WE

A week in the life of the world | Global edition | 17 MAY 2024 | VOL .210 No.20 | £5.95 | €9

LIVE
IN
AN

Why hundreds
of the world's top
climate scientists
are in despair
about the future
SPECIAL REPORT 
34
Eyewitness  Tugs away
Germany Two tugboats set off fireworks during the tugboat ballet, which forms part of
annual celebrations of the river Elbe port. Hamburg marks 7 May 1189 as the
birthday of the port as 835 years ago, citizens were granted duty-free travel
PHOTOGRAPH:
GEORG WENDT/AP for their ships from the city to the North Sea

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 A week in the life of the world
17 MAY 2024

4
GL OBAL REP ORT
Headlines from
34
F E AT U R E S
Long reads, interviews & essays
the last seven days We asked 380 climate
United Kingdom ................... 8 scientists about the future
Science & Environment ........ 9 By Damian Carrington ......... 34
The big story Believe it or not: a deepfake
Israel/Palestine video scandal
The emptying of Rafah.........10 By Jenny Kleeman ............... 40

45
OPINION
Simon Tisdall
51
C U LT U R E
TV, film, music, theatre, art,
Nothing but broken rainbows as architecture & more

15
South Africa goes to polls...... 45 Art
▼ Marina Hyde Rosie Boy t on sitting for her
‘Martha’ deserves better from father, Lucian Freud ............ 51
Netflix’s Baby Reindeer hit ...47  Music
Fintan O’Toole Takeaways from the most
Legacy Act won’t heal the pain political Eurovision yet ........55
SPOTLIGHT of Troubles violence ............ 48 Books
In-depth reporting and analysis A tale of artistic lowlife and
China high living excess ................57
How a network of fake shops  Books
duped western shoppers ...... 15
 Sudan
If you paid Joseph Stiglitiz’s recipe for
taming neoliberalism ......... 58
Disease and despair in Darfur’s your co-chief

60
besieged main city ............... 19
United Kingdom executive
London’s gentlemen’s clubs $49.8m last
weigh up letting in women ...22
Environment year, you can
Fast fashion’s excesses left to
decay in the desert .............. 24
probably afford LIFESTYLE
Science a half-arsed Ask Annalisa
Is the world ready for a bird Should I try for a third baby? ..60
flu pandemic? ..................... 30 compliance Kitchen aide
Canada
Rap beef brings diners to
department Savoury tarts to relish ..........61
Recipe
Toronto restaurant ...............33 Palestinian mujadara ...........61

Join the community 17 MAY 2024 VOL

WE On the cover Our environment editor Damian

Twitter: @guardianweekly LIVE Carrington speaks regularly to the world’s top
facebook.com/guardianweekly IN
AN climate experts, but lately he noticed many of

AGE
Instagram: @guardian
them seemed to be losing faith in keeping global
heating to the 1.5C target. “So I decided to ask

OF hundreds of those scientists what they thought,

to get a real feel for what was going on,” says

FOOLS
Why hundreds
of the world's top
climate scientists
are in despair
about the future
SPECIAL REPORT 
Damian. “What they said shocked even me.”
SPOT ILLUSTRATIONS:
Photograph: Getty/Guardian Design
MATT BLEASE
4

Global
2 CANADA 4 GEORGIA

Clashes between protesters

report and riot police in Tbilisi

Riot police armed with water
cannon and teargas were accused
of beating protesters who picketed
parliament in Tbilisi to try to stop
Headlines from the a final vote on a controversial
last seven days “foreign influence” law.
The violence on Monday came
as hundreds of masked officers
1 U N I T E D S TAT E S Thousands flee as wildfire
charged down demonstrators who
threatens to destroy town had been attempting to block off
Fixer says Trump told him to
Officials in western Canada were access to the parliament in the
bury Stormy Daniels story bracing for “volatile wildfire capital. The Special Investigation
Copyright © 2024 Donald Trump told his one-time activity” early this week as an Service said subsequently it had
GNM Ltd. All rights fixer Michael Cohen only weeks out-of-control blaze, which has opened a case into claims of use of
reserved before the 2016 election to bury already forced the evacuation of excessive force.
Stormy Daniels’s account of an thousands, threatened to destroy The protesters have been
Published weekly by alleged sexual liaison, demanding a northern British Columbia town. seeking to stop a committee of
Guardian News & that he “just take care of it”, On Monday, the province’s MPs from signing off on a bill that
Media Ltd, according to trial testimony in a wildfire service said the blaze would force non-governmental
Kings Place, Manhattan court on Monday. was burning just 2km north-west groups and media to register
90 York Way,
“This was a disaster, a fucking of Fort Nelson, which saw about as “organisations serving the
London, N1 9GU, UK
disaster,” Cohen, after he took 3,500 people evacuated after an interest of a foreign power” if
Printed in the UK, the stand, recalled Trump saying. order to leave was issued. more than 20% of their funding
Denmark, the US, “Women will hate me.” In 2023, Canada witnessed comes from overseas.
Australia and Cohen described Trump as a record number of wildfires Opponents of the bill, including
New Zealand angry at the possibility that that also caused choking smoke the US state department, claim it
Daniels, an adult film star, might in parts of the US and forced is inspired by Russian legislation
ISSN 0958-9996 come forward shortly after the more than 250,000 Canadians passed in 2012, which they say has
Washington Post published a to evacuate their communities. been used to persecute critics of
To advertise contact hot-mic recording from an Access There were no civilian casualties, the Kremlin. The EU has warned
advertising.
Hollywood taping in which Trump but at least four firefighters died that passing the legislation
enquiries@
bragged about groping women “by while battling the fires. will damage Georgia’s chances
theguardian.com
the pussy” without their consent. Special report Page 34  of joining the bloc.
To subscribe, visit Cohen is accused of shuttling
theguardian.com/ $130,000 to Daniels days before
gw-subscribe the 2016 election – in exchange for
3 RUSSIA 5 U N I T E D S TAT E S
her silence about an alleged sexual
Manage your encounter 10 years earlier.
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Defence minister Shoigu Hunter Biden trial date set
Prosecutors contend that
subscribe. Trump’s repayment of Cohen moved to security council after bid to dismiss fails
theguardian.com/ in 2017 was criminal because he Vladimir Putin has removed his A federal appeals court panel
manage
listed the reimbursements as legal longtime ally Sergei Shoigu as rejected a bid by Hunter Biden
expenses in financial documents. defence minister in the most to dismiss criminal gun charges,
USA and Canada
gwsubsus
Cohen’s testimony is also crucial significant reshuffle to the clearing the way for the trial of Joe
@theguardian.com in establishing that Trump knew military command since Russian Biden’s son to proceed, a first for
Toll Free: that the false entries were in troops invaded Ukraine more the child of a sitting president.
+1-844-632-2010 violation of election law. than two years ago. In a surprise A three-judge panel of the
Spotlight Page 32  announcement, the Kremlin said US court of appeals for the third
Australia and Andrei Belousov, a former deputy circuit in Philadelphia said
New Zealand prime minister who specialises in Hunter Biden could not appeal,
apac.help economics, will replace Shoigu. but Biden’s legal team said
@theguardian.com Putin proposed that Shoigu they will ask the full appeals
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+44 (0) 330 333 6767

The Guardian Weekly 17 May 2024

UK headlines p8

6 UKRAINE
Russian forces advance on
north-eastern frontline
Russian forces continued their
advance on Ukraine’s northern
Kharkiv region early this week,
achieving “tactical success”,
Kyiv said, as fears grew that
Moscow would achieve its biggest
breakthrough since the early days
5
of the war. Some of the fiercest
fighting was being conducted
on the outskirts of the Ukrainian
town of Vovchansk, which before
the war had a population of
17,000. Ukrainian and Russian
reports confirmed that by Monday
Russian troops had advanced into
the outskirts of the town.
In an effort to shift the tide,
Kyiv announced the replacement
of the commander overseeing the
north-eastern Kharkiv frontline
and moved additional reserves to
the region.
Spotlight Page 18 
8 M A LTA
Ex-PM Muscat faces bribery
and corruption charges
Former prime minister Joseph 3
Muscat was charged with
corruption in a 2015 hospital
privatisation scandal that was 6
once investigated by the murdered
investigative journalist Daphne
Caruana Galizia.
1 Muscat has been charged with
accepting bribes, corruption
in public office and money
laundering. He has described the
allegations as “fantasies and lies”
and said he was the victim of a
political vendetta. Chris Fearne,
Malta’s deputy prime minister,
and three other political figures
were also charged as part of a
longrunning investigation into
the privatisation under Muscat’s
Labour government.
10 VA T I C A N C I T Y

7 BRAZIL

Museum staff in legal row

Flood toll rises as southern
region faces more rain
The death toll from heavy rains
in Rio Grande do Sul state rose
to at least 147, AFP reported on
Monday, as rains continued to
fall. The national government
announced around 12.1bn reais
($2.3bn) in emergency spending
to deal with the crisis that has
displaced more than 538,000
people in the state.
Emergency workers rescued a
horse that had been trapped for
days on a rooftop. The animal,
dubbed Caramelo on social
media, had been stranded in
Canoas, Porto Alegre, one of the
hardest-hit areas.
9 PERU
Police swoop on president’s
brother and her lawyer
Police detained the brother and
the lawyer of President Dina
Boluarte as part of a widening
corruption inquiry, weeks after
a similar raid on the Peruvian
leader’s home. The pair are
accused of influence trafficking
and belonging to a criminal
organisation. Six other people
were also detained.
The swoop on Boluarte’s inner
circle comes as she continues to
be embroiled in the “Rolexgate”
scandal after prosecutors began
an investigation following reports
that she was using jewellery worth
at least $500,000 despite earning
a monthly presidential salary of
$4,200. Boluarte, 61, claims three
Rolex watches are loaned.
over working conditions
Forty-nine employees at the
Vatican Museums have started
an unprecedented legal dispute
over job conditions and workplace
safety, which could lead to the
Holy See being taken to court.
The staff, mostly long-serving
custodians, claim they are
treated as “commodities” by
Pope Francis’s administration,
according to a newspaper report.
The Vatican Museums,
54 galleries containing a
priceless collection, including
Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel,
is among the most visited
museums in the world. It employs
more than 700 people. The 49
staff have sent a petition to the
Vatican’s governorate.
17 May 2024 The Guardian Weekly
 12 U N I T E D N AT I O N S
General assembly backs
Palestine’s membership bid
The UN general assembly
voted overwhelmingly to
back Palestine’s bid for full UN
membership, in a move that
signalled Israel’s growing global
isolation amid alarm over the
war in Gaza and the extent of the
territory’s humanitarian crisis.
The assembly voted by 143
to nine, with 25 abstentions,
for a resolution calling on the
UN security council to bestow
full membership to the state of
Palestine, while enhancing its
current mission with a range
of new rights and privileges, in
addition to what it is allowed in
its current observer status. The
gesture drew a rebuke from Israel.
The big story Page 10 
11 CHAD
Military leader Itno claims
victory in disputed election
The military leader Mahamat
Idriss Déby Itno was declared
winner of last week’s presidential
election, in results contested by
his main rival, the prime minister,
Succès Masra. Itno was reported
to have won with 61% of the vote,
with Masra on 18.5%. Gunfire
erupted in the capital, N’Djamena,
after the announcement, though it
was unclear if it was celebratory.
Analysts had widely expected
Itno to win the long delayed
election after three years of
military rule. Itno seized power
after his father, who spent three
decades in power, was killed
fighting rebels in 2021.
The Guardian Weekly 17 May 2024
14 ISRAEL
White House condemns
attack on Gaza aid trucks
The White House condemned an
attack on an aid convoy heading to
Gaza by Israeli settlers who threw
packages of food into the road and
set fire to the vehicles.
Video of the incident on
Monday at Tarqumiya checkpoint,
west of Hebron in the Israeli-
occupied West Bank, showed
15 settlers blocking the trucks and
20 throwing boxes of supplies on
17 the ground. Photographs showed
16
piles of damaged aid packages.
“It is a total outrage that there
are people who are attacking and
looting these convoys coming
from Jordan, going to Gaza to
deliver humanitarian assistance,”
US national security adviser Jake
Sullivan told reporters.
19
13 YEMEN
US gives Saudis green light
to revive Houthi peace deal
US determination to keep Saudi
Arabia engaged in a peace process
with Israel has led Washington
to give Riyadh an informal green
light to try to revive a peace deal
with the Houthis, the Yemen-
based rebels who have been
attacking commercial shipping in
the Red Sea since November.
The proposed Yemen UN
roadmap for peace was agreed
in outline in early December but
progress was immediately frozen
as the Houthis escalated their
campaign of attacks in the Red
Sea in what they billed as an act of
solidarity with Palestine.

Global report
15 A FG H A N I S TA N
State of emergency declared
after 300 die in flash floods
More than 300 people were killed
in flash floods that ripped through
multiple provinces in Afghanistan,
the UN’s World Food Programme
said, as authorities declared a
state of emergency and rushed to
rescue the injured.
Many people remained missing
after heavy rains on Friday sent
roaring rivers of water and mud
crashing through villages and
across agricultural land in several
provinces. Authorities and non-
governmental groups deployed
rescue workers and aid, warning
that some areas had been cut off
by the flooding.
Northern Baghlan province
was one of the hardest hit, with
more than 300 people killed there
alone, and thousands of houses
destroyed or damaged, according
to the World Food Programme.
16 INDIA
Modi rival released from
jail in time for election
Opposition leader Arvind Kejriwal,
the chief minister of Delhi, was
granted bail by the supreme
court to allow him to take part
in general election campaigning
after being kept behind bars for
almost two months.
Kejriwal, who heads the Aam
Aadmi party (AAP), has been in jail
since March when he was arrested
on money-laundering charges. He
has maintained that his detention
was politically motivated to
prevent him taking part in the
election, which began in April and
will continue until June. Kejriwal
told supporters he wanted to “save
the country from dictatorship”.
The big story p10 
7
17 CHINA 19 M A L AY S I A D E AT H S
Woman jailed for reporting Orangutan gifts of fered to
on Wuhan Covid to be freed countries buying palm oil
A citizen journalist who has been Kuala Lumpur plans to give
in prison for four years after orangutans as gifts to countries
reporting on the early days of the that buy Malaysian palm oil as Shirley Conran
Covid-19 epidemic in Wuhan was part of an “orangutan diplomacy” British author
due to be released on Monday; strategy to ease concerns over and campaigner
however, by Tuesday there had the environmental impact of who was a
been no news as to whether or not the commodity. former Observer
she had been freed. Global demand for palm oil journalist. She
Zhang Zhan, a former lawyer, has been blamed for driving died on 9 May,
travelled to Wuhan in February deforestation in Malaysia and aged 91.
2020 to document the Chinese neighbouring Indonesia.
government’s response to what Giving orangutans to trading Steve Albini
became the start of a global partners such as the EU, China Vocalist, guitarist
pandemic. She shared her reports and India would “prove to the and producer for
on X (then known as Twitter), global community that Malaysia albums across the
YouTube and WeChat. She was is committed to biodiversity US alternative
one of the few independent conservation”, the plantations music scene. He
Chinese reporters on the ground and commodities minister, Johari died on 7 May,
as Wuhan and the rest of China Abdul Ghani, said. aged 61.
went into lockdown. Malaysia is facing pressure from
Zhang was arrested in May 2020 the EU, which last year approved Roger Corman
and later sentenced to four years an import ban on commodities US film director
in prison for “picking quarrels linked to deforestation. and producer. He
and provoking trouble”, a charge died on 9 May,
often used against activists. aged 98.
She has been held in Shanghai
women’s prison ever since. Kim Ki-nam
During her time in prison, Propaganda chief
Zhang, who turned 40 in who served all
September, has engaged in three generations
periodic hunger strikes to of North Korean
protest against her conviction leaders. He died
and treatment. on 7 May, aged 94.
Juro Kara
Playwright who
18 H O N G KO N G 20 IRAN helped shape
Japan’s postwar
Court bans protest song in Acclaimed f ilm director
avant-garde
new blow to free speech f lees to Europe to avoid jail theatre. He died
A protest song that was made Film director Mohammad on 4 May, aged 84.
popular during pro-democracy Rasoulof secretly fled Iran after
demonstrations must be removed he was sentenced to prison amid Birubala Rabha
from the internet, Hong Kong has pressure over his latest film, Human rights
demanded, in the wake of a court The Seed of the Sacred Fig, which activist who
ruling which banned it. was due to premiere at the Cannes campaigned
In its judgment, the court of film festival this week. against witch-
appeal described the song Glory The film’s distributors hunting in India.
to Hong Kong as a “weapon” to confirmed that Rasoulof, 52, had She died on
incite violent protests in 2019. The fled for Europe. He has won a 13 May, aged 70.
ruling comes amid what critics say string of prizes even though his
is an erosion in Hong Kong’s rule films have been banned in Iran. Lyndall Ryan
of law and rights. Rasoulof and the festival had Australian
The song can no longer been under pressure from Iranian historian whose
be broadcast or performed authorities to pull the film. Last work focused on
“with criminal intent”, or week, he was sentenced to eight colonial frontier
disseminated or reproduced on years in prison, flogging, a fine and violence. She died
internet-based platforms. the confiscation of property. on 30 April,
aged 81.
17 May 2024 The Guardian Weekly

8 Global report
United Kingdom
LABOUR
Senior colleague backs new
MP over lobbying claims
A senior Labour frontbencher
defended his party’s newest MP,
Natalie Elphicke, after allegations
that she lobbied the justice
secretary in 2020 regarding the
forthcoming trial of her then
husband, Charlie, on sexual
assault charges.
Jonathan Ashworth, a shadow
Cabinet Office minister, said last
Sunday that Elphicke regarded the
allegations from Robert Buckland
as “nonsense”, urging the former
justice secretary to give a full
public account of the meeting.
Ashworth was speaking to
the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg
hours after the Sunday Times
reported details about the 2020
meeting between Buckland and
Elphicke, who dramatically
defected from the Tories to
Labour last week. According to
the report, Elphicke used that
meeting to urge Buckland, who
was then the justice secretary
522k
and lord chancellor, to interfere
in a hearing about her husband’s
case. Neither Elphicke nor
Hectares of Buckland responded to requests
private garden in to comment.
Britain, according Elphicke’s unveiling as a Labour
to the Office MP last Wednesday at the start of
for National prime minister’s questions was
Statistics. This supposed to be a political coup for
year’s Chelsea the Labour leader, Keir Starmer.
Flower Show, During her time as the MP for
which opens Dover, Elphicke was one of the
on 21 May, is most high-profile MPs calling for
introducing a the government to find a way to
green medal for stop asylum seekers crossing the
sustainability, Channel in small boats.
rewarding However, Starmer’s decision
wildlife-rich to accept her into the Labour
and eco-friendly party has caused upset on his own
gardens in a benches, given her background on
bid to promote the right of the Tory party.
the nation’s The Guardian view Page 49 
biodiversity
The Guardian Weekly 17 May 2024
ECONOMY
UK moves out of recession,
but slow growth forecast
The UK is officially out of
recession after figures showed the
economy grew by 0.6% in the first
three months of the year.
The Office for National
Statistics said the period marked
a return to growth after a mild
recession in the second half of
2023. It was the strongest rate of
quarterly growth since the end
of 2021 and a better performance
than expected by economists, who
forecast growth of 0.4%.
The downturn came to an
end after an increase in activity
across the services sector, which
has flourished as wages have
outstripped inflation.
However, forecasters expect
the UK to grow slowly this year as
high interest rates continue to take
their toll on disposable incomes.
PROTEST
Two women charged over
Magna Carta attack
Two women in their 80s were
charged with criminal damage
after the glass around Magna Carta
at the British Library in London
was attacked as part of a Just Stop
Oil protest.
The Rev Sue Parfitt, 82, from
Bristol, and Judith Bruce, 85, from
Swansea, targeted the protective
enclosure around the document
with a hammer and chisel.
A statement from the British
Library said security intervened
to “prevent further damage to the
case, which was minimal” and
the “Magna Carta itself remains
undamaged”.
The gallery housing the display
is closed until further notice.
UK Spotlight p22
ENVIRONMENT
No guarantee new bathing
sites are safe for swimming
Twenty-seven new bathing sites
will be designated in England, the
government announced.
Giving waterways bathing
status means the Environment
Agency has to test them for
pollution, but is no guarantee the
waters are safe to swim in.
Last year, testing found that
England’s three river swimming
areas all had “poor” status due
to pollution.
SECURITY
Three charged with aiding
Hong Kong intelligence
Three men appeared in court
in London on Monday accused
under the National Security Act of
allegedly assisting the Hong Kong
intelligence service.
Matthew Trickett, 37, Chi
Leung (Peter) Wai, 38, and Chung
Biu Yuen, 63, were charged with
engaging in unlawful information
gathering, surveillance and acts of
deception between 20 December
2023 and 2 May 2024, contrary to
section 3 (1) and (9) of the National
Security Act 2023.
The Metropolitan police said
the foreign intelligence service
involved “is that of Hong Kong”.
It follows an investigation led
by officers from the Met’s counter-
terrorism command with support
from colleagues from the north-
east and south-east counter-
terrorism policing units.
The three were originally
detained as part of a larger
operation, during which 11 people
were arrested at the beginning of
the month.
Spotlight Page 17 
 Do you have a recently taken picture you’d like to share with
Guardian Weekly? Scan the QR code or visit theguardian.com/
9
pictures-guardian-weekly and we’ll print your best submissions

 Reader’s
eyewitness
Family fiesta
‘To me,
the multi-
generational
aspect of this
image, taken
in Seville at the
Feria de Abril,
a week-long
celebration of
Andalusian
culture, sums
up the Spanish
culture I have
come to know
and love.’
By Richard
Mathews,
London, UK

SCIENCE AND
EN V IRON M EN T
MEDICA L R ESE A RCH
Breakthrough gene therapy
restores toddler’s hearing
A British toddler, Opal Sandy,
who was born with auditory
neuropathy, a condition that
disrupts nerve impulses travelling
from the inner ear to the brain and
can be caused by a faulty gene,
had her hearing restored. After
receiving an infusion containing
a working copy of the gene during
groundbreaking surgery that took
just 16 minutes, the 18-month-old
can hear almost perfectly. She was
treated at Addenbrooke’s hospital,
Cambridge, which is running the
Chord trial. More deaf children from
the UK, Spain and the US are being
recruited to the trial.
VA C C I N E S
‘Proactive’ coronavirus jab
primes body for novel strains
Scientists have created a
vaccine that has the potential to
protect against a broad range of
coronaviruses, including varieties
that are not yet known about. The
experimental shot, which has been
tested in mice, marks a change
in strategy towards “proactive
vaccinology”. The vaccine is made
by attaching harmless proteins
from different coronaviruses to
nanoparticles that are then injected
to prime the body’s defences to fight
the viruses should they ever invade.
The news came as AstraZeneca
announced it has begun the
worldwide withdrawal of its
Covid-19 vaccine due to a “surplus
of available updated vaccines” that
target new variants of the virus.
A RCH A EOLOGY
Garden tidy-up unearths
stone with ancient writing
A geography teacher who was
tidying his garden in Coventry
discovered a stone inscribed in
ogham, an alphabet used in the
early medieval period primarily for
writing in the Irish language.
Katherine Forsyth, professor of
Celtic Studies at the University of
Glasgow, confirmed the markings
on the piece of sandstone were
in an early ogham script, which
most likely dates to the fifth to
▼ The ogham sixth century but possibly earlier.
stone, 11cm long Teresa Gilmore, an archaeologist at
and weighing Birmingham Museums, said such
139g, was found stones were “very rare and have
by a geography generally been found in Ireland or
teacher, Graham Scotland”. She suggested it could
Senior, in his gar- be linked to people coming over
den in Coventry from Ireland or to early medieval
BIRMINGHAM MUSEUMS monasteries in the area.
TRUST
DISEASE
Biodiversity loss is biggest
driver of infection outbreaks
Biodiversity loss is the biggest
environmental driver of infectious
disease outbreaks, making them
more dangerous and widespread, a
study has found. In meta-analysis
p
published in the journal Nature,
researchers found that of all the
“global change drivers” that are
destroying ecosystems – biodiversity
lloss, climate change, habitat loss,
non-native species and chemical
p
pollution – loss of species was
tthe greatest in increasing the risk
of outbreaks. Experts analysed
nearly 1,000 studies of global
environmental drivers of infectious
disease, covering all continents
except for Antarctica. Their results
w
were the same across human and
non-human diseases.

