Opinion If you Environment France orders air-conditioned

have a shops to save energy by shutting doors

miscarriage in page 37
Republican
America, your
health is now at
risk
Moira Donegan
page 19
Tuesday 26 July 2022
theguardian.com/us
Published in New York, United States

An air tanker drops retardant to try to stop the Oak fire reaching Lushmeadows. Photograph: Noah Berger/AP

California fire crews make progress against

ferocious Oak fire near Yosemite
Gabrielle Canon in Mariposa
Firefighters made progress against a
ferocious wildfire in the foothills of the
Sierra Nevada that forced thousands of
residents from their homes in the ga-
teway to Yosemite national park.
The Oak fire started on Friday near
the town of Midpines, California, and
exploded in size over the weekend.
Burning through dense and dry
vegetation on the region’s steep and
rugged hillsides, the blaze was fanned
by gusty winds and temperatures that
hovered around 90F (32C). The extreme
nature of the fire meant it turned tall
trees into matchsticks and sent bil-
lowing black smoke curling over the
quaint historic downtown of Mariposa.
But weather conditions improved
on Sunday night, and by Monday morn-
ing, a heavily resourced firefighting
effort achieved 10% containment.
Since Friday, the blaze has con-
sumed more than 16,700 acres. More
than 3,000 people were under evacu-
ation orders.
More than 2,000 first responders
from state and federal agencies were
battling the blaze, attacking it both
from the ground and the air. At least 10
homes and other structures had been
destroyed, with thousands remaining at
risk in its path.
“The growth of this fire is pretty
amazing given the fact of how quickly
we had resources here,” said Chief Mike
van Loben Sels of the Madera Merced
Mariposa unit of California’s fire and
forestry protection (CalFire). He noted
that embers and spot fires were ignit-
ing more than a mile ahead of the
blaze. “We really threw everything at
this thing from the beginning,” he said.
The fire is one of dozens burning
across the American west as the region
braces for peak fire-risk months that
still lie ahead. More than 5.5m acres
have already burned in the US this year,
roughly 70% more than the 10-year av-
erage.
California, a state that in recent
years has faced intensifying threats
from behemoth blazes, had seen a ligh-
ter-than-normal start to its highest-risk
season. Spring rains offered a reprieve,
delaying the onset of what officials still
fear will be another devastating fire
year. The Oak fire has showcased how
quickly things can change.
On Sunday the California governor,
Gavin Newsom, declared a state of
emergency for the area, allowing for
the deployment of thousands of emer-
gency personnel.
The cause of the fire remains under
investigation.
Firefighters working in steep ter-
rain on the ground protected homes
Sunday as air tankers dropped retar-
dant on 50ft (15-meter) flames racing
along ridgetops east of the tiny com-
munity of Jerseydale. Personnel faced
tough conditions that included steep
terrain, sweltering temperatures and
low humidity, CalFire said.
Light winds blew embers ahead into
tree branches “and because it’s so dry,
it’s easy for the spot fires to get estab-
lished and that’s what fuels the growth”,
said a CalFire spokesperson, Natasha
Fouts.
Smoke drifted about 200 miles
(322km) north toward Lake Tahoe and
the same distance west into the San
Francisco Bay Area, pollution control
officials said.
“Hazy skies may be visible and the
smell of smoke is possible at high eleva-
tions,” the Bay Area Air District said on
Twitter.
Thousands remained under evacu-
ation, awaiting word for when they
could return home. Miles away from
the flames, fire crews and officers had
prepared for the fire’s spread, marking
mailboxes with descriptive pages that
could aid in the firefight.
The forms include information on
if there’s access for large fire trucks, if
occupants had vacated the area, wheth-
er the property posed any extra risks
with visible hazards like propane tanks
or overhead power lines, and if a water
source was available for use.
In the chaos, a local man named
Ron, who declined to share his last
Continued on page 2

2 Headlines
Continued from page 1
name, left behind his medication and
his dog Duke, an ageing labrador mix
with a bad hip.
“When he was left behind I couldn’t
get anybody to help,” Ron said, adding
that he had suffered a stroke and still
gets disoriented. “But that’s my baby,
man.”
CalFire officers Shayon Ascarie and
David Janssen came to Ron’s aid, rush-
ing the man back to his evacuated hill-
side home as the fire crept closer. Heli-
copters zigzagged overhead and planes
dropped fire retardant on the slopes
Mike Pence’s ex-chief of staff testifies to
grand jury investigating January 6
Hugo Lowellin Washington
Former vice-president Mike Pence’s
chief of staff Marc Short appeared last
week before a federal grand jury inves-
tigating events connected to the Jan-
uary 6 Capitol attack, indicating the
justice department has penetrated the
inner circle of the Trump White House
in its criminal inquiry.
The appearance by Short – the top
adviser to the former vice president
who was also by Pence’s side on the day
of the Capitol attack – makes him the
highest-ranking Trump White House
official known to have testified before
the grand jury in Washington.
Short testified in response to a sub-
poena for around two to three hours,
according to a source familiar with the
matter, though it was unclear what he
told the grand jury or whether he pro-
duced documents. ABC News earlier re-
ported his appearance.
The development was also the
latest indication that the criminal
investigation into the Capitol attack
The dystopian American reality one month
after the Roe v Wade reversal
Jessica Glenza
Severe new restrictions upend repro-
ductive care across whole regions of
the US. Patients report delays for proce-
dures that were once common and
routine, as doctors fear vague new
laws with criminal penalties. A 10-year-
old rape victim was forced to travel
out of state to terminate a pregnancy.
And activists promise more draconian
restrictions to come.
In the month since the supreme
court bombshell that ended the right to
abortion, this picture is the new Amer-
ican reality, as states across the south
and midwest embrace their new abil-
ity to ban abortion – at times with-
out exception. The consequences have
been both chaotic and predictable.
“Everything is super in flux right
now,” said Elizabeth Nash of the Gutt-
macher Institute, a reproductive rights
research organization.
“We’re looking at probably about 15
above as the firefighters helped Ron
wrangle the terrified Duke into the back
of their pickup and grab his pill boxes,
before they ferried the duo back down
the mountain to safety.
Jessen and Ascarie, who hail from
different parts of California but were
assigned as partners for the incident,
spent the rest of the morning tra-
versing through the towns to post the
latest maps and answer questions for
a public hungry for information. Along
with supplying essential intel, big-inci-
dent firefights also often require res-
cues like Duke’s. “It is part of the job,
you are just in the right place at the
Marc Short, former Vice-President Mike Pence's chief of staff. Photograph: J Scott Applewhite/AP
has only escalated in recent months, as
the House January 6 select committee
argues Trump obstructed an official
Flowers and a green bandana in front of the US supreme court during a memorial service
for those who will die as a result of the Roe v Wade reversal. Photograph: Allison Bailey/
NurPhoto/Rex/Shutterstock
million women living in a state with an
abortion ban right now. That number
we expect to increase, because more
states are looking to ban abortion – and
we could see as much as half of the
country without abortion access very
soon.”
right time,” Jessen said, adding: “I have
a feeling this isn’t going to be the last
one.”
Throughout the town of Mariposa,
people huddled around their A-frame
information posts sharing stories and
offering their thanks for the ongoing
firefighting effort. Flags flapped over-
head, turning what might have oth-
erwise been a breezy reprieve on a hot
summer’s day into another foreboding
sign that the fire loomed close.
Further up the highway, a road-
side diner called Steve’s Sportsman’s
Café had become a de facto hub for
locals, both those displaced by the fire
proceeding – a crime – in trying to stop
Joe Biden’s certification.
It was not clear to which grand jury,
At its most basic level, the upheaval
caused by the supreme court’s decision
in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health
Organization has endangered patients,
doctors and lawyers said. Dobbs ended
federal abortion protections nearly 50
years after the landmark decision Roe v
and others watching and waiting. Out-
side, a motorcyclist shared videos of
his harrowing close call with the fire. It
spared his home but claimed his shed,
where priceless keepsakes – his grand-
father’s fishing poles and guns – had
been housed. “Still, it could have been a
lot worse,” he said, shaking his head as
he walked into the restaurant.
From behind the cash register,
Tracy Heidseck dished details on how
power outages caused by the blaze did
their own kind of damage. “We already
lost all our food in our fridge and our
freezers,” she said, adding that her well
had also run dry and there wasn’t even
and therefore to which investigation,
Short testified. The justice department
has impaneled several grand juries over
Wade, and returned regulation of abor-
tion to states.
Bans at six weeks gestation or ear-
lier, before most women know they are
pregnant, are in force in 12 states as
of Thursday. The bans have forced pa-
tients seeking abortions, and who have
the time and money, to travel hundreds
of miles from home. At times, that
travel has also placed friends, family
and abortion rights organizations in
legal jeopardy, as states have crimi-
nalized helping people obtain abor-
tions. Other patients have seen routine
care for miscarriages and ectopic preg-
nancies delayed, as doctors fear crim-
inal sanctions should they accidentally
violate bans.
“Truly frustrating and harrowing in
my view, the state of Texas [being]
intentionally ambiguous about when
hospitals can provide care,” said David
Donatti, a staff attorney at the Amer-
ican Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of
Texas. Patients face “prolonged pain
and suffering for pregnancies that are
The Guardian Tuesday 26 July 2022
water to flush toilets. This was one part
of fire threats, which she said loom
large year after year, that takes a toll.
“I am just exhausted,” she said. “I have
no water and no power.”
But the community – and the
restaurant – have come together during
this trying time. Steve Knauf, who owns
the diner, ambled over to offer his sup-
port. “There’s been a lot of hugs and
tears the last couple of days,” he said,
adding: “But, it is like one big family in
here.”
The Associated Press contributed to
this report
the Capitol attack, including one ex-
amining Trump’s fake electors scheme,
which is also being investigated by a
special grand jury in Georgia.
The grand jury investigating the
fake electors scheme – grand jury #22-4
– sought information about the involve-
ment of Donald Trump and his law-
yers, while the grand jury that subpoe-
naed former Trump White House offi-
cial Peter Navarro – grand jury #22-3 –
sought his contacts with Trump.
Nonetheless, Short’s grand jury
appearance marks the first known time
that a top Trump White House official
with inside knowledge about Trump’s
actions leading up to the Capitol attack
and what took place in the West Wing
in the following days has cooperated
with the justice department.
When Short testified in a tran-
scribed interview with the select com-
mittee earlier this year, he told congres-
sional investigators about how Trump
tried to enlist Pence in order to have
him stop Biden’s certification as part of
a wider effort to overturn the 2020 elec-
tion results.
Danielle Maness, chief nurse executive,
stands in an empty examination room used
to perform abortions at the Women’s Health
Center of West Virginia in Charleston. A
judge recently blocked enforcement of the
state’s 150-year-old abortion ban. Photo-
graph: Leah Willingham/AP
not viable, because the chilling effect of
what the state of Texas has done is so
powerful”, he said.
More broadly, however, the court’s
late June decision has shifted what
was once a fight over national abortion
policy to multiple fights in individual
states, and even local governments.
In Louisiana, the legality of abortion
Continued on page 3
Tuesday 26 July 2022 The Guardian
Continued from page 2
has changed almost daily, as a court
case about three new abortion bans
progresses. On the local level, some
progressive cities such as Austin, Texas,
intend to bar police from investigating
abortion-related cases, even as the state
bans the procedure.
Meanwhile, small towns and some
conservative prosecutors have vowed
enforcement. In Benton county, Arkan-
sas, the local prosecutor warned abor-
tion would be investigated “like any
other potential crime”.
In those states where abortion re-
mains legal, patients have suddenly
found clinic appointments full. In
Kansas, the nearest state to Arkansas,
Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas (all of
which have banned abortion), clinics
are at capacity.
“We just don’t have enough appoint-
ments to meet the need,” said
Emily Wales, the president and CEO
of Planned Parenthood Great Plains,
which once operated clinics in Arkan-
sas, Missouri and Oklahoma, as well as
Kansas. “That’s something we’re trying
Reality Winner says she leaked file on Russia
election hacking because ‘public was being
lied to’
Ramon Antonio Vargas
A former intelligence contractor who
was imprisoned for leaking a report
about Russian interference in the
US presidential election that Donald
Trump won in 2016 has insisted she
acted out of love for a nation that was
“being lied to”.
“I am not a traitor – I am not a
spy,” Reality Winner said in an interview
aired Sunday on CBS’ 60 Minutes. “I am
somebody who only acted out of love
for what this country stands for.”
In some of her most extensive
remarks about her case since she
was freed from prison last year for
good behavior, Winner portrayed her-
self living as normal a life as possible in
Texas, teaching yoga and fitness while
also being a pet owner, daughter and
sister named after a pun of her family’s
surname and her father’s wish to have a
“real winner”.
The 30-year-old also gave perhaps
the most detailed account yet about the
day she decided to leave her National
Security Agency contractor’s office at
the Fort Gordon army base in Georgia
with an intelligence report about Rus-
sian attempts to meddle in the election
that saw Trump beat Hillary Clinton for
the White House.
Working for NSA contractor
Pluribus International Corporation,
Winner printed the document – labeled
“TOP SECRET” – that explained how
Russian military intelligence officials
Headlines
to make clear to Kansans as well.” The
nearest clinics with appointments may
now be in Illinois, Colorado, Nebraska
and New Mexico, she said.
A still untold number of patients
will carry unwanted or dangerous preg-
nancies to term, a situation likely to
worsen as more states bring bans online
in the coming weeks.
North Dakota, Idaho and Wyom-
ing are all expected to begin enforcing
bans this summer. Indiana has called
a special session to restrict abortion.
A more severe criminal ban, providing
punishments of 99 years in prison
and $100,000 in fines, is also expected
in Texas, where abortion is already
banned.
The court’s decision has also rippled
into politics, as Americans absorb the
shock of rescinding a nearly 50-year-old
precedent.
Kansas is representative of one such
political battle. On 2 August, voters
there will cast ballots on the first abor-
tion-related referendum in the country,
in what is likely to be a tight and close-
ly watched campaign. Its neighboring
states have, one by one, banned abor-
Reality Winner in 2010 while in the Air Force Photograph: US Government
hacked at least one supplier of voting
software and tried to break into more
than 100 local election systems before
the polls closed in 2016.
She tucked the report into the
pantyhose underneath her dress and
walked out of her office at the Fort
Gordon army base in Georgia before the
document became the basis of an ar-
ticle published on the Intercept news
site.
Federal authorities announced that
Winner had been arrested about an
hour after that article came out. The
tion: when the supreme court allowed
Texas to ban abortion at six weeks
gestation in 2021, clinics in Oklahoma
began to care for Texas patients; then
Oklahoma passed a similar six-week
ban, forcing patients to Missouri and
Kansas; when the court ruled in Dobbs,
Missouri banned abortion, too. That has
left Kansas as a legal haven for abortion.
It may not remain that way. Law-
makers have placed a statewide consti-
tutional amendment vote on the pri-
mary ballot, which would give the
Republican-dominated state legislature
more latitude to restrict abortion in a
state where lawmakers have already
shown interest in banning it.
However, Kansas could also be a
bellwether of how overturning Roe v
Wade has changed the political land-
scape. New polling suggests the court’s
decision may have galvanized suppor-
ters of abortion rights – an issue that
previously motivated its opponents
more strongly than supporters. About
85% of Americans support legal abor-
tion under at least some circumstances.
Historically, however, they have been
less well organized than anti-abortion
Trump administration had her charged
under the Espionage Act, which was in-
itially created during the first world war
as a means to punish people spying on
the US during times of foreign conflict.
Winner pleaded guilty as part of a
deal with prosecutors that called for
her to be sentenced to five years in
prison beginning in 2018. She earned
the right to an early release in June of
2021.
In Sunday’s interview, Winner said
she broke her oath to protect classified
material because Americans were being
groups.
Now, there has been a “dramatic in-
crease in moderate Republicans, apolit-
ical folks” who have found themselves
interested in the Kansas referendum ,
said Ashley All from Kansas for Consti-
tutional Freedom, a group that sup-
ports abortion rights. She said the
court’s decision “was a wake-up call
for people who thought their consti-
tutional rights were protected at the
federal level – and that is not the case
now”.
Kansas won’t be the only place
where the new political reality is tested.
A record number of states have ballot
initiatives on abortion rights this fall.
Voters in Kentucky and Montana will be
asked to vote on anti-abortion ballot
measures, while voters in California
and Vermont will be asked to protect
abortion rights. Campaigners in Mich-
igan, too, are working to secure a ballot
initiative to protect abortion rights.
Notably, local campaigners said
Kansas’s abortion rights vote has also
energized the LGBTQ+ community.
The rights to gay marriage, same-sex
intimacy and contraception were all
intentionally deceived about Russia’s
efforts to sow chaos in the presidential
election that vaulted Trump into the
Oval Office. Winner hoped the report
would end what some purported was
confusion over whether or not Russia
had meddled in the race that Clinton
lost.
“The truth wasn’t true any more,”
said Winner, who also served in the US
air force between 2010 and 2016. “The
public was being lied to.”
Winner said the leak “did not
betray” the country’s “sources and me-
3
called into question in the Dobbs deci-
sion in a concurring opinion by Jus-
tice Clarence Thomas, who argued the
court should “reconsider” cases grant-
ing those rights.
“They’re showing up and showing
out,” Martha Pint, co-president of the
League of Women Voters in Kansas.
“This right to reproductive choice – they
honestly feel their rights will be next.”
While there does appear to be bipar-
tisan support in Congress for enshrin-
ing protections for gay marriage in sta-
tute – even as Senate Republicans are
expected to block protections for abor-
tion and contraception – any hopes that
abortion bans would increase support
among Republicans for social safety
net programshave so far been dashed.
Instead, anti-abortion groups have fo-
cused on closing remaining legal routes
to abortion.
“When all is said and done, about
half of the states [could ban] abortion,”
said Nash. “Meaning 34 million women
of reproductive age would live without
access.”
thods” for obtaining sensitive intel-
ligence.
“I knew it was secret,” Winner
added. “But I also knew that I
had pledged service to the American
people. And at that point in time, it felt
like they were being led astray.”
Her attorney, Alison Grinter Allen,
also spoke to 60 Minutes corres-
pondent Scott Pelley.
Allen told Pelley that her client
indeed broke the law but argued that
Winner’s prosecution – the first of its
kind during the Trump presidency –
was little more than political retri-
bution. The lawyer also said that she
would help Winner pursue a pardon be-
cause her receiving one would be “the
right thing for the country”.
Winner said her imprisonment was
grueling, occurring during coronavirus
lockdowns and the worldwide pro-
tests ignited by the police murder
of George Floyd in Minneapolis. She
said she contemplated dying by suicide
and stopped those thoughts solely be-
cause of her loved ones, particularly her
mother, and that she’s tried to “have a
sense of accomplishment in having sur-
vived prison”.
“I try so hard not to frame things as
being worth it or not worth it,” Winner
said. “What I know is that I’m home
with my parents. And we take our lives
every day moving forward as being
richer in knowing what to be grateful
for.”

4 Headlines
Typically mild Pacific north-west braces for
another blazing heatwave
Maanvi Singh and agencies
A searing heatwave is expected to bring
dangerously high temperatures to US
Pacific north-west – a region known for
its mild, temperate summers.
As Oregon, Washington, parts of
northern California and British Colum-
bia brace for a week of temperatures
well above historic averages, officials
are warning residents in the region –
many of whom lack air conditioning
and are unaccustomed to heat – to take
precautions.
Though the forecast falls short of
June 2021 “heat dome” that brought
temperatures of 116F (46.7C) to Port-
land, and 118F (47.8C) to other parts of
the Pacific north-west, and resulted in
more than 600 deaths, local officials say
the duration of this heat wave is con-
cerning.
“To have five-day stretches or a
week-long stretch above 90 degrees is
very, very rare for the Pacific north-
west,” said Vivek Shandas, professor of
climate adaptation at Portland State
University.
The National Weather Service
(NWS) has warned that the end of the
week will feel worst for many resi-
dents. “Residents without air condi-
tioners will experience a buildup of
heat within their home through late
in the week,” the NWS warned. This
“will significantly increase the poten-
tial for heat related illnesses”, the NWS
warned, especially for outdoor workers.
As the climate crisis fuels longer,
Attack in Vancouver suburb leaves two
homeless people and gunman dead
Leyland Cecco and agencies
Canadian police say two people have
been killed in an early morning gun
attack in a Vancouver suburb that left
two others injured and appeared to
target homeless residents. The suspect
was shot dead by officers.
On Monday morning, the Royal
Canadian Mounted Police said most
of the shootings were in downtown
Langley in southwest British Columbia.
There was also a reported shooting in
the neighbouring Langley township.
Two of the victims were pro-
nounced dead at the scene, police said
later on Monday. One woman remained
in critical condition. A fourth person
was shot in the leg.
The attack is believed to have un-
folded over several hours. Images from
social media showed multiple vehicles,
including a police SUV, with bullet
holes in them.
Residents received a cellphone alert
at about 6.30am warning people to
avoid the area. The alert described the
suspect as a white male, wearing brown
overalls and a blue and green camouf-
A volunteer helps set up snacks at a cooling center in Oregon during a Pacific north-west heatwave last year. Photograph: Gillian Flaccus/
AP
more extreme heatwaves, the region
that many once considered a climate
refuge has found itself once again
facing weather it is wholly unprepared
for.
Portland, Oregon’s bureau of emer-
gency management is opening cooling
centers in public buildings and instal-
ling misting stations in parks. Officials
hope outreach efforts will help those
facing the greatest risk from heat, in-
cluding people who are older, people
who live alone, those with disabil-
ities, low-income households without
air conditioning and the unhoused.
A car with bullet holes in it at the scene of the shootings in Langley, British Columbia, on Monday. Photograph: Jesse Winter/Reuters
lage T-shirt.
Police cordoned off a main
thoroughfare through the centre of the
city. Authorities later issued a second
alert saying the suspect was in custody
“Unfortunately there’s this inter-
section of our climate crisis and our
housing emergency,” said Jonna Papaef-
thimiou, chief resilience officer for the
Portland bureau of emergency manage-
ment, adding that unhoused people
“face the greatest risk from all kinds
of severe weather.”
The heatwave will be especially in-
tense in Yakima, Washington, where
temperatures between 102F and 107F
are expected midweek. Portland is ex-
pecting highs in the 90s, topping off at
100F. And Seattle is expected to hit 90F
temperatures on four consecutive days
and there was no longer a threat to the
public. It was not clear what medical
condition the suspect was in when they
were apprehended.
Authorities initially said they were
this week, according to the NWS.
This heatwave has hit at the tail
end of another heatwave in the north-
east and the mid-Atlantic last week
that put more than 85 million Amer-
icans under excessive heat warnings
on Sunday. Parts of northern California
will also be affected by the high temper-
atures, all while the Oak fire at the
Sierra Nevada foothills forces thou-
sands from their homes. Swathes of the
south-west, from Phoenix to Las Vegas,
are also under excessive heat warnings.
And in the Vancouver area, authorities
have warned residents to prepare for a
unsure whether the shooter acted
alone. But police later said the man
being held was believed to be solely
responsible. Police also said the sus-
pect was known to them. A homicide
The Guardian Tuesday 26 July 2022
stretch of high heat.
Much of the US saw above-av-
erage warmer temperatures in June, ac-
cording to the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (Noaa).
Noaa estimates that weather and cli-
mate disasters, including tornadoes,
hail and extreme drought, have cost at
least $9bn in damage across the nation
so far this year.
Last year’s deadly heat dome
prompted Portland to adapt meas-
ures requiring new subsidized housing
constructions to have air conditioning
and housing built after April 2024 to
install air conditioning in at least one
room. Portland also launched a heat re-
sponse program to provide heat pumps
and cooling devices to vulnerable resi-
dents. It aims to distribute 15,000 units
over the next five years.
About 3,000 cooling units have
been ordered but only about 750 have
been installed so far, according to fig-
ures from Earth Advantage, the non-
profit overseeing the program’s pur-
chases and logistics. This is partly due
to supply chain shortages amid growing
demand for air conditioners, according
to Jaimes Valdez, the organizational,
development and policy manager for
the Portland Clean Energy Fund, which
oversees the initiative.
“This equipment is in high demand,
not just in the region but globally,”
said Valdez, citing recent heatwaves in
Europe. “We do see a lot of need and
this program is ramping up.”
team confirmed on social media that
its investigators had been deployed to
Langley to help the mounted police.
Yellow police tape surrounded a
sandwich shop and a parking lot in
Langley at the scene of one of the
shootings. A black tent was set up
over one of the crime scenes.Langley
is about 30 miles (50km) southeast of
Vancouver.
Mass shootings are less common in
Canada than in the US. The deadliest
gun rampage in Canadian history hap-
pened in 2020 when a man disguised
as a police officer shot people in their
homes and set fires across the province
of Nova Scotia, killing 22 people.
The federal government recently
announced plans to overhaul its gun-
control laws, restricting the purchase,
importation and selling of handguns.
“We are capping the number of
handguns in this country,” said the
prime minister, Justin Trudeau. The
regulations to halt the growth of perso-
nally owned handguns is expected to
be enacted this autumn.
Tuesday 26 July 2022 The Guardian
Six staffers arrested after climate sit-in at
Chuck Schumer’s office
Richard Luscombe
Six staffers were reportedly arrested
in Congress on Monday afternoon for
staging a sit-in at Senate majority leader
Chuck Schumer’s office and protesting
about a lack of legislative action on the
environment.
The congressional staffers and
activists had started the demonstration
earlier Monday, with 17 staffers sitting
in Schumer’s office to demand that he
reopen climate negotiations, according
to Saul Levin, a policy adviser for pro-
gressive congresswoman Cori Bush.
“Right now, we Hill staffers are
peacefully protesting Dem leaders
INSIDE. To my knowledge, this has
never been done,” he wrote.
Some also protested outside the
building.
Schumer, Senate majority leader,
had been under pressure to negotiate
a climate deal, especially after the su-
preme court struck down a key protec-
tion of the Environmental Protection
Agency.
But Schumer, and Joe Biden’s, ef-
Goodfellas actor Paul Sorvino dies at 83
Adrian Horton
Paul Sorvino, the Tony-nominated
actor who played mobster Paulie Cicero
in Goodfellas, has died at age 83. Sor-
vino, the father of actor Mira Sorvino,
died of natural causes on Monday, his
wife Dee Dee announced.
“Our hearts are broken, there will
never be another Paul Sorvino, he was
the love of my life and one of the great-
est performers to ever grace the screen
and stage,” she said in a statement pub-
lished by the Hollywood Reporter.
The Brooklyn native’s career
spanned over a half century, with
memorable roles as James Caan’s
bookie in The Gambler, secretary of
state Henry Kissinger in Oliver Stone’s
Nixon, Claire Danes’s father in Baz
Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, and a he-
roin-addicted lounge singer alongside
Alec Baldwin in The Cooler.
He was nominated for a Tony award
in 1973 for his performance as Phil
Romano, one of four former high school
basketball players who visit their old
Pope Francis ‘begs forgiveness’ over abuse at
church schools in Canada
Leyland Cecco
Pope Francis has apologised for the
“disastrous error” and “evil” of Canada’s
church-run residential schools, asking
survivors of the system that abused
tens of thousands of children for for-
giveness as he toured the country on a
Headlines
Congressional staffers and activists staged a sit-in at the office of Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, on Monday. Photograph: J
Scott Applewhite/AP
forts to advance climate legislation
have been thwarted largely because of
the opposition of the Democratic West
Paul Sorvino in 2014. Photograph: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
coach, in the Pulitzer-winning Broad-
way production of Jason Miller’s That
Championship Season.
“pilgrimage of penance”.
The pontiff’s widely anticipated
apology came during a Monday morn-
ing visit to the community of Mask-
wacis, Alberta – the first formal event
of his one-week tour after landing in the
western province on Sunday.
“I am sorry. I ask for forgiveness,
in particular, for the ways in which
Virginia senator Joe Manchin, who has
been called a “modern day villain” for
his ties to the fossil fuel industry
Sorvino also worked with actor-
director Warren Beatty over several
decades – as the founder of the Amer-
many members of the church and
of religious communities cooperated,
not least through their indifference,
in projects of cultural destruction and
forced assimilation promoted by the
governments of that time, which culmi-
nated in the system of residential
schools,” Francis said, telling nearly
2,000 survivors of the residential school
and killing off the president’s environ-
mental proposals.
Later in the day the sit-in at Schu-
ican Communist party in Reds and in
Dick Tracy, Bulworth and Rules Don’t
Apply.
system of his “indignation” and “shame”
over the painful memory of the treat-
ment of Indigenous children.
Francis also lamented the “colo-
nising mentality” behind the system
and “catastrophic” effects it had on
generations of Indigenous people. “I
humbly beg forgiveness for the evil
committed by so many Christians
5
mer’s office seemed to turn more
contentious.
A tweet posted by NBC News re-
porter Julia Jester features a short video
purporting to show one of the staff
members in handcuffs, explaining why
the group jeopardized their careers to
take the action.
The reporter asked the male staf-
fer what they were demanding of the
senior Democrat. He replied: “to reopen
negotiations on the climate reconcil-
iation package ... and pass climate legis-
lation”.
Christian Hall, a congressional re-
porter for Punchbowl News, also
tweeted that Philip Bennet, president
of the Congressional Workers Union,
had been taken away in handcuffs.
The reporter asked why the group
had chosen Schumer’s office, and not
that of Manchin. (Earlier today, Man-
chin announced he had tested posi-
tive for Covid-19 and was working re-
motely).
The staffer replied cryptically: “Be-
cause there’s always going to be a sheep
that strays away from the herd.”
Sorvino was born in the Benson-
hurst neighborhood of Brooklyn in
1939, the son of an Italian immigrant
father who worked in a robe factory
and a homemaker mother, also a piano
teacher. He dreamed of becoming an
opera singer, performing first in hotels
in the Catskills, but problems with
asthma made him focus on acting.
He attended the American Musical
and Dramatic Academy under Stanford
Meisner and William Esper, and made
his Broadway debut as a singing pa-
trolman in the comedy Bajour in 1964.
He appeared on film for the first time in
Carl Reiner’s Where’s Poppa? in 1970.
Sorvino’s résumé also included one
season as Chris Noth’s partner on Law
& Order, the CBS dramedy That’s Life,
The Panic in Needle Park, The Day of
the Dolphin, The Rocketeer, The Firm,
Mr 3000 and The Bronx Bull.
Sorvino is survived by his third wife,
Dee Dee, whom he met after they both
appeared on Fox News’s Your World
with Neil Cavuto and married in 2014,
as well as his children Mira, Amanda
and Michael and several grandchildren.
against the Indigenous peoples,” he
said.
He and the survivors had gathered
at the Powwow Arbour – a space for
First Nations community gatherings
and celebrations.
The prime minister, Justin Trudeau,
Continued on page 6

6 Headlines
Continued from page 5
the governor general, Mary Simon,
the Assembly of First Nations na-
tional chief, RoseAnne Archibald, and a
number of federal lawmakers were also
in attendance.
The event at Maskwacis (Cree for
“bear hills”), the site of Ermineskin,
Samson, Louis Bull and Montana na-
tions, is the only First Nations com-
munity Francis will visit on his tour
of Canada. The location also marks
the site of the former Ermineskin resi-
dential school, one of the largest of its
kind in the country, which ran from
1895 until 1975.
An anguished rendering of Canada’s
national anthem in Cree by an Indi-
genous woman with tears streaming
down her face marked one of several
emotional moments on Monday.
“It’s a special moment for survivors,”
said Phil Fontaine, a residential school
survivor and former Assembly of First
Nations national chief, who was at the
event.
The unscripted moment capped
a ceremony fraught with symbolism.
Some at the event wore indigenous re-
galia, while others wore orange shirts
to mark the legacy of the residential
school system and the children who
never came home from the institutions.
People watched intently as the pope
spoke, while others leaned on each
other. Some wept.
After the pope spoke, Chief Wilton
Elon Musk denies reported affair with wife of
Google co-founder
Dan Milmo Global technology
editor
Elon Musk has denied a Wall Street
Journal report that claimed he had an
affair with Nicole Shanahan, the wife
of the Google co-founder Sergey Brin,
accusing the news outlet of running
“hit pieces” on him and Tesla.
The chief executive of the electric
carmaker tweeted on Monday rejecting
the affair claim as “total BS”, adding that
he and Brin were still friends.
Citing unidentified sources, the
Wall Street Journal reported at the
weekend that Musk had engaged in a
brief affair with Shanahan in Decem-
ber last year. The paper claimed the
affair had prompted Brin to file for di-
vorce from Shanahan in January and
had ended the tech billionaires’ long
friendship.
Musk tweeted that he was at a party
with Brin on Sunday and that there was
“nothing romantic” between him and
Shanahan, a lawyer and research fellow
at CodeX, an organisation dedicated
to using technology to improve legal
processes based at Stanford University
in California. She is also the president of
a foundation that focuses on criminal
justice reform, reproductive longevity
for women and climate science.
In a later tweet to his more than
100 million followers, Musk said he
Pope Francis wears a headdress presented to him by Indigenous leaders in Maskwacis. Photograph:VATICAN MEDIA/AFP/Getty Images
Littlechild placed a feather headdress
on the pontiff as the crowd cheered.
Over more than a century, at
least 150,000 Indigenous children were
taken from their families and forced to
attend schools like Ermineskin, run by
the Catholic church.
Survivors of the school have tes-
tified about physical abuse as well as
punishment for speaking their mother
tongue. At least 15 children died while
attending the school, including three
of tuberculosis in 1903. A government
Musk tweeted that he was at a party with Sergey Brin on Sunday and that there was ‘nothing romantic’ between him and Shanahan.
Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty
had “lost count” of the number of “hit
pieces” about him published by the
Wall Street Journal. Musk claimed the
news organisation had once reported
that the FBI was about to arrest him,
although a 2018 WSJ article alleging a
criminal investigation into Tesla does
not refer to arrests being planned.
In a subsequent tweet, Musk said
the paper should run stories that “ac-
survey in the 1920s found that half
of the pupils at the school were in-
fected with tuberculosis, according to
the Indian Residential School History
and Dialogue Centre.
The school has largely been torn
down and five teepees now stand at
the site, representing the four nations
in the area, with the fifth serving as a
symbol of the entrance to where the
school once stood.
In 2008, the federal government for-
mally apologised for establishing and
tually matter to their readers and have
solid factual basis”.
Brin filed for divorce citing “irrecon-
cilable differences”, the Journal said,
quoting records it said were filed in
Santa Clara County superior court. Brin
is a board member at Google’s parent
company, Alphabet, and is the world’s
eighth richest person, with a fortune
worth $94.6bn (£78.6bn), according to
running the schools, paying billions of
Canadian dollars in compensation to
survivors.
While both the Protestant and
Anglican churches ran schools, the
majority, nearly 130, were operated by
the Catholic church. Yet the Vatican for
years had repeatedly resisted calls for a
papal apology.
Before visiting the site of the school,
Francis toured the Ermineskin ceme-
tery, where many who attended the
school are now buried.
Bloomberg. Musk is the world’s richest
person and is worth $242bn.
In its report, the Journal also said
Brin instructed his advisers to sell per-
sonal investments in Musk’s companies
after he came to know about the affair.
The paper said it was not able to
determine how large those investments
were, nor whether any sales were made.
A spokeswoman for the Wall Street
The Guardian Tuesday 26 July 2022
“I do know when two people
have apologised, we feel better,” Chief
Greg Desjarlais of the Frog Lake First
Nation in northern Alberta, and a resi-
dential school survivor, told reporters
on Sunday. “But our people have been
through a lot … Our people have been
traumatised. Some of them didn’t make
it home. Now I hope the world will see
why our people are so hurt.”
Ahead of the pope’s remarks, a
banner bearing the names of more than
4,000 children who died in the resi-
dential school system was unfurled on
the arbour grounds.
The pope’s apology in the presence
of Indigenous leaders and residential
school survivors, given on the tradi-
tional territory of those affected by the
legacy of the schools, marks the second
time he has looked to atone to the
church’s past actions.
In April, during a meeting with Indi-
genous delegates at the Vatican, Fran-
cis apologised to survivors, formally
expressing contrition for “deplorable”
past abuses.
Later on Monday, Francis is ex-
pected to visit a Catholic parish in the
provincial capital of Edmonton. The
church incorporates Indigenous lan-
guage and customs in liturgy. In the
coming days, the pope will travel to
Quebec City and Iqaluit, the capital of
the northern Nunavut territory.
Reuters contributed to this report
Journal said: “We are confident in our
sourcing, and we stand by our re-
porting.”
Google and Shanahan have been
contacted for comment.
The Journal’s allegation was pub-
lished as Musk faces a court battle
in October over his attempts to ter-
minate his $44bn purchase of Twitter.
The social media platform wants to
force Musk to go ahead with an agreed
transaction that values the company at
$54.20 per share. Musk walked away
from the deal this month, citing con-
cerns over the number of bot accounts
active on Twitter.
Meanwhile, Tesla disclosed in a
regulatory filing on Monday that it had
received a second subpoena from the
US financial watchdog in relation to
Musk’s tweets in 2018 about taking the
company private. The company said it
had received the subpoena from the US
Securities and Exchange Commission
(SEC) on 13 June and that it would coo-
perate.
In November last year, the regulator
subpoenaed Tesla in relation to a settle-
ment that required Musk’s tweets on
material information to be vetted. In
2018, Musk settled an SEC lawsuit over
his tweets about taking Tesla private by
agreeing to let the company’s lawyers
pre-approve tweets that contained ma-
terial information about Tesla.
Tuesday 26 July 2022 The Guardian
Two Americans killed while volunteering to
defend Ukraine from Russia identified
Ramon Antonio Vargas
Two Americans who were killed along-
side a pair of Canadian and Swedish
nationals while volunteering to defend
Ukraine from Russia’s invasion earlier
this month have now been identified.
Luke Lucyszyn and Bryan Young
were the US citizens killed during an
ambush by a Russian tank on 18 July,
their Ukrainian commander said on
Facebook. The attack in which they
died also killed Emile-Antoine Roy-
Sirois of Canada and Edvard Selan-
der Patrignani, according to the com-
mander, Ruslan Miroshnichenko.
Citing an account from Mirosh-
nichenko, Russian shelling left Lucy-
syzyn wounded, and that prompted
Young and the others to try to help
him, CBS News reported. Additional
tank fire killed the four foreign volun-
teers in the Donetsk region, a heav-
ily disputed region of Ukraine, Mirosh-
nichenko said.
Miroshnichenko’s remarks came
after the US state department late last
week announced the recent deaths of
two Americans in Ukraine, without re-
leasing any additional details. They are
among at least six Americans who have
died in Ukraine since it was invaded by
Russia in February.
Sixth man linked to 1989 Central Park rape
case is exonerated
Associated Press in New York
A forgotten co-defendant of the so-
called “Central Park Five”, whose
convictions in a notorious 1989 rape in
New York City were thrown out more
than a decade later, is set have his
conviction on a related charge over-
turned.
A hearing was scheduled for
Monday afternoon in the case of Steven
Lopez, who was arrested along with
five other Black and Latino teenagers
in the rape and assault on Trisha Meili
but reached a deal with prosecutors to
plead guilty to the lesser charge of rob-
bing a male jogger.
The brutal assault on Meili, a 28-
year-old white investment banker who
was in a coma for 12 days after the
attack, was considered emblematic of
New York City’s lawlessness in an era
when the city recorded 2,000 murders a
year.
Five teenagers were convicted in
the attack on Meili and served six to
News
A tank in the Donetsk region, a heavily disputed region of Ukraine, where the US citizens were killed. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty
Images
Lucyszyn’s parents, Kathryn and
George, told NBC News that their son
had gone to Ukraine in early April to
volunteer as a medic. He worried that
his group lacked necessary equipment
and asked his folks to send over a tac-
tical vest and other supplies, the couple
from Calabash, North Carolina, said.
Manhattan’s district attorney, Alvin Bragg: ‘We talk about the Central Park Five, the Exonerated Five, but there were six people on that
indictment.’ Photograph: Eduardo Muñoz/Reuters
13 years in prison. Their convictions
“He didn’t go there to be a hero,”
Kathryn Lucyszyn said of her 31-year-
old son. “He went there because he
wanted to help people.”
Miroshnichenko said his unit nick-
named Lucyszyn “Skywalker” after the
protagonist of the original Star Wars
film trilogy who shared his first name.
were overturned in 2002 after evidence
Likening their struggle to that
of Luke Skywalker, Miroshnichenko
called Lucyszyn, Young, Roy-Sirois and
Patrignani “warriors of light and good,
heroes of Ukraine”.
US officials, including the president,
Joe Biden, have discouraged Americans
from volunteering to defend Ukraine.
linked a convicted serial rapist and
7
While the government is helping the
Ukrainian defense by providing billions
of dollars in weapons and other re-
sources, it says it is limited in its ability
to help American citizens once things
go awry there.
Many US nationals have none-
theless still travelled to the country
during the conflict.
Americans who have been killed
there include video journalist Brent
Renaud; Jimmy Hill, who was gunned
down while waiting in a bread line; Ste-
phen Zabielski, who was slain during
fighting in May; and Willy Joseph
Cancel, who died during battle in April.
Meanwhile, at least two other Amer-
icans were taken prisoner by Rus-
sian forces during a gunfight in June:
Alexander Drueke and Andy Tai Ngoc
Huynh, both of Alabama.
A statement from Drueke’s family
late Sunday said the US state depart-
ment has spoken with him at least four
times, though it appeared each of the
calls was scripted, and therefore it was
difficult “for them to assess the men’s
treatment and conditions.”
The Kremlin has threatened both
prisoners with possible execution
though their families are hopeful the
US and Ukrainian governments can
negotiate their release.
murderer, Matias Reyes, to the attack.
The Central Park Five, now known
as the “Exonerated Five”, went on to
win a $40m settlement from the city
and inspire books, movies and tele-
vision shows.
Lopez, now 48, has not received
a settlement, and his case has been
nearly forgotten in the years since he
pleaded guilty to robbery in 1991 to
avoid the more serious rape charge.
Lopez’s expected exoneration was
first reported in the New York Times.
“We talk about the Central Park
Five, the Exonerated Five, but there
were six people on that indictment,”
the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin
Bragg, told the Times. “And the other
five who were charged, their convic-
tions were vacated. And it’s now time
to have Mr Lopez’s charge vacated.”
The Associated Press does not
usually identify victims of sexual as-
sault, but Meili went public in 2003 and
published a book titled I Am the Central
Park Jogger.

