Opinion Mark
Zuckerberg and
Elon Musk say
they’re up for a
cage match.
Who would
win?
Alex Hern Global
technology editor
page 21
Friday 23 June 2023
theguardian.com/us
Published in New York, United States
A man enters an encampment that has been outfitted with a misting station during a heatwave in Portland, Oregon, in August 2021. Photograph: Mathieu Lewis-Rolland/Reuters
Oregon county sues big oil over 2021
heatwave that killed dozens of people
Dharna Noor
Oregon’s most populous county on
Thursday sued major oil and gas com-
panies over a deadly 2021 heatwave that
killed dozens of people.
The defendants should be held
responsible, the lawsuit alleges, for
their role in fueling the climate crisis.
From 25 to 28 June 2021, an unprec-
edented heat dome blanketed the Pa-
cific north-west. The record-shattering
temperatures killed 69 in Oregon’s
Multnomah county and hundreds more
across the region, marking one of the
most destructive weather disasters in
American history.
“It was this real crisis situation,”
said the Multnomah county chair, Jes-
sica Vega Pederson. “It really struck this
Science Chris Whitty: UK should have focused
more on stopping Covid-type pandemic
community and this area in ways that
no other event ever, honestly, had.”
The new lawsuit, filed at a state
circuit court in Portland, draws on re-
search showing the scorching heat was
exacerbated by climate breakdown. It
aims to hold 17 fossil fuel companies
and interest groups – including Exxon,
Shell, Chevron, BP, Koch Industries and
the American Petroleum Institute –
accountable for their role in the event.
“The heat dome that cost so much
life and loss was not a natural weather
event. It did not just happen because
life can be cruel, nor can it be ratio-
nalized as simply a mystery of God’s
will,” the litigation says. “Rather, the
heat dome was a direct and foreseeable
consequence of the Defendants’ deci-
sion to sell as many fossil fuel products
over the last six decades as they could.”
page 40
The suit seeks $50m in damages for
the 2021 heat dome’s consequences and
$1.5bn for future climate damages. And
it demands the defendants spend an
additional $50bn on a county plan to
upgrade public healthcare services and
infrastructure to protect residents from
coming extreme heat events and other
climate disasters.
“We know that our need to miti-
gate, to take action, to respond in the
future is going to escalate over time as
climate change worsens,” said Pederson.
“We really want to make sure that we
have the resources to do that.”
When 2021’s heatwave struck, Mult-
nomah’s county seat, Portland, broke
its own heat records on three consec-
utive days. The city’s streetcar cables
melted. Officials recorded 97 hospital
visits for heat illness – nearly the same
number of cases they would usually see
all summer. Many who perished were
seniors and lower-income people who
did not have access to air conditioning.
At the time, Pederson said she and
other officials were “overwhelmed” by
the need to distribute supplies, manage
cooling centers and otherwise keep
communities safe. But later, upon re-
viewing research showing that the cli-
mate crisis made the event at least 150
times more likely, she began to think
about accountability.
“Fossil fuel companies and industry
organizations really lied about the im-
pacts of using these fossil fuels,” she
said. “So it’s about, how do we hold
them accountable … since we are deal-
ing with the effects today and we are
going to be dealing with these effects
for a long time to come.”
The defendants, the challengers
allege, committed negligence and fraud
and created a public nuisance by cov-
ering up their knowledge of the dangers
of using fossil fuels. Attorney Jeffrey
Simon, a partner at Simon Greenstone
Panatier and a law professor of mass
tort litigation, said the case was based
on well-established laws.
“There are no new laws or novel
theories being asserted here,” he said.
The suit cites oil companies’ well-
documented history of sowing doubt
about climate science.
The litigation was filed by the law
firms Simon Greenstone Panatier; Wor-
thington & Caron; and Thomas, Coon,
Newton & Frost – firms that specialize
in large-scale catastrophic harm liti-
Continued on page 2

2 Headlines
Continued from page 1
gation, including legal actions related
to asbestos and lead poisoning. None of
the three firms have previously brought
climate litigation.
It comes as part of a wave of sim-
ilar litigation against fossil fuel inter-
ests. Since 2017, seven states, 35 munici-
Biden announces raft of new deals with Modi
amid calls to address human rights concerns
Mary Yang in Washington
Joe Biden has pronounced the US-
India relationship never stronger and
rolled out a series of new business
deals on the second day of the Indian
prime minister’s state visit, but Naren-
dra Modi’s trip has been marked with
controversy as many call for Biden to
address India’s continuing crackdown
on religious and press freedoms.
An official state visit is the highest-
ranked diplomatic invitation extended
to a foreign leader and is a sign of the
US president’s national security prior-
ities as his administration courts India
as a partner against China.
In a joint news conference with
Modi, Biden called the relationship be-
tween the US and India among the
most consequential in the world and
“more dynamic than at any time in his-
tory.”
“We talked about our shared ef-
forts to mitigate humanitarian tra-
gedies unleashed by Russia’s brutal war
in Ukraine and to defend core prin-
Kesha and Dr Luke reach ‘resolution’ in
defamation lawsuit
Benjamin Lee
Kesha has announced that a “reso-
lution” has been made between her and
producer Dr Luke after an extended
legal battle.
The singer had in 2014 accused her
former collaborator of raping and drug-
ging her as well as sexually assaulting
Katy Perry, leading to a defamation suit
aimed against her. Perry denied the
claim.
Before the trial was set to begin
next month, a joint statement has now
been released.
“Only God knows what happened
that night,” Kesha wrote in the state-
ment shared on Instagram. “As I always
said, I cannot recount everything that
happened. I am looking forward to clos-
ing the door on this chapter of my life
and beginning a new one. I wish noth-
ing but peace to all parties involved.”
Dr Luke, whose real name is Lukasz
Gottwald, has continued to deny the
claims made by the singer.
“While I appreciate Kesha again
acknowledging that she cannot recount
palities, the District of Columbia, and
one industry trade association have
sued major oil and gas corporations and
lobbying groups, alleging that defen-
dants have for decades known about
the dangers of fossil fuels and yet ac-
tively hid that information from con-
sumers and investors.
“Multnomah county has joined the
ciples of the UN charter,” the US pres-
ident said. Modi has previously faced
criticism for not more forcefully criti-
cising Russia’s war in Ukraine.
“Peace and security in the Indo-Pa-
cific is our priority,” Modi said. “India
and the US stand shoulder to shoul-
der in our fight against terrorism and
fundamentalism.”
When asked about the human
rights and democratic issues in India,
Biden said: “The prime minister and
I had a good discussion about demo-
cratic values – that’s the nature of our
relationship, we’re straightforward with
each other.”
Modi said he was surprised by the
critique. “There is absolutely no space
for discrimination,” he said. “In India the
benefits provided by the government is
accessible to all.”
Among the announcements made
on Thursday is an agreement that will
allow US-based General Electric to part-
ner with India-based Hindustan Aero-
nautics to produce jet engines for
Indian aircraft in India and the sale
of US-made armed MQ-9B SeaGuardian
Kesha in 2021. Photograph: Mario Anzuoni/Reuters
what happened that night in 2005,” his
statement reads, “I am absolutely cer-
tain that nothing happened. I never
drugged or assaulted her and would
growing ranks of local governments
that are standing up to big oil and
fighting to make these polluters pay
for the catastrophic damage they kno-
wingly caused and lied about for dec-
ades,” said Richard Wiles, president of
the Center for Climate Integrity, which
has supported plaintiffs who have filed
similar litigation.
drones.
The Biden administration also
announced plans to bolster India’s
semiconductor industry.
“We made critical and emerging
technologies the pillar of our next
generation partnership to ensure these
technologies promote and protect our
values, remain open, accessible, trusted
and secure,” Biden said. “All this matters
for America, for India and for the world.”
Thousands of Indian Americans
and other guests gathered on the White
House south lawn to greet Modi on
Thursday morning, ahead of the private
meeting between the two leaders and a
state dinner. Modi, India’s prime minis-
ter since 2014, also addressed a joint
session of Congress on Thursday after-
noon.
At the same time, dozens of demon-
strators gathered near the White House
gates to protest the visit. Human
rights advocates have accused Modi
and his party, the BJP, of fueling the
rise of violence associated with Hindu
nationalism and discriminating against
India’s Muslim minority.
never do that to anyone. For the sake of
my family, I have vigorously fought to
clear my name for nearly 10 years. It is
time for me to put this difficult matter
The litigation is among the first to
demand damages from fossil fuel com-
panies for a specific climate disaster.
Last year, Puerto Rico filed a federal
lawsuit against oil and coal firms for
their role in 2017’s Hurricane Maria.
“Communities should not be forced
to pay the price for these catastrophic
climate damages while the companies
“The fact that Modi has been invited
despite being complicit with innocent
people being killed since 2002 when
he was the chief minister [of Gujarat]
is devastating for our communities be-
cause it’s just saying, ‘it’s OK what you
do back home but you can still come
here,’” said Husnaa Vhora, the advocacy
associate for the DC-based non-profit
Indian American Muslim council.
Dozens of lawmakers had also
urged Biden to address the issue of
human rights with Modi in a letter on
Tuesday, asking the president to raise
reports of “shrinking of political space,
the rise of religious intolerance, the tar-
geting of civil society organisations and
journalists and growing restrictions on
press freedoms and internet access” in
India.
A handful of representatives, in-
cluding Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar,
who are Muslim, boycotted Modi’s ad-
dress to Congress. The Indian leader fo-
cused on unity in that message.
“The beauty of democracy is the
constant connect with the people, to
listen to them and feel their pulse,” said
behind me and move on with my life. I
wish Kesha well.”
Kesha claimed that over a 10-year
period Gottwald had sexually and emo-
The Guardian Friday 23 June 2023
that caused the crisis perpetuate their
lies and rake in record profits,” said
Wiles. “The people of Multnomah
county deserve their day in court to
hold big oil accountable.”
Modi, who shook hands with applaud-
ing members of Congress as he walked
down to the front. It was his second
time addressing both chambers of Con-
gress, the first being in 2016. “We are
home to all faiths in the world, and we
celebrate all of them,” Modi claimed in
his speech on Thursday.
As expected, Biden balanced law-
makers and human rights advocates’
concerns with the US’s desire to deepen
ties with India, a major trading partner
and a counterweight to China.
“China is in the background of all
of these meetings,” said Tamanna Sali-
kuddin, the director of South Asia pro-
grams at the non-partisan US Institute
of Peace. “There is real convergence be-
tween the US and India on China.”
Since 2020, India has seen deadly
confrontations along its border with
China, and security in the Indo-Pacific
has become a shared priority. “India is,
I think, one of the leading partners we
have in [the Biden administration’s] In-
do-Pacific strategy,” she said.
tionally abused her, with her lawyer
calling the producer someone “willing
to commit horrible acts of abuse in
an attempt to intimidate an impres-
sionable, talented, young female artist
into submission for his personal gain”.
She said he repeatedly drugged and as-
saulted her with the abuse leading to an
eating disorder.
He countersued at the time with his
lawyer calling it part of “a campaign
of publishing outrageous and untrue
statements”.
Her case was dismissed in 2016, and
in 2020 a judge ruled that she had de-
famed Gottwald with her assertion that
he had assaulted Perry.
“Sometimes I’m incredibly happy,
and then sometimes I have panic at-
tacks,” Kesha said in a May interview
with the Guardian to promote her new
album Gag Order. “That’s the truth. I’ve
been so sick of pretending everything is
all good.”
Specific details about the settle-
ment are unknown.
Friday 23 June 2023 The Guardian
3M pays $10.3bn to settle water pollution suit
over ‘forever chemicals’
Reuters
3M Co has reached a $10.3bn settlement
with a host of US public water systems
to resolve water pollution claims tied to
“forever chemicals”, the chemical com-
pany announced on Thursday.
The company said the settlement
would provide the funds over a 13-year
period to cities, towns and other public
water systems to test for and treat
contamination from per- and polyflu-
oroalkyl substances, or PFAS.
3M, which is facing thousands of
lawsuits over PFAS contamination, did
not admit liability, and said the money
will help support remediation at public
water systems that detect PFAS “at any
level”.
“We have reached the largest drink-
ing water settlement in American his-
tory, which will be used to help filter
PFAS from drinking water that is served
to the public,” Scott Summy, a lead
attorney for the water systems suing
3M, said in a statement.
3M had been scheduled to face a
test trial in South Carolina federal court
earlier this month in a lawsuit brought
More than 1.3bn adults will have diabetes by
2050, study predicts
Andrew Gregory Health editor
The number of adults living with
diabetes worldwide will more than
double by 2050, according to research
that blames rapidly rising obesity levels
and widening health inequalities.
New estimates predict the number
will rise from 529 million in 2021 to
more than 1.3 billion in 2050. No coun-
try is expected to see a decline in its di-
abetes rate over the next 30 years. The
findings were published in The Lancet
and The Lancet Diabetes & Endocri-
nology journals.
Experts described the data as
alarming, saying diabetes was out-
pacing most diseases globally, pre-
senting a significant threat to people
and health systems.
“Diabetes remains one of the big-
gest public health threats of our time
and is set to grow aggressively over the
coming three decades in every coun-
try, age group and sex, posing a se-
rious challenge to healthcare systems
worldwide,” said Dr Shivani Agarwal, of
the Montefiore Health System and the
Albert Einstein College of Medicine in
New York.
Separately, the UN has predicted
that by 2050 the world’s population will
be about 9.8 billion. That suggests that
by then between one in seven and one
in eight people will be living with di-
abetes.
The research authors wrote: “Type
2 diabetes, which makes up the bulk
of diabetes cases, is largely preventable
and, in some cases, potentially revers-
ible if identified and managed early in
Headlines
3M did not admit liability when reaching the settlement. Photograph: Nicholas Pfosi/Reuters
by city of Stuart, Florida. The judge
overseeing the case delayed the trial
the morning it was set to start.
Stuart claimed in its 2018 lawsuit
that the company made or sold fire-
Academics said diabetes cases would ‘grow aggressively’ in every country and among every age group. Photograph: Peter Byrne/PA Wire
the disease course. However, all evi-
dence indicates that diabetes preva-
lence is increasing worldwide, primarily
due to a rise in obesity caused by mul-
tiple factors.”
Structural racism experienced by
minority ethnic groups and “geographic
inequity” were accelerating rates of
diabetes, disease, illness and death
around the world, the authors said.
People from marginalised commun-
ities are less likely to have access to
essential medicines such as insulin, and
have worse blood sugar control, a lower
quality of life and reduced life expec-
tancy.
The pandemic has amplified di-
fighting foams containing PFAS that
polluted local soil and groundwater,
and sought more than $100m for filtra-
tion and remediation. It was one of
more than 4,000 lawsuits filed against
abetes inequity globally. People with
diabetes were twice as likely to de-
velop severe infection with Covid-19
and to die compared with those with-
out diabetes, especially among minor-
ity ethnic groups, the authors said.
The research outlines how the
large-scale and deep-rooted effects of
racism and inequity lead to unequal
impacts on global diabetes prevalence,
care and outcomes.
The negative impacts of public
awareness and policy, economic devel-
opment, access to high-quality care,
innovations in management, and soci-
ocultural norms were felt widely by
marginalised populations and will be
3M and other chemical companies.
Dubbed “forever chemicals” as they
do not easily break down in the human
body or environment, PFAS are used
in a wide range of products, from non-
for generations to come, it found.
“Racist policies such as residential
segregation affect where people live,
their access to sufficient and healthy
food and healthcare services,” said co-
author Leonard Egede of the Medical
College of Wisconsin. “This cascade
of widening diabetes inequity leads
to substantial gaps in care and clin-
ical outcomes for people from histor-
ically disenfranchised racial and ethnic
groups, including Black, Hispanic and
Indigenous people.”
The structural conditions in the
places people live and work have far-
reaching, transgenerational negative ef-
fects on diabetes outcomes across the
3
stick cookware to cosmetics, and have
been linked to cancer, hormonal dys-
function and environmental damage.
The US Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) has called PFAS an
“urgent public health and environ-
mental issue”.
The EPA has taken several steps
in recent years to tighten regulations
for the chemicals, and in March an-
nounced the first-ever national drink-
ing water standards for six of the chem-
icals.
3M in December set a 2025 deadline
to stop producing PFAS.
Three other major chemicals com-
panies – Chemours Co, DuPont de
Nemours Inc and Corteva Inc – an-
nounced earlier this month that they
had reached an agreement in principle
for $1.19bn to settle claims they conta-
minated US public water systems with
PFAS.
3M still faces PFAS-related lawsuits
filed by individuals with personal injury
and property damage claims, as well as
by US states over damages to natural
resources such as rivers and lakes that
were not part of the settlement.
world, according to the research.
Dr Alisha Wade, a co-author and an
associate professor at the University of
the Witwatersrand in South Africa, said:
“It is vital that the impact of social
and economic factors on diabetes is
acknowledged, understood and incor-
porated into efforts to curb the global
diabetes crisis.”
The charity Diabetes UK has pre-
viously said that the high number of
overweight or obese people – about
64% of adults in England – is translating
into an increase in cases of type 2 cases.
The condition is becoming increa-
singly common among those under the
age of 40 and in areas where there are
higher levels of deprivation.
The charity said the risk factors
of type 2 diabetes were “multiple and
complex” and included age, family his-
tory, ethnicity and weight.
Chris Askew, the chief executive
of Diabetes UK, said: “This important
study underlines the sheer scale of the
diabetes crisis we’re facing, both in the
UK and around the world.
“Your ethnicity, where you live and
your income all affect your chances of
getting type 2 diabetes, the care you re-
ceive and your long-term health, and
these are all interlinked.
“The need for concerted cross-
government action to address inequa-
lities in diabetes prevalence and out-
comes, as well as the underlying condi-
tions of ill health, such as poverty
and living with obesity, has never been
greater or more urgent.”

4 Headlines
George Santos: father and aunt revealed to
have guaranteed $500,000 bail
Martin Pengelly in Washington
The two people who guaranteed
George Santos’s $500,000 bail after the
Republican congressman was charged
with 13 counts of fraud, money laun-
dering and theft of public funds have
been revealed to be his father and an
aunt.
The revelation that Gercino dos
Santos Jr and Elma Preven were behind
Santos’s bail solves a running mys-
tery that fascinated Washington-watch-
ers and also an American public ob-
sessed with the travails of a politician
famous for playing fast and loose with
the truth.
Santos tried to stop his guarantors
being named, arguing disclosure could
threaten their safety amid a “media
frenzy” and “hateful attacks”.
Santos’s lawyer said that his client
would rather go to jail himself than
have his guarantors unmasked. But
Santos seemed to have backed off that
wish, by not asking to change the condi-
tions of his bail after a federal judge in
New York dismissed his appeal to keep
the names sealed.
Media organisations and the House
Ecological tipping points could occur much
sooner than expected, study finds
Jonathan Watts Global envi-
ronment editor
Ecological collapse is likely to start
sooner than previously believed, ac-
cording to a new study that models
how tipping points can amplify and
accelerate one another.
Based on these findings, the au-
thors warn that more than a fifth of
ecosystems worldwide, including the
Amazon rainforest, are at risk of a cata-
strophic breakdown within a human
lifetime.
“It could happen very soon,” said
Prof Simon Willcock of Rothamsted Re-
search, who co-led the study. “We could
realistically be the last generation to
see the Amazon.”
The research, which was published
on Thursday in Nature Sustainability,is
likely to generate a heated debate.
Compared with the long-established
and conclusively proven link between
fossil fuels and global heating, the
science of tipping points and their
interactions is relatively undeveloped.
The United Nations’ top science
advisory body, the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, has been
more cautious. In its latest report, it
said there was a chance of a tipping
point in the Amazon by the year 2100.
However, several prominent Brazil-
based scientists, including Carlos
George Santos at the US Capitol in Washington DC on 17 May 2023. Photograph: J Scott Applewhite/AP
ethics committee asked that the names
be revealed.
Santos, 34, won election in New
York last year, in a district covering
parts of Long Island and Queens. His
résumé has been shown to be large-
Deforestation of the Amazon, near Santarém, Brazil. Photograph: Brazil Photos/LightRocket/GettyImages
Nobre, have warned that this may come
much sooner. The new study under-
lines that alarming prospect. It ob-
serves that most studies until now
have focused on one driver of destruc-
tion, such as climate change or defore-
station. But when you combine this
with other threats, such as water stress,
degradation and river pollution from
mining, the breakdown comes much
quicker.
ly made-up and past behavior – some-
times allegedly criminal, other times bi-
zarrely picaresque – widely reported.
Santos has admitted to embel-
lishing his résumé but denies wrong-
doing. In court in May, he pleaded not
Lake Erhai in China collapsed
sooner than most observers expected.
According to Willcock, this was be-
cause projections had been based on
one factor – agricultural runoff that was
loading the water system with excess
nutrients – but other stresses com-
pounded and accelerated this degra-
dation. When climate variation, water
management and other forms of pol-
lution were added into the mix, the lake
guilty to all charges. If found guilty, he
could face up to 20 years in prison.
He has been dogged by controversy
and calls to resign. House Republicans,
however, deflected a motion to censure
Santos while party leaders have chosen
system quickly lost its resilience.
Overall, the team, comprised of
scientists fromSouthampton, Sheffield
and Bangor universities, as well as Ro-
thamsted Research,looked at two lake
ecosystems and two forests, using com-
puter models with 70,000 adjustments
of variables. They found that up to 15%
of collapses occurred as a result of new
stresses or extreme events, even while
the primary stress was maintained at a
The Guardian Friday 23 June 2023
not to move against him.
In January, Santos backed Kevin
McCarthy of California through 15 votes
for speaker, in the face of a rightwing
rebellion. McCarthy must govern with
an extremely narrow majority. Santos
has said he intends to run for re-elec-
tion next year. He is next due in court
on 30 June.
Neither Santos nor his lawyers
immediately commented on the identi-
fication of his guarantors.
In Washington on Wednesday,
Santos was among Republicans who
voted to censure Adam Schiff, a Cali-
fornia Democrat who led impeachment
efforts against Donald Trump.
The motion passed. On the House
floor, Dan Goldman, a New York Demo-
crat, told Republicans: “One of my
colleagues says, ‘We will hold mem-
bers accountable.’ You are the party of
George Santos. Who are you holding
accountable?
“The guy is an alleged and acknowl-
edged liar and indicted, and you protect
him every day. Don’t lecture us with
your projection and your defense of
Donald Trump. It’s pathetic, and it’s be-
neath you and it’s beneath this body.”
constant level. The lesson they learned
was that even if one part of an eco-
system is managed sustainably, new
stresses such as global warming and
extreme weather events could tip the
balance towards a collapse.
While the scope of the study was
limited, the authors said the results
showed the need for policymakers to
act with more urgency.
“Previous studies of ecological tip-
ping points suggest significant social
and economic costs from the second
half of the 21st century onwards. Our
findings suggest the potential for these
costs to occur much sooner,” the co-
author Prof John Dearing noted.
Willcock said the findings were
“devastating”, but said this approach –
of analysis through system dynamics –
also had a positive potential because it
showed that small changes in a system
could have big impacts. Although the
study focused on the negative aspect
of straws breaking the back of ecosys-
tems, he said the opposite could also
be true. Lake Erhai, for example, has
shown signs of recovery.
“The same logic can work in reverse.
Potentially if you apply positive pres-
sure, you can see rapid recovery,” he
said, though he emphasised time was
running out faster than most people
realised.
Friday 23 June 2023 The Guardian
Trump’s push for new sexual abuse trial is
‘magical thinking,’ E Jean Carroll says
Reuters
Donald Trump’s push for a new trial in
the civil case in which a Manhattan jury
last month found the former US pres-
ident sexually abused and defamed the
writer E Jean Carroll is “magical think-
ing”, Carroll’s lawyers said on Thursday.
Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024
Republican presidential nomination,
on 8 June asked for a new trial after the
jury awarded Carroll $5m, saying the
damages were excessive because the
jury did not find she was raped and
because the alleged conduct did not
cause her a diagnosed mental injury.
In court papers filed on Thursday in
opposition to Trump’s request, Carroll’s
lawyers maintained that the attack had
harmed her ability to have romantic
and sexual relationships, and she had
suffered intrusive memories.
They pointed to a psychologist’s tes-
timony at trial that Carroll had some
symptoms of post-traumatic stress dis-
order.
“Trump’s motion is nothing more
than his latest effort to obfuscate the
Republican donor invested in UK firm owned
by Tory peer close to Boris Johnson
Stephanie Kirchgaessner, Harry
Davies and Henry Dyer
A billionaire US hedge fund executive
and major donor to US Republican
candidates invested £1m in a British
company owned by a Conservative peer
who was close at the time to the then
prime minister, Boris Johnson.
Kenneth Griffin, the founder of Ci-
tadel, one of the largest hedge funds in
the world, made the personal invest-
ment in 2020 in a company set up
by Lord Howard of Rising, a Conserv-
ative peer whose Westminster mansion
served as Johnson’s leadership cam-
paign “nerve centre” a year earlier.
Lynton Crosby, the Australian stra-
tegist who is considered the polit-
ical mastermind behind electoral cam-
paigns for Johnson, David Cameron and
Theresa May, joined the company, Dal-
bini Limited, as a director three months
after the investment by Griffin, ac-
cording to Companies House records.
Sometimes referred to in press re-
ports as the “Wizard of Oz” due to his
successful election campaigns, Crosby
was brought back as an adviser to the
Tory party to helpwhen Johnson’s pre-
miership was in crisis amid the Par-
tygate scandal, which revealed that
multiple parties had been held in and
Headlines
Donald Trump in Bedminster, New Jersey, earlier this month. Photograph: Amr Alfiky/Reuters
import of the jury’s verdict by engaging
in his own particular Trump-branded
form of magical thinking,” her lawyers
wrote.
Lynton Crosby and Boris Johnson in 2012. Photograph: Alan Davidson/Rex/Shutterstock
around 10 Downing Street during the
height of the Covid pandemic. Crosby
came under scrutiny during this period
over lobbying by his CT Group on
behalf of clients. He denied any poten-
tial conflict of interests.
Company accounts suggest that
about £560,000 of funds Griffin and
Howard invested had been used by
March 2022. The records do not pro-
vide more information about how the
money was spent.
The hedge fund executive made the
investment in Dalbini a year after he
expanded his presence in London by
buying a Grade II*-listed Georgian man-
sion in the heart of Westminster for
Trump’s lawyers did not imme-
diately respond to a request for com-
ment.
Carroll’s lawsuit, filed in 2022, said
£95m.
A spokesperson for Griffin, one of
the world’s richest men, said he had
made the personal investment in Dal-
bini as part of a plan to establish “one
or more media ventures” in the UK “that
would compete with the Guardian and
other news organisations”.
Crosby, speaking on behalf of Dal-
bini, said in a statement that the com-
pany was now dormant and that the
investment opportunities it had ex-
amined were “entirely commercial in
nature”. He added that Dalbini “had no
connection to politics whatsoever”.
The investment raises questions,
however, about why Griffin – who has
Trump raped her in a dressing room
at the Bergdorf Goodman department
store in New York in the mid-1990s, and
defamed her by denying it happened.
an estimated net worth of $35bn –
would personally invest in a company
established by a British peer with close
links to key political figures.
Griffin was the third largest donor
in the US midterm election last year,
having donated about $73m to Repub-
lican candidates. He has also donated
millions of dollars to the Florida gov-
ernor, Ron DeSantis, who is running
for the Republican nomination for pres-
ident. It is not yet clear who Griffin –
who does not support Donald Trump –
will back in the upcoming contest for
the Republican nomination.
The billionaire made the £1m
investment in Dalbini via a private com-
pany, Media Holdings LLC. A person
close to him said it was a “purely per-
sonal” investment and unrelated to his
hedge fund company Citadel.
The spokesperson described
Howard as someone who had been
a personal friend of the hedge fund
executive for many years.
In a seeming breach of parlia-
mentary rules, Howard, a Eurosceptic
member of an English aristocratic
family, had not declared full details
about his involvement in Dalbini in
the House of Lords register of interests
until he was contacted by the Guardian.
The rules require members of the
House of Lords to disclose details about
5
Trump has called Carroll’s claims a
“hoax”.
Carroll, a former Elle magazine
advice columnist, filed a separate law-
suit in November 2019 for defamation
only.
That case has been bogged down
in appeals over whether Trump was
immune from being sued because he
had been president when he spoke. Car-
roll updated that lawsuit to seek $10m
from Trump after he called Carroll’s ac-
count “fake” and labeled her a “whack
job” in a CNN town hall after the jury’s
verdict in the 2022 lawsuit.
The case is one of several legal
woes facing Trump, the first current
or former US president to face crim-
inal charges, as he seeks to return to the
White House.
Last week, he pleaded not guilty
to 37 federal counts of retaining na-
tional defense documents at his Mar-a-
Lago club in Florida and obstructing an
investigation into his conduct. In April,
he pleaded not guilty to New York state
charges stemming from a 2016 hush
money payment to a porn star.
The hedge fund tycoon Kenneth Griffin
made the investment in Dalbini a year after
buying a Grade II*-listed Georgian mansion
in the heart of Westminster for £95m. Photo-
graph: Phil McCarten/Reuters
the nature of a company’s business
when not apparent from its name. How-
ever, while Dalbini was active, Howard
failed to disclose those details.
When initially contacted, Howard
described Dalbini’s business activities
as “confidential”. About a month later
his office amended his disclosure.
“Once you raised the lack of expla-
nation of Dalbini’s activities in Lord
Howard’s register of interests in the
House of Lords, the register has been
updated. He appreciates you drawing
this to his attention,” Howard’s sec-
retary wrote in an email.
She added: “Dalbini researched
possible opportunities but made no
investments.”