17 May 2024 The Guardian Weekly

 The big story
Israel-Gaza war

 Palestinians fled Rafah

to take shelter in Deir
al-Balah in central Gaza
AFP/GETTY
Thousands of displaced Gazans
are on the move again, packing
their lives into carts and pickup
trucks, as Israel’s campaign
against Hamas rages on
This is the emptying of Rafah
I S R A E L / PA L E S T I N E
By Jason Burke JERUSALEM
and Malak A Tantesh RAFAH
U
nder a blazing summer
sun, tens of thousands
of Palestinians fled
Israeli bombardment
and clashes with
Hamas militants in
Rafah on Friday, choking roads with
donkey carts, bicycles, pickup trucks
and wheelchairs.
Aid officials there believe the total
who have now left Gaza’s southern-
most city may be about 350,000, since
receiving warnings early last week
from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) of
an imminent military operation, with
most moving after airstrikes and fight-
ing intensified.
“The streets that were previously
packed with [people] living in make-
shift tents, most of those tents have
been dismantled and people have fled.
The area around the United Nations
building [in the city centre] is unrec-
ognisable … all of the people who were
seeking some degree of sanctuary
there have fled,” said Dr James Smith, a
British medic currently in Rafah.
Among those fleeing was Iyad
Jarboa, an acting instructor and
theatre director who left his home in
eastern Rafah last Thursday with his
family to seek safety in the city of Khan
Younis, 10km away.
“We have been suffering since the
beginning of the war, but these last
nights were the most difficult of all,
with bombing of all kinds everywhere
and none of us able to sleep,” said
Jarboa, 45. “I was worried that my
children and my wife would be killed,
but also that if we left it too late, we
would never escape.”
His brother, sister-in-law and aunt
have all sustained serious injuries
during the conflict. “We only have two
wheelchairs, so I have to carry one of
them on my back and so it would be
impossible to move at all if the situ-
ation worsened,” Jarboa said.
There had been no panic, humani-
tarian officials in Rafah said, just huge
numbers of people packing whatever
they had in preparation for another
move. Many have been displaced many
times as they have fled successive
Israeli military offensives across Gaza.
A million people who sought shelter
in Rafah, after fleeing fighting or after
their homes were destroyed, turned
the small city of 300,000 into a sprawl-
ing, overcrowded encampment.
Fierce battles were also under way
across much of the devastated north
of Gaza last weekend, with heavy bom-
bardment and airstrikes reported as
Israeli forces attacked Hamas mili-
tants in areas that have already seen
repeated rounds of fighting.
▲ Smoke billows after
Israeli strikes on Rafah
AFP/GETTY
Israel faces ‘a diplomatic tsunami’
Peter Beaumont, page 13 '
Biden’s peace hopes may be in vain
Jonathan Freedland, page 14 '
The new clashes underlined the
IDF’s failure to secure much of the ter-
ritory, analysts said, after a campaign
that has brought massive destruction,
the displacement of about 2 million
people and the deaths of around
35,000, mostly women and children.
Israeli military officials said forces
were operating in Jabaliya camp and
Zeitoun, east of Gaza City, as well as
in the far north of the territory in Beit
Hanoun and Beit Lahiya.
Hamas, which seized power in Gaza
in 2007, has been able to reimpose its
authority in many areas of the territory
in recent months, controlling markets,
running Islamic courts and intimidat-
ing opponents. Militants have used
remaining tunnels to ambush Israeli
forces and have continued to fire
rockets into Israel.
“We identified in the past weeks
attempts by Hamas to rehabilitate
its military capabilities in Jabaliya.
We are operating there to eliminate
those attempts,” R Adm Daniel Hagari,
Israel’s military spokesperson, told
reporters. A previous Israeli effort to
stop Hamas reconstituting its forces in
Zeitoun took place in March.
Witnesses described nearly contin-
uous airstrikes and artillery shelling.
“Bombardment from the air and
ground hasn’t stopped since yester-
day, they were bombing everywhere,
including near schools that are housing
people who lost their houses. War 
is restarting, this is how it looks,”
17 May 2024 The Guardian Weekly
12 The big story
Israel-Gaza war
said Saed, 45, a resident of Jabaliya,
via a chat app.
For economic, domestic political
and diplomatic reasons, Israel has
withdrawn most of its troops from
Gaza, though has left a powerful force
positioned along a new road its forces
have built bisecting the territory south
of Gaza City.
Israeli media are increasingly
critical of Benjamin Netanyahu for fail-
ing to outline any practicable proposal
for a new administration in Gaza. This
has left an anarchic security vacuum
that has helped Hamas regain its hold
over parts of the territory and its popu-
lation, they said.
Yedioth Ahronoth, a mass market
newspaper, reported last Sunday
that Israeli military officials have
demanded that the prime minister
make a decision about the “day after”
in Gaza.
Ben Caspit, a columnist, said Israel
“will continue to pay the price in blood,
sweat and a whole lot of tears so that
we never get anywhere …. because
Hamas’s regime cannot be toppled
without preparing an alternative to
that regime”. More than 270 Israeli sol-
diers have died in the offensive so far.
There is also some concern about
the diplomatic price paid by Israel,
though Netanyahu’s recent pledge
that the country would “stand alone”
if necessary resonated with many Jew-
ish Israelis and support for the war is
still strong.
Israel’s Rafah offensive has also
drawn warnings from Egypt, where
officials said it is putting the coun-
try’s decades-old peace treaty with
Israel at risk. Last Sunday evening,
Cairo said it intended to formally join
South Africa’s case against Israel at the
international court of justice.
T
he war began when
Hamas attacked south-
ern Israel on 7 October,
killing about 1,200
people, mostly civil-
ians, and taking another
250 hostage. They still hold about 100
captives and the remains of more than
30, and internationally mediated talks
over a ceasefire and hostage release
appear to be at a standstill.
Netanyahu has said Rafah is the last
stronghold of Hamas, and that Israel
can only achieve its war aims – defined
as destroying the militant Islamist
organisation – by killing militants and
leaders in the city.
The Guardian Weekly 17 May 2024
 A camp in
Deir al-Balah
ASHRAF AMRA/
ANADOLU/GETTY
▲ A woman Israel’s advance into Rafah has
and child flee prompted global outrage, and strained
Rafah with their relations with the US, its staunchest
belongings ally.
AFP/GETTY Volker Türk, the UN high com-
missioner for human rights, said last
Sunday that a full-scale Israeli assault
on Rafah “cannot take place”, insisting
it cannot be squared with international
law. “The latest evacuation orders
affect close to a million people in
Rafah. So where should they go now?
‘There is no There is no safe place in Gaza! These
safe place exhausted, famished people, many
of whom have been displaced many
in Gaza! times already, have no good options.”
These Israel has told those fleeing the
new fighting in the north and Rafah
exhausted, to head to a designated “humanitarian
famished zone” along a stretch of coastline. But
people have the area is already packed with vast
numbers of displaced people and has
no good limited available water, sanitation,
options’ healthcare facilities or food.
Some families who have recently
moved from Rafah have set up tent
camps on the shores of the Mediter-
ranean Sea near the central city of Deir
al-Balah. Upon arrival, dozens rushed
to collect water near a building for
Unrwa, the UN agency for Palestin-
ian refugees. More waited in the heat.
“The situation is difficult and con-
tinues to worsen,” Wafaa Masarei said
as she rested with a few belongings:
boxes, bags of clothes, pots, mat-
tresses, a plastic jug. Her two children
sought protection from the sun under
a table and blankets.
Esraa al-Namlla, 30, had left her
home in east Rafah with her four chil-
dren. She uses a wheelchair after hav-
ing both legs amputated in an airstrike
earlier in the war, which also badly
injured her husband and two sons.
“Now I don’t know where I will go
with my husband and my children …
There is no safe place to go to. I feel
helpless now … I am unable to do any-
thing for my husband or my children,”
Namlla said. “How will we live in a tent
when I cannot go to the bathroom, or
even sit on the floor?”
Jarboa, the theatre director, said he
had told his young children that the
family was going on a camping trip.
“They feel happy because they are
close to the sea … As for us adults, we
are all just awaiting our fate.”
JASON BURKE IS THE GUARDIAN’S
INTERNATIONAL SECURITY
CORRESPONDENT; MALAK A TANTESH
IS A REPORTER BASED IN GAZA

A N A LY S I S
I S R A E L / PA L E S T I N E
Sanctions
War and rising
settler violence
could further
alienate Israel
By Peter Beaumont
Israel is facing a long-
threatened “diplomatic
tsunami” on multiple
fronts over its handling
of the war in Gaza and the
unprecedented rise in settler attacks
on Palestinians in the West Bank.
Amid almost monthly sanctions
announcements from the US and
European capitals over settler
violence, which have incrementally
expanded their scope, the Guardian
understands yet more potential
targets are under consideration.
Sanctions so far have targeted
individuals and extremist
organisations, and most recently
a controversial friend and adviser
of Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right
national security minister.
As the US announced it was
holding up a shipment of heavy
munitions to Israel over Benjamin
Netanyahu’s insistence on going
ahead with an attack on Rafah,
Ireland and Spain said they were
committed to a formal recognition
of Palestinian statehood.
Pressure is also mounting in
Europe for a trade ban on Israeli
settlement products. Alexander De
Croo, the prime minister of Belgium
– which chairs the Council of the
European Union – has said he is
seeking like-minded allies to push
for a trade ban, arguing that Israel
has potentially violated human
rights guarantees in the EU-Israel
association agreement.
Turkey, which has long had a
complex relationship with Israel,
has announced its own complete
trade ban with the country, though
there were reports last week of a
reprieve for Turkish traders, which
Ankara denied.
Colombia this month became the
second South American nation after
Bolivia to cut ties with Israel.
Elsewhere Israel is under
investigation at the international
criminal court, which is reportedly
considering issuing warrants for
senior Israeli officials, and at the
international court of justice,
which is investigating a complaint
of genocide and incitement to
genocide brought by South Africa.
The prospect of a “diplomatic
tsunami” against Israel – a warning
coined by the former prime minister
Ehud Barak while he served as
defence minister under Netanyahu –
has been much threatened but until
now never implemented.
Despite widespread expressions
of international support for Israel
after Hamas’s 7 October attack,
its conduct of the war in Gaza, in
tandem with a surge of pro-settler
violence in the occupied West
Bank, has intensified long-bubbling
frustrations with Netanyahu’s
refusal to contemplate any progress
towards Palestinian statehood.
His government has ploughed
ahead despite explicit warnings,
including in March from the US
secretary of state, Antony Blinken,
that the country risked further
global isolation if it attacked Rafah,
Gaza’s southernmost city.
While Israeli officials have tried
to be bullish, saying they will fight
on alone, many of the moves have
consequences for a country facing
economic issues because of the war.
“Experts have been warning for
years of the risk of an implosion
and that the situation [between
Israel and Palestinians] was
unsustainable,” said Yossi Mekelberg
of the Chatham House thinktank.
“That is not to justify anything that
happened on October 7 … but maybe
support for Israel with infinite
amounts of weapons is not a good
idea when they are dropped
on civilians.”
While Mekelberg views the
Turkish move within the context
of Netanyahu and Recep Tayyip
Erdoğan’s fractious relationship,
going back to a deadly Israeli attack
on a Turkish aid flotilla to Gaza in
13
2010, the hardening of positions
in Europe and the US are “really
unprecedented”. Mekelberg sees
a coincidence of events in Israel,
around Netanyahu’s coalition of
rightwing and far-right politicians,
provoking governments to act.
“Settler violence is not new but
when you bring representatives
of those settlers, and one of them
who has been convicted [Ben-Gvir],
in as part of government then the
argument that somehow settler
violence exist at the margins no
longer holds.”
Dahlia Scheindlin, in a column
for Haaretz last week, said that
while previous sanctions against
Israel were little more than “bad
vibes”, that has changed with the
Turkish threat of a trade ban and the This has
US move to hold up the delivery of been
heavy munitions.
She said: “All of this [has] been brewing
brewing for years. Israel has been for years.
behaving in a self-defeating fashion
like a bull in a china shop.” Israel
Government lawyers in multiple has been
capitals are already considering behaving
whether there should be new
sanctions, amid questions over in a self-
whether key institutions in defeating
settlement building, such as
the Israeli regional council in way like
the occupied territories and the a bull in a
settlement division of the World china shop
Zionist Organization, should be in
their sights. One person familiar
with the direction of discussions
said: “It is about violence, impunity
and settlements and isolating
settlement activity from the world, ▼ A protest
not isolating Israel.” against Benjamin
PETER BEAUMONT IS A SENIOR
Netanyahu in
INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT Tel Aviv
FOR THE GUARDIAN RONEN ZVULUN/REUTERS
17 May 2024 The Guardian Weekly
14 The big story
Israel-Gaza war
C OM M E N TA RY
Tug of war
Biden just wants this
over, but Netanyahu and
Hamas have other ideas
By Jonathan Freedland
eware cornering a US president
anxious about re-election.
Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly
ignored that advice in his dealings
with Joe Biden, and last week his
country learned the price.
It came in the revelation that
Biden had withheld the supply
of about 3,500 bombs, refusing to let US munitions
play a part in an Israeli assault on the southern Gaza
city of Rafah, where more than a million Palestinians
have sought refuge. The president was at pains to say
he was not giving up his “ironclad” commitment to
Israel. Instead, it was just the specific, long-threatened
Rafah operation that he would not back with weapons.
To understand why this is such a big deal, remind
yourself of the people and the countries involved.
The US is Israel’s most crucial ally.
But look at the state of things now. Biden has become
the first US president in more than four decades to deny
Israel military aid in this way. And why has he done it?
Because, under Netanyahu, a growing section of the US
public is souring on Israel as never before.
It’s true that a bedrock level of support for the country
exists that may surprise those seeing daily footage of US
campuses in ferment. When Gallup asked Americans
in March where their sympathies lay, 51% stood with
Israel, while 27% backed the Palestinians. But among
Democrats and young people, it’s the Palestinians who
prevail, by eight-point margins in both cases.
The Guardian Weekly 17 May 2024
Those are the numbers that weigh on Biden and his
re-election team, as they face the unravelling of the
coalition that defeated Donald Trump in 2020. A period
of newly intense suffering in Gaza will alienate yet more
of the voters Biden needs to win. The White House asked
Netanyahu to show them a plan that would achieve
a goal they regarded as legitimate – the removal from
Rafah of Hamas’s last remaining battalions – but without
risking mass civilian casualties. Netanyahu could not
do it. Which is why Washington has resorted to a more
direct means of making him stop.
It’s become a test of strength that Biden cannot afford  Joe Biden has
to lose. He made an all-out attack on Rafah a red line: denied Israel
if Netanyahu crosses it, that makes Biden look weak. military aid
Facing an opponent, Trump, determined to make KEVIN LAMARQUE/
strong v weak the defining choice of the coming election, REUTERS
he cannot let that stand.
But still Netanyahu refuses to buckle, telling his
people ahead of Israeli independence day that they will
fight alone, without US arms, with their fingernails, if
they have to. He wants to sound Churchillian, but these
are words of weakness, not strength. For he is pulled
in two directions: Washington wants him to stay out of
Rafah, while his far-right coalition partners, the ultra-
nationalists Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, insist
he go in hard and win a “total victory” over Hamas.
US support may be essential for Israel’s national
interest, but in a contest of Biden v Ben-Gvir, there
was only going to be one winner. Without the latter’s
support, Netanyahu loses his coalition. It may
have Netanyahu’s name on it, but this is Ben-Gvir’s
government now.
It’s the same logic that has led Netanyahu to drag his
feet in talks to broker a ceasefire and release the Israeli
hostages still held in the darkness by Hamas. Biden A period
wants him to do a deal, the Israeli public want him to do
a deal, but he prefers to keep pounding Gaza, harder and of newly
harder, in search of an illusory and impossible victory. intense
Because that’s what Ben-Gvir wants – even if it means
pushing Biden into an ever tighter corner.
suffering in
Still, Biden and Netanyahu are not the only players Gaza will
in this bleak drama. Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader in alienate
Gaza, has his own determination to remain in charge.
Those who have studied him closely believe his yet more
priority is not so much an end to the killing of innocent Biden
civilians but rather a scenario that allows him to claim
victory. Sinwar thought he had that last week, with
voters
the deal Hamas loudly accepted. The stumbling block
is the agreed duration of any cessation of violence.
Sinwar does not want it to be temporary, even if that
would save many lives and ease the misery of Gaza. He
wants a declaration that the war is permanently over.
And for that he can wait.
And so there is no deal, because neither Netanyahu
nor Sinwar believes what’s on offer serves their interests.
As the former US state department official Aaron David
Miller puts it: “The only party that’s really in a hurry is
Biden.” Though that’s not quite right. Also in a hurry
are the hostages and their families, whose agony has
endured for more than 200 days, and the civilians of
Rafah, huddled in tents, grieving their tens of thousands
of dead, without running water or sanitation. They’re in
a hurry too. But no one is listening to them.
JONATHAN FREEDLAND IS A GUARDIAN COLUMNIST
 15
In-depth reporting and analysis

UNITED KINGDOM
London’s all- male
clubs mull over
a mixed future
Page 22 '

CHINA

Vast online
M
ILLUSTRATION:
ore than 800,000 people IT experts indicates the operation is GUARDIAN DESIGN;
in Europe and the US highly organised, technically savvy – GETTY IMAGES

appear to have been and still going on.

scam dupes duped into sharing card

details and other sensitive personal
data with a vast network of fake online
Programmers have created tens of
thousands of fake web shops offering
discounted goods from Dior, Nike,

thousands designer shops apparently operated

from China.
An international investigation by
Lacoste, Hugo Boss, Versace and Prada,
as well as many other premium brands.
Published in languages including

of shoppers the Guardian, Die Zeit and Le Monde

By Carmen Aguilar García,
Sarah Marsh and Philip McMahon
gives a rare inside look at the mechanics
of what the UK’s Chartered Trading
Standards Institute has described as
one of the largest scams of its kind,
with 76,000 fake websites created.
Data examined by reporters and
English, German, French, Spanish,
Swedish and Italian, the websites
appear to have been set up to lure
shoppers into parting with money
and sensitive personal data. How-
ever, the sites have no connection
Continued 
to the brands they claim to sell, and
16 Spotlight
Asia Pacific
in most cases consumers who spoke
about their experience said they
received no items.
So far, an estimated 800,000 people,
almost all in Europe and America, have
shared email addresses, with 476,000
of them having shared debit and credit
card details, including their three-digit
security number. All of them also
handed over names, phone numbers,
email and postal addresses.
Katherine Hart, a lead officer at the
Chartered Trading Standards Institute,
described the operation as “one of
the largest online fake shops scams
I have seen”. “Often these people are
part of serious and organised crime
groups so they are harvesting data
and may use it against people later,
making consumers more susceptible
to phishing attempts.”
“Data is the new currency,” said Jake
Moore, a global cybersecurity adviser
at the software company ESET. He said
such personal data collections could
also be valuable to foreign intelligence
agencies for surveillance purposes.
“The bigger picture is that one must
assume the Chinese government may
have potential access to the data.”
The existence of the fake shops
network was revealed by Security
Research Labs (SR Labs), a German
cybersecurity consultancy, which
obtained several gigabytes of data and
shared it with Die Zeit.
A core group of developers appears
to have built a system to semi-auto-
matically create and launch websites,
allowing rapid deployment. This core
appears to have operated some shops,
and allowed other groups to use the
system. Logs suggest at least 210 users
have accessed the system since 2015.
A few weeks before Christmas,
The Guardian Weekly 17 May 2024
Point of sale
Northern Europeans ordered products from the network at a higher rate than anywhere else
US
Total: 137,452
Rate: 41
Unique email
addresses
obtained by the
network, per
100,000 people
Source: Security Research
Labs. Note: Based on
unique email addresses
obtained by the 22,500
websites still live in April
2023. Only countries with
a population over half a
million included
Shop front
The first fake shops
in the network
appear to have
been created in
2015. More than
1m “orders” have
been processed in
the past three years
alone, according to
analysis of the data.
Not all payments
were successfully
processed, but
analysis suggests
the group may
have attempted
to take as much as
€50m ($54m) over
the period. Many
shops have been
abandoned, but
a third of them –
more than 22,500
– are still live.
UK Denmark
Total: 18,950 14,870 emails, equivalent to
Rate: 28 252 emails per 100,000 people
France
Total: 113,072
Rate: 166
Melanie Brown, 54, from Shropshire,
England, was looking for a new hand-
bag. She put the image of an item from
one of her favourite German designers,
Rundholz, into Google. Immediately
a website appeared offering the bag
at 50% off the usual £200 ($250) retail
price. She added it to her cart.
“It reeled me in,” she said. After
selecting the bag she spotted other
designer clothes from a high-end
brand she loves called Magnolia Pearl.
She racked up a £1,200 bill on 15 items.
“I was getting a lot for the money, so I
thought it was worth it,” she said.
But Brown was being defrauded.
For nearly a decade, a network operat-
ing from Fujian province in China used
what appears to be a single software
platform to create tens of thousands
of fake online shops.
Around 50 people who say they
were scammed have been interviewed
for this investigation. The Guardian
spoke to 19 from Britain and the US.
Their evidence suggests these web-
sites were not set up to trade in coun-
terfeit goods. Most people received
nothing in the mail. A few did, but the
items were not the ones ordered.
Many who tried to shop never lost
money. Either their bank blocked the
payment, or the fake shop did not
process it. However, all of those inter-
viewed did hand over private data.
Simon Miller, director of policy and
communications for Stop Scams UK,
said: “Data can be more valuable than
sales. If you are hoovering up some-
one’s card details, that data is invalu-
able then for a bank account takeover.”
Australia
Total: 10,800
Rate: 42
SR Labs believes the scam is operat-
ing on two levels. First, credit card har-
vesting, in which fake payment gate-
ways collect credit card data but do not
take any money. Second, fake selling,
where criminals do take money.
There is evidence the network took
payments processed via PayPal, Stripe
and other payment services, and in
some cases directly from debit or
credit cards.
The network used expired domains
to host its fake shops, which experts
say can help to avoid detection by
websites or brand owners. It appears
to have a database of 2.7m of these
orphaned domains and runs tests to
check which ones are best to use.
Action Fraud, Britain’s reporting
centre for cybercrime, said it would
seek to have the fake web shops
taken down.
Hester Abrams, the international
engagement manager at the indus-
try collaboration Stop Scams UK,
said: “Consumers will only be better
protected from criminal outfits
exploiting digital systems if busi-
nesses and governments make scam
prevention a genuine priority. Inves-
tigations like this show just how
much impact we could have against
scammers with a better coordinated
international effort.”
CARMEN AGUILAR GARCÍA IS A DATA
JOURNALIST; SARAH MARSH IS
CONSUMER AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT;
PHILIP MCMAHON IS A SOFTWARE
DEVELOPER, ALL FOR THE GUARDIAN
Additional reporting
Helen Davidson and Chi-Hui Lin

A N A LY S I S As China’s president, Xi Jinping,
CHINA arrived in Serbia for the second
leg of his European tour last
Tuesday, authorities across the
Chaos theory
continent were grappling with a wave of
allegations about Chinese spying.
Last week, the UK prime minister, Rishi
Rise in Beijing Sunak, revealed that a “malign actor” had
compromised British military payroll records,
with reports pointing the finger at China.
espionage And in Germany, three German citizens
were arrested last month under suspicion
cases alarms of arranging to transfer information about
sensitive technology to China, while in another
case, a man named as Jian G, who worked for
European a German far-right member of the European
parliament, was arrested under suspicion of
countries
espionage. Maximilian Krah, the Alternative
für Deutschland (AfD) MEP whom Jian G
worked for, has denied any wrongdoing.
Meanwhile in Belgium, authorities opened
a criminal investigation into the far-right
politician Frank Creyelman in January, after
While Xi Jinping toured the an investigation by the Financial Times, Der
Spiegel and Le Monde alleged he had been used
continent last week, concern
as a Chinese intelligence asset for several years.
has grown at impact of China’s “Countries have now been forced to
covert intelligence operations confront it,” said Martin Thorley, a senior
analyst at the Global Initiative against
By Amy Hawkins Transnational Organised Crime, “despite the
unpalatable nature of dealing with this at the
same time as having market dependencies,
▼ Xi Jinping and supply-chain links etc in China.”
Serbian president Roderich Kiesewetter, a German MP and
Aleksandar Vučić former army officer, said the German secret
meet in Belgrade services had been warning for “several years”
XINHUA/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
17
about the threat from China but “the warning
was … on purpose not heard”.
There are concerns that the pace of Chinese
influence operations in Europe – through
traditional espionage and “greyzone” activity
such as influence peddling and transnational
repression – has intensified, as attitudes
towards China have hardened in recent years.
Nigel Inkster, the former deputy chief of
MI6, says Europe has been more focused
on the threat of Chinese intelligence
activities since 2019. “The complexities in
the European-Chinese relationship are such
that it seems to be almost inevitable that we
would see an increase in Chinese activity,
both straightforward espionage and influence
operations,” he said.
China has dismissed the allegations of
espionage as “malicious slander”.
Inkster said the pro-democracy protests
in Hong Kong, the revelations about human
rights abuses in Xinjiang, China’s support of
Russia in the war in Ukraine and concerns
about China’s economic behaviour had
sharpened the focus of European agencies on
Chinese intelligence efforts.
Experts say Chinese spies have three main
priorities: to shape political and economic
trends in line with China’s interests; gather
information on sensitive industries; and to
monitor the diaspora populations, particularly
minority groups such as Tibetans, Uyghurs
and Hongkongers.
China’s objectives were “nuanced and
strategic”, Inkster said. “They are not about
destruction for its own case. If there is chaos,
China will seek to take advantage of it. But
that’s different from ... creating the chaos.”
China’s intelligence operations are
understood to be managed by the Ministry
of State Security (MSS), which combines
intelligence gathering, security services and
the secret police. It has been described as a
combination of the FBI and the CIA.
In recent months, the MSS has become more
vocal about its activities. Last year, the agency
launched a WeChat account, publicising its
efforts to root out spies and terrorists.
But, notes Thorley, there is a “latent
network” of companies and organisations
in the UK that work to further the Chinese
Communist party’s interests. “They aren’t
micromanaged … however, if the party wants
to, it pulls on the leash and gets what it wants.”
That highlights that “China operates
asymmetrically”, according to Sari Arho
Havrén, associate fellow at the Royal United
Services Institute. “The complexity is quite
difficult to detect because we can’t match the
magnitude of resources that China puts in.”
AMY HAWKINS IS THE GUARDIAN’S SENIOR
CHINA CORRESPONDENT
17 May 2024 The Guardian Weekly
18 Spotlight
Europe
UKRAINE
Ghost city
Civilian life
on the edge
of Russia’s
advance
By Luke Harding KOSTIANTYNIVKA
F
or months, Serhiy Gorbunov
has been trying to persuade
residents of Chasiv Yar, Rus-
sia’s current target in eastern
Ukraine, to leave. “People are living
underground in basements,” he said.
“We tell them: ‘Please go.’ They answer
with excuses. Most say they don’t want
to abandon their homes. We try to help
but they refuse.”
Gorbunov heads the city military
administration in Kostiantynivka,
the nearest functioning city to the
frontline. That is 12km from his office,
reached via a road that climbs up to the
heights of Chasiv Yar. The Russians,
who have been besieging the town
for over a year, have now reached its
outskirts and are trying to surround it.
If Chasiv Yar falls, the Russians will
be able to use its hilltop position to
batter the key remaining Ukrainian-
controlled cities in the Donetsk region:
Kramatorsk, Sloviansk, Druzhkivka
and Kostiantynivka.
Most of Chasiv Yar’s apartment
blocks have been damaged and video
shows an apocalyptic scene. The Rus-
sians attack continuously. Incredibly,
680 civilians remain in the town. Others
hang on in neighbouring villages.
Gorbunov said he was sure
Ukraine’s armed forces would be able
to defend Chasiv Yar and prevent an
advance on Kostiantynivka.
“Occupation is not going to happen.
Remember what befell the Russian
warship? Putin can go to the same
place under the sea,” he joked. “After
two years of full-scale war, you need a
bit of humour.” Despite his confidence,
the situation looks bleak for Ukraine.
New US military y assistance worth
$61bn has yet to reachre exhausted
Ukrainian service personnel.
pe They
admit they are outgunned nn and out-
numbered. The Russians are w willing to
tolerate huge losses of tanks and men
to capture tiny settlements.
Isolating Kostiantynivka would
allow Moscow to disrupt Ukrainian
military logistics by shelling the H20
highway, which goes to the south of
the province.
Gorbunov said 30,000 people
remained in his city, from a prewar
total of 70,000, with a large number
of soldiers. Army wages have, how-
ever, boosted the local economy. There
Territorial gains are new pizza restaurants and mobile
The Russians have phone repair shops. Residents say the
been moving cash has also fuelled a boom in pros-
forward, seizing the titution and under-the-table alcohol,
city of Bakhmut,
which is banned in frontline areas.
10km east of The military mayor said there was
Chasiv Yar, last no reason to panic, despite daily
year and Avdiivka
in February. In
April, enemy troops
enemy bombardment. Municipal
workers could meanwhile be seen
planting rose bushes, and repairing
launched a surprise
attack and overran
roads after complaints from the mili-
tary that injured soldiers transported
the settlement
of Ocheretyne,
north-west of
by ambulance faced a bumpy journey.
In Chasiv Yar, one shop remains
open and any vehicle going there is at
Avdiivka. They have
since taken further
territory, creating
risk from Russian drones. A volunteer,
Sarhis Arutiunian, said he previously
delivered generators and stoves, as
a growing salient
well as cars for the military. Now the
that bulges through
town’s remaining civilians, most of
the Ukrainian line.
them elderly, lead a twilight existence,
rarely venturing out.
“Chasiv Yar used to be a cosy
place,” Arutiunian said. “Now it’s a
city of ghosts. It’s been completely
destroyed, the same as Bakhmut,
Avdiivka and Mariupol. I’ve talked to
some of the pensioners who stay there.
They say: ‘I’m going to die soon any-
way, so what’s the point in moving?’”
Arutiunian works for a commu-
nity organisation, Svitlyachky Blago,
which hands out basic supplies. Last
▼ Families week it supplied first aid kits. “The
queue for aid war is close. We’ve got used to it,”
from community Julia Efimova said as she queued to
organisation pick up medicines for her 85-year-old
Svitlyachky Blago grandmother. She continued: “I’m an
in Kostiantynivka optimist. I believe in our army.”
ALESSIO MAMO Kostiantynivka is frequently hit. An
industrial zone has been smashed. A
rocket destroyed one of the city’s three
hospitals, killing several displaced
people from Bakhmut who had been
living in a hostel next door.
Arutiunian reflected on the changes
in the region over little more than a
decade. A football fan, he had watched
all the 2012 European Championship
matches played in the Donbas Arena
of the regional capital, Donetsk.
“Donetsk was full of England fans.
They got drunk ... We liked them,”
he said. He added: “Now everything
is fucked up.”
Gorbunov was defiant. After a stint
as acting military mayor, this month he
was formally appointed to the post by
the president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
“They won’t take my city,” he said.
“Everything will be Ukraine.”
LUKE HARDING IS A SENIOR
INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT
FOR THE GUARDIAN
 Spotlight
Africa
SU DA N
Massacre
and famine
fears in
besieged
Darfur city
By Zeinab Mohammed Salih
EL FASHER
A
t the Abu Shouk camp on the
northern fringe of El Fasher,
about seven people arrive
every day with injuries sus-
tained from clashes between the para-
military Rapid Support Forces (RSF)
and groups allied to Sudan’s army.
For months the RSF have been
besieging El Fasher, the capital of
North Darfur state, trapping a million
people in the last major population
centre in Darfur not under paramilitary
control. Earlier the city was protected
by a fragile peace, but since April vio-
lence on its outskirts has soared after
its two most powerful armed groups
pledged to fight on the army’s side.
Fighting is particularly intense near
Abu Shouk, where the army-aligned
groups are taking on RSF fighters to
the north. Shells have fallen in the
camp, killing dozens.
Injuries are far from the only chal-
lenge facing Haroun Adam Haroun,
the sole doctor at Abu Shouk.
Hundreds have died from malnutri-
tion and scores of malaria cases are
registered every day. Haroun is also
troubled by a respiratory disease that
has swept the camp.
“I am very sad people are dying
from preventable causes and we can-
not do anything for them,” he said.
“There is an extreme lack of medicines
and funding.”
The war broke out on 15 April last
year, pitting the army, headed by the
country’s de facto leader, Abdel Fat-
tah al-Burhan, against the RSF, led by
his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan
Dagalo. Experts say Sudan is at risk of
breaking apart. According to the UN,
the country “is experiencing a human-
itarian crisis of epic proportions”, with
famine threatening and more than
8.7 million people uprooted – more
than anywhere else in the world.
El Fasher hosts many internally
displaced people, including hundreds
of thousands displaced in 20 years of
ethnic violence. There are grave con-
cerns for civilians if the RSF and allied
militias launch a full-scale invasion,
not just from fighting but also from
the potential for atrocities if the RSF
take control. The RSF and allied Arab
militias have targeted the Masalit
ethnic group across Darfur, including
in the city of El Geneina, where the UN
believes up to 15,000 people died last
year in two massacres.
Last week the US ambassador to the
UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, warned
of a “large-scale massacre … a disaster
on top of a disaster”, if the RSF moved
in to El Fasher.
19
Army-aligned groups are the main
presence in the centre, manning
checkpoints and building a trench
to stop or at least delay an RSF incur-
sion. The army airlifts provisions to
them because it is not possible to send
help by land.
Western governments and aid
groups have implored the RSF not to
attack El Fasher, and for now it appears
the calls have been heeded. It is possi-
ble, however, that an attack may come
from the RSF-aligned Mahameed tribe,
A woman
which controls much of North Darfur,
and baby at the
if RSF command of the tribe slips.
Zamzam camp,
Last month, the RSF captured the
close to El Fasher
town of Mellit, and with it control of
in North Darfur
the last road into El Fasher in army
MOHAMED ZAKARIA/MSF/
hands. The little aid trickling into the
REUTERS city dried up because the army bars
aid along RSF-controlled routes. The
UN pulled out, other humanitarian
groups reduced staff, and traders
steered clear, leading to a rise in the
cost of food.
Unlike in Abu Shouk, where
Haroun has no help from aid groups,
in the Zamzam camp to the south of
El Fasher, Médecins Sans Frontières
(MSF) is treating injuries and assisting
the malnourished.
MSF said screening of more than
63,000 under-fives, as well as preg-
nant and breastfeeding women,
confirmed “a life-threatening mal-
nutrition crisis”.
Claire Nicolet, head of MSF’s
emergency response in Sudan, said:
“With the fighting escalating, we are
extremely worried it will make it even
more difficult for the much-needed
international support we have been
calling for to arrive.”
Rabie Ali Dinar, the sultan of the
local Fur tribe, was confident the city
would not fall. He said the army had
recently recruited thousands of men.
“El Fasher will be hard for them to
win,” he said.
However, last Friday clashes
‘Everything intensified. Medical sources said
160 people were treated in hospital,
must be including 19 children. Thirty-two were
done to in a critical condition.
prevent a As the city is home to Arab and
African communities, an all-out battle
repetition would lead to huge civilian bloodshed
of history and revenge attacks, Toby Harward,
the UN’s deputy humanitarian coor-
in Darfur’ dinator for Sudan, said. “Everything
Toby Harward must be done to prevent a repetition
UN deputy of history in Darfur,” he said.
coordinator for ZEINAB MOHAMMED SALIH IS A
Sudan JOURNALIST BASED IN SUDAN
17 May 2024 The Guardian Weekly
Eyewitness
Weather