8 News
Democratic senator Joe Manchin tests
positive for Covid
Sam Levine in New York
Senator Joe Manchin, the West Virginia
Democrat who has thwarted many
of Joe Biden’s most ambitious policy
goals, has tested positive for Covid.
The 74-year-old senator is fully
vaccinated and said on Twitter on
Joni Mitchell gives first full live performance
since 2002
Laura Snapes
Joni Mitchell gave her first full live
performance since 2002 at this week-
end’s Newport Folk festival. Mitchell,
78, joined country musician and friend
Brandi Carlile at the festival to perform
Mitchell classics including A Case of
You, Both Sides Now and Big Yellow
Taxi. During the 13-song set, Mitchell
also performed the guitar solo from
Just Like This Train.
Joining her and Carlile – who has
covered Mitchell’s 1971 album Blue in
full – were Marcus Mumford, Wynonna
Judd, Blake Mills, Jess Wolfe and Holly
Laessig of the band Lucius, and Mit-
chell’s bandmates Phil and Tim Han-
seroth and Celisse Henderson: a live
version of the private “Joni Jam” nights
that Mitchell has held at her Los An-
geles home in recent years with the
likes of Elton John, Bonnie Raitt and
Herbie Hancock.
“I just realised, Joni’s the least nerv-
ous person up here,” Carlile told the
crowd.
As well as renditions of Mitchell
songs including Carey, Amelia and
Circle Game, the group also cov-
ered Gershwin’s Summertime, Frankie
Lymon’s Why Do Fools Fall in Love and
Leiber and Stoller’s Love Potion No 9.
Major blow for One America News as Verizon
Fios drops far-right network
Sam Levine in New York
Verizon Fios will no longer carry One
America News (OAN) at the end of this
month, dealing a major blow to the
far-right television network that has
become a hotbed of misinformation.
Verizon was the largest pay-TV pro-
vider still carrying the OAN, according
to the Daily Beast, which first reported
the network was getting dropped. Ve-
rizon and OAN were unable to reach
an agreement to continue providing the
network and customers will not be able
to access the service after 30 July.
The development means that OAN
in effect will not have a major television
platform in the US. DirecTV, a major
Monday he was experiencing mild
symptoms.
Manchin’s positive diagnosis comes
as Biden himself is recovering from
Covid-19. After four days of taking the
antiviral Paxlovid medication, the pres-
ident’s symptoms from the virus “have
now almost completely resolved”, his
physician, Kevin O’Connor, said in a
Joni Jam … Mitchell performing at the Newport folk festival on Sunday. Photograph: Douglas Mason/Getty Images
Watch videos of the performance at
Pitchfork and read the setlist below.
Mitchell’s last full live show was
at the Wiltern in Los Angeles on 13
November 2002. She last appeared at
the Newport folk festival in 1969 on the
same bill as Arlo Guthrie and the Everly
Brothers.
Since having a brain aneurysm in
‘One America News Network will be left without a major carrier to spread its often harm-
ful and dangerous disinformation and baseless conspiracy theories,’ said Yosef Getachew of
Common Cause. Photograph: David Barak/Zuma Wire/Rex/Shutterstock
statement on Monday. “When ques-
tioned, at this point he only notes some
residual nasal congestion and minimal
hoarseness.”
Both men tested positive amid a
surge in Covid cases across the US
in recent weeks. The highly conta-
gious BA.5 subvariant, which can avoid
immunity from vaccines better than
2015, Mitchell has made a steady return
to public life. She was present at a
tribute concert in celebration of her
75th birthday in 2018 and appeared on
stage as other musicians performed Big
Yellow Taxi to blow out the candles on
her birthday cake.
To mark the 50th anniversary of
Blue in June 2021, Mitchell shared a
its predecessors, is now the dominant
strain of the virus in the US.
Manchin’s diagnosis could affect an
expected vote this week on increas-
ing semiconductor chip production in
the US, the Associated Press reported.
While members of the US House of
Representatives can vote remotely by
proxy, members of the Senate cannot.
video thanking fans for “getting” an
album that originally “fell heir to a
lot of criticism” – namely that her
candid lyrics were undignified over-
sharing. She appeared at the Kennedy
Center Honors gala in December 2021
– telling reporters, “I’m hobbling along
but I’m doing all right” – where she was
among the recipients. In April, Mitchell
revenue provider for OAN, announced
that it was dropping the network in
April.
The only network still carrying the
channel is General Communications
Inc, available in a little over 100,000
households, the Daily Beast reported.
OAN is also still available on two little-
known streaming providers.
“One America News Network will be
left without a major carrier to spread its
often harmful and dangerous disinfor-
mation and baseless conspiracy theo-
ries,” said Yosef Getachew, the media
and democracy program director at
Common Cause, a government watch-
dog group that urged Verizon to drop
OAN. “This is a welcome change but
long overdue.
The Guardian Tuesday 26 July 2022
Manchin dealt a significant blow
to Democrats earlier this month when
he said he would not support climate
change and tax provisions in a bill
Biden hoped would be a signature part
of his domestic agenda.
was named MusiCares person of the
year and gave a brief performance at
the ceremony to honour her.
Mitchell is also working on a series
of archival releases to share demos, pre-
viously unheard material and covers.
The first, Joni Mitchell Archives Vol 1:
The Early Years (1963–1967), was re-
leased in October 2020 and featured a
rare new interview by Cameron Crowe
in the liner notes.
In January, she removed her cata-
logue from Spotify in solidarity with
Neil Young, who directed his manage-
ment and label to remove his music
from the streaming platform given its
support of Joe Rogan, whose pod-
cast has been criticised by doctors
for spreading misinformation about
Covid-19 and vaccination.
“Irresponsible people are spreading
lies that are costing people their lives,”
Mitchell said. “I stand in solidarity with
Neil Young and the global scientific and
medical communities on this issue.”
The full setlist of Joni Mitchell’s
Newport folk festival performance
CareyCome in from the Cold-
Help MeCase of YouBig Yellow
TaxiJust Like This TrainWhy Do
Fools Fall in LoveAmeliaLove Potion
No 9ShineSummertimeBoth Sides
NowThe Circle Game
“No company should profit from
spreading content that endangers our
democracy.”
Common Cause and other civil
rights groups have pressured carriers to
drop OAN.
The network, which has staunchly
supported Donald Trump, has played a
significant role in spreading the lie that
the 2020 election was stolen from the
former president.
It is facing billion-dollar lawsuits
from voting equipment vendors Domi-
nion and Smartmatic over its false
claims. In May, as part of a settlement
in a defamation lawsuit, the network re-
tracted untrue information about two
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.

Support The Guardian by subscribing.

Visit gu.com/subscribe-to-change

10
Continued from page 8
Georgia election workers falsely ac-
cused of committing crimes while bal-
lots were being counted in Atlanta in
Chinese military has become more
aggressive and dangerous, says US chief of
staff
Associated Press
The Chinese military has become
significantly more aggressive and dan-
gerous over the past five years, the
United States’ top military officer said
during a trip to the Indo-Pacific that in-
cluded a stop in Indonesia.
Gen Mark Milley, chairman of the
joint chiefs of staff, said on Sunday that
the number of intercepts by Chinese
aircraft and ships in the Pacific region
with US and other partner forces had
increased significantly over that time,
and the number of unsafe interactions
has risen by similar proportions.
“The message is the Chinese mili-
tary, in the air and at sea, have become
significantly more and noticeably more
aggressive in this particular region,” said
Milley, who recently asked his staff to
compile details about interactions be-
tween China and the US and others in
the region.
His comments, made en route to
a meeting with Indonesian defence
chiefs in Jakarta, came as the Indo-
nesian president, Joko Widodo, pre-
pared to set off to Bejiing for a two-
day visit on Monday where he will meet
the Chinese president, Xi Jinping. It will
be the first time in two years that a
foreign leader has been received indivi-
dually by Beijing aside from February’s
Winter Olympics.
Milley’s trip to the region is sharply
Shooting in Los Angeles park leaves at least
two dead
Guardian staff and agencies
At least two people were killed and sev-
eral others injured in a shooting at a
park in Los Angeles, officials said.
Seven people were taken to local
hospitals after gunfire erupted at an
informal car show at Peck Park in the
San Pedro neighborhood on Sunday,
the Los Angeles fire department
said.Two of them – a man and a woman
News
2020.
One of OAN’s top correspondents
also helped fundraise and support a
partisan review of the 2020 election
in Arizona as she covered it for the
The top US military leader, Gen Mark Milley, right, with Indonesia's military chief, Andika Perkasa, in Jakarta on Sunday. Photograph:
Mast Irham/EPA
focused on the China threat. He will
attend a meeting of Indo-Pacific de-
fence chiefs this coming week in Aus-
tralia, where key topics will be China’s
escalating military growth and the need
to maintain a free, open and peaceful
Pacific.
US military officials have also raised
alarms about the possibility that China
could invade Taiwan – possibly by 2027.
China has stepped up its military provo-
Police near the scene of a shooting at Peck
Park in San Pedro, Los Angeles, that left at
least two dead and several injured. Photo-
graph: Ringo HW Chiu/AP
network. That correspondent has since
left to work for Trump’s political action
committee.
Earlier this year, the OAN host Dan
Ball urged viewers to dig up dirt on
cations against the self-ruled island as
it looks to intimidate it into unify-
ing with the communist mainland.The
US and others are also worried that a
recent security agreement that Beijing
signed in April with the Solomon Isl-
ands could lead to the establishment of
a Chinese naval base in the South Pa-
cific. The US and Australia have told the
Solomon Islands that hosting a Chinese
military base would not be tolerated.
– later died of their wounds, depart-
ment spokesperson Brian Humphrey
said.
The shooting victims – four men
and three women – ranged in age from
23 to 54, he said, but could offer no
information about what caused the
confrontation.
The car show was an informal ga-
thering, rather than an officially sche-
duled event, Humphrey said. As part of
Southern California car culture, owners
AT&T executives as the carrier weighed
dropping the network. Ball last week
pleaded with viewers to contact Ve-
rizon and urge them not to drop the
network.
“This is an area in which China is
trying to do outreach for their own pur-
poses – and again, this is concerning
because China is not doing it just for
benign reasons,” Milley told reporters
travelling with him. “They’re trying
to expand their influence throughout
the region. And that has potential
consequences that are not necessarily
favourable to our allies and partners in
the region.”
of classic cars and low riders often
gather in public places to show off their
vehicles.
The Los Angeles police depart-
ment said the shooting started around
3.50pm, adding that the incident was
not an active shooter situation.
Police had yet to report whether
they had identified any suspects.
Peck Park is about 20 miles (32km)
south of downtown Los Angeles, Cali-
fornia.
The Guardian Tuesday 26 July 2022
Reporters are leaving OAN, and one
person there told the Daily Beast that
there has been a push to focus on con-
tent that can go viral on social media.
The Biden administration has been
taking steps to expand its military and
security relationship with Indo-Pacific
nations as part of a campaign to build a
stronger network of alliances in China’s
backyard and counter China’s growing
influence
Milley, who met on Sunday with
Gen Andika Perkasa, chief of the Indo-
nesian military, said Pacific nations like
Indonesia wanted the US military in-
volved and engaged in the region.
“We want to work with them to de-
velop interoperability and modernise
our militaries collectively,” Milley said,
in order to ensure they could “meet
whatever challenge that China poses”.
He said Indonesia was strategically
critical to the region, and had long been
a key US partner.
Milley, who spent the afternoon at
Indonesia’s military headquarters in Ja-
karta, was greeted with a massive bill-
board bearing his photo and name, a
military parade and a large television
screen that showed a video of his
career.
At the end of the visit, Andika
told reporters that Indonesia had found
China to be more assertive and “a
little bit aggressive” with naval vessels
in connection with territorial disputes
with his country.
The shooting is the latest to hit the
United States this summer, following
mass shootings in Highland Park, Illi-
nois, Uvalde, Texas, and Buffalo, New
York.
The wave of incidents has renewed
a fierce debate over why such mass ca-
sualty events keep occurring in the US,
and the need for new gun access legis-
lation.
Tuesday 26 July 2022 The Guardian
First Thing: Ginni Thomas faces possible
January 6 subpoena
Nicola Slawson
Good morning.
The House January 6 committee
could subpoena Ginni Thomas, the wife
of the supreme court justice Clarence
Thomas, if she will not testify volun-
tarily about her involvement in Donald
Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020
election.
The news from panel member Liz
Cheney came two days after Trump’s
former strategist Steve Bannon was
convicted of criminal contempt of Con-
gress for refusing to cooperate with the
committee. He faces time in jail.
The second Republican on the com-
mittee, Adam Kinzinger, said yesterday:
“You can’t ignore a congressional sub-
poena or you’ll pay the price,” a warning
he said applied to “any future witnesses
too”.
Cheney, the vice-chair of the panel,
told CNN’s State of the Union: “The
committee is engaged with [Ginni
Thomas’s] counsel. We certainly hope
that she will agree to come in volun-
tarily but the committee is fully pre-
pared to contemplate a subpoena if she
does not.”
Why does the committee want to
speak to Thomas? She corresponded
with Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of
staff, and John Eastman, a law professor
who shaped the congressional side of
a push that culminated in the deadly
Capitol attack. She also corresponded
with Arizona Republicans about at-
tempts to overturn Joe Biden’s victory
there.
What can we learn from the Jan-
uary 6 hearings? Trump’s efforts to
subvert the elections laid bare the
system’s weaknesses, exposing it to
greater exploitation.
California fire remains uncon-
tained as governor declares state of
emergency
A ferocious wildfire in the foothills
of the Sierra Nevada raged uncontained
yesterday, forcing thousands of resi-
dents from their homes in the gateway
to Yosemite national park.
The Oak fire started on Friday near
the town of Midpines, California, and
exploded in size over the weekend.
Burning through dense and dry
vegetation on the region’s steep and
rugged hillsides, the blaze was fanned
by gusty winds and temperatures that
How a Trump-backed ‘QAnon whack job’
won with Democratic ‘collusion’
Martin Pengelly in New York
Dan Cox, an extremist pro-Trump
Republican, won his party’s nomination
for governor in Maryland last week
thanks to “collusion between Trump
and the national Democrats”, the cur-
rent Republican governor said.
“I don’t think there’s any chance
that [Cox] can win,” Larry Hogan added,
speaking to CNN’s State of the Union.
News / Politics
Clarence and Ginni Thomas last October. Photograph: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
hovered around 100F (38C). The ex-
treme nature of the fire meant it turned
tall trees into matchsticks and sent bil-
lowing black smoke curling over the
quaint historic downtown of Mariposa.
It remained at 0% containment last
night, despite a heavily resourced fire-
fighting effort. Since Friday, it had con-
sumed more than 15,000 acres. More
than 3,000 people were under evacu-
ation orders.
Have any homes been destroyed?
At least 10 homes and other structures
had been destroyed, with thousands re-
maining at risk in its path.
Is it the only fire raging? No. The
fire is one of dozens burning across
the American west as the region braces
for peak fire-risk months that still lie
ahead. More than 5.5 million acres have
already burned in the US this year,
roughly 70% more than the 10-year av-
erage.
Is Murdoch tiring of Trump?
Mogul’s print titles dump the ex-
president
Rupert Murdoch, hitherto one of
Donald Trump’s most loyal media
messengers, appears to have turned on
the former president.
US media circles were rocked this
weekend after the New York Post
issued an excoriating editorial indict-
ment of Trump’s failure to stop the
attack on the US Capitol.
The editorial, in a tabloid owned by
Murdoch since 1976, began: “As his fol-
lowers stormed the Capitol, calling for
his vice-president to be hanged, Pres-
ident Donald Trump sat in his private
dining room, watching TV, doing noth-
ing. For three hours, seven minutes.”
Trump’s only focus, the Post said,
was to block the peaceful transfer of
Hogan previouslycalled Cox “a
QAnon whack job”.
“Collusion” is a loaded word in US
politics, in the long aftermath of the
Russia investigation, in which the spe-
cial counsel Robert Mueller scrutinised
election interference by Moscow and
links between Trump aides and Russia.
The battle to succeed Hogan as gov-
ernor of Maryland might seem small
beer in comparison. But the race at-
tracted national attention.
power.
“As a matter of principle, as a matter
of character, Trump has proven him-
self unworthy to be this country’s chief
executive again.”
Haveany of Murdoch’s other paper’s
turned against Trump? The Wall Street
Journal, another Murdoch paper, issued
a similar critique. Trump had “shown
not an iota of regret”, the Journal said,
adding: “Character is revealed in a crisis,
and Mr Pence passed his January 6 trial.
Mr Trump utterly failed his.”
What else did the paper say?
“Unsubscribe from Trump’s daily
emails begging for money. Then pick
your favorite from a new crop of
conservatives. Look to 2022, and 2024,
and a new era. Let’s make America sane
again.”
In other news …
A leading critic of the US response
to the monkeypox outbreak, he didn’t
understand why the US didn’t have
more vaccines for the rapidly spreading
viral disease. The California Democrat
Adam Schiff said he wanted “to light a
fire under the administration”.
At least two people were killed and
several others injured in a shooting at a
park in Los Angeles, officials said.Seven
people were taken to local hospitals
after gunfire erupted at an informal car
show at Peck Park in the San Pedro
neighborhood yesterday, the Los An-
geles fire department said.
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei
Lavrov, has reassured Egypt over Rus-
sian grain supplies at the start of a
four-country tour of Africa, amid uncer-
tainty over the future of a deal to
resume Ukrainian exports via the Black
Sea. Egypt bought 80% of its wheat
from Russia and Ukraine, and has been
Cox, endorsed by Donald Trump,
surged past Kelly Schulz, a member of
Hogan’s cabinet, to win the Republican
nomination.
In the Democratic race, Wes Moore,
a bestselling author, beat candidates
including Tom Perez, a former Demo-
cratic national committee chair and US
labor secretary.
In a midterm election year, Demo-
crats have sought to boost pro-Trump
Republicans in competitive states, plac-
torn between the two.
The Chinese military has become
significantly more aggressive and dan-
gerous over the past five years, the
United States’ top military officer said
during a trip to the Indo-Pacific that
included a stop in Indonesia. Gen
Mark Milley said the number of unsafe
interactions has risen by similar propor-
tions.
Stat of the day: More than 85 mil-
lion Americans were under excessive
heat warnings on Sunday
From the Pacific Northwest to the
southern Great Plains and on to the
heavily populated Interstate 95 cor-
ridor, more than 85 million Amer-
icans were on Sunday under exces-
sive heat warnings or heat advisories
issued by the National Weather Ser-
vice (NWS). The agency warned of
“extremely oppressive” conditions in
the north-eastern USfrom Washington
to Boston. Even in Promised Land
state park, 1,800ft up in Pennsylvania’s
Pocono mountains, temperatures were
forecast to soar above 90F (32C).
Don’t miss this: Want to stop feel-
ing hurt when someone says no?
Take the rejection therapy challenge
In 2012, 30-year-old Jia Jiang walked
up to a stranger and asked if he could
borrow $100. “No” was the response
from the baffled man sitting in a hotel
lobby. He wanted to know why he was
being asked, but Jiang didn’t explain;
he just said thanks then walked away.
This was Jiang’s first day of rejection
therapy, a concept created by Canadian
entrepreneur Jason Comely that chal-
lenged people to approach strangers
with weird requests to build their resi-
lience against rejection.
… or this: I’ve been meeting with
the same group of men for 36 years –
here’s what they’ve taught me
“When I saw a flyer for a ‘men’s
group’ in a shop window, I was a
young, buttoned-up and newly single
father. More than three decades on, the
conversations are still changing my life,”
writes David Spiegelhalter. “The messy
bits of people’s lives have been fasci-
nating, although confidentiality means
that, unfortunately, I can’t give the de-
tails of all the extraordinary stories. But
I can say that for decades we’ve listened
to concerns about drinking too much,
being fed up with work, enjoying work,
suffering from depression, negotiating
bisexuality, difficulties with partners,
ing the risky bet that as the January
6 committee remains in the headlines,
extremists who support the former
president’s lie about electoral fraud in
his 2020 defeat will prove unpalatable
to voters.
Hogan said: “There’s no question
this was a big win for the Democratic
Governors Association that I think
spent over $3m trying to promote this
guy [Cox]. And it was basically col-
lusion between Trump and the national
11
More than 3,000 people under evacu-
ation orders from just one of dozens of fires
burning across the American west, with the
risk yet to peak. Photograph: David McNew/
AFP/Getty Images
anxieties about children, and so on – all
the usual business of living.”
Climate check: Tyre dust: the
‘stealth pollutant’ that’s becoming a
huge threat to ocean life
For decades, coho salmon returning
from the Pacific Ocean to the creeks
and streams of Puget Sound in Wash-
ington state to spawn were dying in
large numbers. No one knew why.
Scientists working to solve the mystery
of the mass deaths noticed they oc-
curred after heavy rains. Toxicologists
suspected pesticides but no evidence
of pesticides was found. They ruled out
disease, lack of oxygen and chemicals
such as metals and hydrocarbons. It
was when they tested car tyre particles
– a poorly understood yet ubiquitous
pollutant – that they knew they were on
the right track.
Last Thing: Chess robot grabs and
breaks finger of seven-year-old oppo-
nent
Played by humans, chess is a game
of strategic thinking, calm concen-
tration and patient intellectual endea-
vour. Violence does not usually come
into it. The same, it seems, cannot
always be said of machines. Last week,
according to Russian media outlets, a
chess-playing robot apparently unset-
tled by the quick responses of a seven-
year-old boy unceremoniously grabbed
and broke his finger during a match at
the Moscow Open.
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now.
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Democrats, who propped this guy up
and got him elected.
“But he really is not a serious can-
didate.”
The New York Times reported the
sum spent by the DGA on pro-Cox TV
ads at “more than $1.16m”.
Hogan’s host, Jake Tapper, pointed
out that 142,000 Republicans voted for
Cox, a state legislator, “So it’s really
Continued on page 12

12
Continued from page 11
Republican voters that did this.”
Hogan said: “Yes, well, some of
them. I mean, we only have a little
over 20% of the people in Maryland
are Republican, and only 20% of them
showed up at the polls. So it’s about 2%
of the people of our state that voted for
the guy. And in the general election, I
think it’s going to be a different situ-
ation.”
Hogan has sought to establish him-
self as a figurehead for anti-Trump
Republicans. Asked if he would vote
for Moore, he said he would “have to
make a decision about that between
now and November. But I’m certainly
not going to support this guy [Cox]. I
said I wouldn’t. He’s not qualified to be
governor.”
Cox tried to impeach Hogan over
his handling of the Maryland Covid re-
sponse. He has used QAnon-adjacent
language and attended a QAnon-linked
convention.
QAnon is an antisemitic conspiracy
Is Murdoch tiring of Trump? Mogul’s print
titles dump the ex-president
Edward Helmore in New York
Rupert Murdoch, hitherto one of
Donald Trump’s most loyal media
messengers, appears to have turned on
the former president.
US media circles were rocked this
weekend after the New York Post
issued an excoriating editorial indict-
ment of Trump’s failure to stop the
attack on the US Capitol on 6 January
2021.
The editorial, in a tabloid owned by
Murdoch since 1976, began: “As his fol-
lowers stormed the Capitol, calling for
his vice-president to be hanged, Pres-
ident Donald Trump sat in his private
dining room, watching TV, doing noth-
ing. For three hours, seven minutes.”
Trump’s only focus, the Post said,
was to block the peaceful transfer of
power.
“As a matter of principle, as a matter
of character, Trump has proven him-
self unworthy to be this country’s chief
executive again.”
The Wall Street Journal, another
Murdoch paper, issued a similar cri-
tique in which it said evidence before
the House January 6 committee was
a reminder that “Trump betrayed his
supporters”.
Trump, the Journal said, took an
oath to defend the constitution and
had an obligation to protect the Capitol
from the mob he told to march there,
knowing it was armed.
“He refused. He didn’t call the mili-
tary to send help. He didn’t call [Mike]
Pence to check on the safety of his
loyal [vice-president]. Instead he fed
the mob’s anger and let the riot play
out.”
Trump had “shown not an iota of
Politics
Dan Cox shakes hands with a supporter on primary night in Emmitsburg, Maryland.
Photograph: Kenneth K Lam/AP
theory which among other beliefs holds
that the US is run by a cabal of child-
molesting cannibals which Trump will
defeat.
Hogan has said he is considering
a run for the Republican presidential
nomination. He was not drawn further
on the matter on Sunday.
He did tell ABC’s This Week he
Donald Trump is embraced by Rupert Murdoch during a dinner in New York in 2017.
Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
regret”, the Journal said, adding: “Cha-
racter is revealed in a crisis, and Mr
Pence passed his January 6 trial. Mr
Trump utterly failed his.”
The editorials were only the latest
salvoes from the big guns of Murdo-
chian conservatism.
“The person who owns January 6
is Donald Trump,” the Journal said in
June.
“Look forward!” it urged readers.
“The 2024 field is rich. You have Flor-
ida governor Ron DeSantis, former sec-
retary of state Mike Pompeo, former
UN ambassador Nikki Haley … the list
goes on. All candidates who embrace
conservative policies … Unsubscribe
from Trump’s daily emails begging for
money. Then pick your favorite from
a new crop of conservatives. Look to
2022, and 2024, and a new era. Let’s
make America sane again.”Columnists
issued similar calls.
“Let go of the anvil that, in the most
buoyant waters imaginable, will sink
you to the bottom of the sea,” Peggy
Noonan wrote in the Journal.
thought a Trump 2024 announcement
before November, which seems likely,
would cost Republicans in the mid-
terms.
“We had discussions about that at
the Republican Governors Association
last week,” he said, “and I think most
people are very concerned about the
damage it does to the party if he an-
In the Post, Michael Goodwin said
Trump’s “old feuds and grievances al-
ready sound stale and by 2024 they are
not likely to inspire the hope and confi-
dence America desperately needs”.
Last year, Murdoch himself said
conservatives must play an active role
in political debate, “but that will not
happen if President Trump stays fo-
cused on the past”.
There are also signs that Murdoch’s
most powerful media property, Fox
News, is beginning to change its stance.
On Friday, Fox News elected not to
broadcast a Trump rally in Arizona
during which a state endorsement met
with boos. Instead, Fox News broadcast
an interview with DeSantis.
Observers believe Murdoch, 91, may
be tiring of Trump’s lie that the 2020
election was stolen, which has both
kept Trump in the spotlight and denied
him the ceremonial status usually ex-
tended to ex-presidents.
Murdoch outlets have faced legal
repercussions for repeating Trump’s lie.
A judge in Delaware recently said Fox
nounces now.
“And, you know, it may help in very
red states or very red districts. But in
competitive places and purple battle-
fields, it’s going to cost us seats if he
were to do that.”
Hogan said he thought Trump’s
“ego probably can’t take another loss
– after all he lost to Joe Biden, which is
hard to do – but he likes to be the center
of attention”.
On CNN, Tapper cited Liz Cheney,
another anti-Trump Republican and
possible presidential hopeful who
seems set to lose her US House seat
in Wyoming, and asked if Hogan felt
Trump was winning the battle for the
soul of his party.
“There’s no question that we lost a
battle and we’re losing a few battles,”
Hogan said. “But the fight is long. It’s
long from being over.
“I mean, we have another couple
of years before the next [presidential]
election. In November of ’20, I gave a
speech at the Reagan Institute saying,
‘There’s going to be a long battle for the
Corp could be sued by Dominion Voting
Systems for broadcasting conspiracy
theories related to the 2020 election.
Rupert Murdoch and his son Lach-
lan are named in the $1.6bn suit, for
allegedly acting with “actual malice” in
allowing Fox News to broadcast claims
the election was rigged. The judge, Eric
Davis, cited reports that the elder Mur-
doch privately said Trump lost the elec-
tion.
Fox News says it is “confident we
will prevail as freedom of the press
is foundational to our democracy and
must be protected, in addition to
the damages claims being outrageous,
unsupported and not rooted in sound
financial analysis, serving as nothing
more than a flagrant attempt to deter
our journalists from doing their jobs.”
A friendship of convenience
The relationship between Murdoch
and Trump has long been regarded as
one of convenience. Thirty years ago,
Trump often used the New York Post in
his divorce battle with Ivana Trump, his
first wife who died this month. As de-
scribed by the Trump ally Roger Stone,
to the New York Times, Trump consi-
dered the Page Six column “very impor-
tant to his rising stature in New York
City and branding efforts”.
But a year before Trump was
elected, in 2015, the Times reported
that Murdoch thought him a “phony”.
After Trump mocked the senator
and former Republican presidential no-
minee John McCain, Murdoch wrote on
Twitter: “When is Donald Trump going
to stop embarrassing his friends, let
alone the whole country?”
The Journal called Trump a “catas-
trophe” and declared: “Trump is toast.”
But by the time Trump was elected in
2016, he and Murdoch had cemented a
The Guardian Tuesday 26 July 2022
Larry Hogan speaks to reportes in Anna-
polis, Maryland. Photograph: Brian Stukes/
Getty Images
heart and soul of the Republican party
and this is just the beginning.’
“I think, in November, we’re going
to have a different story, when a lot
of these fringe candidates lose. And
then we’re going to have to start think-
ing about, between November’s elec-
tion and the election two years later,
what kind of a party are we going to be?
And can we get back to a more Reaga-
nesque big tent party that appeals to
more people?
“Or are we going to double down on
failure?”
Donald Trump with Rupert Murdoch
and his ex-wife Anna Murdoch. Photograph:
Sonia Moskowitz/Zuma Press
friendship of convenience.
Murdoch was able to bypass White
House aides to reach the president.
Trump reportedly called Murdoch for
reassurance Fox News would not be af-
fected by a deal to sell 21st Century Fox
to Disney.
Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump
holidayed on Murdoch’s 184ft yacht.
Ivanka became a trustee for Murdoch
and Wendi Deng’s twin daughters.
The latest editorials may not change
the views of Fox News primetime hosts.
Sean Hannity, for one, has described
the House January 6 hearings as an
“obsessive partisan anti-Trump smear”
and claimed they have not “estab-
lish[ed] a criminal case or reveal[ed]
new damning evidence … as they have
promised”.
But the print titles seem to be
moving on. Quoting “someone in the
Murdoch orbit”, Vanity Fair said last
month the media baron was “a prag-
matic guy”.
“He knows better than anybody
how to read political tea leaves. It’s
fairly self-evident that quite a few
people in the firmament have begun
to challenge the previously supported
collective viewpoint about Trump. It’s
understood now that the gloves are off.
As [Trump] lashes out, it just makes it
easier for people to hit back.”
Tuesday 26 July 2022 The Guardian
Met admits not sending Boris Johnson
questionnaires over Partygate gatherings
Ben Quinn
Anger over the Partygate scandal has
been reignited after Scotland Yard con-
firmed that it did not send question-
naires to Boris Johnson before decid-
ing against fining him for attending two
Downing Street lockdown gatherings.
Fines were issued to other attenders
at the gatherings in 2020, including one
at No 10 on 13 November, where the
prime minister gave a leaving speech
for his departing director of communi-
cations, Lee Cain, and another in the
Cabinet Office on 17 December.
Downing Street has previously
briefed that Johnson did not receive
police questionnaires relating to some
lockdown events. But the revelation on
Monday is thought to be the first time
the Metropolitan police has admitted
this, under details released as part of a
legal challenge.
The Good Law Project (GLP), a non-
profit campaign group that has brought
a judicial review over accusations that
the Met failed to fully investigate John-
son’s presence at parties, said: “The
Met’s actions have raised grave con-
cerns about the deferential way in
which they are policing those in power.
“We don’t think the Met’s response
is consistent with their legal duty of
candour. And we certainly don’t think
Myanmar junta executes democracy activists
in first such killings in decades
Rebecca Ratcliffe and Maung
Moe
Myanmar’s junta has executed four
prisoners including a former politician
and a veteran activist, drawing shock
and revulsion at the country’s first use
of capital punishment in decades.
Junta-controlled media reported on
Monday that four men, including Phyo
Zeya Thaw, a rapper and former law-
maker from Aung San Suu Kyi’s party,
and the prominent democracy activist
Kyaw Min Yu, known as Jimmy, had
been executed. They were accused of
conspiring to commit terror acts and
were sentenced to death in January in
closed trials.
The UN special rapporteur Thomas
Andrews said he was “outraged and
devastated” by the executions. “The
widespread and systematic murders
of protesters, indiscriminate attacks
against entire villages, and now the
execution of opposition leaders, de-
mands an immediate and firm response
by member states of the United Na-
tions,” he said.
France and Japan also condemned
the executions, while the US national
security council described the killings
as “heinous”.
Aung Myo Min, the human rights
minister in Myanmar’s national unity
government (NUG), which was formed
in exile by elected politicians, ethnic
minority representatives and activists,
World News
Boris Johnson is pictured in 10 Downing Street at a gathering on 13 November 2020 during a Covid lockdown. Photograph: Sue Gray
Report/GOV.UK/Reuters
it’s consistent with what the Met has
elsewhere conceded is their public duty
to maintain public confidence in polic-
ing.”
The group is taking action in
concert with Brian Paddick, the Lib-
eral Democrat peer and former senior
police officer.
In a document summarising the
Phyo Zeya Thaw, a 41-year-old former lawmaker from ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s
party was among four men executed by the Myanmar junta Photograph: Aung Shine Oo/AP
said he was extremely saddened. “What
else do we need to prove how cruel the
murderous Myanmar’s military is?” he
said.
Following reports of the executions,
demonstrators in Yangon held up a
banner which read “we will never be
frightened”.
Another banner was hung on a
bridge in Yangon bearing a warning that
the junta should “be ready to pay for
the blood debt”. Text underneath read:
“RIP Zeyar Thaw, Jimmy, Hla Myo Aung
and Aung Thura.”
Local media reported that the fami-
lies of the men had travelled to Insein
prison in Yangon demanding to see
their loved ones’ bodies.
A source close to the family of Kyaw
Min Yu said they had received confir-
Met’s response to the challenge, re-
leased by the GLP, the force said it could
confirm no questionnaire was sent to
Johnson for the two 2020 gatherings. It
confirmed it sent one in relation to a
gathering held on 14 January 2021.
Johnson received a single £50 fine
in April for breaking Covid laws at a
birthday party thrown for him in June
mation from the deputy prison chief
of Insein prison that the death penalty
had been carried out. No information
was provided about when the execu-
tion took place. Prison officials refused
to hand the body over to relatives, they
said, despite prison regulations stating
it must do so unless there is a special
reason.
Myanmar’s military junta seized
power in a coup in February 2021, oust-
ing the elected government of Aung
San Suu Kyi, and has since unleashed
a campaign of brutal violence to sup-
press opposition.
A total of 14,847 people have been
arrested since the coup, while 11,759
remain in detention, according to the
advocacy group Assistance Association
for Political Prisoners (AAPP) Burma,
2020.
In its response to the GLP, Scot-
land Yard said investigating officers had
examined hundreds of documents in-
cluding emails, diary entries, witness
statements and CCTV images.
Questionnaires were a useful part of
the investigation, but if answers were
clear from other evidence, “there was
which monitors arrests and killings.
According to AAPP Burma, 76 pris-
oners have been sentenced to death
since the coup, including two child-
ren. A further 41 people have been sen-
tenced to death in absentia. Before the
executions on Monday, Myanmar had
not carried out capital punishment in
more than 30 years, according to the
UN.
Many in Myanmar turned their
social media profile pictures black and
red in a show of mourning. Others
posted lines from the men’s lyrics and
speeches including the line “nothing’s
gonna happen if we are all united” from
one of Phyo Zeya Thaw’s rap songs.
Phyo Zeya Thaw, 41, was arrested
in November when about 100 police
and soldiers raided a housing complex
in Yangon. Before entering politics he
was an activist and rapper. In 2000 he
released the country’s first rap album,
having founded the hip-hop band Acid.
His lyrics, and their thinly veiled criti-
cisms of the previous military regime,
captured the anger and frustrations of a
generation of young listeners.
Phyo Zeya Thaw was an activist
with the movement Generation Wave,
which used graffiti, pamphlets and
coded protest material to campaign
against the previous regime. Like many
of the group’s members, he was ar-
rested and imprisoned. He went on to
become a lower house MP in April 2012,
the same year Aung San Suu Kyi was
elected to parliament.
13
little to be gained” from sending one to
a particular person simply for them to
confirm what was already known, and
there was no duty to send one, it was
said.
The Met said Operation Hillman,
the probe into Partygate, had con-
cluded and that it would not comment
on the steps taken in the course of the
investigation.
There was an angry reaction from
former officials embroiled in the police
inquiry, included one who pointed out
that Rishi Sunak received a fixed-pe-
nalty notice for his presence at the end
of Johnson’s birthday party, which the
then chancellor was said to have wan-
dered into as he prepared for another
meeting.
Jo Maugham, director of the GLP,
said: “Johnson isn’t going to be prime
minister for much longer. But, for me,
this continues to be about what it was
always about: trust in policing and the
rule of law. Seventy-two per cent of
voters think there is one law for the rich
and another for the poor. Why won’t
the Met address that perception? Why
won’t they just say what happened?”
No 10 declined to comment, refer-
ring queries to Scotland Yard.
Demonstrators hold a banner reading
“we will never be frightened” at a protest in
Yangon on Monday. Photograph: NurPhoto/
REX/Shutterstock
Kyaw Min Yu, 53, a veteran activist,
was arrested in an overnight raid in Oc-
tober. He was a prominent leader of the
88 Generation Students Group, which
led pro-democracy uprisings against
the military, and was imprisoned in
1988 for his role in the protests. He was
released in 2005 but jailed again from
2007 until 2012.
Kyaw Min Yu was also a writer,
and while in prison translated works
including Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci
Code and Angels and Demons, and
wrote the novel, The Moon in Inle Lake.
His 2005 self-help book Making Friends
was a bestseller, according to PEN Inter-
national.
The two other executed men – Hla
Myo Aung and Aung Thura Zaw –
were accused of killing a woman they
suspected was a military informer in
Yangon, according to Agence France-
Presse.
The men had tried to appeal but
Continued on page 14

