Crown costs The hidden riches of Britain’s royals 34

A week in the life of the world | Global edition

14 APRIL 2023 | VOL .208 No.15 | £4.95 | €7.99

Why Israel and Hezbollah are heading for war 10

Belfast’s Flights Space

peace walls of fancy raiders
Behind the The quest Inside the
sectarian for net-zero world of UFO
divides aviation podcasts
22 40 54
Eyewitness  Branching out
Senegal Young men in the capital, Dakar, climb a tree to get a better view of celebrations for
Senegal’s 63rd independence day. Military parades and fairs featuring traditional
PHOTOGRAPH:
dance, food and music commemorated the West African country signing a transfer
JOHN WESSELS/AFP/GETTY
of power agreement with France on 4 April 1960 after two centuries of colonial rule.

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 A week in the life of the world Inside
14 April 2023

Middle East violence,

the cost of the crown
and strange podcasts
Over recent months, on various battlegrounds across the 4 -14 GLOBAL REPORT
Middle East, Israel has faced off against the Iran-backed Headlines from the last
Shia Muslim organisation Hezbollah. But for several seven days
hours last week, fears were high of a broader conflict after 10 Israel Why all-out war
a round of violence sparked by an Israeli police raid on looks inevitable
Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque, the third holiest site in Islam.
As Martin Chulov reports this week from southern 15-33 SPOTLIGHT
Lebanon, retaliatory attacks may have failed to provoke In-depth reporting
all-out war – but it now seems only a matter of time and analysis
before that outcome materialises. And Bethan McKernan 15 India Rahul Gandhi fights
considers how multiple crises are threatening Israeli resurrected court case
prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s grip on power. 19 US Data leak nightmare
The big story Page 10  for the Pentagon
22  UK A fragile peace in
The Good Friday agreement 25 years ago may have Northern Ireland
marked the end of Northern Ireland’s Troubles 24 Environment Why energy
but, in many places, the province remains divided industry holds climate key
and dysfunctional, as characterised by the 26 Hong Kong Lights out for
continued presence of so-called peace walls in some famed neon signs
communities. Rory Carroll reports from Belfast, 30 Science The problem of
where suspicion and sectarianism linger. ships and whales
Spotlight Page 22  33 Politics What’s happening
to female world leaders?
With the coronation of King Charles III coming up, don’t
miss our special report into the cost of the crown, the 34-44 F E AT U R E S
lavish public funding of Britain’s royal family and why the Long reads, interviews
monarchy is so reluctant to talk about its finances. and essays
The cost of the crown Page 34  34 The royal price tag
By David Pegg and
Culture ponders the difficulties of writing theatre shows Paul Lewis
based on the acting world’s most famous names. We also 40 Will the aviation industry
probe the rise of UFO-themed podcasts, as Nell Frizzell ever clean up its act?
asks whether the ideas explored By Christopher de Bellaigue
by some of them are really as
outlandish as they first seem. 45-50 OPINION
Culture From page 51  45 Will Hutton
Why truth in news matters
47 Maria Skóra
Poland’s religious crisis
48 Michael Mann
Climate action in Australia

51-59 C U LT U R E
TV, film, music, theatre,
art, architecture & more
51 Stage
Join the community On the cover Burton and Gielgud
Twitter: @guardianweekly The silhouette of an Israeli soldier is outlined brought back to life
facebook.com/guardianweekly
Instagram: @guardian in the sky by a flare fired to search for a rocket 54 Audio
that landed near Kibbutz Meitsar in the Israeli- The far-fetched world of
annexed Golan Heights. Rockets were fired UFO podcasts
last Saturday night from Syria towards Israel, 58 Books
the Israeli army said, following earlier fire from Life in East Germany
Lebanon blamed on Palestinian militants.
SPOT ILLUSTRATIONS:
Photograph: Jalaa Marey/AFP/Getty 60-61 LIFESTYLE
MATT BLEASE 60 Ask Annalisa
My friend’s eating disorder
4

Global
2 U N I T E D S TAT E S 4 FRANCE

Macron sparks anger over

report remarks regarding Taiwan

Emmanuel Macron has flown
into a storm of criticism after he
said Europe should not become
a “vassal” and must avoid being
Headlines from the drawn into any conflict between
last seven days the US and China over Taiwan.
The French president made
the remarks in an interview on
1 U N I T E D S TAT E S President Biden egged on
his plane after a three-day state
to announce run in 2024 visit to China, where he received
Fifth victim dies in 146th
Joe Biden has all but confirmed a red-carpet welcome from
mass shooting of the year that he intends to run for the Oval China’s president, Xi Jinping –
Copyright © 2023 A Louisville bank employee Office again in 2024. The president a show of pageantry that alarmed
GNM Ltd. All rights armed with a rifle opened fire made the announcement on NBC’s some European China watchers.
reserved at his workplace on Monday, Today show, but told the host Speaking to reporters from Les
killing five people – including Al Roker that he was not prepared Echos and Politico, Macron said
Published weekly by a close friend of Kentucky’s for a formal announcement yet. Europe should be a third power in
Guardian News & governor – while livestreaming the Roker drew out Biden’s the world order, along with the US
Media Ltd, attack on Instagram, according comment before the White and China. While the comments
Kings Place, to authorities. House’s annual Easter egg roll, in reaffirmed Macron’s goal of
90 York Way,
The incident was at least which people roll brightly dyed “strategic autonomy” for Europe,
London, N1 9GU, UK
the 146th mass shooting in the hard-boiled eggs on the White avoiding military and economic
Printed in the UK, US this year. The Gun Violence House lawn on Easter Monday; dependencies, his remarks on
Poland, the US, Archive resource website defines Roker asked Biden whether he Taiwan stoked anger and alarm.
Australia and a mass shooting as one in which planned to participate in the egg According to Les Echos, Macron
New Zealand four or more victims are killed rolls after the next presidential said: “Do [Europeans] have an
or wounded. election in 2024. interest in speeding up on the
ISSN 0958-9996 Police arrived as shots were still “I plan on at least three or four subject of Taiwan? No. The worst
being fired inside Old National more Easter egg rolls,” Biden said. of things would be to think that we
To advertise contact Bank and killed the shooter in an When Roker asked the president Europeans must be followers on
advertising.
exchange of gunfire, Louisville to elaborate, Biden replied: “I plan this subject and adapt ourselves
enquiries@
metro police department chief, on running again … but we’re not to an American rhythm and
theguardian.com
Jacquelyn Gwinn-Villaroel, said. prepared to announce it yet.” a Chinese overreaction.”
To subscribe, visit Nine people, including two
theguardian.com/ police officers, were treated for
gw-subscribe injuries, University of Louisville
3 RUSSIA 5 U N I T E D S TAT E S
Hospital spokeswoman Heather
Manage your Fountaine said in an email. One
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American journalist held Robert F Kennedy Jr puts
of the wounded, identified as
subscribe. 57-year-old Deanna Eckert, later on espionage charges in a bid for the presidency
theguardian.com/ died, police said on Monday night. Russian Federal Security Robert F Kennedy Jr, an anti-
manage
Andy Beshear, the governor Service investigators formally vaccine activist and scion of one
of Kentucky, on the verge of charged Evan Gershkovich with of the most famous US political
USA and Canada
gwsubsus
tears, said during an earlier espionage and collecting what it families, is running for president.
@theguardian.com news briefing that he knew said were state secrets about the Kennedy, 69, filed a statement
Toll Free: some of the victims, including military-industrial complex, but of candidacy with the Federal
+1-844-632-2010 Thomas Elliot, a senior vice- the Wall Street Journal reporter Election Commission. The
president at the bank. had denied the charges and said campaign is a long shot, in the
Australia and he was working as a journalist, vein of that launched by the self-
New Zealand Russian news agencies reported help author Marianne Williamson.
apac.help last Friday. Kennedy, a nephew of
@theguardian.com The US state department on President John F Kennedy and
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gwsubs@ charges against him as bogus and in the anti-vaccine movement,
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+44 (0) 330 333 6767

The Guardian Weekly 14 April 2023

UK headlines p9

9 SWEDEN

6 CANADA Nord Stream blast the work

Dead mice in walls render
PM’s Ottawa house unsafe
1
So many dead mice were
trapped behind the walls and
heaped in the basement of the
Canadian prime minister’s official
residence that officials decided to
shut down the decrepit building
last year, amid concerns that the
air in the mansion was no longer
safe to breathe.
The interior walls of the
limestone-clad house, perched
on a cliff above the Ottawa river
and built in 1868, also contain
hazardous asbestos and cannot be
removed until a remediation plan
is in place. The building was taken
over by the government in 1951.
of ‘state-sponsored group’
The prosecutor investigating the 8
Nord Stream sabotage has said
the “clear” scenario was that 3
a state-sponsored group had been
involved, casting doubt over
theories that an independent 4
group was responsible.
Mats Ljungqvist said that
the type of explosive used in
2
5 the bombings ruled out a “large
portion of actors”.
According to a UN report, the
three underwater explosions
that ruptured the gas link
between Russia and Germany
north-east and south-east of the
Baltic Sea island of Bornholm
on 26 September 2022 were
equivalent to the power of several
hundred kilograms of explosives.
10 I T A LY

8 N O R WAY Portrait of Picasso for 50th

7 COLOMBIA
Deadliest country for
defenders of human rights
Colombia was the deadliest
country in the world for human
rights defenders in 2022,
accounting for 186 killings – or
46% – of the global total last year,
according to the latest report from
the international human rights
group Front Line Defenders.
The killings of rights defenders
across the globe increased in 2022,
with a total of 401 deaths across
26 different countries.
Colombia had more than three
times the number of human
rights murders than Ukraine, the
country with the second highest
number, with 50 registered cases.
In 2021, Colombia also
topped the chart, with 138 rights
defenders killed.
Super-rich leave country to
avoid increased wealth tax
A record number of super-rich
Norwegians are abandoning
Norway for low-tax countries
after the centre-left government
increased wealth taxes to 1.1%.
More than 30 left in 2022,
according to research by the
newspaper Dagens Næringsliv.
Even more rich individuals
are expected to leave this year
because of the increase in the tax
last November.
Many have moved to
Switzerland, where taxes are
much lower. They include the
billionaire industrial tycoon
Kjell Inge Røkke, who has moved
to the Italian-speaking canton
of Lugano, close to his favoured
hangout of Lake Como.
anniversary of his death
An Italian land artist has used
a tractor to create a portrait
of Pablo Picasso on wasteland
in Castagnaro, Verona. Dario
Gambarin said he had been
inspired by Picasso’s 1907
self-portrait to create what he says
is the world’s largest portrait of
the Spanish artist. Picasso died on
8 April 1973 in Mougins, France.
Gambarin, known for his
enormous works, has created
images of John F Kennedy, Pope
Francis and, before the 2016 US
presidential election, portraits
of Donald Trump and his rival
Hillary Clinton.

14 April 2023 The Guardian Weekly


11 ISRAEL
Embattled Netanyahu
reinstates defence minister
As Israel faced a surge in violence
on almost every front, the prime
minister, Benjamin Netanyahu,
reversed his decision to fire the
defence minister, Yoav Gallant, for
warning that his judicial overhaul
was harming the military. In a
televised speech late on Monday,
Netanyahu said Gallant would stay
in his position, two weeks after he
dismissed the minister. Gallant
welcomed Netanyahu’s move.
Gallant’s removal triggered an
unprecedented surge of protest
against the already unpopular
plan to disempower the judiciary
as many Israelis reached the
conclusion that even their
security could be sacrificed for
Netanyahu’s personal interests.
But Gallant, seen abroad
as a key interlocutor in a
government where extremists
wield considerable power, never
received a formal dismissal
letter, remaining in office amid
a surge of violence triggered by
Israeli police raids on Jerusalem’s
al-Aqsa mosque.
Last week, citizens of the
country were rattled by rocket fire
from Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, a
roadside shooting that killed three
British-Israeli women in the West
Bank, and a car ramming in Tel
Aviv that killed an Italian tourist
and wounded seven other people.
The security crisis has
further shaken Netanyahu’s
popularity, with a poll taken
last Sunday showing that only
27% of respondents “rely on
the government to handle the
wave of terror”.
The big story Page 10 
The Guardian Weekly 14 April 2023
15
17
19
18
12 YEMEN
Riyadh makes plan for
peace after Houthi talks
Saudi Arabia has persuaded the
key players in the Yemeni coalition
government to go along with a
minimum eight-month ceasefire
with Houthi rebels in parallel with
talks on the future of the country
that may take as long as two years,
as it rushes to capitalise on its new
relationship with Iran.
Saudi and Houthi leaders met
last Sunday for the first time in
public in the Houthi-held capital,
Sana’a, with the Saudis keen to
cut their losses after a disastrous
eight-year-long intervention that
started with airstrikes in 2015.
The scale of the Saudi volte-
face was reflected in a picture of
the Saudi ambassador to Yemen
sitting next to the Houthi leader,
Ali Qarshah. In November 2017,
Qarshah was named as one of
40 Houthi terrorists for which
Saudi Arabia was prepared to pay
multimillion-dollar rewards.
13 IRAN/SAUDI ARABIA
Middle East rivals in talks to
reopen diplomatic missions
A Saudi delegation visited Tehran
last Saturday to discuss reopening
diplomatic missions with Iran
after seven years. The visit came
two days after a meeting between
Iran and Saudi Arabia’s heads
of diplomacy, Hossein Amir-
Abdollahian and Prince Faisal bin
Farhan in China.
Diplomats from Tehran were
due in Riyadh this week to start
the process of reopening its long
closed embassy, and a similar
process is under way between
Iran and Bahrain in a sign of how
the Tehran-Riyadh agreement
brokered on 10 March in China has
the potential to upend the face of
Middle East diplomacy.
14 NEW ZEALAND
Spy bosses warn of increase
in foreign interference
Intelligence bosses have warned of
“increasingly aggressive activity”
in the country by people they
believe are spies for foreign states.
The annual report by the
Security Intelligence Service,
published last week, said
unnamed states are making
“enduring and persistent” efforts
to collect intelligence against
New Zealand’s government, target
those with access to sensitive
information and interfere in all
spheres of public life. Agents
from one foreign government
have cultivated “a range of
relationships of significant
concern”, the report said.

Global report
15 CHINA
Beijing carries out military
drills around Taiwan
Military exercises targeting Taiwan
concluded after three days in which
China’s forces encircled the island,
simulated missile attacks on cities,
and practised ship-launched strikes
from the east. China’s People’s
Liberation Army (PLA) said on
Monday the combat readiness
drills had “comprehensively
tested the troops under actual
combat conditions”.
Taiwan’s defence ministry said
it would continue to pay close
attention to the PLA’s activities.
On the final day, more than 100
PLA warplanes and ships were
detected near Taiwan.
Beijing launched the exercises
last Saturday in response to
Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-
wen, meeting the US house
speaker, Kevin McCarthy, in
Los Angeles last week.
16 B U R K I N A FA S O
Terrorist group kills 44
near border with Niger
Forty-four civilians have been
killed by “armed terrorist groups”
in two villages near the border
with Niger. The “despicable and
barbaric attack” targeted the
villages of Kourakou and Tondobi
last Thursday, said Rodolphe
Sorgho, lieutenant-governor of
the Sahel region.
He added that 31 people
had died in Kourakou and 13 in
Tondobi. The governor reported
that “actions to stabilise the area
are under way” with an army
offensive in the area. The Sahel is
grappling with a seven-year long
campaign by jihadists linked to
al-Qaida and Islamic State.
The big story p10 
7
17 IRAN 19 INDIA D E AT H S
Hijab rules stepped up but Dalai Lama asked boy to
school poisonings ignored ‘suck his tongue’ in public
Enforcement groups are to be The Dalai Lama has apologised
set up on the Tehran metro and after he faced allegations of
women not wearing the hijab will inappropriate behaviour after Ben Ferencz
be refused entry, in effect banning kissing a young boy on the lips and The last surviving
some women from work, Iranian asking him to “suck his tongue” at prosecutor from
state TV has reported. a public event in India. the Nuremberg
The move appears to be part The interaction, which took trials in Germany
of government efforts to force place in late February at the Dalai that brought Nazi
public bodies to take greater Lama’s temple in Dharamshala, war criminals to
responsibility for enforcing the was attended by about 100 young justice after the
hijab. Many women, especially students who had just graduated second world war.
in urban centres, have refused from the Indian M3M Foundation. He died on 7 April,
to comply with hijab rules in The Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, aged 103.
a sign that the “women, life, 87, is the holiest figure in Tibetan
freedom” protests which began Buddhism. Rachel Pollack
in September continue on an After a video of the incident Award-winning
individual level. went viral, it was condemned by author,
The clampdown comes as girls many, who called it “scandalous” transgender
in secondary schools in Tehran, and “disgusting”. The controversy activist and comic
Karaj and other cities report prompted an apology from the book writer. She
more poisoning attacks. At least office of the Dalai Lama, who said died on 7 April,
nine schools were attacked last the spiritual leader’s behaviour aged 77.
Sunday. According to the Iranian had been “innocent and playful”.
MP Mohammad Hassan Asefari, Klaus Teuber
security agencies were unable Creator of the
to identify the perpetrators, and hugely popular
the ministry of health had yet to Catan board
determine the type of poison that game. He died on
was being used. 1 April, aged 70.
The contrast between efforts to
enforce the hijab and the lack of Al Jaffee
using CCTV to look into the attacks Pioneering
infuriates government opponents. Mad magazine
cartoonist over
seven decades
and inventor of
18 INDIA 20 NIGERIA the “fold-in”. He
Five men arrested over died on 10 April,
Gunmen kill at least 46
aged 102.
human sacrifice at temple people in attack on village
Police arrested five men accused Forty-six bodies have been found Rokia Afzal
of conducting a human sacrifice, after gunmen attacked a rural Rahman
nearly four years after the village in central northern Nigeria, Bangladeshi
discovery of a woman’s headless local government officials said, entrepreneur and
body at a Hindu temple left the latest in a series of deadly women’s rights
officers baffled. assaults in the region. activist. She
Shanti Shaw, 64, was The attack happened last died on 5 April,
decapitated with a machete in Wednesday in Umogidi in Benue aged 82.
2019 after visiting the temple state, where clashes are common
in Guwahati, a city in India’s between nomadic herders and Paul Cattermole
remote north-east. Police made farmers competing for resources. Former singer
no progress in the case until Paul Hemba, security adviser to with British pop
Shaw’s body was finally identified the Benue state governor, blamed group S Club 7. He
in January, sparking a renewed herdsmen, who he said had been died on 6 April,
investigation that tracked down attacking local communities. The aged 46.
several culprits, with others still motive for the attack was unclear
at large. Police said 12 people had but Benue has been one of the
taken part in the crime. hardest hit by the clashes.
14 April 2023 The Guardian Weekly
8 Global report
SCIENCE A N D EN V IRON M EN T
M AT H E M AT IC S
‘Einstein’ tile solves
enduring maths problem
Mathematicians have discovered a
shape that can be arranged in a tile
formation, interlocking with itself
ad infinitum, without the resulting
pattern repeating.
The shape is known as an
aperiodic monotile, or “einstein”
shape, meaning “one stone”. The
discovery of the 13-sided shape,
nicknamed “the hat”, was largely
the work of David Smith of east
Yorkshire. “There’s been a thread of
beautiful mathematics over the last
60 years searching for ever smaller
sets of shapes that do this,” Dr Craig
Kaplan, an associate professor of
computer science at the University
of Waterloo in Ontario, said.
N EU ROSCIENCE
Human memory ‘may be
unreliable within seconds’
Scientists exploring our ability to
recall shapes say people can make
mistakes after just a few seconds.
“Even at the shortest term, our
memory might not be fully reliable,”
said Dr Marte Otten of the University
of Amsterdam. “Even after one and
a half seconds, two seconds, three
seconds – then we start filling in
based on our expectations.”
Writing in the journal Plos One,
Otten and colleagues note previous
research has shown that when
people are presented with a rotated
or mirror-image letter, they often
The Guardian Weekly 14 April 2023
report seeing the letter in its correct
orientation. This was previously put
down to participants mis-seeing the
shape. “We thought they are more
likely to be a memory effect. So you
saw it correctly, but as soon as you
commit it to memory stuff starts
going wrong,” said Otten.
A RCH A EOLOGY
Benin bronzes made from
metal mined in Germany
Some of the Benin bronzes were
made with metal mined in the
German Rhineland, scientists
have discovered.
The Edo people in the Kingdom
of Benin, modern Nigeria, created
their sculptures with melted down
brass manilla bracelets, the currency
of the transatlantic slave trade
between the 16th and 19th centuries.
While rarely found in archaeological
excavations on land, they have been
retrieved in substantial numbers
from the wrecks of vessels.
German researchers compared
the bracelets’ metal with metallic
ores and mines across Europe
before tracing them to western
Germany. Dr Tobias Skowronek
said: “Where the metal came from
and how Benin got its brass has long
been a mystery.” The findings were
published in the journal Plos One.
ANIMALS
Researchers identify two
tiger personality traits
From wily Shere Khan to exuberant
Tony, tigers have often been
depicted as characterful. Now
scientists have identified two
personality attributes.
Writing in the journal Royal
Society Open Science, researchers
say a questionnaire given to feeders
or vets working with the animals
in China revealed descriptions
of the tigers formed two main
clusters, which researchers dubbed
“majesty”, encompassing high
ratings for words such as dignified
and imposing, and “steadiness”
– associated with high ratings on
words like obedient and quiet.
United Kingdom
POLITICS
Starmer defends attack on
Sunak’s sex-abuse stance
 An aperiodic Keir Starmer has said he will
monotile never “make absolutely zero apologies
repeats a forma- for being blunt” in an article
tion, no matter published after a row over
how long the a widely criticised Labour attack
pattern. The men advert on child sexual assaults.
who discovered In a veiled message to critics
the pattern have within his party, Starmer said
written a paper, he would “stand by every word
not yet peer- Labour has said on this subject”
reviewed, detail- and would use the Tories’ record
on crime as a legitimate criticism
ing their findings
DAVID SMITH, JOSEPH “no matter how squeamish it
SAMUEL MYERS, CRAIG
S KAPLAN, CHAIM
might make some feel”.
GOODMAN-STRAUSS The advert ( below), which
drew criticism from left and right,
used a picture of Rishi Sunak and
said he did not believe adults
convicted of sexually assaulting
children should go to prison and
cited the Conservative record on
offenders avoiding jail.
Several senior Labour figures
distanced themselves from the
poster. The Observer reported that
the shadow home secretary, Yvette
Cooper, “had nothing to do with it”.
In an opinion piece for the
Daily Mail, Starmer said Labour
would continue to take on the
Conservatives on law and order
and pointed to the case of Zara
Aleena, the aspiring young lawyer
who was murdered by an offender
who had been recalled to prison
two days before the attack and
should not have been free.
“For the first time in my
lifetime, everywhere you look
– from the economy to the NHS
to the chaos on our streets –
we have been set on a path of
decline,” Starmer said. Over
the past decade, the UK had
8km
“become a country where thugs,
gangs and monsters mock our
justice system and make decent
The depth at people’s lives a misery”.
which a fish
was filmed
swimming off
Japan’s south-
east coast. The
footage showed
an unknown
snailfish species
belonging
to the genus
Pseudoliparis

Eyewitness
 Picking up the pieces
A volunteer uses a brush in a
beach clean to collect nurdles
and other plastic waste at
Whitesand Bay in south-
west England. According
to the UK’s Fauna & Flora
association, 11.5tn nurdles
end up in the ocean every
year. These micro-beads
circulate in the ocean and
often wash up on beaches.
Mostly transparent, about
the size of a lentil, nurdles are
used to make plastic objects.
But like crude oil, they easily
escape during transport and
are persistent pollutants.
BEN STANSALL/AFP/GETTY
H E A LT H C A R E
Junior doctors in England
in four-day strike over pay
Junior doctors across England
carried out a four-day strike this
week that resulted in an estimated
350,000 appointments, including
operations, being cancelled.
Doctors mounted picket lines
outside hospitals in a deteriorating
dispute over pay. It is the longest
industrial action in the health
service since nurses, ambulance
crews and other health workers
took action last year.
NHS managers said patient care
was “on a knife-edge” and “very
fragile” because of the stoppage
by members of the British Medical
Association (BMA).
The chief executive of the NHS
Confederation, Matthew Taylor,
said the likely impact of the strike
was “heartbreaking” and called
on both sides to end their “battle
of rhetoric”.
Taylor told the BBC there was
no question this strike would be
more disruptive than the 72-hour
stoppages by NHS staff last month,
which led to 175,000 cancelled
appointments.
NORTHERN IREL AND
Crowd attack police vehicle
in lead-up to Biden’s visit
The British and Irish governments
condemned petrol bomb attacks
in Derry before Joe Biden’s visit
to Northern Ireland this week.
A small crowd threw petrol bombs
and other missiles at a police
Land Rover during a parade by
republicans in the Creggan area of
the city on Monday.
There were no casualties but
the images overshadowed the
25th anniversary of the Good
Friday agreement, which drew
dignitaries to Northern Ireland.
Biden was due to arrive in Belfast
on Tuesday, the start of the US
president’s four-day visit to the
island of Ireland.
Spotlight Page 22 
9
MONARCHY
King supports research
into royals’ slavery ties
King Charles has for the first
time signalled his support
for research into the British
monarchy’s historical links
with transatlantic slavery, after
the emergence of a document
showing a predecessor’s stake in
a slave-trading company.
Buckingham Palace released
the statement after it was
contacted by the Guardian about
the extensive history of successive
British monarchs’ involvement
and investment in the
enslavement of African people.
The Guardian has published
11k
a previously unseen document
showing the 1689 transfer
of £1,000 of shares in the
slave-trading Royal African The number
Company to King William III, from of tax bills for
Edward Colston, the company’s Chinese firms
deputy governor. delivered to a
Buckingham Palace did not flat owner in
comment on the document but Cardiff, Wales,
said it supported a research with no links to
project into the monarchy’s the businesses.
involvement in the slave trade. In one day alone,
Cost of the crown Page 34  he received 580
envelopes
14 April 2023 The Guardian Weekly
10