 Lights fantastic In Australia, a Monash University

astronomer described the show
– bigger than anything seen in
Night skies were lit up around the Australia in decades– as “bloody
world by a spectacular display of awesome”. “It was absolutely
the northern lights last Friday, with spectacular last night,” Michael
sightings seen widely across Europe, Brown said. “An ‘oh, wow’ moment.”
the US and even Australia and New Matt Williams
Zealand (as the southern lights).
The lights occur when charged
particles emitted from the sun reach
the Earth’s atmosphere and collide
with gases around the magnetic
poles triggering breathtaking night-
time auroras.
In the US, the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration
(NOAA) issued a “severe” G4
geomagnetic storm event, but by
last Friday evening it announced
conditions had reached “extreme”
G5 levels, the highest level on the Merseyside
space weather scale, for the first United Kingdom
time since October 2003.

British Columbia
Canada

Punta Arenas
Chile
Bloody
awesome.
It was
absolutely
spectacular
last night.
An ‘oh wow’
moment Brandenburg
Germany
 Oregon
United States

11
Number of years from one solar
maximum to the next, with the latest
expected in 2024 or 2025. During this
time, solar activity increases — from
sunspots and solar flares to displays
of northern and southern lights

Melbourne ROBIN LOZNAK/ZUMA PRESS WIRE/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK;

PAUL CROCK/AFP/GETTY; CLAUDIO MONGE/AFP/GETTY;
Australia PATRICK PLEUL/DPA /AP; ANDREW CHIN/GETTY; PETER
BYRNE/PA
22 Spotlight
Europe
D
UNITED KINGDOM iscussions are under
way over whether to
admit women at several
of London’s remaining
Calling time?
gentlemen’s clubs after last week’s
vote by Garrick Club members to allow
women to join after 193 years.
Garrick vote The Travellers Club, the Savile
Club, the Beefsteak Club, Boodle’s,
Buck’s, Brooks’s, the East India Club
fuels debate and White’s are among some of the
remaining London clubs that still do
over letting not admit female members.
Club secretaries at some of these
institutions are understood to have
women in consulted lawyers to see whether
their rules are also now vulnerable
to reinterpretation in the wake of the
Garrick vote, which rested on new
Some of London’s last all-male legal advice that the pronoun “he”
in the club’s rulebook should also be
private clubs are discussing
taken to mean “she”.
female membership – while A tentative consultation was
also consulting the lawyers launched among Savile Club mem-
bers earlier this year over the possi-
By Amelia Gentleman ble opening up of the club to female
members at some time in the future.
Gareth Neame, the executive producer
of Downton Abbey, is understood to
have resigned both from his role as
The Guardian Weekly 17 May 2024
chair of the Savile last month and as a
member as discussions began. He did
not disclose why he stepped down.
The question of whether women
should be allowed to become mem-
bers is also being discussed at the East
India Club. Sources said the club’s
management was understood to be
in favour of changing the rules to allow
women to join, but votes on the issue
had never reached the required two-
thirds majority.
The Beefsteak Club is also under-
stood to be considering allowing
women to join its dining club.
Female staff at one city firm
expressed frustration recently that cor-
porate entertainment continued to be
organised at Buck’s, a club favoured by
▲ Facades of the royals, military officers and financiers,
which also has a no-women-members
East India Club
and White’s rule. Although female guests are
private members’ allowed at the club, they are not invited
club with to join male colleagues and clients.
interiors of the An informal poll at the Travellers
Travellers Club Club, which has historically had a
and Garrick Club close association with the Foreign
LONDONSTILLS.COM; Office and international diplomats,
KHALID KASSEM/STACEY
PUBLISHING; MARK
rejected a proposal to allow women to
PHILLIPS/ALAMY join in 2014. Many members canvassed

expressed strong hostility to the sug-
gestion, with one stating the men-only
rules allowed members to enjoy “male
banter, without having to bother with
the etiquette that one inevitably must
adhere to in female company”.
Those clubs that decide to change
their rules to admit women may
not alter much in atmosphere for
some time, not least because exist-
ing members have to begin recruit-
ing women with the spare time and
money, and the desire to join. Pratt’s
decided to admit women last year but
the club’s slow admissions process has
meant that only two or three have so far
been allowed in.
Although the Athenaeum began
admitting women 21 years ago, its
membership remains solidly male:
only 28% of the club’s 147 new mem-
bers were women in 2022-23.
The Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC)
started admitting female members in
1998, after 212 years of being a men-
only organisation; 26 years later,
women only make up 4% of the full
members – because there is a 29-year
waiting list and prior to 1998, women
would not have been able to put them-
selves on it. The club has a limited
number of about 18,000 members,
so someone has to leave or die before
a new member can be admitted. The
‘It’s one MCC is not able to fast-track women to
full membership, because that would
thing to contravene the Equality Act.
admit Jill Rutter, a senior fellow of the
women in Institute for Government and former
civil servant, and a cricket enthusiast,
principle said: “It’s one thing to admit women
but the in principle but as we have seen with
other clubs, the pace of change can
pace of be glacial unless they’re prepared to
change can take exceptional measures to acceler-
be glacial’ ate women in. More than 20 years after
women were finally allowed to apply to
the MCC, they still represent a minute
fraction of the membership. There, the
issue is that women were put at the bot-
tom of the waiting list. At the Garrick
it will be how many are blackballed by
women-sceptical membersmbers.”
Maj Rupert Lendrum m, the secretary
at Buck’s, wrote to say that it would be
“no surprise … that the e club does not
wish to comment on such uch matters. As
a private club our policies
cies and proce-
dures remain private.”
Gareth Neame and d representa-
tives of other clubs were contacted
for comment.
AMELIA GENTLEMAN IS A GUARDIAN
REPORTER
A N A LY S I S
UNITED KINGDOM
Blurred vision
Starmer has laid
out his plan to
tackle asylum.
But will it work?
By Sunder Katwala
Could Keir Starmer
“Make Asylum Boring
Again”? That would be the
ultimate test of success
for his claim that he can grip the issue
that has caused Rishi Sunak more
trouble than any other. Starmer’s
message is he is no less committed
to securing the borders and stopping
the small boats crossing the Channel,
but that achieving this requires a
serious plan to tackle smuggling
gangs and fix the asylum system
in Britain too. So how different is
Labour’s plan – and would it work?
Labour’s analysis should be that
making asylum work depends on
blending control and compassion.
In Starmer’s Dover speech last week,
robust messages about control were
loudly proclaimed. More liberal
ideas about a rules-based system
could be found, but mostly by
reading between the lines. Starmer
did confirm that Labour would scrap
the Rwanda scheme.
There is a clash of principle over
asylum. Labour would process
the asylum claims of those who
arrived without permission. The
Conservatives have passed several
laws vowing they will not. Yet
23
ministers are in denial. Whether or
not up to 500 people go to Rwanda
does not give the government any
plan for the next 50,000 people it
still claims it intends to remove.
Starmer is right to deny the
charge that Labour’s policy is an
“amnesty”, since processing the
backlog would see some asylum
claims granted and others refused.
But he confusingly blurs his
own argument with a tit-for-tat
labelling of government policy as a
“Travelodge amnesty”.
Starmer believes in a functioning,
rules-based asylum system. The
standstill on making asylum
decisions does delay and prevent
returns to safer countries. Fewer
than one in 10 asylum claims from
India are granted, for example,
yet asylum seekers who could be
returned there are now in limbo
alongside refugees from Syria and
Eritrea, where nine out of 10 claims
would succeed once assessed.
Labour wants to compete on
competence, hence its “graft,
not gimmicks” slogan, and focus
on inter-agency cooperation.
More energy and capacity could
go into doing something more
useful than trying to operate the
Rwanda scheme. But deepening the
policing effort alone is unlikely to
be sufficient to restore order to the
Channel unless a broader British-
French deal can also be negotiated.
Starmer recognised that logic last
autumn. His three-pronged plan
involved being tough on smuggling
gangs, fixing the asylum system at
home, and multilateral cooperation
to manage asylum flows. He has
since retreated from talking about
the third flank of that strategy once
political opponents caricatured his
willingness to negotiate on routes
and returns deals as having EU
asylum quotas imposed on Britain.
The Dover speech fits the needs
of the camp
campaign that Labour wishes
to fight later
late this year. It cautiously
keeps open the policy space for
serious asylum
asyl reforms too. The
question that
th leaves open is how
far that balance
bala can be maintained
without developing
dev more confidence
in the public’s
publi appetite to hear and
understand the whole story. Observer
SUNDER KAT
KATWALA IS DIRECTOR OF THE
THINKTANK BRITISH FUTURE
17 M
May 2024 The Guardian Weekly
24 Spotlight
Environment
WA S T E

By Sarah Johnson

D
raped in layers of denim,
Sadlin Charles walks the
catwalk of sand between
piles of discarded clothes
and tyres in Chile’s Atacama desert.
His outfit has been made from items
found in the surrounding heaps of rub-
bish, which are so vast they can be seen
from space. Almost all of this waste
has come from countries thousands
of kilometres away, including the US,
China, South Korea and the UK.
A staggering 60,000 tonnes of used
clothing is shipped to Chile each year.
According to the latest UN figures,
Chile is the third largest importer of
secondhand clothes in the world. Some
of these clothes are resold in second-
hand markets, but at least 39,000
tonnes ends up being illegally dumped
in the Atacama desert. The desert is
one of the country’s most popular tour-
ism destinations, famed for its other-
worldly beauty and stargazing, but for
those living near the dump sites it has
become a place of devastation.
“This place is being used as a global
sacrifice zone where waste from dif-
ferent parts of the world arrives and
ends up around the municipality of
Alto Hospicio,” said Ángela Astudillo,
co-founder of Desierto Vestido, a non-
governmental organisation that aims
to raise awareness about the environ-
mental impact of the waste. “It builds
up in different areas, is incinerated and
also buried. The way it has affected
us the most is stigmatisation, as we
are portrayed as one of the dirtiest and
ugliest places in the world.”
Astudillo, 27, lives a five-minute
drive from one of about 160 dumps in
the area. She sees trucks full of rubbish
drive past and breathes in smoke from
the fires started to burn the clothes.
She has received threats for her work
documenting the problem.

Catwalk show shines a light on

“It’s sad because this has been
happening for a long time and the
people who live here can’t do anything

fast fashion’s vast clothes dump because it puts us in danger. The only
thing we can do is denounce what is
happening, and stand idly by,” she said.
To counter this feeling of powerless-
ness, her organisation teamed up with
Activists and designers raise awareness of the devastation to land and people in Fashion Revolution Brazil, a fashion
the Atacama desert, which has become a ‘global sacrifice zone’ for textile waste activism movement, and Artplan, an
advertising agency, to put on a fashion

The Guardian Weekly 17 May 2024


show to raise awareness and illustrate
what can be made out of the waste.
Maya Ramos, a stylist and visual
artist from the state of São Paulo in
Brazil, designed a collection worn by
eight Chilean models in the show in
April’s Atacama fashion week 2024.
From afar, Ramos, 32, tasked
Astudillo and others with collecting
items of clothing from the dumps that
would fit into the theme of the four ele-
ments – earth, fire, air and water. She
later travelled to the Atacama desert
to put the outfits together and spent 24
hours cutting and stitching the clothes
that had been collected, by hand.
Each outfit symbolises different
types of pollution and the impact on
the environment. The drab grey shirt
that Charles modelled embodies the
pollution caused by rampant clothing
production. The denim cutouts, lay-
ered like discarded waste, symbolise
piles of clothing covered in desert
dust, while the belt on the denim vest
represents the constraints this envi-
ronmental injustice places on the lives
of the people who live in the area.
“The problem is more than fashion
and the supply chain,” said Ramos.
“It’s a societal problem. People,
through a lack of connection with
nature, are consuming more than they
need at an unbridled pace.”
On average, each consumer buys
60% more clothing than 20 years ago
and 92m tonnes of textile waste are
60,000
Number of tonnes of used clothing
shipped per year to Chile; 39,000
tonnes are dumped in the Atacama
60%
Rise in consumer clothes purchases
compared with 20 years ago,
creating 92m tonnes of textile waste
 Sadlin Charles
models denim
salvaged from
discarded
garments at
Atacama
fashion week
MAURÍCIO NAHAS
▼ The show
took place in
the Atacama
desert, where
a vast amount
of discarded
clothing is
illegally dumped
MAURÍCIO NAHAS;
MARTIN BERNETTI/
AFP/GETTY
‘It’s a societal problem.
People are consuming
more than they need
at an unbridled pace’
created annually. Every second, the
equivalent of a lorry load of clothes
ends up on a landfill site somewhere
in the world. According to the UN, the
fashion industry is responsible for 20%
of the planet’s wastewater and 10% of
greenhouse gas emissions.
A popular way to dispose of clothes
in developed countries is to give them
to charity shops. But many donations
end up in countries in the global south,
where there is a big trade in second-
hand clothing and where the authori-
ties receiving these loads cannot cope.
In Accra, Ghana’s capital, tangled
webs of clothes line the shore, while
mountains of textile waste have built
up in another area of the city. The
shocking scene in northern Chile has
been attracting increasing attention.
In 2023, the images of the discarded
clothes as seen from space went viral.
Iquique, a city in northern Chile, is
home to an important duty-free port.
When clothes arrive, importers gather
and workers sort the garments.
Unwanted clothing ends up in the
hands of truck drivers who ferry it
to dumps outside Alto Hospicio, an
expanding municipality with a popu-
lation of 130,000 people. Here, it goes
through another cycle of sorting and
resale in small shops or at La Quebra-
dilla, a huge open-air market.
In Chile it is forbidden to dump
textile waste in legal landfills because
it creates soil instability, so items that
25
don’t sell are destined for the desert.
Brands commonly found amid the
sand include Zara, H&M, Calvin Klein,
Levi’s, Wrangler, Nike and Adidas.
Most are made of polyester, a plastic-
based fabric that can take 200 years to
decompose. When these garments are
incinerated, they release toxic fumes,
damaging the soil, the ozone layer and
the health of the local population.
Fernanda Simon, the director of
Fashion Revolution Brazil, said there
is an element of environmental rac-
ism and colonialism in systems that
see products being consumed in the
global north before being discarded in
the global south. It is the most vulner-
able populations who are affected; in
Alto Hospicio, a poor city, people are
inhaling gases as clothes are burned.
“Atacama is one example,” she said.
“We have this beautiful place many
people travel to. Now, nearly 50,000
tonnes of clothes have been discarded
there. We need systemic change.”
Local authorities have introduced
fines of 180,000 pesos ($190) for
people caught dumping waste in the
desert, said Astudillo. But she said that
only areas close to where people live
are monitored, few fines are issued and
dumping continues unabated.
The country has implemented the
“law of extended responsibility of the
producer”, which establishes a legal
framework for waste management,
while holding importers responsible
for the waste they generate. However,
it does not yet include clothing and
textiles. Meanwhile, the clothes keep
coming and the waste keeps building.
SARAH JOHNSON IS A GUARDIAN
REPORTER FOCUSING ON HUMAN
RIGHTS AND GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT
17 May 2024 The Guardian Weekly
26 Spotlight
North America
T
C A NA DA he headquarters of the
Kawartha Lakes First Nation
sits off a road 160km north-
east of Toronto. Between ads
‘Pretendians’
for all-terrain vehicles, hand-scrawled
messages on the three buildings decry
government corruption.
Controversy At the centre of the lot stands a tipi.
Alongside banners commemorating
over formerly
missing and murdered Indigenous
women and the victims of Canada’s
residential school system, Confeder-
unheard-of ate flags flap gently in the wind.
To its 20 members, this is the heart
First Nation
of Canada’s newest First Nation. But
seven local Indigenous chiefs claim
it is the site of a brazen fraud that
threatens to erode their hard-fought
Local chiefs claim Kawartha constitutional rights.
In recent years, Canada has grap-
Lakes group is part of wave of
cases in which people falsely
pled with a spate of “pretendian”
cases – in which people falsely claim
claim Indigenous identity Indigenous identity. The use of Indig-
enous symbols and slogans has also
By Leyland Cecco grown increasingly common among
KAWARTHA LAKES, ONTARIO the country’s far right.
Members of Kawartha Lakes First
Nation argue they are exempt from
laws and taxes, echoing the rhetoric
of the extremist sovereign citizens
movement in the US, and their emer-
gence has raised concerns over how ▼ Signs and flags
groups may use Indigenous identity seen on William
to lay claim to land or demand govern- Denby’s property
ment concessions. in Ontario
About two months ago, William COLE BURSTON
Denby, the self-proclaimed “chief”
of the Kawartha group, began email-
ing local chiefs, and municipal and
provincial officials. Denby protested
against the destruction of farmland
for housing developments and made
broad allegations of corruption. He
said he was the hereditary leader of
a forgotten Indigenous nation and
claimed his group had rights to nearly
15,000 sq km of land.
At first, Taynar Simpson, the chief
of Alderville First Nation, ignored
the near-daily emails. But then, he
said: “Against my better judgment, I
decided to respond.” ‘They seem
Simpson is one of Canada’s leading
Indigenous genealogical consult- to believe
ants and his work has been critical they’ll get to
in reaching financial settlements create their
for widespread abuse at residential
schools as well as the episode known own little
as the Sixties Scoop, in which Indig- fiefdom
enous children were forcibly placed
in foster care.
with their
“I asked Denby for any evidence of own laws’

his claim because I know pretty much
everything about the First Nations
people in this territory. And told him
I’d never heard of his group before,”
said Simpson.
In email correspondence seen by
the Guardian, Denby told Simpson
he held “records” dating back to 1780
that proved “our ancestors” were on
this land for more than 30,000 years.
He failed to produce documentation.
But it wasn’t until Denby appeared
before Kawartha Lakes city council a
few weeks later that Simpson grasped
the scale of the group’s aims. “Denby
stepped up to the microphone to say
Alderville First Nation had transferred
all authority of the region over to him.
He put this on record. I was like, ‘Are
you kidding me? I never said anything
like that!’” Simpson said.
T
he group’s apparent readiness
to make questionable claims
in a bid for territory alarmed
Simpson and the chiefs of six
other nations who are signatories to the
1923 Williams treaties. In a rare joint
statement, they said Denby and his
group were “illegitimately assert[ing]
rights” and had no ancestral Indig-
enous connection to the region; they
warned that they would take “any
necessary legal action to protect our
citizens, rights and interests”. Denby
dismissed it as “lies”.
Denby’s claims of Indigenous ances-
try also caught the attention of a local
genealogy enthusiast, who created
a blog to catalogue and debunk the
claims. “I wanted to see who his [Indig-
enous] ancestor might be. I couldn’t
actually find one – which doesn’t mean
there isn’t one – but almost certainly
there isn’t one within at least six gen-
erations or five generations,” said
the genealogist, who asked not to be
named to avoid potential harassment.
Denby has claimed both Ojibwe and
Mohawk ancestry, but also told sup-
porters that anyone born in Canada
is “native”. He also claims he is a
descendant of the “Kawartha tribe”
– but the genealogist points out the
name “Kawartha” was created in the
late 1800s as part of a tourism cam-
paign to rebrand the Trent valley.
On a recent afternoon, its camp was
quiet. According to Denby’s wife, “he’s
probably out raisin’ hell”. Calls to his
phone went unanswered. Steven Les-
perance, whom Denby made a “deputy
chief”, declined to comment.
On 26 April, Denby was arrested and
charged with criminal harassment,
uttering threats and intimidation of
a justice system participant. During
his bail hearing, a crown prosecutor
read from an email sent from Denby
to a number of city councillors that
led police to detain him: “We do not
want to start to kill, poison, bury every
one of you or your families if you do
not stop destroying our farmland. We
know where you all live. Nobody wants
to have to go this far but we will. This
is your final warning.” Denby has yet
to enter a plea and none of the charges
have been proved in court.
The far-right strategy of using
Indigenous identity to claim a right
to lands has concerned researchers.
“They seem to believe that if they
can finagle a little land claim, if they
can call themselves a First Nation,
they’ll get to create their own little fief-
dom with their own laws,” said Veldon
Coburn, a professor at the University
of Ottawa’s Institute of Indigenous
Research and Studies.
The use of what Coburn calls a “pot-
pourri of Indigenous iconography”
has become a growing trend among
far-right groups. Romana Didulo, the
QAnon figure who has proclaimed her-
self “Queen” of Canada, uses the motto
Kiçhi Manitō Osākihin, a rough Cree
language translation of “God loves
you”. During the “Freedom convoy”
occupation of Ottawa in 2022, truckers
pinned “Every child matters” flags to
their vehicles, a phrase associated with
victims of the Indigenous residential
schools, and protesters held pipe cere-
monies and lit a sacred fire – against
the wishes of the Algonquin Nation.
Canada’s constitution outlines the
Land grab
Area of Ontario territory claimed by
Kawartha Lakes First Nation
27
▲ Alderville First rights of Indigenous peoples, the state’s
Nation’s chief, obligations to recognised groups and
Taynar Simpson, the legitimacy of historical and con-
is an expert temporary treaties. But Coburn says
in Indigenous many assumptions that groups such as
genealogy the Kawartha Lakes First Nation make
COLE BURSTON are based on a misunderstanding of
those provisions and an antiquated
view of Indigenous peoples.
He and others worry that as the fed-
eral government weighs up self-govern-
ance legislation that would recognise
new – and sometimes contested – Indig-
enous nations, increasingly sophisti-
cated groups could convince officials
they have a legitimate claim, and even
15k
supplant existing rights-holders. “We’re
seeing cases where legitimate Indige-
nous peoples are having to defend their
Area of land, in title,” said Coburn.
sq km, claimed As well as claiming to be a First
by William Nations chief, Denby also alleges
Denby, self- that the Kawartha Lakes municipal
proclaimed chief authorities have a constitutional “duty
of Kawartha to consult” with his group. “He’s trying
Lakes First to claim ownership to all the Kawartha
Nation Lakes region. But when you misrepre-
sent yourself to achieve gain like this,
that’s fraud,” alleged Simpson. Ontario
police said no investigation had been
opened into Denby’s claims.
Some academics caution against
empowering the government to deter-
mine which groups are making legiti-
mate claims.
Simpson sees strong parallels
between the fight with Denby and
the legacy of the colonial project. “In
many ways, the federal government
is no different from Bill Denby. They
masquerade that they have owner-
ship over all these lands. They use the
same playbook to try to gain rights and
access to the territory. And they work
to discredit the people that have been
here for thousands of years.”
LEYLAND CECCO COVERS CANADA FOR
THE GUARDIAN
17 May 2024 The Guardian Weekly
28 Spotlight
Africa
ETHIOPIA
Wheel life
Cycling gives
women of
Tigray a road
to recovery
By Fred Harter AXUM
A
s the cyclists w ound
through the mountains,
the team coach Tadesse
Mikiele trailed in a minivan,
making observations and discussing
tactics with his staff. At one point,
he beckoned over the captain, Genet
Mekonen, who was trailing at the back.
“Why are you slowing down on the
declines?” he asked her. “You need to
be brave. Increase your speed, attack
when you go downhill.”
Genet peeled off to rejoin the group
at the front. Two days before their next
race, Tadesse said he was happy. “You
can see, on the hills, they move up as a
team. They do not separate, they sup-
port each other. We are in good shape.”
Eighteen months ago, tanks
lumbered along this road in Ethiopia’s
northern Tigray region. Drones pum-
melled targets. At a roadside village,
Eritrean troops allied to Ethiopia’s
The Guardian Weekly 17 May 2024
military massacred dozens of people.
It was the final battle of one of the
bloodiest wars of recent times, pitting
Ethiopia’s federal government against
Tigray’s rebellious regional rulers.
Today, Tigray’s cycling teams,
including the women of coach
Tadesse’s Mekelle 70 Enderta club, are
competing on the road again, a small
sign of the fragile normality that has
returned after two years of devastating
war. Hunger and insecurity persist but
sport, at least, has resumed.
During the war, Tigray’s internet
and phone lines were cut off. Aid was
obstructed and the banks were shut,
so people couldn’t access savings to
buy food. The UN secretary-general,
António Guterres, called the restric-
tions a “de facto humanitarian block-
ade”. A UN panel concluded that all
sides had committed war crimes.
Tigray’s women suffered greatly.
The UN experts concluded that
Eritrean and Ethiopian forces waged
a campaign of sexual slavery and that
Tigray’s fighters perpetrated sexual
violence in the neighbouring regions
of Amhara and Afar. In total, 600,000
people were killed across northern
Ethiopia, according to the African
Union’s main peace negotiator.
“I don’t have words to describe it, it
was a terrible time,” said Genet at the
team hotel after training. “I survived
by the will of God.”
Tigray has mountainous roads and a
history of investing in cycling. But con-
ditions can be treacherous. Cyclists
contend with potholes, minibuses
speeding around blind bends and the
occasional wandering cow.
Just three of Tigray’s six women’s
cycling teams survived the war.
Mekelle 70 Enderta, based in the
regional capital, had 16 cyclists before
the conflict. Now it has eight.
One of the club’s cyclists spent
a year on the frontline, fighting in
dozens of battles before rejoining her
teammates. “I didn’t think I’d survive,
let alone return to cycling,” she said.
Others were displaced. The club sur-
vived thanks to coach Tadesse.
“Cycling needs continuous training,
with very few break days, if you want
to be competitive, but we couldn’t go
out for almost three years because of
 The Mekelle 70 Covid and the war,” said Genet.
Enderta women’s Last month, Mekelle 70 Enderta
cycling team competed in a tournament held in
training before Axum, a holy city whose main church
a race is said to hold the original Ark of the
FRED HARTER Covenant. In November 2020, Axum
was the site of the biggest massacre
of the war when Eritrean troops went
door-to-door slaughtering hundreds
of men and boys. The memory of the
massacre hangs heavily over the city.
A minute of silence was held before
each race to commemorate the dead.
“Almost all” of Tigray’s male cyclists
signed up to fight and many were
killed, said Berihu Mesfin, general sec-
retary of Tigray’s cycling federation.
Several teams had their bikes looted by
soldiers and struggled to raise money
to replace them. “We’ve started com-
petitions again,” said Berihu, “but
cycling in Tigray is still recovering.”
The women of Mekelle 70 Enderta
have not been paid since October 2020,
the month before war erupted. They
live in a team dormitory, where they
get meals, but no money. “We can’t
buy clothes or even soap, but we are
still here, surviving, for the sake of the
team,” said member Serkalem Taye.
Cycling officially resumed in Tigray
in June 2023, eight months after a
ceasefire ended the war, with a compe-
tition featuring teams from every cor-
6
ner of Ethiopia. Tigray’s cyclists won
all but two of the races, said Berihu.
At the African Games, held in Ghana
Number of in March, all six women chosen to
women’s cycling represent Ethiopia came from Tigray,
teams in Tigray with three from Mekelle 70 Enderta,
before the war. including Serkalem and Genet.
Only three Despite coaching for two decades,
remain after Tadesse admits there were times when
a conflict that he felt like giving up during the war.
is estimated to “I’m still with the team for the sake of
have claimed these women,” he said. “They have
the lives of sacrificed a lot to achieve what they
600,000 people have. I don’t want to let them down.”
across northern FRED HARTER IS A REPORTER BASED
Ethiopia IN EAST AFRICA

