparent Greg Abbott canvasser
laughing about her job goes viral
Erum Salam
A video of a woman apparently working
as a door-to-door canvasser supporting
Greg Abbott went viral after she burst
out laughing when a resident said he
would “absolutely not” back the Texas
governor.
“Everybody’s got to have a job,” Mo-
nique Dawson said, seemingly referring
to her own position with the campaign.
Dawson could be heard laughing in
the video as she returned to her vehicle.
The video was captured on a Ring
home security doorbell camera. After it
surfaced online, Dawson, from Dallas,
wrote on Twitter: “I just saw the look
on his face and it was pure amusement.
I couldn’t hold in my laugh to save my
life, and they fired me.”
Responding to a request for com-
ment, a spokesperson for Abbott said:
“This individual has never been em-
ployed by Texans for Greg Abbott or
Gun crime victims are holding the firearms
industry accountable – by taking them to
court
Chris McGreal
With each slaughter of innocents,
the gun industry offers its sympathy,
argues that even more weapons will
make America safer, and gives thanks
for a two-decade-old law shielding the
firearms makers from legal action by
the victims.
Mike Fifer, the chief executive
of one of the US’s leading handgun
manufacturers, Sturm Ruger, once de-
scribed the 2005 Protection of Lawful
Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) as
having saved the firearms industry be-
cause it stopped in its tracks a wave
of lawsuits over the reckless marketing
and sale of guns.
But now victims of gun crime are
following an alternative path forged by
legal actions against cigarette makers,
prescription opioid manufacturers and
big oil in an attempt to work around
PLCAA – and the lack of political will to
act on gun control – to hold the firearms
industry accountable for the bloody toll
of its products.
On Tuesday, Ilene Steur, who was
badly injured when a man fired 33
shots on the New York subway in April
wounding 10 people, filed a lawsuit
News
pients of large federal government con-
tracts. Forty companies in the sample
were awarded $37.2bn in government
contracts between 1 October 2019 and 1
May 2022.
The biggest recipient was Maximus,
a company that manages federal stu-
dent debts and Medicare call centers,
which received $12.3bn in federal con-
Greg Abbott speaks during a visit to the border wall near Pharr, Texas, last year. Photograph: Sergio Flores/AFP/Getty Images
Protesters gather near Senator Marco Rubio’s office in Miami, Florida, on 3 June to
demand gun safety legislation. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
accusing the manufacturer of the semi-
automatic pistol used in the attack,
Glock, of breaching “public nuisance”
laws.
Steur’s lawsuit contends that Glock
endangered public health and safety
in breach of New York state law with
an irresponsible marketing campaign
to push its gun’s “high capacity and
ease of concealment” in an “appeal to
prospective purchasers with criminal
intent”.
It also accuses Glock of giving
significant discounts to American
tracts. In 2021, Maximus CEO Bruce
Caswell collected $7.9m in compen-
sation, 208 times the firm’s median pay-
check. Maximus workers have recently
staged walkouts over pay and benefits.
Amazon, the second-largest fed-
eral contractor in the sample, amassed
$10.3bn in federal contracts. Last
month shareholders approved a $212m
police departments on weapons pur-
chases to “give the gun credibility” in
the larger and more lucrative civilian
market.
“Gun manufacturers do not live in
a bubble,” said Mark Shirian, Steur’s
lawyer. “They are aware that their mar-
keting strategies are empowering pur-
chasers with ill intent and endangering
the lives of innocent people. This law-
suit seeks to hold the gun industry
accountable.”
The public nuisance strategy has
been used against the tobacco industry
The Guardian Wednesday 8 June 2022
pay deal for Amazon’s CEO, Andy Jassy,
6,474 times the company’s median pay.
This report offers a number of
policy solutions, including actions pres-
ident Joe Biden could take without
waiting for Congress. “The president
could wield the power of the public
purse by introducing new standards
making it hard for companies with huge
for lying about the link between ciga-
rettes and lung cancer, and with mixed
success against pharmaceutical com-
panies for creating the US opioid epi-
demic by recklessly pushing prescrip-
tion opioids.
Public nuisance claims are also at
the heart of a series of lawsuits by states
and municipalities accusing oil firms of
covering up and lying about the part
fossil fuels play in driving the climate
crisis.
Until recently, the gun industry
thought PLCAA provided a shield from
similar actions. The National Rifle Asso-
ciation persuaded a Republican-con-
trolled Congress to pass the law after
the families of people shot by the
sniper who terrorised the Washington
DC area for three weeks in 2002, killing
10 people, won a total of $2.5m from the
gun manufacturer, Bushmaster, and
the store that sold the weapon.
But a lawsuit by the families of 20
young children and six staff murdered
in the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary
school massacre sought to exploit an
exception in PLCAA if a firearm is sold
in violation of “applicable” state or fed-
eral law, in this case public nuisance
and consumer protection legislation.
The Connecticut supreme court
CEO-worker pay gaps to land a lucra-
tive federal contract,” Anderson said.
The report also urges Biden to ban top
executives at federal contractors from
selling their personal stock for a multi-
year period after a buyback.
volunteered for the campaign.”
But Dawson also shared a link to
a GoFundMe page, titled “Social media
cost me my job”.
On the page, she said: “Hi my name
is Monique Dawson. I worked as a
volunteer for governor Greg Abbott. As
a result of this video being posted I was
fired from my job. If you can spare a
$1 or 2 it will add up and replace what
I could have been earning as a cam-
paigner. Bills are due and I have no
other source of income outside this
job.”
Surpassing her goal of raising
$15,000, Dawson also said she had a
new job offer on the table and shared an
image on social media suggesting she
had applied to be a paid canvasser for
Abbott’s Democratic challenger, Beto
O’Rourke.
This article was updated on 6 June
2022 with a statement from Abbott’s
spokesperson.
Jordan Gomes, a survivor of the shoot-
ing at Sandy Hook elementary school, stands
next to Senator Richard Blumenthal during
a rally for the Uvalde, Texas, community
after a mass shooting at Robb elementary
school. Photograph: Bryan Woolston/Reu-
ters
upheld the argument that PLCAA did
not prevent the gun maker being sued
for breach of state laws for irres-
ponsibly militaristic marketing cam-
paigns for its semi-automatic rifles
aimed at young men. Remington ap-
pealed to the US supreme court which
declined to take the case while it
was still in litigation. In February, Re-
mington settled for $73m.
At about the time the Connecticut
supreme court ruled in favour of the
Sandy Hook families, New York intro-
duced the law Steur is relying on that
expands public nuisance legislation to
Continued on page 11
Wednesday 8 June 2022 The Guardian
Continued from page 10
cover gun crimes. On Wednesday, a
federal district judge in New York dis-
missed an attempt by the gun industry
to quash the law on the grounds that it
pre-empted PLCAA.
Timothy Lytton, a specialist in gun
litigation at Georgia State University
college of law and author of Suing the
Gun Industry, expects the validity of
the New York law, and the claim that
public nuisance legislation is an excep-
tion to the protection given to the gun
industry, to be appealed all the way to
the US supreme court.
“The most important thing that the
supreme court needs to decide with
regard to firearms litigation is probably
the scope of the federal immunity law
and whether or not the exception that
was relied upon by the Sandy Hook
US raises monkeypox alert level but says risk
to public remains low
Ramon Antonio Vargas
The US Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention has raised its monkeypox
alert level and warned travellers to be
mindful of approaching sick people,
though it also said the risk to the gen-
eral public remained low.
More than 1,000 monkeypox cases
have been reported in at least 29
countries and every continent except
Antarctica as of Monday. The US has
seen 31 cases of the virus in 13 states,
including seven in New York and six in
California.
Many of the infected had not re-
cently travelled to the areas of Africa
where monkeypox usually occurs, such
as Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of
Congo and other parts of central and
western Africa, the CDC said. Some of
the cases involved people living with
an infected person. Investigators have
been examining whether at least some
cases in the current outbreak may be
spreading through sexual contact.
The CDC urged travelers to avoid
close contact with sick people – espe-
Proud Boys leaders charged with seditious
conspiracy in 6 January riot
Hugo Lowell in Washington
Top leaders of the far-right Proud Boys
group, including its national chairman,
Enrique Tarrio, have been charged with
seditious conspiracy for plotting to
storm the US Capitol to obstruct the
certification of Joe Biden’s election win
over Donald Trump on 6 January 2021.
The move by federal prosecutors
to charge Tarrio and four other Proud
Boys leaders with seditious conspiracy
– in addition to previous charges of
obstructing a congressional proceeding
– marks a major development in the
criminal investigation into the Capitol
attack.
In the 33-page indictment unsealed
News
plaintiffs is a viable legal theory. If it’s a
viable legal theory, then I think you’re
likely to see an upsurge in litigation,” he
said.
But, Lytton said, legal actions
against the gun industry face an addi-
tional challenge because of the su-
preme court’s interpretation of the
second amendment and the rights it
gives to gun owners, a legal area that
has also yet to be more widely tested.
“There are limits on the ability to
sue a newspaper for libel because of
the first amendment. It may be the case
that the second amendment has sim-
ilar restrictions on the ability of indi-
viduals to hold the firearms manufac-
turer liable. But we don’t know what
those restrictions might be because
we have very little indication from
the supreme court about what the
second amendment actually protects
‘Risk to the general public is low,’ the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. Photograph: AP
cially those with lesions on their skin or
genitals – and their bedding or clothes.
Others with whom to avoid con-
tact included dead or live rats, squirrels,
in Washington DC on Monday, the jus-
tice department said Tarrio and his co-
defendants Joseph Biggs, Ethan Nor-
dean, Zachary Rehl and Dominic Pez-
zola for months used encrypted mes-
saging apps to stop Biden’s certification
by force.
The new charges against the Proud
Boys leadership come days before the
parallel congressional inquiry into the
Capitol attack is scheduled to start tele-
vised hearings that are expected to ex-
amine, in part, Trump’s personal culpa-
bility in the events of January 6.
Seditious conspiracy, which is chal-
lenging to prove, requires federal prose-
cutors to show beyond a reasonable
doubt that at least two people agreed
to use force to overthrow the govern-
other than a basic right for an indi-
vidual to own a firearm that they can
use for ordinary purposes,” he said.
Still, as litigation against the to-
bacco, opioid and oil industries demon-
strates, the point of lawsuits is not only
to win in court. After each massacre,
the gun industry usually seeks to blame
the individual shooter and the failure
of systems, such as mental health ser-
vices. Lytton said lawsuits put the focus
back on the actions of the firearms
makers and forces public discussion of
how they sell weapons.
“The impact of litigation is not just
about who wins and who loses. It’s
about the framing, information disclo-
sure and agenda-setting effects that the
litigation process creates even if the
plaintiffs lose. A great example of that is
clergy sexual abuse.
“Almost none of those suits have
monkeys and apes, since the virus that
causes monkeypox often comes from
rodents and primates. The CDC also
cautioned against eating or preparing
ment or to interfere with the execution
of a US law.
The new indictment is the latest
involving seditious conspiracy, after
the justice department filed identical
charges earlier this year against top
members of the far-right Oath Keepers
militia group, including its founder Ste-
wart Rhodes, over the Capitol attack.
A bipartisan US Senate report linked
seven deaths to the attack on the Ca-
pitol, which failed to stop certification
of Biden’s win. Trump was impeached
for inciting an insurrection but ac-
quitted when enough Senate Repub-
licans stayed loyal.
In adding on the seditious con-
spiracy charges, the justice department
appeared to indicate that it has learned
been won and almost none of them
in front of a jury. But they’ve revolu-
tionised the global church because of
these three effects of the litigation,” he
said.
Two decades of litigation over the
US opioid epidemic that has claimed
more than 1 million lives has shifted
the focus away from the drug industry’s
attempt to blame the victims for their
addiction to the big pharma’s respon-
sibility for pushing the wide use of
prescription narcotics despite the dan-
gers. Highly embarrassing revelations
in several court cases about the drug
companies’ cynical marketing tech-
niques helped pressure opioid makers
and distributors into settling thousands
of lawsuits over the opioid epidemic.
Similarly, states and cities suing the
oil industry for lying about the climate
crisis hope that public disclosure of
meat from wild game, known as bush-
meat, or using creams, lotions or powd-
ers derived from animals in Africa.
“Risk to the general public is low,”
new information in recent weeks about
the Proud Boys’ plans ahead of 6 Jan-
uary as a result of several significant
developments.
One of the Proud Boys, who was
originally charged with Tarrio and the
other co-defendants for obstructing
a congressional proceeding, Charles
Donoghue pleaded guilty in April and
accepted a plea deal to cooperate
with the criminal investigation into the
group.
Meanwhile, though the indictment
also identified unindicted co-conspi-
rators – “Person 1” is understood to be
Jeremy Bertino and “Person 2” is prob-
ably Aaron Whallon Wolkind – neither
of those men have been charged. A
third top Proud Boy leader, John Ste-
11
what fossil fuel companies knew and
when they knew it will add to pressure
on big oil to reach settlements.
But Lytton warned that strategy
may not have the same impact on the
gunmakers.“There’s something very dif-
ferent about firearms. When it comes to
tobacco or opioids or pretty much any
other area of public policy in the United
States, people tend to reconsider their
views and start to rethink the problem,”
he said.
“The only place in American public
policy where this is not true is in fire-
arms violence. No matter how terrible
the tragedy is, people tend to get even
more committed to the views that they
already have.”
the CDC said. “But you should seek
medical care immediately if you de-
velop new, unexplained skin rash (le-
sions on any part of the body), with or
without fever and chills, and avoid con-
tact with others.”
At one point on Monday the CDC
told travelers to “wear a mask” as it “can
help protect you from many diseases,
including monkeypox”, according to
a screenshot posted on Twitter by
epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding, but the
recommendation no longer appeared
on the CDC’s website on Tuesday.
The monkeypox virus does not
spread easily between people, though
transmission can occur through con-
tact with an infected person’s body
fluids, sores, contaminated bedding
and clothes, and respiratory droplets
during face-to-face contact.
The virus has a slow incubation
period, and those exposed to it can
be given existing smallpox vaccines to
limit severity of any sickness.
wart, also remains uncharged.
The government said in the indict-
ment that on 20 December 2020, Tarrio
created a chat called “MOSD Lead-
ers Group” – described by Tarrio as a
“national rally planning committee” –
that included Nordean, Biggs, Rehl and
other individuals who were not iden-
tified.
Through the rest of December, the
government said, Proud Boys leaders
used additional MOSD group chats to
plan a “DC trip” and communicate to
group members that they should go
to the capital not wearing their famil-
iar black and yellow colours but travel
“incognito” instead.
Continued on page 12

12
Continued from page 11
The government said in the indict-
ment that on 30 and 31 December
2020, Tarrio communicated with an
individual – whose identity is known
only to a grand jury – who sent him
a nine-page document, called “1776 re-
turns” in reference to the year of Amer-
ican independence from Britain. It laid
out a plan to occupy “crucial buildings”
on 6 January.
The document broadly outlined a
plan to reconnoiter and storm crucial
government buildings in Washington
DC on 6 January, though not the Ca-
pitol itself, the New York Times earlier
reported.
Tarrio is said to have received the
“1776 returns” document from one of
his girlfriends, who compared the plan
to storming the Winter palace in St
Petersburg that sparked the Russian
Revolution in 1917, the New York Times
reported.
The indictment cited a reference to
that moment in the new indictment,
drawing upon what appeared to be
newly uncovered text messages. After
the Capitol attack ended, Bertino mes-
saged Tarrio, “1776”, to which Tarrio re-
Doc Antle of Tiger King charged with
laundering $505,000
Associated Press
Bhagavan “Doc” Antle, one of the stars
of the runaway hit Tiger King, has been
charged with laundering more than half
a million dollars.
Federal prosecutors said that Antle
believed the money to be the proceeds
of an operation to smuggle people
across the Mexican border into the US.
Charges against Antle and Andrew
Jon Sawyer, one of Antle’s employees at
Myrtle Beach Safari, were revealed on
Monday during a federal court hearing
in Florence, South Carolina.
According to federal prosecutors,
Antle and Sawyer laundered $505,000
over a four-month period by doling
out checks from businesses they con-
trolled, receiving a 15% fee from
the money that passed through their
hands.
The checks, prosecutors allege,
falsely purported to be payment for
construction work at Myrtle Beach
Safari but were in reality intended to
serve as evidence that the recipients
had legitimate income.
According to the complaint un-
sealed in court Monday, Antle dis-
cussed his plan to conceal the cash he
received by inflating tourist numbers
at his 50-acre wildlife tropical preserve.
Founder of violent UK neo-Nazi group jailed
for more than eight years
Steven Morris
The founder of a violent neo-Nazi
group created with the aim of inspiring
News / World News
Enrique Tarrio leaves the Washington DC central detention facility in January this year. Photograph: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters
sponded: “The Winter Palace.”
Three days before the Capitol
attack, a Proud Boy referred to only
as “Person-3” posted a voice message
in the MOSD Leaders Group that stated
the “main operating theater should be
Bhagavan ‘Doc’ Antle, who was arrested on Friday. Photograph: AP
Prosecutors also said he had previously
used bulk cash receipts to purchase ani-
mals for which he could not use checks.
Records for the Horry county jail
show Antle and Sawyer were both ar-
rested on Friday. Attorneys for both
men did not immediately comment on
the charges when reached via email.
According to authorities, Antle and
a race war in the UK has been jailed for
eight and a half years.
Alex Davies, described in court as
the “biggest Nazi of the lot”, was found
guilty of being a member of National
out in front of the House of Repre-
sentatives”, according to the indict-
ment.
“That’s where the vote is taking
place with all of the objections,” the
person said, according to the indict-
Sawyer each face a maximum of 20
years in federal prison if convicted.
Antle is featured prominently in
Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Mad-
ness, a 2020 Netflix documentary mini-
series that focused on tiger breeders
and private zoo operators in the US. The
series focused heavily on Joe Exotic, an
Oklahoma zoo operator who was tar-
Action (NA) after it was proscribed by
the UK government.
Davies, 27, from Swansea, set up the
“continuity group” NS131 with the aim
of getting around the ban, brought in
The Guardian Wednesday 8 June 2022
ment. “Plan the operations based
around the front entrance to the Ca-
pitol building. I strongly recommend
you use the National Mall and not
Pennsylvania Avenue.”
The new pieces of evidence in the
geted for animal mistreatment and was
convicted in a plot to kill a rival, Carole
Baskin.
Animal rights advocates have ac-
cused Antle of mistreating lions and
other wildlife. He was indicted in Vir-
ginia in 2020 on animal cruelty and
wildlife trafficking charges.
In May, People for the Ethical Treat-
after NA posted “congratulatory” tweets
after the murder of the MP Jo Cox.
At the Old Bailey in London, Judge
Mark Dennis QC told Davies: “You
are an intelligent and educated young
latest indictment were messages Ber-
tino sent to Tarrio after the attack. “You
know we made this happen,” Bertino
said. Referring to the implications of
obstructing Biden’s win, Bertino added:
“They HAVE to certify today. Or it’s
invalid.”
Tarrio was not in Washington DC on
6 January 2021, having been ordered to
leave the capital by a judge after being
arrested the day before for burning a
Black Lives Matter banner at a church
during a pro-Trump rally in December.
But the justice department has said
that even though Tarrio was not ac-
cused of “physically taking part in the
breach of the Capitol”, he “led the ad-
vance planning and remained in con-
tact with other members of the Proud
Boys during” the attack.
Eleven members of the Oath Kee-
pers militia are also charged with sedi-
tious conspiracy.
Lawyers for Tarrio and the other
four Proud Boys leaders have said there
is no evidence they conspired to storm
the Capitol, and that the MOSD group
chats and the acquisition of tactical
gear before 6 January were measures
to protect themselves in case of poten-
tial altercations.
ment of Animals asked the IRS to inves-
tigate Antle’s Rare Species Fund, a non-
profit raising money for wildlife conser-
vation. Peta alleges he uses some of the
fund’s money to subsidize his safari site
in Socastee, outside Myrtle Beach.
“It’s fitting that ‘Doc’ Antle is behind
bars after years of locking up the
endangered animals he uses in tawdry
photo ops. His legal woes are mounting,
as Peta recently blew the whistle on his
apparent ‘charity’ scam, and the end to
his reign of terrorizing tiger cubs can’t
come soon enough,” said Debbie Metz-
ler, associate director of Peta’s captive
animal law enforcement division, in a
statement.
Antle is facing two felony counts
of wildlife trafficking and conspiracy to
wildlife trafficking charges, as well as
13 misdemeanor counts of conspiracy
to violate the Endangered Species Act
and animal cruelty charges tied to traf-
ficking lion cubs. Those charges are
scheduled to go to trial next month.
Antle has a history of recorded
violations, going as far back as 1989,
when he was fined by the US Depart-
ment of Agriculture (USDA) for aban-
doning deer and peacocks at his zoo in
Virginia. Over the years, he has more
than 35 USDA violations for mistreating
animals.
man but you have held, over a period
of many years, warped and shocking
prejudices.”
Continued on page 13
Wednesday 8 June 2022 The Guardian
Continued from page 12
The judge said that by relaunching
NA with the acronym NS131, Davies
had tried to hide the group in “plain
No regrets over handling of Vladimir Putin,
says Angela Merkel
Philip Oltermann in Berlin
Angela Merkel has said she feels no
regrets for her handling of Vladimir
Putin during her time in power, arguing
that Russia’s president would have per-
ceived a 2008 Nato membership plan
for Ukraine that was blocked by her
government as a “declaration of war”.
The former German chancellor
also claimed that an oligarch-run
and democratically immature Ukraine
would have been less prepared for an
invasion then than it is now.
“I would feel very bad if I had
said: ‘There’s no point talking to that
man [Putin]”, Merkel said in an ons-
tage interview at the Berliner Ensem-
ble theatre on Tuesday night – her first
public appearance since leaving office
half a year ago.
“It is a great tragedy that it didn’t
work, but I don’t blame myself for
trying,” she added in an unusually frank
answer from a politician who rarely
spoke freely while in office.
Asked about whether she re-
gretted opposing the US-led member-
ship action plan for Ukraine and Geor-
gia in 2008, Merkel said: “Ukraine was
not the country that we know now.
It was a Ukraine that was very split …
even the reformist forces [Yulia] Tymo-
shenko and [Viktor] Yushchenko were
very at odds. That means it was not
a country whose democracy was in-
wardly strengthened.” She said Ukraine
at the time was “ruled by oligarchs”.
From the Russian president’s pers-
pective, “it was a declaration of war”.
While she didn’t share Putin’s pers-
pective, Merkel said she “knew how he
thought” and “didn’t want to provoke it
further”.
She claimed to have blocked
US wins legal battle to seize $325m
superyacht docked in Fiji
Kalyeena Makortoff
US authorities have won a legal battle
to seize a $325m (£258m) superyacht
docked in Fiji that they claim is benefi-
cially owned by one of Russia’s richest
men, the sanctioned oligarch Suleiman
Kerimov.
US officials have been battling for
control and seizure of the 106-metre
vessel, which features a helipad, Ja-
cuzzi, lobster tank and sundeck ma-
naged by up to 36 crew, after claiming
in court filings that the vessel was con-
trolled by a “straw owner” meant to ob-
scure the true beneficiary of the vessel.
Lawyers for the British Virgin Isl-
ands company which is registered as
World News
sight”. He said: “This was a well-orches-
trated and determined effort to flout
the ban on the activities of National
Action and continue to promote and
strive to achieve the long-held objec-
Angela Merkel at the Berliner Ensemble theatre on Tuesday night. Photograph: Filip Singer/EPA
Ukraine’s route to membership of the
military alliance with the country’s best
interests at heart. “You cannot become
a member of Nato from one day to the
next,” Merkel said. “It’s a process, and
during this process I knew Putin would
have done something to Ukraine that
would not have been good for it.”
The Minsk agreements of 2014 and
2015 were signed by then Ukrainian
president Petro Poroshenko to reach a
political settlement in east Ukraine, but
have since been criticised for forcing
concessions while the country was mili-
tarily on the back foot.
Merkel defended the accords,
saying they bought Ukraine time. “It
calmed down the matter and bought
Ukraine time to develop into the coun-
try that it has become now.”
She praised president Volodymyr
The oligarch-owned superyacht Amadea docked in Lautoka, Fiji. Photograph: Reuters Tv/
Reuters
the corporate owner of the yacht,
tives.”
Members of NA armed themselves
with machetes, swords, firearms and
crossbows as they plotted “white jihad”
across the UK. One man associated with
Zelenskiy for his wartime leadership,
saying he represented a new Ukraine.
The interview with Der Spiegel jour-
nalist Alexander Osang began with
Merkel talking about how she had spent
her first weeks out of office going for
solitary walks by the Baltic Sea, wear-
ing a hoodie so as not to be recognised
by passersby, and listening to an audio-
book of William Shakespeare’s Mac-
beth.
But the conversation inevitably
turned to the war in Ukraine, and
whether Germany’s alleged leniency to-
wards the Kremlin had emboldened
Putin. Merkel said she felt the geopo-
litical problems created by the collapse
of the Soviet Union had been present
throughout her 16 years in power. “It
wasn’t possible to properly end the cold
war … the Russia question always re-
known as the Amadea, have denied
the group was jailed for planning to kill
an MP, and another was in close contact
with a man imprisoned for a racist ma-
chete attack.
At his trial in Winchester, Davies
mained.”
Merkel said she had started to take
seriously the possibility of a looming
invasion in her last few weeks in office,
when she attended the G20 summit
in Rome while Olaf Scholz’s successor
government was still in the process of
being formed.
“There were hints and we talked
about it a lot,” the 67-year-old said. “I
realised that Putin had finished with
the Minsk process.”
While Merkel condemned Russia’s
war of aggression in clear terms, she
also seemed to suggest some blame
needed to be apportioned to the west.
“What happened is a great mistake
on Russia’s behalf … an objective break
with all rules of international law that
allow us to coexist in Europe in peace. If
we started to go through one century
Kerimov was linked to the vessel, and
claimed instead that it belongs to a Rus-
sian businessman, the former Rosneft
boss turned private oil tycoon Eduard
Khudainatov.
The European Union issued sanc-
tions against Khudainatov last Friday,
citing his ties to president Vladimir
Putin and former deputy prime minis-
ter, Igor Sechin. However, the EU sanc-
tions decision did not refer to his own-
ership of the Amadea, or a separate
$700m vessel recently seized by Ital-
ian authorities that some reports claim
is linked to the businessman. Khudai-
natov has not personally commented
on the ownership of either vessel.
The legal wrangling began shortly
after the Amadea arrived in Fiji waters
13
was described by the prosecution as
“the founder, the galvaniser, the re-
cruiter … an extremist’s extremist”.
after another arguing which territory
belongs to whom, then we would be
at war non-stop.
“I don’t share the opinion of Mr
Putin, to make that very clear. But we
didn’t manage to create a security archi-
tecture that could have prevented this
[war in Ukraine]. And we should think
about that too.”
She rejected the criticism that Ger-
many under her leadership had fallen
for an illusion that a militarily aggres-
sive Russia could be democratised by
expanding trade links with the west.
“I didn’t believe that Putin could
be changed through trade,” Merkel said.
But she said her belief was that if polit-
ical cooperation was impossible, it was
sensible to at least have some economic
connections with Moscow.
Merkel’s defence of expanding eco-
nomic ties with Russia seemed at odds
with her claiming to have warned other
politicians that Putin felt animosity
towards the entire western model of
democracy, and that he wanted to “de-
stroy Europe”.
The former leader of the conserv-
ative Christian Democratic Union
(CDU) conceded that European coun-
tries had failed to spend sufficiently
on their militaries, even though she re-
jected criticism that the German army
had fallen into disarray under her
watch.
“What should we have enforced
more strongly?” she asked rhetorically
when reviewing the decisions of her
last two terms in office. “It [the mili-
tary] is the only language that Putin
understands. He saw that we, and not
just Germany but others too, no longer
had the strike power of the cold war.”
on 13 April, following an 18-day journey
from Mexico. Fiji’s supreme court said
in its judgment that the vessel sailed
into Fiji water without a permit, “most
probably to evade prosecution by the
United States”.
The court ruled it was in the public
interest that the yacht “sail out of Fiji
waters”, because having it docked in
there was “costing the Fijian govern-
ment dearly”.
The Fiji government had been cov-
ering the costs of maintaining the
vessel – which according to some esti-
mates runs up to $1.1m each month –
while the appeal by the vessel’s regis-
tered owner, Millemarin Investments,
Continued on page 14

14
Continued from page 13
Spanish police investigate 20,000
undelivered letters from decade ago
Ashifa Kassam in Madrid
From Monday to Friday, he clocked in
dutifully at the central post office in
the Spanish city of Alicante, picking up
bags and bags of mail to be delivered.
But exactly what the former letter
carrier did next is now under inves-
tigation after more than 20,000 unde-
livered letters dating back to 2012 and
2013 were found crammed into bin bags
at his home.
The discovery came after the 62-
year-old, who has not been named by
police, sold his house in Biar, a town
of about 3,600 people at the foot of
the mountains near Alicante. When a
construction crew showed up to reno-
vate the newly purchased house, they
found rubbish bags scattered through-
out.
After the man ignored repeated
pleas to empty the house, the build-
ers began opening the bags. What they
found were stacks of sealed letters,
bills and frayed official correspondence
Polio outbreak in Pakistan worsens as eighth
child reported paralysed
Haroon Janjua
Pakistan’s polio eradication campaign
is in disarray after an alarming jump in
cases last week. Eight polio cases have
now been reported in children over the
past month in North Waziristan dis-
trict, bordering Afghanistan. They are
the first cases in more than a year.
This new outbreak, officials believe,
is due to parents falsely marking them-
selves and their children as vaccinated,
and the government has launched an
investigation into the outbreak.
North Waziristan is a former Ta-
liban stronghold in north-west Pakis-
tan, where high vaccine refusal rates
are thought to be behind the new cases.
“Fake markings and refusals are two
key reasons in the recent outbreak,
with polio staff conspiring with par-
ents to miss the vaccination,” said an
official at Pakistan’s polio eradication
programme, referring to how parents
suspicious of immunisation have got
hold of special pens used by health
workers to mark vaccinated children’s
fingers.
Dr Shahzad Baig, national pro-
gramme coordinator, said: “The cases
are highlighting exactly where the chal-
lenges lie, and we are doing our utmost
to ensure that the virus remains con-
World News
wound its way through the courts.
Neither Kerimov nor Khudainatov
The unnamed man was charged with ‘infidelity in the safekeeping of documents’. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock
dating back a decade, all of them des-
tined for residents in one area of Ali-
A child’s finger is inked to show a polio dose has been given. Some health workers are said to be helping parents avoid vaccinations by
falsely marking a child’s fingers. Photograph: K Chaudary/AP
tained and we fight it till the end.”
Before this surge, the last case of
child paralysis as a result of polio was
reported in January last year.
The federal health minister, Abdul
Qadir Patel, said: “Following the first
two cases in April, the polio programme
took immediate steps to ringfence this
could be reached for comment.
cante.
“There was not one package,” police
area and prevent the virus from spread-
ing further, particularly in the his-
toric reservoirs [of infection] of Karachi,
Peshawar and Quetta.
“Pakistan has had tremendous suc-
cess against polio over the past few
years, and we are taking all steps to pro-
tect the gains made by the programme.”
The Guardian Wednesday 8 June 2022
sources told the newspaper El País, “be-
cause they are subject to registration
It was crucial for parents to vac-
cinate their children every time it was
due, said the minister, as every dose of
polio vaccine built further immunity.
Nationwide vaccination drives have
been carried out door-to-door for the
past 25 years. The teams are mostly
female health workers, often volun-
and a more thorough follow-up by the
post office.”
Police suspicions swiftly fell on the
former owner of the house. In 2013, the
post office had opted not to renew his
temporary contract, citing what police
described as “irregularities” that had
plagued his delivery route in his year
as a letter carrier.
The man was briefly arrested by the
Guardia Civil last week and accused of
“infidelity in the safekeeping of docu-
ments”.
The trove of stolen correspondence,
in the meantime, has been handed
back to Spain’s post office. The let-
ters will remain at the disposition of
judicial authorities during the inves-
tigation, until a judge determines that
the letters – posted more than a decade
ago – can finally be delivered.
• The headline of this article was
amended on 7 June 2022 to refer to the
letters as “undelivered”, not “unposted”.
teers, who have to be escorted by secu-
rity guards.
Three such campaigns have been
carried out in January, March and May
this year. During the March campaign in
north-western Pakistan, gunmen shot
and killed a female polio worker. In
January, also in the north-west, assai-
lants shot and killed a police officer pro-
viding security to the polio team.
Militant groups in Pakistan have
killed more than 100 health workers
and their security guards since 2012.
According to the World Health
Organization, Pakistan is one of only
two countries, with Afghanistan, where
the wild polio virus is still endemic.
Anti-vaccination sentiment in
Pakistan is deeply rooted. Clerics and
others have spread myths that vaccines
are a conspiracy by the west to sterilise
Muslim children, and a husband was
allowed to divorce his wife for vacci-
nating their children against polio.
In April 2019, more than 25,000
children were rushed to hospital during
a mass panic in north-west Pakistan
after the spread of unfounded rumours
about polio vaccines causing fainting
and vomiting.
Wednesday 8 June 2022 The Guardian
EU deal will force iPhones to use USB-C
charger by 2024
Jedidajah Otte
The EU has paved the way for all smart-
phones to be legally required to use a
USB-C port for charging, a move that
could be a headache for Apple, whose
iPhone is the only main brand smart-
phone without this type of connection.
The EU’s agreement will apply from
autumn 2024 for all smartphones sold
in the bloc, a decision that could
substantially impact Apple as the
iPhone uses Apple’s lightning port for
wired charging.
USB-C ports were introduced in
Apple’s 12in MacBook model in 2015
and in the iPad Pro in late 2018, while
other iPads have come with the port
since 2020.
Some Apple users with devices fea-
turing the lightning connector praise
its “grip”, with some complaining that
USB-C ports become loose over time.
Others have expressed their desire
to do away with their “dongle” bundles
of adapters and replace them with a
universal cable for all Apple products.
The EU said the rule change aims to
reduce hassle for consumers as well as
electronic waste, as it will enable con-
India: more countries join Muslim protests
over Muhammad remarks
Amrit Dhillon in Delhi
Six more countries have joined diplo-
matic protests across the Muslim world
over derogatory remarks insulting the
prophet Muhammad made by spokes-
people for the party of Indian prime
minister, Narendra Modi.
Indonesia, the UAE, the Maldives,
Jordan, Bahrain and Libya have joined
Qatar, Kuwait, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Oman,
and Afghanistan in lodging official
complaints over comments from repre-
sentatives of the Hindu nationalist Bha-
ratiya Janata party. Meanwhile hardline
party members have reacted angrily
to disciplinary action against the pair
after their comments went viral in the
Middle East.
Indonesia, which has the largest
number of Muslims in the world,
summoned the Indian ambassador
in Jakarta. “Indonesia strongly con-
demns unacceptable derogatory re-
marks against Prophet Muhammad
PBUH [peace be upon him] by two
Indian politicians,” read a tweet by the
foreign ministry.
Bahrain called on “the need to
denounce any reprehensible insults
against the Prophet Muhammad PBUH,
World News
The common charger will be ‘a reality in Europe’ according to the European parliament. Photograph: Julien Warnand/EPA
sumers to use older chargers for new
devices.
The rules will apply to “all small
and medium-sized portable electronic
devices”, which will include mobile
phones, tablets, cameras, keyboards,
Protests in Mumbai call for the arrest of Nupur Sharma, the BJP’s national spokesperson, over comments she made about the prophet
Muhammad. Photograph: Ashish Vaishnav/SOPA Images/REX/Shutterstock
as a provocation to Muslims’ feelings
and incitement to religious hatred”.
The BJP’s attempt to quell the anger
by suspending its national spokes-
person, Nupur Sharma, and expelling
its Delhi media head, Naveen Kumar
speakers, headphones, headsets and
earbuds. Laptops will have to be
adapted to fit the requirements 40
months after they come into force.
The decision is yet to be approved
by the European parliament and Euro-
Jindal, and dismissing them as “fringe
elements” who did not represent the
government’s views has had little suc-
cess in the Muslim world.
And at home Hindu hardliners who
have frequently targeted India’s Muslim
pean Council, but is expected to be a
formality.
European parliament spokesperson
Alex Agius Saliba said: “Today we have
made the common charger a reality in
Europe.
minority vented their anger over the
climbdown, unusually for a party that
has never faced any internal criticism in
its eight years in power.
Many praised Sharma, who made
the remarks during a debate on a
15
“European consumers were long
frustrated with multiple chargers piling
up with every new device. Now they
will be able to use a single charger for all
their portable electronics.
“We are proud that laptops, e-read-
ers, earbuds, keyboards, computer mice
and portable navigation devices are
also included, in addition to smart-
phones, tablets, digital cameras, head-
phones and headsets, handheld video
game consoles and portable speakers.
Ben Wood, chief analyst at CCS In-
sight, said the announcement could
become a “non-issue” for Apple as the
firm already uses USB-C on a number of
products.
“Having one common charging
standard would be a victory for
common sense in the eyes of con-
sumers,” he said.
“Although Apple has made a strong
argument for it keeping its lightning
connector … some of its products, in-
cluding Mac and iPad Pro, now support
USB-C.
“Hopefully it will eventually
become a non-issue if Apple keeps
adding USB-C to more devices, and that
means ultimately we could see USB-C
coming to iPhone.”
rightwing news channel, and expressed
incredulity that a BJP government
could buckle to pressure from Muslim
countries. Jindal was expelled over a
tweet he made about the prophet
which has since been deleted.
The hashtag “#ShameOnBJP” was
trending on Twitter along with expres-
sions of solidarity with the national
spokesperson and, in a rare rebuke to
Modi, hardliners have suggested that
Uttar Pradesh’s firebrand chief minister,
Yogi Adityanath, might make a better
prime minister.
The party has contended that it
cannot jeopardise India’s extensive
trade links with the Arab world, its need
for Gulf oil, and the requirement to pro-
tect the 6.5 million Indians who live in
the Gulf.
Indian opposition leaders have
meanwhile demanded the arrest of
Sharma, who has told Delhi police she
has received death threats, and Jindal,
saying the action taken so far was a
sham.
The Congress party leader, Rahul
Gandhi, accused the BJP of dividing
India internally and weakening it exter-
nally. “The BJP’s shameful bigotry has
not only isolated us, but also damaged
India’s standing globally,” he tweeted.