6 Headlines / News
Supreme court rules against Navajo nation in
Colorado River water dispute
Guardian staff and agency
The US supreme court on Thursday
ruled against the Navajo nation in a dis-
pute involving water from the drought-
stricken Colorado River.
Some of the main states that draw
water from the river – Arizona, Nevada
and Colorado – and water districts in
California that are also involved in the
case, had urged the court to decide for
them, which the justices did in a 5-4
ruling.
Colorado had argued that siding
with the Navajo nation would under-
mine existing agreements over the
share of dwindling water supplies and
disrupt the management of the river.
The Biden administration had said
that if the court were to come down in
favor of the Navajo nation, the federal
government could face lawsuits from
many other tribes.
Lawyers for the Navajo nation, lo-
cated in the south-west with a resident
population of about 175,000 and the
largest area of US land held by a Native
American tribe, had characterized the
tribe’s request as modest, saying they
simply were seeking an assessment of
the tribe’s water needs and a plan to
meet them.
The facts of the case go back to
treaties that the tribe and the fed-
eral government signed in 1849 and
1868. The second treaty established the
Trump documents investigation examined
New Jersey club from outset
Hugo Lowell in Washington
Federal prosecutors investigating
Donald Trump’s retention of national
security material were examining evi-
dence within weeks of the FBI search
of Mar-a-Lago last year that he might
have handled classified documents at
his Bedminster club in New Jersey, ac-
cording to two people close to the
matter.
The indications of classified docu-
ments at Bedminster so alarmed prose-
cutors that they focused part of the
investigation on whether Trump might
have transported the materials or dis-
closed their contents there in addi-
tion to refusing to return them to the
government, the people said.
Trump was charged this month
with retaining national defense infor-
mation and obstruction of justice, in
an indictment that also notably alleged
that Trump discussed a military plan to
attack Iran and waved a classified map
of Afghanistan in front of a staffer in
2021 at the New Jersey property.
The suspicion that Trump tra-
velled with classified documents be-
tween Mar-a-Lago, his winter residence,
and Bedminster, his summer residence,
started early in the criminal inves-
tigation that intensified after the FBI
search and culminated in Trump being
accused of violating the Espionage Act.
A dried out lake stands near the Navajo nation town of Thoreau, New Mexico. Photograph: SpencerPlatt/Getty Images
reservation as the tribe’s “permanent
home” – a promise the Navajo nation
says includes a sufficient supply of
water. In 2003 the tribe sued the federal
government, arguing it had failed to
consider or protect the Navajo nation’s
water rights to the lower portion of the
Colorado River.
A federal trial court initially dis-
missed the lawsuit, then an appeals
court allowed it to go forward.
During arguments in the case in
Donald Trump at his Bedminster club in New Jersey on 13 June 2023. Photograph: Amr Alfiky/Reuters
A justice department spokesperson
declined to comment.
Within weeks of the FBI search
of Mar-a-Lago, the justice department
sought to act on the indications of clas-
sified documents at Bedminster when
it told the Trump legal team that prose-
cutors believed the former president
March this year, Justice Samuel Alito,
on the bench’s right wing and cur-
rently embroiled in a scandal over
gifts and his pushback via the media,
pointed out that the Navajo nation’s
original reservation was hundreds of
miles away from the section of the
Colorado River it now seeks water from.
Today, the Colorado River flows
along what is now the north-western
border of the tribe’s reservation, which
extends into New Mexico, Utah and Ari-
still possessed classified materials, the
people said.
The message in the letter, which
became a formal court motion filed
under seal weeks later, was clear: ar-
range for new searches of all of the
Trump properties because, as of that
time, the only place that had been
zona. Two of the river’s tributaries, the
San Juan River and the Little Colorado
River, also pass alongside and through
the reservation. Still, one-third of the
approximately 175,000 people who live
on the reservation do not have running
water in their homes.
The government said it has helped
the tribe secure water from the Colo-
rado River’s tributaries and provided
money for infrastructure, including
pipelines, pumping plants and water
combed for classified documents was
the Mar-a-Lago resort.
Whether to acquiesce with the re-
quest split the Trump legal team.
Trump in-house counsel Boris Epsh-
teyn and Trump lawyer Chris Kise were
uneasy about being ordered around by
the government, while the other Trump
The Guardian Friday 23 June 2023
treatment facilities. But it said no law or
treaty required the government to deal
with general water needs.
The states argued that the Navajo
nation was attempting to make an end
run around a supreme court decree
that divvied up water in the river’s
lower basin.
It was a 5-4 ruling, written by Justice
Brett Kavanaugh.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, typically an
ultra-conservative but also a strong
champion of Native American rights
and tribal sovereignty, dissented along-
side liberal-leaning Sonia Sotomayor,
Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jack-
son.
He wrote, in part: “In the Navajos’
view, the federal government’s efforts
to assist the Navajos with their water
needs did not fully satisfy the trust obli-
gations of the United States under the
1868 treaty.
“The Navajos filed suit seeking to
compel the United States to take affir-
mative steps to secure needed water for
the tribe – including by assessing the
tribe’s water needs, developing a plan
to secure the needed water, and poten-
tially building pipelines, pumps, wells,
or other water infrastructure.
“The states of Arizona, Nevada, and
Colorado intervened against the tribe
to protect those states’ interests in
water from the Colorado River.”
lawyers Tim Parlatore and Jim Trusty
suggested a cooperative approach.
The legal team ultimately decided
on working with the justice department
and, in one exchange, asked prose-
cutors which Trump properties and
where at the Trump properties they
wanted them to search.
The prosecutors were noncom-
mittal and told the Trump legal team
that they were not in the business
of providing specific locations because
they might not know about all of the
properties in the former president’s
control. But, notably, they did specif-
ically request a new search of Bedmin-
ster.
Bedminster had not previously
been searched after Trump received
a subpoena last May for any clas-
sified-marked documents because it
had been issued to the Trump political
office, which is registered at Mar-a-Lago
and a building in Palm Beach – not the
golf club in New Jersey.
(The reason why the subpoena was
issued to the Trump political office
was not certain, though the justice
department typically issues subpoenas
to organizations because of the fifth
amendment act of production doctrine
that protects individuals from being
compelled to turn over contraband.)
But when the new searches of
Continued on page 7
Friday 23 June 2023 The Guardian
Continued from page 6
the Trump properties by contractors
took place, they found no classified
documents at Bedminster, according to
people familiar with what they certified
to the then chief US judge in Wash-
ington, Beryl Howell, who was over-
seeing the grand jury litigation.
Rare combination of tornadoes and softball-
sized hail leads to deaths in Texas
Associated Press
A line of severe storms produced what a
meteorologist calls a rare combination
of multiple tornadoes, hurricane-force
winds and softball-sized hail in north-
west Texas, killing at least four people
and causing significant damage around
the town of Matador. National Weather
Service meteorologist Matt Ziebell says
the supercell developed about 8pm
local time on Wednesday near Amarillo
before striking Matador, injuring nine
people in addition to the four killed
and causing widespread destruction.
Ziebell says the storm later produced
109mph (175km/h) winds at Jayton in
addition to the four-inch or larger hail.
“That is certainly rare to see all at
the same time, killer tornadoes, hur-
ricane-force winds and softball-sized
hail,” Ziebell said.
Wednesday “was definitely a rare
combination of high-end wind shear
and storms of extreme instability”, ac-
cording to Ziebell.
Modi’s visit focuses attention on caste
discrimination in US
Atul Dev
Maya K came to the US in 2002. She was
born in Hyderabad in India, in a family
considered to be untouchable by the
upper-caste Hindus.
Castes are the hereditary classes of
Indian society, each with its role and
status defined in the scriptures of Hin-
duism. At the top of the ladder are
the Brahmins, who claim an exclusive
right to perform religious rituals; at the
bottom are the Dalits, who were denied
the right to education and consigned to
the jobs that required hard labour, or
were considered impure.
Caste discrimination was outlawed
in India at the time of the coun-
try’s independence, but in recent years
Hindu mobs have lynched Dalits who
try to assert their identity with pride.
Earlier this month, in the most recent
such killing, a 22-year-old was beaten
and stabbed to death in Maharashtra,
a state co-ruled by the Hindu natio-
nalist Bharatiya Janata party of the
prime minister, Narendra Modi, for
celebrating the birth anniversary of BR
Ambedkar, the Dalit economist and
lawyer who wrote India’s constitution.
Modi, who is currently on a state
visit to the US, has faced criticism
during his tenure for the persecution
News
The results of the Bedminster
search left prosecutors uneasy given
the earlier evidence about indications
of classified documents at the club,
the people said, and prompted them to
ask the Trump team for a custodian of
records to attest that no further docu-
ments remained in Trump’s possession.
It was when the Trump legal team
Pat Smith looks through his restaurant, Matador Diner, after a tornado Thursday in Matador, Texas. S Photograph: Annie Rice/AP
There were widespread power out-
ages across the region, with more than
India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, speaks in Alexandria, Virginia, on Wednesday. He
has stated that ‘Indianness’ is the only caste in India. Photograph: Will Oliver/EPA
of minorities, the collapse of consti-
tutional institutions, and the impri-
sonment of government critics in
India. His party, critics allege, aims
to make India a Hindu nation, where
Dalits, Muslims and other minorities
are treated as second-class citizens. For
some in the US, the repercussions con-
tinue abroad, making the pomp and
circumstance of a Modi state visit feel
personal.
“As Indians have come to this coun-
try,” Maya (not her real name), who
lives in Washington DC, said, “they have
brought this discriminatory mindset
with them.”
declined to make a custodian available
– principally because Trump did not
have one and suggested instead that
Parlatore could testify to the grand jury
about the new searches of the Trump
properties – that prosecutors sought
contempt proceedings, the people said.
The absence of classified docu-
ments at Bedminster led prosecutors
900 customers without power in the
Matador and Jayton areas, according to
Maya had heard snide comments
about her caste and faced discrim-
ination while pursuing her under-
graduate studies in India, but she did
not imagine that would continue in the
US. “When I started working, I had an
Indian American manager,” she told me.
“As soon as he found out my caste, he
started ignoring me completely, it got to
a point when he would just pretend to
not have heard what I said in a meeting,”
she said.
In 2008, Maya founded Ambedkar
Association of North America, named
after BR Ambedkar. The group now has
about 700 members spread across the
to suspect that Trump treated it like
a vacation home, where he took boxes
of things away from Mar-a-Lago at the
start of the summer, and then returned
with all of his things to Mar-a-Lago at
the end of the season, the people said.
Though it remains uncertain when
exactly prosecutors learned about the
audio tape of Trump discussing the
poweroutage.us.
The worst damage appeared to be in
US and Canada with the goal of helping
the underprivileged communities back
in India with financial support, and
fighting against caste discrimination in
the US. According to a Carnegie Endow-
ment for International Peace survey
about half of all Hindu Americans iden-
tify with a caste group.
“Caste is still not a protected cate-
gory of discrimination in most of the
Unites States,” she said.
Modi talks about eliminating caste
in his public speeches – he recently
said that “Indianness” is the only caste
in India – but members of his own
party support and protect upper-caste
Hindu vigilantes. While hatred against
minorities has been a frequent fea-
ture of India’s history, Hindu vigilantes
have been emboldened by the ascent
of Modi, whose political career was
launched in 2002 amid a massacre of
Muslims in Gujarat. Ever since, Modi
has been one of the most divisive poli-
ticians in India, and those divisions are
also beginning to animate the Indian
diaspora in the US.
In July 2020, government regulators
in California sued Cisco Systems, a
tech conglomerate based in San Jose,
accusing it of discriminating against an
Indian American employee and allow-
ing him to be harassed by two man-
agers because he was from a lower
7
military plan to attack Iran in July
2021 at Bedminster, their suspicions
were confirmed by March when they
subpoenaed Trump aide Margo Martin,
who made the recording, to confirm its
authenticity.
Matador – a town of about 570 people
70 miles (112km) north-east of Lubbock
in Motley county.
A phone call to the Motley county
sheriff’s office was not immediately re-
turned.
The Texas department of emer-
gency management district coor-
dinator, Bill Durham, said more infor-
mation would be released later on
Thursday morning.
Reports from storm chasers and
meteorologists on social media showed
considerable damage around Matador,
with damaged homes, utility lines, trees
and infrastructure.
Ziebell said thunderstorms were
likely to continue on Thursday, but the
risk of severe weather with tornadoes
was unlikely.
Wednesday’s tornado outbreak
came six days after a tornado left three
people dead and more than 100 injured
in Perryton in the northern Texas Pan-
handle.
Califiornia state senator Aisha Wahab,
center, with Thenmozhi Soundararajan,
right, promote a bill which adds caste
as a protected category in the state’s an-
ti-discrimination laws, in Sacramento in
March. Photograph: José Luis Villegas/AP
caste. In May 2021, federal law enforce-
ment agents raided a Hindu temple in
New Jersey after hundreds of lower-
caste workers accused a Hindu sect
with close ties to India’s ruling party
of luring them from India and forcing
them to do unpaid labour. In August
2022, in a parade to mark the occa-
sion of India’s Independence Day in
Edison, New Jersey, the upper-caste
Hindu organisers deployed a bulldozer
tacked with the picture of Yogi Aditya-
nath, a hardliner of Modi’s party and
chief minister of the country’s most
populous state, Uttar Pradesh, where a
number of Muslim homes have been
razed by bulldozers on his orders. That
same month, at another parade in
Continued on page 8

8 News
Continued from page 7
Anaheim, California, Indian Americans
charged at protesters who were hold-
ing signs that read, “Abolish caste” and
“Protect India’s Muslim lives”.
Maya has been involved with the
gathering movement to ban caste
discrimination in the US. In 2019,
Brandeis University in Massachusetts
added caste to its nondiscrimination
policy. Since then, the California State
University system; the University of
California, Davis; Brown University in
Rhode Island; and Colby College in
Maine have followed suit. In 2021, Har-
vard’s graduate student union forced
the university to add measures to pre-
Invasion of giant African land snails prompts
quarantine in south Florida
Richard Luscombe in Miami
An invasion of giant African land snails
has alarmed residents in south Flor-
ida, where authorities have established
a quarantine area to try to deal with the
destructive pests.
The invasive snails have voracious
appetites and consume at least 500
species of plants, according to Flor-
ida’s department of agriculture, which
is fearful for the state’s lucrative grow-
ing industries of citrus and other fruits
and vegetables.
In response, it has set up a “treat-
ment area” covering several dozen
blocks of the city of Miramar, south-
west of Fort Lauderdale, and is warning
residents that the slimy creatures also
pose a serious health risk to humans
by carrying the rat lungworm parasite,
known to cause meningitis.
Under the quarantine order, the
department says it is unlawful “to move
a giant African land snail or a regulated
article, including, but not limited to,
plants, plant parts, plants in soil, soil,
yard waste, debris, compost or building
materials”.
It intends to spray the area with the
chemical snail bait metaldehyde, which
Dozens injured as apple-sized hailstones hit
Colorado concertgoers
Richard Luscombe
Dozens of people were injured by hail-
stones the size of apples that pelted
concertgoers in Colorado on Wednes-
day night, with at least seven need-
ing hospital treatment following the
powerful storm.
Witnesses described the onslaught,
at a concert by the former One Direc-
tion singer Louis Tomlinson at the Red
vent caste discrimination in their con-
tracts.
Beyond the campuses, in February
this year, Seattle added caste to the
city’s anti-discrimination laws, becom-
ing the first in the US to do so. Kshama
Sawant, the Indian American member
of the Seattle city council who wrote,
presented and fought for the legislation
in the council meetings told the press
she had received thousands of emails in
support of the bill.
Sawant herself grew up in an upper-
caste family in western India, “listening
to the pejorative things that are said
about the lower castes”, she told me.
Fighting caste, she said, was not just
about correcting individual behaviour.
The invasive snails have voracious appetites and consume at least 500 species of plants, according to Florida’s department of agriculture.
Photograph: Joe Skipper/Reuters
is approved for residential use.
The snails are illegal to import or
possess in the US without a permit, and
authorities have been trying for years
to eradicate them. They can damage
buildings, as well as destroying crops,
Rocks amphitheater in Morrison, west
of Denver, as “straight out of a horror
movie”.
Video of the hailstorm was posted
to social media showing people racing
to take shelter and others covering
their heads with boxes taken from mer-
chandise stands. “I have bruises and
welts all over my back and legs,” con-
cert attendee Jess Thompson wrote in a
post.
Another concertgoer, identified by
“It is a societal system of oppression,
which needs to be taken up at an
institutional level,” she said. “Hence the
need to make laws about it.”
Her campaign to outlaw caste
discrimination in Seattle, Sawant said,
faced widespread backlash from Hindu
nationalist organisations in the US,
such as the Hindu American Foun-
dation and the Coalition of Hindus of
North America. She credited the victory
in the city council to the alliance of
lower-caste and Muslim activists that
supported her – a socialist. “Without
that alliance, it wasn’t going to happen,”
she said.
Rasheed Ahmed, the executive
director of Indian American Muslim
and in some quarters are even consi-
dered a delicacy.
In March, customs officers in De-
troit intercepted a traveler from Ghana
trying to smuggle six snails into the
country in a suitcase.
the Denver Gazette as Nicole, posted
a similar account: “It started pelting
people with hail … and I luckily found
shelter under a sign. I am bleeding and
have huge bumps on my head from the
hail.”
In a statement posted to Twitter,
the West Metro Fire fire department
said: “Seven people [were] transported
to area hospitals with non-life-threat-
ening injuries. A total of 80 to 90 people
[were] treated on scene. Injuries in-
Council, told me that he sees an al-
liance of India’s persecuted minor-
ities forming among Indian Amer-
icans. “Our Hindu nationalist oppo-
nents have financial backing and diplo-
matic support, they are probably larger
in number and greater in influence,
but we are standing together to coun-
ter them,” he told me. “Religious
fundamentalism in India is something
we all have to fight together; it is not the
problem of one community.”
“Ambedkarite women have been
working on this stuff for years,”
Maya said, pointing out that Equal-
ity Labs, an organisation run by Then-
mozhi Soundararajan, had conducted a
quantitative survey in 2017 about caste
In one of the biggest outbreaks, offi-
cials in Miami-Dade discovered almost
150,000 snails in more than two dozen
separate areas of the county in 2014,
many clinging to houses, eating plas-
ter and stucco to gain calcium for their
clude cuts and broken bones.”
Officials canceled the concert out of
fear for public safety and British singer
Tomlinson posted to Twitter his con-
cern for those affected or injured.
“Devastated about the show to-
night, hope everyone’s ok, I’ll be back!
Even though we didn’t play the show I
felt all of your passion! Sending you all
love!” he wrote.
Organizers advised those who could
to seek shelter in their vehicles as the
The Guardian Friday 23 June 2023
discrimination in the US, which formed
the basis of a 2019 congressional brief-
ing on caste in Washington DC.
In March this year, Aisha Wahab, a
member of the California state senate
and the first Afghan American woman
to be elected to a public office in the
US, introduced SB 403, a bill that aims
to ban caste-based discrimination in
America’s most populous state.
“We will have to make alliances not
just with socialists but Democrats and
even Republicans, and we are prepared
to do that,” Maya said. “Our goal,” she
said, “is to outlaw caste discrimination
in the entire United States – then we
will be able to use our real names in
public.”
shells, and eating their way through
gardens.
Invasions have occurred in other
areas of Florida on an almost annual
basis since. Pasco county was placed
under quarantine last June after more
than a thousand of the snails, females
of which can produce up to 2,500 eggs
a year, were discovered in New Port
Richey.
Experts believe the snails first ar-
rived in Miami in 1966, and num-
bers swelled to almost 18,000 within
six years. According to an ABC News
report, the species was declared eradi-
cated twice in Florida, in 1975, and
again in 2021.
“The primary danger is that they’re
voracious plant eaters, so they can do
an awful lot of damage to both land-
scapes and to agriculture,” the Univer-
sity of Florida entomologist William
Kern told Miami’s Local 10 news station.
“If the snails crawl on uncooked
vegetables, you can have a problem
with it getting a human infection. With
any invasive species, if you find it early,
you may be able to control it or elim-
inate it.”
storm began, the Gazette reported, with
some returning to their cars to find the
windshields shattered.
The newspaper said loudspeaker
announcements advised people to
come back to the amphitheater after
receiving an all-clear, only for a second
wave of hail to send them running for
cover again less than an hour later. Offi-
cials canceled the concert at that point.

10
Trump critic Will Hurd announces
Republican run for president
Associated Press
Former Texas congressman Will Hurd, a
onetime CIA officer and fierce critic of
Donald Trump, announced on Thurs-
day that he is running for president,
hoping to build momentum as a more
moderate alternative to the Republican
primary field’s early frontrunner.
Hurd, who made the announce-
ment on CBS Mornings, served three
terms in the House through January
2021, becoming the chamber’s only
Black Republican during his final two
years in office. He said in a video
launching his White House bid that the
“soul of our country is under attack”,
reminiscent of Democrat Joe Biden’s
slogan about the 2020 race being a
“battle for the soul of the nation”.
“Our enemies plot, create chaos, and
threaten the American dream. At home,
illegal immigration and fentanyl stream
into our country. Inflation, still out of
control. Crime and homelessness grow-
ing in our cities,” Hurd says in the video.
“President Biden can’t solve these prob-
lems – or won’t. And if we nominate
a lawless, selfish, failed politician like
Vice Media to be acquired by buyers from
Fortress Investment Group – report
Jenna Amatulli
Vice Media, whose assets include Vice
News, Motherboard, Refinery29 and
Vice TV, is slated to be acquired by a
group of buyers from Fortress Invest-
ment Group, according to a report in
the New York Times.
Just last month, the organization
filed for bankruptcy.
Amid multiple bids, Fortress’s bid
was reportedly the most “qualified”
buyer for the standard set by Vice. The
Times also noted that when companies
declare bankruptcy, subsequent deals
need to be approved by a bankruptcy
judge who decides if the buyers’ plan is
“sustainable for the business”.
An upcoming bankruptcy auction
for the company was originally sche-
duled for Thursday and has been called
off, per the Times.
A source disclosed to the Guardian
that GoDigital, a privately held multi-
national group that owns the Latino
digital media company NGLmitú,
music distributor Cinq Music, and
more, had been in negotiations to ac-
quire Vice, but that fell through.
In a statement to the Guardian,
GoDigital said they “developed a plan
News
Will Hurd in Washington in December 2019. Photograph: Andrew Harrer/EPA
Donald Trump – who lost the House,
the Senate, and the White House – we
all know Joe Biden will win again.”
Democrats won control of the
House in 2018 and the Senate in 2020
Vice Media's office building is seen in Los Angeles, California, on 15 May 2023. Photograph: Jae C Hong/AP
not just for the survival of Vice and
its brands, but for their rejuvenation,
growth, and expansion” and “put in
a bid that properly reflects a future
where everyone has a stake”. They
claimed to have “worked until the
last minute to make adjustments that
but saw the GOP narrowly retake the
House majority during last year’s mid-
terms.
Hurd has long struck a similar tone.
He tweeted last summer that “the
would help meet a productive compro-
mise” but ultimately “the sellers and we
have different values”.
In an email obtained by the Guar-
dian sent to Vice staff on Thursday
morning, co-CEOs Bruce Dixon and
Hozefa Lokhandwala wrote: “Today we
GOP can’t build sustainable majorities
if our candidates are praising Hitler on
the radio, getting arrested by the FBI
for participating in the insurrection or
being evaluated solely on their loyalty
filed a notice with the bankruptcy court
designating the ‘stalking horse bidder’
as the successful bidder for the com-
pany.”
While noting that their lenders
included Fortress Investment Group,
Soros Fund Management and Monroe
The Guardian Friday 23 June 2023
to the guy who lost the last election.”
Although Hurd is no fan of Trump,
he also has been critical of Biden, tell-
ing NBC’s Meet the Press in May that
the prospect of another election pit-
ting the current president against the
former one would be “the rematch from
hell”.
Hurd has visited Iowa and New
Hampshire in recent months, and those
close to him said he was seriously
mulling a presidential run since early
spring. Trump’s recent indictment on
federal felony charges for mishandling
classified documents could potentially
open the way for critics like Hurd to
gain traction in the primary.
Hurd joins a crowded primary field
with Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, Senator
Tim Scott of South Carolina, former UN
ambassador Nikki Haley, former New
Jersey governor Chris Christie, former
Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson,
North Dakota governor Doug Burgum,
activist Vivek Ramaswamy, radio host
Larry Elder and Miami mayor Francis
Suarez, in addition to Trump.
Capital, Dixon and Lokhandwala did
not disclose who the “superior” bidder
was, but added that they would be
“presenting the sale for approval by
the bankruptcy court tomorrow, and
expect the transaction to close on or
around Friday July 7th.”
The co-CEOs claimed the sale
would be “an important milestone” for
the company to have “financial health
and stability”.
In a statement from Writers Guild
of America East members at Vice and
IATSE MPEG Local 700 members, the
group said they were looking “forward
to working with Fortress Investment
Group and the other buyers on anoth-
er fair contract”. They added that, in
the wake of Vice Media’s recent bank-
ruptcy declaration, “many of our re-
cently laid-off colleagues have not re-
ceived a single dollar of their contrac-
tually-owed severance for almost two
months”.
They implored Fortress Investment
Group, Soros Fund Management, and
Monroe Capital, as well as past and
present executives at Vice, to contri-
bute to a GoFundMe to “help our laid-
off colleagues”.
Vice Media declined the Guardian’s
request for comment.
Friday 23 June 2023 The Guardian
Ohio derailment: fire chiefs call for more
training on hazardous chemicals
Associated Press
The fire chiefs whose departments
were the first on the scene of Feb-
ruary’s fiery train derailment in east-
ern Ohio agree that firefighters need
more training about hazardous chem-
icals, but that it would be hard for them
ever to be fully prepared to deal with a
disaster of that magnitude.
Their evidence was heard as the
National Transportation Safety Board
(NTSB) is holding a rare field hearing in
East Palestine, Ohio, over the next two
days.
Thursday’s proceedings are focused
on the emergency response to the
derailment and the crucial decision
officials made days later to release the
toxic vinyl chloride in five tank cars
and burn it to keep those cars from
exploding.
That decision sent a towering
plume of black smoke over the town
near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border and
prompted the evacuation of about half
of East Palestine’s 5,000 residents. Offi-
cials have defended the decision as the
best option when faced with the pros-
pect of an explosion that would have
sent shrapnel into the town.
But residents have been left with
many questions about possible lin-
gering health effects even though state
and federal officials say tests have
shown the air and water in town re-
mains safe.
The East Palestine fire chief, Keith
Drabick, said there was a consensus in
the command center that releasing the
chemicals from the cars and burning
them was the “least bad option”.
But Drabick and other first res-
ponders who testified at the hear-
ing agreed that firefighters need more
training – particularly volunteer fire-
fighters who were first on the scene
Rightwing war on ‘woke capitalism’ partly
driven by fossil fuel interests and allies
Dharna Noor
The American right wing’s widening
fight against what it calls “woke capi-
talism” is partly driven by fossil fuel
interests or industry allies, according to
a new report published on Thursday.
Conservatives often use the term
“woke capitalism” to refer to environ-
mental, social and corporate gover-
nance – or ESG – criteria used to screen
investments based on their environ-
mental and social implications.
Just this year, Republican law-
makers in 37 states introduced a stun-
ning 165 pieces of anti-ESG legislation,
according to the new report from the
strategic research and advisory firm
Pleiades Strategy.
“The trend has been rampant,” said
Connor Gibson, who co-authored the
report.
The 165 proposals sought to employ
a variety of tactics, ranging from impos-
News
The Ohio crash in February. Residents have been left with many questions about possible lingering health effects. Photograph: Gene J
Puskar/AP
after the derailment – on how to handle
hazardous materials.
“I don’t think you can ever be pre-
pared for something like this,” Drabick
said.
Ohio officials said volunteer fire-
fighters receive only 36 hours of ini-
tial training when they are certified –
significantly less than the 200 hours
professional firefighters receive – and
that no hazardous materials training is
included.
The fire chiefs said the initial re-
sponse to the derailment was compli-
cated because the radios used by the
different departments do not work with
each other.
It also took some time for emer-
gency responders to find out exactly
what the train was carrying because the
first firefighters on scene did not have
access to the AskRail app that railroads
The Texas governor, Greg Abbott, and Mandy Drogin of the Texas Public Policy Foun-
dation – which began attacking ESG in 2020 – at a bill signing on 12 June 2023. Photograph:
Jay Janner/AP
ing limits on public contracts and re-
stricting pension managers to forc-
ing disclosures and combatting federal
developed to provide that information.
The train crew that had that infor-
mation was a mile away after moving
the locomotive and did not imme-
diately connect with first responders.
Drabick said it took about 45 mi-
nutes for his department to gather
information about what was on the
train.
The railroad company has been
working ever since the 3 February
derailment to dig up and remove conta-
minated soil and water from the derail-
ment site. The Environmental Protec-
tion Agency and Ohio officials have
been overseeing the cleanup.
Norfolk Southern has committed
more than $62m to helping the town re-
cover. The company has said it expects
the derailment to cost it nearly $400m,
although insurance will cover some of
that and any other companies that are
investment rules.
The researchers examined news ar-
ticles, fiscal notes and statehouse tes-
found responsible may have to contri-
bute. But the total cost will probably
increase over time as various lawsuits
filed by states, the federal government
and residents work their way through
the courts.
The NTSB said in its preliminary
report that an overheated bearing on
one of the railcars probably caused the
derailment, but it may take more than
a year before the agency publishes its
final report. The bearing started heat-
ing up miles before the derailment, ac-
cording to sensors Norfolk Southern
has along the tracks, but it did not get
hot enough to trigger an alarm until
just before the crash. The crew had
little time to react.
The derailment, and several others
since February, generated nationwide
concern about railroad safety and
prompted members of Congress to pro-
timony related to each bill. They found
that the majority of them bear strong
resemblances to model bills crafted or
circulated by four influential rightwing
thinktanks: the American Legislative
Exchange Council, the Heritage Foun-
dation, the Heartland Institute and the
Foundation for Government Accoun-
tability.
Each of the four organizations
is affiliated with the far-right think-
tank coalition State Policy Network,
whose members have also fought to
pass punitive anti-pipeline protest laws
and which has received funding from
groups linked to fossil fuel billionaires
Charles and the late David Koch.
Advocacy for many of the bills was
also led by fossil fuel-tied groups, in-
cluding the Texas Public Policy Foun-
dation (TPPF), which has accepted at
least $8.8m from organizations linked
to the Kochs since 2012, and has also
received funding from ExxonMobil,
ConocoPhillips and Chevron. The TPPF
11
pose a package of reforms. Norfolk
Southern’s chief executive, Alan Shaw,
was grilled at two different Senate hear-
ings where he apologized for the derail-
ment and promised to make things
right in East Palestine.
All the Democrats on the House
committee on oversight and accoun-
tability sent Shaw a letter that was re-
leased on Thursday morning express-
ing frustration that his railroad has
refused to produce documents they
asked for related to the way it uses
trackside detectors and some of the
operating decisions Norfolk Southern
has made in recent years as it slashed
its workforce to reduce costs.
The railroad has followed the indus-
try practice to rely more on running
fewer, longer trains so it doesn’t need
as many crews and locomotives. Rail
unions have raised concerns about
whether all the cuts have made rai-
lroads riskier, while executives have de-
fended their approach.
Norfolk Southern’s lawyers told the
congressional committee that the rail-
road couldn’t release the internal docu-
ments because of the ongoing NTSB
investigation. Committee Democrats
have rejected that explanation and said
nothing about the NTSB investigation
should keep the committee from look-
ing into the matter and the railroad
knows that. So far, the railroad has pro-
vided only two small batches of docu-
ments that appear to be publicly avail-
able.
“We are profoundly troubled by
Norfolk Southern’s illegitimate efforts
to mislead committee Democrats and
use NTSB’s investigation as a shield to
impede Congressional oversight,” the 21
Democrats wrote in their letter.
began attacking ESG as far back as 2020
and says it was behind a pioneering
anti-ESG bill passed in Texas in 2021.
The American Petroleum Institute,
the nation’s largest oil and gas lobbying
organization, has also worked to shape
anti-ESG policies. And representatives
from several other fossil fuel interest
groups have supported the efforts as
well, the researchers say.
Despite their well-connected cham-
pions, just 22 of the 165 proposed anti-
ESG bills progressed through stateh-
ouses, the report says.
“The dark-money-funded attacks
on the freedom to invest responsibly
hit deep opposition from business,
labor and environmental advocates in
statehouses across the country this
year,” said Frances Sawyer, founder of
Pleiades Strategy and co-author of the
report. “Our report shows that the effort
to weaponize government funds, con-
Continued on page 12