Spotlight
Asia Pacific
T A I WA N
The park
where a late
dictator still
smiles on
his people
By Helen Davidson and
Chi Hui Lin TAOYUAN
T
he last time Mrs Hsieh came
to Cihu Park in Taoyuan
was almost 50 years ago, on
a school trip to the grave of
Taiwan’s recently deceased dictator.
Busloads of children were brought in
to pay their respects to Chiang Kai-
shek, known as Generalissimo, who
had died at 87, after decades ruling the
island under brutal martial law.
“There were a lot of buses, and there
was a long queue,” Hsieh recalled. “It
was a school rule. We had to bow, and
then we went home.”
Chiang’s body is still there, under
guard in a mausoleum at the end of a
path that winds through misty bam-
boo. But the other end of the park is the
truly ghostly part, dotted with hun-
dreds of statues, almost all of Chiang.
Some stand in a circle – a group of
Chiangs gathered for a casual confer-
ence or a campfire chat. Elsewhere,
dozens are lined up in what looks like
a choir of Chiangs. There is Chiang
on a horse, Chiang in a seat, Chiang
reading a book. A few have Chiang
surrounded by adoring children, and
paths are lined with his busts on con-
crete pedestals. Almost all are smiling.
There were no statues here in the
1970s, said Hsieh. They have been
moved here over time, taken from
public spaces but not destroyed,
standing as an uncanny honour guard.
“It’s a strange place,” said Hsieh. “It
would be scary at night.”
The veneration shown to Chiang
when Hsieh was a child is no longer
a given. Chiang was the ruler of the
Republic of China until he and his
Kuomintang (KMT) party were driven
out by the communists in China’s
civil war. They and millions of sup-
porters retreated to Taiwan in 1949,
establishing the republic in exile,
with Chiang planning to retake the
mainland one day. Under his almost-
four-decade-rule – now known as
the “white terror” – an estimated
3,000-4,000 people were executed
and 140,000 imprisoned for actual or
perceived opposition to the KMT.
After his death in 1975, Taiwan
transitioned to a democracy, and criti-
cism of the leadership present and past
became possible. But Chiang’s legacy
is still fervently debated here.
In 2018, the ruling Democratic
Progressive party (DPP), which was
born of the opposition to martial law,
established a transitional justice com-
mission to investigate and atone for the
KMT’s acts against Taiwan’s people. In
2022, a programme offered grants of up
to 100,000 Taiwan dollars ($3,000) for
local authorities to change or remove
“authoritarian symbols” to help end a
“culture of political veneration”.
Taiwan has more than 300 roads
named after Chiang, almost 60
schools, and dozens of localities.
A handful have changed name in
the past five years: a road in former
capital Tainan is now named after a
prominent victim of the massacre of
February 1947, when thousands of
protesters were killed by KMT troops.
Last month, a DPP legislator
challenged the government on its slow
progress over the more than 700 stat-
ues that still stand. Cabinet official Shih
Books p58
29
Pu said part of the issue was that many ▼ Statues of
of the statues were on military sites, Chiang Kai-shek
which did not want to remove them. stand guard
The modern KMT party, now in around his
opposition, has apologised for past mausoleum
acts but opposes the DPP’s transitional HELEN DAVIDSON
justice efforts, which it says amount to
a political witch-hunt. Some members
have likened a proposal to remove the
largest Chiang statue – a 6-metre-high
sculpture in central Taipei – to the
Taliban’s destruction of the Buddhas
of Bamiyan in 2001
Opinions in the country are divided
but nuanced. Prominent campaigner
Lin Li-cai, whose father was a victim of
the massacres, said her family will “set
off firecrackers” if the Taipei statue
is removed. But some say Chiang’s
crimes must be balanced against the
economic boom he ushered through,
and his fight against the Japanese and
the communists.
“Chiang did a lot of controversial
things,” park visitor Mr Huang said.
“But he also made contributions. If
he hadn’t come to Taiwan back then,
it would probably be ruled by the
communists now, and most Taiwan-
ese do not want to be governed by
‘If Chiang
Xi Jinping.”
Hsieh thinks there’s no point hadn’t come
erasing history, and the statues look to Taiwan,
OK in schools. Also, she added, laugh-
ing, Cihu park is spooky enough. It
it would
doesn’t need any more. Observer probably
be under
HELEN DAVIDSON IS A GUARDIAN AND
OBSERVER CORRESPONDENT BASED IN
TAIWAN; CHI HUI LIN IS A JOURNALIST
communist
BASED IN TAIWAN rule now’
 Spotlight
Science

MEDICA L R ESE A RCH

Fight O
ver the past four years, a
silent pandemic has been
raging. The death toll is
believed to number in
Mayo Clinic’s vaccine research group,
who has previously compared the ris-
ing infection rates among animals to
“the rumbles prior to an earthquake”.

or flight
the hundreds of millions, but it has
received remarkably little attention.
The pandemic in question is bird
flu, the H5N1 strain of influenza, which
While H5N1 is well known for its
devastating impact on wild bird popu-
lations and poultry farms in the US –
as of 5 May, 91 million farmed birds

Are we ready
since 2020 has moved far beyond
the avian world and into mammals
ranging from dairy cattle to domes-
tic pets, and species that live on our
have been infected in the US across
48 states – Poland has been particu-
larly alarmed by reports of pet cats
contracting the virus from cattle and

for bird flu? doorsteps, such as foxes. The virus’s

presence has been detected on every
continent, even Antarctica. While
it has yet to evolve the capability of
becoming seriously ill or dying. “We
have very little research to tell us how
this is all occurring in cattle, and how
it is being spread,” he said.
ILUSTRATION: GUARDIAN DESIGN/GETTY

The H5N1 virus has been devastating bird
populations, and is now infecting mammals
too. Is human-to-human transmission next?
By David Cox
spreading between humans, alarm
bells were raised last month after a
dairy farm worker in Texas contracted
H5N1, seemingly from cattle.
It would appear to be the first
known case of bird flu jumping to
humans from another mammal.
“There is increasing concern at the
scientific and public health levels,”
said Dr Gregory Poland, director of the
In the UK, the virologist Prof Paul
Digard and his team at the Roslin Insti-
tute in Edinburgh were awarded an
additional £3.3m ($4.1m) grant last
year to ramp up their research into the
risk the current strain of H5N1 might
pose to humans.
“Flu is constantly evolving, and it
is clear that a couple of years ago, the
current strain of bird flu changed to

The Guardian Weekly 17 May 2024


Bird flu is ‘fairly
widespread’ in US
cattle. Reports of pet
cats contracting the
virus from cattle and
becoming ill or dying
have caused alarm
4-8bn
become supercharged,” said Digard.
“Now that it seems to be fairly wide-
Number of flu spread in the cow population in the US,
vaccine doses that’s a much more direct route where
that could be it could transmit to people and gain the
made in a year adaptations it needs to go pandemic.”
The Roslin team’s task is to figure
1.2bn out the precise changes in the viral
sequence that seem to be allowing it
Current global to infect cattle, and then test the strain
capacity for on human cells and mini-organs in the
making flu jabs lab. The ultimate goal will be to make
predictions about whether it is becom-
ing more dangerous to humans and to
animals living in close proximity to us.
‘With If the findings spark concern, it
could provide governments with more
vaccines, evidence to start bolstering supplies of
if you wait flu vaccines. Last year, the UK Health
Security Agency reportedly ran a pro-
until it’s a curement exercise to source suitable
pandemic, jabs, while the US has accumulated a
then you’re national reserve of four types of flu
vaccine that could provide some pro-
playing tection against H5N1. But Digard said
catchup’ governments face difficult decisions
over balancing the cost of vaccines
against preparing for an outbreak.
“The issue is trying to decide when
to pull the trigger for go,” he said.
“Because if you wait until it’s already
a pandemic, then you’re playing
catchup, and you know that you’re
not going to be able to make enough
vaccine quickly to protect everybody.”
The world has plenty of recent
experience when it comes to roll-
ing out large-scale vaccination pro-
grammes. More than 13bn doses of
Covid-19 vaccines have been admin-
istered, covering 70% of the world’s
population, while at the height of the
2009 swine flu outbreak, around 3bn
vaccine doses were churned out.
A
ccording to the US Centers
for Disease Control and
Prevention, there are two
candidate vaccines against
a related strain of flu viruses that could
be shipped within weeks, if necessary.
Various manufacturers also have dis-
pensations to update their flu vaccines
with relevant targets from the H5N1
strain, without needing new licensing.
The World Health Organization
(WHO) estimates 4-8bn doses of flu
vaccines could be produced within
a year in an H5N1 pandemic. Experts
say that would require a significant
expansion of the global capacity for
making flu vaccines, placed at about
1.2bn doses.
“Remember that it takes two doses,
three to four weeks apart, to achieve
protective immunity,” said Poland.
“You can quickly do the maths and
see where that leaves us.”
While manufacturers have been
working on H5N1 vaccines since the
mid-2000s, research has always indi-
cated that they pose a much greater
technical challenge than the seasonal
flu vaccines distributed each year. In
particular, the jabs seem to require a
far larger dose to generate a sufficient
immune response. A dose of the H5N1
vaccine candidate manufactured by
the French pharmaceutical company
Sanofi is 90 micrograms, six times the
size of a typical seasonal flu vaccine.
The WHO’s capacity predictions
may rely on ramping up the production
of adjuvanted vaccines. These utilise
an additional ingredient, or adjuvant,
which is combined with the vaccine to
boost the immune response, enabling
a far smaller dose, and one that is
easier to produce in large quantities.
However, speed of production
31
could still prove to be a bottleneck.
In the event of an H5N1 pandemic,
the WHO estimates that 79% of the
vaccines produced would be made
using traditional gold-standard tech-
nologies, which require incubation in
chicken eggs. While a Sanofi spokes-
person said that during the 2009 swine
flu pandemic, vaccines were produced
within three months, egg-based plat-
forms are more time-consuming: the
process can take up to six months.
Instead, messenger RNA (mRNA)
technology, which proved so invalu-
able in generating Covid-19 vaccines,
could again be a vital tool, with the
platform known to be faster and more
efficient than egg-based technologies.
Clinical trials by Moderna and GSK
working in collaboration with CureVac
are testing H5N1 vaccines in people.
However, Digard said there is insuf-
ficient data to examine the possible
effectiveness of mRNA vaccines.
Given that H5N1 is still largely
confined to the animal population,
one idea for reducing transmission
and limiting the potential for jump-
ing to humans may be vaccinating
poultry and farm animals on a mass
scale. However, Karen Grogan, an
associate professor at the University
of Georgia’s Poultry Diagnostic and
Research Center, is not convinced this
would make a significant difference.
“Vaccination of commercial poultry
would not decrease the amount of
viable virus in the environment since
there is so much being shed by wild
birds,” she said. “The spread into dairy
cattle is likely linked to wild birds on
those dairies. There are no approved
H5N1 vaccines for use in farm animals
or household pets; those would need
to be developed, which is a process
that takes around four years.”
While the prevalence of H5N1 in
the wild is worrying, Digard is keen
to point out that, while the virus is
widely reported as having a fatality
rate of 52% in humans, based on 882
cases of infections between January
2003 and December 2023, it appears
to have become much less pathogenic
for people in recent years.
“I’m not minimising the risk – if this
did go pandemic, even with a very mild
virus, people would end up dying,”
he said. “Even swine flu, which is the
mildest flu pandemic we have records
for, still killed hundreds of thousands
of people. But it wouldn’t be a science-
fiction style pandemic.” Observer
DAVID COX IS A SCIENCE JOURNALIST
17 May 2024 The Guardian Weekly
32 Spotlight
North America
A N A LY S I S
U N I T E D S TAT E S
Brief encounter
Trump voters
don’t care about
Stormy Daniels’
lurid testimony
By Chris McGreal NEW YORK
Stormy Daniels may
have regarded sex with
Donald Trump as brief,
unimaginative and
regrettable but the adult film star
gripped the US with a salacious and
lengthy retelling of the encounter to
a New York court last week.
Daniels’ humiliating testimony
in Trump’s fraud trial infuriated the
former president, who glowered
from a few metres away.
New York state is prosecuting
the former president for fraud after
he allegedly used his business,
the Trump Organization, to pay
$130,000 in hush money to Daniels
before the 2016 election. She went
public two years later with a book,
Full Disclosure, in which she claimed
to have had sex with Trump once.
The Guardian Weekly 17 May 2024
He continues to deny the
encounter but opinion polls show
most Republicans think he is lying.
They also do not seem to care.
Dr Larry Sabato, the director
of the Center for Politics at the
University of Virginia, said he
doubted it would make a significant
difference to the outcome of Trump
v Joe Biden later in the year.
“When the details about Stormy
Daniels finally came out during
Trump’s presidency, people just
instinctively knew it was true.
Just like people instinctively knew
that Bill Clinton had fooled around
because he’d done it so many times
before. People are not stupid. But in
this era, it doesn’t matter much.”
Daniels spent more than
seven hours on the witness
stand describing her encounter
with Trump at a celebrity golf
tournament in Lake Tahoe in 2006.
She was a host at a hospitality
tent run by the pornographic film
company Wicked Pictures.
Trump, who was 60 years old at
the time and had a newborn son
with Melania, his wife of less than
a year, invited Daniels, who was
27, to dinner. She went along on
the advice of her publicist, who said:
“What could possibly go wrong?”
Daniels told the court her evening
evolved from administering a
playful spanking with a magazine
that had Trump’s face on the cover
to her alarm at finding him on a bed
stripped down to his underwear.
Daniels said he then pressured
▼ A courtroom her into having sex. “I was staring
sketch of Donald up at the ceiling, wondering how I
Trump and got there,” she told the jury.
Stormy Daniels Daniels said the sex “was brief”
although, apparently, not brief
JANE ROSENBERG/
REUTERS
enough. “I felt ashamed that I didn’t
stop it, that I didn’t say no,” she said.
All but the former president’s
most die-hard supporters are likely
to have recoiled at Daniels’ account
that in the middle of all this Trump
told her she reminded him of his
daughter Ivanka.
The prosecution’s key witness,
Trump’s former lawyer Michael
Cohen, took to the stand on Monday.
Cohen handled the payment to
Daniels to buy her silence and has
already served 13 months in prison
after pleading guilty to tax evasion
and breaching campaign finance
laws over the transaction.
Still, Sabato is sceptical that even
evidence that Trump stole from his
own company will do much to dent
his support. “The group of American
voters that used to care deeply
about issues like that ... are white
evangelical Christians. And now
we’ve got the orange Jesus in their
view. They long ago excused Trump
of anything,” he said.
Instead, the trial has only gone to
strengthen the view of many Trump
supporters that the former reality TV
star is a victim of an establishment
conspiracy. Eight in 10 Trump voters
believe the fraud investigation by
the Manhattan district attorney,
Alvin Bragg, was rigged to frame the
former president.
A conviction in the case could be
another matter. An ABC News/Ipsos
poll this month showed that while
We’ve got 80% of Trump’s supporters would
stand by him if he were convicted of
the orange a felony, 16% would reconsider their
Jesus in support and 4% would walk away
the view from the former president. Sabato
said that could prove enough to sink
of white Trump’s run for the White House.
evangelical On the other hand, it appears
increasingly unlikely the former
Christians. president will go on trial before the
They have election on the multiple charges –
excused ranging from mishandling classified
documents to his role in the
Trump of storming of the Capitol on 6 January
anything 2021 – that he faces in Florida,
Georgia and Washington.
CHRIS MCGREAL IS A WRITER FOR
GUARDIAN US

C A NA DA
Restaurant
is winner
in rappers’
escalating
war of words
By Leyland Cecco TORONTO
W
hen he arrived for din-
ner with his mother
at the New Ho King,
Averie Taylor Francois,
14, didn’t need to read the menu. Nei-
ther did the dozens of others waiting
patiently for a table at the bustlingg
Toronto restaurant. The dish everyonee
had come to enjoy wasn’t on the menu..
“I ordered the Kendrick special,” ”
he said. “The staff knew what it was.”
” “Kendrick
Over the past few weeks, rapperss
Kendrick Lamar and Drake have been n or only tal
locked in an escalating feud releasing
g also talks about
a string of ad hominem “diss tracks”.
Lamar took the feud to Drake’s home
e “I think the
town of Toronto when, last month, he e
released the song Euphoria. Alongsidee
the biting attacks on the Canadian wass
a reference to an unassuming Chinese e
restaurant in the city.
Lamar raps: “I be at New Ho King g
eatin’ fried rice with a dip sauce and
d THE GUARDIA
a blammy, crodie,” mockingly using
Toronto slang.
Catapulted into the spotlight, the
restaurant has seen its business surge
and staff were left scrambling to make
triple the normal volume of fried rice.
Interest reached a fever pitch days
later when Drake responded with
Family Matters, filming part of its
video at New Ho King. In a dark, empty
restaurant, the rapper and his friends
sit before an array of dishes spread out
on the table – including the fried rice.
New Ho King, which has operated
in the city’s Chinatown for nearly five
decades, is still grappling with the
newfound fame. Until recently, its
tables would be sparsely populated
on weekday evenings, picking up pace
on the weekends.
But on a Thursday evening, a queue
snaked out the door as diners clam-
oured for a table. Passersby stopped
outside and posed for photos.
“We’ve been selling a lot of fried
rice,” said a server. “A lot. Most people
come here e to order it.”
Taylor Francois
F i , a self-described
lf d ib d
“obsessed”
“obsessed d” fan of Lamar, was among
the Toron
Torontonians
ntonians drawn to New Ho
King after the reference.
“Kendr rick is not one of those rap-
pers who only talks about America
talks
lks about what he gains. He
a people, he talks about
33
society. And to see him reference a
Toronto restaurant – it’s really great.
I even love that he made fun of the
Toronto accent,” he said. “Drake has
done a lot within the city. But Kendrick
is spreading Toronto out to different
points. It’s not only in Canada now. It’s
become bigger than that.”
While the restaurant has benefited,
not every diner agrees that Kendrick
was acting out of goodwill.
 New Ho King “He just showed he knows this city
is seeing a surge – he can make references to specific
in business due places,” said Jenny Min. “At the end
to the battle of the day, Drake has done far more
between Drake for this city.”
(below left) and Min, who lives close by, said that
Kendrick Lamar until now, New Ho King had never
(below right) really distinguished itself from dozens
COLE BURSTON of other Chinese restaurants nearby.
“I’ll admit it,” she said. “The song
made us come and try the fried rice.”
Neither Lamar nor Drake specify
which rice dish to order from the 14
menu options: the most popular is the
Ho King Special Fried Rice, a mix of
shrimp, pork, eggs, peas and lettuce.
“It’s a bit overhyped, if I’m going
to be honest,” said Min. “It needs a bit
more salt and a bit more char.”
Despite Drake’s strong ties to the
city – and his role as its biggest global
cheerleader – there is a strong sense
within New Ho King that Lamar has
emerged lyrically victorious.
Lamar exists in the pantheon of
rap’s most gifted lyricists. In 2018,
the Pulitzer committee praised him
for “affecting vignettes capturing the
complexity of modern African Ameri-
can life” in the album Damn when it
awarded him the prize.
“Quite simply, Drake is playing
against someone he cannot beat,” said
‘I’ll admit Bruce Liu, who came to New Ho King
with his friends for the fried rice.
it. The song But the recent
r shooting of a secu-
made us rity guard in front of Drake’s sprawling
come here estate that le
left him “seriously injured”,
as well as two
tw attempts by residents
and try the to seemingl
seemingly gain access to the man-
fried rice’ sion, have prompted
pr concerns that the
lyrical feud, imbued with increasingly
Jenny Min provocative and unsubstantiated alle-
Toronto resident gations, mig
might spill over into the public
with violen
violent consequences.
th beef needs to end. Both
their images have taken a hit from the
allegations each have made. No one
is really com
coming out on top,” said Liu.
“Well, I guess
gues there’s been one winner
– this restaurant.”
restau
LEYLAND CE
CECCO COVERS CANADA FOR
GUARDIAN
17 Ma
May 2024 The Guardian Weekly
34

SPECIAL REPORT BY DAMIAN CARRINGTON

We asked 380 climate scientists what they felt about the future.

ABOUT THE FUTURE MY

CHILDREN ARE INHERITING’
The Guardian Weekly 17 May 2024
 35

They are terrified, but will keep fighting

17 May 2024 The Guardian Weekly

 How high will global heating go?
How high above pre-industrial levels do you think average global temperature will rise between now and 2100?
Count of answers given by IPCC climate experts 77% of climate scientists expect a rise of at least 2.5C
36 Each square
is 1 answer

Below 1.5C 1.5C 2.0C 2.5C 3.0C 3.5C 4.0C 4.5C 5.0C or above

Source: Guardian survey of climate experts. 380 responses

ometimes it is almost impossible not to feel destroyed.’ We have seen these extreme events happening every-
hopeless and broken,” says the climate scientist where. There is not a safe place for anyone.
Ruth Cerezo-Mota. “After all the flooding, fires “I think 3C is being hopeful and conservative; 1.5C is already bad,
and droughts of the last three years worldwide, but I don’t think there is any way we are going to stick to that.”
all related to climate change, and after the fury Cerezo-Mota is far from alone in her fear. An exclusive Guardian
of Hurricane Otis in Mexico, my country, I really survey of hundreds of the world’s leading climate experts has found that:
thought governments were ready to listen to the • 77% of respondents believe global temperatures will reach at least
science, to act in the people’s best interest.” 2.5C above pre-industrial levels, a devastating degree of heating.
Instead, Cerezo-Mota expects the world to • Almost half – 42% – think it will be more than 3C.
heat by a catastrophic 3C this century, soar- • Only 6% think the 1.5C limit will be achieved.
ing past the internationally agreed 1.5C target The task climate researchers have dedicated themselves to is to
and delivering enormous suffering to billions of paint a picture of the possible worlds ahead. From experts in the
people. This is her optimistic view, she says. atmosphere and oceans, energy and agriculture, economics and
“The breaking point for me was a meeting in Singapore,” says politics, the mood of almost all those the Guardian heard from was
Cerezo-Mota, an expert in climate modelling at the National Autono- grim. And the future many painted was harrowing: famines, mass
mous University of Mexico. There, she listened to other experts spell migration, conflict. “I find it infuriating, distressing, overwhelming,”
out the connection between rising global temperatures and heat- said one expert, who chose not to be named. “I’m relieved that I do
waves, fires, storms and floods hurting people – not at the end of the not have children, knowing what the future holds,” said another.
century, but today. “That was when everything clicked,” she says. The scientists’ responses to the survey provide informed opinions
“I got a depression. It was a very dark point in my life. I was unable on critical questions for the future of humanity. How hot will the world
to do anything and was just sort of surviving.” get, and what will that look like? Why is the world failing to act with
Cerezo-Mota recovered to continue her work: “We keep doing it anything remotely like the urgency needed? Is it, in fact, game over,
because we have to do it, so [the powerful] cannot say that they didn’t or must we fight on? They also provide a rare glimpse into what it is
know. We know what we’re talking about. They can say they don’t like to live with this knowledge every day.
care, but they can’t say they didn’t know.” The climate crisis is already causing profound damage across the
In Mérida on the Yucatán peninsula, where Cerezo-Mota lives, the planet with just 1.2C of average global heating over the last four years.
heat is ramping up. “Last summer, we had around 47C maximum. But the scale of future impacts will depend on what happens – or
Even at night, it’s 38C, which is higher than your body temperature. not – in politics, finance, technology and global society, and how the
It doesn’t give a minute of the day for your body to try to recover.” Earth’s climate and ecosystems respond.
She says record-breaking heatwaves led to many deaths in Mexico. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has
“It’s very frustrating because many of these things could have been convened thousands of experts in all these fields to produce the
avoided. And it’s just silly to think: ‘Well, I don’t care if Mexico gets most authoritative reports available, which are approved by all gov-
ernments. It was founded in 1988 by the United Nations, which was
Daily temperature anomalies concerned even at that time that global heating could “be disastrous
Global daily average temperature anomalies relative to a preindustrial baseline, C for mankind if timely steps are not taken at all levels”.
The IPCC’s task was to produce a comprehensive review and
Relative to a preindustrial baseline, C Feb 2024 recommendations, which it has now done six times over 35 years. In
Five-year rolling average Four consecutive days above 2C
terms of scale and significance, it may be the most important scientific
2.0C 2023
First day above 2C
endeavour in human history.
The IPCC experts are, in short, the most informed people on the
planet on climate. What they think matters. So the Guardian contacted
Each vertical strip is a year 2015
every available lead author or review editor of all IPCC reports since
1.5 Each dot is a daily global average First days above 1.5C 2018. Almost half replied – 380 out of 843, a very high response rate.
Their expectations for global temperature rise were stark. Lisa
1958 Schipper, at the University of Bonn, anticipates a 3C rise: “It looks
First day above 1C really bleak, but I think it’s realistic. It’s just the fact that we’re not
1.0
taking the action that we need to.” Technically, a lower temperature
peak was possible, the scientists said, but few had any confidence it
would be delivered.
Their overwhelming feelings were fear and frustration. “I expect
a semi-dystopian future with substantial pain and suffering for the
0.5 people of the global south,” said a South African scientist who chose
not to be named. “The world’s response to date is reprehensible – we
live in an age of fools.”