16
From hunger striker to MP candidate: the rise
of France’s ‘humanist baker’
Angelique Chrisafis in Besançon
After dark in a bakery kitchen,
Stéphane Ravacley was bashing blocks
of butter with a giant rolling pin as he
prepared his croissant pastry. “A lot of
French people have lost faith in poli-
tics,” he said, shaping the first of 500
croissants. “They’re not voting, they
don’t feel listened to, and it’s my battle
to win them back.”
The 53-year-old baker who hails
from what he calls the “bottom rung of
the social ladder” has captured France’s
imagination as one of the most improb-
able newcomers in this weekend’s first
round of the parliamentary elections.
Ravacley’s outsider challenge to
Emmanuel Macron’s centrist party in
the Doubs near the Swiss border in
eastern France is focusing attention on
the newly re-elected president’s image
problem as being aloof, especially con-
cerning people’s everyday worries.
Macron is seeking a centrist parlia-
mentary majority in order to have a free
hand for his policies, such as raising the
pension age and overhauling the bene-
fits system. But turnout on 12 and 19
June is expected to be at a record low of
less than 48% amid a growing mistrust
of the political class. Some voters feel
that the real battle will take place with
street demonstrations against Macron’s
policies from the autumn, so there’s
“not much point” in voting, as one
unemployed man said on a housing
estate in the eastern town of Besançon.
A historic alliance of parties on the
left, led by the radical Jean-Luc Mélen-
chon, is seeking to make big parlia-
ment gains, and is predicted by poll-
sters to triple its seats and become the
main opposition to Macron’s centrists.
Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally
Will anti-abortionists use ‘uterus
surveillance’ against women in the US?
Arwa Mahdawi
I
f you are looking for a cheerful
column that will make you giggle
and distract you from everything
that is wrong with the world, click
away now. This week I have noth-
ing but doom, gloom and data trackers
for you. If you are hoping to sink into
a well of existential despair, maybe let
out a few screams into the void, then
you’ve come to the right place.
Here goes: the US supreme court, as
you are no doubt aware, is expected to
overturn Roe v Wade and the federal
right to an abortion very soon. At least
13 Republican-led states have “trigger
laws” in place, which means that the
moment Roe is overruled, abortion will
be fully or partly banned. Other states
will follow suit. According to the Gutt-
macher Institute, a pro-choice research
organisation, 26 states are certain or
likely to ban abortion when Roe falls.
Perhaps you are the glass half-full
sort. Perhaps you are thinking: “Well, at
World News / Opinion
Stephane Ravacley in 2021 during his campaign to save his Guinean apprentice from
deportation. Photograph: Sébastien Bozon/AFP/Getty Images
is also seeking to increase its seats.
Ravacley, who does not belong to a
political party, is running for parliament
for the leftwing alliance, backed by
the Greens. He argues that the French
parliament, which is overwhelmingly
middle-class with a high level of formal
education, needs more working-class,
manual labourers who understand the
way French people think. He grew up in
eastern France, in a poor family who
worked the cereal fields. His mother
died in a tractor accident when he was
four, leaving his father with three child-
ren.
Ravacley is known as the “humanist
baker of Besançon”. He became famous
last year for going on hunger strike in
defence of his Guinean bakery appren-
tice, Laye Fodé Traoré, an orphan who
had arrived in France as an unaccom-
panied minor aged 16, but faced depor-
tation when he turned 18. Ravacley’s
protest tapped into national concern
for unaccompanied minor migrants.
Stars including the actors Omar Sy
and Marion Cotillard signed an open
letter to Macron on his behalf. Still,
Protesters at the Defend Roe v Wade Emergency March in San Francisco, US, last month. Photograph: Michael Ho Wai Lee/Sopa Images/
Rex/Shutterstock
least people can travel to a state where
it took 11 days of hunger strike and
Ravacley’s sudden hospitalisation for
the authorities to make contact and
begin processing Traoré’s paperwork,
allowing him to stay.
“When I went on hunger strike, I
was initially met with silence from the
authorities and that changed me as a
person,” Ravacley said. “I’ve become a
monster now – a kind and gentle mon-
ster – I really understand that if you
want to change things you have to fight
for it.”
The baker’s campaign schedule is
gruelling. He works on his croissants
until 10pm, sleeps three hours, rises at
1.30 am to bake bread for his shop until
midday, briefly naps, then sets off in his
old Renault Twingo full of flour-sacks
as he canvasses in his eastern consti-
tuency that spreads from the housing
estates of Besançon to the small vil-
lages outside.
Ravacley still supports migrants
who arrived as unaccompanied minors,
as well as French young people leaving
the care system, which has opened him
to far right attacks. Last week, one of his
abortion is legal.” Unfortunately, it’s not
The Guardian Wednesday 8 June 2022
election posters was sprayed with the
Nazi swastika and racist slurs. “I’ll never
give in to hate,” he said.
In an election described by poll-
sters as lacklustre and dull, Ravac-
ley has become a high-profile figure.
During last month’s Cannes film fes-
tival, the Dardenne brothers directing-
duo, whose latest film is about young
migrants in Belgium, dedicated their
film to Ravacley. They called his hunger
strike a “great act of resistance in our
era”.
Ravacley said: “I was rolling out
my croissants, as usual at that time
of night, the phone rang and some-
one said: ‘Put on the TV, they’re talking
about you at Cannes.’ Incredible.”
The town of Besançon, run by a
Green mayor since 2020, saw a high
vote for the left’s Mélenchon in the
presidential race – he topped the poll
in the first round, beating Macron and
Le Pen. Ravacley’s challenge is whether
the new leftwing alliance can now per-
suade voters to turn out again in the
parliamentary elections, particularly on
housing estates where abstention is
high.
On the estates of Besançon’s Clairs-
Soleils neighbourhood, as Ravacley
knocked on doors, people said their big-
gest concern was making ends meet, as
well as the climate crisis, but that trust
in politics was low.
Outside a primary school, Ahmed,
32, an accountant collecting his two
daughters, said he recognised Ravacley
from TV. “It’s important to have some-
one in parliament who understands
people’s everyday concerns, and we’re
really struggling with the cost of food
and petrol,” he said. “If I vote, I’ll vote for
him. But I’m not really sure if it’s worth
voting any more, nothing ever changes.”
Nabia Hakkar-Boyer, a regional
that simple. There are the obvious
Stephane Ravacley (centre) delivers a
speech during a campaign meeting in Be-
sançon on 15 May. Photograph: Sébastien
Bozon/AFP/Getty Images
councillor for the Socialist party,
and Ravacley’s runningmate, said: “He
comes across as down to earth and dif-
ferent to other candidates. He looks like
the voters themselves, and he under-
stands their lives. He always has flour
on his trousers and he works more than
15 hours a day.”
Since the gilets jaunes anti-govern-
ment protests of Macron’s first term,
there has been a demand for “ordinary
citizens” to play more of a role in polit-
ical decision-making. Under pressure,
Macron promised this month that he
would set up a vast democratic consul-
tation with the French people, but he is
yet to spell out in what form.
Ravacley is not the only cit-
izen protester who has turned parlia-
mentary candidate this year. Rachel
Keke, a hotel housekeeper who led a
two-year strike for better conditions for
cleaners at a hotel on the edge of Paris,
is running for the left alliance east of
the capital.
Meanwhile, Ravacley has even
made his flour-encrusted, worn-down
work shoes a campaign argument. “I’ll
go to the National Assembly in my
magic shoes,” he said. “They keep my
feet on the ground.”
logistical and financial constraints, for
one thing. Then there’s the fact that
we live in a world of mass surveil-
lance: pretty much everything we do
these days leaves a digital footprint –
one that anti-abortion extremists will
not hesitate to weaponise. One Demo-
cratic senator has described the poten-
tial of new technology to track down
and punish anyone who might even
be thinking of having an abortion as
“uterus surveillance”. Expect to see a
big rise in this, not least because some
anti-abortion states are providing finan-
cial incentives to snitch on your fellow
citizens. Texas, for example, has passed
“bounty hunter” laws promising at least
$10,000 to individuals who help en-
force the abortion ban by successfully
suing an abortion provider.
To be fair, there’s nothing new
about uterus surveillance. Anti-abor-
tion activists may be stuck in the past
when it comes to reproductive rights,
but they have always been adept at
Continued on page 17
Wednesday 8 June 2022 The Guardian
Continued from page 16
using modern technology to further
their goals. One tactic they’ve used for
decades is standing outside clinics and
recording the licence plates of anyone
who enters. As far back as 1993, extrem-
ists were tracing the people connected
to those licence plates, obtaining their
phone numbers, then calling up to
harass them. Years ago tracing some-
one took a bit of time and effort. Nowa-
Only cultural change will free America from
its gun problem
Andrew Gawthorpe
S
ome days it feels like guns
are such a foundational part
of American identity that
the country would have to
cease to be itself before it
would give them up. When a gunman
murdered dozens of elementary-age
schoolchildren, leaving their bodies in
such a state that parents had to give up
DNA samples for them to be identified,
it was one such day. What cultural
value, what material interest, could
be worth this? It must be something
that its defenders consider supremely
important.
Guns – that’s what. Critics of the
sickness which is America’s obsession
with guns often focus their fire on the
second amendment, or the perverse
political influence of the National Rifle
Association. But neither of these things
really get to the root of the pathology.
It’s true that gun-rights advocates rely
on a surely mistaken reading of the
constitution to justify arming them-
selves to the teeth. And it’s also true
that the NRA is a malign force in Amer-
ican politics. But the constitution can
be changed or reinterpreted, and spe-
cial interest groups can be vanquished.
What is at issue here is something
more foundational, and more difficult
to change: American culture itself.
The gun is the great symbol, and
poisonous offshoot, of American indivi-
dualism. The country has long valo-
rized masculine heroes – the cowboy,
the frontiersman, the patriotic soldier
– who impose their will on the com-
munity’s enemies with violence. It’s no
coincidence that whenever a horrific
mass shooting occurs, those in favor of
guns respond by claiming that the solu-
tion to the guns of the bad guys is more
guns in the hands of the good guys.
Such reasoning responds to a deep-
Operation Save Big Dog ramps up the day
after the Boris music died
John Crace
W
ithin minutes of
the greased piglet
proving to be
rather less slip-
pery than his
supporters had expected, Operation
Opinion
days, you can look up someone’s per-
sonal information with the click of a
button and a small fee.
The wonders of the modern world
mean there are a mind-boggling
number of ways in which you can now
identify anyone who might be think-
ing about an abortion. To begin with,
there’s location data. Vice media re-
cently reported that a data location
company is selling information related
to Planned Parenthood facilities (many
‘The pleasure derived from guns, the sense of participation in America’s deepest myths about itself which they might foster, come at the
expense of tens of thousands of lives a year.’ Photograph: Nuri Vallbona/Reuters
seated American historical myth, and
allows the speaker to imagine them-
selves as the hero.
But they are not heroes – far from
it. Mass shooters may be, as the writer
John Ganz put it, the “nightmare ob-
verse” of the ideal of the lone fron-
tiersman. But everyone else who de-
fends their own right to possess a gun,
who lauds guns as the bringers of peace
and order, is guilty too. Their choices
make society less safe, not more. The
pleasure derived from guns, the sense
of participation in America’s deepest
myths about itself which they might
foster, come at the expense of tens of
thousands of lives a year. Sometimes,
they are the lives of small children,
innocent to the ways of a world which
has allowed them to die.
Men own guns at nearly twice the
rate of women, and within all of this
there is something deeply pathetic
Save Big Dog went into overdrive, with
loyal MPs sticking their faces in front
of any passing TV camera. First up was
Nadhim Zahawi. “There was a ballot,” he
said. Nothing gets past him. “Fifty plus
one is a majority and Boris did much
better than that.” Er, quite. If by better,
you mean worse than Margaret Thatch-
er and Theresa May, both of whom were
of which provide abortions). The data
shows where groups of people visiting
the locations came from, how long they
stayed and where they went afterwards.
That data is aggregated so it doesn’t
provide the names of individuals; how-
ever, de-anonymising this sort of infor-
mation is not very difficult. There is
plenty of evidence that location data
is almost never anonymous.
Period-tracking apps, which are
used by millions of people, are also
about the state of American manhood.
American gun culture treats ownership
of weapons of war as a sign of mascu-
linity and virility, something that makes
you more of a man. Almost anywhere
else in the western world, a man seek-
ing to demonstrate his masculinity in
this way would be treated as an absurd
and tragic poser. No doubt many gun
owners tell themselves that they are
better equipped to protect the inno-
cent. But they are wrong. Rather, gun
culture reveals the centrality of vi-
olence to American conceptions of
manhood – a violence which ultimately
harms rather than protects.
If the problem is cultural, then what
is the solution? There is no easy one.
By now, the grooves of the debate
are well-worn, and even a shocking
event like the Uvalde massacre will not
shake us out of it for long. Proposals
to change the law or the constitution
effectively finished as prime minister.
The education secretary pressed on.
Struggling to explain the magnitude of
the joy that would be felt throughout
the world at Boris Johnson’s miraculous
triumph, Zahawi alighted on Ukraine.
Thousands of people who had been
sheltering from Russian airstrikes in
the Donbas would be taking to the
a worrying source of potentially incri-
minating information in a post-Roe
world. Experts have warned that
rightwing organisations could buy data
from these apps and use it to prove
that someone was pregnant then had
an abortion. Your text messages could
also be used against you, as could
your browser history. Indeed, author-
ities in Mississippi have already used a
woman’s online search for abortion pills
to indict her for second-degree murder
will be bitterly criticized, and gun-rights
proponents will present the shooter
as an anomaly who holds no lessons
for “responsible” gun-owners. The su-
preme court is expected soon to loosen
rather than tighten the law around car-
rying guns in public. Republicans will
angrily decry attempts to “politicize”
the massacre, as if the fact that inno-
cent children are being brutally mur-
dered due to the policies those very
same Republicans support was not al-
ready a political issue of the highest
order.
But cultural change is not imposs-
ible. It has happened in recent dec-
ades on very important issues. Amer-
ica also contains within itself the will
to self-improvement, and citizens who
will give their all to achieve it. Some-
times it comes before political or legal
change, and sometimes it comes after
it. The only way to avoid despair is
streets to cheer the Convict. What’s
more, Volodymyr Zelenskiy would be
offering up prayers for Johnson’s tem-
porary salvation. As if on cue, the Ukrai-
nian president did indeed tweet his
pleasure. He takes his job as Boris’s the-
rapist very seriously. That will be 80
guineas and two chieftain tanks for that
intervention.
17
after she miscarried. That happened in
2018; imagine what is going to happen
in a post-Roe world. Speaking of which,
I’ve just realised I Googled the word
“abortion” 100 times while researching
this. I’m off to scrub my search history.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian col-
umnist
to see the struggle to protect inno-
cent lives against the ravages of gun vi-
olence as a multi-generational struggle
akin to that which won African Amer-
icans the right to vote, or that which
won the right to gay marriage. Each of
these required Americans in the grip
of myths and pathologies to relinquish
them, and each at one time seemed
impossible. But change did eventually
come.
The path ahead will not be easy –
and, as the supreme court’s expected
ruling on Roe v Wade has shown, there
will be setbacks along the way. Those
who embody a pathological under-
standing of what America should be are
currently ascendant, and there will be
no easy victory over them. But despair
would be surrender. That’s why for now
there is the need to mourn the tiny lives
which were extinguished. Remember
them, and in doing so remember some-
thing else: America’s genius is that it
can be changed, never quickly enough,
but always in the end. It’s a slim hope to
grasp onto in this moment of rage and
sorrow, but it may be all that we have
left.
Andrew Gawthorpe is a historian of
the United States and the host of the
podcast America Explained
Gun culture reveals
the centrality of
violence to American
conceptions of
manhood – a violence
which ultimately
harms rather than
protects
James Cleverly also intervened,
once again highlighting the fallibility of
nominative determinism. It was a clear
win for the Convict, he insisted. And
there was no other person in the party
who could have won even 60% of the
vote. Because the rest of the cabinet –
Continued on page 19
Wednesday 8 June 2022 The Guardian
Continued from page 17
including him – were completely fuck-
ing hopeless and there wasn’t a single
one who could be trusted to get them-
selves dressed in the morning. Not that
the Convict could manage that either,
judging by the state of him. Every day
he looks increasingly derelict. And even
if there was one cabinet minister ca-
pable of rivalling him, the majority of
backbenchers were just a bunch of
congenitally disloyal snakes. It wasn’t
the best advert for the Tory party.
If anything, the backbenchers were
even more deranged. Peter Bone, who
had plotted against the Maybot and de-
clared her a goner after her confidence
vote, was now openly saying that Boris
– smaller majority and all – had proved
himself a winner and should be left
alone. It wasn’t for dissident MPs to
replace a prime minister except when
it suited them. In his defence, his syn-
apses only connect at random intervals,
so it may take him a while to spot the
contradiction.
Boris Johnson survived the no-confidence
vote. Can he cling on to power? Our panel’s
verdict
Polly Toynbee, Bob Neill, David
Lammy, Devi Sridhar, Ed Davey,
Dawn Butler and Zubaida Haque
Polly Toynbee: He will be on the run
from booing from now on
They will get their comeuppance,
those 211 cowardly MPs, crawlers and
placemen who clung to their grotes-
quely unfit leader. The public’s mind
is made up.But the incorrigible one
bashes on, hitting anything that gets
in his way. “Getting on with the
job” means grasping anything to ap-
pease Boris Johnson’s wildly diver-
gent rebels, ranging from off-the-
scale rightwingers like Steve Baker to
upright constitutionalists such asJesse
Norman, shocked by Rwanda expul-
sions, Northern Ireland protocol trea-
ty-breaking and a denuded ministerial
code. This week Johnson will prom-
ise a 70% bribe to housing association
tenants, selling off remaining social
housing. Yesterday he wooed MPs with
imminent tax cuts, never mind our
derelict public services.Survive? He’ll
be on the run from booing from now
on, never daring to meet un-vetted
voters for fear someone tells him of
a mother dying alone while helied
about partying and puking inside No
10. “I’d do it again”, the “humbled” one
told MPs last night.The Mail’s splash
today features a red button, warning
“148 Tory MPs hit the self-destruct
button by opening the door to smirking
Starmer’s coalition of chaos: Lib Dem,
Labour, SNP.” Starmer doesn’t smirk,
he’s too uptight. But yes, of course this
is Labour’s ideal result – a directionless,
despised PM clinging on, shamed and
lamed, wildly zigzagging all over the
place.• Polly Toynbee is a Guardian col-
umnist
Bob Neill: The prime minister
should step aside
You don’t have to be as avid a clas-
sicist as the prime minister to know
Opinion
Adam Holloway was insistent that it
was all the BBC’s fault for showing pic-
tures of the Convict looking like Han-
nibal Lecter. Anthony Hopkins could
sue for that. Lecter looked a whole lot
better than Johnson does right now.
The eyes are barely open, the legs
only function from memory, the skin
is parched and pallid, and the toddler
haircut is falling apart.
You could almost suspect that John-
son had been on the coke after his own
sniff-filled TV clip. But the reality is that
it isn’t class A drugs that make Boris
so hopelessly incoherent. He mainlines
that state through his natural soci-
opathic narcissism. It’s a rarity now if he
happens to complete a sentence. Accu-
rately transcribe what he says and you
get the babblings of a three-year-old.
At least Michael Fabricant will
never die wondering why he has never
been promoted to a serious job. Now
think of just some of the quarter-wits –
take a bow Suella Braverman and Oliver
Dowden – who have made it into cab-
inet, and you begin to get a glimpse
‘A directionless, despised PM, shamed and lamed, wildly zigzagging all over the place.’
Photograph: Reuters
that his victory in yesterday’s confi-
dence vote resembles the eponymous
ones of Pyrrhus of Epirus. Yes, he sur-
vived, but the facts speak for them-
selves: the result is worse than those
inflicted on Thatcher, Major and May. In
total, 41% of the parliamentary party
voted against him. Take away those
with government jobs and that’s equiv-
alent to 75% of Tory backbenchers.
Recent events have significantly –
and, I believe, irrevocably – damaged
trust in the prime minister. There are
some enormously tough decisions to
take over the coming months, at home
and abroad, and we need to take the
country with us on those. If we are to do
so, the public must have faith in govern-
ment. I don’t see how that’s possible
while Johnson remains at the helm.
The prime minister says we need
to refocus on the challenges ahead and
move on, but that can only be done if
the public trusts the government. Last
night’s vote shows that a considerable
number of MPs don’t have confidence
that Johnson is capable of rebuilding
that. It gives me no pleasure in saying
it, but in the interests of country and
party, he should step aside.• Bob Neill
is the Conservative MP for Bromley and
Chislehurst
of how breathtakingly dim Micky Fab
is. Something he appears hell bent on
proving on a daily basis. His take was
he had been expecting the Convict to
do even worse, so this was a massive
result. Er. Not sure that was quite the
line.
Bob Seely was refreshingly frank
and pragmatic. He didn’t much care
for Boris. Never had, never would. But
No 10 had made him a cash offer for
his Isle of Wight constituency that he
hadn’t been able to refuse. So he had
voted for Johnson. And would continue
to do so just as long as the dosh kept
coming. The relationship was entirely
transactional and Seely couldn’t have
been happier.
Pride of place for the idiot’s idiot in
the Tory wankocracy went to Brendan
Clarke-Smith. He argued that he was
sick to death of people weaponising
their Covid tragedies to have a pop at
Johnson. The pandemic was now over
and everyone should just shut up about
their losses – hadn’t the whole point of
Brexit been to forge a new generation of
David Lammy: Each day he splut-
ters on will reap further havoc
There is no return for a prime minis-
ter who has lost the confidence of
almost half of their own MPs. Each day
that Johnson splutters on will reap fur-
ther havoc on the British public and
the UK’s standing abroad. He should
be fixed with a laser-like precision on
eye-watering energy bills, on rocketing
inflation, and on Putin’s illegal war in
Europe.
Instead, his attention will now be
on the few dozen MPs who voted in
favour of his lying and law-breaking.
Every decision that Johnson will make
in his last days will be about which jobs
and baubles to offer these MPs to keep
them on side.
We need to get Britain back on
track. Not only with a new leader, but
with a new government. Only Labour
has a plan to restore trust in politics,
to grow the economy so that we can
pay for the schools and hospitals we
desperately need, to restore Britain’s
reputation abroad and to rebuild the al-
liances Johnson has damaged.• David
Lammy is the Labour MP for Tottenham
and shadow foreign secretary
Devi Sridhar: He will face a reck-
oning for failure to lead on Covid
British stiff upper lips? – and get on with
it. So your mum died? Big fucking deal.
Everyone’s gotta croak some time. So
why not just be happy for Boris instead
of going on about law-breaking?
Cabinet ministers, such as Liz Truss,
Michael Gove and Rishi Sunak, were
rather more neutral in their support.
If one of them had the imagination,
the wit and the talent, they’d be look-
ing to ease the Convict out. But they
are all hopeless so they did the bare
minimum, hoping someone else would
be the first to knife Boris. No one did,
so they were obliged to sit like tailors’
dummies while Johnson did a TV clip –
every bit as tone deaf as his appeal to
Tory MPs the day before – at the start of
the cabinet meeting.
The day after the day the Boris
music died ended with just four Tory
backbenchers being bothered to attend
a debate on standards in public life.
Obviously the others must have felt
they had done enough. Labour’s Angela
Rayner opened with a simple plea.
Johnson had done his best to under-
Politician after politician has had
to be accountable for their response
to the Covid-19 pandemic except John-
son. The former US president Donald
Trump’s appalling response, and deli-
berate spread of misinformation on
Twitter, was seen as one factor respon-
sible for his November 2020 loss to
Joe Biden. The king of Sweden, Carl
XVI Gustaf, said his country had
“failed” to save lives given the large
number of people who died compared
with neighbouring countries. And the
former Japanese prime minister Yoshi-
hideSuga resigned after public criticism
of his Covid-19 response.
Yet despite Britain having one of
the highest death rates in the world
in 2020 and a prime minister who
has underplayed the disease at each
turn, Johnson has survived again and
again. He had severeCovid early on,
but instead of taking the disease se-
riously and supporting staff in the NHS,
he has instead pushed the country to
“move on”, almost as if we should forget
what really happened. Imagine that the
NHS had sufficient staff, resources and
investment to provide the same quality
of care that Johnson received to eve-
ryone. How many lives could have been
saved? Imagine if he had taken Covid
seriously from the start, how many tens
of thousands of deaths could have been
prevented? The answers to those two
questions alone point to a failure to
lead, and to protect the British public,
during a major emergency – the first job
of any head of state. A reckoning will
come, but it is not today.• Devi Srid-
har is chair of global public health at the
University of Edinburgh
Ed Davey: Tory MPs are now
responsible for his behaviour
After months of defending the
indefensible, Conservative MPs had a
golden opportunity to finally put an
end to Johnson’s sorry premiership.
Instead they doubled down, narrowly
choosing to put the career of a lying
19
mine the integrity of his office and
must not be allowed to get away with
watering down the ministerial code.
You might have thought that was a
relatively uncontroversial proposition,
but Michael Ellis begged to differ. Then
he always does. That’s the point of him.
He’s the Convict’s go-to dogsbody to
clean up his shit. Keeper of the King’s
Stools.
Ellis oozed and ahhed, ever so
’umbly. It wasn’t that Boris wanted to
weaken the ministerial code. It was
that he wanted to make it stronger by
making it weaker. Schrödinger’s code.
You just couldn’t expect someone as
law-abiding as Johnson to obey the law.
There should be some leeway where
Boris could do what he wanted and
decide if he had broken the law. And
that applied to his mates too. Such a
shame to have to sack someone he
liked.
Just another tawdry day in West-
minster.
lawbreaker over the good of the coun-
try.
The scenes prior to yesterday’s no-
confidence vote made clear that the
Tories are headed for a civil war while
this desperately weak prime minister
attempts to cling on to office. This will
mean a summer of discontent for the
rest of us. For Johnson, the cost of
living crisis and spiralling NHS wait-
ing times are merely collateral. His
entire focus is self-preservation. His sel-
fishness is hurting our economy and
harming families up and down the
country.
In spite of the spinelessness of most
Conservative MPs last night, what is
clear beyond all recognition is that the
people of Britain have lost confidence
in Johnson. They recognise that he is
not fit for office. So why can’t Conserv-
ative MPs? Liberal Democrats are fight-
ing this Conservative government in
seats across the country. The people
of Tiverton and Honiton will speak for
Britain in giving their verdict on John-
son in two weeks’ time – the Conserv-
ative party will have no choice but to
listen.• Ed Davey is leader of the Liberal
Democrats
Dawn Butler: Johnson’s arrogance
pervades the whole party
Last July I was booted out of the
House of Commons for calling John-
son a liar – a view shared by a major-
Continued on page 20

20
Continued from page 19
ity of people. Last night, Conservative
MPs voted for a serial liar to hold the
most prestigious office in the country.
All 359 Conservative MPs voted, many
byproxy. Yet when MPs pleaded with
the Conservative leader of the house,
Jacob Rees-Mogg, to allow MPs with
long-term health conditions to vote by
proxy earlier this year, we were told
“No”.
As an MP recovering from cancer
treatment I’ve had to miss dozens of
critical votes in recent months. So have
other colleagues across the House. I
was allowed to be paired with a Tory
but I was not allowed to have a proxy
Love Island is back – but is Britain over reality
TV’s most controversial villa?
Emma Garland
W
e try to be better
people. Every year
we make fresh
vows to eat heal-
thier, scroll less,
spend more time nurturing our inner
child by taking up watercolours and
reading books about foraging. And it
works, for a while. We post our Strava
achievements online and tell our fol-
lowers how “sorry” we are to reveal that
eating vegetables and not binge drink-
ing makes you feel “good, actually”.
Then June arrives. The adverts begin
to appear on our timelines and in train
stations; 10-foot digital billboards of
Britain’s most waxed humans winking
suggestively in bikinis. The concept of
free time begins to wither before our
eyes as we resign six hours a week to
watching future ambassadors for Gym-
shark pretend to be unlucky in love. By
the time that jingle hits the airwaves,
like Pavlov’s bell for Twitter addicts –
brrr br br br br BREE br br – escape is
futile. Another summer – another eight
weeks of Love Island to lead us astray.
As hundreds of elected repre-
sentatives poured into the House of
Commons on Monday evening to affirm
or renounce their confidence in Boris
Johnson, 11 random twentysomethings
rode into Mallorca on jeeps to ascend
to the position of national celebrity. At
the exact hour the leadership of the
United Kingdom teetered on the rocks,
the top trending name on social media
was Curtis Pritchard, a man famous for
saying he likes to be “the person who
How do you convince a leaver Brexit was a
bad idea? Make them stand in a queue
Zoe Williams
I
hate the phrase “the architects
of Brexit”, partly because I still
long for an alternate world in
which Brexit vanishes as a word
and concept, and partly because
to say it has “architects” credits it
with a degree of structural soundness
Opinion
vote or vote remotely, even though
we have the technology to enable this.
Johnson is emblematic of the arrogance
and self-interested exceptionalism of
the Conservatives.
Calling out Johnson or deposing
him as leader is not enough. Last year, I
started a campaign to strengthen the
ministerial code, to make the com-
mittee on standards – rather than the
prime minister – responsible for decid-
ing whether alleged breaches had taken
place. I only need three more Tory MPs
for the debate to be granted. John-
son may soon go, but the problem is
deep-rooted in a party that believes it’s
always one rule for them and another
for the rest of us.• Dawn Butler is the
‘Within minutes, viewers were reminded why Love Island is one of the UK’s most-watched shows.’ Presenter Laura Whitmore with Love
Island contestants in Mallorca, Spain, June 2022. Photograph: ITV/Rex/Shutterstock
gets up and makes everyone a coffee so
that everyone is ready for the morning”
three years ago. It was a strange con-
trast of events: the unfortunate cynic-
ism of real-life politics meets the over-
blown fervour of semi-scripted enter-
tainment. Does it make sense? Not one
bit. Am I here for it anyway, despite
proclaiming that Love Island was “over”
not 12 months ago? Apparently yes.
Within minutes of last night’s epi-
sode, viewers were reminded why Love
Island is one of the UK’s most-watch-
ed shows. The format has been re-
vamped, with the tradition of having
the male contestants “pick” from a
it doesn’t possess. Nonetheless, there
is a man, Daniel Hannan, who has
been hurling himself at this project of
disintegration since his student days,
so let’s call him one of its architects.
Writing in the Telegraph, he casually
dropped in that it would have been
easier for all of us if we had stayed in
the single market. Tell you what would
have been helpful, pal: saying this with
Labour MP for Brent Central
Zubaida Haque: What does the
Tory party now stand for?
Of course it was inevitable. The
only thing surprising about the no-
confidence vote in Johnson is that it
didn’t happen earlier. Since the begin-
ning of his premiership, he has been
a threat to the functioning of democ-
racy in this country and to the rule of
law; he has failed to protect vulnerable
groups repeatedly during times of na-
tional crisis, yet there have been no
consequences for this prime minister.
We will hear from Johnson’s suppor-
ters that he now has “a mandate to
continue”. But it’s hardly a resound-
ing victory when 148 of your own MPs
lineup of glorious women in six-inch
heels scrapped. With the audience
in charge of the first coupling, and
an Italian “snack” called Davide being
sent in place of their usual female
“bombshell”, the producers have clear-
ly heeded some of the criticisms of the
last few years. This season also features
Love Island’s first deaf contestant and
a more relatable array of backgrounds,
rather than a slew of ready-made in-
fluencers and estate agents. Ahead of
the premiere, they dropped their usual
fast fashion partner (responsible for
clothing everyone) in favour of eBay,
which could have interesting impli-
any kind of force between 2016 and
2019, when it might have changed or
meant anything. This is just the way
zealots are – it is pointless to try to hold
them to account or pose any questions
about their sheer brass neck. They will
chase you off a cliff and then ask mildly
why you didn’t think to pack your para-
chute.
Nevertheless, it’s hard to get that
The Guardian Wednesday 8 June 2022
say they don’t have confidence in you
as their leader. A prime minister who
doesn’t tell the truth matters to some.
Clearly trust and truth in poli-
tics isn’t a priority for everyone: 211
Conservative MPs said they had confi-
dence in Johnson. I’m not sure if that
tells us more about the way No 10 is run
or the state of the Conservative party,
but whichever way you look at it, it’s a
dire reflection of this government.
Will there be a moment of intros-
pection in the Conservative party?
There’s certainly a huge gap between
them and us. We made huge sacri-
fices during the pandemic; we’re living
with 195,000 Covid deaths and 2 million
people with long Covid – yet we have a
cations for the Love Island-to-brand-
ambassador pipeline that relies mostly
on deals with the likes of Missguided,
Pretty Little Thing and Boohoo. It’ll be
curious to see whether its audience
responds in kind. Love Island exists
as entertainment, yes, but also as a
guaranteed career launcher for hopeful
social media stars and entrepreneurs
across fashion and fitness. If the tide
is turning on fast fashion, taking the
boat along with it, willthe contestants
also have to adapt on the other side?
Most of these changes have been
done out of necessity, obviously. The
show has become something of a bell-
sour, familiar taste of injustice out of
your mouth. Hannan is allowed to say
this, since from him it is original, even
novel; when a fierce proponent of this
idiotic scheme says that maybe it went
too far, that’s news, folks. If any of the
rest of us said it, it would be repe-
titive, predictable, irrelevant – a faux
pas, even, like telling strangers how
many push-ups you can do or the time
tone deaf prime minister who says he
would “do it again” when asked about
the parties during lockdown in No 10.
When the ministers tire of de-
fending the indefensible they might
want to think about what the Conserv-
ative party now stands for. A crisis is
engulfing the country. Tens of thou-
sands of households are being pushed
towards food banks and poverty. Yet
the only thing that appears to be con-
cerning the party in government is
the preservation of a lyingleader who
squandered public trust. Are those the
priorities of the Conservative party
now?• Dr Zubaida Haque is the execu-
tive director of The Equality Trust
wether for national sentiment, pulled
up on everything from onscreen racism
and emotional manipulation to the
poor duty of care it has previously
shown towards contestants. It also indi-
cates a change in what people want
from entertainment. Criticism of Love
Island reached such a fever pitch last
year that it was forced to either adapt
or die, but only time will tell if these
adjustments will be enough to reel back
the show’s peak viewing figures of 2019.
In the meantime, the first hour and
a half of Love Island 2022 was pretty
wholesome by recent standards – toe
sucking and discussion of favourite sex
positions notwithstanding. The girlies
entered with instant declarations of
“love” for one other and high pony-
tails swishing in the continental breeze,
the lads entered in Crocs and “ugly
trunks”. Liam from Newport admitted
he thought Elton John was a duo (Elt
and John), Paige from Swansea tried to
chat up a man from Rome by gushing
about her love of “mafia books”. All in
all, it felt like an ever-so-slightly fresh
start for reality TV’s most contentious
villa. That said, on the island where
nothing ever changes – and I’m talking
about the UK here – it seems we’ll take
anything we can get.
Emma Garland is a writer specia-
lising in culture and music
Do you have an opinion on the issues
raised in this article? If you would like to
submit a letter of up to 300 words to be
considered for publication, email it to us
at guardian.letters@theguardian.com
you dreamed about a fox.
When a leaver gets stuck in an
airport queue in Málaga for three
hours, while their EU counterparts glide
through and swipe all the best hire cars,
they are allowed to curse the forces
of bureaucracy, but if a remainer did
it, we’d be remoaning again. As the
Continued on page 21
Wednesday 8 June 2022 The Guardian
Continued from page 20
titans of the airline industry – Ryanair’s
Michael O’Leary, Jet2’s Steve Heapy –
blame chaotic scenes at airports and
stranded passengers on the combined
forces of Brexit, the odd Tory schmuck
will go through a rote denial, but their
heart isn’t really in it. Their voices
sound a bit tired and you know the
day is coming when they shrug and say:
“Maybe this wasn’t such a great idea
after all. Perhaps we should go back to
the drawing board, start with a little
light customs union. There, that isn’t so
hard, is it?” And when, so choked with
outrage that we can’t even breathe, let
alone formulate words, we are reduced
to conveying our disapproval with hand
signals, our Brexit overlords will turn
round, all innocent, and say: “Isn’t this
what you said you wanted? Politicians
who can admit when they have made a
mistake?”
It was always going to be foreign
holidays where the sharp point of re-
ality hit the hot-air balloon of taking
back control. The nightmare for EU citi-
zens trying to figure out how to stay
Boris Johnson lied to grieving families like
mine. How is he still prime minister?
Lobby Akinnola
I
was disappointed but not sur-
prised that the prime minister
won the vote of no-confidence
last night. Boris Johnson seems
to have an ability to escape the
consequences of his actions within his
own party. He is untouchable. One of
the main impressions I’ve had during
the pandemic is that this government
is not prioritising the people, that the
wellbeing of the public comes second
to ministers’ own careers. And now this
seems to have been confirmed, very
loudly. The Conservative party has said,
“We find this attitude acceptable in a
leader. We don’t care what you think.”
When news of Partygate broke, I
was struggling to deal with the loss of
my dad, who died in April 2020. I wasn’t
able to say goodbye to him. I wasn’t able
to see him when he was ill because of
the rules. And even before he was ill, I
had planned to go home for the week-
end; but lockdown was announced, so
I obeyed the rules and I never saw my
dad alive again. I’ve told myself that it
was the right thing to do, because we
were told that we had to protect the
people around us. But I have a heavy
cost to bear – that I will never see my
dad again. And it hurts to think that
when asked to make the same sacri-
fice it had asked of the British public,
our own government didn’t think that
the inconvenience of not having a party
Opinion
‘It was always going to be foreign holidays where the sharp point of reality hit the hot-air balloon of taking back control’ … passengers
queue at Heathrow. Photograph: Mark Thomas/Alamy
in the UK and whether to even bother,
that’s a private matter, playing out in
individual households. Staff shortages,
‘The prime minister no longer has the moral authority to ask anyone to do anything.’ Boris Johnson leads a cabinet meeting at No 10 on
Tuesday after surviving a vote of no-confidence. Photograph: Reuters
was worth it.
There were staff in Downing Street
who said, “This is dangerous, you’re
putting people at risk.” We can all agree
that it was not helpful to work in an
environment where there were parties
taking place – where people were min-
gling, there was no social distancing,
and no concern about who might be
affected by the decision to break the
rules.
Polls have shown that the public no
supply chain problems, even tailbacks
at ports, can all be filed under “other
people’s problems”, at least for a while.
longer trust the prime minister. He has
broken the law and lied to everyone,
but the Conservative party seems to
have decided that it is more impor-
tant for it to support this man rather
than choose a new leader who might,
at least, rebuild some faith with the
public. It is concerning because we are
currently facing multiple crises, like the
war in Ukraine and the cost of living
crisis. And despite what we are being
led to believe, Covid isn’t over yet. But
Airports, though – families in Gatwick
having their longed-for trip to Corfu
cancelled with 15 minutes notice talk-
the prime minister no longer has the
moral authority to ask anyone to do
anything. Who is going to listen to him?
He doesn’t have our trust because he
has betrayed it time and again.
It is hard for me to find hope in
the 41% of Conservative MPs who voted
against their leader. Had any of these
things happened under the watch of
any other prime minister, I feel like
they would have long since resigned.
But unless power is wrestled from him,
21
ing through their disappointment on
radio phone-ins; students stuck in My-
konos; queues at borders that a thou-
sand people will use the last 4% of their
phone battery to post on Instagram –
are moments that are just too readily
dramatised. No amount of rhetoric can
erase them and, sooner or later, there
will be reverse-ferreting all over the
place.
Looking back, I wish we had fought
the entire EU referendum campaign on
the hassle of it all. A bit less “Project
Fear”, a bit more “Project Ball-ache”.
Is that really what you want, for your-
self, for your descendants? More admin,
more queueing, more gigantic pains in
your neck? Is anything worth that? We
could have met every lofty soliloquy
about “global Britain” with a half-raised
eyebrow and a quiet, “You know what
sovereignty really means? It means
waiting for things and filling in forms.
It means doing everything you least like
in life, much more often.”
Oh well, at least we’ll know better
for next time.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian col-
umnist
Johnson will not go. Getting the public
inquiry into the UK’s pandemic re-
sponse up and running is the only way
that we are going to get any kind of
truth and transparency. Johnson has
built a little enclave around him to
protect him from any form of conse-
quence. Only a thorough, systematic
and legally binding investigation will
bring people to account – and help be-
reaved families like mine move on.
I met Boris Johnson in September
2021. I told him my story and about
the pain of losing my father. He looked
at the five of us who had lost family
members to Covid and he said that he
had done everything he could. Later we
found out that he had held a party in
the same garden we had that conver-
sation in. One of these parties took
place the day after my father’s funeral.
He lied to my face. He lied to the faces
of grieving people. If I was to speak
to him again I would ask, “Can you
not empathise with the suffering your
behaviour has caused?” Because I truly
do not understand this.
Lobby Akinnola is a member of the
Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice
group
Do you have an opinion on the issues
raised in this article? If you would like to
submit a letter of up to 300 words to be
considered for publication, email it to us
at guardian.letters@theguardian.com