14
Continued from page 13
their sentence was upheld in June.
They were reportedly denied access to
legal counsel during their appeal, in
Tyre dust: the ‘stealth pollutant’ that’s
becoming a huge threat to ocean life
Karen McVeigh
For decades, coho salmon returning
from the Pacific Ocean to the creeks
and streams of Puget Sound in Wash-
ington state to spawn were dying in
large numbers. No one knew why.
Scientists working to solve the mys-
tery of the mass deaths noticed they
occurred after heavy rains.
Toxicologists suspected pesticides,
as the main creek they studied ran
through a golf course. But no evidence
of pesticides was found. They ruled out
disease, lack of oxygen and chemicals
such as metals and hydrocarbons.
The first real breakthrough hap-
pened when they tested actual runoff
collected from a nearby road and ex-
posed test salmon to it. The fish died
within hours.
“The harder step was delving into
what could be in that stormwater,” said
Jenifer McIntyre, an assistant professor
of aquatic toxicology at Washington
State University, who has spent 15 years
searching for what was killing the coho,
an important species in the Pacific
north-west.
It was when they tested car tyre
particles – a poorly understood yet
ubiquitous pollutant – that they knew
they were on the right track. Using a
parmesan grater atop a drill, they care-
fully shaved tiny fragments of tyre and
soaked them in water.
“When we tested the tyres it killed
all the fish,” said McIntyre. From there,
they were able to identify the culprit:
a toxic chemical known as 6PPD-quin-
one, the product of the preservative
6PPD, which is added to tyres to stop
them breaking down. The pioneering
study, published in 2020, has been he-
ralded as critical to our understanding
of what some describe as a “stealth pol-
lutant”.
Tyre-wear particles – a mixture of
tyre fragments, including synthetic rub-
bers, fillers and softeners and road
surface particles – are considered by
environmental scientists to be one of
the most significant sources of micro-
plastics in the ocean.
Created during acceleration and
braking, they are dispersed from road
surfaces by rainfall and wind. The main
environmental pathway is from road
Ghislaine Maxwell moved to low-security
prison in Florida
Emine Sinmaz
Ghislaine Maxwell has been sent to a
low-security prison to serve her 20-year
prison sentence for procuring teenage
World News
violation of international human rights
law.
The junta-controlled newspaper
Global New Light of Myanmar said on
Monday the men had given “directives,
Tyre wear particles are considered by environmental scientists to be one of the most
significant sources of microplastics in the ocean. Photograph: Ian Nicholson/PA
run-off into storm drains, where they
empty into rivers and the sea. They
are also released from sewage efflu-
ent and from the atmosphere, where
they can circulate into the ocean and
back again. A 2020 study suggested
windblown microplastics are an even
bigger source of ocean pollution than
rivers.
While it is fiendishly difficult to pin
down the exact composition of micro-
plastics, there is plenty of research
which points to tyre dust making up
a significant portion.
In 2017, a global model by the Inter-
national Union for the Conservation of
Nature estimated tyre wear to be the
second largest source of primary micro-
plastics in the ocean, at 28%, after syn-
thetic textile fibres, at 35%.
And, in 2019, a report by scien-
tists across Europe concluded abra-
sion from car tyres was a large source
of microplastics and possibly nanop-
lastics. While there remains a lack of
data on risks to the environment and
human health, the scientists concluded
that if future emissions remain con-
stant or increase “the ecological risks
could be widespread within a century”.
One thing is certain. Tyre-wear par-
ticles are ubiquitous. The average tyre
loses 4kg over its lifetime. About 6m
tonnes of tyre particles are emitted
annually and have been found every-
where from the deep sea, to the atmos-
phere, even in the Arctic and the An-
tarctic.
And it is only going to get worse.
Electric cars will lower tailpipe emis-
sions, but tyre wear is projected to rise,
girls to be abused by the financier Jeff-
rey Epstein.
The 60-year-old has been moved to
FCI Tallahassee in Florida, according to
the Bureau of Prisons. She will be eli-
gible for release on 17 July 2037.
made arrangements, and committed
conspiracies for brutal and inhuman
terror acts”.
The junta gave no details on how
the men were executed.
due to heavier vehicles and torque (the
rotational force of a car engine). The
UK’s air quality group warned in 2019
that dust from tyres and car brakes
would continue to pollute the air, rivers
and ultimately the sea, even when the
fleet has gone electric.
In January, McIntyre’s research
team published a new study, which
found that 6PPD-quinone was “more
toxic than previously calculated” to
coho and should be categorised as a
“very highly toxic” pollutant for aquatic
organisms.
Like any detective, McIntyre hopes
her team’s work will prompt others to
look backwards, at locally extinct aq-
uatic species, to determine whether
6PPD-quinone may have played a role.
Dr Steve Allen, a specialist in atmos-
pheric microplastics at the Ocean Fron-
tier Institute at Dalhousie University
in Canada, described the coho salmon
study as “landmark”, because it ex-
amined the real-world effects of tyre
particles.
The study of microplastic is fast
moving but still in its infancy. Fewer
than 100 scientific papers about them
have been published to date, said Allen,
all of them in the last decade.
Siobhan Anderson, the co-founder
and chief scientific officer of the Tyre
Collective, a group of masters students
who designed a device to collect micro-
plastics directly from tyres, calls tyre
dust “a stealth pollutant” because few
people know about it. “There is very
little public awareness,” said Anderson,
whose organisation is in talks with
Volvo and Seft about development of
The disgraced socialite appealed
against her conviction and sentence
this month.
Maxwell, the daughter of the pub-
lishing baron Robert Maxwell, had been
held at the Metropolitan Detention
Yee Mon, the NUG’s defence minis-
ter, wrote on Facebook: “This revo-
lution isn’t over until we bring justice
against [junta chief] Min Aung Hlaing.
He won’t have an inch of earth to run
its device.
“Tyre wear is unique in that it can
count as microplastic but it is also air
pollution because it’s so small,” she said.
“Anything that is 10 microns can be in-
haled in our lungs and anything that
is 2.5 microns has the potential to pass
the membrane barrier,” Anderson said.
Tyre dust particles have been found
to be smaller than 23 nanometers (0.02
microns).
Edward Kolodziej, an associate pro-
fessor at the University of Washington
and co-author of the coho study, cites
twostudies from China showing that
tyre dust is an important contributor
to urban air pollution. “It’s not just the
roadway runoff and stormwater getting
into the river that kills the fish, there’s
also unknown or poorly characterised
chemicals present in these things that
are ending up in our lungs.”
Kolodziej is concerned about the
big data gaps in our knowledge of the
effects of thousands of chemicals in
the environment. “As a society, we’re
literally making 300,000 chemicals, of
which 20,000to 30,000 are the most
commonly used,” he said. “Between
90% and 95% of chemicalshave had no
assessment of what they do in the envi-
ronment.”
“All these chemicals are pro-
prietary, confidential business infor-
mation. When you go and buy a prod-
uct like a tyre, nobody’s being told
about what chemicals are in it.”
Frédérique Mongodin, the senior
marine litter policy officer of Seas At
Risk, said she is very concerned about
the “chemical cocktail” from tyres.
“Tyre dust is impossible to control. We
are pushing the EU to introduce meas-
ures at the design stage.”
The $264bn (£194bn)-a-year tyre
industry is countering scientific studies
on tyre wear and microplastics with re-
search of its own.
The Tire Industry Project (TIP), a
body representing 10 tyre manufac-
turers including Goodyear, Michelin
and Pirelli, has commissioned mul-
tiple studies over the last decade, con-
cluding that TRWP (tyre and road wear
particles) presents no environmental
and health risks.
Gavin Whitmore, the commu-
nication manager of TIP, disagrees that
tyre wear is a major source of ocean
Center, New York, since her arrest in
July 2020 on charges that she lured girls
as young as 14 into Epstein’s abusive
orbit.
Her lawyers repeatedly complained
that conditions at the Brooklyn jail
The Guardian Tuesday 26 July 2022
for, [we] will chase him down until the
end of the world.”
A coho salmon jumping up a waterfall
to get to its spawning grounds. Photograph:
Cavan Images/Alamy
microplastics.
“We’re finding something like 2-5%
maximum of TRWP is reaching the
ocean,” he said, citing a two-part
study published in 2018, commissioned
by the European Tyre and Rubber
Manufacturers Association, which used
the Seine watershed as a case study.
Environmental groups, however,
have questioned the independence of
this research.
Anne Cécile Rémont, the director of
the TIP said that after the coho salmon
study, the US Tire Manufacturing Asso-
ciation (USTMA) has been involved in
discussions with regulators and stake-
holder on “potential alternatives” to
6PPD. A proposal in California, where
the loss of coho salmon has signif-
icantly affected Indigenous commun-
ities, would require tyre makers to con-
sider safer alternatives to 6PPD. USTMA
has said it supports the proposal.
Asked if the industry was pre-
pared to be more transparent about the
chemicals in tyre wear to speed up re-
search, Rémont said the formula was
what gives a manufacturer compet-
itive advantage. “Sharing ingredients is
very difficult and complicated,” she said
but added that the USTMA is devel-
oping a “surrogate test material” for re-
searchers.
But experts are calling for more
transparency from the tyre companies.
It took decades for scientists to narrow
down which chemical was causing the
mass die-offs of coho salmon in Wash-
ington state.
“Very few people, except manufac-
turers, know what is in the tyres,” said
Allen. “There are thousands upon thou-
sands of chemicals. What happens if
two of them get together? When it
comes to microplastic, we don’t know
what a safe level is and we may have
already passed it.”
were “reprehensible”. They claimed
Maxwell was subjected to such inva-
sive surveillance that it “rivals scenes
of Dr Hannibal Lecter’s incarceration”
Continued on page 15
Tuesday 26 July 2022 The Guardian
Continued from page 14
from the film The Silence of the Lambs.
They also alleged that Maxwell was
deprived of water and fed food infested
with maggots. They claimed that raw
sewage permeated her cell, which was
plagued by rats, and that guards pre-
vented her from sleeping by shining
torches into her eyes every 15 minutes.
Her lawyers requested that she
serve her sentence at FCI Danbury
in Connecticut, a minimum security
prison that was the inspiration for
the hit Netflix series Orange Is the
New Black. Experts have previously
described the jail as being “like Dis-
neyland” compared with the Brooklyn
institution.
Alison Nathan, who oversaw Max-
well’s trial, had recommended that
Maxwell be moved to FCI Danbury fol-
lowing the request, but the Bureau of
Prisons ultimately made the decision.
FCI Tallahassee opened in 1938 and
houses women only.
Prosecutors argued in June that
Maxwell should be imprisoned for at
least 30 years. But in submissions
before her sentencing hearing, her law-
yers said she should face no more than
Monkey attacks injure 42 people in Japanese
city
Agence France-Presse
Local authorities in a Japanese city are
to use tranquilliser guns to confront
marauding monkeys that have injured
42 people in recent weeks.
Japanese macaques are common
across large parts of the country and
are a pest in some areas, eating crops
and sometimes entering homes. But a
spate of monkey attacks in Yamaguchi
in the west of the country has been
unusual, with adults and children suf-
fering wounds including scratches and
bites.
“All of Yamaguchi city is surrounded
by mountains and it’s not rare to see
monkeys,” said a city official from the
agricultural department, who declined
to give her name. “But it’s rare to see
this many attacks in a short period of
time.”
The injuries have so far been large-
ly mild, but authorities are turning to
David Trimble, key architect of Good Friday
agreement, dies aged 77
Ben Quinn and Martin Belam
David Trimble, Northern Ireland’s inau-
gural first minister and a crucial union-
ist architect of the Good Friday agree-
ment, has died aged 77.
His death on Monday was an-
nounced by the Ulster Unionist Party
(UUP), the party he led into a his-
toric power-sharing arrangement be-
tween nationalists and republicans in
Northern Ireland.
Lord Trimble was the first person to
World News
Ghislaine Maxwell had been held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in New York since her arrest in July 2020. Photograph: US
Department of Justice/PA
four to five years, arguing it would be
“a travesty of justice for her to face a
sentence that would have been appro-
priate for Epstein”.
In their bid for leniency, Maxwell’s
Japanese macaques are common across large parts of the country. Photograph: Dai Kurokawa/EPA
serve in the role of first minister, and
won the Nobel peace prize, along with
John Hume, leader of the nationalist
SDLP party, for their part in negoti-
ations for the Good Friday agreement.
He was UUP leader between 1995 and
2005, accepting a life peerage in the
House of Lords in 2006.
Trimble had played a “crucial and
courageous role” in the Good Friday
agreement negotiations, said Ireland’s
Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, who said all
in politics at the time had “witnessed
his crucial and courageous role.”
lawyers contended that her jail condi-
tions were harrowing, alleging: “An
inmate in Ms Maxwell’s unit threatened
to kill her, claiming that an additional
20 years’ incarceration would be worth
Tony Blair, who was one of the bro-
kers of the peace deal as Labour prime
minister and had an often fraught rela-
tionship with Trimble, paid tribute by
saying that he had “showed politics at
its very best.”
Tributes from across Northern Irel-
and’s political divide and beyond were
paid to a politician whose own political
journey from hardline unionism to a
risk-taking partner with his sworn ene-
mies helped end decades of strife.
Describing Trimble as “a man of
courage and vision”, the UUP’s leader,
the money she’d receive for murdering
Ms Maxwell.”
They also argued that an emo-
tionally abusive childhood at the hands
of her father primed her for Epstein’s
Doug Beattie, said: “He chose to grasp
the opportunity for peace when it pre-
sented itself and sought to end the dec-
ades of violence that blighted his be-
loved Northern Ireland.”
“He will forever be associated with
the leadership he demonstrated in the
negotiations that led up to the 1998 Bel-
fast agreement.”
Trimble had demonstrated bravery
and courage while battling his recent
illness in a way that was typical of
the qualities he showed in his political
career, at Stormont and at Westminster,
15
influence.
Epstein was arrested by federal
authorities in July 2019 on sex-traf-
ficking counts. He killed himself while
awaiting trial in a New York City federal
jail.
The judge handed down a 20-year
sentence, saying Maxwell “repeatedly,
and over the course of many years
participated in a horrific scheme to traf-
fic young girls, some the age of 14”.
Nathan said it was important that
although “Epstein was central to this
scheme” she was not being sentenced
“as a proxy” for him. She said: “The
defendant’s conduct … was heinous and
predatory.”
The sentencing took place nearly
three months after the judge rejected
Maxwell’s request for a fresh trial after
revelations that a juror in her case had
not disclosed childhood sexual abuse
during jury selection.
Maxwell, who has maintained her
innocence, was convicted on 29 Decem-
ber of five of the six charges she faced.
The jury came to its decision after
40 hours of deliberations spanning six
days.
tranquilliser guns after traps they set
failed to snare any of the monkeys. “In-
itially, only children and women were
attacked. Recently, elderly people and
adult men have been targeted too,” the
official said.
The city is not sure if the attacks
are the work of multiple monkeys or
a single aggressive individual. The in-
truders have in some cases entered
houses by sliding open screen doors,
or going through windows.
City officials and police have been
patrolling the area since the first attacks
around 8 July but have yet to capture
any monkeys.
The story has made headlines in
Japan in recent weeks, with people
reporting regular invasions. “I heard
crying coming from the ground floor
so I hurried down,” one father told the
Mainichi Shimbun daily. “Then I saw a
monkey hunching over my child.”
Beattie added.
On the nationalist side, the Sinn
Féin leader, Mary Lou McDonald, said
on Twitter that she was “saddened”
to hear of Trimble’s death, adding:
“His contribution to building the peace
process in Ireland will stand as a proud
and living legacy of his political life.”
Trimble’s death was announced
shortly before the Tory leadership TV
debate between Liz Truss and Rishi
Sunak. They both paid tribute to Trim-
Continued on page 16

16
Continued from page 15
ble – who joined their party in 2007 – as
“a giant.”
The SDLP leader, Colum Eastwood,
said Trimble had left an “indelible mark
on our shared island’s story” and that
without him there would not have been
a Good Friday agreement.
The MP for the Westminster consti-
tuency of Foyle said: “Over the course
of his political career, but particularly in
difficult years of the Good Friday agree-
ment negotiations, he demonstrated
immense courage and took political
risks that sustained the life of our fled-
gling peace process.
“He doesn’t often enough get credit
for it, but without David Trimble’s for-
titude, there would simply have been
no agreement.”
Peter Mandelson, who was sec-
retary of state for Northern Ireland
from late 1999 to 2001, referred to the
“pain and strife” which Trimble had
Czech police turn seized Ferrari into patrol
car
Oliver Holmes
Police in the Czech Republic have
turned a high-powered Ferrari they
seized from criminals into a patrol car
capable of chasing down joyriders at
speeds of up to 200mph.
The 2011 Ferrari 458 Italia was for-
merly coloured racing red, but the
authorities painted it with yellow and
blue reflective stripes and mounted a
panel of lights on top. It will be used to
chase stolen cars and to crack down on
illegal road races, police said in a state-
ment.
While similar models can fetch
upwards of £150,000, Czech police
stressed that the supercar was no
luxury buy; they modified it for about
£10,300, which they said was the same
cost as a new Skoda hatchback.
The vehicle will be used by a special
surveillance department and driven
only by trained police officers.
Sunak ruse aims to outmanoeuvre Truss over
China
Patrick Wintour Diplomatic
editor
Rishi Sunak’s pre-emptive strike at-
tacking Liz Truss over alleged For-
eign Office pusillanimity towards China
looks to have been a daring attempt to
fend off an imminent assault from his
Tory leadership rival.
But it locks the contestants into a
potentially uncontrollable dogfight as
they seek to prove their credentials as
the truer enemy of authoritarianism.
Sunak had detected a Truss attack
coming when, asked by ITV during its
debate to pose one question to Sunak,
Truss chose the niche Westminster
issue of whether he supported a meet-
ing of the UK-China Economic and
World News
David Trimble was the first person to hold the office of first minister of Northern Ireland.
Photograph: Matthew Lloyd/Getty Images
faced as he went about implementing
the agreement, while Alastair Camp-
bell, strategist and spokesman for Blair
at the time, described Trimble as some-
one who “could be a difficult and mer-
curial character, but he was the right
man in the right place at the right time”.
The car was coloured racing red before being given its yellow and blue reflective stripes. Photograph: Police of the Czech Republic
Financial Dialoguecouncil going ahead.
It looked a clear attempt to set up
a dividing line between Sunak’s Trea-
sury-led orthodoxy on China, and her
call for a more robust approach.
There had also been briefings in
Sunday papers last week by Truss allies
accusing Sunak of seeking trade deals
with China.
Enjoying the support of the fierce-
ly China-sceptic Times newspaper,
Sunak’s team thought a surprise attack
on the “Truss Red Carpet for the Chi-
nese” would please his media base and
undermine her credentials as a cold war
warrior. It also skilfully chimed with re-
marks by the MI6 boss, Richard Moore,
last week that China was now the UK’s
top priority.
But his stab at first mover’s advan-
Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, the leader
of Northern Ireland’s largest union-
ist party and a former UUP member
who left over his opposition to Trim-
ble’s pro-agreement stance, said: “David
leaves a huge and lasting legacy to
Northern Ireland. He can undoubtedly
tage hasn’t just alarmed the Chinese
embassy in the UK. There is also a
group of free-trading Tory MPs who
have long feared a Dutch auction of
anti-China rhetoric breaking out. Boris
Johnson’s brother Jo for one has long
warned that if Brexit is followed by
a fully fledged Ch-exit (an economic
decoupling with the world’s second
largest economy), it would be the equiv-
alent of attempting to fly the Global
Britain airplane after demobilising both
main engines mid-air.
In a country in search of growth,
alienating Chinese state-controlled
markets may not thrill British busi-
ness. Many of those businesses would
have preferred the earlier Sunak mes-
sage in his Mansion House speech last
year – where he said the debate on
be said to have shaped history in our
country.”
The former Sinn Féin leader Gerry
Adams expressed his “deep regret” at
Trimble’s death and extended his “sin-
cere condolences” to his family and his
former UUP colleagues.
Born in Belfast in 1944, he was
educated at Queen’s University before
becoming a barrister and a lecturer. His
involvement in politics picked up pace
in the 1970s and he was involved in
the Vanguard party, an extreme union-
ist grouping.
A return to the mainstream union-
ist establishment followed, however,
and he rejoined the Ulster Unionist
party in 1978, becoming MP at West-
minster for Upper Bann at a by-election
on May 17, 1990.
The high point of his career, at that
point, was when he won the Ulster
Unionist leadership in September 1995
after the resignation of the veteran Sir
James Molyneaux.
China lacked nuance adding “we can
pursue with confidence our economic
relationship with China in a safe mu-
tually beneficial way without compro-
mising our values”.
Regardless of whether Sunak made
the right tactical choice in pre-empting
Truss, it is not clear how much Sunak
broke genuinely new ground in his four
policy proposals – to close all 30 Con-
fucius Institutes in the UK, to build
stronger diplomatic security alliances
against China, to use MI5 to help British
business cooperation, and to examine
the case for banning Chinese acqui-
sitions of key British firms including
strategically sensitive tech firms.
The Beijing to Britain weekly intel-
ligence briefing was pretty scathing,
saying: “These are not ideas to impress
The Guardian Tuesday 26 July 2022
David Trimble, Tony Blair and the Irish
nationalist John Hume await the results
of the Good Friday agreement referendum.
Photograph: Alan Lewis/Photopress Belfast
Others paying tribute to him in-
cluded Boris Johnson, the UK prime
minister, who said he was “deeply sad-
dened”. The Labour leader, Keir Star-
mer, said Trimble was a “towering
figure of Northern Ireland and British
politics”.
Trimble is survived by his wife,
Daphne, and his sons and daughters,
Richard, Victoria, Nicholas and Sarah.
Jiří Zlý, head of the police’s traf-
fic department, said the car would
be used nationwide against some of
the “most aggressive” criminals on the
Czech road.
The country’s police force is not the
first to use sports cars. Italian officers
have a partnership with Lamborghini,
and use their cars to transport urgent
blood supplies to accident sites. In
Dubai, police run an entire fleet of
supercars.
Czech police said the Ferrari was
not the most valuable or rarest vehicle
they had seized – 900 cars were confis-
cated last year. The vast majority, they
said, are resold, with the proceeds used
to cover damage caused by offenders.
“We keep some vehicles for official
duties,” police said. “However, these are
not such luxurious cars as Ferraris.”
thinktankers, China analysts or busi-
ness leaders. They are headline ideas,
not costed, hard to measure and not
new.” James Cleverly, a Truss supporter
and the new education secretary, in-
sisted on Monday that the education
department was well on top of the issue
of Confucius Institutes.
Sunak had in effect picked up an
amendment to the higher education
bill tabled in June with cross-party sup-
port by Alicia Kearns and Tom Tu-
gendhat, the two senior Tories on the
foreign affairs committee. Kearns had
argued that universities were being
weaponised and were part of a Chinese
hybrid warfare.
Their rebellion was bought off when
Continued on page 17
Tuesday 26 July 2022 The Guardian
Continued from page 16
ministers conceded a new clause in the
bill placing a duty on the Office for Stu-
dents to monitor the Confucius Insti-
tutes to ensure they do not breach free-
dom of speech, and if necessary to ter-
minate a partnership.
Critics of Kearns said recent aca-
demic studies had suggested Confucius
Institutes do not have the malign influ-
ence the detractors claim. And if the
institute’s covert purpose is not to
teach Chinese but make the west more
open to China, they have hardly suc-
ceeded. Even some China hawks such
as the former diplomat Charlie Parton
have not called for a total ban.
China would also not take a mass
closure lying down. The British Council
would certain to be shut in retaliation.
Rana Mitter at Oxford’s China
Centre was also critical, saying the
UK desperately needs more people
who read and understand Chinese. The
reason the Chinese funded institutes,
he argued, was the lack of UK govern-
ment funding for Mandarin teaching.
The one thing the UK could not afford
was to be ignorant about China.
Sunak’s other restriction on the Chi-
nese activity in universities is hardly
revolutionary. He proposed to force all
UK universities to disclose all Chinese
partnerships worth £50,000 or more.
If Biden isn’t willing to really fight the climate
crisis, he shouldn’t run in 2024
Daniel Sherrell
O
n Friday, 15 July, Joe Biden
acknowledged the death
of his signature climate
bill, conceding defeat in
a war he never truly
seemed willing to wage. He did it from
a hastily prepared briefing room in
Jeddah, where he had spent the pre-
vious day shilling for increased Saudi
oil production.
It was painful to watch. The fossil
fuel oligarchs had him right where
they wanted him: his climate ambitions
foiled, his rhetoric defanged, his hat in
his hand. For their part, they had never
been under any illusions that they were
waging a war. Over the course of his
presidency, they had deployed every
weapon at their disposal to protect
their profit margins from the public’s
desire for a dignified life on a habitable
planet.
Their final blow was delivered on
Thursday by US senator Joe Manchin,
puppet to the plutocrats, a man capable
of patting his grandchildren on the
head while selling their future to the
highest bidder. With a fickleness bor-
dering on sadism, Manchin killed our
last chance at federal climate action for
years, effectively completing the cor-
porate capture of our nation’s climate
policy.
Biden’s failure to prevent this cap-
ture has confirmed, with almost eerie
precision, the worries that dogged him
on the campaign trail. That he was too
milquetoast, too norm-bound, too nos-
talgic for the 1970s. Young people have
waited in vain for the administration
to evince a fiery, existential urgency
World News / Opinion
Allies of Liz Truss have been briefing that Rishi Sunak would seek trade deals with China despite human rights and security concerns.
Photograph: themotioncloud/Getty Images/iStockphoto
The higher education bill had set the
threshold at £75,000.
Another Sunak proposal – a call for
a ban on strategically sensitive firms
coming under Chinese control – is also
an issue that the government has had
on its radar ever since the passing of
the National Security and Investment
Act in the wake of the Huawei debacle.
‘Biden had spent the previous day shilling for increased Saudi oil production.’ Photograph: Bandar Aljaloud/AP
around climate, a willingness to start
twisting arms and cracking skulls. But
Biden has shown himself either unwil-
ling or unable to don the same brass
knuckles as his opponents. His latest
defeat has affirmed what we’ve long
feared: that he just isn’t the man for
the moment.
There are still ways that he could
flip this script. He could declare a cli-
mate emergency and leverage the De-
fense Production Act and the Stafford
Disaster Relief and Emergency Assis-
tance Act to circumvent a Congress
corrupted by corporate polluters. He
could wage rhetorical and political war
on Manchin, stripping him of his com-
mittee chairmanship, and parading his
naked corruption in front of the Amer-
The business secretary, Kwasi Kwar-
teng, only last week used the act to pre-
vent Beijing Infinite Vision Technology
Company from acquiring vision sens-
ing technology from the University of
Manchester. There was no harm in hig-
hlighting the issue, but Sunak seems
to be theatrically trying to shut a long-
closed stable door.
ican people. He could appeal privately
to Mitt Romney, perhaps the last Senate
Republican with any integrity, who just
last month bemoaned our nation’s lack
of progress on climate. He could say
the truth out loud, at the top of his
lungs: that the fossil fuel industry has
declared war on the American people.
That we are fighting for the soul of
our democracy and the future of our
planet.
If he’s unwilling to do even that,
he shouldn’t run for president in 2024.
What young voter in their right mind
would nominate him again? Why would
we trust him to succeed without a
congressional majority when he’s failed
so abjectly with one? His entire theory
of governance will have been dis-
What is more noticeable is neither
Sunak or Truss have so far discussed in
the open the two big live China issues –
the defence of Taiwan and whether the
UK government should declare a geno-
cide in Xinjiang.
Truss has already got herself in
hot water with the sinophile Johnson
government by saying the UK should
proved: his “decades of experience”, his
purported “knowledge of the Senate”,
his reputation as a “deal maker” – if he
couldn’t land a climate bill, what good
were they?
Surrounded by a suffocating gauze
of Beltway consultants, he made mis-
take after mistake. He failed to use
his bully pulpit to rally the public
around the dangers of climate change.
He almost never named – let alone dec-
laimed – that those dangers were the
direct result of burning oil, coal and
natural gas. He held up executive cli-
mate regulations and approved fossil
fuel projects, miscalculating that it was
carrots and not sticks that would win
Manchin’s approval. Over the remon-
strations of the Squad, he decoupled
17
learn from the mistakes of Ukraine and
proffer arms to Taiwan to help the
country deter a Chinese invasion. She
has not repeated that remark, but her
whole stance on the threat to liberty,
the central theme of her speeches, sug-
gests she would as prime minister at
the very least push America towards a
more proactive stance on Taiwan.
The genocide issue has yet to ex-
plode, but could if the UN human
rights commissioner, Michelle Bache-
let, defies Chinese lobbying and pub-
lishes a report declaring that a genocide
did happen in Xinjiang.
The UK under successive foreign
ministers has rigidly resisted stating
that a genocide did take place, citing
the longstanding UK view that it is
for international courts, not national
parliaments, to determine whether
a genocide had occurred. However,
Truss’s aides are briefing that she be-
lieves a genocide did take place.
Either way, Beijing will be watching
like a hawk to see if the China issue
continues to be seen as a source of
rich ammunition for the candidates, or
was instead a one-off ploy by Sunak to
defuse a bomb Truss had intended to
detonate later in the campaign.
his own climate agenda from Manchin’s
beloved infrastructure package, prom-
ising everyone that he could get Man-
chin’s vote on the former.
Was that a lie, or just deeply naive?
I’ll still be agonizing over this question
in 2024, when I pull the lever for his pri-
mary opponent.
I want to emphasize that Biden is
not the villain here. It is Republicans –
and Joe Manchin – who are making the
sociopathic choice to further enrich the
already-super-rich at the expense of all
life on earth. I have no doubt that Biden
wants sincerely to address the climate
crisis. But presidents are not judged
on their intentions. They are judged on
their results. And on climate especially,
the results of the Biden administration
– of the entire, gerontocratic leadership
of the Democratic party – have fallen
dangerously short of what’s needed.
With summer heatwaves inten-
sifying and federal climate legislation
wilting, young people are rightfully
desperate. There are only so many
losses we will accept before taking our
chances on a different formula: the
charismatic fire of an AOC, the cros-
sover appeal of a John Fetterman, the
judicious futurism of a Ro Khanna.
Joe Biden may be a “decent man”, as
his defenders constantly contend. But
what does my generation care about
decency, when the planet’s going up in
flames? If he really wants a second term
in office, he should show us why he
deserves one. He needs to realize he’s
at war with the oligarchs. And then he
needs to start winning.
Daniel Sherrell is the author of
Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of
Our World (Penguin Books) and a cli-
mate activist
Tuesday 26 July 2022 The Guardian
If you have a miscarriage in Republican
America, your health is now at risk
Moira Donegan
T
he worst-case scenarios
arrived with alarming
speed. In the weeks since
the US supreme court’s
decision in Dobbs v Jack-
son Women’s Health, the case that over-
turned Roe v Wade and eliminated
the constitutional right to an abortion,
American women have faced a rad-
ical reordering of their lives. A right
essential to their dignity and self-deter-
mination has been stripped away after
nearly 50 years – and with it, the gains
women have made in professional,
political and social life are newly and
gravely endangered. But in addition to
this moral and civic crisis, the supreme
court’s decision has also created a vast
and acute new public health crisis, as
abortion bans complicate once-stan-
dard care for pregnant women – and
place the health of even those who are
not pregnant into new and arbitrary
danger.
For one thing, there are the miscar-
riages. Care for patients experiencing
spontaneous pregnancy loss has been
dramatically reshaped in hospitals
across Republican states. The treat-
ment for a miscarriage is to evacuate
the contents of the uterus, either with
a minimally invasive surgery or with
medication, and these interventions, as
it happens, are identical to those used
in voluntary abortions. But with ambi-
guous, as-yet-uninterpreted but strong-
ly worded laws now in effect in anti-
choice states, providers don’t know
what they are permitted to do for
miscarrying patients. Many bans have
so-called “life of the mother” exemp-
tions, but these are vaguely worded,
and carry strong penalties for providers
if they get it wrong. How sick does a
patient need to be before a doctor can
abort the pregnancy that is killing her?
Does she need to be dying? How close
does she need to be to death?
These are not hypotheticals: since
the Dobbs decision, accounts of dange-
rously delayed miscarriage care have
been reported with alarming frequency.
Providers are postponing life-saving
abortions, often until a fetus dies on its
Monkeypox is truly an emergency. The WHO
was right to raise the highest alarm
Devi Sridhar
P
robably the last thing you
want to hear is that the
World Health Organization
has declared another dis-
ease – this time monkeypox
– to be a public health emergency of
international concern. Monkeypox is a
virus similar to smallpox that causes
fever, swollen lymph nodes and dis-
tinctive rashes on the face, palms, the
soles of the feet and genitalia. Gay and
bisexual men are most at risk, as are
other men who have sex with men. It
Opinion
‘With ambiguous but strongly worded laws now in effect in anti-choice states, providers don’t know what they are permitted to do for
miscarrying patients.’ Photograph: sturti/Getty Images
own and cardiac activity can no longer
be detected – an emotionally fraught
and physically painful process that can
take days or weeks. One woman in
Texas told CNN about having to carry
a dead fetus that her body would not
expel for two weeks, as she searched in
vain for a provider who would take the
legal risk of giving her a D&C.
Meanwhile, a miscarrying woman
has a softened cervix, putting her at
heightened risk of infection, and she
is vulnerable to hemorrhaging or even
sepsis as the pregnancy tissue inside
her begins to break down. Dr Jessian
Munoz, an obstetrician in San Antonio,
told the AP about his attempts to treat
a patient who had developed a ute-
rine infection while her fetus still had
signs of cardiac activity. Constrained by
Texas laws, there was little he could do
until it was almost too late. “We physi-
cally watched her get sicker and sicker
and sicker,” Munoz said. The woman
lost multiple liters of blood, needed
emergency surgery, and had to be put
on a breathing machine – all because
the law of her state considered the
hypothetical life of her fetus to be more
valuable than her own. So far, we have
not seen reports of women’s deaths
can be a serious disease with the case
fatality rate around 3-6%, although the
vast majority of people manage to re-
cover at home without hospitalisation
or medication.
This WHO declaration is unusual
in that the organisation’s director gen-
eral, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus,
overruled a split emergency committee
(an expert advisory committee from
around the world in virology, epide-
miology and public health) to insist
that the loudest alarm bell should be
rung. His justification was: “We have an
outbreak that has spread around the
world rapidly, through new modes of
from these delayed miscarriage treat-
ments. But the deaths are coming.
Then there are the ectopic preg-
nancies. In approximately one in 50
pregnancies, a fertilized egg will im-
plant somewhere other than the ute-
rine wall – usually in the fallopian tube,
but sometimes elsewhere in the abdo-
minal cavity. In these cases, the preg-
nancy is never viable; it is always life-
threatening to the pregnant patient.
As with miscarriages, the treatment is
abortion. But providers in conservative
states aren’t sure what they’re allowed
to do under the law, or what they can
do without incurring punishment from
zealous anti-choice colleagues or vigi-
lantes newly empowered to bring ruin-
ous lawsuits.
In Michigan, for now an island of
legal abortion in a deep anti-choice
midwestern sea, a woman presented at
a hospital emergency room with an ec-
topic pregnancy that could have killed
her; she had travelled there from anoth-
er state, where doctors had turned her
away. Another woman wasn’t so lucky:
her central Texas hospital advised her
doctor not to intervene in her ectopic
pregnancy until it ruptured, at which
point her life was in immediate danger.
transmission, about which we under-
stand too little and which meets the
criteria in the international health regu-
lations.”
For a disease to be called a public
health emergency of international con-
cern, it has to meet a high threshold.
It must be an “extraordinary event”
that constitutes a public health risk
to other countries through the inter-
national spread of disease, requiring a
coordinated global response.
Given how many disease outbreaks
occur, often hundreds a month, this
alarm bell has been rung sparingly for
diseases such as polio, Covid-19, Ebola,
The more highbrow denizens of the
anti-choice movement insist that the
deluge of draconian misogynist laws
that have been brought into effect by
the supreme court should not really
create these disastrous outcomes, de-
spite the brutally obvious fact that anti-
choice laws have clearly created a ra-
pidly more dangerous landscape for
women’s health.
These voices claim that the vague
wording and narrow circumstances
permitted by the laws’ “life of the
mother” exemptions are not the real
problem, but rather that the real prob-
lem is the way hospitals and their law-
yers are reading the law. “I have seen re-
ports of doctors being confused,” John
Seago, the president of Texas Right to
Life, told the New York Times, “but
that is a failure of our medical associ-
ations.” The National Review pundit
Alexandra DeSanctis Marr wrote, “Abor-
tion supporters are the ones conflating
abortion with miscarriage care and
care for ectopic pregnancy. Pro-lifers
know the difference between necessary
women’s health care and intentionally
killing a baby. It’s abortion supporters
who won’t distinguish.”
Would that these distinctions were
Zika virus and H1N1 swine flu. Since
the first human case was discovered
in 1970 in the Democratic Republic
of Congo, monkeypox outbreaks have
largely been contained and limited to
roughly a dozen African countries. In
recent weeks, the number of cases has
risen to more than 15,000 across the
world.
Dr Tedros’ concern now is with
the increase in cases, and how the
virus is spreading rapidly across the
world through sexual contact networks.
A new research paper on 528 mon-
keypox cases in 16 countries lays out
that 98% of the people infected were
19
so clear and apparent as Seago and
DeSanctis believe they are. The truth
is that while any moral movement for
choice must defend women’s rights
to control their own bodies with-
out reservation, in these tragic med-
ical crises, the line between an “elec-
tive” and an “emergency” abortion is
not so easy to distinguish. The differ-
ence between abortion and “necessary
women’s health care” is ambivalent be-
cause medicine and the body do not
conform to the strict moral lines that
the anti-choice movement tries to place
them in. When pressed, even Seago
admits this. Soon after declaring that
the laws championed by his group
pose no danger to women’s health, he
acknowledged that complying with the
law would indeed require providers to
delay emergency care. “He acknowl-
edged that such delays could cause
medical complications for women,” the
Times said.
Not that the likes of Seago and De-
Sanctis are in touch with their move-
ment anyway. The base of the anti-
choice movement seems alarmingly
comfortable with dispensing of “life
of the mother” exemptions, much
as that same movement has largely
dispensed with their professed sup-
port for rape and incest exemptions.
In Wisconsin, anti-choice groups have
called for amending the state’s long-
dormant 1849 abortion ban to grant
fewer exemptions for maternal life and
health. In Idaho, a recent Republican
party convention amended its platform
to support an abortion ban with no
exemptions at all. When a proposal to
include an ectopic pregnancy exemp-
tion was proposed, it failed by nearly
four to one.
In retrospect, it seems obvious that
the anti-choice movement would insist
on a false dichotomy between abor-
tion and women’s healthcare. It seems
in keeping with the other false bina-
ries that the movement is so enamored
of: like that between women who have
children and women who have abor-
tions; or between those who deserve be
in control of their lives, and those born
with a uterus.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US col-
umnist
gay or bisexual men, 75% of them were
white, and 41% had HIV. No women
were among the cases, and 95% of cases
were thought to be linked to sexual
transmission. These findings are cru-
cial in developing an effective and tai-
lored public health response to contain
spread which needs to largely focus
on the current highest-risk group: men
having sex with men (MSM).
While some have suggested it is
homophobic to note that MSM are
the group at highest risk, others have
noted that homophobia is recognising
Continued on page 20

20
Continued from page 19
this pattern of spread and not doing
anything about it. It is standard in
public health when tackling infectious
diseases to identify which groups are
most at risk and offer support to reduce
the negative impact the disease can
have. Think of flu vaccination cam-
paigns tailored to protect pregnant or
older people – some of the highest-risk
groups for illness and death from in-
fluenza. This is also a disease that could
easily spread beyond the MSM com-
munity, given its usual transmission
pattern is through household members,
close contacts and healthcare workers.
This is an emergency quite dis-
tinct from Covid-19 and polio, which
are also current public health emer-
gencies being tracked by the WHO.
Fortunately, we have an effective vac-
cine – developed for smallpox – that
has been approved for the prevention
of monkeypox as well. However, availa-
bility is limited even in Britain. The
necessary response to monkeypox is
intense vaccination efforts within the
MSM community and ensuring ade-
quate supply and access to all who need
it. There needs to be clear messaging
and education to raise awareness about
Putin’s attack on the grain deal was
despicable. It also shows he’s desperate
Hamish de Bretton-Gordon
O
ver the weekend, Russia
signed a deal with
Ukraine to allow grain
exports to resume from
three Ukrainian ports,
thereby easing the global food crisis.
Before the ink was dry, Russian forces
fired precision missiles into the port of
Odesa as grain was being readied for
export.
This is clearly the behaviour of
a tyrannical despot, one whose word
cannot be trusted. But it may also be an
act of desperation: Richard Moore, the
head of MI6, told a US security confe-
rence last week that the Russian army is
about to “run out of steam”.
The Russian president, Vladimir
Putin, has approached the conflict as
Take off your bra! Put on some weight! After
decades of being talked down to, Kate Moss
speaks out
Zoe Williams
S
o many things Kate Moss said
on Desert Island Discs were
shocking and yet not shock-
ing, but before any of that,
just the sound of her voice
was absolutely arresting. For over 30
years, she has been the sphinx at the
very centre of the culture: no chat
shows, no panel games; no podcasts
Opinion
A man receives a monkeypox vaccine in Montreal, Canada, on Saturday. Photograph: Graham Hughes/AP
symptoms and testing, and support for
those who want to isolate and need to
take time off work.
Just telling people not to have sex
hasn’t worked well: this has been clearly
shown by the HIV response and the fail-
ure of abstinence-only approaches. It’s
though it were a second world war tank
battle – and, unsurprisingly, his 20th-
century tactics are not standing up to
21st-century weaponry. But we know
from the Russian playbook in Syria that
when the conventional does not work,
Putin is quick to turn to the unconven-
tional. In Syria, this meant attacking
hospitals and schools, denying aid and,
ultimately, using chemical weapons. In
Ukraine, another Russian war crime is
about to happen in plain sight, even
after the grain deal: the weaponisation
of food and fuel. If we allow this to
happen, it is not such a large step to
chemical, biological or nuclear warfare,
all of which Russia has already threat-
ened.
The weaponisation of food has al-
ready forced up prices for those who
can least afford it in Africa and Asia,
putting millions at the threat of star-
or voiceovers; no Simpsons cameo, no
gentle segue into the kind of familiarity
where someone who sounds a bit like
her could make a decent living doing
voiceovers for radio ads. She has been,
at various points, just about the most
famous person in the country, without
anyone who didn’t know her being able
to say with certainty what she sounded
like. And maybe it’s because she’s really
shy, as she told Lauren Laverne on
Sunday, or maybe it’s because she made
more effective to show how to reduce
risk and protect oneself.
With fatigue setting in after years
of the Covid-19 pandemic, public health
leaders don’t want to cry wolf. How-
ever, this is a dire situation and a true
global emergency, as stated clearly by
vation. The grain deal, brokered by Nato
member Turkey, should allow food
from Ukraine to reach these countries,
but any guarantees of safety for the
ships transporting it– especially in the
wake of Russia’s attack on Odesa this
weekend – should be taken with a pinch
of salt.
As soon as these ships get into inter-
national waters off the coast of Odesa,
they should be protected by Nato figh-
ter jets. The Russian air force has
proved scant match for ageing Ukrai-
nian jets, and it will be even less of
a match for state-of-the-art Nato ones.
The deal also involves lifting some
sanctions against Russia, allowing it to
generate huge amounts of revenue by
selling its own grain and fertilisers on
the world markets. This will, of course,
allow Putin to rebuild his beleaguered
army.
a decision, at the age of 14, that she
wouldn’t become public property – in
which case, she’s just about the wisest
person, famous or otherwise, who ever
lived.
It’s terrifically sad to hear what it
was like to be a model in 1990, partly
because it’s probably exactly the same
today. Moss described going to a cast-
ing for a bra catalogue when she was
15, and some garden-variety predator
asking her to take her bra off. It’s such a
the WHO. Rather than fatigue, cynicism
and fatalism, it’s time for governments
to step up a tailored response. It won’t
involve lockdowns or restrictions, but
surveillance, testing, provision of self-
isolation support, clear messaging and
outreach to the most at-risk groups,
The Ukraine crisis is also one of
the things responsible for creating ram-
pant inflation in the UK and elsewhere,
contributing to the cost of living crisis.
Helping Ukraine defeat Russia is the
quickest way to get economies back on
track. If this means putting boots on the
ground, ships in the sea or planes in the
air, then so be it, if it ensures Putin’s war
crimes in Ukraine do not also affect the
most in need around the globe. There
are many war crimes being committed
in Ukraine by Russian forces and, as the
UN appears powerless or unwilling to
act, Nato must.
In Ukraine, as in Syria, Putin ap-
pears to have no concern about colla-
teral damage or the rules of war and
appears to favour directly targeting
civilians as the quickest way to stra-
tegic victory. Unfortunately for him,
the Ukrainian people have shown that
low move. An equal could retort, “Why
do you need to see me without a bra,
when you’re specifically hiring me to
wear a bra?” It’s a pure leverage of
shabby, middle-ranking power.
She talked about the photographer
Corinne Day, who was a friend of hers,
and yet still steamrollered her into
– what else? – being naked, for the
1990 Camber Sands shoot for The Face
that not only made Day’s name and
Moss’s, but also Cool Britannia’s. Then
The Guardian Tuesday 26 July 2022
and most importantly targeted vacci-
nation.
West African countries have been
struggling with monkeypox for years.
This has drawn little attention from
richer countries and the disease was al-
lowed to simmer there without much
investment or provision of vaccination.
Monkeypox is a reminder that a dis-
ease circulating anywhere, however far
from us we may think it is, is only
ever a plane ride away, and that bugs
don’t respect national boundaries. The
entire history of humankind surviving
these sorts of disease outbreaks shows
that the best approach is collective; that
if a fire is raging in your neighbour’s
garden, the imperative is to help them
put it out. Not just because it’s the right
thing to do, but also because it could be
your house on fire next.
Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global
public health at the University of Edin-
burgh
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they have the stomach for this fight
– Nato must match their bravery and
back them to the hilt. We cannot forget
that our failure to act in Syria, when
up to 1,500 civilians were killed with
the nerve agent sarin, no doubt embol-
dened Putin to invade Ukraine.
Putin is losing in all aspects and
on all fronts of this war, and we must
help Ukraine to victory at all costs. Last
weekend’s events confirm- – if further
confirmation were needed – that Putin
cannot be trusted. In order for much-
needed food to get to those who most
need it, Nato must get directly involved
to protect its passage through the Black
Sea.
Hamish de Bretton-Gordon is a
chemical and biological weapons
expert and a fellow at Magdalene Col-
lege, Cambridge
Moss talked about her crippling anxiety
before the equally seminal Calvin Klein
shoot in 1992, rooted, it sounds, in that
nightmare hall of mirrors, where she
was lauded for her beauty, yet expected
to surrender her autonomy in its ser-
vice – and smile while she was at it.
If that sounds particularly judg-
mental towards the fashion industry,
it isn’t really, because the rest of the
Continued on page 21
Tuesday 26 July 2022 The Guardian
Continued from page 20
world wasn’t any better, it was just fur-
ther away. The 90s overflowed with ru-
mours about Kate Moss – that she was
dumb, that she was a druggie, that she
used not to be dumb before she was a
druggie, or – counter view – that she had
always been dumb, because she grew
up in Croydon. Misogyny and snobbery
collided to produce a cloud of disap-
proval that sounded arch and knowing
but was base and irrational, almost me-
dieval.
It came to a head in 2005 when
some tawdry story about cocaine cost
her millions in lost advertising cam-
paigns. It made no sense. Cocaine in
2005, as it had been in the 90s, as it
is now, was just a trundling, out-of-of-
fice-autoreply of a story. Stories about
traces found in the toilets of the Royal
Opera House, the BBC! Traces on every
banknote! Come back to me, moral
majority, when you have some drug
dirt on a figure whose drug use ac-
tually matters, such as someone who
is running a government department. If
The UN wants to educate children – it will
succeed only if it feeds them first
Kevin Watkins
M
ore than 100 years
have passed since
social reformer Mar-
garet McMillan
fought for free
school meals in Britain. As a pri-
mary school inspector in Bradford, she
had seen hunger render poor children
unable to learn, robbing the promise
that came with universal education.
The landmark 1906 Education Act pro-
vided public funds for meals where
children were “unable by reason of lack
of food to take full advantage of the
education provided”.
That phrase should be at the heart
of the agenda for the UN’s Trans-
forming Education summit scheduled
for September. This is the world’s
opportunity to tackle a hunger crisis
jeopardising recovery from learning
lost during Covid-19 school closures.
Yet UN agencies, the World Bank, and
governments shaping the summit have
failed to grasp the nettle.
Perhaps that’s because hunger
among schoolchildren is hidden. Inter-
national data focuses on child health
during the critical first 1,000 days of
life. That has obscured the importance
of the 8,000 days it takes for a child
to transition to adulthood. Nutrition
during the formative years is critical for
health and cognitive development.
A wake-up call is long overdue. Ear-
lier this month, the Food and Agri-
culture Organization (FAO) published
Opinion
Kate Moss getting ready for a fashion shoot in New York in 1995. Photograph: Catherine McGann/Getty Images
you’re only going to go after models and
rock stars, that’s just bullying.
When she wasn’t the poster girl
A school cook serves lunch to students at St Luke's Church of England Primary School in
East London. Photograph: Daniel Leal/AFP/Getty Images
data on malnutrition across developing
regions. Applying those rates to school-
children captures the deadly inte-
raction of poverty and food price infla-
tion. In sub-Saharan Africa and south
Asia, global centres of child hunger,
there were almost 180 million children
aged five to 18 who experienced un-
der-nutrition in 2021 – a 76 million in-
crease over pre-pandemic levels. One
quarter of Africa’s schoolchildren are
now trying to learn while hungry.
The reality is almost certainly worse
than FAO data which does not yet in-
clude the inflation triggered by the
Ukraine war. Wealth and gender dispar-
ities also weigh heavily. Fewer than
half of adolescent girls in south Asia
receive an adequate dietary intake.
Micronutrient deficiencies, and anae-
mia – a major barrier to learning – are
endemic. In Africa, poor nutrition is a
for “partying” and “heroin chic”, Kate
Moss was being blamed for being the
model peddling “unrealistic standards”
leading cause of ill-health among pri-
mary children and adolescents.
Nothing destroys potential as sa-
vagely as hunger. Malnourished child-
ren are less able to concentrate and
absorb information. They are also more
likely to drop out of school, partly
because they are not learning – and
partly because poverty pushes them
into work and child marriage.
Feeding children in school can pro-
tect them from malnutrition, increase
enrolment, reduce dropout rates and
improve learning. Evidence from India’s
midday meal scheme shows children
of women who participated when they
were at school are less likely to be
stunted.
Much of the infrastructure for deli-
vering school meals is already in
place. Before the pandemic, these pro-
grammes represented the world’s larg-
for girls, being too thin, making thin
look too easy, or making it look too
hard, not having a “healthy” BMI, swan-
est safety net, reaching more than 300
million children in the poorest places.
The pandemic’s classroom closures
cut the nutritional lifeline of school
meals, leaving many children with-
out their main – or only – meal of
the day. The fiscal space available
to governments trying to restore the
programmes has shrunk with slower
growth, reduced tax revenues and
unsustainable debt. Education budgets
have been cut in two-thirds of the poor-
est countries.
Children have returned to school
carrying the double burden of lost
learning and increased hunger. The
World Bank estimates that 70% of 10-
year-olds could now be living in “learn-
ing poverty”, unable to read a simple
story, up from 53% before the pan-
demic. One study after another shows
deterioration in learning coupled with
rising inequality. Dropout rates are on
the rise.
Restoring the momentum behind
school meal provision could change
this picture. It would take about $5.8bn
(£4.8bn) a year to reach an additional
73 million children. This could protect
children from hunger, restore learning,
and support the budget of households
living in extreme poverty. It would also
represent value for money: every $1 in-
vested would generate another $9 in
benefits, according to one study. Yet
major donors have shunned aid for
school meals – and the World Bank, the
largest source of development finance,
has no school meals strategy.
Which brings us back to the
21
ning around like a walking eating dis-
order, not even ashamed. It was unfair
because she never had an eating dis-
order – that’s just the way she looks.
It would make just as much sense
to attack her for setting unreasonable
standards for the perfect nose. But it
was unfair on a deeper level. She was
accused of upholding a dangerous ideal
by the very people who had decided
she was perfect, and then expected to
atone for that.
Throughout the years of Kate
Moss’s ongoing discretion, she still
always came off as completely magni-
ficent. Was her dignity preserved by her
silence, like the Queen’s? Turns out, no:
she has now spoken and is, still, com-
pletely magnificent.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian col-
umnist
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
atguardian.letters@theguardian.com
Pupils queue for their midday meal
in New Delhi, India. Photograph: Manish
Swarup/AP
summit. Last month, the UN orga-
nised a preparatory jamboree bringing
together dozens of governments, UN
agencies, and NGOs to “rethink and rei-
magine” education, reflect on evidence
and table solutions. What emerged was
a stream of consciousness devoid of
financing commitments and strategies
for delivery. Margaret McMillan would
have been turning in her grave.
There will be no transformation of
education without a credible response
to the hunger crisis. Children at the
sharp end of that crisis don’t need
another talking shop. They need a prop-
erly financed plan of action to deliver
what every parent reading this article
would demand for their child – a chance
to learn in freedom from hunger.
Kevin Watkins was chief executive
of Save the Children and is visiting pro-
fessor of development practice at the
Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa at the
London School of Economics