The Guardian Weekly 14 April 2023

 11

 Palestinians in Gaza LEBANON

watch a rocket fired at Lebanon
Israel last month Tyre
MOHAMMED SABER/EPA

The rocket attack Golan

Heights
that followed Israeli Haifa

airstrikes and
Mediterranean
mosque raids failed Sea

to provoke all-out Nablus

war – but it must Tel Aviv West

surely be inevitable Bank

Israel Jerusalem

Gaza Hebron

Jordan
By Martin Chulov 40 km

T
TYRE, SOUTH LEBANON 40 miles

he groves of greater than ever. The backdrop to last

The big story southern Lebanon
had been quiet for
nearly 17 years.
But as farmers
Middle East tended to orange
trees and banana
crops last Thurs-
day, rocket men lurked among them,
readying the biggest barrage fired into
Israel since the war of 2006 and tak-
ing a startled region to the precipice of
another conflict that leaders on both
sides of the border fear will be worse
than all before them.
In Beirut and Tel Aviv, an escalation
seemed imminent. But as a troubling
afternoon wore on, the apocalyptic
showdown between Hezbollah and
Israel that had been widely predicted
started to fizzle. Rhetoric was of meas-
ured responses. Israel was content to
blame Palestinian groups and put
a distance between them and Hezbol-
lah. War could wait for now.
But as two mortal foes continue to
stalk each other across the battlefields
of the Middle East, fighting shadow
wars in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq and
as far away as Yemen, the risk of even
seemingly measured provocations
spiralling out of control is perhaps
Thursday’s flare-up was a mix of issues
that was even more potent than usual.
Israeli police raids on the al-Aqsa
mosque in Jerusalem during Ramadan
had played poorly across the region, as
had military action in the West Bank
that had claimed an unusually high
number of casualties. A far-right Israeli
government, beholden to ultra-nation-
alists and facing sustained dissent at
home, had given added impetus to foes
in Iran and their proxies in Lebanon to
make their presence felt.
But perhaps the real reason for the
heavy barrage of rockets was in Syria,
where Israeli jets had three times in the
past week attacked airbases believed
to house parts of a drone programme
sponsored by Iran, but run by Hezbol-
lah. On the Syrian border with Iraq,
Israeli jets had frequently attacked
elements of what its military leaders
see as a bigger threat – the transfer of
components to convert rockets into
precision-guided missiles that could
wreak unprecedented havoc in Israel.
Fired in large numbers, they
could overwhelm Israel’s Iron Dome
defence system, which performed
well last week, intercepting 25 of 
34 rockets, according to the Israeli

Why regional tensions have risen

Precision-guided Explainer, page 13 
missiles could
Netanyahu’s popularity plummets
overwhelm Israel’s Analysis, page 14 
defence system

14 April 2023 The Guardian Weekly

12 The big story
Middle East
military. Five hit the ground across
Galilee; four were not accounted for.
“We have many thousands of
surprises for them,” said a Hezbollah
member in Beirut. “They have hit
some areas in Syria, but they haven’t
hit them all. We are comfortable.”
T
he organisation had much
to be satisfied about in the
aftermath of the rocket fire.
The Israeli response had
ignored Hezbollah and all but ignored
Palestinian factions that it was content
to blame. A missile fired from an Israeli
jet had destroyed a small viaduct about
a kilometre and a half from a Palestin-
ian camp south of the Lebanese city of
Tyre. The smell of oranges mixed with
cordite, which had clearly been chosen
to avoid the risk of casualties.
“If this is all they want to do, then
we should not fire back,” said a local
man. “This is a win for us.”
Throughout the shadow war of the
last decade, both parties have been
sensitive about protecting deterrence.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has
vowed to retaliate if any members are
killed by Israel anywhere in the region.
But as Israeli airstrikes mounted,
Hezbollah has often been slow to
The Guardian Weekly 14 April 2023
▲ Fire and smoke
rise after an
respond, or not struck back at all.
“They are burying their people qui-
Israeli airstrike etly, just like they did during the Syrian
in the Gaza Strip war, when they did not want to openly
on 7 April champion people dying fighting Sun-
AHMED ZAKOT/SOPA/
SHUTTERSTOCK
nis as martyrs. Nasrallah can’t afford to
hit the Israelis every time they hit him,
or Iran,” said the Hezbollah member.
Israel too has been cautious. Its
military officials know who holds
power across southern Lebanon and
realise it remains inconceivable that
Palestinian groups could launch such a
barrage of rockets without, at the very
least, the tacit approval of Hezbollah.
The organisation has a vice-like hold
on areas of southern Lebanon, and its
members were visible last Thursday.
Over the horizon, events that are
bigger than either side’s ability to man-
17
Number of
age are gathering steam. A detente
between Iran and Saudi Arabia, bro-
kered by China, is likely to lead to
years since the a truce in Yemen and visits between
last conflict, in heads of governments in Tehran and
2006, between Riyadh. Until the surprise announce-
Israeli and ment of peace talks last month, Saudi
Hezbollah forces leader Mohammed bin Salman had
in Lebanon, been a staunch adherent of Israel’s
northern Israel stance against Hezbollah and had seen
and the Golan the Shia militant organisation as a stra-
Heights tegic threat to the kingdom’s interests.
‘For now we’ll just
get on with our lives.
History is already
written for us’
The direct engagement of Prince
Mohammed with Iran, which is likely
to be followed by regional heavy-
weight the UAE, heralds a surprising
new approach that has worried Israel.
“There’s something in it for the
Saudis that we have yet to figure out,”
said an Israeli official in Europe. The
move to re-engage Bashar al-Assad has
also come out of the blue. “We’re not
entirely sure what’s going on.”
Lebanese and Israeli citizens have
drawn breath, but their lands will
probably be a proxy battlefield over
which a destructive war will be fought.
“For now we’ll just get on with our
lives,” said Haitham Rashid, a Sunni
Lebanese enjoying a meal to celebrate
the end of the Ramadan fast in Beirut
last Thursday. “History is already writ-
ten for us. We will accept our fate when
it comes.” Observer
MARTIN CHULOV IS A MIDDLE EAST
CORRESPONDENT FOR THE GUARDIAN
AND OBSERVER
Explainer
Hezbollah
Tension flares
across region
How the conflict
has escalated
By Martin Chulov
Fears have grown of a
broader conflict between
Israel and Hezbollah,
which have faced off on
various battlegrounds
across the Middle East
with increasing frequency
over recent months.
Their shadow war has focused
on the valleys of southern
Lebanon and the skies of
northern Israel, but airstrikes
have also taken place in Syria
and Iraq, where Hezbollah has
an extensive presence, and
even as far away as the waters
off Yemen, where shipping
linked to both sides has
come under fire.
How did the current round of
violence begin?
Palestinian groups and Hezbollah
were angered by an Israeli police
raid last week on Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa
mosque, the third holiest site in
Islam. The raid took place against a
backdrop of increasing violence in
the West Bank, the overlap of the
Muslim holy month of Ramadan
with the beginning of the Jewish
Passover holiday, and the formation
in December of the most rightwing
and anti-Arab government in
Israel’s history.
What is Israel saying?
The Israeli Defence Force was
careful in its targeting and rhetoric
not to draw Hezbollah into a conflict
that neither side especially wants
at this point. While an Israeli
response was widely expected,
perhaps more can be drawn from
the limited scope of the attack and
the pains taken to keep Hezbollah
at bay. Both parties remain anxious
to retain deterrence during
standoffs. But Israel’s readiness
to accept the implausible position
that Hezbollah did not know of,
or could not control, Palestinian
rocket fire from its heartland is
perhaps the biggest takeaway from
an event that could otherwise have
escalated dramatically.
What is Hezbollah?
Hezbollah is the most powerful
non-state actor in the Middle
East. It was formed about 40 years
ago in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley,
nominally as a bulwark to Israel’s
presence in Lebanon, though it
quickly became opposed to its arch-
foe’s very existence. The group is
financially and politically beholden
to its backer, Iran, and is the most
important arm of Iran’s foreign
policy projection in the Middle
East. Its members are Shia Muslims,
whom regional Sunni leaders
consider a formidable challenge
to their own ambitions – so much
so that they have been prepared
to draw closer to Israel to combat
Hezbollah threats.
How are events in Syria linked to
the crisis?
Israel has repeatedly attacked
targets linked to Iran inside Syria.
Iran, through proxies, including
13
Hezbollah and the Syrian army,
has used Syrian bases to smuggle
and store parts for precision
guidance systems to be fitted to
crude rockets and for importing
drones that could be used to fight
Israel. Combating these threats
has been a preoccupation of the
Israeli army, and has led to several
thousand attacks inside Syria in
recent years, many from airstrikes.
At times Hezbollah members have
been killed, raising tensions on the
border. It is believed that several
Hezbollah members were killed in
Syria during recent airstrikes.
What has been happening in Gaza?
Palestinian factions in Gaza have
been under pressure to respond
to the violence in al-Aqsa, with
rockets fired into southern Israel
thought to be its comeback. The
fire and the Israeli response has
been limited and does not appear to
herald a broader flare up.
What might happen next?
For now, the threat in southern
Lebanon and northern Israel appears
to have passed. Israel is content to
▼ Israeli security
forces at the stick to a charade that Hezbollah was
Temple Mount not involved in last week’s rocket
strikes, and Hezbollah will let the
complex,
Jerusalem, Israeli attacks on Palestinians slide.
The exchanges, however, were a
last Sunday
AHMAD GHARABLI/
wake-up call to just how close all-
AFP/GETTY out war could be.
14 April 2023 The Guardian Weekly
14 The big story
Middle East
A N A LY S I S
ISR AEL
Bye bye Bibi?
Netanyahu’s
popularity is
tanking, even
on the far right
By Bethan McKernan
Israel’s prime minister,
Benjamin Netanyahu,
found himself standing
last Friday afternoon at
the side of a remote road in the vast
desert valley that runs the length of
the occupied West Bank’s frontier
with Jordan.
Along with his defence minister,
Yoav Gallant, he was inspecting the
scene of a shooting attack earlier in
the day that had killed British-Israeli
sisters Maia and Rina Dee, 20 and 15,
as well as their mother, Lucy, whose
death was announced on Monday.
“For this challenge as well, we
are standing united, unified, sure of
our righteousness,” Netanyahu said
in comments broadcast by Israeli
television. “We will act together
with total backing for our forces.”
Unfortunately for the prime
The Guardian Weekly 14 April 2023
minister, his remarks rang hollow for
many Israelis. Israel faces flare-ups
in violence on almost every front –
East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the
Gaza Strip, Lebanon and Syria.
The security establishment has
also been unnerved by the sudden
rapprochement between Saudi
Arabia – the region’s geopolitical
heavyweight, with whom Israel is
seeking warmer ties – and Israel’s
arch foe, Iran. As if the intersecting
border crises were not enough to
deal with, Israel is also undergoing
unprecedented upheaval sparked by
the government’s bitterly contested
plan to overhaul the judiciary.
Dozens of former senior defence,
security and intelligence officials
have voiced opposition to the
proposals weakening the supreme
court on the grounds they are anti-
democratic. Israel’s crucial military
reservists, including almost all of
those serving in the most important
air force unit, have joined the
nationwide protests and said they
would refuse to attend for service,
setting alarm bells ringing over the
reliability of the chains of command
and operational capacity.
Gallant was standing by
Netanyahu’s side as the pair pledged
to find the sisters’ killer but, two
weeks ago, Netanyahu fired him,
although later reneged, after he
became the first senior government
official to voice objections to the
judicial changes.
Public pressure quickly forced the
prime minister to back down and
announce that legislation weakening
the supreme court would be
postponed until after the Knesset’s
Passover recess.
But the uncertainty over Gallant’s
position and the appointment
of the inflammatory national
security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir,
does not exactly convey strength
and stability.
Leaked Pentagon documents that
surfaced last Saturday suggesting
the Mossad, Israel’s spy agency,
encouraged its staff and the Israeli
public to participate in the protest
movement, have added to a growing
perception among Israel’s many foes
that such internal discord represents
a big opportunity.
“I served in the army for decades,
and I did not see behaviour as
reckless as that of Netanyahu,” His
Moshe Ya’alon, a former defence
minister and IDF chief of staff, said obsessive
at a protest in Tel Aviv on Saturday.
“His obsessive plot to overturn
plot is a
Israel’s democracy represents an threat to
immediate threat to Israel’s security
… Our enemies are watching, and
Israel’s
our deterrence is waning.” security
Despite corruption scandals and
a colourful private life, during his … Our
previous five stints as prime minister enemies
Netanyahu was seen as a safe pair of
hands in terms of Israel’s security. are
Now, even among the rightwing watching
public that voted in the current
coalition of extremist and ultra-
religious parties, dwindling support
suggests that image is fading and
the Israeli leader could once again
be forced out of office. According to
polling released by Israel’s Channel  Protesters
12 on Sunday, 69% of voters gave the amass in Tel Aviv
government a bad grade on its first last weekend
100 days in office. against judicial
Hebrew media reported last overhaul
weekend that government sources ILAN ROSENBERG/
REUTERS
had suggested they would be
forced to launch a big military
operation in the coming weeks,
after the conclusion of the sensitive
overlapping Passover and Ramadan
holiday period, in order to bolster its
legitimacy in the eyes of the public.
They are right to point out that
the government was elected on
a platform promising order and
security. So far, it has delivered the
exact opposite.
BETHAN MCKERNAN IS THE GUARDIAN’S
JERUSALEM CORRESPONDENT
 15
In-depth reporting and analysis

UNITED KINGDOM
Belfast’s slowly
dwindling
peace walls
Page 22

INDIA

Gandhi’s
F
or a court system with a back-
log of 40m cases, there was
one lawsuit that appeared to
Gandhi asked the crowds gathered in ▲ Rahul Gandhi,
the state of Karnataka. of the Congress
Hundreds of kilometres away in party, waves as

‘bullet train’ move through India’s court-

rooms unusually fast.
Gujarat, Purnesh Modi, an elected
representative of Modi’s Bharatiya
he leaves court in
Surat, Gujarat

conviction
The case related to India’s most Janata party (BJP), appeared to take REUTERS
well-known main opposition leader, the comment personally. He filed a
Rahul Gandhi, and comments that he legal case against Gandhi, who was

draws focus had made at a campaign rally during

the 2019 general election.
In a speech, Gandhi had compared
then president of the Congress party,
alleging he had defamed the “entire
Modi community”. According to rough

on judiciary his political rival, the incumbent prime

minister, Narendra Modi, with two
convicted criminals who also bore
the same surname. “Why do all these
By Hannah Ellis-Petersen thieves have Modi as a surname?”
estimates, there are about 130 million
people called Modi in India.
For the next two years, the case
progressed at a glacial pace common
Continued 
to India’s courts. But after the judge
16 Spotlight
South Asia
go after political rivals. According to Gopal Krishna Agarwarl, a BJP
‘At a time when our government statistics cited by the spokesperson , said the govern-
society is becoming less opposition, 95% of the actions taken Court order ment was simply pursuing the anti-
by these agencies over the past seven Struggle for corruption mandate that got it elected.
and less tolerant, this years have been against opposition “Opposition has been using power for
judicial control
trend is dangerous’ party members, and dozens of MPs personal gain. They were of the opin-
have faced arrest, jail or questioning. ion that nobody can catch them, that
Many fear the crackdown will esca- Attempts by they were above the law of the land,
refused to comply with Purnesh late ahead of the general election next prime ministers but that’s not the case under the Nar-
Modi’s request that Gandhi be sum- year, even as Modi’s popularity among to exert control endra Modi government,” he said.
moned to the court for a second time, voters remains untouchably high. over the Yet for critics and legal experts, the
Modi went to the high court to make “These agencies are primarily used judiciary are verdict against Gandhi has fuelled a
an unusual request: that the case be to harass, intimidate and defame nothing new: growing concern that India’s judi-
indefinitely halted. The Gujarat high political rivals,” said Pawan Khera, both Jawaharlal ciary has increasingly come under
court agreed. It remained on pause a spokesperson for the Congress party. Nehru and the thumb of the government and is
until 16 February this year, when He recently found himself pulled off a Indira Gandhi, being weaponised against opponents,
suddenly Purnesh Modi decided he plane by police and arrested for alleg- two of India’s with severe consequences for India’s
wanted to unfreeze the case, and he edly making a slur against Modi. most powerful democracy – which is already seen as
returned to the high court, citing “new Khera alleged the threat of investi- past leaders, threatened by erosion of press free-
evidence” that would never appear. gation was being used to coerce oppo- altered the dom, oppression of minorities and
The court again agreed. With a new sition members into joining the BJP constitution an unprecedented concentration of
judge at its helm, the case moved, as to make cases go away and to cripple to gain more power under the executive.
one Congress leader described it, like state governments ruled by rival par- judicial control. With the BJP commanding a huge
a “bullet train”. Seven hearings took ties by imprisoning their leadership. In 2015, parliamentary majority, MPs banned
place in just 20 days and by 23 March, Derek O’Brien, a leader of the Narendra Modi from voting against their own party,
the judge was ready with a verdict. opposition All India Trinamool Con- made a similar and the politicisation of “autono-
Gandhi was swiftly found guilty gress party, which has had several attempt to give mous” government bodies, as well as
of defamation and sentenced to two MPs caught up in such investiga- the government a largely stifled and compliant media,
years in jail, the maximum possible tions, called the use of the agencies a say in judicial the judiciary is considered by many as
sentence. Gautam Bhatia, a lawyer and brazen. “This is bigger than trying to appointments, India’s only remaining independent
constitutional law expert, called the take down the opposition, it’s about but that check on the power of the executive.
verdict against Gandhi “completely destroying our federal system, our was struck According to lawyers and experts, in
indefensible from any perspective”. parliament, our constitution, our down by the recent years the Modi government has
The BJP moved fast after the convic- democracy,” he said. supreme court. implemented a more covert method of
tion: within 24 hours Gandhi had been coercing the judiciary, using the only
expelled from parliament and 12 hours ▼ Congress party supporters at power left – that of backdoor influence
after that he was evicted from his MP’s a protest in Delhi last month over the appointment, promotion and
bungalow. He is appealing on the KABIR JHANGIANI/NURPHOTO/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK transfer of judges.
basis that the verdict was “harsh and
excessive” and made in “hot haste”.
While the government has been
accused of systematically target-
ing and weakening the opposition
since Narendra Modi was elected in a
landslide win in 2014, the expulsion
of Gandhi was seen as taking it one
step further. The BJP has denied any
involvement, saying it was an inde-
pendent decision by the courts, but the
opponents called the timing uncanny.
Just over a week earlier, Gandhi had
begun leading protests in parliament,
demanding answers over Modi’s rela-
tionship with the billionaire industri-
alist Gautam Adani, who was recently
accused of corporate fraud. Gandhi’s
dogged refusal to drop the Adani issue
was seen to bring embarrassment to
the prime minister and united the usu-
ally fractured opposition parties.
Those parties say the government
has routinely used tools of the state,
in particular agencies tasked with
looking into corruption or fraud, to

The Guardian Weekly 14 April 2023


While appointments are technically
made by a “collegium” of judges
behind closed doors, the government
can voice its concerns and it has to give
a final warrant to approve any appoint-
ments. This so-called “pocket veto” is
allegedly routinely used by the Modi
government to transfer or blockade
the promotion of judges who are seen
as too “pro-civil liberties”, and to push
for the promotion of judges it sees as
favourable to its interests.
Anjana Prakash, a senior lawyer and
former judge at the Patna high court,
described how the government “with-
holds names, clears some at their will
and thus manipulates appointments
and transfers to its short-term gain”.
She added: “At a time when our society
is becoming less and less tolerant, this
trend is dangerous, to say the least.”
While lawyers said it was hard to
prove government influence over the
verdicts, they pointed to the reluc-
tance by judges to take up politically
sensitive cases concerning civil rights,
as well as the refusal to grant bail to
anti-government activists.
In several cases, judges who had
passed verdicts protecting civil liber-
ties or condemning government or
police actions had been transferred
and were languishing in smaller
courts, their promotions blocked.
“It sends a signal down the chain
from the highest to lowest courts
that this is the cost of judgments that
go against the executive or are pro-
liberty – that it will just be reversed by
a higher court, sometimes with strong
language,” Bhatia said.
Meanwhile, judges who delivered
favourable judgments have gone on
to take up prestigious retirement roles
offered by the government – most
notably Ranjan Gogoi, who as chief
justice delivered several politically
advantageous verdicts for the Modi
government in the supreme court in
2018 and 2019. Four months after he
retired, in an unprecedented move,
the government nominated him for a
seat in the parliamentary upper house.
Agarwarl, the BJP spokesperson,
insisted the judiciary’s independence
remained sanctified but Bhatia said
that the onslaught by the government
on the judiciary had left its ability to
stand up to the executive enfeebled,
weakening one of the last pillars of
democracy still standing in India.
HANNAH ELLIS-PETERSEN IS
THE GUARDIAN’S SOUTH ASIA
CORRESPONDENT
INDIA
BJP ‘rewriting
history’
by editing
schoolbooks
By Hannah Ellis-Petersen
T
he Indian government has
been accused of rewrit-
ing history to fit its Hindu
nationalist agenda after
school textbooks were edited to
remove references to Mahatma Gan-
dhi’s opposition to Hindu nationalism,
as well as mention of a controversial
religious riot in which the prime min-
ister, Narendra Modi, was implicated.
Textbooks were also revised to
remove chapters on the history of
the Mughals, the Muslim rulers who
controlled much of India between the
16th and 19th centuries.
The ruling Bharatiya Janata party
(BJP), which has pursued a Hindu
nationalist agenda that has moved
India away from its secular founda-
tions, has been open about its desire
to rewrite the country’s history and
break away from what it describes
as the “slave mentality” of colonial
oppressors. Since the BJP came to
power in 2014, there have been mul-
tiple amendments to textbooks.
References to the Mughals,
whom Hindu nationalists consider
to be Muslim oppressors, have been
removed or amended, while ref-
erences to the Hindu nationalist
Vinayak Damodar Savarkar as a “most
17
celebrated freedom fighter” have been
added. The new editions of political
science and history textbooks pub-
lished by the National Council of
Educational Research and Training
(NCERT) drew controversy over the
amendments, some made without the
usual public notifications.
Among the changes to the politi-
cal science textbook for 17 to 18-year-
olds was the removal of a reference to
the dislike Hindu nationalists had for
Gandhi, India’s famed freedom fighter,
and how they made multiple attempts
to assassinate him.
▲ The education According to scrutiny of the text-
authority said it books by the Indian Express news-
removed content paper, which revealed the amend-
to help students ments, references to the Gujarat riots
after Covid have also been purged from textbooks
NOAH SEELAM/AFP/ by the NCERT. The riots, which took
GETTY
place in 2002, are a sensitive topic
for Modi, who was chief minister of
Gujarat at the time and was accused of
being complicit in the violence, which
involved brutal attacks on Muslim
families and the deaths of more than
1,000 people, mostly Muslims. After
the revisions, references to the riots
have gone from all social science text-
books for those aged 11 to 18.
NCERT has also removed chapters
The past recast relating to the Mughal courts from
Mahatma Gandhi history books for 17 and 18-year-olds
was killed by under measures to “streamline” the
a Hindu nationalist, curriculum after the Covid pandemic.
Nathuram Godse, Historians and opposition politi-
in 1948. Gandhi is cians condemned the revisions. “You
still reviled by some can change the truth in books but you
Hindu nationalists cannot change the history of the coun-
for his views on try,” said Mallikarjun Kharge, the head
Hindu-Muslim of the opposition Congress party.
unity and, since Aditya Mukherjee, a professor
the BJP came to of contemporary Indian history at
power, there has Jawaharlal Nehru University, said the
been a growing removal of Mughal history from text-
reverence among books was an attempt to “weaponise”
hardliners for his
and “erase” history to suit the govern-
killer. The amended
ment’s political agenda. “Whenever
textbooks softened
we have witnessed erasure of a par-
mention of Godse
ticular community from our history,
and removed
it is usually followed by a genocide of
reference to
the community,” Mukherjee told the
the ban on the
news channel NDTV.
militant Hindu
group Rashtriya The NCERT chief, Dinesh Saklani,
Swayamsevak said the changes should not be “blown
Sangh after out of proportion” and had been
Gandhi’s death. made by an “expert panel”. The BJP’s
national spokesperson, Gopal Krishna
Agarwal, said it was “not rewriting
history” but instead rebalancing the
“biased approach” of some histori-
ans. The ministry of education did
not respond to a request for comment.
14 April 2023 The Guardian Weekly
18 Spotlight
Europe
UKRAINE
The race for tech
supremacy in skies
above battle zones
Frontline drone operators say that Russia is
close to hobbling their most popular models
– setting off a race to find replacements
By Dan Sabbagh KYIV
C
rouching in a freezing base-
ment or risking it all on top
of a nine-storey building, the
drone squads in the war zone
of Bakhmut are ubiquitous. Some are
forced to lurk a few hundred metres
from, or even on, the frontline. With-
out them, Ukraine’s efforts to hold on
to the embattled city would be much
harder, perhaps impossible.
But the concern for Ukraine, accord-
ing to three frontline drone operators
deployed in the city, is that the Rus-
sians are close to countering the most
The Guardian Weekly 14 April 2023
popular models, made by the Chinese
manufacturer DJI. “They are manufac-
turing special jamming systems,” said
Yaroslav, 31. “I believe like in three,
four months, DJI will not be usable.”
It means a scramble for replace-
ments, prompting countless initiatives
in probably the most dynamic aspect
of the near 14-month war, a conflict in
which drones have helped defenders.
Neither Yaroslav nor Maksym, both
from Kharkiv, had military experience,
but they were recruited into Ukraine’s
63rd brigade, switching to the hot zone
of Bakhmut in December and January.
Their day in Bakhmut typically
started before dawn, where in a group
of two or three, the men brought at
least a pair of drones to their for-
ward position, most likely a simple
DJI Mavic 3 quadcopter (which costs
about $2,000) or a more advanced DJI
Matrice 30T (about $14,000) – and
20 to 30 batteries, because “in winter,
the battery life is about half an hour”,
said Maksym.
To say the work in Bakhmut, scene
of the heaviest fighting, is intense is an
understatement. Maksym described
▲ Soldiers ready watching an attack that lasted “seven
a drone for a hours, with wave after wave of attack-
mission in the ers” coming at Ukrainian positions
Kherson region “from the morning until 3pm”, each
last October sought out from above to give Ukrain-
ED RAM ian soldiers a chance to stop them.
It is terrifying and dehumanising
watching the violence from overhead
and dropping bombs down below.
“When you are watching movies, you
think you must feel something when
you are killing people. But in the war,
there are no emotions, you just totally
do what you need to do,” said Yaroslav.
Drone operators such as Maksym
and Yaroslav, embedded within
frontline battalions, are asked to
conduct reconnaissance monitoring
enemy attacks or search for higher-
value targets such as artillery pieces
although, in Bakhmut, the Russians
only briefly fire these about 5km
behind enemy lines. “You only have a
couple of minutes to catch and destroy
them,” Yaroslav said. They also help
Ukrainian gunners correct their aim,
and occasionally use armed drones.
Hundreds of war videos filmed
from above demonstrate the military
capability of drones. They are used
as propaganda vehicles by both sides
and, in Ukraine, it is common for bri-
gades or battalions to have a videog-
rapher to help produce such content.
In theory, DJI drones were banned
in Ukraine and Russia by DJI nearly
a year ago, with the company saying
it “abhors any use of our drones to
cause harm”. But in practice they are
bought in large numbers by donors
from Europe and the US – the Star Wars
actor Mark Hamill fronts one fundrais-
ing campaign. They have proved the
most effective for local-level recon-
naissance and can be easily modified
to carry grenades to bomb from above.
But drone operators report the DJI
craft are becoming less effective as
Russian electronic warfare techniques
diminish their range. In Bakhmut,
sight lines are restricted by build-
ings. A frontline drone squad may only
cover a few hundred metres. Before,
their range was 10 or 20 times more.
“Even 500 metres was tough to
cover with two drones,” Yaroslav said.
It was possible to cross “1km maxi-
mum” beyond the frontline.
Combat losses are considerable,
with friendly fire a problem, as nerv-
ous infantry on the ground know
the presence of a drone loitering for
a moment above can be a prelude to
accurate incoming artillery. Some-
times a drone does not last a day; other
times it can be preserved for several
months. Operators are key targets:
Maksym has shrapnel embedded in his
arm from a shell that landed near him.
Yevhen, 38, another drone operator