22
Why was the jubilee a success? Because
republicans had nothing as jolly to offer
Stephen Bates
S
canning the jubilee press cov-
erage, the Buckingham Palace
media teams must have al-
lowed themselves a glow of
satisfaction. The four days
passed off more successfully than per-
haps they might have feared. Her Ma-
jesty was nursed through the celebra-
tions and potential pitfalls were skil-
fully evaded: Prince Andrew’s dose of
Covid proved convenient; the Sussexes
did not draw too much attention to
themselves.
Better still, from the monarch’s
point of view, they were seen playing
happy families. Prince Charles had Ca-
milla firmly by his side and was even
seen to be dandling Prince Louis on his
knees during Monday’s pageant, while
his parents, Prince William and Cathe-
rine, looked almost like normal parents,
minus the hassles most have to endure.
Prince George, meanwhile, betrayed the
boredom of small boys everywhere,
forced to listen to his parents’ sort of
music: oldies he’d never heard of at the
concert. Normal people, yet not normal
at all.
More importantly the Queen was
able to show off the dynasty on the
balcony of Buckingham Palace, a select
group containing three potential future
monarchs: her heir Charles, his heir Wil-
liam and his heir George. If they have
inherited their matriarch’s genes and
nothing too untoward happens, that se-
cures the House of Windsor into the
next century – the succession being
a prime consideration of monarchs
throughout history.
They could all gaze down the
Why is eco-conscious California spending
millions to support natural gas?
Miranda Green for Floodlight in
partnership with the Guardian
and Capital & Main in Los
Angeles
I
n the course of an hour, more
than a hundred big rig trucks
chug through the aptly named
city of Commerce. The heavily
Latino community in Los Angeles
intersects Interstate 710 – the main
highway that moves cargo shipments
from the nearby ports to their final
destinations.
Along with the merchandise they
deliver – Amazon shipments, produce
and Mitsubishis – the trucks emit signif-
icant amounts of air pollutants. As do
the dozens of cargo ships that cluster
outside the ports and the freight trains
that transport goods.
California has touted its green repu-
tation worldwide, even though the
southern part of the state has some of
the worst air pollution in the US, partic-
ularly here at the ports of Los Angeles
and Long Beach. Los Angeles has the
worst smog pollution of any city in the
Opinion
A platinum jubilee street party in Oxfordshire, 5 June 2022. Photograph: David Hartley/Rex/Shutterstock
Mall, at the thousands of enthusiastic
faces and convince themselves too
that the institution is unassailable, at
least under current circumstances. The
enthusiasm stretched far beyond cen-
tral London too: initial figures suggest
that nearly 17 million people took part
in community celebrations during the
weekend – a quarter of the population
being more than passive spectators.
The BBC says that Saturday night’s Pla-
tinum Party at the Palace was the most-
watched programme of the year.
Quite a few kings and queens have
reigned long enough to have had the
possibility of jubilees, but it seems to
have been a Mrs Biggs in 1809 who
first suggested that a celebration of
George III’s 50th anniversary on the
Regulators are pouring millions into natural gas as they seek to tackle regional air pol-
lution. Illustration: Define Urban
country, and the region is still strug-
gling to meet national smog standards
from 1997. Transportation has been the
biggest hurdle.
Transportation contributes at least
40% of California’s greenhouse gas
emissions, and as regulators grapple
with how best to reduce air pollution
in the region, they are pouring millions
of dollars into a controversial solution:
natural gas.
throne might engender what she called
“a spirit of loyal enthusiasm”. It worked
a treat then with banquets, parties
and parades, paid days off for work-
ers, monuments and even civic projects
such as the installation of street lights
in Oswestry. “The number of people
in the street … was immense,” wrote
the MP George Rose, a friend of the
king, “and the illuminations remark-
ably beautiful.” Shades of last week-
end. Sadly, the old king could not enjoy
them as his final bout of madness set in
on the very day of the anniversary.
Crowds came out for Queen Vic-
toria’s two jubilees and for George V’s
silver jubilee in 1935: “I’m beginning to
think they must like me for myself,” the
gruff old king remarked. As Kingsley
The regional air regulator that over-
sees Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernar-
dino and Orange counties, the South
Coast air quality management district,
has for years dedicated a significant
potion of its clean air grants – millions
of dollars – toward natural gas trucks
and infrastructure through its various
incentive programs meant to clean up
the air, according to data on two of
the agency’s main grant programs. One
The Guardian Wednesday 8 June 2022
Martin, the editor of the New Sta-
tesman, wrote: “People constantly reite-
rated that he was ‘a father to us all,’” and
indeed when George died the following
winter a ditty circulated through the
streets: “Greatest sorrow England ever
had/ When death took away our dear
Dad/ A king was he from head to sole/
Loved by his people one and all.”
The jubilee did exactly what was in-
tended, but it might not have been so.
It is only a few months since Prince
Andrew’s disgrace and a couple of years
since Harry and Meghan walked out.
What was manifest therefore was a
mixture of emotions: clearly relief at
being able to get out and party with
a good conscience after the pandemic
and the other traumas and upheavals of
of its biggest grant programs spent
more than 90% of funds on diesel
and natural gas incentives – rather
than on electric vehicles. Much of that
funding has flowed to very large, pri-
vate companies like Disneyland Resort
and Waste Management Inc to replace
diesel vehicles with natural gas.
The agency has also contributed
hundreds of thousands of dollars to an
industry-focused partnership that runs
a pro-gas website.
South Coast argues that the elec-
tric alternatives available are too expen-
sive, in part because they require addi-
tional spending on charging station
infrastructure. The board argues that
some of the equipment the grants re-
place – for marine, construction and
agricultural uses – doesn’t have a widely
available electric alternative. But it
says it’s working with Volvo, Volkswa-
gen and other manufacturers to help
bring more cost-effective options to the
market.
Climate advocates worry, though,
that if South Coast continues to operate
on the belief that natural gas can be
part of the state’s pollution solution,
recent years from Brexit to Partygate.
There was also humour and irony,
that very British celebration of the
eccentricity and self-deprecation that
led to chaps in tweeds pedalling push
bikes down the Mall or pootling along
in a round car looking like an orange. A
defiant national pride too in displays of
union flags dangling from windows in
even deprived areas and adorning the
waistcoats of plump middle-aged gen-
tlemen at street parties.
But it would not have come off
without the figure of the slight woman
in pastel shades on the palace balcony.
Whatever one thinks of the institution,
it’s very hard to attack a frail, very el-
derly woman, particularly one who has
evidently pursued her sense of duty. As
a young queen in the 50s she was ac-
cused (by a peer of the realm) of sound-
ing like a priggish schoolgirl; 70 years
on she can twinkle through a skit with
a CGI image of a much-loved fictional
bear, swapping marmalade sandwiches.
All that and an uplift in commerce
as a result of the jubilee too. And young
people taking a conspicuous part in the
celebrations. They will be lucky to see
another jubilee any time soon: Charles
won’t make a silver, though William
may, as an elderly gent decades hence.
The debriefs will go on, but the
fact is that until republicans can come
up with something similarly joyous for
the majority of the people they are
going to struggle. There was a spirit
of loyal enthusiasm. Despite all their
vicissitudes the royals have pulled it off
again.
Stephen Bates reported on the royal
family for the Guardian and is the
author of Royalty Inc
Transportation contributes at least 40%
of California’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Photograph: Patrick T Fallon/AFP/Getty
Images
southern California will never meet
federal emissions standards.
“If you look at [South Coast], we’ve
never reached attainment for national
ambient air quality standards, ever.
You can say we have tougher environ-
mental laws – but we aren’t even hitting
federal policy,” said mark! Lopez, a com-
munity organizer and special project
coordinator at East Yard Communities
for Environmental Justice, a group that
organizes communities near the Los
Angeles ports and in East Los Angeles.
Critics question why the agency is
investing so many public dollars into
Continued on page 23
Wednesday 8 June 2022 The Guardian
Continued from page 22
helping large private corporations clean
up their businesses and why it is doing
so by investing in gas at a time when
the world is calling for a shift toward
renewable power.
“You have this kind of deep invest-
ment in the gas industry and it helps
prop up the opposition to zero emis-
sions. And that’s what we fear is hap-
pening,” said Adrian Martinez, senior
attorney at the environmental group
Earthjustice.
“At some point it’s got to stop … I
think where it gets strange is when the
government is so entangled in pushing
and selling [the gas industry’s] product
for them.”
Choosing the right vehicles
One of South Coast’s community-
focused incentives grants, the com-
munity air protection program, distri-
butes funding aimed at lowering emis-
sions in low-income neighborhoods.
That program paid out more than
$210m over the past four years to en-
courage mostly private businesses to
upgrade their diesel trucks. Most of
that money – more than 90% – has been
spent on either newer diesel engines or
natural gas trucks and infrastructure.
While the Obama administration
lauded gas as a bridge fuel in the tran-
sition away from coal, the science in
the years since has made clear that gas
has a much bigger climate impact than
previously understood and is not a per-
manent solution.
Trucks powered by natural gas
cause less smog than those that run
on diesel – natural gas emits about 29%
less planet-heating carbon dioxide than
diesel fuel – but electric vehicles can
more significantly reduce air and cli-
mate pollution as the state’s power grid
shifts toward renewable power.
South Coast argues its dispropor-
tionate support of gas is because
there aren’t enough heavy-duty elec-
tric vehicles available for purchase
– which the board attributes to a
lack of public interest and skepticism
over electric vehicle reliability.“Many of
the participants in the incentive pro-
grams do not want to take a risk on
unfamiliar new technologies, especially
when their livelihood relies upon this
equipment,” said Nahal Mogharabi, an
agency spokesperson.
We Own This City review – like The Wire, but
about real corrupt cops. What a horror show
Rebecca Nicholson
I
t is inevitable that We Own This
City (Sky Atlantic) will be com-
pared to The Wire. Developed by
David Simon and George Pele-
canos, starring several actors who
also appeared in The Wire and also set
in Baltimore, it is deeply immersed in
the same world, and takes a similar
stylistic approach. Anyone expecting to
have their hand held as they are walked
through this multi-faceted story may
be disappointed. Instead, this six-parter
is a sinewy true story of police corrup-
tion that drops you right into the thick
of the action. If this is a spiritual heir to
The Wire, then it’s good to be back. No
doubt, no doubt.
Who owns this city? Is it the cops or
Opinion
“As with most new technologies,
the battery electric trucks are expen-
sive, have limited range, and require the
addition of infrastructure that makes
them much less cost-effective in pro-
viding the criteria pollutant emission
reductions,” Mogharabi said.
But a recent study from California’s
air resources board – which oversees
South Coast – concluded that zero
emissions vehicles are the cheapest
option to own and operate because
they save so much in fuel and main-
tenance costs. The study also found
that replacing diesel trucks with nat-
ural gas trucks can actually be worse for
the climate, because the venting and
flaring associated with producing nat-
ural gas emits so much methane.
Incentivizing natural gas
California is at the frontlines of a
debate that is quickly following in the
rest of the country – when is it time to
step away from gas?
In 2017, California’s then governor,
Jerry Brown, traveled to Europe on
what was dubbed a climate “crusade”,
pledging to lead the US response on
climate change since the Trump White
House had vowed to pull out of the
Paris climate accords. California has
since made good on its promise, set-
ting goals to obtain net zero emissions
by 2045 and enforce zero-emission new
car sales starting in 2035.
But those goals are at odds with the
gas vehicles and programs California
is funding through its incentive pro-
grams.
In late 2002, South Coast’s then
chair, Norma Glover, established the
California natural gas vehicle part-
nership to partner with energy and gas
stakeholders, transit authorities and ve-
hicle and engine manufacturers to pro-
mote messaging on the need for “great-
er deployment of natural gas vehicles in
California”.
Glover was the first chair of the part-
nership and ran it for two years before
establishing a related consulting firm,
according to her LinkedIn. The industry
members of the partnership today in-
clude the gas distributor Clean Energy
Fuels and SoCalGas, the main provider
of natural gas to southern California.
Since 2002, South Coast has paid
at least $250,000 in dues to the part-
nership, including hiring the consulting
firm Gladstein, Neandross & Associates
Puffed up … Sgt Wayne Jenkins (Jon Bernthal) in episode one of We Own This City. Photo-
graph: HBO
the criminals? Or is the line so scuffed
and faded it is no longer possible to tell?
Adapted from the nonfiction book of
to run its website, organize meetings
and fulfill other administrative duties.
GNA also does marketing and finds
grants for clients that work in the low
and zero emissions vehicle industry,
which include Clean Energy Fuels and
SoCalGas, as well the utility Pacific Gas
and Electric (PG&E). It also represents
the oil and gas companies Shell Energy
and ConocoPhillips. GNA manages the
partnership’s communication strategy,
including its social media, newsletter
and website. The partnership’s web-
site highlights gas-industry arguments
that investments in gas trucks will
ultimately reduce pollution more than
investments in electric ones. South
Coast’s dues for the partnership have
come from California’s clean fuels pro-
gram fund, which is run by South Coast
and funded by department of motor ve-
hicle registration fees, according to con-
tracts obtained by Floodlight.
South Coast also spent about
$17,000 between 2020 and 2021 to over-
see the partnership, according to the
agency’s budget.
The partnership has worked close-
ly with the California Natural Gas Ve-
hicle Coalition, which is backed by west
coast gas companies and the oil and gas
producers Chevron, BP and Shell. The
coalition has fought climate policies, in-
cluding by filing a lawsuit against the
California air resources board in 2020
for failing to consider the role gas ve-
hicles could play in mitigating emis-
sions.
This March, South Coast moved to
distance itself from the partnership
by voting to turn it into a non-profit.
South Coast will remain a dues-paying
member, however.
Mogharabi said the decision was
made “to relieve the agency and its
staff of the financial and administrative
responsibilities related to the [part-
nership]”.
Grant winners and losers
Since 2007, South Coast has addi-
tionally paid GNA $3.4m to help it eva-
luate applications for its state and fed-
eral incentive programs as well as to
“provide analyses” of new policies and
the cost-effectiveness of alternative
fuels. A case study GNA has since re-
moved from its website said it helped
South Coast allocate $100m a year in
incentive funds.
Some of the money South Coast
the same name by Justin Fenton, We
Own This City begins in 2017, nearly
two years after the death in custody of
paid to GNA – $80,000 – was to co-
sponsor the 2020 and 2021 Renewable
Gas 360 symposium and host a we-
binar in conjunction with it. The sym-
posium describes itself as a way to edu-
cate “policymakers nationwide of the
important role that renewable gases
can and should play”. SoCalGas and
PG&E were also hosts, according to
the symposium’s website.GNA’s paying
clients have also been some of the
biggest beneficiaries of South Coast’s
incentive programs. They include BNSF
Railway, one of the largest freight rail-
road companies in North America – and
the United Parcel Service (UPS), which
received $44m and $32m respectively
between 2007 and 2022 for projects that
included buying “9 CNG heavy duty
trucks to replace diesel models”, ac-
cording to annual budgets. A spokes-
person for South Coast said it was
not aware that BNSF and UPS were
GNA’s clients but said they received
their grants “based on the cost-effec-
tive nature of their projects”.Other GNA
clients that received grants include
Waste Management Inc, Ralph’s Gro-
cery, and Carnival Corporation & PLC,
which owns Carnival Cruise Lines.
Disneyland Resort received nearly
$1.7m between 2007 and 2013
from South Coast to pay for gas
infrastructure upgrades and related
construction, including converting 24
of its diesel trams to natural gas and
upgrading a natural gas fueling station.
Disneyland Parks and Resorts in fiscal
year 2013 alone made $14bn in reve-
nues, according to its budget report.
The gas distributor Clean Energy
Fuels received more than $12m in
South Coast grants between 2007 and
2021 to deploy 20 natural gas taxis
and construct two natural gas fueling
stations among other greenlit projects,
according to an analysis of the air
agency’s annual budget. Clean Energy
Fuels is also a GNA client.
SoCalGas has since 2018 helped its
customers secure grants for 409 “near-
zero” emissions trucks and 34 natural
gas fueling stations through one of
the largest clean vehicle incentive pro-
grams run by South Coast– the Carl
Moyer memorial air quality standards
attainment program– according to its
press release. Those grants have in turn
helped SoCalGas sell more of its prod-
uct.
Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man,
and the acquittal of, or dropped charges
against, the six police officers involved.
Baltimore is “a poster child for the basic
failure to stop lawlessness”, and a vast
network of angles on what exactly has
gone wrong with policing there takes in
the FBI, Department of Justice, elected
politicians and law enforcement offic-
ers from a number of regions.
In the controversial podcast The
Trojan Horse Affair, the reporters talk
jokily about the need for a “murder
wall” to keep track of their investigation
– that TV-trope pinboard with photo-
graphs and notes linked by red string.
After the first episode, I wondered if
I should start one, to keep track of
who’s who and what they have to do
with it all. Still, complexity is to be ex-
pected from Simon and Pelecanos, and
23
Lopez, the community organizer,
said: “The agency has over the years
really shifted away from being a regu-
lator towards being a funding body,
being a pass-through for funds for pol-
luters, in hopes that they do better.
“Essentially it’s just about shifting dol-
lars around and really it’s just creating a
cycle where polluters pay and then they
get their money back for their infra-
structure,” Lopez said.
Smart investing or playing favo-
rites?
At least one other South Coast pro-
gram has been flagged for giving most
of its money to natural gas projects. At
a board meeting this year, a staffer, Matt
Miyasato, noted that just 17% of the
total $141m in grants the board went
on to approve in 2022 for the Carl Moyer
program went toward purchasing “true
zero”, or electric, technologies.
Two of the board’s 13 members re-
cused themselves from the vote on the
funding approval because they have
received campaign contributions from
the companies on the funding list, in-
cluding Clean Energy Fuels.
A campaign last year by the
environmental justice group California
Environmental Voters criticized several
board members for being in the pocket
of the fossil fuel industry. They large-
ly targeted the LA city councilmember
Joe Buscaino for protecting the inter-
ests of the oil and gas industry.
Buscaino recently stepped down
from the council to run for mayor of
Los Angeles, but he has since dropped
out of the race.
In a statement, he said that during
his time at South Coast, the air basin
saw a 55% reduction in inhalation
health risks from contaminants.
“I would love to have electric.
Please. Now. Today. But that is not avail-
able. Gas is the next best thing,” Bus-
caino said.
Though environmentalists are
encouraged by some of the progress re-
cently made by California, they say they
have serious concerns about what they
see as California officials’ close work-
ing relationships with the gas indus-
try.“Even as the world is moving to
zero emissions, they are still very much
promoting combustion in trucks,” Mar-
tinez, the Earthjustice attorney, said.
as a viewer I would rather be trusted to
connect the dots than be marched pa-
tiently from department to department
with reminders of who everyone is at all
times.
This is a cop’s-eye view of Bal-
timore. It opens with a “run sheet” log-
ging the activity of Sgt Wayne Jenkins
(Jon Bernthal) of the Gun Trace Task
Force. (If kicking off your series with a
procedural document filling the screen
isn’t a sign of confidence, then I don’t
know what is.) Jenkins delivers a bul-
lish speech to new officers, appearing to
warn them against police brutality, ar-
guing that “it only gets in the way of you
doing the job”.
What Jenkins considers the job to
be only becomes plain in slow motion,
Continued on page 24

24
Continued from page 23
but by the end of this first episode, it is
clear that he isn’t some friendly bobby
on the beat. Bernthal is fantastic as
the swaggering Jenkins, puffed up, self-
important and turned on by the power
he wields. “Can’t fuck with superman,”
he boasts. He likes to be down in the
dirt, storming drug dens and throwing
his weight around. These raid scenes
are undeniably thrilling and strong on
How can I tell my husband I want us to have
sex?
Pamela Stephenson Connolly
M
y husband and I have
no problem commu-
nicating – except
about one subject. I
have a higher libido
than him, but have a hard time telling
him when I want to have sex. I think
it stems from a few negative expe-
riences when I did ask but was turned
down in a manner that made me feel
ashamed. But those experiences were
the outliers among a majority of posi-
tive ones; we have talked about them
very thoroughly to put them behind us.
So I don’t think that can be entirely
responsible for this lack of commu-
nication – the words just won’t come
out of my mouth. Maybe it’s some inner
shame for having a higher libido than
my husband, but it would have to be
entirely subconscious because thinking
and talking about it, I don’t feel that
way. I just feel utterly unable to say that
I’d like to have sex.
Maybe your reticence is a good
‘He has been forgotten’: why humorist Art
Buchwald should be remembered
David Smith in Washington
O
n the red carpet at the
Kennedy Center in Wash-
ington in April, the com-
edian and activist Jon
Stewart was asked if he
would ever consider running for polit-
ical office.
“Show business is a good training
ground ego and arrogance-wise for poli-
tics,” he told the Guardian, “but the art
of compromise and the different trans-
actional natures of what they do is gen-
erally antithetical to misanthropes who
sit in rooms and write jokes. It’s too
tempting to blow up meetings.”
That night, when Stewart received
the Mark Twain Prize for American
Humor, the presidential historian Jon
Meacham said of him: “He likes to say
that he’s not an activist, not a player of
the arena, but only an observer. Well,
Jon, we love you – but you’re really
wrong about that.”
The line between player and ob-
server is worth keeping in mind when
considering Art Buchwald, the most
widely read newspaper humourist of
Opinion
detail: guns under the sofa cushion, a
toy truck on the stairs. It never labours
the point, but is incredibly effective.
Post-Freddie Gray, policing is in dis-
array. Wunmi Mosaku is Nicole Steele,
a civil rights lawyer who will find her
way to Jenkins’ task force. In a neat
demonstration of what is happening in
the city, Steele films a crowd who are
all filming an arrest on their phones;
eventually the officers walk away, tell-
ing the street to “police yourselves”.
‘The words just won’t come out of my mouth’ (picture posed by models). Composite: Rob Lewine/Getty Images
thing. At some level you probably
understand the truth about him and
your situation, which is that (as you
Art Buchwald in 1958. ‘Like any great satirist, he could throw a good punch, he could take
a punch and then he could throw a good punch back.’ Photograph: ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy
his time, whose memorial service was
held at the Kennedy Center in 2007.
Dean Acheson, a former secretary of
state, called him the “greatest satirist
in the English language since Pope and
Swift”.
Buchwald is now the subject of
a biography, Funny Business, by the
historical researcher Michael Hill, who
draws on his most memorable columns
and unpublished correspondence. Its
dust jacket blurb includes praise from
There are 24 still-serving officers who
can no longer testify in court because
they have committed perjury on the
stand. And there is one notorious of-
ficer, Hersl, held up as “a prime example
of what’s gone wrong in Baltimore”.
Hersl (The Good Wife’s Josh Charles)
is racist, violent, vindictive – and still
employed. “Everybody’s so fuckin’ sen-
sitive,” he spits.
These many layers begin to knot
themselves together after a series
have already discovered) your husband
does not respond well to a bold verbal
move, so you need to try another ap-
Meacham for an “absorbing, illumi-
nating, and wonderfully entertaining
book”.
Buchwald moved in elite circles
that included Robert, Edward and Ethel
Kennedy, the Washington Post editor
Ben Bradlee and publisher Katharine
Graham, actors Humphrey Bogart and
Lauren Bacall and writers John Stein-
beck and Irwin Shaw. But he always re-
garded himself as an outsider, the court
jester who points out that the emperor
The Guardian Wednesday 8 June 2022
of drug deaths. Strong heroin has
“dropped a dozen people” and all ap-
pears to be coming from the same
source. “We’re not going to make a dent
in this shit, are we?” says the cynical Of-
ficer McDougall, knowing they are en-
gaged in a futile exercise. But when
the police track the suspected heroin
dealer, they find another tracker fixed
to his car, next to their own. The tables
turn, and quickly.
During an FBI interview in the near
proach. Think carefully about an alter-
native, more seductive approach. Do
you know what are the visual, olfac-
has no clothes.
Speaking via Zoom from Frede-
ricksburg, Virginia, Hill, 68, says: “He
viewed himself as a satirist trying
to wake people up about about cer-
tain issues. Good political satirists are
important if not essential – and I think
Buchwald would agree with this – to
a healthy democracy. If a bureaucrat
is doing something absurd, if a self-
involved celebrity is doing something
absurd, he felt it was his obligation.
“Buchwald made it his goal to
always be anti-establishment. He was
against anything that he perceived to
be the establishment, but particularly
the absurdities of the establishment. He
didn’t care what political party it was:
he was going to go after them. He felt
very strongly about freedom of satire
and freedom of speech and he was
never going to be muzzled.”
Just after Bill Clinton’s election as
president in 1992, for example, a friend
approached Buchwald at a party in
Georgetown and remarked that, now
a Democrat was in the White House
for the first time in 12 years, Buchwald
would presumably go easy. Hill adds:
“Buchwald said, ‘What are you talking
future, a man named Momodu Gondo,
or G-Money, explains that information
is the key to unlocking everything in
Baltimore. What matters is “who got it,
who gets it” he says. We Own This City
throws a lot of information out there,
from acronyms to procedural terms to
shifting timelines, via a web of loose-
ly connected characters. But this horri-
fying story will more than reward you,
once you tune in to its beat.
tory and sensory triggers for him? If
not, when he is relaxed, try talking
to him about what exactly turns him
on. Armed with that information, focus
on creating an erotically charged envi-
ronment to which he is likely to re-
spond. This may involve some trial and
error. Similarly, learn what things are
likely to turn him off, and avoid them.
Pamela Stephenson Connolly is a
US-based psychotherapist who specia-
lises in treating sexual disorders.
If you would like advice from
Pamela on sexual matters, send us
a brief description of your con-
cerns to private.lives@theguardian.com
(please don’t send attachments). Each
week, Pamela chooses one problem to
answer, which will be published online.
She regrets that she cannot enter into
personal correspondence. Submissions
are subject to our terms and conditions:
see gu.com/letters-terms.
Comments on this piece are premo-
derated to ensure discussion remains
on topics raised by the writer. Please
be aware there may be a short delay in
comments appearing on the site.
Photograph: Dick Swanson/Getty Images
about? This is my job you’re talking
about. This is what I do.’”
Born in New York in October 1925,
Buchwald had a wretched childhood.
He almost never saw his his mother,
Helen, an immigrant from Hungary,
who was admitted to a mental hospital
a few weeks after his birth and confined
Continued on page 25
Wednesday 8 June 2022 The Guardian
Continued from page 24
for the remaining 35 years of her life.
With his father struggling to pay bills,
Buchwald and his sisters were sent to
foster homes.
“It left a horrible, dark impression
upon him, which is part of the reason
that he battled depression for the rest
of his life,” Hill explains. “But the posi-
tive side of that, if there is one, was that
he became very independent early on
and he also realised that the only way
he was going to be able to survive all the
crap life was throwing at him was to be
funny, be the class clown, which is what
he did. He decided that I’m going to be a
funny guy. So that became his goal.”
In the 1940s Buchwald dropped out
of high school, joined the marines and
served in the second world war. He got
wind of an opportunity for veterans to
go to Paris and study so bought a one-
way ticket to Europe and talked his way
into a job at the New York Herald Tri-
bune.
He became the quintessential
American in Paris, mingling with Ernest
Hemingway and others, and writing
popular columns such as “Paris After
Dark”, “Mostly About People” and
“Europe’s Lighter Side”.
Hill continues: “He said later that
those 14 years he spent there were the
happiest years of his life. A lot of his
friendships that were started in Paris
carried over for the rest of his life,
particularly Ben Bradlee, who was with-
out doubt one of his closest friends and
Slow water: can we tame urban floods by
going with the flow?
Erica Gies
After epic floods in India, South Africa,
Germany, New York and Canada killed
hundreds in the past year, droughts are
now parching landscapes and wilting
crops across the western US, the Horn
of Africa and Iraq. The responses have
included calls for higher levees, bigger
drains and longer aqueducts. But these
concrete interventions aimed at con-
trolling water are failing. Climate ex-
tremes are revealing a hard truth: our
development choices – urban sprawl,
industrial agriculture and even the con-
crete infrastructure designed to control
water – are exacerbating our problems.
Because sooner or later, water always
wins.
Water might seemmalleable and
cooperative, willing to flow where we
direct it. But as human development
expands and the climate changes, water
is increasingly swamping cities or drop-
ping to unreachable depths below
farms, often making life precarious.
Signs of water’s persistence abound.
Supposedly vanquished waterways pop
up in inconvenient places. Seasonal
creeks emerging in basements are evi-
dence that those houses encroach on
buried streams, while homes built on
wetlands are the first to flood.
When our attempts at control fail,
we are reminded that water has its own
agenda. Water finds its chosen path
through a landscape, moulding it and
being directed by it in turn. To reduce
the impact of today’s more frequent
and severe droughts and floods, a new
global cohort of “water detectives” –
Opinion / The Long Read
defenders.”
Some friends advised Buchwald
against leaving the high life in Paris
but he returned to the US in 1962.
He soon established himself through
a Washington Post column syndicated
in 500 newspapers worldwide. In 1982
he won a Pulitzer prize for outstanding
commentary.
Hill explains: “He was able to
tap into the beginning of anti-estab-
lishment fervour and then, of course,
with Watergate, you had a whole new
period of not only rebellion but disillu-
sionment.
“He helped people keep their sanity
and laugh at things, laugh at the absur-
dity of politicians and what they were
doing. It was a respite from the grim
headlines of Vietnam and Watergate
and so forth. People were able to take
a break and read Buchwald.”
But the brand of humour was less
crass or savage than some of Buch-
wald’s comic heirs. “He said at one
point, ‘I don’t go for the jugular’. There
was a line that he didn’t cross. He could
be sharp, he could be pointed, he wasn’t
afraid to go at it but he wasn’t mean-
spirited or profane about it.”
Buchwald himself once explained
that the key to his humour was to “treat
light subjects seriously and serious sub-
jects lightly”. No topic was too big or too
small or too esoteric.
Hill continues: “If somebody
wanted to have a fun offbeat way to
understand the political, cultural, social
issues of the 60s, 70s, 80s and even
Floods in Xinxiang in China's Henan province in 2021. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
restoration ecologists, hydrogeologists,
biologists, anthropologists, urban plan-
ners, landscape architects and engi-
neers – are asking a critical question:
what does water want?
Figuring out what water wants – and
accommodating those desires within
our human landscapes – is now a cru-
cial survival strategy. The water detec-
tives start by uncovering what water
did before generations of humans so
radically transformed our landscapes
and waterways. How did water interact
with local rocks, soils, ecosystems and
climates before we scrambled them?
As those detectives make more
discoveries, we can begin to under-
stand why certain areas flood repeat-
edly, or how our tendency to speed
water off the land deprives us of ur-
gently needed local rainfall. Then we
can start to think creatively about how
to solve these problems, by making
space for water within our existing
habitats.
90s, go back and read Art Buchwald’s
columns. He talked about everything.
It was not only politicians and bureau-
crats but it was celebrities, miniskirts,
baggage claims at airports. He touched
on everything.”
Hill’s favourite column is from
1964 and entitled “J Edgar Hoover
Just Doesn’t Exist”, suggesting that the
FBI director was a “mythical person
thought up by Reader’s Digest”. It
sparked a debate across the country
about whether the assertion was ac-
tually true. Hoover and the FBI did not
see the funny side.
Buchwald’s numerous columns
mocking President Lyndon Johnson’s
conduct of the Vietnam war ruffled so
many feathers that the National Secu-
rity Agency put him under surveil-
lance. As the conflict worsened, Buch-
wald proposed sending in superheroes
Batman and Robin (the Batman star
Adam West saw the column and wrote
to Buchwald promising to rush to his
rescue if Johnson retaliated).
Naturally “the wit of Washington”
also had a field day with President Ri-
chard Nixon and the Watergate scandal.
“He said he wished Nixon would run for
a third term because he was providing
such great material.
“He said he’d go after both sides but
going after the left was a little bit more
delicate because, if he did, they would
say, ‘Aren’t you one of us? Why are you
doing this?’ It didn’t deter him but he
said it took a little bit more courage to
take a whack at the left.”
The answers that the detectives
are finding – in cities, fields, swamps,
marshes, floodplains, mountains and
forests – are that we should be
conserving or repairing natural sys-
tems, or mimicking nature to restore
some natural functions – and not-
building more concrete infrastructure.
These reparative approaches go by
various names: nature-based systems,
green infrastructure, low-impact devel-
opment, water-sensitive urban design.
In China, the “sponge cities” initiative
aims to make urban regions better able
to absorb rainfall and release it when
needed.
Because these kinds of solutions
are based on working with or simu-
lating natural systems, they offer bene-
fits beyond just reducing floods and
droughts. They can help us address
the dramatic declines of animal spe-
cies. They can help us adapt to cli-
mate change, or even slow its pro-
gression. Protecting biodiversity and
Some of the columns are now eerie
historical rhymes. In 1976 he offered
“Art’s Gun Control Plan”, demanding a
federal mandate to cut off “everybody’s
trigger finger at birth” in an effort to
curb gun violence in America. “The
constitution gives everyone the right to
bear arms,” he writes. “But there is noth-
ing that says an American has to have
ten fingers.”
In 1989, the celebrity tycoon Donald
Trump launched an ill-fated airline
with characteristic bluster and invited
Buchwald to fly on it. Buchwald replied
in a letter: “… thanks for all the free mi-
leage you are handing out. As I under-
stand, if you say the word ‘Trump’ in
a gathering of over twenty people, you
get forty-three miles of credit on your
OnePass account.”
So what would Buchwald have
made of Trump the president? Hill
reckons: “He would have had the time
of his life and maybe he might have
been a little bit sharper with him.
“Buchwald would have fared pretty
damn well in the social media Twitter
age because he had a wonderful off-
the-top-of-his-head wit. If he were alive
today, he could win an all-out Twitter
war with anybody. Like any great satir-
ist, he could throw a good punch, he
could take a punch and then he could
throw a good punch back.”
Buchwald, who had three children,
enjoyed playing chess and poker and
smoked six to eight cigars a day –
his “pacifier” – until quitting in 1988
on doctor’s orders. In the 1990s he
storing carbon dioxide are not just peri-
pheral effects of solving water prob-
lems – they are integral to healthy nat-
ural systems.
So what does water want? In its
liquid state, with sufficient quantity or
gravity, water can rush across the land
in torrential rivers or tumble in awe-in-
spiring waterfalls. But it is also inclined
to linger to a degree that might surprise
many of us, because the infrastructure
of the modern world has erased so
many of water’s slow phases, instead
confining it, containing it, or speeding it
away. These slow stages are particularly
vulnerable to human interference, be-
cause they tend to occur in flatter
places – once floodplains and wetlands
– that we blocked or drained so that we
could settle.
But when water slows and stalls
on land, that’s when the magic hap-
pens, providing habitat and food for
many forms of life above and below.
The key to greater resilience, say the
water detectives, is to find ways to
let water be water, to reclaim space
for it to interact with the land. Inno-
vative water management projects aim
to slow water on land in some approx-
imation of natural patterns. For that
reason, I’ve come to think of this move-
ment as “Slow Water”.
Like the Slow Food movement –
founded in Italy in the late 20th cen-
tury, in opposition to fast food and all
its ills – Slow Water approaches are bes-
poke: they work with local landscapes,
climates and cultures rather than try
to control or change them. Slow Food
aims to preserve local food cultures
and to draw people’s attention to where
25
finally went public about his long-
held “dark secret” in a series of inter-
views revealing his lifelong struggle
with depression.
He even went on tour with two
friends, novelist William Styron and
broadcaster Mike Wallace, who also bat-
tled the condition. They called them-
selves the “Blues Brothers” as they
shared their stories in the hope of pro-
viding comfort.
Hill reflects: “He went public be-
cause he wanted to try and help other
people deal with it. I know he heard
from a lot of people who said him going
public helped a lot.It was something he
battled all of his life but again that’s
part of what’s great about Buchwald:
from early on he was always beating the
odds. He wasn’t afraid of anybody.”
At one point Buchwald was every-
where with a radio show, a slot on the
TV current affairs show 60 Minutes,
a Broadway play, lectures all over the
country and bestselling compilations of
his columns. Yet 15 years after his death
at the age of 81, as the torch passed
to a new generation including Stewart,
Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah and John
Oliver, his fame has dwindled faster
than expected.
“He’s dropped from the public con-
sciousness and it’s a shame,” Hill la-
ments. “He has, unfortunately, been for-
gotten. I hope this book will bring him
back to life. I hope people in this tough
time might get some laughs out of it
too.”
Funny Business is out now
The Julian Hinds pumping plant on
the Colorado River aqueduct, which carries
water from Lake Havasu to southern Cali-
fornia. Photograph: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters
their food comes from, and how its
production affects people and the envi-
ronment. Similarly, Slow Water draws
attention to the ways in which speeding
water off the land causes problems. Its
goal is to restore natural slow phases
in order to support local availability,
flood control, carbon storage and di-
verse forms of life.
Just as Slow Food is local – sup-
porting local farmers and protecting
a region’s rural land from industrial
development while reducing food’s
shipping miles and carbon footprint –
ideally, Slow Water is, too. The engi-
neered response to water scarcity has
usually been to bring in more water
from elsewhere. But desalinating and
transporting water consumes a lot of
energy: in California, for example, the
giant pumps that push water south
from the Sacramento Delta are the
state’s largest user of electricity.
Withdrawing water from one basin
and moving it to another can also dep-
lete the donor ecosystem, or introduce
invasive species to the receiver. Water
engineering is also an environmental
Continued on page 26