22
Has Democrat John Fetterman found a way
to beat the reality-TV politician?
Matthew Cantor
W
hether it’s Ronald,
Donald or Arnold,
Americans are all
too familiar with
the phenomenon
of the second-tier celebrity turned poli-
tician. So when the TV doctor Mehmet
Oz decided to run for Senate in
Pennsylvania, his background as a B-
lister seemed well suited to the role.
As he proudly notes in his offi-
cial biography, Oz has won Emmys,
has written eight bestsellers, and was
featured on six seasons of The Oprah
Winfrey Show. He is a master of tradi-
tional media. But now the daytime TV
star is facing a Democratic opponent
who has proved himself a media suc-
cess story in his own right – though his
area of expertise is Twitter, not tele-
vision.
When John Fetterman entered the
race, the relatively little known lieu-
tenant governor had his work cut out
for him: a Bernie Sanders backer who
supports universal healthcare and a $15
minimum wage, he is running to re-
place a Republican in a swing state.
But he has rapidly made himself
a national name as he tears into Oz
on social media – hammering him, in
particular, on the question of whether
he’s really from Pennsylvania at all. Oz
has said he moved there in 2020 – to
a place his wife’s parents own. Before
‘I’m just not afraid’: Lynda Carter on her
online activism and Wonder Woman
Emma Brockes
T
he afterlife of the movie
star with a single, iconic
role is a curiosity. Be-
tween 1976 and 1979,
Lynda Carter appeared in
three seasons of Wonder Woman, a
hit so huge that for those of us who
saw it as children, she remains a some-
what mystical figure. Knight Rider was
great, the A-Team was fun, but Wonder
Woman – jumping between boulders,
sparks flying from her wrist plates – was
something else.
Here is Carter today, in a pastel-
colored blazer on video chat from her
home in Maryland, and although I’m a
46-year-old woman with two children
and a mortgage, I can’t help it: I’m com-
pletely agog. “It was such a short part of
my life, but it has made a bigger impact
than any other thing I’ve done,” says
Carter, who is 70 and looks nothing of
the sort. Among the many reasons to
love her, is her good grace in the face
of a generation’s obsession with those
three short years of her life.
We are not, ostensibly, here to talk
about Wonder Woman, nor Carter’s
latest release (she’s pivoted from acting
to singing; most of her songs are kind
of pop showtunes, but her new single
is a fantastic dance remix of her song
Opinion
John Fetterman, Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor, takes a selfie with attendees at a
meet-and-greet in May. Photograph: Hannah Beier/Reuters
that, he lived in New Jersey for decades.
In Fetterman’s view, Oz is still a
Jersey boy, and the Democrat has
weaponized meme after meme against
his rival. Fetterman has posted a pic-
ture of Oz’s face on a Pennsylvania
driver’s license, labeled “McLovin” in an
homage to cinema’s best known fake
ID. He has mocked his rival for appar-
ently filming an ad for his Pennsylvania
campaign in his New Jersey mansion.
And he has employed the services of
the most Jersey person this side of
Bruce Springsteen: Nicole “Snooki” Po-
lizzi.
In a clip that has received more
than 84,000 likes on Twitter, the Jersey
Shore reality star offers some savage
sympathy: “I heard that you moved
from New Jersey to look for a new
Lynda Carter in New York in December 2021. Photograph: John Nacion/NurPhoto/Rex/
Shutterstock
Human and Divine, which she wrote for
her late husband).
More pressing is the renaissance
she’s enjoying on social media. Plenty
of celebrities spout off about politics,
but in the wake of the overturn of
Roe v Wade, Carter’s Twitter feed has
broken through. She is warm and wry,
using her odd but powerful standing
in the memories of millions of Amer-
icans to have a word about what’s going
on. When, a few months ago, Carter
started tweeting about abortion rights,
got up in arms about Florida’s “don’t say
gay” laws and had a cheeky back and
forth with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,
Gen X keeled over at the sheer deli-
job,” she says. “I know you’re away from
home and you’re in a new place, but …
don’t worry, because you’ll be back in
New Jersey soon.”
Fetterman’s attacks aren’t limited to
the digital world. He had a pilot fly a
banner over the Jersey shore saying,
“Hey Dr Oz. Welcome home to NJ! ᤸ
John.” He posted the image online, flex-
ing Pennsylvania credentials by dedi-
cating it to “yinz and youse down the
shore today” – a combination of Pitts-
burgh and Philly-speak. He’s also sell-
ing a “Dr Oz for NJ” sticker. And in a
coup de grâce on Thursday, Fetterman
confirmed that he had launched a peti-
tion to have Oz honored in the New
Jersey Hall of Fame, which celebrates
the accomplishments of state residents.
Oz himself has a ways to go when
ciousness of it all. Check it out, guys:
Wonder Woman has engaged with the
discourse.
Nowhere has the actor been more
strident or effective than in her oppo-
sition to the supreme court’s over-
turning of Roe v Wade. Carter has
always been political – “give me some-
thing to march about!” she says, and
supported Hillary Clinton, who she
counts as a friend, in her run for pres-
ident. But this was different.
“I am so stunned I haven’t really
spoken out about my feelings,” says
Carter. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so
speechless. That you would have to
explain a D&C, that a stranger, a po-
it comes to the art of the political
stunt. He posted pictures of himself
visiting Pat’s and Geno’s, the dueling
cheesesteak shops, across the street
from each other, that are a Philadelphia
landmark. It was a rookie error, akin
to a New Yorker taking a selfie at
Times Square – any local can list at
least five cheesesteak places they’ve
deemed better than those two. Fet-
terman called Oz a “tourist”, and even
Pat’s itself replied: “Do you even live in
[Pennsylvania]? And can you spell the
town you live in?” (Oz misspelled the
name of his supposed home town, Hun-
tingdon Valley, in a campaign filing.)
When you’re getting burned by a chee-
sesteak shop, you know you need to up
your social media game.
While Fetterman has proved him-
self a natural in the art of trolling,
you can almost feel the blood, sweat
and tears poured into Oz’s efforts.
When he posted a doctored image
of Bernie Sanders with Fetterman la-
beled “best friends”, Fetterman rep-
lied with a meme mocking Oz’s graph-
ic design skills. When the Republican
shared a picture of a dictionary defi-
nition of “John Fetterman” – a “Bernie
Sanders socialist” who is “wrong for
Pennsylvania” – it felt like exactly
what it was: an attempt to crow-
bar old-fashioned political boilerplate
into a modern format. (It also placed
“John Fetterman” between “justice” and
“jurisdiction”, which, as several people
pointed out, is not how the alphabet
liceman, might come to your house to
say you had a procedure. Or that [if you
have] IVF you’re capable of murder or
something. My God.”
That, she says, is the emotional side.
The practical side is what to do about it.
“If we all got to together in state where
they are going to arrest anyone who
admits to having an abortion – and said,
‘Lock me up’? I just think we should all
race to the state, I don’t care how old
you are!”
You mean overwhelm the system?
“Right. Prove it! Prove I’m not
pregnant now!” This, the textbook I-
am-Spartacus move, seems a fittingly
jaunty suggestion coming from Carter.
Although the politics is all hers,
Carter has help with the wording of
her tweets. She tells me that a team
of young women and “a couple of very
cute guys” – mostly under 30, and led
by Sabrina Cartan, a media strategist –
have been responsible for distilling and
presenting her online persona. “They
get me,” she says. “They get my voice,
and my strengths and my weaknesses,
and my sense of humor.” It’s in the con-
text of this group that ideas are dis-
cussed, angles worked, jokes rehearsed
and Carter’s message honed for the
public domain. “They are free to voice
their own opinions, and they do,” she
says. “They lend their ideas, and exper-
tise, and voices, and we are each other’s
The Guardian Tuesday 26 July 2022
Mehmet Oz at a rally in June. Photo-
graph: Ariana Shchuka/AP
works.)
Perhaps in desperation, Oz has re-
cently adopted a new tactic: a “John Fet-
terman basement tracker” that records
how long it’s been since the Democrat
has held a public event. But instead of
coming off as a blow to his opponent,
the strategy just seems mean-spirited.
What took Fetterman off the campaign
trail was a stroke on 13 May.
Despite his pause from IRL cam-
paigning, Fetterman’s strategy appears
to be working. Polls have repeatedly put
the Democrat on top in the race, and he
has raised about nine times as much
as his opponent since April. A win
in November may serve as a political
lesson about the importance of carving
out a digital identity and could be cru-
cial to Democrats’ chances of holding
the Senate. Like so many others these
days, Fetterman is working from home
– and finding that he can still get things
done.
Carter as Wonder Woman. Photograph:
Everett Collection/Rex Feature
cheerleaders. That makes for a lot of
fun.” It also allows Carter to feel suffi-
ciently emboldened to wade in to the
political debate. “If not now, when, in
my life and career?” she says. “I’m just
not afraid.”
The funny thing about this is that,
for a great many celebrities, the fear
of voicing an opinion about politics is
secondary to the fear of admitting to
having help with the message. Carter
is blithely uninterested in concealing
how the sausage is made, not least be-
cause it would deny credit to her colla-
borators. She is very emphatic about
young people – about “passing the
baton”, as she puts it – and acting as
a figurehead to inspire and amuse. That
the source of this influence is a 40-year-
old TV show would be baffling if most
of us weren’t, at this point, completely
well-versed in how social media picks
up and reboots childhood heroes.
Continued on page 23
Tuesday 26 July 2022 The Guardian
Continued from page 22
Success lies in injecting precisely
the right amount of camp to trig-
ger affection without undermining the
message. Too little, and you’re preach-
ing; too much, and you’re David Hassel-
hoff. “I just didn’t know how there’s a
certain Twitter way,” says Carter. “And it
was a little above my head. And then
my head of media strategy came in and
said, well, this is how we engage. I went,
whoa!”
If Carter had a certain amount of
political credibility in the bank, it is
thanks to the weird status of the orig-
inal Wonder Woman. I loved that show
– the music, the outfits, the incred-
ibly lame special effects. She didn’t ac-
tually fly, she jumped between what ap-
peared to be fibreglass boulders, sure-
footed as a cat. And, of course, I loved
Carter, her flip between sweet-natured
Diana Prince and fierce but still twinkly
Wonder Woman. She was all-powerful,
and she was beautiful, and she had a
lasso that she knew how to use.
Still, let’s not get carried away.
In 2017, when Patty Jenkins revisited
They used her eggs to have a baby. Now
they’re one big family
Ellie Houghtaling with photo-
graphs by Bridget Bennett
N
urses hush her to
be quiet. Women in
the surrounding beds
haven’t been as for-
tunate as she is, but
Brooke Sodahl, 22, is fresh out of the
operating room and has someone she
needs to call. “They got 26 eggs!” she
whispers over the line.
Rachel Grashow, 34, is on the other
end, getting ready for work in her
Boston apartment. The whole world
lights up as she hears the words. For the
first time in years – after five deaths in
the family and a cataclysmic reckoning
with her own infertility that included
a miscarriage and four failed rounds of
IVF – she feels her luck turning. Her
family is about to grow, and Sodahl, a
stranger she met on the internet few
months ago, is the reason: she is their
egg donor.
When Grashow hangs up the phone,
returning to her day job at Harvard
doesn’t seem like an option. She calls
out from work, and heads to the place
where she knows she is most needed.
An hour later, she climbs into the ele-
vator at the Boxer hotel, juggling three
cups of soup up to Sodahl’s hotel room
to find her laid up on the bed, stomach
cramping, unable to relax.
Earlier that week, Sodahl had flown
up to Boston to begin the surgical pro-
cedure to remove her eggs. While she
was there, Grashow and her husband,
Ken Walton, invited their donor out to
dinner to get to know her, and were
surprised by their mutual connection.
But it was this afternoon in 2013 when
soup, a back rub and a couple of movies
turned a contractual obligation into an
unconventional sisterhood.
•••
It is rare for families to meet the
stranger donating eggs to them. In the
US, egg and sperm donation is usual-
ly a closed process: the family hears
Opinion
Wonder Woman in the form of the
Gal Gadot movie, the tone and script
were overtly feminist, which abso-
lutely wasn’t the vibe of the orig-
inal show. Three years before shoot-
ing the Wonder Woman pilot, Carter
won the Miss World USA competition,
a fact the show capitalized on with
the tiny shorts and corset of her cha-
racter’s wardrobe, and the beauty con-
test bounce of her manner. If Carter’s
Wonder Woman was designed to thrill
and inspire, she was also, per TV stan-
dards of the day, required to titil-
late. And yet, the iconography of the
only mainstream female superhero was
so strong that Ms. magazine featured
Wonder Woman on its cover six times
and even in the show, something of the
fierceness of the original DC character
shone through.
Nonetheless, it wasn’t exactly a stri-
dent message. In 1976, anything bearing
a feminist label was guaranteed a swift
box office death. (Of all the 70s and 80s
TV shows, the one with the most undis-
guised feminist energy wasn’t Wonder
Woman but Charlie’s Angels.) In the
spirit of retrofitting history to fit our
Rachel Grashow, left; Ken Walton and Rachel Grashow, with their daughters Nika and
Tessa Walton; Brooke Sodahl. Photograph: Bridget Bennett/The Guardian
about the donor through an agency, re-
ceiving only basic, non-identifying fea-
tures about them – such as their univer-
sity or their eye color – but never learn-
ing a name or hearing their voice.
The donor is also often blind to
the family. Most will go through test-
ing (and in the case of egg donation,
hormone injections to procure 20 or
more eggs over the period of half a
year), never knowing whether a dona-
tion was successful, who the family is,
or what the hopeful offspring will look
like.
But Grashow and Sodahl met
through an increasingly accepted
process called “known donation”. Here,
egg and sperm donors can meet pros-
pective parents face-to-face (or com-
puter screen to computer screen) to
build a relationship before converging
on the process of creating a new life to-
gether. The relationship from then on
can be as open or closed as desired.
Experts say this model provides less
pain and confusion for donors, parents
and children – but most people still opt
for closed donations: they don’t want to
involve strangers in their lives; they are
often influenced by the cultural pres-
sure to appear “normal”; or they fear
having to reveal a painful infertility
diagnosis to their friends and neigh-
bors.
Grashow says the benefits of going
current biases, however, Lynda Carter’s
Diana Prince is spoken of these days
as a feminist progenitor practically up
there with Mary Wollstonecraft. “I think
Wonder Woman was considered a piece
of feminist work,” says Carter. “And it
meant to be feminist. They tried to get
it less feminist, but she was definitely
the feminist – oh, definitely.”
Carter is fully onboard with the
franchise’s current reboot. “Oh, I was
thrilled, I was standing, I was applaud-
ing, I was crying, I was laughing. I was
holding the hand of my daughter and
husband.” She says: “It was strange to
see another woman taking that mantle,”
although somewhat made up for by her
smallpost-credits role as Amazonian
warrior Asteria in the most recent film.
She is happy to keep throwing
out suggestions, offering her support
to younger women, and harnessing
the sizable goodwill felt towards her,
all of which is only possible because
of Carter’s shrewd acceptance of the
nature of her appeal. In the decades
after Wonder Woman, she appeared
in countless shows and TV movies –
in 1983, Carter played the title role
through a known donation are ob-
vious to her now. Since that long after-
noon at the Boxer, she and Sodahl
have shared a sister-like relationship,
building a family together that sprawls
across the country.
The connection is symbiotic and, at
first glance, effortless. Sodahl is in their
lives and the children aren’t in the dark:
there’s no mystery surrounding their
ancestry, their genetic predispositions
to certain illnesses, or how they came to
be in this world.
Not all donations go as well as this.
•••
It wasn’t until their 27-year-old son
Steven died in 2020 that Laura and
David Gunner found out what they
wish they had known about his sperm
donor. Gunner vividly remembers the
moment she, her husband and their
male ob-gyn sat around a table in 1992
to discuss how anonymity would be
best for the child.
“I was the lady in the room sitting
at the kid’s table. It was just not a good
experience,” said Gunner via phone.
Gunner remembers the doctor’s
throwaway warning: that if the couple
didn’t choose an anonymous donation
the donor might spring up years later,
demanding custody.
The possibility terrified her, as there
were few explicit protections for par-
ents or donors when it came to third-
in a biopic of Rita Hayworth; in the
mid-90s, she played Elizabeth Shields,
the female lead, in 22 episodes of a fron-
tier TV drama called Hawkeye – but
despite her best efforts, never broke
through again in the same way.
She has never wanted to show up to
Comic-Con, she says, but neither does
she resent the source of her fame –
as so many in her position, with one
overshadowing role, tend to do. “If I was
on a talkshow, they would talk about
Wonder Woman and I would discuss it.
Or if someone stopped to tell me their
story, I would listen and sign their auto-
graph.” Carter, as sunny about this as
she appears to be about most things, is
happy that the show launched her at all.
And this in a 12-month period that
has been tougher than any other in
her life. Last year, Carter’s husband of
37 years, the lawyer Robert Altman,
died of myelofibrosis. She and their
two adult children are still in a period
of mourning. “The guy that I married
was handsome, smart, loving,” she says,
and it was an unusually wonderful mar-
riage. Why did it work? “He really did
not hold me back in anything I wanted
party fertility back in 1992. (The Child-
Parent Security Act in New York, which
went into effect February 2021, now
offers intended parents full legal cus-
tody in egg or sperm donations, remov-
ing any parental rights of the donor.)
They had no reason to doubt
the information in donor 1558’s med-
ical report, which portrayed him as a
healthy, young ice hockey player. But a
year after Steven died, through connec-
tions on the Donor Sibling Registry and
a 23andMe test, the Gunners found a
grandmother of donor 1558, who shared
details of Steven’s sperm donor with
them.
Just like Steven, donor 1558 was tall
with a tight smile, a fair complexion
and wore glasses. And just like Steven,
he had died of an opioid overdose after
a long struggle with schizophrenia.
“I can’t even describe the shock,”
said Laura Gunner. “They were paral-
lel in presentation of mental illness,
their diagnosis, their decompensation.
I couldn’t understand how this hap-
pened.”
The Gunners, devastated, reached
out directly to the Virginia-based
agency that supplied the sperm, asking
them to notify other families who had
used the donor’s sperm. The agency
refused and asked for medical proof
of not just Steven’s condition, but
also the donor’s – which the Gunners
didn’t have. The agency hadn’t verified
the donor’s medical information them-
selves, but now wanted the Gunners,
who never knew him, to do so. It felt
hypocritical.
“He was incentivized to lie. I was
not,” Gunner said by text message.
The FDA now requires donors to
get a physical examination and to take
blood and urine samples for infectious
diseases and STDs.
The group that oversees egg and
sperm donation, the American Society
for Reproductive Medicine, stipulates
that donors with a history of serious
mental illness should be excluded from
donating, but little is done to enforce
23
to do,” says Carter. “On the contrary, he
encouraged me to go back to singing
again. Or: ‘Don’t worry, take that movie,
I’ll deal with the kids, I’ll bring ’em every
weekend, we’ll figure it out.’And I would
do the same for him. If we had a vaca-
tion plan, I wouldn’t take a movie, or
a singing tour, or something like that,
because we had family plans. And we
spent as much time as a family together
as possible. And then Covid hit, and we
were together 24/7. And then in Feb-
ruary 2021, he perished.”
She says all this simply and her
takeaway is characteristically outward-
looking. “When I see what the supreme
court has done, and the glee that is on
the faces of people who have stolen the
rights of generations of women, I’m just
sad,” she says, but it’s an active kind
of sadness that foments connection. If
this has been a period of “insight and
grief”, says Carter, then the only way
forward is empathy. “A great deal of em-
pathy,” she says and smiles; it’s the only
real superpower.
• This article was amended on 25
July 2022; an earlier version gave the
incorrect surname for Sabrina Cartan.
Rachel Grashow embraces Brooke
Sodahl, who donated her eggs to Grashow
and her husband Ken Walton, who now have
two daughters.
this. Usually, donors are required to
fill out a physical and mental health
survey during health screenings, but
none of the information provided is re-
quired to be or verified. So while donor
1558’s condition violated ASMR’s guide-
lines, there were no consequences.
In other instances of organ dona-
tion, such as kidney transplants, donors
are legally required to go through
extensive assessments and medical his-
tory reviews.
“This feels ridiculous,” Gunner said,
“but I did not fully understand that the
donor was my son’s biological father. It
was presented almost that the donor
was this abstract person with an altruis-
tic nature that was helping us. It wasn’t
presented to us to consider that this
was a person.”
In 2021, the Gunners contacted their
friend and local representative, New
York state senator Patrick Gallivan, to
address what they saw as a gap in the
donation industry: how could families
go through a whole donation and con-
ceive children without ever knowing if
what the donors reported about them-
selves was true?
Together they drafted two bills
which are in committee in the New
York state senate. If passed, the legis-
lation would require medical, educa-
tional and felony history of any pros-
pective donor in New York before dona-
tion.
“I just can’t think that there won’t be
Continued on page 24

24
Continued from page 23
support after they hear a story like this.
Think of what’s at stake here – a human
life!” Gallivan said by phone in March.
The couple also inspired a new
bill in the House of Representatives,
introduced last week by Representative
Chris Jacobs. The new bill, called
“Steven’s Law”, would require potential
sperm donors to disclose their medical
records to intended parents.
But despite the Gunners’ tireless ef-
forts to change the system, they feel
little resolve.
“I go over that moment a million
times, with the doctor and my husband
at the side of me, and I try to rewrite
history to ask the questions that need
to be asked,” Gunner said.
“And then I think, ‘How was that
my responsibility? How were those my
questions to ask?’”
•••
When I ring the bell at Sodahl’s
house, nestled in the Las Vegas red rock
mountains, it’s Grashow who greets me
warmly at the door. She offers endless
snacks, chuckling as she acknowledges
this isn’t exactly her home. Sodahl
is upstairs with Grashow’s girls, Nika,
eight, and Tessa, six, braiding their hair.
Soon, the girls descend into the
kitchen giggling and run straight to Gra-
show to show off their new locks. Al-
though they share Sodahl’s button nose
and her wide smile, it’s their manner-
isms that organically liken them to
Grashow. Nika is sharp and inquisitive,
cerebral like her mother, while Tessa
clings to her heels.
A couple years earlier, Grashow’s
oldest daughter, Nika, approached her
wondering: is Sodahl her mom? As
she grew, more resemblances between
her appearance and Sodahl’s transpired
and with them, a curiosity that was
heightened by her penchant for light
provocation.
“I don’t think she was trying to hurt
me but she was probing. I told her, ‘I am
definitely your mom,’” Grashow said.
That seemed to be enough for Nika, and
the topic hasn’t resurfaced.
“I think the girls know intrinsically
that we’re their parents,” says Walton,
their father. “From the moment we
thought they’d even remotely under-
stand, we started trying to explain
where they came from. We’d use a
puzzle piece analogy: sometimes you
only need two puzzle pieces, but we
Instagran: meet Thailand’s new generation of
over-60s influencers
Rebecca Ratcliffe South-east
Asia correspondent
S
omsak Jiteurtragool stands in
a sun speckled field, sapl-
ings lined in rows behind
him. “Hello viewers, today
I’m bringing you to Principal
Uncle and Auntie’s Forest Garden plot,”
he says. A tour begins, and the camera
pans up and down various plants: from
red wood to makha and mahogany.
He tells the camera that his 600
seedlings, which cost just 27 baht [0.73
USD] each when he planted them five
years ago, could be worth up to 10,000
baht [271.19USD] per plant in 10 years’
time.
Opinion
needed an extra piece from Auntie
Brookie.”
It wasn’t always this easy: when
Grashow brought her daughter to first
meet Sodahl seven years ago, she
feared the worst: that Sodahl and
Nika would feel an immediate innate
connection facilitated by their biology,
usurping Grashow’s maternal bond
with her children.
But that didn’t happen. When
Sodahl saw Nika, she looked at her with
curious eyes: a Where’s Waldo hunt for
the similarities. It was a fun peek into
her own future, if she were to have kids,
but Sodahl never felt any inclination
that Nika was hers. She simply did not
want to be a mother yet. Helping Gra-
show start her own family was exactly
what she wanted: the possibility to be
a cool aunt figure without any of the
responsibility.
Now the broadened families see
each other twice a year, in Las Vegas
at Brooke’s home and on vacation to-
gether at Cape Cod in Massachusetts,
near Grashow and Walton’s home. They
call each other regularly. When Nika
had a recent surgery, Sodahl’s parents
mailed presents and a care package.
And through time and close connec-
tion, Grashow’s insecurities have eased.
“Nobody understands it until they
actually see it,” Walton says. “My family
are dumbfounded. They don’t know
what it’s like choosing family.”
“We did this weird thing,” Grashow
begins, laughing.
“And now it’s even weirder!,” Sodahl
chimes in, finishing her sentence.
“I think if Brooke had been ano-
nymous, I would have used my imagi-
nation to fill in all the pieces in what-
ever way would have been convenient
for me,” said Grashow over the phone
another evening. “That maybe if the
girls were jerks, maybe I had chosen a
sociopath.”
•••
The fear over who the “real” parent
is remains the leading reason why
many prospective parents and donor
organizations avoid open donations.
That fear was crystalized in 1991, when
Robin Young and Sandy Russo were
sued for paternity by their sperm donor,
Tom Steel.
Steel, who was initially introduced
to the young lesbian couple through a
mutual friend, wanted to change the
terms of their parental arrangement
when he was diagnosed with HIV in
Most older Thai people are already using social media, one participant said, but they don’t
consider themselves as content creators. Photograph: Sutiporn Somnam/Getty Images
Somsak, a 62-year-old retired head-
the early 1990s, when the disease was a
death sentence. He wanted more time
with the child born of his donation, de-
spite originally agreeing not to be in-
volved.
The US legal system didn’t rec-
ognize Young and Russo’s same-sex
partnership as legitimate, and in 1994,
the appellate division of the New York
state supreme court recognized Steel as
the legal paternal figure in the child’s
life.
The four-year court battle was a
landmark case in the third-party fer-
tility industry, with lingering impacts
on the rights of donors and parents
alike (the saga was chronicled in the
HBO Max series Nuclear Family, di-
rected by Ry Russo-Young, the offspring
of Young and Steel, now an acclaimed
film-maker.)
But sperm donation is a drastically
simpler process than egg donation, a
multi-month procedure that requires
hormone injections and surgery, and
has more legal guardrails than the
newer industry of egg donation.
Legal experts in the world of
women’s reproductive rights say that
few protections have been drafted
specifically with female donors in
mind. Some of the legislative deci-
sions that apply to the realm of egg
donation are hand-me-downs from sur-
rogacy cases, litigated to protect the
parental rights of the intended parents,
not intending to provide safety or secu-
rity to those donating.
In New York, state senator Liz
Krueger proposed a bill in February
2020 that would curtail the health risks
taken on by would-be surrogates and
egg donors and sought to provide an
avenue for tri-parent families to legally
exist (there is currently no legal frame-
work for multi-parent family struc-
tures). It also proposed a donor registry,
but critics argued the plan was flawed
because participation in the registry
would have been entirely voluntary. It
was shot down in favor of the Child-
Parent Security Act, another surrogacy
bill with few explicit protections for
donors.
Most egg donors want open dona-
tions: in October 2021, a study of 271
donors found nearly two-thirds (63%)
of interviewed egg donors preferred
their donations be known as opposed
to anonymous; 88% were in favor of a
donor registry; and 45% felt that such a
registry should be mandatory.
teacher from central Thailand, isn’t
But industry leaders argue fewer
people will donate their eggs if they’re
expected to maintain an open, poten-
tially lifelong connection with the
family and fear that the responsibility
of keeping and verifying health records
would increase the cost of an already
expensive procedure.
“In most cases, you’re going to take
a treatment that’s already difficult to
access because of cost and put that
[new financial] burden on the patients,”
said Sean Tipton, the chief advocacy
and policy officer of the American So-
ciety for Reproductive Medicine.
In 2012, ASRM successfully lobbied
against and ultimately blocked legis-
lation in New York that would increase
transparency and create a donor regi-
stry.
Tipton warns against the involve-
ment of the government in the indus-
try, arguing that a central registry poses
risks when “non-magnanimous poli-
ticians” seek to draft policy around
reproductive rights, as in as the na-
tional abortion rights crisis.
“We are very committed to giving
patients the autonomy to make their
own decisions about their reproductive
lives,” said Tipton. “There would be
many advantages to [a donor registry]
in the industry, but we have not seen a
proposal that solves the rather formid-
able obstacles, which include privacy
[for donors and families].”
•••
Now that Sodahl has children, she
appreciates the emotional turmoil that
parents must go through when decid-
ing to use a donor. She remembers
the false expectations of an instant
connection after giving birth, which
was at odds with her own experience.
She could only imagine how con-
ceiving children with the help of a
donor would enhance any impostor
syndrome around the already fragile
experience of early motherhood.
But she and Grashow can’t im-
agine a donation any other way. Gra-
show agrees that families have a right
to know accurate information about
donors, butshe feels there’s a larger lie
perpetuated by agencies.
“There’s this illusion of health and
control that people don’t think about
when they’re conceiving naturally,” Gra-
show says. “A myth that you can control
biology and pick the perfect donor to
have the perfect kid.”
No matter how much parents invest
your typical social media influencer.
Yet his Facebook video on growing
trees as an investment has been viewed
by almost 8,000 people, and his Face-
book page dedicated to gardening, set
up six months ago, already has more
than 900 followers.
Somsak is one of about 50 people
who took part in a digital training
scheme designed for over 60s by the
Thai Media Fund, a government agency.
The project, which will soon accept a
new intake of students, aims to help
Thailand’s rapidly ageing population
use social media more effectively, and
to generate their own content.
Most older Thai people are already
using social media, says Somsak, but
they don’t consider themselves as con-
The Guardian Tuesday 26 July 2022
upfront in the process, there’s no guar-
antee the child will look or be like them,
that they won’t get sick, or that they’ll
live a happy life.
Still, Grashow feels she has an
advantage by knowing Sodahl – a
glimpse into the future she wouldn’t
have had if she chose not to. Together,
their family feels complete.
Their experience might become
more commonplace in the future, but
it still won’t be the norm. In early June,
Colorado became the first state in the
nation to ban anonymous sperm and
egg donation. When the law goes into
effect in 2025, children born of future
procedures will legally gain access to
their donor’s identity and medical his-
tory. It will require agencies and clin-
ics based in Colorado to keep current
records on the health of their donors,
which will create a de facto registry.
Only a dozen states have attempted
to regulate the industry through the
law. Six states (California, Connecticut,
Maine, Rhode Island, Vermont and
Washington) adopted the 2017 Uniform
Parentage Act, which authorizes the re-
lease of donor identities once the child
reaches age 18. Still, it permits donors
to conceal their identities at the time
of donation, so pro-disclosure activists
don’t see the regulation as truly protec-
tive.
Meanwhile, the increasing popu-
larity of genetic tests like 23andMe
and MyHeritage effectively nullify any
promises of anonymity in the donation
process.
Recently, Sodahl and her husband,
Jared, volunteered to serve as guar-
dians to Nika and Tessa should any-
thing happen to Grashow and Walton.
Eight years ago, that offer would have
been Grashow’s worst nightmare.
“It’s a weight off my chest that they
offered,” said Grashow. “I think it’s what
I always wanted. It was a huge gift to
me.”
The girls are completely open with
friends or strangers about the struc-
ture of their family. A month ago, Nika
wrote an essay for her class where she
described having “two moms and two
dads”.
Their family might be different, but
the girls aren’t confused at all. Nika
ends her essay with one short sentence:
“I love my big family.”
Somsak Jiteurtragool with one of his
saplings. Photograph: Facebook
tent creators. “As the older generations,
we should get up and give it a go,”
he says. “Do something that you like,
present something that you are enthu-
siastic about.
“Our knowledge can be valuable to
society. The younger generation can
Continued on page 25
Tuesday 26 July 2022 The Guardian
Continued from page 24
learn from us,” he adds.
Almost 78% of Thailand’s popu-
lation is online, according to a report by
DataReportal and the creative agency
We Are Social, while a 2021 estimate
suggested that Thais spent almost
three hours every day on social media.
This is likely to include many from
Thailand’s older age groups, says Dr
Dhanakorn Srisooksai, chief executive
officer of Thai Media Fund. “We are
entering the digital era with elderly
people, more and more elderly are
using media right now, but with limited
skills,” says Dhanakorn. Forecasts sug-
gest more than 30% of Thailand’s popu-
lation will be aged over 60 by 2035.
Older users tend to face different
risks online, Dhanakorn adds. While
David Warner: a fiercely charismatic actor
who raised the IQ of his movies
Peter Bradshaw
D
avid Warner was a distin-
guished English Shakes-
pearean actor, in fact one
of the great stage Ham-
lets of his generation but,
in movie terms, and especially as he
got older, his strong, intelligent face and
equine handsomeness almost made
him the English Max von Sydow, emi-
nently castable in supporting character
roles as troubled or darkly villainous
people in scary films.
It was Warner’s destiny to have
one of the most macabre and shock-
ing death scenes in movie history in
the classic 1976 chiller The Omen, a
stomach-turningly horrible coup which
he endured in the role of Keith,
the long-haired and wild-eyed photo-
grapher who notices that there is
something very wrong with the che-
rubic baby adopted by the US ambas-
sador and his wife: Gregory Peck and
Lee Remick. The climatically gruesome
moment comes when Peck soft-hear-
tedly refuses to use the special anti-
christ-killing daggers on the child and
throws them away. Keith defiantly picks
them up, saying he will use them him-
self, at which point dark forces re-
lease the handbrake on a builder’s truck
parked nearby with an inadequately se-
cured sheet of plateglass in the back.
This shoots out, decapitating Keith. I
remember literally jumping out of my
The big idea: should we be using data to
make life’s big decisions?
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
W
hom should you
marry? Where
should you live?
How should you
spend your time?
For centuries, people have relied on
their gut instincts to figure out the an-
swers to these life-changing questions.
Opinion
online bullying and addiction to social
media are the biggest problems af-
fecting young people online in Thail-
and, older generations are more vulner-
able to scams and disinformation, he
says. “They might believe some sort of
fake news about vaccines, for example,
that it can have an effect on their
health … or some fake news about a
certain diet or about a nutrition supple-
ment that might have an effect on their
actual health and cause them to lose a
lot of money.”
Alongside training on areas such
as disinformation, the Thai Media
Fund’s project partnered participants
with university students who pro-
vided mentoring on the technical skills
needed to develop an online presence,
including editing videos. Participants
created online pages sharing their areas
Bafta nominated … David Warner in the 1966 film Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment.
Photograph: British Lion Film Corporation/Allstar
seat in the cinema when I first saw
Warner’s fake prosthetic head spinning
up into the air, and at the dawn of
the VHS age, this horribly ingenious
spectacle was repeatedly savoured by
generations of horror fans on pause and
rewind.
Warner was also to have an iconic
horror presence in Anthony Hickox’s
1988 movie Waxwork, playing the sinis-
ter Mr Lincoln, who owns a creepy wax
museum whose horrifying exhibits can
enfold unwary visitors into their own
hellish reality. In John Carpenter’s In
the Mouth of Madness (1994), Warner
is the consulting psychiatrist Dr Wrenn,
to whom the hero John Trent, played by
Sam Neill, recounts his disturbing story:
at this stage in his career, Warner is
perhaps assuming the father-confessor
Now, though, there is a better way. We
are living through a data explosion,
as vast amounts of information about
all aspects of human behaviour have
become more and more accessible. We
can use this big data to help determine
the best course to chart.
There has long been overwhelming
– and often surprising – evidence that
algorithms can be much better than
people at making difficult decisions.
of expertise, from learning English to
advice on caring for children who are
autistic. A grandad in Ubon Ratcha-
thani created a YouTube chatshow with
his grandson in Bangkok, so that they
could stay in touch even while living far
away from one another.
‘I let it go naturally’
Nadrda Suksuthamwong, 61, a per-
sonal trainer and fitness influencer,
another of the participants, credits the
course with teaching her about how to
illustrate and cut her videos more effec-
tively. She has used social media for
10 years and has a TikTok following of
more than 68,300 people. “My children
are in their 30s, they tell their friends
– my mom is a TikTok star,” she says.
Her videos feature the shuffle dance
trend, as well as advice on proper form
when exercising. “I think our livelihood
role.
It wasn’t true to say that the movies
didn’t give Warner a leading role. He
was nominated for a Bafta for Karel
Reisz’s fascinating Morgan: A Suitable
Case for Treatment in 1966, an angrily-
unhappy-young-man role for the times:
the mercurial leftwing artist whose
wife has left him for a smoothie art
dealer. Warner is gangly and tall, awk-
ward, fiercely charismatic, voluble, with
a mop of fair, a little like the young
Rhys Ifans. It was the kind of inter-
esting, textured lead role that an actor
like him could expect to get in the thea-
tre or in TV drama (Morgan was devel-
oped from a television play), but maybe
not so much in the movies. Four years
later, Sam Peckinpah cast Warner as
the itinerant preacher Reverend Joshua
Researchers have collected data on var-
ious kinds of choices people make,
the information they base those choic-
es on, and how things turn out. They
have found, for example, that a simple
data-driven algorithm would have been
better than judges at deciding wheth-
er a defendant should stay in jail or
be released; better than doctors at
deciding whether a patient should get
a procedure; and better than school
is from working so I don’t think of retir-
ing at all,” she says.
Older people are perhaps put off
producing content online because they
worry about making mistakes, she
adds. “They don’t want to be compared
with other people and that can make
them lose their confidence, so they dare
not present themselves in the media.”
Pojai Poonnat, director of the
project, which is called Soong Wai
Huajai Young Work, said that some
participants were shy about appearing
on screen. “They’re worried about being
bullied over how they look and or how
they behave in front of the camera,”
she says, adding that trainers suggested
alternatives such as doing voiceovers.
As a former school headteacher,
Somsak wasn’t nervous about pre-
senting. Environmental conservation
Sloane in The Ballad of Cable Hogue
and for Alain Resnais he was John Giel-
gud’s troubled son Keith in Providence,
released in 1977.
Perhaps Warner’s most interesting
role came in the 1979 cult sci-fi mys-
tery thriller Time After Time by Nicho-
las Meyer. Warner plays 19th-century
surgeon John Stevenson who is sus-
pected of being Jack the Ripper; mean-
while HG Wells (played by Malcolm
McDowell) reveals to his associates that
he has invented in reality the kind of
time machine featured in his work. Ste-
venson uses this invention to evade
the police and escape into the future
and Wells follows him to the deeply
strange and alien world of the late
1970s. The role is perfect for Warner:
disturbing, intelligent, alienated. Meyer
also directed Star Trek VI: The Undis-
covered Country in 1991 and made
Warner the stately and sympathetically
presidential-looking chancellor of the
Klingon high council.
As the years went by, Warner car-
ried on doing outstanding character
work. He was the Prussian covert agent
Sir Edmund Appleton in the 1978 ver-
sion of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine
Steps; and was interestingly used as
the unprincipled software executive in
Steven Lisberger’s Philip K Dick-esque
VR movie Tron, with the gangsterish
name of Dillinger who steals the work
of Jeff Bridges’s programmer Keith
Flynn. Later he was the ex-Pinkerton’s
gumshoe on board the Titanic in James
principals at deciding which teachers
should be promoted.
The power of data analysis has
been proved in the sports and busi-
ness worlds, too. As made famous by
the book and movie Moneyball, base-
ball teams found that algorithms were
better than scouts at picking players,
and better than managers at picking
strategies. In finance, the hedge fund
Renaissance Technologies dramatically
25
was a topic he promoted at school, he
says, and now he hopes to share the
same messages among his own gener-
ation. “They have time and some of
them have land,” he says.
Each morning, he films a short
video while out in the garden, which
he spends about 30 minutes editing
later in the evening, ready to post the
next day. Somsak doesn’t obsess over
his follower count and number of likes.
“I let it go naturally,” he says. “If [people
online] like the same thing as me, they
can come and join.”
“During my official work before I re-
tired, I was quite happy with my work
and happy being busy,” he says. Now, he
says, social media has become his new
classroom.
Macabre … Warner and Gregory Peck in
The Omen. Photograph: 20th Century Fox/
Allstar
Cameron’s epic who keeps an eye on
Kate Winslet’s headstrong young hei-
ress, and Admiral Boom in Mary Pop-
pins Returns, the crusty old seadog who
had a habit of firing a cannon from his
balcony.
With the rigour of his classical train-
ing, his style and his fine voice, Warner
boosted the IQ of any movie he was in.
I remember literally
jumping out of my
seat in the cinema
when I first saw
Warner’s fake
prosthetic head
spinning up into the
air
outperformed competitors by seeking
out patterns in stock market data and
using them to inform its investment
strategy. Tech firms in Silicon Valley
have found that data from experiments
provides better insights into how to
design their websites than designers
could.
But stats have had surprisingly little
Continued on page 26