from Kharkiv, was, like Maksym and
Yaroslav, deployed in Bakhmut for
three months over the winter. “Mavics
are starting to die,” he said. “In Decem-
ber, we were able to fly 3km, so we
were not working from the zero point
[the frontline]. Now the guys say they
cannot fly further than 500 metres.”
A computer programmer before the
war, Yevhen is helping develop new
types of drones to overcome a loom-
ing battlefield problem. He is involved
in testing a longer-range Ukrainian-
made Windhover drone with the army,
although the three-pronged six-rotor
device has been in development since
before the war – one of many home-
grown drone projects.
Yevhen predicts that replacing DJIs
in the frontline will require longer-
range, more expensive fixed-wing
reconnaissance drones operating
from the rear, such as the Leleka-100,
which costs $50,000 and has a range
of 100km, combined with FPV (first
person view) kamikaze drones: high-
speed racing drones with bombs att-
ached, often controlled via headsets.
Samuel Bendett, a drone expert
with the US Center for Naval Analyses,
says the change in technology could
favour Ukraine. The “Russians are
very concerned that Ukrainians have
the advantage” with FPV drones, wor-
ried that a large number will be used to
support a counteroffensive, and that
Moscow may not have enough pilots
or technological know-how to keep up.
“This is a technology race not
just between the militaries, but also
between the volunteers with their own
technology arsenals,” he added.
DAN SABBAGH IS THE GUARDIAN’S
DEFENCE AND SECURITY EDITOR
Artem Mahzulin also contributed to
this report
▼ Ukrainian drone operators Maksym
(left) and Yaroslav
Spotlight
North America
 The Pentagon
has referred
the document
leak to the US
Department
of Justice
AFP/GETTY
A N A LY S I S
U N I T E D S TAT E S
Paper trail
US defence
documents
leak could be
‘tip of iceberg’
By Julian Borger WASHINGTON
The leak of more than
100 secret US defence
The documents could be the
disclosure “tip of the iceberg” of
a trove of material that had started
of highly circulating long before it was widely
classified noticed, according to a new report.
The disclosure of highly classified
material is material already represents
the worst Washington’s worst national
US security security breach in many years,
including details about Ukraine’s
breach in lack of ammunition, US intelligence
many years collection methods used against
Russia, and embarrassing evidence
pointing to US spying on close allies
such as Ukraine, South Korea and
Israel. Analysts suggest the damage
to the US could still get much worse.
One of the documents, dated
23 February and marked “Secret”,
outlines how Ukraine’s Soviet-era
S-300 air defence systems would
be depleted by 2 May at the current
usage rate. It is unclear whether
Ukraine has since changed the
speed with which it is using S-300
missiles, whether stocks have been
replenished, or whether it is relying
more on other anti-aircraft systems.
The same document also refers
to an intelligence source as “LAPIS
time-series video”, an apparent
19
reference to a little-known and
closely guarded satellite system for
imaging objects on the ground.
On Monday, Ukraine denied
a report that it had been forced to
amend some military plans before
a long-anticipated counter-offensive
because of the leak.
The authenticity of the
documents has not been officially
confirmed but the Pentagon issued
a statement last Sunday saying it
was reviewing the materials, which
appeared to contain “sensitive and
highly classified material”.
A UK defence source said on
Monday that reports – citing the
documents – claiming that a Russian
fighter jet nearly shot down a British
surveillance plane off the coast of
Crimea in September contained
“inaccuracies and [did] not reflect
what happened in International air
space over the Black Sea”.
The investigative journalism
group Bellingcat traced the leak back
through a series of channels used
by different internet communities,
mostly involving teenagers with
interests ranging from military
gear, Orthodox Christianity, music
and video games, all using Discord,
a messaging platform popular
with gamers. Racist language was
common on the forums involved.
The Pentagon has referred the
leak to the justice department for
investigation. The documents
have a range of classifications,
including Top Secret, and Noforn,
which stands for “not releasable to
foreign nationals”, suggesting the
leaker is American.
Another, marked “Top
Secret” from a CIA Intel update
from 1 March, says the Mossad
intelligence agency was encouraging
its officers to take part in protests
against the Israeli government’s
plans to weaken the independence
of the judiciary. The Israeli
government denied there had been
any Mossad involvement in the
demonstrations.
A challenge for the investigation
is that the Pentagon circulates such
material widely. Thousands of US
staff and contractors are frequently
able to get access to Top Secret and
Noforn material.
JULIAN BORGER IS THE GUARDIAN’S
WORLD AFFAIRS EDITOR
14 April 2023 The Guardian Weekly
20 Eyewitness
China

 Spring greens
Farmers harvest chives in
Taizhou, in China’s eastern
Zhejiang province. Typically, the
Allium tuberosum variety, more
commonly found in Asia but also
cultivated in North America, is
more garlicky than its mildly
oniony European counterparts.

AFP/GETTY

The Guardian Weekly 14 April 2023

 21

14 April 2023 The Guardian Weekly

22 Spotlight
Europe

R
UNITED KINGDOM osaleen Petticrew once had
compelling reason to appre-
ciate the high walls that sep-
arated her Catholic part of
bits”, enjoy visiting his family, and Historic accord
supported the recent removal of a bar- The Good Friday
rier on Flax Street that had separated agreement ended
Ardoyne from the Shankill Road area. three decades

Drawn-out
Belfast from the adjoining Protestant “You just realise, we’re all the same,” of the Troubles,
neighbourhood. said Rosaleen. brought peace
For five dreadful months in 2000, It almost sounds like a fable, dark- and led to the Irish

process she and other mothers from Ardoyne ness giving way to light, suspicion Republican Army
had to walk their daughters to Holy blossoming into friendship. It evokes and others laying
Cross school past a mob of loyalists a government advertising campaign down their arms.

The slow who hurled insults, rocks and bottles.

Even by Northern Ireland standards it
was a vile protest and made headlines
from around the time of the Good
Friday agreement that used a line from
Van Morrison’s feelgood song Coney
Signed on 10 April
1998, it also led to
a joint Nobel peace

decline around the world. Walls did not cover

the whole school route, but Rosaleen
still valued them as a bulwark. “I’d
Island: “Wouldn’t it be great if it was
like this all the time?”
It would. But Northern Ireland sel-
prize for David
Trimble and John
Hume, leaders of

of Belfast’s never felt that hatred before.”

Retaining Troubles-era “peace
dom feels like this. The dawn glow of
25 years ago when the British, Irish
the Ulster Unionist
party and the SDLP.
Commemorations

peace walls
Progress has been made since
the Good Friday agreement
25 years ago, but Northern
Ireland is still deeply divided
By Rory Carroll
walls” between Catholic and Prot-
estant areas seemed advisable even
though the 1998 Good Friday agree-
ment had supposedly ushered in an
era of peace and reconciliation.
The sentiment might have calcified,
like so much else in Northern Ireland,
but in 2015 one of Rosaleen’s teenage
daughters, Katie, fell in love with a
Protestant. It was a shock. Questions
abounded. Was he a bigot? Was Katie
safe visiting his area? Was Stuart safe
visiting their area?
Eight years later the couple are still
together and have their own children.
The Petticrew family love Stuart “to
and US governments shepherded the
for the 25-year
region’s political leaders to a break-
anniversary
through deal, ending 30 years of
included visits from
violence and winning a joint Nobel
the US president,
peace prize for David Trimble and
Joe Biden, former
John Hume, seems to have given way
president Bill
to darkness at noon. Clinton, King
Society and politics are sectarian Charles, former
and dysfunctional. Loyalist and repub- UK prime minister
lican paramilitaries still wield control Sir Tony Blair and
in some communities. Children still
former taoiseach
tend to go to Catholic or Protestant Bertie Ahern.
schools, and families still tend to live
in Catholic or Protestant areas. Peace
walls still proliferate, especially in
Belfast. One at Cupar Way, between the

The Guardian Weekly 14 April 2023


Falls and Shankill roads, is 14 metres
tall, three times higher than the Berlin
Wall, and in place for twice as long.
More than eight in 10 people still
vote along tribal – or constitutional, to
use a fancier term – lines. The Demo-
cratic Unionist and Ulster Unionist
parties are overwhelmingly Prot-
estant. The Social Democratic and
Labour party and Sinn Féin are over-
whelmingly Catholic. Power-sharing
has again collapsed – the Stormont
executive has not functioned for 40%
of its existence since 1999 – and this
time the assembly is also in moth-
balls. Civil servants are unable to take
big decisions.
Little wonder that a pall was hanging
over celebrations of the agreement’s
anniversary on 10 April. It delivered
peace, a monumental achievement,
but lack of reconciliation bequeathed
a toxic polity unable to govern itself.
Brexit reopened debates about iden-
tity and sovereignty.
“Northern Ireland is an ethnically
divided society in which two groups
are divided on much more than sov-
ereignty, but also religion, sport, lan-
guage, territory, education, political
party organisation and whatever some
loony councillor in the sticks chooses
to get uppity about next,” said Malachi
O’Doherty, a commentator and author
of the book How to Fix Northern
Ireland. “The power-sharing system
actually consolidates this division.”
Public discourse should pressure
parties to not base support on ethnic
or sectarian groups and there must be
more effort to end territorial division,
which reinforced education segrega-
tion, said O’Doherty.
Prof Peter Shirlow, the director of
the University of Liverpool’s Institute
of Irish Studies, believes the gloom
around the anniversary was mis-
placed. Northern Ireland had become
far more open, tolerant and economi-
cally successful, he said. “In terms of
taking us away from violence, and
building a peace dividend, the agree-
ment has been very successful.”
Research shows a sharp decline in
sectarian incidents and much greater
mixing between Catholics and Protes-
tants in workplaces and socially. The
institute’s most recent survey showed
24% of relationships were mixed,
treble the 8% recorded in 1999, said
Shirlow. “A lot of the prejudices that
ran people’s lives have declined.”
About a fifth of people do not care
about orange versus green disputes.
Many of these non-aligned “nei-
thers” do not vote but, when they do,
they back the centrist, liberal Alli-
ance, which has become the third-
biggest party.
All this points, said Shirlow, to a
thawing of the sectarian permafrost.
According to the 2021 census, 45.7% of
the population is Catholic and 43.5%
Protestant – a historic reversal, but
secularisation hollows its significance.
Many churches are empty on Sundays.
A boom in fintech and cybersecurity
companies, and a rise in immigration,
has given Belfast a globalised vibe.
Signs of normalisation are visible
across society: an Irish language pro-
ject in the loyalist heartland of east
23
Belfast; city centre pubs devoid of any
affiliation except to craic; LGBTQ+
Gaelic football clubs.
But the most potent symbols of
division – the barriers erected in the
1970s and 1980s to deter killings – are
dwindling slowly.
“The walls just meant that if you
wanted to shoot someone you had
to be a bit more creative,” said Rab
McCallum, a project coordinator of
Twaddell, Ardoyne, Shankill Com-
munities in Transit (Tascit), which
promotes cross-community relations.
“They should come down.”
In the past decade about 18 walls
▲ Nationalist were removed and a similar number
protesters were reduced or modified, leaving
confront riot about 60, according to the department
police in west of justice. This reflects the painstak-
Belfast after ing process of obtaining community
a loyalist parade support, said Paddy Harte, the chair
passed close to of the International Fund for Ireland,
a Catholic area in which supports peace line initiatives.
June 2000 “People are getting on with their lives.
PETER MORRISON/AP People want the normal things,”
Harte said.
Few would dispute that. But there
is no clamour to remove peace walls.
Partly it stems from fear of trouble,
if not the Troubles. Petrol bombs
whizzed over an interface at Lanark
Way during Easter 2021.
For some loyalists, the walls are
protection against perceived national-
ist ascendance. Catholics outnumber
Protestants, Sinn Féin has become the
biggest party, making Michelle O’Neill
the putative first minister, and Brexit
has revived the spectre of a united
Ireland. All are psychological shocks.
“Only one side benefited from the
Good Friday agreement and it wasn’t
unionists. It was a stitch-up,” said Jeff,
a retired soldier. Peace walls were one
of the last defences against encroach-
ing Catholics, he said. “The minute it’s
down, they’ll be over and move into
our housing.”
The Good Friday agreement was a
collective leap of faith – a declaration
that separate identities could gov-
ern together while seeking different
destinations. The hope that accom-
panied the Van Morrison soundtrack
 A mural feels naive. Politics churns with ran-
on gates in cour, squabble, crisis. But the killing
a so-called peace
stopped, and horror, grief and despair
wall that separates ebbed. The result is limbo: a messy,
Catholic and inchoate, post-conflict dispensation.
Protestant It is not pretty. And yet, compared with
communities what came before, it gleams.
CHARLES MCQUILLAN/ RORY CARROLL IS THE GUARDIAN’S
GETTY IRELAND CORRESPONDENT
14 April 2023 The Guardian Weekly
24 Spotlight
Environment
C L I M AT E E M E RGE NC Y Al Jaber, as well as being the UAE
minister for industry and advanced
technology, is known as a business-
man, chief executive of the UAE

Energy
national oil company, Adnoc – one
of the world’s biggest oil and gas
producers – and the founding chief

industry executive of its renewable energy

company Masdar.
He was a deeply controversial

is ‘key to choice to chair these crucial talks, at

which governments will assess pro-
gress made on cutting greenhouse gas

climate emissions since the 2015 Paris agree-

ment, a process known as the “global

action’
Head of UN’s Cop28 aims
to use talks to set out how
a business mindset can limit
greenhouse gas emissions
By Fiona Harvey
stocktake”. They must then try to find
ways to limit global heating to 1.5C
above pre-industrial levels, a target
rapidly slipping beyond reach.
Adnoc is planning a massive
expansion of oil and gas, the Guardian
revealed last week. Climate activists
from around the world have attacked
Al Jaber for not renouncing his
Adnoc role.
Romain Ioualalen, the global policy
manager at the campaign group Oil

T
he world needs a “busi-
ness mindset” to tackle the
climate crisis, the president
of the next UN climate sum-
mit has said.
Sultan Al Jaber, the president-
designate of the Cop28 summit to be
hosted in the United Arab Emirates
this year, said he aimed to use the UN
talks to set out how the private sector
can limit greenhouse gas emissions
and give businesses and governments
a clear set of tasks and targets at the UN
talks, which have traditionally been
dominated by policymakers, polit-
icians and civil society activists.
“We need a major course correc-
tion and a massive effort to reignite
progress. This cannot be done by
governments alone,” Al Jaber told the
Guardian in a rare interview, his first
with a global newspaper since taking
on the Cop28 role.
“The scale of the problem requires
everyone working in solidarity. We
need partnerships, not polarisation,
and we need to approach this with a
clear-eyed rationale and executable
plan of action,” he said.
“Cop28 is committed to building on
the progress made at Cop26 and Cop27
to inject a business mindset, concrete
KPIs [key performance indicators, a
cornerstone of most commercial
strategies] and an ambitious action-
oriented agenda.”
Change International, said: “This is
a truly breathtaking conflict of inter-
est and is tantamount to putting the
head of a tobacco company in charge
of negotiating an anti-smoking treaty.”
But Al Jaber said no one should pre-
judge his presidency, as he was com-
mitted to safeguarding the 1.5C limit
and ensuring that all countries, and
the private sector, would act to achieve
the massive emissions cuts necessary.
He vowed to turn his business back-
ground into an asset for the talks, say-
ing that no previous Cop president had
come with such entrepreneurial and
management experience. He pointed
to the UAE’s achievements in renew-
able energy, overseas development aid
and in diversifying beyond oil so that
75% of its GDP is now non-oil-based,
and said this would enable him to
motivate other oil-producing coun-
tries to come up with similar plans.
“The UAE intends to build this same
business case for climate action at
▼ Sultan Al Cop28,” he said. “We know we need
Jaber says no to engage the private sector fully and
one should unlock the trillions of dollars that are
prejudge his Cop needed. This requires a business plan
presidency that outlines key deliverables with
MARK FELIX/AFP/ GETTY concrete KPIs; it requires reliable
and sufficient capital, and it requires
coordinated collective action.”
He wants the private sector to play a
significant role at the summit, arguing
that companies – including oil and gas
firms – will be pivotal to tackling the
climate crisis. “The energy sector
must work as a partner with other
sectors to help decarbonise entire
economies,” he said.
One longtime attendee of Cop sum-
mits and adviser to governments said
Al Jaber’s plans to take a more busi-
nesslike approach to Cop28 were “very
much how his mind works”. They said:
“I think it works up to a point. But for

The Guardian Weekly 14 April 2023


some issues like adaptation and loss
and damage [the key issue of provid-
ing funds to rescue countries afflicted
by climate breakdown], the business
plan analogy may only get you so far.”
His plans are unlikely to find favour
with climate activists at the talks.
Tasneem Essop, the director of Climate
Action Network, accused Al Jaber of
fundamentally misunderstanding his
role, despite having been a longtime
member of the UAE’s diplomatic team
attending Cops.
“This is a UN conference, and a
separate process from any engage-
ment with businesses,” she said. “If he
wants to convene ‘stakeholders’ and
engage with fossil fuel companies, he
can do that in his own time. He must do
‘We need to engage
the private sector and
unlock the trillions
of dollars needed’
that separately from the UN process.”
She said activists were prejudging
Al Jaber based on his probable han-
dling of the Cop president role, as an oil
industry executive and on his eager-
ness to engage with business.
“There needs to be a firewall
between his role as CEO and role as
Cop president,” she said. “He doesn’t
seem to understand his role as Cop
president, and that’s what our pre-
judgment is based on.”
A
l Jaber also spoke to the
Guardian of the need to
invest in new technologies
such as hydrogen and carbon
capture and storage (CCS), which some
activists are likely to find controver-
sial. “I want to make sure that Cop28
becomes a rallying point for partner-
ships across every region to commer-
cialise hydrogen production, transpor-
tation and industrial use,” he said.
CCS technologies have been seen by
many climate scientists and experts as
25
a distraction, and one that has been
championed by the oil industry in
order to keep its operations going. Al
Jaber disagrees, pointing to the recent
findings of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which
in its comprehensive report last month
noted that carbon capture would be
needed in some form, particularly
in the likely event of an overshoot of
the 1.5C limit.
“We also need to exponentially
expand carbon capture technologies,”
said Al Jaber. “The IPCC has been say-
ing since 2016 that carbon capture is
an essential tool for keeping tempera-
ture rises in check. Yet there is only
44m tonnes of carbon captured annu-
ally. We need to multiply that amount
by 30. This is a huge undertaking
that is currently just not affordable.
We need progressive, smart gov-
ernment regulation and policies to
incentivise private investment on an
industrial scale.”
Al Jaber also called for overhaul
of the World Bank and other interna-
tional financial institutions, a push
that could be widely supported before
Cop28, as many governments, of
developed and developing countries,
and civil society groups are clamour-
ing for fundamental change to the way
that public financial institutions deal
with the climate crisis.
David Malpass, the outgoing World
Bank president, who was appointed
by Donald Trump in 2019 and accused
▲ An Adnoc of being a climate denier, resigned
oil refinery in in February. He is being replaced by
Ruwais, United Ajay Banga, a former banker who is
Arab Emirates expected to usher in sweeping changes
CHRISTOPHE VISEUX/ to expand climate finance, which were
BLOOMBERG/GETTY
due to be prefigured at the World Bank
spring meetings this week.
Finance from the public and
private sectors will be needed to shift
the global economy to a low-carbon
footing, according to Al Jaber. “The
common threat to all the progress I
am talking about is capital,” he said.
“Last year $1.4tn was invested in clean
technology globally. We need four
times that amount. And we need to
make sure that investment reaches the
most vulnerable communities across
the global south.
“The bottom line is finance needs
to be much more available, accessible
and affordable. We need to stop talking
about a just transition for the global
south, and start delivering.”
FIONA HARVEY IS AN ENVIRONMENT
EDITOR AT THE GUARDIAN
14 April 2023 The Guardian Weekly
26 Spotlight
Asia Pacific
it did not keep statistics. Chan’s team
put the number at 400 last year, but
the survey was not completed. “We’re
under the impression that more signs
are coming down quicker,” she said.
Tetra Neon Exchange has collected
about 10 signs this year. Since it was
founded in 2020, the non-profit has
received almost 60 signs, storing most
of them at a lot in a rural part of Yuen
Long in the New Territories.
The number of removal orders for
overhanging signboards – includ-
ing but not exclusively neon signs –
issued by the buildings department
has increased over the past years, with
1,119 orders in 2022 compared with
fewer than 700 in 2015.
Hong Kong’s neon signs had their
heyday in the second half of the 20th
century as the economy prospered.
The signs were not limited to big
brands or department stores – family-
run businesses also installed them.
“Shop owners wanted their busi-
nesses to be passed on through the
generations,” Chan sa id. “They
invested a lot in getting a sign com-
missioned because – to them – a sign

T
HONG KONG he narrow pavements of
Wan Chai are accustomed
to the lunchtime rush, with
queues spilling from res-
carries the soul of a business.”
▲ Neon night Essentially advertising, these
along Lockhart signs were so ubiquitous that neon-
Road in the drenched streetscapes became syn-
Wan Chai district onymous with the city.

Fading glory
taurants and promoters pushing fly-
ers on passersby. But on an otherwise
unexceptional Monday last month,
GERHARD JOREN/ But, in 2010, the government
LIGHTROCKET/GETTY
began issuing “very tight policies for
removing unauthorised neon signs,”

The fight one main thoroughfare was the site

of more commotion than usual.
Brian Kwok, an associate professor at
the Hong Kong Polytechnic Univer-

to save neon
Metres behind a bus stop on Hen- sity’s School of Design, said. Scores
nessy Road, a truck pulled into a “no had been deemed illegal.
stopping” zone, where two neon Owners could remove their sign-

from the signs – about 3 metres tall – rested on

a trolley. Workers deftly hooked up a
rope and hauled the signs on to the
▼ Wu Chi-kai is
one of the last
neon craftsmen
board and install a new one, or apply
for retrospective approval. But the
procedures were cumbersome and

scrapheap truck before driving off.