26
Continued from page 25
justice issue. Between 1971 and 2010,
20% of the global population gained
water from human interventions on
rivers, including dams, but 24% were
left with less water, according to a 2017
study.
Bringing in water from elsewhere
can also harm the people receiving it. A
big new reservoir imparts a false sense
of security – when we live long dis-
tances from the source of our water,
we don’t understand the limits of its
supply, so we’re less likely to con-
serve it. We also don’t understand how
the water we use supports its local
ecosystem. By over-expanding human
populations in places where there isn’t
enough local water – such as in the US
south-west, southern California and the
Middle East – we make those places and
those people more vulnerable to drops
in supply. Water transfers also create a
well documented cycle of scarcity, akin
to the way that adding more lanes to a
motorway just attracts more cars.
Slow Water is in the spirit of many
Indigenous traditions. Kelsey Leonard
is a citizen of the Shinnecock nation,
a Native American tribe whose tradi-
tional territory lies in modern-day New
York state. She is also assistant pro-
fessor in the school of environment,
resources and sustainability at the
University of Waterloo in Ontario. As
she explained in an online talk in
2020, Indigenous traditions don’t con-
sider water to be a “what” – a com-
modity or threat – but a “who”. Many
Indigenous peoples around the world
believe not only that water is alive, but
that it’s kin. “That type of orientation
transforms the way we make decisions
about how we might protect water,” she
said.
The water detectives are a diverse
bunch, with varying beliefs. But they
share an openness to moving from a
mindset of control to one of respect.
As our long-held illusion that we can
control water is crumbling in the face
of escalating disasters, we are begin-
ning to understand that it’s better to
learn how to accommodate water, and
to enjoy the benefits that cooperation
can bring.
***
Nowhere has urbanisation hap-
pened more rapidly than in China,
where a mass exodus from the coun-
tryside over the last 40 years has seen
the number of urban dwellers boom,
from around 20% of the population
in 1980 to almost 64% in 2020. To
house and employ all these people,
cities sprawled and new ones were built
from scratch. Builders paved flood-
plains and farmland, felled forests and
channelised rivers, leaving stormwater
that once filtered into the ground with
nowhere to go but up and over levees.
Then, one notable flood struck the na-
tional government where it lives.
On 21 July 2012, Beijing was hit by
its largest storm in 60 years. As much
as 46cm of rain fell on some parts of
the city, filling underpasses and flood-
ing roads a metre deep. Landscape
architect Yu Kongjian barely made it
home from work. “I was lucky,” he
says. “I saw many people abandon their
cars.” As the deluge descended, the city
was plunged into turmoil. Seventy-nine
people died, many of them drowned in
their vehicles, electrocuted or crushed
by collapsed buildings. The damage
stretched across 14,000 sq km, costing
nearly $2bn.
Yu, co-founder of the acclaimed
landscape architecture firm Turens-
cape and a leading figure in the Slow
The Long Read
Water movement, was frustrated. He
had warned the government years ear-
lier that disaster was coming. He had
led a research team in mapping what
he called the city’s “ecological secu-
rity pattern”, showing the government
which parcels of land were at high
risk of flooding, and urging it to block
development and instead to use them
to absorb stormwater. They ignored
his recommendations. “The 2012 flood
taught us the lesson that the ecolog-
ical security pattern is a life-and-death
issue,” Yu told me when I met him in
Beijing in 2018.
Urban sprawl is also exacerbating
water scarcity in China, especially in
the north and west. In some of China’s
densest cities, because of rain running
off buildings, streets and car parks,
only around 20% of precipitation soaks
into the soil. Instead, as in so many
other cities around the world, drains
and pipes funnel it away – lunacy, Yu
thinks, in a place with water short-
ages. In common with other cities in
China’s north, Beijing is pretty dry out-
side the summer monsoon season. For
decades, the city has pumped ground-
water to supply its growing population
and rising rates of consumption. This
is lowering the water table by about a
metre each year, causing the ground
to sink as well. This phenomenon is
also happening elsewhere, such as in
Mexico City and California’s San Joa-
quin Valley.
But now Yu is leading the way as
China re-engineers old cities and de-
signs new ones to accept rather than
fight natural water flows. His land-
scape architecture projects incorporate
Slow Water principles in order to lessen
floods, save water for dry spells and
reduce water pollution.
The 2012 Beijing disaster was a turn-
ing point. A month later, a Turenscape
stormwater project in Harbin, a city
about 800 miles north-east of Beijing,
won a top US design prize. Chinese
state television broadcast a high-profile
interview with Yu. He said a govern-
ment minister told him afterwards that
President Xi Jinping had seen it. Less
than a year later, Xi stood in front
of China’s national urbanisation confe-
rence and announced his sponge city
initiative, boosting the idea from fringe
concept to national mission. It is part
of Xi’s Ecological Civilisation agenda,
which aims to clean up the pollution,
flooding hazards and associated costs
caused by his predecessors’ industrial
civilisation. With its centralised govern-
ment, China built its industry and its
economy at a blistering pace. Similarly,
now it is pursuing sponge cities on
a scale difficult for most countries to
even consider.
Globally, urban flooding has
become particularly acute as the
land area covered by cities worldwide
has doubled since 1992. Researchers
from Johns Hopkins University calcu-
lated how impervious surfaces increase
flooding: every time a city increases
coverage of absorbent soil with roads,
pavements or car parks by 1%, runoff
boosts the annual flood magnitude in
nearby waterways by 3.3%. To coun-
teract this trend, sponge cities seek
places throughout urban areas for
water to sink into the ground.
The system works best when these
features are linked together so the
water can travel along some approx-
imation of its natural path. Cities can
convert old industrial areas beside
rivers into parks, and cut through
paving to make way for run-off chan-
nels lined with water-loving plants,
infiltration ponds and seepage wells.
The idea is to mimic nature as much as
possible. Where human space is non-
negotiable, designers sometimes use
surrogates, such as permeable paving
and green roofs that can absorb water.
In 2015, the government began
demonstration projects in 16 cities,
adding 14 more in 2016. Each project
covered at least 13 sq km, although
some were much larger. Objectives in-
cluded reducing urban flooding, re-
taining water for future use, clean-
ing up pollution and improving nat-
ural ecosystems. The goal was, by 2020,
for each project to retain 70% of the
average annual rainfall on site, both
to help prevent flooding and to store
water underground for the dry season.
The Chinese government said it has
met these targets. Still, even though
its scale is more ambitious than re-
lated projects elsewhere, it is likely
insufficient. During heavy rains in 2021,
one pilot city, Zhengzhou, still suffered
significant flooding and deaths. Ab-
sorbing rainfall across 13 sq km of a city
that spans thousands wasn’t enough to
avert disaster.
Yu and other urban water detec-
tives are looking to manage water to a
grander extent, seeking out connected
routes for water to slow and flow across
entire watersheds, which often extend
beyond jurisdictional boundaries. Solv-
ing a city’s flooding problems requires
coordination with communities and
landowners upstream. Ideally urban
designers could absorb water where
it falls, reducing stormwater runoff
at every rooftop and at every farm
field upstream. Yu is dreaming beyond
sponge cities to sponge land. “This is a
philosophy for taking care of the conti-
nental landscape,” he tells me. “It’s time
to expand the scale.”
***
When planning a project, Yu and
other urban designers start by trying
to figure out what water did before
a city spread, and what it does now
within its current confines. Like many
of the water detectives I met, the
staff at Turenscape use spatial mapping
software from Environmental Systems
Research Institute (ESRI), which can
map watersheds from mountains to
ocean, modelling floods, plant succes-
sion, infrastructure and much more.
The tool allows designers to compre-
hend complex systems and interrelated
challenges, such as how to reduce
flooding while also preserving other
species, building smarter cities and
reducing resource waste.
The first thing planners plot is topo-
graphy, or the highs and lows of the
landscape – a primary factor in how
water flows. Models also include soil
type, which can dramatically affect how
water drains; and vegetation, because
that affects how much water soaks
in, runs off or evaporates from plants
into the air. Plus, soil acidity can affect
which plants will thrive or die in a
restored area. Turenscape also models
historic and ecological data, as well as
information on the local population,
economy and transportation.
The data comes from various
sources. Hydrology records can help
to predict rainfall and flooding more
accurately. Topography data can be ga-
thered by aeroplanes with lidar sensors,
which use lasers to survey under build-
ings. City maps can show transpor-
tation corridors, parks, domestic yards
and industrial buildings with giant
roofs. Getting good soil data in urban
areas can be tricky because builders
often move soil from one place to
another. To know for sure what’s down
there, engineering firms typically drill a
The Guardian Wednesday 8 June 2022
hole and take a core sample.
With this information, Slow Water
practitioners can better understand
how a particular variable affects the
way water behaves. When their land-
scape maps are complete, they send
test floods through the digital model
they’ve created. These experiments
allow them to identify pinch points
where water is constrained and will
flood first. Then they experiment with a
topography adjustment or the addition
of a wetland or pond to see how each
affects stormwater behaviour.
Yu told me he traces his passion
to repair humans’ relationship with
water back to the agricultural com-
mune where he grew up, in Zhe-
jiang province, south-west of Shanghai.
There he observed the Chinese “pea-
sant wisdom” for managing water, prac-
tised for thousands of years. Farmers
maintained little ponds and berms to
help rainfall soak into the ground, stor-
ing it for a dry day. The seasonal creek
next to his village swelled and retreated
with the seasons. “For me, flood is a
time of excitement because the fish
come to the field, the fish come to the
pond.” He saw that flooding need not
be the enemy. “If you have wise ways
to deal with flood, water can also be
friendly.”
A week after meeting Yu, I vi-
sited one of Turenscape’s projects in
progress, Yongxing River Park, located
in Daxing, a far-flung exurb of Beijing.
Satellite images from three years ear-
lier showed open land surrounding the
river, which was straightened and con-
fined by steep concrete walls. Today
those images are chock-a-block with
buildings around a more generous,
meandering path for water.
The project was nearly complete
when I saw it in April 2018. About 4km
long and perhaps two city blocks wide,
the park follows the river. Workers re-
moved concrete along the river chan-
nel and excavated soil to widen the
riverbed. That dirt was then moulded
into a large berm running down the
centre, creating two channels. The river
flows on one side, while the other chan-
nel has large holes of varying depths
that act as filtration pools and direct
the water flow. During the dry season,
the filtration side is filled with par-
tially cleaned effluent from a sewage
treatment plant. Wetland plants in the
pools slow the water, further cleaning
it and allowing some of it to filter into
aquifers. During monsoon season, that
channel is reserved for floodwaters, and
the effluent is treated industrially.
The broader riverbanks, newly freed
from concrete, are dotted with thou-
sands of small plants in closely set
rows to hold the earth. As we walk
the path between the two channels, we
pass young willow trees scaffolded to-
gether with sticks for strength while
they grow. Willows, a native stream-
side plant beloved by beavers, have
roots that reach for the air, like cy-
press and mangroves, allowing them to
survive extensive periods of flooding.
Elsewhere, reeds, small bushy willows,
dwarf lilyturf and other native plants
stabilise the soil. Existing large trees,
including elms and poplars, were re-
tained.
During big rains in 2020, Yu sent
me photos of Yongxing River Park. The
trees and grasses had grown consi-
derably since I’d seen it two years ear-
lier, turning it into a lush, green oasis.
The channel contained a good amount
of water, but was nowhere close to over-
topping.
***
All Slow Water projects must factor
in local climate, soil and hydroge-
ology. Consider two Chinese cities with
diametrically opposed water needs.
Kunshan, in Jiangsu province near
Shanghai, is built on polders – land
reclaimed from water with levees. The
water table is so high that surface water
does not soak away, but filtration –
cleaning the water – is necessary. Hotan,
a desert city in far western Xinjiang
province, gets less than 4cm of rainfall
a year on average, so it needs to protect
its groundwater supply.
If China ignores this specificity,
its broad ambition for sponge cities
may falter, says Chris Zevenbergen, an
expert in urban flood-risk management
at the IHE Delft Institute for Water
Education in the Netherlands and a
visiting professor at China’s Southeast
University. The rush to develop cities
in the past 20 years did not allow
builders time to understand imper-
fections in design and make changes.
That is what led to cities across China
experiencing the same problem at the
same time: widespread urban flood-
ing. Rushed implementation of sponge
cities initiatives could also lead to mis-
steps. Xi’s programme has strict dead-
lines, which may not allow time to
monitor performance, adjust if neces-
sary and transfer knowledge. It “takes
time to learn and to reflect”, Zeven-
bergen warns.
A paper written by Chinese govern-
ment research institutes in 2017
expressed similar concerns about
a cookie-cutter approach. Although
Zevenbergen expects the Chinese will
make a lot of mistakes along the way,
he thinks that “in the end, they will
become the leaders in sponge cities.
The same happened in the realm of
renewable energy.” The country has a
culture of getting things done. “Every
year I’m in China, I make designs with
students, and the next year the projects
have been implemented. And that is
really astonishing.”
The flipside of getting things done
quickly, however, is a culture with
less devotion to maintenance and
aftercare. And green infrastructure re-
quires maintenance, such as prun-
ing or replacing plants. A Chinese–
European peer-learning exchange pro-
gramme with which Zevenbergen is in-
volved is helping to accelerate the pace
of learning.
China needs to learn fast. Grey
infrastructure – so called because it
is usually built with concrete – strug-
gled during recent heavy summer mon-
soons, which pushed several giant
dams to the brink of failure and killed
more than 200 people. Meanwhile, the
Yangtze area alone is choked with so
many dams that 333 rivers have dried
up to varying degrees.
Zevenbergen calls the massive
dams examples of “stupid infra-
structure”. Giant grey infrastructure
projects like these are unlikely to have
long lives in the age of climate change,
because they can take a decade to
build and are engineered to accom-
modate certain maximum flows. To do
that effectively “means that we need
to know how much climate change we
can expect”, Zevenbergen told me. “The
problem is, we do not know.”
Yet China is still dam-oriented. De-
spite the national promotion of sponge
cities, Yu noted that China’s schools
continue to train engineers using 20th-
century principles. And in the offices
where decisions are made, Yu still con-
fronts a penchant for stronger dams,
bigger pipes and larger stormwater sto-
Continued on page 28
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28
Continued from page 26
rage tanks – a refrain I heard repeat-
edly from water detectives around the
How do you get 20m tonnes of grain out of
Ukraine?
Joanna Partridge
A clock is ticking inside the towering,
multistorey warehouses on the quay-
side at the Black Sea port of Odesa on
the Ukrainian coast.
One huge metal structure alone
contains a quarter of a million tonnes
of grain, yet represents just over 1%
of the estimated 20m tonnes trapped
in Ukraine since the Russian invasion
began in late February.
Hundreds more of these “grain ele-
vators” are scattered across the world’s
fifth-biggest wheat exporting country:
next to roads, at railway terminals, and
at ports. Yet still full of last year’s harv-
est, these towers are already almost at
capacity.
In just over a month the spring harv-
est gets under way, when farmers begin
collecting the winter wheat, which will
need to find its way to Ukraine’s grain
silos. Meanwhile, inflation is soaring,
countries such as India are blocking
wheat exports, and the risk of famine
is growing.
Pressure is building for an inter-
national agreement on a rescue mis-
sion for Ukraine’s grain, which is despe-
rately needed to feed the world, and
which Kyiv urgently wants to sell to
get its hands on vital foreign currency.
Ukraine produces as much as half the
world’s sunflower seeds, a tenth of its
wheat and up to a fifth of barley and
rapeseed.
As well as a huge diplomatic effort,
rescuing Ukraine’s grain also represents
a vexing logistical challenge. Given the
vast quantities involved, the majority of
Ukrainian grain has always been trans-
ported by sea rather than road or rail.
Turkey – which has the authority
over sea traffic entering and leaving
the Black Sea – is thought to be lead-
ing conversations with Russia about
proposals to allow grain ships from
Ukraine through a naval corridor to the
Bosphorus.
However, several problems need to
be solved to ensure the safe trans-
port of Ukrainian crops, beyond inter-
national agreements, from ship and
Return to the 70s: World Bank warns of weak
growth and high inflation
Larry Elliott Economics editor
The global economy faces a protracted
period of weak growth and high infla-
tion reminiscent of the 1970s as the
impact of a two-year pandemic is
compounded by Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine, the World Bank has warned.
In its half-yearly economic health
check, the Washington-based Bank said
The Long Read / Finance
world. Shifting the dominant culture
will mean adopting a new ethos of
water and land management. Yu said:
“We are fighting so hard to try to get
Grain in a facility in the Donetsk region that was shelled amid Russia's invasion of
Ukraine. Photograph: Serhii Nuzhnenko/Reuters
crew capacity to the availability of
insurance.
When Russia launched its full inva-
sion of Ukraine, it blockaded the coun-
try’s Black Sea ports including Odesa,
preventing any ships from leaving or
entering harbours. In addition, the sur-
rounding waters have been filled with
floating mines. De-mining the waters
would be required for any kind of grain
corridor.
Then there is the challenge of find-
ing the armada of vessels to trans-
port the grain. Agricultural goods are
moved between continents in bulk
cargo vessels, which can hold as much
as 50,000 tonnes, poured into several
large compartments in the ship’s hold.
If an estimated 20m tonnes of grain
were to be transported, as many as 400
suitable ships would be required.
However, shipping analysts say
vessel availability should not be a limit-
ing factor, although it would require
some time for these bulk carriers to
reroute and sail to the Black Sea from
their current locations.
“Before the war, more than 90% of
all Ukrainian agri-food export was done
by sea,” said Mariia Didukh, director of
the Ukrainian National Agrarian Forum,
which represents the country’s largest
food producing organisations.
Export figures underline the scale
of the challenge: before the war, be-
tween 5m and 6m tonnes of grain were
exported each month from Ukraine’s
Petrol prices are soaring, feeding the
steep rise in global inflation. Photograph:
Geoffrey Swaine/REX/Shutterstock
people to think in an ecological way.”
This is an edited extract from Water
Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of
Drought and Deluge by Erica Gies, pub-
seaports, according to the International
Grains Council, an intergovernmental
organisation that seeks to promote
cooperation in the global grain trade.
According to Didukh, only a fifth
of normal monthly export levels has
been transported out of the country by
alternate means during the first three
months of the war, representing just
1.2m tonnes of grains, sunflower oil and
all other agricultural exports.
“We have been developing alter-
native routes for export including rail-
way, trucks, and some Danube ports
in Romania,” she said. “By railway or
trucks it is more expensive, it is longer
and very, very small capacities. It is
unreal for us.”
Rail and road are also fraught with
logistical challenges. The Ukrainian rail-
way network has, like Russia, a slightly
wider gauge, or distance between the
two rails of a railway track, than its
European neighbours such as Poland
or Romania.
This means grain transported by rail
has to be unloaded and put on a dif-
ferent train when it reaches Ukraine’s
European borders.
The Guardian understands that
three Ukrainian ports are being consi-
dered for departures of grain ships: not
only Odesa but also the neighbouring
ports of Yuzhne to the west, and Chor-
nomorsk to the east.
A shipping company source work-
ing in Ukraine said much needs to be
echoes of the stagflation of four dec-
ades ago had forced it to cut its growth
forecast for this year from 4.1% to 2.9%.
David Malpass, the Bank’s pres-
ident, said: “The war in Ukraine, lock-
downs in China, supply chain disrup-
tions and the risk of stagflation are
hammering growth. For many coun-
tries, recession will be hard to avoid.”
The Bank said its global economic
prospects (GEP) report was the first
The Guardian Wednesday 8 June 2022
lished by Head of Zeusand available at
guardianbookshop.com
• Follow the Long Read on Twit-
ter at @gdnlongread, listen to our pod-
done to ensure the safety of any trans-
port, once the sea close to the coast
has been swept for mines, including
the provision of adequate insurance to
cover the vessel and the crew.
According to the source, even Rus-
sian government assurances to ships
using the naval corridor might not per-
suade all shipowners to undertake a
mission.
“There is a lot of money to be made
and some companies are more relaxed
about taking on more risk,” the source
said.
The availability of war insurance, to
cover both ship and crew, will also be a
determining factor in the success of any
grain corridor.
The influential London-based Joint
War Committee designated Russian
and Ukrainian waters in the Black Sea
and the Sea of Azov as “listed areas”
in February, meaning that shipowners
are required to notify insurance under-
writers if they are travelling there. This
also means that additional premiums
are charged.
Even if suitable “war insurance”
could be arranged, some shipping
industry representatives are not con-
vinced a grain corridor can be arranged
quickly.
“I think it is an unlikely prospect for
the time being. You have got to be sure
that your ship is not going to be tar-
geted,” said Guy Platten, the secretary
general of the International Chamber of
Shipping.
“So many things would have to put
in place before any shipowner is going
to take the charter, and would need so
many assurances before ships would
move up there.”
He added that about 100 ships, and
2,000 crew with 20 different natio-
nalities were “in the wrong place at
the wrong time” when Russia invaded,
and have been stuck in Ukraine’s ports
ever since. It has taken time but now
more than three-quarters of these sea-
farers have been evacuated to safety,
although about 450 remain onboard.
“There are lots of steps that would
have to happen before ships were to
trade there again, and there are going
systematic attempt to compare the cur-
rent state of the world economy with
those during the stagflation of the
1970s.
It said the slowdown in growth be-
tween 2021 and 2024 was on course to
be twice that of the period between
1976 and 1979, adding that recovery
from the high inflation that followed
the oil shocks of the mid and late
1970s required steep increases in inter-
casts here and sign up to the long read
weekly email here.
In just over a month the spring harvest
will get under way in Ukraine. Photograph:
Khaled Elfiqi/EPA
to be huge premiums in place,” Platten
said. “Every shipowner will look at the
risk and the reward.”
While international talks continue,
the clock is ticking. Ukraine’s agri-
culture industry and food analysts esti-
mate the world has 10 weeks to find a
solution, before the spring harvest will
need to take its place in the country’s
grain silos.
Discussions about time pressure are
likely to dominate at the annual meet-
ing of the International Grains Coun-
cil, which counts Russia and Ukraine as
members, when it meets in London on
Tuesday.
A failure to arrange a grain corridor
could also have lasting repercussions
for countries such as Egypt, who are re-
liant on Ukrainian imports.
“The question will be for harv-
est ‘23,” said Arnaud Petit, the execu-
tive director of the International Grains
Council.
“If Ukrainian farmers see that the
capacity of export from Ukraine is very
limited, they will limit production for
harvest ‘23, and that would mean that
would mean we are looking at not
only one year but two years of market
disruptions, that would be the worst-
case scenario.”
Given the vast
quantities involved,
the majority of
Ukrainian grain has
always been
transported by sea
est rates in the west. These played a
prominent role in triggering a string of
financial crises in emerging market and
developing economies, it added.
While both rich and poor countries
would be hit by the growth slowdown,
the World Bank said developing and
emerging market economies were the
more vulnerable. It said the level of per
Continued on page 29
Wednesday 8 June 2022 The Guardian
Continued from page 28
capita incomes in developing countries
in 2022 would be 5% below their pre-
pandemic trend.
The Bank pledged $12bn (£9.6bn)
last month to support low-income
countries hit by the loss of food and
fertilisers caused by Russia’s invasion
and used the GEP to call for “deci-
sive” global and national policy action
UK retailers given jubilee lift as high street
footfall rises
Larry Elliott Economics editor
Four days of jubilee celebrations pro-
vided some much-needed respite for
Britain’s retailers after a tough May in
which cost of living pressures weighed
heavily on spending.
There was a sharp increase in con-
sumer footfall on the high streets
during the long bank holiday weekend
to mark the Queen’s 70 years on the
throne, according to the British Retail
Consortium (BRC).
The number of people visiting
shops in the jubilee week was up more
than 17% on the average for May – a
month in which the BRC said there
was evidence of rising inflation deter-
ring the public from spending, with big-
ticket items particularly hard to shift.
Footfall for the bank holiday Thursday
on 2 June alone was 45.5% higher than
the May 2022 average.
“It was great to see so many people
out celebrating and shopping at their
favourite local destinations – a wel-
come boost for retail businesses reliant
on store performance, particularly on
the high street,” said the BRC’s chief
executive, Helen Dickinson.
“We hope that the momentum can
Australia’s used car market is in overdrive as
dealers chase customers to buy back vehicles
Royce Kurmelovs
fbrAustralia’s used car market is in
overdrive with a shortage of vehicles
leaving dealers chasing former cus-
tomers to offer competitive buy-backs
as they scramble to fill their lots.
Others are scouring online market-
place websites and social media sites to
contact those wanting to sell used cars
privately.
In an email seen by the Guardian
with the subject line “We want your
Mazda3!” a New South Wales car dealer
emailed former customers offering to
buy back the cars they sold them years
ago.
“We are paying top dollar for your
vehicle and even better, you will RE-
CEIVE the money SAME DAY! How
good is that?” it said.
Others who have been trying to sell
privately say they have been contacted
directly by dealers and car-buying ser-
vices after placing ads on Facebook and
GumTree.
Finance
to avert the worst consequences of the
war in Ukraine for the global economy.
This would require efforts to cushion
the blow from surging energy and food
prices, speeding up debt relief and ex-
panding vaccine programmes in low-
income countries.
The Bank said that after halving
from 5.7% in 2021, growth would be
stuck at 3% in both 2023 and 2024 as
the war affected investment and trade,
Shoppers on Oxford Street during the celebrations of the platinum jubilee on 3 June 2022. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA
continue despite the ongoing economic
turbulence.”
Dickinson said the BRC’s monthly
sales monitor for May showed con-
sumer demand being squeezed by the
cost of living crunch that had already
driven the annual inflation rate to a 40-
Carmakers, who cancelled orders at the start of the pandemic only to face a huge uptick in
demand, are at the back of the queue for computer chips in short supply. Photograph: James
Ross/AAP
Australia’s new and used car
market is experiencing unprecedented
demand, due largely to supply chain
issues.
Paris Lord, 45, from Canberra said
he was contacted by “a few” dealers
before he sold his plug-in Mitsubishi
Hybrid 2017 Outlander in March this
the pent-up demand from the pan-
demic faded, and policy support was
withdrawn.
The report said growth in advanced
economies would decrease from 5.1% to
2.6% this year while growth in emerging
and developing countries would drop
from 6.6% to 3.4%.
In his foreword to the GEP, Malpass
said subdued growth was likely to pers-
ist throughout the 2020s because of
year high of 9% in April.
Sales last month were 1% below
those in May 2021, with higher-value
items, such as furniture and electronics,
taking the biggest hit. Fashion and
beauty products were the strongest
performers as shoppers prepared for
year for $32,000.
Lord, who sold because there was
no plug in the basement car park of his
new residence and because he wanted
to go car-free, said he didn’t mind
taking a small loss on the sale.
“I was selling it privately for a reason
and didn’t want their alleged service,”
weak investment in most of the world.
“Just over two years after Covid-19
caused the deepest global recession
since world war two, the world econ-
omy is again in danger. This time it is
facing high inflation and slow growth
at the same time. Even if a global
recession is averted, the pain of stag-
flation could persist for several years –
unless major supply increases are set in
motion.”
summer.
“It is clear the post-pandemic
spending bubble has burst, with re-
tailers facing tougher trading condi-
tions, falling consumer confidence,
and soaring inflation impacting con-
sumers spending power,” Dickinson
Lord said. “One of them took it for a
test drive and still wouldn’t increase
their offer. Usual palaver. ‘Aww mate,
the tyres need replacing’, blah blah.
“Their offers were too low. I knew
they would jack up their sticker price,
because of the shortage of cars and
other supply chain dramas.”
A semiconductor shortage has
plagued manufacturers of electronic
goods since the start of the pandemic
with one analyst quoted in Wiredde-
scribing computer chips as “the new
toilet paper” of the global economy.
Carmakers, who cancelled their
orders at the start of the pandemic only
to be blindsided by a huge uptick in
demand, have since been left at the
back of the queue.
The general manager of motor ve-
hicles for Pickles auctions, Brendon
Green, said prices are 150% higher –
about $8,000 to $10,000 – than before
the pandemic.
“Traditionally when a business,
government entity, or private buyer re-
ceive a new car, they dispose of a used
29
“Amid the war in Ukraine, surg-
ing inflation, and rising interest rates,
global economic growth is expected to
slump in 2022. Several years of above-
average inflation and below-average
growth are now likely, with poten-
tially destabilising consequences for
low- and middle-income economies. It’s
a phenomenon – stagflation – that the
world has not seen since the 1970s.”
said. “Supply chain issues including
rising commodity and transport costs,
a tight labour market and higher energy
bills are forcing retailers to increase
their prices, contributing to wider infla-
tion.”
Barclaycard said it had detected a
similar pattern to the BRC, with weaker
spending on discretionary items in May
followed by an increase in platinum ju-
bilee activity.
In the four days of the bank hol-
iday break from 2 June to Sunday 5
June, spending in restaurants was up
41.5% on the same Thursday-to-Sunday
period of 2021; spending in pubs, bars
and night clubs rose by 74.2%, while
entertainment spending increased by
67.3%.
Rob Cameron, the chief executive
of Barclaycard Payments, said: “Spend-
ing soared across many sectors during
the platinum jubilee weekend as Brits
came together to celebrate and enjoy
the sunny weather. Despite wider con-
cerns around the cost of living, the
hospitality sector especially will be
pleased by this welcome boost, having
missed out on two years of unrestricted
trading.”
Paris Lord received text messages from a
car dealer before he sold his 2017 Mitsubishi
Outlander online. Photograph: supplied
vehicle,” Green said.
“Due to the lack of vehicle turnover,
Continued on page 30

30
Continued from page 29
our auctions are extremely competitive
among dealers which has driven used
car price up, so it’s no surprise they are
getting creative when trying to source
used vehicles.”
The situation means Australians are
left waiting an average of 146 days to
get hold of a new vehicle.
According to PriceMyCar those in
Western Australia spent the longest on
wait lists with queues averaging 239
days, closely followed by the North-
ern Territory where times are about 180
days.
Among the models taking the long-
est to arrive was the Land Rover De-
The Guardian view on Boris Johnson: a dead
man walking
Editorial
A weakened Boris Johnson probably
suits the majority of MPs at West-
minster. Unfortunately for the Conserv-
ative party, those with the most to gain
sit on the benches opposite. Few voters
know exactly what Labour and the Lib-
eral Democrats stand for, but both par-
ties think that many more Tory seats
will be vulnerable at the next general
election if Mr Johnson remains in post.
This is a reasonable belief. The govern-
ment is out of ideas and exhausted.
Tory despair is compounded by Mr
Johnson presiding over an openly di-
vided party.
On Monday night, more than four
out of 10 of his colleagues said that Mr
Johnson should go. That rebels could
be found from all wings of the party,
rather than in one organised faction,
is an indication of how far the rot
has spread. Conservative MPs would no
doubt keep Mr Johnson if he helped
them keep their jobs. The trouble is
that opinion polls show that Mr John-
son is neither popular nor trusted –
even among Tory voters. The governing
party is right to fear electoral retri-
bution, one likely to materialise this
month in two byelections where scan-
dal-hit Tory MPs stepped down.
With such backbench resentment,
it is hard to see how Mr Johnson
The Guardian view on time-loop fiction:
when the past is imperfect
Editorial
The Royal Society of Literature’s award
of this year’s Encore prize for the
best second novel of the year has
an appropriately counterfactual rela-
tionship with history, going, as it did,
to a writer – Francis Spufford – who had
five well-received works of nonfiction
behind him before he embarked on his
second life in fiction.
Light Perpetual had already been
longlisted for the Booker prize, so this
is not a writer who has struggled in ob-
scurity to complete that difficult follow-
Finance / The Guardian View
fender which has a wait time of 357
days and the Toyota RAV4 which takes
293 days on average to arrive.
The founder of PriceMyCar, David
Lye, said car dealers were being forced
to be “very aggressive” and creative in
how they source their stock.
“Car dealers have embarrassingly
empty showrooms, so they’re hitting
the phones, hitting people up on Car-
Sales, so they can buy them directly,”
Lye said.
Lye said some dealers may find
“flexible” ways to inflate delivery prices
but their franchise agreements meant
they could not sell a car for more than
the recommended retail price.
He said most price gouging oc-
‘Mr Johnson was never fit to be prime minister. He has not been able to face up to the difficult choices ahead.’ Photograph: Reuters
will get the 38 bills in his Queen’s
speech through parliament. The prime
minister has been unable to convince
the public that he has the answers
to household incomes being squeezed
by inflation and public services being
stretched to breaking point post-pan-
demic. His rhetoric of ready fixes and
easy wheezes might have been funny
once, but no one is laughing in a crisis.
Voters won’t believe a prime minister
‘Ask a pub quiz team to name a time-
loop classic and most will come back with
Groundhog Day.’ Photograph: Everett Collec-
tion/Rex Feature
up. It is especially apt, however, given
the subject of his winning novel, which
imagines the potential afterlives of
five children whose actual lives ended
curred in the individual market where
private sellers were listing prices many
thousands more than what would be
expected.
“There are plenty of instances of pri-
vate buyers, regular Australians, buying
a car, taking delivery, sticking it in their
driveway, adding $20k to the price and
putting it on Carsales,” Lye said.
On Tuesday, Kia Australia said
some customers were buying new EVs
and selling them immediately with a
markup – with many other customers
left empty-handed as waiting lists blow
out and allocations of 100 or less ve-
hicles sell out within minutes.
“The major problem that we’re
facing at the moment is the flipping
who has repeatedly failed to tell the
truth about Downing Street’s pandemic
partying.
It will take more than a reshuffle
to restore confidence in Mr Johnson’s
premiership. He will fool no one with a
rightward lurch that voters will see as a
ploy to buy off backbench discontent.
A programme of tax cuts and priva-
tisation must do more than send the
pulses of rightwing Tory MPs racing.
in November 1944 when a German
V2 rocket struck south London. The
author has said that the idea came
to him when he spotted a comme-
morative plaque on his way to work.
“How can that loss be known,
except by laying this absence, now and
onwards, against some other version of
the reel of time?” asks the novel. It is
not alone in posing this question. The
recent BBC adaptation of Kate Atkin-
son’s Life After Life pursues a similar
line through the story of Ursula Todd,
who repeatedly dies and reappears to
live a different story, restorative ver-
sions of which carry her through his-
The Guardian Wednesday 8 June 2022
of retail customers what they’re doing
with the cars once they bought it,”
Kia Australia chief operating officer
Damien Meredith told the Driven.
“We’ve heard stories of people
buying a car again, on the east coast,
the Sydney Metro and they’re turning
up in Western Australia, with a pre-
mium of $8,000 to $10,000 on them.
So there seems to be a customer flip-
ping exercise,” he said.
In January the Australian Auto-
motive Dealers Association (AADA)
and other industry observers thought
supply chain shortage would ease
and prices would begin to drop from
mid-2022 until the end of the year.
But the ADAA chief executive,
The prime minister is by instinct a
deeply unserious politician. With the
NHS close to collapse, Mr Johnson
offers only bombast. Comparing the
healthcare system to a DVD movie
rental service in an “age of Netflix”
might sound adventurous in a press
release. But proposing bluster rather
than detailed plans to deal with an NHS
breakdown is likely to be electorally
counterproductive.
toric events including the Spanish flu
pandemic of 1918 and the London blitz.
The award-winning Netflix series
Russian Doll also progresses through a
series of deaths, while a wave of time-
loop novels is coming down the line,
raising the question of what this partic-
ular structure represents and why it
should be in vogue right now.
Ask a pub quiz team to name a
time-loop classic and most will come
back with Groundhog Day, which has
become a fixture in lists of great films.
However, in American fiction, the trope
can be traced to a 1892 short story by
William Dean Howells, about a girl who
James Voortman, said the situation has
only worsened with the invasion of
Ukraine which has “highlighted some
additional chinks in the supply chain”.
“We are hopeful the automakers
can pivot and manufacture key compo-
nents in other areas of the world, and
still hopeful that the situation will start
to improve by the end of the year,”
Voortman said.
“Right now we can’t even be honest
with our customers about when cer-
tain models are arriving, there’s just too
much uncertainty and, frankly, it’s been
like this for almost two years now.”
• This article was amended on 8
June 2022 to correct a misspelling of
Brendon Green’s name
Conservative MPs might fret about
the absence of anyone suitable to suc-
ceed Mr Johnson. The cabinet lacks
the courage to tell him to go. But the
prime minister is a dead man walking.
He survives because no one wants to
be responsible for finishing him off.
This is only delaying the inevitable.
The betting is that the Tory leader-
ship rules will be changed to allow the
prime minister to face another chal-
lenge sooner than next June. The trig-
ger for this might be MPs on the stan-
dards committee deciding in autumn
that Mr Johnson misled parliament
about No 10’s partying during lock-
down.
Paul Goodman, the editor of the
Conservative Home website, wrote
sagely that it would be better for Mr
Johnson “to go now as master of his
own fate, undefeated at the ballot box
… rather than be forced out”. Unfor-
tunately, these words will be unheeded.
The country needs new leadership, one
that can produce policies, not just play
to the gallery. Mr Johnson is com-
fortable with lying in politics. Despite
agreeing on a customs border in the
Irish Sea to get Brexit done, he now
improbably claims he did not. Mr John-
son was never fit to be prime minister.
He has not been able to face up to the
difficult choices ahead. Britain should
be led by someone who can.
spends an entire year reliving Christ-
mas. There is a separate tradition in
Japanese anime attributed to Yasutaka
Tsutsui’s 1965 novel, The Girl Who
Leapt Through Time.
Though the urge to rewrite history
is a recognisable response to grief, it
would be simplistic to say that the cur-
rent vogue is simply a response to the
monstrous “what ifs” raised by the han-
dling of the Covid pandemic: what if
particular super-spreader events hadn’t
happened, for instance, repeating the
role of the 1918 victory celebrations in
Continued on page 31
Wednesday 8 June 2022 The Guardian
Continued from page 30
the spread of Spanish flu? For every
historical interrogation such as Atkin-
son’s and Spufford’s, however, there
Jim Seals, of soft rock duo Seals and Crofts,
dies aged 80
Benjamin Lee
Jim Seals, of music duo Seals and
Crofts, has died at the age of 80.
The lead vocalist of the pair, known
for hits such as Summer Breeze and Di-
amond Girl, died on Monday. The cause
of death is unknown.
“This is a hard one on so many
levels as this is a musical era passing
for me,” said musician and colleague
John Ford Coley on Facebook. “And it
will never pass this way again, as his
song said. He belonged to a group that
was one of a kind. I am very sad over
this but I have some of the best memo-
ries of all of us together. Rest In Peace
Jimmy.”
Together with Dash Crofts, Seals
helped define soft rock in the 1970s.
Their first major hit was Summer
Breeze in 1972, selling over a million
copies. The next year saw the release
of Diamond Girl which was also a hit,
making it to No 4 in the US.
There was controversy in 1974 with
the release of the album Unborn Child,
Johnny Depp thanks fans with video: ‘We did
the right thing together’
Adrian Horton
Johnny Depp has posted a message to
his “most treasured, loyal and unwa-
vering supporters” on Instagram and
TikTok on Tuesday, days after win-
ning a defamation trial against ex-wife
Amber Heard.
In the post, the 58-year-old actor
wrote to his fans: “We’ve been every-
where together, we have seen every-
thing together. We have walked the
same road together. We did the right
thing together, all because you cared.
And now, we will all move forward
together. You are, as always, my em-
ployers and once again I am whittled
down to no way to say thank you, other
than just by saying thank you. So, thank
you. My love & respect, JD.”
Depp, who was touring the UK
with musician Jeff Beck when the ver-
dict was announced last week, accused
Heard of defamation “with malice” for
a 2018 Washington Post op-ed titled
“I spoke up against sexual violence –
and faced our culture’s wrath”, in which
she referred to herself as a survivor of
domestic abuse but did not mention
Depp by name.
The Guardian View / Arts
are a dozen time-loop romcoms and
many more time-loop video games, in
which snippets of background infor-
mation gradually emerge to point play-
ers in the right direction.
Dash Crofts, left, and Jim Seals performing in 1975. Photograph: Michael Putland/Getty Images
which included an anti-abortion song
that was written shortly after Roe v
Wade. It was banned by many radio
Johnny Depp told his fans: ‘And now, we will all move forward together.’ Photograph: Stuart Wallace/Rex/Shutterstock
A Virginia jury found her liable for
$15m after a closely watched seven-
week trial that featured dozens of wit-
nesses and was fodder for memes,
misinformation and amateur analysis
online. Some have called the verdict,
It is a phenomenon that speaks
both to a general sense of power-
lessness and to an appetite for fixes
particular to each individual player in
the game of life. “As flies to wanton
stations, and concerts were picketed al-
though the duo insisted it was not as
political as many claimed, just that it
which found that Heard acted with
“malice” in calling herself a victim of
spousal abuse, a tipping point in the
backlash to the #MeToo movement.
“As Johnny Depp says he’s ‘moving
forward,’ women’s rights are moving
boys are we to the gods”, wrote Shakes-
peare in King Lear, an earlier, tragedian
wisdom that many 21st-century socie-
ties have been primed to resist. Time-
loop fiction is a symptom of this resis-
asked people “don’t take life too lightly”
before considering an abortion.
“It was our ignorance that we didn’t
backward,” said a spokesperson for
Amber Heard in response. “The ver-
dict’s message to victims of domestic
violence is … be afraid to stand up and
speak out.”
The Pirates of the Caribbean actor
31
tance, displaying both a wilful optim-
ism and a refusal to accept any such
common fate.
know that kind of thing was seething
and boiling as a social issue,” Seals said
years later. “On one hand we had people
sending us thousands of roses, but on
the other people were literally throwing
rocks at us. If we’d known it was going
to cause such disunity, we might have
thought twice about doing it.”
The band continued with hits like
Get Closer and I’ll Play For You before
they took a hiatus in 1980 after being
dropped by Warner Bros after their 11th
studio album, The Longest Road.
There were two reunions, in 1991
and then in 2004 with the final album,
Traces. Seals suffered a stroke in 2017.
“I just learned that James ‘Jimmy’
Seals has passed,” said his cousin Brady
Seals, member of country band Little
Texas. “My heart just breaks for his wife
Ruby and their children. Please keep
them in your prayers. What an incred-
ible legacy he leaves behind.”
Seals is survived by his wife Ruby
Jean and three children, Joshua, Ju-
liette and Sutherland.
also made his TikTok debut on Tues-
day with a video montage from his tour
with Beck, including a show at London’s
Royal Albert Hall a few days before the
verdict was announced. The account al-
ready has 4.5 million followers.
Depp had previously commented
on his trial victory with a statement
shortly after the verdict, writing: “From
the very beginning, the goal of bringing
this case was to reveal the truth, regard-
less of the outcome. Speaking the truth
was something that I owed to my child-
ren and to all those who have remained
steadfast in their support of me. I feel
at peace knowing I have finally accom-
plished that.”
His initial Instagram post was liked
by over 18 million users, including Patti
Smith, Jennifer Aniston, Amanda Knox,
Paris Hilton and Taika Waititi.
Heard expressed disappointment
for “what this verdict means for
women” in a post-trial Instagram post,
writing that “it sets back the idea that
violence against women is to be taken
seriously”.