0 How climate scientists cope

So how do the scientists cope with their work being ignored for decades,
and living in a world their findings indicate is on a “highway to hell”?
Camille Parmesan, at the CNRS ecology centre in France, was on
-0.5
the point of giving up 15 years ago. “I had devoted my research life to
1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020 [climate science] and it had not made a damn bit of difference,” she
Source: Copernicus C3S/ECMWF Era5. Note: Preindustrial baseline = 1850-1900 said. “I started feeling [like], well, I love singing, maybe I’ll become
a nightclub singer.”

The Guardian Weekly 17 May 2024

 37

She was inspired to continue by the dedication she saw in the young
activists at the turbulent UN climate summit in Copenhagen 2009.
“All these young people were so charged up, so impassioned. So I said
I’ll keep doing this, not for the politicians, but for you.
“The big difference [with the most recent IPCC report] was that all
of the scientists I worked with were incredibly frustrated. Everyone
was at the end of their rope, asking: what the fuck do we have to do
to get through to people how bad this really is?”
“Scientists are human: we are also people living on this Earth,
of respondents are who are also experiencing the impacts of climate change, who also
optimistic that the planet have children, and who also have worries about the future,” said
will achieve the limit of Schipper. “We did our science, we put this really good report together
and – wow – it really didn’t make a difference on the policy. It’s very
difficult to see that, every time.”
Climate change is our “unescapable reality”, said Joeri Rogelj, at
Imperial College London. “Running away from it is impossible and
will only increase the challenges of dealing with the consequences
and implementing solutions.”
Henri Waisman, at the IDDRI policy research institute in France,
said: “I regularly face moments of despair and guilt of not managing
to make things change more rapidly, and these feelings have become ‘I OFTEN FACE
MOMENTS OF
even stronger since I became a father. But, in these moments, two
things help me: remembering how much progress has happened
since I started to work on the topic in 2005 and that every tenth of a
degree matters a lot – this means it is still useful to continue the fight.”
DESPAIR, BUT
‘I SEE THE
Rising temperatures, implausible targets
In the climate crisis, even fractions of a degree do matter: every extra IT IS USEFUL
YOUNGER
tenth means 140 million more people suffering in dangerous heat.
The 1.5C target was forced through international negotiations by an TO CONTINUE
THE FIGHT’
alliance of uniquely vulnerable small island states. They saw the

GENERATIONS previous 2C target as condemning their nations to obliteration under

rising oceans and storms.

FIGHTING AND
The 1.5C goal was adopted as a stretch target at the UN climate Henri Waisman
summit in Paris in 2015 with the deal seen as a triumph, a statement IDDRI policy research
of true multilateral ambition delivered with smiles and euphoric institute, France

I GET A BIT OF applause. It quickly became the default target for minimising climate
damage, with UN summits being conducted to the repeated refrain of:

HOPE AGAIN’
“Keep 1.5 alive!” For the target to be breached requires global tempera-
tures to be above 1.5C across numerous years, not just for a single year.
It remains a vital political target for many climate diplomats,
Ruth Cerezo-Mota anchoring international climate efforts and driving ambition. But
National Autonomous to almost all the IPCC experts the Guardian heard from, it is dead.
University of Mexico A scientist from a Pacific Island nation said: “Humanity is heading
towards destruction. We’ve got to appreciate, help and love each other.”
Schipper said: “There is an argument that if we say that it is too
late for 1.5C, that we are setting ourselves up for defeat and saying
there’s nothing we can do, but I don’t agree.”
Jonathan Cullen, at the University of Cambridge, was blunt: “1.5C
is a political game – we were never going to reach this target.”
The climate emergency is already here. Even just 1C of heating has
supercharged the planet’s extreme weather, delivering searing heat- of respondents believe
waves from the US to Europe to China that would have been otherwise global temperatures
impossible. Millions of people are very likely to have died early as a will rise by at least
result already. At just 2C, the brutal heatwave that struck the Pacific
north-west of America in 2021 will be 100-200 times more likely.
But a world that is hotter by 2.5C, 3C or worse, as most of the experts
anticipate, takes us into uncharted territory. It is hard to fully map
this new world. Our intricately connected global society means the
impact of climate shocks in one place can cascade around the world,
through food price spikes, broken supply chains and migration.
One relatively simple study examined the impact of a 2.7C 
rise, the average of the answers in the Guardian survey. It

17 May 2024 The Guardian Weekly

38 Climate scientists

found 2 billion people pushed outside humanity’s “climate niche”, METHODOLOGY

ie the benign conditions in which the whole of human civilisation Julian Ganz provided the
arose over the last 10,000 years. technical support to conduct
The latest IPCC assessment devotes hundreds of pages to climate the survey, which was sent on
impacts, with irreversible losses to the Amazon rainforest, quadrupled 31 January 2024. Men made
flood damages and billions more people exposed to dengue fever. up 68% of the respondents,
With 3C of global heating, cities including Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro, women 28% and 4%
Miami and The Hague end up below sea level. preferred not to state their
“It is the biggest threat humanity has faced, with the potential gender. This mirrors the
to wreck our social fabric and way of life. It has the potential to kill gender split of the IPCC
millions, if not billions, through starvation, war over resources, dis- authors overall. A large
placement,” said James Renwick, at Victoria University of Wellington, majority of the scientists –
New Zealand. “None of us will be unaffected by the devastation.” 89% – were aged between
“I am scared mightily – I don’t see how we are able to get out of this 40 and 69 and they were
mess,” said Tim Benton, an expert on food security and food systems from 35 different countries
at the Chatham House thinktank. He said the cost of protecting people across the world, with every
and recovering from climate disasters will be huge, with discord and continent represented by
delay over who pays the bills. Numerous experts were worried over dozens of experts. The age
food production: “We’ve barely started to see the impacts,” said one. and gender questions were

‘THERE IS NOT Another grave concern was climate tipping points, where a tiny
temperature increase tips crucial parts of the climate system into
not mandatory but were
answered by 344 and 346

THE POLITICAL
collapse, such as the Greenland ice sheet, the Amazon rainforest respondents respectively.
and key Atlantic currents. “Most people do not realise how big these
risks are,” said Wolfgang Cramer, at the Mediterranean Institute of

WILL TO USE Biodiversity and Ecology.

MONEY ON
A lack of political will

ADAPTATION
In the face of such colossal danger, why is the world’s response so slow
and inadequate? The IPCC experts overwhelmingly pointed to one ‘IT IS
GETTING
barrier: lack of political will. Almost three-quarters of the respondents

FUNDING’
cited this factor, with 60% also blaming vested corporate interests.
“[Climate change] is an existential threat to humanity and [lack

Shobha Maharaj
Trinidad and Tobago
of respondents believe
global temperatures
will rise by more than
of] political will and vested corporate interests are preventing us
addressing it. I do worry about the future my children are inherit- CHEAPER
AND CHEAPER
ing,” said Lorraine Whitmarsh, at the University of Bath in the UK.
Lack of money was only a concern for 27% of the scientists,
suggesting most believe the finance exists to fund the green transition.
Few respondents thought that a lack of green technology or scientific
understanding of the issue were a problem – 6% and 4% respectively. TO SAVE THE
CLIMATE’
“All of humanity needs to come together and cooperate – this is a
monumental opportunity to put differences aside and work together,”
said Louis Verchot, at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture
in Colombia. “Unfortunately climate change has become a political Lars Nilsson
wedge issue … I wonder how deep the crisis needs to become before Lund University, Sweden
we all start rowing in the same direction.”
Dipak Dasgupta, an economist and former government adviser
in India, said short-term thinking by governments and businesses
was a major barrier. Climate action needed decade-long planning, in
contrast to election cycles of only a few years, said others.
A world of climate chaos would require a much greater focus on
protecting people from inevitable impacts, said many scientists, but
again politics stands in the way. “Multiple trillions of dollars were
liquidated for use during the pandemic, yet it seems there is not
enough political will to commit several billion dollars to adaptation
funding,” said Shobha Maharaj, from Trinidad and Tobago.
The capture of politicians and the media by vastly wealthy fossil
fuel companies and petrostates, whose oil, gas and coal are the root
cause of the climate crisis, was frequently cited. “The economic
interests of nations often take precedence,” said Lincoln Alves, at
Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research.
Stephen Humphreys, at the London School of Economics, said:
“The tacit calculus of decision-makers, particularly in the Anglo-
sphere – US, Canada, UK, Australia – but also Russia and the major

The Guardian Weekly 17 May 2024

 39

WHAT CAN
fossil fuel producers in the Middle East, is driving us into a world in and more than 60% of the
which the vulnerable will suffer, while the well-heeled will hope to scientists said they had cut
stay safe above the waterline.” Asked what individual action would their own meat consumption.

YOU DO?
be effective, he said: “Civil disobedience.” Almost 30% of the experts said
“The enormity of the problem is not well understood,” said Ralph eating less meat was the most
Sims, at Massey University in New Zealand. “So there will be environ- effective climate action.
mental refugees by the millions, extreme weather events escalating, Voting tops the list
food and water shortages, before the majority accept the urgency in Is protesting an effective form
reducing emissions – by which time it will be too late.” as experts reveal the of climate action?
most powerful climate Almost a quarter of the
The gap between rich and poor actions we can all take scientists said they had
participated in climate protests.
“Fight for a fairer world.” That simple message from one French
scientist reflected the thoughts of many, who said the huge gap By Damian Carrington What else?
between the world’s rich and poor was a giant barrier to climate action. Having fewer children was

M
Global solidarity could overcome any environmental crisis, according any people, faced with backed by 12% of the experts
to Esteban Jobbágy, at the University of San Luis in Argentina. “But the worsening impacts of but many made further
current growing inequalities are the number one barrier to that.” the climate emergency, suggestions, such as shifting
Aditi Mukherji, at the CGIAR research group, said: “The rich countries want to know what savings or pension funds away
have hogged all the carbon budget, leaving very little for the rest of they can do personally to fight from fossil fuel investments
the world.” The global north has an obligation to fix a problem of its global heating. The Guardian and towards green ones.
own making by providing climate funding to the rest of the world, she asked hundreds of top climate
said. The Indian government put a price tag on that: at least $1tn a year. scientists for their views. Can individual action help?
Overconsumption in rich nations was also cited as a barrier. “I feel Many of the experts were clear.
resigned to disaster as we cannot separate our love of bigger, better, What is the most effective “It can only go so far. Deep cuts
faster, more, from what will help the greatest number of people sur- action individuals can take? in carbon emissions from oil
vive and thrive,” said one US scientist. “Capitalism has trained us well.” Most experts (76%) backed and gas, as well as other sectors
However, Maisa Rojas, an IPCC scientist and Chile’s environment voting for politicians who such as transport, are needed,
minister, said: “We need to communicate that acting on climate pledge strong climate which are outside the control
change can be a benefit, with proper support from the state, instead measures, where fair of the average individual,” said
of a personal burden.” elections take place. Dr Shobha Maharaj, a climate
She is one of a minority of the experts surveyed – less than 25% – “Polls suggest voters are impacts scientist from Trinidad
who still think global temperature rise will be restricted to 2C or less. actually more willing for and Tobago.
The IPCC vice-chair Aïda Diongue-Niang, a Senegalese meteorologist, governments to take stronger But Prof Hiroyuki Enomoto,
said: “I believe there will be more ambitious action to avoid 2.5C to 3C.” climate action,” said Prof Bill at Japan’s National Institute of
So why are these scientists optimistic? One reason is the rapid Collins, at the University of Polar Research, said individual
rollout of green technologies from renewable energy to electric cars, Reading in the UK. Another actions are important in
driven by fast-falling prices and the multiple associated benefits they expert highlighted the danger increasing collective awareness
bring, such as cleaner air. “It is getting cheaper and cheaper to save of a second Donald Trump of the problem.
the climate,” said Lars Nilsson, at Lund University in Sweden. presidency to climate action.
Even the rapidly growing need to protect communities against Are the scientists walking the
inevitable heatwaves, floods and droughts could have an upside, What about reducing flying? talk themselves?
said Mark Pelling, at University College London. “It opens exciting The second choice for most Yes. Many are shifting their
possibilities: by having to live with climate change, we can adapt in effective individual action, focus away from the physics
ways that bring us to a more inclusive and equitable way of living.” according to the experts, was of the climate system towards
Such a world would see adaptation go hand-in-hand with cutting reducing flying and fossil-fuel action that slows global heating
poverty and vulnerability, providing better housing, clean and reli- powered transport in favour of and work that protects people
able water and electricity, better diets, more sustainable farming electric and public transport. against the climate impacts
and less air pollution. This was backed by 56%, and they now see as unstoppable.
However, most hope was heavily guarded. “The good news is the two-thirds said they had cut Numerous scientists said
worst-case scenario is avoidable,” said Michael Meredith, at the British their own number of flights. they had given time as expert
Antarctic Survey. “We still have it in our hands to build a future that Flying is the most polluting witnesses in legal cases on
is much more benign climatically than the one we are currently on activity an individual can climate change and others said
track for.” But he also expects “our societies will be forced to change undertake. Globally it is a small they were helping groups to
and the suffering and damage to lives and livelihoods will be severe”. minority of people who drive develop new climate policies.
“I believe in social tipping points,” where small changes in society aviation emissions, with only Maharaj spends at least half
trigger large-scale climate action, said Elena López-Gunn, at the about one in 10 flying at all. her time as the science director
research company Icatalist in Spain. “Unfortunately, I also believe of a company implementing
in physical climate tipping points.” Can eating less meat help? responsible reforestation.
Back in Mexico, Cerezo-Mota remains at a loss: “I really don’t know Meat production has a huge “There are so many people on
what needs to happen for the people that have all the power and all impact on the environment. the ground who care and who
the money to make the change. But then I see the younger generations Most people in wealthy want to make a difference; that
fighting and I get a bit of hope again.” countries already eat more is truly encouraging and really
DAMIAN CARRINGTON IS A GUARDIAN ENVIRONMENT EDITOR meat than is healthy for them drives me,” she said.

17 May 2024 The Guardian Weekly

40

Raf faella Spone was accused of faking

an incriminating video of teenage
cheerleaders. She was arrested, outcast and
subjected to death threats. The problem?
The video wasn’t fake after all. She talks
for the f irst time about being the centre of
a story that created headlines around the
world, yet nothing was as it seemed …
Believe it or not

By Jenny Kleeman
ADI HIME IS TAKING A DEEP DRAG on a
blue vape in the video, her eyes shut, her
face flushed with pleasure. The 16-year-
old collapses into laughter, causing
smoke to billow out of her mouth. The
clip is grainy and shaky – as if shot in low
light by someone who had zoomed in on
Madi’s face – but it was damning. Madi was
a cheerleader with the Victory Vipers, a highly competitive “all-star”
squad based in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. The Vipers had a strict
code of conduct; being caught partying and vaping could have got
her thrown out of the team. And in July 2020, an anonymous person
sent the incriminating video to Madi’s coaches.
Eight months later, that footage was the subject of a police news
conference. “The police reviewed the video and other photographic
images and found them to be what we now know to be called deep-
fakes,” district attorney Matt Weintraub told journalists at the Bucks
County courthouse on 15 March 2021. Someone was deploying cutting-
edge technology to tarnish a teenage cheerleader’s reputation.
The vaping video was just one of many disturbing communications
brought to the attention of Hilltown Township police department,
Weintraub said. Madi had been receiving messages telling her she
should kill herself. Her mother, Jennifer Hime, had told officers some-
one had been taking images from Madi’s social media and manipu-
lating them “to make her appear to be drinking”. A photograph of
Madi in swimwear had been altered: “Her bathing suit was edited
out.” Madi wasn’t the only member of the Victory Vipers cheer team
to have been victimised. In August 2020, Sherri Ratel had been sent
anonymous texts accusing her teenage daughter, Kayla, of drinking
and smoking pot. Noelle Nero had been sent images of her 17-year-
old daughter in a bikini with captions about “toxic traits, revenge,
dating boys and smoking”. These, too, were “all altered and shown
as deepfakes”, Weintraub added.
The anonymous sender had used “spoofing” software to disguise
their identity behind an unknown number. The police had traced it to
the IP address of Raffaella Spone, a 50-year-old woman with no previous
41
Portraits by KYLE KIELINSKI
criminal record. In her mugshot, she wears a lime green turtleneck with
her hair scraped back. Her eyes, lined in black, look at the camera in a
cold stare; her lips are pursed with anger. She looks terrifying.
“It appears that her daughter cheers – or did cheer – with the victims
at the Victory Vipers gym,” Weintraub told the assembled journalists.
Spone had taken it upon herself to smear her 16-year-old’s rivals in
an attempt to get them thrown off the team.
Weintraub didn’t mince his words.“Here in Bucks County, we have
an adult with specific intent, preying on juveniles through the use of
deepfake technology.” This went further than cheerleader rivalry in
suburban Pennsylvania. Anyone could be a victim of this new kind of
crime, and anyone a perpetrator. “All one needs to do is download an
app and you’re off to the races,” Weintraub continued. The authorities
would always be on the back foot, he added: “It takes minutes to make
a deepfake video, but it takes us months to investigate.” The woman
in the mugshot was the canary in the coalmine: the era of believing
your own eyes was officially over.
In 2021, a fresh wave of panic about deepfakes was crashing on
a world that had spent far too much time locked down at home in
front of screens. The press conference came only a few weeks after
a deepfaked video of Tom Cruise doing a magic trick went viral on
TikTok. But the cheerleader deepfake story was something else: an
irresistible combination of wholesome all-American girls, nudity,
teenage rivalry, underage partying and dystopian technology.
The story exploded. It made international headlines. Madi Hime
appeared alongside her mother on ABC’s Good Morning America.
They shared the vaping footage – the only imagery from the case to
be made public – and Madi described how she felt when one of her
cheerleading coaches told her what they’d been
Mother figure sent. “I went in the car and started crying, and
Raffaella Spone was like, ‘That’s not me on video,’” Madi said.
was accused of “I thought if I said it, nobody would believe me,
creating deepfake because there’s proof – there’s a video. But it was
videos but says she obviously manipulated.”
has never owned Towards the end of the police press 
a computer conference, a reporter had raised his
17 May 2024 The Guardian Weekly
42 Believe it or not
hand. Given our first instinct is to believe our eyes, how did the police
conclude the videos were deepfakes, he asked, “versus saying: maybe
this is teenagers lying, and the videos are real”?
“There’s what’s called metadata,” Weintraub replied. “We can look
behind the curtain, as we were able to do in this case. We can’t do it
in every case because some providers are halfway across the world.
Some don’t cooperate. Others are just inundated with requests.”
He threw his hands up, as if overwhelmed by the scale of it all,
adding, “We take it as gospel that a picture is a picture, a video is a
video, that they’re unaltered, untainted. This is a setback.”
But a little over a year later, when Spone finally appeared in court,
she was told the cyberharassment element of the case had been
dropped. The police were no longer alleging that she had digitally
manipulated anything. Someone had been crying deepfake. A story
that generated headlines around the world was based on teenage lies,
after all. When the truth finally came out, it was barely reported – but
the videos and images were real.
F THE WORD “CHEERLEADER” makes you think of girls
with pompoms on the sidelines of high school American
football games, think again. Competitive, “all-star” cheer-
leading is a sport in its own right. It demands jaw-dropping
nerve and athleticism, a combination of gymnastic,
circus and dance skills, as well as – for female cheerlead-
ers – heavy makeup, backcombed hair and rhinestone-
encrusted costumes. It’s an overwhelmingly female sport,
but it’s not just for girls. Every year, 4 million Americans take part.
Each team is a delicate ecosystem. “Tumblers” perform stunning
acrobatic feats on the mat. “Stunters” throw “flyers” vertiginously
into the air to perform flips and somersaults. The pyramid is the
centrepiece of any routine, where the entire squad comes together,
with “bases” supporting tiers of teammates and a single flyer at the
summit. Flyers need to be light, agile and athletically gifted.
Cheerleading accounts for 65% of spinal or cerebral injuries across all
female athletes in America. But, for some, the high stakes are worth it:
all-star cheerleaders can win college scholarships, become social media
influencers and gain lucrative branding deals. Simply making the
team can be enough to bring young people status in their community.
Doylestown, an hour’s drive north of Philadelphia, is a pretty
American town within an excellent local school district; this is where
parents with sharp elbows come to raise their families. From the out-
side the Victory Vipers gym, in a huge, nondescript hangar, doesn’t look
like a place that costs $4,950 a year to be part of (not including travel
expenses for out-of-town competitions), if you’re in the top team.
Neither of the Victory Vipers co-owners responded to requests to
speak to me for this article. When Spone was charged, they issued a
statement, saying the team “has always promoted a family environ-
ment” and that “this incident happened outside of our gym”.
Matt Weintraub became a judge in January; his office said that,
given his new position, “the ethical rules require him to decline”
my interview offer – but he has been declining to comment on the
case since May 2021.
In an email, Hilltown Township’s chief of police, Chris Engelhart,
said: “This matter may still be subject to civil litigation and as such,
we cannot make any comments.” I have tried to contact Madi and
Jennifer Hime for two years, over email and social media, and also
Kayla Ratel and her parents, Sherri and George; none of them have
responded. Of the three families, only the Neros have got back to me,
to politely decline my request. Those who made the loudest noise
when the cheerleader deepfake story broke have now gone quiet.
But Raffaella Spone has agreed to speak, in-depth, for the first time.
She barely leaves her house now, she says, but is willing to meet me
20 minutes from the Victory Vipers gym, in a diner near where her
lawyer is based, so long as he can join us. In person, Spone is tiny;
The Guardian Weekly 17 May 2024
‘We take it as gospel
that a picture is a
picture, a video is a
video, that they’re
unaltered, untainted.
This is a setback’
she has a soft, warm face that looks almost nothing like her mugshot.
She greets me with a hug.
“Allie was my no-fear athletic child,” she tells me of her youngest
daughter (she has another, whose name she has managed to keep out
of the press). Allie made the local gymnastics team at five years old,
Spone says. In the summer of 2016, she decided she wanted to do
competitive cheer and tried out for the Victory Vipers. Allie, a flyer,
was prepared to work hard, begging her mother to take her to practice
even when she was injured. “She felt her teammates were depending
on her,” Spone says. Cheerleading became Allie’s world – and hers.
Cheerleading depends on perfect synchronicity and complete
trust: any mistake or misunderstanding could lead to a broken neck.
Allie formed strong bonds with her teammates. Spone says: “They
were inseparable. If they weren’t over at my house, she was over
at theirs. Whether it was in the pool, at the beach, all they did was
practise. They lived and breathed it.” And Spone made friends with
their parents. “While we were waiting for our kids to practise, we
would go to a local Mexican place and have dinners.”
The way Spone describes it, there was no rivalry between the Vipers.
But it’s clear that in 2020 she had been checking the social media
feeds of her daughter’s cheerleading friends and had become con-
cerned by what she saw. What happened next caused things in that
cheerleading family unit to break down, irretrievably. “They were
my friends. They were people I cared about,” Spone says, quietly.
“It broke every part of me.”
On the evening of 18 December 2020, five male police officers
banged on Spone’s door with a search warrant. “They took our phones.
They took my daughter’s Xbox, her school computer, my husband’s
work computer – I don’t own a computer, I never have,” she tells me,
pointedly. “They took my husband’s phone charger and my daughter’s
disposable camera. They took TVs out of every single room.”
The police had been in her home for several hours before officer
Matthew Reiss told her what she was being charged with. “He said,
‘You know what you did. You created deepfakes.’ I had never heard
that term in my life,” Spone tells me. She faced several counts of har-
assment, including three counts of cyberharassment of a child, but
she wasn’t charged until March 2021, when she came into the police
station, had the mugshot taken, and became the face of a moral panic.
In the affidavit of probable cause – the sworn police report outlin-
ing the basis for the charges against her – Reiss writes that he and his
colleagues had spent months speaking to the families of the three
teenagers who said they had been receiving anonymous messages.
The “behind the curtain” work he describes relates to how police
determined that the spoofed texts had been sent from Spone’s IP
address. But when it comes to evidence that she was deepfaking