26
Continued from page 25
impact, thus far, on our personal lives.
One major problem is that good data
about life’s biggest personal questions
has been difficult to come by. The revo-
lution may have come to baseball early
thanks to all the information about
performance that its obsessive fans had
demanded and collected. Now we can
anticipate a “Lifeball” moment as a
result of all the data that our smart-
phones and computers are able to harv-
est.
Consider this not-too-trivial ques-
tion: what makes people happy? Data
to answer this question in a rigorous,
systematic way was simply not avail-
able in the 20th century. While play-
by-plays from every game provided raw
material for data scientists working in
sports, there was no equivalent record
of events in people’s lives and the
changes and mood they provoked. Hap-
piness, unlike baseball, was simply not
open to quantitative research
It is now. Experience sampling
projects ping people on their devices
and ask them various questions: what
are you doing? Who are you with?
How happy are you? The largest of
these, Mappiness, co-founded by the
UK-based economists Susana Mourato
and George MacKerron, has collected a
repository of more than 3m data points.
They have revealed the activities that
provide far more enjoyment than most
of us would have guessed, such as exer-
cising, going to a museum and gar-
dening. Then there are the things that
give us less pleasure than you might
assume, such as playing video games,
The Guardian view on Brexit and the border:
all jammed up
Editorial
The worst of the chaos of the last few
days at the Kent border towns of Dover
and Folkestone thankfully appears to
be over. But tens of thousands of British
tourists have had the start of their holi-
days seriously disrupted, while HGV
drivers waited for up to 18 hours to
cross the Channel as sections of the
M20 were turned into a lorry park. Huge
queues for ferries at Dover eased first,
followed by those for the Eurotunnel
at Folkestone. But, amid warnings that
the problem may recur as soon as this
weekend, questions about what caused
it need urgent answers.
Ministers including Liz Truss, the
foreign secretary who wants to be
prime minister, should provide them.
It is almost four years since Dominic
Raab, then Brexit secretary, said he
hadn’t grasped “the full extent” of the
UK’s reliance on the Dover-Calais cross-
ing. But more than 18 months since
the withdrawal agreement took effect,
there has been plenty of time to put in
place arrangements to ensure the Brit-
ish port’s smooth running. Because of
Covid restrictions on foreign travel last
summer, it was widely predicted that
the crunch would come after schools
broke up this July. Yet the events of the
weekend show that, once again, Britain
was poorly prepared.
Predictably, Ms Truss and others
Opinion / The Guardian View
Illustration: Elia Barbieri/The Guardian
watching TV and browsing the inter-
net. Watching sports fixtures involving
your favourite team can be particularly
dangerous to your mood, it turns out.
The average sports fan gets 3.9 points
of happiness when their team wins, but
forfeits 7.8 points of happiness when it
loses.
There is even some evidence that
just telling people about the data on
happiness can increase it. One rando-
mised controlled trial found that indi-
cating which activities had been found
most likely to bring them pleasure,
combined with a plan to incorporate
more of them into daily life, led to im-
proved mood.
Vehicles queue to enter the Eurotunnel terminal in Folkestone on Sunday. Photograph: Henry Nicholls/Reuters
blamed the French for the situation,
and pointed to the lack of staff at
passport control booths on Friday as
a trigger for the immense traffic jams
that built up during the day. But
given that Dover’s owners put in a
bid for £33m of government funding
to help them manage the changed
circumstances, and particularly the
post-Brexit requirement for passports
to be stamped, it is clear that they antic-
ipated issues beyond one-off delays. So
Another way to be happier is to
marry well. Here, too, data is offer-
ing us new insights. One study by 86
researchers collected information on
more than 11,000 romantic couples.
They used machine learning models
to understand what predicts romantic
satisfaction. They found many highly
desired traits, such as a partner’s attrac-
tiveness and height, have just about no
correlation with long-term happiness.
Instead the qualities most predictive
of romantic satisfaction tended to be
psychological ones, such as having a
so-called “growth mindset”, or a secure
attachment style.
And one final data-driven strategy
far the government has not explained
its decision against the upgrade, apart
from noting that there were more bids
than funds. The obvious conclusion is
that warnings were not taken seriously
enough by a government determined
to minimise negative effects of quit-
ting the EU – and to blame anyone but
itself when these become too obvious
to ignore.
Kent is not the only departure
point where business has not been
for happiness is moving house. A study
by three economists at the National
Bureau of Economic Research in Cam-
bridge Massachusetts analysed survey
data and ranked the happiness of every
corner of the US. They found that when
people moved from an unhappy city to
a happier place, the effect rubbed off on
them, and their overall mood improved.
Clearly, data based on large samples
of people isn’t all you need consider
when moving. An individual might not
want to pack up and head to Charlot-
tesville, Virginia – the happiest place
in the US – based on these surveys
alone. Interestingly, data is giving us in-
sights into many of the other factors
running smoothly. Airports too have
seen cancellations, vast queues and
long waits, due to staff shortages after
layoffs related to the pandemic – and
difficulty filling posts due to low pay
and visa rules. Such disruption points
to weak planning by both industry and
government. (That it unfolded at the
same time as plans to allow the aviation
industry to expand massively points to
an alarming failure of leadership.)
Conservatives habitually mock
The Guardian Tuesday 26 July 2022
that might come into play. For example,
a study of tens of millions of children
has found the places that increase their
future earnings the most. Another with
a huge sample size found that certain
cities can improve one’s life expectancy.
These are the early days of the data
revolution in personal decision-mak-
ing. I am not claiming that we can com-
pletely outsource our lifestyle choices
to algorithms, though we might get to
that point in the future. I am claim-
ing instead that we can all dramat-
ically improve our decision-making by
consulting evidence mined from thou-
sands or millions of people who faced
dilemmas similar to ours. And we can
do that now.
•Don’t Trust Your Gut: Using Data
to Get What You Really Want in Life by
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is published
by Bloomsbury.
Further Reading
Moneyball by Michael Lewis (WW
Norton & Co, £11.99)
The Happiness Project by Gretchen
Rubin (HarperCollins, £10.99)
Noise: A Flaw in Human Judge-
ment by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier
Sibony, Cass R Sunstein (William Col-
lins, £10.99)
Experience sampling
projects ping people
and ask them: Who
are you with? How
happy are you?
political opponents for unrealistic
pledges, while boasting of their own
hard-headedness. But it is the current
government that appears addicted to
false promises. The myth of Brexit has
taken the place of reality, as trade-offs
that were the inevitable consequence
of leaving the EU are denied in favour of
buccaneering fantasies. Having encour-
aged voters to give up free movement
by leaving the EU, politicians now rec-
ommend that they blame others for
every inconvenience.
Future difficulties with regard to
the borders are coming into view. Brit-
ish disabled drivers’ badges may not
be accepted in some EU countries,
meaning that travellers will face restric-
tions on where they can go. Roam-
ing charges are being reintroduced for
mobile phones, leading to higher bills.
Waiting times at borders could get
longer with tougher checks that may
involve drivers being asked to get out
of cars. These were all predictable
consequences of Brexit. Practically
speaking, none of them ought to be
insurmountable. But efficient adminis-
tration and straightforward commu-
nication with the public were never the
top priorities of Boris Johnson’s govern-
ment – and appear unlikely to be those
of his successor.
We report to
no one

We report
for everyone
We believe that journalism
should serve the public interest,
not outside influence.

Support The Guardian by subscribing.

Visit gu.com/subscribe-to-change

28
The Guardian view on the Lambeth
conference: don’t make it about sexuality
Editorial
The staging of the twice-delayed Lam-
beth conference, which this week sees
bishops from the Anglican communion
assemble in Canterbury for the first
time since 2008, should be a cause
for celebration. Postponed in 2020
due to the pandemic, it offers repre-
sentatives from more than 40 national
churches around the world the chance
to reconnect in person. The archbishop
of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has ex-
pressed the hope that it will be an occa-
sion for fruitful dialogue, as Anglicans
negotiate the challenges of creating “a
postcolonial model” for a communion
created in the era of empire.
Sadly, such admirable aspirations
risk being undermined by more divi-
sive debate on sexuality and the status
of same-sex unions. Among a series of
draft texts distributed last week to the
650 attending bishops and archbishops,
one called for the reaffirmation of
an infamously divisive resolution from
the Lambeth conference of 1998. This
flatly rejected homosexual practice as
“incompatible with scripture”, and fu-
elled years of acrimony and culture
wars, leaving gay and lesbian Anglicans
feeling marginalised, betrayed and ex-
cluded. The draft text also asked bi-
shops to back the proposition that “it is
Thirteen Lives review – Ron Howard’s Thai
cave-rescue saga told with non-Hollywood
heroics
Peter Bradshaw
Here is Ron Howard’s decent retelling
of an amazing true-life story: the Tham
Luang cave rescue in northern Thailand
in 2018, when international volunteers
and Thai Navy Seals battled to rescue
12 teenage boys and their football coach
trapped in a flooded cave. Howard and
screenwriter William Nicholson have
the tricky job of following last year’s
excellent documentary on this subject,
The Rescue, by Jimmy Chin and Eliz-
abeth Chai Vasarhelyi.
Just as with Howard’s other near-
disaster-movie Apollo 13, we have the
unlucky number right up there in
the title. When the 13 were stranded
in the cave, caught unawares by the
torrential downpour, a colossal mission
got under way which involved thou-
sands of volunteers frantically pump-
ing, draining and diverting the rain-
water so that they wouldn’t drown,
while the authorities tried to think
what to do.
Colin Farrell and Viggo Mortensen
play John Volanthen and Rick Stan-
ton, two dedicated amateur cave divers
from Britain who were brought over to
Thailand at the prompting of resident
British national and experienced diver
Vern Unsworth (Lewis Fitz-Gerald). It
The Guardian View / Arts
‘The archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has expressed the hope that it will be an occasion for “walking together”.’ Photograph: Yui
Mok/PA
the mind of the Anglican Communion
as a whole that same-gender marriage
is not permissible”.
The feeling of deja vu is deeply
depressing. In 2018, when this confe-
rence was originally due to take place,
Mr Welby cancelled it on the grounds
that levels of internal division were
such that it might do more harm than
Bold plan … Colin Farrell, Joel Edgerton and Viggo Mortensen in Thirteen Lives. Photograph: Vince Valitutti/Metro Goldwyn Mayer
Pictures
was Volanthen and Stanton who first
found the boys alive. But how to get
them out? Even with scuba gear and
guidance, the boys couldn’t be relied
on to swim out without panicking and
drowning in the darkness. So Stan-
ton suggested bringing over another
diver, Australian anaesthesiologist Ri-
chard “Harry” Harris (Joel Edgerton),
good. In a sensible attempt to avoid
the toxicity of previous debates, he
has decreed that, for the first time, no
traditional “resolutions” will be passed
during the coming discussions. Since
each national church can ignore or
adopt Lambeth pronouncements as it
sees fit, this was an eminently prag-
matic approach designed to defuse ten-
who has the terrifying job of putting
each boy under sedation and floating
their sleeping form through the terri-
fyingly narrow cave tunnels, period-
ically topping up the dose, with death
an ever-present danger for rescuer and
rescued. Sahajak Boonthanakit plays
Governor Narongsak who calmly gives
the go-ahead for the foreigners’ bold
sions. The conciliatory approach even
led to suggestions that this would be
the “Kumbaya” Lambeth conference.
But it appears that arch-conservatives
found a way to try to inject some all-
too-familiar toxicity into proceedings.
At the weekend, bishops from the
Church in Wales – which last year intro-
duced church blessings for same-sex
plan, tacitly agreeing to let them have
the praise in the event of success, but
resolving to take the blame if things
went wrong.
In human terms, this is a
straightforward film, unlike the story
of the trapped Chilean miners in 2010,
who were all adults with complex back-
stories. Howard conveys the claustro-
The Guardian Tuesday 26 July 2022
couples – issued a furious statement,
condemning the draft text as an at-
tempt to “undermine and subvert” the
dignity of LGBT+ people. The bishops
of Los Angeles and Toronto have also
weighed in, and senior Anglicans have
called on Church of England bishops to
throw out the text in its current form.
Among liberals in the church, there is
a sense of having been blindsided by
some behind-the-scenes politicking of
the most cynical kind.
It is in the interests of all con-
cerned that this fraught debate is not
resumed on such crude and polarising
terms. Not least on the grounds that
the consensus asserted by the draft
text palpably does not exist. On LGBT
+ rights, there remains a gulf between
the views of conservative hierarchies in
the global south, their allies in the west,
and the liberal wing of the Anglican
church. It is to be hoped that delegates
at this week’s 15th Lambeth conference
learn from bitter experience, give cul-
ture wars a wide berth, and seek out
common ground on which genuine
agreement may be possible.
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
phobia and danger of the cave system
– although, for a non-caver like me, the
question of why anyone should want
to cave dive in the first place remains
unanswered. He finesses the (unavoid-
able) problem of white-saviour-ism by
making the performances as unas-
suming and un-Hollywood as possible:
Mortensen, Farrell and Edgerton all go
into ordinary-bloke mode. The only real
Hollywood moment comes when Brit-
ish diver Chris Jewell (Tom Bateman)
almost panics and loses his nerve, a bit
like Ives in The Great Escape.
Well, there is another problem
which Ron Howard clearly found inso-
luble, and so he avoids it, just as Chin
and Vasarhelyi did in their film. The
blowhard plutocrat Elon Musk noto-
riously disgraced himself during the
rescue by calling Unsworth a “pedo” for
rejecting his preposterous and egocen-
tric offer of a submarine for the rescue
– it was clearly unsuitable, being ob-
viously too big and un-manoeuvrable.
The film doesn’t mention any of this,
and maybe ignoring Musk’s grotesque
outburst is the only way to go. This
event, tonally jarring, is an example of
how real life sometimes just won’t fit
into the template: it’s what you leave
out when you’re printing the legend.
Continued on page 29
Tuesday 26 July 2022 The Guardian
Continued from page 28
John Oliver on the causes of the US inflation
crisis: ‘An unprecedented perfect storm’
Adrian Horton
John Oliver returned to Last Week To-
night after a month-long hiatus with an
economics lesson on inflation, which
has walloped the US over the past two
years. Food prices in the US, for ex-
ample, are up 10.4% over last year, elec-
tricity up 13.7%, and gasoline up 59.9%
– “so to be honest, it’s probably a good
idea to start making your gasoline at
home in the morning instead of getting
an expensive cup of it on your way to
work,” Oliver joked.
The soaring inflation and its strain
on many people’s budget have prompt-
ed a “a flurry of finger-pointing”, Oliver
explained, “with many tending to place
the blame on whatever they were al-
ready mad at”. Democrats have blamed
corporate greed, Republicans blamed
Joe Biden, Biden blamed Putin, “and
your dog presumably blam[ed] the
vacuum cleaner”.
Confusingly, “aside from the dog,
they’re probably all at least at a little
bit right”, Oliver said, as this inflation
crisis is the result of a multitude of fac-
tors combining in an “unprecedented
perfect storm”.
Oliver broke down the components
into an Economics 101 on supply and
demand, conducted through the ex-
ample of three giant spreadeagled frog
statues marketed for $1,425 apiece
(Oliver purchased all three, which deco-
rated his studio). On the excess demand
side, particularly Republican efforts
to blame Biden’s stimulus packages
during the pandemic: “There is a kernel
of truth to it,” said Oliver, as people
did have more cash on hand, but “that
is not the only reason” for inflation.
Many people actually saved money
during the pandemic, “and the extent
Adele announces new dates for postponed
Las Vegas residency
Guardian music
Adele has announced new dates for her
postponed Las Vegas residency.
The singer, who cancelled the orig-
inal dates at the start of the year, will
now begin her Weekends with Adele
concerts on 18 November running to 25
March, taking in 32 shows.
The residency was originally an-
nounced in support of the album 30
which was the best-selling album of
2021. Adele then cancelled the day
before it was set to begin.
“Words can’t explain how ecstatic
I am to finally be able to announce
these rescheduled shows,” she shared
Arts
• Thirteen Lives is released on 29
July in the US and UK, and on 5 August
John Oliver: ‘Anyone loudly saying that one thing is the cause of inflation is either lying or has absolutely no idea what they’re talking
about.’ Photograph: YouTube
that people were spending money, it
mostly wasn’t on services like flights or
hotels or restaurants. Instead, it went
to goods like furniture, appliances or, I
don’t know, some steamy watercolor rat
erotica.”
And “the notion that our economy
would be fine if not for Biden’s stimulus
completely ignores what it would’ve
looked like without it,” such as a likely
double-digit recession in spring 2021.
“So two things are likely true here: the
government stimulus did contribute to
inflation, but it was also a necessary
intervention,” said Oliver.
He then turned to supply, which has
been disrupted since Covid by factory
shutdowns and supply chain delays.
As for Biden blaming Vladimir Putin’s
invasion of Ukraine for the supply
Adele performs on stage in Hyde Park. Photograph: Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images for
Adele
on Prime Video.
chain crisis – “that’s just not true”, Oliver
said. “Inflation was happening even
before Putin invaded Ukraine, so that’s
just not how time works. What is true,
though, is that Putin definitely exacer-
bated the problem.”
It is also true that corporate greed
has made it worse. “Some companies
are taking advantage of this envi-
ronment to drive up prices, and they’re
getting record profits in return,” Oliver
explained. “And that is infuriating, but
most economists will tell you that’s not
what caused inflation in the first place.
After all, it’s not like corporations only
just got greedy in the last two years.
Companies will shamelessly profiteer,
the exact same way that a dog will
make an absolute meal out of its own
ballsack. If left to its own devices, that’s
unfortunately just what it’s going to do.”
The thesis of Oliver’s inflation
crash-course was basically that there
is no one cause of the problem, and
“anyone loudly saying that one thing
is the cause of inflation is either lying
or has absolutely no idea what they’re
talking about”, he said.
Regardless of the exact formula of
the cause, the entity many are look-
ing to for relief is the US Federal Re-
serve, which has the power to raise
interest rates and thus indirectly curb
spending. In June, the Fed announced
it would raise interest rates by 0.75
percentage points, its largest hike since
1994 – a move some, including chair-
man Jerome Powell, dubbed as too late.
Biden has pledged to make tack-
ling inflation his number one domestic
on social media. “I truly was heartbro-
ken to have to cancel them. But after
what feels like an eternity of figuring
out logistics for the show that I really
want to deliver, and knowing it can
happen, I’m more excited than ever!”
In a July interview on Desert Island
Discs, the singer revealed that the
reason was down to quality. “The show
was not good enough,” she said. “Maybe
my silence has been deadly, I don’t
know. But it was horrible.”
Adele also spoke about the grief
she felt after cancelling as well as the
overwhelming guilt. “I was a shell of a
person for a couple of months,” she said.
“I just had to wait it out and just grieve
it, I guess, just grieve the shows and get
29
priority, attempting to empathize with
struggling Americans by saying, in a
press conference, “I know you’ve got to
be frustrated. I know. I can taste it.”
“No, no, no! Never say that again!”
Oliver exclaimed at the comment. “That
may be the grossest thing I’ve ever
heard come out of Joe Biden’s mouth,
and that is saying a lot, because I’ve
heard the stuff that he used to say in
the 1970s.”
There have been some small,
encouraging developments: gas prices
have dropped slightly, and long-term
inflation expectations recently ticked
down after the Fed’s intervention. Most
economists now expect this wave of
inflation to pass in a year to 18 months.
But that’s an “incredibly long time
for those suffering the most,” Oliver
noted. For all the talk about supply
and demand curves, “it’s important to
remember that inflation’s effects are
anything but abstract for those that it’s
hitting the hardest”.
“The next year is likely to be very
hard for a lot of people,” he added,
“which is why what we should defi-
nitely be doing right now is helping
them”. He suggested passing a refund-
able child tax credit for those that need
it, and expanding rental assistance,
which economists say would have a
minor impact on inflation.
Regardless, he concluded, “there are
two things that we do know for sure:
one, it’s going to take a difficult combi-
nation of monetary policy, supply chain
recovery and time to bring supply and
demand back into alignment. And two,
that if everyone does win the lottery
in the future, and does suddenly want
some frog statues, I just made the
smartest investment of all time.”
over the guilt, but it was brutal.”
In her new statement, she also
added: “Now I know for some of you
it was a horrible decision on my part,
and I will always be sorry for that, but
I promise you it was the right one. To
be with you in such an intimate space
every week has been what I’ve most
been looking forward to and I’m going
to give you the absolute best of me.”
There will be a select number of
tickets for the performances available
with fans who held tickets for the orig-
inal dates being prioritised.
Adele recently made a return to the
stage at Hyde Park in London as part of
British Summer Time.

30
Vinyl fantasy: how gamers fell in love with
records
Keith Stuart
Caroline Grace has always enjoyed vin-
tage technology. An IT tech in the Mid-
Ohio Valley, they collect retro games,
laser discs and cassette tapes, but
mostly, vinyl records. Their collection
is in the thousands, and hundreds of
those are video game soundtracks. “I’ve
been a big fan of games all my life,” says
Grace. “Some of my earliest memories
are playing games like Wonder Boy III:
The Dragon’s Trap and Goof Troop with
my dad and brother. I get positive feel-
ings from listening to the Wonder Boy
III music now. I have a lot of pleasant
memories of playing it with my family
back in the day.”
The idea of buying video game
soundtracks on vinyl may seem coun-
ter-intuitive: the most hi-tech digital
entertainment medium meeting this
fragile relic of the analogue era. But
gaming albums have been steadily
rising in popularity since the early
2010s. Partly that’s thanks to the wider
vinyl revival, but it’s also due to the
efforts of specialist record labels such
as Data Discs, which produces beau-
tiful albums based on vintage video
games. “When we started the label in
late-2014 there wasn’t really anyone
releasing game soundtracks on vinyl,”
says co-founder Jamie Crook. “We had
been half-joking about trying to re-
lease Streets of Rage for the best part
of a decade and we’re still surprised
that no one else beat us to it. It just
seemed abundantly clear that game
soundtracks were going to be one of
the next growth areas, alongside Japa-
nese ambient, especially after the huge
popularity of film soundtrack labels
from 2012 onward.”
The idea became a reality when
Cook sent a speculative email to Streets
of Rage composer Yuzo Koshiro: he
was on board immediately, as was Sega
Japan (“though I think they were also a
little bewildered”). Consequently, Data
Discs was able to license a number of
The Last Movie Stars: Ethan Hawke pays a
complex tribute to his idols
Charles Bramesco
The Last Movie Stars, a new docu-
mentary series on Paul Newman and
Joanne Woodward released to HBO
Max this past weekend, occasionally
allows its focus to drift to a third sub-
ject. Ethan Hawke presides as direc-
tor and producer on the six episodes,
and he makes no effort to minimize
his own presence under some pretense
of fly-on-the-wall objectivity. As much
as his extensive research project exists
to chronicle the lives and works of a
Hollywood power couple in a league
of their own, he also digests the narr-
ative at hand by examining his own
relationship to it.
With a cavalcade of famous pals
Zoom-ing in during the shaggy-haired
Arts
Press play … LP covers for Streets of Rage and Shenmue soundtracks. Composite: Data
releases spanning Sega’s history, from
Sonic to Shenmue, and has since broa-
dened to other classic Japanese titles
such as Okami, Ikaruga and surprise
best-seller Policenauts, the old cyber-
punk thriller from Metal Gear creator
Hideo Kojima.
Nostalgia seems to be a major draw
for many collectors. Alongside Data
Discs, labels such as movie soundtrack
specialist Mondo and hip New York-
based indie Ship to Shore PhonoCo also
produce high quality albums for classic
games. “Nostalgia plays a big part in my
vinyl collecting – I will go out of my
way to acquire records for games that
I enjoyed as a kid,” says Chris Hansen,
an IT contractor for the Department
of Homeland Security in Mississippi. “I
got into collecting vinyl in 2016 when I
heard about Mondo’s release of Castle-
vania. I own every Castlevania game,
it’s my favourite series, so I had to get
the record. When I started looking into
other releases, I discovered that Data
Discs had put out Streets of Rage and
Streets of Rage 2 on vinyl. I’ve been
hooked ever since.”
But it’s not all about the past; a huge
number of contemporary video games
are accompanied by vinyl soundtrack
releases, whether that’s an orchestral
score for a bestselling Triple A block-
buster, or an electronic soundtrack for a
cult indie game composed entirely by a
early days of quarantine, a murderers’
row of actors’ actors who also record
voiceover readings of archival docu-
ments, Hawke pontificates on how a
generation of serious thespians mod-
eled themselves and their careers after
Newman and Woodward. For a subs-
tantive performer looking to cultivate
a rich inner life of varied hobbies and
intellectual pursuits to go along with A-
list icon status, there’s no clearer exem-
plar than Newman, whose ice-blue eyes
hid the soul of a Lee Strasberg student
and racecar driver.
Considered as a whole, this tribute
to the pair ’00s tabloid media would’ve
dubbed Jaul (Poanne?) doubles as a
case study in fandom practiced prop-
erly. The profile of the typical fan
has been significantly warped over
the past internet-besotted decade, now
lone musician. For small studios, it can
be tough to make a living from game
sales alone in such an over-saturated
market, so selling merch to a dedicated
fanbase is an important source of rev-
enue.
There is also an important com-
munity element to video game vinyl.
Releases tend to be limited editions and
not always widely marketed, so fans
meet up on Discord servers and Reddit
forums to swap tips and compare
collections. “We sometimes help each
other get our personal ‘holy grails’,” says
Pete Boyle, a collector based in Leeds.
“Last year, I mentioned in passing that
I missed the original release of the Fire-
watch soundtrack by Chris Remo. Mi-
nutes later I received a message from
someone offering to sell it to me at cost
plus post. It was in my hands less than
two weeks later! We look out for one
another. I have made some incredible
friends for life.”
In the early 2010s, Austin Win-
tory’s beautiful cello-led soundtrack for
Journey and the 1980s-splashed elec-
tropop of Hotline Miami 2 showed
how varied and musically accom-
plished game scores had become. Now,
from global Final Fantasy concert tours
to BBC Radio 3’s excellent Sound of
Gaming programme to the forthcoming
gaming concert at the BBC Proms,
game soundtracks have been accepted
more closely associated with lock-
step devotees of pop music or super-
hero movies, hordes prone to cyber-
swarming anyone who challenges their
absolute allegiance. Hawke trades this
unquestioning fealty for an apprec-
iation with a more critical bent, will-
ing to acknowledge Newman’s sizable
flaws alongside his virtues. For all his
open admiration, Hawke constructs an
even-keeled assessment of an essential
artist and troubled man. In doing so,
he demonstrates how to account for
the problematic aspects of a personal
favorite, a challenge for all of us that
grows more pressing with every break-
ing scandal.
While he’s sculpted a public image
of an alt-heartthrob farther from the
movie-star mainstream than Newman,
Hawke has still followed in the elder
as an art form alongside film scores. For
many players, listening to game music
is a personal, immersive experience, be-
cause we may have listened to it not
just through a 90-minute film, but tens
of hours of play.
“The concept of dynamic music –
or music that changes to your envi-
ronment or actions – is unique to
games,” says Sound of Gaming pre-
senter Louise Blain. “As players, we
have come to rely on music to tell
us we’re in danger, to react when we
draw our swords, and tell us to calm
down when the coast is clear. It is our
soundtrack, no one else’s.
“Film music never needs to fill the
gap when we get distracted and wander
off the beaten path to see what we can
find hiding deeper in the woods. Red
Dead Redemption 2 composer Woody
Jackson jokingly called some of the
60 hours of music he’d composed for
the game ‘cowboy yoga music’ be-
cause those atmospheric strings had to
accompany us everywhere. Game music
understands that we want to lose our-
selves and take in the scenery as well as
ticking off quest lists. It also means that
the more time we spend, the stronger
our emotional connection can be.”
This is a really vital point. Game
music reminds us of places that we
have effectively lived in. What’s more,
we often play alongside friends, so
game music is the sound of a shared
journey, bringing to life all the emotions
that entails. “There are two soundtracks
that will always remind me of a partic-
ular time in my life,” says Dutch vinyl
collector Jill Verhage. “The soundtrack
to Ori and the Blind Forest, as it is
one of the last games my best friend
played before she passed in 2017, and
the soundtrack of Ori and the Will
of the Wisps, which always brings me
great sadness knowing she never got to
experience that game.”
Whatever else motivates collectors,
these are beautiful artefacts. At Data
Discs, the team spends days sourc-
ing archival video game art for their
actor’s path: from-the-ground-up train-
ing in theater, consistently range-ex-
panding screen roles under a host
of esteemed auteurs, side endeavors
too dedicated to be written off as
dabbling. As the episodes touch on
each canonical Newman performance,
Hawke shares a beat of breathless awe
with whoever he’s got on the line.
“Denzel in Malcolm X. De Niro, Raging
Bull. Paul Newman, Cool Hand Luke!”
Hawke effuses, delivering some vari-
ation on this for Hud, The Sting, The
Color of Money, and the rest. But his
is a purposeful admiration, his compli-
ments always couched in a though-
tful analysis of the characters Newman
played and how they corresponded to
his life story.
Though Hawke doesn’t talk around
his identification with Newman, he
The Guardian Tuesday 26 July 2022
Surprise best-seller … LP cover for the
Policenauts soundtrack. Photograph: Data
releases. “On occasion, we’ve tracked
down the original paintings, either from
the licensor’s vaults or through pri-
vate art collectors, and have had HD
photographs taken,” explains Crook.
“The rights for artwork can sometimes
be complicated too. For example, for
our After Burner II release, we had
to license the cover image of the
F-14 Tomcat directly from Northrop
Grumman, which was a very laborious
(and expensive) process, but ultimately
worth it.”
Soundtrack albums so easily
become an extension of a game’s aes-
thetic. They are large enough to show
off its artwork, and they have an ele-
ment of discovery too, with extensive
liner notes, glossy inserts and luscious
packaging. And like video games, they
are tactile, concerned with skill and
ritual. You treat vinyl records with reve-
rence and care, dropping the needle so
that it falls as softly as a good jump in
a platform game. And when the music
starts, you are transported.
We often play
alongside friends, so
game music is the
sound of a shared
journey
does devote just as much time and
attention to Woodward, and the shift-
ing dynamic between the longtime
spouses. It’s here that Hawke’s cir-
cumspect view of a larger-than-life
legend really comes into play, as firs-
thand sources establish her to be
a nobly suffering support beam to
a husband on the verge of col-
lapse. The series doesn’t gloss over
Newman’s functional alcoholism, show-
ing us home movies in which he slop-
pily toddles around his living room
clutching a bottle. More unsettling still
is a clip in which we see one of his
children doing a convincing cross-eyed
impression of Daddy under the influ-
ence, a sign of the negligent parenting
for which he’d feel immense guilt later
Continued on page 31
Tuesday 26 July 2022 The Guardian
Continued from page 30
in life. (The death by overdose of
his son, fledgling stuntman Scott, is
Newman’s rock bottom.) George Cloo-
ney reads as Newman throughout the
series, and infuses real anger into a rant
that sees him defending his choices as a
father by claiming that at least he didn’t
beat his kids.
But life is long, and Newman’s
thread continues. The latter episodes
chart his redemption as he scales back
his intake of alcohol – “just beer,” he
maybe-jokes – and makes good through
charity and outreach to those strug-
gling with addiction. Hawke takes this
without judgement, as he does the rest
of Newman’s complicated journey. “The
people I admire the most are the ones
who overcome their demons and work
with them, and that’s what I take from
it,” Hawke told Business Insider last
week. “If you don’t have shadow, you
don’t have light.” He wisely eschews
Bob Rafelson: subtle and complex director
was presiding genius of the Hollywood new
wave
Peter Bradshaw
Of all the creative energies and
commercial synergies that swirled
around Hollywood at the end of the
1960s, surely the strangest was the one
between the Monkees, actor Jack Ni-
cholson and the producer-director who
was to become a presiding genius of
the American new wave: Bob Rafelson.
Yet if Rafelson had not co-created pop
music’s great boyband in his capacity
as a TV producer, his company would
not have been as madly successful as
it was: he would not have been able
to produce Dennis Hopper’s counter-
cultural classic Easy Rider in 1969 (co-
starring Nicholson) and Peter Bogda-
novich’s cinephile gem The Last Pic-
ture Show in 1971. And it all allowed
Rafelson to become a key director of
the time, with an enduring partnership
with Nicholson that gave birth to some
of the greatest films of the era.
The Monkees had given Rafelson
crucial professional access to the world
of popular music which plugged him
into the zeitgeist – or, to be exact, an
expertise in fabricating the zeitgeist.
The band he helped invent may not
have been as cool as the Beatles or the
Rolling Stones, but they starred in the
film he directed and co-wrote with Ni-
cholson: the ineffably freaky and direc-
tionless all-star zanefest Head in 1968
which did nothing but annoy the crit-
ics and the Monkees’ more conserv-
ative fanbase. It’s been doggedly claim-
ing cult status ever since.
Arts
Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman Photograph: Album/Alamy
Much imitated … Karen Black and Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces. Photograph: Colum-
bia/Sportsphoto/Allstar
Out of all this emerged Rafelson’s
glorious 1970 masterpiece, Five Easy
Pieces, co-written with Carole Eastman:
an intricate tragicomedy, subtle, com-
plex and ruminative in ways that set
it apart from a very great deal of Hol-
lywood cinema, either before or after
the new wave, and with something of
Chekhov or Dickens. Nicholson plays
an oil-rigger: rough-mannered, angry
and insubordinate (his peppery and dif-
ficult attitude while ordering food at a
diner has become a much-spoofed-and-
imitated Nicholson classic). When he
learns that his father is dying, the angry
young man travels back to the family
home and we discover that he was
once a brilliant classical pianist who in
an act of psychic self-harm has aban-
doned his vocation. To see the subtlety
and vulnerability of the performance
which Rafelson got out of Nicholson is a
wonder now: this is the Nicholson that
existed before the crazy-man act that
became an integral part of his brand.
Every bit as brilliant, but still unac-
countably undervalued, was Rafelson’s
superb drama The King of Marvin Gar-
dens from 1972, in which Nicholson is
even more atypical with a wonderfully
melancholy and introspective perfor-
mance as David, an NPR-style talkshow
host in Philadelphia, given to long, lite-
rary monologues at the microphone.
Bruce Dern plays his long-estranged
brother, a shady character who wants
David to help him out with some dodgy
business manoeuvres in Atlantic City
(home of “Marvin Gardens”, a famil-
iar address from the original Amer-
ican Monopoly boards). It is masterly
work from Rafelson: firecracker dialo-
gue, a tremendous brotherly chemistry
between Nicholson and Dern and a
haunting ambience in that wintry sea-
side town.
Stay Hungry (1976) was an eccen-
tric rough diamond of a movie, co-writ-
ten with sportswriter and bodybuilding
enthusiast Charles Gaines, starring Jeff
Bridges as a guy who buys an advanta-
geously located gym to close a property
deal, falls in love with the receptionist
(Sally Field) and finds himself weirdly
drawn to the bodybuilding world of a
certain humungous Austrian guy work-
ing out there: an early role for Arnold
Schwarzenegger.
But Rafelson brought the steam
heat, the thrills and the overt ero-
ticism with his noir drama, The Post-
man Always Rings Twice, based on
the 1934 novel by James M Cain with
Jack Nicholson as the Depression era
drifter who shows up at a west coast
diner and falls for the beautiful woman
running the place (Jessica Lange) who
is planning to murder her husband.
Some preferred the earlier, more obli-
quely sexy version from 1946 directed
by Tay Garnett with John Garfield and
Lana Turner, but the David Mamet
dialogue packed a punch and Rafel-
son channelled the testosterone-surge
of Nicholson’s performance with a sure
hand. A more interesting noir – and
certainly a subtler one – was the 1987
drama Black Widow with Debra Winger
as the Department of Justice official ob-
sessed with taking down sultry serial
husband-killer Theresa Russell. The
movie has a rare screen performance
from Nicol Williamson as the man next
in the frame. It’s a very sleek and stylish
31
outright hero-worship for Newman’s
greatness or dismissal for his darkness,
instead assuming a nuanced view that
accounts for all the frailty of human
nature. Anyone invested in the arts
must confront this contradiction con-
stantly, that the people responsible for
work we find beautiful or moving could
nonetheless behave in ugly or cruel
ways behind closed doors. The adult
mind can hold two opposing thoughts
at the same time, and in Hawke’s case,
even fuse them into a wider compre-
hension of how a genius’ demons can
inform and even motivate their finest
hours. There’s no interest in condem-
nation nor exoneration here, a verdict
either way being a useless roadblock
to understanding. Newman has passed,
his legacy cemented. He simply is, and
Hawke accepts him on those self-evi-
dent terms.
The Last Movie Stars is now avail-
able on HBO Max in the US with a UK
date to be announced
Claiming cult status … the Monkees in
Head. Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex
piece of work.
After this, his Mountains of the
Moon in 1990 was a sweeping and
high-minded movie about the Victorian
explorers Richard Burton and John
Speke, played by Patrick Bergin and
Iain Glen, that was respectfully re-
ceived. Nicholson turned in a menacing
yet roguish performance in the oddly
dark romantic comedy Man Trouble
from 1992, in which he provides guard
dogs and falls in love with a woman
who needs one of his canines. Rafel-
son’s swansong with Nicholson was the
tough, forthright and well-made noir
thriller Blood and Wine, in which he
teamed up with Michael Caine and
British producer Jeremy Thomas. Ni-
cholson is the alcoholic wine merchant
who plans to rip off a client. It’s a good
movie, whose main value perhaps lies
in the restatement of Rafelson and Ni-
cholson’s enduringly potent and valu-
able relationship.
Perhaps Rafelson never quite recap-
tured the pure inspiration of his early
work – but what amazing work it was.
Five Easy Pieces and The King of
Marvin Gardens are authentic Amer-
ican classics.