32
Colbert on the January 6 TV hearings: ‘Your
new favorite show: America’s Got Treason’
Guardian staff
Stephen Colbert
Stephen Colbert returned to The
Late Show after a week of holiday to
poke fun at CNN, which is, according
to an internal memo, stepping back
from overhyping everything as “break-
ing news”.
“Which means overhyping every-
thing is now up for grabs, so we
have breaking news,” Colbert parodied.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I stand before
you shocked and terrified to report that
what I am saying right now means
nothing. It is all a false sense of ur-
gency created to keep you captivated
long enough to get to the next Lipitor
commercial.”
The cable news network, which re-
cently hired the Late Show showrunner
Chris Licht to replace its ousted chief
executive, Jeff Zucker, plans to cut back
on the breaking news graphic because
“its impact has become lost on the au-
dience” and CNN should be focused on
“informing, not alarming” viewers.
“And with CNN out of the game
they’ll leave plenty of alarming for the
folks over at Fox News,” Colbert noted.
“In fact, they are now counter-pro-
gramming with Tucker Carlson’s new
show Look Out! Gay Immigrants Are
Coming for Your Penis!”
In other news, the House January 6
committee is set to make its case public
with primetime hearings. “That’s right,
the insurrection is going primetime.
Get ready for your new favorite show,
America’s Got Treason,” Colbert joked.
Seth Meyers
On Late Night, Seth Meyers ripped
on the former TV personality turned
politician Dr Mehmet Oz, who eked out
a narrow victory in the Republican pri-
mary in Pennsylvania for US Senate. “I
mean, how can you be the best man for
the job when you’re not even the best
Post your questions for Denise Richards
Rich Pelley
Denise Richards has had her share
of celebrated screen moments. There’s
that bit in 1997’s Starship Troopers
where she’s trying not to throw up
while dissecting slimy alien bugs. (“We
humans like to think we’re nature’s
finest achievement, but it just isn’t
true.” “Eeeuu!”) She puts Pierce Bros-
nan’s Bond in his place as the Lara-
Croft-esque Dr Christmas Jones in
1999’s The World Is Not Enough.
(“Doctor Jones. Christmas Jones. No
jokes, I’ve heard them all.”) She has
also guest-starred in Saved by the Bell,
Married With Children, Doogie Howser
MD, Beverly Hills 90210, Seinfeld, Lois
& Clark: The New Adventures of Super-
man, Melrose Place and as Ross and
Monica’s cousin Cassie in Friends. After
marrying Charlie Sheen in 2002, Ri-
chards guested in Spin City and Two
and a Half Men. After their divorce,
Sheen cameoed alongside Richards in
Tyler Perry’s 2012 movie Madea’s Wit-
Arts
Stephen Colbert: ‘That’s right, the insurrection is going primetime. Get ready for your new favorite show, America’s Got Treason.’ Photo-
graph: Youtube
Oprah doctor spinoff?” Meyers won-
dered. “I’m not saying Dr Phil would
be a good senator, but at least he’d have
a plan if your teen started dressing too
sexy.
“I never thought Dr Oz would be
a nominee for anything other than
the New England Journal of Medicine’s
annual Craziest Doctor Alive issue,” he
added.
Oz, who got his start on Oprah’s talk-
show in the 2000s, was endorsed for
Senate by Donald Trump. “And just like
every other successful Republican poli-
tician in the country,” Meyers noted, “Oz
has learned that in order to thrive in
today’s GOP and court the Republican
base, you have to embrace election
denialism by implying that there was
widespread fraud in November 2020
when we all know that there was not.”
As Oz said in a May TV interview:
“As a physician, I like to get into the de-
Wild thing … Denise Richards in a radio interview earlier this year. Photograph: Anna Webber/Getty Images for SiriusXM
ness Protection, while Richards re-
turned the favour in Sheen’s television
tails. I talk to individuals who say their
votes weren’t counted … We have got to
understand the different ways cheating
occurred.”
“I understand that as a physician,
you want to get into the details, but
there are also times you just don’t
have to,” Meyers responded. “If a pa-
tient came in and said their arm fell off
but you could see that it hadn’t, you
probably wouldn’t order a full set of
tests. You’d send them off to a different
doctor who does, you know, brain stuff.
Which is what we should do to anyone
who says their vote wasn’t counted.”
Trevor Noah
On the Daily Show, Trevor Noah
checked in on another heated primary:
the Democratic race for mayoral can-
didate in Los Angeles. The race is a
close call between Karen Bass, a former
community organizer and Democratic
congresswoman, and billionaire real
series Anger Management. And let’s not
forget that time in 2018 when she was
The Guardian Wednesday 8 June 2022
estate developer Rick Caruso, who has
tapped into fears of rising crime and
homelessness. Caruso, who has poured
over $40m of his own fortune into
widespread advertising, has also en-
listed a bevy of celebrity endorsements,
including Snoop Dogg, Gwyneth Pal-
trow and George Lopez.
“If you guys are out voting, Rick
Caruso is my choice and I really be-
lieve that he will make a difference,”
said Kim Kardashian in a video posted
to her Instagram.
“Did she say ‘if you guys are out
voting?’” Noah noted. “That’s a fun way
to campaign for someone. It’s almost
like she wants to endorse Caruso, but
she doesn’t want to come off too strong,
you know? ‘I’m not saying like go vote
for him, but if you guys happen to like
pass like a voting booth, then I guess
feel free to like vote for him or what-
ever.’
guest announcer on Ant & Dec’s Sat-
urday Night Takeaway.
“So thanks to Caruso’s huge spend-
ing advantage, his celebrity endorse-
ments, and his focus on quality of life
issues for people who aren’t homeless,
this election looks like it’s going down
to the wire,” Noah explained.
“So every vote is going to count.
Which, if you listen to LA voters, isn’t
necessarily a good thing,” he added
before several local news clips of LA
residents not knowing a single mayor-
al candidate or even the current mayor,
Eric Garcetti.
“Damn, forget knowing who’s run-
ning for mayor – a lot of people in
Los Angeles don’t even seem to know
that there is a mayor?” Noah laughed.
“I thought $40m in ads sounded like a
lot before, but now I’m thinking it’s not
enough.”
Jimmy Kimmel
And in Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel
mocked a Fox Business host who de-
cried Joe Biden’s planned appearance
on Kimmel’s show this week as “the
land of insanity in which we all live”.
“Oh I see, what I do is insane,”
he deadpanned. “You guys telling us
we should arm PE teachers to protect
kids? That makes sense. Tucker Carlson
giving Vladimir Putin a reach-around
every other night? Sane. President on a
late-night talkshow? Insane. Got it.”
Kimmel also laughed at Louie Goh-
mert, a Republican congressman from
Arizona, who said in a recent interview:
“We have a two-tiered justice system. If
you’re a Republican, you can’t even lie
to Congress, or lie to an FBI agent, or
they’re comin’ after you, they’re going
to bury you.”
“That’s right, you can’t even lie to
the FBI any more!” Kimmel joked. “At
least he’s not lying about how upset
he is about not being allowed to lie, I
guess? Small victory? The good news is
he’s on the judiciary committee.”
But when it comes to Denise Ri-
chards moments, there’s none more
memorable (particularly for former tee-
nage boys) than the bit in 1998’s Wild
Things where Richards, Neve Campbell
and Matt Dillon get hot and heavy in
the swimming pool. Wild Things re-
volves around a pair of high-school
rivals – spoiled rich girl Richards and
trailer park bad girl Campbell – and
their slightly dim guidance counsellor
Dillon. Kevin Bacon and Bill Murray are
in it too. Not unlike 1995’s Showgirls,
Wild Things is probably best remem-
bered for its status as a trash clas-
sic, bringing sexual taboos into the
mainstream in a way that couldn’t
be repeated by dodgy follow-ups Wild
Things 2 (2004), 2005’s Wild Things: Di-
amonds in the Rough or (ahem) 2010’s
Wild Things: Foursome.
So to help celebrate the re-release of
Wild Things, featuring the steamier 115-
minute “Unrated Edition” from 2004 –
calm down, it’s mainly extra scene-set-
Continued on page 33
Wednesday 8 June 2022 The Guardian
Continued from page 32
ting bits – Richards has kindly agreed
‘The beginning of a conversation’: the Met
examines a complex history of emancipation
art
Walker Mimms
Museum exhibitions are traditionally
about objects. But in a provocatively
commentated show of Black portraits
from the 18th and 19th centuries, the
Met confronts itself.
Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux
Recast centers on Why Born Enslaved!,
the bust Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux mod-
elled in 1868 and produced in pop-
ular editions thereafter. Life-size, she is
bound at the chest with rope, glowering
upwards in knowledge and pain – a cap-
tive with no doubts of the crime she’s
been dealt.
The Met already owned Carpeaux’s
terracotta version ofthe famous work.
Then a rare marble (one of two from his
studio) went on sale in 2018. “When the
opportunity to acquire this bust came
up,” Elyse Nelson, the conceiver and co-
curator of the show, told me, “we ac-
quired it with the idea that this could be
the linchpin for an exhibition.
“Sculpture requires patronage, re-
quires wealthy patrons, so is often
associated with the state,” Nelson ex-
plained. That state, the court of Na-
poleon III, was very proud of the
emancipation decree from back in 1846,
a generation before America’s. Car-
peaux’s work offered belated congra-
tulations to France. The emperor was
among its first buyers.
But when art is tied to regimes
— especially regimes as grabby as the
Second Empire – it has trouble gain-
ing our trust. There was something un-
clean about the Met’s acquisition: by
purchasing an enslaved woman, the
show’s catalog asks, “can we be other
than complicit in the aestheticization
of slavery?”
In this spirit, the show interrogates
Carpeaux across his early sketches of
the bust, his marble, his earlier versions
and his renderings of a larger public
work related to her. It must be the
fullest examination ever staged of his
iconic sculpture.
For the catalog Wendy S Walters,
a professor of non-fiction at Colum-
bia and Nelson’s co-curator, explores
the work as a record of subjection,
even fetishization. “We have histor-
The best albums of 2022 so far
Alexis Petridis, Ben Beaumont-
Thomas and Laura Snapes
Horace Andy – Midnight Rocker
Rocksteady and dub productions
shepherded by Adrian Sherwood – with
strings, melodica and harmonica – pro-
vide classy backing for a man who
could claim to have Jamaica’s most
Arts
to take questions from the highbrow,
Guardian-reading public. So, keep it
clean, but get cracking as we’ll need
Installation view of Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast. Photograph: Photo by
Anna-Marie Kellen, Courtesy of The Met
ically understood enslavement,” Wal-
ters explained to me, “to think that the
sexual component of enslavement was
separate from the work component.”
They were not.
Walters argues that Carpeaux revi-
sits that sexual component a little too
readily: the hyperrealism where rope
meets breast, the artist’s alleged aggres-
sion toward women, his commodi-
fication of a slave’s likeness for financial
gain and political favor.
Viewers will leave either outraged
by such politicization of art or equipped
with a more nuanced understanding
of the touchy era following abolition,
a time when European heads of state
made grand gestures toward equality
while they plotted the Scramble for
Africa.
Carpeaux’s contemporaries appear
and give him context. Familiar works
by Charles Cordier field unsparing ques-
tions about the white gaze. Once a gem
of the collection, the Black man of Jean-
Leon Gérome’s Bashi Bazouk (1868-69)
still adorns the cover of the Met’s offi-
cial guidebook, but now it is scrutinized
“through the prism of European impe-
rialism”.
One of the show’s virtues is to reach
back before Carpeaux, to the golden era
of protest when his abolitionist voca-
bulary was first being forged. One dis-
play is devoted to Josiah Wedgwood,
the English potter whose medallion
from 1787 took off like wildfire among
activists of the time. No bigger than
a thumbprint, it shows a Black man
beautiful singing voice. His vibrato
seems buffeted by the bass that sur-
rounds him, a voice in total com-
munion with its surroundings as he
delivers sermons on the state of the
world. Read the full review. BBT
Bad Bunny – Un Verano Sin Ti
The world’s most popular pop artist,
if we’re using streaming data as the
measure, is also one of its most gifted.
your questions in the comments below
by 6pm this Thursday 9 June as Ri-
chards is making a flying visit, and we’ll
chained and begging for our sympathy.
Here he is reproduced on a glass co-
logne bottle, on a pearlware jug, and on
a gilded seal fob modified to show a
female slave.
Though Wedgwood’s intentions
were good and his timing ingenious,
such finery smacks of the black Insta-
gram square, the corporate pledge to
“do better”, the pint of Juneteenth ice
cream.
The most illuminating guest is Jean-
Antoine Houdon, Carpeaux’s forebear
in marble. Locals have long admired
Houdon’s Bather(1782)in the Met’s sun-
drenched court of European sculpture.
Braced for a splash, the bather is lovely
– the arch of her outstretched foot fixed
nimbly on a stone, a detail both struc-
tural and emotive.
It turns out she didn’t wash alone.
The bather was commissioned for a
fountain in the 45-acre pleasure garden
(now the Parc Monceau) of the king’s
cousin, the duc d’Orleans. Above her
originally stood a Black woman carved
in lead, a servant who pumped water
through a ewer on to the pure white
back of her stone mistress.
Though the servile half of the
fountain disappeared during the Revo-
lution, a plaster of her head appears on
loan from Soissons. Far from Houdon’s
famous realism (see his exquisite Ben
Franklin in the American wing), this
head depicts a simplified, obsequious,
very unfortunate, smiling mammy.
Worse, when France freed her
slaves the first time, in 1794, Houdon
Even if you don’t understand Span-
ish, his vocal lines are so packed with
poignancy that little romances and his-
tories suggest themselves anyway. Hop-
ping from trap to mambo to house to
EDM to wistful pop to every pace of reg-
gaeton, he evokes every possible mood
of summer. Read the full review. BBT
Big Thief – Dragon New Warm
Mountain I Believe in You
print her answers here in Film & Music
and online very soon.
• Wild Things is out now on digital
converted his slave’s likeness into terra-
cotta, scrawled an abolitionist caption
into her base, and mass-produced her
as a souvenir of emancipation. The Met
have brought out their copy of this
miniature for the show.
Here is expert curation: the plas-
ter slave, the clay freedwoman, the im-
plied connection to the marble mistress
across the wing. “I think this project
changed me as an art historian,” Nelson
said of such timebombs. “I think that
this is just the beginning of a conver-
sation, and that a larger conversation
could follow.”
If the parable of Houdon teach-
es anything, it’s how greasily the
feudal values of the ancien régime
could masquerade as liberalism. These
masqueraded in artist and patron alike:
having installed Houdon’s “happy slave”
fountain in his wonderland, the duc
d’Orleans, one of the richest men in
France, renounced his title when revo-
lution arrived and rebranded himself
“Philippe Egalité”. (The guillotine got
him anyway.)
The curators believe Houdon’s
cheap intentions with his smiling slave
“served as precedents” for Carpeaux 90
years later. But Why Born Enslaved! is
not so easily reduced – not quite.
Yes, Carpeaux’s patrons, like
Houdon’s opportunist duke, were the
worst kinds of virtue signalers. While
Napoleon III sent troops to seize
Mexico, his empress used her bronze
of Why Born Enslaved! to broadcast
republican sentiment back home.
And yes, Carpeaux borrowed from
his own racialized fountain, his globe
allegory in the Luxembourg Gardens in
Paris (1874). Now anonymous, the sitter
for Why Born Enslaved! was visibly the
same woman who modelled his “Africa”
in that monumental public work. The
chain around Africa’s ankle might well
be construed as a degrading and irre-
levant icon. “That was very common,:
an emancipated figure, even decades
after abolition, would still be carrying
the vestiges of their captivity,” Walters
explained.
For context, Walters and Nelson
include earlier “four continents” alle-
gories in porcelain and on paper. For
all its realism, Carpeaux’s fountain – and
Folk-rock at heart but spanning
bluegrass, squalling rock, scratchy trip-
hop and more on this 20-track double
album, songs continue to pour from
one of the most prolific bands in the US
today. Even more amazing than their
versatility and hit rate is their strength
of feeling: Adrianne Lenker’s vocals and
the band’s playing are suffused with
struggles and utterly sincere love. Read
33
platforms.
Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (French, 1827–
1875) Why Born Enslaved!, modeled 1868,
carved 1873. Photograph: Paul Lachenauer/
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase,
Lila Acheson Wallace, Wrightsman Fellows,
and Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation
by extension his bust – derived from a
time-worn menu of ethnic tropes that
put Europa first.
But these facts cannot dim the
absolute electricity of the woman’s
gaze. Against her ropes she spins sharp-
ly to the left, and as you spin with her,
encircling a back-to-back display of the
terracotta and the later marble, you’ll
detect from that early draft to the final
one a faint sharpening of her brow —
as if a wound that began in entreaty
has hardened into reproach. Against
the glib Wedgwood and the shameless
Houdon, Carpeaux creates nothing less
than a human.
Janet Jackson owned a repro-
duction, Beyoncé posed with one, and
Kehinde Wiley depends on the sin-
cerity of Carpeaux’s original for the
strength of his own homage, which is
wisely on display: a small bust criti-
quing exploitation in modern sports.
Carpeaux’s endurance, as this
searching and feisty exhibition makes
clear, can and should exist alongside
the paternalizing traditions and the
dirty money in spite of which his work
took such vivid life.
“The figures themselves carry mul-
tiple valences,” Walters offered, “and if
we allow them to carry multiple va-
lences, then we’re really starting to
think critically about what represen-
tation is, which to me seems to be the
purview of a museum.”
Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux
Recast is on display at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York until 5
March 2023
the full review. BBT
Axel Boman – LUZ
Dubby breakbeat house, smooth
yacht-rock atmospherics, South African
hip-hop: the first of Stockholm pro-
ducer Boman’s two 2022 collections is
headily eclectic and a rare entity in
a genre where tracks almost always
Continued on page 34

34
Continued from page 33
trump albums: it repays listening from
beginning to end, rather than cherry-
picking songs for a playlist. AP
Cate Le Bon – Pompeii
“Raise a glass in a season of ash,”
Le Bon sings on her sublime sixth
album, written as she attempted to lean
into the chaos of the pandemic and,
inspired by the likes of Cabaret Vol-
taire, embraces curiosity instead of fear.
Pompeii is rich with mercurial saxo-
phones and a tarnished sense of dark
glamour, as if someone had roughed up
early Roxy Music. It’s cool, with a weird
strut you couldn’t hope to emulate, but
also distinctly vulnerable, with Le Bon
offering up unvarnished humanity as
a gesture towards hope. Read the full
review. LS
Charli XCX – Crash
A rare example of an artist pulling
off a perfect pop heel-turn. On her last
album for Atlantic – a fractious rela-
tionship – XCX decided to play them
at their own game, leaning into the cha-
racter of “major label pop star” and em-
bracing blue-chip co-writes and radio
friendly bangers. Crash works because
it never feels weighed down by the con-
cept, filled with instant songs such as
Beg for You and Baby, and no small
amount of emotion. It wasn’t just about
breaking up with her label, but the
conclusive end of her wavering long-
term relationship and the loss of her
late collaborator, Sophie. Read the full
review. LS
Eric Chenaux – Say Laura
Permit some warranted hyperbole:
the Canadian songwriter has one of
the all-time great singing voices in
popular music, an intensely romantic
Chet Baker-ish instrument that seems
to float with piercing direction, like a
paper aeroplane thrown hard through
mist. Backed with his equally dis-
tinctive burbling guitar, Say Laura is
a perfect gateway to his oeuvre with
some of his loveliest compositions –
and There They Were may be his best
ever. BBT
Silvana Estrada – Marchita
The debut album by the 24-year-
old Mexican songwriter brims with the
specific sadness of not just one’s first
breakup, but “mourning that first idea
one has about love”, she has said.
Estrada plays the Venezuelan cuatro,
which creates a tender bed for her dra-
matic vocals. Inspired as a singer by jazz
greats such as Sarah Vaughan and Ella
Fitzgerald, she flinches with pain (Te
Guardo), frays with anguish (Marchita)
and can summon a precision as elegant
and propulsive as the flutter of a bird’s
wing (Sabré Olvidar). A captivating ar-
rival. LS
Fana Hues – Flora + Fana
Hues’ dreamy second full-length
album is R&B so liquid you could
swim in it. As the California musi-
cian attempts to come to terms with
a breakup, she turns those languid
depths into a prism refracting an end-
less wealth of seductive shades: Mos-
cato is a vulnerable, acoustic plea from
the bottom of an empty wine glass;
High Roller a subtly psychedelic epic;
Wild Horses a diaphanous bliss-out. LS
Father John Misty – Chloë and the
Next 20th Century
A melodically stunning series of
genre pastiches – easy listening bossa
Arts
Silvana Estrada, Charli XCX, and Joel Ross. Composite: Jackie Russo,, Emily Lipson,
Lauren Desberg
nova, swing band brass, John Barry
soundtrack – over which Joshua Till-
man spins one mordantly funny short
story after another: misery memoir au-
thors are cancelled, relationships rekin-
dled by recently deceased pets, ill-ad-
vised sexual liaisons disrupted by car
accidents. A songwriter at the top of his
game. Read the full review. AP
Jenny Hval – Classic Objects
Hval’s music has often looked at
a woman’s place in society, and her
eighth album starts in a familiar place,
pondering the institution of marriage:
a guy proposing at one of her gigs,
as well as her own wedding. The Nor-
wegian reassures us that she only got
into this patriarchal construct for “con-
tractual reasons”. But as Classic Objects
unfolds, that sense of certainty melts
away as Hval interrogates how her
identity and values were formed, and
what she really believes in. As weigh-
ty as that sounds, the music is loosely
dubby and shimmering, and Hval finds
humour, lightness and transcendence
in her searching. Read the full review.
LS
Huerco S – Plonk
American producer Brian Leeds,
AKA Huerco S, released an ambient
classic with his 2016 album For Those
of You Who Have Never (And Also
Those Who Have): extremely beautiful
but unstable and fraught. Those qual-
ities are all intensified on this dense,
brilliant follow-up, where there are lush
chords and chimes in abundance, but
set in a world of profound instability.
Drum programming as hard and pre-
cise as a nail gun dances somewhere
between speed garage, techno and drill,
but Leeds is a master of rhythm even
when there’s no percussion at all. BBT
Jeshi – Universal Credit
As strong and memorable a por-
trait of disaffected Britain as Boy in
Da Corner by Dizzee Rascal or Noth-
ing Great About Britain by Slowthai
(whose flow Jeshi’s resembles at time),
Universal Credit is the defining album
of our current cost of living crisis. Using
imaginative beats that don’t cleave to
current fashions, Jeshi trips through
a fug of drugs and inhibited earning
power while mulling the fate of his
generation. BBT
Kendrick Lamar – Mr Morale & the
Big Steppers
There’s a sense in which Mr Morale
& the Big Steppers is business as usual:
another masterpiece from an artist
who’s released nothing but master-
pieces for a decade. But its teeming
sound, dazzling rapping and occasio-
nally risky subject matter is the work
of a man thrillingly unwilling to stay
still. Read the full review. AP
Let’s Eat Grandma – Two Ribbons
Loss rings through the Norwich
duo’s third album: Jenny Hollingworth
grapples with her boyfriend’s death
from a rare form of cancer, and she and
Rosa Walton struggle to make sense of
their lifelong friendship coming apart
at the seams. That they don’t look away
from it is what makes Two Ribbons
such a bracing and beautiful record,
with pain and reconciliation rendered
in heart-stopping synth-pop and a new
foray into surreal pastoralism. Read the
full review. LS
Leyla McCalla – Breaking the
Thermometer
Breaking the Thermometer started
life as a stage show about Haiti’s fight
for democracy during the 1960s. Then
the pandemic halted performances and
McCalla remade it as an album. Like
Anaïs Mitchell’s similarly ambitious,
multimedia Hadestown, you can im-
agine this beautifully immersive record
finding a wide audience. Singing in
Creole and English, McCalla’s voice has
an inviting, soft authority; her kinetic
cello plucks and the percussion really
kick up dust. Best is her take on Cae-
tano Veloso’s You Don’t Know Me, an
enigmatic state that McCalla evokes
with dreamy pleasure at holding on to
privacy, but also frustration that few
care to dig deeper. Read the full review.
LS
Cécile McLorin Salvant – Ghost
Song
The highly garlanded Miami jazz
vocalist pulls out all the stops to
interrogate lost love. She covers Kate
Bush’s Wuthering Heights in a confron-
tationally slow a cappella; sings Brecht
and Weill with the brisk beauty of a
colourful bird ruffling its feathers; mar-
ries music from The Wizard of Oz with
a song by Gregory Porter. Her arrange-
ments are fantastic: you can feel the
shared jazz influences between her and
Fiona Apple, and the original I Lost My
Mind combines baroque “mad songs”
with churning organs reminiscent of a
Julia Holter song. Ghost Song encou-
rages a wild sense of wonder but never
loses its singular focus. LS
Melt Yourself Down – Pray for Me,
I Don’t Fit In
On which London sextet Melt
Yourself Down finally succeed in
marshalling their eclectic influences
– dance music, Afrobeat, Krautrock,
punk, abrasive jazz – into a cohesive
sound of their own. For all the self-
doubt in the lyrics, Pray for Me, I
Don’t Fit In sounds thrillingly con-
fident, charging head-down at the lis-
tener. Read the full review. AP
The Guardian Wednesday 8 June 2022
Mitski – Laurel Hell
The aggressive commerciality and
digital artifice of the 1980s is iro-
nised by Mitski on her most ambitious
album, using peppy pop and sophis-
ticated metropolitan balladry to con-
front human need, whether for cap-
ital or love. A triumph of arrangement,
with a sort of rococo-futurist studio
sound, its pop hooks stop it feeling
overworked. Read the full review. BBT
Molly Nilsson – Extreme
Ten albums in, the Sweden-born,
Berlin-dwelling synth-pop singer is as
lo-fi as ever, but her songwriting just
gets stronger. Her sense of irony is
potent and funny – hair-metal chords
seem to skewer dumb aggression, and
Earth Girls’s joyous chorus of “women
have no place in this world” is a wi-
thering portrait of toxic masculinity –
but Kids Today and Fearless Like a
Child have a straightforward, moving
naivety. Pompeii, meanwhile, is Calvin
Harris-level pop that should have been
huge. BBT
Rosalía – Motomami
You’d call it Kanye-level ambition if
Ye hadn’t squandered that on his last
few records: the Spanish star’s third
album exhibits her unparalleled range,
studious adulation of the music that
made her and an explosive, collagist
nous that’s all her own. There’s dembow
(La Combi Versace), bachata (La Fama),
her trademark flamenco (Bulerías), and
inventive genuflecting toward icons as
disparate as Daddy Yankee, Lil’ Kim
and Willie Colón. And she has bars
(Saoko), addictively basic bops (Chick-
en Teriyaki) and beauty: her vocals on
Hentai are Disney heroine-beautiful as
she sings about coitus being second
only to godliness. Read the full review.
LS
Joel Ross – The Parable of the
Poet
The mood of vibraphonist Joel Ross’
third album is frequently twilit, be-
calmed and imbued with Coltrane-ish
spirituality – evidenced by the titles of
Prayer, Benediction and Wail – but it
also diverts to more unsettled, darker
territory, as on Choices. It all flows
beautifully, immersing the listener: an
album you willingly succumb to. AP
Soul Glo – Diaspora Problems
Breakneck-quick and utterly magni-
ficent hardcore punk out of Phila-
delphia, with frontman Pierce Jordan
venting thousands of words of anger
like a political protester in fast-forward.
Alongside burly riffs that could flip a
car, there are occasional forays into
Death Grips-ish rap and spoken word.
BBT
St Paul and the Broken Bones –
The Alien Coast
St Paul and the Broken Bones came
up with the term “cosmic sound” to
describe their fourth album, which set
Paul Janeway’s emotive church-y vocals
over Giorgio Moroder disco and a doo-
mily epic electronic-laced take on their
country-rock-soul hybrid. Head to the
superb final track, Love Letter from a
Red Roof Inn first and you’ll be hooked.
AP
Stromae – Multitude
The Belgian synth-pop star’s long-
anticipated third album was subtler
than his breakout hits Papaoutai and
Alors on Danse, but its depths rewarded
the nine-year wait. He refined the
instrumentation, weaving in string and
Bad Bunny. Photograph: Eric Rojas
woodwind instruments from around
the globe, and used satire to deliver gut-
ting truths about how humans get one
over on one another. On Santé, a chorus
cheers the workers who got us through
the pandemic in one breath, then reeks
with entitlement towards them in the
next. LS
Kurt Vile – (watch my moves)
The American singer-songwriter
has one of the most consistent cata-
logues in 21st-century indie, but album
nine is his very best: the sound of a
wise man who has none of the answers,
just happily picking his way through
life and alighting here on classic after
classic. Read the full review. BBT
The Weeknd – Dawn FM
Less immediate than its vastly
successful predecessor After Hours –
there’s nothing as obviously commer-
cial as its big hit Blinding Lights –
Dawn FM is a skilfully done, beautifully
crafted concept album on which 80s-
influenced R&B rubs shoulders with
Daft Punk-ish pop house and killer
ballads, packed with so many great
songs that picking a highlight is almost
impossible. Read the full review. AP
Wet Leg – Wet Leg
On arrival, Wet Leg’s Chaise Longue
sounded like the kind of witty indie no-
velty that used to end up high in John
Peel’s Festive 50. But their eponymous
debut had substantially more to offer:
with hooks to spare, it offers smart,
funny, sharply drawn studies of life as
small-town women in their 20s. Read
the full review. AP
Nilüfer Yanya – Painless
Yanya’s 2019 debut, Miss Universe,
was a splendid mess of an album that
sprawled in various musical directions.
Painless is sharper, cooler, more cohe-
sive and focused – the music draw-
ing on 80s and 90s alt-rock; the lyrics
pointed and economical; the melodies
honed and potent. It’s also better: an
object lesson in refining your craft.
Read the full review. AP
Yard Act – The Overload
The point where alternative guitar
rock’s tendency towards sprechgesang
reached the top of the charts. You
could see why: The Overload offered
skittering but muscular post-punk funk
and lyrics that moved beyond funny
(albeit on-the-nose) satire into some-
thing more complex and affecting in
the lengthy vignette of Tall Poppies and
the surreal, epic closer 100% Endur-
ance. Read the full review. AP
Wednesday 8 June 2022 The Guardian
Sally Rooney novels reset expectations of
Ireland, says TV director
Nadia Khomami Arts and culture
correspondent
The Irish director behind Conversations
With Friends and Normal People has
said he loved depicting a modern and
unencumbered Ireland in the hit TV
programmes.
Lenny Abrahamson, who adapted
Sally Rooney’s first two novels for the
screen, said he noticed striking differ-
ences between the Ireland of Rooney’s
generation and his own.
“I found it fascinating to visit the
lives of people in pretty much the same
place that I had been. I went to Trinity
College, I remember my feelings walk-
ing through the gate for the first time,
so I can directly compare those two
generations,” he told the Radio Times.
“I found that really exhilarating and
positive. I thought: God, these people
and the world that they’re inhabiting is
so much less encumbered by some of
the stuff that Irish people had on their
backs when I was that age. So, recog-
nising this is an opportunity to show
this culture and this place in its new
form.”
Abrahamson, 55, best known for his
2015 film Room, which received four
Oscar nominations, said he believed
cliches of Ireland were still out there.
‘I know I’m not going to please everyone’:
Lucile Hadžihalilović on her beguiling film-
making
Mark Cousins
It was a small clip, on YouTube. A
young boy on an operating table. And
he seemed to be … pregnant. What? The
scene was velvety smooth, still, night
time, yellowish. I was fascinated.
I looked up the name of the film
director: Lucile Hadžihalilović. French-
Bosnian. A month later I got to see the
whole film – Evolution – on a big screen.
It was just as haunted, as obsessed by
bodies and colour and mood, as the
YouTube clip. I tracked down more of
her work. Her debut feature, Innocence
had girls, rivers, an old dark house and
labyrinths. If movies are image sys-
tems, I was starting to understand that
Hadžihalilović is great at image sys-
tems.
Then, a film company sent me a link
to Hadžihalilović’s new film Earwig and
asked if I would host a Q+A with her.
I didn’t have time. Besides, I’d stopped
interviewing film-makers 20 years ago,
and am not sure if I really believe in Q
+As any more. But she is so special that
I couldn’t say no. So I sent her some
email questions.
MC: If your name wasn’t on the
front of your new film, Earwig, I think
I would still have guessed that it was
made by you. Are you pleased to have a
recognisable tone of voice?
Arts
Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal in Normal People. Photograph: Enda Bowe/BBC/PA
“Sally’s work is like a massive palate
cleanser, it resets your expectations,” he
said.
Both Normal People, Rooney’s sear-
ing tale of teenage first love, and
Conversations With Friends, which fo-
cuses on the relationships between a
group of young Dubliners, broke out
of the online-only, youth-focused BBC
‘Sometimes I’d like to escape myself’ … French-Bosnian director Lucile Hadžihalilović.
Photograph: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for BFI
LH: Yes, I am. It would be sad to
sound or look like anybody else – as
long as I don’t look like a cliche of
myself. But sometimes I’d like to escape
myself …
In the edit suite, I’m often wor-
ried that my scenes are too slow,
that I might bore the audience. You
use an oozing pace and only slowly
reveal things. That’s very confident,
isn’t it? Where does that confidence
come from?
I try to find the right pace that
will put the audience in a certain state
of mind, an altered state close to the
characters’ one, a pace that will im-
merse the audience in the world of
Three to become huge BBC One hits.
They propelled the careers of the actors
Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal
(Normal People), as well as Alison
Oliver who stars alongside Joe Alwyn
in Conversations With Friends.
Abrahamson said he felt a respon-
sibility for younger actors when filming
the sex scenes prevalent in both shows.
the film, that will make them feel the
mood of the places and the characters.
With my editor, we’ve tried to speed up
some scenes but they became tasteless.
A slow pace brings intensity. It’s also a
way to encourage the audience to focus
on the details through which the story
is told rather than dialogue and action.
To dive deeper into the mood of the
scenes.
For me, some films with a fast
pace and a lot of cuts can be ex-
tremely boring. Boredom isn’t neces-
sarily caused by pacing, but by aes-
thetic and content. I know I’m not going
to please everyone, but for some I hope
it’s going to be rewarding.
One such scene in Normal People lasted
more than nine minutes, making up a
third of the episode.
“The intimacy in these series is an
essential part of the story. It’s not decor-
ative. We did feel great responsibility,
so within the filming [we had] an inti-
macy coordinator. We created a safe
environment and we showed the actors
Earwig has hints of story. What is
your attitude to story? I often feel that a
film can have too much story, that it can
be a kind of bully, a bit macho.
On the one hand, I like it when
the story is simple, even minimalist. It
allows us to focus on the real cinematic
aspects of the film. And on the feelings
and the emotions.
I don’t like it when everything is
revealed, explained. I like to have to
guess, and I like to have time to feel and
think. I like holes in the narration, they
are very attractive. To have to fill the
gaps or to wonder about blurred zones
involves me much more in the film and
makes the experience more intimate. I
try to involve the audience of my films
in the same way.
Would you prefer to have been di-
recting in the silent era?
There was a faith in the power of the
images, an intensity and often poetry
in silent film that is wonderful and that
we have lost. An enchantment toward
this new art form that must have been
really exciting to experience.
Also, silent films can be really close
to the language of dreams which is
very appealing to me. But in the silent
era I would have missed the use of a
soundtrack.
What painters do you like? Your
imagery and situations remind me of
Paula Rego or Puvis de Chavannes.
35
the episodes before they were broad-
cast, to make sure they were happy,” he
said.
After the release of Normal People,
clips of intimate scenes were taken out
of context and distributed on porn web-
sites. At the same time, callers to the
RTÉ Radio 1 show Liveline voiced com-
plaints about the sex scenes in the
show.
Abrahamson said everyone in-
volved with the show felt confident
that their work was “good and impor-
tant” and could be defended. “I don’t
think any of that [the repurposing of
footage on porn websites] hurt any of
the actors.”
The production team were quick to
get any clips taken down from porn
sites, he said. “I think that’s all you can
do, otherwise you’re letting the worst
people in society determine what you
can do because of how they’ll construe
it.”
Abrahamson said the viewer com-
plaints reflected Ireland’s historically
Catholic culture. “But ultimately I think
it was a positive experience. That Live-
line episode became iconic precisely
because it doesn’t represent the coun-
try now. We could look at it and shake
our heads, whereas before that was the
dominant view,” he said.
Romane Hemelaers as Mia in Earwig.
Photograph: Anti-Worlds/Petit Film/Fra-
Kas/BFI/Channel Four
I love very much symbolist painters
like Odilon Redon, Ferdinand Knopf
or Léon Spilliaert. Or Nordic European
painters such as Munch or Gallen-Kal-
lela. I like the way they often mix
nature and mythology. Some surrealist
painters are very inspiring too: De Chi-
rico, Tanguy, Toyen, Štyrský, or Doro-
thea Tanning, for instance.
The great film producer Jeremy
Thomas says that we all have a secret
box in our heads. What’s in your secret
box?
It should remain secret.
If you met Rembrandt, what would
you ask him?
I suppose I’d like him to talk about
his science of lightning and “clair-
obscur” – the distribution of light and
shade. And I would love to discuss with
him In Praise of Shadows, an essay writ-
ten by Junichiro Tanizaki in 1933 about
Japanese aesthetics and the power of
Continued on page 37
Wednesday 8 June 2022 The Guardian

Arts 37

Continued from page 35
obscurity and silence.
If you met Greta Garbo, what would
you ask her?
I would not talk to her but I would
worship her as the “founder of a reli-
gious cult called cinema” as Federico
Fellini would say. In this cult, one of the
main goddesses is Marlene Dietrich.
What really scares you?
Losing control over my body and
my mind, being “possessed”; a kind of
fear I felt very strongly as a teenager
after watching The Exorcist.
Have you ever cried at something
because of its visual beauty?
Some Japanese films, such as
those by Mizoguchi, Naruse or Kino-
shita can make you cry because of
their beauty and subtleness. Japanese
cinema shows such a great love of and
dedication to art, which is extremely
moving. These films give me a strong
feeling of nostalgia, as do Andrei Tar-
kovsky’s films Stalker and Mirror.
Painting too can be very moving.
Recently, I saw an exhibition of Georgia
O’Keeffe. The vibration of the colours
was so beautiful that it provoked phys-
ical reactions – like tears.
Have you evolved as an artist? If so,
have you had to force yourself to do so,
or does change come naturally?
I’m not sure that I have evolved
very much. After my film Innocence I
felt more confident to explore imagi-
nary worlds. And with Earwig, thanks
to Brian Catling (the author of the novel
and also a visual artist), I’ve put myself
in the head of a male adult character
for once, I’ve let the violence erupt
more than usual, and played with time
and chronology instead of having a
linear narrative, which makes it closer
to dream logic.
By contrast, for my next project I
hope to explore a more realistic and
straightforward narrative. What helps
or forces me to evolve is working with
my collaborators: co-writers and edi-
tors, as well as cinematographers. And
the reactions of the audience.
• Earwig is released in cinemas on
10 June.