images of minors, things get very vague. Reiss takes Jennifer Hime’s
word that “an altered” video of Madi vaping had been sent to the
Vipers’ coaches. He says he had “reviewed the video and found it to
be the work of a program that is or is similar to ‘Deep Fakes’”. There
is no detail on what this reviewing entailed, and how he could be
certain it had been altered. Weintraub began the March 2021 press
conference by thanking Reiss: “He certainly deserves credit for a very
thorough and lengthy investigation.”
Spone’s lawyer, Robert Birch, knew what a deepfake was. “My first
reaction was, how does a 50-year-old woman deepfake something on
a phone? You need pretty sophisticated editing capabilities.”
Birch argues that the press conference was a ploy by the district
attorney to get some attention. “He was running for re-election that
year. He took a look at the criminal complaint and saw an opportunity.”
It is true that Weintraub didn’t shy away from the publicity it
generated. He appeared on Good Morning America and The Today Show,
and gave interviews to the Washington Post and the New York Times.
Four days after Weintraub’s press conference, generative AI and
deepfake expert Henry Ajder expressed concerns that ABC was still
running the footage under the caption “DEEP FAKE VIDEO” when it
clearly was not. He tweeted that “the vape pen/cloud/hand moving
over the girl’s face”, “the awkward facial angles” and other aspects of
the video “would likely require a huge amount of work by a deepfake
expert, with editing in post”.
One of the most widely reported claims from the press conference
was that Spone had taken a photo from Madi’s social media and altered
it to make her appear naked. “From day one after that press confer-
ence, I demanded that the district attorney’s office send me the death
threats and the nudes, and I never got them,” Birch says, drumming
his finger on the table. When he was finally allowed to see the evi-
dence against his client, in November 2021 – almost a year after she
was charged – he found the image that was the basis for the “nude”
claim: a screen-grabbed snap from Snapchat sent by someone called
Skylar, featuring Madi in a pink bikini that had been blurred so it
blended in with her flesh tone, the sort of thing someone could do
using basic photo editing software on their phone with a swipe of a
finger. It looked like a silly joke. Skylar is a real person – a teenage girl
in Madi’s circle of friends, Spone and Birch tell
Smoking gun? me – but the police had never contacted her to
Images from the ask about the image.
video Raffaella Birch criticises what he calls “a complete
Spone was accused lack of investigation” on the part of the Hill-
of altering to show town Township police. They didn’t ask to see
Madi Hime vaping Madi’s phone until a year after her mother told
43
them she had been receiving disturbing messages, by which time
Madi had got a new one and disposed of her old one. No death threats
against Madi were ever recovered. Madi had also deleted several of
her social media accounts, which her mother had claimed provided
the source material for the manipulated images and video. The police
had taken Madi at her word, but there was no way of finding the source
videos and images, or seeing the supposed deepfakes that had been
created out of them, apart from the video she had shared with Good
Morning America.
When The Daily Dot, a tech news website, looked into the deepfake
claims in May 2021, and asked Reiss about the methods he had used
to establish that the videos had been digitally altered, he admitted he
had relied on his “naked eye”, adding: “We hope Mrs Spone during
the course of the preliminary hearing or trial will enlighten us as far
as what her source and intent was.”
HESE WOULD BE THE LAST PUBLIC COMMENTS
Reiss made about the case. On 26 May 2021 he
was arrested on suspicion of possessing images of
child sexual abuse. When police raided his home
and seized his electronic devices, they found
more than 1,700 images and videos depicting
children, including 84 of toddlers and infants.
Reiss pleaded guilty in March 2022, and was later
sentenced to 11 and a half to 23 months in jail.
“I had death threats over every social media platform,” Spone
says. “Thousands.” She had some fanmail, too: from a convicted
murderer in a Wisconsin prison. Someone maliciously reported her
to child protection officers, who turned up at her home to interview
her daughters. The man who was renting the house next to hers
approached her once. “He looked me dead in the eyes and said, ‘I’m
going to kill you. You’re a disgusting paedophile.’” She called the
police, who she says took no further action.
Spone used to be a crisis worker in a psychiatric unit, but says she
has felt unable to return to work after the story broke. Her savings
have all been spent on legal fees. “I lost everything. Family, friends,
people I’ve known my whole life. Nobody wanted to associate with
me.” Her eyes fill with tears. “I did contemplate taking my life. It
was too much, between the constant threats and knowing that’s the
legacy that I leave behind.”
“You can never scrub off the internet what’s on the internet – that’s
the thing,” Birch says.
In March 2022, Spone was found guilty of three counts of
misdemeanour harassment for repeatedly sending anonymous
messages about the three teenagers. A jury found that she had used
secret phone numbers to send incriminating photos and videos. The
messages – sent to the Victory Vipers and to the teenagers’ families –
accused the cheerleaders of drinking, smoking and posting revealing
photos on social media. The anonymous numbers used to send the
messages had been sent from an IP address belonging to Spone. Her
appeal against her conviction was unsuccessful.
“She was convicted of sending five text messages,” Birch sighs.
“There wasn’t one threat in any of them. All the messages said was,
‘You should be aware of what your daughters are posting.’” He claims
that a fair trial was impossible, after all the publicity his client had
received, saying: “Any jury would be poisoned.”
I ask Spone if she sent the messages she has been found guilty over.
She denies it, without looking up from her phone. Her phone has been
a constant presence since we sat down; she illustrates everything she
tells me with evidence stored on it. She has photos of Madi she says
were taken the same night as the notorious vaping video: she’s wearing
the same clothes, sitting in the same spot. “There are loads of
videos. When anybody says, ‘I don’t do that’ – I’ve got proof. 
Yes, you do! Posted on public accounts, for everyone to see.”
17 May 2024 The Guardian Weekly
44 Believe it or not
Spone may not manipulate videos and images, but she definitely
collects them. Still, she says she never sent them. “The charges were
that she directly sent messages to the minors,” Birch adds. “That
never happened. That’s the point.”
But did she send messages to the gym and the parents? There is a
long pause. “No,” Spone eventually says.
I’m surprised to hear her say this, given Birch told the Washington
Post Spone messaged the parents out of concern for what their daugh-
ters had put online. When I point this out, there’s another long pause.
“If I said that, I said it,” Birch says, with a shrug. “It is what it is.”
Even if Spone is guilty of sending the five messages, she is inno-
cent of the claims that made her notorious. Sending anonymous and
unwelcome text messages is not the same as digitally manipulating
images of minors.
She was sentenced to three years’ probation and 70 hours of
community service; she had to undergo a mental heath assessment
and wear an ankle monitor for three months. The conditions of her
probation bar her from making public statements about the three
girls, so she can’t give me an account of how they all fell out so badly.
When the news broke, Kayla’s father, George Ratel, told the Phila-
delphia Inquirer he thought the problems started when he and his
wife told Kayla to stop socialising with Allie “due to concerns over
[Allie’s] behaviour”. Spone maintains she was never trying to get
anyone kicked off the team – her daughter already had the most
eye-catching position – but this doesn’t explain why Victory Vipers
coaches were among those who received anonymised messages sent
from her IP address.
‘I don’t want anyone
else to go through this.
If it can happen to me
– and I’m a nobody –
it can to you too’
The Guardian Weekly 17 May 2024
Spone is now suing Weintraub, Reiss, Hilltown County police and
the Himes for defamation and violating her civil rights. The lawsuit
claims that, in “a continuing pattern of intentional defamation to
continue to falsely paint [Spone] as a child predator”, the then dis-
trict attorney’s office and the police “allowed the false accusations”
of deepfakes “to continue until the day of the plaintiff ’s trial in 2022,
knowing that it had no evidence”.
“No amount of money can rectify what was wrong,” Spone tells me,
and I believe her: she seems consumed with the details of the case,
nearly four years after the events. But Birch says she could receive
substantial damages: “The jury could award anything from nothing
to $20m if they wanted to.” It’s a tough case, he concedes, a David and
Goliath battle. “We’re suing the district attorney, who’s now a judge.”
LL FOUR GIRLS HAD LEFT Victory Vipers by
the time the story became public. Madi moved
to another cheer squad. She has achieved the
kind of fame competitive cheerleaders dream
of. There have been rumours about true crime
documentaries and film deals; in February 2022,
Madi posted on TikTok about “when [cable
channel] Lifetime sent me and my mom a script
of their new movie”. She now has almost 100,000 followers and close
to a billion views on her main TikTok account alone.
Allie stopped doing cheer in 2020. Spone claims she had wanted
her daughter to leave the Victory Vipers long before she did because
she felt unhappy about the way it was run, but Allie had begged her
to stay because of a tradition where seniors get to press their hands
into cement on a wall in the back of the gym, leaving a permanent
record. In the end, Allie never got to make her mark.
When I ask Spone how her relationship with Allie is now, there
is another long pause. “She knows about this interview. She is not
happy. She’s like, ‘Mom, when will this ever be over?’ She just wants
to live her life – I can’t blame her, at 19. But I want the truth to be told.
I will not rest until the truth is out.”
“Truth?” Birch interjects. “What is truth?”
He is half joking. It’s the day the US supreme court rules Trump
was wrongly removed from the Colorado ballot, and the television set
above where we’ve been sitting for hours has been tuned to CNN. Every
so often, Birch points a finger at the screen and says: “Fake news.”
The cheerleader deepfake mom story is the ultimate fake news story.
Both Spone and Birch tell me they never believe anything they see
and hear any more. “My whole world got turned upside down,” Spone
says, “so it makes me question whether anything I’m seeing is true.”
In an age of conspiracy, to assume that anything truly is as it ini-
tially appears is perhaps a little quaint or naive.
On trial The existence of deepfake technology is useful
Raffaella Spone says for people who want to sow doubt and have
she has considered something to gain by distancing themselves
taking her life, having from their true words and actions. Lawyers for
spent her savings on the first 6 January Capitol rioter to go on trial
legal fees, receiving claimed in 2022 that video evidence against him
death threats and had been deepfaked. Last year, Tesla’s defence
losing friends lawyers tried to claim that statements made
by Elon Musk about the safety of the Model S
and the Model X in a filmed interview might have been deepfaked. As
the technology improves and becomes more widely available, more
people will be crying deepfake when they are caught on camera. The
cheerleader deepfake mom was a canary in the coalmine, after all.
The damage to Spone comes from going viral as the main character
in a sensational but false story. “I want to correct those facts,” she
repeats. “I don’t want anyone else to go through what I went through.
If it can happen to me – and I’m a nobody – it can happen to you.” •
JENNY KLEEMAN IS A JOURNALIST, BROADCASTER AND AUTHOR
 45
Comment is free, facts are sacred CP Scott 1918

MARINA HYDE
A true story of
Netflix and its
lack of care
Page 47 '

SOUTH AFRICA
Mandela’s party has left a land of
broken dreams. Its time seems over
Simon Tisdall
ILLUSTRATION:
GUARDIAN DESIGN; GETTY
‚
17 May 2024 The Guardian Weekly
46 Opinion
ho will save South Africa
from itself? Not the ruling
African National Congress
(ANC), whose 30 unbroken
years of under-achievement
have brought the country to
its present sorry pass. Not
“reformist” president Cyril
Ramaphosa, widely considered a disappointment. And
not Russia or China, to which Pretoria’s flailing regime,
increasingly at odds with the west, looks for succour.
Three decades after Nelson Mandela’s historic poll
victory formally vanquished apartheid, and less than
two weeks before another watershed election, it’s all
going wrong for the Rainbow Nation. Africa’s most
developed country is now its most unequal, the World
Bank says. Crime is rampant, corruption endemic,
growth is tanking. More than 60% live in poverty.
Unemployment among black people is 40%.
Voters face a choice on 29 May between a discredited,
tarnished ANC, which is predicted to lose its
parliamentary majority for the first time, and a broad
array of disunited opposition parties. Like 1994, it is also
a fundamental choice about what sort of South Africa
they want – democratic or authoritarian, open or closed,
free market or centrally directed, inclusive or exclusive.
As when Mandela completed his long walk to
freedom, the international community, and the western
democracies especially, are watching to see which way
South Africa jumps. It has a chance to lead again.
Reporting in 2022, the World Bank identified race,
apartheid’s legacy and unequal land ownership as
ongoing core problems. Even now, about 10% of the
60 million population controls 80% of the wealth.
Government attempts to level the playing field
frequently misfire. Ramaphosa says about 25% of
farmland is now owned by black South Africans. But
critics argue the land restitution programme has sharply
reduced productivity and employment. Government
“equity targets” to ensure workplaces accurately reflect
the country’s racial make-up attract similar controversy.
The official unemployment figure is a dismaying 32%.
Surveys suggest vast disparities between the average
monthly incomes of black and white households.
Housing and education are other big problem areas,
where the discriminatory and segregationist practices of
the past still disadvantage the least well off.
Yet white South Africans, angry at the Black Economic
Empowerment regulations and spooked by violent
crime, continue to vote with their feet. Nearly
Exploitative dictators
like Putin and Xi will not
save South Africa from
itself. Nor will ANC elites.
Only South Africans can
The Guardian Weekly 17 May 2024
one-fifth of 1994’s total white population has emigrated,
exacerbating present-day skills shortages. This has
led to arbitrary curbs on capital export and pension
payments, and declining tax revenues. Only about 12%
of South Africans pay income tax. About 62% of the black
population receives state grants (welfare benefits).
In his state of the nation address in February,
Ramaphosa implicitly laid much blame for post-1994
failures on his predecessor, Jacob Zuma, who was briefly
jailed amid corruption allegations in 2021. “For a decade,
individuals at the highest levels of the state conspired
with private individuals to take over and re-purpose
state-owned companies, law enforcement agencies and
other public institutions,” he said. “Billions of rands that
were meant to meet the needs of ordinary South Africans
were stolen. Confidence in our country was badly
eroded. Public institutions were severely weakened. The
effects of state capture continue to be felt across society,
from the shortage of freight locomotives to crumbling
public services, from the poor performance of our power
stations to failed development projects.”
It was an extraordinary confession, inadvertently
highlighting Ramaphosa’s own ineffectiveness since
taking office in 2018. As ANC leader, Ramaphosa is
seeking a second presidential term. His main challenger
is the liberal, centre-right Democratic Alliance, good for
an estimated fifth of the vote. Yet if the ANC does fall
below 50% support, it may be the land-expropriating,
hard-left Economic Freedom Fighters and a new
populist party, uMkhonto weSizwe (Spear of the Nation),
backed by Zuma, that do the most damage.
Messy coalition negotiations could lie ahead. By rights,
in any modern democracy, the ANC’s record should
“cast it into oblivion”, wrote Brian Pottinger, former
editor of South Africa’s Sunday Times. “Not so in South
Africa ... There is nostalgic pride in the ANC’s 112-year-
long struggle for black emancipation and dignity.” Yet
research shows loyalty to the ANC is weaker among
post-1994 generations – the so-called “born frees”.
Pottinger believes that the ANC is incapable of
delivering change – and will double down on failure.
“The ANC will stick to its catastrophic redistributive
economic policies rather than pursuing growth, batten
the hatches against capital flight and pre-emptively seek
to chill free speech,” he predicted.
Simon As western political confidence
Tisdall is a and investment wane, the ANC is
foreign affairs relying ever more heavily on defence,
commentator security and commercial ties with
Russia and China. South Africa has
refused to condemn Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and
joined naval operations with China and Russia last year.
Beijing is South Africa’s largest trading partner. Russian
oligarchs have helped fund the ANC.
For all who value democracy, freedom and the rule
of law, these are plainly the wrong choices. Exploitative
great powers and dictators such as Vladimir Putin and
Xi Jinping will not save South Africa from itself. Nor will
self-serving ANC elites. Only South Africans themselves
can do that – by exercising en masse the power of the
vote bequeathed to them by Nelson Mandela • Observer

MEDIA
Why didn’t Netflix do
more to avoid the
Baby Reindeer furore?
Marina Hyde
hat will happen next in
the Baby Reindeer saga?
Probably one or more bad
things. Latest bad thing to
happen (at time of writing)
was Piers Morgan’s decision
to pay the so-called “real
life Martha” – reportedly
the inspiration for the show’s stalker character – what
she claims was £250 ($313) to interview her on his
YouTube show. I always feel the most disingenuous
gambit in journalism is the one that goes: “We just want
to give you the chance to tell your side of the story …”
Clearly mindful of the criticisms that would be
levelled at him for featuring someone UK news outlets
had largely avoided even naming, Morgan approached
his interviewee wearing a veneer of empathy. Ultimately,
though, the Martha character’s enterprise would surely
seem low-grade to all the people who edited tabloid
newspapers in the not-too-distant past. After all, if you
want someone relentlessly pursued, you just get the
news desk to do it. Or a private detective. Or – but no. We
daren’t all operate under the “uncensored” banner.
Baby Reindeer is the hit Netflix show written by and
starring Richard Gadd, telling his story of being stalked,
as well as his abuse at the hands of an exploitative TV
figure, and is prefaced with the words: “This is a true
story”. Not “based on a true story”, or “inspired by real
events”, or all the other get-outs/get-ins that have made
ED MILLER/NETFLIX
“based-on” crime a genre all of its own.
47
Within a sensationally short time of the show
dropping, “Martha” had been identified from her
previous posts, while the TV figure plotline turned into
a guessing game, with some men wrongly identified and
forced to call the police. Within the TV industry, jaws
dropped. This was surely a mega compliance failure?
In a list of telly’s unsung heroes, broadcasters’
compliance departments would be right up there,
ensuring that shows conform to standards and codes,
for instance when they involve vulnerable or “real
life” people. When the Baby Reindeer controversy first
kicked off, I joked to someone that I pictured the Netflix
compliance department as a single phone ringing out in
a cupboard. I’m pretty sure the compliance department
at Piers Morgan Uncensored is a single tickbox on a wall
beneath the slogan “WILL IT GET ME CLICKS?”
I guess that’s YouTube for you. And I have sympathy
for channels and streamers creating shows in a world
where social media platforms evidently couldn’t care
less about ethics. However, this is the world we live in,
and into which they knowingly put their shows, so more
realism is urgently overdue from certain purveyors of
real-life stories. You can find plenty who believe that
“Martha” receiving death threats and having people on
her doorstep is a form of just deserts. But ceding control
of justice to the TikTok or X algorithm is grim.
Without wishing to spaff Netflix’s
Marina Hyde billions for them, I think that if you
is a Guardian paid your co-chief executive $49.8m
columnist last year, you can probably afford a
half-arsed compliance department.
I’m guessing Netflix probably couldn’t give a toss
about this sort of handwringing. This isn’t the line the
Netflix public policy director floated in front of a UK
parliamentary select committee last week, of course, with
Benjamin King telling MPs that Netflix and the production
company Clerkenwell Films took “every reasonable
precaution in disguising the real-life identities of the
people involved in that story”. Er … no. Admittedly, it
was tricky in the case of this material, with Gadd having
addressed it in earlier Edinburgh fringe shows where
the identification risks are infinitely smaller than with
a Netflix hit. But when the BBC made I May Destroy
You with HBO and the production company Various
Artists, I’m told meticulous care was taken to support
Michaela Coel in telling the story of her sexual assault
and her attempts to process it. There were lawyers,
there was extensive pastoral support, and the defining
characteristics of the real people were unidentifiably
different. Did Netflix do this? Evidently not all of it.
Strange that the government has spent years honking
that everything from the BBC to Channel 4 to the NHS
should be “more like Netflix”. Meanwhile, if Baby
Reindeer had been a BBC show, the resultant furore
would have been framed differently. BBC director-
general Tim Davie would have been forced to resign – his
demise having been bayed for by many of the papers
now covering the identification fallout. None of those
news outlets would dream of calling for Netflix’s Ted
Sarandos to resign. No, these big fish much prefer the
feeding frenzy of the small pond. True story •
17 May 2024 The Guardian Weekly
48 Opinion
UK/IRELAND
A failure to reckon fully
with the Troubles fuels
distrust and discord
Fintan O’Toole
ifty years ago, on 17 May 1974, my
father, a bus conductor, was out
on strike. That day, the Troubles
arrived with a vengeance in my
home town of Dublin. Three bombs
exploded at different points in
the city centre during rush hour.
Because the buses were not
operating, there were more people walking along
those streets than usual. Twenty-three of them were
killed and another three later succumbed to their
injuries. Another bomb that exploded 90 minutes later
in Monaghan killed seven people.
The Guardian Weekly 17 May 2024
In 1984, when I was trying to write a piece for the
10th anniversary of the bombings, I called to the houses
of some of the bereaved families. No one wanted to
talk to me. They felt betrayed, abandoned, already
forgotten. Marie Sherry, who was injured but survived,
later described how, in the weeks and months after the
massacre, she would ask her mother: “‘Mum, any news
on those people who did the bombing? Was anybody
charged?’ There never was news. Nobody was charged.”
This torment continues to haunt tens of thousands
of people who lost loved ones or who were themselves
maimed in atrocities during the Troubles.
Distrust and disharmony linger because impunity
goes deep. Figures obtained by the investigative website
The Detail in 2018 show 1,186 of the 3,200 killings
within Northern Ireland (thus not including those in
the Republic of Ireland or Britain) remain unsolved. Of
these, 46% were attributed to republican paramilitaries,
23% to loyalist paramilitaries and 29% to the security
forces. This last figure is telling: the UK state is not, in all
of this, a neutral presence. It has a lot of skin and bone
and blood in the game.
It is right to remember that paramilitaries, including
the IRA, of which Sinn Féin was the political wing,
remain deeply embedded in this culture of impunity.
Illustration Matt Kenyon
 Founded 1821 Independently owned by the Scott Trust

Just last month, the inquest into the sectarian

murders of 10 Protestant workmen at Kingsmills
in County Armagh in 1976 noted that the IRA has
When MPs cross the f loor,
continued to lie about its perpetration of the massacre.
The coroner also put on record that the IRA refused to
engage with the inquest.
it’s a triumph of political
This damage continues to be done through selective
outrage. Some of those who demand accountability
from the British state exempt themselves from the
theatre over substance

S
same strictures. urveying recent UK Opposition leaders tend not
Yet democratic states ought to have higher standards election losses, some to be overly discriminating in
than paramilitary killers. Conservatives have accepting defectors. For an
concluded that the incumbent administration, it is
The truth about the involvement of British state problem is a deficit of radical an indicator of irreversible rot.
actors in many killings remains murky. In the case Conservatism – a prospectus Ms Elphicke’s record might
of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, there have defined by commitment to not make her a natural fit with
long been doubts about whether the Ulster Volunteer cutting taxes, public spending Labour, but the terms in which
Force, which claimed responsibility in 1993, could and immigration. Natalie she justified the decision were
have been capable on its own of such a complex and Elphicke would once have been crafted with precision – that
carefully coordinated operation. An official inquiry considered a proponent of that Mr Sunak is untrustworthy,
in the Republic concluded that although there was approach, but last Wednesday ineffective and weak. It was a
no direct evidence of involvement by British security the MP for Dover expressed her political coup de theatre.
force members, it was “neither fanciful nor absurd” frustration with Rishi Sunak’s Such things matter more
to believe that it happened. Similar suspicions attach leadership by moving in a in the hothouse atmosphere
to dozens of other killings by the Glenanne gang that very different direction – to of Westminster than beyond.
operated within the UVF and that certainly contained cross the Commons floor and In the bigger picture, winning
many members of the security forces. join Labour. the allegiance of former Tory
The British government has now used the Northern Ms Elphicke’s politics, rooted voters is an essential stage on
Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act to on the hard right of her former the journey from opposition to
close down not just criminal inquiries into Troubles party, gave no indication of power, and recruiting sitting
killings, but also inquests and civil cases taken by propensity for conversion to Tory MPs sends an effective
relatives and survivors, and instead Keir Starmer’s creed. Setting signal that the doors are open.
Fintan establish an independent commission policy differences aside, some But appearing to pay almost
O’Toole is a for reconciliation and information Labour MPs are queasy about no heed to the credentials of
columnist with recovery. It has also separately the concerted effort their new the recruit sits at odds with
the Irish Times announced that it will commission colleague put into supporting the opposition’s function in
an official history of the Troubles Charlie Elphicke, her presenting voters with a clear
as recorded on state files. Some greatly respected predecessor in the Dover seat alternative to the government.
people are involved in these initiatives. and now ex-husband, when Voters like broad-church
But the lifeblood of such institutional efforts is he faced allegations of sexual parties but they also need
public trust, a confidence that is extremely difficult assault – offences for which he a sense of those parties’
to establish in a context where the British state has was jailed. principles, and where the
such a lamentable record of obfuscation. Why should Ms Elphicke was among a boundaries lie. Adding one
historians have access to government files that are not group of MPs whose lobbying more Labour seat at Tory
available to grieving families? Why, even if we have to of a judge in the case was expense without even
accept that criminal trials are now extremely unlikely deemed a breach of the code of requiring a byelection is a
in most unresolved murder cases, should coroners’ conduct by the parliamentary gift Sir Keir might have felt
inquests be scrapped too? regulator. Had her defection he could hardly refuse. Yet
Keir Starmer has promised to revisit the Legacy not come with a commitment he might, when the flurry of
Act. If and when he has the power to do so, he should to stand down at the next excitement has died down,
start with three basic propositions. First, the rights of general election, there would pause to consider how well his
bereaved families and survivors are paramount. Second, be difficult questions to answer new MP embodies the values
any truth recovery process must be devised jointly by about her suitability as a he intends to bring to office.
the Northern Ireland executive and the British and Irish Labour candidate. Defections rarely express
governments. Third, and perhaps most painfully for an Meanwhile, with three Tory irresistible attraction to a
incoming Labour government, Britain has to drop the MPs switching to other parties new party. The motor force
pretence that it is merely an honest broker in all of this. so far this year – two to Labour, is repulsion away from
The state – including under Labour administrations – was one to Reform – the question is: the old one. Ms Elphicke’s
a party to the conflict. It has a historic duty to submit its who might be next? The losses decision says very little about
actions to independent judgment. Until it accepts that do not substantially affect Labour, but it is eloquent in
responsibility wholeheartedly, the poison of the past will parliamentary arithmetic. casting Mr Sunak’s party as a
continue to seep into the future • The impact is on morale. lost cause •

17 May 2024 The Guardian Weekly

50 Opinion
Letters
WRITE Linking the 1968 student
TO US protests with today
In addition to the parallel
between Joe Biden’s Gaza
and Lyndon Johnson’s
Letters for Vietnam experiences,
publication in terms of electoral
weekly.letters@ and wider political
theguardian.com consequences there is a
—
moral parallel here (Can
Please include a
Biden avoid 1968 parallel?,
full postal address
and a reference
Spotlight, 10 May).
to the article. It is to the great credit
We may edit letters. of the US students calling
Submission and for the application of basic
publication of all human values in Gaza just
letters is subject as American students did
to our terms and for Vietnam in the 1960s.
conditions, see: If we continue to have
THEGUARDIAN.COM/
LET TERS-TERMS
a free society, all these
students will deservedly
be remembered for
Editorial
taking a strong stand on
Editor: Graham
Snowdon decency and humanity in
Guardian Weekly, international affairs.
Kings Place, Both American student
90 York Way, protesters now, and those
London N1 9GU, of the 1960s, can tell their
UK grandchildren they took
a strong moral stand for
To contact the universal human values
editor directly: when so many in America
editorial.feedback
failed to do so.
@theguardian.com
Terry Hewton
Corrections Adelaide, South Australia
Our policy is to
correct significant • Bravo to the student
errors as soon as protests at US universities.
possible. Please The disproportionate
write to guardian. response by police,
readers@ and arrests in some
theguardian.com circumstances, runs
or the readers’
counter to the concerns
editor, Kings Place,
expressed by the students.
90 York Way,
London N1 9GU,
It demonstrates the
UK conflict between state
power and civil society.
The killing, maiming
and displacement of
Palestinians in Gaza,
especially of women
and children, can
never be sanctioned.
The relationship some
universities have with
Israel and the support
the US government has
with Israel by way of
its industrial military
complex adds complicity
to the reduction of Gaza
to rubble.
Judith Morrison
Nunawading, Victoria,
Australia
Tourists fail the screen
test at holiday hotspots
Your Eyewitness photo
(Bridge too far, 3 May)
perfectly epitomises why
humanity is doomed – five
tourists in a gondola in
Venice, each staring into
their phones, oblivious
to the grandeur around
them, as protesters in the
background wave flags
against day trippers.
Perhaps if tourism
authorities are really
serious about limiting the
onslaught of self-absorbed
narcissists despoiling their
towns and annoying the
locals, they should instead
ban mobile phones –
because apparently if
you haven’t taken a selfie
somewhere then there’s
no point going there.
With mobile phone
usage raising red flags
everywhere due to the
increasing harm they
cause children, now is
not the time for adults to
wave the white flag – so
let’s start banning them in
certain situations.
As your editorial
correctly suggests, “some
of the planet’s hotspots
are best unvisited”; so if
you can’t take your eyes off
your phone then stay home
when you’re doing so, and
leave travel to those who
will appreciate it.
Chris Roylance
Paddington, Queensland,
Australia
A work in progress, but
beware distorting the past
Mihir Bose’s experiences
in the UK resonate
somewhat with my own
(Britain may be a great
country, but it’s still a
work in progress, Opinion,
3 May).
In 1966, as a 14-year-
old, I arrived at Tilbury
docks on a cold, foggy
morning aboard the SS
Himalaya. My father, on
temporary assignment in
the UK, was able to get me
admission to Westminster
City grammar, near
Buckingham Palace. I was
the only Indian; the racism
I faced was not vicious but
muted, often manifested
through jokes and accent.
Now, after spending
most of my life residing
between Bengaluru and
London, I too perceive
Britain as a work in
progress, but experience it
as well ahead of the other
mature democracies in
the west, at least in the
context of diversity.
For those determined
to edit the past with
skewed narratives just
to endorse their own
agendas, this has become
a dangerous weapon of
mass distortion. Distortion
of our past seemed much
more manageable when
it was confined to just
history books.
Shyamol Banerji
Bengaluru, India
• Thank you Mr Bose for
your excellent article on
modern Britain.
Like you, I am a colonial
offspring, but unlike you I
am white. I came to Britain
in 1961 on leaving school in
Kenya, which was on the
brink of independence.
My parents thought I was
going “home”. I knew
I was a foreigner. If I spoke,
my voice activated
damaging assumptions,
not least among
progressive whites here
who pinned all the sins of
the empire upon me.
After all these years,
I am most comfortable
living in a multi-ethnic
area of Edinburgh, where
my warmest neighbours
are the Indian staff of the
nearest corner shop!
Susan Pattison
Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
COR R ECTIONS
We described Daisy Beattie
as a puppet maker and
supervisor on Spirited
Away; she is also the puppet
co-designer (Enter the
dragon, Culture, 10 May).