The signs that once jostled for
space and attention along the
city’s crowded commercial
streets are disappearing as
safety regulations get stricter
By Hillary Leung HONG KONG
For Cardin Chan, this was just
still working in
Hong Kong
the costs could be prohibitive, Kwok
said. Business owners must submit
another day as the general manager PHILIP FONG/AFP/GETTY extensive paperwork and arrange
of Tetra Neon Exchange, a non-profit
that collected Hong Kong’s famed
neon signs.
Tightened government regulations
on unauthorised neon signs mean
scores of signs, which for decades
have hung outside bakeries, clothing
shops and restaurants, are disappear-
ing – stripping the streets of their once-
familiar glow.
There is no authoritative figure of
how many neon signboards remain.
The buildings department, which
oversees building codes and safety,
said that, in 2011, there were about
120,000 signboards, but added that

The Guardian Weekly 14 April 2023


inspections every five years. “A lot
of owners would rather just take the
signs down,” Kwok said, adding that
they may replace them with LED signs,
which are “cheaper and [capable of]
presenting information in a more
colourful way.”
Wu Chi-kai, a veteran neon crafts-
man, has been working in the industry
for almost four decades. Standing in
his one-man workshop, he demon-
strated how neon signs are made.
First, he heated a thin glass tube over
a flame, rendering it malleable enough
to be bent into shape. Depending on
the desired glow, he might use a clear
glass tube or a colour-coated one. The
type of gas in the tube also determines
the colour – charged neon gives off a
red hue, while argon emits a blue glow.
It has been more than 20 years since
Wu last worked on a signboard. He
mostly receives small, sporadic orders
for office decor or display cases. With
not a lot to keep him occupied, his days
pass slowly. “I guess there are maybe
eight or nine neon masters left in Hong
Kong,” Wu said.
The disappearance of neon signs
has drawn attention to the craft. Kwok
said he has observed more conserva-
tion efforts and local media coverage.
There is also an ongoing neon sign-
board exhibition at the M+ contem-
porary art museum.
The lights are not out for good
for all businesses that were ordered
to remove their signs. Some have
installed new neons, albeit more
modest in size and not extending as
far into the street.
Tai Ping Koon, a restaurant with
more than 150 years of history, took
down the neon sign outside its Tsim
Sha Tsui branch in February. It has
since been replaced with another
featuring the same design.
“The new sign is about one-third
smaller,” Andrew Chui, the brand’s
managing director, said. “Even though
[making a new one is] expensive, our
sign is very special and has appeared
in a lot of old photos and music videos.
So we want to preserve it.”
Chan hesitated to say Hong Kong’s
neon industry was in demise. “I think
neon still stands a chance in the city,”
she said. “But I also want people to
realise a sense of urgency. It’s really
disappearing very fast, and if we
don’t take the right action right now,
it would disappear for good.”
HILLARY LEUNG IS A REPORTER FOR
HONG KONG FREE PRESS
J A PA N
Bear-meat
vending
machine
proves a hit
By Justin McCurry TOKYO
J
apan has added to its large
and eclectic pool of vending
machines with a model that
sells fresh bear meat – and it
has proved an unlikely hit.
The machine, in the northern
prefecture of Akita, has attracted
a steady stream of customers since it
was installed at the end of last year,
according to media reports.
The meat, which sells for ¥2,200
($16.50) per 250g, is proving popu-
lar with passengers alighting at
a nearby railway station in the town
of Semboku, but the operator has also
received requests for mail order deliv-
eries from Tokyo, about 500km away.
The machine, which touts its
contents as a regional speciality,
was stocked with locally killed wild
bear and sold a mixture of lean and
fatty meat, the Mainichi Shimbun
newspaper said.
The meat came from bears cap-
tured in the mountains by members
of a hunting club permitted to kill
a certain number during the annual
hunting season, the paper added.
Animal rights campaigners con-
demned the enterprise and called
for an end to the hunting of bears for
their meat. “This feels like another low
27
blow for wildlife,” Nick Stewart, the
wildlife campaign director at World
Animal Protection, said.
“Bears are of great significance to
the wider ecosystem in which they live.
If we protect them, then their habitat
and the animals and plants within it
also benefit. This is animal exploitation
gone mad. Bears are wild animals, not
a convenience food. Leave them in the
wild to live a wild life.”
The vending machine appeared in
November after Soba Goro, a local res-
taurant, spied an opportunity to use
ursine cuisine as a tourist attraction.
▲ A black bear Bear meat consumption is highest
in northern Japan in northern Japan, where it is sold in
YOSHIHIRO SATO cans and even as instant curry. It has
a slightly gamey flavour.
“Bear meat tastes clean, and it
doesn’t get tough,” a Soba Goro
spokesperson told the Mainichi.
Japan’s ubiquitous vending
machines sell myriad food items, from
staples such as hot and cold drinks to
edible insects and hamburgers.
According to the Japan Vending Sys-
tem Manufacturers Association, the
number of machines peaked at 5.6m
in 2000 – or one for every 23 people –
before falling to just over 4m by 2020,
but Japan still has the largest number
Street food of vending machines per capita.
The Japanese Kyodo Senpaku, Japan’s biggest
whaling company whaling company, recently started
opened its first selling whale meat from vending
kujira (whale machines in an effort to boost con-
meat) “stores” at sumption. It plans to install them in
two locations in 100 locations over the next five years.
Tokyo in January Human contact with bears in Japan
after a successful is not confined to the dinner table. The
trial late last number of bear encounters has risen
year. Although from an estimated 4,800 in 2009 to
whale meat was more than 20,000 in 2020, when two
a staple source of people were killed and 158 injured,
protein in Japan the environment ministry said.
during postwar Experts say a shortage of acorns
food shortages, in bears’ natural habitat means they
consumption are more likely to come into contact
declined after
with humans as they forage for food.
the 1960s as
About 40% of the encounters in 2020
pork, chicken
occurred in residential and urban
and beef became
areas, or on agricultural land, the
more affordable.
Yomiuri Shimbun said.
In Japan’s deadliest bear attacks,
known collectively as the Sankebetsu
incident, a 2.7-metre-high brown bear
weighing more than 300kg killed seven
villagers and injured three others on
the northern main island of Hokkaido
in 1915. The bear was tracked down and
shot dead by a hunter.
JUSTIN MCCURRY IS THE GUARDIAN’S
TOKYO CORRESPONDENT
14 April 2023 The Guardian Weekly
28 Spotlight
Global
ESPIONAGE

Deep fakes
Russian
‘illegals’
flee their
cover lives
Suspected sleeper spies leave
panic, pain and growing
suspicions for those close to
them in Brazil and Greece
By Shaun Walker LJUBLJANA
Pjotr Sauer AMSTERDAM
and Tom Phillips RIO DE JANEIRO

H
alf way through a trip
to Malaysia in January,
Gerhard Daniel Campos
Wittich stopped messaging
his girlfriend back home in Rio de
Janeiro. She promptly launched a
frantic search for her missing partner.
A Brazilian of Austrian herit-
age, Campos Wittich ran a series of
3D-printing companies in Rio that
made, among other things, novelty
resin sculptures for the Brazilian mili-
tary and sausage dog key chains.
The Brazilian foreign ministry and
Facebook communities in Malaysia
mobilised to look for the missing man.
But Campos Wittich had disappeared.
News about him eventually came from
an unexpected source on the other
side of the world in Athens, and it was
as shocking as it was unexpected.
Campos Wittich was allegedly
a fake identity, said Greek media,
citing sources in the Greek intelligence
service. According to these reports, he
was not, as he had told his girlfriend,
the child of an Austrian father and
Brazilian mother, raised by his grand-
parents in Vienna.
He was allegedly a Russian “ille-
gal”, a deep-cover spy working for an
elite intelligence programme, who
had been trained for years in Russia
to be able to impersonate a foreigner.
He was allegedly secretly married to
another illegal, who posed as a Greek-
Mexican photographer named Maria
Tsalla and ran a knitting supplies shop
in Athens. Both had, it was claimed,
been dispatched on a decades-long
mission to serve Vladimir Putin’s intel-
ligence services.
At least six such suspected illegals
have been unmasked in various loca-
tions over the past year, suggesting
there could be one or more defectors
passing information to the west. Alter-
natively, Russian intelligence may be
asking more of its illegals, thus expos-
ing them to additional risk, because
so many of its “legal” spies based in
Russian embassies have been expelled
over the war in Ukraine.
A high-ranking Greek official with
knowledge of the current case con-
firmed previous Greek reports to the
Guardian and gave further details.
Greece believed Campos Wittich
was a Russian illegal with the surname
Shmyrev, said the official, while his
wife, “Maria Tsalla”, was born Irina
Romanova. She married him in Russia
before their missions began and took
his surname, the Greeks claimed.
She had left Athens in a hurry in early
January, just after Campos Wittich left
Brazil. Neither had returned.
Illegals often work in pairs as
married couples, but the case of
Campos Campos Wittich and Tsalla is the first
alleged example of two halves of an
Wittich illegal couple working in separate
had an countries with separate lives.
“We have very little doubt that they
accent that were married,” said the Greek official,
those who adding that it was an unusual case. He
met him claimed that the pair had engineered
meetings in Greece, Cyprus and
struggled France, possibly romantic encounters
to place mixed with espionage catch-ups.

The Guardian Weekly 14 April 2023


 Gerhard Daniel Campos Wittich and
Maria Tsalla were allegedly working for
Vladimir Putin’s intelligence services
FACEBOOK
Interviews in Greece and Brazil
suggest both Wittich and Tsalla left
emotional devastation in the wake
of their hurried departures. Both had
long-term romantic partners in their
cover identities, who had no suspicion
they were involved with Russian spies.
Campos Wittich lived for at least
two years in Rio with his Brazil-
ian girlfriend, who coordinated the
social media search for him when
he disappeared. She is a veterinarian
who works for the country’s ministry
of agriculture.
“She is really scared of this situation
and hurt by all the pain of having an
abrupt cut-off in a relationship that
was perfect in her eyes,” said one of
her friends.
The couple spoke Portuguese
together; Campos Wittich had an
accent that those who met him
struggled to place. “I couldn’t say
whether it was Russian, or German, or
Turkish-sounding,” said one longtime
acquaintance in Rio. Campos Wittich
talked about his past rarely and in
vague terms, explaining his strange
Portuguese enunciation with refer-
ence to his upbringing in Vienna.
I
rina Shmyreva’s alleged cover
story was similarly convoluted.
She had arrived in Greece several
years ago on a Mexican passport
identifying her as Greek-born Maria
Tsalla, said the official. One friend
recalled that she claimed to have
grown up in Belize. She allegedly used
a doctored birth certificate to “restore”
her Greek nationality, and claimed she
had returned to the country she left as
an infant to discover her roots.
She liked to take photographs
and ran a travel blog on which she
described herself as “a passionate and
restless artist”. The only photographs
of herself she had posted online had
most of her face carefully obscured by
various objects: a cat, a camera, a ball
of wool. Tsalla enrolled at a language
school to improve her Greek, and
began dating the director.
“She was a very good person. Kind
and thoughtful. She volunteered a lot,
taking care of stray cats. The news that
she was [an alleged] spy was very hard
on me,” said a longstanding friend,
who took a job in Tsalla’s knitting shop.
“Campos Wittich” and “Tsalla” –
or Mr and Mrs Shmyrev, if the Greek
authorities’ suspicions are correct – are
probably already back in Russia, but
at least four other suspected illegals
are in detention, including a Russian
with a Brazilian cover identity, who
was jailed in Brazil after a decade-
long mission in which he obtained
a master’s in the US and gained an
internship at the international crimi-
nal court in The Hague.
In December, Slovenian authorities
arrested a married couple posing as
Argentinians, who ran an online art
gallery in Ljubljana. Sources told the
Guardian that the couple were officers
of Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence
service and believed that they oper-
ated across Europe.
Tsalla and Campos Wittich might
have been at an earlier “embedding”
stage of their missions, which could
have gone on for decades if they were
not detected.
“We did not have any evidence that
she carried out espionage in Greece;
the only illegal thing for which she
29
6
could be accused was using false
documents,” said the Greek official
of Tsalla. However, she travelled
widely and intelligence services
Number of across Europe are now investigating
suspected her movements.
deep-cover Of the two, it was the “Brazilian”
Russian spies who made more contacts in circles
unmasked over that could have been interesting for
the past year Russian intelligence.
Campos Wittich lived in Rio for at
least five years and his 3D-printing
company had military installations
and government agencies among its
clients for its novelty resin figurines.
One such creation, of a green snake
smoking a pipe and firing two
revolvers, was commissioned by
the 1st Battalion of the Army Police
as a tribute to Brazil’s efforts in the
second world war.
At the time of his disappearance,
Campos Wittich had been making the
final payments on new headquarters
for his company in downtown Rio,
in a commercial building less than
50 metres from the US consulate.
As he prepared to pay the final
instalment for renovations, the call
allegedly came for him to flee, amid
fears that the arrests in Slovenia may
have compromised other illegals.
A senior Brazilian official said
Campos Wittich left Brazil in late
December, flying via Doha to Malay-
sia, where he supposedly planned to
attend a 3D-printing course.
He checked into a four-star hotel
with a saltwater infinity pool in Kuala
Lumpur and told his girlfriend he
planned to take a break in the Cameron
Highlands, a picturesque sweep of tea
plantations and hills. Instead he took
a taxi to the airport on 9 January, and
subsequently went dark.
Tsalla’s contacts were also left con-
fused by her departure. She called her
employee at the end of January, from a
Kyrgyzstani phone number, to say that
“something major” had happened,
without elaborating. “She said I could
take over her company if I wanted to.
Otherwise, she would just close it,”
SHAUN WALKER IS
THE GUARDIAN’S
recalled the friend.
CENTRAL AND The romantic partners of both
EASTERN EUROPE illegals have been left devastated,
CORRESPONDENT; said their friends and acquaintances
PJOTR SAUER
IS A RUSSIAN
in Athens and Rio.
AFFAIRS “She suspected nothing at all,”
REPORTER FOR said the friend of Campos Wittich’s
THE GUARDIAN; partner. “She is just a lovely woman
TOM PHILLIPS IS
THE GUARDIAN’S
looking to create a family and get
LATIN AMERICA married to a man she thought was the
CORRESPONDENT man of her life.”
14 April 2023 The Guardian Weekly
30 Spotlight
Science

J
anie Wray could tell there
was something horribly
wrong from the way her col-
league gasped. They were on a
research station off the coast of British
Columbia and Wray’s colleague was
watching live drone footage through
a pair of goggles. “She just went, oh my
God,” said Wray.
She had spotted a humpback whale
on its migration south, swimming
without the use of its tail. Wray and
her colleagues at BC Whales crowded
around a computer screen to watch the
footage. “Immediately, we all knew
that we had a whale that most likely
had a broken back,” she said. It was
almost certainly the result of a ship
strike. Later, they discovered it was a
whale they knew: Moon.
A collision with a vessel is one of
the main threats to whales and if the
whale does not die on impact, it is
usually only a question of time. In
Moon’s case, Wray knows she made
the 4,800km migration to Hawaii,
but there is no food for her there.
“We’re actually hoping that she has
passed,” said Wray. She has not been
seen since December.
With potentially thousands of
whales hit every year, and with the
number of ships rapidly increas-
ing across the globe, the problem is
only getting worse. But as the recent
UN high seas treaty shows, there is
increasing political will to protect the
world’s oceans and their inhabitants.
The question is whether it is even pos-
sible to save the whales from dying
at the bows of ships. New technology
suggests yes – but it’s going to take all
hands on deck.
Commercial whaling, which killed
3 million whales in the 20th century,
was banned in most countries in the
mid-1980s. But since then, another
threat has continued to grow: ocean
NAT U R E traffic. Worldwide ship numbers quad-
rupled between 1992 and 2012, and
while it is driven by increased traffic
in Asia, it is happening everywhere.

All hands on deck

For example, in western European
waters, the density of ships and boats
increased by more than a third in the
mid-2010s, a recent paper claimed.
Consequently, the risk of fatal ship
strikes has ballooned. Global data is
GUARDIAN DESIGN/GETTY

A ‘shockingly large’ number of whales die after collisions with ships, even in limited, but if we extrapolate from
regional studies, Sean Brillant from the
protected areas. But can solutions be found to protect this vulnerable species ?
Canadian Wildlife Federation says the
annual number is “shockingly large –
By Ida Emilie Steinmark thousands to tens of thousands”. And
the International Whaling Commission

The Guardian Weekly 14 April 2023


says strikes are increasing. Its analysis
suggests vulnerable species are at risk
globally: from blue whales in Chile to
sperm whales in the Mediterranean.
So far, there have been two main
solutions. One has been to reroute
shipping lanes away from whale
habitats, which, despite its effective-
ness, rarely happens. The other is
speed limits, but they vary in scale
and enforcement.
I
n most places that have whale-
protective speed restrictions or
guidelines, the limit is 10 knots
or 18.5 km/h. The figure is based
on a number of studies that compared
fatal strikes to strikes that, allegedly,
didn’t kill the whale. The results
showed that the probability of a whale
dying of a strike is around 50% at 10
knots, compared to the near-certainty
of death at double the speed.
But, as Moon illustrates, not all
struck whales die immediately. In
fact, if you look at the raw physics of
a collision, like Brillant and his col-
leagues did in 2020, it becomes clear
that there is no speed that can really
be considered safe.
They found that the risk of killing
a whale at 10 knots is still around
80% for large ships, while for smaller
vessels such as fishing boats, the risk
remains above 50%. “It means two
things,” said Brillant. “One is that
we can’t rely on speed restrictions to
solve this problem … and number two
is that we do need to pay attention to
the small vessels.”
To Brillant, the clear implication
is that we need full exclusion zones
where no boats are allowed, but such
areas cannot be implemented every-
where. He mentions the southern
gulf of Saint Lawrence, where North
Atlantic right whales swim between
two feeding grounds. “One of the busi-
est shipping lanes in the world, coming
into the Great Lakes, goes east-west,
and the whales are going north-south.
There’s no solution to that,” he said.
In those situations, he pins his
hopes on the imperfect speed restric-
tions. But one physicist-turned-
marine researcher thinks he has found
a way to make them more effective.
Daniel Zitterbart ’s whale-alert
system has been in the pipeline for a
decade. Now, he says, he and his col-
leagues at the Woods Hole Oceano-
graphic Institution in Massachusetts
are nearing the finish line.
In their latest paper, they model the
chances of ships spotting whales in
time to avoid them when using their
now commercialised system: software
hooked up to thermal cameras that
detect the hot air exhaled through
whale blowholes at the surface. For
smaller, manoeuvrable ships that need
less time to react, the probability “is
already 99%”, said Zitterbart.
Unwieldy, high-speed container
ships, on the other hand, need much
more warning time, so the cameras
have to detect whales when they are
further away. Because blows last only a
few seconds, they are tricky to reliably
detect at a distance. “Right now [the
reliable detection range] is between
two and three kilometres and actu-
ally we need it to go to about four,”
said Zitterbart.
He predicts this is achievable within
two to three years, at which point he
says the chance of a fast container ship
spotting a whale in time will be around
80%. But slowing the ship to 10 knots
drastically improves the odds too,
meaning that speed limits and detec-
tion tech together could already be a
winning combination.
Other, commercial detection
systems are also starting to pop
up: Orca AI, a company that makes
The carcass of a fin
whale on a quay side.
The huge increase
in sea traffic means
shipping may pose an
existential threat to
many whale species
ANGELIQUE NIJSSEN/GETTY/ISTOCKPHOTO
31
400
smart machine-vision navigation
systems, recently added a whale-
detection function.
Percentage At the moment, Orca AI’s cameras
increase in spot the tail rather than the blow, and
ship numbers Zitterbart is not convinced that is use-
worldwide ful, even if it can be detected far in
between 1992 advance, because seeing the tail often
and 2012 means the whale is diving and on its
way out of danger. Brillant is sceptical
of the whole concept, struggling to see
how any early warning could make an
enormous ship avoid a moving whale.
And even if the tech does live up
to its promise, companies need an
incentive to invest – to start, thermal
cameras cost between $30,000 and
$250,000. Zitterbart expects the rise of
autonomous vessels will bring about
that incentive, because “you don’t
want your fancy autonomous vessel
to run into an animal”. But the transi-
tion to no-crew ships will be slow, so
the real challenge will be to get the tech
on board vessels already at sea and he
sees only one path to that. “If there
is no regulator forcing it, people will
just not do it.”
Achieving regulation, whether for
mandatory speed limits, exclusion
zones or detection kit, is easier said
 A humpback than done. The relatively straight-
whale, named forward policy of banning commercial
Moon by research- whaling, for example, took decades.
ers, last year swam One thing that will help, though, is
4,800km from better data to reveal the true scale of
the coast of British the problem and what solutions have
Columbia, Canada, the most impact, but that depends on
to Hawaii with a captains consistently reporting when
broken back they have hit a whale.
PACIFIC WHALE FOUN-
DATION/NORTH COAST
Wray hopes that Moon’s story will
CETACEAN SOCIETY serve as encouragement to do just
that and that talking about Moon will
spur on legislators to take at least
local action, such as creating slow-
down zones along the coast of British
Columbia in her memory. “I think if
everybody just thinks about Moon, so
that if they see a [whale’s] blow, they
actually slow down,” she said. “That
would be really wonderful.”
Why Moon made the seemingly
impossible 4,800km journey to a
breeding ground with a broken back
is impossible to know, but Wray can’t
stop wondering if she was pregnant.
Whether she was or not, the mere pos-
sibility is a reminder that every fatal
ship strike means both the loss of a
whale and a setback to a recovering
species. Observer
IDA EMILIE STEINMARK IS A
SCIENCE WRITER WITH A BACKGROUND
IN CHEMISTRY AND BIOPHYSICS
14 April 2023 The Guardian Weekly
32 Spotlight
North America
U N I T E D S TAT E S
Closing in
The former
president
‘knows he’s
in trouble’
By David Smith WASHINGTON
I
t was the day that Donald Trump
got mugged by reality. After
years of dodging legal account-
ability, the former US president
found himself being driven towards
a New York court where he would be
charged with a crime.
“WOW, they are going to ARREST
ME,” he wrote on his Truth Social
media platform. “Can’t believe this is
happening in America.”
Trump pleaded not guilty to 34
felony counts of falsifying busi-
ness records relating to hush money
payments; it represented only the
first drop of rain in what could be a
legal thunderstorm, with more cases
fast approaching.
Michael D’Antonio, a political
The Guardian Weekly 14 April 2023
commentator and author of The Truth
About Trump, said of the first former
US president in history to be arrested
and arraigned on criminal charges:
“His attitude prior to this has always
been obstinance and a chin-jutting
pride and refusal to appear to be
affected. But he sure appeared to be
affected this time. There was a quality
of a cow being led to the slaughter. He
must realise that he’s in trouble and
that the situation is grave, and that
showed on his face.”
Trump himself will not be in jeopardy
when Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6bn
defamation lawsuit against Fox News
goes to trial, scheduled for 17 April.
But the case, which could hear testi-
mony from Fox Corporation executives
Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch and an
array of Fox News hosts, could pro-
vide some deeply embarrassing details
about how the former president is per-
ceived by the network.
Then, on 25 April, a civil trial in a
New York lawsuit involving Trump
is scheduled to begin. E Jean Carroll,
a former Elle magazine column-
ist, accuses Trump of defaming her
by denying he raped her in a dress-
ing room in New York’s Bergdorf
Goodman department store in late
1995 or early 1996. Carroll is seeking
monetary damages and it is not known
whether Trump will testify.
Another important trial is set for
2 October. Letitia James, the New York
attorney general, is suing Trump and
his Trump Organization for fraud.
James has said her office found more
200
than 200 examples of misleading asset
valuations between 2011 and 2021, and
that Trump inflated his net worth by
Number of billions of dollars.
misleading asset James said the scheme was intended
valuations found to help Trump obtain lower interest
by the office of rates on loans and better insurance
Letitia James,
the New York
coverage. The civil lawsuit seeks to
permanently bar Trump and three of
attorney general his adult children from running com-
panies in New York state, and recoup
at least $250m obtained through fraud.
Before then, in Georgia, a prosecutor
is investigating Trump’s alleged efforts
to overturn his 2020 election defeat
in that state. Fani Willis, the Fulton
County district attorney who will
decide whether to pursue charges,
told a judge in January that a special
grand jury had completed its work.
If convicted, Trump would not be
able to seek clemency from a future
Republican president since such par-
dons do not apply to state offences.
Barbara McQuade, a law professor at
the University of Michigan, said: “The
most perilous is probably the case out
of Georgia because it relates to elec-
tion interference and because there
is no ability for Trump, if he becomes
president again, to pardon himself.
Meanwhile the justice department
has investigations under way into
Trump’s actions in the 2020 election,
including lies that led to the 6 January
insurrection, and his retention of
highly classified documents after leav-
ing the White House in 2021. Both are
overseen by Jack Smith, a war crimes
prosecutor and political independent.
The FBI seized 13,000 documents
 Donald Trump from Mar-a-Lago last August; about
pleaded not 100 documents were marked classified
guilty to 34 and some designated top secret. Last
felony counts week the Washington Post newspaper
in court in reported that investigators have fresh
Manhattan evidence pointing to possible obstruc-
JANE ROSENBERG/ tion of justice by the former president
REUTERS
as he resisted a subpoena demanding
the return of all classified documents.
As for the charges over hush money
payments during the 2016 election
campaign, Trump is expected back
in court in New York on 4 December.
Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at
the Brookings Institution thinktank in
Washington, said: “The moment he set
foot into official custody in New York
probably was a chilling realisation for
him of the difficulties that lie ahead ...
It’s that feeling of the walls closing in
from every direction.”
DAVID SMITH IS THE GUARDIAN’S
WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF
 Spotlight
Global
POLITICS
Why are
so many
women
leaving the
world stage?
By Jonathan Yerushalmy
O
n a recent speaking tour in
Australia, Barack Obama
offered up his idea on how
to turn the tide on more
than a decade of democratic ero-
sion, to steer the world on to a path of
sustainability and peace: “I am actu-
ally convinced that if we could try an
experiment in which every country
on Earth was run by women for just
two years … I am confident the world
would tilt in a better direction.”
Obama’s interviewer – former
Australian foreign minister Julie Bishop
– replied, saying female leaders would
only need six months. Data, however,
shows that even the far more modest
goal of parity between the sexes in
global leadership remains distant.
Fewer than a third of the UN’s 193
member states have ever had a female
leader and, while there has been a huge
proportional rise in women at the top
of global politics in the past 20 years,
the numbers remain incredibly low.
Only 12 UN member states have
female leaders, down from 17 in 2022.
Research from UN Women suggests
that gender equality at the highest
positions of power will not be reached
for 130 years. The growth in the num-
ber of female leaders has plateaued.
In January, Jacinda Ardern resigned
as prime minister of New Zealand say-
ing she “no longer had enough in the
tank” to do the job. Moldova’s Natalia
Gavrilita quit as prime minister in
February, blaming crises caused by
“Russian aggression”. Nicola Sturgeon
stood down in February after more
than eight years as Scotland’s first
minister, saying the “time was right”.
This month, Sanna Marin – the
33
world’s youngest prime minister – lost ▼ Sanna Marin lost a closely fought
a closely fought election in Finland. election in Finland earlier this month
Dr Federica Caso, a lecturer in LEHTIKUVA/ REUTERS
international relations at La Trobe
University, warned that growing
militarisation across the world could
spell uncertainty for all female leaders.
“Voters tend to see men as more reli-
able on defence and security,” she said.
A 2018 survey from Pew Research
partly bears this out. The majority of
US voters said there was no difference
between female and male political
leaders. However, in areas such as edu-
cation and healthcare, women were
deemed to be more effective, and in
areas of national security and defence,
men were thought to do a better job.
Women came up against stereotypi-
cal ideas of how they should behave,
particularly from the media, Caso said.
Ardern faced personal attacks
unprecedented in New Zealand
politics. Threats against her nearly
tripled over three years. In her resig-
nation announcement, she said they
did “have an impact”. Marin suffered
intrusive, often sexist scrutiny of her
private life, notably while facing an
inquiry after video emerged of her
drinking and dancing with friends.
Sexist media coverage can have
an effect on female leaders’ ability
to secure donations for election
campaigns, Caso said. “It’s hard …
constantly being challenged on your
gender as opposed to your policies.”
The unequal pressures of family
commitments and caring responsi-
bilities are also held up as a potential
reason that the tenure of female
leaders – a median length of 2.1 years, Front and centre children’s affairs or women and gender
according to Pew Research – is so short. In the UN research, equality than foreign affairs, defence
Research from the European parlia- a leader is defined or economic positions. That means
ment in 2021 shows that gender-equal as the person the traditional path to power remains
societies enjoy better health, stronger with executive more difficult for women to traverse.
economic growth and higher security. power and overall Some countries have enacted gen-
Perhaps unsurprisingly, female responsibility for der quotas to progress equal repre-
populations have far better outcomes the running of sentation. A 2021 UN study found that
when they are represented in decision- a country. This is countries that legislated candidate
making roles. In Norway, a study found a head of state or quotas saw an increase in women’s
a direct relationship between the pres- president, as is representation. But only 13 countries
ence of women on municipal councils the case in the US have cabinets that have reached gen-
and the level of childcare on offer. Caso or France, or of der parity, and just six countries have
warned of not lumping women into government, as in parliaments with 50% or more women.
one group but said studies suggested the UK or Australia. Obama’s dream of women running
The data only
that women tended to “negotiate and the world for two years remains dis-
includes countries
mediate [and] to be more diplomatic”. tant, and experts consider it far too
represented in the
While the number of female foreign simplistic. “After two years, you would
UN, so Taiwan’s
ministers is several times higher than see that women are not a homogenous
Tsai Ing-wen,
the number of female leaders, barriers category,” said Caso. “But it would turn
for example, is
remain. Data from UN Women shows the world upside down.”
not included.
that women are more likely to be given JONATHAN YERUSHALMY IS GUARDIAN
cabinet portfolios related to family and AUSTRALIA’S UK/US SITE EDITOR
14 April 2023 The Guardian Weekly
34 Special investigation