32
Driven to distraction: the best film, music,
games and more to prepare for a road trip
Michael Cragg, Sam Jordison,
Alex Mistlin, Hollie Richardson
and Keith Stuart
Film
Alfonso Cuarón (Gravity, Roma)
took a break from his burgeoning Hol-
lywood career to capture lightning
in a bottle with Y Tu Mamá Tam-
bién, a Spanish-language road drama
set against the backdrop of Mexico’s
political turmoil at the end of the
20th century. Julio and Tenoch (Gael
García Bernal and Diego Luna respec-
tively) play wide-eyed teenagers who
hit the road in search of female flesh
and a mysterious beach called Boca
del Cielo (“Heaven’s Mouth”). Accom-
panying them is Luisa (Maribel Verdú),
a sexy older woman with a dark
secret. What follows is one of the
most thought-provoking and unaba-
shedly erotic (and homoerotic) coming-
of-age movies ever made. Alex Mistlin
***
TV
You don’t need to leave London to
find joy on the road. No, honestly! In
Zen Motoring, rapper Ogmios sees the
‘If you have issues with someone in a place
like this, you have to confront them’: why
reality TV loves an island
Louis Staples
It’s that time of year again: heads
are being turned, Prettylittlething.com
endorsement deals chased, and we’re
hearing the phrase “It is what it is”
ad nauseam. That’s right: with sky-high
ratings and no shortage of drama, this
is Love Island’s summer – and we’re all
just living in it.
But over and above the shena-
nigans at ITV’s Mallorcan villa, reality
television seems to be obsessed with
islands at the moment. This month,
season two of FBoy Island – a bizarre
show where women choose between
men who describe themselves as “nice
guys” and those who identify as woma-
nising “fuck boys” – arrives on HBO
Max. Netflix’s Too Hot to Handle – a
dating show that transports 10 horny
singles to a tropical paradise and bans
them from kissing or touching each
other – dropped its third season in Jan-
uary. MTV’s Ex on the Beach, which
reunites fiery contestants from British
reality shows with their exes, has filmed
12 seasons on islands including Crete,
Koh Samui, Bali and Gran Canaria.
It’s not just dating shows: Chan-
nel 4’s The Island With Bear Grylls
has seen various groups battling for
survival in an unforgiving tropical ter-
rain. Nude survival show Naked and
Afraid was a surprise hit in the US, run-
ning for 14 seasons and filming in Fiji,
Dominica and Trinidad and Tobago.
Last year, Bravo’s Real Housewives
Arts
Full throttle … Mexican coming-of-age drama Y Tu Mamá También. Photograph: Anhelo
Producciones/Allstar
urban beauty in the everyday moments
on the city’s streets as he drives around
recording it all on a wobbly dash-
cam. He then narrates his subtle obser-
vations in soothing, send-me-to-sleep
tones. “While they empty their bins, I
empty my mind,” he says of the refuse
collectors, stopping to appreciate their
choreography. Later, he gets out of the
car to rescue a pigeon by letting it chill
on the dashboard. When an elderly man
waves at him four times while crossing
Treasure island … beachy reality shows are ratings gold. Illustration: Jonny Glover/The
Guardian
franchise branched out into its first
“all stars” season, bringing holidaying
Housewives together in the Turks and
Caicos Islands in the Lucayan Archi-
pelago.
Reality TV’s preoccupation with isl-
ands stretches back to the genre’s ori-
gins. In 2000, Survivor was the first US
reality show to become ratings gold.
The Big Brother-in-the-jungle format
followed two “tribes” of Americans in
Borneo, with 51 million people tuning
in to watch its dramatic finale. Today,
some of the most popular island-based
shows, such as Temptation Island and
Love Island, are revivals from reality
TV’s early years, beginning in 2001
and 2005 respectively. The same goes
for Shipwrecked, the Channel 4 show
that was rebooted in 2019 but de-
buted two decades earlier. In 2008, re-
the road, our zen driver almost cries. It’s
a form of therapy. Hollie Richardson
***
Music
A good road trip needs a dramatic
soundtrack, one that peaks and troughs
in all the right places. As well as throat-
shredding singalongs, it should also en-
courage air guitar (for the passengers)
and steering wheel-based piano tin-
kling (for the driver). It needs tender
moments to ease the pain of the inevit-
ality TV’s island obsession was enough
of a thing to be mocked in the Milf
Island episode of the US sitcom 30
Rock, which revolved around a fictional
reality show featuring “25 super-hot
moms, 50 eighth-grade boys, no rules”.
Why is reality TV so drawn to isl-
ands? June Deery, the author of the
2015 book Reality TV and a professor
at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in
the US, thinks that this type of isolated
setting is “inherent” to the medium.
“Whether the island is a geographic
place, or a socially produced envi-
ronment, it allows controlled condi-
tions and is a form of narrative crea-
tion,” she says. “Hence its attraction for
reality TV producers.”
Brian Moylan, an author and
commentator on reality TV, agrees that
isolation is the most important factor.
able traffic jams and mammoth solos
for when the terrain opens out. Tick-
ing every box is this gloriously over-
stuffed 1977 epic from the late Marvin
Lee Aday, AKA Meat Loaf. Allow the
title track to propel you off the dri-
veway like, well, a bat out of hell,
and the gorgeous Heaven Can Wait
to ease your pre-service station dip.
Pair it with 1993’s 75-minute follow-up
for maximum windows-down freedom.
Michael Cragg
***
Books
When he was 38, William Least
Heat-Moon lost his job and his wife
but “got the idea instead”. He decided
to take a circular trip over the Blue
Highways, the back roads of the United
States, marked in blue in his old Rand
McNally atlas. He put a camp bed in the
back and started out on his slow, 13,000-
mile journey in early 1978. He was a
man searching for a new life with no
idea how to get there, but also some-
one capable of persuading just about
anyone, anywhere to share their story
with him. The result – Blue Highways
– is one of the oddest and best books
written about America. Sam Jordison
“It’s about creating an alternate un-
iverse, where anything can happen –
or more precisely, where a very spe-
cific set of things that the producers
want to happen can happen,” he says.
“Even if contestants aren’t on an island
physically, they’re often on one figura-
tively.” It’s true that on Love Island we
rarely see outside the confines of the
Mallorcan villa: it’s an island-within-
an-island. The winter series is located
in South Africa and the mid-pandemic
season of Love Island USA was filmed
on the top floor of a Las Vegas hotel.
If an actual island isn’t a strict require-
ment on a show with the word “island”
in the title, then Big Brother’s famous
Elstree compound is surely an island in
the figurative sense.
Real or artificial, these islands are
ideal for creating conflict. Throw in
scantily clad singletons (Too Hot to
Handle), alcohol (Ex on the Beach)
or exhaustion (The Island With Bear
Grylls) and you’ve got a recipe for
drama. We see this every year on Love
Island, where fans grumble that the
show is boring, then complain even
more when producers intervene to
spice things up. It is also visible on
Real Housewives, when the cast of rich
women embark on trips to exotic loca-
tions. Removing them from their usual
surroundings and support systems and
filming them round the clock in loca-
tions such as St Barts in the Caribbean
(now nicknamed “scary island” by fans)
have sparked the most intense drama
over the years. “If you have issues with
The Guardian Tuesday 26 July 2022
Zen Motoring, with Ogmios (centre).
Photograph: Ainsley Cannon/BBC/Rumpus
***
Game
The Forza Horizon titles are ostens-
ibly racing games where you compete
to earn cash and become famous. But,
in fact, you don’t ever have to race
anyone, you can just drive. Forza Ho-
rizon 4 (PC, Xbox) lets you do that
within a beautifully replicated Britain.
You can jump in a car in the Cotswolds
then drive it up through the Pennines
and into Scotland. The gorgeous sce-
nery washes by, the weather changes,
sunlight glints off distant hills, the rain
forms puddles on the tarmac ahead of
you. You get to be your own Kerouac,
your own Thelma or Louise – and if the
trip goes wrong, you just start again.
This road trip is truly endless. Keith
Stuart
Tropic like it’s hot … FBoy Island’s fantasy
world. Photograph: Julie Corsetti/BBC/HBO
Max
someone in a place like this, you have
to confront them,” Moylan says. “There’s
no escape from the island.”
It is no coincidence that reality TV is
enamoured of islands – remote, primal
settings – at a time when the world
is becoming increasingly digitised and
hyperconnected. A lot of these shows
are sold as a social experiment, asking
whether people can find love, or even
survive, without the distractions and
amenities of modern life. They allow
us to fantasise about how we would
cope in these situations. “What would
happen if you were stranded on a
desert island with a bunch of hot young
people who also want a Boohoo con-
tract?” Moylan says. “Love Island asks
that very question.”
The journalist Anna Peele, who re-
cently dissected the rise of Love Island
for Vanity Fair, says that technology is
shifting our ideas of experiences that
feel primal or intense. “Modern movies
and TV are always trying to come up
with reasons to show people not star-
Continued on page 33
Tuesday 26 July 2022 The Guardian
Continued from page 32
ing at screens,” she says. “Right now, it
feels primal to have to communicate
directly.” Survival shows make people
catch their own food and build their
own shelter, while dating shows revolve
around sex: the most primal act of all.
It is curious that reality TV – a
newer genre, with seemingly infinite
possibilities – is so wedded to a set-
ting that has been widely explored else-
where. From the scripted TV drama
Lost to films such as Cast Away, books
including Robinson Crusoe, Treasure
Island and Lord of the Flies, and even
Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, there is
hardly a format where island-based iso-
lation isn’t a common device. In the
Comic-Con 2022: Wakanda Forever, Sandman
and Bill Murray joins the MCU
Michael Sun and Sian Cain
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among
Thieves
Truly the nerds have inherited the
earth, or at least Hollywood: this Comic-
Con gave us the first look at the forth-
coming adaptation of the tabletop role-
playing game, a fantasy caper starring
Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Brid-
gerton hottie Regé-Jean Page and Hugh
Grant.
While the trailer is a little light
on hearty laughs, it has a) Grant as a
baddie and b) is co-written and directed
by Jonathan Goldstein and John Fran-
cis Daley, who made one of the most
underrated comedies of the decade –
Game Night – so expect something fun.
Also I have consulted a huge D&D fan
who tells me the owlbear truly is a thing
and he gave this trailer a thumbs up.
Where’s my Catan movie?
When is it out? 2 March 2023 in Aus-
tralia, 3 March in US and UK
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Marvel presented the trailer for the
long-anticipated Black Panther sequel,
featuring a homage to its late star Chad-
wick Boseman, glimpses of new charac-
ters joining the fray, and a strangely
seamless mashup of No Woman, No Cry
with Kendrick Lamar’s Alright. After
Boseman’s death from colon cancer
in 2020, Marvel announced that they
would not be recasting his role – though
the trailer teases the possibility of a
new character wearing the Black Panth-
er suit.
“Chad’s passion and genius and his
culture and the impact he made on this
industry will be felt forever,” director
Ryan Coogler said on a panel alongside
returning cast members Letitia Wright
and Lupita Nyong’o, and new – like
I May Destroy You creator Michaela
Coel, who plays the Wakandan warrior
Aneka.
When’s it out? 11 November 2022
Lord of the Rings: the Rings of
Power
I for one am fine with Jeff Bezos
attempting to buy my love by spend-
ing his horrendous wealth on adapting
fantasy books; last year we got Robert
Jordan’s The Wheel of Time, and now
we’re getting The Rings of Power, a
prequel of sorts to JRR Tolkien’s The
Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings books.
Set thousands of years earlier, this
Arts
early years of the reality genre, it made
sense that it would choose a setting
that felt familiar, where other mediums
had done the “heavy lifting”, as Moylan
puts it. But two decades on from Sur-
vivor and the beginning of the reality
TV epoch, the continued reliance on
island-style shows feels like a potential
point of stagnation, or a sign that new
ideas are thin on the ground.
The saturation could also be a sign
that, as it matures, reality TV is becom-
ing more like the scripted television,
films, books and theatre that preceded
it. As with traditional media, editing
and storylining have always been a
part of reality TV shows. But view-
ers are now savvier to the ways re-
ality narratives are preordained, and
Comic-Con 2022: composite image featuring Black Adam (Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson),
Owain Arthur as Prince Durin IV in a scene from The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.
(Amazon Prime Video via AP) and a first-look image from John Wick 4, starring Keanu
Reeves. Composite: StudioCanal, AP and PR
new series covers what happened in the
Second Age of Middle-earth: the forging
of the famous rings, the rise of the evil
Lord Sauron and the fall of the island
Númenor, Tolkien’s take on the legend
of Atlantis (and where Aragorn’s ances-
tors, the Dúnedain, lived, for those who
haven’t read or watched beyond LOTR).
Visually and tonally, it appears to
be taking its cues from Peter Jack-
son’s films as much as Tolkien: there’s
Sauron! A glimpse of what might be
a Balrog! And a young Galadriel (pre-
viously played by Cate Blanchett and
now by Morfydd Clark), along with a
little Elrond (previously Hugo Weaving,
now Robert Aramayo). It’s like seeing
your elf mum and dad when they were
young (so only, like, 1,000 years old).
When’s it out? 2 September on
Amazon Prime
Bill Murray joins the Marvel Cine-
matic Universe – in one of about 65
new Marvel shows and films
After much speculation – fuelled
by a loose-lipped interview with a
German magazine, then stoked by a
Jimmy Kimmel appearance referencing
a potential role in an unnamed Paul
Rudd flick – Bill Murray is joining
the Marvel ranks, appearing for a split
second in footage from Ant-Man and
the Wasp: Quantumania.
“Janet Van Dyne!” Murray’s as-yet
unnamed character says to Michelle
Pfeiffer, who plays a fashion designer-
slash-scientist previously rescued from
the clutches of subatomic space. “I
thought you were dead!”
Many of us have enjoyed the 29
films in the MCU and some of the
shows are often more blatant about it,
too. Love Island is practically a Shake-
pearean drama, with multiple narra-
tives and characters – villains, heroes
and antiheroes – edited to collide on
a regular basis. “An isolated setting
is about power: the power of pro-
ducers over participants for purposes of
entertainment,” Deery says. “It enables
producers to become more like the
all-powerful authors of fiction. They
become the vigilant and manipulative
Prosperos of their own modest king-
doms.”
Reality TV producers becoming the
new authors, scriptwriters and play-
wrights signals a move away from
“authenticity” as the genre’s most
valuable currency. Most island re-
Marvel shows (we will pretend Iron
Fist never happened). But the new
Ant-Man was just one of many, many
Marvel projects announced at Comic-
Con. Kevin Feige was wheeled out to
reel off an exhaustive list of titles like
Steve Jobs plugging a new iPod. Here’s a
summary:
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law (Disney
+, August)
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
(November).
Ant-Man and the Wasp:Quan-
tumania (February 2023)
Secret Invasion (Disney+, Sep-
tember 2023): a spin-off show set
around Ben Mendelsohn’s character
Talos, part of a shapeshifting alien race
called the Skrull who – you guessed it –
secretly invade Earth; also stars Samuel
L Jackson, Martin Freeman and Olivia
Coleman
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (5
May 2023)
Echo (Disney+, December 2023), a
series focused on Maya Lopez, the
hearing impaired arse-kicker played by
Alaqua Cox in another Disney+ series,
Hawkeye
Loki season two (Disney+, Decem-
ber 2023), reuniting Tom Hiddleston’s
Nordic god and Owen Wilson’s time
travelling bureaucrat
Blade (3 November 2023), a film
reboot starring Mahershala Ali as the
vampire-killing vampire
Ironheart (Disney+, September
2023), a series centred on Riri Wil-
liams,a Black teen genius who takes
over Tony Stark’s work making souped-
up suits
ality shows aren’t pretending to be
organic environments where inter-
personal relationships are natural – in
fact, they are leaning into becoming the
opposite. “When we’re watching Love
Island, we know it’s a hyperproduced
environment,” Moylan says. “And we
really don’t care.”
Have we hit “peak island”? Probably
not. “There are only so many places
you can isolate people. Islands have the
best mix of exoticism and practicality,”
says Peele. Whether you’re on an actual
island or a figurative one, isolation
has been integral to reality TV’s status
as a cultural phenomenon. The shap-
ing of contestant experiences through
controlled circumstances – what Deery
calls “staged actuality” – is both the
Agatha: Coven of Chaos (Disney+,
December 2023), a sequel to Wanda-
vision that follows up on what hap-
pened to Kathryn Hahn’s villain.
Daredevil: Born Again (Disney+,
March 2024), Marvel’s return to its best
telly series, bringing back Charlie Cox
as the blind crime fighter and Vincent
D’Onofrio as Kingpin
Captain America: New World Order
(3 May 2024), the first Cap film starring
Anthony Mackie instead of Chris Evans
Thunderbolts (25 July 2024), an
antihero team assembled in the comics
by Baron Zemo (previously played by
Daniel Brühl)
Fantastic Four (8 November 2024):
no cast was announced – but here’s
hoping they keep John Krasinski as
Reed Richards and cast his real-life wife
Emily Blunt as Sue
Avengers: The Kang Dynasty (2 May
2025): yet another ensemble superhero
film – but who will still be alive to be in
it remains to be seen
Avengers: Secret Wars (7 November
2025), see above
The Walking Dead’s second life
Longtime zombie killer Rick Grimes
– leading man of The Walking Dead’s
first nine seasons, before seemingly
being killed off – was meant to have
his own spin-off film trilogy, as AMC
announced in 2018. But in a sur-
prise appearance, Andrew Lincoln (who
plays Grimes) and co-star Danai Gurira
announced that it would be a six-part
series instead, airing next year.
Grimes was last seen in the show
blowing up a bridge to stop an ad-
vancing horde of zombies, before his
boots inexplicably showed up on an
island in the most recent season. “I
personally can’t wait to get my cowboy
boots back on,” Lincoln told the crowd.
When’s it out? Sometime in 2023
The Sandman
No, you’re not dreaming: Neil
Gaiman’s lengthy comic book series,
which has passed through the hands of
everyone from HBO to Joseph Gordon-
Levitt in development hell, might ac-
tually finally be happening. This trailer
reveals Tom Sturridge as the titular cha-
racter, the personification of dreaming,
who is also known as Dream or Mor-
pheus. A century after being captured
and imprisoned by occultists, Dream
escapes and finds the waking world and
the world of dreams are out of whack
– it’s hard to pin down much more of
33
origin and essence of the genre. So from
scantily clad singletons in a Mediter-
ranean villa to Lord of the Flies-style
survival shows, don’t expect reality TV
to give up on the island quite yet. Now
pass the suncream – and the popcorn.
Even if contestants
aren’t on an island
physically, they’re
often on one
figuratively
Danai Gurira and Andrew Lincoln speak
on stage at AMC’s The Walking Dead at
Comic-Con 2022. Photograph: Kevin Winter/
Getty Images
a plot in this comic series, which could
mean it won’t translate for screen like
some of Gaiman’s other works – but
we’ll see.
The 10-episode series also stars
Gwendoline Christie, Patton Oswalt,
Charles Dance, David Thewlis and Ste-
phen Fry. Gaiman also revealed the
first season is based on the first two
volumes, Preludes and Nocturnes, and
The Doll’s House.
When’s it out? 5 August on Netflix
John Wick 4
Keanu Reeves gatecrashed a Comic-
Con directors panel to reveal a teaser
for John Wick 4, where he’s back as
the reformed hitman with a heart and
taking a battering. Luckily, he is also
seen doing some appropriately macho
things to prepare, like punching a pylon
until it is blood-stained and looking dra-
matic in the rain.
“Have you given any thought to
where this ends?” a voice asks at the
trailer’s start. Not here, apparently: the
franchise has already been renewed for
a fifth chapter. But who doesn’t want to
see Nanu going ‘nanas again?
When’s it out? 23 March 2023 in Aus-
tralia, 24 March in US and UK
Black Adam
While Marvel has gone down the
cheerful path of Taika Waititi and Fleet-
wood Mac, DC has stuck to its po-
faced, smashy-crashy formula, priori-
tising cool over fun. Dwayne “the Rock”
Johnson, one actor who actually looks
as if he could lift a car over his head,
plays the titular antihero, who was
given his powers by Ancient Egyptian
gods. It’ll probably play on every screen
in your local cinema and makes squil-
lions.
When’s it out? 20 October 2022 in
Australia, 21 October in US and UK

34
Dine like Da Vinci, unleash your inner diva –
101 ways the arts can slightly improve your
life
Guardian writers
Stage
If you’re seeing something long and
challenging, remember that having an
alcoholic drink beforehand is asking for
trouble. So be sure to do it.
Decorate a room as if you’re a set
designer, letting your imagination run
wild. As William Morris said, bin what-
ever isn’t useful or beautiful.
Study your favourite standup and
learn their best joke off by heart. It’s
not just about making your friends
laugh: comedy teaches confidence and
communication.
Feeling sad, happy, angry, nervous?
There’s a showtune for that! From Evan
Hansen to Alexander Hamilton to Mary
Poppins, find a character whose feel-
ings mirror yours – then unleash that
emotion.
Improvisation isn’t just some zany
thing comedians do on telly. It’s a
philosophy, as Pippa Evans’ recent book
Improv Your Life shows. When you’re
thrown a curveball, deviate from your
standard script. Instead of “No but” say
“Yes and”. Your positivity will be re-
warded.
Offer yourself to companies that
provide TV audiences, eg SRO. You
could see your favourite comedians for
free, and hear your own embarrassingly
loud laughter when the show airs.
Improve your mood by improving
your posture. And what better example
than all those upright spines in ballet?
The Silver Swans videos, by the Royal
Academy of Dance, are aimed at over
55s but could work for anyone. It will be
one giant leap not just in stance, but in
how you view your body, every single
energised bit of it.
Stop idly googling at mealtimes.
Go down a better YouTube hole and
be uplifted by superhuman spinners.
Recommended: Mikhail Baryshnikov’s
11 pirouettes in White Nights, Tamara
Rojo’s 32 fouettés in Swan Lake or the
uncountable headspins of 14-year-old
B-girl Terra .
Learn two lines of a Shakespeare
soliloquy every day while brushing
your teeth, morning and night. Within
a month, you’ll have the whole thing –
an entire party piece!
Off on a first date? Ask what would
Romeo or Juliet would do. Worried
about a presentation? Work out how
Mark Antony would handle it. Turning
down a romantic proposition? Channel
Yelena’s glacial spirit in Uncle Vanya.
Want to take confrontations to the next
level with your irritating spouse? Think
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
When you feel a slump coming on,
watch dance sensation Hannah Lowth-
er’s supermarket routines on TikTok.
High kicks and twizzles in the tinned
soup aisle, all in a Tesco uniform.
Music
Need a timer? Use music instead.
Find a song you love that’s the right
length, hit play and enjoy the count-
down for once.
Put your fate in the hands of a
friend whose taste you trust – or even
that you’re sceptical about – and ask
Arts
Clockwise from top left … equestrian gaming, architecture in the sky, guru Larry David,
Cheaters for morning laughs, headspinning B-Girl Terra. Composite: Rockstar Games/Ala-
my/HBO/Clerkenwell Films
them to bring you to things they love
so you can see the world through their
eyes.
Just as interesting as any musician’s
imperial period are the times where
they got it wrong. Make a beeline for
their weirder albums, the ones that his-
tory has cast aside – and decide wheth-
er the critics were right. Edgar Wright’s
comprehensive Sparks documentary is
a great primer.
Listen to radio from around the
world. There are umpteen apps, but
there’s something satisfying about the
Radio Garden website, boasting an
image of the world you can rotate, in
order to find thousands of live broad-
casts from anywhere on Earth. Spin it
at random, or alight on a place you’ve
always wanted to visit – and discover
what their daily soundtrack involves.
Make mealtimes more evocative by
soundtracking your dinner with music
that shares its origins with your food.
Lasagne and Nessun Dorma were made
for each other!
Explore The Internet Archive’s
audio collection, a vast library aiming to
give “universal access to all knowledge”.
Its fascinating, head-spinning hoard of
audio files has got the lot: digitised
78RPMs, hip-hop mixtapes, old rave-era
DJ sets, early demo tapes by artists both
famous and completely unknown.
Read music writing on Substack.
A lot of the biggest newsletters found
there are either curated by artists them-
selves (Tegan and Sarah, Wilco’s Jeff
Tweedy, Perfume Genius) or are hy-
per-specific: “Essays on every Phish
show from 1994 onwards.” Sometimes
it provides a home for fantastic writ-
ers exploring areas few mainstream
outlets would consider: Ted Gioia’s
Honest Broker blog is an endlessly intri-
guing, opinionated, eclectic stream of
ideas about all areas of music; Nelson
George’s Mixtape offers a collation of
archive material, playlists and musings
(there’s a fabulous evocation of an Afri-
can-American house party circa 1967
alongside a report of a recent, random
conversation in a coffee shop with Out-
kast’s André 3000).
Never play a song in the car without
singing along at the top of your voice.
It’s like karaoke but without the han-
gover in the morning.
Scour YouTube’s archive of music
documentaries. We’re living in a great
era for new ones, such as Summer of
Soul and 1971: The Year That Music
Changed Everything. But YouTube re-
mains an unbeatable source, from a
1979 South Bank Show about Talking
Heads, to a downbeat 1967 doc about
Duke Ellington struggling to keep his
orchestra on the road. Then there’s
LDN, the definitive 2017 history of
UK rap, drill and grime, not to men-
tion every episode of BBC2’s legendary
low-budget early 90s indie/dance show
Snub TV.
Music festival lineups are so
stacked, it’s tempting to create a lami-
nated spreadsheet and plan your day as
a series of gigs interspersed with pow-
er-walking and scarfed-down pies. But
it’s better to slow down. Pick a couple
of must-sees, then meander the rest.
You’ll come away with some accidental
new favourites, and it won’t feel like
you’re mirroring a busy day at work.
Chill!
Achieve your 10,000 steps plugged
into Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony,
the work Wagner described as “the
apotheosis of dance”. It will still be
boosting your mood on your 100th
listen.
Some operas are easier than others.
Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman, Ja-
nacek’s Jenufa and Philip Glass’s Akh-
naten are ideal gateways to worlds of
wonder.
Seek out Ingmar Bergman’s charm-
ing and idiosyncratic film of The Magic
Flute. Filmed on a set that pains-
takingly recreated Stockholm’s 18th
century Drottningholm Palace Theatre,
with props and backdrops mimicking
the opera’s first ever production in
1791 Vienna, Mozart’s fairytale story
and its glorious music sparkle afresh
in this loving and intimate made-for-TV
movie.
Attend a chamber music concert,
preferably a string quartet. If the au-
dience seem a bit staid, don’t be fooled.
Huge emotions stir beneath polite exte-
riors when Beethoven gets going. Sit
close and let the music wash over you.
Chamber music rarely costs much more
than a tenner and it’s the perfect balm
for a Sunday evening.
Who says clubbing has to be a late-
night pursuit? You often get reduced
(or even free) entry when the doors
open. The floor will be yours to fill and
the DJ will still be going for it (or at least
pleased to see you).
Alone in the house for a bit?
Lie down, close your eyes, crank the
volume up to 11 and listen to a classic
album in its entirety. It’s what it, and
you, deserves.
Explore the catalogue of a band/
artist/genre you’ve seen mentioned a
lot but have never heard. From Steely
Dan to Neu!, from drill to early sludge
metal, fortune favours the brave.
There’s more to Discogs Music
Marketplace than flogging records. The
evergreen database, constantly up-
dated by ardent collectors and deal-
ers, is a goldmine for new discoveries.
Type in your favourite album, scan the
recommendations and hunt down rare
releases and forgotten hits.
If you played an instrument or sang
as a kid, go back to it. So what if you’ll
never be as good as you were. Doing
something incredibly difficult slightly
well is still honourable. If you can afford
it, send yourself to a summer school
like Dartington. You will be rewarded
with joy, friendship and the intoxicating
feeling of experiencing music from the
inside.
Architecture
Look up! The most interesting bits
of buildings are often above you.
Never cross a patterned (ie non-
grid) patio without inspecting the
craftsmanship. Only two corners
should ever meet, as four creates a
cross that stops the eye. Look for
mortar spills, too (called snot in the
trade).
Walk across cold marble floors in
bare feet, slide across polished concrete
floors in your socks, and always take
the stairs.
Open both halves of a sash window.
They are designed to create a convec-
tion current.
See how many different brick-laying
patterns you can spot, from running
bond (common) to diagonal basket
weave (rarer) to whorled (super-ad-
vanced).
Keep your eyes peeled for “vermi-
culated rustication”. That’s stonework
carved to look like its been eaten away
by worms.
Buy a fun door-knocker. You’ll smile
every time you come home, especially
if you’ve painted your kitchen yellow.
Film
Go to the movies alone on a
Monday after work. If it’s a fancy
cinema, treat yourself to a cocktail.
Your attentiveness to the film will be
all the better for not being confused
with socialising. Communing with a big
screen is a great way to start the week.
Visit an elderly relative and show
them the BFI’s Britain on Film player,
which finds movies by location. Ta-da!
Instant nostalgia.
Stick the subtitles on. This is not
just about muddy sound – it’s amaz-
ing how much neat dialogue is easily
missed.
Look up the film you’ve just seen on
Movie-Locations. You may have trouble
recognising the setting: it’s amazing
how quickly and dramatically places
change – and how ingenious film crews
can be in making use of an envi-
ronment.
Watch public domain films on You-
The Guardian Tuesday 26 July 2022
Posture-fixing … dancer Tamara Rojo.
Photograph: PA Images/Alamy
Tube or archive.org. There are early
cinema masterworks, such as The
Lodger and The Cabinet of Dr Cali-
gari, as well as quirkier stuff like Reefer
Madness and Plan 9 from Outer Space.
Night of the Living Dead is even out
there, stalking the internet after its orig-
inal distributor failed to renew its copy-
right.
Read the novel a great film was
based on. You will then understand the
adage that it often takes a bad book to
make a good film.
Play Screen Test with your partner.
Watch a film in the cinema together,
each storing half a dozen factual ques-
tions such as: “What was the name
of the heroine’s cat?” Then afterwards
in the pub, fire the questions at each
other.
When you’re on holiday, visit a
famous movie location. In Mull, go to
the red telephone box from I Know
Where I’m Going. In Rome, visit the
Trevi Fountain (as featured in La Dolce
Vita, although you can get in trouble for
climbing in).
Using the iMovie app on your smart-
phone and the 8mm app that creates
faux-Super 8 footage, create a montage
of clips of you and your partner walking
around looking thoughtful to the music
from The Way We Were.
Stay to the very end of the credits
in a film. There could be a post-cre-
dits sting. Even if there isn’t, the music
copyright namechecks are dependably
valuable and interesting.
When you go the cinema, just
before you are told to turn off your
phone, search YouTube and loudly
play the music to the old Pearl &
Dean advert: “PAH-pah-PAH-pah-PAH-
pah, pah-ah-pah-PAH.” Always gets a
big laugh from nostalgists in the au-
dience.
Art
Love still lifes but can’t afford a
Cézanne? Arrange yourself a lovely
bowl of fruit instead. It’s tastier, better
for you and cheaper.
Gather together all those self-
improvement books claiming Titian
Will Change Your Life or Rembrandt
Can Cure Your Troubled Soul and then
dispose of them.
Want to make yourself giddy with
pleasure? Look for those little patches
of colour in the otherwise almost en-
tirely white paintings of US minimalist
Robert Ryman.
Thank your good fortune that you
are not counting grains of rice in one of
Marina Abramović’s art workshops.
Plan a trip to a museum in a town
you have never visited before in order
to look at a single artwork. Do not
look at anything else and pay particular
Continued on page 35
Tuesday 26 July 2022 The Guardian
Continued from page 34
attention to your lunch – and, if you are
staying over, your dinner too. You will
remember your little adventure much
better if you eat well and don’t overdo
the art.
Nourish your mind but care for
your bottom. An inflatable cushion is a
wise investment for video installations,
which are almost always furnished with
hard benches. If there is no seating, lie
on the floor and rest your head on the
cushion.
If you visit the room containing
Rothko’s Seagram Murals at London’s
Tate Modern, ask the attendants to turn
up the lights for a better view. If they
refuse, which is likely, use the torch on
your phone to illuminate random pas-
sages of brushwork, occasionally crying
out “Ah-ha!” like Sherlock Holmes find-
ing a clue.
Even if you think you cannot draw,
keep a sketchbook handy. Make little
sketches, even cartoons, while visiting
an exhibition. Write down overheard
conversations or, failing that, shopping
lists. People will think you are serious
and interesting.
Give up your job, raid your child-
ren’s inheritance, and set yourself up
as an artist in a town where no one
knows you. Make deep pronounce-
ments about your art but never show
it. Cultivate a reputation as an undis-
covered genius. Soon, critics, dealers
and collectors will be clamouring at
your door. When the time comes to
show and tell, say the whole thing was
a spoof and that that is your art. Ar-
ticles will be written, TV interviews
conducted, a place in history assured.
At the height of it all, slip away and
resume your former life.
Pick a partner and stroll the streets
like Gilbert and George, the suit-wear-
ing couple whose walks and lives are
their art. Keep an eye out for historic
graveyards and rude street names.
In a museum, wander without pur-
pose, unfocused, until something snags
you or tiredness overtakes you. In front
of an artwork, do not try too hard. Let
your mind drift. Things will come in
and out of focus. Do not be troubled by
your incomprehension. Being baffled is
good. If you are bored, move on.
Eat like an artist. Out, in other
words. For some reason, artists have a
heightened appreciation of restaurant
grub. Or at least the rich ones do.
Smoke a pipe like Vincent van
The Deer King review – Studio Ghibli
graduates take on dystopian deer tamer saga
Phuong Le
A key animator on numerous classics
including Princess Mononoke, Spirited
Away and Your Name, Masashi Ando
teams up with Masayuki Miyaji, anoth-
er Studio Ghibli veteran, to co-direct
this sprawling adaptation of Nahoko
Uehashi’s fantasy novel series. This
long-awaited endeavour, however, lacks
the directorial deftness that has ele-
vated their previous credits.
Stretching itself thin to cover the
lengthy source material, The Deer King
is laden with meandering, expository
details. A tale of conflict between the
Arts
Gogh, who claimed it was the best way
to stay calm and happy. Of course, he
was neither so it’s probably bad advice.
Lose entire weekends by spending
Friday afternoons drinking absinthe,
the lurid green liquor consumed in dan-
gerous quantities by French artists in
the age of Manet and Toulouse-Lautrec.
Forget the Da Vinci Code. Adopt the
Da Vinci Diet. Repelled by dead flesh,
Leonardo was a vegetarian who gorged
on beans, accompanied by wine from
his own vineyard. All that protein may
give you a brain as big as his.
Eat as much cheese as you fancy,
in the manner of Michelangelo, espe-
cially Tuscan stinkers. Then work off
the calories by hammering a large block
of marble.
Visit a museum for 20 minutes.
Enjoy just a handful of works, absorbing
enough beauty and power to give you
a lift. A concentrated burst beats an
exhausting trawl.
Explore a new artist every week.
Look them up online, read a book about
them, seek out their work. Not only
will this deepen your experience of art,
you’ll soon feel more confident in your
tastes.
If you’re feeling stir crazy, join a vir-
tual tour of somewhere you’re never
going to get to in person. Take a virtual
drive along the silk road at St Peters-
burg’s Hermitage museum, or plunge
into France’s Chauvet Caves and peer
in well-lit close-up at the miracle of
prehistoric art.
Only look at art you love. If some-
thing seems massive, boring, obscure
or irrelevant, fear not. Most art is! Find
what moves you and enjoy that in small
doses, often.
Indulge in repeated contemplation.
Return to a gallery over and over to
look at the same thing. The rewards of
“learning” an artwork, playing over it
and unlocking it without pressure, are
immense. If you need more convincing,
read Hisham Matar’s A Month in Siena.
Give yourself a fresh view of
the Muslim world with The Muslima
Project, a collection of inspiring work
created by women. There’s something
for everyone: street art from Afgha-
nistan, satirical painting from Iran,
women’s football from Zanzibar.
All art is conceptual. Get over it and
lead a happier life.
TV and radio
Make laughter a part of your morn-
ing routine. The rise in 15-minute BBC
comedies (think Zen Motoring or wry
Pretty enough … Masashi Ando and Masayuki Miyaji’s The Deer King. Photograph: PR
romcom Cheaters) makes a quick burst
of first-thing fun easy.
Raid the Desert Island Discs archive
on BBC Sounds. Everybody needs to
hear Maya Angelou’s harrowing, incred-
ible life story. And she’s just one of
thousands. Plus, the music choices are
shorter on the web versions, a good
thing with footballers.
Adopt Curb Your Enthusiasm life
hacks. Wear a MAGA cap to repel social
approaches, never pause toast, and
always jump queues using the “chat
and cut” technique.
If the news is too overwhelming or
the wittering too tedious on your morn-
ing listen, switch to Radio 3’s Breakfast
show. It’s fab and won’t send you de-
mented. And on Saturday, try Building
a Library (part of Record Review, from
9am). You don’t actually have to build
one: just listening to different versions
of the same piece discussed is a great
way to build up knowledge. Stay tuned
for Music Matters at 11.45am.
Lean into the need for a good cry,
using trashy YouTube videos of great
TV scenes. There’s Will’s dad leaving in
Fresh Prince, Marissa’s death in The OC,
Homer’s “do it for her” ode to Maggie in
The Simpsons. Hankie!
Forget Duolingo. Learn a new lan-
guage on the sly by watching foreign
dramas. That way, you might one day be
able to inform a South Korean that they
are being chased by a zombie.
Bored with chart-toppers and sick
of ad breaks? Switch to grassroots radio
stations. For deep sonic excursions and
specialist talk shows, try NTS, World-
wide FM and Radio Alhara.
Watch CBeebies. Even if you don’t
have kids. It’ll restore your faith in
humanity.
Books
Want to read lots of amazing novels
but are running short on time? Stick
them on Audible at 1.3 speed. But be
warned: 1.4 is too fast!
Still taking your phone into the
bathroom? Keep a book in there to
occupy you during, er, more sustained
visits and learn something first thing in
the morning instead of doom-scrolling.
Even if you have no ambitions to
become a professional writer, take a
writing class, especially poetry. It will
make you a better, more critical reader,
will cure you of embarrassment (after
you’ve read aloud your first sonnet,
nothing is scary any more) and will find
you new friends. It will also improve
your everyday written interactions.
Pay a virtual visit to the British Li-
brary in London, where you will find
beauty, scholarship and historical rari-
ties. In person, you’d usually only see
a single page of precious manuscripts
in semi-darkness. Online, you can read
William Blake’s diaries, leaf through
Mercator’s atlas, or examine the draft
score of Handel’s Messiah – and all in
your own good time.
Make a conscious effort to read a
novel by a writer who has had dramat-
ically different experiences from your
own: someone from another country, or
of a different gender, race or class.
Walk the Birks of Aberfeldy, the glo-
rious gorge trail in Perthshire named
after Robert Burns’ poem, which made
it famous. Its full of boulders, rockpools
and waterfalls but Rabbie’s right: it’s the
countless birks, or birches, that make it
ravishing.
Add literary sparkle to your day
by sprinkling your Twitter feed with
poetry. Start with @Larkinquotes and
@Yeats_Quotes. More currently, Ian
McMillan’s tweeted asides and obser-
vations from his daily travels are a joy.
If you’ve got a week on a beach with
a few hours a day to really concentrate,
forget the fluff and attack that massive
tome you’ve always wanted to conquer.
Chomping through Roberto Bolaño’s
2066, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate or
George Eliot’s Middlemarch will make it
a holiday to remember.
Encourage any teenagers in your
life to read all the chewy books and see
all the arthouse films they can. They
have the time and attention span, or at
least more so than later in life.
Keep a careful note of what you’ve
seen and read, including its impact
on you. This will remind you of what
you’ve enjoyed and hopefully lead you
to other great stuff.
On holiday, read a book to do with
your destination: in South America,
read In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin; in
the Big Apple, try The New York Tri-
logy by Paul Auster; in Yorkshire, treat
yourself to Wuthering Heights by Emily
Brontë.
Games
In Grand Theft Auto Online, find a
friend, create your own private game,
and go for a hike up Mount Chiliad or
a long walk along beaches, taking in
a sunset. You’ll see a whole new side
of the game and won’t have to worry
about getting run over.
Be a tourist in your favourite game.
Sail the oceans in Assassin’s Creed
Aquafa and the Zol peoples as a plague
rages runs parallel to a spiritual jour-
ney towards healing. After breaking
out of prison, Van, an enslaved Aquafa
resistance fighter, finds the loss of his
wife and child softened by Yuna, an
orphaned toddler whom he rescues
during his escape. Though bitten by the
same rabid dogs that spread the deadly
disease, Van does not get infected but
instead gains a superpower that grants
him the ability to alter nature, like
making leafy branches sprout from a
wooden log. This special ability be-
comes a curse, as different forces of
good and evil are hot on Van’s trail,
threatening to disrupt his new life as a
35
Odyssey, yomp to Jorvik in Valhalla,
people-watch around Tokyo in Yakuza.
Don’t think about achieving anything.
Just enjoy the sensation of being some-
where else.
In a game that lets you dress
your character, always choose some-
thing you’d never wear in real life but
that nonetheless makes you happy. In
Animal Crossing, why not walk around
in yellow boots and a galaxy-print
hoodie?
Rediscover the games of your child-
hood by picking up an old console and
some fondly remembered games on
eBay. There’s no better way to trans-
port yourself to simpler times.
Never board a long flight without a
Nintendo Switch.
Got a spare 10 minutes? Get into
ambient gaming. Make petals drift on
the breeze in Flower. Let dolphins pull
you through gorgeous oceanscapes in
Abzu. It’s mindfulness – with a control
pad.
Design your dream home in The
Sims, unencumbered by concerns
about affordability, practicality, or get-
ting your partner to agree to a feature
wall or leopard-skin living room bar.
In Mario Kart, Street Fighter or any
other competitive game, play on the
lowest difficulty and leave your (com-
puter-controlled) opponents in the
dust. It’s the perfect way to feel good
on a stressful day.
Put on a soundtrack from a favou-
rite old video game while you work.
You’ll be surprised at what memories
it brings up.
Forget games with tyre-shredding
fast cars. Go equestrian instead. Ride
a horse across a desert, through a forest,
or up a mountain. You’ll need a game
with a gee-gee obsession: Red Dead
Redemption 2, The Legend of Zelda:
Breath of the Wild, or Shadow of the
Colossus. Giddy up!
Turn the difficulty level down to
easy. Nobody is watching.
• By Chris Wiegand, Brian Logan,
Lucy Knight, Lyndsey Winship, Arifa
Akbar, Alexi Duggins, Hollie Richardson,
Ben Beaumont-Thomas, Dave Simpson,
Imogen Tilden, Safi Bugel, Charlotte Hig-
gins, Stuart Heritage, Andrew Pulver,
Oliver Wainwright, Adrian Searle, Jona-
than Jones, Claire Armitstead, Lucy
Knight, Kate Abbott, Keza MacDonald,
Alex Needham, Alexis Petridis, Peter
Bradshaw, Andrew Gilchrist.
deer tamer in a small village with Yuna.
Juggling palace politics, magical
animals and medical ethics, The Deer
King can’t get over major pacing prob-
lems: the emotional moments are not
given enough time to land, as the plot
rushes to its next world-building intri-
gue. The visuals are pretty enough
but, like the repetitive score, they lack
distinctiveness; unlike Spirited Away,
which both Ando and Miyaji worked on,
it is difficult to recall any single image.
One can only hope that, in future, the
directors will have a better script that
may befit their talents as animators.
• The Deer King is released on 27
July in cinemas.
Tuesday 26 July 2022 The Guardian
Shadow Game review – border crossing as
video game shows teen migrants’ traumas
Phil Hoad
Illegal immigration is disconcertingly
rebranded as a kind of Hunger/Squid
Games-esque challenge by the teenage
boys shown here trying to gatecrash
Fortress Europe. “Of course, the game
is dangerous. If you fall on a moun-
tain, you will die,” says SK, a 15-year-old
who is fleeing Afghanistan. “If you pass,
you will win. That’s why they call it the
game.” Slapping this pop-culture filter
on the harsh realities of globalisation
gives this Dutch documentary a high-
concept jolt, but in actuality it is prob-
ably the only way for such young minds
to process the traumatic enormity of
what they are engaged in, and make
light of their own vulnerability.
The distances involved – with some
of those playing the “pedestrian game”
walking overland from Syria to the Bal-
kans – are mind-boggling. But we are
a generation on from the rickety hu-
man-trafficking supply lines of Michael
Winterbottom’s In This World; many
of these migrants seem relatively well-
France orders air-conditioned shops to save
energy by shutting doors
Jon Henley in Paris
Air-conditioned shops throughout
France will have to keep their doors
shut or risk a fine of €750 (£635), a
French minister has announced, after
the mayors of several major cities un-
veiled a similar rule during the coun-
try’s heatwave last week.
Agnès Pannier-Runacher, the minis-
ter for ecological transition, said leaving
doors open with air conditioning on led
to “20% more energy consumption and
… is absurd”. A decree confirming the
decision will be issued in the coming
days.
It follows recent announcements
by the mayors of Paris, Lyon and
other cities. Anne Hidalgo, the Socialist
mayor of Paris, last week denounced
“an aberration that must cease in the
context of the climate emergency and
energy crisis”.
Municipal police in the capital have
already begun issuing €150 fines after
Dan Lert, a deputy mayor in charge
of the green transition in Paris, and
the rest of the council expressed out-
rage over a “vast, irresponsible waste of
energy”.
French electricity is cheap because
of the country’s use of nuclear power,
Arts / Environment
Their ordeals linger with a near-hallucinatory power … Shadow Game. Photograph: Witfilm
resourced, buying winter clothing and
mobile phones to replace confiscated
ones en route. They also seem to have
Agnès Pannier-Runacher called the waste of energy due to open doors ‘absurd’. Photograph: Ludovic Marin/AFP/Getty Images
which produces about 70% of its needs,
but the Russian gas crisis has prompt-
ed the president, Emmanuel Macron,
to demand an energy “sobriety pro-
gramme”.
Retail outlets including major
supermarkets have already agreed a
plan under which they will switch
the social-media reflex of documenting
their journeys. Would-be bodybuilder
and biology student SK, with his shy
off illuminated signs “as soon as the
store closes” and “systematically reduce
lighting intensity” by reducing shop-
floor lighting levels.
Public premises will also be re-
quired to set thermostats higher in
summer and lower in winter, while the
public will be expected to turn off their
Bollywood smile, hosts his own vlog-
ging-style segments from atop coal
freight wagons and mine-strewn Croa-
wifi router and TV when they are away
and switch off lights in rooms they are
not using.
As part of the plan, aimed at reduc-
ing French power consumption by 10%
within two years, Pannier-Runacher
said on Sunday she would also issue
a decree banning illuminated adver-
37
tian forests.
But this air of 21st-century self-
empowerment is entirely superficial.
They trudge through snowy coun-
tryside at night and fend off bears and
wolves with DIY aerosol flamethrowers.
Mustafa, a 17-year-old Iraqi, is beaten
and tortured by Croatian border police
(who come over particularly badly – you
wonder how complicit the EU is with
their zero-tolerance stance). Often shot
in bleary night vision or under sodium
lights in interstitial border zones and
camps, their ordeals linger with a near-
hallucinatory power. But with the tes-
timony of 10 or so different migrants all
intermingled, individual journeys get
subsumed – perhaps intentionally – into
a collective portrait of “the game”. Of
course there are no winners here, even
those of us with the luxury of watching
as global migrant numbers continue to
rise.
• Shadow Game is available on
True Story on 29 July.
tising between 1am and 6am every-
where except in railway stations and
airports.
Yves Marignac, of the négaWatt
thinktank, which recommends ways
to reduce energy consumption, told
France Info public radio the minis-
ter’s announcements did not amount to
“miracle measures” but were certainly
more than symbolic.
“We are talking about measures
likely to reduce consumption by a
few per cent in a sector which itself
represents a few per cent of French con-
sumption,” he said. “But it’s important
precisely because it’s only by working
all the levers that we will collectively
achieve this objective.”
Marignac added that what was also
significant in Pannier-Runacher’s re-
marks was the implicit reminder that
“we have lived for decades in this prom-
ise of abundant energy, and have com-
pletely lost sight of the reality of our
energy consumption”.
Closing the doors of air-conditioned
commercial premises was obviously
“common sense”, he said. “When a
government has to remind us of this,
it shows how far down the cheap, harm-
less energy route we have travelled.”
 The Guardian Tuesday 26 July 2022

38 Science

Childhood hepatitis surge ‘probably linked to

two common viruses’
Linda Geddes Science corres-
pondent
Simultaneous infection with two
common viruses is thought to explain
a recent surge in childhood hepatitis
cases, which has led to 12 UK children
requiring liver transplants so far.
Two research groups have detected
high levels of adeno-associated virus 2
(AAV2) – a little-known virus not pre-
viously associated with human disease
– in almost all of the affected Brit-
ish children they have tested. AAV2 is
unable to replicate by itself but can do
so in the presence of a second virus.
Changes in the seasonal circu-
lation of viruses, brought about by the
pandemic, may have triggered a rise
in co-infections that are usually less
common, causing hepatitis in some of
these cases.
“My feeling is that this has probably
happened before. But because there
have been some changes in the sea-
sonal trends of these viruses, we’ve
seen a small collection of cases all
at once, and that’s why we’ve picked
them up,” said Prof Emma Thomson, a
consultant in infectious diseases at the
MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for
Virus Research, who was involved in
the new research.
In one study, a team led by Prof Judith Breuer of Great Ormond Street hospital tested samples from 28 children with hepatitis, five of whom
required transplants. Photograph: Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty Images
Since health authorities were first
alerted to a sudden increase in cases
of acute severe hepatitis of unknown
origin in young children in early April,
the World Health Organization (WHO)
has reported at least 1,010 probable
cases in 35 countries, including 22
deaths. Most of the UK’s 268 cases have
involved children under the age of five,
with 74 of them requiring admission to
intensive care.
The leading theory was that a surge
in infections caused by a separate
group of common viruses called adeno-
viruses was to blame, because they
were commonly found in samples from
affected children. Another idea was
that Covid infections had left children
more susceptible to hepatitis.
To investigate, Thomson and her
colleagues carried out detailed genetic
sequencing of samples from nine Scot-
tish children with hepatitis of unknown
origin. AAV2 was detected in all of
them, but in none of the 58 children
they also tested who did not have the
condition.
Separately, researchers led by Prof
Judith Breuer at Great Ormond Street
hospital and University College London
tested samples from a further 28 child-
ren with hepatitis, five of whom re-
quired liver transplants. They detected
high levels of AAV2 in most of these
children.
Both studies were able to rule out
recent or prior Covid infection as a
direct cause for the acute hepatitis – al-
though neither has been peer reviewed.
Since AAV2 cannot replicate with-
out a “helper” virus, the researchers be-
lieve co-infection with a second virus
– an adenovirus, or less often a herpes
virus called HHV6 – may explain the
onset of severe hepatitis.
Whether AAV2 or the second virus
is directly responsible for triggering this
damage is still unclear. Thomson said
larger studies were urgently needed
to investigate this. “We also need to
understand more about seasonal circu-
lation of AAV2, a virus that is not rou-
tinely monitored – it may be that a peak
of adenovirus infection has coincided
with a peak in AAV2 exposure, leading
to an unusual manifestation of hepa-
titis in susceptible young children.”