12
Continued from page 11
tracts and pensions to prevent com-
panies and investors from considering
real financial risks is not a winning plat-
form.”
Many of the bills that did pass were
watered down before they became law,
the report says. But that doesn’t mean
they won’t have real negative conse-
quences.
Opponents of the successful pieces
of legislation fear they could costtax-
Modi’s US visit prompts condemnation and
protest from Muslim leaders
Erum Salam
Narendra Modi’s state visit to the US
has prompted condemnation and pro-
test from Muslim leaders, lawmakers
and other allies.
US house representatives Rashida
Tlaib, Representative Ilhan Omar,
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez, Cori Bush and Kweisi Mfume
are among those who have said they
will boycott the Indian prime minister’s
address to Congress on Thursday in
light of the violence and repression of
the media and religious minorities like
Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and Dalits
carried out under his rightwing natio-
nalist government.
“Modi has a notorious and extensive
record of human rights abuses,” Tlaib,
Bush, Omar and Jamaal Bowman said
in a statement. “He was complicit in
the 2002 Gujarat riots that killed over
1,000 people, leading to the revocation
of his US visa. His government has
openly targeted Muslims and other reli-
gious minorities, enabled Hindu natio-
nalist violence, undermined democ-
racy, targeted journalists and dissi-
dents, and suppressed criticism using
authoritarian tactics like internet shut-
downs and censorship.
“It is shameful to honor these
abuses by allowing Modi to address a
joint session of Congress. We refuse to
participate in it and will be boycotting
the joint address. We stand in solidarity
with the communities that have been
harmed by Modi and his policies. We
must never sacrifice human rights at
the altar of political expediency and we
urge all members of Congress who pro-
As Modi visits, Indian American lawmakers
face balancing act
Ankita Rao in Washington
Ahead of Narendra Modi’s state visit to
Washington this week, Pramila Jayap-
al – a progressive Democratic congress-
woman – circulated a letter signed
by dozens of congressional lawmakers
calling for Joe Biden to acknowl-
edge the erosion of human rights and
democracy during the Indian prime
minister’s nine years in power.
“A series of independent, credible
reports reflect troubling signs in India
News / Politics
payersmillions, collectively. And the
implications for climate policy could
be even larger, because the legislation
could have a chilling effect on future
climate policy.
The laws could create an envi-
ronment that discourages support for
shareholder resolutions that aim to
lower emissions, said Sawyer. It could
also make it harder for states to take
advantage of the clean energy invest-
ments offered by the Inflation Reduc-
tion Act, she said, due to fears that
Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar at a news conference in 2021. Tlaib and Omar are among those who have said they will boycott Narendra
Modi’s address to Congress on Thursday. Photograph: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
fess to stand for freedom and democ-
racy to join us in boycotting this embar-
rassing spectacle.”
In a statement, the Center on Is-
lamic Relations (Cair), the US’s larg-
est Muslim civil liberties and advo-
cacy organization, also said it “wel-
comes pledges by members of Congress
to boycott Thursday’s joint meeting
of Congress honoring India’s far-right,
anti-Muslim Prime Minister Narendra
Modi”.
Cair’s research and advocacy direc-
tor, Corey Saylor, said: “Leaders do the
right thing in the face of pressure to
toward the shrinking of political space,
the rise of religious intolerance, the tar-
geting of civil society organizations and
journalists, and growing restrictions on
press freedoms and internet access,” it
warned.
The letter was also signed by Sena-
tors Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth
Warren; notable in their absence, how-
ever, were several other Indian Amer-
ican politicians and Democrats, in-
cluding Ro Khanna, Shri Thanedar, Ami
Bera and Raja Krishnamoorthi.
Modi’s state visit comes at a conse-
those funds would drive competition
with the industries the bills favor.
“The full extent of those costs, we
don’t know,” she said.
Anti-ESG legislation has increa-
singly popped up in statehouses over
the past two years. In 2021, North
Dakota lawmakers passed a law calling
for a study of the implications of state
funds making investments “for the pur-
pose of obtaining an effect other than a
maximized return to the state”.
The same year, Texas lawmakers
comply with bad ethics. Boycotting any
event honoring Prime Minister Modi
centers our value of religious freedom
over cynical politics. We applaud these
elected officials and urge others to join
their leadership.”
Saylor added: “The honor of a state
dinner and joint meeting of Congress
signals to Modi that no one will inter-
fere in his repression of Indian religious
minorities and journalists.”
Modi was once denied a visa to visit
the US by the state department in 2005
because of his violent persecution of
minority faiths in Gujarat, where he
quential time for the small but record
number of Indian Americans in Con-
gress.
Many of these same lawmakers
have led some of the country’s most
vocal and comprehensive responses to
the threats against US democracy, from
the bipartisan focus on China to voting
rights legislation.
But speaking out on India’s crack-
down on religious freedoms, press
and speech comes with political risk:
some lawmakers serve large diaspora
constituencies and surveys suggest at
passed a law prohibiting state funds
from contracting with or investing in
companies that “boycott” fossil fuel
stocks, based on a policy passed four
years earlier that aimed to prevent
Texas from doing business with entities
that support the Boycott, Divestment,
Sanctions, or BDS, movement, for Pales-
tine.
Similar legislation began to appear
in statehouses across the country.
Last year, Idaho, New Hampshire, Ten-
nessee, Oklahoma and Kentucky all
served as chief minister.
More recently, anti-Muslim policy
and violence in India and in Indian
communities abroad have ramped up
under Modi.
In 2019, citing militancy in the
region, Modi stripped Kashmir – India’s
only Muslim-majority state – of its
constitutional autonomy in what was
seen as an effort to make India a Hindu-
first nation, eroding the pluralistic and
secular reputation for which the coun-
try was once known.
That same year, the Citizenship
Amendment Act was passed, amend-
least half of Indian Americans remain
supportive of Modi. The voting bloc is
also only growing in political influence
and importance – now 4 million strong
and on track to be the largest among
Asian Americans.
Meanwhile, a growing number of
Indian Americans are speaking out
against Modi’s brand of Hindu natio-
nalism – Hindutva – and its reper-
cussions in India and abroad.
“It’s difficult terrain for Indian
American politicians to have to navi-
gate or lead a response to the Modi
The Guardian Friday 23 June 2023
passed various forms of anti-ESG legis-
lation.
The legislation is unpopular, the
authors say, but they still expect to
see more of it in the coming years
as more policymakers take the energy
transition more seriously.
“We think this is the latest iteration
of climate denial and obstruction and
delay,” said Gibson.
ing the country’s citizenship law so that
naturalization could be expedited for
Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and
Christian migrants from Afghanistan,
Bangladesh and Pakistan, but not Mus-
lims. As a result, violent clashes broke
out in 2020 in the capital city of New
Delhi. About 50 people were killed,
most of whom were Muslim.
Modi’s government has also been
accused by rights groups of turning
a blind eye to the violence com-
mitted against Muslim cow farmers by
rightwing Hindutva vigilantes with the
aim of protecting cows, a holy animal in
Hinduism.
Tlaib, who is one of only three
Muslim members serving in the House,
said: “It’s shameful that Modi has been
given a platform at our nation’s capital –
his long history of human rights abuses,
anti-democratic actions, targeting Mus-
lims & religious minorities, and cen-
soring journalists is unacceptable. I will
be boycotting Modi’s joint address to
Congress.”
A letter was also signed by 75 Demo-
crats, detailing the human rights viola-
tions under Modi and urging Biden to
“discuss the full range of issues impor-
tant to a successful, strong, and long-
term relationship between our two
great countries”.
Modi’s visit to the US is seen as
an attempt by both countries to forge
closer ties so the south Asian country
can stop relying on Russia for mili-
tary arms as it continues to wage war
against Ukraine.
It is also speculated that Modi is
using this US visit to repair his image
after receiving several global “flawed
democracy” ratings.
visit,” said Sara Sadhwani, a politics pro-
fessor at Pomona College and author
and researcher of the Indian American
Elections Survey. “It’s one thing to sup-
port the relationship of the US and
India. It’s another thing to support a
leader.”
Khanna, a congressman from Cali-
fornia, represents the largest Asian
American district in the country. The
Democratic-majority district is home to
some of the most concentrated south
Continued on page 13
Friday 23 June 2023 The Guardian
Continued from page 12
Asian communities in the US, and
Khanna was recently named co-chair of
the Congressional Caucus on India and
Indian Americans.
But when Khanna has broached
the topic of Modi in recent years, he
has quickly met backlash from Modi
supporters and critics alike. In 2019, he
tweeted a call for Hindu American poli-
ticians to “stand for pluralism, reject
Hindutva, and speak for equal rights
for Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists
and Christians”. More than 200 Indian
American organizations immediately
lodged complaints, and called for him
to resign from the Congressional Pakis-
tan Caucus.
Last month, when Khanna joined
the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy,
in inviting Modi to address Congress,
advocacy organisations and activists
such as the Indian American Muslim
Council expressed their own disap-
pointment.
“I support very strongly the US-
India strategic relationship and I also
believe it has to be grounded in a
commitment to the rule of law, to plu-
ralism, to human rights – we have to
build and strengthen the relationship,”
Khanna told the Guardian, adding that
the “vast majority” of his constituents
felt the same. His office did not imme-
diately comment on Jayapal’s letter.
Krishnamoorthi, a congressman
King Charles honours ‘immeasurable’ impact
of Windrush generation
Alexandra Topping and agencies
King Charles has hailed the pioneers
of the Windrush generation, saying it
is crucially important to recognise the
“immeasurable” difference they made
to Britain, as the UK marked the 75th
anniversary of the arrival of the HMT
Empire Windrush.
The king joined the descendants of
“pioneers” at a service that celebrated
the achievements of a generation who
were urged to travel to Britain to help
with labour shortages in the postwar
years only for many of their number to
face threats of deportation in their later
years.
In a personal tribute in the foreword
of a book that accompanies a display
of portraits celebrating the Windrush
generation, the king paid tribute to the
“indomitable generation”.
“History is, thankfully and finally,
beginning to accord a rightful place
to those men and women of the Win-
drush generation,” Charles wrote. “It is,
I believe, crucially important that we
should truly see and hear these pio-
neers who stepped off the Empire Win-
drush at Tilbury in June 1948 – only
Politics / World News
Left: Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister. Right: Pramila Jayapal, who circulated a
letter urging Biden to acknowledge the erosion of human rights and democracy in India.
Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images; Nathan Posner/Shutterstock
from Illinois also acknowledged the
complicated issues of democracy in
India, but pointed to the country’s role
in the context of the US’s tensions with
China.
“What’s very important is that right
now democracy is under threat [in the
US and India] and we have to do what
it takes to buck up,” he said. “I’ve lived
through January 6 – it represents how
fragile our own democracy is. At the
same time I’m aware of what’s hap-
pening in India and concerned.
“We have to make sure we leve-
rage each other’s strengths and pro-
mote democracy everywhere. Because
remember there is an alternative model
out there that is being shopped by the
King Charles laughs with Edna Henry at a Buckingham Palace reception to mark the 75th
anniversary of the arrival of HMT Empire Windrush. Photograph: Reuters
a few months before I was born – and
those who followed over the decades,
to recognise and celebrate the immea-
surable difference that they, their child-
ren and their grandchildren have made
to this country.”
Windrush: Portraits of a Pioneering
Generation honours the accom-
plishments of the Windrush gener-
ation and those who followed, and the
images are now on public display at the
Palace of Holyroodhouse. Created by
black artists selected by the king, they
Chinese Communist party.”
Such qualified acknowledgments of
the threats facing democracy in India
don’t go far enough for some.
“The White House and Congress
are making a terrible mistake by cele-
brating Modi on this trip,” said Arjun
Sethi, a Georgetown Law professor and
human rights activist. “Human rights
abuses continue to worsen under his
administration and they should be
asking him very difficult questions in-
stead of honoring him.”
Sethi pointed to numerous internet
blackouts that the Modi government
has used to quell dissent and the ex-
treme tactics to stifle the press, wheth-
er by blocking accounts on Twitter or
will also be displayed for two weeks on
500 billboards and 600 shopping centre
screens across the UK.
On Thursday in St George’s Chapel
at Windsor Castle, the royal family’s
place of worship, the king joined 300
guests including young people from
schools across England, dignitaries and
representatives of charities and com-
munity projects.
The Rev Rose Hudson-Wilkin, the
bishop of Dover, said: “They are pio-
neers who paved the way for gener-
deporting journalists. But he said the
onus was not just on lawmakers, but on
members of the community itself.
“There is a well-known pheno-
menon among south Asians in America
who proclaim to be liberal and suppor-
ters of human rights – except when
it comes to Modi, violence and hate
against marginalized communities in
India,” he said.
Sadanand Dhume, a senior fellow
focused on south Asian politics at the
American Enterprise Institute, said law-
makers like Khanna have to do a “ba-
lancing act” to serve both a progressive
base and Modi supporters. But he also
said the chasm between Indian Amer-
icans supporting Modi and those who
were either critical or indifferent of him
was only expected to grow with the
younger population.
“Hindu nationalism as an ideology
is innately unappealing, and there’s a
large proportion of the Indian Amer-
ican community that is not Hindu,” he
said. “The ideas espoused by the BJP
[Modi’s party] are simply not compat-
ible with liberal democracy as we
understand it.”
The White House, in the mean-
time, has done its own balancing act.
Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national secu-
rity adviser, said the administration will
“make our views known” on India’s
press and religious freedoms, according
to Reuters. “We do so in a way where we
don’t seek to lecture or assert that we
ations who came after them, not
merely to survive but to thrive.”
The congregation heard the words
of John Agar’s Remember the Ship –
with its stirring exhortation “to remem-
ber the ship in citizenship” – recited
by pupils from the Archbishop’s School
in Canterbury. A choir from St Martin-
in-the-Fields high school for girls sang
Something Inside (So Strong), while the
gospel hymn His Eye is on the Sparrow
was sung by Jermain Jackman.
Paulette Simpson, the deputy chair
of the Windrush Day advisory panel,
said the Windrush pioneers had been
invisible for too long. “They have been
part of the fabric of modern Britain and
it is heartwarming to see that not only
the pioneers but their descendants in
various walks of life are being recog-
nised and written in to British history,”
she said.
The HMT Empire Windrush first
docked in England on 22 June 1948 at
Tilbury Docks in Essex, bringing people
to Britain from the Caribbean who had
answered the call to help fill postwar
labour shortages.
The celebrations of their achieve-
ments come after the Windrush scan-
dal, exposed by the Guardian in 2018,
13
Pramila Jayapal’s letter warned ‘of
troubling’ signs in India over the erosion
of human rights. Photograph: Mandel Ngan/
AFP/Getty Images
don’t have challenges ourselves.
With all of the careful political cal-
culus, Thursday’s events promise to be
contentious. Some members of Con-
gress – including Ilhan Omar and Ra-
shida Tlaib – will boycott Modi’s ad-
dress to the chambers because of anti-
Muslim sentiment. And thousands of
Indian Americans, which will probably
include influential political donors, in-
vited to Modi’s address could encounter
protesters outside the White House
complex.
But for some Indian American law-
makers, the ability to simultaneously
represent the US and strengthen a rela-
tionship with India is worth protecting.
“I just want to focus on the people
of both countries,” said Thanedar, a con-
gressman from Michigan. “I’d like to see
a much stronger relationship with India
than we’ve seen in the last several dec-
ades.”
The Labour peer Valerie Amos sits next
to King Charles during the service at St
George’s Chapel. Photograph: WPA/Getty
Images
in which many British citizens, mostly
from the Caribbean, were denied access
to healthcare and benefits and threat-
ened with deportation despite having
the right to live in the UK.
Charles has said the Windrush
generation rebuilt a country, after arriv-
ing with little more than what they
were able to carry with them. He said
their stories “help light the path of
progress and remind us of a funda-
mental truth: that though we might
all be different, every individual, no
matter their background, has some-
thing unique to contribute to our so-
ciety in a way that strengthens us all.”

14
TikTok chief operating officer V Pappas steps
down after five years
Guardian staff and agency
TikTok’s chief operating officer, V
Pappas, is stepping down after five
years with the short-video company.
In an email to staff on Thursday, the
Australian said they would be taking
on an advisory role for the company
during the transition.
“Given all the successes reached at
TikTok, I finally feel the time is right to
move on and refocus on my entrepre-
neurial passions,” said Pappas.
The news was first reported by the
Information.
Shou Chew, the chief executive of
TikTok, announced on Thursday in a
memo to employees that Zenia Mucha,
previously a 20-year veteran at Disney,
will join TikTok as chief brand and
communications officer.
Adam Presser, TikTok’s chief of
staff, will become head of operations
and oversee content, user operations
and distribution, Chew said.
TikTok, which is owned by the Chi-
Only 18% of leave voters think Brexit has
been a success, poll finds
Heather Stewart
Only 18% of 2016 leave voters believe
Brexit has been a success, according to
polling for the thinktank UK in a Chang-
ing Europe – but 61% think it will turn
out well in the end.
Seven years on from the refe-
rendum campaign, the pollsters Public
First asked more than 4,000 leavers
how they felt now about Brexit. Less
than a fifth of them – 18% – said it had
gone well, or very well, while 30% said
it had gone neither well nor badly, and
26% said it was still too soon to say.
With inflation stuck at historic
highs and GDP stagnating, economists
have increasingly warned about the
continuing impact of Brexit on trade
and investment. Less than a third of the
leave voters polled (29%) believe Brexit
has had a negative economic impact,
however.
Among those leavers who believe
Brexit has not gone well, many blame
politicians for handling it badly –
a narrative espoused by the former
Ukip leader Nigel Farage, who recently
claimed that “Brexit has failed”. In this
group, 70% said Brexit could have gone
Anger in Japan as report reveals children
were forcibly sterilised
Justin McCurry in Tokyo
Campaigners in Japan have reacted an-
World News
V Pappas in Washington last year. They joined TikTok from YouTube, where they worked for nearly eight years. Photograph: Rex/
Shutterstock
nese company ByteDance, has come
under increasing scrutiny over its ties
Pro-Brexit supporters celebrate outside parliament in London on 31 January 2020. Photograph: Neil Hall/EPA
well, and almost half (48%) believe that
politicians could have made it work but
did not even try.
Implementing the decision to leave
the EU has repeatedly split the
Conservative party in the past seven
grily to a government report revealing
that children as young as nine were
among thousands of people who were
forcibly sterilised under a eugenics law
to China.
The US government, and more than
years. Wrangling over the UK’s rela-
tionship with the EU led to the defene-
stration of Theresa May and helped
Boris Johnson to secure an 80-seat
majority in 2019 by promising to “get
Brexit done”.
that was not repealed until the 1990s.
The 1,400-page report, submitted
to parliament this week, details how,
between 1948 and 1996, about 16,500
half of US states, have prohibited the
app on government devices over con-
The UK in a Changing Europe direc-
tor, Anand Menon, said disappointment
about the way Brexit has been managed
is likely to exacerbate mistrust of poli-
ticians.
“While very few people think Brexit
people were operated on without their
consent under the law, which aimed
to “prevent the birth of poor-quality
descendants … and to protect the life
The Guardian Friday 23 June 2023
cerns of Chinese access to American
user data, and the Biden administration
has threatened a national ban unless
ByteDance sells its shares. In May, Mon-
tana became the first US state to ban
the app. TikTok, as well as several users,
have sued the state in response.
US lawmakers last week introduced
new legislation to protect Americans’
user data from being used by US adver-
saries.
Other governments, including those
of Canada and Australia, have banned
use of the app on government devices
as well.
TikTok has denied Chinese author-
ities could access data from its users.
Pappas, who was born in Darwin
and grew up in Brisbane, joined TikTok
from YouTube, where they worked for
nearly eight years.
Their departure follows the exit of
another key executive in May, when
its head of trust and safety, Eric Han,
stepped down.
is going well, a large number of leav-
ers also believe it is still too soon to
make a definitive judgment. Many leave
voters believe Brexit has not been a suc-
cess because politicians have let them
down. The danger is that this will lead
to an erosion of faith in politics and
politicians,” he said.
Despite the dissatisfaction among
many leavers with the way Brexit has
been managed, there is little sign in the
polling of a wholesale change of heart
– perhaps helping to explain Labour
and the Liberal Democrats’ reluctance
to focus on Brexit in campaigning.
A large majority of those polled –
72% – said they would vote again the
way they did in 2016 even knowing
what they know seven years later; while
72% also said they wanted to stop dis-
cussing Brexit.
Rachel Wolf, a founding partner of
Public First, said: “People like Farage are
playing into a more general view that
politicians messed it up. On the other
hand, people are not exactly keen to
keep talking about Brexit. ‘Get Brexit
done’ – ie make it go away and stop talk-
ing about it – still works.”
and health of the mother”. Most of the
victims were women.
Continued on page 15
Friday 23 June 2023 The Guardian
Continued from page 14
Another 8,000 other people gave
their consent – almost certainly under
pressure – while almost 60,000 women
had abortions because of hereditary ill-
nesses.
The two nine-year-olds who were
sterilised were a boy and a girl, the
report said.
The victims’ long campaign for re-
dress has highlighted the Japanese
state’s mistreatment of people with
disabilities and chronic conditions in
the period after the second world war.
In 2019, MPs passed legislation
offering each victim government
compensation of ¥3.2m ($22,800) – an
amount campaigners have said does
not reflect the suffering the victims had
experienced. The application deadline
for the payment is due to expire in April
2024, but to date only 1,049 have re-
ceived the sum, according to media re-
ports.
Victims of the sterilisation pro-
gramme have campaigned for decades
seeking financial damages and recog-
nition of the physical and mental an-
guish they endured.
So far, four courts have awarded
damages to victims, but others have
sided with the government, saying that
the 20-year statute of limitations had
passed. Lawyers have argued that the
victims learned of the nature of their
surgery too late to meet the legal dead-
Australian politicians bought Nazi artefacts,
auction house director claims
Mostafa Rachwani
An Australian auction house that sold
an extensive collection of Nazi artefacts
online has defended the sale by stating
politicians were among the buyers.
Jewish groups are outraged at the
sale of the “blood-stained items” that
included signed pictures of Hitler,
Himmler and Rommel, a striped
concentration camp cap, a “Jewish
winter overcoat” with yellow star at-
tached, picture albums of dead soldiers
and PoWs and personal photo albums
of SS officers.
Danielle Elizabeth Auctions, based
in Southport on the Gold Coast, pro-
moted last weekend’s auction of 240
items under the banner: “Huge Militaria
Sale. Get it Before History is Banned &
Erased.”
The artefacts also included posters
of Hitler, uniforms, helmets, daggers,
antisemitic propaganda posters and a
Nazi vase.
Danielle Elizabeth Auctions’ man-
aging director, Dustin Sweeny, de-
fended the Nazi sale, saying it was
not illegal and “lots of politicians” had
bought items.
“I can honestly say I’ve never even
met a neo-Nazi. The people buying our
historical artefacts are collectors, poli-
ticians, lawyers, emergency doctors and
history professors,” he told Guardian
Australia. “It’s legal, it isn’t illegal, we
aren’t selling drugs to kids.”
When asked who the politicians
were, Sweeny refused to provide fur-
ther details, stating the auction house
didn’t divulge the identity of pur-
chasers.
“There are lots of politicians, but
World News
Junko Iizuka was forcibly sterilised when she was 16-years-old under Japan's Eugenic Protection Law. Photograph: Daniel Hurst/The
Guardian
line to seek redress.
Germany and Sweden had sim-
ilar measures in place, but have since
apologised to victims and provided
compensation. Both countries laws
were repealed decades before Japan’s
were.
Earlier this month, a high court
rejected demands for damages from
two women, including Junko Iizuka,
who was 16 when she was taken to a
Lot 219 in the auction, Pictures From The Life Of The Fuhrer, sold for $280. The director of Danielle Elizabeth Auctions has said politicians
were among the buyers of items in the sale. Photograph: Danielle Elizabeth Auctions
I can’t divulge names or what they
buy, or how much they spend. Quite
often we have buyers’ agents who
make purchases for people’s collec-
tions, where they don’t want people out
there screaming about it,” he said.
“Everyone is now trying to dig and
find out who it is to point fingers, but
I can’t divulge names or information
about our buyers.”
Sign up for Guardian Australia’s
free morning and afternoon email new-
clinic in north-east Japan and forced to
have a mystery operation that, she later
discovered, would prevent her from
ever having children.
“Eugenics surgery deprived me of
all of my modest dreams of a happy
marriage and children,” Iizuka, 77, told
reporters this week.
Iizuka, who goes by a pseudonym
and disguises her face with a hat and
mask in public, said the procedure
sletters for your daily news roundup
The auction house’s description of
Lot 158 – Jewish Concentration Camp
and Atrocity Photos – reads in part:
“Many of these are very disturbing to
put it mildly … there are a number
of very gruesome photos including
Execution Photos, Piles of Dead Bodies,
Firing Squad pictures, photos inside the
Concentration camps including many
prisoner profile pictures, and there is
even an Original Jewish Passport in-
had destroyed her most important rela-
tionships.
“As soon as I told my husband,
whom I trusted, that I had had sur-
gery and was unable to have children,
he left me and demanded a divorce,”
she said. “I became mentally ill and
was unable to work. I have been diag-
nosed with post-traumatic stress dis-
order. Eugenics surgery turned my life
upside down.”
cluded.” Following instructions on how
to bid, the item description ends: “Thk
You, and enjoy the sale.”
Dr Dvir Abramovich, the chair of the
Anti-Defamation Commission, called
on politicians to disclose if they had
bought any of the items.
“No one will be getting a free pass or
cover on this issue,” he said.
“I call on every member of the
federal parliament to disclose wheth-
er they own Nazi memorabilia or ob-
15
After the report’s publication, the
chief cabinet secretary, Hirokazu Mat-
suno, said the government “sincerely
reflects on and deeply apologises” for
the “tremendous pain” victims suffered
through forced sterilisation.
The report noted that sterilisation
under the now defunct eugenics law
– which allowed authorities to carry
out the procedure on people with
intellectual disabilities, mental illness
or hereditary disorders to prevent the
birth of “inferior” children – was a
requirement for admission to some
welfare facilities or for marriage.
Koji Niisato, a lawyer representing
the victims, praised the report for re-
vealing the full horror of forced steri-
lisation, but said it left important ques-
tions unanswered. “The report did not
reveal why the law was created, why it
took 48 years to amend it or why the
victims were never compensated,” Nii-
sato said, according to the Kyodo news
agency.
Iizuka, who will appeal against the
ruling in her compensation case, said
she was still suffering from trauma
more than six decades after she was
sterilised without her consent.
“I and the other victims are getting
old, and some have died,” she said. “I’m
sick and often have to go to hospital.
But we must not allow the harm that
was inflicted on us to remain hidden in
the darkness.”
tained these blood-stained items from
last weekend’s revolting auction. If they
have, they need to explain why it is
OK for the extermination and dehuma-
nisation of millions to have a tag price
and be offered to the highest bidder.”
Abramovich said anyone who had
bought items would also need to out-
line why they were “contributing to this
ghastly profiteering from the proceeds
of history’s worst crime as well as
the glorification and mainstreaming of
Hitler’s legacy in Australia”.
He noted there was legislation
before the federal parliament to ban the
public display and sale of Nazi symbols.
The bill, introduced in mid-June,
will make it an offence to seek to profit
from such material in stores or online.
It will not ban private ownership or
transfers of artefacts that are not for
profit.
The federal attorney general, Mark
Dreyfus, said on Thursday evening:
“The government’s position on this
could not be clearer. I’d have to ask why
anybody would want to own these sym-
bols that glorify hatred and the horrors
of the Holocaust.”
The NSW Jewish Board of Depu-
ties chief executive, Darren Bark, said
he supported the legislation and such
items should be used for “educational
purposes” only.
“The NSW Jewish Board of Deputies
welcomes the proposed federal legis-
lation banning the trade of these sym-
bols and continues to work to ensure
that these disgusting auctions are il-
legal in NSW,” he said.
“Unless used for educational pur-
poses or in other reasonable settings,
Continued on page 16