Kate Bush earns first ever US Top 10 hit with

Running Up That Hill
Ben Beaumont-Thomas
Kate Bush has earned her first ever US
Top 10 hit with Running Up That Hill, 37
years after it was released.
The song is a key plot point in
the new series of Netflix’s supernatural
drama Stranger Things, and has ex-
ploded in popularity since the show de-
buted on 27 May. It is now at No 8 in
New heights … Kate Bush performing
Running Up That Hill in 1985. Photograph:
United Archives GmbH/Alamy
the US, and reached the same position
in the UK singles chart last Friday.
Running Up That Hill reached No
30 in the US when it was first released
in 1985, her highest chart placing there
until now.
It is currently the second-most
played song globally on Spotify and
Apple Music, behind Harry Styles’s As
It Was and Future’s Wait For U respec-
tively.
In the UK charts’ midweek sales
update on Sunday, it had risen to No 2
behind Styles to put it in strong conten-
tion for the No 1 spot this Friday.
In a statement on her website, Bush
said the song’s resurgence is “really
exciting”, adding that it “is being given
a whole new lease of life by the young
fans who love the show – I love it too!”
Aside from Christmas songs which
go back into the charts each year, it’s
rare for an old song to re-enter the US
Top 10. The last time was Queen’s Bohe-
mian Rhapsody reaching No 2 in 1992
after it was included in Wayne’s World,
though Fleetwood Mac grazed the Top
10 with Dreams in 2020 after it was used
on a viral TikTok video.

‘Kate Winslet calls me mummy!’ – Jean

Smart on Hacks, Mare of Easttown and
superstardom
Rachel Aroesti
There are 18 participants on my video
call with Jean Smart, the veteran actor
whose striking return to the spotlight
has brought about what US commen-
tators are calling “the Jeanaissance”. It’s
a rather grand title but it seems justified
– especially if this high-security inter-
view experience is anything to go by.
The disorientating vetting procedure
involves multiple texts and emails, two
different Zoom calls, one “breakout
room” and 16 industry bods silently ob-
serving our interview. Clearly, the 70-
year-old is extremely hot property in
TV land.
Smart may not be a household
name in the UK but she’s an increa-
singly familiar face. Across the Atlan-
tic, she’s long been both. The actor first
found fame in the mid-1980s as one of
the leads in Designing Women, a trail-
blazing sitcom set in an Atlanta inte-
rior design agency populated by female
characters who were, she says, “so dis-
tinctive, so original and so detailed”.
But it wasn’t just progressive in a femin-
ist sense: “No one had done a show
about southerners that made them real
three-dimensional characters, so that
was fun!”
Later, she won two Emmys for her
extended guest star stint as old school-
pal Lana Gardner on Frasier, while
the 2000s and 2010s brought a string
of standout supporting roles in every-
thing from 24 and Fargo to Saman-
tha Who? and Watchmen. Yet it wasn’t
until last spring, when she was simulta-
neously starring in the exceptionally
sharp sitcom Hacks and stealing scenes
as Kate Winslet’s mother in the dark
‘I’m a smartass, just like Deborah’ … the actor in Hacks. Photograph: HBO Max
detective drama Mare of Easttown, that
the world seemed to decide an effusive
celebration of Smart’s talent was long
overdue.
Hacks – whose first season was fi-
nally released in the UK on Prime Video
in April, with season two following this
Friday – has proven a particularly satis-
fying showcase for Smart’s skills. She
plays Deborah Vance, a very glam and
terrifyingly cutthroat old-school stan-
dup who butts heads with Ava Da-
niels, the “cancelled” Gen Z comedy
writer tasked with breathing new life
into her increasingly stale Las Vegas
residency. Smart is so convincing as
Deborah – a blisteringly acerbic diva
hellbent on avenging those who have
wronged her – that interviewing her be-
comes an increasingly frightening pros-
pect the more episodes of this snappy,
emotionally knotty sitcom I devour.
As it turns out, there is not a hint
of derision or dismissiveness to Smart
in real life. She is, however, as coiffed,
glossy and gorgeous as Deborah. “We
both like leopard print and sequins,” she
says, eyebrow raised. The pair also have
a wry sense of humour and a feel for
a punchline (“I’m a smartass like her –
sarcasm is in my arsenal”).
Yet Smart doesn’t seem to share De-
borah’s gilded-cage lifestyle. The latter
would be conducting this interview in a
gleaming corner of her sprawling man-
sion. Smart is sitting in front of a shelf
unit crowded with books and framed
family photos (including a picture of
her late husband, the actor Richard Gil-
liland, whom she met on the set of De-
signing Women). The impression is of a
cosy, low-key home.
In fact, everything about Smart ra-
diates well-adjusted serenity. One of the
themes of Hacks’ new season is De-
borah’s professional anxiety: she wor-
ries she has become irrelevant and
unwanted. Surely that’s something an
actor who has been jobbing for almost
50 years could relate to? Not so, appar-
ently. “Even when there were times
when I wasn’t getting a lot of work –
which thankfully didn’t last for long –
I always had that confidence it would
work out,” she says, keen to point out
that she doesn’t identify with the rage
and indignation that roil through De-
borah’s life as a result of having been
betrayed by her husband and sister.
“Her bitterness is her battery. I’ve
never understood people who say,
‘Somebody broke my heart. I’m just
never going to trust men again.’ You
think: ‘Why are you treating a rela-
tionship with one person as if it has
anything to do with half the population
of the world?’ But she’s never let herself
try to get past it. It fuels her.”
It quickly becomes apparent that
everything to do with the gratifyingly
sour Hacks is infinitely more lovely off-
screen. The unforgiving job of a stan-
dup, for example, was transformed into
something safe and sanitised for Smart,
who had all the fun of cracking jokes
“without the scary parts – because the
crowd are all extras who are paid to
laugh”. Delivering Deborah’s sets came
relatively easily, but Smart didn’t see
the appeal of standup much beyond
that. “The difference between being a
standup and doing a play on stage is
you can be bombing in a play and you
don’t have to really face it – because
99.9% of the time you’re not address-
ing the audience directly. But if you’re
a standup, it’s painfully obvious when
you’re doing poorly. That’s got to be the
worst feeling in the world.”
Another savage aspect of the show
that’s decidedly warmer in real life is
Smart’s relationship with Hannah Ein-
binder, who plays Ava. On screen, their
professional collaboration is fraught.
Deborah, a traditional comedian for
whom a great punchline is non-nego-
tiable, rails against Ava’s looser, gag-lite
approach – a way for the show to cle-
‘So distinctive’ … in Designing Women in
1986. Photograph: CBS/Getty Images
verly probe comedy’s generation gap.
But in season two, the pair’s personal
dynamic becomes increasingly twisted
as they develop an intimate and un-
healthy mother-daughter bond.
Behind the scenes, however, Smart
and Einbinder’s friendship sounds
heartwarming. When Smart was re-
cently awarded a star on the Hollywood
Walk of Fame, her Hacks co-star gave
a droll but hugely affectionate speech.
“We just laugh all the time,” says Smart,
“and send each other silly text mes-
sages – a cartoon I saw or a joke I heard.”
She smiles. “Because I love seeing back
that ‘hahaha!’ or ‘lolololol!’”
Clearly, Smart is somebody who
bonds with her co-stars. In Mare
of Easttown, she played Kate Wins-
let’s ice-cream-scoffing, Fruit Ninja-ob-
sessed mother – another combative, but
marginally less dysfunctional mother-
daughter relationship. Smart says Wins-
let insisted on calling her “mummy”
when the camera’s weren’t rolling. At
one point, Smart had an accident on
set: she was leaning on a bannister for
comic effect and fell right over it. “So
I’m lying in a heap at the bottom of the
stairs and they’re waiting for the ambul-
ance to arrive. Kate was supporting my
back because it hurt so bad. And she
Continued on page 38

38
Continued from page 37
was saying, ‘It’s all right, mummy. It’s all
right. They’re coming.’
“Later, when they got me an ambul-
ance, the guy getting ready to hook
up the morphine drip said, ‘Boy, your
daughter was sure worried about you.’
I said, ‘What? Oh no! That actress is
playing my daughter – didn’t you rec-
ognise her?’” When Smart told him it
was Winslet, he was devastated to have
missed his chance to speak to her. “I
said, ‘Could you get back to the mor-
phine, please, fanboy?’”
In Hacks, Deborah is continually
forced to reckon with her own pa-
renting decisions, such as bringing De-
UK cinema chain cancels screenings of
‘blasphemous’ film after protests
Helen Pidd, Jessica Murray and
Andrew Pulver
A UK cinema chain has cancelled all
screenings of a “blasphemous” film
about the daughter of the prophet
Muhammad after branches were pick-
eted by Muslim activists.
Cineworld said it took the decision
to cancel all showings of The Lady of
Heaven to “ensure the safety of our staff
and customers”.
The cancellation was criticised by
a House of Lords peer as being “dis-
astrous for the arts, dangerous for free
speech”.
The film’s producer defended the
rights of the protesters to express their
displeasure but said it was “silly” and
against British values for the film to be
pulled completely.
A video circulating online showed
the manager of Sheffield Cineworld
telling protesters that Sunday night’s
screening had been cancelled, to cries
of “Allahu Akbar” (God is great).
5Pillars, a Muslim news site,
tweeted a photo of what it said was
“200 Muslims protesting against sec-
tarian hate film Lady of Heaven out-
side Cineworld in Broad Street, Bir-
mingham” on Sunday.
Lady of Heaven, released last Friday
in the UK, claims to be the first film to
put the “face” of the prophet Muham-
mad on screen.
But as the Guardian’s two-star
review pointed out: “No single actor
is credited with playing him, or any of
the other holy figures in his entourage.
And, as a nervous initial disclaimer
points out, their faces, often shown in
dazzling sunbursts, are computer-gen-
erated. Presumably, this is enough to
placate Islam’s prohibition on visual
representation of the prophet, but this
is a Shia-aligned film that is evidently a
little more lenient on the issue.”
A screening in Bolton was cancelled
after 100 protesters turned up at the
local Cineworld branch. The chair of
the Bolton Council of Mosques had
urged the cancellation of the screen-
ing, saying the film was “underpinned
with a sectarian ideology and is blas-
phemous in nature to the Muslim com-
munity”.
More than 117,000 people have
signed a petition to try to get the film
removed from all UK cinemas.
Arts
borah Jr on tour with her back when
she was a child. “Dragging her to all
these awful clubs where she stayed
up too late and got into alcohol and
was hanging around with horrible male
comedians. She thought it was out of
love – she just wanted her little girl with
her. Of course, her daughter remembers
that it was highly inappropriate and
that’s what makes it so painful.”
Has Smart felt a similar pull? “Oh,
it’s terrible,” she says of a working
mother’s predicament. While filming
Mare of Easttown in Philadelphia, she
“flew home twice a week” to be with her
son Forrest, whom she adopted with
Gilliland in 2009; she also has an older
son, Connor. “It was exhausting, but I
The film’s producer defended the rights of the protesters to express their displeasure but saidit was against British values for the film to be
pulled completely. Photograph: PR IMAGE
A spokesperson from Cineworld
said: “Due to recent incidents re-
lated to screenings of The Lady of
Heaven, we have made the decision to
cancel upcoming screenings of the film
nationwide to ensure the safety of our
staff and customers.”
Cineworld was due to screen the
film in Bradford, Birmingham, Bolton,
London (Ilford and O2 Greenwich),
Glasgow Silverburn, Milton Keynes,
Sheffield and Wolverhampton.
Vue, a rival cinema chain, still had
screenings listed for London and the
south-east on Tuesday. Vue did not re-
spond to claims it had pulled the film
from selected cinemas but a spokes-
person said: “Vue takes seriously the
responsibilities that come with pro-
viding a platform for a wide variety
of content and believes in showcasing
films of interest to diverse commun-
ities across the UK.
“Vue will only show a film once the
BBFC (the independent British Board
of Film Classification) has assessed and
rated a film. The Lady of Heaven has
been BBFC accredited and is on show in
a number of our cinemas.
“Decisions about how long a film
remains on show are taken on a site-
by-site basis and based on a variety of
commercial and operational factors.”
The 5Pillars review of the film
was headlined: “Lady of Heaven: pure,
wanted to. I had to.”
Despite having entered her eighth
decade last year, Smart is showing no
signs of slowing down. And her next
film role may take her profile to anoth-
er level. In Babylon, directed by La La
Land’s Damien Chazelle, she plays a
British film critic in the golden age of
Hollywood. Smart has never done an
English accent on screen, but going by
her Winslet impression during this call,
she has it nailed. The film – which also
stars Brad Pitt as 1920s heartthrob John
Gilbert, Margot Robbie as Clara Bow
and Tobey Maguire as Charlie Chap-
lin – seems like Oscar-bait. It wouldn’t
be surprising if it provides Smart with
something new to go on her already
unadulterated sectarian filth.”
Its reviewer complained that the
film compared three of the prophet’s
closest companions to Isis.
Claire Fox, who sits in the House
of Lords as Baroness Fox of Buckley,
tweeted that the decision to cancel the
screening showed the “creep of extra-
parliamentary blasphemy law” was now
censoring film.
She wrote: “Same ‘I Find that Offen-
sive’ cancel culture arguments now
being used far beyond campus activ-
ism. Disastrous for the arts, dangerous
for free speech, a lesson to those who
argue identity politics are no threat to
democracy.”
Malik Shlibak, executive producer
of the film, told the Guardian cinemas
should “stand up and defend their right
to show films that people want to see”.
“I think cinemas are crumbling to
the pressure, and taking these deci-
sions to quell the noise,” he said, adding
the production company had received
dozens of messages from people who
were trying to book tickets to see the
film but not being able to.
“This is an artistic endeavour talk-
ing about and elaborating on history
and religion, which always has a ple-
thora of different takes and interpre-
tations. That’s normal and healthy. We
welcome this and we welcome people
to express themselves, whether they’re
The Guardian Wednesday 8 June 2022
crowded awards shelf.
Promisingly, Smart says playing this
critic won’t be a complete departure
from Deborah. “She knows she inti-
midates people – that people are a little
afraid of her because they know she has
the power to make or break a career.
There’s an interesting twist in a big
scene I have with Brad – you see a side
of her you haven’t seen.”
And with that teaser, my time is
up: I am halfway through thanking her,
when all the machinery behind the
interview springs into action and I’m
ejected from the call. Left, like eve-
ryone else, to marvel at the Jeanais-
sance from afar.
Hacks is on Prime Video in the UK,
for or against the film,” he said.
“What we don’t support, and what
we vehemently stand against, is what
they’re trying to do, which is to censor
others and dictate what we can and
cannot watch in UK cinemas.
“They have no right to do so and it’s
something very dangerous. The general
population really need to be aware of
this and stand up to this, because it is
infringing and putting in danger their
freedom of speech.”
Cinema censorship
Freaks
In 1932 Dracula director Tod Brown-
ing made a then-shocking film set in
a travelling circus, featuring disabled
actors in the key roles. While the film
was released in the US in a truncated
form to poor box office, in the UK it was
refused a certificate by the BBFC (then
called the British Board of Film Cen-
sors) and in effect banned. It was “redis-
covered” and shown at the Venice film
festival in 1962, leading to the BBFC
giving it a certificate the following year.
A Clockwork Orange
Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of An-
thony Burgess’s novel was released
uncut in the UK in 1971, but after sensa-
tional news reports linked the film to
murder cases, a number of local coun-
cils refused permission for cinemas to
show it. In 1973, Kubrick requested
that Warner Bros, the film’s distributors,
HBO Max in the US and Stan in Aus-
tralia.
Hacks gave me a taste
of comedy without
the scary parts –
because the crowd
were all extras who
were paid to laugh
withdraw the film permanently in the
UK, and it was not legally shown until
after Kubrick’s death in 1999.
Salo or 120 Days of Sodom
The final film by Italian auteur Pier
Paolo Pasolini – an adaptation of Mar-
quis de Sade, set during the final days
of Mussolini’s fascist regime – was due
for release in 1975, but was refused
a certificate on the grounds of “gross
indecency”. Legal regulations allowed a
cut version of film to be shown at mem-
bers clubs from 1977 onwards, although
the first cinema to show it, in London’s
Soho, was quickly raided by the police.
It was finally given an 18 certificate by
the BBFC (renamed the British Board of
Film Classification in 1984) in 2000.
The Life of Brian
Arguably the most notorious
censorship row in the UK surrounded
the Monty Python team’s satire on
Christianity, which was released in 1979
with an AA certificate (equivalent to a
15). Religious campaigners (led by Mary
Whitehouse’s Festival of Light) accused
the film of blasphemy, leading to the
celebrated TV discussion between the
Python team and the film’s opponents.
A number of local councils raised the
rating to X, and a handful banned the
film entirely.
The Driller Killer
The “video nasty” panic of the early
80s saw the prosecution of a string of
horror films, mostly after they became
available on VHS. Abel Ferrara wrote
and directed this graphic slasher film,
which was released on video in 1982
and became one of around 35 placed on
the director of public prosecution’s list
of banned films once the Video Record-
ings Act was passed in 1984. It achieved
a legal video release in 1999.
Crash
David Cronenberg’s 1996 adap-
tation of JG Ballard’s novel (focusing
on the erotic appeal of car wrecks) was
the subject of a pre-release campaign
to ban it by a number of tabloid news-
papers, but the BBFC passed it uncut
with an 18 certificate. However, West-
minster council refused permission,
meaning that most West End cinemas
were unable to show it. However, the
council for its neighbouring London
borough, Camden, did not follow suit,
allowing many venues to screen it.
Wednesday 8 June 2022 The Guardian
The Righteous review – thoughtful horror is
soaked in Catholic guilt
Leslie Felperin
The marketing – poster, trailer and the
like – for this monochrome low-budget
feature is selling The Righteous like it’s
a horror film. It’s all dark figures lurking
in the murk, ominous, droning synth
music and lots of talk of sin, suggesting
it issues from the horror subgenre that’s
soaked in a Catholic mindset: God
v Satan, crime and punishment and,
aptly given the cinematography here,
black and white morality. But while
this feature debut for writer-director-
co-star Mark O’Brien is certainly suf-
fused with uncanny dread, it’s much
more thoughtful and meditative than it
is scary, and barely supernatural until
the end. This slipperiness really works
in the film’s favour, and suggests that
O’Brien, who also gives a tremendous
performance here (he’s been in scads
of stuff as a character actor, from Mar-
riage Story to Halt and Catch Fire), has
proper, big boy directing talent.
The lean, near-stagebound story re-
volves around just a handful of charac-
ters. In the middle of Nowheresville
Clover Moore urges Sydney renters to take up
green energy to meet net zero target
Tamsin Rose
Sydney’s lord mayor, Clover Moore, has
urged renters and apartment dwellers
to do their bit to help the city reach net
zero by switching their energy supply
to renewable sources.
Moore’s plea comes amid spiralling
energy costs and increased pressure
on household budgets, with the New
South Wales Tenants Union noting
while many renters wanted to make
green choices, it was not always a
simple equation.
The lord mayor said the city of
Sydney has reduced emissions in its
own operations by 70%, nine years
ahead of council’s 2030 schedule, but
meeting its goal of net zero by 2035
would require residents doing their
part.
“Many of our residents believe they
can’t go renewable if they are renting or
live in an apartment block, but there’s
more to renewable electricity than just
putting solar panels on the roof,” Moore
said.
“Switching to GreenPower is the
single biggest and, probably easiest,
thing you can do to help tackle the cli-
mate crisis.
“It may seem an odd request to
make of the residents and business
owners to change electricity plans, but
to achieve the city’s goal of net zero
by 2035 we must reduce emissions not
Arts / Environment
Expressive … Ethel (Mimi Kuzyk) and Aaron (Mark O’Brien) in The Righteous
USA, Frederic (Henry Czerny) and his
wife Ethel (Mimi Kuzyk, like O’Brien
and Czerny a familiar face finally get-
ting a bit of limelight here) are griev-
Clover Moore says ‘there is more to renewable electricity than just putting solar panels on the roof’, suggesting residents switch to
GreenPower electricity plans. Photograph: Jessica Hromas/The Guardian
only in our own operations but also
across the broader local government
area.”
GreenPower is a government-ma-
naged scheme that lets households
buy certified renewable energy through
electricity retailers. It involves paying
an extra tariff for each kilowatt hour
of energy consumed; based on the av-
erage NSW consumption for a house-
hold of three it costs about $5 a week.
ing for their young adopted daughter
Joanie, recently killed in mysterious
circumstances. Their despair is so great
they can barely fill us in on the back-
Council switched to 100% renewable
electricity in 2020.
A survey by council found a third
of residents who were not already
using a GreenPower accredited plan did
not know what they were, and about
12% did not trust electricity companies
to use the money to fund renewable
energy generation.
The Clean Energy Council’s chief
executive, Kane Thornton, agreed that
story, but through hints and mentions
we learn that Frederic was once a priest
who left the clergy to be with Ethel, and
that Joanie’s birth mother was a flighty
switching plans was a good option for
people who can’t install solar.
“When you choose GreenPower,
you’re helping to drive Australia’s clean
energy transition,” he said.
“The greater the demand, the more
renewable energy is added to the
grid, helping to support Australian jobs
while reducing greenhouse gas emis-
sions.”
Erskineville renter Alice Gonnet, 33,
39
local woman named Doris (Kate Cor-
bett). One night, a strange young man
with a southern drawl named Aaron
(O’Brien) comes seeking help for his in-
jured ankle, so Frederic and Ethel do
the decent Christian thing and offer
him help and a place to stay the night.
But it’s soon apparent that something
is really off about him, even though he
does have a way with words and tells
mesmerising stories about his miser-
able childhood.
Sure, this is a talky movie, big
on debates and low on action, and
may feel somewhat theatrical – but
that’s not necessarily a bad thing, espe-
cially when the performances are this
subtle, expressive and electric. Cinema-
tographer Scott McClellan lights the
faces beautifully and has a special
knack for capturing the glittery reflec-
tion of lamps in eyes, like the flicker of a
soul before it’s crushed.
• The Righteous is available on 10
June on Arrow.
said there had been a “small” extra
cost when she compared certified green
plans against traditional energy offer-
ings, but she had decided it was worth
making sacrifices in other areas of her
life.
“I have to do my best to have the
least impact on the planet,” she said.
“I see people eating UberEats every
day – I’d prefer to cook and have sus-
tainable power.”
But not everyone has extra cash
lying around, and cost pressures on
renters are increasing, according to the
NSW Tenants Union’s chief executive,
Leo Patterson Ross.
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every morning
“Most people are conscious that
they could be doing something dif-
ferent, something better for the envi-
ronment, the question is, are they
empowered to do that?” he said.
“Do they have the ability to make
changes that really impact energy con-
sumption, that also doesn’t put them
in harm’s way or significantly increase
their costs so that they’re having to
forego other essentials?”
Patterson Ross said the onus should
be placed on owners and governments
to raise the standards of rentals so they
were more energy-efficient.

40
Let Africa exploit its natural gas reserves,
says Mary Robinson
Fiona Harvey Environment
correspondent
African countries should be able to
exploit their vast natural gas reserves
despite the urgent need to cut global
greenhouse gas emissions, the former
UN climate envoy Mary Robinson has
said.
Robinson, the chair of the Elders
group of former world statespeople and
business leaders, said African coun-
tries’ need for energy was so great that
they should use gas widely, in contrast
to developed countries that must halt
their gas use as quickly as possible to
stave off climate breakdown.
“Africa is trying to get its voice
out about its needs for just, equitable
energy, and of course that implies some
use of gas as a just transition,” she told
the Guardian in an interview.
She pointed to the 600 million
people in Africa without access to elec-
tricity and the 900 million who use bio-
mass or dirty oil cooking stoves, who
could use gas as a less polluting alter-
native. “There has to be a certain leeway
to tackle the energy poverty in Africa,
and give Africa a faster capability to
move,” she said.
African leaders will bring forward
similar arguments ahead of Cop27 in
Sharm el-Sheikh in November, which is
certain to make the issue a flashpoint at
the UN climate summit that is seen as
a chance for African countries to gain
global attention for their vulnerability
to the climate crisis, and their economic
EU faces legal challenge over plan to fast-
track gas projects
Daniel Boffey in Brussels
An EU plan to fast-track funding and
permits for 30 gas projects is facing a
legal challenge from NGOs including
ClientEarth and Friends of the Earth
Europe.
The European Commission has
been asked to review its backing
for infrastructure projects such as
the EastMed pipeline, a 1,180-mile
(1,900km) gas pipeline to connect off-
shore gas fields in Israel and Cyprus to
Italy.
The EU’s executive branch has up to
22 weeks to revise its initial decision or
show that it does not violate environ-
mental law, under a new way of chal-
lenging Brussels introduced last year.
Should the commission fail to offer
a satisfactory legal justification, the
case could be taken to the European
court of justice, potentially holding up
progress on €13bn (£11bn) worth of
projects.
The two NGOs, along with Food &
Water Action Europe and CEE Bank-
watch Network, claim the priority list
of projects was drawn up by Brus-
sels without consideration of methane
Environment
Workers at an onshore oil and gas rig site in Gabon, Africa. Photograph: Greenshoots
Communications/Alamy
potential.
Robinson’s intervention is likely to
inflame controversy after two weeks
of UN preparatory talks for Cop27 con-
vened in Bonn, Germany, from Monday.
While some back the idea that African
gas can be exploited while the EU and
developed countries find green alter-
natives, others see an African dash for
gas as a potential disaster.
With gas prices high and likely to
remain so, and with most of Africa’s
potential reserves owned or licensed by
foreign companies, it would be difficult
to keep African gas on the continent,
rather than sold to the highest bidder.
Thuli Makama, the Africa pro-
gramme director at the campaign
group Oil Change International, said:
“Africa should not be pressured to ex-
ploit fossil fuel reserves to serve the
international community in the face
Part of a section of gas pipeline in Poland. The IEA and the IPCC have said no new oil and gas extraction projects should be built.
Photograph: Kacper Pempel/Reuters
emissions, a gas that experts say has a
global warming potential more than 85
times higher than that of CO2 over the
next 20 years.
Guillermo Ramo, a lawyer for Clien-
of Russia’s unprovoked war, and Africa
does not need to develop these re-
serves to meet its energy access needs.
It’s a myth that fossil fuels are good for
development.”
African countries are also unhappy
that developed countries have ex-
ploited their own gas and are now
seeking new sources because of soaring
prices and supply constraints following
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Africa has
major gas reserves in countries in-
cluding Nigeria, Mozambique and Se-
negal but many are still largely unex-
ploited.
Mohamed Maait, Egypt’s finance
minister, made the argument last
month on a visit to London. He warned
rich countries not to appear to “punish”
the poor world and gave the example
of Senegal, where major gas discoveries
are expected that could transform the
tEarth, said: “This list amounts to a
VIP pass for fossil gas in Europe, when
we should be talking about its phase-
out. The commission did not consider
the impact of methane emissions de-
The Guardian Wednesday 8 June 2022
economy – but would also constitute
a vast “carbon bomb” of the kind that
if exploited would lead to temperature
rises far exceeding the 1.5C limit tar-
geted in Glasgow.
“Senegal were hoping this discovery
would help them. Now you are coming
to say, climate change means stopping
the finance,” said Maait. “That is very
worrying.”
Urging Africa to drill for gas marks
a change of heart for Robinson, who
before last year’s Cop26 summit heav-
ily criticised the UK government for its
involvement in financing a new gas-
field in Mozambique. She also called
the UK’s tax breaks for North Sea oil and
gas “a form of madness”.
Robinson, the former president of
Ireland and an influential figure in
global climate diplomacy, acknowl-
edged she had been very reluctant to
encourage fresh exploitation of gas, but
Africa’s energy poverty was so great
that the transition to gas was needed.
“Some people think it’s a dangerous
message,” she said. “You can see my di-
lemma. I’m utterly committed to [cli-
mate action], I couldn’t be more on-
message about how serious that is. But
it’s not a one size fits all.”
The International Energy Agency
has warned that no new oil and gas
should come onstream in future if the
world is to limit global heating to 1.5C
above pre-industrial levels. The Guar-
dian has uncovered nearly 200 carbon
bombs, a significant number of them in
Africa, representing oil and gas deposits
that if exploited would result in green-
rived from gas infrastructure projects,
in spite of evidence that these are sub-
stantial. That’s unlawful as it directly
clashes with the EU’s own climate laws
and its legal obligations under the Paris
Mary Robinson: ‘Some people think it’s a
dangerous message,’ she said of her backing
for African gas. Photograph: Niall Carson/
PA
house gas emissions going far beyond
1.5C or 2C of heating.
“If we had done the right thing and
invested in clean energy for African
companies at scale, we would be in
a different place, but we haven’t done
that,” said Robinson. “And now we have
to understand that African countries
are hit by the climate crisis dispropor-
tionately.”
She said European countries and
the US, which are still heavily reliant
on fossil fuels, had no basis on which to
advise African countries to leave their
reserves alone.
However, Jamie Peters, a cam-
paigner at Friends of the Earth, said:
“Fossil fuel extraction hasn’t brought
prosperity for the vast majority of Afri-
cans and further developments will
only bring more damage. There needs
to be a rapid move to develop clean
energy systems in Africa to provide
energy security and much-needed jobs
– and this should be funded by the rich,
industrialised nations that have done
most to create the climate crisis.”
agreement.”
Every two years, the European
Commission compiles a list of priority
energy infrastructure projects deemed
beneficial to the EU’s 27 member states.
Under reforms to the system, no en-
tirely new gas projects can be listed, but
projects necessary to secure supply can
be included.
Included among them this year are
30 gas projects that are now eligible
for streamlined environmental impact
assessment, a fast-tracked permitting
procedure and EU funding.
The listed projects involve gas
transport, storage or import including
pipelines and LNG terminals such as
the €7bn EastMed pipeline, the Melita
Transgas pipeline, the Cyprus LNG
import terminal, the Baltic Pipe and the
Poseidon pipeline between Greece and
Italy.
The International Energy Agency
and the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change have said no new oil
and gas extraction projects should be
built, to keep global warming to 1.5C
above pre-industrial levels.
The commission did not imme-
diately respond to a request for com-
ment.
Wednesday 8 June 2022 The Guardian
Tiwi Islanders challenge offshore drilling,
saying Santos did not consult them
Lisa Cox
Traditional owners from the Northern
Territory’s Tiwi Islands have launched
a legal challenge to the $4.7bn Barossa
offshore gas project, saying they were
not consulted about plans to drill the
gas field.
The project is a joint venture be-
tween Santos and SK E&S and will in-
volve drilling for gas in the Timor Sea
and transporting it via a 260km pipe-
line to the existing Darwin LNG facility.
The National Offshore Petroleum
Safety and Environmental Manage-
ment Authority (Nopsema) gave Santos
approval in March to drill up to eight
wells off the northern beaches of the
Tiwi Islands.
Munupi senior lawman Dennis
Tipakalippa is challenging that deci-
sion in the federal court saying he and
his community were never consulted
about the drilling.
“Santos say they did consultation
for this drilling project, but no one
spoke to me as a traditional owner and
senior lawman for the Munupi clan,” he
said.
“My clan, the Munupi, own these
northern beaches. It’s our land that’s
closest to the drilling site. We are the
ones who are going to be affected.”
In its environmental plan for the gas
field, Santos said it had contacted Tiwi
land council by email about the project
and no responses raising issues or con-
The reef fish people find ugly more likely to
be endangered, study finds
Sofia Quaglia
There are plenty of fish in the sea, but
“ugly” fish deserve love too, according
to a study.
The reef fish people rate as most
aesthetically pleasing are also the ones
that seem to need the least conser-
vation support, while the fish most
likely to rank as “ugly” are the most
endangered species, the research has
found.
“There is a need for us to make
sure that our ‘natural’ aesthetic biases
do not turn into a bias of conservation
effort,” said Nicolas Mouquet a com-
munity ecologist at the University of
Montpellier, and one of the lead au-
thors of the study. This discrepancy be-
tween aesthetic value and extinction
vulnerability could have repercussions
in the long run, he said.
Mouquet’s team first conducted an
online survey in which 13,000 mem-
bers of the public rated the aesthetic
attractiveness of 481 photographs of
ray-finned reef fish. The scientists fed
the data into an artificial intelligence
system, enabling them to generate
predictions for how people would prob-
ably have rated a total of 2,417 of the
most commonly known reef fish spe-
cies from 4,400 different photographs.
Environment / Science
Dennis Tipakalippa (second left) and other Tiwi Islanders protesting the Barossa gas project. Senior lawman and traditional owner
Tipakalippa is taking the federal offshore oil and gas regulator to court to challenge its decision to approve drilling in the Barossa gas field,
300km north of Darwin Photograph: Environment Centre Northern Territory/AAP
cerns had been received to date. In
its environmental plan for the pipeline,
the company said there had been on-
going contact with the Tiwi land coun-
cil, including during the formal consul-
tation period in 2019.
The federal court action is the
second legal challenge to the project.
An earlier challenge launched by
Tiwi Islander and Larrakia traditional
owners which sought to prevent South
The telescope fish was one of the species that performed lower on the aesthetic-rankings
and was deemed ‘uglier’ by the public. Photograph: Stephen Frink/Getty Images
The combined results suggested
that bright, colourful and round-bodied
fish species – such as the queen angel-
fish and the striped cowfish – were
most often rated as more “beautiful”.
But they were also the less “evolutio-
narily distinct” species – meaning they
are more similar, genetically, to other
fish.
Fish species that were lower in the
aesthetic rankings and were deemed
“uglier” by the public – usually “drab”
fish, Mouquet notes, with elongated
body shape and no clearly delineated
colour patterns, like the telescope fish
or the round herring – were also more
Korea’s export credit agencies from fi-
nancing the development failed last
month.
Tipakalippa said the drilling would
threaten Tiwi Islanders’ food sources,
culture and way of life.
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every morning
He said they were particularly con-
cerned about damage to sea country if a
ecologically distinct, at greater ecolog-
ical risk, and listed as “threatened” on
the International Union for Conser-
vation of Nature Red List.
The more “unattractive” species
have adapted to look this way because
they often live in the water column
and have to hide within a more homo-
geneous habitat, but this also makes
them of greater commercial interest
and more likely to be overfished, ac-
cording to the study, published in PLOS
Biology.
“Our study highlights likely impor-
tant mismatches between potential
public support for conservation and the
spill occurred.
“We spend a lot of time out in the
water – hunting, fishing. We only ever
take what we can eat in a day, no more,”
he said.
“We respect our homelands, our sea
country and it looks after us. Santos
should have respected us and con-
sulted in the proper way.”
The Environmental Defenders’
Office, which is representing Tipa-
species most in need of this support,”
said Mouquet. He noted that biases in
conservation efforts have been docu-
mented for many different types of
animal species – for example verte-
brates are much more represented in
research than invertebrates – and aes-
thetic value is often an important
underlying factor in these preferences.
“Species such as clownfish and co-
lourful parrotfishes are definitely the
easiest for people to connect with …
and it makes sense why they are often
used as the figurehead of conservation
efforts,” said Chloe Nash, a researcher of
biogeography of marine fish at Univer-
sity of Chicago, who was not involved
in the study. “But the majority of fish
biodiversity is actually composed of
species that would not be considered
to be ‘aesthetically beautiful’.”
While aesthetics are recognised
as a fundamental ecosystem service,
they’re often underestimated for their
effect on policy and conservation deci-
sions, said Joan Iverson Nassauer, a
scholar of landscape ecology at the
University of Michigan, who was not
involved in the study. “This research
vividly quantifies the power of aes-
thetic experience to affect science and
management,” said Nassauer. In future
research, to avoid simplification, it
would be helpful to consider how test
41
kalippa, said Santos had a legal obli-
gation to consult with people who
might be affected by the drilling.
“Our client is arguing that consul-
tation did not occur, and so the ap-
proval is invalid,” special counsel Alina
Leikin said.
She said the outcomes of the case
could be significant because it was the
first legal action brought by a First Na-
tions person challenging an offshore
project approval because of alleged lack
of consultation.
“This case could establish what
constitutes adequate consultation with
First Nations people in relation to off-
shore gas developments,” she said.
“It could have significant impli-
cations for how mining companies view
their consultation obligations with First
Nations people.”
A Santos spokesperson said the
company did not comment on matters
before the court.
A spokesperson for Nopsema said
the authority had published a detailed
statement of reasons for its decision to
approve the project.
It said the authority was aware of
the legal action and could not com-
ment on matters that were the subject
of court proceedings.
“Nopsema is aware of a number
of media articles regarding allegations
that Santos failed to consult in connec-
tion with the Barossa Project devel-
opment drilling and completions envi-
ronment plan,” the spokesperson said.
The queen angelfish was rated as more
aesthetically pleasing. ‘Our study highlights
likely important mismatches between poten-
tial public support for conservation and the
species most in need of this support,’ said
Mouquet. Photograph: Georgette Douwma/
Getty Images
participants would rank fish in their
landscape context out in the wild, and
at their natural size, she said.
According to Mouquet, findings
such as these can help researchers
understand “non-material aspects of
biodiversity”, which make up what
scholars call “nature’s contribution to
people” – the harmful and beneficial ef-
fects of the natural world on people’s
quality of life. Further research in this
field could help scientists better antic-
ipate consequences of species loss, he
said, and flesh out appropriate commu-
nication strategies to tackle this sub-
ject with the public, policymakers,
conservation NGOs and even other re-
searchers.