Cost
of
the
crown

The Guardian Weekly 14 April 2023

I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y D O U G C H AY K A
35

By David Pegg and Paul Lewis

In the run-up to
the coronation of
King Charles III, the
Guardian’s Cost of the
crown series examiness
the entrenched
secrecy around the
royal family’s wealth.
Our investigation
exposes the money the he
king and his late mother
her
extracted from vast land
and
and property portfoliosos
run as commercial
enterprises, and how
their riches compare
with Europe’s other
royal families
14 April 2023 The Guardian Weekly
36 Cost of the crown
H
ow much money will the coronation
of King Charles III cost the British
public? What tax rate will the new
king pay on his private income? How
many engagements did “working
royals” such as the Dukes of Glouces-
ter and Kent attend over the past five
years? How much were they paid?
How much rent do Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, who
are not working royals, pay for residences in royal palaces?
In recent weeks, the Guardian has posed all of these
questions to Buckingham Palace. The responses boil down
to “ask someone else”, “work it out for yourself ”, or simply
“you have no right to know”. We beg to differ.
Obituaries of Queen Elizabeth II uniformly applauded
her calm stewardship of the realm, or her supposed non-
interference in British politics. None mentioned another
hallmark of her reign: entrenched secrecy, which has given
rise to a culture in which the British people are deprived of
the most basic information about the monarchy.
Correspondence with the monarch or the heir, whether
seismic or harmless, is banned from disclosure. Parliamen-
tary criticism of the conduct of royal family members, no
matter how disgraced, is prohibited. The palace says the
royal archives – the repository of our constitutional monar-
chy’s history – are open to “any serious researcher”. How-
ever, they are the private property of the Windsors, who
grant permission before researchers can examine them.
Nowhere is the refusal to let the light in more fiercely
90
Years that royal wills should remain
sealed, according to a ruling by the
president of the family court after
the death of Prince Philip in 2021
The Guardian Weekly 14 April 2023
£1.2bn
The amount Charles and the
late queen took in private
income from royal estates
enforced by the royals than over financial matters. The
wills of even obscure members rs of the family are censored
by judicial decree. The royalss closely guard the secrets off
their financial wealth, insistingng it is “private” even when
ic roles.
it is clearly born of their public
It should not detract from Elizabeth II’s achievements
ll
to observe how this addiction to secrecy allowed d the
h most
unacceptable and corrosive practices to take root. In the
past three years, official papers uncovered by the Guardian
have revealed how the Queen and her advisers repeatedly
abused the procedure of crown consent to secretly alter
British laws, including, in 1973, as part of a successful bid to
conceal her “embarrassing” private wealth from the public.
Until at least 1968, and very probably after, Elizabeth II’s
household did not appoint “coloured immigrants or for-
eigners” to clerical roles, although they were permitted
to work as domestic servants. Even today, Buckingham
Palace insists it only complies with non-discrimination
law voluntarily. Does the king approve of this? What other
abuses have yet to be revealed? And how are they going
to come to light when the monarchy is exempt from the
Freedom of Information Act (FoI)?
The Guardian has launched Cost of the crown, an inves-
tigation into royal wealth and finances. Our reporting will
reveal information in the public interest about the fortunes
that have been quietly amassed by the royals by dint of
their public function. Our reporting will also demonstrate
the vast challenge of obtaining answers to the most simple
of questions.
Take, for example, the question of how much public
money is spent on security for the royal family. The govern-
ment, so often the monarch’s ally over matters of secrecy,
claims that to disclose even just a single totalised figure for
the entire family, without any further details whatsoever,
would constitute an unacceptable threat to their safety.
It refuses to explain this reasoning in any detail, or why
heads of state in other developed countries, including On the website
French and US presidents, can publish details about the Cost of the
costs of their security. crown: an
Instead, an FoI request to disclose the security costs of investigation
British royals was rejected, first by the Home Office and into royal wealth
then, on appeal, by the Information Commissioner’s Office and finances

– forcing the Guardian to instruct lawyers last month to
bring a further appeal at the information tribunal. To say
it will take months to get an answer would be optimistic.
It took our colleague Rob Evans 10 years and a trip to the
supreme court to secure the release under FoI of Prince
Charles’s “black spider memos”, which showed how the
heir to the throne lobbied senior government ministers
on everything from badger culling to alternative herbal
medicines. The government spent more than £400,000
($500,000) on legal costs in an ultimately failed bid to
keep the memos secret.
This is not merely a problem for journalists. Academics,
biographers, archivists, activists, curious citizens and even
parliamentarians seeking basic information are denied clear
answers. Rory Cormac and Richard Aldrich, historians of
Britain’s intelligence services, are well acquainted with
official secrecy where it is warranted.
“Richard and I have both spent our entire careers trying
to write histories of MI5 and MI6,” Cormac said. “We com-
pletely understand the need for secrecy around intelligence
services. We spend our time going through archives, trying
to piece together snippets of declassified material, to arrive
at something historically rigorous. We think the intelligence
services are the secret state. But they are like WikiLeaks
compared to the royal family.”
How hard are the royals working for
their money?
In 1993, John Major’s government published an open gov-
ernment white paper that was ahead of its time in setting
out a vision for an informed citizenry, including on royal
matters. It declared: “Records relating to the royal family
will be treated in the same way as all other records.”
The previous year, Elizabeth II acknowledged in a speech
at the City of London’s Guildhall that “no institution – City,
monarchy, whatever – should expect to be free from the
scrutiny of those who give it their loyalty”.
The clarity of those commitments makes the secrecy
in the ensuing decades all the more striking. One stark
example is the creation of the sovereign grant, the fund-
ing settlement introduced in 2011 by David Cameron’s
coalition government.
The previous system for funding the royals, the civil
list, had been in operation since the 18th century. For all
its flaws, it provided parliament with a breakdown of how
much money each member of the family was to be paid. And
it gave the elected representatives of the British people a
regular chance to debate how much taxpayer money should
be handed over to the unelected monarch.
Under the sovereign grant, public funding for the royals
is set as a proportion of the profits of the crown estate. It
has proved to be a financial coup for the royals, who had
surrendered the crown estate in 1760.
The Windsors no longer have to endure the civil list
ritual of parliamentarians debating how much they should
receive. The settlement has proved generous (£86m this
year) and an expected windfall in crown estate profits has
put the king in the enviable position of having to ask for a
reduction in future payments.
Yet our attempt to discover precisely what public func-
tions royals have fulfilled in return for all this money is
less than straightforward. The palace directed reporters
to the Court Circular, the official record of their activities.
37
However, the information is only available in daily editions,
with no totals and no way of easily searching what engage-
Classified ments royals have undertaken in recent years.
Means used To work this out, we first had to drive to the village of
Datchet in Berkshire, and the home of Tim O’Donovan,
by the royal an amiable retired insurance broker who has spent the
family to evade past 44 years compiling his own paper records of these
financial engagements; archives that he generously agreed to share.
scrutiny We commissioned a team of software engineers to build a
machine-learning program to read as many of the circulars
Right to know as have been digitised and ask it to analyse them in an effort
Unlike other to find answers. If the UK is going have a royal family as its
publicly funded head of state, surely its citizens should have easier access
organisations, to information about what exactly they do for them?
the monarchy
is exempt What is kept secret from the British public?
from requests
made under The disparity between how we treat regular public figures
the Freedom of and those who happen to have royal blood is made plain
Information Act when they die. Under British law, wills are public, partly
to prevent fraud or malpractice by executors. However,
Funding the wills of the royal family are routinely sealed by judges.
No information The historical event that gave rise to this custom was the
is published on cover-up of a royal sex scandal.
the cost of royal Until 1911, Windsor family wills – other than those of a
security, and monarch – were public, like any other British family. The
no breakdown judiciary began censoring them at the request of Queen
is given of how Mary after the death of her brother, Francis of Teck, in order
the sovereign to conceal from the public his decision to bequeath jewels
grant is shared to a woman with whom he was having an affair.
between royals “Queen Mary wanted them back again,” explains Michael
Nash, a lecturer in British constitution at the University of
Duties East Anglia. “She called in her legal advisers and she said:
While not secret, ‘I want nobody to know about this.’ So the will was sealed.”
it is hard to Members of the family have been able to request their
discover how wills be hidden, on account of their bloodline, ever since.
many public Official papers reveal senior government officials seriously
functions royals doubted the legal basis for this process half a century ago,
perform, with but it has continued unabated.
only the daily After the death of Prince Philip in 2021, the president
Court Circular of the family court, Sir Andrew McFarlane, held a secret
offering details hearing from which the media were in effect excluded. The
judge went further than ruling that just Philip’s will should
Wills be sealed, announcing that the wills of all senior royals
It was decided in should henceforth be secret for a minimum of 90 years.
a secret hearing McFarlane did not fully explain how he reached this
in 2021, from 90-year figure in the judgment; it exceeds the normal level
which the media of secrecy applied to government papers almost five times
were barred, that over. It means that if Catherine, Princess of Wales, sur-
senior royals’ vives as long as her grandfather-in-law, her will cannot be
wills should be unsealed until the year 2171. Once that period has elapsed,
kept sealed for her will could be disclosed to the public. But only, following
90 years McFarlane’s ruling, with the Windsors’ permission.
When McFarlane’s judgment was made public, the
Guardian hired lawyers to mount a legal challenge – not
over the decision to seal the will, but over the media’s exclu-
sion from the hearing, on the grounds it was contrary to the
principle of open justice. We lost the case, after the court
of appeal ruled that the media did not have the right to be
notified about it. In their ruling, the judges observed that
publicity of the court hearing would have compromised
the need to preserve the dignity of the queen and
her family’s
y privacy.
p cy. 
McFarlane’s ruling is being
b cited by the National
14 April 2023 The Guardian Weekly
 Cost of the crown

Archives to justify banning researchers from other public

records discussing the royal family’s wealth. Four files
sought by the Guardian concerning bequests of obscure
members of the family – Helen, Duchess of Albany; Alastair,
Duke of Connaught and Strathearn; Princess Victoria, and
Princess Arthur of Connaught – are now sealed.  Mathilde
and Philippe
Challenging questions for the king of Belgium
 Máxima
Last year, the veteran broadcaster David Dimbleby, who and Willem-
led the BBC commentary of the queen’s funeral, broke with Alexander
custom to advance an opinion that some might categorise of the
as political. Speaking at a literary festival, he complained Netherlands
about Buckingham Palace’s attempts to steer the state
broadcaster’s coverage, and complained that the BBC had
an “old sore about the monarchy”.
The corporation, he said, “would not go near things like
the power that the palace has to change taxation legisla-
tion”, or ask whether the Duchy of Cornwall, a business
portfolio that controversially generates profits for the Prince
Glücksburgs v Borbóns
of Wales, should pay tax.
“All those issues are never touched by the BBC because I
Comparing payments to
think they feel their viewers will not like it – a visceral feel-
ing,” he said. “It is not discourteous to question, it is not
European royal families
rude, it is important, because the way we are governed is
important, and the way our constitution works is important.” Comparing the cost
The Cost of the crown series asks challenging ques-
tions of the new king. Questions about the personal
of Europe’s royal
enrichment of his family, and the extent to which they dynasties is akin to
have profited from their public roles. Questions about the comparisons between
dubious origins of some of their wealth. And questions United Kingdom
apples and oranges.
about whether the public is getting value for money for the Family name/House:
record sums it gives over each year to fund the Windsors Each family is unique, The Windsors
and their lavish lifestyle. and each government Monarch: King Charles III
Buckingham Palace argues that the financial arrange- has a different way of Approximate public funding:
ments of royals should “remain private, as they would for $107m-$152m
any other individual”. But the mist that shrouds such ques- paying for them. Some
tions comes from the confusion over what can legitimately royal budgets cover There is no breakdown of how
be called the royals’ private wealth, what belongs to the the cost of maintaining much individual members
British people and what, as so often is the case, ambigu- of the royal family receive
ously straddles the two.
palaces, staff and for their official duties. The
These are not easy topics for King Charles to confront. security; others are monarch does receive a lump
He may prefer that we were not raising them on the eve of limited to annual sum – the sovereign grant –
his coronation. But we believe the time is right. which has risen dramatically
stipends to individual
DAVID PEGG IS A GUARDIAN REPORTER; over the past decade. The UK
PAUL LEWIS IS HEAD OF INVESTIGATIONS AT THE GUARDIAN kings or queens. taxpayer gave £86.3m ($107m)
Cost of the crown reporting team: David Pegg, Rob Evans, Tax is paid by some towards the cost of the British
Maeve McClenaghan, Felicity Lawrence, Henry Dyer, European royals but royal family last year.
Severin Carrell, Manisha Ganguly, Rupert Neate, Greg Controversially, the
Wood, Harry Davies, David Conn, Aamna Mohdin, Lucy not others. Some new king and his heir,
Hough, Maya Wolfe-Robinson and Richard Nelsson countries are highly Prince William, also receive

1911
transparent, providing income from two hereditary
estates – the Duchy of
detailed breakdowns Lancaster and the Duchy of
of how public money Cornwall – currently more
is spent on individual than $49.6m a year.
From 1993, the monarch
royals. Others are more
agreed to pay “voluntary”
The year when royal family wills opaque. One thing, at income tax, although they
least, is clear: European are exempt from inheritance
began to be sealed by the judiciary, royal families come tax, meaning the late queen
at Queen Mary’s request, prompted with vastly different
passed her fortune to the king
without any deductions for
by the covering up of a sex scandal price tags. the public good.

The Guardian Weekly 14 April 2023


Spain
Family name/House:
The Borbóns (or Bourbons)
Monarch: King Felipe VI
Approximate public funding:
$9.2m
Spain’s royal family ranks
among the most beleaguered
on the continent. Marred by
accusations of corruption,
extramarital affairs and
a precipitous fall from
grace, the former king Juan
Carlos I abdicated in 2014 and
eventually left the country.
Investigations into his
financial dealings were
eventually shelved and the
former king’s lawyers noted
he had been cleared of “any
illicit conduct susceptible to
criminal reproach”.
However, the scandals led
to an intense debate among
Spaniards about their royal
family, who this year will
receive €8,431,150 ($9.2m)
from the state budget.
Seeking to present
a new era of transparency,
Juan Carlos’s son, King
Felipe VI, made public his
personal assets of €2.6m.
He renounced his personal
inheritance from his father in
2020 and removed him from
the royal family’s payroll.
From the public grant, Felipe
receives €269,296 in an annual
personal allowance. Spanish
royals pay tax on their income.
Sweden
Family name/House:
The Bernadottes
Monarch: King Carl XVI Gustaf
Approx public funding: $14.3m
Sweden was the first
monarchy to change its rules
on succession from agnatic
primogeniture (the eldest
male son) to absolute cognatic
primogeniture (the eldest
child). The change was passed
by the Swedish parliament
in 1980, and led to Crown
Princess Victoria becoming heir
apparent instead of her brother
Prince Carl Philip.
The Swedish royal court
received a total grant of 147.9m
Swedish krona ($14.2m) in 2021
(the latest figure available).
Of this, 73.9m kr covered
the cost of the king’s official
duties, travel, staff and stables.
Within this, 13.6m kr was
allocated to the king and other
titled royals who carry out
official duties to cover costs of
a “non-official nature which are
connected with, or caused by,
the royal position”.
In 2019, the king stripped
five of his grandchildren of
their royal titles to reduce the
total cost of “appendages” to
serving royals.
Belgium
Family name/House:
Van België, de Belgique, or von
Belgien (or “of Belgium”)
Monarch: King Philippe
Approx public funding: $15.5m
Like the British royals, the
Belgian monarchy ditched
its previous surname,
Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, in
1920 in response to fierce
anti-German sentiment after
the first world war. The new
name – van België (Dutch),
de Belgique (French) or von
Belgien (German) – means “of
Belgium” in the country’s three
official languages.
The Belgian monarch has
had no direct power since 1951,
although the king has kept the
right “to be consulted by his
ministers, to encourage them,
and to caution them”.
The current monarch,
King Philippe, or Filip, is
granted an annual civil list to
cover the cost of performing
official duties. The amount is
established at the start of each
reign. Philippe, who acceded
to the throne in 2013, received
€12.5m in 2021. The amount
is set to increase with the
consumer prices index measure
of inflation. As well as the
money paid to Philippe, other
members of the royal family
receive yearly “emoluments”.
Denmark
Family name/House:
The Glücksburgs
Monarch: Queen Margrethe II
Approx public funding: $17.4m
On average, each Dane cycles
1.4km a day, according to
the Denmark tourist board,
and those cyclists include
the royal family. Frederik,
the crown prince and heir
apparent, competed in the
Tour de Storebælt cycle race
near Copenhagen; he and his
wife, Mary, ferry their children
around town on a cargo bike.
Queen Margrethe II, 82,
Europe’s longest-serving
monarch, receives about 91.1m
kroner a year ($13.3m) in civil
list payments. The government
says this covers expenses
“relating to staff, operation
of the royal household,
administration and properties
as well as the queen’s expenses
of a more private nature”.
Separately, Frederik receives
22,434,876 kroner a year, 10%
of which goes to his wife. All
the money is received tax-free.
Norway
Family name/House:
The Glücksburgs
Monarch: King Harald V
Approx public funding: $30m
The Norwegian monarchy dates
back more than 1,000 years.
Harald Fairhair is regarded
as the first Norwegian king,
who united several “petty
kingships” into a single realm
39
in about 885. The current
king belongs to the House of
Glücksburg, which has held the
Norwegian throne since 1905.
The royal court’s latest
annual accounts say the
Norwegian royal family
received 312m Norwegian
kroner ($29.8m) in 2022 in the
civil list. It is unclear how this is
distributed. A previous reportport
from 2015 states that “the
king and queen and the crown own
prince and crown princess all
receive an allowance” to coverover
“the management, operation, ion,
maintenance and development ment
of the private properties
and households, as well ass
appropriations for private
expenses and official attire”.e”.
The Netherlands
Family name/House:
Van Orange-Nassau
Monarch: King
Willem-Alexander
Approx public funding: $55m
55m
The Dutch royals are among ong
the monarchies exempt from rom
paying income tax. This year,
the prime minister, Mark Rutte,
rejected opposition demandsands
to scrap the exemption.
His government proposed d
an annual royal budget off
€50.2m for 2023.
That includes €1,035,000000 for
King Willem-Alexander, and
a further €5.37m to pay foror his
staff and other expenses..
Princess Amalia, the
hrone,
19-year-old heir to the throne,
has been granted €1.72m m:
€307,000 is salary and thehe
nses.
rest is for staff and expenses.
However, she has waived d
ce,
her right to the allowance,
saying it would make herr feel
“uncomfortable” to accept ept it
“until I incur high costs in my
ge”
role as Princess of Orange”.
RUPERT NEATE IS THE GUARDIAN’S
WEALTH CORRESPONDENT; HENRY
DYER IS AN INVESTIGATIONS
REPORTER FOR THE GUARDIAN;
ASHIFA KASSAM IS A JOURNALIST
BASED IN SPAIN
14 April 2023 The Guardian Weekly
40

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By Christopher de Bellaigue

The Guardian Weekly 14 April 2023

 41

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back – which made the sound of a loud hairdryer. As the eVTOLs are the exception to that rule. Consider all that
spectators bobbed nervously from foot to foot, the machine bespoke composite bodywork and fly-by-wire techno-
rose into the air, tipped a bow and hovered for 10 seconds logy; the way Maker’s rotors sit flat, like adorable baby
or so before coming gently to earth. Everyone cheered and helicopters, for takeoff and landing, but tilt for forward
clapped and exchanged slightly standoffish hugs. Back in flight; the tantalising promise of full automation. There is
the headquarters of Archer Aviation in Palo Alto, watching something about pure electric that appeals to the antiseptic,
▲ High hopes events on a huge screen, the rest of the company’s employ- unsooty aesthetic of our age. If you peer into the workings
Battery-powered ees were on their feet, whooping and whistling. of a Maker, you’ll see a neatly stowed battery pack and some
prototype of It was the first test flight for Maker, Archer Aviation’s cables; the cabin gives off the smell of a sanitised rental car.
what Lilium aims version of a new kind of aircraft called an electric vertical Following the first successful test flight, Archer’s
to fly by 2025 takeoff and landing vehicle. This masterpiece of nomen- CEO Adam Goldstein’s next task is to guide Maker 
LILIUM clature should on no account be attempted when drunk; through certification with the Federal Aviation

14 April 2023 The Guardian Weekly

42 Net-zero flight

Administration, a process that can take years and costs

hundreds of millions of dollars. It also means preparing for
mass production (Archer has entered a partnership with
Stellantis, one of the world’s biggest carmakers), identify-
ing routes and takeoff sites in cooperation with municipal
authorities, and preparing ordinary people for what may
be a turning point in their flying lives – the moment when
a plane stops trying to be a train, running scheduled services
from point to point and packing in large numbers of people,
and becomes a taxi on demand.
Hundreds of companies have entered the well-
capitalised world of urban air mobility, which will over the
next few years be shaken down to a few dozen contenders.
Joby, a California rival, and the German
company Lilium also have a head start
through mergers with blank-cheque
companies. In January 2022, Boeing put
$450m into Wisk Aero, a startup backed
by Google co-founder Larry Page. Then
there is Airbus’s urban air mobility
programme, CityAirbus NextGen, and
the Israeli startup Urban Aeronautics,
whose small-format CityHawk is pro-
pelled by enclosed rotors and, according
to a delightful company statement, “has
more in common with the birds who nest
upon the rooftops of skyscrapers than
with nearly every other eVTOL proto-
type”. But will this investment lead the
industry to its declared objective of net-zero flight? environmental crisis has made the principle of “polluter
In 2018, CO2 emissions from civil aviation represented pays” a fact of life for many economic sectors. Whether it is
about 2.4% of global emissions caused by human activity. through carbon pricing for power plants, fines for farmers
But the impact of aviation on the climate goes beyond CO2, who pollute rivers or visitor taxes to mitigate the effects
which may constitute little more than a third of the sector’s of overtourism, the idea that the cost of environmental
contribution to climate change. Aircraft also release nitrogen degradation must be borne by those who create it has been
oxides, oxidised sulphur, water vapour and contrail cirrus widely, if grudgingly, accepted. Not, however, by the avia-
– artificial clouds produced when water vapour condenses tion industry. The customer whom it treats the best, the
around soot from the plane’s exhaust at high altitude. This frequent flyer, is the worst polluter. And the most logical
temporarily increases the amount of heat trapped in the way to reduce aviation’s contribution to global warming,
atmosphere. All of these affect the climate; their combined which is for people to fly less, is the one that the airlines
effect is to warm it – in the case of contrail cirrus, much – and their political allies – steadfastly refuse to entertain.
more intensively, if more briefly, than CO2. Released at high The aviation industry revels in its own exceptionalism,
altitudes, aviation emissions have between two and four which is indivisible from its sense of entitlement and is
times the impact of comparable ground-source emissions. The logical reflected in the bizarre privileges it enjoys. It has no equiva-

I
f we take these impacts into account, we see that
aviation represents about 3.5% of the warming
impact caused by humans. That compares with
around 6% for the cement sector and 17% for road
transport. Aviation barely counts as a mass activity,
and it’s rarely essential. Most people take planes
to have fun at the other end. Aviation has a strong claim to
be the most damaging leisure activity around.
A long car journey of, say, 11 hours, with breaks for fuel
and other necessities, might cover 1,000km. In a full car,
the amount of fuel burned by each passenger is under 14kg.
In the same 11 hours in an airliner, you’ve gone from Paris
to San Francisco, a distance of 8,850km, and the average
amount of fuel burned by each passenger exceeds 300kg.
And that’s assuming the plane is full. If it’s half-empty, the
per-person burn is much higher.
As a sector, transport lags behind global climate targets.
Within transport, aviation is even further behind, sharing a
subset (with shipping) of spectacular underachievers. The
lent of the tax that drivers pay at the petrol pump. Nor
way to cut is VAT levied on international air tickets. Like shipping
aviation’s – another sector that scorns national jurisdictions – cross-
border aviation is absent from the 2015 Paris agreement on
input to climate change, in part because of the difficulty of assigning
global responsibility for the emissions of flights in which a carrier
from one country flies from a second to a third.
warming is In 2016, the International Civil Aviation Organization
one airlines agreed to the outline of a carbon offsetting and reduction
scheme for international aviation, or Corsia, which aimed
and their to stabilise emissions at 2020 levels. Under the scheme,
allies refuse airlines buy offsets – planting trees, investing in solar farms
or distributing low-emission stoves – to atone for excess
to entertain growth in carbon emissions above an agreed limit. Carbon
offsetting is hated by environmental groups, which estimate
that a lot of the emission reductions under the scheme would
have happened anyway. Even after it becomes mandatory
in 2027 – India, China and Russia are among the countries
that haven’t joined – it won’t include domestic flights, which
produce more than a third of industry emissions.