16
Continued from page 15
Nazi symbols are a threat to our entire
country and have no place in our tole-
rant, multicultural society.
“These symbols are chilling re-
China barbecue restaurant explosion kills 31
after gas leak
Agence France-Presse
At least 31 people have been killed
when an explosion ripped through a
restaurant in the north-western Chi-
nese city of Yinchuan on the eve of a
popular local holiday, according to state
media.
“A leak of liquefied petroleum gas
… caused an explosion during the
operation of a barbecue restaurant,”
state news agency Xinhua said of the
Wednesday evening blast, citing the re-
gional Communist party committee.
Seven more people were receiving
medical treatment, the agency said,
with one of them in a “critical con-
dition”. Two others had suffered severe
burns, two had minor injuries and two
had scratches caused by flying glass,
Xinhua said.
The explosion at about 8:40pm
local time on Wednesday took place at
Gales forecast as adventurer reaches halfway
point in bid for Rockall record
Severin Carrell Scotland editor
An adventurer living alone on the
barren islet of Rockall, 230 miles
(370km) west of the Outer Hebrides, is
halfway to completing a record-break-
ing stay, while enduring “atrocious”
Atlantic weather.
Chris “Cam” Cameron, a teacher and
former soldier, is often soaked and bit-
terly cold. He landed on Rockall more
than three weeks ago with two compa-
nions to raise £50,000 for military char-
ities and beat the 45-day occupation
record, set nearly 10 years ago.
“My dad was a sea captain who used
to go to sea for 12 months at a time,” said
Cameron. “I want to highlight being
away from family in difficult situations
and doing it out of duty. That’s why I
want to raise this money.
“And for the veterans who put
themselves at risk all their days and are
too proud to ask for help when they
most need it. We owe them that. It’s not
about the record at all.”
After broadcasting to more than
7,000 radio hams for several days to
raise money, his companions left him
World News
minders of a horrific period in history
and belong in museums to remem-
ber the horrors of the Holocaust, not
flogged off to the highest bidder at auc-
tion.”
Bark said the artefacts were an af-
Firefighters work at the fire scene following a gas explosion at a barbecue restaurant in Yinchuan. Photograph: Video Obtained By
Reuters/Reuters
A drone image of Chris ‘Cam’ Cameron and his initial two companions on the isolated
Atlantic outcrop Rockall. Photograph: Aaron Wheeler for Rockall: The Edge of Existence
documentary
alone in a survival pod on a narrow gu-
ano-encrusted area of the rock known
as Hall’s Ledge on 2 June.
Rockall’s sheer-sided peak is 17
metres above sea level and entirely
exposed to the Atlantic’s often fierce
weather – waves are known to swamp
the rock.
After three days of heavy winds
and waves, Cameron is bracing himself
for a force 8 gale forecast this week-
front to the Jewish community, Aus-
tralian soldiers who fought the Nazis,
their descendants, the LGBTQ+ com-
munity and “our democratic values”.
Another auction by David G Smith
Auctions of Bathurst – scheduled for
end, which is expected to directly strike
Hall’s Ledge. He is reconfiguring his sur-
vival pod and fixing a new safety line to
tie himself to a bolt fixed into the gra-
nite.
“That way, if everything does get hit
by a massive wave and washed away, I
will be independently attached,” he said
on WhatsApp. “That’s my job for today
while there is a rest in the weather. I
pray that the storm either dies out or
this weekend – also features Nazi
memorabilia including helmets, pins,
daggers and badges.
The auction house declined to com-
ment when contacted on Thursday.
NSW, Victoria, Queensland, WA and
moves north. But today is a calm day –
the first in three days.”
Cameron, who is compiling a jour-
nal, writing poetry and taking daily
meteorological readings, has been sent
poems about Rockall written by Anne
Osbourn, a professor of biology and
plant scientist at the John Innes Centre
in Norwich.
Osbourn said she had become intri-
gued by Rockall during the Covid-19
lockdowns and had corresponded with
Nick Hancock, a chartered surveyor
from West Lothian who set the current
occupation record of 45 days in 2014.
Cameron, a Royal Navy reservist for
30 years who now lectures to military
personnel, said on Wednesday he ex-
pected to leave Rockall on about 20
July, when a calm weather window was
forecast.
That is also when the chartered
yacht he used to sail there, the Taeping,
is available to rescue him, short of the
60-day occupation target he had set.
“The 50-day mark is when there is a
break in the weather according to our
stats and an available window in the
vessel’s itinerary,” he said. “£50k for 50
days also sounds better.
The Guardian Friday 23 June 2023
Tasmania have all moved to ban the
display of Nazi symbols in recent years
in a bid to curb far-right extremism.
• Additional reporting by Paul Karp
and Josh Butler
the Fuyang Barbecue Restaurant in a
residential area of downtown Yinchuan,
the capital of the Ningxia autonomous
region.
Footage on state broadcaster CCTV
showed more than a dozen firefighters
working at the site as smoke poured
out of a gaping hole in the restaurant’s
facade. Shards of glass and other debris
littered the darkened street, which is
also home to a number of other eateries
and entertainment venues.
The ministry of emergency
management said local fire and rescue
services dispatched more than 100
people and 20 vehicles to the scene in
the wake of the blast.
The rescue efforts had concluded
by 4am on Thursday, it said.
The explosion occurred on the eve
of the three-day Dragon Boat festival
holiday, when many in China go out and
socialise with friends.
Chris ‘Cam’ Cameron: ‘I want to highlight
being away from family in difficult situa-
tions and doing it out of duty.’ Photograph:
Sam Frost/The Guardian
Nicola, Cameron’s wife and a pri-
mary school teacher, said she and their
two teenage children spoke to him
twice a day but that the family tended
not to dwell on where Cameron was
or the risks he was facing. The narrow
ledge he occupies is frequently very
slippery, with a sheer drop to the sea.
Cameron’s colleagues have given
him a football with a handprint painted
on to take to Rockall: a facetious ref-
erence to the volleyball adopted by
Tom Hanks in the film Cast Away and
nicknamed Wilson.
“I think he has this need to prove
himself,” Nicola said. “But I wish he had
just bought a sports car instead.”
Friday 23 June 2023 The Guardian
Temple visits rise in China as jobless young
people seek spiritual assistance
Amy Hawkins
In the search for a job in a gloomy econ-
omy, many young people in China are
hoping for divine intervention.
According to data released by the
Chinese travel platform Qunar, the
number of visitors to temple scenic
spots increased by 367% in the first
quarter of this year, compared with the
same period in 2022.
Much of that increase can be ac-
counted for by the opening up of tour-
ist and cultural destinations since zero-
Covid restrictions were abandoned in
December. But some other religious
sites are also experiencing increases in
visitors compared with their pre-Covid
levels.
Nearly 2.5 million tourists visited
Mount Emei in Sichuan, one of the four
holy mountains in Chinese Buddhism,
between January and May. That is over
50% more than in the same period in
2019.
According to Trip.com, another
travel platform, about half of the tem-
plegoers in January and February were
born after 1990. Millennials and Gen Z
are part of a cohort of young people
facing record levels of unemployment.
In May, the unemployment rate for 16-
to 24-year-olds hit 20.8%. China’s dif-
ficult economic recovery from zero-
Indian minister invites opposition for talks
over ‘dire’ Manipur situation
Amrit Dhillon in Delhi
India’s home affairs minister, Amit
Shah, has called opposition parties for
talks on Saturday to discuss an out-
break of ethnic violence in Manipur
state in the north-east, in a sign that
the government has acknowledged the
situation has spun out of its control.
More than 100 people have died
and 50,000 have been displaced since
clashes broke out in early May between
members of the Kuki ethnic group, who
mostly live in the hills, and the Meitei
people, the dominant community in
the lowlands. Churches, temples, shops
and businesses have been destroyed.
It is uncommon for Narendra Modi’s
government to consult the opposition.
“They’ve realised the water has
gone above their heads,” said Neerja
Chowdhary, a political analyst. “Ma-
nipur is close to lawlessness and the
government has realised the situation
cannot be allowed to fester. Nothing
has worked. And it’s not just Manipur
– the entire north-east of the country, a
very volatile region, will be affected if
things don’t improve.”
Congress, the main opposition
party, has not yet decided whether
it will attend the talks. Pawan Khera,
a party spokesperson, said there had
been a “lack of concern for Manipur at
the highest levels” and described the
situation in the state as “dire”.
World News
Tourists visit Jianfu temple in Xi'an, north-west China, last month. Photograph: Xinhua/Shutterstock
Covid and slowdowns in the education,
property and technology sectors have
squeezed opportunities for fresh gra-
duates, causing many to have more
faith in deities than their degrees.
The phrase “incense-burning youth”
has caught fire on social media, refer-
ring to young people who have turned
to spiritual offerings in an attempt to in-
crease their prospects. “Between going
Indian army soldiers on patrol earlier this month amid an outbreak of ethnic violence in the north-eastern state of Manipur. Photograph:
Indian Army/Reuters
Tensions in the state came to a
head last month between the major-
ity Meitei, who are mostly Hindus
and live in and around the state cap-
ital, Imphal, and the mainly Christian
Kuki tribe in the surrounding hills. The
clashes were sparked by resentment
among Kukis towards Meitei demands
for access to economic benefits and
quotas in government jobs and edu-
cation reserved for hill people.
forward and going to work, I choose in-
cense,” is one popular catchphrase.
The slogan reflects a desire to pray
for self-improvement, as well as the
decision of some young people to opt
out of the rat race altogether. It has
been linked to neijuan,or “involution”,
the term used to describe the intense
pressure felt by young people in China,
where putting in more effort often feels
The opposition has criticised Shah
and Modi for not visiting the state
sooner after the violence began on 3
May. Shah went to Manipur on 29 May
where his proposal of a “peace panel”
died in the water when both commun-
ities refused to participate.
The army and paramilitary forces
have been struggling to quell the vi-
olence. The Kukis have declared they
have no faith in the Meitei-dominated
futile.
Many temples have cashed in on
this demand for spiritual nourishment
by offering meditation courses, on-site
cafes and, according to some reports,
psychological counselling centres. All
this has been labelled the “temple econ-
omy” by some commentators.
Buddhist-style trinkets are also
increasingly popular. In January, Lama
state government and have withdrawn
to the hills around Imphal. Any Meiteis
living in the hills have fled to Imphal,
resulting in total segregation and a dee-
pening of mistrust to the point where
some observers say civil war is a possi-
bility.
Last week, L Nishikanta Singh, a re-
tired lieutenant general from Manipur,
tweeted: “The state is now ‘stateless’.
Life and property can be destroyed any-
17
temple, Beijing’s biggest Buddhist
monastery, issued a statement clari-
fying that it had not authorised third-
party platforms to sell Lama temple
bracelets, contrary to the claims of
some online vendors.
Although the Chinese Communist
party is officially atheist, many people
turn to ancient practices in times of
need.
Prof Emily Baum of the Univer-
sity of California, Irvine, who studies
modern Chinese history, said: “In China,
which has a long history of ancestor
worship, youths might go to a temple
to leave offerings for deceased relatives
in the hopes of receiving favour in the
future.”
For Chinese worshippers, burning
incense is a practical as well as spiritual
act. Prof James Miller of Duke Kunshan
University in Jiangsu, China, an expert
on the Chinese traditional practices of
Taoism, said: “Visiting temples is not
seen as a necessary indicator of reli-
gious belief but as a practical step that
anyone can take to help with the prob-
lems that they are facing.
“Although the Chinese Communist
party promotes atheism, it also pro-
motes traditional Chinese values,
which are inscribed in China’s long and
complex religious history.”
Additional research by Chi Hui Lin
time by anyone just like in Libya, Leb-
anon, Nigeria, Syria etc.”
Modi’s total silence on the crisis has
prompted criticism. Leaders from the
state have been in Delhi since 10 June
hoping for a meeting with Modi, but he
left for a visit to the US on Tuesday
without meeting them.
“We have not come here to beg
something from the prime minister.
What has happened in Manipur should
be considered a national issue,” said the
former Manipur chief minister Ibobi
Singh, who was among the delegation
that travelled to Delhi.
Posters have gone up in Manipur
showing Modi’s face and the words:
“Still missing. Have you seen this man?
Status: blind and deaf.”
In New York on Thursday, Modi led
a yoga session on the lawns of the
UN headquarters to mark International
Yoga Day, prompting the columnist V
Sudarshan to remark: “No amount of
prime ministerial yoga is going to fix
Manipur and there doesn’t seem to be
much else going on in response from
Modi’s side.”
In a video message, the Congress
party leader, Sonia Gandhi, lamented
the fact that people had been forced to
flee the only place they called home. “It
takes tremendous trust and goodwill to
nurture the spirit of brotherhood, and a
single misstep to fan the flames of hate
and divisiveness,” she said.
Friday 23 June 2023 The Guardian
Saturday Night Live: the 10 best sketches
from the 48th season
Zach Vasquez
I
n the weeks leading up to what
should have been the final three
episodes of Season 48 of Saturday
Night Live, the writing was on the
wall – or, rather, the writing wasn’t
on the wall.
By May, the Writers Guild of Amer-
ica strike was all but certain, which
meant the show would be put on inde-
finite hiatus. No one expected the issue
to be resolved in time for the season
to have a proper conclusion – would-
be hosts Pete Davidson, Kieran Culkin
and Jennifer Coolidge were left hanging
– and now, almost two months later, the
fight is still ongoing.
The strike is only the latest dra-
matic turn to roil Saturday Night Live
over the last several years, coming as
it did on the heels of the Covid shut-
downs and a mass exodus of longtime
on-screen talent. Despite this, the show
has remained more or less the same in
terms of quality, which is to say, uneven
at best.
Eyes
Since joining the cast two seasons
ago, Sarah Sherman has proven divi-
sive. Her wacky, grotesque style of
body-horror comedy was never going
to be to everyone’s liking, nor did it
seem like a good fit for the strictures of
network television. However, if nothing
else, she’s managed to carve a niche for
herself within the cast, and the show
has given her lots of airtime to flaunt
her weirdness.
One of the best examples is this
closing sketch from the second episode,
which sees her play a kooky marketer
showing off the brand-new googly-eyes
she had surgically implanted, only to
quickly realize that the procedure –
non-reversable since she forgot to refri-
gerate her old eyes – makes her both
see and look worse. The prosthetics
are goofy enough to sustain laugh-
ter past the initial sight gag (pun in-
tended), while Sherman’s herky-jerky
movements and high-pitched freakouts
add to the enjoyable zaniness.
Potato Hole
When Dave Chapelle returned to
host this season, he was coming off
a prolonged public battle with LGBTQ
+ advocates over what they consi-
dered increasingly transphobic com-
ments. Chappelle’s whiny resentment
over this criticism had all but taken
over his comedy performances, so there
was a question as to whether he could
still make an audience not already in
Just two people – but millions of inhabitants:
the tiny Cornish island where nature is
thriving
Frankie Adkins
With its driftwood, capsized boat and
Opinion
King Brothers Toyota sketch with Michael B Jordan. Photograph: YouTube
thrall to his POV actually laugh.
Turns out, he can. As with his pre-
vious hosting gigs, the comedian basi-
cally turned SNL into an episode of
his long-defunct Chappelle Show, with
the opening sketch –in which he plays
a laconic bluesman sitting in on a
morning talkshow in promotion of his
new album, cryptically titled My Potato
Hole – worthy of the best of that series.
The whole thing is a slow build to
one incredible reveal, as brutally deci-
mating and politically cutting as it is
hilarious.
Heaven Scene
The other great sketch from Chap-
pelle’s episode makes ingenious use of
his signature introductions by having
him explain that one of the other cast
members is filling in for him in the next
sketch. At first, we assume he’s referring
to new featured player Devon Walker,
starring as a recently deceased man
who finds himself in Black Heaven. But
we soon have the rug pulled out from
under us when Mikey Day shows up
as a streetwise pimp. Day plays the
part perfectly by playing himself not
wanting to play the part, while Chap-
pelle, along with musical guests Black
Star and cameoing Chappelle Show cast
member Donnell Rawlings, laugh it up
from the sidelines, adding more hila-
rious meta-layers to the whole thing.
Aubrey Plaza monologue
Aubrey Plaza made her name star-
ring alongside Amy Poehler on the NBC
sitcom Parks and Recreation, so even
though she was never a member of Sat-
urday Night Live, her hosting debut still
crystal-clear waters, Looe Island looks
more like a scene from Robinson
Crusoe than the well-trodden coastline
of Cornwall. Few realise that only a
felt like a homecoming of sorts, as well
as a victory lap following her high-pro-
file turns in HBO’s The White Lotus and
the acclaimed indie drama Emily the
Criminal.
Plaza made the most of it too, bring-
ing onboard some big names for her
monologue, including the aforemen-
tioned Poehler, as well as fellow Parks
and Rec alumnus president Joe Biden.
A lot of times, the host’s mono-
logues can come off as smugly self-
congratulatory, but Plaza avoids this
by simply being her deadpan, cynical,
slightly sinister self. She’s a natural
comic talent and one who fits so per-
fectly into the milieu of Saturday Night
Live it’s a wonder the show failed to
scoop her up back when she was start-
ing out.
King Brothers Toyota
One of the occasional pleasures of
Saturday Night Live comes from the
late-in-the-episode weirdo sketch – the
one whose very premise is so idiosyn-
cratic that you wonder how the writers
even came up with the idea in the first
place, let alone how it made it to air.
Think: Potato Chips or Career Day.
This season’s King Brothers’ Toyota
Overstock Sale-A-Thon never reaches
those heights, but it manages to take
the viewer on a wild ride all the same.
What starts out as a solid and relatable
spoof of local auto dealer TV commer-
cials and traffic jams caused by “prohi-
bitively popular” fast-food chains even-
tually unspools into a chronicle of one
family’s war of attrition against the
“Brigham Chamber of Commerce and
mile from Looe – a seaside town whose
narrow streets spill over with tourists in
the summer months – there is a wildlife
sanctuary.
their villainous patron, Councilman
Hugo Gallegos”.
Wing Pit
One of SNL’s go-to formulas these
days, especially when it comes to pre-
filmed sketches, is to take the type
of ubiquitous TV commercial viewers
see all the time – in this case, a food
chain’s ad for a game day deal – and
steer it into horror movie territory. But
few of these examples take it as far as
Wing Pit, which sees a Super Bowl party
at first overwhelmed, and eventually
decimated, by an apocalyptic deluge of
spicy chicken wings, all in the name of
“Chirax, the Chicken God of Death”.
American Girls Cafe
Of all the celebrities to take on
hosting duties this season, none were
received with more trepidation than
the Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis
Kelce. While a handful of athletes have
acquitted themselves well on Saturday
Night Live over the years, most have
fallen flat. If Kelce simply managed not
to embarrass himself, it would have
counted as another victory for the jock.
Well, not only did he meet those
expectations, he absolutely demolished
them. After displaying some easy
charm and a natural stage presence
during his monologue, he got the au-
dience dying in the very first sketch,
wherein he plays an aloof, pervy dandy
enjoying a lunch with his favorite dolls
at an American Girl Cafe. He’s a little
wooden at the start, but by the time
he gets rolling, it’s clear the guy has a
future in acting.
Straight Male Friend
In Cornwall’s only marine nature re-
serve, birds nest in thickets of trees,
sheep graze grassy slopes and seals
seek refuge in the island’s rocky bays.
19
Kelce is even better in this pre-
filmed sketch, playing a character more
in line with his public persona. As
Bowen Yang’s meathead “Straight Male
Friend”, he provides a “low-effort, low-
stakes relationship that requires no
emotional commitment, no financial
investment, and other than the occa-
sional video game-related outburst, no
drama”. Kelce proves very smart at play-
ing dumb, while also betraying a tang-
ible sweetness reminiscent of Channing
Tatum. But he also brings an edge to
his performance, especially when deli-
vering what is probably the best line
of the season: “Yo, sorry about being a
pussy about my dad dying earlier, man.
That won’t happen again.”
Couple Goals
The only gameshow sketch that
proved memorable this season came
during Quinta Brunson’s episode late
in the truncated season. We think we
have Couple Goals pegged early on: in
their attempt to answer seemingly easy
questions about one another, Brun-
son and Kenan Thompson’s married
couple will end up stumbling upon
some shocking hidden truth. This is
indeed what happens, but the secret
that’s revealed is far darker and, for
reasons that will reveal themselves in
the best visual punchline the show has
given us in ages, highly specific than
anyone can guess.
Weekend Update: Che Pulls April
Fool’s Prank on Jost
One area where Saturday Night Live
showed a marked improvement this
year was Weekend Update. There was
no noticeable change to pinpoint: Colin
Jost and Michael Che once again found
themselves behind the desk telling the
same types of jokes they’ve been telling
for the past nine years, but something
about their chemistry finally clicked.
While not a sketch per se, the
best Update moment this season came
during the April Fool’s Day episode,
with Che secretly instructing the au-
dience not to laugh at any of Jost’s
jokes during the first rundown of head-
lines. Watching it live was a tense
affair, especially when someone in the
crowd starts verbally heckling Jost.
Then, before things can go any fur-
ther, Che reveals the truth, causing Jost
and the audience to completely lose it.
In giving over to sheer, unadulterated
relief (“I was like, ‘Am I not mic’d?’ And
then I was like, ‘Oh, I just suck!’), Jost
comes off more empathetic than he’s
ever been before.
Quiet and tranquil, Looe Island is
nearly deserted – apart from two wild-
Continued on page 20