42
Nasa to launch rockets from the Northern
Territory for scientific research
Katharine Murphy Political
editor
Nasa rockets will be launched into
space from the Northern Territory in
June and July under an agreement an-
nounced on Thursday.
The prime minister and the NT
chief minister will confirm three scien-
tific suborbital sounding rockets will be
launched between 26 June and 12 July
from the Arnhem Space Centre, which
is owned and run by Equatorial Launch
Australia.
The two governments say the event
will be the first time that Nasa launches
rockets from a commercial facility out-
side the US, and they will be the first
Nasa rockets launched from Australia
since 1995, when launches were con-
ducted from the Royal Australian air
force Woomera range complex.
About 75 Nasa personnel will be
in Australia for the launches. The
two governments say the missions will
investigate heliophysics, astrophysics
and planetary science phenomena only
observable from the southern hemis-
phere.
Why are women expected to endure pain
during medical procedures?
Letters
Re your report (‘The pain is inhumane’:
how NHS gynaecology delays affect
women’s health, 2 June), in 2008 I was
diagnosed with endometrial cancer.
The diagnostic process involved having
a hysteroscopy, where a camera is in-
serted through the vagina and cervix
into the uterus.
No anaesthesia or sedation was of-
fered, and I found it so painful that the
nurse who was holding my hand asked
the doctor to stop and I later had the
procedure under general anaesthetic. A
couple of years later I was referred to a
gastroenterology department for bowel
problems following the 20 sessions of
radiotherapy I’d had for the cancer, and
I had a colonoscopy. It was normal for
the procedure to be carried out with
sedation – no question of doing it with-
out.
Why the difference? I have known
several other women who have had
Beyond Measure by James Vincent review –
worth its weight in gold
Madoc Cairns
Once upon a time there was no
time at all. And no weight, no mass,
no height, no volume. None of the
Science
A Nasa launch vehicle blasts off in Florida. The launches in the Northern Territory of smaller research rockets will be the first Nasa
launches from a commercial facility outside the US. Photograph: Joel Kowsky/NASA/AFP/Getty Images
The Arnhem Space Centre is lo-
cated on the Dhupuma Plateau near
Nhulunbuy, on the lands of the Gumatj
people. The two governments say the
Trish Kelly, who was not offered anaesthesia for her hysteroscopy, says that ‘the withholding of pain relief would not be tolerated in other
invasive procedures’. Photograph: Image Source/Alamy
gauges and instruments we use to
make sense of the world around us
existed. They hadn’t been invented
yet. And although the physical prop-
erties measurements refer to existed
before the names humans coined to
traditional owners have been consulted
as part of the approval process.
Anthony Albanese arrived in
Darwin after a two-day visit to Indo-
describe them, James Vincent notes in
Beyond Measure, the point at which
people developed systems to quantify
the physical world around them was a
moment of transformation for our spe-
cies. Thirty-two thousand years later,
The Guardian Wednesday 8 June 2022
nesia on Wednesday night and will
make the space announcement with
the NT chief minister, Natasha Fyles, on
Thursday before returning to Sydney.
that transformation is still unfolding,
as measurement embeds itself ever fur-
ther into our lives, from work to health,
love to death: the world made data.
A Fitbit is some distance from a
bone ruler, and the gap marks a huge
In a statement Fyles said: “This is a
landmark occasion for the Top End.”
“We have backed this project from
inception, which I have seen first-hand,
and now we’re less than a month
away from seeing the launch of Nasa’s
first sounding rocket from the Arnhem
Space Centre,” she said.
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every morning
“Nasa is adding capacity and rock-
eting East Arnhem Land into the global
spotlight for investors – this will help
our industry grow, create more jobs for
locals and more opportunities for busi-
nesses to expand.”
Albanese said: “We can trace Aus-
tralia’s celebrated connection to the
space industry back to the 1950s and
as a nation we have to build on that
legacy.”
“This project will bring together
global and local industry to take Aus-
tralia’s space sector into a new era,” he
said.
hysteroscopies, or had coils fitted with-
out sedation and have experienced
excruciating pain.
Does the medical profession con-
sider that because some of us go
through childbirth we don’t need pain
relief in gynaecological investigations?
The pain is indeed inhumane and the
withholding of pain relief would not
be tolerated in other invasive proce-
dures.Trish KellyManchester
• Obviously, we’re all glad the
Queen has reached the age of 96. But I
wonder how many more women would
reach the same age if they had the
same access to immediate diagnosis
and medical treatment that she has had
all her life (Dismissal of women’s health
problems as ‘benign’ leading to soaring
NHS lists, 2 June).Sue WardNewcastle
upon Tyne
• Have an opinion on anything
you’ve read in the Guardian today?
Pleaseemailus your letter and it will be
considered for publication.
expenditure of energy across a vast ex-
panse of time during which generations
laboured over finer and finer grada-
tions of measurement. What moti-
Continued on page 43
Wednesday 8 June 2022 The Guardian
Continued from page 42
vation could there possibly be for this
kind of devotion? In the first instance,
Vincent says, the simplest imaginable:
survival.
In agricultural society, the ability
to measure the passage of time – to
follow a calendar, a pattern of sowing
and reaping – made harvests possible.
A sharper sense of weather – an eye, in
other words, for measurement – made
harvests predictable. Nilometers in an-
cient Egypt, Vincent discovers on a trip
to the country, could tell Nile-side wor-
riers how far fertilising flood waters had
risen that spring, predicting feast or
famine later in the year.
Even today, the gravity attached to
the yearly ritual is almost palpable:
dead pharaohs would be buried with
measure-sticks in hand. Early on, the
right to assess – and enforce – mea-
surement became concomitant with
political authority. We call them rulers
for a reason.
Defining and maintaining standard
weight and volume – particularly in the
all-consuming food and drink trade –
continued as one of the state’s central
obligations for millennia. Vincent is a
nimble storyteller, and a sympathetic
one: his sensitivity to the human drama
at work behind the grand theories is
particularly visible in his treatment of
the chaotic centuries before standar-
disation.
Special police forces, such as the
Byzantine empire’s bullotai, roamed the
empire checking weights. Legal sys-
tems, such as England’s court of pie-
powder (“the lowest and the most expe-
Why the collapse of an Atlantic ocean current
could mean La Niña becomes the norm
Matthew England, Andréa S. Ta-
schetto and Bryam Orihuela-
Pinto for the Conversation
Climate change is slowing down the
conveyor belt of ocean currents that
brings warm water from the tropics up
to the north Atlantic. Our research, pub-
lished today in Nature Climate Change,
looks at the profound consequences to
global climate if this Atlantic conveyor
collapses entirely.
We found the collapse of this
system – called the Atlantic meridional
overturning circulation – would shift
the Earth’s climate to a more La Niña-
like state. This would mean more flood-
ing rains over eastern Australia and
worse droughts and bushfire seasons
over south-west US.
East-coast Australians know what
unrelenting La Niña feels like. Climate
change has loaded our atmosphere
with moister air, while two summers
of La Niña warmed the ocean north
of Australia. Both contributed to some
of the wettest conditions ever expe-
rienced, with record-breaking floods in
New South Wales and Queensland.
Over the south-west of North Amer-
ica, a record drought and severe bush-
fires have put a huge strain on emer-
gency services and agriculture, with the
2021 fires alone estimated to have cost
at least US$70bn (AU$98bn).
Earth’s climate is dynamic, vari-
able and ever-changing. But our current
trajectory of unabated greenhouse gas
Science
‘Fraternity through the tape measure.’ Photograph: Olena Ruban/Getty Images
ditious court of justice in England”),
greased the gears of a society depen-
dent on trusted standards – and unea-
sily conscious of how fragile those stan-
dards actually were. When French com-
moners demand “One king, one law,
one weight and one measure”, or me-
dieval townsfolk petition for a munic-
ipal clock, we’re reminded that how-
ever abstruse measurement appears,
it’s never distant: a life shared with
hundreds, let alone millions of people,
would be unthinkable without it.
Only natural, then, that sea changes
in the way we live affect the way
we measure. France in the throes of
revolution is Vincent’s paradigm here.
When absolute monarchy was toppled,
measurement’s ancien regimefell with
it. Old systems of measurement based
on the human body – such as the hand-
to-elbow cubit, or the thumb-width
inch – were intuitive but inaccurate, as
variable as human beings themselves.
A standard founded on the underlying
A new study finds the collapse of the Atlantic overturning circulation due to climate change could result in a shift to La Niña-like conditions
globally. Photograph: Dan Peled/Getty Images
emissions is giving the whole system
a giant kick that will have uncertain
consequences – consequences that will
rewrite our textbook description of
the planet’s ocean circulation and its
impact.
What is the Atlantic overturning
meridional circulation?
The Atlantic overturning circu-
lation comprises a massive flow of
warm tropical water to the north Atlan-
tic that helps keep European climate
mild, while allowing the tropics a
structure of the universe would, by con-
trast, be universally usable and univer-
sally accessible: fraternity through the
tape measure.
No wonder that the metre (marking
one 10-millionth of the distance from
the north pole to the equator) was
originally proposed by revolutionary
France as an internationalist gesture,
a paving stone on the road to uni-
versal human friendship. And no sur-
prise that opposition to metricisation
takes the form of outsized patriot-
ism – from Victorians who believed
the pyramids were built using British
measures to Boris Johnson’s attempted
resurrection of imperial units in time
for the jubilee. Litres and kilograms,
commonplace now, once acted as the
heralds of a new world: rational, scien-
tific, humane – building, measure by
measure, a finer, happier world.
Those dreams died – along with
some of the revolution’s bolder imagin-
ings, such as the 10-day week. But
chance to lose excess heat. An equiv-
alent overturning of Antarctic waters
can be found in the southern hemis-
phere.
Climate records reaching back
120,000 years reveal the Atlantic over-
turning circulation has switched off, or
dramatically slowed, during ice ages.
It switches on and placates European
climate during so-called “interglacial
periods”, when the Earth’s climate is
warmer.
Since human civilisation began
scientific, standardised measurement
went on to conquer the world. Beyond
Measure is unabashed about the good
that has achieved – food chains couldn’t
function without it, let alone complex
civilisation.
But Vincent is unsentimental about
measurement’s darker aspect: the way
common standards can enchain as well
as liberate. In a later chapter, he fol-
lows guerrilla campaigners against the
metric system in the heart of Eng-
land, and – although not quite con-
vinced by their replacement of kilo-
metre signposts with ones noting miles
– he knows that the forwards march
of measurement brings loss as well as
gain.
Metres and centimetres may be
more scientific than feet and inches,
but they’re both only as rational
as the humans using them. Malign
phenomena inspired or justified by
measurement – from colonialism and
eugenics to eating disorders – vindicate
Vincent’s warnings that measures were
created for the sake of human beings,
not the other way round. In an en-
dlessly quantified world, lines between
the inhuman and inhumane can be
hard to notice – and easy to cross.
In walking those lines, far worse
guides could be found than Vincent,
who marries infectious enthusiasm for
the science with healthy scepticism
about the uses human beings put it
to. Giving critics of, and apologists for,
measurement their due, Beyond Measu-
regently suggests that something is
being missed. The point isn’t that mea-
surement is good or bad, but that it’s
human. And to be human is to adapt, to
about 5,000 years ago, the Atlantic over-
turning has been relatively stable. But
over the past few decades a slowdown
has been detected, and this has scien-
tists worried.
Why the slowdown? One unam-
biguous consequence of global warm-
ing is the melting of polar ice caps
in Greenland and Antarctica. When
these ice caps melt they dump massive
amounts of freshwater into the oceans,
making water more buoyant and reduc-
ing the sinking of dense water at high
43
James Vincent: ‘a nimble storyteller, and
a sympathetic one’. Photograph: Faber
amend, to alter. If the quantified world
isn’t working, no need to panic. Maybe
it’s time for a change.
•Beyond Measure: The Hidden His-
tory of Measurement by James Vincent
is published by Faber (£16.99). To sup-
port the Guardian and Observer order
your copy at guardianbookshop.com.
Delivery charges may apply
Old systems of
measurement based
on the human body
were intuitive but
inaccurate, as
variable as human
beings themselves
latitudes.
Around Greenland alone, a massive
five trillion tonnes of ice has melted
in the past 20 years. That’s equivalent
to 10,000 Sydney Harbours worth of
freshwater. This melt rate is set to
increase over the coming decades if
global warming continues unabated.
A collapse of the north Atlantic
and Antarctic overturning circulations
would profoundly alter the anatomy
of the world’s oceans. It would make
them fresher at depth, deplete them
of oxygen, and starve the upper ocean
of the upwelling of nutrients pro-
vided when deep waters resurface from
the ocean abyss. The implications for
marine ecosystems would be profound.
With Greenland ice melt already
well under way, scientists estimate the
Atlantic overturning is at its weakest
for at least the last millennium, with
predictions of a future collapse on the
cards in coming centuries if green-
house gas emissions go unchecked.
The ramifications of a slowdown
In our study, we used a compre-
hensive global model to examine what
Earth’s climate would look like under
such a collapse. We switched the Atlan-
tic overturning off by applying a mas-
sive meltwater anomaly to the north
Atlantic, and then compared this to an
equivalent run with no meltwater ap-
plied.
Our focus was to look beyond the
well-known regional impacts around
Continued on page 44

44
Continued from page 43
Europe and North America, and to
check how Earth’s climate would
change in remote locations, as far south
as Antarctica.
The first thing the model simu-
lations revealed was that without the
Atlantic overturning, a massive pile-up
of heat builds up just south of the equa-
tor.
This excess of tropical Atlantic heat
pushes more warm moist air into the
upper troposphere (about 10 km into
the atmosphere), causing dry air to des-
cend over the east Pacific.
Major League Rugby in crisis as LA and
Austin disqualified from playoffs
Martin Pengelly in New York
Less than a month after the US was
awarded the 2031 and 2033 Rugby
World Cups, Major League Rugby, the
US men’s professional competition, has
pitched into crisis with the disquali-
fication of LA and Austin, the top two
teams in its Western Conference.
Sources across the US game said
the expulsions from season-ending
playoffs were for breaches of rules sur-
rounding the salary cap.
LA and Austin ownership did not
respond to Guardian requests for com-
ment.
MLR said it had no comment to
add to a brief statement on social
media, which said: “Due to a violation
of league rules, the LA Giltinis have
been disqualified from the 2022 Major
League Rugby competition.”
The Giltinis, who employ the former
Australia fly-half Matt Giteau, are in
their second season in the league,
having won it in their first.
In a similar statement last week,
MLR said: “Due to a violation of league
rules, the Austin Gilgronis have been
disqualified from 2022 postseason play.
Championship Series fixtures will be
announced as they are determined.”
Austin and LA are owned by Adam
Gilchrist, an Australian entrepreneur
in the personal fitness industry. Both
teams are named for cocktails named
NWSL coaches placed on leave amid
investigation for ‘alleged retaliation’
Agencies
The Orlando Pride have placed head
coach Amanda Cromwell and first assis-
tant Sam Greene on temporary leave
pending the results of an investigation
into alleged retaliation, the National
Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) club
said on Tuesday.
The decision by the Pride came
moments after the league and NWSL
Players Association recommended the
Science / Sport
The descending air then streng-
thens trade winds, which pushes warm
water towards the Indonesian seas. And
this helps put the tropical Pacific into a
La Niña-like state.
Australians may think of La Niña
summers as cool and wet. But under
the long-term warming trend of cli-
mate change, their worst impacts will
be flooding rain, especially over the
east.
We also show an Atlantic over-
turning shutdown would be felt as
far south as Antarctica. Rising warm
air over the west Pacific would trig-
ger wind changes that propagate south
The LA Giltinis, in black, scrummage against Rugby New York at the Los Angeles Coliseum in April. Photograph: Joe Scarnici/Getty Images
for LA Giltinis
after Gilchrist.
MLR is in its fifth season, having
survived the coronavirus pandemic
which cut short season three. This year,
an expansion team in Dallas – which
lost all 16 games – brought the league
to 13 teams. Chicago and St Louis are
widely reported to be the next expan-
sion cities.
The league has lost one team pre-
viously, the Colorado Raptors with-
The Orlando Pride have placed head
coach Amanda Cromwell on temporary
leave. Photograph: Jeremy Reper/ISI Photos/
Getty Images
move. A decision regarding the two
to Antarctica. This would deepen the
atmospheric low pressure system over
the Amundsen Sea, which sits off west
Antarctica.
This low pressure system is known
to influence ice-sheet and ice-shelf
melt, as well as ocean circulation and
sea-ice extent as far west as the Ross
Sea.
A new world order
At no time in Earth’s history (giant
meteorites and super volcanoes aside)
has our climate system been jolted by
changes in atmospheric gas compo-
sition like what we are imposing today
by our unabated burning of fossil fuels.
drawing in 2020. Guardian reporting
linked the foundation team’s exit to
political shifts surrounding the arrival
of powerful owners in LA, Gilchrist, and
New England, Errik Anderson, a biotech
investor.
The Raptors shifted focus and now
seek to convert athletes from sports in-
cluding football, basketball and wres-
tling. The program is in its second year
and has sent players to MLR and the
coaches’ future with the club will be
made after the investigation concludes.
“The recommendation comes as
part of the broader ongoing inves-
tigation that began in October 2021
to explore allegations of workplace
misconduct toward NWSL players, as
well as systemic issues in the league
that impact the prevention, detection,
and response to misconduct,” the NWSL
and NWSLPA said in a joint news re-
lease.
Specific details about what prompt-
The Guardian Wednesday 8 June 2022
The oceans are the flywheel of
Earth’s climate, slowing the pace of
change by absorbing heat and carbon
in vast quantities. But there is payback,
with sea level rise, ice melt, and a signif-
icant slowdown of the Atlantic over-
turning circulation projected for this
century.
Sign up to receive an email with
the top stories from Guardian Australia
every morning
Now we know this slowdown will
not just affect the north Atlantic region,
but as far away as Australia and Antarc-
tica.
We can prevent these changes from
USA men’s sevens team.
Control of MLR will be increasingly
attractive as two US-hosted Rugby
World Cups approach and World Rugby
looks to invest in the American game.
In May, when the 2031 men’s and
2033 women’s events were announced
in Dublin, Matt McCarthy, a leading re-
porter on US rugby, told the Guardian
a “huge, game-changing investment in
high schools, colleges, clubs, for men
ed the investigation were not disclosed
by the league or team. Orlando said
assistant coach Seb Hines will serve as
interim coach.
“Providing a respectful envi-
ronment and adhering to all league
policies are of the utmost priority for
the Pride,” the club said in a statement.
“The Club is committed to fully
cooperating with the Joint Investigative
Team through the conclusion of this
process. As this is an ongoing inves-
tigation, the club will have no further
happening by growing a new low-
carbon economy. Doing so will change,
for the second time in less than a cen-
tury, the course of Earth’s climate his-
tory – this time for the better.
Matthew England is a Scientia Prof
and deputy director of the ARC Aus-
tralian Centre for Excellence in An-
tarctic Science at the University of New
South Wales Sydney, Andréa S. Ta-
schetto is an Associate Prof at UNSW
Sydney and Bryam Orihuela-Pinto is a
PhD candidate at UNSW Sydney
This article first appeared on the
Conversation
and women, sevens and 15s” would also
“safeguard the future of Major League
Rugby as a fully professional men’s 15s
competition”.
McCarthy added: “The estab-
lishment of the pro league in Japan
in the years before the 2019 World
Cup shows what World Rugby knows
must happen. Now the World Cups are
coming to America, MLR simply cannot
be allowed to fail.”
Last weekend, amid political uproar
even before the decision to expel LA,
the final round of the regular MLR
season saw Austin beat the Houston
SaberCats and LA fall to defeat by the
Seattle Seawolves, champions in 2018
and 2019.
The Guardian understands the deci-
sion to disqualify LA was taken at a
board meeting on Monday night.
On Tuesday, MLR said: “The Hou-
ston SaberCats will now host the West-
ern Conference Final and play the
winner of the Western Conference
Eliminator between the Seattle Sea-
wolves and San Diego Legion.”
In the east, Rugby ATL of Atlanta
and Rugby New York will contest the
eliminator, the winner progressing to
the conference final against the New
England Free Jacks.
The MLR Championship game is
scheduled for the weekend of 25-26
June.
comment at this time.”
In April, the Houston Dash sus-
pended head coach and general man-
ager James Clarkson at the recommen-
dation of the league and NWSLPA as
they continued working on an inves-
tigation that began last October due
to numerous reports of workplace
misconduct and systemic issues across
the NWSL.
Clarkson has denied the allegations.
Wednesday 8 June 2022 The Guardian
Tiger Woods withdraws from US Open with
eye on St Andrews: ‘I will be there’
PA Media
Tiger Woods has confirmed he will not
play in next week’s US Open at Brook-
line.
The 46-year-old had to withdraw
from the US PGA Championship in May
after three rounds and does not feel
ready for the next major of the year.
“I previously informed the USGA
that I will not be competing in the US
Open as my body needs more time to
get stronger for major championship
golf,” Woods said on Twitter.
“I do hope and plan to be ready to
play in Ireland at JP McManus Pro-AM
and at The Open next month. I’m ex-
cited to get back out there soon!”
The news comes as no surprise
given how Woods struggled at South-
ern Hills last month, the 15-time major
winner clearly struggling with the pain
in his right leg following the severe inju-
ries he sustained in a car accident in
Los Angeles in February last year.
Woods fought back from an open-
ing 74 to shoot a second round of 69
in Tulsa and make the cut with a shot
to spare, but then laboured to a 79 on
First openly trans NFL cheerleader to make
her debut in 2022 season
Gloria Oladipo
The first openly transgender cheer-
leader in the National Football League
will make her debut in the 2022 season
starting in September.
Justine Lindsay, a 29-year-old Black
trans woman, will cheer for the Carolina
Panthers “TopCats”, becoming the first
openly trans cheerleader of the NFL,
BuzzFeed News first reported.
While there is not an official record
for NFL cheerleaders hired throughout
the league’s history, Lindsay appears to
be the first openly transgender person.
Lindsay announced her hiring in an
Instagram post from March, thanking
the TopCats team, other dancers who
supported her, and their director, Chan-
dalae Lanouette: “This is a moment I
will never forget and I cannot wait to
show you all what this girl has to bring.
Thank you [Topcats] a dream come
true.”
In her first interview since joining
the team, Lindsay spoke to BuzzFeed
about anxiety she felt when posting on
social media about her historic hire. “I
was so scared,” she said. “There’s just
some things you can’t post.”
Lindsay’s announcement has gone
viral since then, with fans commenting
messages of support and congra-
tulations to the new cheerleader.
But Lindsay has had to deal with
transphobia, harassment she addressed
in a recent Instagram post: “Thank you
Sport
Tiger Woods plays a shot during the third round of the US PGA Championship at Southern Hills Country Club in May. Photograph:
Michael Madrid/USA Today Sports
Saturday, his worst score ever in the US
PGA.
Speaking after his remarkable
return to top-flight action in the Mas-
Justine Lindsay will cheer for the Carolina Panthers ‘Topcats’. Photograph: Gabby Hutter/Carolina Panthers
to all my haters who think I’m bringing
the organization down, clearly I don’t,”
wrote Lindsay on Monday.
She continued: “The carolina panth-
ers Organization is an excellent one,
one that supports all people white,
black, yellow trans, straight etc. at the
end of the day myself and the other
29 members [Topcats] made the squad
fair and square.”
Lanouette and the Panthers also
emphasized that Lindsay made the
team due to her talent as a dancer.
ters in April, Woods had made it clear
how keen he was to compete in the
150th Open Championship over the Old
Course at St Andrews, scene of two of
“My goal is to create a team of indi-
viduals that are absolute fire on the
field but are incredible human beings
in the locker room, good friends, good
people, and at the end of the day, you
have to walk through the door first
to get to that spot,” Lanouette said to
BuzzFeed.
“Members of the TopCats are hired
based on their qualifications and abil-
ities,” the Panthers said in a state-
ment shared with NPR. “Our organi-
zation is an equal opportunity em-
his three Open victories.
“I am looking forward to St An-
drews,” he said in April. “That is some-
thing that is near and dear to my heart.
ployer and does not discriminate be-
cause of age, race, religion, color, disa-
bility, sex, sexual orientation, or na-
tional origin. We wish all the TopCats,
including Justine Lindsay, an incredible
season.”
Lindsay’s recent hire comes as
conservative lawmakers across several
states are passing legislation that crimi-
nalizes trans athletes.
Republican legislators in Ohio on
Wednesday passed legislation in the
House that would ban trans girls
45
“I’ve won two Opens there, it’s the
home of golf, it’s my favourite golf
course in the world. I will be there for
that one.”
In his pre-tournament press confe-
rence at Southern Hills, Woods likened
playing in the Masters to climbing Ever-
est and said “it’s only going to get flatter
and better”.
However, when asked how close he
is now to the peak level of fitness he
will be able to achieve, Woods added:
“That’s a great question. I don’t know.
“There’s a lot of hardware in there
(the right leg) and there’s going to be
limitations to what I’m going to be able
to do, but I’m going to get stronger. I
don’t know (by) how much that is or
how much range of motion I’ll ever get
back.”
Speaking after his first round of 74,
Woods was asked how the injury affects
his swing.
“Loading hurts, pressing off it hurts,
and walking hurts, and twisting hurts,”
he said. “It’s just golf. If I don’t do that,
then I’m all right.”
and women from participating in high
school and college athletics. The bill
would also mandate a genital inspec-
tion “verification process” for athletes
suspected of being trans.
In March, the Iowa governor, Kim
Reynolds, signed a bill into law that
banned trans girls and women from
participating in high school and college
sports. Louisiana’s governor, John Bel
Edwards, allowed a similar legislative
ban to become law by not vetoing it de-
spite also not signing it.
Black cheerleaders also remain a
minority in the NFL, with Eurocentric
beauty expectations, like straighter
hair, remaining the norm for dancers.
Lindsay, though, will be allowed to
keep her bald look, which she adds is
another opportunity to “inspire other
young girls who may be insecure rock-
ing their bald look”.
Overall, despite the barriers that the
league is still grappling with, Lindsay
said that she is excited to pave the
way as a Black trans woman: “This is
big,” she said to BuzzFeed. “I think more
people need to see this. It’s not because
I want recognition. It’s just to shed light
on what’s going on in the world.”
Other NFL teams have made
progress with diversifying their cheer-
leading roasters. In March 2018, the Los
Angeles Rams hired its two first ever
male cheerleaders.
That same year, the New Orleans
Saints’ “Saintsations” hired its first ever
male dancer.

46
Dustin Johnson hopes for Ryder Cup rethink
after calling time on PGA Tour
Ewan Murray
The golf world was still reeling from
the shock of Sergio García’s resignation
from the PGA Tour as Dustin Johnson
used a sunny morning on the outskirts
of Hemel Hempstead on Tuesday to
calmly announce he had done likewise.
The impact of the Saudi Arabia-
backed LIV Golf Series, which begins
with a $25m (£19.85m) event here
on Thursday, continues to reverberate.
Nothing is happening in isolation. Hot
discussion now surrounds whether
Garcia and Johnson, synonymous with
the Ryder Cup for their teams, can
remain as a part of the biennial event.
“It’s hard to speak on what the
consequences will be but for right now,
I resigned my membership from the
Tour,” said Johnson, the world No 15.
“What the consequences are going to be
… I can’t comment on how the Tour is
going to handle it.”
Johnson won five matches out of
five when the US trounced Europe
in September. Last year, the PGA of
America’s chief executive, Seth Waugh,
was unequivocal. He said: “If someone
wants to play on a Ryder Cup for the US,
they’re going to need to be a member of
the PGA of America and they get that
membership through being a member
of the tour.”
Johnson, who has about 100 mil-
lion reasons to support the LIV Series,
said he hoped Waugh would rethink his
position.
Last week, the PGA of America said
it was “premature to speculate on any
Ryder Cup implications”. But the PGA
Tour, which is expected to outline its
stance on exiting members over the
next 48 hours, is absolute in its oppo-
sition to the Saudi scheme.
Naoya Inoue bolsters pound-for-pound case
with knockout of Nonito Donaire
Guardian sport
Naoya Inoue, the unbeaten three-divi-
sion champion from Japan known as
the Monster, lived up to his repu-
tation as one of boxing’s best pound-
for-pound fighters with a sensational
second-round knockout of Nonito Do-
Harry Kane penalty rescues Nations League
point for England in Germany
David Hytner at the Allianz
Arena
The Nations League campaign ap-
peared to be turning into a headache
for Gareth Southgate and England. The
Sport
A view of the 18th green during practice. Photograph: Paul Childs/Action Images/Reuters
Johnson had pledged allegiance to
the PGA Tour, where he has accu-
mulated $74m in on-course earnings,
as recently as February. “I don’t want to
play golf for the rest of my life, which
I’ve felt like I was probably going to
have to do,” the 37-year-old said. You
have to wonder about the scale of his
monthly outgoings.
The position of García, a Ryder Cup
hero in European context, is different.
He has not resigned from the DP World,
formerly European, Tour. While that
body also stands against the LIV Series,
nothing has been said by them in public
or to players regarding the scale of sanc-
tions or Ryder Cup cost for those who
tee up at Centurion. García will bide his
naire in their bantamweight title unifi-
cation fight on Tuesday night at the
Saitama Super Arena in Saitama, Japan.
Inoue showcased his unique cock-
tail of power, speed and footwork from
the opening bell, walking Donaire down
and dropping him with a heat-seeking
right hand near the end of the frame.
Donaire made it to his feet and was
idea had been to show a response
to Saturday’s flat 1-0 loss in Hungary
but England trailed to Jonas Hofmann’s
goal early in the second half and they
had fired only in fits and starts. It was
Germany that were showing the assur-
ance in possession, examining South-
time before making any call on Europe.
Enter Kevin Na. Last Saturday, he
became the first player to announce he
was leaving the PGA Tour to pursue
LIV riches. Na believes it is far from a
given players will be ostracised from
the Ryder Cup. “I don’t think that’s
going to happen,” he said.
“Whether I’m right or wrong, I don’t
know, but I’m saying that as of now,
nobody has made an announcement
about ‘You’re not being eligible for the
Ryder Cup.’ Doesn’t the Ryder Cup want
the best players playing for the tour-
nament?”
Pressed on Waugh’s sentiment, Na
added with a smile: “Rules can always
change.”
saved by the bell, but went down under
a flurry of punches midway through
the second and was immediately waved
out by referee Michael Griffin at the 1:24
mark.
“The last right straight, I didn’t know
it was a right one but during the inter-
mission, I saw the video and knew this
was going to be the one [that stopped
gate’s four-man backline and making it
look wobbly.
And yet England found a way back,
the final 20 minutes coming to feel like
a golden period for them, the chances
coming in increasing volume and clar-
ity. The frustration would have been
The Guardian Wednesday 8 June 2022
Louis Oosthuizen, Charl Schwart-
zel and Branden Grace have also ten-
dered PGA Tour resignation. That has
consequences for the Presidents Cup,
presided over by the PGA Tour and in
which the South African trio have been
regular participants.
Na spoke positively about the PGA
Tour, with his depiction leaving the
inference that he simply could not be
bothered with a potential courtroom
battle over playing status.
“I have nothing but love and thanks
for PGA Tour, what it’s done for my
career for the 19 years that I’ve played
it,” said the world No 34. “I don’t want
to be in a legal battle with where I’ve
worked for 19 years. I just didn’t want to
Donaire],” said Inoue, who has also won
belts at 108lbs and 115lbs. “This is magic
for myself too. I put pressure on myself
and did it.”
Inoue landed 42 of 85 punches
(49%), compared to 16 of 71 for Donaire
(23%), according to Compubox’s punch
statistics.
The unbeaten 29-year-old, who has
intense, the questions plentiful, had
another tie slipped away from them.
But Harry Kane – who else? – was
not in the mood for the soul-searching
inquest. He had been denied by Manuel
Neuer as England turned the screw,
arriving to meet a low cross from the
be a part of that.
“I wanted to be more positive going
into LIV. I didn’t want any negativity
going towards my new chapter of my
new career. This has the potential to
have the best players in the world and
to be maybe the best tour in the world.”
Explanations for featuring on this
stage ranged from mildly convincing
to woefully lame. Graeme McDowell
nudged depressingly close to the
domain of ‘I am not a politician’ when
asked how he could square involve-
ment with effectively working as an
extension of a Saudi PR machine.
“I wish I had the ability to be able
to have that conversation with you,”
the Northern Irishman said. “If we tried
to cure geopolitical situations in every
country in the world that we play golf
in, we wouldn’t play a lot of golf. It’s a
really hard question to answer.
“We’re just here to focus on the golf
and what it does globally for the role
models that these guys are and that we
are.”
A dozen captains for the $5m team
element of this tournament were con-
firmed. So, too, names as ranged from
“Cleeks” to “Fire Balls.” Ari Fleischer,
best known for his role at the White
House and advocacy of the invasion of
Iraq, opened press conferences with a
range of soft-ball questions. One jour-
nalist, irate at not being permitted a
poser to Na, asked Fleischer if he was
the recipient of “blood money” during
an unseemly kerfuffle at the media-
centre door.
All this before Phil Mickelson has
sat behind a microphone. We really are
living in the most extraordinary of golf-
ing times.
finished 20 of his 23 professional fights
inside the distance, added Donaire’s
WBC bantamweight title to his WBA
and IBF straps. England’s Paul Butler
holds the WBO belt, the only other
major world title at 118lbs, teasing the
delicious prospect of a potential four-
belt unification fight later this year.
substitute Jack Grealish and watching
the goalkeeper save with his legs. Grea-
lish made a significant impact upon
his 72nd minute introduction, bringing
energy and incision off the left.
Continued on page 47
Wednesday 8 June 2022 The Guardian
Continued from page 46
As Kane later admitted, it could
have been “one of those days”. But the
captain would make the difference to-
wards the end when he melted away
from Nico Schlotterbeck inside the area
to pursue another Grealish pass.
Schlotterbeck’s challenge as he fell
looked clumsy and Kane argued loudly
that he had been clipped by the centre-
half. The strange thing was that Ger-
many went straight up to the other end,
with the substitute Leroy Sané failing
to make the final pass before VAR got to
work. After a lengthy review, the deci-
sion was reached. Penalty.
From there, as usual, it was never
in doubt. Kane placed the ball and
drilled it into the bottom corner. He had
his 50th England goal, one clear of Sir
Bobby Charlton and only three behind
the record holder, Wayne Rooney. And
the travelling England support, who
officially numbered 3,466 inside the
stadium but were plainly many more,
could celebrate.
They jumped up in areas across the
home sections and they could almost
toast a stunning stoppage-time winner.
Yet again, Grealish did the damage,
teasing and crossing but, when Kane
opened up his body for the sidefoot, he
missed his kick.
Colorado Avalanche sweep aside Oilers to
advance to Stanley Cup final
Associated Press
Artturi Lehkonen is sending a team to
the Stanley Cup final for the second
straight season.
Lehkonen scored 1:19 into over-
time, and Colorado rallied to beat the
Edmonton Oilers 6-5 Monday night,
completing a four-game sweep in the
Western Conference final and propel-
ling the Avalanche into the Stanley Cup
final for the first time since 2001.
Colorado will take on the winner of
the Eastern Conference final between
the New York Rangers and two-time de-
fending Stanley Cup champion Tampa
Bay Lightning. The Rangers lead that
best-of-seven series 2-1. Game 4 is Tues-
day at Tampa Bay.
Lehkonen repeated his feat of last
season, when he scored in OT in Game
6 to send the Montreal Canadiens to the
final against eventual repeat champion
Tampa Bay.
“Cale (Makar) took the shot,” Leh-
konen said. “I got a tip on it. It landed
straight on my blade. I basically had an
empty netter in front of me, so tap it in.”
Lehkonen becomes the second
player in NHL history, and first in 83
years, to score an overtime goal to send
his club into the championship series
more than once in his career. Toronto’s
Gordie Drillon accomplished the feat in
1938-39.
“Everybody knows how good he is,
how resilient he is,” Mikko Rantanen
said of fellow Finn Lehkonen, acquired
by Colorado at the trade deadline. “He
checks, he defends hard, he kills penal-
ties, plays on the power play, he scores
big goals, goes to the hard areas. What
else can you ask for from a player – a
trade acquisition. It’s fun to watch, and
I’m really happy that we got him, and
he’s shown why we gave quite a bit for
Sport
Harry Kane celebrates after his penalty equaliser for England in Munich. Photograph:
Nigel Keene/ProSports/Shutterstock
Southgate could be more than
happy with the point. The penalty was
a little soft but, then again, so was the
one that Hungary had scored on Sat-
urday. It became a story of England’s
resilience, their refusal to wilt in the
face of a controlled performance from
the nation that Southgate regards as
the “benchmark” in world football, to-
gether with Brazil.
England always seem to measure
themselves against Germany, with the
high point of Southgate’s near six-year
tenure coming at last summer’s Euro-
pean Championship in the 2-0 last 16
victory over them. On England’s first
The Colorado Avalanche celebrate after winning the Western Conference final series over the Edmonton Oilers on Monday night. Photo-
graph: Perry Nelson/USA Today Sports
him.”
Cale Makar, Devon Toews Gabriel
Landeskog, Nathan MacKinnon and
Rantanen also scored for Colorado.
Pavel Francouz stopped 30 of 35 shots.
“Our main thing is just trying to be
resilient, making sure that every single
night we bring that same game,” Makar
said. “Sometimes it might not be pretty,
but at the end of the day we’re just
going to try to get the job done.”
Zach Hyman scored twice for the
Oilers. Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Connor
McDavid and Zack Kassian also scored
for Edmonton. Leon Draisaitl had four
assists and goalie Mike Smith finished
with 36 saves.
“I don’t think anyone necessarily
expected us to be here,” Draisaitl said.
“With that being said, we expected to be
here, we want to be here and we want to
return to Munich since the 5-1 World
Cup qualifying win in 2001, they could
focus on a number of positives, which
took in a commanding midfield display
from Declan Rice.
It was not all smooth as Southgate
went with surely his strongest avail-
able line-up for a game that felt more
loaded and valuable in terms of World
Cup preparations than any other this
season. Jordan Pickford will not enjoy
the inquest into the Hofmann goal and,
too often, England were loose at the
back.
It had been nervy for them at
the outset. Antonio Rüdiger helped on
be even further. I’m proud of the group,
but obviously we’re disappointed.”
McDavid sees the Oilers’ playoff run
as move in the right direction.
“It feels like it’s steps,” McDavid
said. “ Every team goes through it. You
become a playoff team, then you get
there most years and they go on a little
bit of a run. They learn that lesson and
then it’s their time to win. You look at
a Colorado team that has been in that
situation many, many times and ob-
viously they are knocking on the door
right now. This is a step in the right
direction.”
The teams combined for six goals
in the third period – four by Colorado,
which rallied from a 4-2 deficit despite
being outshot 15-13.
“It was a great comeback win, for
sure,” Lehkonen said. “We were talking
a Joshua Kimmich corner that was
cheaply conceded by Kieran Trippier,
who filled in at left-back, and Kyle
Walker’s toe away from Thomas Müller
was crucial.
Germany looked dangerous on set-
pieces and they shaded the first-half,
with Jamal Musiala, the former Eng-
land under-21 midfielder, bringing the
menace off the left, his twinkle toes
easy on the eye. He had a clutch of
sightings before the interval only for
England to get bodies in the way.
There was also the let-off for South-
gate’s team in the 23rd minute when
Hofmann ran on to a long ball from
Schlotterbeck to finish, as Harry Ma-
guire – England’s last man – wrestled
Kai Havertz down on halfway. Hofmann
was called back for a marginal offside.
It was a worry to see how Maguire was
exposed positionally.
England, though, did flicker in the
first-half, with Kane blazing over the
crossbar after Maguire had jumped for
a Trippier corner. During eight minutes
of stoppage-time. Bukayo Saka worked
Neuer at the near post and then curled
wide of the other upright.
The Germany buildup for the break-
through goal had been patient but then
the excellent Kimmich fizzed the killer
pass to Hofmann, who had tiptoed
into space inside the area. John Stones
in the second intermission that we just
got to find our game and we can pull
through this.”
Rantanen appeared to complete
Colorado’s comeback, scoring a power-
play goal with just over five minutes
remaining to give the Avalanche a 5-4
edge.
But the Oilers stormed back and
forced overtime when Kassian scored
at 16:38 and tied it at 5-all. Lehkonen
scored 1:19 into overtime, a goal that
stood up after review for a high stick.
The Avalanche improved to 11-2 in
the playoffs, including a perfect 7-0 on
the road. Only six other teams in NHL
history have strung together at least
seven consecutive road victories in a
post-season.
“I’ve waited a long time to have an
opportunity to have a chance to play for
47
Jonas Hofmann fires Germany ahead.
Photograph: Lee Smith/Action Images/Reu-
ters
could not get across in time and Hof-
mann’s shot was powerfully struck. The
way that it flashed past Pickford was
nevertheless a concern. He did not have
his hands in position, throwing up one
of them and seeing it offer no resis-
tance.
Mason Mount flickered as England
sought to respond, extending Neuer
with a rasping drive after Jude Bel-
lingham, who had replaced the injured
Kalvin Phillips, won a tackle. Phillips
would leave the stadium on crutches.
Müller was denied by Pickford fol-
lowing a David Raum cross and the
goalkeeper would also stop from the
substitute Timo Werner following a
quick break. But it was England who
pushed and Kane who was decisive.
a Cup,” veteran defenseman Erik John-
son said. “I saw the puck in, I was just so
happy that it went in and we advanced
and now we get a chance to go for the
Cup.”
Colorado opened the scoring at 3:46
on a power play when Lehkonen stole
the puck from Hyman and fed Makar
before firing a shot through traffic and
in off Smith’s left post for his fifth goal
of the playoffs.
Trailing 1-0 after the first period, the
Oilers got going at 7:39 of the second
when Hyman took a pass from Draisaitl
off the rush and beat Francouz with a
backhand past the glove for his 10th
goal of the playoffs.
Nugent-Hopkins gave Edmonton its
first lead at 16:57 when Toews and
MacKinnon got their signals crossed.
The Oilers center jumped on the turn-
over and beat Francouz on another
backhand move – this time to the block-
er side – with his sixth as Draisaitl,
playing with an injured leg, was getting
treatment after hobbling to the bench.
Colorado rookie Alex Newhook was
whistled for delay of game for shoot-
ing the puck over the glass late in the
period, and Edmonton made the visi-
tors pay when McDavid scored his 10th
goal of the postseason, and 31st point,
beating Francouz off another Draisaitl
feed for a 3-1 lead with 1:06 left in the
period.
McDavid and Draisaitl are the
eighth pair of teammates in NHL his-
tory to each record 30 points in a
playoff.
Colorado got one back 31 seconds
into the third when Toews’ shot hit
Oilers defenseman Cody Ceci in front
as he was battling with MacKinnon. It
was Toews’ fifth.
Hyman scored his second of the
Continued on page 48