The Guardian Weekly 14 April 2023


 Uplifting Unlike many other sectors, aviation’s decarbonisation
A model of an efforts are barely out of the starting blocks. Of the tech-
eVTOL by Uber, nologies vying to dominate the future of “green aviation”,
which declared it’s unclear which stand the greatest chance of success.
such aircraft Advocates of hydrogen-powered flight point out that this
would become wondrous element packs much carbon-free energy, but
‘affordable daily hydrogen will require big changes to aircraft design and
transportation for infrastructure on the ground. Proponents of a kind of sus-
the masses’ tainable aviation fuel (SAF) called e-fuel – which involves
ROBYN BECK/AFP/GETTY sucking carbon out of the air and fusing it with hydrogen –
consider biofuels to be almost as polluting as hydrocarbons.
Yet President Joe Biden’s administration put these fuels,
made from US crops, at the heart of its plans to ramp up
SAF production to 3bn gallons a year by 2030. (Last year
that figure was a mere 60m.) Some see a place for carbon
capture and sequestration – that is, filtering off carbon
dioxide produced by industry before it is released into the
atmosphere, and burying it. Others regard it as an expen-
sive irrelevance. All sides deride electrification – all except
those investors who have poured billions into electric flight.
But here is the silver lining. Thousands of startups and
new units within companies are pouring resources into
technologies that have made flying green their objective.
There’s a chance that the cumbersome, needy, petulant,
change-averse behemoth that is modern aviation is starting
to rediscover the fearlessness of the first aviators, and that
by finally shouldering its responsibilities it will set itself
on a path to eliminating the greenhouse gases it has spent
recent decades so blithely emitting.
I
 Up in the air
From left: a Joby t was in 2016 that eVTOLs first started receiving
air taxi outside attention, when Uber Elevate, the ride-hailing and
the New York food-delivery platform’s urban air mobility divi-
stock exchange in sion, published a research paper that presented
2021 and a self- small aircraft running on renewable electricity as
flying Wisk Aero part of a broader endeavour to decarbonise soci-
eVTOL air taxi ety. Uber Elevate also declared that, through automobile-
ANDREW KELLY/ REUTERS; style mass manufacturing, such aircraft would become
WISK/AFP/GETTY
“an affordable form of daily transportation for the masses,
even less expensive than owning a car”.
Another surge of hype came in 2019, when Morgan
Stanley predicted that by 2040 the market for autonomous
urban aircraft could be worth $1.5tn, a forecast that made its
way into investor pitches. Morgan Stanley later revised this
figure down to a mere $1tn, but stood by its assertion that
eVTOLs could have as dramatic an effect on transport as cars
did in the early 20th century and commercial airliners after
the second world war. “Radical changes to transportation
modality,” the investment house noted, “don’t so much
‘cannibalise’ the current/prevailing form of transport …
as totally reinvent and rescale the size of the market itself,
frequently by orders of magnitude.”
Archer will sell direct to airlines – as it did in 2021, when
United placed an order for $1bn worth of Archer planes,
with an option for half as many again. Its second aim is to
become a ride-sharing platform; “taking” an Archer will
mean using the app to book a seat in a vehicle leaving in 20
minutes from near your home, a commute that – miracu-
lously – won’t require you to sit in traffic for hours.
Goldstein showed me a 2020 clip of Jay Merkle, the avia-
tion federation official in charge of certifying eVTOLs, say-
ing: “Probably the biggest question I get … is: ‘Are they really
happening?’ Yes, this is more than just hype … we have at
least six aircraft well along in their type certification, which
43
is the first step in introducing the new aircraft into opera-
tion.” In 2021, Archer had another round of certification
approved, taking it closer to full commercial certification.
There’s something endlessly fascinating about America’s
record of contributing so handsomely to the climate cri-
sis and then regarding it as a business opportunity with
a workaround. The atmosphere at Archer isn’t moody
and apocalyptic, as it can be at some of the introspective
European startups I have visited. It’s possibly the effect of
the California sun, but the idea that you can create a new
category of aviation using components from around the
world and that this might actually be good for the climate
has been internalised without demur.
T
he idea that no problem of human origin is
so great that it cannot be overcome, and that
it engages every atom of human ingenuity
and profit-lust, has been known to bring out
the cynic in me. (Surely better to avoid creat-
ing the problem?) But meeting Geoff Bower,
Archer’s unfeasibly youthful chief engineer, who comes to
work in a Tesla Model Y and wrote his Stanford doctoral
thesis on the way albatrosses fly over the ocean without
flapping (they borrow energy from the atmosphere), I get
the feeling that the problem isn’t about abstractions and
guilt. It’s about physics.
The problem is taking off and landing. The bigger the area
covered by your rotors – the disc area – the less power you
need in order to take off, but the more you need in order to
cruise, because the drag is higher. The balance that Archer
tries to strike between disc area and drag involves tilting
Maker’s front six rotors in cruise and relying on its fixed
wings to provide lift in horizontal flight.
But of all the fuel technologies currently in development,
electric batteries offer by far the least power for the most
weight. A kilogram of petrol holds 13 kilowatt-hours (the
amount of energy used per hour) of energy. A kilogram
of lithium-ion battery holds not even 0.3 kilowatt-hours.
That we’re even able to contemplate electric-powered
aircraft is thanks to Elon Musk, whose Tesla Inc has done
more than any other entity, public or private, to stimulate
improvements in the lithium-ion battery. That puny-sound-
ing 0.3 kilowatt-hours is in fact five times more energy than
the old lead-acid battery could muster. Electric motors are
between two and three times more efficient than combus-
tion engines. And batteries can be recharged.
Although flying an electric plane produces no old-school
CO2, nitrogen oxide or water vapour, that doesn’t mean
they are entirely good for the climate. The lifecycle climate
impact of eVTOLs depends on other things. The first is
the impact of the components that go into them. This can
be alleviated through recycling: batteries have terrestrial
applications long after they are past their shelf life in the air,
and in the future eVTOLs may be built of thermoplastics that
can be remoulded. But more than anything, the sustain-
ability or otherwise of all-electric craft depends on where
the electricity that charges their batteries comes from.
A technology’s carbon intensity is a measure of emis-
sions of CO2 or its equivalent over its entire life – includ-
ing materials, construction, use, demolition and disposal,
referred to as lifecycle – compared with the megawatts of
energy expended. Just how far electric aviation must
progress before it becomes truly climate friendly 
was illustrated in an assessment by environmental
14 April 2023 The Guardian Weekly
44 Net-zero flight
and aviation scientists in the UK
and US. Basing their calculations
on the 2015 average US grid CO2
intensity, they found that all-
electric aircraft would have a life-
cycle carbon intensity 20% higher
than that of their jet engine coun-
terparts. Taking into account
non-CO2 impacts brought the
figure down by around 30%.
 At a high price The International Energy Agency has forecast that the
Most people use world’s electric power demand will near-double between
planes as a way 2010 and 2040 (without accounting for aviation or ground
to get somewhere transportation electrification), but that emissions from
and have fun, generating electric power will drop by only about 5% due
yet flying is to continued use of coal. In India taking an electric train can
one of the most be more damaging to the climate than flying. If you’re run-
damaging leisure ning a plane using electricity from the Brazilian grid, which
activities around has a high share of renewables, your lifecycle emissions are
AMER GHAZZAL/ALAMY likely to be lower than those in China, where most electricity
comes from coal. Nothing is truly climate friendly unless
everything about it is climate friendly. And this, naturally,
isn’t something that a plane manufacturer can guarantee.
I
s the eVTOL a commercially viable product or
a genuine weapon against climate change? When
I spoke to Richard Aboulafia, an aviation analyst
at AeroDynamic Advisory, he pointed out that the
aviation technologies that can be reproduced at
scale are often least good for the environment.
He described eVTOLs as this “bizarre circus sideshow … in
which everybody has decided that the thing that should be
most funded is the thing that does the least good”.
Decarbonisation surely doesn’t mean creating new
demand for emissions, no matter how cleverly their impact
is reduced. It means replacement – getting rid of what is
costly to the climate and putting in its place something less
damaging, or not damaging at all. And Aboulafia is right to
Is the question whether this is what eVTOLs achieve. The money
eVTOL and ingenuity going into the sector are stupendous, but
the only way that all these resources will help the climate
a viable in the wider sense – that’s to say, lessen the effects of the
product or wrecking ball that is smashing its way through our weather
– is for electric flight to assume heavier loads over longer
a genuine distances and enter the grownup world of aviation proper.
weapon If we accept that sustainable aviation fuels are currently
the only pathway to zero-carbon long-distance flying, what
against about flights whose range is under 800km? Two electric
climate strategies are possible solutions. The one that is closer to
hand is hybrid electric. A hybrid engine involves burning
change? fuel of one kind or another, and using that to charge and/
or augment your batteries.
In June 2022, Rolls-Royce, the world’s second-largest
aircraft engine manufacturer, unveiled the prototype of a
new compact engine, a “turbogenerator”, which burns fuel
to turn propellers directly or charge batteries on board, ena-
bling aircraft to switch between power sources depending
on the phase of the flight (and how much power remains in
the batteries). The generator can be scaled to deliver power
in the range of 500kW–1,200kW, handily capable of propel-
ling single-aisle airliners well over the 250km or so that is
the absolute upper limit of the most ambitious eVTOL. To
reduce emissions while using such a configuration, the
pilot could switch to battery power during carbon-intensive
The Guardian Weekly 14 April 2023
phases of flight, such as passing through ice-saturated parts
of the atmosphere (to reduce contrails) or during takeoff
and landing. But emissions are unavoidable.
The holy grail isn’t hybrid, but full electrification, and
this requires radically improved battery performance.
Since the turn of the millennium, frenetic R&D has given
lithium-ion batteries, on average, about 4% more specific
energy every year. From the high-voltage lithium-ion bat-
teries that are currently under development at Rolls-Royce
to the lithium-air batteries that Japan’s National Institute
for Materials Science unveiled in 2022 and the “solid-state”
battery that is being pursued by QuantumScape, a US startup,
the critical element in electric aviation will carry on getting
lighter and more powerful. The only question is how fast.
Night and day in his laboratory at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie
Mellon University, robots controlled by Venkat Viswana-
than, one of the world’s leading battery experts, conduct
experiments aimed at achieving breakthroughs in perfor-
mance. In 2021, he and his colleague Shashank Sripad wrote
that “a battery-pack specific energy [density] of 800 wh/kg
[watt hour per kg] could potentially be reached at around
mid-century”. In other words, in around 2050, lithium-
ion batteries will be capable of powering a single-aisle
A320 or Boeing 737 the 600 nautical miles [1,100km] that
constitute a regional mission. Furthermore, all-electric
“aircraft with … a range of 1,200 nautical miles … could
replace more than 80% of all aircraft departures” in the
second half of this century.
Capability on the workbench does not necessarily denote
capability in the real world, however. As Alan Epstein, a
former vice-president of technology and environment at
Pratt & Whitney, and a professor emeritus at Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, said when we spoke in 2022: “You
have to distinguish between range and mission length. For
about 1,400 miles [2,200km] – the amount may vary con-
siderably depending on the weather and traffic at the time
of departure – the airlines routinely carry more than 50%
more fuel on board than you need just to fly that distance.”
This is because in case of unforeseen events “you have to be
able to divert to another airport and often … the only airport
that you know is open is the one you took off from”. If your
fuel is kerosene, with its high energy density, excess fuel can
be carried without undue trouble. Translated into electric
flight, however, the principle of excess capacity plays havoc
with your finely calibrated tradeoff between battery pack
and distance. “So a 500-mile range airplane may only be
able to fly 200- or 250-mile missions,” Epstein said.
Everyone likes an optimistic vision, and the truth is that
no one actually knows how fast battery technology is going
to develop. The two days I spent visiting Archer were glass-
half-full days. Then towards the end of my conversation
with Bower, after he had patiently explained his formulae
to me, I felt the familiar, unsettling tug of legacy aviation.
“This technical prowess sounds very fine,” I said, “but the
decarbonisation of the aviation industry can be completely
upended by passenger numbers. Relatively few people in
the developing world have been in an airplane, and under-
standably many would be interested in trying. What then?”
“That’s the long-term hard problem for aviation,” one
of the world’s best aerospace engineers ruefully acknowl-
edged. “I don’t know the answer.”
CHRISTOPHER DE BELLAIGUE IS A JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR
This is an edited extract from Flying Green: On the
Frontiers of New Aviation
 45
Comment is free, facts are sacred CP Scott 1918

MICHAEL MANN
At last, Australia
has a climate
action policy
Page 48

MEDIA
Rightwing US news is hostile to
facts – and Britain is following suit
Will Hutton

Illustration Dominic McKenzie

14 April 2023 The Guardian Weekly

46 Opinion
T
he United States is a grim warning
of what happens when a society
dispenses with the idea of truth.
Fragmentation, paranoia, division
and myth rule – democracy wilts.
Fox News, we now know from emails
flushed out by a lawsuit from the
voting machine company Dominion,
feared it would lose audiences if it told the truth about
the 2020 presidential election. Instead, it knowingly
broadcast and fed Donald Trump’s lie that the election
had been stolen – in particular the unfounded allegation
that Dominion had programmed its voting machines
to throw millions of votes to the Democrats. Fox could
have been instructed to tell the truth by its owner, as
this month’s Prospect magazine details, but as Rupert
Murdoch acknowledged under oath: “I could have. But
I didn’t.” There was no penalty for lying, except being on
the wrong side of a $1.6bn lawsuit.
But the culture of truth denial is no accident; it was
a key stratagem of the US right as it fought to build
a counter-establishment in the 1970s, 80s and 90s that
would challenge and even supplant what it considered
an over-dominant liberal establishment. Unalloyed
facts, truthful evidence and balanced reporting on
everything from guns to climate change tended to
support liberals and their worldview. But if all facts
could be framed as the contingent result of opinions,
the right could fight on level terms. Because the right is
richer, it could frame facts from its well-funded media
that truth and misinformation would become so jumbled
no one could tell the difference. “Stop the steal” is such
a fact-denying strategy. Ally it with voter suppression
and getting your people into key roles and there are the
bones of an anti-democratic coup.
For years, the right had a target in its sights – rather as
the British right today has the BBC – the 1949 Fairness
Doctrine. This required US broadcasters to ensure that
contentious issues were presented fairly; that both
sides to any argument had access to the airwaves and
presented their case factually. Like the BBC, it enraged
the right and, over his period of office, Ronald Reagan
ensured the Federal Communications Commission,
which enforced it, was chaired by anti-Fairness
Doctrine people. Finally, in 1987, the doctrine was ruled
unnecessary because it obstructed free speech. Within
months, the ultra-rightwing Rush Limbaugh Show,
was being nationally syndicated as the scourge of the
liberal elite – anti-immigrant, anti-tax, anti-feminist,
anti-LGBT, anti climate change and later denying
Millions believe the lies.
And anyone who calls
out the process
is quickly dismissed
as an elitist
The Guardian Weekly 14 April 2023
Covid vaccines, and always rejecting the evidence that
smoking caused cancer. A lifelong smoker, Limbaugh
died in 2021 of the very lung cancer he denied.
Through the 1990s, many rightwing TV stations were
launched following suit, including Fox News. Donald
Trump’s ascent would have been impossible without it.
Millions believe the lies. And anyone who calls out the
process is quickly dismissed as an elitist: out of step with
the real opinions of real voters in neglected America.
In this respect, the next general election is the
most important in Britain’s democratic life. The Tory
party has learned from the rise of the Republicans.
Voter suppression is one part of the toolkit – the new
UK requirement to show photographic ID to vote is
borrowed straight from the Republican playbook, as
is the weakening of the Electoral Commission. What
remains is to control the broadcast media, given that the
right already possesses the majority of the print media.
Freezing the BBC licence fee in a period of double-digit
inflation helps to enfeeble it – but better still would be to
consign it and conceptions of fairness and impartiality
to history. Thus the promised end of the licence fee
before the current charter expires in 2027. This will open
the prospect of overtly rightwing broadcaster GB News
trying to reproduce the scale and success of Fox News.
GB News in important respects goes further than Fox;
Fox gives few presentation slots to active rightwing
politicians. But from Jacob Rees-Mogg to the deputy
chair of the Tory party, Lee Anderson, GB News has
become the Tories’ broadcasting arm. There is little
pretence at journalism. The watchdog Ofcom raps its
knuckles over some of the more egregious examples
of bias, but has no real power. Its chair, Michael Grade,
knows from spells at ITV, Channel 4 and the BBC what
good TV journalism looks like – it’s not on GB News – but
equally he knows his role in the Tory scheme of things.
And the coup needs useful intellectuals. Step up the
academic Matthew Goodwin, who has morphed from
studying the right to becoming an active rightwing
advocate, arguing that a liberal elite constituting Emily
Maitlis, Gary Lineker and Emma Watson (some elite!) has
the country in its thrall, out of step with working-class
opinion. Yes, it is possible to understand why many in
the working class in “red wall” seats want strong defence
and immigration policies and think climate change is
only a middle-class preoccupation
 Will Hutton – but that does not mean that the
is an Observer “stop the boats” policy is not cruel
columnist and inhumane or that climate change
is bogus. What should matter surely
is the truth – not whether the answer is closer to the
view of some member of an elite or red-wall voter.
Goodwin’s function is to throw a smokescreen around
what is actually happening.
There is endless commentary about how Labour’s Keir
Starmer lacks definition against Rishi Sunak. Wrong. His
election would halt this coup; Britain would strike out
on a different, more democratic course. It is one thing to
tut at the shenanigans in the US, but the Conservative
ambition in the UK is to go at least as far, if not further.
The issue is whether British voters want that  Observer

Ties between the ruling
POLAND
party and Catholic
church alienate voters
Maria Skóra
T
he Catholic church in Poland is close
to an existential crisis. For one of
the most Catholic countries in the
world, and the homeland of Pope
John Paul II, this is unprecedented.
Poland is not becoming an atheist
country overnight, but the trend is
indisputably towards secularisation,
especially among younger Poles. This will have
significant political consequences for the ruling national
conservative Law & Justice party (PiS), which has close
ties with the church. Meanwhile, the next parliamentary
elections are due towards the end of the year.
The Catholic faith has long been one of the distinctive
pillars of Polishness, and played an important role
in the nation-making process. In times of partitions,
Nazi occupation and communism, the Catholic church
portrayed itself as a bastion of resistance in the long
quest for Polish independence. After 1989, it regained
the land and property it had lost after the second
world war, with a substantial increase, and returned to
a primary role in the public sphere. There were often
▲ A banner clergymen present at various secular celebrations
reading ‘Catholic (such as the opening of McDonald’s restaurants) or to
church guilty’ at introduce religion classes at schools.
a protest over the The church’s political power in newly democratic
alleged cover-up Poland was immediately apparent. Few parties
of sexual abuse openly opposed or contradicted it. The left was most
BEATA ZAWRZEL/
NURPHOTO/REX/
willing to do so, but even Aleksander Kwaśniewski,
SHUTTERSTOCK the first and only leftwing president of Poland with
47
a post-communist past, met with the pope numerous
times. Since the national-conservative coalition led by
PiS took power in 2015, the alliance of throne and altar
has become more deeply entrenched.
Members of the government don’t hide their faith.
The Catholic church in Poland received a record amount
of money from the public budget in the face of the crises
resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic, inflation and the
Russian war on Ukraine. As a result of its position, the
church has been aggressive in promoting its conservative
worldview to the wider public. The archbishop of
Kraków called the LGBTQ community a “rainbow
plague”, and the church’s hardline conservative stance
on women’s rights clearly influenced the constitutional
tribunal of Poland’s recent near-total ban on abortion.
Despite the obvious political power of the Catholic
church in Poland today, it may have overstepped its
bounds and begun alienating more moderate citizens.
Like other states in Europe, Poland was already gradually
becoming more secular. About a quarter of all Poles do
not attend church, with the proportion among those who
are 35 and younger rising to one-third.
Beyond the gradual trend of
 Dr Maria eroding religious belief, there is also
Skóra is a more critical attitude towards the
a research church and clergy, and it’s easy to see
associate at what puts people off: intolerance,
Institut für arrogance, outdated views, financial
Europäische machinations and scandal. Only
Politik recently, allegations about John
Paul II covering up sexual predators
rocked the country. The hardline views of the church, its
hypocrisy and its ongoing involvement in Polish politics
have been the final straws for many.
Unsurprisingly, people identifying as leftwing or
liberal are most unsympathetic to the presence of
religion and the church in the public space and the
most are PiS voters. Meanwhile, young people do not
find the overall conservative agenda appealing, often
seeking out new faces in politics, or centrist, liberal
and leftwing parties. In particular, young women are
progressive voters. Their political awakening may stem
from the assault on women’s rights, and the fact that
mass protests weren’t able to reverse the decision of the
constitutional tribunal on restricting access to abortion.
It seems that, through its political impact and close
affiliation with the governing coalition, the Catholic
church in Poland has accelerated the cultural and
generational shift against religious conservatism.
Young voters are expected to turn out in large
numbers in this year’s election. The stakes are high as
the governing national-conservative coalition, backed by
the church, is facing soaring inflation, high energy prices
and the ongoing clash with Brussels over the rule of law.
Meanwhile, the liberal and leftwing opposition demands
reconciliation with the EU, and the far-right calls for
a libertarian economic agenda and an even harder line on
women’s and LGBT rights. It remains to be seen if people
will use a vote against PiS to express their frustration
with the church, and if less religiously conservative
youth will bring about the change in power 
14 April 2023 The Guardian Weekly
48 Opinion

C L I M AT E climate intransigence. Meanwhile, the rightwing

CRISIS Debate in Australia has Murdoch media machine continued to spew climate
disinformation. Things appeared bleak, yet I sensed
something had changed.
moved to action – and There was fiercer-than-usual pushback against the
Murdoch disinformation campaign. The media narrative
had shifted from questioning to highlighting the role the
left the deniers behind climate crisis was playing in the unfolding crisis. I had
numerous opportunities during my brief sojourn to help
the public connect the dots.
Michael Mann

I
left Australia three years ago, cutting my
sabbatical short as Covid-19 spread and
lockdowns ensued. I had just lived through
Black Summer, a climate crisis-fuelled
disaster marked by unprecedented heat,
withering drought and deadly bushfires.
Though I went to Australia to research the
effects of the climate crisis on extreme
▲ Australia’s weather events, it instead became my lived experience.
bushfires of 2020 The governing Coalition had left a trail of death
have given way and destruction. Dozens of lives were lost, thousands
to floods in 2022 of homes destroyed, 24m hectares burned, and
and 2023 Australia was shunned from an international climate
JENNY EVANS/GETTY summit over the then prime minister Scott Morrison’s
But denial was not dead. My media appearances
on ABC’s Q&A and 60 Minutes featured tussles with
climate-denying politicians. A year later, I encountered
more of the same, testifying at an Australian Senate
media diversity inquiry about the role of the Murdoch
media in promoting climate denial and delay.
Queensland Liberal party senator Gerard Rennick
confronted me with what he purported to be conflicting
data from different climate reports. He was reprimanded
by the chair for trying to deflect the conversation.
One year later, Rennick would be widely mocked
for insisting to the head of the CSIRO, the national
science agency, Larry Marshall, as he testified in
a Senate committee hearing, that the Heisenberg
uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics invalidates
global climate models. Having done graduate

The Guardian Weekly 14 April 2023

 Founded 1821 Independently owned by the Scott Trust 49

studies in theoretical physics and climate science,

I can assure the reader that this is laughably absurd.
I exchanged words once again with Rennick this
The time is ripe for controls
month. He had posted a clip of his exchange with
Marshall on Twitter, insisting – nonsensically – that
CO2 cannot warm the atmosphere because of “gravity”
on AI – before its rapid
and “convection”. I politely explained to him that
this is not the case. I informed him that the cooling of spread cannot be stopped

T
the atmosphere with altitude has nothing to do with
“convection” but rather is a consequence of the balance he horse has not inequality. Creative workers
of forces (pressure and gravity) and the conservation merely bolted; it is may lose their living.
of energy. I even provided the lecture notes from my halfway down the Regulation will be difficult.
introductory college course on atmospheric science road and picking But it is needed. Big tech
where I derive the relationship, inviting him to point out up speed – and no one is companies may have flagged
any errors he could identify. sure where it’s heading. concerns, but they have been
Rennick chose not to do that. Instead, he insisted The potential benefits of slashing ethics staff. And while
I was “making a fool” of myself, disparaged my scientific artificial intelligence – such as decentralised, open source AI
work and called me “champ”. At this point, I became developing lifesaving drugs – could help to balance corporate
a bit less charitable with him. Other participants have are undeniable. But with the interests, it will also make
been similarly uncharitable. Among the links readers launch of hugely powerful it harder to tackle threats to
have supplied to put his tweet in context is a climate text and image generative social justice or public security.
explainer for young children from Nasa. models such as ChatGPT-4 and The US chamber of
We should view these outbursts of denialism as Midjourney, the challenges commerce, which is
rearguard skirmishes in what I’ve called “The New it poses are clearer than congenitally hostile to
Climate War”. Climate denial is now ever: from vast job losses to regulation, last month urged
 Michael a distraction intended to feed the entrenched discrimination and legislators to act. Britain’s
E Mann is conservative base while pacifying an explosion of disinformation. data watchdog has also issued
presidential polluters. The true battle has moved The shock is how greatly AI a warning. China, which
distinguished on, from denial to deflection, technology has progressed, and aspires to AI leadership, has
professor at the distraction and delay. Thanks in part how fast. The concern is what led the drive to regulate, but
University of to delay tactics from the Liberal party, happens as companies race to its priorities have only partial
Pennsylvania voters rejected them in the federal outdo each other. overlapped with those of
and the author election of May 2022, and in every The alarm is being sounded democratic societies. In the
of The New state but Tasmania. In fact, the battle within the industry itself. This US, no comprehensive federal
Climate War lines on climate have retreated so far month more than 1,000 experts legislation is under way. It
that the real fight isn’t over whether signed an open letter urging is the EU that has stepped
the climate crisis is real or human-caused, or whether we a pause in development – and forward, pressing ahead
should act. It’s now about what form action should take. saying that, if researchers do with an AI act, although it is
not pull back, governments struggling to keep pace with
As the climate crisis deepens, in place of the bushfires should step in. A day later technological developments.
of 2020 we have the floods of 2022 and 2023. In Italy became the first western Yet while Europe tries
place of scorched koalas in New South Wales, we country to temporarily ban to grab the reins, the UK is
have village-dwelling crocodiles in Queensland. It’s ChatGPT. OpenAI, which watching the runaway horse
a reminder of the shape-shifting nature of a crisis that released ChatGPT-4, is unlikely gallop away. The AI white
promises ever-greater extremes. That’s the bad news. to agree to voluntary restraints paper, released last month,
The good news? After nearly a decade, Australia once spurned by competitors. proposed no new powers – let
again has a meaningful climate policy, after negotiations AI refusing to shut down alone resources to give them
between the Albanese government and the Greens. when instructed, or even heft. Expecting overtasked
Is that enough? Climate action requires global posing humans an existential and underfunded bodies
cooperation. After substantial progress at Cop26 in threat – overlooks the pressing such as the Health and Safety
Glasgow, the Cop27 meeting in Sharm el Sheikh late ethical challenges that are Executive to tackle the dangers
last year yielded minimal progress, failing to secure already evident, as critics is entirely unrealistic. Giving
emissions reductions that will keep the warming of the of the letter have pointed them 12 months to set out
planet below a catastrophic 1.5C. The UN IPCC synthesis out. Fake articles circulating guidance is laughable given the
report finds that this target is still within reach, but it will on the web or citations of speed of change.
require dramatic action in the years ahead. non-existent articles are the tip If handled in the right way,
So we find ourselves in an atmosphere of uncertainty, of the misinformation iceberg. the potential benefits of AI
a bit like the erstwhile-ambivalent Rick Blaine and AI’s incorrect claims may end could be huge. But this current
resistance fighter Victor Laszlo at the end of Casablanca. up in court. Faulty, harmful, approach is more likely to
The fate of the second world war remained unclear, but invisible and unaccountable enrich entrepreneurs and
there was an air of optimism. As Laszlo said to Rick, we decision-making is likely to investors while society is left
say now to Australia: Welcome back to the fight • entrench discrimination and to bear the costs •