20
Continued from page 19
life wardens whose job it is to care for
the land so its biodiversity flourishes.
Coastal grassland on the island.
Photograph: Claire Lewis
Although its circumference, also
known as St George’s Island, is only one
mile, Looe has a long and varied his-
tory. Records indicate the island was an
early Christian settlement, a tin trading
centre and a hotspot for smuggling. In
more recent years, it was inhabited by
two sisters, who fulfilled a childhood
dream of buying a private island.
Babs and Evelyn Atkins secured the
land in 1965 for £22,000, and retired
there to write books about their remote
island life. With no descendants, the sis-
ters rejected a multimillion-pound offer
to transform the island into a theme
park, and bequeathed it to a charity,
the Cornwall Wildlife Trust. Since 2004,
Looe Island has been a nature reserve
with the sole aim of letting wildlife
thrive in peace.
“We’ve tried to manage the land
so that everything can go through its
lifecycle, whether it’s an insect, flower
or bird,” says Claire Lewis, who is the
current caretaker of Looe Island along
with her partner, Jon Ross. The couple,
who are nature wardens for the trust,
have been the island’s only residents
for nearly 20 years. Their job involves
monitoring species, reporting back to
wildlife groups and hosting a limited
number of visitors on the island.
From Easter through to October,
provided the tides are right, tourists can
board an official boat from the main-
land and take a self-guided trip around
the island. Trespassing – by curious
paddleboarders, swimmers and boaters
– is forbidden.
“It’s about minimising the impact
on the island,” says Lewis. “The more
people you have to stay longer, the
more likely there will be disturbance.”
Claire Lewis has lived on the island
as its caretaker for nearly 20 years.
Photograph: Frankie Adkins
The island’s geography, a patchwork
of woodland, maritime grassland, sand,
shingle and rocky reef, has provided a
‘It’s like tapping into the animating energy of
the universe’ – Guardian readers’ best albums
of 2023 so far
Guardian readers
Imagine This Is a High Dimensional
Space of All Possibilities – James
Holden
James Holden’s label Border Com-
munity introduced me to electronic
music that I probably would never have
listened to otherwise. Over the years, he
seems to have moved away from club-
based music in favour of a more or-
ganic, human sound. It’s been almost 20
years since the creation of Border Com-
munity and this album is a celebration
of that. Each track feels like a nod
to parts of his previous discography.
The percussion on most tracks is very
faint and makes the album feel like a
lost memory. The only track where the
beat hits with a thud is Worlds Collide
Mountains Form, which sounds like a
Opinion
Approaching Looe Island by boat. Cornwall’s only marine nature reserve was established
in 2004. Photograph: Frankie Adkins
natural refuge for wildlife. “One of the
things you notice is how full of life
it is,” Lewis says. And, at a time when
biodiversity is in freefall – with reports
suggesting half of the world’s bird spe-
cies are in decline and flying insects
have plunged by 64% since 2004 – Looe
Island seems to be a pocket of resis-
tance.
Lewis interrupts every so often to
point out holly blue and comma butter-
flies, or to show off the island’s colony
of great black-backed gulls, the largest
in Cornwall, which can be found loung-
ing on rocks or flexing their impressive
1.5-metre wingspan.
Great black-backed gulls on the
main beach on Looe Island
Clockwise from top left: a great
black-backed gull; a young cormorant;
a fulmar; a godwit with its distinctive
orange summer plumage
Oystercatchers looking for shellfish
along the coast. Photograph: Derek
Spooner
After almost two decades on the
island, Lewis can differentiate easily be-
tween the calls and cadences of bird
song – singling out oystercatchers, her-
ring gulls, blackbirds, wrens or chaf-
finches like a conductor in an or-
chestra. Surrounded by natural sounds
and smells, her senses have become
fine-tuned.
“We can tell if somebody has landed
[on the island] because of the noises
the birds make,” she says. “When people
band playing by the fire, feeding off
each other in a trance-like state. To me,
that signals where James is now and he
wants you to join in. Ross, 35, Norwich
in|FLUX – Anna B Savage
This year I made a resolution
to find more ways to explore new
music. I started out by asking my
friends to share their favourites and the
first recommendation I received was a
home run: in|FLUX by Anna B Savage.
It’s folky, organic and a touch electronic,
with sharp teeth and some pretty horny
lyrics. Intricate songwriting that de-
serves to be listened to over and over
again. Her live show was spectacular,
too. One for fans of Laura Marling, the
Delgados, St Vincent. Ben Thomas, 38,
Manchester
That! Feels Good! – Jessie Ware
Jessie Ware’s That! Feels Good! has
been the standout release in a year
get off the boat, I can tell if someone’s
washed their hair in strong shampoo or
if they’re wearing a lot of deodorant.”
Looe Island acts as a barometer,
measuring the toll human activity has
on wildlife. Away from the mainland’s
chemical soup of sewage spills, pesti-
cides and light pollution, nature is
given space to breathe. “I think we’re
far enough away for it to not have
a huge impact, but we can’t control
everything,” Lewis says.
Compost is made from mostly nat-
ural resources, such as sheep manure
and seaweed, and the island’s energy
is from solar panels and wind tur-
bines. More recently, visitors are being
instructed to wash their shoes with
disinfectant, to protect against avian flu
spreading from the mainland.
A seal sleeping upright in the sea.
Photograph: Claire Lewis
Managing an island involves a deli-
cate balance. Lewis says it is unlikely
that species such as red squirrels would
be deliberately brought over. “If we start
introducing things we can’t easily con-
trol, it can shift everything out of bal-
ance,” she says. Their rule of thumb is:
“This is what happens happily here, let’s
not tinker with it too much.”
There are a few exceptions – a flock
of Shetland sheep was introduced to
trim scrubby patches of land so cormo-
rants could scour for prey, and Rus-
sian vine was removed because it was
slowly suffocating the island’s apple,
filled with phenomenal albums. From
the opening moments of the title track
to the bold and self-assured These Lips,
which closes the album, this is a capti-
vating body of work from an artist at
the peak of her creativity. The propul-
sive and bombastic Free Yourself; Hello
Love’s yearning beauty; and the naked
dancefloor abandon of Freak Me Now
are the album’s best moments, yet with
each listen you’ll find something else
to fall hopelessly in love with. Ware’s
magnetic personality is on full display
across the 10 songs. It is an album I
return to daily, and one that doesn’t
merely feel good but sounds incredible.
Michael Meir-Wright, Nottingham
All of This Is Chance – Lisa O’Neill
A stunning, thought-provoking
album that combines O’Neill’s gravelly
voice with some beautiful melodies.
Her Irish lilt adds warmth and sincerity
plum and walnut trees.
A crystal jellyfish – a species rarely
found in the UK. Photograph: Claire
Lewis
Still, a glance at the island’s vege-
table garden gives a tropical impres-
sion, as the mild and sheltered habitat
gives rise to crops such as yam and kiwi.
The wardens grow most of their own
fruit and vegetables, trading surplus
runner beans or rhubarb for mackerel,
fresh from the boats of passing fishers.
The couple make do without most lux-
uries, though “we could do with a pub”,
says Ross.
By now, the wardens know the
island like the back of their hands, but
occasionally they are surprised. In 2013,
Lewis spotted a translucent jellyfish
with long, fine tentacles. It was a crys-
tal jellyfish, a species rarely found in
the UK, and usually seen in the warmer
waters of the east Pacific. Sightings of
unusual jellyfish, attributed to the cli-
mate crisis, are increasing, with 11 spe-
cies spotted around the UK and Irel-
and in 2022, according to the Marine
Conservation Society (MCS).
Woodland is part of a rich diversity
of habitats on the island. Photograph:
Frankie Adkins
External groups and volunteers
regularly visit the island to carry out
bird ringing, nest counts, butterfly tran-
sects – when observers count num-
bers along a fixed path – and seal
identification. Sue Sayer has been doing
monthly surveys on the island with
the Cornwall Seal Group Research Trust
since 2008. “It’s a wonderful case study
of how positive management can in-
crease diversity,” she says. As an off-
shore and intertidal island, it is an
important stopover for mobile seals –
“like a service station on the seal motor-
way”, she says.
The island used to lie in “a sweet
spot” for marine life, where warm cur-
rents mingled with cooler, nutrient-rich
waters. But, says Lewis: “There does
seem to be a shift, where warm water
is getting further north. We can do our
best here, but there may be other fac-
tors going on.”
Clockwise from top left: a holly blue
to the powerful lyrics that talk of life,
beauty, fragility and love. It took me a
few listens to get into it but now the
power of each song just sweeps me into
a reverie. If I Was a Painter and Old Note
are the highlights, dripping with beauty
and subtle hints of the absurdities of
life. When Goodnight World starts, we
are given a moment to reflect on those
we love, those we have lost, and our
own sense of immortality. Captivating
and beautiful. Michael Sewell, Brussels
Heavy Heavy – Young Fathers
So far it’s still Heavy Heavy by
Young Fathers. They maintained every-
thing that’s been so special and unique
about their sound – that sense you
get when listening to their music that
you’re tapping into a small but almost
overpowering fraction of the animating
energy of the universe or the human
mind or God or whatever – but ap-
The Guardian Friday 23 June 2023
View of the coastal grassland on Looe
Island nature reserve on Looe Island. Photo-
graph: Claire Lewis
butterfly; a comma butterfly feeding;
elderflower – attractive to butterflies
and other pollinators; a small tortoi-
seshell butterfly
For now, life remains largely un-
changed on Looe Island. “Most of the
time it’s peaceful. It’s good for anyone’s
mental health to have that quiet,” says
Lewis. “Island time” is punctuated by
the rhythms of nature. “Yesterday, we
saw our first sandwich terns of the
spring. We’ll say ‘hello’ and then ‘good-
bye, we’ll see you next year’,” she says.
There is a comforting sense of conti-
nuity when acting as the guardian of a
small island. “I like the idea that some
of these birds could have been the same
ones the sisters were looking at 20 years
ago,” says Lewis.
View of Looe Island from the
Cornish mainland. Photograph: Claire
Lewis
Find more age of extinction coverage
here, and follow biodiversity reporters
Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield
on Twitter for all the latest news and fea-
tures
We’ve tried to manage
the land so
everything can go
through its complete
lifecycle, whether
insect, flower or bird
Claire Lewis
plied it to a dancier, more jubilant set of
songs than ever before. Karl, 39, Phila-
delphia, USA
Brandy Clark – Brandy Clark
Brandy Clark’s eponymous album is
stunning. It’s an Americana gem with
interesting lyrics and hooks that get
stuck in your head. Her way with words
allows her to take specific experiences
and make them relatable to a gen-
eral audience. After a raucous opener –
which some may say doesn’t fit with the
rest of the record – the rest of the songs
ease into one another, sliding together
in a way that creates a sonic tapestry
of personality, experience, and pers-
pective. It’s a complete work of art that
offers a glimpse into the artist and her
many human facets. I can’t recommend
it enough. Elizabeth, 49, Tucson, Ari-
Continued on page 21
Friday 23 June 2023 The Guardian
Continued from page 20
zona, USA
Chiremerera – Jah Prayzah
Chiremerera is the first part of a
double album and I believe it’s Jah Pray-
zah’s best yet. It’s about an hour long
but you wouldn’t notice as each song
is beautifully composed, sung and ar-
ranged. While this album could mostly
be categorised as Shona traditional
music, it’s contemporary in the lyrics
and musical arrangements. I found the
music very emotional and almost spi-
ritual. The lyrics are potent and some
songs still bring tears to my eyes. It’s
music that I deeply relate to and feels
like it speaks directly to my soul. It’s
so good that I have to share it with
the world. But that makes me wonder
how it sounds to people that don’t
understand the lyrics or the history of
the music. Tafara Duncan, 41, Johan-
nesburg, South Africa
The Last Rotation of Earth – BC
Camplight
It’s got pianos, jokes, strings, horns,
strumming, so much sadness, and little
distorted guitar moments. I don’t know
what genre it is. But this album is full
of wonderful songs that are beautiful,
desolate and funny. There are melodies
here that feel like they’ve been wait-
ing for someone to find them since the
dawn of time. And the lyrics don’t hang
around doing nothing – they’re devas-
tating, commiserating and make you
laugh. The Movie is one of my favourite
tracks ever. I find a lot of honesty in this
album. Nothing is held back. Risks are
Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk say they’re
up for a cage match. Who would win?
Alex Hern Global technology
editor
I
n the red corner, the world’s
richest person, and in the blue
corner, the world’s richest millen-
nial: Elon Musk and Mark Zuck-
erberg have agreed to a cage
match, after Musk jokingly suggested
the bout in response to efforts by Meta
to launch a Twitter competitor.
“I’m sure Earth can’t wait to be
exclusively under Zuck’s thumb,” Musk
tweeted on Wednesday in response to
a post about Meta’s rumoured Threads
app. The app, previously known inside
Instagram as Project 92 and Barcelona,
has been pitched to celebrities and in-
fluencers as a “stable place to build and
grow” their audiences.
“At least it will be ‘sane’,” Musk
added. “Was worried there for a
moment.”
When a follower warned that the
Twitter boss should watch his words
around Zuckerberg, Musk responded:
“I’m up for a cage match if he is lol.”
What could have been one of many
half-thought-out tweets dashed off by
Musk – whose itchy posting finger has
already brought him a libel suit from a
British diver he labelled a “pedo” and an
SEC demand for a lawyer to vet his mis-
sives after he falsely claimed to have
“funding secured” to take Tesla private
– became rather more significant when
Zuckerberg responded.
In a post on his verified Insta-
gram account, the Meta chief execu-
Opinion
Uneasy listening … (from left) Young Fathers, Ailbhe Reddy and Caroline Polachek
taken and pay off. I think more people
should listen to it. Zoe, 21, Seoul, South
Korea
But Here We Are – Foo Fighters
Out of the grief of losing Taylor
Hawkins, soon followed by his mother,
Dave Grohl has created something that
is part celebration and part tribute to
them both. Some of the songs have a
“classic Foo” sound, while others, such
as the 10-minute The Teacher, tread
new ground, with Grohl effectively
using feedback as a musical instru-
ment. It conveys a sense of loss and
confusion along with the lyrics, which
‘Send me location,’ Mark Zuckerberg responded to Elon Musk. Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images
tive shared a screenshot of Musk’s chal-
lenge with the caption: “Send Me Loca-
tion”.
The danger for Musk is that Zuck-
erberg is, apparently, quite good at
fighting. Both men seem to have limit-
less reserves of energy, but where Musk
applies that to running five separate
companies at the same time, Zuck-
erberg prefers to get really, really se-
rious about hobbies.
In the past he has spent periods
learning Mandarin, touring America (in
what was widely seen as a dry run for
an abortive presidential campaign) and
are some of his best in recent times. Foo
Fighters have a new energy that has
helped them create arguably their most
vital album since 2011’s Wasting Light.
Gary L Taylor, 41, East Tilbury
Gift from the Trees – Mammal
Hands
Gift from the Trees by Mammal
Hands is a powerhouse of inven-
tiveness, walking the fine line
between accessible structure and
pure, discombobulating, time-fluc-
tuating jazz. This album is their finest
outing to date: somehow at once com-
posed and singular, but also sprawling,
only eating meat he killed with a bow
and arrow. Recently, though, his hobby
has been Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and when
he made his competitive debut last
month he won two out of three bouts.
“Zuck’s been training,” said Elena
Cresci, a former Guardian journalist
and professional muay thai champion,
“whereas Elon Musk has been tweet-
ing that he doesn’t train beyond throw-
ing his kids up in the air. So on paper
it’s Zuck. He’s been having a good time
doing his little BJJ competitions.’’
One wrinkle is the combatants’
sizes. At an estimated 1.87 metres (6ft
traversing and seismic. A gem. Ben, 41,
Edinburgh
A Fistful of Peaches – Black
Honey
I feel so lucky to have caught this
band seven years ago in their early
days. They gig like another lockdown
is imminent and Fistful, their third
album, is laden with bangers. Catch
them live – Izzy B Phillips is a great
frontwoman and the boys are pinch
tight. Richard Sutton-Smith, 62, Wad-
hurst
Desire, I Want to Turn Into You –
Caroline Polachek
1in) and about 85kg (13st 5lb), Musk
is several weight classes above Zuck-
erberg, who measures 1.71 metres (5ft
7ins) and less than 70kg (11st). All else
being equal, that would put Musk at an
advantage, even after taking account of
the 12-year age gap between the two.
“Elon Musk is just a lot bigger than
him, so he could just lie on top of
him and hope for the best,” Cresci said.
That’s not far off Musk’s actual fight
plan. “I have this great move that I
call ‘The Walrus’, where I just lie on
top of my opponent & do nothing,” he
tweeted.
21
Caroline Polachek’s Desire, I Want
to Turn Into You is a maximalist jewel
box. The lyrics are poetic but not unap-
proachable, and her delivery can switch
between almost-rap/trap and operatic
swells, and her phrasing is so deftly
attuned to each song – snappy, flow-
ing, cantering. Her classical training
is evident, and she writes incredible
hooks and pop-happy tunes. Songs on
here will make you want to dance,
sing along, and sometimes weep. Most
of them sample snippets from others
on the record, making it one of the
most cohesive and interesting albums
in recent memory. It greatly rewards
repeat listening. And try to see her
live if you can for an immersive, emo-
tional experience. Sophie Carsenat, 53,
Toronto, Canada
Endless Affair – Ailbhe Reddy
I love everything about this album. I
feel as though there is no wasted space
on it and every track adds something.
It is funny, melancholy, sweet, touch-
ing, and above all else catchy, with
many excellent choruses throughout.
There are many cathartic moments on
the album, generally, in the satisfyingly
loud choruses but she delivers some
beautiful quieter moments with Pray
For Me being the stand out. The lyrics
present a good balance of experiences
that can feel relatable and universal.
But also, at times, small fragments of
herself that feel highly personal and
at times journalistic. There were many
other albums I loved this year but this
one has been a constant. Neil Cullen,
Ireland
The ultimate question for the fight,
if it does occur, is whether Musk takes it
seriously or treats the whole thing as a
joke. “I’ve coached a couple of white-
collar fights and how it usually goes
is when it’s their first fight, they get
overexcited and gas themselves out in
the first round,” Cresci said. “But these
are two men with a lot of money at
their disposal, so they can pay for as
much training as they want. Look at
YouTubers like Logan Paul, who are ac-
tually decent boxers now because they
can afford to train with the best.”
Musk v Zuckerberg: tale of the
tape
Elon MuskAge: 51.Net worth:
$236bn.Place of birth: Pretoria,
South Africa.Education: University of
Pennsylvania (BA, BS).Children: at least
10.Monthly active users: 330m (Twit-
ter).Congressional hearings: one (na-
tional security in space launches).Mon-
ey lost last year on flights of fancy:
$30bn on buying Twitter and running
it into the ground.
Mark ZuckerbergAge: 39.Net worth:
$99.9bn.Place of birth: White Plains,
New York.Education: Harvard Univer-
sity (unfinished).Children:
three.Monthly active users: 2.9bn
(Facebook).Congressional hearings: two
(Cambridge Analytica and Libra crypto-
currency).Money lost last year on
flights of fancy: $13.7bn on the meta-
verse.
 The Guardian Friday 23 June 2023

22 Opinion

Happy endings: the Dining Across the Divide

pair who became ‘soul sisters’
tune. It’s kind of odd, meeting some- delayed and cancelled. It has been quite nonetheless.”
Zoe Williams body in the way we did and finding hard, re-establishing friendships, but “I certainly didn’t expect to come

W
hen Anne was
matched w ith
Katie for Dining
Across the Divide
in 2021, they
sounded quite far apart on immi-
gration. They met in Argyll and Katie
arrived “with the saltire on her mask”.
Anne remembers “expecting to meet a
Tory Brexiter. Not someone as lovely as
Katie. I’m delighted.”
Katie said back then: “Anne and I
were like soul sisters.” And now – a few
days after a walk they had near Anne’s
home in Dunoon – she amends that.
“It’s like discovering a long-lost sister;
not even a sister, a twin. There are very
few things we disagree on. I can’t think
‘I didn’t expect to come out with a lasting
friendship’: Katie (on left) and Anne. Photo-
graph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian
of any other friend I have who’s so in
we’re so perfectly matched.”
You could call their hike a Dining
reunion, except it’s not, really, because
they see each other all the time. “Fairly
quickly after we met, we were phon-
ing each other, meeting for coffee, going
for walks. She and her husband came
to a party I was having,” Katie says.
Anne drives a beat-up old Fiat Panda
and loves going in Katie’s Tesla. “Katie’s
doing a massive project with her hus-
band, building a house from scratch,
with vegetable plots, bees, so much
attention to detail and care: I’m taking
such vicarious pleasure from it.”
Katie spent her working life as a
dentist and didn’t have much time to
socialise. “Friendships suffered a bit,”
she says. “People didn’t tolerate being
it’s taught me a lot. As you get older, out with a lasting friendship,” Katie
and more open-minded, you discover says. “I hope she’d say the same.”
lots of very unlikely people will make “I more than like her,” Anne says. “I
very good friends. But I wouldn’t class think I love her. But don’t put that - I
Anne as that. We are very, very alike.” wouldn’t want to embarrass her.”
“We’ve always cared about the
bigger picture, both of us,” Anne says.
“Biodiversity, the future of the planet –
we care about life, for other people, ani- As you get older, and
mals, and from that caring, we agree. more open-minded,
We also gossip about anything and
everything.” Katie thinks Anne has been
you discover lots of
more successful in her career and has very unlikely people
lived a more varied life (ultimately make very good
working as a psychotherapist). “I don’t
think that’s true,” Anne says, laughing. “I friends
think we’ve both lived – when I say good
lives, I don’t mean without trauma and
anguish, that’s impossible, but good,

Four more people just died in an e-bike fire. If

nothing changes, they won’t be the last
gig companies like Uber and DoorDash,
Wilfred Chan which have been trying to appease

T
wisted mountains of
charred bikes, scooters,
wheels, and battery cas-
ings. The distinctive,
acidic smell of burnt
chemicals. And where delivery workers
once stood in line chatting while wait-
ing for repairs, now blackened ruins and
a somber crowd of neighbors behind
police tape. This was the scene – one
that’s become horrifyingly common –
after yet another deadly lithium battery
fire in New York City.
Four people, including a 71-year-old
man and 65-year-old woman, died in
the inferno just after midnight on Tues-
day – the latest victims of a growing
problem that’s now claimed the lives of
13 people this year in the nation’s dens-
est city, compared with six such deaths
in all of 2022. The fires are caused by
the cheap, dangerous electric batteries
powering the two-wheeled devices that
the city’s 65,000 delivery workers use to
meet the demands of Silicon Valley gig
platforms. And without decisive action,
more carnage is guaranteed.
Tuesday’s disaster, the 108th li-
thium-battery-related fire this year in
New York City, started at a shop called
HQ E-bike Repair, on an immigrant-
heavy street of Manhattan’s Lower East
Side, and quickly spread to the apart-
ments above. The shop had been cited
before for violations related to charg-
ing the batteries, said New York’s fire
commissioner, Laura Kavanagh. But li-
thium battery fires often cause explo-
sions that give victims almost no
chance to react, she said. “The volume
of fire created by these lithium-ion bat-
teries is incredibly deadly … We’ve said
this over and over: it can make it nearly
impossible to get out in time.”
Among those gathered at the shop’s
burnt wreckage was Alberto Lugo, a
former frequent customer who lives
down the street. “A lot of places, they’ll
Firefighters and investigators amid the aftermath of a fire at an e-bike shop on Tuesday.
Photograph: Bebeto Matthews/AP
charge you an arm and a leg, but the
owner was very fair,” Lugo tells me.
He recalls the owner as “careful” to
not charge devices indoors, saying he
often did repair jobs on the sidewalk.
“So when I heard about it this morn-
ing, my tears came out, because they’re
good people,” he says.
While the fire department advises
that people only use batteries that have
been certified by UL Solutions, a rigor-
ous safety testing lab, e-bikes that use
these batteries easily cost thousands of
dollars. That’s beyond reach for most
delivery workers and immigrant city
dwellers, who tend to buy no-name ve-
hicles, batteries and chargers, for a frac-
tion of the cost. Walk into one of New
York City’s e-bike shops and you’ll often
see rows of these batteries juicing up
side by side on overloaded power strips.
But even if they’re not being charged,
batteries stored in tight quarters can
still catch fire and cause a chain reac-
tion.
New York’s city council recently
passed a measure banning the sale of
non-UL certified electric bikes, scoo-
ters, and batteries, as well as their
reconditioning and resale. That doesn’t
do much for the countless New Yorkers
who still use uncertified equipment –
and who don’t have the means to ditch
it.
One is Mr Wu, another former cus-
tomer of the shop, in his 60s. Even
as we stand before the smoldering ve-
hicles, he tells me that he can’t stress
about his cheap e-bike catching fire;
the chances of it happening would be
like “winning the lottery”, he reasons.
“What matters most is that it’s good and
cheap.” Another onlooker is Terence, a
57-year-old Bronx e-bike owner whose
father was a firefighter. But “I’ve had my
e-bike now for five or six years, and I’ve
been using this sort of battery, and I’ve
never, ever had a problem,” he says.
Even those who fear the risks feel
stuck. Gustavo Ajche, a delivery worker
and founder of the labor group Los
Deliveristas Unidos, carries two bat-
teries when he works so that he can go
longer distances – there’s simply no way
to make a living without them. But he
can’t afford to replace the packs, which
aren’t UL-certified, so all he can do is
charge them more cautiously. “I charge
it a little bit when I get home and the
next day, I charge it a little more, be-
cause I don’t want to be in this kind of
mess with this fire,” he says.
Recently, Los Deliveristas helped
win the city’s first minimum wage for
delivery workers – $17.96 an hour, which
passed over the vehement objections of
investors by raising prices while slash-
ing worker pay. The tech firms have
been just as unhelpful in addressing
the lithium battery issue, says Ajche.
Recently, Uber announced a trade-in
scheme for workers to exchange their
old e-bikes for a reported credit of
just $200 toward a new, UL-certified e-
bike that would cost more than $3,000.
Ajche says the offer made him laugh
out loud. “It’s a joke,” he said. “They’re
not here to help us, they’re just trying to
make money.”
DoorDash’s sole monetary contri-
bution has been little more than a
Band-Aid: a $100,000 donation to New
York’s fire department to “help increase
fire safety messaging, education, and
outreach”, according to a DoorDash
spokesperson.
Grubhub, which also donated
$100,000 to the fire department, has
partnered with the electric bike-share
platform Joco to offer 500 of its top deli-
very workers access to free rentals of
safety certified e-bikes, in addition to
opening a downtown Manhattan “rest
stop” for delivery workers. It’s a prom-
ising idea, but Ajche says workers are
frustrated that a fully charged Joco bike
only goes about 30 miles – about half
of a typical worker’s shift – and Joco’s
battery exchange locations shut down
in the evening, when work is busiest.
Amy Perlik Healy, Grubhub’s vice-pres-
ident of government relations, told the
Guardian “no single company, manufac-
turer or organization is going to solve
this problem” and the company would
continue to “gather data that will help
inform how we can best support riders
moving forward”. Uber did not respond
to a request for comment.
If the gig companies don’t step up,
Ajche says workers like him could ben-
efit from a city-backed battery swap
program, so that New York’s e-bike and
e-scooter owners can trade in their
questionable packs for certified ones.
Firefighters remove windows from a six-
story building in the aftermath of the fire this
week. Photograph: Bebeto Matthews/AP
But a promising battery swap bill pro-
posed by the Manhattan city coun-
cilman Keith Powers in the spring has
yet to see a vote. It also faces tech-
nical challenges even if passed, given
the vast array of micro-mobility devices
and battery styles out there – and at
well over $1,000 per UL battery, the pro-
gram could be expensive.
In the meantime, delivery workers
have been fighting for another solu-
tion: small charging hubs placed at
high-traffic areas throughout the city,
where deliveristas can rest and refuel
their batteries safely. The idea was ap-
proved by New York City last year, with
a pledge of $1m in federal funds from
Senator Chuck Schumer, but the initi-
ative is off to a shaky start. A charg-
ing hub proposed for the swanky Upper
West Side almost immediately ran into
fierce resistance from wealthy residents
– which is “sad”, Ajche says. “They need
delivery services, but they don’t want to
have us close to them.”
But with nobody willing to take
responsibility for prevention, more bat-
teries will explode – and more people
will die. The last such incident came
in April, when a seven-year-old and
a teenager died in their second-floor
apartment building after a bike being
charged in the building’s vestibule sud-
denly ignited. It took firefighters just
three minutes to reach the home, but
the inferno had already raced up the
stairs. The victims, the fire department
said, “didn’t have a chance”.
Friday 23 June 2023 The Guardian

Opinion 23

How we met: ‘He cooked me pork chops for

dinner – and I was sold’
company and he was “really sad” when
Lizzie Cernik it was time for her to leave. Knowing

L
ong before internet dating
was commonplace, Da-
nielle found unexpected
romance online. In 1997,
she was working as a teach-
er in New York. “I was taking my class to
Paris on a trip and my colleague posted
a message on a French bulletin board to
ask about the weather before we went.”
When they returned, her colleague
told her someone had replied, and sug-
gested that she contact him. “Peter had
responded to say: ‘When in Paris, who
cares what the weather is?’ She con-
vinced me to write back and let him
know how the trip had gone.”
Peter, who is originally from Essex,
lived in London where he worked for
a computer company. “I joined the bul-
letin board as I was learning French. I’d
been intending to move to France,” he
says. “When Danielle wrote back, I was
confused at first because I had spoken
to her colleague previously. But we got
chatting and decided to exchange email
addresses.”
Danielle says she immediately felt
comfortable talking to him and en-
joyed their online conversations. “Some
Danielle and Peter in 2022. Photograph: Courtesy of the family
of the things he asked made me
really reflect. He asked questions about
America, and it made me think about
other people’s perspective of the United
States.”
Before long, they were emailing sev-
eral times a day. “We just slowly grew
to know each other,” says Peter. “I found
Danielle really engaging and I missed
her when I wasn’t talking to her. Even-
tually I decided to phone her and we
had some long calls.”
With the summer holidays ap-
proaching, Danielle made a spon-
taneous decision: she booked a ticket to
London to visit Peter for his birthday.
“My friends thought I was insane,” she
says. When she told him, he felt “a bit
shocked” and “a little hesitant at first”. “I
was surprised someone would be crazy
enough to book an air ticket without
checking,” he says.
Despite his initial concerns, they
got on brilliantly. “He cooked me pork
chops for dinner as soon as I arrived
and I was sold. He could cook and he
was really nice,” she says. Peter says
they thoroughly enjoyed each other’s
they wanted to see each other again,
Peter booked a trip to visit Danielle in
August. They became a long-distance
couple, and visited each other when
they could. At first, they had doubts
about their future together, due to dif-
fering stances on religion. “I’m Catholic
and he’s not religious,” says Danielle.
“But in the end, we decided it didn’t
matter because we liked each other so
much. We agreed that if we had child-
ren, they would be raised Catholic.”
The next summer, Danielle came to
England for longer and they got en- A family photo from 2022. ‘The boys are
gaged at a Fourth of July party. “I pro- thinking Danielle and I are totally mad,’ says
posed with a sparkler,” he says. They Peter. Photograph: Courtesy of the family
married that November, in Hereford. In
July 1999, Peter’s US visa came through life throws at them and deal with it
and he joined Danielle in New York, together. “There’s nothing I don’t love
where he found a job as a school com- about Danielle. We have disagreements
puter technician, while she continued but they melt away instantly. Those
to teach. Their two sons were born in countless hours back when we were
2001 and 2003. long-distance dating helped because
In 2010 Danielle had breast cancer, we came to really understand each
followed by another cancer in 2018, other.”
due to the radiation therapy. “Peter was Danielle is happy that Peter accepts
really supportive while I was unwell,” her as she is. “He makes me laugh all the
she says. “I couldn’t have asked for time. He goes with the flow and we love
better.” trying new things together.”
Peter says they always take what

‘They forced me to carry my baby to the end’:

women of color on being denied abortion
a fraction of what their white counter-
Poppy Noor parts earn; they are more likely to live

P
regnancy has long been
riskier than abortion in
America. About 650-750 US
women die during preg-
nancy each year, the high-
est maternal death rate in the industria-
lized world.
Comparatively, very few women die
from abortion or suffer complications:
two women died from abortion compli-
cations in 2018. So, when Roe v Wade
was overturned last summer, there
were fears that deaths and compli-
cations from pregnancy would shoot
up – particularly among women of
color.
Black women were 2.6 times more
likely to die during pregnancy and
childbirth than their white counter-
parts in 2021 according to CDC anal-
ysis. Structural racism, Medicaid cov-
erage and a failure to properly invest
in maternal healthcare all contribute
to this. Black women report being dis-
missed, overlooked and ignored during
childbirth and by the medical insti-
tution generally when it comes to
maternal care.
After Roe v Wade was overturned, it
was mostly states in the south and the
midwest that banned abortion imme-
diately. These states have the largest
shares of women of color living in them.
Women of color are also more likely
to have abortions – Black women were
almost four times as likely as white
women to get an abortion in 2020;
Latina women were almost twice as
Anya Cook with her husband Derick Cook at Windmill Park in Coconut Creek, Florida.
She believes race played a factor in her care on the night when she first arrived in the ER.
Photograph: Sydney Walsh/The Guardian
likely. This could be for a whole host of
reasons: women of color generally earn
in states where contraception is hard to
access; and Black women, specifically,
are more prone to miscarriage.
Here are two stories of women of
color who had to navigate their preg-
nancies after being denied an abortion
in post-Roe America.
Anya Cook
It was the first week that Anya Cook,
36, felt comfortable going out as a fully
fledged pregnant person. She was well
into her second trimester – 16 weeks –
but having suffered 17 miscarriages in
two years, she had learned not to get
hopeful too early. In December 2022,
her city of Coral Springs, Florida, was
having its annual parade. Cook felt cute
in her two-piece biker-short set as she
watched children stuff their faces with
ice creams, while parents cheered on
the marching band from the sidelines.
Leaving a restaurant later that even-
ing, Cook felt a wet rush down her legs,
like someone had thrown a glass of
water on her. On the way to the hospital
with her husband, Derick, she hoped
that even if her water had broken, she
could get a small stitch and continue
with a healthy pregnancy.
When Cook got to the ER, as far as
she could see, no one had been shot, or
was in need of urgent care. But over the
next hour, she would learn how it felt to
be invisible. The receptionist told Cook
no beds were available, although Cook
believes she saw many sitting empty.
People turned their heads away as Cook
squirmed uncomfortably in a wheel-
chair, amniotic fluid gushing between
Samantha Casiano: ‘They kept telling me,
if this was a normal healthy baby things
would be different, but yours is going to pass.’
Photograph: Danielle Villasana/The Guar-
dian
her legs. “Mommy, what happened to
her?” she heard a small boy visiting the
ER ask. The boy’s mother shushed him.
Soon, Cook would find out. Her
water had indeed broken early, and
there was no stitch that could reverse
it. In the next 48 hours, she would de-
liver and her fetus would not survive.
Cook would be sent home, to de-
liver on her own. Because the doctors
could still see a fetal heartbeat on the
ultrasound, she couldn’t have an abor-
tion, even though they knew 16 weeks
was too early for it to survive. And be-
cause Cook was not yet in a life-threat-
ening situation, the doctors couldn’t
intervene to save her.
“I said, ‘Let me guess. Is it because
of Roe v Wade’?” says Cook by phone
interview.
The doctor confirmed it was.
Cook left the hospital certain of her
fate that evening. After scouring the
internet to learn about PPROM – pre-
Continued on page 24