Starwatch: Delta Aquariid meteors reach

peak this week
Stuart Clark
Practise your meteor-watching skills
this week in preparation for next
month’s main event: the August Perseid
meteor shower.
This week, it is the turn of the fain-
ter Delta Aquariid meteors to reach its
peak. Nominally expected on 30 July,
the truth is that they are consistent for
days surrounding the crescendo. This
year is a good one to look because the
Delta Aquariids tend to be faint, yet the
new moon occurs on 28 July mean-
ing that it will be long gone from the
sky around midnight when the meteors
become most visible.
Although faint, the Delta Aquariids
leave persistent trails in the sky. The
chart shows the view looking south-
east from London at midnight as 29
July becomes 30 July. Expect to spend
the hours from midnight until dawn
outside. This will give your eyes time to
fully adjust to the dark and reach their
maximum sensitivity, as well as allow-
ing the radiant to climb higher into the
sky. Don’t look directly at the radiant
but be aware of that whole patch of sky
around it – this is where the meteors
will appear. The shower is much better
placed in the southern hemisphere as
the radiant will be higher in the sky.

Fossil of ‘earliest animal predator’ is named

after David Attenborough
Linda Geddes Science corres-
pondent
A hundred years from now, Sir David
Attenborough’s body may have turned
to dust, but a fossilised sea creature,
thought to represent Earth’s earliest
animal predator, will continue to bear
his name.
Discovered in Charnwood Forest,
Leicestershire, where Attenborough
hunted for fossils as a child, the crea-
ture predates what was previously
thought to be the oldest predator by
20m years.
Palaeontologists have named
it Auroralumina attenboroughii,in
honour of the TV presenter. The first
part of its name is Latin for dawn lan-
tern, in recognition of its great age and
Artwork emphasises the fossil Aurora-
lumina attenboroughii. Photograph: British
Geological Survey/UKRI/PA
resemblance to a burning torch, and the
creature is thought to have used a set
of densely packed tentacles to capture
food in Earth’s early oceans.
Charnwood Forest is known for
its fossils. Although Attenborough dug
there as a child, he avoided the rocks
where Auroralumina has been discov-
ered. “They were considered to be
so ancient that they dated from long
before life began on the planet. So I
never looked for fossils there,” he said.
A few years later, in 1957, a fern-
like impression was discovered by
Roger Mason, a younger boy at Atten-
borough’s school. The discovery turned
out to be one of the oldest fossi-
lised animals, and was named Charnia
masoni, in Mason’s honour.
“Now I have – almost – caught up
with him and I am truly delighted,”
said Attenborough, who has more than
40 species named after him, ranging
from a Madagascan dragonfly to a dan-
delion-like hawkweed found only in the
Brecon Beacons in south Wales.
Auroralumina is part of a trove of
more than 1,000 fossils discovered in
2007, when a team of researchers from
the British Geological Survey spent
more than a week in Charnwood Forest,
cleaning a 100-sq-metre rock surface
with toothbrushes and pressure jets,
before using a rubber mould to capture
an impression of its lumps and bumps.
The fossil was dated at the British
Geological Survey’s headquarters using
tiny radioactive minerals in the sur-
rounding rock, called zircons, that act
as geological clocks.
Related to the group that includes
modern corals, jellyfish and anemones,
the 560m-year-old specimen is the first
of its kind. Its discovery, reported in
Nature Ecology and Evolution, throws
into question when modern groups of
animals appeared on Earth.
“It’s generally held that modern
animal groups like jellyfish appeared
540m years ago in the Cambrian explo-
sion. But this predator predates that by
20m years,” said Dr Phil Wilby, palaeon-
tology leader at the British Geological
Survey, who helped to discover it.
“It’s the earliest creature we know
of to have a skeleton. So far we’ve only
found one, but it’s massively exciting to
know there must be others out there,
holding the key to when complex life
began on Earth.”
Dr Frankie Dunn from the Oxford
University Museum of Natural History,
who carried out the detailed study, said:
“It’s nothing like anything else we’ve
found in the fossil record at the time.”
Whereas the body plans of other
fossils from this period bear no rela-
tion to those of living animals, “this
Continued on page 39
Tuesday 26 July 2022 The Guardian
Continued from page 38
one clearly has a skeleton, with dense-
ly packed tentacles that would have
Low pay and damp housing driving UK lung
disease deaths, study finds
Josh Halliday
Poorer people are much more likely
to die from chronic obstructive pul-
monary disease (COPD) than wealthier
patients due to damp housing and low
pay, researchers have found.
A survey of nearly 6,000 people
living with COPD, one of Britain’s most
common lung conditions, found that
structural inequalities had a significant
bearing on whether a patient would
survive.
Of the nearly 4,000 people who suf-
fered two or more acute attacks a year,
such as breathlessness or severe cough-
ing, 55% earned less than £20,000 a year
and 13% lived in a cold, damp house.
The research, carried out by Asthma
+ Lung UK and published in BMJ Open
Respiratory Research, builds on pre-
vious findings that poorer people with
COPD are five times more likely to die
than the wealthiest people with the
condition.
More than 1.3 million people in the
UK are affected by COPD, a group of
lung conditions that include emphy-
sema and chronic bronchitis, but many
Monday briefing: Gay and bisexual men are
most at risk from monkeypox. Why aren’t we
saying so clearly?
Archie Bland
Good morning. Over the weekend, the
World Health Organization declared
monkeypox to be a global health emer-
gency, and said the outbreak “is concen-
trated among men who have sex with
men, especially those with multiple
sexual partners”. In the UK, the Ter-
rence Higgins Trust called for an urgent
injection of cash to scale up vacci-
nations, which are being targeted at
men in high-risk groups. And outside
Guy’s Hospital in London yesterday, a
three-hour queue snaked around the
building to get a jab – with those waiting
for their turn almost all gay and bisex-
ual men.
This makes sense: all the evi-
dence suggests that the outbreak is
highly concentrated among men who
have sex with men, and the virus is
overwhelmingly transmitted through
sexual contact. But even as that has
become abundantly clear, there has still
been a curious reticence in much of the
public health messaging about saying
so.
Today’s newsletter, with sexual
health activist and researcher Dr Will
Nutland and Guardian columnist Owen
Science
waved around in the water capturing
passing food, much like corals and sea
anemones do today,” she said.
Possibly, it originated from shal-
More than 1.3 million people in the UK are estimated to have COPD, a group of lung conditions that includes emphysema and chronic
bronchitis. Photograph: SIphotography/Getty Images/iStockphoto
more are believed to have the disease
without knowing.
Symptoms include breathlessness,
a constant cough, wheezing and cough-
A man receives a monkeypox vaccine at an outdoor walk-in clinic in Montreal. Photo-
graph: Graham Hughes/AP
Jones, is about why that is, what the
consequences are, and what a better
way to talk about the problem might be.
That’s right after the headlines.
Five big stories
Health| The NHS is facing “the
greatest workforce crisis” in its history
which is putting patients at serious risk
of harm, an influential group of MPs
warns today. Estimates provided to the
health and social care select committee
suggest that there may be as many as
50,000 vacancies for nurses and 12,000
for doctors.
lower water than the rest of the fossils
found in Charnwood. “All of the fossils
on the cleaned rock surface were anc-
hored to the seafloor and were knocked
ing up phlegm. An estimated 30,000
people die from COPD each year in the
UK.
Research in 2020 found that the
Travel| UK holidaymakers hoping to
travel to France endured another day
of disruption as traffic chaos turned the
Eurotunnel into a “hotspot of holiday
hell”. British and French officials have
blamed each other for the problems.
Conservative leadership| Rishi
Sunak is to unveil plans to curb China’s
soft power by closing its 30 Confucius
Institutes, which promote Chinese lan-
guage and culture, in the UK. In a veiled
attack on his leadership rival, foreign
secretary Liz Truss, he will say the UK
has “turned a blind eye to China’s nefa-
over in the same direction by a deluge
of volcanic ash sweeping down the sub-
merged foot of the volcano, except one,
A. attenboroughii,” Dunn said. “It lies at
mortality rate between the richest and
poorest patients with COPD has grown
in the past 11 years.
The poorest 10% of patients are
rious activity and ambitions”.
Ukraine| Russia’s foreign minister,
Sergei Lavrov, sought to reassure Egypt
over Russian grain supplies at the start
of a four-country tour of Africa, amid
uncertainty over the future of a deal to
resume Ukrainian exports via the Black
Sea.
Myanmar |The country’s junta has
executed four democracy activists, in-
cluding a former lawmaker from Aung
San Suu Kyi’s party, state media said
on Monday, in the first use of capital
punishment in decades. The junta has
sentenced dozens of activists to death
since seizing power last year.
In depth: ‘Who actually gets the
right information is random’
Monkeypox is serious: symptoms
include fever, an intense headache,
a rash and lesions that can be ex-
tremely painful. It can lead to hospita-
lisation and dangerous complications.
But most cases are mild. While it can
be fatal, there have been no recorded
deaths linked to the current outbreak
in the UK, and, the WHO said on Sat-
urday, only five deaths among more
than 16,000 reported cases worldwide.
While most people are very unlikely
to catch monkeypox at the moment, for
the communities where it is spreading,
39
an odd angle and has lost its base, so
appears to have been swept down the
slope in the deluge.”
now five times more likely to die with
the condition than the wealthiest, com-
pared with four times more likely in
2009/11.
Prof Nick Hopkinson, medical direc-
tor of Asthma + Lung UK, said: “One
of the impacts of inequality is that it
affects some of the most vulnerable
people in society and it increases the
risk of dying from lung disease.
“COPD is one of the biggest health
problems in the UK and one of the big-
gest causes of hospital admissions so
failure to deal with this is causing big
problems for the health and social care
system.”
Of the 5,997 patients surveyed, the
research found that of those who expe-
rienced two or more COPD exacer-
bations a year, 62% were more likely
to smoke and 53% were more likely to
have experienced occupational expo-
sure to dust, fumes and chemicals.
Asthma + Lung UK said just 25% of
people with COPD receive proper care.
It urged patients to get a self-manage-
ment plan, access to pulmonary rehab,
help to stop smoking, a flu and pneu-
monia jab and support managing other
conditions.
People queue for monkeypox vacci-
nations at Guy’s Hospital in London on
Sunday. Photograph: Hollie Adams/Getty
it’s suddenly a huge subject. There are
fears that if it is not stopped, it could
become an entrenched STD (although
it is not usually transmitted through
bodily fluids, but through prolonged
skin-to-skin contact).
“I knew almost nothing about mon-
keypox about three months ago,” said
Dr Will Nutland, co-founder of two
organisations devoted to gay and bisex-
ual men’s health, PrEPster and the Love
Tank. “Now it’s like another job on top
of my job. I’m a bit monkeypoxed out.”
Despite that concentration, as Guar-
dian columnist Owen Jones has
warned, efforts to talk about it clearly
have sometimes been characterised as
evidence of bigotry. “The madness” of
that position, he tweeted yesterday, “is
Continued on page 40

40
Continued from page 39
that the logic of [the] argument is the
vaccine shouldn’t be prioritised for men
who have sex with men.”
Here’s what we know about how
monkeypox is spreading, and how it
should be addressed:
***
Almost all cases of monkeypox are
among gay and bisexual men
The evidence is clear: an article in
the New England Journal of Medicine
last week, which looked at infections
across 16 countries between April and
June, found that 98% of cases were in
gay or bisexual men. In 95% of cases,
the infection occurred through sexual
activity. The R number, of coronavirus
fame, is 1.6 for men who have sex with
men in the UK, but below 1 for everyone
else. In the UK, more than 70% of cases
were in London as of 6 July.
In short, said Nutland: “The vast,
vast majority of cases are in gay and
bisexual men, and pretending that
that’s not the case doesn’t help any of
us.”
***
The public health messaging hasn’t
always matched that reality
A mantra of public health commu-
nication on the subject in the UK and
US is that anyone can can catch mon-
keypox. “Well yeah, anyone could get
monkeypox, but not anyone is getting
monkeypox,” said Nutland.
Lurking in the background of that
approach is “the HIV/AIDS pandemic,
which led to huge stigmatisation”, said
Owen. In other words, part of what’s
underpinning this may be a well-inten-
tioned desire to avoid creating a sense
of shame. “But if we’re not clear about
where the risk is, it’s completely self-de-
feating, because that’s who we have to
prioritise talking to and protecting.”
That focus has started to change
– and Nutland acknowledged that “it’s
always hard in the early stages [of an
outbreak] to understand where trans-
mission is happening and what might
happen next”.
But the data has been clear for a
while now. Nutland was keen to praise
Amusan shatters 100m hurdles world record
to revive super shoes debate
Sean Ingle in Eugene
Nigeria’s Tobi Amusan reignited the
debate about track and field’s new
super shoes as she unexpectedly shat-
tered the 100m hurdles world record in
Eugene.
On a night when Mondo Dup-
lantis also broke his own pole vault
world record, Amusan ran a staggering
12.12 seconds in her semi-final to beat
Kendra Harrison’s old best by 0.08 sec
– smashing her personal best time by
nearly three-tenths of a second.
Immediately after the race, the
former world 200m and 400m record
holder, Michael Johnson, wondered
whether the timing system at Hayward
Field was off. He was far from alone.
However it transpired that Amusan had
been given a boost by using Adidas Adi-
zero Avanti shoes, which are designed
for 5km and 10km runners, rather than
track spikes.
After running even faster to win
Science / Sport
“some exceptional people” at the UK
Health Security Agency, but he also
said: “I really wish more attention had
been paid to gay and bisexual men.” He
points to a poster campaign, “Spot it,
stop it”, saying: “The vast majority of
that campaign has not targeted who it
should have.”
This PDF shows a bafflingly generic
example. A middle-aged straight couple
in West Wittering might see it and con-
clude they’d better have separate beds
for a while. A better approach, Nutland
said, is the one being adopted by PrEP-
ster and the Love Tank, which have
distributed 5,000 information packs
through saunas, sex shops and other
venues whose clients are most likely to
be at risk.
***
Abstinence-based messaging (still)
doesn’t work
“I work alongside some people who
want us just to call for gay and bisexual
men to stop having sex for a month
to get on top of this,” says Nutland.
“But we know from Covid, from teenage
pregnancy, from so much research on
HIV, that when you tell people just not
to do something, and particularly not to
have sex, it doesn’t work.”
And, after all, somebody likely to be
receptive to an abstinence message is
already likely to abstain once they’ve
been told about the symptoms of mon-
keypox and how it’s transmitted. “For
the others, it stops them seeking help if
they’re unwell, and they’re more likely
to end up hospitalised.”
Owen also sees a kind of self-
censorship at play among some gay and
bisexual commentators (a frustration
that led him to start tweeting about it
about it last week). “People worry about
washing the dirty linen in public – it’s
almost like, ‘Don’t say it in front of the
straights!’ So the discussions are huge
for some people on WhatsApp and
Instagram, but who is actually getting
the right information becomes random.
Younger gay and bisexual men, for ex-
ample, might not have those networks.”
***
Until vaccines are more easily avail-
able, there’s only so much communi-
Tobi Amusan celebrates her 100m hurdles gold medal. The Nigerian finished the final in
12.06, which would have broken the world record she had set 90 minutes earlier in the semi-
final but for the wind speed rendering it ineligible. Photograph: John G Mabanglo/EPA
gold in the final nearly two hours later,
Amusan revealed she had accidentally
stumbled on the idea of using the
shoes, which have extra bouncy foam,
after injuring her foot.
Adidas bill the Adizero Avanti as
“like hitting fast-forward” and promise
cations can do
It took Owen 20 phone calls to fi-
nally get an appointment for a vaccine.
“You go right around the block,” he said.
“Sexual health clinics are being over-
whelmed, which also means their other
services are massively under stress. I
rang one place 10 times. They were
inundated.”
Meanwhile, “supervax” events like
the one at Guy’s over the weekend are
vital – but, Nutland points out, other
strategies are needed to reach those
who may not be comfortable being vis-
ible in the queue, who are more likely to
be from minority groups.
The UK has ordered 100,000 addi-
tional doses of vaccine, and the NHS
is stepping up vaccination in London
(and now advising eligible people to
wait to be contacted). It is a good start,
says Nutland, but not enough. “Our best
estimate if we’re going to double dose is
we need at least another 150,000 doses”
– and with only one manufacturer glo-
bally, that may take some time.
Even so, he says: “It isn’t vaccine
supply that is the key broken link
– it’s our public health system, and
our sexual health system in partic-
ular. Local authority budgets have been
slashed over the last 12 years. And
when councils have to make a deci-
sion between sexual health services
or some other public health service,
sexual health is still the poor relation.”
What else we’ve been reading
Six months since the war in Ukraine
began, Peter Beaumont’s dispatch from
the eastern Donbas region is a portrait
of adaptation to the unbearable. “I sleep
in my clothes so I can get out quickly if
there is an airstrike,” says Tamara, 85, a
former nurse. “I hate it! I hate it! I just
want this war to end.” Archie
Leah McLaren looks back at her
unconventional relationship with her
mother, unpacking the ways the
‘benign neglect’ she experienced as
a teenager has affected her own pa-
renting skills now. Nimo
After a week in which the imme-
diacy of the climate crisis was under-
lined in the UK, John Harris sees
disruptive protest as the only way for-
the shoes “provide a snappy, propulsive
ride with high traction and reduce fa-
tigue, so you finish 5km and 10km races
with a kick”. There is nothing illegal
about the shoes, with current World
Athletics rules dictating that sprint
spikes cannot have soles thicker than
ward. “The people now lying in roads
and charging into airports and refi-
neries have conveyed the urgency of
climate breakdown more successfully
than anyone in a suit,” he writes.Archie
Once chic and cool, Airbnb and
the individually planned holiday have
been falling out of favour with various
demographics. Amelia Tait explores the
resurgence of the all-inclusive holiday,
arguing that we should all embrace it.
Nimo
In Saturday magazine, Brian Cox
(the actor) and Brian Cox (the scien-
tist) met (over Zoom) for the first
time. Which is fun for obvious reasons,
but also led to a fascinating conver-
sation ranging from Shakespeare to
black holes. Archie
Sport
Cycling| Jonas Vingegaard of Den-
mark celebrated his first Tour de France
title after Belgium’s Jasper Philipsen
brought the curtain down on the 109th
edition with a sprint victory in Paris.
Formula One| Max Verstappen won
the French Grand Prix, extending his
lead over Charles Leclerc to 63 points
after his title rival crashed out. Mer-
cedes’ Lewis Hamilton and George Rus-
sell finished second and third.
Cricket| The third one-day inter-
national at Headingley was abandoned
because of rain, meaning the three-
match series between England and
South Africa was drawn 1-1. South
Africa reached 159-2 before bad weath-
er prevented further play after just two
hours.
The front pages
The Guardian’s print splash this
morning: “‘Greatest staffing crisis’ in
NHS history leaves patients at risk”.
The Mirror also leads with the scath-
ing cross-party report: “Worst NHS staff
crisis ever” while the Metro has “NHS is
on its knees”. Chaos at the ports makes
top story in the Times: “Channel tour-
ists face long queues all summer”. “Why
did my baby die?” – the Sun’s lead is
about TV personality Lauren Goodg-
er, who lost newborn Lorena minutes
after giving birth. “Tory race to be next
PM turns toxic” – that’s the i – and
the variously aligned titles are well and
20mm – the same as the Adizero Avanti.
Until now these shoes have always
been used for long races, but the bene-
fits for Amusan were obvious as she
flew high over the hurdles and into the
record books. “My abilities are not cen-
tred around spikes,” said the Nigerian,
who ran 12.06 in the final, only for the
wind speed of +2.5m/s to make it inelig-
ible for record purposes.
“I had patella fasciitis at the begin-
ning of the season so that set me back
for a while,” Amusan added. “I spoke
to Adidas and requested if I could get
spikes with a softer sole. They recom-
mended a lot of stuff and I feel com-
fortable in [the shoes], so I was using
them basically the entire time.”
The new breed of super shoes do
appear to particularly help hurdling
events, with Sydney McLaughlin also
breaking the women’s 400m hurdles
record wearing New Balance’s latest
model earlier this week.
There was another world record at
the finale of these championships as
The Guardian Tuesday 26 July 2022
truly dug in at the front. The Mail says
mockingly “Tough on China Mr Sunak?
Pull the other one”. It comes after, as
the Telegraph explains, “Sunak takes
aim at Truss over China’s influence in
universities” – the former chancellor
says his rival as education minister was
“blind to threat from Beijing”. The Ex-
press seeks to bolster its favourite with
“Truss: my tax breaks will boost Brit-
ain”. The lead story in the Financial
Times is “China plans corporate disclo-
sure tiers in bid to avoid US delistings”.
Today in Focus
Homeless in California: the Amer-
icans forced to camp in the desert
In the richest state of the richest
country in the world, unhoused people
are camping in the Mojave desert. Sam
Levin reports
Cartoon of the day | Ben Jennings
The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that
the world’s not all bad
After seeing the destruction of fo-
rests for palm oil in Borneo, James
Baird, a farmer and landowner in
Sussex, realised that the relationship
between agricultural practices and
nature was “broken”. He decided he had
to do something to better protect the
environment, so he helped set up the
Weald to Waves project – an ambitious
plan that seeks to restore and conserve
biodiversity in the area. The goal of
the project is to create at least 10,000
hectares of nature-friendly corridors to
boost biodiversity on land and in the
sea. “The era when nature has been
disregarded and degraded is coming to
an end,” Baird says. “Farmers who are
unwilling to change are going to find it
very difficult to continue as they were.”
Sign up here for a weekly roun-
dup of The Upside, sent to you every
Sunday
Bored at work?
And finally, the Guardian’s cross-
words to keep you entertained through-
out the day – with plenty more on the
Guardian’s Puzzles app for iOS and An-
droid. Until tomorrow.
Quick crossword
Cryptic crossword
Sweden’s Mondo Duplantis reacts as he
sets another world record in the men’s pole
vault. Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty
Images
Duplantis cleared 6.21m. The Swedish
vaulter won another gold medal – and,
like Amusan, left Eugene with a bonus
cheque of $100,000.
“I’ve gotta save the best for last,” said
Duplantis, who beat his nearest rival
Christopher Nielsen by an astonishing
27cm. “You get quite a bit of pressure on
you when you’re the only person com-
peting in the entire track. It’s an honour
when people stay in their seats when
it’s literally only me on the track. It was
Continued on page 41
Tuesday 26 July 2022 The Guardian
Continued from page 40
quite a pleasure jumping out there, ho-
nestly.”
Asked how he would celebrate, the
Olympic and world champion smiled.
“I’ll probably stay up kinda late,” he
said. “Those kinda performances prob-
ably call for something fun.”
Earlier in the day, Jakob Inge-
brigtsen made up for his 1500m defeat
James Harden has taken a $14m pay cut to try
to win a title. Why the hate?
Oren Weisfeld
When James Harden entered the NBA
in 2009, the league’s highest-paid
player, Kobe Bryant, made just over
$23m a year. Now, there are 50 players
making more than that sum, and the
highest-paid among them, Steph Curry,
will make a hair over $48m in 2022-23.
But when Harden declined his
player-option of $47.3m next season to
sign a new two-year contract (with a
player-option in Year 2) worth $68.6m
that will see him take a $14m dis-
count next year, he became the first
star player to take a pay cut of that
magnitude in the modern history of the
league. After all, this isn’t Dirk Nowitzki
taking a team-friendly deal at 39-years-
old or Kevin Durant, Dwyane Wade
and Chris Bosh losing out on a couple
million in the prime of their careers.
Harden took a big pay cut with the aim
of helping his Philadelphia 76ers build a
championship contender around him-
self and co-star Joel Embiid, reportedly
telling Sixers’ president of basketball
operations Daryl Morey “to improve the
roster, sign who we needed to sign and
give me whatever is left over.”
That pay cut helped the Sixers sign
veteran forward PJ Tucker to a three-
year, $33m contract, prying him away
from the rival Miami Heat, who beat
the Sixers in the 2022 playoffs. Embiid
specifically mentioned Tucker as some-
one who plays with the kind of tough-
ness and physicality that the Sixers
lacked, saying, “since I’ve been here I’d
be lying if I said that we’ve had those
type of guys… we never had [a] PJ
Tucker.”
The Sixers also signed Danuel
House Jr to a two-year, $8.4m con-
tract and Trevelin Queen, the 2021-22
G League MVP. The Sixers added depth,
athleticism and shooting to a team that
could have gone to the NBA finals last
year had Embiid not suffered an orbital
fracture and torn ligament in his thumb
during the playoffs. They wouldn’t have
been able to add those players – and
improve their title chances – if not for
Harden’s pay cut.
Harden is a former MVP, a 10-time
All-Star, and a three-time scoring cham-
pion who has every individual accolade
possible, but he has never won an NBA
Sport
to Jake Wightman with a dominant
performance in the 5,000m. The race
was never fast enough to blunt the Nor-
wegian’s finishing speed, and he was
able to take the lead with 900m to go
and gradually ramp up the pace before
kicking for home.
Such was his dominance he was
even able to celebrate by pointing his
finger at the crowd and easing down
before crossing the line. “I didn’t want a
James Harden will return to the Philadelphia 76ers with a seemingly stronger supporting cast this season. Photograph: Matt Slocum/AP
championship. You would think that
his willingness to do everything in his
power to compete for a championship
would be commended.
But instead his decision to take a
pay cut has been met with cynicism by
pundits and fans – at least those outside
of Philadelphia.
ESPN’s Max Kellerman echoed a lot
of peoples’ sentiments when he said:
“The reason I’m being cynical is be-
cause … it’s doing two things at once:
it does help them sign guys and every-
thing, House and PJ Tucker – but really
what it also does is get him an extra
[guaranteed] $27m and another year
[on his deal], and maybe what he’s feel-
ing now is: ‘I don’t know if I’m going
to get that in two years.’” Others have
speculated that Harden will make the
money back in some mischievous way,
either off the books or in the form of a
secretly promised long-term extension
next offseason.
But that’s all just speculation, and
nothing is guaranteed in the NBA, as
one injury at age 32 could significantly
impact Harden’s future earnings. This
was possibly his final opportunity to
cash in – especially with his skills appar-
ently on the decline. But instead of
opting into his $47m player-option next
season or taking the maximum amount
as a free agent on the open market –
sprint finish because I wanted to prove
I am the better guy,” said Ingebrigtsen,
who beat the Kenyan Jacob Krop into
silver by 0.74 sec. “It was a great race but
I wanted and I needed that. It felt really
amazing.”
Elsewhere the German Olympic
champion, Malaika Mihambo, con-
tinued her dominance in the women’s
long jump by soaring to a second
successive world gold with a final leap
which the Sixers would have likely had
to match, since they have such little
leverage and couldn’t watch him walk
for nothing – he took a discount. That is
what we know.
“[I’m] cynical only because people
a lot of times frame things as if
they’re not self-interested, and they’re
almost always self-interested,” Kel-
lerman added, in the same breath
acknowledging that Harden turned
down long-term extensions from both
his previous teams, the Houston Rock-
ets and Brooklyn Nets, because he
didn’t like the direction the franchises
were headed. So yes, it is a self-inter-
ested move, but not monetarily speak-
ing — maybe the idea that people can
have self-interests outside of money
is too hard for some people to under-
stand.
Aside from speculating about
Harden’s hidden agendas, what jars is
that the same people who criticize play-
ers such as Damian Lillard and Brad-
ley Beal for taking the most money
possible to stay with their middling
franchises – ones that have failed
to build championship-caliber teams
around them time and again – also cri-
ticize Harden for taking less money to
try to win a championship. The same
people who laugh at Chris Paul and
Charles Barkley for never winning a
of 7.12 metres.
Mihambo was on the brink of ex-
iting the competition after faulting on
her first and second jumps but recov-
ered well to register a valid third at-
tempt of 6.98m. Ese Brume of Ni-
geria claimed silver with 7.02m, while
Brazil’s Leticia Oro Melo took bronze
with 6.89m, a personal best.
Afterwards, World Athletics re-
vealed that the record for the number
title will laugh at Harden taking a pay
cut to try to do so.
Perhaps it’s because of Harden’s
past that he’s criticized in this way.
After all, this is the same player who
forced his Rockets to trade a prime
Chris Paul for an ill-fitting Russell
Westbrook because he grew frustrated
with the partnership. It’s the same
player who forced his way from the
Rockets to the Nets after showing up
unfit to play, and then from the Nets to
the Sixers after growing frustrated with
the Kyrie Irving situation, all within the
span of one year. Not to mention the
same player who, um, enjoys a good
party. But is it fair to attack Harden for
learning from his past and finally hun-
kering down with one team and doing
everything he can to help them win?
Harden seems to be at a point in
his career where he is willing to sacri-
fice for the greater good of the team
and, most importantly, for his first NBA
championship. After making $269m in
his career on the court and more than
$200m from Adidas (plus more from
other sponsorships) off it, Harden is
willing to leave a significant amount of
money on the table in order to achieve
a lifelong dream of winning a cham-
pionship. And that’s somehow seen as a
bad thing.
The real reason that so many people
41
of countries winning gold medals at
one championships had been broken,
with 29 countries taking turns on the
top step of the podium, compared with
26 in 2017. Peru, Kazakhstan and Ni-
geria won their first ever gold medals,
while India and Burkina Faso enjoyed
their best ever medal performances in
winning silver.
seem to be upset with Harden’s deci-
sion is either because they don’t like
Harden based on what he’s done in the
past, or because they are simply jealous
that the star player on their favourite
team won’t do the same. That isn’t to
say that other star players should feel
pressure to take a discount like Harden
did – only that if they do, they should be
lauded, not questioned.
After all, it’s decisions like these
that make a salary-capped league like
the NBA more competitive. The Sixers
could now realistically compete with
the Boston Celtics, Miami Heat, and
Milwaukee Bucks in a playoff series,
and that makes for good television if
nothing else.
When it comes to creating a healthy
working culture – something that the
Sixers have been unsuccessful at over
the course of Embiid’s tenure – a move
like this could help foster a lot of good-
will among the rest of the roster, with
other players more likely to sacrifice on
and off the court for the greater good of
the team.
The Sixers probably won’t win the
championship this coming season, but
sometimes the method matters just as
much as the results. And by giving
them a slightly better shot at winning
a title when depth is more important
than ever and when most stars seem
to be more focused on maximizing
their earnings than winning, that’s com-
mendable. And more than that, it could
be inspirational.
Harden could set a new precedent
in the NBA for other superstars to
follow. Even if the Sixers don’t win it
all, Harden could show the next gener-
ation that once you’ve gained enough
individual accolades and made enough
money, you can go for it, regardless
of what the talking heads say. Plus, if
Harden does win a championship or
even two, there’s no telling how much
more money he could make in spon-
sorship deals and post-career oppor-
tunities due to his success, like Garnett
starring in Uncut Gems.
Harden could have taken the easy
way out and cashed in, but instead he
did what few superstars were willing to
do before him and put his money where
his mouth is. Now we wait and see what
impact that decision will have on the
future of the NBA.
 The Guardian Tuesday 26 July 2022
42 Sport

LIV golfers criticised by 9/11 survivors’ group

over staging of New Jersey event
Ewan Murray
The head of a group representing fami-
lies affected by the 9/11 terror attacks
has castigated the Saudi Arabia-backed
LIV Golf Series for staging the tour-
nament at Bedminster in New Jersey
this week. Terry Strada, the national
chair of 9/11 Families United, believes
the venue is the “worst place on the
planet” for event three of the lucrative
rebel tour.
On Tuesday morning Strada will
front a media conference close to
Bedminster, owned by the former
US president Donald Trump. There,
9/11 Families United will publicise
documents they believe prove Saudi
involvement in the attacks on the
World Trade Center. Saudi Arabia has
always categorically denied being com-
plicit in 9/11. “The players need to see
this and the White House needs to pay
attention as well,” said Strada, whose
husband Tom was among the almost
3,000 people killed in the 2001 atrocity.
New Jersey lost 750 residents in
9/11. Strada said of golfers including
Phil Mickelson who have converted to
the LIV Series: “They might have all
thought about what it would feel like
for the families if they came to Bedmin-
ster and New Jersey. Of all the courses
in the world, this is literally the worst
they could hold a tournament in. It
Graeme McDowell’s public statement of a ‘smear campaign’ against LIV Golf has been
labelled ‘comical’ by the chair of 9/11 Families United. Photograph: Craig Mercer/MB Media/
Getty Images
was extremely insulting and hurtful to
think that, six weeks prior to the latest
anniversary, families were not going to
feel the pain of a Saudi-backed league
in their back yard.
“The families suffered the most but
these towns suffered, too. There were
schools with broken-hearted children
coming back into classrooms. New York
City cannot host a tournament so
Bedminster, New Jersey is the worst
place on the planet this could be taking
place.”
Trump’s involvement as essentially
the tournament host adds another layer
of controversy. Last week he actively
advised golfers to side with LIV against
the traditional model of the PGA Tour.
“He should know better than anyone,
as a former president, the level of
depravity the kingdom is capable of,”
Strada said. “He turned a blind eye to
it when he was president. He is a New
Yorker, he claims to have empathy for
the families but clearly he does not.
If he had a sensitive bone in his body
he would understand the level of angst
this causes.
“These people don’t understand
how devastating September 11 was. My
husband was dismembered. We don’t
know where all his body parts landed.
He has never been identified. There was
a psychological cruelness that people
do not realise. These players have flip-
pantly forgotten how awful the attacks
were but former president Trump is
especially egregious in his behaviour
towards us. There are no words for it.”
Strada branded Graeme McDowell’s
public statement of a “smear campaign”
against LIV as “comical”.
On behalf of a body which
represents more than 10,000 family
members of victims and survivors of
9/11, Strada wrote a scathing letter to
the representatives of Mickelson and
a handful of others after they pledged
commitment to LIV. No response has
been forthcoming, although Mickelson
has expressed his “deepest sympathy”
to the families of those who lost loved
ones on 9/11.
“That didn’t surprise me,” Strada
said on the lack of a direct response
to the letter. “It was disappointing. I
don’t think they know how to react
to the families. They are just spin-
ning off Saudi talking points, right
and left. They are becoming more and
more insulting as time goes by be-
cause they just repeat the same things.
Sportswashing is a very serious issue if
you look at it through a serious lens.
“I cannot imagine that they are
completely heartless but actions speak
louder than words and their actions
scream that they are heartless. They
have done some abhorrent things; the
shirt [worn by Pat Perez] with 100 dollar
Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster,
New Jersey hosts the third LIV Golf Series
event. Photograph: Seth Wenig/AP
bill design. The dancing and partying
on the LIV jet. How did they think 9/11
families would feel about that?”
A routine defence by LIV golfers
that the source of money for golf tour-
naments under the banner of existing
tours receives little focus cuts no ice
with Strada. “Business is one thing,” she
said. “I might not like people doing
business with the kingdom but that’s
not what this is. It is not a busi-
ness arrangement. This is intentional
sportswashing to cleanse their image,
manipulate public opinion and sweep
the 9/11 atrocities under the rug. Golfers
are willing to do this because of a large
sum of money.”
In response to previous outrage
from those affected by 9/11 to the stag-
ing of an LIV event at Bedminster,
organisers said, “These families have
our deepest sympathy,” adding: “While
some may not agree, we believe golf is a
force for good around the world.”

Cristiano Ronaldo set for talks with

Manchester United over future
Fabrizio Romano and Ed Aarons
Cristiano Ronaldo is set to hold talks
with Manchester United this week as he
seeks to clarify his future amid doubts
whether he will remain at Old Trafford
this season.
The 37-year-old flew back to the
UK on Monday evening having missed
United’s pre-season trip to Thailand
Erik Ten Hag is keen to involve Cristiano
Ronaldo in his plans as soon as possible.
Photograph: Jon Super/AP
and Australia due to a family issue,
with manager Erik ten Hag expected
to meet with him in the coming days.
Ten Hag is keen to involve Ronaldo in
his plans as soon as possible, although
it is understood that Ronaldo’s repre-
sentatives have been attempting to find
him a new club after he made it clear he
wants to play in the Champions League
this season.
Chelsea have indicated they are no
longer interested in signing Ronaldo
after holding talks earlier this month,
while Bayern Munich are also believed
to have turned down the chance to do a
deal for a player who scored 24 goals in
38 appearances for United last season.
Atlético Madrid have also shown an
interest in the five-time Ballon d’Or
winner but must sell players first before
they can consider bringing him back to
the Spanish capital.
With less than a fortnight left before
Brighton’s visit to Old Trafford on 7
August for the season opener, Ten Hag
said last he has no concerns about Ro-
naldo being ready for action.
“We all know Ronaldo is a top
professional and will be fit, that is the
last concern I have,” he insisted.