14 April 2023 The Guardian Weekly

50 Opinion
Letters

WRITE Tackle the lasting legacy
TO US or time to draw a line?
A thousand thanks – what
a tremendous emotional
shakeup the articles
Letters for in your Cotton Capital
publication series gave me. I would
weekly.letters@ especially like to thank
theguardian.com David Olusoga for his
—
remarkable article
Please include a
(Special report, 31 March).
full postal address
and a reference
David Hesketh
to the article. Castanet Tolosan,
We may edit letters. Haute-Garonne, France
Submission and
publication of all • The Guardian has
letters is subject brought the subject of
to our terms and John Edward Taylor’s
conditions, see: indirect involvement
THEGUARDIAN.COM/
LET TERS-TERMS
with slavery to light in
David Olusoga’s essay.
Katharine Viner was
Editorial
contrite in acknowledging
Editor:
Graham Snowdon and apologising for it.
Guardian Weekly, Isn’t that enough? Do
Kings Place, your subscribers and
90 York Way, purchasers want to see the
London N1 9GU, Scott Trust’s money spent
UK on a 200-year-old issue?
Kenneth J Penny
To contact the Calgary, Alberta, Canada
editor directly:
editorial.feedback
• I was left with a strong
@theguardian.com
feeling of incredulity.
Corrections In allegedly revealing
Our policy is to for the first time the
correct significant extent of slavery-sourced
errors as soon as money that poured into
possible. Please Manchester and helped
write to guardian. in founding the Guardian,
readers@ David Olusoga gives us a
theguardian.com glimpse into the collective
or the readers’
amnesia of the British
editor, Kings Place,
nation. We are now to
90 York Way,
London N1 9GU,
believe that the entire
UK membership of the Scott
Trust are complicit in this.
Do you really believe
you were invited into India
to show the Indigenous
population how to weave
cotton, or down into the
Cape of Africa to improve
their spin bowling? The
part the British played
in the barbaric trade
of humans across the
Atlantic is but a tiny
chapter in a multi-volume
story that resulted in vast
sums of money flowing
into a tiny island on the
north coast of Europe.
Niall Ó Cléirigh
Dublin, Ireland
• The articles were a
lightbulb moment for me.
I live in a house in north
Wales that was described
in the 1890s as a “common
boarding house”. Yet
this ordinary home has
links with slavery. The
property was built and the
land owned by the local
landed gentry, who made
their money through
sugar plantations and the
labour of enslaved people
in St Kitts. The effects of
slavery are all pervasive,
visible not only in stately
homes but in ordinary
estate workers’ housing.
Thank you for highlighting
how slavery has shaped
my environment.
Julie Grier
Rhuddlan, Wales, UK
Parallels are slim between
Ireland and Middle East
Much as I admire Jonathan
Freedland’s writing, it
seems disingenuous
to make comparisons
between Northern Ireland
and Israel/Palestine
(Opinion, 7 April).
Northern Ireland is
about alignment, whether
to be part of a united
Ireland as a republic ruled
from Dublin or to be part
of the United Kingdom.
Israel/Palestine is about
two peoples claiming the
same piece of land. As for
lost opportunities, the
Palestinians lost theirs in
1948 when, if they had
accepted the two-state
UN-sponsored resolution,
they would now have had
a Palestinian state for 75
years, whereas the Israelis
lost their greatest chance
for peace when Jewish
extremists assassinated
Yitzhak Rabin. All that
the two situations share
is prejudice.
Michael Prevezer
Harrow, England, UK
UN reform needed in light
of Russia’s council role
Even if we question the
ongoing global hegemony
of the US, the farce of
Russia now chairing the
UN security council is
deeply repugnant (Letters,
31 March). Clearly the UN,
the council and its powers
need reform – but how?
The phenomenal
success of citizen
assemblies as a way to
restore some integrity to
representative democracy
suggests a way forward.
Imagine if the UN was to
support a programme by
which every one of its 193
member countries held a
standard, professionally
managed, citizen-based
process to deliberate on
what a reformed UN and
security council should
look like and what their
powers should be.
Imagine if one option
was the idea that countries
cede the ability to wage
war to a UN-based conflict-
resolution process. What
would 193 informed and
engaged publics make
of that proposal? Maybe
we could ask Costa Rica,
which abolished its
military in 1948.
Peter G Martin
Port Willunga,
South Australia
The long-running joys
of Barden’s chess moves
As the world chess
championship begins, I
would like to pay tribute to
your chess correspondent,
Leonard Barden, who has
written a weekly column
for the Guardian since
1955. Even in his 90s, Mr
Barden keeps up with the
latest developments and
writes fresh and lively
columns. In the 60s,
keen schoolboys wanting
the latest on Petrosian
or Spassky could pore
over the moves in the
Guardian. The latest world
championship games will,
of course, be broadcast
live on the internet – and
I look forward to reading
Mr Barden’s commentary
on them.
Steven Lorber
London, England, UK

A WEEK
IN VENN
DI AGR A MS
Edith Pritchett

The Guardian Weekly 14 April 2023

 51
Film, music, art, books & more

AUDIO
The out
ut ooff tthis
his
world g
growth
rowth of of
UFO podcasts
odcasts
Page 54 

Behind the
Hamlet. Burton. Gielgud. How do
curtain
you write a play about some of the
most famous names in theatre?
And what can they teach us?
14 April 2023 The Guardian Weekly
52 Culture

I
Stage
have spent most of my life avoiding writing
about real people. In fact, as a screenwriter,
I’ve made half a career out of avoiding it. I
wrote pieces that were almost about real
people, but not quite. With my TV dramas
National Treasure, Kiri and Help, out of
necessity I wrote towards the truth but didn’t
embrace it utterly. With National Treasure,
I wrote about historic sex crimes and refer-
enced famous sex offenders, but didn’t write
By Jack Thorne of them because to do so was legally and ethically compli-
COVER cated and might involve upsetting or worsening the damage
ILLUSTRATION already done to victims. With Kiri, we risked disrupting
Klawe Rzeczy ongoing legal cases. With Help, I wanted to write about
care homes during the pandemic without exposing any
one of them to unwelcome scrutiny.
As a dramatist this puts you in a difficult position: how
do you make something feel true, but not be true? But it
also gives you latitude to find a way into the story from an
angle of your choosing. You talk to people, you uncover
things, you try to represent stories as best you can.
Recently, however, I have been drawn to real events.
I find myself writing about real people. Some historical,
some current, all complicated. That dual obligation, which
better writers than me have struggled with, of telling some-
thing that is engaging and true. Having an obligation to your
subjects that goes beyond your obligation as a storyteller,
and perhaps even your obligation to the truth as you under-
stand it, is terrifying, for me at least.
With real people you have to feel their breath as they
tell their story to you, and you have to feel their breath
as you (later) tell them the way you will tell their story.
Last year I co-wrote a drama with Genevieve Barr called
Then Barbara Met Alan about the disabled rights move- work out how their Hamlet might work. What was Bur-
ment. Alan and Barbara are heroes to both of us but, in ton trying to do playing him? He was the most famous
order to tell their story properly, we had to show the raw actor in the world by this point – he and Elizabeth Taylor
reality of them. Did they like that exposure? Not all of it. invented the paparazzi with their glamour – so why put
But we adjusted our story and ended up with something on a hair shirt when he could be earning millions doing
that represented them in a way they were brave enough to something less taxing?
be comfortable with. Gielgud, in contrast, was on his uppers: Laurence Olivier
Later this month, we begin previewing a play I’ve written was running the National in London, the Royal Shakespeare
for the National Theatre about Sir John Gielgud directing Company weren’t much interested in him, and the Royal
Richard Burton playing Hamlet on Broadway in 1964. The Court and “modern theatre” was increasingly dominating
idea first came from Sam Mendes and he directs it. The the West End. He took the job because he didn’t have many
play contains, by necessity, Gielgud, Burton, Elizabeth other offers. The easy thing to do would have been to allow
Taylor, Hume Cronyn, Eileen Herlie, William Redfield and Burton to dominate. But Hamlet mattered to Gielgud; he’d
many, many more. Figures that are iconic, figures that lots
of people have a history with, either in person or in passion.
How do you do justice to these incredible figures? How
do you feel able to do justice to them? Particularly in a single
evening. These are questions I’ve really struggled with.
There are two accounts of that original rehearsal period.
Both are interesting works. One by Redfield, the actor
playing Guildenstern, which takes the form of letters he
wrote to a friend detailing the process. The other by Richard
Sterne, a “Gentleman” in the show, who went to extra-
ordinary lengths to get accurate recordings of the rehearsals
as they took place. There are also numerous biographies
and written materials about all the main figures, as well as
 Newlyweds Burton’s diaries and Gielgud’s letters.
Burton with It was a very difficult production. Burton behaved badly
Elizabeth Taylor because he didn’t get the direction from Gielgud he felt he
SUNSET BOULEVARD/
required. Or perhaps because he got more direction than
CORBIS/GETTY he expected. The two, who were prior friends, couldn’t

The Guardian Weekly 14 April 2023


Gielgud was
the epitome
of tradition;
Burton was
bursting
to be modern
played him quite definitively more than 300 times, and he
wouldn’t let it go. Disaster quickly loomed.
Sam Mendes said two things that particularly stuck with
me as I tried to write the play. The first was that he wanted it
to be something that took people inside a rehearsal process.
This was the height of lockdown and both of us were desper-
ate to be back inside a rehearsal room; he wanted to explain
the process of making a play and make it feel dynamic.
How do you reflect on a process that aims to reflect life?
The second was that this was to be about classical theatre
meeting modern ideas. Gielgud was the epitome of tradi-
tion, looking back to his aunt Ellen Terry and her theatrical
partner Henry Irving; Burton was bursting to be modern,
while paradoxically yearning for ideals of classical theatre.
They spend the play dancing around the notion of how
to play Hamlet. A character so beautifully written he can
be played a thousand different ways. They are trying to
find Burton’s Hamlet. To do so they have to pull strips off
themselves and each other. This, hopefully, is our key to
telling a story that goes beyond the theatre, and becomes a
character study of what we hide and what we don’t. What
we want the world to see within us and what we don’t. The
play gets inside their shame, their ambition, their ego and
their destruction.
Our title The Motive and the Cue is a quote from
Hamlet’s “O, what a rogue and peasant slave” speech.
Broken down by Gielgud in the play, the motive is Hamlet’s
reason for a given act, the cue is the passion behind that
act. They can’t answer Hamlet’s motive, nor his cue, with-
out addressing their own.
In my experience of writing, you can never escape the
53
 Star turn
Richard Burton
performs a scene
from Hamlet
BETTMANN
 Stage notes
John Gielgud
directs Burton
BETTMANN
why of why you’re telling the story, why you are the writer.
The same is true of your pure fiction, of books you might
adapt, and even of true events. Sometimes you know the
why, sometimes it’s a surprise you find out halfway through.
Other times, others may see something of you in it that you
cannot. Gielgud has a constant refrain in the play about
the character and the actor; the actor is trapped with the
character, but so is the character trapped with the actor.
I feel the same way about writing. That sadly these people
are lumped with me (and Sam, too) as I try to refract their
lives. I’ve looked for their truth, and their shame, and these
characters feel my truth and shame through my writing of
them. Just as Burton finds his Hamlet, Sam and I have hope-
fully found our Burton, Taylor and Gielgud, and it is such a
pleasure to see the magnificent Johnny Flynn, Tuppence
Middleton and Mark Gatiss find them in the rehearsal room.
I hope we’ve found something honest, compelling, that
truly gets inside the process of making a story and, most
importantly, something that feels like them. That expresses
how magnificent and how damaged they all were. The fact
of Taylor, Gielgud and Burton being sadly gone doesn’t give
us the licence to express their hidden truths however we
like. This production is about them in their rawest states,
and I hope we’ve been true to those states. I hope that we
have shown them the same love as if we had to face them
across a cafe. We’ve felt an obligation to them and I hope
our fascination with them reveals a play people want to see.
JACK THORNE IS A BRITISH PLAYWRIGHT, TELEVISION
WRITER, SCREENWRITER AND PRODUCER
The Motive and the Cue is at the National Theatre,
London, from 20 April until 15 July
14 April 2023 The Guardian Weekly
54 Culture
Audio
Alien invasion
in our ears
PODCASTS
The past few years have witnessed
an explosion of podcasts devoted
to UFOs and visitors from other
worlds. But are the ideas of the
people behind some of the best
listens really that far-fetched?
By Nell Frizzell
I
n the depth of winter last year, I was run-
ning through a cold and unlit field near my
house when I saw a trail of lights moving
through the sky. I stopped. The air caught
in my throat. “Bloody hell,” I thought, “were the
UFO people right all along?”
In the past five years, the number of podcasts
investigating aliens, UFOs, the esoteric and the
inexplicable has exploded on to the internet like a
meteor shower. High Strange, That UFO Podcast,
Johnny Vaughan’s Alien Kidnap Club, Chinwag
with Paul Giamatti, the BBC’s Uncanny – the list
goes on. There are certain themes and similarities.
A lot of men. A lot of men talking about military
hardware, philosophical theories, government
conspiracy and maligned intelligence. A lot of
people selling DVDs and hosting conferences and
self-publishing. But there is also a richness to
these podcasts that mirrors podcast trends such
as true crime. They have an audience, they have
experts and, boy, do they have stories.
One guest on Vaughan’s Alien Kidnap Club
is the shaman, drummer and author Devara
ThunderBeat. Listening to her describing space-
ships, messages from angels and ancient Egyptian
forms in the rocks around her home in Sedona,
Arizona, it would be easy to mock. And yet when
I speak to Devara via Zoom about her experiences
of meeting aliens and travelling on UFOs, she
is compelling and not afraid to laugh at herself.
“There are so many similarities between
what happened to me and how people describe
near-death experiences,” she begins. “After they
brought me up into the ship through a portal,
they took me to Sirius A.” I nod, Googling Sirius A
– the sky’s brightest star. “Things were thinner,
The Guardian Weekly 14 April 2023
almost translucent. You can still feel, still hear.
So I put the two together and said: ‘When you die
you go up into the sixth dimension. There’s no
death.’” A comforting thought for a rainy morn-
ing, I joke, and she nods, smiling.
ThunderBeat also believes she has travelled to
the centre of the sun. Which is, surprisingly, not
very hot. “They opened up another portal and
brought me into another ship to take me into the
sun,” she explains. “They had a purple triangle-
headed being. He was 5ft [1.5 metres] tall, he had
three fingers and three toes on each side, and
he started floating around me. They said: ‘He’s
looking for implants because they’re not allowed
inside the sun, where we live.’” Does she lead a
very clean life here on Earth, I wonder, thinking
of my childhood friends and their macrobiotic
diets and meditation retreats. “Oh yeah, I’m
fully organic,” she replies. “In 20 years of being
in rock bands I hardly ever drank. I took my music
very seriously.” So much so, she says, that when
she met Led Zeppelin in 1977 and was offered
cocaine, she ended up spending four hours in
a backroom bar playing backgammon instead.
For Andy McGrillen, the presenter of That UFO
Podcast, the interest is in being a conduit for an
audience with a broad range of interests and
his guests, who might have particular areas of
expertise. “From commercial pilots to naval staff,
people in the air force – a lot of them don’t want to
put themselves out there because of the ridicule,
the stigma factor,” he tells me over the phone. “So
they appreciate if you come to the subject with
respect. It’s about removing judgment and just
presenting the information to allow other people
to decide. The mainstream media are still stuck
in that rut of little green men and flying saucers.”
How, I wonder, did he get interested in UFOs?
“One night in the mid-90s, myself, my mum,
sister and two others, we were crossing a busy, Illustration by Clément Barbé
built-up urban area,” McGrillen replies. “This was
the middle of Glasgow at 9 o’clock on a winter’s
night. About half a mile down the road there was
what looked like a ferris wheel tilted at a 30- or
40-degree angle. It was spinning ridiculously
quick, like a washing machine. If it was a carnival
ride then everybody on it was dead.” We laugh. They opened up
“It was up in the sky and it was largely just
lights, I remember.” Does his mother remember a portal and brought
this too? “She remembers it,” he says. “But she’ll
also always say it wasn’t aliens. And I’m not
me into a ship to
saying it was. But it was very strange.” take me into the sun

Johnny Vaughan, known to many in the UK for
his Radio X show, is less agnostic. “I don’t believe
in aliens,” he says. “I don’t buy into the argument
that says because we’re here the probability is
that someone else is too. We’ve found nothing.”
Quite a lot of people who – how can I put
this? – had a big time of it in the 90s are now
into UFOs, I venture. Robbie Williams being a
classic example. Why does he think that might
be? “If you can remember 1997 you weren’t
there,” Vaughan laughs. “A lot of people in the
90s probably felt like they were abducted.”
And yet his is not a podcast that ridicules or
dismisses its guests. “All of them were so sincere
and really made me think,” says Vaughan, who
came to the subject after he and two friends saw
a dish of mirrored light beside the road while
driving back from a football game. The light
began to rise up, spin and then shot off into the
sky faster than anything he could explain. “What
really drew me to it is that while these things
might sound crazy, I know I’m not lying. So I have
to go in with the assumption that these people
aren’t either. I don’t believe in aliens, so if you
rule out the impossible, what did happen?”
Well, what indeed? When I speak to Hilary
Porter, the co-founder of the British Earth and
Aerial Mysteries Society, I am left feeling deeply
sympathetic. “I had bedroom visitors,” she says,
speaking over the phone. “Robed figures would
come into the room. They seemed like biblical
figures – I am a Christian,” she clarifies. “They
brought me a ball once – it was floating beneath
this chap’s hand. His palm was open and it would
be floating and he could move it without touching
it. They tried to train me to do the same.”
When she was about five, she saw something
strange near her home. “We lived in prefabs,”
says Porter, who is a former Ministry of Defence
electronics draughtsperson and not, as she puts
it, “a dumb bunny”. “I went into the far entrance
to the field and there, sure enough, was this
pearly, off-white disc.” She takes a sip of water.
“I got down into the long grass and inched my
way towards it on my elbows. Suddenly in front
of me was this being with reptilian-type skin
and dark eyes. It was standing on all fours and it
dragged me across the ground to the saucer. We
went into this round chamber. It was all dark in
there.” As the mother of a five-year-old, this story
fills me with horror, fear and pity. Whatever hap-
pened to Porter, or to anyone who reports these
experiences, it is hard not to feel some sort of
concern for any trauma or fear they felt.
A YouGov report from 2021 found that half
of Britons apparently believe that aliens exist.
Personally – and having spoken to a number of
people who claim first-hand experiences – I’m of
the mind that as global politics gets more fright-
ening, a particular kind of psyche reacts to that
uncertainty by looking to otherworldly explana-
tions. Perhaps the rise in podcasts tackling all
things UFO is because, rather than facing the
unpleasant notion that we are in charge and we
are flawed, many people lean into the idea that
there are bigger forces in control. Those might be
angels or aliens, secretive military forces or gov-
ernment services, but the inclination is the same.
Oh and my inexplicable string of lights in the
night sky? Well, a Google search as I stood shiv-
ering in the mud shut that down rather quickly.
What I’d seen wasn’t evidence of aliens. It was
Elon Musk’s Starlink, an attempt to use a winking
satellite chain to bounce internet into rural areas.
Rather than visitation by a higher intelligence, it
was the vanity project of a billionaire.
NELL FRIZZELL IS A JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR
Review 55
T H E AT R E
Drive Your Plow Over
the Bones of the Dead
Barbican, London
★★★★★
A woman in her 60s, wearing
a shabby tracksuit top and holding
a carrier bag, stands in the middle of
the stage. She speaks from behind
a mic. It is not clear whether she is
altogether sane or why she should
be in charge of the story. This is in
keeping with Nobel-prize winner
Olga Tokarczuk’s extraordinary
novel Drive Your Plow Over the
Bones of the Dead, upon which
Complicité’s show is based. You do
not know where you are with Janina
Duszejko or where you are going.
She is an unreliable witness.
This uncommon thriller, an
eco-noir, works on the mind like
a seizure of cold. In a small Polish
community, the body count of
murdered men from the local
hunting club is unsteadily rising.
The actor playing Janina is
standing in for Kathryn Hunter,
whose illness put the opening
night on hold. Amanda Hadingue
is not only heroic in the role, she is
outstanding. Each member of the
10-strong international company is
superb. César Sarachu is particularly
entertaining as Janina’s neighbour.
His name – “Oddball”– could
be applied to all the characters.
Director Simon McBurney pulls off
an unforgettable feat – an eco-fable
that offers an image of our modern
world continuing like a heedless
party seen through a glass darkly. It
is a show that will leave you thinking
about hunting in the widest sense –
and what it might mean to be prey.
Kate Kellaway, Observer
Touring the UK and Europe
until 18 June
14 April 2023 The Guardian Weekly
 Culture
Books
S C I E NC E A N D NAT U R E
Germ warfare
Diseases have shaped
humanity, from the
Neolithic era to the
Black Death – but will
we heed the wake-up
call of Covid-19?
By Steven Poole
▲ Circle of life
The people who
built Stonehenge
were wiped out
by disease
ADAM STANFORD/
AERIAL-CAM/BBC/PA
57
age, replaced across Europe by light-skinned
farmers of Mediterranean origin? “The most
likely answer,” the author suggests, is that the
farmers carried infectious diseases to which
they had, over time, become immune, but which
devastated the Indigenous populations. Those
farmers were in turn almost completely replaced
by another wave of migrants, shepherds from the
Eurasian steppe – thanks, perhaps, to a Neolithic
wave of bubonic plague in Europe. Kennedy does
not shy away from emphasising the point most
relevant to modern politics: “Contemporary
Europeans are neither genetically ‘pure’ nor are
they the region’s indigenous people.” Modern
genetic analysis shows that even the people who
built Stonehenge were completely wiped out and
replaced by a new wave of migration.
We can be more confident, at least, about
the geopolitical effects of disease once we enter
the era of written history. An epidemic of either
typhus or smallpox devastated Athens from
430BC, which “undermined Athens’s capac-
T
ity to fight against the Spartans and had a pro-
he Covid-19 pandemic has wreaked found impact on the course and outcome of the
extraordinary destruction and misery, Peloponnesian War”. Medieval waves of the Black
killing nearly 7 million people world- Death killed astonishing numbers of people – as
wide thus far and devastating the lives much as 60% of the entire population of Europe
of many more. And yet, viewed through the long succumbed in a single decade of the 14th century.
lens of human history, writes the public health The book performs that satisfying trick of
sociologist Jonathan Kennedy, “there is little encouraging the reader to think differently about
about it that is new or remarkable”. Previous pan- familiar topics, though its ideas are inevitably
demics have killed many more, both in absolute variable in their persuasiveness. Among the most
numbers and as proportions of populations, and conjectural, for example, is the suggestion that
so may future ones. Covid should be a wake-up “the Christian faith skyrocketed because it pro-
call that helps us manage deadlier plagues in the vided a more appealing and assuring guide to life
future. But will we heed it? and death than paganism during the devastating
Our very existence and success as a species, pandemics that struck the Roman empire in the
Kennedy argues in this fascinating book, has second and third centuries CE”, Kennedy sug-
been shaped by bacteria and viruses. Where, for gests. Well, maybe. But the conversion of Con-
example, did all the other species of humans go? stantine, briefly mentioned on the same page,
At one time, early Homo sapiens shared the Earth was surely the nearer and sufficient cause.
with (and interbred with) the stronger, larger- Kennedy is convincing in his emphasis on the
brained and equally artistic Neanderthals, as well way that disease can intersect and interact with
as the hobbit-like Denisovans. What happened to social inequality, both globally – most sub-Saharan
them? It could be, as some argue, that we simply Africans remain unvaccinated for Sars-Cov-2 –
killed them all, or that they were somehow less and within countries, where health outcomes are
well able to adapt to climate change. But Kennedy shockingly dependent on socioeconomic status.
explores the possibility that roving Homo sapiens So what to do? Perhaps, as Kennedy suggests,
from Africa, who had acquired strong immune sys- the recent, comparatively mild pandemic will
tems, might have infected the settled cause us to rethink “how humans
Neanderthals of Europe with a novel see their place in the world”, to stop
pathogen that they couldn’t fight off creating super-pathogens with our
– just as the colonising Spanish, tens incontinent use of antibiotics, and to
of thousands of years later, decimated realise that “if we Homo sapiens don’t
the Aztec population with smallpox as strive to live in balance with the other
much as with weapons. living things on our planet, we face a
A similar dynamic repeats over and BOOK OF very bleak future”. That is a tall order,
over in human history, in Kennedy’s THE WEEK and not just politically. Bacteria alone
telling, even if some of the details Pathogenesis: make up an estimated 13% of the bio-
remain speculative. Why, for example, How Germs mass of Earth, while humans represent
were dark-skinned Neolithic hunter- Made History a mere 0.01%. In the war against dis-
gatherers such as the celebrated By Jonathan ease, we are massively outnumbered.
“Cheddar Man”, who first settled Kennedy STEVEN POOLE IS AN AUTHOR
the British Isles after the last ice AND CRITIC
14 April 2023 The Guardian Weekly
58 Culture
Books