24
Continued from page 23
term premature rupture of the mem-
branes – she was sure she was going
to die: complications from PPROM can
include serious infection and hemorr-
hage.
Cook booked an appointment at the
salon the next morning to have her
hair done, ready for her casket. She
and Derick argued all the way there.
He couldn’t believe she was giving up.
Cook delivered her daughter, who
she named Bunny, a few hours later,
in the salon toilet. In the small, ste-
rile-smelling room, she sat on the toilet
with Derick between her legs, and tried
to direct him, telling him to remove the
cord and help her deliver her placenta,
based on things she had seen on TV.
One of the clients in the salon
that day was a nurse. When she saw
Cook, she spoke with urgency: Cook
was hemorrhaging and needed to get
to the hospital, stat.
Cook remembers feeling dismissed
and questioned when she arrived at the
hospital. “The paramedics told them I
was bleeding out,” says Cook. Still, she
says she was asked by nurses and doc-
tors several times if she was OK before
being rushed for treatment.
In the end, to be taken seriously,
Cook says she opened her legs. “I lit-
erally just released my body and blood.
Like a pipe that burst in your kitchen,
blood – gushing, shooting out,” explains
The Greek shipwreck was a horrific tragedy.
Yet it didn’t get the attention of the Titanic
story
Arwa Mahdawi
H
ave you heard about
the billionaire and
multimillionaires
trapped on a sub-
mersible after spending
up to $250,000 each to view the wreck-
age of the Titanic? Of course you have.
The story has been headline news in
anglophone countries ever since the
vessel, named the Titan, went missing.
Enormous resources have been dep-
loyed to try to recover the passen-
gers. Every tiny development has
been exhaustively covered. Millions of
people, myself included, have been
glued to the live blogs and rolling cov-
erage. And millions of people, myself
included, are now newly minted ex-
perts on the difference between a sub-
mersible and a submarine.
It’s completely natural to be glued
to the Titan story because, obviously,
it’s one hell of a story. Yes, the circums-
tances are unfathomably awful but,
also, they’re so unfathomably awful
that they seem unreal. The whole thing
feels like a movie – like the latest
instalment of the Knives Out series.
I mean, come on, there’s a billionaire
called Hamish Harding involved. The
company who made the submersible is
called OceanGate: it’s as if it was named
in preparation for a massive contro-
versy.
The chief executive of OceanGate –
a company which appears to have cut
a lot of corners in its quest to build
Opinion
Cook. “I said, now do you believe me?”
She woke up the next day, having
lost almost half of the blood in her
body. Lasting damage to the blood ves-
sels around her uterus may make it
even harder for her to get pregnant
again.
Asked if she believes race was a
factor in her care, Cook says yes.
“If I was Ron DeSantis’s wife, I would
have gotten the care I needed, right
there in that very moment,” she said –
referring to the night when she first ar-
rived in the ER.
DeSantis recently signed off on a
six-week abortion ban in the state,
which will make it even harder for
people to get abortion care in Florida
in the future.
“[Would] the governor’s wife wait
for a bed, or go home to deliver when
they know her baby won’t survive? Oh,
no. That would have not happened. I
don’t lose sight on that, ever,” Cook says.
Samantha Casiano
Deep breaths. That’s how Saman-
tha Casiano, 29, got through the 13
weeks between finding out her fetus
was going to be born with half a skull
and wouldn’t live long after birth; and
knowing she couldn’t get an abortion in
Texas anyway.
She had gone home after being told
the news and searched the internet
for what to do. There were abortion
clinics in New Mexico and Colorado,
but Casiano immediately felt stupid for
‘A frantic rush to save five wealthy people versus a shoulder shrug at the idea of 100 kids dead at the bottom of the sea.’ Photograph:
Mohamed Abd El Ghany/Reuters
things quickly without regard to boring
old safety regulations – is called Stock-
ton Rush. The story seems almost too
ludicrous to be true. It seems absurd
that people paid obscene amounts of
money to get into something which
might as well have been called Tiny
Little Death Trap.
While it’s only natural to be glued
to the Titan story, it’s far from
the only recent maritime tragedy in
recent weeks. And yet it’s absorbing a
disproportionate amount of the world’s
attention, empathy and resources. Last
having looked. Where was she going to
get the money to hire a rental car and
drive out of state for three days to get
an abortion? And who was going to look
after her five children while she went?
Her paychecks barely made up $1,200 a
fortnight.
Frightened, she deleted her search
history and removed the idea of escape
from her mind.
Casiano spent the next few weeks
feeling like a prisoner trapped in her
own body. With the growing kicks
and pains that accompanied her preg-
nancy, she felt reminded that the life
inside her was growing just to die. She
watched, uncomfortably, as her hus-
band increasingly convinced himself
their daughter might be OK. Casiano
knew the numbers. Almost all babies
with anencephaly will die shortly after
birth.
At 33 weeks, she hopped atop her
brother-in-law’s grey truck with her
husband, clutching her stomach as they
headed down the road from her trailer
to the hospital. It was time.
The doctors had been adamant that
Casiano had to continue her pregnancy
as though her fetus would survive
since they diagnosed anencephaly at 20
weeks. But now she was about to de-
liver, she realized their pro-life stance
would only last the duration of her
pregnancy. They had no intention of
treating her like someone whose baby
was going to live during the birth.
Wednesday, one of the worst tragedies
that has ever occurred on the Mediter-
ranean Sea took place: a fishing boat
carrying about 750 people, mainly
Pakistani and Afghan migrants, cap-
sized on its way to Italy. There were 100
children below deck in that ship. One
hundred children. The exact number
of fatalities is unclear: so far we know
that 78 people have been confirmed
dead and as many as 500 are missing.
Those are heartbreaking numbers and
yet hundreds of dead and missing mi-
grants have failed to garner anywhere
Casiano’s fetus was breech – feet
first – for which people are usually of-
fered a C-section, to prevent a more
painful delivery. Delivering breech can
result in the baby’s head getting stuck
on the way out; asphyxiation; and the
pelvis seizing. Casiano was offered no
monitor to see how her fetus was doing
during the birth. “They kept telling me,
if this was a normal healthy baby things
would be different, but yours is going to
pass,” says Casiano. “I felt like I’d been
invited to a birthday party, where no
one turns up, and no gifts are given.”
Her daughter, Halo, died four short
hours after birth.
Casiano spent the next two nights
sleeping on the ward of the hospital
while she recovered, listening to new
parents being united with their child-
ren. When she left, the doctors sent her
walking out the front doors, instead of
gently carting her out in a wheelchair
as they do for the mothers leaving the
hospital with their newborns. “I felt so
degraded,” says Casiano. “It’s like they
forced me to carry my baby to the end,
but when the time came, they were like
‘OK, let’s get this over with.’”
Casiano is suing the state of Texas
alongside 14 other plaintiffs for being
denied access to life-saving abortion
care. The lawyers representing her have
noted that a white plaintiff in the case
with the same diagnosis as Casiano was
told to go out of state to get care, but
Casiano’s treatment was very different.
near the amount of attention from the
US media as five rich adventurers.
I’m not saying there hasn’t been
any coverage of the Greek shipwreck.
Of course there has. But it pales in
comparison to the attention that’s been
given to the Titan’s disappearance. The
rescue efforts also couldn’t be more dif-
ferent: a frantic rush to save five weal-
thy people versus a shoulder shrug at
the idea of 100 children dead at the
bottom of the sea.
The Greek coastguard and govern-
ment officials, in response to criticism
The Guardian Friday 23 June 2023
“When she asked what her options
were, her doctor said, ‘You don’t have
any. You need to carry this pregnancy to
term. They wouldn’t even show her the
ultrasound,” says Molly Duane, a senior
staff attorney at the Center for Repro-
ductive Rights.
“There could be many reasons for
that. But these themes of abortion
laws and discrimination and institu-
tionalized racism … it is borne out by
real people’s experiences,” she says.
The lawyers also note how Casiano
has been singled out in the case.
Casiano could not afford to pay for
her daughter’s funeral, or a headstone
for her grave, until a GoFundMe page
she set up went viral. Recently, the
state of Texas filed a motion to have
the case dismissed, linking to Casiano’s
GoFundMe in the motion, and accusing
her of going on a $50,000 “media tour”,
with her abortion story.
But Casiano is adamant she will
continue speaking out.
“I do it because other women might
not be as social as me, or as able as me,
to say what they have gone through,
and how they feel,” says Casiano.
“If I saw somebody else going
through what I went through, I would
be like: ‘How are you doing this?
Nobody should have to do that’,” she
says.
of their handling of the disaster, have
said that people on board refused any
help. Activists, on the other hand, have
said the people on board were plead-
ing for help more than 15 hours before
it sank. In any case, is it really the job
of a coastguard to look at a ship full
of desperate people, full of innocent
children, and decide they don’t want
help? Nobody looked at the Titan and
thought: ahh well, they signed a waiver
saying they accepted death was a possi-
bility, there’s no point saving them.
Again, the Greek shipwreck is one
of the worst tragedies there has ever
been in the Mediterranean. And that’s
saying a lot, because the Mediterranean
is a mass grave. Every year, tens of thou-
sands of people flee poverty and perse-
cution in the hope of a better life and
every year hundreds of those people
die in the attempt. More than 1,200
people died in the Mediterranean in
2022, and there have been about 25,000
deaths since 2014.
It’s hard to get your head around
those numbers, isn’t it? It’s hard to
absorb that amount of anguish. And
that’s precisely the problem. If you find
yourself more captivated by the story
of five rich people in a submersible
rather than the 750 people who sank on
a fishing trawler, it’s not because you’re
a bad person. It’s because it’s human
nature to be feel overwhelmed by suf-
fering at scale; it’s called psychic numb-
ing. As the saying goes, one death is a
tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.
Continued on page 25
Friday 23 June 2023 The Guardian
Continued from page 24
The people on that boat weren’t
statistics, though. They were human
beings who deserve better. They de-
serve better than being lumped to-
gether under the term “migrants”. A
term that, the Guardian noted in a
recent editorial, “disguises rather than
British extremists are importing tactics from
the US hard right. Their target? Family drag
shows
Tim Squirrell
D
rag and cross-dressing
have been a part of
British cultural expres-
sion for centuries. From
Shakespeare plays to
pantomime dames, and the late Barry
Humphries’ creation Dame Edna Eve-
rage; playing with representations of
gender in all its forms has long been
widely enjoyed by audiences. Drag
shows are a modern expression of this
tradition, which is now being threat-
ened by a coordinated campaign to si-
lence it.
More than 50 family drag events
in the UK were targeted by protesters
from June last year to this May, ac-
cording to data gathered by our re-
searchers at the Institute for Strategic
Dialogue (ISD). Ten shows were can-
celled or postponed before they even
took place. At the ones that did go
ahead, small groups (rarely more than
12) using abusive and confrontational
tactics routinely accused parents who
were taking their children to the events
of supporting paedophilia, or threat-
ened to perform “citizen’s arrests” on
the drag queens performing at them.
Clashes between protesters and coun-
ter protesters or police broke out at a
number of them.
The groups spearheading this cam-
paign often have ties to white supre-
macist movements or far-right ex-
tremism and have appropriated for
political aims legitimate discussions
about what is suitable entertainment
and education for children, and at
what age. They push a “groomer” narr-
ative, reviving a decades-old attempt to
baselessly associate the LGBTQ+ com-
munity with paedophilia.
But why now? The extraordinary
success of anti-LGBTQ+ narratives and
As a martial arts veteran, I know Zuckerberg
could take Musk in a fight. But what a waste
of energy!
Joel Snape
Are Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg
going to have a cage fight? Of course
they aren’t. In case you missed this
Opinion
illuminates the individuals behind the
label”. They deserve the same sort of
resources and attention and empathy
that five rich adventurers, who put
themselves in harm’s way for the fun
of it, rather than because they were des-
perate for a better life, have had.
Here’s the thing: unless I’ve severely
underestimated the number of billio-
A protest outside Tate Britain in London, against it hosting Drag Queen Story Hour UK on
11 February, 2023 Photograph: James Manning/PA
action in the US is providing a febrile
backdrop to the UK protests. Last year,
the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis,
signed the “Stop Woke” Act, which pre-
vents schools from discussing racism,
oppression and LGBTQ+ issues in the
classroom. Book bans are also proli-
ferating due to organised far-right ef-
forts to limit access to material with
LGBTQ+ and black characters.
Previous analysis by our re-
searchers found US groups had an out-
sized influence on internet subcultures
and activism in many parts of the
world. And our latest research confirms
this – British anti-drag protesters are
repurposing rhetoric and actions spear-
headed by US-based extremist groups.
In the UK’s anti-drag movement, Amer-
ican actors are approvingly cited by
groups in Telegram channels who are
inspired by their narrative of pushing
back against “grooming” and “queer ide-
ology”.
Beyond the expected far-right
extremists, a surprising and diverse
range of UK groups are joining forces
over a shared aim. Covid deniers, “sove-
reign citizens” (who believe the UK
is not a legitimate state) and various
story, Zuckerberg’s company, Meta, re-
cently released plans for a Twitter-like
app; Musk responded to tweets about
it by saying that he was “up for a cage
fight” with the Facebook founder; Zuck
shot back with a meme that only Ulti-
naires with a death wish, I think this is
the last story we’re going to see about
obscenely rich people going missing in
a submersible for quite a while. But
I’m afraid I can almost guarantee we’re
going to see plenty more stories about
ships carrying migrants capsizing.
If anything good can come of these
two tragedies, I hope it’s that it makes
other conspiracy theorists all sought to
have drag events cancelled last year.
This mirrors trends in the US,
where, in the same period, our re-
searchers found 203 events had been
targeted by groups that included far-
right extremists, neo-Nazis, parents’
rights groupswhooppose inclusive sex
education and promote book bans,
Covid sceptics, Christian nationalists
and anti-LGBTQ+ groups.
One US anti-drag protest in Decem-
ber 2022 hosted by the self-described
“parents’ rights” group Protect Texas
Kids was attended by the far-right ex-
tremist group Proud Boys, the neo-
Nazi Aryan Freedom Network, various
Christian nationalist groups, the pro-
gun group Open Carry Texas, and white
nationalist Groypers. Law enforcement
had to interveneto prevent violence.
Alliances of convenience of this
kind already seen in the US are now
appearing more frequently in the UK
and further afieldto protest about a
range of issues. Inthe UK,Germany, Irel-
and, Italyand theNetherlands, Covid-
related activism involved groups with
profound ideological differences – from
5G conspiracy theorists, to white supre-
mate Fighting Championship fans will
actually get; and the world continues
to turn/get hotter. The only thing you
really need to understand about this
affair is that two men who shouldn’t
have GSOH anywhere near their poten-
more people rethink how we value
human lives. I hope it makes it uncom-
fortably clear that, in the eyes of the
media and policymakers, one missing
billionaire is seemingly more important
than hundreds of missing migrants.
I hope it makes us consider the
framing around the story of migrant
crossings. I hope it makes more people
macists, to sovereign citizens – aligning
to agitate against public health meas-
ures, which they viewed as an unac-
ceptable incursion on their freedoms
by an authoritarian state. Our research
showed that Covid conspiracists and
white nationalists – who at face value
have little in common – organised to
protest against Drag Queen Story Hour
together, including in Brighton and
Leeds in August 2022.
British protesters’ increasing use
of intimidation and harassment tac-
tics, mirroring US movements, in their
attempts to stop these all-ages drag
events have resulted in real harms to
people. One drag performer told a court
that he had lost work, received death
threats and been targeted by “paedo-
phile hunters” after being portrayed as
a “groomer” online.
Families attending drag shows in
the UK have had abuse hurled at them
by protesters. Last year, protesters from
the sovereign citizens movement at-
tempted to perform a citizen’s arrest
of a drag performer at a library in Read-
ing. Elsewhere, staff at libraries hosting
drag events received coordinated ab-
usive phone calls and emails, according
to our research, and white nationalist
groups such as Patriotic Alternative car-
ried out leafleting campaigns equating
drag shows with child abuse.
In the US, attempts to silence have
gone even further. In November 2021,
five people were killed in a mass shoot-
ing at an LGBTQ+ nightclub in Colo-
rado. In April 2023, a “White Lives
Matter” member used molotov cock-
tails in an attempt to burn an Ohio
church to the ground after learning of
its plans to host multiple drag events.
In 2021, anti-LGBTQ+ crimes surged
by 70% in the US, according to FBI fig-
ures. In the UK, the latest Home Office
data shows annual increases of 41% in
hate crimes targeting people on the
tial dating profile tried to make some
funnies, and everyone else joined in the
battle royale for attention. Did I men-
tion that it’s really hot outside?
Anyway. On the surface, this story
probably reflects better on Zuck than
25
interrogate the ways in which migrants
are blamed for their deaths, blamed for
seeking out better lives – and how com-
pletely different that is from the em-
pathy afforded to millionaires seeking
out underwater thrills.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian US col-
umnist
A police officer separates Drag Story
Hour protesters and counter-protesters at
a library in Queens, New York City, on 20
June 2023. Photograph: Justin Lane/EPA
basis of sexual orientation, and 56% in
those targeting people on the basis of
their gender identity.
Public debate about what is appro-
priate entertainment for children, and
at what ages, is absolutely legitimate
and deserves a fair hearing. But these
tactics only serve to undermine that
discussion, with chilling consequences
for free expression and create fertile
ground for a potential uptick in vi-
olence.
Allowing groups to weaponise
hate against vulnerable communities
unchallenged could have far reaching
consequences for human rights and
public safety. We must create spaces
in which civil debate and challenge
can flourish without being hijacked by
fringe groups. Governments, especially
at the local level, must seek to protect
the rights of those who are under attack
and build resilience to campaigns that
undermine their humanity. There is still
time for Britain to wake up to this direc-
tion of travel, before the situation wor-
sens in the way it has in the US.
Tim Squirrell is head of communi-
cations at the Institute for Strategic
Dialogue
Do you have an opinion on the issues
raised in this article? If you would like to
submit a response of up to 300 words by
email to be considered for publication in
our letters section, please click here.
Musk: the former, after all, actually
practises mixed martial arts (MMA),
and recently competed in a Brazilian
jiu-jitsu tournament where he won a
Continued on page 26

26
Continued from page 25
brace of medals. As a two-decade BJJ
bro with a handful of amateur MMA
fights under my own (black) belt, I
know how difficult that is. Even if
you’re hiring the best coaches in the
world, you still have to do the work
to get better, and there is (I’m assum-
ing) no level of wealth that makes it
feel better when another man grinds
his shoulder into your face.
Competing is even scarier. Though
serious injuries in the sport are reason-
ably rare, you’re essentially daring
random strangers to hyperextend your
joints and squeeze your carotid arte-
ries shut every time you have a match,
and some of them are really, really good
at it. That Zuckerberg is giving it a go,
when he could probably just pay 100
bodyguards to follow him everywhere
for the rest of his life, shows a humility
and willingness to embrace the begin-
ner mind that you have to admire, even
if you’ve seen The Social Network. Be-
sides, a billionaire paying some of the
world’s best grapplers to turn him into a
fighting machine is so comic-book that,
as a nerd, I’m honour-bound to respect
it. I hope he builds an anti-Superman
suit next.
This, I think, is also why I’m a bit
disappointed in Musk. His fans refer to
him as a real-life Iron Man Tony Stark: a
Alito’s wrongdoing makes a supreme court
ethics overhaul an imperative
Margaret Sullivan
T
he US supreme court is
an extraordinarily exclu-
sive club. The nine mem-
bers are unelected and
employed for life, or until
they step down voluntarily. And, as in
many exclusive clubs, the membership
likes to keep things just as they have
always been.
Tradition has its merits, of course,
but recent events clearly show that
change is urgently needed.
The court, shockingly, is not bound
by a code of ethics as lower courts
are. Federal laws about financial disclo-
sures, for example, do apply to them,
but there is no clear method of enforce-
ment.
The remedy, a bad one, apparently
is that these justices are so wise that
they will police themselves. Clearly,
that doesn’t happen, or not effectively
enough.
More proof came this week when
the excellent investigative news outlet
ProPublica revealed that, in 2008, Jus-
tice Samuel Alito took a trip to Alaska
on the private jet of hedge fund man-
ager and Republican donor Paul Singer
– a trip that likely would have cost more
than $100,000 if arranged indepen-
dently.
But Alito never disclosed the trip.
What’s worse – and perhaps entirely
predictable – Singer’s businesses were
involved in several supreme court cases
over the next few years, and Alito didn’t
recuse himself.
Opinion
Face off … Elon Musk (left) and Mark Zuckerberg. Composite: Theo Wargo/WireImage; Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images
self-made, self-taught billionaire who’s
an expert in everything from rocketry
to neural enhancement. He is supposed
to be the pinnacle of the productivity
bro pyramid: a perfectly optimised guy
who sleeps for six hours a night and
spends his days nudging humanity
towards its next evolutionary phase.
Unfortunately, every time he tweets,
he unpicks this image just a little bit:
‘What’s to be done about these persistent judicial ethics lapses?’ Photograph: Erin Schaff/EPA
He’s being blasted for it in some cor-
ners, and so is the court. Rightly so.
“The billionaire who paid for pri-
vate jet rides and luxury fishing trips
for Samuel Alito also bankrolled the
groups funding the plaintiffs in the
student loan relief case,” complained
Sawyer Hackett, a senior adviser to
Julián Castro, the former San Antonio
mayor and Obama cabinet member.
(Two lawsuits have challenged the
legality of President Biden’s $400bn
student loan forgiveness plan; the su-
preme court is expected to rule on it
within weeks.)
And Hackett asked the obvious
a meme when he could be developing
interplanetary travel here, a dad joke
when he could be welding together his
own rocket boots there. Tony Stark, let’s
not forget, can actually do wing chun.
Musk refers to his own fighting style as
“the walrus” – “I just lie on you.”
Ultimately, though, neither billio-
naire comes out of this very well, be-
cause – as you might remember from
question, given that reality: “How can
this court be considered legitimate?”
The answer is that it can’t be,
until the court gets its house in order.
The Alito revelations come on top of
recent ProPublica reporting about Jus-
tice Clarence Thomas’s ethical lapses
– specifically his acceptance of finan-
cial favors from Texas billionaire Harlan
Crow, another Republican donor. Crow
made tuition payments for a member
of Thomas’s family, paid for lavish
trips and participated in a dubious real
estate deal involving the home that the
justice’s mother lived in.
Sadly, these justices aren’t the only
school, or the 1989 movie Road House
– fighting doesn’t really prove any-
thing. Recently, it’s become de rigueur
for ideological opponents to offer each
other out for a scrap, perhaps because
being Good At Fighting – having the
dedication to endure endless training
sessions or the willpower to take a solid
punch and keep going – feels like a
proxy for other worthwhile qualities.
ones behaving badly: the Wall Street
Journal’s editorial page agreed to pub-
lish Alito’s defensive statement, in an
op-ed, about the ProPublica revelations
before the investigative article had
even run. (Alito wouldn’t comment on
ProPublica’s reporting when he was
given the opportunity before publi-
cation.) Call it a “pre-buttal”, and one
that lacked even a basic level of journa-
listic solidarity on the part of the Jour-
nal’s opinion side. Thought experiment:
what if, say, the Washington Post’s
editorial board had allowed Elizabeth
Holmes to pre-empt John Carreyrou’s
investigation for the Wall Street Journal
The Guardian Friday 23 June 2023
But – here’s the thing – it really isn’t.
I could probably beat up 99% of the
people I disagree with on Twitter, but
that doesn’t make me more qualified
than they are to opine on the housing
crisis. Conversely, I’ve been beaten up
by plenty of people, and half of them
were even less informed than me.
So, Elon, Mark, by all means keep
up the competitiveness – it’s a healthy
quality. But could I humbly suggest that
the real tussle should be to see who
can fix the climate crisis the hardest?
Anyone, after all, can climb into a cage
– but it’s going to take a Tony Stark or
a Lex Luthor to sort out the rest of the
planet.
• Joel Snape is a writer and fitness
expert
A billionaire paying
the world’s best
grapplers to turn him
into a fighting
machine is so comic-
book that I’ve got to
respect it
that exposed the fraudulent practices
of her blood-testing company, The-
ranos (her crimes sent her to federal
prison last month).
What’s to be done about these
persistent judicial ethics lapses?
“When a potential conflict arises,
the sole arbiter of whether a justice
should step away from a case is the jus-
tice him or herself,” ProPublica noted.
That’s not nearly good enough.
For years, good-government groups
and thinktanks have been advocating
for change.
In 2019, the well-respected Bren-
nan Center for Justice, in an extensive
report, urged the court to voluntarily
adopt a formal ethics code, rather than
wait for Congress to impose one. It also
called for the court to explain justices’
reasons for recusal, in order to pro-
vide more transparency, and to streng-
then its informal – and all-too-weak –
practices governing gifts and financial
disclosures.
All good and necessary ideas. And it
would be ideal for the court to get to
work on all of that.
But since there seems little appetite
to do so, it’s left up to Congress to do
it for them. Checks, balances and all of
that.
Today’s supreme court is extremely
powerful, increasingly political and
decreasingly trusted. It’s never been
more obvious that ethics reform needs
to happen now.
Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US
columnist writing on media, politics
and culture