48
Continued from page 47
night and 11th overall on a 4-on-2 rush,
sending a knuckling shot off a Draisaitl
set-up past Francouz at 3:55 for a 4-2
lead.
Landeskog got Colorado back
within one at 8:58 on a mad scramble
From LeBron’s block to Jordan’s 41: the
greatest NBA finals MVPs
Joseph Palmer
10) Dirk Nowitzki (Forward, Dallas
Mavericks), 2011
Dirk Nowitzki earned his only
championship playing against “the
Heatles,” the Miami super team formed
when perennial All-Stars LeBron James
and Chris Bosh took their talents to
South Beach to join Dwyane Wade,
yet another perennial All-Star. Game
1 of the series immediately gave the
oddsmakers reason for concern. In a
tense, low-scoring affair in Miami, No-
witzki used a splint to shrug off an
in-game torn tendon in his left hand
before hitting the game-winner with
the very hand he injured. He then won
Game 4 despite having a sinus infection
and a fever of 101F, confirming his now
undisputed ability to play excellently
through trying circumstances.
9) Jerry West (Guard, Los Angeles
Lakers), 1969
1969 was West’s sixth finals appear-
ance – and he had lost all five pre-
vious matchups to the Bill Russell-
led Boston Celtics. Despite this track
record, West played incredibly, aver-
aging 38 points per game throughout
the series, including a 53-point perfor-
mance in Game 1 and a 40-point triple-
double in Game 7, which the Lakers lost
to give Boston the title. West’s inspired
performance wasn’t lost on his oppo-
nents: Russell famously remarked that
“Los Angeles has not won the cham-
pionship, but Jerry West is a champion.”
The powers that be also recognized the
quality of West’s play, awarding him
the first ever-finals MVP award and the
only one ever given to a player on the
losing team.
8) Hakeem Olajuwon (Center,
Houston Rockets), 1995
Sometimes lost amid the 1990s’
other superstars were two years of
quiet dominance by the league’s first
international superstar, Hakeem Ola-
juwon. One of several performances
on this list that are defined by the
exceptional quality of his opponent,
Olajuwon’s Rockets swept a Shaquille
O’Neal-led Orlando Magic that had just
knocked Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls
Gareth Southgate says England showed they
are ‘top team’ in Germany draw
Nick Ames at the Allianz Arena
Gareth Southgate felt England heeded
his challenge to show they are a “top
team” after coming back from a goal
Sport
in front after Smith turned the puck
over.
Edmonton got a power play with
under nine minutes to go looking to go
back up by two, but Draisaitl’s shot off
the side of Francouz’s goal was as close
as the Oilers would get.
MacKinnon tied it with his 11th on a
LeBron James celebrates in the finals moments of Game 7 of the NBA finals. Photograph:
Ezra Shaw/Getty Images
out of the playoffs (the only team to
do so in the 90s). Olajuwon scored 30+
points in every game and tipped in the
game-winner off a teammate’s miss in
Game 1.
7) Dwyane Wade (Guard, Miami
Heat), 2006
Wade’s play in 2006 is, to this
date, the best Michael Jordan impres-
sion anyone has ever done on the
finals stage. He was an unlikely can-
didate to be the series MVP – after
all, his teammate was O’Neal, a three-
time finals MVP in his own right. Yet,
after losing the first two games, it was
Wade who scored 42, 36, 43 and 36
points in four straight wins to bring
Miami their first championship. And,
according to the (often controversial)
compound statistic known as player
efficiency rating (PER), Wade’s 2006
series was the best individual perfor-
mance in over 20 years.
6) Bill Russell (Center, Boston Cel-
tics) 1962
OK, so this award didn’t exist until
1969, but such was Russell’s domin-
ance we’re giving him one anyway. In
his 13 years in the league, Russell’s Cel-
tics won the championship 11 times, in-
cluding eight straight titles.
Russell’s defense-oriented style
never translated well into statistics but,
as he famously noted, “The way I play,
my team wins.” This was particularly
true during his dominant 1962 perfor-
mance against West’s Lakers. In very
un-Bill-Russell-like fashion, he led his
down, and a sloppy first three quarters
of the game, to secure a respectable
draw against Germany.
Harry Kane’s late penalty came
amid a flurry of pressure and
chances, with England’s tempo noti-
high shot Smith with 6:30 left in regu-
lation, setting the stage for Rantanen’s
go-ahead goal, his fifth of the playoffs.
But Kassian scored his second,
firing home a puck in the crease after
Draisaitl’s initial shot with 3:22 left.
Colorado got past the Oilers in
four straight despite losing No 1 goalie
Celtics in scoring that series. He played
all 53 minutes of Game 7, which went to
overtime, racking up 30 points and 40
rebounds in the process.
5) Shaquille O’Neal (Center, Los
Angeles Lakers), 2000
To a certain generation of fans,
Shaq was a real-life superhero: he even
played one in a (admittedly, not great)
film. His powers peaked at the turn
of the millennium when he and Kobe
Bryant led the Lakers to three straight
titles. During the first of those runs,
in 2000, Shaq was almost unstoppable.
After being just one voter shy of win-
ning the regular season MVP unanim-
ously, Shaq dominated the Indiana
Pacers by averaging 38 points and 16.7
rebounds across six games. If it’s poss-
ible, Shaq was even more dominant
than the numbers suggest.
4) Magic Johnson (Guard, Los An-
geles Lakers), 1980
In 1980, at just 20-years-old, John-
son became the youngest player ever
to be named finals MVP. In the series’
most famous moment, Johnson started
the clinching Game 6 as his team’s
center (traditionally the tallest position
on a team) despite normally serving
as the team’s point guard (traditionally
the shortest position). Johnson would
rotate playing through all five possible
positions during the game on his way
to earning 42 points, 15 rebounds, and
seven assists in a title-winning perfor-
mance.
3) Willis Reed (Center, New York
ceably increasing after Jack Grealish’s
introduction. It was an improvement
on Saturday’s flat defeat in Hungary
and Southgate revealed he had thrown
down the gauntlet to his squad before
their outing in Munich.
The Guardian Wednesday 8 June 2022
Darcy Kuemper and winger Andre
Burakovsky to injury in Game 1, before
Kadri went down Saturday. Kuemper
returned to serve as the Francouz’s
backup Monday.
“We’re playing hockey on June 6th.
In order to accomplish that, you’ve
done some good things and I don’t
Knicks), 1970
Willis Reed may be the most unfa-
miliar name on this list to the casual
fan, but the hall of famer’s stoic leader-
ship in Game 7 of the 1970 series is still
regularly referenced by pundits to this
day.
Reed averaged more than 31 points
per game through the first four games,
serving as the New York Knicks’ lead-
ing scorer. The Knicks led the series 3-2
after five games, but their Game 5 vic-
tory came at a high cost – Reed was
injured, tearing a muscle in his right
thigh. The injury caused him to miss
Game 6, which the Knicks lost by more
than 20 points.
To the surprise of Knicks fans, the
injured Reed limped out for Game
7. He took, and made, the Knicks’
first two shots and spent most of the
first-half defending Wilt Chamberlain
before his injury forced him out of
the game. The Knicks would go on
to win both the game and the cham-
pionship. His presence that evening in-
spired all those watching, leading legen-
dary broadcaster Howard Cosell to tell
Reed, “You exemplify the very best that
the human spirit can offer.”
2) Michael Jordan (Guard, Chicago
Bulls), 1993
As anyone who watched The Last
Dance can confirm, Michael Jordan has
many, many finals performances to
choose from. His first championship,
against Magic Johnson’s Lakers in
1991, gave us his “spec-TAC-ular move.”
Jordan’s second finals, in 1992, intro-
duced us to the nonchalance of the
“the shrug.” He clinched his fourth
title in 1996 on Father’ Day, a coin-
cidence which likely further com-
pounded Jordan’s raw, emotional re-
sponse to his first title after his father’s
murder. The list goes on – there’s “the
flu game” in 1997, and his title-winning
shot with five seconds left in 1998.
Jordan’s greatest overall finals
performance on the court, however,
is also the one hardest to summarize
in single phrase or moment. In 1993,
Jordan’s Bulls won their third cham-
pionship in a row, a feat no team had
achieved since Bill Russell’s Celtics. At
an absurd 41 points per game, Jordan
“We’ve had some good results at
Wembley and wanted to come away
from home and get a good result,” he
said. “It’s so important that we bounced
back from a disappointing result. We
challenged the players that a top team
think we can lose sight of that, but
there’s a lot more required in order to
find a way to get the Stanley Cup final,”
Edmonton coach Jay Woodcroft said.
Bill Russell won 11 NBA titles with the Cel-
tics. Photograph: Bill Chaplis/AP
averaged the (still-standing) record for
the most points per game in a finals
series.
1) LeBron James (Forward, Cleve-
land Cavaliers), 2016
It’s almost a toss-up between
Jordan’s high-scoring highlights in 1993
and LeBron James all-around excel-
lence in 2016. But, when examined
closely, it’s clear that James’s 2016
achievement is undeniably unique.
Let’s start with his opponent –
James and the Cavaliers were playing
the defending champion Golden State
Warriors, a team led by Steph Curry in
a season in which he became the first-
ever unanimously elected MVP. Curry’s
Warriors had also won 73 games during
the regular season, breaking the record
previously held by Jordan’s Bulls.
James’s situation was bleak. After
Game 4, the Cavs were down 3-1, a
deficit no team had ever overcome in
a finals. Yet, in the final three games,
James was unstoppable. He scored 41
points each in Games 5 and 6 before
capping off the series with a triple
double in Game 7. He led every major
statistical category for the series, some-
thing no other player has ever done
in the playoffs. And, on top of all the
statistical excellence, James crafted his
own signature play. “The Block” (it has
its own Wikipedia entry) was a breath-
taking chasedown of reigning finals
MVP Andre Iguodala that preserved a
tie score in the final moments of Game
7.
The victory also ended Cleveland’s
title drought across all major profes-
sional sports, which had stretched back
to 1964. Not bad for a kid from nearby
Akron.
doesn’t lose two on the bounce and
they’ve responded to that in the right
way.”
England wobbled after Jonas Hof-
Continued on page 49
Wednesday 8 June 2022 The Guardian

Sport 49

Continued from page 48 finish is exceptional, isn’t it?” Southgate

mann’s 50th minute opener, which was
well merited on the balance of play, and
could have conceded again before turn-
ing the tide in the latter stages. South-
gate was particularly critical of their
passing during the first half but ex-
pressed his delight at the manner of
their recovery.
“To respond in the way they did
was fantastic,” he said. “I thought in the
balance of the overall game [the equa-
liser] was well deserved. It’s an impor-
tant sign for them as much as anything.
[We have] seven or eight who got us
to a World Cup semi-final, that’s why
those players are so important to us be-
cause that core of the team put their
bodies on the line for each other. On
Gareth Southgate wanted his players to show they could recover from defeat in Hungary
with a good result in Germany. Photograph: Markus Gilliar/Getty Images
nights like this you have to do that
to get a result.” The spot-kick, awarded
by VAR after Nico Schlotterbeck’s foul,
was Kane’s 50th goal for England. “The
said.
“The pressure at that moment, he
trusts his technique, we have huge faith
in him. Rightly the fact he’s got 50 goals
will be the centre part of the story. But
his all-round game, the way he led the
line, the way he competed, the way
Harry Kane (right) impressed his man-
he pressed from the front today, was ager with his all-round game. Photograph:
exceptional.” Markus Gilliar/Getty Images
Kane described reaching the miles-
tone as “a really nice feeling” and felt Grealish had played his way into start-
England had proved a point. “It was ing contention, Southgate struck a note
really important to show our mentality,” of caution. “At the start of the game,
he said. “And even going 1-0 down, the challenge to the wide players is to
it showed good character to get back attack, defend, try to score goals, a high
into the game and get a result, playing tactical level and you’ve got to be spot
against a good side. [It] shows where we on,” he said. “I think that’s an area Jack
are at.” can get better at.”
Asked whether the impressive

‘The job is only half done’: Socceroos turn

focus to Peru after crucial UAE win
Mostafa Rachwani
Australia’s celebrations following vic-
tory over the United Arab Emirates
have been tempered by an accep-
tance that the job is not yet com-
plete, with focus quickly turning to
next week’s final World Cup qualifying
playoff against Peru.
A late Ajdin Hrustić volley gave
Graham Arnold’s side a nervy but cru-
cial win in Wednesday morning’s Asian
playoff in Qatar, after Caio Canedo can-
celled out Jackson Irvine’s opener. The
2-1 victory sets up a final must-win
inter-continental playoff next Tuesday
morning AEST as the Socceroos con-
tinue their bid to reach a fifth consec-
utive World Cup.
Irvine’s opening strike set the scene
for an important victory over the UAE,
and he said it was a “great feeling”, but
warned that the job was only half done
with one final hurdle to overcome in
the drawn-out efforts to secure a place
at this year’s tournament in Qatar.
“Obviously it’s a great feeling,” he
said. “But you have that moment of ela-
tion when the final whistle goes, and
then straightaway you are focused. It’s
a great result which means we can go
into the week full of confidence. The
job is only half done and we will have a
tough preparation week again. Recover,
get ready to go again. We have a great
squad with a good energy about us, and
Jackson Irvine and Kye Rowles after the Socceroos’ crucial 2-1 win over the UAE in their World Cup qualifying playoff. Photograph:
Mohamed Farag/Getty Images
I’m excited.”
Coach Arnold, who has been under
intense pressure since Australia’s quali-
fication campaign stuttered earlier this
year, said the Socceroos knew the UAE
would sit back, adding that he ensured
his team would not play into the hands
of the opposition.
“We made sure we stayed nice and
compact the whole game,” he said. “I
thought there was a lot less space
for the opposition tonight. Overall I
thought defensively we were good, and
I saw a good reaction tonight.”
Arnold said he had wanted to
emphasise “Aussie DNA” to the squad,
which he characterised as being about
the “fight” and the “win” and not how it
would be achieved.
“That is what I have been driving to
the boys ... about the Aussie DNA, and
that is fight, scratch and do whatever
you have got to do to win the game.
However we win it, who cares? Just win
it.”
Hrustić, whose thunderous volley
took a deflection on its way into the
back of the net in the 84th minute, said
the team never gave up, even after the
UAE equalised.
“I told the boys at the start, ‘let’s
do it’ ... we have put so much work in
and we have been working our arses off,
so to say,” Hrustić said. “We conceded
a goal and we shouldn’t have. We kept
going, kept fighting and we took our
chance, and the goal for Australia was
for all the boys, for the staff, because we
have been through a lot and it hasn’t
been easy. I don’t think everyone rea-
lises how much work we put in, so I’m
happy. Really happy.”
Former player and current
commentator Craig Foster called Hrus-
tić’s strike “beautiful”, adding in a social
media post that the team’s perfor-
mance in the second half was “much
better”.
Another former international, Rob
Cornthwaite, added to the chorus
online saying the game “wasn’t pretty”
but had particular praise for returning
midfielder Aaron Mooy, who played his
first game of competitive football this
year.
The match was tense and cagey at
times and far from an enthralling spec-
tacle, leading to concerns that a repeat
of the Socceroos’ performance against
the UAE will not be enough to beat Peru
in six days’ time.
Kick-off against Peru, who qualified
for the inter-continental playoff after fi-
nishing fifth in South America’s Con-
mebol conference, is at 4am AEST next
Tuesday.

Boris Johnson’s comments led to threats

against me, says Emily Bridges
PA Media
The transgender cyclist Emily Bridges
feels comments made by Boris Johnson
over whether she should race women
were the catalyst for a wave of vio-
lent threats and has also revealed she
wanted to compete at the Common-
wealth Games this summer.
The 21-year-old Welsh athlete made
headlines in March when her attempts
to race at the British National Omnium
Emily Bridges is disappointed at miss-
ing the Commonwealth Games. Photograph:
Andy Jones
Championships in the women’s cate-
gory were thwarted at the 11th hour by
the world governing body UCI.
It sparked a debate that spread fur-
ther than just the sport, with the prime
minister weighing in when he stated: “I
don’t think biological males should be
competing in female sporting events”
at a time when Bridges was already
receiving plenty of criticism on social
media and from fellow competitors.
During an interview with ITV,
Bridges said: “It’s really strange to see
probably the most famous man in Brit-
ain talking about you and having an
opinion on something that he doesn’t
know anything about.
“The response after that was as ex-
pected, I had threats of physical vi-
olence made against me by complete
strangers online. People are entitled to
hold an opinion about it, but there’s a
way to go about voicing that opinion -
and threatening to kneecap me is not
that way.
“I’m scared a lot of the time about
being who I am in public. Is someone
going to recognise me? They were real
concerns and it was a real fear that I had
after the comments were made, and it
was scary. I was scared.”
Some of those most vocal against
Bridges’ potential inclusion in the
March event pointed to the fact she had
competed in the men’s points race of
the British Universities’ Championships
a month earlier.
The cyclist accepts in hindsight it
was maybe the wrong decision but in-
Continued on page 50
 The Guardian Wednesday 8 June 2022
50 Sport / Soccer

Continued from page 49
sisted it was made to ensure she re-
mained competitive, especially ahead
of appearing at the championships in
Derby, which initial British Cycling rules
on transgender participation ensured
she could enter.
“It probably wasn’t the right thing to
do,” Bridges admitted. “I wanted to do
it because I wanted to keep my skills
sharp. Immediately after I came off the
track, I was like ‘I kind of wish I hadn’t
done that’ because I knew what was
coming.”
After the UCI’s intervention and fail-
ure to grant Bridges a switch in li-
cence, British Cycling suspended its
transgender policy pending a review to
“find a better answer”.
It meant any hopes the cyclist
from Wales had of competing at the
Commonwealth Games - where trans-
gender females are allowed to race in
the women’s event - in Birmingham this
summer were dashed.
Bridges added: “I knew that my
main goal for the season, the Common-
wealth Games, was then out of the
question because I couldn’t race this
event, and it was unlikely I was going to
be able to race any international events
during the Welsh Cycling’s set time-
frame for the selection.
“So the Commonwealth Games
were gone. I feel a real pride about
being Welsh and I wanted to represent
my country.”

Revealed: Uefa safety consultant quit and

expressed concerns in February
Exclusive by David Conn
Serious concerns were raised about
Uefa’s safety and security department
earlier this year when an English safety
expert with decades of experience quit
his role as a consultant for European
football’s governing body.
Steve Frosdick, originally a Metro-
politan police officer, has dedicated
his career to stadium safety in British
and European football since the 1990s
and has multiple advanced profes-
sional qualifications. He resigned from
his Uefa consultancy in February, after
11 years in which he was employed to
enhance its expertise, incident moni-
toring, and development and training
programmes.
He is said to have become se-
riously unhappy with the direction of
the department which since last year
has been headed by Zeljko Pavlica, a
close friend of the Uefa president, Alek-
sandr Ceferin. Frosdick is said to have
believed that Uefa’s professionalism,
expertise and development were being
undermined, and he rejected a proposal
to revise his contract, that would have
downgraded his role.
Frosdick’s resignation and criti-
cisms came less than four months
before serious safety problems beset
Uefa’s two end-of-season showpiece
events: the Europa League final, where
Rangers fans complained there was no
water in the heat of Seville, and the
horrific chaos suffered by Liverpool and
Real Madrid supporters at the Cham-
pions League final in Paris.
The revelation of Frosdick’s depar-
ture will add to growing concerns about
Uefa’s safety operation, and perceived
cronyism in the appointment of Pav-
lica, which Uefa rejects. The Liver-
pool supporters’ trust Spirit of Shank-
ly, which is representing fans who suf-
Liverpool fans outside the Stade de France before Champions League final against Real
Madrid. Photograph: Christophe Ena/AP
fered the excessive delays, police bru-
tality and violent attacks in Paris yet
were officially blamed by Uefa for the
problems, has renewed its calls for a
fully independent inquiry.
The safety and security department
has a responsibility for the safe running
of Uefa’s matches including finals, and
has a leading role in efforts to streng-
then good safety practices across Euro-
pean football. Pavlica, a former top-
ranking security officer in his native
Slovenia, was appointed to head the
department last year after the retire-
ment in February 2021 of the previous
head of department for four years,
Kenny Scott. A 30-year career officer
with Strathclyde police up to the rank
of chief superintendent, Scott was then
head of security at Rangers from 2007
to 2010 and joined Uefa full-time in
2017.
Ceferin, a lawyer in Slovenia, and
Pavlica, a former senior security officer
for Janez Drnovsek when he was pres-
ident of Yugoslavia and Slovenia, are
said to have been friends for decades.
Ceferin was best man at Pavlica’s 2018
wedding to Brigita, a former Olympic
athlete representing Slovenia. Short-
ly after Ceferin won the election to
become president of Slovenia’s football
association in 2011, Pavlica was given
his first job in football, working for the
association as a safety and security of-
ficer.
Uefa has denied cronyism in his
promotion to head its safety and secu-
rity department, stressing that Pavlica
stepped up from Slovenian national
football to working for the Europe-
wide confederation in 2014. That was
an external, part-time role. Two months
after Ceferin won the election to
become Uefa president in September
2016, Pavlica was promoted to a per-
manent role at Uefa, as a security ad-
viser.
A Uefa spokesperson said that Pav-
lica “is a well-respected name in the
security business” and in football, and
“had an excellent safety and secu-
rity record with the Slovenian national
team and served Uefa very well for
more than eight years”. He was consi-
dered the “natural successor” to head
the department, the spokesperson said,
having worked alongside Scott, in-
cluding on Uefa’s club and national
team competitions.
The head of department vacancy
was not externally advertised, nor
was a benchmarking assessment car-
ried out of Pavlica’s suitability for the
very senior European safety role. The
spokesperson explained that Uefa can
make direct appointments when there
is “an obvious solution internally”, that
Pavlica’s promotion was part of “succes-
sion plans” and external assessments
are not mandatory in Uefa regulations.
Frosdick was substantially involved
as a consultant in Uefa’s training and
development programmes and its inci-
dent monitoring system, which sought
to learn detailed lessons from matches
where safety had been put at risk and
improve best practice. He is understood
to have been invited to make a farewell
presentation in a video meeting to Uefa
colleagues on 18 February, and is said
to have outlined criticisms, including
alleging a decline in professionalism.
Frosdick declined to comment.
Uefa argues that its expertise has
improved since Pavlica’s appointment,
not been undermined, saying it has
hired proven safety and security ex-
perts, continued with training pro-
grammes despite the pandemic, and
is working to improve incident moni-
toring. However the spokesperson con-
firmed that its stadium and security
strategy programme, which ran from
2017, had not yet been renewed since it
finished last year. Uefa’s description of
the 2017–21 programme, which is still on
its website, stated that it “drives Uefa’s
efforts to keep ahead of the risks and
incidents”.
Asked why the programme was not
currently running, the spokesperson
said it had been impossible to imple-
ment a new strategy because of the
pandemic: “The next edition of the
programme is currently under devel-
opment and subject to approval by the
Uefa stadia and safety committee at
Steve Frosdick pictured at Celtic in 2015.
He acted as a consultant for the club on their
installation of rail seating. Photograph: SNS
Group Alan Harvey/SNS Group
one of their next meetings.”
Joe Blott, the Spirit of Shankly chair,
emphasised the demand for a fully
independent investigation, amid ques-
tions, also asked directly by Liverpool,
about the independence of the review
Uefa announced two days after the
final. Uefa appointed as chair the Portu-
guese politician Tiago Brandão Rodri-
gues, who has worked closely with
Tiago Craveiro, a former chief executive
of the Portuguese Football Federation,
who is a senior adviser to Ceferin at
Uefa.
“Liverpool supporters suffered hor-
rendous experiences in Paris, and we
are outraged that Uefa instantly, falsely
put the blame on us,” Blott said. “It is
now truly disturbing to learn of ques-
tions about cronyism, professionalism
and the culture in Uefa’s safety depart-
ment, and we need a fully independent
investigation, including into Uefa itself
and its running of matches.”
To questions about the events in
Paris, specifically the apparently nega-
tive perception of Liverpool suppor-
ters as troublemakers in advance of
the match, Uefa’s spokesperson said:
“Due to the ongoing independent inves-
tigation, Uefa will not be commenting
or disclosing any details on the matter
for the time being.”

Socceroos stay alive as Ajdin Hrustic fires late

winner in World Cup playoff win over UAE
Joey Lynch
If forced to pick out a player who has
emerged as a cornerstone of their team
during the run to Qatar 2022, there
would be few better candidates than
Ajdin Hrustić. Just weeks on from help-
ing Eintracht Frankfurt lift their first
European trophy in 42 years, the 25-
year-old booked the Socceroos’ place
in next week’s win-and-you’re-in World
Cup playoff with Peru with an 84th-
minute rocket that secured Australia a
The Socceroos celebrate after Jackson
Irvine opened the scoring against the UAE
in the World Cup playoff in Qatar. Photo-
graph: Mohammed Dabbous/Reuters
2-1 win over the United Arab Emirates.
It may have taken a healthy deflec-
tion off Ali Salmeen – certainly enough
to fool Khalid Eisa in the UAE goal – but
given the stakes of Wednesday morn-
ing’s encounter, there will be little appe-
tite in the Socceroos camp to qualify
celebrations. Such temperance would
also be underselling that few players
available to Graham Arnold have the
technique to hit the ball with such
power and direction in the first place,
and that frequently during this cam-
paign Hrustić has been the shining
light in what has otherwise been a pre-
dictable and uninspiring attack.
Coach Arnold had spoken of “Aussie
DNA” during the build-up to this fixture.
In his interpretation, it was a call to a
spirit of “backs to the wall, run out, get
on the pitch, chase, fight, harass and do
everything that’s required to win this
game”. Yet laid bare across the open-
ing 45 minutes at the Ahmad Bin Ali
Stadium in Qatar was what has increa-
singly come to delineate this team:
conservatism in possession, an inability
to fashion quality chances outside of
transition and a steadfast reluctance to
be exposed to any sort of risk by switch-
ing things up.
It cannot be said the UAE them-
selves were a dazzling example of
verve and attacking football. Coach Ro-
dolfo Arruabarrena’s side was also slow
and ponderous in extended periods of
possession; their best moments arrived
when 19-year-old left-winger Harib Al-
Maazmi was given an opportunity to
run at the flank of Nathaniel Atkin-
son and Bailey Wright. The teenage at-
tacker presented the lone bright spark
Continued on page 51
Wednesday 8 June 2022 The Guardian
Continued from page 50
of either side across the opening ex-
changes: his cut inside and shot from
an acute angle that forced Mat Ryan
into action in the 35th minute the most
notable of the opening stanza’s shots
on goal.
Putting defenders on their heels by
running at them can do magical things,
as the Australians discovered minutes
Nations League roundup: Italy beat Hungary
as Turkey thrash Lithuania
PA Media
Italy moved a point clear at the top of
Group A3 after a 2-1 win over Hungary
in their Nations League clash in Cesena.
The European champions, who
failed to qualify for the World Cup,
went ahead through a fierce drive from
Nicolo Barella, while Lorenzo Pellegrini
doubled the lead just before the break.
Hungary - who had beaten England in
Budapest on Saturday - reduced the
deficit through an own goal from Az-
zurri defender Gianluca Mancini on the
hour, but could not conjure an equa-
liser.
In Group B3, Bosnia-Herzegovina
beat Romania 1-0 in Zenica with a
second-half goal from substitute Smail
Prevljak to record a first win in eight Na-
tions League games.
Bayer Leverkusen forward Joel
Pohjanpalo scored twice in the space
of seven first-half minutes as Finland
Gareth Bale needs ‘sympathetic’ club, says
Wales manager Robert Page
Ben Fisher
Robert Page has said Gareth Bale will
have to find a club sympathetic to his
needs if the Wales captain is to arrive at
the World Cup in peak condition.
Page said he will discuss with Bale
and Aaron Ramsey next week how they
intend to resolve their uncertain club
futures. Bale is a free agent after de-
parting Real Madrid and Ramsey has a
year on his contract at Juventus, who
sanctioned what proved to be a fruit-
less loan to Rangers in January. The
Wales manager said it would be unrea-
listic for Bale to lead the team in Qatar
without signing for a club because “all
the training in the world” does not rep-
licate match fitness.
Page allows Bale and Ramsey to
follow individual training programmes
but admitted club managers may be
reluctant to allow the same degree of
licence.
“Clubs must be looking at them
and thinking: ‘How can they do that
for their country?’” Page said. “It is a
common-sense approach for us. It is
hard when you’re trying to create that
Soccer
into the second half when Mat Leckie
forced a turnover of possession and the
ball fell to Martin Boyle. Driving into
the penalty area with venomous intent,
the Scotland-born winger laced a cross
along the ground that was met by Jack-
son Irvine. Irvine did what he does best
as he arrived in the box from the mid-
field and fired home.
Less than three minutes later, how-
ever, Caio Canedo levelled things up.
Lorenzo Pellegrini celebrates after scoring Italy’s second goal in Cesena. Photograph: Ettore Griffoni/LiveMedia/REX/Shutterstock
Gareth Bale and Rob Page after Wales’ playoff win over Ukraine. Photograph: Shaun
Botterill/Getty Images
environment at club level, when you’ve
got other world-class players around
you. We haven’t got 10 Gareth Bales in
that [Wales] changing room. It is harder
to do that [at club level]; you do have
to have that sort of ‘throw the blanket
over all of the players, this is how we’re
going to train today’.
“That is going to be his [Bale’s]
difficulty, finding someone that will
manage him. He has to take that
responsibility himself and that will
Capitalising on the Socceroos’ inability
to clear, Al Abyad countered and the
lethal Al-Maazmi whipped a ball in.
With the Socceroos’ defence all at sea,
naturalised Brazilian Canedo pounced.
After all of 180 seconds, the pressure
was on Australia once again.
The Socceroos had the better of the
chances as the game progressed but
extra-time and penalties loomed, when
substitute Jamie Maclaren’s effort after
determine whether he plays a lot of
football because if he’s not able to train
like that through the week the manager
at the respective club might not want to
select him on the weekend. He under-
stands what he needs to do.
“Gareth’s problems in the past have
been when he’s not been playing week
in, week out, and for the Belarus game
he came into camp undercooked and
ended up getting a little tweak in his
calf, so he understands he needs to play.
a rare moment of fine interplay was
saved in the 80th minute.
But cometh the moment, cometh
the man. Befitting his newfound status
as the Socceroos’ talisman – especially
in the absence of Tom Rogic, who
pulled out of the squad citing personal
reasons in the buildup to the game –
Hrustić popped up when it mattered
the most.
Had his side played particularly
It is up to him and his family to decide
on where is best for him to get in the
right frame of mind for November, it’s
going to be as simple as that, and it
might even be as short term as that.”
Bale played 22 minutes for Real
between Wales’ playoff semi-final win
against Austria in March and the vic-
tory against Ukraine in the final on
Sunday and Ramsey struggled for game
time at Rangers, for whom he missed
the decisive penalty in the Europa
League final against Eintracht Frank-
furt.
“At the end of the camp, at the end
of the last game, I will have that conver-
sation,” Page said when asked about
Ramsey’s future. “They’re experienced
players and they’ll know what’s best
for themselves. If he has to go back
and do a pre-season to see where he
is at, then he’ll probably do that and
make that decision before the [transfer]
window closes, to get out and maybe
have another loan move or whatever.”
Nottingham Forest’s Brennan John-
son will start for Wales in their Na-
tions League match at home against
the Netherlands on Wednesday. He
was wanted by several Premier League
51
well? Not particularly, and the Peru-
vians that were watching on will have
seen little on Wednesday that will strike
fear into their hearts. But for all the
familiar problems that were on show,
the Socceroos did not deserve to lose.
Now, they stand just one triumph away
from Qatar 2022.
beat Montenegro 2-0 in Helsinki to sit
second on goal difference.
Turkey thrashed Lithuania 6-0 in
Vilnius to make it two wins out of
two in Group C1. Dogukan Sinik struck
twice in the opening 14 minutes, with
veteran Fenerbahce forward Serdar
Dursun adding another from the pe-
nalty spot before completing his own
double with nine minutes left. Subs-
titute Yunus Akgun and Halil Dervi-
soglu wrapped things up with late goals
in the closing stages as Lithuania suf-
fered a 14th defeat in 17 internationals.
Gerson Rodrigues’ penalty with 15
minutes left gave Luxembourg a 1-0
win over the Faroe Islands in Tors-
vollur, where the hosts finished with
nine men after Rene Joensen and Solvi
Vatnhamar were sent off during the
second half.
Wales' Aaron Ramsey (left) has a year left
on his Juventus contract but is out of favour
with the Turin club. Photograph: Ian Cook/
CameraSport/Getty Images
clubs in January, including Brentford,
but stayed to win promotion with his
boyhood club via the Championship
playoff final.
“I always believed in myself and
to do it with Forest is just so much
better – it is what I wanted,” Johnson,
21, said. “To play in the Premier League
this season is definitely something I felt
like I had to be doing and in terms of
my Wales career as well I think it puts
me in a really good stead to get into
the team. Going into a Premier League
season with a World Cup, it is another
real test that I can’t wait for.”

52
Real Madrid agree €100m deal to sign
Aurelién Tchouaméni from Monaco
Fabrizio Romano
Real Madrid have agreed a €100m
(£85.3m) deal to sign the defensive
midfielder Aurelién Tchouaméni from
Monaco. The European champions are
to pay a guaranteed €80m for the 22-
year-old with the rest in add-ons.
Liverpool and Paris Saint-Germain
are among other teams who pursued
the France international. Jürgen Klopp
Transfer latest: Liverpool chase Calvin
Ramsay, Leeds land Rasmus Kristensen
Fabrizio Romano
Liverpool are in talks to sign the 18-
year-old right-back Calvin Ramsay from
Aberdeen. The Scotland Under-21 inter-
national is open to the move and the
Premier League club hope progress can
be made in negotiations over a fee.
Ramsay played 24 league games for
Aberdeen in the 2021-22 season, after
breaking into the first team towards the
end of the previous campaign, and is
regarded by Liverpool as having the
talent to compete for a place in the
immediate term as well as being one
for the future.
Ramsay, born in Aberdeen, won the
Scottish Football Writers’ Association’s
Young Player of the Year award at the
end of April.
Leeds have reached an agreement
to sign Rasmus Kristensen from Red
Bull Salzburg in a permanent trans-
fer, and the 24-year-old Denmark right-
back is due to have a medical on
Wednesday.
Kristensen worked under the Leeds
manager, Jesse Marsch, at Salzburg and
‘I’m improving every day’ – Steph Houghton
confident of winning Euro fitness battle
Suzanne Wrack
Steph Houghton has said she has “hit
every target so far” in proving her fit-
ness for the England manager, Sarina
Wiegman, and is confident she can get
back to her best before the Euros.
“I back myself, I back my fitness, I
back the work I’ve done that nobody’s
seen, and I’m improving every single
day,” said the 34-year-old. “I’m enjoying
being back out on the pitch. I’m con-
fident I can get back to my best.”
The former Lionesses’ captain is
training with the squad under Wieg-
man for only the second time after
she sustained an achilles injury in Sep-
tember. The Manchester City centre-
back made a return to action in January
but played a handful of games before
Soccer
called Tchouaméni in the hope of con-
vincing him to move to Anfield but the
player was interested only in Madrid.
PSG walked away from negotiations
last Friday on that basis, having been
ready to pay the highest fee with a guar-
anteed €100m.
Madrid made a breakthrough in
Aurelién Tchouaméni in action for
France against Denmark in the Nations talks with Monaco on Monday night
League last week. Photograph: Jose Breton/ and have agreed a contract with Tchou-
NurPhoto/Rex/Shutterstock améni to 2027. That has been in
place since just before the Champions
Calvin Ramsay pictured during Aberdeen’s game at home to Dundee in April. Photograph: Stephen Dobson/ProSports/Rex/Shutterstock
has also played for Ajax and Midt- Juventus are increasingly confident
jylland. Leeds have already brought in Paul Pogba will rejoin them. With Paris
the USA midfielder Brenden Aaronson Saint-Germain and Real Madrid fo-
from Salzburg. cused on different targets, the Serie A
Steph Houghton enjoys a training session with the England squad at St George’s Park.
Photograph: Joe Giddens/PA
aggravating the injury. “My fitness has never been an issue, in
“Even though I played only five terms of a physical point of view, it’s
games I think I played well,” she said. just more about my actual injury. It’s
The Guardian Wednesday 8 June 2022
League final.
Tchouaméni, who played for Bor-
deaux before joining Monaco in Jan-
uary 2020 for about £16m, is the latest
player bought by Madrid to freshen a
brilliant but ageing midfield. The defen-
sive midfielder Casemiro is 30, Luka
Modric 36 and Toni Kroos 32. Tchou-
améni joins his 19-year-old France col-
league Eduardo Camavinga at the Ber-
nabéu. Confirmation of a new one-year
deal for Modric is scheduled to be an-
club aim to finalise a deal with the
midfielder, who is leaving Manchester
United at the end of his contract.
Pogba has been offered a net salary
not necessarily about the number of
games that I have played, it’s about the
experiences that I’ve had.
“I’ve watched a lot of football, I’ve
watched all the girls’ games, I’ve watch-
ed all the England games, so I’ve
learned from the side. Now, I’m just
trying to put things into practice. I
feel as though in my head I’m there or
thereabouts, it’s just allowing my body
to do what it needs to do and that’s
to continue working hard over the next
few weeks.”
The battle to be back on the pitch
with the national team has been tough,
she said. “With the setbacks that I’ve
had and a bit of a disappointing season
from a personal perspective I don’t
need people to tell me that [it’s been
disappointing]. My focus was always on
trying to get back in the squad. I’m
nounced on Wednesday.
Monaco’s sale of Tchouaméni
comes four years after they received
€180m for Kylian Mbappé from PSG.
They have also sold Thomas Lemar, Fa-
binho, Youri Tielemans, Bernardo Silva
and Benjamin Mendy in deals each
worth €45m or more since 2017.
of about €8m (£6.8m) a year, plus
potentially lucrative bonuses, by Juven-
tus and final details are due to be dis-
cussed by the club with his agents.
Pogba played for Juventus from 2012-16.
Juventus are also waiting for an
answer from Ángel Di María after offer-
ing the Argentina international the
chance to sign when his PSG contract
expires at the end of this month. Di
María’s agent has held talks with Bar-
celona as well.
Another former United player, Ne-
manja Matic, is poised to join José
Mourinho at Roma on a one-year deal
with an option to extend for a further
season. The midfielder played under
Mourinho at Old Trafford and Chelsea.
Napoli are in advanced negotiations
to sign the centre-back Leo Östigard
from Brighton. The Premier League
club want more than the €3m offered
but Napoli are confident of securing
the Norway international, who has not
played for Brighton’s first team but has
had a series of loans, most recently at
Genoa.
Steph Houghton watches on during a
training session at St George’s Park. Photo-
graph: Joe Giddens/PA
still not there yet but I’ve been given a
chance to do that and prove my fitness.”
Houghton completed another full
training session at St George’s Park and
says the gap between her and the rest of
the squad is not a big one. “I feel as if I’m
holding my own in training. There’s a
Continued on page 53
Wednesday 8 June 2022 The Guardian
Continued from page 52
lot of players being managed in terms
of a physical load because we don’t
want to peak too early. It’s just about
following the medical advice and build-
ing up my sessions slowly. I haven’t
Soccer
missed a session yet, which is a good
thing. It’s about sticking to the plan,
taking it day by day and step by step.
When you’ve been out for such a long
time it’s about being back on the pitch
and having the ball back at my feet.”
Wiegman will join the squad next *
week before the team’s pre-tournament
friendly against Belgium at Molineux
on 16 June after suffering a family
bereavement. “We want to send our
love to her and her family,” said Hough-
ton. “It’s tough, and family always
comes before football.”
The manager’s absence has meant
the announcement of the 23-player
squad for the home Euros has been
pushed into next week, giving Hough-
ton and the rest of the 28-strong
provisional list extra sessions to prove
themselves. “It’s important I don’t get
53
too ahead of myself,” said Houghton.
“With the squad announcement being
pushed back, it gives me more chances
and more training sessions to impress.”