‘We are fighting the car’: Wolff lauds

Hamilton’s F1 skillset in tough season
Giles Richards
The Mercedes team principal, Toto
Wolff, has praised Lewis Hamilton for
the role he has played in driving the
team forward during a difficult year.
After Hamilton took second place at
the French Grand Prix, Wolff noted how
Hamilton was demonstrating a very dif-
ferent skill set to that which he had
employed in taking his seven Formula
One world championships.
Max Verstappen won for Red Bull
at Paul Ricard but Mercedes returned
Lewis Hamilton celebrates his second-
placed finish in the French Grand Prix.
Photograph: Antonin Vincent/DPPI/Shut-
terstock
their best result of the season, with
Hamilton second in his 300th grand
prix and his teammate George Russell
in third, the team’s first double podium
this season. Mercedes remain unable to
match Ferrari or Red Bull for race pace
but at least stayed with them at Le Cas-
tellet.
Mercedes have been working flat
out to try and improve the perfor-
mance of their car all season, a task
Wolff believes Hamilton has been uni-
quely suited to adapt to with his huge
experience from 16 years in the sport.
“The situation is very different than
when you are fighting for a title,” he
said. “Then it’s 100% of concentration
to fight the other guy. This is different
because we are fighting the car at the
moment, we are trying to motivate and
energise the team and in the factory.
Lewis is positive even on days that are
not so good, like [qualifying] on Sat-
urday. That attitude is great and that’s
something that has really grown with
him over the years.”
Hamilton delivered an exemplary
drive on Sunday, albeit one in which
his position was flattered as a result of
Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc crashing out,
allowing Verstappen to secure a huge
63-point lead in the championship, and
by Leclerc’s teammate, Carlos Sainz,
starting in 19th. Hamilton was able
to stay in front of Verstappen’s team-
mate, Sergio Pérez, and maintained a
consistent gap to the Dutchman. Wolff
emphasised the difference his driver
was making in what he once more con-
ceded was sorely-wanting machinery.
“You have a seven-time world cham-
pion in a car that is just not good
enough for a world championship at
the moment,” said Wolff. “He is push-
ing very hard and maximising what is in
the car and gave a faultless delivery.”
Continued on page 43
Tuesday 26 July 2022 The Guardian
Continued from page 42
Russell and Hamilton are fifth and
sixth in the drivers’ championship and
despite their best efforts it’s clear a
Brailsford admits Thomas proved Ineos
management wrong at Tour de France
Jeremy Whittle in Paris
Dave Brailsford, the Ineos director of
sport, has lauded the Tour de France
performances of Geraint Thomas and
the debutant Tom Pidcock – in which
the veteran Welshman finished third
and the 22-year-old took a spectacular
stage win at Alpe d’Huez – while also
admitting the 36-year-old proved team
management wrong.
Brailsford said Thomas’s perfor-
mance was “to be admired greatly”,
adding: “He has brought his years and
years of experience to this and that’s
what got him his third place in this
year’s Tour. He’s been brilliant, we have
seen the best version of himself. Eve-
rybody feels it’s a very satisfying perfor-
mance for him and the team.”
But Brailsford also accepted that
Thomas’s enduring ambition might
have been underestimated by team
management. Asked if Thomas had
proven a point to those within Ineos
who had doubted him, Brailsford said:
“Well, if I was in his shoes I’d have
a wry smile on my face, let’s face it.
We sat down and agreed that he’d be a
role model to the young lads, a perfect
teammate, and I think that slightly re-
Marianne Vos takes yellow jersey on second
stage of Tour de France Femmes
Jeremy Whittle in Provins
The evergreen Marianne Vos, a mul-
tiple world champion, crowned her illu-
strious career by taking her first yellow
jersey in the Tour de France Femmes
after emphatically winning stage two of
the week-long race in Provins.
Vos, who was beaten to the line
on the Champs Élysées in the open-
ing stage by Lorena Wiebes on Sunday,
made no mistake on the uphill sprint
into the medieval town. “We were
aiming to take a stage win and we
knew that was going to be hard but we
wanted to take the opportunity when it
came,” she said.
The 35-year-old, winner of the first
La Course, the one-day precursor to the
revived Tour de France Femmes, has
been one of the influential figures cam-
paigning for its rebirth.
“When nine years ago we were talk-
ing with ASO [Amaury Sport Organi-
sation] about an opportunity to get a
race, it went really fast to get La Course
going,” Vos recalled. “When we raced La
Course for the first time on the Champs
Élysées, it felt like a milestone. Now to
be here for a real Tour de France, with
all the emotion of a stage race, that’s
Sport
ninth consecutive constructors’ cham-
pionship title is already beyond Mer-
cedes. They are third, 44 points behind
Ferrari and 126 points behind Red Bull.
Wolff is, however, proud of his team
Ineos Grenadiers' Geraint Thomas (with child) and Thomas Pidcock (right of Thomas)
celebrate winning the award for best team at the 2022 Tour. Photograph: Gonzalo Fuentes/
Reuters
laxed approach worked.
“Basically, he hasn’t put a foot
wrong all season. He’s a natural mentor.
In the end, top young riders watch the
older top riders and for Tom [Pidcock]
and the others to watch Geraint and see
how he handles himself, well, they will
take a huge amount from that.”
Pidcock finished 17th overall in his
first tour, but also took a remarkable
stage win on the coveted climb of
Alpe d’Huez, a success that allied his
fearless descending skills with an in-
Marianne Vos celebrates her victory on stage two of the Tour de France Femmes. Photograph: JeffPachoud/AFP/Getty Images
another milestone.”
But in a torrid finale to the 136km
stage, several of the major contenders
fell by the wayside in a series of crash-
es. The worst of these put paid to the
hopes of Marta Cavalli (FDJ Suez Futu-
roscope), who gingerly remounted but
and the character they have shown
during what has been a consistently
challenging season.
“The biggest asset is the culture we
have in the team,” added Wolff. “It is the
spired climbing display. “His win on
Alpe d’Huez sums him up,” Brailsford
said. “He was respected for the win but
also loved for the manner of the win.”
Asked if Pidcock could be devel-
oped into a Tour contender in the
coming years, Brailsford was more
guarded. “I think if you clip his wings
you’re taking away from the personality
and the bike rider that he is. The mis-
take would be to drop him into a very
sterile approach because I’m not sure
that’s right for him.
was unable to finish the stage. The
Italian had slowed as she approached
a group of fallen riders but was hit
from behind at speed, and with great
force, by the pursuing Australian rider
Nicole Frain of the Parkhotel Valken-
burg team.
immune system of the team, it keeps us
working with the right mindset and to
persist when it is difficult. The drivers
are part of our culture and mindset and
they squeeze the utmost out of the car.
“He needs the opportunity to be
himself. I think he can set his sights
on the Tour in the future, but to get
there, he has to be true to his authentic
self and his authentic self is a brilliant
bike rider across all terrains.”
Brailsford, who is travelling in Por-
tugal on behalf of OGC Nice as they
complete their preseason buildup, was
not present on the Tour for the first
time in a decade, but remains in situ
as Ineos Grenadiers team principal and
was in daily contact with the team man-
ager, Rod Ellingworth.
“I’ve got a fantastic working rela-
tionship with Rod, the team and the
riders,” he said. “Going into this year
with the role I have now, it was always
a very different year for me and how I
allocate my time, but I was in contact
with Rod constantly and we know each
other inside out. We have spoken pretty
much on a daily basis. Every day, the
performance team gets together and
pulls a report together and I get that
every night.”
Twelve months ago Ineos Gre-
nadiers were coming to terms with
the dominance of Tadej Pogacar, as he
celebrated his second Tour win. Now
they have to confront the challenge
of the juggernaut that is Jonas Vinge-
“She’s suffering from a concussion,”
Cavalli’s team manager, Stephen Del-
court, said. “She wanted to continue but
we said: ‘No.’ We didn’t want to play
with her health. Cycling’s part of life but
not the priority. She’s gone to hospital
for a scan.”
43
They never let go, they just never let go.”
Dave Brailsford says he does not expect
Jumbo-Visma’s Jonas Vingegaard to prove
invincible after winning the Tour. Photo-
graph: Marco Bertorello/AFP/Getty Images
gaard’s all-conquering Jumbo-Visma
super-team.
“In cycling, we all always draw these
big conclusions, like last year, that Po-
gacar will be invincible and, like the
first week of this year’s race, when eve-
ryone thought he’d got it won,” Brails-
ford said.
“But sport’s not like that. Pogacar
isn’t invincible and it [the Tour] hasn’t
ended as people predicted. The idea
that there’s been two riders going at it
[Pogacar and Vingegaard] and nobody
else, that everyone else was making up
the numbers – I just don’t buy that.
“We always consider somebody
invincible and they never are. It hap-
pened with [Chris] Froome, [Egan]
Bernal, and now Pogacar. We will see
how Vingegaard gets on.”
“I think that she didn’t see,” Del-
court said when asked if Frain was at
fault. “When you see crashes like that it
makes you worried for the safety of the
riders. It’s like when one of your family
has an accident. Above all it’s a sad day
for Marta.”
As an edgy peloton negotiated traf-
fic calming, crosswinds and narrow
back roads in the Seine-et-Marne
region east of Paris, Vos stayed at the
front and expertly threaded her way
through the crashes in the final 30km
of racing.
Other fallers included Amanda
Spratt, leader of Team BikeExchange
Jayco and her teammate, the Slovenian
Urska Zigart, who was being watched
by her partner Tadej Pogacar, from the
roadside.
After Maike van der Duin led a
group of six, including Vos, clear of the
mayhem, the break built a lead on the
finishing circuit that guaranteed they
would decide the stage victory. But the
unexpected time gaps between Vos and
the favourites and the multiple crash-
es throughout the peloton, will have
ramifications for the days to come.

44
Manly apologise for mishandling pride jersey
initiative as players boycott NRL match
Emma Kemp and Mike Hytner
Manly coach Des Hasler has apologised
on behalf of the club for the “poor”
execution of its decision to unveil a
pride jersey as part of an inclusivity
initiative which has resulted in a boy-
cott of up to seven players.
In a press conference on Tues-
day afternoon, Hasler said the one-
off design was intended to “represent
diversity and inclusion for all” but was
done with “little consultation or colla-
boration with key stakeholders”.
Despite that, he confirmed the team
would wear the rainbow jersey, an-
nounced on Sunday night, in Thursday
night’s clash with the Sydney Roosters.
Religious and cultural differences
are believed to be partly behind the
players’ stance, with a lack of consul-
tation also causing unrest among the
group, who only learned of the new
strip design via social media on Sunday
night.
On Tuesday, Hasler said none of the
coaching staff nor the players had prior
knowledge of the jersey and that he felt
for the seven players in question.
“They are not wearing the jersey as
it conflict with their cultural and reli-
gious beliefs. And I am concerned for
their welfare,” he said. “Their spirituality
is a central part of their well being. The
club has made an error from which it
will learn. The players will not lay on
Thursday and we accept their decision.
“These young men are strong in
their beliefs and convictions. We’ll give
them space. And the support they re-
quire. The playing group are solid and
Rugby union warned ‘radical action’ must be
taken to counter brain disease
Paul MacInnes
Rugby union must take “radical action”
to counter the risk of degenerative
brain disease among its players, a pres-
sure group has warned, or risk the
reputation of the sport being “damaged
beyond repair”.
Progressive Rugby made the claim
as it prepared to submit evidence as
part of legal proceedings taken by
former players against World Rugby,
the Rugby Football Union and the
Welsh Rugby Union. The case, brought
by 185 former professionals, was due to
be presented to court on Monday.
A joint statement issued by the
three governing bodies insisted on their
commitment to player welfare.
“We care deeply about all our play-
ers, including former players, and never
stand still when it comes to welfare,” it
said. “Our strategies to prevent, identify
and manage head injuries are driven
by a passion to safeguard our play-
ers and founded on the latest science,
evidence and independent expert guid-
ance.” Momentum is building towards a
reckoning over concussion and related
illnesses in rugby, with Progressive
Sport
Players Sean Keppie, Kieran Foran and Reuben Garrick have not objected wearing the Manly Warringah Sea Eagles pride jersey.
Photograph: Manly Warringah Sea Eagles/AAP
understanding of each other’s views. As
a club, we will wear the jersey on Thurs-
day night.”
Hasler also apologised to all stake-
holders of the game, both within and
outside of the Sea Eagles.
“The intent of the rainbow colour
application of our jersey was to
represent diversity and inclusion for
all, utilising the symbolic colours of
pride to embrace all groups who feel
marginalised and faced discrimination
and have a suppressed share of voice,”
Hasler said.
“The jersey intent was to support
the advocacy and human rights per-
The former Wales captain Ryan Jones has been diagnosed with early onset dementia. Photograph: Hannah Peters/Getty Images
Rugby set to issue what it believes is
a comprehensive manifesto for restruc-
turing the sport.
“While not involved in the litigation,
we are deeply saddened to see the large
number of players taking legal action
taining to gender, race culture, ability
and LGBTQ rights. Sadly, the execu-
tion of what was intended to be an
extremely important and initiative was
poor.
“There was little consultation or
collaboration with key stakeholder,
both inside and outside the club. Sadly,
this poor management … has caused
significant confusion, discomfort and
pain for many people. In particular,
those groups whose human rights we
were, in fact, attempting to support.
“We have even adversely affected
our player group, a wonderful group
of people comprising of many different
as a result of neurological issues they
believe are related to their time playing
the game,” the organisation said.
“Progressive Rugby is in the process
of finalising a comprehensive list of
player welfare critical requirements
racial and cultural backgrounds. We
wish to sincerely apologise for the mis-
takes we have made.”
Speaking at the launch of the NRL’s
Women in League round on Tues-
day morning, Australian Rugby League
Commission chair Peter V’landys in-
sisted the game was an inclusive sport,
but said he also respected the Manly
players’ stance.
“In my view we’re all human beings,”
V’Landys said. “It doesn’t matter what
colour we are, what race we are, what
religion we are. We may have our differ-
ences and we may have different beliefs
but at the end of the day we are all
which will be submitted to World
Rugby. We believe delay is no longer an
option and that radical action must be
taken as a matter of urgency to ensure
rugby union’s reputation isn’t damaged
beyond repair.”
The Guardian Tuesday 26 July 2022
human beings and we should respect
that.
“However, I do respect the Manly
players’ right [to] freedom. They’ve got
every right to withdraw their services if
they wish to do so.”
V’landys was himself unaware of
the initiative until Monday and he said
Manly could have handled the situation
better.
“They could have been a lot more
collaborative with the players,” he told
reporters. “They shouldn’t have sprung
it on the players.”
After the group of players aired
their views on the design, an emer-
gency meeting of Sea Eagles manage-
ment was held on Monday night, when
the request to wear the “Everyone in
League” shirt was reiterated.
By Monday night, the jersey had
sold out on the club’s online store in
all men’s and women’s sizes, with only
junior versions of the strip available.
Manly are the only club to wear a
pride jersey this week, becoming the
first team in the 114-year history of the
competition to wear such a design.
Earlier this year, AFLW player
Haneen Zreika chose to miss Pride
round rather than wear Greater West-
ern Sydney’s pride uniform, citing reli-
gious beliefs.
The minister for government ser-
vices and the National Disability Insur-
ance Scheme, Bill Shorten, said it was
a “great shame” and the situation was a
“trainwreck” that should never have got
to this point.
Australian Associated Press contri-
buted to this report
The complaints that form the basis
of the class action, which is led by the
law firm Rylands, include a central alle-
gation that World Rugby, the RFU and
WRFU failed properly to educate and
protect players from health risks when
the sport turned professional in 1995.
Further complaints are related to a fail-
ure subsequently to mitigate risk, in-
cluding the contentious “stand down”
period for players who have suffered
apparent concussion and an alleged
lack of MRI scans.
The former Wales captain Ryan
Jones was recently diagnosed with
early onset dementia. He joins others
including the Wales international Alix
Popham, the former England flank-
er Michael Lipman and England’s
2003 World Cup-winning hooker, Steve
Thompson, all of whom have been diag-
nosed in their 40s with early onset
dementia.
The former Pontypool, Ebbw Vale
and Pontypridd wing Lenny Woodard,
who also represented Wales at rugby
league, received a diagnosis of early
onset dementia last year. The 46-year-
old said he had received five to 10 se-
Continued on page 45
Tuesday 26 July 2022 The Guardian
Continued from page 44
rious head injuries during his career
and many more “subconcussions”, but
had always put pressure on himself to
stay on the pitch.
“If I came off from a game and
someone comes into the squad, takes
‘Devastating’: Cricket Scotland faces special
measures after racism report
Simon Burnton
A report into racism in Scottish cricket
has been described as “the most devas-
tating verdict to be delivered on any
sporting institution in the United King-
dom” and as “a wake-up call for all of
Scottish sport” after its authors detailed
448 examples of institutional racism at
Cricket Scotland and concluded that
of 31 indicators of good practice the
organisation failed to meet 29 and fully
satisfied none.
The entire Cricket Scotland board
resigned on Sunday in advance of
the report’s publication and released
a joint statement apologising “to eve-
ryone who has experienced racism, or
any other form of discrimination, in
cricket in Scotland”. But Aamer Anwar,
the lawyer who represents Majid Haq
and Qasim Sheikh – the two former
internationals whose descriptions of
the discrimination they experienced
during their playing careers prompted
the report – said the apology was “too
little and too late” and that the board’s
resignation was “the cowardly option,
meaning that today there is nobody to
answer for their failure of leadership”.
Stewart Harris, chief executive of
Sportscotland, which has been urged to
place Cricket Scotland in special meas-
ures while it undergoes a complete
reorganisation, described the report’s
conclusions as “deeply concerning and
in some cases shocking” while Gordon
Arthur, who took over as Cricket
Scotland’s interim chief executive this
month, pledged on Monday to “address
the past, repair the sport and ensure
England more ‘resilient and confident’ since I
took over, says Sarina Wiegman
Suzanne Wrack
Sarina Wiegman believes England have
grown in confidence and become more
resilient since she took over as man-
ager and expects them to be able to
handle the big occasion when they face
Sweden for a place in the final of Euro
2022 on Tuesday night.
The Lionesses will go into the
match at Bramall Lane on a high after
their dramatic comeback against Spain
in the quarter-finals despite having
failed to get past the last four at
three successive tournaments. Wieg-
man, who led the Netherlands to vic-
tory at Euro 2017 before taking over
from Phil Neville in September last
year, has backed her players against
Sport / Soccer
my position and plays incredibly well,
they’ll keep the position,” he said. “If
that happens in March and I’m trying
to earn a contract for the following
season, it’s an interesting situation to
be in when you’ve got a mortgage and
children.
“The coaches, too, want their best
Louise Tideswell, managing director of Plan4Sport, and Stewart Harris, chief executive of Sportscotland. Photograph: Andrew Milligan/
PA
history does not repeat itself”.
Following the review, 31 allegations
of racism against 15 people, two clubs
and one regional association have been
referred for continued investigation.
Some allegations have been shared
with Police Scotland as potential hate
crimes, and others may be referred to
the police in future. In addition, many
participants who had “clearly witnessed
or experienced racism” have chosen not
to proceed with the process.
In 325 responses to an anonymous
survey, a further 122 examples of people
seeing, hearing or being made aware of
racism were detailed and another 49 of
prejudice on the grounds of religion. Of
Sarina Wiegman celebrates England beating Spain in their quarter-final. Photograph:
Naomi Baker/Getty Images
Sweden having remained unbeaten
since a friendly defeat against Canada
team on the pitch, so you’re constantly
asking: am I doing the best for me? Am
I doing the best for the team? Some-
times those aren’t the same answer and
I think that decision must be taken
away from the players.”
Woodard said he joined the legal
action because he wanted “a line in
those 325 participants, 34% had perso-
nally experienced racial discrimination
and 62% were aware of specific inci-
dents of racism, inequality or discrim-
ination.
In addition to prejudice on the
grounds of race, gender, religion and
nationality, the report’s authors also
found grounds for “concern over the
perceived bias towards the recruit-
ment of players from public schools
over state schools”. Opaque selection
processes for national teams at all
levels was a constant issue, while the
board of Cricket Scotland is described
as being “only concerned about the
men’s national squad and [having] no
last April.
“I think the mentality has been
the sand” to be drawn under previous
practices. “On a personal level I want
to make the game safer and, while I’m
not looking for financial gain for myself
personally, what I’m looking to do is
ensure that my children and my partner
do not have to pay for any treatment
that I have as a result of this.
interest or oversight on any other part
of cricket”.
The report, compiled by the char-
ity Plan4Sport, found that not only was
Cricket Scotland not trusted to manage
allegations of racism effectively, several
allegations “had not been investigated
at all”. Meanwhile some of those who
raised concerns had been victimised
or forced out of the organisation com-
pletely. One volunteer within the West-
ern District Cricket Union – whose area
covers half the population of Scotland,
and who the report also recommends
should be placed in special measures
– said “it was very difficult to work in
West Scotland and not witness racism”.
good. I have seen only a good men-
tality, actually, since I came in last Sep-
tember,” she said. “The resilience has
been really good. The confidence in
the team has grown and that has also
grown over the past year. We’re just
really, really accountable to each other.
“We had a little setback, of course
that’s part of the game too, when we
conceded a goal [against Spain]. But we
stayed calm, we stayed trying to play
our game. I think we’re really strong
and we can handle setbacks.”
Asked whether the Lionesses were
ready to make history, the Dutch man-
ager said: “The England team is ready
to play the best game tomorrow against
Sweden,” before adding with a grin, “and
hopefully we will inspire the nation.”
It was playful from the manager,
45
“I think there’s a lot of negativity
around this, with some former players
saying we’re ruining the game, but ulti-
mately it’s not fair on my children to
have to bear the brunt of caring for me
because I made the decision to play
rugby 30 to 40 years earlier.”
Louise Tideswell, the managing
director of Plan4Sport, declared it was
clear that the “governance and leader-
ship practices of Cricket Scotland have
been institutionally racist”. She said:
“Over the review period we have seen
the bravery of so many people coming
forward to share their stories which had
clearly impacted on their lives … The re-
ality is that the leadership of the organi-
sation failed to see the problems and,
in failing to do so, enabled a culture of
racially aggravated microaggressions to
develop.”
In a statement delivered on behalf
of Haq and Sheikh, Anwar said: “Today’s
report is the most devastating verdict
of racism to be delivered on any sport-
ing institution in the United Kingdom.
Scottish cricket owes a debt of gra-
titude to Majid and Qasim for never
giving up. It is they who have been a
catalyst for change, it is too late for their
careers, but they did this for future
generations.”
Haq is Scotland’s all-time leading
wicket-taker and made 209 appear-
ances, but after he made an alle-
gation of discrimination during the
2015 World Cup he was sent home and
never picked again. Sheikh was also not
picked again, aged 27, after in 2012 pub-
licly questioning why he was not being
selected for the national team.
“It should never be normal for a
young person to be made to feel worth-
less, to be dehumanised in a sport they
love, to be brainwashed into thinking
it’s their fault,” Anwar said, “but that
sadly is the brutal story of hundreds
of young people of colour who played
cricket in Scotland.”
Millie Bright will be vital to England’s
fortunes against Sweden Photograph: Lynne
Cameron/The FA/Getty Images
who also said she hoped she would
be “a little calmer” on the sidelines
following her wild celebrations against
Spain. Wiegman, who said she has a
fully fit squad, has put a lot of effort into
lifting the pressure off the shoulders of
her players.
Continued on page 46

46
Continued from page 45
“I’m in the now, thinking in the
now,” she said, when asked how much
Sweden have changed since England
lost to them in the third place playoff
at the 2019 World Cup.
“We are England, Sweden is our
opponent. Tomorrow they have a very
strong squad. So do we. And we just
hope we will play our style of game and
that will bring us the win.
“I think it’s going to be a very tight
game. We know they’ve performed
really well in recent years – they’ve
always performed well in the women’s
game. They are the No 2 in the Fifa
Premier League 2022-23 preview No 2: Aston
Villa
Ben Fisher
Guardian writers’ predicted position
10th (NB: this is not necessarily Ben
Fisher’s prediction but the average of
our writers’ tips)
Last season’s position 14th
Odds to win the league (via Odd-
schecker) 250-1
Prospects
There is no point masking it: Aston
Villa intend to become a force and it
does not take long in Steven Gerrard’s
company to get a flavour of his desire
to elevate the club up the table. Villa’s
naivety at times last season grated
on Gerrard, whose first full campaign
in charge will inevitably attract scru-
tiny but, backed by billionaire owners
Naseef Sawiris and Wes Edens, they
have strengthened their spine during
a busy close-season.
Villa got much of their summer
business done early, wrapping up eye-
catching moves for Philippe Coutinho
(permanently), Diego Carlos and Bou-
bacar Kamara, and there is another new
face in the dugout. Neil Critchley, who
previously worked in Liverpool’s acad-
emy, quit his role as Blackpool head
coach to join as Gerrard’s assistant, re-
placing Michael Beale, who made the
reverse step by heading to the Cham-
pionship to take the top job at QPR.
Whether Gerrard shakes things up
by naming a new captain will be inter-
esting; in April he suggested the cap-
taincy was up for grabs and that he
would make a call on whether Tyrone
Mings, who has worn the armband
through pre-season, would retain it.
The other note of intrigue is wheth-
er Villa opt to keep hold of 20-year-
Sweden’s Asllani labels Euro VAR as
catastrophic before England semi-final
Suzanne Wrack
Sweden’s Kosovare Asllani criticised
the implementation of VAR at the Euro-
pean Championship before her side’s
semi-final against England. Sweden
have had five goals ruled out by the
technology in four games.
Soccer
rankings. So, it’s going to be a totally
different game, very different to Spain
because they have a different style of
play, but we have prepared.”
England do not have the best record
against Sweden with just one win and
one draw in six Euro games. Wiegman’s
record is more impressive, with the
Netherlands manager having knocked
Sweden out at the quarter-final stage
of the Euros in 2017 before beating
them again in their 2019 World Cup
semi-final. “It’s a different situation,”
Wiegman said. “That doesn’t count. It’s
tomorrow and only tomorrow.”
If Wiegman is looking only ahead,
so are her players. The centre-back
Philippe Coutinho (centre) has made his move to Villa from Barcelona permanent over
the summer after joining on loan in January. Photograph: Darren England/EPA
old striker Cameron Archer, the sub-
ject of loan interest from almost every
Championship club after a fruitful spell
at Preston last season. Gerrard’s deci-
sion to leave Carney Chukwuemeka at
home for their pre-season tour to Aus-
tralia because of the 18-year-old’s re-
fusal to sign a new contract suggests
he is unafraid of making big calls.
The manager
Gerrard requires no introduction
and those who have witnessed his evo-
lution into the technical area as a suave
manager (jumper, tie and brogues are
commonplace on matchdays) say he
is the same as he was as a player:
singleminded, a driver of high stan-
dards, and a stickler for punctuality.
Led Rangers to their first Scottish Pre-
miership title in 10 years as the team
went unbeaten throughout 2020-21, in-
cluding back-to-back Old Firm wins,
before being lured to Villa by the former
Liverpool managing director, Christian
Purslow, last November. Was inducted
into the Premier League’s hall of fame
“Using 50% fewer cameras in our
tournament than the men’s game, that
is a catastrophe really,” Asllani said.
“The decisions can’t be made with the
same precision. It’s not just for us, for
other teams too. There are situations
where I think you should have more
cameras, that can be really decisive.”
The Sweden manager, Peter Ger-
Millie Bright was quick to deflect away
from England’s three consecutive semi-
final exits from major tournaments.
“Those are parked to one side,” she said.
“It’s hard to compare, each
semi-final is different for their own
reasons. We’ve got new players in the
squad and we’re on a new journey. Eve-
ryone’s just for the here and the now,
focused on the game, and everyone is in
great spirits. We just want to keep build-
ing our confidence and performing for
the fans.
“The past is the past, so all eyes
forward. We remain in our own little
bubble. Everybody says the pressure is
on us but we stay focused on what we
last year, a nod to his 120 goals and
92 assists across 504 top-flight appear-
ances. Enjoys watching the The Office
to switch off “when I’m in a bad mood
or when I need to take my mind off re-
sults, I go right to [David] Brent to cheer
me up”.
Transfer coup
It is hard to look past the per-
manent arrival of Coutinho, four years
ago paraded by Barcelona as their mar-
quee £142m signing, but Villa’s move
to lure Kamara on a free from Mar-
seille looks a shrewd deal. Gerrard
made a personal check on Kamara in
April, taking in Marseille’s win against
Nantes at the Stade Vélodrome, and
Villa feel they have acquired one
of the most promising young talents
in Europe. Gerrard wanted midfield
reinforcements – Villa tried for Yves Bis-
souma in January and trailed Kalvin
Phillips before it became clear he was
out of reach – and has been excited
by the 22-year-old Frenchman in pre-
season, saying: “He has a really impres-
hardsson, joined Asllani in her crit-
icism, with memories of Rebecka
Blomqvist’s effort against Switzerland
and Stina Blackstenius’s goal in their
quarter-final defeat of Belgium both
stirring up frustration. Blackstenius
was deemed to be offside but the Swe-
dish referee Jonas Eriksson pointed out
that the line was drawn incorrectly.
need to do to stay in the games.
“Every time I pull on the England
shirt I feel at home. I don’t want to erase
any memories in football, you just learn
from the past. It’s really nice to be back
in my home town and I’m looking for-
ward to seeing the fans in the crowd.”
Her defensive teammate Lucy
Bronze said Sweden still pose a big
threat despite not being at their best
in the Euros. “I think the majority of
the players watched the quarter-final
game [against Belgium], we’ve watched
as many games as we can throughout
the tournament anyway,” she said.
“Sweden probably haven’t looked
their strongest but we all know
sive football IQ”.
World Cup impact
There is something of a South
American theme. The signing of Carlos
means Villa have three Brazilians in
their squad, together with Coutinho
and Douglas Luiz, though Carlos is un-
capped at senior level, while Emiliano
Martínez and Emi Buendía will hope
to represent Argentina, who are unbea-
ten in 32 matches. Matty Cash, who
was born in Slough, will fly the flag
for Poland, whom he qualifies to play
for through his mother, Barbara. Ollie
Watkins surely has an outside shot of
getting a spot on England’s plane. Villa’s
first game after the World Cup is at
home to Liverpool on Boxing Day.
Alternative attractions during
World Cup
Head over Trinity Road to Aston
Hall, a 17th century Jacobean man-
sion built for Sir Thomas Holte, hence
the Holte End at Villa Park. In 2019,
it was named the UK’s most-haunted
site. When you’re done with the ghosts,
the Bullring & Grand Central is Bir-
mingham’s biggest shopping centre.
Leading the shirt sales
Coutinho, who wears No 23, is a su-
perstar, regardless of whether you think
his impact has diminished in recent
seasons. The Scotland midfielder John
McGinn is a big fans’ favourite – strains
of “we’ve got McGinn” echoed around
Birmingham New Street hours before
their first pre-season game at Walsall –
while Carlos, a £26m signing from Se-
villa, already seems a big hit.
Social climber
Douglas Luiz has almost 1m fol-
lowers on Instagram but that’s nothing
compared to the 7.7m who follow his
partner, Alisha Lehmann, the Swiss for-
“That line is completely wrong,”
Eriksson told the Swedish newspaper
Expressen. “You should draw the line
at the penultimate player’s most defen-
sive point but, if the ball is in front
of that player, then it is the ball’s
most offensive point that counts. But in
this case the video referee has drawn
the line from the ball’s most defen-
The Guardian Tuesday 26 July 2022
that they’re the highest-ranked team
coming into the tournament. It’s a
team that we’ve come up against a lot
in tournaments and I think anything
can happen on the day. They probably
didn’t play at their best against Bel-
gium but they just showed what win-
ning teams do and that’s find a way to
win, find a way to score a goal and to get
through.
“We know to expect everything.
We’re expecting to have Sweden come
out all guns blazing and have their
best performance against us because
they’ve got just as much to play for as
we do.”
Aston Villa manager Steven Gerrard
speaks to the players during a break in play
in a pre-season game against Walsall in July.
Photograph: Andrew Boyers/Action Images/
Reuters
ward who plays for Villa Women. Leh-
mann played no part in Euro 2022 be-
cause she was not “mentally ready”.
The Jamaica winger Leon Bailey has
the backing of his countryman Usain
Bolt – endorsements sometimes come
in the shape of bicep emojis – but,
in truth, all of the squad are dwarfed
by the popularity of their gaffer, who
has 10m-plus followers. A recent Ger-
rard post celebrated Villa’s midfield trio
of England Under-19 European Cham-
pionship winners: Chukwuemeka, Tim
Iroegbunam and Aaron Ramsey, whose
elder brother, Jacob, enjoyed a break-
through season last term.
If Villa were a Netflix doc …
Shortly after Gerrard replaced Dean
Smith last November, another Liver-
pool legend, Mark Lawrenson, pre-
dicted that Gerrard would be the most
talented player at training, so chances
are in any film the 42-year-old would
be seen playing a Hollywood ball or
sticking one in the top corner. “He has
lost nothing,” Lucas Digne said this year.
“He’s still really amazing and his passes
are incredible.”
sive point, alternatively from the penul-
timate player’s forehead. But in any
case both are wrong.”
Gerhardssson said: “I think it’s
strange. I like VAR, I think it’s fair
when they have it but, if we have one
game where they make a mistake be-
Continued on page 47
Tuesday 26 July 2022 The Guardian
Continued from page 46
cause they draw the line on the wrong
side and now we’ve heard they don’t
have the same cameras, for me it’s not
acceptable in a Euro.
“We haven’t seen it ourselves but
a Swedish referee at home in a studio
pointed out that they drew the line
incorrectly … then you’re incompetent
at your job. Talking about the cameras,
there shouldn’t be a difference whether
it’s women’s or men’s football.”
The manager was also critical of the
rule which allowed five substitutes but
prevents all five from warming up at the
same time.
“We now have five substitutions but
you can only warm up three,” he said. “I
don’t know if it’s space; why can’t you
have five warming up? If you don’t put
in a player who’s warmed up, it’s also a
thing that I think is strange. Why can’t
five people warm up together? They’re
friends, I can promise you.”
The Sweden players are no stran-
gers to the task of trying to upset a
Fans to get bans for pitch invasions and
pyrotechnics in football crackdown
Paul MacInnes
Pitch invaders at English football will
be banned from stadiums and reported
to police under new measures agreed
by the game’s authorities.
The crackdown will lead to suppor-
ters facing the same sanction if found
with fireworks or flares, commonly
known as “pyro”, in grounds and for
throwing objects or drug use. The new
rules follow multiple scenes of disorder
at the close of the last domestic season.
A hardline approach agreed be-
tween the Premier League, EFL and
Football Association comes into imme-
diate effect. The length of any ban has
not been determined but they are ex-
pected to be valid for one year.
“Together, with clubs and partners
across football, we are making clear the
type of incidents we saw last season
must stop,” the Premier League’s chief
executive, Richard Masters, said. “If
we don’t take collective and sustained
action, it may only be a matter of time
before someone is seriously injured, or
worse.”
Any fan who runs on to the pitch
or carries or uses pyro will be subject
to an automatic club ban, with bans
possibly extended to parents or guar-
dians if the offenders are under the age
Chelsea’s move for Jules Koundé in danger of
collapse as Barcelona push
Jacob Steinberg
Chelsea’s move for Jules Koundé is in
danger of collapsing, with Barcelona
refusing to end their pursuit of the Se-
villa defender.
It had appeared that Chelsea were
set to make Koundé their third summer
Soccer
Sweden’s Kosovare Asllani rushes to celebrate with Stina Blackstenius (centre) only for Blackstenius’s goal to be disallowed by VAR against
Belgium. Photograph: Nick Potts/PA
host nation. In 2016 they beat Brazil on
Everton's fans invade the pitch and let off smoke bombs after the club avoided relegation in May. Photograph: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images
of 18. Individuals will also be reported
to police, with the football authorities
pledging to work together to achieve
prosecutions.
Further efforts will be undertaken
in an attempt to influence the cul-
ture that has led to an uptick in dis-
order since fans returned to grounds
after lockdown. The authorities say
signing. They were in advanced talks
with Sevilla, who have been holding out
for £55m, and financial restrictions had
left Barcelona on the verge of pulling
out of the race for the 23-year-old last
Friday.
However Barça revived their inter-
est in Koundé over the weekend and
are increasingly optimistic they will
penalties at the Rio Olympic Games to
they will ask social media companies
to remove content featuring pitch inva-
sions and pyro, claiming that videos
showing the Crystal Palace defender
Joachim Andersen being hit by an Ever-
ton fan have been viewed more than
four million times. Broadcasting com-
panies have already been asked to
move their cameras away from pictures
win the race to sign the France inter-
national. The Catalan club, who have
already beaten Chelsea to the signing of
the Brazil winger Raphinha, have con-
tinued to tell Koundé to wait for them
to submit their opening offer. It is be-
lieved they could end up paying a lower
fee than Chelsea.
Barça’s persistence has raised fears
progress to the final, where they lost
of burning flares.
The authorities said they had writ-
ten to the policing minister, Tom
Pursglove, asking that the government
tighten rules on the sale of flares and
other pyro.
“Football stadiums must be a safe,
inclusive and enjoyable environment
for all, and it is the responsibility of
that Chelsea, who have a five-year deal
ready for Koundé, are set to encounter
further frustration in their attempts
to rebuild their defence. It is unders-
tood that Chelsea, who have pursued
the centre-back since last summer, are
close to giving up and could walk away
from negotiations with Sevilla if there
is no breakthrough soon.
47
against Germany.
Are they hoping to spoil England’s
party? “My favourite question,” Ger-
hardsson said. “I don’t think about it at
all because I always think about possi-
bilities, that’s my view of everything. If
you have a possibility, then you have a
feeling in your body that you can do it.”
Asllani said: “It means a lot to the
whole team. We are playing a semi-final
against the host nation, we’ve done that
before against Brazil in the Olympics
in an arena which is three times bigger
than this. It’s a special feeling to go into
a stadium with the home nation’s fans.
We’ll do everything we can. I don’t think
you can be more excited and ready. We
stick to the game plan and I think we’ll
have a good chance tomorrow.”
Magda Eriksson, the Chelsea cap-
tain, said: “I have been really impressed
with England so far. This will be the
toughest test so far. It’s the best team
we are going to face but we are so ready
for this. This game is what we’ve been
dreaming of – to reach the next stage
we’re going to do everything we can.”
everyone in the game, including go-
verning bodies, clubs, players, coaches,
and fans, to ensure that we all play
our part in protecting our game and
each other,” said the FA’s chief execu-
tive, Mark Bullingham.
The rules go hand in hand with
government measures to clamp down
on drug use amongst football fans, with
cocaine expected to be added to the
list of offences which could generate a
football banning order. More stringent
searches are also set to take place at
grounds.
The Football Supporters’ Asso-
ciation supported the new sanctions,
as did the players’ union the PFA. “We
are contacted by supporters on a fairly
regular basis who have been caught
jumping on the pitch, or with pyro in
the stands, and without exception they
regret doing it,” said the FSA’s Kevin
Miles.
Maheta Molango, the chief execu-
tive of the PFA said: “For those on
the pitch, we know that this response
will only be judged by its effectiveness.
Consistent and proper enforcement of
laws that are already in place is needed.
There also needs to be planned and
targeted investment in security around
games where we know that flashpoints
may be more likely to occur.”
Another complication is Thomas
Tuchel is not entirely convinced about
signing Koundé. There are doubts over
whether the 5ft 10in defender is tall
enough to succeed in the Premier
League.
Tuchel refused to talk about
Continued on page 48

48
Continued from page 47
Koundé before Chelsea faced Arsenal
in a pre-season friendly in Florida last
Saturday. Chelsea’s manager expressed
frustration with Barça’s conduct this
summer, suggesting he may stop César
Azpilicueta from moving to the Camp
Nou.
Tuchel then gave a fiery press
conference after Arsenal beat his side
4-0. The German is understood to
be frustrated with Chelsea’s lack of
progress in the transfer market. He
has seen them miss out on deals for
Nathan Aké, Matthijs de Ligt and Ra-
phinha. There has been little progress
in talks with Paris Saint-Germain over
the France defender Presnel Kim-
pembe. RB Leipzig’s Josko Gvardiol
and Internazionale’s Milan Skriniar are
other defensive targets.
Chelsea, who have bolstered their
attack by signing Raheem Sterling
from Manchester City, need to streng-
then their defence after losing Andreas
Christensen and Antonio Rüdiger on
free transfers. They have signed Ka-
lidou Koulibaly from Napoli, but Tuchel
Gianluca Scamacca flying to London for West
Ham medical in £35.5m deal
Jacob Steinberg
West Ham are set to complete the
£35.5m signing of Gianluca Scamacca
after agreeing personal terms with the
Sassuolo striker.
The 23-year-old is due to fly to
London on Monday night and undergo
a medical on Tuesday. West Ham, who
will pay £30.5m plus £5m in add-ons,
have offered the Italy international a
five-year deal with the option of an
extra year.
David Moyes, who is also trying to
sign Eintracht Frankfurt’s Filip Kostic,
has been looking to provide Michail An-
tonio with competition up front. West
Ham bid £30m plus add-ons for Ar-
mando Broja last week. They inten-
sified their pursuit of Scamacca after
Chelsea dithered over selling Broja.
Scamacca scored 16 goals in 36
appearances in Serie A last season. A
former academy player at Roma, the Getty Images
tall and powerful striker joined Sas-
suolo from PSV Eindhoven in 2017.
The deal will raise West Ham’s * for a place in the top four. They have with Lukasz Fabianski in goal, added increased their depth in midfield by
The Guardian Tuesday 26 July 2022
Soccer
Marcos Alonso, Christian Pulisic, Hakim
Ziyech and Timo Werner, who has been
linked with a return to RB Leipzig.
Levi Colwill, a 19-year-old centre-
back, could look to leave if Chelsea
make further additions in defence, and
Armando Broja has seen a move to
West Ham collapse. Everton and Napoli
could move for Broja, though Chelsea
are prepared to keep the 20-year-old
striker.
As it stands Chelsea do not appear
to be in a strong position before the
Premier League starts on 5 August. The
club, who visit Everton in their opening
game, have experienced huge change
since their sale to a consortium fronted
by Boehly and Clearlake Capital.
An element of chaos was always
likely after the end of the Roman Abra-
movich era and there is still plenty of
time for Tuchel to strengthen before
the transfer window shuts. Chelsea are
Jules Koundé playing for France against Denmark in the Nations League League in Paris last month. Photograph: Aurélien Meunier/Uefa/ monitoring Frenkie de Jong, but the
Getty Images Netherlands midfielder remains reluc-
tant to leave Barça. Tuchel is also in
wants to bring in two more centre- Chelsea’s co-owner Todd Boehly has clear that his squad still contains play- the market for a right wing-back and
backs. taken charge of recruitment on an in- ers who wants to leave. There are is looking at Internazionale’s Denzel
However progress has been slow – terim basis – and Tuchel also made doubts over the futures of Azpilicueta, Dumfries.
buying Flynn Downes.
Moyes is keen to bring in a left-sided
player and West Ham, who lost out on
Jesse Lingard to Nottingham Forest last
week, remain in talks with Eintracht
over a deal for Kostic. They have made
a £12.75m bid for the 29-year-old Serbia
international, who has a year left on
his deal. There are doubts over whether
Kostic, who can play at left wing and
left wing-back, wants to leave Eintracht
after their qualification for the Cham-
pions League.
West Ham are also considering a
move for Leicester’s Luke Thomas and
watched the Blackburn striker Ben Bre-
reton Díaz during his side’s pre-season
friendly against Lincoln last Saturday.
Moyes is looking to bring in an addi-
tional midfielder. West Ham have sub-
mitted two offers for Lille’s Amadou
Onana, but with that deal dragging
on they have registered interest in
Gianluca Scamacca playing for Italy against England in last month’s Nations League meeting at Molineux. Photograph: Claudio Villa/ Napoli’s Piotr Zielinski. Moyes is also a
long-term admirer of Zielinski’s fellow
Napoli midfielder Fabián Ruiz, who
hopes of mounting another challenge signed Alphonse Areola to compete Nayef Aguerd in central defence and would not be cheap.