28
The fourth leading cause of death in the US?
Cumulative poverty
Reverend William Barber and
Gregg Gonsalves
C
an you name the top 10
causes of death in Amer-
ica? Without too much
trouble, most Americans
could likely come up with
some of them: cancer, heart disease,
stroke, accidents. But it would come as
a surprise to many to know that po-
verty is right up there with these other
dreaded scourges – much higher, in
fact, than many ills that have inspired
investigative committees, major policy
investments and sustained attention
from the public and private sectors in
American life.
A recent study by one of our col-
leagues shows that cumulative poverty
over many years is the fourth leading
cause of death in this country. Cur-
rent poverty – just being poor right
now – is seventh on that list, and it
alone causes 10 times as many deaths
as homicide, close to five times as many
deaths as gun violence, and 2.5 times as
many deaths as drug overdoses. Cumu-
lative poverty that lingers year after
year is associated with approximately
60% more deaths than current poverty,
putting only heart disease, cancer and
smoking-related deaths ahead in the
number of Americans it kills.
But if this is true, why do we hear
so much about crime rates, opioids
and gun violence in America, but so
little from our elected leaders about
the crisis of poverty? Why is there no
“Surgeon General’s Warning” on low-
wage jobs? The relationship of poverty
to disease and death is a well-estab-
lished fact detailed in reports by the
World Health Organization, the World
Bank and our own government. But
we as a people have become numb to
the unnecessary deaths that are norma-
lized by the ways we often think and
talk about the economy in public life.
Sadly, the United States is the leader
in poverty among the rich countries of
How Ukraine’s national dish became a
symbol of Putin’s invasion
Anya von Bremzen
On 25 February 2022, I woke up after
a turbulent night checking news up-
dates about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Amid the shock and bouts of crying and
doomscrolling, a seemingly trivial yet
intimately unsettling thought entered
my mind. I realised that after years
of investigating national cuisines and
identities for a book I was working on,
I no longer knew how to think or talk
about borsch, a beet soup that Ukraine
and Russia claimed as their own.
I grew up in Soviet Moscow eating
borsch – ȈȕȗȠ in Cyrillic, no “t” at
the end, that’s a Yiddish addition – at
least twice a week; after we emigrated
in 1974, it signified for me the compli-
cated, difficult home we had left. Here
Opinion / The Long Read
‘Cumulative poverty over many years is the fourth leading cause of death in this country.’ Photograph: Bryan Olin Dozier/NurPhoto/
Shutterstock
the world. As of 2019, the US had the
worst poverty rate overall (17.8%) and in
children specifically (20.9%) among the
other 25 wealthy countries that are part
of the Organization for Economic Co-
operation and Development (OECD).
In addition, poverty affects us all.
Seventy-five per cent of all Americans
between 20 and 75 years of age will be
among the “current” poor or near po-
verty for at least one year of their lives.
Contrary to popular belief, poverty is
hardly just the province of the inner
city: only 10% of poor Americans live
in high-poverty census tracts – most are
spread out across the country. They are
our neighbors. And although the rates
of poverty are highest among commun-
ities of color, by sheer volume most
people living in poverty are white.
Finally, poverty is a drag on our
economy. Child poverty alone in the US
presents an $800bn to $1.1tn price tag,
based on reductions in adult produc-
tivity, criminal justice costs and the
costs of healthcare for children from
Borsch: ‘The colour of pomegranate, bright as a Ukrainian folk song’. Photograph:
Westend61/Getty Images
in Queens, New York, where I live, a big
pot made by my mother usually sat in
my fridge. But who did have the right
poor families.
But what if we could end poverty
in America, the misery and suffering
it generates – the 500 deaths a day
it causes in this country? Our col-
league Matthew Desmond, a sociologist
at Princeton University, estimates that
we could lift everyone within our bor-
ders above the poverty line for less than
1% of our national GDP – $177bn. Ending
poverty is within our grasp. It is some-
thing we can accomplish together. So
what’s stopping us?
As the economists Daron Acemoglu
and James Robinson said in their 2012
book Why Nations Fail, “those who
have power make choices that create
poverty. They get it wrong not by mis-
take or ignorance but on purpose.”
Matthew Desmond elaborates a sim-
ilar theme in his recent book Poverty,
By America: “Tens of millions of Amer-
icans do not end up poor by a mistake
of history or personal conduct. Poverty
persists because some wish and will it
to.”
to claim it as heritage? That tangled
question of cultural ownership I’d been
reflecting on for so long had landed on
It is difficult to believe that some
people are pro-poverty. The incentives
for maintaining the status quo, for
keeping many Americans poor, rest on
the fact that some people find consi-
derable financial benefit from presiding
over the misery of others. This is what a
young Friedrich Engels – observing the
deaths of factory workers, the condi-
tions of the slums and the exploitation
of children in Manchester, England in
the mid-19th century – called “social
murder”. Many were dying, while a few
made a killing from their suffering. It
was true then, and it is true now.
But this is not our destiny. We can
be the generation that abolishes po-
verty, the country that goes from the
bottom of the heap among its peers –
whether it’s about poverty, or life expec-
tancy – to the top of it. We can rise to
lead and “we the people” of the US can
stand up to form a more perfect union,
lifting this generation and the gener-
ations after it out of poverty, wiping
away the deaths being poor causes in
my own table with an intensity that
suddenly felt viscerally personal.
Back in Moscow, in the politically
stagnant 1970s, I never regarded borsch
as any people’s “national dish”. It was
just there, a piece of our shared Soviet
reality like the brown winter snow or
the buses filled with hangover breath
or my scratchy wool school uniform.
Our socialist borsch came in different
guises. Institutional borsch with its
reek of stale cabbage was to be endured
at kindergartens, hospitals and workers’
canteens across the 11 time zones of our
vast Union of Soviet Socialist Repub-
lics. Personal borsch, on the other hand,
brought out every Soviet mother’s and
grandmother’s sweet ingenuity – al-
though to me it all tasted kind of the
same in the end.
My mother was inordinately proud
The Guardian Friday 23 June 2023
this nation.
But this means holding up a mirror
to who we are as a country. Those
who gain from keeping people in the
chains of poverty, condemning them to
early death, must be confronted with
a movement that names poverty in
the richest nation on Earth as a public
health crisis, an economic dead weight,
a moral abomination and a stain on
the republic. When the poor and low-
wealth people of this nation link arms
to make the moral case for an econ-
omy that works for everyone, we have
the power to change the conversation
about what is possible in Washington
and in our statehouses.
The US claims to be a beacon of
democracy abroad and a nation com-
mitted to justice and general welfare at
home. This cannot be true as long as
poverty is the fourth leading cause of
death in the richest nation in the his-
tory of the world. Poor and low-wealth
people are fighting for their lives and
for the life of our democracy through
the Poor People’s Campaign: A National
Call for Moral Revival, which worked
with members of the US House of
Representatives last year to introduce
a Third Reconstruction Resolution that
outlines policy priorities that can guide
legislation to end poverty.
In an echo of the Bible, this move-
ment is saying, “Woe unto those who
make unjust laws and rob the poor of
their right.” But this prophetic challenge
isn’t a condemnation. It is an invitation
to life. Together, we can become the
land of “liberty and justice for all” that
has never yet been. Indeed, people who
know that they do not have to accept
the death sentence of poverty are lead-
ing the way.
The Rev Dr William J Barber II is
founding director of the Yale Center for
Public Theology and Public Policy and
co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign:
A National Call for Moral Revival
Gregg Gonsalves is associate pro-
fessor of epidemiology at the Yale
School of Public Health
The writer’s mother, Larisa, teaching
cookery for a League of Kitchens online
class, March 2021. Photograph: Iri Greco/
BrakeThrough Media
of her hot, super-quick vegetarian ver-
sion. I still have an image of her in our
trim Moscow kitchen, phone tucked
under her chin, shredding the carrots,
cabbage and beets on a clunky box
grater right into our chipped enamel
Continued on page 29
Friday 23 June 2023 The Guardian
Continued from page 28
family pot. It was herrecipe, she always
insisted, a miracle of shortage economy
conjured from a can of tomato paste
and some withered root veggies. In the
fall she’d add a tart Antonovka apple;
in winter maybe a glob of American
ketchup for a piquant, faintly dissident
touch.
Ukraine became an independent
state in 1991, having been an orig-
inal republic of the USSR, and part
of the Russian empire since the late
1700s. The earliest known mention of
borsch dates from 1584, in the diary of
a German merchant who travelled to
Kyiv when most of present-day Ukraine
belonged to the Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth – well before Ukraine
orRussia developed any modern form
of national consciousness. The Slavic
word borsch most likely referred to
hogweed back then, a common plant
that was often fermented and used for
a sour green potage. The deep-red soup
we all know must have developed to-
wards the start of the 18th century
as the cultivation of beetroot in east-
ern Europe took off. From then on,
mentions of borsch in Russian cook-
books became fairly common, although
often referencing “Malorossiya” (Little
Russia) – the imperial term for Ukraine.
The Soviets themselves never
denied borsch its Ukrainian origins.
Parallel to our frugal quotidian beet
soup was a dish the propaganda-puffed
recipe books (boasting of the diverse
cuisines of ourSoviet republics) pre-
sented as thereal Ukrainian borsch. A
baroque meal in a bowl, thick enough
to stand a spoon in, it brimmed with
all kinds of meats – meats! – nobody
ever saw at a store. Although that
borsch supposedly celebrated Ukrai-
nianness, it was a socialist-realist fic-
tion, of course, a Soviet folkloric-kitsch
rebranding of Ukraine as our scarlet
empire’s wholesome breadbasket – a
Ukraine scrubbed of the horrors of
Stalin’s state-induced famines, of the
repressions of its language, culture and
any authentic expressions of natio-
nalism. In a political system where the
Kremlin socially engineered identities
and assigned cultural heritage to the
Soviet republics, that borsch was an im-
perial possession of almighty Moscow –
as was Ukraine itself, implicitly always
a lesser nation than Russia, or perhaps
not even a nation at all, as Putin now
would have us believe.
I’d never thought much about that
“real” Ukrainian borsch until 1989, 15
years after my mum and I immigrated
to the US, when I wrote my first cook-
book, Please to the Table. My book,
too, meant to celebrate the culinary
diversity of the Soviet republics – an
imperialist-tainted project, perhaps, I
now think, uneasily, in retrospect. A
deeply ironic one, for sure, because
MikhailGorbachev’s creaking imperium
was coming apart at the seams as my
book went into print and the Soviet
republics kept asserting their indepen-
dence. Researching borsch in western
Ukraine in those twilight days of the
USSR, I was shocked to discover ver-
sions I never suspected existed: borsch
with white sugar beets and porcini mu-
shrooms; with fermented beet kvass;
with smoky dried pears and wild game
shot by a hunter we’d met on the
road. Returning to New York, I inter-
viewed members of the Ukrainian dias-
pora here, generous people who fed
me fragrant honey cakes and Christ-
mas borsch with tiny dumplings called
vushka. And then wrote angry letters
when my publisher decided to subtitle
The Long Read
the book: The Russian Cookbook.
***
My mother’s “super-quick vege-
tarian” borsch featured in Please to
the Table, along with a handful of
other borsch recipes. And by some
strange twist of fate, almost three dec-
ades later it became a kind of sal-
vation for her. After her darkest, most
hopeless days under Donald Trump
during the pandemic, she miraculously
sprang back to life early in 2021 when
she started teaching cooking on Zoom
for a wonderful multicultural school
called the League of Kitchens. For
her class, my mother plumped for her
Moscow veggie borsch accompanied by
herb-and-garlic-smothered dinner rolls
called pampushky. And as soon as
her menu promising “iconic Russian
dishes” went up on League of Kitchens’
website, an angry email arrived from a
Ukrainian American journalist. “To say
borsch is a Russian dish is not accu-
rate and could be seen as offensive to
a lot of people,” said the email. “There
has been an ongoing fight over borsch
in recent years as part of the backdrop
to the continuing very real war between
Russia and Ukraine.”
Indeed. The first real political flare-
up over borsch broke out in 2019,
five years after Putin annexed Crimea
and started a war in eastern Ukraine.
That year the Russian Federation’s min-
istry of foreign affairs provocatively
tweeted: “A timeless classic! #Borsch is
one of Russia’s most famous & beloved
#dishes & a symbol of traditional cui-
sine.” Ukrainian social media responded
with outrage and scorn at this weapo-
nising of soup. “As if stealing Crimea
wasn’t enough,” seethed one commen-
tator, “you had to go and steal borsch
from Ukraine as well.” “Cultural appro-
priation!” cried Ukrainians interviewed
on the subject. “[The Russians] will not
take our borsch,” vowed Ievgen Klopo-
tenko, a young activist chef in Kyiv,
as he launched a crusade to have it
inscribed into Unesco’s intangible cul-
tural heritage list.
For her part, my passionately
anti-Putin, anti-imperialist mother was
pained by the Ukrainian journalist’s
email. Cooking for her was always
politically conscious. She garnished her
classes with memories of Soviet repres-
sions and the endless, humiliating food
queues. She told of fleeing the hated
Soviet regime at the age of 40 with
only me and two suitcases and no
right of return, of how she made her
borsch in our bare apartment in alien,
faraway Philadelphia. But she refused
to assign a single identity to a dish that
she, along with people across multiple
borders, have been cooking for gener-
ations, have internalised as their own.
“There are many types of borsch,” she
would insist, grating her carrots and
beetroots, “Russian, Polish, Lithuanian,
Moldovan, Karelian, diaspora Jewish –
and, yes, yes, Ukrainian.”
Across the giant span of the USSR,
she would further insist, borsch was
a comfort food that connected people
who shared not just the dishes but also
the tragedies of Soviet fate – Stalin’s
gulags, for instance, which didn’t spare
a single group or ethnicity. Anyway, this
was her, Larisa’s, recipe, full of her per-
sonal touches, resonant with so many
memories.
I wasn’t about to argue with my
mother about whose dish it “really”
was. My years of work on this issue
had left me wary of territory where
gastronomy was entangled with nation-
branding and profit. I was sceptical of
the overused concept of cultural appro-
priation. I agreed with philosopher
Kwame Anthony Appiah that it casts
cultural practices as something like cor-
porate intellectual property. Whereas,
in reality, as he put it: “All cultural prac-
tices and objects are mobile; they like
to spread, and almost all are themselves
creations of intermixture.”
***
Then 24 February 2022 happened.
That night, my mother, my partner,
Barry, and I sat in silence, gripped by
grief, rage, despair – and utter disbelief
– watching live CNN footage of Putin
launching his full-scale invasion. There
were air-raid sirens blaring in Kyiv that
night, missile strikes, explosions rock-
ing several other major Ukrainian cities.
My mother was ashen-faced. She barely
spoke, but I’m pretty sure she was flash-
ing back to the sunny day of 22 June
1941, when she was seven and the Nazi
invasion of the Soviet Union was un-
leashed.
Over the following weeks the news
brought a surreal split screen of two
countries collapsing in different ways:
Ukraine all smoke, haze and wreck-
age from Putin’s missiles and artil-
lery; Russia ominously freezing itself
back to the cold war USSR of my
childhood – extreme censorship, toxic
state-sponsored patriotism. As if one
needed any further reminder that alle-
giances and identities can shift over-
night, Soviet émigrés from our cir-
cles who considered themselves cultu-
rally Jewish-Russian-American started
remembering all the family members
they had in Ukraine. As did we.
My mum’s dad was from Dnipro-
petrovsk (now Dnipro); her entire
maternal clan was from Odesa, the
city of our sunburned summer vaca-
tions. Now in that city where she her-
self was born and lived very brief-
ly, acquaintances who used to gri-
mace at Ukrainian nationalism switch-
ed their social media feeds to Ukrainian
and railed against Moscow’s brutality.
Meanwhile, close friends of ours here,
worldly people born in Soviet Ukraine,
were posting diatribes savaging “Great
Russian Culture” on Facebook. Some
gloated over images of dead Russian
soldiers, just boys, splayed in the snow.
It was shocking to see; but deep down I
shared their naked rage. Every Russian
– including myself – seemed to be some-
how complicit. I felt guilty for thinking
in the imperialist language of Putin’s
aggression, for the volumes by Pushkin
and Tolstoy on my bookshelves. And,
yes, for my previous thoughts about
borsch.
If I started my national dish project
comfortable with my own cosmopo-
litanism, I felt bereft now, a gaping
emptiness where my mental happy
places should be. In the US, years of
Trumpism were poisoning the coun-
try that opened its doors to my mum
and myself back in 1974. My ancestral
homeland? A genocidal terrorist state.
My younger brother and my father had
died in Moscow the previous year, and
now I couldn’t imagine ever returning
to visit their graves.
It’s an evergreen cliche that in times
of crisis the foods we grew up with pro-
vide a comforting sense of home and
security, reconnect us to who we are,
where we come from. But just thinking
of borsch brought more heartache. Who
owns borsch? The question hung in the
air, accusatory. The soup of my child-
hood had become a symbol of Putin’s
assault on Ukrainian land, culture and
heritage, of his drive to plunder and
obliterate Ukraine.
By April, Russia’s atrocities in
Bucha were being uncovered, millions
of Ukrainians had become refugees,
and entire towns and cities lay in
ruins. Meanwhile, Russia’s foreign min-
istry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova,
a blond-haired ferocious Putinist, deli-
vered a bizarre tirade about borsch. “It
had to belong to just one people, just
one nationality,” she ranted after Ukrai-
nians insisted that borsch was their na-
tional dish. “But for it to be shared?
… No! They didn’t want to compro-
mise. This is exactly what we are talking
about, xenophobia, nazism, extremism
in all forms!” In the service of an unpro-
voked invasion, she was co-opting the
time-honoured, benevolent notion that
food should be shared.
By then my mother, who had been
so traumatised by the early days of the
war, had found in her borsch an emo-
tional anchor and a new political mean-
ing. Together with the League of Kitch-
ens she was using her Zoom classes to
raise money for Ukraine, to speak out
in our local media, even on Japanese
television, against Putin’s horror show.
The struggle transformed her. At 88,
she became a modest, heartfelt part of
the global “stand with Ukraine” move-
ment, where borsch was no longer just
soup but a fundraising force and a soli-
darity symbol.
“Anyone who cooks borsch today
gets closer to us,” declared Klopo-
tenko, the young Kyiv chef. In London,
my friend Olia Hercules, a brilliant
Ukrainian food writer turned crusader,
started the Cook for Ukraine drive with
her Russian émigré colleague Alissa
Timoshkina, raising more than £2m and
boosting the profiles of Ukrainian cul-
ture and food. In New York, iconic East
Village restaurant Veselka became an
activism hub, with all its borsch prof-
its going to Ukrainian charities. Soon
the social media of my food friends
all over the world was a tide of blue-
yellow flags, of varenyky dumplings
and stuffed cabbage – and the same
borsch and pampushky my mom made
for her class.
My mother now spoke about borsch
with a newfound authority and moral
clarity. It didn’t matter who exactly “in-
vented” the soup, she insisted. What
was crucial was how borsch figured in
anational narrative. And for Ukrainians
under attack, it was a powerful symbol
of unity. “Borsch,” she told one radio
interviewer, “stands for home, gene-
rosity, the richness of land, and family
ties … And all these things are now
being taken away from Ukrainians.”
This was pretty much Unesco’s
justification for an unprecedented
emergency move to fast-track the cul-
tural heritage application that had been
submitted back in 2019. On 1 July 2022,
day 128 of the invasion – as Russian mis-
siles killed more than 20 people near
Odesa – Unesco declared the culture
of Ukrainian borsch an “intangible cul-
tural heritage in need of urgent safe-
guarding”.
“Victory in the war for borsch is
ours!” Ukraine’s culture minister Olek-
sandr Tkachenko posted on Telegram:
“Remember and be sure: We will win
this war like we did the war for borsch.”
***
Late that summer, six months into
Russia’s assault, I called Aurora Ogo-
rodnyk, a food researcher in Lviv,
who is writing a book about borsch
with anthropologist Marianna Dushar.
I wanted to ask for her thoughts on the
dish as a Ukrainian national symbol, a
role supercharged by Putin’s invasion.
“But borsch has long been symbol-
ically important for us,” Aurora said.
“We cook it for baptisms, weddings and
funerals, we serve it in public com-
munal pots during political protests –
29
we even prepare it in dried form as ra-
tions for our soldiers, since 2014.” She
paused, then added simply: “It’s who we
are, our DNA. Red like our blood. And
now Ukrainians eat it when they return
to their ruined cities and villages.”
I’d met Aurora in the sunny Before
era, at an international food conference.
Now, she said, she was mostly at home
in Lviv in western Ukraine, well away
from the major fighting in the country’s
south and east, yet always under threat
of a missile strike. “Daily life goes on
here,” she told me, sounding eerily calm,
“but with the ever-present backdrop of
a sudden air raid … the realisation that
any moment you, too, can be killed.”
I wondered if perhaps now wasn’t
the right moment to talk about soup,
while civilians were being slaughtered
and cities destroyed?
“No, now is the moment!” Aurora
said. “To finally banish those Russian/
Soviet colonialist optics. Because it was
fine having us as funny, folksy Ukrai-
nians with our borsch and our salo
[lard] when we were part of the USSR,
which Russia controlled. But once we
began to assert our independence, they
decided to remind us, no, borsch doesn’t
belong to you, actually.
“So borsch, is also an emblem of
separation for us,” she said. “A red line
where we cut them off and say enough
to colonialism.”
There were a thousand more things
I planned to ask Aurora. But instead,
I suddenly found myself profusely
apologising. Apologising for narcissis-
tically going on about the guilt I was
feeling, my own rage at the Russians,
my loss of identity, my sheepishness for
not yet learning Ukrainian and having
to speak Russian to her.
With quiet authority, Aurora offered
me a way forward. “I understand your
rage, I share it, Anya. And when you’re
far away it’s easy to get engulfed by des-
pair. But all you need is a moment of
reflection – just one. Then stop dwelling
on hatred and guilt. Spread love and
compassion through your cooking and
writing.
“And really,” she added. “How is any
of this your personal fault?”
At the end I asked Aurora if she be-
lieved Russians and Ukrainians would
ever eat borsch together again. There
was a long silence. Finally, she replied:
“Not until the Ukrainians who win this
war and the Russians who lose it are
long gone.”
So where, then, was my guilt in
all this? Hanging up after speaking to
Aurora, I thought again of a poem,
the savagely offensive verse lamenting
Ukraine’s independence by the poet
Joseph Brodsky, exiled Jewish–Russian
Soviet dissident and Nobel laureate.
The one where he promises that on
their deathbeds, Ukrainians will for-
sake the “bullshit” of their national
19th-century poet Taras Shevchenko
for Pushkin; the one where he wants
to spit in Ukraine’s great river, the Dnie-
per. Brodsky wrote this in 1992, when
he was living in the US, and embittered
by Ukraine’s splitting away from Russia.
He never published it, though he read
it in public, just twice. Recently, it
had been resurfacing in conversations
about Russian imperialist arrogance.
“I think I need to decolonise borsch
from myself,” I texted Aurora. “To stop
thinking of owning it because of my So-
viet-Russian personal history.” Aurora
texted back some kind words in Ukrai-
nian. The tension I felt during our
conversation lifted a little.
***
Continued on page 30

30
Continued from page 29
On a stormy evening in August, two
old friends arrived at my apartment
in Queens with an armful of sump-
tuous marigolds. Andrei explained their
Ukrainian name: “Chornobryvtsi –dark-
browed, meaning beautiful.”
“On the drive over,” his wife, Toma,
said, “they perfumed our car with the
scent of Ukrainian summer.” Later, I
learned that Ukrainians plant marigolds
by their houses to ward off the evil eye
and misfortune.
Toma and Andrei are from Kyiv and
live in New Jersey, and we hadn’t seen
them for months. Since the invasion,
Andrei – a documentary film-maker
whose works include an account of
Ukraine’s Orange revolution of 2004 –
had been posting on Facebook with
such raw anti-Russian passion, I wasn’t
sure if they’d want to see me again.
In one post he talked about how his
hatred, at first an “acute disease with
fever, curses and wishes for a painful
death to you know who”, had become “a
chronic condition, always with me, day,
morning, evening. And, of course, in my
dreams.”
Deeply worried about them, shee-
pishly I had emailed my sympathies,
and repeatedly suggested getting to-
gether. Andrei would thank me for
“reaching out” and leave it at that.
Markets predict 6% UK interest rate by end of
year
Graeme Wearden
The financial markets are predicting UK
interest rates will hit 6% by the end of
the year, and remain at that level until
next summer, after the Bank of Eng-
land hiked its benchmark rate by half a
percentage point.
The financial markets were volatile
as economists warned that the Bank’s
efforts to cool inflation by lifting its key
lending rate to 5% on Thursday could
trigger a recession.
Money markets are pricing in fur-
ther increases in rates, with the BoE
expected to lift borrowing costs by
another percentage point by its Decem-
ber meeting, to 6% – a level last seen
in 2001. Rates could then be main-
tained at 6% until June 2024, when the
Bank could start cutting, market pricing
shows.
Adrien Pichoud, chief economist
and senior portfolio manager at Bank
Syz, a Swiss lender, said the Bank of
England can’t risk being perceived as
soft in its primary mission of keeping
inflation contained.
“Unless current dynamics in service
prices and wages were to ease abruptly
in the coming months, additional rate
hikes will likely be required by the end
The Long Read / Finance
But now they were here, looking
festive with their Ukrainian flowers and
blue-yellow Ukraine solidarity brace-
lets. We were overjoyed to see them.
I had thought long and hard about
what borsch I would serve for this occa-
sion, brought about by such wrenching
circumstances. To decolonise borsch,
to make it truly Ukrainian, I rejected all
the recipes I knew as a Soviet and post-
Soviet Russian. For days I researched
the soup in Ukrainian, struggling with
Google’s translations at first, then even-
tually easing into this language once
so close to mine. What I found was a
trove of regional recipes, recipes that
now read like an atlas of violence.
Here was borsch (“prunes obli-
gatory”) from Vinnytsia, the west-cen-
tral city with a long Jewish history,
where on a sunny July day Russian
rockets killed 23 civilians going about
their daily routines. There was a borsch
based on dried fish from Mykolaiv, an
industrial port city bombarded by Rus-
sians for months on end; there was
a Tatar borsch with lamb, quince and
corn from Crimea. I discovered borsch
aphorisms and cartoons, borsch prov-
erbs and jokes, borsch poems newly
composed in the noise of this war,
personal borsch recipes triumphantly
named for places where Ukrainians re-
pelled Russian aggressors.
Sifting through all these, I would
The financial markets were volatile as economists warned that the Bank of England’s efforts to cool inflation by lifting its key lending rate
to 5% could trigger a recession. Photograph: Yui Mok/PA
of the year,” Pichoud said.
“Such tightening in financing condi-
tions will eventually take its toll on eco-
nomic activity, and the risk of a reces-
sion caused by high interest rates is
clearly rising. But this risk is probably
required to be taken in order to avoid
think of something Marianna, Aurora’s
co-author, told me. “Borsch isn’t so
much a recipe as a national idea,”
she said, “an idea that all Ukrainians
carry inside them. Borsch develops and
changes – and it changes us in the
process.” In my own way, I felt that
borsch was changing me, too.
Toma and Andrei’s eyes grew wide
at my opening dish: a chilled borsch,
for which I’d fermented the beet kvass
myself, as it was done centuries ago,
then added sour cherries and rhubarb
for a classic fruity, tart flavour. “In Kyiv,”
said Toma, “we’d use fresh gooseberries
for that sour effect.”
Just six months ago we were the
same people, I reflected sadly, as my
mother passed around her chopped
liver, herring paté and a garlicky
eggplant dip – Jewish appetisers iconic
to her native Odesa. We were all
former Soviets turned émigrés, Russian
speakers of mixed ethnic backgrounds
who’d read Pushkin, had the same cul-
tural compass. “And now the invasion
has divided us,” Andrei continued my
thought, his voice going quiet, “into
those living in a daily personal hell, and
the compassionate bystanders … who’ll
never truly understand our trauma.”
Toma and Andrei had spent the
past months waking up and going to
bed checking the news and updates
from their families in Kyiv. Toma has
inflation dynamics to settle even more
deeply,” Pichoud added.
Short-dated UK government bond
prices weakened a little on Thursday,
pushing up the yield, or interest rate,
on two-year UK gilts, which are used to
price mortgages. They traded around
two sisters back home. Andrei’s sister
had suffered such severe depression
and panic attacks she was in Germany
receiving treatment. “It helped to get a
break from the air raids,” said Andrei.
“But she can’t wait to get back to her
kids and grandkids.”
I brought out my second borsch,
to the table my mother had decorated
with sunflowers and a mini Ukrainian
flag. It’s shocking pink, with blended-in
sour cream, dusky with broth infused
with smoked pork. It has no potatoes or
cabbage and is meant to be sipped from
cups at weddings. Nobody at the table
had tasted anything like it. The recipe
had been taught me by Maria, a recent
refugee from Ivano-Frankivsk in the
west of the country. “It will deRussify
you!” Maria promised, only half joking.
Inevitably the conversation turned
back to our changed identities. Andrei
– of Jewish-Polish-Ukrainian back-
ground, just like borsch, I noted – went
to a Ukrainian school but now deeply
regrets not doing a better job reading
Ukrainian literature in its original lan-
guage. Toma was born in Dresden (ex–
German Democratic Republic) but had
lived in Kyiv since childhood. Though
her entire family is ethnically Russian,
her sister back home can’t bear the
sound of Russian any more, can’t look
at Russians.
As they talked, I thought of the
5.1%, near the 15-year highs hit on
Wednesday.
“The market is implying that this
hike will kill growth, and reduce infla-
tion, and I think the market’s right, says
Mike Riddell, head of macro uncon-
strained at Allianz Global Investors.
The Guardian Friday 23 June 2023
dream I’d been having for weeks, one
where I sit in my childhood Moscow
apartment drinking sugary tea with my
departed father and brother – from
which I’d wake up feeling homeless,
sundered from my past. I wanted to
tell them about it, but now Toma was
proposing a toast.
“To borsch,” she offered. “It’s the
colour of pomegranate, bright as a
Ukrainian folk song.”
“To eating it often with people we
love,” my mother put in.
Andrei raised his shot glass of Polish
vodka. “Borsch is a generous dish,”
he declared, “a Ukrainiandish, even if
other people might claim it. I say: leave
it to Ukrainians, please, and after they
win this war they’ll invite the rest of the
world to the table.”
“But notmembers of the Russian
Federation,” Toma added tartly.
And we drank.
This is an edited extract from Na-
tional Dish by Anya von Bremzen, pub-
lished by Penguin Press US on 20 June. It
will be published by Pushkin Press in the
UK in September.
• Follow the Long Read on Twit-
ter at @gdnlongread, listen to our pod-
casts here and sign up to the long read
weekly email here.
Thursday’s intervention failed to lift
the pound, as economists reacted to
the increased likelihood of recession.
Normally, higher interest rates
should support a currency, but after
some volatility immediately after the
BoE decision sterling was down a third
of cent against the dollar in afternoon
trading at $1.2740.
Joe Nellis, a professor of global
economy at Cranfield School of
Management, also warned of recession.
“The Bank of England is deploying
shock and awe tactics in a bid to shake
the economy out of its current state of
inflation,” Nellis said.
“Inflation is becoming embedded in
the system with little sign of it sub-
siding. Unfortunately, further financial
hardship is expected for many mil-
lions of households – and those at the
lower end of the income scale with vari-
able rate mortgages, or who are in the
process of remortgaging, will be hit the
hardest,” he said.
Stocks fell in London on Thursday,
with the FTSE 100 index of blue-chip
shares losing 57 points to close at 7,502
points, its lowest close since the start
of June. Banks, housebuilders and con-
sumer-facing companies were among
the fallers.
Friday 23 June 2023 The Guardian
The Guardian view on Macron’s green
finance deal: save lives, not profits
Editorial
The International Energy Agency in
2021 had an unambiguous message:
developing new fossil fuel resources
is incompatible with restricting global
heating to below 1.5C, a threshold
beyond which the most disastrous cli-
mate impacts lie. Yet the oil and gas
industry isn’t listening. Last year it com-
mitted half a trillion dollars for new
capital expenditure on future drilling
and extraction, while making outra-
geous profits of $4tn. Business as usual
will destroy life as we know it.
Energy is fundamental for devel-
opment and meeting basic needs. But
producing it from coal, oil and gas is
simultaneously the cause of the cli-
mate emergency. Clearly the issues of
climate, energy and development must
be addressed in an interconnected way.
This is very difficult against a post-
Covid backdrop when poor nations
have record levels of debt. In the wake
of the Ukraine invasion, rising interest
rates have caused the dollar to surge –
raising the cost of meeting loan repay-
ments which are often denominated in
the US currency. African nations spend
up to five times their health budgets on
debt obligations.
The French president, Emmanuel
Macron, should be congratulated for
hosting a summit to reimagine finan-
The Guardian view on Glastonbury’s
enduring appeal: a show like no other
Editorial
More than 200,000 people will head for
Worthy Farm in Somerset this weekend
for the 2023 Glastonbury festival. Since
1970, when tickets cost £1 (including a
pint of milk), it has grown to become
the UK’s largest festival and a rite of
passage for music lovers. Despite its
sometimes otherworldly appearance,
Glastonbury (of which the Guardian is
a longstanding media partner) is not
immune to the cost of living crisis.
Since organisers put up a “super fence”
in the early 2000s as a condition of
keeping its licence, changing its nature
but securing its future, it has faced
ever-rising costs.
In pre-pandemic 2019, the last time
tickets went on sale, they cost £265;
this year they have risen to £335. The
co-organiser Emily Eavis has cited the
knock-on effects of cancelling two fes-
tivals during Covid. In contrast with
other more corporate events, Glas-
tonbury offers free tickets for children
and works with food vendors on afford-
able options – but even so, there are
fears that younger music lovers could
end up priced out.
Festival financing has become
harder. The Association of Independent
Festivals says the costs of energy, stag-
ing and security have jumped 30%
The Guardian View
Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados, delivers her speech at the financial summit in Paris on 22 June. Photograph: Ludovic Marin/
AP
cial solutions to the interlinked global
goals of tackling poverty, curbing
planet-destroying emissions and pro-
tecting nature. But there is still a long
way to go. The announcement by the
International Monetary Fund that rich
countries had met a target, set in 2019,
of a $100bn climate fund for poor coun-
tries is probably less than meets the
eye. The contrast with the trillions of
dollars mobilised in an instant, to bail
Billie Eilish performing on the Pyramid main stage at Glastonbury in June 2022 – the youngest ever performer to headline the festival.
Photograph: Joel C Ryan/Invision/AP
since 2019. Last year, several British fes-
tivals were forced to cancel because of
a lack of ticket sales, while others have
launched crowdfunding and pay-it-for-
ward schemes to attract crowds. Never-
theless, as one of the world’s premier
music gatherings, Glastonbury’s appeal
remains undimmed. The festival sold
out in a couple of hours in November
out finance houses in 2008, is stark.
It is inexcusable that funds to address
global heating cannot be found.
“For us it is about saving lives,
for others, it is about saving profits,”
said Mia Mottley, the prime minister
of Barbados, chiding the rich world for
inaction during a “polycrisis moment”.
Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro,
called for a global financial transaction
tax. Kenya’s president, William Ruto,
2022.
Its Pyramid stage has hosted such
acts as David Bowie and Stevie Wonder,
while Jay-Z, Beyoncé and Adele have
performed career-defining sets that
challenged the festival’s traditional
focus on rock. The festival also rightly
pushes boundaries in other areas –
using revenue to support charities
came to Paris after endorsing a report,
“Just Transition”, which pointed to
Africa’s potential for harnessing renew-
able energy far outstripping any pro-
jected needs. Yet the continent has
been barely able to industralise at all,
let alone tap its vast green power poten-
tial.
Leaders in North America and
Europe are intent on reshaping their
energy systems, but the key mate-
and striving to remain environmentally
friendly.
Last year, the headliners broke bar-
riers. At 20, Billie Eilish became the
youngest ever singer to top the bill,
followed the next night by Sir Paul
McCartney, who became the oldest per-
former, before rapper Kendrick Lamar
stole the show. This year’s headline trio
31
rials required are found in the devel-
oping world. Even China, which domi-
nates critical rare earth elements and
their processing, lacks vital metals.
This should allow for a grand bargain,
where poorer countries are given policy
space to address the three structural
deficiencies that hinder their devel-
opment – a lack of food sovereignty,
a lack of energy sovereignty, and low
value-added manufacturing – in return
for sharing their minerals. Otherwise,
parts of Latin America, Africa and
Asia risk becoming targets of a new
scramble for resources – with clean
energy firms behaving as destructively
as fossil fuel companies: buying off
politicians, wrecking ecosystems and
lobbying against environmental regu-
lations. The cash, debt relief and access
to western markets needed by devel-
oping nations should not feed the en-
gines of extractive capitalism.
Mr Ruto said the three weeks taken
to create the current “Bretton Woods”
financial institutions should be enough
to design their replacement. This might
sound ambitious but it was Martin
Luther King who warned against the
“tranquillising drug of gradualism”. This
sense of urgency is needed now to stop
an environmental disaster.
– the Arctic Monkeys, Guns N’ Roses
and Elton John – represent a restoration
of a rock aesthetic. It is disappointing
that the main stage headliners fea-
ture only a single female bandmember,
Guns N’ Roses’ Melissa Reese.
Much of the beauty of Glastonbury
is to be found amid its myriad small-
er stages, away from the headliners
that command the attention of TV au-
diences. And Ms Eavis, whose father
founded the festival, says she remains
committed to balancing the bill, not
only in terms of gender but in “every
aspect of diversity”. She has been a
leading voice on the issue and is right
that the music industry has a “pipeline
problem” that begins with record labels
and radio playlists.
Prominent female artists such as
Lizzo and Lana Del Rey could bring the
Worthy Farm house down this week-
end. Glastonbury has the power to
turbocharge careers. In 2019, the grime
artist Stormzy was the first black British
solo artist to headline the festival, after
releasing just one album. Twenty-two
years earlier, in 1997, Radiohead played
OK Computer one month after its re-
lease to a festival blanketed in mud. On
Sunday, all eyes will be on Elton John
closing the festival with what may be
his last ever UK show. But Glastonbury
also retains enormous cultural power
to open ears and minds to what is new.