A WEEK
IN VENN
DI AGR A MS
Edith Pritchett

The Guardian Weekly 17 May 2024

 51
Film, music, art, books & more

MUSIC
The f inal word
on this year’s
Eurovision
Page 55 '

Rose Boyt, daughter of the artist Lucian Freud, sat for her father three times.
Now 65, she has written a remarkable memoir based on diaries she kept while being painted

Reframing Freud

 Looking back
Lucian Freud with
his daughter Rose
Boyt in 1974
HARRY DIAMOND

17 May 2024 The Guardian Weekly

52 Culture
Visual arts
INTERVIEW OSE BOYT ’S MEMOIR, Naked Portrait,
By Tim Adams is, in the narrowest sense, her account
of sitting for three paintings for her
father, Lucian Freud. In the first, she
sprawls, unclothed, legs spread wide
on her father’s chaise, aged 18. In the
second, at 30, she is buttoned up in a
dark shirt, hair cropped, refusing the
artist’s gaze. And in the third, at 39, she perches in a home-
made floral patterned dress on a sofa arm, beside her hus-
band, Mark Pearce, his son Alex and their new baby, Stella.
▲ Mother love You might say that the loose triptych represents a sort of
The Pearce allegory of independence for Boyt, from the wildly overbear-
Family, 1998, by ing legacy of her father, and in some ways her book has that
Lucian Freud. The sort of triumphant, survivor’s note. But, as with anything
painting shows concerning Freud, the reality is more complicated.
Rose Boyt aged Boyt, one of Freud’s 14 acknowledged children, is now 65.
39, her husband She has a special place in the pantheon of heirs in that Freud
Mark Pearce and chose her, alongside a lawyer, to be the co-executor of his
his son Alex, and £96m ($120m) estate, a process that has occupied her for a
the couple’s new great deal of the 13 years since his death. One way of thinking
baby, Stella about her memoir might be as a climax to that other con-
LUCIAN FREUD
suming task. Plenty of people have had their say on Freud’s
ARCHIVE / BRIDGEMAN entirely singular life (“I don’t read any of that crap,” Boyt
The Guardian Weekly 17 May 2024
says) but no one is better placed than her – also the author
of three novels of chaotic families – to weigh its extremes.
At the heart of her memoir is a diary she kept when sitting
for the middle portrait, which she has now re-examined
in light of her own experience of parenting, therapy and
#MeToo: “Until I had read the diary I had completely forgot-
ten all that sex talk [with Dad],” she writes, of her father’s
compulsion to overshare with her about his wolfish libido.
“I just smiled and laughed when I should have put my hands
over my ears and screamed: SHUT UP YOU SICK FUCK,” she
suggests. But, then, in the next breath: “We [the children
of different mothers] won’t have a word said against him.”
One of the compulsive aspects of Boyt’s book is that, as
a reader, you get to listen in on her trying to make sense
of events that go well beyond what any daughter might be
expected to fathom. I read it in one sitting, taking notes
such as these: “LF brings two live lobsters to house on day
Rose is born and insists her mother boils them up for sup-
per in nappy bucket”; “Rose travels world on cargo ship
with mother and three siblings; boat sinks”; “Rose first
time in New York: Andy Warhol draws ring on her finger
and ‘proposes marriage’”; and “Rose says her father ‘never
was in love or made anyone happy’”.
A couple of days after this immersion in her story, I sat
with Boyt in the elegant north London townhouse in which
she has lived in for 33 years. Where to start? One of the things
that struck me, reading her book, I say, was that her father’s
infamous fear of domesticity, of the mundane, seemed
infectious. Did everyone in his orbit feel under pressure to
be extraordinary all the time, to catch his interest?
She concedes that “being the child of a sort of gorgeous
genius makes people’s expectations of you unbelievably
high”, but also contends that she is her mother’s daughter
at least as much as her father’s. One of the psychological
challenges of her adult life, she says, has been that nothing
shocks or surprises her. “I think,” she says, “living on the
ship did that.”
So we talk first about how when she was seven, Boyt,
her mother and her three young siblings sailed around the
world on a leaky cargo ship her mother had sold their home
to buy. It began, like much of Boyt’s life, by accident. Suzy
Boyt was Freud’s student at the Slade, 17 years his junior
when they met; in what became a familiar pattern with his
women, she had his children in quick succession, and all
but gave up her own artistic ambitions.
“You’ve got to picture my mum, this beautiful glamorous
artist, with four kids,” she says. “One day, she’s in this Mini
at the top of a hill and she decides to put the brakes on and
slide down the hill because it is icy. It all went wrong and
she crashed. And then this tall, blond Germanic sea captain
appeared out of nowhere to rescue her.”
This was a man Boyt calls only Uwe in the book; having
swiftly fallen in love with him, Suzy Boyt thought it would
be “a marvellous adventure” for the kids to sail around the
world with him on a cargo ship. Is that how Rose saw it?
“I think in real time, as a child you don’t actually think,
‘Oh, bums, I won’t be able to go to school any more,’” she
says. “You’re up for it. It’s taken me a long time to describe
how it really was: I always felt loved. But I didn’t feel safe.”
Aged seven, it was often Rose’s job to look after her baby
brother Kai on deck. “The first time I lost him we found him
hanging from his fingertips over the mouth of the hold, a
sheer drop of 30 feet [9 metres],” she writes. “The second
time he had gone overboard … Mum and Uwe jumped over

the gunwale and fished him out of the freezing water …”
The adventure lasted about 18 months and ended with
the family in Trinidad and a drunken telegram from Uwe
from a solo voyage: “SHIP SUNK, GO HOME”; they were
repatriated, penniless, back to London.
The experience left her with a kind of outlaw sense. She
recalls taking a big knife into her primary school, and being
outraged that the headteacher confiscated it. “I was prob-
ably pretty strange,” she says. “It’s why I’ve spent much of
my later life trying to be as bougie and normal as possible.”
By that time, her father had established the pattern of his
life: numerous lovers, gambling, high- and lowlife friends,
all organised around the 24-hour compulsion of his paint-
ing. How big a presence was he in her life in those years?
“He was around plenty enough,” she says. “I can
remember saying to Mum, once: ‘Where’s Dad?’ And her
saying: ‘Oh, he’s at work.’ And I just thought: ‘Oh, dads go
to work, whatever.’ But I kind of knew we were different.”
NDERSTATEMENT IS BOYT’S DEFAULT
TONE. “Dad was certainly confusing,”
she says. She recalls the occasion that
he took her off to Patisserie Valerie
in the West End, and put his fingers
in every cream cake on offer, before
leaving an outsize tip for the waitress.
“I knew that at home mum had, like,
one onion, one tin of tomatoes, one bag of spaghetti for
five children,” she says. “I thought about putting that tip
in my pocket for her, but I didn’t.” Her mother never asked
for any money from Lucian.
As Boyt got older, she must have become more aware of
the cruelty of that financial disparity between her parents?
“I left home when I was 15. I was just: I’m out of here,”
she says. “But also, Dad could not really be blamed for
Mum having bought the ship and it sinking.” (As she notes
in the book, it is a reflex for everyone around the artist to
make excuses for his behaviour – even her own therapist.)
53
One of the prompts for her leaving
home was the trauma of being raped,
at 14, by one of her older brother Ali’s
friends. The general response from the
family seemed to be “shit happens”.
There were other sexual traumas; she
had lived in fear of being alone with
Uwe, who, among other things, was
in the habit of having the children line
up naked on deck and dousing them
with cold water. The drunken sailor
returned to haunt the family in Lon-
don for a while, before killing himself
by jumping off Tower Bridge. Boyt
moved in with her boyfriend round
the corner from her father at 15, a sort
of self-conscious wild child, working
for a while in Vivienne Westwood’s
King’s Road shop and looking for ways
to inveigle her way more closely into
Lucian’s life. She cooked him fried
eggs on toast after school and cleaned
his studio; she was a convenient friend
for his lovers.
It was around this time that her
father asked her to sit for him. ▲ Father image
That memory first prompted her book. She had written Rose Boyt:
an essay about it for an exhibition catalogue, but when ‘I wasn’t going
she thought about that account, she felt she hadn’t to write this to
been quite honest. cancel him’
“I started it with the description of going into my father’s SUKI DHANDA
studio. Nothing had been discussed about what I should
do. But I just seemed to think: ‘Oh, yeah, I’m supposed
to be naked.’ As the writing of the book progressed, I
allowed myself to be more angry, more straightforward
about all that.”
She realised that her previous essay “was a version
that I created not to shame myself, or my father”. Now
she recalled the full range of emotions she felt. Her father
spent some time asking her whether she was OK with the
dramatically exposed position on the chaise she had to hold
night after night. She didn’t really know what she was giving If you see
permission for, until she got to look at the canvas, “and yourself
saw what he was seeing … I was really shocked,” she says.
As with all Freud’s work, the painting went on, dusk till naked in a
dawn, several nights a week over months. He wanted to call painting
it The Artist’s Daughter, a title “that would make anyone
think of incest”, Boyt says. “Not that I wanted to have sex
by your
with him, nor him with me, just in case you were wondering genius
…” she writes. He called it Rose, as she requested. father, you
She had liked to think of their relationship at the time as
being “like that between two teenagers”. In retrospect, she then think:
recalls more “of what I now might call micro-aggressions”, ‘Is that
deeply controlling behaviour and stabbing himself in the
thigh with his paintbrush if things were not to his liking.
who I am?’
“When you’re sitting you feel incredibly unimportant,
because [his] world’s full of naked girls, half of whom are
your sisters,” Boyt recalls. “There’s just too many sitters,  Laid bare
too many sisters. And then at the same time, you are feel- Lucian Freud’s
ing so very important, because you’re being scrutinised.” first portrait
That process inevitably left her with identity issues. of Rose, then
“If you see yourself naked in a painting, and the aged 18
painting’s been painted by your genius father who  THE LUCIAN FREUD
ARCHIVE / BRIDGEMAN
knows everything, you then think: ‘Is that who I am?’ IMAGES
17 May 2024 The Guardian Weekly
54 Culture
Visual arts
You’re so valuable because of the painting – but then are
you valuable in other contexts?”
The temptation, particularly in our censorious times,
might be to condemn Freud out of hand for his most
extreme behaviour. But Boyt refuses even to attempt to
come to a settled judgment about her father – which is
exactly what makes her book feel so truthful.
“I think that ambiguity is a luxurious position,” she says.
“You can’t allow yourself ambiguity when things are very
unstable. And I think my achievement is to allow a mas-
sive level of ambiguity. I realised in the writing that I was
▲ The ring and I contradicting myself every five minutes: I love him, I hate
Rose Boyt. Self him. He loves me, he doesn’t. Everything’s up for grabs. I
Portrait with mean, I obviously wasn’t going to write this to cancel him
Ring drawn by or whatever. And I wasn’t going to write a book about him
Andy Warhol, being the god of me. We maintained a lot of respect and
New York, 1978 affection despite being two awkward cusses.”
ROSE BOYT
Y THE TIME OF HER SECOND PORTRAIT,
she was a far more reluctant sitter and
tried to refuse, “but,” she says, “there
was not really an option for him to be
able to say: ‘Oh, yes, that’s fine.’”
Her determination was at least to
keep a private record of their nights
together. She would take furtive notes
about their endless conversations and type them up when
she got home. She says she had not looked at that diary in
decades when she uncovered it during house renovations.
She was embarrassed by a lot of it when she did. She
laughs. “There’s way too much about wanting a husband.
It’s very Bridget Jones.” She couldn’t look at it for a while
after the death of her father, but then the plan was to go
back and extract “all Dad’s stories, which I remembered as
being hilarious, stories about gangsters and film stars, lords
and ladies”. But then when she got into it, “it all turned
into something else”.
The change was partly a change in the culture; women
were suddenly speaking out about patriarchal power, Boyt’s
therapist encouraged her to re-examine her memories.
“When I started it, there was no sense of myself as having
had crimes perpetrated against me, none of that. It was only
reading the diary, and then typing it up. It was only then
that I started to think: ‘Oh: me, too.’”
She is angry in the book that her parents did not respond
to the fact of her rape, or her anxieties around Uwe.
“I think I had secrecy bred into me,” she says. (Outra-
geously at one point, Freud, who disliked the confessional
tone of her first novel, Rose, tried to appeal to artistic dis-
cretion on the basis of “family feeling”.)
She wrote in her diary of a persistent sense of worthlessness;
that happiness wasn’t for her. Has she conquered that?
We had a “I had always felt that I had no right to mind what
lot of happened to me, but now I feel different,” she says. “For
me, the feeling of working through shame and recognising
respect it, and not being implicated in it, has been really important.
and Just being able to speak out. I mean, take this interview,
for example; rather than thinking: ‘Oh, my God, he’s
af fection going to stitch me up’; I’m trying to think: ‘Oh, a chance
despite to tell my story …’”
being two By the time of that third family portrait, the power
balance between ageing father and daughter had begun
awkward to shift. Her Bridget Jones efforts had borne fruit in her mid-
cusses 30s in the most unlikely of places – she met her husband,
The Guardian Weekly 17 May 2024
Mark Pearce, a recent widower, across the hospital bed of
her friend, the Observer theatre critic Susannah Clapp,
whom they were both visiting. One result of that mar-
riage was that Boyt for the first time was able to make
some demands of her father. She said she would not sit
for another portrait unless she could do it with her hus-
band. And, looking back, she says: “I must have known
that I was in with a chance of getting pregnant – I made
the dress that I was going to wear in the painting, and it
was one of those crossover wrap dresses that ties behind
that could expand.” After some months she conveyed the
happy news to her father.
Inevitably Freud’s first thought was the painting.
“‘Oh for fuck’s sake!’ he raged … and then he was really
happy for me …”
The announcement changed their relationship.
“Obviously, once you’re pregnant, you have power: ‘Sorry
Dad, I need to go to the bathroom.’ ‘Sorry Dad, I need to get
some food.’ I wasn’t trapped in the studio any more. And
then I went away, and had the baby.”
Freud pestered her and Mark to return. “The baby’s
going to be in the painting, you know that?” she said. The
artist had a mortal fear of prams but, as she says, “even he
knew you couldn’t just leave babies at home any more.
Stella was nine months old. Alex [Pearce’s son from his first
marriage] came with us too, obviously. And nine months
later, I was pregnant again. This time, Dad realised that
there was nothing he could do about anything. And so he
painted this little cute little embryo like seaweed with a
flower or something [under the final painted layers of her
dress]; it was very joyful; the painting was finished just
before Vincent was born.”
Boyt claims to have no real idea why he asked her to
be his executor.
She is very anxious not to place herself centre stage
among her siblings. “I don’t think anyone else was fight-
ing to do it,” she says. “But I was thrilled, really. It really
made me feel seen in a different way to the naked portrait. I
thought: ‘That’s a side of me that’s not been valued, or that
hasn’t been noticed.’” She has enjoyed the responsibility of
the process, “and no one has tried to kill me yet”.
I wonder if now that the business of their father’s legacy
is mostly concluded, his children still find good reasons
to get together?
“All the time,” she says.
And do they spend all their time trying to get these stories
of the past straight?
“No, we don’t really talk about that,” she says.
“Everyone’s got their own thoughts and feelings and rela-
tionships with Dad. My brother Ali [who also has a book in
the works] sometimes tells preposterous stories about him
and Dad on the razzle, but that’s about it. The other day it
was Bella’s party. We have these big parties when nearly
everyone goes and we talk about our own children – and
our own grandchildren …”
Before I go, I wonder how her own formative years
shaped her as a mother – her children are now 26 and 25.
“I feel blessed that neither of them have been interested
in drugs and alcohol,” she says. “Put it this way, I don’t think
I was ever going to create a daughter who wanted to leave
home when she was 15.” She smiles. “I’m certainly not the
biggest fan of chaos.” • Observer
TIM ADAMS IS AN OBSERVER FEATURE WRITER
Naked Portrait by Rose Boyt is out now
 Culture
Music
It was the most politically
Hit and miss
charged Eurovision song contest
Goths, glory in memory – but it was won
by a famously neutral nation.
and plenty As the glittery dust settles from
Saturday night in Malmö,
of gimmicks Sweden, here’s what we learned
By Michael Hogan 1. Switzerland was a smash hit
After a week of turmoil, we got a popular winner.
Swiss singer Nemo, who identifies as non-binary,
came into the night as third favourite but romped
to a widely welcomed victory. Their poperatic,
drum’n’bass-driven song The Code wasn’t just
naggingly catchy but imaginatively staged, with
▲ Punchline the 24-year-old hitting high notes while balancing
UK entrant on a giant spinning turntable. The committed
Olly Alexander performance was impossible to resist.
performs the Just a shame about the awkward ending. Not
song Dizzy only was Nemo’s interminable walk from the
MARTIN MEISSNER/AP green room to the stage like something from This
gre
is Spinal
S Tap, but they smashed the glass trophy
during their triumphant celebrations.
du
2. Europe
E still doesn’t love the UK
It sstarted so well for Olly Alexander. The UK
entrant’s performance of Dizzy went down
en
well enough in the arena. When jury votes were
we
counted, he’d made it on to the fabled “left-hand
cou
side of the leaderboard”. Then the wheels came
sid
off. He received the dreaded “nul points” in the
public vote. Alexander plummeted to 18th out
pu
of 25 with just 46 points – a fraction of the top
scores, which were in the 500s.
sco
Blinding
B Nemo The Swiss singer was a popular
win
winner TOBIAS SCHWARZ/AFP/GETTY
55
So what went wrong? Some blamed the song –
a derivative Pet Shop Boys-esque number. Others
pointed to sound issues, with vocals muddy
and low in the mix. Others thought the staging,
with writhing dancers in what resembled a serial
killer’s bathroom, was more suited to an edgy
video than Eurovision. Others pointed to the UK’s
unpopularity post-Brexit. It was likely a combo
of all the above. At least he improved on last year,
when Mae Muller was second from bottom.
3. Eurovision had gone goth
The contest once had a reputation as the home
of cheesy novelty pop. Not so much nowadays.
Judging by the mix of musical styles on show
at this 68th edition, melodramatic emo-metal
has joined thumping doof-doof Eurodisco as the
contest’s dominant genre.
4. Graham Norton’s still got it …
All the controversy meant this wasn’t an easy gig
for UK TV host Norton, but he pitched it pretty
much perfectly. Shrugging off awkward audio
problems as the broadcast began, he struck his
usual note – withering at times, warm at others.
He issued a nightmare warning to children ahead
of Ireland’s demonic diva and a nudity warning
ahead of Finland’s trouser-free funster.
After Spain’s booty-shaking male dancers
stripped down to thongs, he said: “I can only
imagine the cheers in Sitges right now.” As the
Abbatars appeared in a laboured skit, Norton
drily noted: “They really lift the script off the
page, don’t they?”
5. … And so has Joanna Lumley
The beloved actor appeared as UK jury
spokesperson and was impressively multilingual
with impeccable pronunciation. Naturally, Dame
Joanna clutched a glass of champagne through-
out her report, while managing to squeeze a
“darling”, a “sweetie” and an “absolutely fabu-
lous” into her 60 seconds on screen. What a pro.
6. Abba’s no-show was a slight swizz
With the contest held in Sweden on the 50th
anniversary of Abba winning with Waterloo,
speculation was rife about guest cameos from
Agnetha, Björn, Benny and Anni-Frid. The hosts
repeatedly trailed a surprise appearance.
Please welcome a Scandi supergroup
beginning with A (it was Alcazar). Please wel-
come the Abbatars. Please welcome a tribute act
formed of previous winners Charlotte Perrelli,
Conchita Wurst and Carola. The big teases.
7. Israel defied the controversy
Since last Thursday’s semi-final, thousands
of pro-Palestinian protesters had gathered in
Malmö, indignant at Israel’s inclusion while the
war in Gaza rages on. There were calls for artists
to boycott the competition. LGBTQ+ venues can-
celled viewing parties. Israeli entrant Eden

Golan’s song was rewritten to be less lyrically
17 May 2024 The Guardian Weekly
56 Culture
Music
provocative. She was loudly booed during dress
rehearsals and advised to remain in her hotel
room for her own safety. Security was stepped up
and organisers were braced for stage invasions.
Not only did Saturday night pass off without
major incident but Golan fared well. The 20-year-
old came second in the public vote, finishing fifth
overall. “United by music” is the slogan for this
year’s contest. Perhaps it came true in the end.
8. The hosting duo shone …
Hollywood actor Malin Åkerman and comedian
Petra Mede helmed proceedings with a winning
blend of sincerity and silliness. Mede cracked
deadpan gags about the winner receiving a
Gilmore Girls season three DVD and official
Euro-merch including a rune stone. Åkerman
interviewed veteran former host Karin Falk (“I’m
92, I’m not dead”) and her own mother-in-law,
the British choreographer Chrissy Wickham – who
duly ripped off Åkerman’s skirt Bucks Fizz-style.
9. … but cult hero Martin lost his lustre
The European Broadcasting Union boss, Martin
Österdahl, fared less well. He’s built up a rep-
utation as something of a Eurovision legend.
However, fans clearly held him responsible for
this year’s dramas – not just Israel’s participa-
tion but the late disqualification of Dutch entrant
Joost Klein – and booed Österdahl whenever he
appeared on screen.
10. Eurovision eccentricity is alive and well
The night produced its trademark mix of bizarrely
bananas, magnificently camp moments. We had
a bloke with a blond mullet
▼ Hatch point hatching out of a giant blue
Finland’s egg and setting his flesh-col-
Windows95man oured Y-fronts on fire. We had
TOBIAS SCHWARZ / GETTY a rap about Mother Teresa, a
screeching witch, disco strip-
pers, boyband twins, plentiful pyrotechnics and
an eye-popping amount of near-nudity. Even
when the performances were over, the Maltese
jury spokesperson was randomly covered in
teddy bears. Douze points for effort.
MICHAEL HOGAN WRITES ABOUT LIFESTYLE
AND ENTERTAINMENT
Reviews
TELEVISION
Doctor Who
BBC/Disney+
★★★☆☆
The new era of Doctor Who,
with Russell T Davies back as the
showrunner and Ncuti Gatwa as the
Doctor, begins with a double bill,
pointing to a stellar future for Who
as a playground of the imagination,
far more fancy of foot and light of
outlook than it has been for years.
Gatwa establishes himself as a
cracking Doctor immediately. What
an obviously perfect piece of casting
he is, naturally able to express the
Doctor’s dazzling extremes.
Davies, meanwhile, has always
been a writer who deals in big ideas
more than precise dialogue or
watertight plotting, capable of those
latter things though he is.
Season opener Space Babies
bulges loosely, despite going to
absurd lengths to accommodate
new fans. It is a textbook example
of a mid-ranking Who instalment,
fun but forgettable. Much better
is episode two, The Devil’s Chord,
which takes the Doctor and
companion Ruby (Millie Gibson) to
Abbey Road to witness the Beatles
recording their debut album.
If the comeback season can find
stories to match its creator’s flair and
its leading man’s star power, new
dimensions await. Jack Seale
MUSIC
Olivia Rodrigo
OVO Hydro, Glasgow
★★★★☆
Toilet sinks are streaked with purple
glitter and lost hair ribbons decorate
the foyer. Olivia Rodrigo has not yet
arrived, but the Hydro already feels
like a teen girl’s bedroom. On stage,
Guts – the title of her Grammy-
nominated second album – is spelled
out by towering, melting candles.
A soldout crowd scream when the T
teeters and falls; they know it means
the show’s about to start.
The American singer-songwriter
skips on stage over the surging bass
line from her sarcastic pop-punk
rager Bad Idea Right?
Collaging a grungy, 90s MTV
vibe with silver-screen glamour,
the show flicks between all-out
rock show and elegant, intimate
pop balladeering. For Vampire, a
showstopping, stormy rock opera,
she is cast in black and white like
a cursed silent film heroine, yet
still curls her lip to snarl the song’s
furious accusation: “Fame-fucker.”
The 21-year-old leads her band
with breezy confidence, somersaults
her ballads’ big notes with ease and
focuses on delivering feeling. No
wonder she saves Good 4 U and Get
Him Back! for the encore: she runs,
leaps, bounces and screams through
the two pop-rock teen anthems.
But it’s on All-American Bitch
that she directly confronts those
enormous expectations. A cathartic
song inspired by Joan Didion, the
track implodes under the weight
of societal pressure. “Think about
someone that pisses you off and
scream your fucking heads off !”
Rodrigo yells and thousands of
young women take the cue. “I
know my place … and this is it,”
she shrieks. Katie Hawthorne
Touring Europe and North America
until 17 August

Podcast of the week What Happened in Alabama?

Black journalist Lee Hawkins grew up in a predominantly white
area of Minnesota and describes the family “watching our backs
on the walk home from school”. At night, his dad would wake up
screaming, haunted by his past in Alabama. Hawkins powerfully
uncovers the impact of slavery and segregation. Hannah Verdier

The Guardian Weekly 17 May 2024

 Culture
Books
FICTION
Picture this
From the galleries
and squats of the 90s
London art world to the
riches of Covid-era New
York, a tale of reunion,
fame and fallout
By Sandra Newman
▲ In the frame
Art and the artist
are reduced to
commodities
ANNA BERKUT/ALAMY
57
authenticity immediately becomes just a cannier
way to sell out. Not only art but artist is reduced
to a commodity. Against this backdrop, Jay and
Alice seek solace and humanity in each other, but
are brought down by demons of past and present.
The use of artworks – a difficult trick in fiction
– is especially impressive in Blue Ruin. Kunzru
effortlessly makes us see why Rob’s art-school
still lifes, “executed with a few washes of water-
colour that gave each object real volume and
presence”, intimidate Jay and fill him with a
sense of his own fraudulence. We feel viscerally
why the diagram-drawings Jay makes about his
relationship with Alice are an artistic dead end,
while his performance pieces are both artistically
transformative and personally dangerous.
Kunzru also does a great job at conveying the
outsider life into which Jay falls: “I have walked
for miles along roaring highways, strafed by
lights. I have been chased by feral strangers,
who tried to throw me off a bridge … I worked
construction during the fracking boom in New
Mexico, watching the gas flares rise up over the
B
lue Ruin opens with the protagonist, sagebrush like portents of doom. I would be lying
Jay, delivering groceries to a palatial if I said I never thought about art.” I tend to be
home in a rich enclave of upstate sceptical of this gothic treatment of working-class
New York. On the doorstep his cus- reality, in which being broke and doing unskilled
tomer stands masked; this is happening in jobs becomes a descent into the underworld and
the early days of the Covid lockdown. Thus it a purifying ordeal. But I have to admit it works
takes him a moment to recognise Alice, his girl- here, if only because Kunzru does it so well.
friend from another life. When Kunzru returns to Jay and Alice in the
Twenty years before, Jay and Alice lived present day, the book is less successful. It becomes
together in London. He was then an up-and- a relatively familiar social satire of privileged peo-
coming Young British Artist, and she an aspiring ple, who are unsurprisingly revealed as self-cen-
curator. They had one of those relationships that tred, weak-minded and spiritually empty. Rob,
made people run their names together: Jayan- once a brilliant firebrand, now spends his days
alice, Aliceanjay. Now she is “radiant with the drinking and trying to sleep with his gallerist’s
kind of health that’s made of yoga and raw juices young girlfriend; Alice fumes about having to
and massage and money”. She’s also married deal with the #MeToo accusations that gather in
to Rob, Jay’s erstwhile best friend and rival, for his wake. The gallerist has amassed an arsenal
whom she left him without a word. Jay, mean- and fallen into fantasies of defending the house
while, is prematurely aged from poverty and the against a Covid-inspired breakdown in society.
punishing jobs that go with it. He’s sick with long No doubt there’s a point here about how the
Covid and filthy from weeks of living in his car. indulgence of the 90s led people to this decayed
“See me, Alice,” he thinks. “Nothing but a ragged condition, in which all capacity for pleasure is
membrane. A dirty scrap of ectoplasm, separat- exhausted, and no one feels strongly enough
ing nothing from nothing.” She does see him; she about anything even to drum up cynicism. But
calls out his name. A moment later he collapses, it gets lost in long stretches of dialogue in which
struggling to draw a breath. characters snipe at each other to demonstrate
Alice takes Jay in, hiding him in a barn to con- how shallow and unattractive they are. It’s
ceal him from Rob and the other two members also jarring to find Alice flattened into the two
of her lockdown pod. In Jay’s long, dimensions of satire, when we’ve pre-
fevered days of convalescence, he is viously known her as a complex, fully
haunted by memories of their past. realised human being.
These long flashback sections are But as a whole, Blue Ruin is
what is most remarkable in Blue Ruin. bracingly intelligent and often just
The seamy, drug-crazed, millenarian plain beautiful. It’s a reminder that
atmosphere of the 90s British art fiction, at its best, is a place to encoun-
world, with its intermingled idealism B O O K O F ter new experiences and dwell in big
and cynicism, is brilliantly evoked. THE WEEK ideas. Kunzru is known for ambitious
Here radical artists squat in derelict Blue Ruin novels that bring politics to rich, imag-
industrial buildings, but fill them with By Hari inative life; Blue Ruin shows him at the
paintings that pander to the tastes Kunzru top of his game.
of wealthy collectors; any quest for SANDRA NEWMAN IS AN AUTHOR
17 May 2024 The Guardian Weekly
58 Culture
Books