T
FICTION he year is 1995 and Shy is a 16-year-old Like Porter’s first three books, Shy focuses on
boy toting an impressive CV of delin- characters in extremis; like them, it is interested
quencies. “He’s sprayed, snorted, in questions of childhood and maturity, cruelty
smoked, sworn, stolen, cut, punched, and compassion, art and despair. As the poetry
Boy zone run, jumped, crashed an Escort, smashed up a of Ted Hughes came to the aid of the bereaved
shop, trashed a house, broken a nose, stabbed father in Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, so
Max Porter’s fourth his stepdad’s finger.” He’s been “expelled from drum’n’bass and jungle come to Shy’s aid; as
two schools. First caution in 1992 aged thir- Lanny’s parents wrestled with the horror of his
book is a lyrical and teen.” He has alienated his mother. He loves only disappearance, so Shy wrestles with the tides
compassionate drum’n’bass and jungle. He is now a pupil at the and terrors of a depression he may have partly
Last Chance boarding school, described in a well- inherited – or so the book gently suggests –
portrait of a troubled meaning documentary film as an “unconven- from his mother.
youth at a young tional” institution for the rehabilitation of “some One of the interesting things about Porter’s
of the most disturbed and violent young offenders work is that he uses the formal techniques of
offenders’ institution in the country”, and described by Shy modernism not to shock the reader
as “a shite old mansion converted into into assuming a greater critical dis-
By Kevin Powers a school for badly behaved boys in the tance from the text but rather to cul-
middle of bumblefuck nowhere”. tivate a deeper imaginative involve-
When the novel opens, Shy is sneak- ment in the lives of his characters.
ing out of school at 3am with a rucksack His books, for all their expressionistic
full of rocks on his back. He is heading idiosyncrasies, are hugely readable,
for the school duck pond. The ruck- Shy even gripping. This is not really a func-
sack will weigh him down. Last Chance By Max Porter tion of Porter’s linguistic brilliance;
indeed. Shy’s trip to the pond is also the still less is it a function of plot, which
story of his life. His inner monologue ducks and Porter doesn’t bother with. In fact, Porter’s books
dives, summoning memories, smashing together offer an object lesson in the importance of loving
disparate linguistic registers: family arguments, your characters – compassion being one of the
therapeutic exercises, the improvs of drum’n’bass two secret ingredients of successful narrative art
MCs, the macho nonsense of teenage boys. “The – and of allowing them to speak for themselves.
night,” for Shy, “is a shattered flicker-drag of these The substance of Shy is Shy’s inner turmoil;
sensejumbled memories.” Porter conveys it beautifully (“His thoughts are
Shy the character is “sensejumbled”; so is Shy loping along in odd repetitive chunks, running
the novel. But of course it is. It’s a Max Porter at him, stumbling”). He makes us feel not just
book. Like Grief Is the Thing with Feathers (2015), Shy’s confusion but his mother’s and stepfather’s
Lanny (2019) and The Death of Francis Bacon despair at ever reaching him. The method of the
(2021), Shy occupies an interzone between fiction book is essentially choric: Shy’s streams of con-
and poetry. It tells an essentially novelistic story sciousness are fed by tributaries of other people’s
using some of the tricks and tropes of modernist language – his parents’ bribes and imprecations;
verse (and modernist fiction: “sensejumbled” the voiceover of the documentary film about Last
sounds straight out of Joyce). Chance; the banter and bravado of Shy’s fellow
ALEX SEGRE/REX

B
H I ST ORY y 1988, the average East German drank and belonging in contrast to what they perceived
142 litres of beer a year, double the to be the empty consumerism of the West”.
intake of the average West German. Indeed, one way of reading Hoyer’s revisionist
The obvious explanation is they drank history is as a takedown of western hubris, using
The other GDR to escape the unbearable awfulness of being in the example of East Germany to highlight our
the German Democratic Republic, shortcomings in social mobility and
A revisionist history with its omnipresent Stasi, clown-car women’s rights.
Trabants, travel restrictions, geronto- Take childcare. In 1989, the GDR
by a daughter of East cratic rulers, grim Baltic holidays and had one of the highest rates of female
Germany adds nuance laughable elections. employment in the world, mostly
Not so, argues East German-born because state nurseries, open from
to our understanding historian Katja Hoyer. Most East Ger- 6am to 6pm, admitted children from
of life under the Stasi mans drank not to forget their worries Beyond the Wall: birth. After the Berlin Wall fell, such
but because they had so little to worry East Germany expensively egalitarian services were
about. By the late 1980s, true, the level 1949-1990 dismantled and East German mothers
By Stuart Jeffries of surveillance carried out by the Stasi By Katja Hoyer found it difficult to square parenting
was at an all-time high, but often little with a career. As Hoyer puts it, they
was done with the information gathered. were “baffled when they had to justify why
Not that Hoyer is an Ostalgie-filled apologist. they even wanted both”.
Her GDR is one divided between those “who When Germany was divided into British,
resented the permanent state of alert and polit- French, American and Russian sectors after the
icisation of life” and “others who craved meaning fall of the Third Reich, few expected the last one

The Guardian Weekly 14 April 2023

 59

pupils; the concern, love and impatience of Shy’s BOOKS OF THE MONTH
therapists and teachers. It is virtuoso. The best recent science fiction and fantasy
It also feels, when you finish it, more than a
tad sentimental. If compassion is one of the two
secret ingredients of fiction, then the other is By Lisa Tuttle after him. What begins With hauntingly beautiful
cruelty – or perhaps we might say, more gently, as classic military space descriptions of the natural
irony. Grief Is the Thing with Feathers worked opera blossoms into world, this challenging
so well because it leavened its deep reserves of something far more novel is tough and
compassion with the bitter black comedy of the complex as Kyr discovers memorable.
character of Crow (“I find humans dull except in what life is like for the
grief”). Lanny was at its best when it looked away rest of Earth’s refugees on
from Lanny the endearing faery-child and sank the planet Chrysothemis,
deep into the ordinary spikiness of humdrum meets a friendly alien
adult life. (In The Death of Francis Bacon, things and encounters the
went the other way: too much bitterness, not omnipotent intelligence
enough compassion.) The Ten Percent Thief known as the Wisdom.
Without giving too much away, Shy ends in By Lavanya The story combines
a dollop of pure sentiment. Seinfeld’s no hug- Lakshminarayan thrilling action with
ging rule is not followed here. We might argue A mosaic of a novel depicts more thoughtful content,
about whether or not such an ending has been a satirical yet horribly touching on such hot Camp Zero
earned; some readers will certainly feel that it believable future world topics as AI, fascism and By Michelle Min Sterling
channels sufficient emotive power to bring the starkly divided between gender politics. Another debut in the field
book beautifully home. To my mind it doesn’t; enclosed cities where of climate fiction imagines
there is, late on, an encounter with nature in the the Twenty Percent live the United States in 2049,
raw that is asked to bear slightly more thematic in luxury, supported by when many parts of the
and narrative weight than it really warrants, and the aspirational Seventy country have become
the book as a whole feels unbalanced in various Percent, and a hot, unbearably hot. Only
ways. Shy’s mother and stepfather, for instance, depleted landscape the wealthy can live in
remain merely spectral figures, which may be outside where the bottom comfort and safety. One
true to the subjective experience of depression – Ten Percent are outcasts, haven is the Floating
all the world can seem full of ghosts when you’re denied access to the City in Boston Harbour;
depressed – but leaves the book feeling thinner virtual world, electricity, another is being built in
than it otherwise might. clean water and respect. Not Alone the cleaner, cooler climate
At one point, young Shy dreams of playing No one could imagine By Sarah K Jackson around Dominion Lake
Joseph in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor such “useless” people Storm winds laden in northern Canada,
Dreamcoat. Like Joseph’s coat, Shy has many mounting a successful with toxic dust from where Rose has been sent
patches: some of them are brilliantly coloured; revolution … A smart, microplastics have to join a small group of
a few – but only a few – are disappointingly bare. vivid, engaging debut destroyed human and sex workers billeted in
KEVIN POWERS IS AN AMERICAN FICTION WRITER, from a talented writer. animal populations. Katie, an abandoned shopping
POET AND IRAQ WAR VETERAN a survivor, is raising her mall. Her secret agenda
son, Harry, in isolation, is to get close to Meyer,
venturing outside heavily the American who owns
would become an independent nation, still less masked to forage. After the land, and report back
a walled-in Stasiland. “What is this GDR?” asked five years, she fears the to the wealthy client who
Stalin’s security henchman Lavrentiy Beria in state of her lungs has promised her a home
1952. “It’s not even a proper state. It only exists become critical, and when in the Floating City if
because of Soviet troops.” she learns that her fiance, she can find out what
On 7 October 1989, a four-year-old Hoyer and Jack, might still be alive Meyer is really doing.
her father celebrated the GDR’s 40th anniversary in Scotland, she embarks Meanwhile, further
with a trip to the viewing platform of Berlin’s Some Desperate Glory on a long, arduous north, an all-female team
Fernsehturm, the socialist-built TV tower. Below, By Emily Tesh journey north, staking is conducting climate
police cars converged on Alexanderplatz in an This debut novel opens everything on the chance surveillance on the edge
attempt to quell the unstoppable protests that led on Gaea Station, where of finding someone to of the Arctic Circle. An
to the collapse of the Berlin Wall a month later. a few thousand human care for Harry after her all-male mission before
Like most East Germans, her dad had no survivors continue death. The story is driven them ended badly, but the
inclination to join the demonstrators: the Hoyers a desperate war against by the debut author’s women form a cohesive,
were comfortable with their secondhand Trabant the alien empire that passionate concern for almost utopian society.
and two-bed flat in a 1960s prefab block. Today destroyed planet Earth. the environment, and The different narratives in
their daughter lives in the UK, but not without When her brother is a warning of horrors this absorbing novel come
a memory of what died that day. What makes disappears, 17-year-old to come but also a stark together in a surprising
her meticulous book essential reading is not so Kyr learns he’s been sent depiction of how nearly and satisfying way.
much its sense of what East Germans lost, as on a secret mission that impossible it is for one LISA TUTTLE IS A SCIENCE
what we never had. will mean his death. She person to raise a child FICTION AND FANTASY
STUART JEFFRIES IS A FEATURE WRITER risks everything to go alone, without support. AUTHOR AND CRITIC

14 April 2023 The Guardian Weekly

60 Lifestyle
ASK
Annalisa Barbieri
I think my friend
has an eating
disorder. Should
I say something?
Over the years, my best friend and
I have shared the highs and lows of
motherhood, career and family. As
we get older, however, it troubles
me that we have never discussed
her well-hidden eating disorder.
When I found out she had
disordered eating (it took me years
to realise, as she is very clever),
I decided to wait until she was ready
to talk. But a decade on, I think it
unlikely that this conversation
will ever happen. There was one
opportunity recently, when she had
to have some teeth re-veneered, and
said breezily: “I wonder why that
had to happen?” – but I was too slow
to seize it and ask a question.
I sometimes worry our friendship
is not authentic because there is
such a large part of her life from
which I am excluded. I grew up in
a family beset by secrets, and I’m
quite used to keeping the status
quo by not asking confronting
questions. Perhaps that is why our
friendship works.
I could go on this way
indefinitely, but I love and care
STEPHEN COLLINS
The Guardian Weekly 14 April 2023
about my friend and know that
underneath the impressive exterior,
there is a lot of pain. Do I leave it as
is? Or do I say something – and what
could I say that won’t be potentially
friendship ending?
P
erhaps you have worked
out, on some instinctive
level, that loving and
caring about your friend
means not mentioning this part of
her. Presumably you think that by
mentioning her eating disorder you
can have a talk about it and … then
what? It won’t be magically cured
since, if that were possible, she’d
have been free of it years ago.
Eating disorders are complex.
Over the years of speaking to
specialists, that’s the word that
comes up the most when we talk
about them. Talking to you about it
may not make it better; it might even
make it worse. Maybe she needs
this place, with you, where she’s not
defined by her eating disorder.
I consulted UKCP-registered
psychotherapist Ali Ross. He said
that, even if you were to bring it
up and have a conversation with
your friend about it, “It wouldn’t
address the underlying issue”,
since an eating disorder is usually
a symptom of something else. Your
friend may not even know what the
underlying issue is.
Neither Ross nor I felt you should
bring it up. We understand you want
to help, but Ross said the best way
you could do this was by “continuing
to be a loving friend, and being
available if she chooses to talk about
it at some point”. And if she were to
bring it up, just listen to her, since
eating disorders were, he said, very
often about “control and discipline”,
and she’s unlikely to react well
to being told what to do. I’m not
saying you would do that, but the
temptation might be strong.
I think you forcing it out into
the open might take away her
feelings of control and bring shame
to the fore, all of which could be
damaging for her.
I really understand about wanting
everything to be out in the open,
but this isn’t realistic. Everyone has
a private part of themselves.
You talk about it not being an
authentic friendship because
you’re excluded from this part of
her life. But as Ross said: “That’s
not the contract of friendship.” Do
we need to know everything about
our friends? Does your friend know
everything about you?
I really understand you want to
take away her pain, but you may
have to accept that it’s out of your
control. And maybe, as you say, the
Talking to reason your friendship works is
because you care but you don’t pry
you may into something you feel she doesn’t
not make want to talk about. Personally
I think this is not a failing on your
it better; part, but a skill.
it might If you would like advice on
even a family matter, email
ask.annalisa@theguardian.com.
make it See theguardian.com/letters-terms
worse for terms and conditions
 KITCHEN AIDE
By Anna Berrill
When life gives you preserved
lemons, make almost anything
I buy a jar of preserved lemons to
make chicken and chorizo stew, but
I only ever use a couple of them. Any
suggestions for what to do with the
rest of the jar?
Joseph, Glasgow, Scotland, UK
“There are so many things,” says
chef and writer Sami Tamimi.
“I could write a book about this very
question.” But, until that day comes,
know that the fragrant, slightly tart
fruit will brighten and add depth to
all sorts, from dressings and dips to
salads, stews and Sunday roasts.
The first lesson in these lemons,
however, is one of storage. “You
don’t have to keep them in the
fridge,” Tamimi says. “The salt
content means they’ll last happily
in the cupboard for a few months.”
But when life gives you too many
lemons, he says, it’s time to turn
to the freezer: “Remove the pips,
blitz the preserved lemon(s), then
decant into an ice-cube tray and
freeze.” Those cubes could then be
destined for future salad dressings,
mixed with olive oil and seasoning
to pour over a roast leg or shoulder
of lamb, or even chill out in a jug of
homemade lemonade.
The talents of preserved lemons
extend far beyond the likes of
tagines. Proving their versatility,
chef Nargisse Benkabbou, the
author of Casablanca: My Moroccan
Food, chops them very thinly,
“until they’re paste-like”, and
adds to curries, seafood and fish
THE PICTURE PANTRY/ALAMY
traybakes, and even guacamole, to
add “a fragrant kick”. They’re also
good in pasta sauces, Benkabbou
says, with her go-to being alfredo
– one of Italy’s creamiest, which
is made by mixing melted butter,
sometimes double cream, grated
parmesan and black pepper.
Another way to work through that
jar, Tamimi says, is to incorporate
chopped lemon in dumplings before
nestling them in a stew, while they
are ideal for salsas (alongside herbs
and chilli) to accompany fish or
chicken. For a dip, Ravinder Bhogal
blends cooked peas with garlic, mint
and preserved lemon rind. With
the motor running, she trickles in
extra-virgin olive oil, seasons and
tops with quick-pickled radishes
and crumbled feta. “A butterbean
dip with a little preserved lemon
and cooked garlic would also be
really nice,” Tamimi adds.
A more radical approach, though,
would be to lean towards the sweet
side. In Dessert Person, Claire Saffitz
harnesses the savoury nature of
preserved lemons by blending the
rinds with Greek yoghurt, vanilla,
and fresh lemon juice and zest,
before adding that to her batter for
a lemon meringue cake. Tamimi,
meanwhile, is “dying” to try
preserved lemon in an ice-cream or
y.”
sorbet: “Now, that would be lovely.”
You got the scoop here first.
ANNA BERRILL IS A FOOD WRITER
Got a culinary dilemma? Email
feast@theguardian.com
611
6
T H E W E E K LY R E C I P E
By Henry Dimbleby
№ 213
Meatless
meatballs
Prep 10 min The single best thing each of us
Cook 1hr 30 min can do for the environment is to
cut back on our meat consumption
Serves 6 – and by at least 30%. If, like me,
you have carnivorous children,
• DAIRY FREE
you’ll need a few tricks up your
sleeve – this recipe is cheap and
easy to make.
Method
Ingredients Crush two cloves of the garlic and
4 garlic cloves, put them into a small pan with
peeled the tomatoes. Level the top with
1 x 400g tin chopped a spoon and gently pour over three
tomatoes
tablespoons of olive oil so it forms
4 tbsp olive oil
1 onion, peeled
a thin layer over the tomatoes.
1 x 400g tin Warm over a moderate heat
chickpeas, well until the first bubbles break the
drained surface. Cook on a very gentle heat
1 x 400g tin kidney for an hour to an hour and a half
beans, well drained (however long it takes you to make
1 tsp paprika the balls) so that the occasional
2 tsp cumin bubble breaks through the olive
3 level tbsp gram
oil – you will need to turn down the
flour
1 egg
heat gradually over the course of the
1 cup breadcrumbs hour. Do not stir.
(I used panko, but any While the sauce is cooking, finely
will do) chop the onion and fry with a pinch
Salt and black of salt in a tablespoon of olive oil
pepper until softened – at least 15 minutes.
Oil, for frying Roughly chop the remaining
1 tbsp chopped fresh two garlic cloves and put in a food
parsley or coriander
processor with the chickpeas, beans,
paprika, cumin, gram flour and egg.
Blend on pulse mode – it shouldn’t
be too smooth: there should be little
lumps of chickpea and kidney beans
through it from about the size of
pine nuts to peas. Transfer to a bowl
and season, going heavy on the
pepper. Add the fried onion, and stir.
Heat the oven to 140C (120C fan/
g
gas 1). Roll the mixture into balls and
ccoat with breadcrumbs, then fry in
o
oil for about eight minutes, or until
th
the breadcrumbs are golden.
Put the balls into a serving dish,
th
then into the oven for 20 minutes.
R
Remove from the oven, blitz the
ssauce with a blender, pour on top
o
of the balls and sprinkle with the
cchopped herbs.
14 April 2023 The Guardian Weekly

62 Diversions
QUIZ
Thomas Eaton
1 Ten Percent by
Double Exposure was
the first commercially
available what?
2 What are listed in a
catalogue raisonné?
3 Which radical group
assembled at St George’s
Hill, Surrey, in 1649?
4 Which animal
breastfeeds for up to
eight years?
PUZZLES
Chris Maslanka
1 Wordpool
Find the correct definition:
NEOBLASTIC
a) iconoclastic
b) characteristic of new
growth
c) modern explosive
d) temple-destroying
2 Jumblies
Rearrange the letters
of CREDITOR to make
another word.
3 Dropouts
Replace each asterisk by
a letter to make a word:
W*A*N*T
CHESS
Leonard Barden
As Ian Nepomniachtchi
and Ding Liren, Russia’s
world No 2 and China’s
world No 3, began their
€2m ($2.2m) 14-game
title match in Astana,
Kazakhstan, Magnus
Carlsen was relaxing
in Chamonix after
competing in the online
Chessable Masters.
The Norwegian, who
announced several
months ago that he would
abdicate after a 10-year
reign, is comfortable with
his decision to jettison his
title and the months of
hard slog in preparation
every alternate year.
The Guardian Weekly 14 April 2023
5 Where is the gas crater
known as the Door to Hell?
6 Which building in
Virginia has 27 hectares of
parking spaces?
7 Whose chariot was
pulled by a pair of goats?
8 Meteorologist James
Stagg recommended the
date for what event?
What links:
9 Istanbul (1923); Rio de
Janeiro (1960); Lagos
(1991); Yangon (2006)?
10 Alcman; Alcaeus;
4 Word Centre
Identify the word from its
centre: **PANE**
5 Missing Links
Find a word that follows
the first word in the clue
and precedes the second,
in each case making
a fresh word or phrase.
Eg the answer to fish mix
could be cake (fishcake &
cake mix) and to bat man
he (bathe & he-man).
a) pop chart
b) ring line
c) petty point
d) four meals
e) arm stop
f ) basement tyre
© CMM2023
Carlsen defended the
crown four times, and
has a secure place at the
pinnacle of chess history,
alongside or nudging
ahead of Garry Kasparov
and Bobby Fischer.
Carlsen is still ranked
3862 White mates in three moves
(by Fritz Giegold, 1975). Just a
single line of play with Black’s
replies forced, but you will do well to
find it in under five minutes.
Pindar; Sappho;
Simonides?
11 CPIH; CPI; RPI?
12 Collar; eyelet; strobel;
swoosh; tongue; vamp?
13 Grand Duchess
Anastasia; Martin
Bormann; Elvis Presley;
Tupac Shakur?
14 Algiers; Britain;
the Century; Midway;
the Sexes?
15 Desdemona’s
strawberry handkerchief
and Shakira’s
strawberry jam?
e) arm/pit/stop; f) basement/flat/tyre.
point; d) four/square/meals;
b) ring/side/line; c) petty/cash/
5 Missing Links a) pop/star/chart;
4 Word Centre JAPANESE.
3 Dropouts WHATNOT.
DIRECTORS and RECORDIST).
2 Jumblies DIRECTOR (CREDITORS has
1 Wordpool b).
Maslanka
imagined).
titles. 15 Evidence of infidelity (real or
to be alive. 14 Films: The Battle of …
people who are persistently rumoured
12 Parts of (Nike) trainers. 13 Dead
11 UK indices of price inflation.
Taw. 10 Ancient Greek lyric poets.
by: Ankara; Brasilia; Abuja; Nay Pyi
status as capital city and were replaced
7 Thor. 8 D-day landings. 9 Lost their
5 Turkmenistan (Darvaza). 6 Pentagon.
True Levellers). 4 Orangutan.
complete works. 3 Diggers (or
Quiz 1 12-inch single. 2 Artist’s
Answers
No 1 and has a full
programme of upcoming
events. He is scheduled
to play over-the-board
in the Grand Chess Tour
rapid and blitz in Warsaw
in May and Zagreb in July,
and in Norway Chess at
Stavanger in May-June.
Whoever wins in Astana
will face a credibility test
similar to Anatoly Karpov
when Fischer resigned the
Fide title in 1975. Karpov
overcame it within a year
or two, aided by Fischer’s
complete withdrawal and
his own successes.
The Russian was the
slight favourite as their
match began.
Be5 mate.
3862 1 Ra8! gxh4 2 Rg7! Kxg7 3
Notes and Queries
The long-running series that invites
readers to send in questions and
answers on anything and everything
COU N T RY DI A RY
OR MISTON
East Lothian, Scotland, UK
T
he flash of yellow is almost
hidden from the roadside,
a sort of blink-and-you-
miss-it as the cars whoosh
by. My dad had spotted the colourful
interruption the day before, and
wants to share his discovery with
me and my mum. Over the crash
barrier, our feet land softly on last
year’s dead leaves. A gentle hillside
swoops down in a cascade of winter
aconites. They are a golden secret,
the biggest patch we’ve ever seen in
Scotland. Probably escapers from
someone’s garden that have thrived
in this scrap of woodland.
The start of the year has been
grey and raw, so the aconites are a
welcome whisper that there will
always be fresh growth. But there’s
a huge amount of litter too. Crisp
packets, plastic bottles, drinks cans.
We’re on a corner of the road, and it’s
obvious they’ve been tossed out of
people’s windows – whoever threw
them unaware that their rubbish
would land in what would become,
for a brief moment, a field of gold.
My initial calm is replaced by worry
for the badgers, foxes and other
creatures that surely live nearby and
now have to deal with this debris.
We cross back over the road and
head into the woods, where clots of
snowdrops blanket the ground and
yews droop. There’s a beauty here
that needs to be teased out from
the dullness of the day, that unfurls
the longer you look at it. But it’s the
yellow that lodges in my mind, like
sunshine spilled on the ground.
We gather up as much litter as
we can carry, clutching cans and
cloudy glass bottles, putting some
in poo bags that we still have in our
pockets, despite the fact that our
beloved dog died last year. In weeks,
or maybe days, the flowers will be
over, and will bide their time until
next year – a promise spreading
among the rubbish. Elspeth Wilson
ILLUSTRATION: CLIFFORD HARPER
Like Puzzles? Try the new Guardian Puzzles app. Download from the App Store or Google Play
Read more: theguardian.com/puzzles-app 63

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Quick crossword
No 16,508
9 10 1 2 3 4

11 12 6 7

8 9

13 14

 All solutions published next week

15 10 11 12

16 17 18 19

20 13 14 15

21

22 16 17 18

23 24

19

25 26

The Weekly cryptic By Pasquale Across 7 Mary Quant’s iconic attire (9)
5 Large paper pad on a stand used 12 Loyal (8)
No 29,035 for making presentations (4,5) 14 Every 52 weeks (6)
8 Young male horse (4) 15 Arrows carrier (6)
9 As is the Pope (8) 17 Wild goat (4)
Across 15 Swimming race — a time to dive in (8)
10 Reading matter available
1 A bird traversing lake, a noted flyer (6) 17 Difficulty leads to jazz singer making a
from the internet (1-5)
4 Protective plate supports gemstone (8) complaint (7)
11 Toasted bun (6)
9 Observe learner keeping quiet — backward 19 Hawkish type with various cruelties putting
13 Despicable (informal) (6)
type interacting weakly (6) us off (7)
15 Awkwardly eccentric (6)
10 Friendly note within an urgent message? (8) 20 Pilgrim’s bad experience somewhere near
16 Japanese dish — I try IKEA Solution No 16,502
11 Aids to those researching wicked Etonian Windsor (6)
squires (14) 22 Doctor shower’s output, not right (4)
(anag) (8) I N F I N I T I V E
18 South American cape (4) F D U E U A
13 A submarine captain, first person to attempt
19 Prince of Darkness (9) O C E A N I C R U N I N
meteorological technique (10) R S K T N I E
14 Yield from what’s sown in garden, T U T U B A S T I L L E
reportedly (4) Down Y A R A L R
16 Spoil vote, as one looking for revolution? (4) 1 Raised horizontal surface (8) W I C K E D W I Z A R D
18 Extended treatise penned by professional 2 Makes more interesting (6) I A R R L O
wordsmith (10) 3 Cadence (6) N O T I O N A L C H E W
4 Consequently (4) K F B N J E E
21 Absence of instruments to welcome in golden S C I F I C U E B A L L
prizewinners (5,9) 6 Last leader of the Soviet Union,
S C I D V L
23 Brief about pee containing metallic d. August 2022 (9)
WH I S T D R I V E
element (8)
24 Problem with this Roman vessel (6)
Solution No 29,029
25 It’s marvellous to celebrate drinking
squash (8)
Sudoku
26 Parlay has a king thus functioning (2,4) A I W H P S S W Medium
V E N T I L A T E M A I Z E Fill in the grid so
Down E C N T N U N L that every row,
1 Bar left in sack (4) R O U N D P L E N T I F U L every column
2 Catch caught on river, suitable B O E L O and every 3x3
for catching (7) C H I N W A G O R G A N I C box contains the
3 Weapon to pass through the East End? (8) A S P O I R numbers 1 to 9.
5 Payer regarding Spooner’s dividend (11) K E I T H F E E B E A N O
6 Amateur seaman turned up for party (6) Last week’s solution
E N O A E F
7 Tavern’s purple fruit not popular (7) D U S T P A N R A T C H E T
8 What’s said to be terrible root crop U F E W E
or plant (5-4) W O R K O F A R T E R R O R
12 You might notice it in one bar, O I N R O E E A
I fancy (11) K I N K Y E R R A N D B O Y
13 Fossils — a couple of thousand on new site (9) E G X S T S Y S

14 April 2023 The Guardian Weekly

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