I
ECONOMICS n 2009, the American government loaned myths about individual economic rationality,
almost half a billion dollars to Elon Musk’s perfect competition and how the spirit of free
Tesla corporation to hasten the develop- enterprise needed to roam unchecked were pre-
ment of electric car technology. What did it sented as undeniable facts.
Prof its of doom think it was playing at? Didn’t it remember what But can governments be trusted to deliver
Ronald Reagan said? “The most terrifying words socially desirable goals such as electric cars?
Joseph Stiglitz makes in the English language are: ‘I’m from the govern- Consider the UK’s HS2 high-speed railway –
ment and I’m here to help,’” the late president incrementally reduced in size after great fanfare.
an ardent argument for told a 1986 press conference. Or consider, Stiglitz suggests, the errors the US
state intervention and For Reagan and the brains behind his neo- government made in drawing up its contract with
liberal puppet, the role of government is to get Tesla. “It made a mistake. It failed to insist on a
progressive capitalism out of the way and let the unfettered orgy of share of the upside potential … by insisting on
to rein in neoliberal self-interested neoliberal economic receiving shares, for instance. If it had,
life express itself as nature intended. the government (and American tax-
excesses Taxation is theft and interventionist payers) would have more than made
industrial policy always a mistake, up for the losses incurred in other tech-
By Stuart Jef fries except when it involves bailing out nology and investments.”
failing banks in reward for tanking To put it another way, governments
the economy. aren’t very good at business. “Mistakes
▼ Car trouble Nobel-winning economist and The Road will be made,” says Stiglitz. “But the
Tesla was loaned former Bill Clinton aide Joseph Stiglitz to Freedom discovery of a mistake is no … reason
$465m by the demurs. He proposes, instead, what he By Joseph to abandon a policy.” He notes that
US goverment calls progressive capitalism. We need E Stiglitz the US has embraced interventionist
JOSH EDELSON/
AFP/GETTY
more government, not less. Stiglitz industrial policies as never before to
even writes a sentence that may induce any provide correctives to badly functioning mar-
tooled-up Maga enthusiasts to expectorate into kets, especially since the 2008 banking disaster
their spittoons and pump their shotguns. “We – hence the development of Covid vaccines and
need environmental regulations, traffic regula- recognition of excessive dependence on foreign-
tions, zoning regulation, financial regulations, made microchips. The US government, that is to
we need regulations in all the constituents of our say, is already doing more governing than neo-
economy,” he writes. liberal orthodoxy allows.
We need, what’s more, to question Margaret The case for minimal government was made
Thatcher’s analogy between government finance by the nemeses of Stiglitz’s book, economists
and a housewife’s balanced weekly budgeting. Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. The for-
Stiglitz says most companies grow by incurring mer, whose 1944 book The Road to Serfdom was
debts, but no one would just look at the liability so prized by Thatcher she handled out copies at
side of a firm’s balance sheet. “If we spend the cabinet meetings, insisted that tyranny would
money on infrastructure, education or techno- result from government control of economic
logy, then we have a more productive economy,” planning. Friedman’s scorn for big government
he writes. “When a firm invests well, the value of was typified by his remark: “If you put the federal
the assets increases more than the liabilities, and government in charge of the Sahara desert, in five
the firm’s net worth is enhanced. The same for years there’d be a shortage of sand.”
countries.” This is basic economics, though not Stiglitz, who has had beef with Friedman
of the kind that I and many others were taught ever since the pair clashed at the University
at university in the early 1980s, when laughable of Chicago in the 1960s, thinks Thatcher’s

A
H I ST ORY s flashpoints go, few come flashier fascinating history of the island. But the nutshell
than Taiwan. To pick one incident answer is that a mixture of poisonous nation-
from a string of recent close calls: the alism and fudged diplomacy over many years,
visit of Nancy Pelosi to Taipei in 2022. combined with the premierships of Xi Jinping and
Dire strait Pelosi, then speaker of the House, was travelling Donald Trump, has turned the Sino-American
to Taiwan to make an “unequivocal relationship into a tinderbox. Tai-
How presidential statement that America stands with wan could be the spark that ignites it.
Taiwan”. The visit produced predicta- One of the ironies is that the island
animosity and ble fury in Beijing. But the more Beijing wasn’t historically Chinese, but ended
China-US diplomatic threatened, the more determined the up that way thanks to American inter-
speaker became, and so, for a few days, ference. Until the 17th century, the
failures have created the world’s two largest economies people of Taiwan were mostly ethnic
peril for Taiwan stood one small military accident away The Struggle Austronesians. The island was then
from catastrophic conflict. for Taiwan conquered by the Qing dynasty. After
How did we come to this? Sulmaan By Sulmaan the Qing came the Japanese, who held
By Charlie English Wasif Khan, a historian at Tufts Uni- Wasif Khan it until 1945. It was President Roosevelt
versity, lays out the reasons in his who promised it to a Chinese leader,

The Guardian Weekly 17 May 2024

 59

favourite monetarist thinker is responsible for BOOKS OF THE MONTH

a desertification of human hope thanks to his The best recent science f iction, fantasy and horror
quasi-religious faith in shareholder capitalism,
in which the only goal for managers of companies
is to maximise shareholder value. Friedman, By Lisa Tuttle other side of the sky. An
Stiglitz insists, unleashed a generation of Gordon absorbing, fascinating
Gekkos to slime their way to economic power novel, cleverly devised so
with their “greed is good” philosophy. Worse, the the reader is never sure
pursuit of shareholder greed encouraged com- where reality ends and
pany managers to ignore what economists call fantasy begins.
externalities – such as water organisations filling
British rivers with excrement, drug companies
killing Americans by addicting them to opioids
or the rape of the Earth for private gain. A View from the Stars
Much heavy lifting for Stiglitz’s case is done by By Cixin Liu (various
the American political philosopher John Rawls, Flowers from the Void translators
whose 1971 book A Theory of Justice proposed By Gianni Washington Essays and short stories
a thought experiment. Imagine each of us is The stories in this wide- from the past three
temporarily behind a veil of ignorance know- ranging collection of decades by the author of
ing nothing of our talents, income and wealth, horror and fantasy The Three-Body Problem.
or core values. What principles of justice would run from the gothic The Other Valley His stories are filled with
we devise to ensure the society we lived in was a grotesque to even more By Scott Alexander Howard a sense of wonder as they
good one? Not, suggests Stiglitz, those that pre- disturbing tales about This debut novel is set in push ideas about the
vail today in countries such as the US and UK. weird obsessions and fatal an isolated valley caught future of humanity to
Instead, he thinks it would yield the principles misunderstandings. Some between its own past extremes, and the personal
of progressive capitalism he spends the book border on science fiction, and future. To the east is essays offer a rare glimpse
defending – involving more government inter- with alien creatures and a valley 20 years ahead; into attitudes towards
vention and reforming neoliberalism’s excesses. lifesize living dolls, while to the west, the same science fiction in China.
I’m not so sure. His vision of progressive a fantasy about an African place is 20 years in the A fascinating collection.
capitalism seems too little, too late – too little witch trying to join an all- past. To protect against
to create egalitarian societies after decades of white coven in colonial catastrophic changes to
neoliberalism; too late to stave off climate dis- Massachusetts is so richly the timeline, the borders
aster. I wish Stiglitz had drawn – as the British imagined it feels like a are fenced and patrolled
philosopher Daniel Chandler did last year in a novel in miniature. An by armed guards. The
book similarly aimed at loosening neoliberalism’s impressive debut from a governing Conseil grants
chokehold – on another element of Rawls’s think- very talented new writer. a few brief supervised
ing. His principle asserts that any inequality in crossings every year,
society can be justified only to the extent that it to elderly mourners
benefits the worst off. But that, I suspect, smacks desperate for a glimpse
too much of socialism for the Nobel laureate. of their loved ones when The Hungry Dark
Stiglitz’s conviction – ardently expressed, they were still alive. By Jen Williams
mostly unconvincing – is that capitalism got Odile is a shy, studious After seven fantasy
us into this mess and can get us out of it too. girl training for a place novels, Williams changed
Observer on the Conseil when she direction to crime thrillers.
STUART JEFFRIES IS A FEATURE WRITER AND CRITIC glimpses two mourners Her latest involves the
lurking outside the hunt for a serial killer, but
The Dark Side of the Sky school. Recognising them sits firmly in the British
Chiang Kai-shek, in 1943. When Chiang was By Francesco Dimitri as older versions of the folk horror tradition. As a
defeated in the Chinese civil war by Mao’s com- The tale of a cult told from parents of a boy she likes, child, Ashley was haunted
munists in 1949, he retreated to the island. the inside, through the she faces an impossible by the sight of silent
What followed for Taiwan was a difficult voices of its members, choice. He is doomed to grey figures gathering
balancing act. The US proved an ambivalent collectively known as the die, but if she tries to save around her. As an adult,
Taiwanese protector. The Carter administration Bastion. To outsiders, him, she will destroy she makes a living as a
managed to free the country of its commitment to founders Becca and Ric her own future. The psychic – but it’s all faked,
Taiwan in 1978, and for a few decades it seemed are dangerous con experience never stops until those strange figures
possible that Taiwan might willingly integrate artists, but those in the haunting her until, years appear again and lead her
with the mainland. But then came Xi and Trump. community believe they later, she must confront to the body of a missing
China-US relations now stand “at the edge of have found a better, other ethical dilemmas. child. Atmospheric
chaos”, according to Khan. Beijing’s aggression in more spiritual way to live. This is an unusual and suspenseful, a
the strait has hit new heights, and Biden appears They have seen the stars approach to time travel, well-plotted blend of
to have recommitted the US to defend Taiwan change when they gather a philosophical thought supernatural and crime.
militarily. A cataclysm beckons. in the forest, and are experiment and a moving, LISA TUTTLE IS A SCIENCE
CHARLIE ENGLISH IS AN AUTHOR AND FORMER aware of being watched thrilling story of memory, FICTION AND FANTASY
HEAD OF INTERNATIONAL NEWS AT THE GUARDIAN by hungry eyes on the love and regret. AUTHOR AND CRITIC

17 May 2024 The Guardian Weekly

60 Lifestyle
ASK
Annalisa Barbieri
I keep thinking
about a third
child, but should
I stick at two?
I have a strong attachment to my
family – in particular my three
siblings. We live in different
countries but the bond is strong.
I have two children aged six
and two. I always wanted three
children. I know I am beyond lucky
and grateful to have two. As I have
just turned 40, it is occupying more
space in my head. I assume that the
bigger your family, the more joyful,
strong and fun it is. Being with my
siblings makes me feel invincible;
we have great banter and care for
each other. It has always felt as if it
was us against the world.
I know I could give that sense
of community to my two children
without giving them a sibling. We
have a lovely intergenerational
community around us. I also know
that just because we have a third
child doesn’t mean we will recreate
what I had growing up.
We have a few compelling
reasons against having a third:
impact on environment, living
space, impact on sleep, physical toll
of another pregnancy.
STEPHEN COLLINS
The Guardian Weekly 17 May 2024
Our life is settled, lovely, fun,
comfortable. I don’t want to rock
the boat. But it’s not just that I am
feeling broody, it’s also that I worry
we will regret not paying the price
of a couple of years of bad sleep to
have three children. I am so aware
that lots of people struggle to
conceive. So there is also an element
of shame around this obsession.
L
et’s get rid of the shame.
Other people not being
able to conceive is not your
fault. It’s obvious you feel
grateful for what you have. In your
longer letter you listed quite a few
cons (not so many pros interestingly)
about having a third. It’s wonderful
you have such loving siblings but
your experience is of having three
siblings, not of three children. That
could be quite different.
Whatever you do, make an active
decision so you can own it rather
than “leaving it to fate”.
I consulted UKCP-registered
psychotherapist Alison Bruce,
who wondered how much you’d
discussed this with your partner.
You didn’t say. Bruce thought it was
great you wanted to continue the
“good”: “We so often hear about
the transgenerational passage of
trauma within families, but this
story illustrates how important
the transgenerational passage of
goodness can be.”
Bruce also mentioned something
that I think is important here:
allowing yourself to mourn life
cycles. No matter how many
children you have, you will probably
miss their babyhood and you need to
allow yourself to feel that. This is a
really important distinction because
sometimes it’s not wanting another
child, but to go back and savour with
more intent the babyhood of the
children we did have.
And there will come a time when
you can make no more children and
you will need to process that; that’s
a definite milestone for a woman.
There can be a certain sadness at
this juncture (or, for some women,
celebration). You may always
wonder what it’s like to have one
If you would more – but maybe it’s a distraction
like advice from the realisation that perhaps
on a family you won’t have any more babies.
matter, email I also wondered how much of
ask.annalisa@ it was actually not wanting a third
theguardian. child but wanting permission to stick
com. See to “just” two and not doing what you
theguardian. always imagined. That’s more what
com/letters- I heard in your letter. After all, your
terms for terms children will very probably have lots
and conditions of cousins. You’re not failing anyone
if you decide to stick to two.
Obviously no one can advise
you and your partner what to do,
but what helped me when I was
in the same situation was really
thinking about reality. So in any
You can given situation I’d think: OK, how
would I manage a third now? How
like the would I manage a baby if my eldest
idea of really needed to talk to me, how
would I manage this journey, or that
something holiday? Not just brushing over the
details but concentrating on them.
but not Remember you can like the idea of
the reality something, but not the reality.
 KITCHEN AIDE
By Anna Berrill

T H E W E E K LY R E C I P E
By Fadi Kattan

№ 267
Mujadara

Prep 10 min Whenen I close my eyes and think of

Soak 30 min a dish
h that says
sa home, mujadara
appears. There are probably as
Cook 1 hr many variations of mujadara as

Unleash the quiche and keep it hot: Serves 4 there are Palestinians.

tips for showstopping tarts • VEGAN

The thing about quiches and tarts,
says Kitty Coles, author of Make
More with Less, is people become
set in their ways. “They really can
be whatever you want them to be,
so don’t worry too much about
following exact rules.” That said, a
rough formula is helpful. “It’s some
sort of creamy thing [creme fraiche,
cream cheese, ricotta, say], plus
an egg or two, plus any ingredients
you have in your fridge.” This could
simply be herbs (parsley stalks or
chives) or the end of a bunch of
spring onions, plus lemon. “That
would be a great start because you
can blitz it all up and have instant
flavour.” Top with radishes tossed in
oil or serve with a side of veg.
As a change from greens, you
could try first harvest beetroot and
carrots. Anna Shepherd, author
of Love Vegetables would finely
shave beetroot and use it to top filo
or ready-rolled puff or shortcrust
pastry alongside shallots and pink
peppercorns. “Layer that with plant-
based creme fraiche and serve with
a bit of cheese,” she says.
“Peas are so good in a quiche with
delicious bits of bacon,” Coles says.
But May in the UK is asparagus time,
which happily loves “anything eggy
and rich in dairy”, notes Angela
Clutton, author of Seasoning. The
trick is to bump up the flavour,
and Clutton does this in a few
ways: orange zest in the pastry;
horseradish and dill in the custard;
smoked trout with the asparagus.
DAVID LEVENE
“It’s also really important to char the
asparagus before it goes anywhere
near your quiche,” Clutton adds, to
get that beautiful colour as well as
intensifying the flavour. “Garnish
with pea shoots as soon as the
quiche comes out of the oven, so
they delicately sink into the surface,
then, once it has cooled, add fresh
ones for prettiness.”
“You could also go down the gram
flour route,” Shepherd says. “I love
a farinata [chickpea pancake] with
roast veg, cumin and rosemary.”
And leave it to rest, so it “takes on
more flavour and gives that extra
savoury dimension”. Alternatively,
Shepherd might get her grate on
with a rösti base. “You’re hitting
that savoury, crisp, crunchy profile,
plus you’re getting an extra portion
of veg.” Top with a green olive and
herb salsa, simple tomato sauce or
some dressed peppery leaves, plus
shavings of parmesan. “That makes
a beautiful centrepiece.”
One of the greatest things about
quiches and tarts, though, is that
they’re good for days. However, ver,
Clutton likes hers best withith a
“breath of the oven” on it. “By all
means make the quiche ahead of
time, but make sure e you get it out
of the fridge in time, and ideally
pop it in the oven againin to give it a
little zhoosh,” she says. “Fridge-cold
quiche is clearly a crime.” ”
ANNA BERRILL IS A FOOD WRITER
ITER
Do you have a culinary dilemma?
ma?
Email feast@theguardian.com
• DAIRY FREE
• GLUTEN FREE
Method
Soak the lentils in cold water for 30
minutes, then drain.
In a pot, combine the drained
Ingredients lentils, salt and 750ml water, then
280g dried green cook on a medium heat for 10 to
lentils 12 minutes, until the lentils are al
125ml extra-virgin dente. Drain, rinse under cold water
olive oil
to stop the lentils cooking further,
4 red onions, peeled,
halved and thinly
then leave to drain fully.
sliced Put 60ml of the oil in a medium
Salt frying pan on a medium heat. Add
1 tsp sugar the sliced onions, sprinkle with a
1 tsp ground cumin pinch of salt, then cover and cook
1 tsp ground on a low heat for three or four
coriander minutes, until translucent. Sprinkle
1 tsp ground the sugar over the onions and cook
cinnamon
for six to eight minutes more, until
350g medium-grain
rice
the onions are caramelised. Drain
half the onions on a plate lined with
For the dressing kitchen paper and leave the rest in
2 spring onions, the oil in the pan.
trimmed and chopped Put the remaining 65ml olive oil
Juice of 2 lemons in a large pot on a medium-high
1 tsp ground sumac heat, add the cumin, coriander,
1 tsp extra-virgin cinnamon and a half-teaspoon of
olive oil
ssalt, and cook, stirring, for about two
m
minutes, until they smell fragrant.
Add the rice, stir to coat, then pour
in 600ml
600 hot water. Bring to a boil,
turn down
do the heat to medium and
cook for four to five minutes. Stir in
the lentils and cook for 12 minutes,
until the lentils
len and rice are almost
done, but stil
still have a slight crunch.
on
Stir in the onions and oil from the
frying pan, then leave on a low heat
until the liquid rereduces. Turn off the
heat, cover and rest for 10 minutes.
For the dressing, combine the
spring onions, lemon jjuice, sumac
and oil in a small bowl. Transfer
T the
rice and lentils to a servin
serving bowl
and fluff up with a fork. SpSprinkle the
dressing on top, garnish with the
reserved drained onions and sserve.

17 May 2024 The Guardian Weekly


62 Diversions
QUIZ
Thomas Eaton
1 Which couple’s tomb
was “discovered” at
Glastonbury Abbey in 1191?
2 The M’Naghten rules are
concerned with the legal
definition of what?
3 Who nicknamed the
Empress of the Blues?
4 What was Jesus’s native
language?
5 The Banker – Himself was
a credit on which TV show?
6 In 1958, what became a
public holiday in Scotland?
7 Which heron is known
for its booming call?
8 Which mid-18th-century
conflict has been called
the first world war?
PUZZLES
Chris Maslanka
1 Find the smallest
number equal to 3 times
the sum of its digits.
2 Wordpool
Find the correct definition:
ICTUS
a) thunderbolt
b) Thor’s hammer
c) metrical stress in verse
d) small weight
CHESS
Leonard Barden
Britain’s 4NCL national
chess league has
traditionally been the
preserve of one or
two very strong and
well-financed clubs.
Guildford, the record
holders, went unbeaten
for eight seasons before
they abdicated their title
and downsized in 2021.
The 2023-24 season
ended last week with
the closest finish in the
league’s history as Wood
Green, with 20/22 match
points and 61 game points,
edged out Manx Liberty by
half a game point and the
Sharks by one game point.
The Guardian Weekly 17 May 2024
What links:
9 Stars; Rip It Up; The
Race; American Idiot; All
Rise; Galileo; Crush?
10 Boat; bottle
indentation; former
currency; gamble; kick?
11 Davis; Dellinger;
Froines; Hayden;
Hoffman; Rubin; Weiner?
12 The Emperor; Flights;
Snow White and Russian
Red; Solaris?
13 Old Indian coin;
heavenly food; Australian
lizard; grassland;
African clawed frog;
excessively cheerful?
14 Charing Cross; Notre
Dame; Roman Forum;
Zhengyangmen Gate?
15 Abraham Lincoln; Pyotr
Stolypin; Todor Panitsa?
3 Jumblies
Rearrange POLYTHENE to
make another word.
4 Of Sheep and Men
Identify the two words
differing only in the letter
shown:
****O**** (jumping for joy?)
******** (risky play)
5 Uncle Rebus
& & &
& & & (6)
© CMM2024
Wood Green have
dominated the London
League unbeaten for many
years before a recent loss
to Hammersmith, while
Manx Liberty, from the
Isle of Man, are also a
professional team with
a nucleus of Romanians.
3919 Artur Yusupov v Kevin
Spraggett, Candidates match,
Quebec, 1989. White (to move)
chose 1 Rdd8. Can you do better?
8
7 Purton are team managers
6 with excellent long-term
5 records, and for both this
4 was probably their finest
3
2 (Rc2+ 3 Bxc2 only delays mate)
1 3 Rh8 mate. If 1...Kh6 2 Bf5! Bxd6
a b c d e f g h
CINEMA CONNECT
Killian Fox
Name the films and the female actor
who connects them.
(6 ands).
GAMBLING. 5 Uncle Rebus VIANDS
TELEPHONY. 4 OSAM GAMBOLING,
1 27. 2 Wordpool c). 3 Jumblies
Lobster all star Léa Seydoux. Puzzles
Two, The Grand Budapest Hotel and The
theatres. Cinema Connect Dune: Part
Rome; Beijing. 15 Assassinated in
distances: London; Paris; (ancient)
14 Zero point for measuring road
goanna; savanna; platanna; Pollyanna.
13 Ending in -anna: anna; manna;
in 1969. 12 Books by Polish authors.
11 Chicago Seven activists on trial
Girls; Tessa Violet. 10 Punt definitions.
Juice; Yello; Green Day; Blue; Indigo
rainbow colours: Simply Red; Orange
8 Seven years’ war. 9 Musical artist
or No Deal. 6 Christmas Day. 7 Bittern.
4 Aramaic (scholarly consensus). 5 Deal
Guinevere. 2 Insanity. 3 Bessie Smith.
Answers Quiz 1 King Arthur and
Manx had 2600+ rated
grandmasters on the top
three boards, and had
won the 4NCL for the last
two seasons.
The Sharks, for whom
GM Dan Fernandez scored
an unbeaten 7/9, were
the surprise. Their squad
of mainly English IMs
upset a weakened Manx
team in an early round,
then stayed in the leading
group. Wood Green’s Loz
Cooper and Sharks’ Ben
achievement yet.
3 Rh8 mate. Not 1 Bf5+? g6!
3919 1 g6+! If 1..Kxg6 2 Bf5+ Kh6
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
H U NGER FOR D
Berkshire, England, UK
T
he knobbly pollarded street
trees along Hungerford’s
broad rural high street are
maypoled with ribbons.
At intervals, a small crowd in top
hats, carrying oranges, baskets and
beribboned poles of yellow and blue
flowers, emerges from each house
and enters another in turn.
The pebbledashed frontage
of two cottages conceals the two
halves of a medieval cruck house
that’s witnessed this ceremony
each of its 575 years. Each
neighbour retains grazing rights
on the town’s common, due to the
historical tenacity of the people
here. This colourful spring pageant
– coinciding with the first swift
over the rooftops – is Tutti Day, the
near-culmination of a fortnight’s
Hocktide ceremonies.
At a confluence of chalk
streams, this is a commoner’s
town, administered since the 14th
century by the Town and Manor
of Hungerford. During the 1850s,
townsfolk resisted municipalisation,
holding out for 50 years, until a town
council was established alongside.
On Tutti Day itself, Tuttimen
(any gender) visit each house to
collect a token tithe. Once a penny
per person, the tithe at some
point became a kiss exchanged
for an orange. Drinks are offered
at each home, and at the end of a
long boozy day, the Tuttimen are
wheelbarrowed back to the pub.
Meanwhile, the Hocktide jury
summons all commoners for a roll
call re-establishing fishing and
pasture rights. What might seem a
folkloric re-enactment is in fact an
affirmation of the freedom of open
spaces, grazing, fishing rights and
a community coffer, as well as a
spirit of resistance, taken up by the
cows summering on the common,
sampling each car they stop with
rough tongues. Nicola Chester
ILLUSTRATION: CLIFFORD HARPER
 Guardian Puzzles & Crosswords
Access over 15,000 puzzles on our app. 63
Download from the App Store or Google Play.
Read more: theguardian.com/puzzles-app

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Quick crossword
9 No 16,849
10 11 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

12 13 9 10

14 15 11 12

All solutions published next week

16 13

17 18 19 14 15 16

20 17

21 22 23 18 19 20

21

24 25 22 23

26 27 24

The Weekly cryptic By Anto Across 7 Group influence (4,8)

1 Author’s complaint? (7,5) 8 Modern Darwin (anag) –
No 29,376 9 Stick (5) unwilling to consider new
10 Circus performer’s equipment (7) ideas (6-6)
11 Sudden attack (4) 13 Glenn Miller’s instrument (8)
Across 15 Small and flexible doesn’t quite describe an IT
12 Dodge (a tricky question?) (8) 16 Boastful self-confidence (7)
1 Tie up credit frequently for ceramics factory (9) company (9)
14 Cold (6) 17 Expert commentator (6)
6 Brought up to talk about money in an informal 16 Start betting with something that’s easy to
15 Dark, gloomy (6) 19 High-rise homes (5)
way (4) understand (4,4)
18 Notorious (8) 21 Eat quickly – and run (4)
10 Dirty sort of business a Republican goes after (5) 18 Adviser using time in the US to break bank (7)
20 Make the grade (4)
11 Skye local managed to provide security 19 Travelling around new domain with Charles
22 Very hard substance – card suit (7) Solution No 16,843
apparatus (4,5) (7)
23 Broadcasting (2,3)
12 Prepared ahead to deliver scam (5,2) 20 State authorises subversive regiment to be WA S H E R S Q U I R T
24 Critique – diarist’s tone (anag)
13 Murder composer that’s challenging, cold and gutted (6) A Y Y U N H
(12)
dangerous (7) 23 Some boredom a hazard in US city (5) S O N A R Q U I B B L E
14 Religious type initially essential to churches Down A O I U N O I
(5,8) 2 Funfair (anag) – thug (7) B E N Z E N E T E X A S
3 ____ Driver, 1976 Martin I Y R E M
17 Agricultural stocktaking can put you out (8,5)
M A R Q U E T R Y
21 Fool takes on leading German - it shouldn’t Scorsese film (4) S I L A J
last long (4,3) 4 Shop work (6) K I D D O O F F E N C E
22 Satellite includes operating pole that shows 5 Companion to ensure good I R T U E G S
seasonal weather (7) behaviour (8) B A U H A U S M O T E T
24 Do a gentle twist when stretched (9) 6 Substance with a particular O P C M Z E
25 Gouda in box occasionally includes fertiliser (5) effect (5) B R E A T H V E N E E R
26 Betting group starts targeting operations that
Solution No 29,370
eventually ... (4)
27 ... locate stand for Spooner where bets are
Sudoku
placed (9) C L I E N T S P O R T S Medium
O N I S O U E Fill in the grid so
Down S O F T C U T C O R N E R S that every row,
1 Ireland releases information after hoarder
K E O R R I V every column
makes plea for mercy (8)
M I C R O S A F L U T T E R and every 3x3
2 Character has ring that’s enormous (5)
E I T Y S R box contains the
3 Funny film about case you’ve kept up in the
E S C A L A T O R N E T S numbers 1 to 9.
air? (5,2,7)
I S L
4 She provides an endless series of games (7) Last week’s solution
W A R E S P E C I F I C S
5 Everything in note demanding silence is
I L D H R L
somewhat implausible (7)
7 It’s rare seeing her here juggling with two I N D I C A T E Y A H O O S
clubs (9) D N P R S A U
8 Amount of drugs given by guru after party (6) P O W E R P O I N T C O D E
9 Helpless gent is tossing during it - advise 17 W R L C A K E
perhaps (9,5) S Y S T E M C L O S E D

17 May 2024 The Guardian Weekly