32
The Perfect Find review – Gabrielle Union
anchors breezy Netflix romcom
Andrew Lawrence
She had me at: “There’s nothing wrong
with Black nepotism.”
The thesis statement stamps the
tone for The Perfect Find, an edgier
than average choice for a Netflix-and-
chill romcom, and there’s so much
irony intended in Gabrielle Union being
the one to deliver the line. She is Jenna,
a Manhattan It-girl recovering from the
demise of a decade-long relationship
that unfolded in New York newsprint.
After a protracted self-imposed
exile at her childhood home ups-
tate, Jenna starts over in Brooklyn.
To make rent, she walks into an Es-
sence-like magazine to pitch herself as
its next creative director. Doyenne-in-
chief Darci (Gina Torres) holds a grudge
against Jenna for the jobs and man she
stole away, but agrees to take her on
in the end. She’s barely settled into
the great style closet that becomes
her office when Darci introduces her
son, Eric (up-and-comer Keith Powers),
the beguiling videographer Jenna drun-
kenly met and made out with at a party
the night before. That’s when Jenna
endorses Black nepotism. The line is
punctuated with a nervous chuckle,
but the film could not be more serious
about taking care of its own.
The Black celebrity cameos alone
run from rap icon Remy Ma to Union’s
own husband, the NBA legend Dwyane
Wade. Another former NBA wife, La La
Anthony, is one of Jenna’s homegirls.
Reality TV star Ts Madison delights as
the grand dame in mourning over Taraji
P Henson, the pet peacock she chased
‘It’s OK that life is hard’: Jennifer Lee, the
bullied Cinderella fan who rose to billion-
dollar boss at Disney
Catherine Shoard
Forty years ago, Jennifer Lee was miser-
able in middle school. Her parents had
got divorced and she had moved to
Rhode Island with her mother and
sister. She was, by her own account,
“always a mess. Stains on my clothes
… knots in my hair … chubby.
“I was born into a very modest life,”
she says today. “I was a kid with ADHD;
terrible in school. I don’t think people
ever thought I could amount to any-
thing.”
Her liferaft was a VHS tape of Cinde-
rella, rewatched daily for its pep talk
in perseverance. “Cinderella was bul-
lied severely and I was bullied. But
she stayed true to herself, even when
it was really hard. Something about the
concept of fighting through it helped
me.” She pauses. “I think a lot of us
get knocked down often, over and over
again, in our lives.”
After a few stumbles, Lee ended
up in New York with a job in pub-
Arts
Gabrielle Union and Keith Powers in The Perfect Find. Photograph: Photo Credit: Alyssa Longchamp/Alyssa Longchamp
to death. Janet Hubert, AKA the original
Aunt Viv, also hams it up as Jenna’s con-
cerned mother who nonetheless evicts
her only child for crimping mom and
dad’s sex life. Even director Numa Per-
rier appears on camera. And fans who
have been rocking with her back when
she blazed a fresh trail in the streaming
world with indy channel Black&Sexy
TV will surely thrill to the sight of Lina
Green, a beloved star from that orig-
inal company, as Darci’s twin assistant
opposite real-life sister Erica Jaye, too.
The script of this 99-minute fea-
ture comes courtesy of TV writer Leigh
Davenport and adapts the novel of
the same name by Tia Williams – two
‘If it’s not authentic, no one comes’ … Jennifer Lee. Photograph: Disney
lishing, a postgraduate degree in film
and a young daughter. When Agatha
was seven, they decamped to Hol-
lywood so that Lee could do rewrite
work on the script for Disney’s Wreck-
It Ralph. Two months turned into 12
years; today, Lee is chief creative officer
at the company where she had temped.
Why? Lee has been responsible for
a wildly lucrative revolution, which
more cameos in the film. Besides a
bestselling author, Williams is Estée
Lauder’s editorial director; hence why
the fashion world touches here feel so
textured, not least the Harlem Renais-
sance-inspired campaign Jenna dreams
up in a bid to win subscribers. The
story also explores themes a Lifetime
movie would happily sacrifice for its
main affair – Eric’s fatherless upbring-
ing and its impact on his relationships
with women, and a more age-appro-
priate suitor for Jenna who, like her, still
hasn’t married or had kids despite their
big ages.
But the thing that really makes
this film so clever is its deft hand for
re-energised the studio – and cinema
beyond. She won an Oscar for Frozen
in 2014, which also made her the first
woman ever to direct a film (which
she also scripted) that made more than
$1bn. In 2019, she co-wrote and co-di-
rected Frozen’s sequel – the project on
which she met her now-husband, the
actor Alfred Molina – and that same
year took over as Disney Animation’s
unpacking all the heavy baggage and
making light of it.
When Jenna invites the romantic
rivals to a housewarming party, the age-
appropriate guy turns out to be an even
bigger boy-man played by Godfrey (the
veteran standup and master mimic),
yet another delightful cameo. His cha-
racter nearly comes to blows with Eric’s
wingman, but an emergency breaks out
when the homey goes into anaphylactic
shock – a nightmare reaction to the
fish oil in Jenna’s food. The older boy-
man declares victory anyway. “That’s
what [you] would’ve looked like if I had
fought you outside.”
Throughout, Perrier keeps the
chief creative officer after the departure
of John Lasseter for “inappropriate hug-
ging” (not of her, she has said).
Now 51, Lee is warm, glossy and
as successful as you can get. She no
longer needs to see a bit of Cinderella
to get her out of the house, but the
film is still a touchstone (original pencil
sketches from 1950 hang behind her LA
desk). Her new film, Wish, co-written
with Frozen’s Chris Buck, is also about
a downtrodden teenage girl who wishes
on a star. Colourful magic and chatty
animals follow, but so, too, does the
realisation you need to put in some leg-
work to make your dreams come true.
The film is Disney’s big push for
a cinema hit this Christmas (in the
company’s centenary year, to up the
stakes further). Lee has been on a
small world tour previewing 20 mi-
nutes of unfinished footage. In London
last week, we saw Asha (voiced by
Ariana DeBose) scamper with her py-
jama-wearing baby goat through the
watercolour medieval-ish kingdom of
King Magnifico (Chris Pine), who soli-
The Guardian Friday 23 June 2023
mood Black and sexy, toggling between
Nat King Cole’s Je Vous Aime Beau-
coup and Usher’s Good Kisser during
the meet-cute and pushing in on the
pillow talk (her trademark) while set-
ting up these forbidden lovers for a
harsh public reveal. Perrier also pastes
in vintage scene work from Nina Mae
McKinney and Greta Garbo to give
this streaming romcom some old Hol-
lywood heft.
The downside to juggling so many
interesting ideas is that sometimes the
main point gets dropped. The scenes
between Union and Torres, whose Darci
recalls Vanessa L Williams’s glossy boss
in Ugly Betty, are almost too riveting –
as if Darci was actually meant to be the
antagonist. It doesn’t help the narrative
that Eric never musters the courage to
stand up to his mother and defend his
relationship. In fact, most of his impor-
tant decisions happen off-camera, in-
cluding the final choice to stay or go –
which, ultimately, doesn’t even feel like
his to make. His arc, from self-deter-
mined love interest to shrinking boy-
man, is a disappointment.
Otherwise, The Perfect Find is as
much a tribute to Black love as it is
a salute to the Roaring 20s – a fine
romance to build a night in around. It
meets the give-me-something-old-but-
different Hollywood brief with style
and wit, and takes care of anyone who
might find family here. There’s nothing
wrong with that, either.
The Perfect Find is available on Net-
flix on 23 June
Lee, right, with Ariana DeBose, who
voices Asha in Wish. Photograph: Disney
cits his subjects’ wishes, then grants a
handful in X Factor-style shows. Asha is
interviewed for the post of his appren-
tice, but whistleblows once she rea-
lises that Magnifico approves only the
most vanilla dreams, fearful anything
more ambitious might trigger a pea-
sants’ revolt.
Continued on page 33
Friday 23 June 2023 The Guardian
Continued from page 32
It looks bracing, I say: a young
woman of colour taking on a totali-
tarian regime. “You got that from 20 mi-
nutes,” Lee says. “I’m excited!” So how
does she think it might play in Iran?
Lee remains impeccably politic.
“We’re not trying to make a statement
like that. Underdog stories are there
for a reason.” That reason is that the
next generation needs stories in which
“a teenage girl can change the world.
Especially in a time where it can feel
like a drop in the ocean to be that
person. We’re forming our own socie-
ties all the time and they’re not easy,
they’re really complex, and we didn’t
shy from letting that be evocative.”
The film also looks as if it might
be bravely sceptical about monarchies,
I suggest. “It was important to me to
not make a statement about monarchy,”
says Lee. There’s a queen, too, she
Academy, take action: why there should be
an Oscar for best stunts
Stuart Heritage
You could ask a million different people
what they want from the Oscars, and
you’d get a million different replies.
Some would want greater diversity,
others for commercial movies to be
better recognised. Some would want to
see the entire ceremony scrapped alto-
gether and replaced by a list of win-
ners sent out via email, although that
last one might just be me. Anyway,
the point is that nobody – nobody on
Earth – would want the Oscars to be any
longer.
To watch the Oscars these days is
to commit to slowly losing all feeling
in your lower body. On and on they go,
for hours and hours. All the awards. All
the speeches. All the montages. All the
bits where everyone assembled focuses
their willpower to shut out the creep-
ing death of theatrical film-making as a
financially viable medium. It goes on a
while, and at this stage only an absolute
lunatic would want to start adding cate-
gories to an already overstuffed dance
card.
However, it looks as if this might
be happening in the next couple of
years. And, perhaps counterintuitively,
it is going to improve the Oscars ten-
fold. This is because the new category
will be to celebrate stunt performers.
Brian Cox: ‘I think the Succession debate is: is
he dead?’
As told to Rich Pelley
I recently read your autobiography,
which I enjoyed a lot. You’re refre-
shingly honest – and critical – about
other actors and styles of acting. Did
you have any qualms? TheloniousI
don’t have any qualms talking honestly
and directly. It’s horses for courses with
acting. Each actor has their own style,
Arts
says, who ends up making a decision
“which is really about good leadership.
I wanted to make sure we were saying
this isn’t about any one place or struc-
ture.”
I believe her. I’d long assumed
scripting a Disney super-cartoon must
be a nightmare of dancing on eggshells
while dodging hot potatoes; that deci-
sions over characters’ race, sexuality
and level of mobility (Asha’s best friend
has a crutch) are the result of years
product-testing and offence-proofing in
every possible territory.
Not so, says Lee. “It’s such an
odd thing because from the outside,
you’d think it’s a check-box formula. It’s
oddly the opposite. When you manage
characters from outside in, they don’t
resonate. And if it’s not authentic, no
one comes.”
Lee’s gift has always been in
adding dimensions to 2D characters.
For Frozen, she put Elsa and Anna
Keanu Reeves in John Wick: Chapter 4. ‘Recognition for stunt performers is undoubtedly a
good thing.’ Photograph: Album/Alamy
This has been a long time coming.
For years now, outside every major
movie awards ceremony around the
world, there has been a small group
of stunt performers protesting against
their lack of recognition. But finally it
seems to have paid off. In a recent
interview to mark the Blu-ray re-
lease of John Wick: Chapter 4, director
Chad Stahelski has offered a promising
update.
“We’ve been meeting with members
of the Academy and actually having
these conversations, and, to be honest,
it’s been nothing but incredibly posi-
tive, incredibly instructional,” Stahelski
told Comic Book Movie. “Everybody on
approach and attitude. My view is that
acting is a much simpler thing than a
lot of people make out. It’s not as heavy
handed as some people believe it is.
I believe that actors are transmitters,
that things come through them, and
that’s what we have to allow so we don’t
overload. When I read the book again,
I did have slight qualms. I thought:
“Maybe I’m being a bit too harsh.” Then
I thought: “No, I’m not.” I’m at an age
through Myers-Briggs personality tests
and wrote diaries in their voices. She
did the same for Asha and Magnifico.
Much of the graft at Disney, she says,
is 800 employees “just being very
vulnerable and sharing” about their
own families and experiences of child-
hood. “Relaxing into letting there be a
lot of deep conversations.” Their own
offspring are encouraged to feed in; the
nine-year-old Agatha ended up doing
vocals for the young Anna in Frozen.
When Lee was promoting that film,
she said she was concerned about a
global “escalation – and exploitation –
of fear”. Presumably that has only in-
creased in the decade since? She nods
and tiptoes agreement. “It was a dif-
ferent time. Social media wasn’t at this
scale. It’s scary. The concept of the
reward of instant likes, instant atten-
tion, instant praise is probably con-
fusing.”
She has Agatha to thank, she says,
both sides wants this to happen. They
want stunts at the Oscars. It’s going to
happen.” And it could happen sooner
than later, with Stahelski giving a time-
frame of four years or sooner.
Recognition for stunt performers is
undoubtedly a good thing. Film as a
medium has long relied on the spec-
tacle of watching someone with more
guts than sense hurling themselves
into the path of danger. This year
was the 100th anniversary of Safety
Last, in which Harold Lloyd dangled
precariously from a number of ledges,
and things have only got more spec-
tacular since. The Chariot Race in Ben
Hur. Jackie Chan sliding through plate
now where I can say what I feel and
believe, and that’s brilliant. But I don’t
really diss any actors in my book.
Your on-screen persona is often
terrifying. Would you like to be cast
as a romantic lead? MazziniAbsolutely!
Of course I would. I had my moments
when I was younger and maybe it’ll
come again. Who knows?
Would you consider getting your
head frozen in a postmortem bid for
for correcting her assumption that
young people expect immediate grati-
fication. “My daughter said: ‘We are
so overstimulated and we don’t know
what to trust or where to look. We
just need certain things to be easy. And
when they’re not, it’s a tipping point.’
“For young people, life is far more
flooded, far more chaotic. The floor is
always moving. The world is quite loud
and seems to be full of contradictions.”
Lee’s solution is a practical one: get
them a roadmap early – and make it
even more clearly signposted and less
reliant on fairy godmothers than Cinde-
rella. Wish is quite a kick up the pants.
“It’s your responsibility to pursue a
wish,” says Lee. “And there will be scary
times and failure and things won’t work
out. I like the idea that it’s OK that it’s
hard.”
That’s what fairytales are, she says,
confidently. Her colleagues at Marvel
make mythic stories of the gods.
glass and exploding lightbulbs in Police
Story. Tom Cruise climbing up the side
of the Burj Khalifa in Mission: Imposs-
ible – Ghost Protocol. Every single
second of Mad Max: Fury Road. This
is the stuff that the entire foundation
of cinema was built upon. Of course the
performers should be recognised.
Which isn’t to say that this is easy.
As Stahelski said in his interview, there
is the question of who actually gets
the Oscar. Is it the stunt artists? The
choreographer? The film’s director? Is
the award for best stunt? Best se-
quence? Best performer? Whatever the
decision, some are bound to feel left
out. But a step forward is still a step for-
ward.
And the broader hope is that stunt
inclusion will breathe some life into the
stuffy old Oscars. For years now, the
ceremony has slowly begun to eat itself.
There are some ceremonies where it
feels like the nominated movies were
only made to appeal to the conserv-
ative middlebrow tastes of the Acad-
emy voters, regardless of how popular
they are with the broader public. You
might not remember which film won
best picture four years ago, for instance,
but you will remember the sight of all
the Avengers clattering into each other
at the end of Endgame in the same year.
Or Matt Damon driving a car so reck-
lessly in Ford v Ferrari that he reduced
immortality, or do you think the future
is unlikely to be a suitable place for a
20th-century Scotsman to be thawed
out? NemoMk2That’s rather a compli-
cated question. I don’t particularly want
my head frozen in a postmortem bid for
immortality. I don’t believe in immor-
tality. I believe once you’re gone, you’re
gone. Do I think the future is likely to
be a suitable place for a 20th-century
Scotsman? It’s a very loaded question.
33
She prefers putting someone ordinary
through the wringer for their own
betterment – and that of the audience.
“Fairytales teach us how to cope with
the tough realities of life.” She smooths
her blue silk dress. “Plus, there’s a goat
in pyjamas.”
•Wish is in UK cinemas from 24
November
My daughter said:
‘We are so
overstimulated and
we don’t know what
to trust or where to
look. We just need
certain things to be
easy’
Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible –
Ghost Protocol. Photograph: AP
Tracy Letts to tears. Or any of the fight
scenes from John Wick 3. Or the cliff
drop from Midsommar.
Wouldn’t clips of these help to jazz
the Oscars up a bit? Rather than watch-
ing actors go through the lumbering
process of emoting at top volume at
each other, in dreary little films about
nothing, wouldn’t it be better to just
watch a ton of crap explode? Of course
it would. And because all these things
happened in films that people actually
watched, they might feel a sliver of
investment in who won. And that might
mean that people actually start watch-
ing the Oscars again. The inclusion of
stunt performers in the Oscars isn’t just
a throwaway favour to an underserved
community. It’s integral to the sur-
vival of the ceremony itself. It cannot
happen quickly enough.
Why have they picked up on Scotsman?
The idea that I’m going to be thawed
out? Well, I don’t want to be frozen. And
I don’t see why the future should not be
a likely place for a 20th-century Scots-
man.
I have always preferred Manhunter
to The Silence of the Lambs. Do
you have any particular feelings about
Continued on page 34

34
Continued from page 33
being overshadowed in this role?
Philip_Larkin_FanNo, not at all. It’s
horses for courses, again. There are
going to be many different Hamlets,
King Lears and Macbeths. So there
are going to be many Hannibal Lec-
ters. Mads Mikkelsen has played him
[in TV show Hannibal]. Tony [Hopkins]
played him beautifully. I worked with
Tony in [2013 Bruce Willis film] Red
2. Although we never actually met, we
had some long conversations. I really
admire Tony because he has such an
extraordinary range of talent. I wish I
could do what he does. He can com-
pose, he can act, he can paint. I wish I
had that range, but I don’t.
Is there another actor that you
regret not having had the chance to
work with? Wallace8There’s a lot of
actors who are long dead. I’d have loved
to have been on set with Spencer Tracy
to observe how he works, or Marlon
Brando or Katharine Hepburn. There
are some actors I’ve been very lucky to
work with, like Olivier and Ian McKel-
len. I’d absolutely love to work with
Meryl Streep. There is still the possi-
bility of that. You never know. Some-
thing may come along.
I think other actors quite like me
because I’m not fussy. I don’t take it
too seriously. I give it the attention
it deserves, but I don’t do the reli-
Phil Spencer, Xbox chief, on AI: ‘I’m
protective of the creative process’
Keith Stuart
Artificial Intelligence is very much on
the news agenda right now. The unstop-
pable rise of ChatGPT and the see-
mingly imminent prospect of gene-
ralised AI able to re-create broad
human thinking processes has seen
concerns raised by everyone from
major business CEOs to Geoffrey
Hinton, one of the godfathers of AI re-
search. AI has been an element of video
game design and production for at least
two decades, but now with AI art pro-
grams and the rise of procedurally gen-
erated game dialogue, there are grow-
ing questions over how AI is going to
effect not just the content of games, but
the teams that make them.
Talking at the Xbox games show-
case in Los Angeles recently, Xbox chief
Phil Spencer played down concerns
that AI could be used to streamline the
game production process and therefore
lead to smaller teams.
“Actually, that isn’t an area we’re
thinking about a ton with AI,” he said.
“One of the areas where AI is probably
front and centre for us is policy and
enforcement. In terms of the safety of
our networks and just the amount of
traffic that happens on Xbox Live, it’s
almost incomprehensible for a human
Arts
Brian Cox … ‘I do worry that today there’s no pathway for the working-class actor.’ Photo-
graph: David Levenson/Getty Images
gious experience element of acting. I
think I’m very simple actually. I’m very
straightforward. I believe in the power
of the imagination.
Was there a defining moment when
you switched from supporting the
Labour party to the SNP, or was it a slow
process? Does it worry you someone
born with a similar working-class back-
ground to yours would have hardly any
chance of a career on stage or in film/
TV? SidfishesI still consider myself a so-
cialist. I was very, very angry about how
Tony Blair dealt with Iraq, particularly
getting into bed with Donald Rums-
feld and Dick Cheney. That really disil-
lusioned me. I felt the social democracy
was gone. The party I’d been partic-
The applications for machine-learning in community moderation … Phil Spencer of Xbox. Photograph: Casey Rodgers/Invision/AP
who’s trying to monitor that – so apply-
ing technology that can ensure that the
right conversations are happening with
the right people, that’s an area where
the intersection between Microsoft’s AI
capability and what gaming is doing is
important.”
The use of AI and machine-learning
in community moderation is growing.
ularly scathing about 20 years ago has
now grown into a strong social demo-
cratic party. I’ve always hated the word
nationalist. I would prefer it to be
called the Scottish Independent party,
because I believe in independence as
opposed to nationalism.
I do worry that working-class kids
have not got the same pathway that I
had. It’s much more of a struggle. I’m
a child of the 60s, which was a period
of great social mobility. When I came
to London as a 16-year-old and had my
first audition, I was welcomed. I also got
a grant. My mother was a widow, so I
had a very good grant. All my fees and
living expenses were paid. That was the
60s. We’re a lot worse off now, finan-
Last year Ubisoft and Riot launched
a research project to tackle toxicity
and abuse in online game communities,
using AI as an important component,
and an array of data solutions com-
panies are offering AI moderation pack-
ages. Meanwhile, however, we’re also
starting to see more concepts such as
Ubisoft’s Ghostwriter, which generates
cially. We’ve seen the rise of how the
public schools have dealt with the thea-
tre in a brilliant way and created condi-
tions where people like Eddie Red-
mayne, Benedict Cumberbatch and Do-
minic West have come out from the
private sector. But I do worry. There’s
no pathway for the working-class actor.
Do you have a stylist in real life? I
really love how you dress – very dapper.
JenonlineI do have a stylist, only be-
cause of all the appearances I have to
make and the sweat of thinking what
to wear. I’ve got this wonderful Indian
stylist called Venk Modur, who’s bril-
liant. The problem is, I’ve got too many
clothes now. I’ve got a bigger wardrobe
than my wife!
Where do you sit on the theory
that Logan Roy was dead all along?
TurangaLeela2I think the debate is: is
he dead? Have we seen his body? They
carefully avoided showing his body.
Everybody said: “Have you seen it?
Wasn’t that a great episode?” I still
haven’t seen it. I’m a terrible one for
watching. I don’t like watching myself,
but my wife will make me. I watched
some the other night. We’ve got two
more episodes to go: the funeral and
the finale. So don’t tell me what hap-
pens.
The impact of Logan Roy is way
beyond one’s expectation. That’s not
just me. That’s also the writing. My
favourite line in the whole show is: “I
repetitive dialogue, or “barks” for NPCs,
and Blizzard’s Diffusion tool, appar-
ently trained on the company’s own
Warcraft artwork to produce concept
sketches for future titles. With the costs
of making games escalating every year
and the general refusal of gamers to
spend more than £60 on a new title,
something surely has to give?
The Guardian Friday 23 June 2023
Cox as Hannibal Lecter in Michael
Mann’s Manhunter. Photograph: TCD/
love you, but you’re not serious people.”
I’m going to start writing that on my
Christmas cards. Ha!
How Irish are you, Brian?
Hekim68I’m 88% Irish and 12% Scot. I
consider myself more Scots than Irish. I
love the Irish, but they are, they’re very
… what’s the word? There is no word for
“no” in Irish Gaelic. It’s like it’s an of-
fence to say no. They’d sooner cut your
throat than say no to you. The great
thing about Scotland is that I learned
the word “no”.
Brian, can you please tell me “FUCK
OFF!”? HamesJoyceI can certainly tell
you to fuck off. Please do fuck off. It’s
so funny. Human beings are the most
ridiculous species on God’s earth be-
cause they want me to tell them to fuck
off. I go fuck off, because I want to tell
them to fuck off. But no one gets the
dichotomy.
• Prisoner’s Daughter is released on
4 July on Prime Video.
“I’ll say as a head of Xbox, I’m very
protective of the creative process,” said
Spencer. “A year or maybe 18 months
ago, every question I got was, when am
I building the NFT game? And, I’m like,
games aren’t built to showcase tech-
nology. Technology helps showcase the
creativity in a game. AI’s been in video
games for decades and I like to make
tools available to our creators so they
can make the best games, and that’s
where I start.”
As for the growing interest in using
ChatGPT-like models to create NPC
dialogue, Spencer was similarly cir-
cumspect. “I don’t think we’ve found
the intersection of large language
model AI and more fun in a video game.
I’m not saying we won’t, but I like to
enable our teams to think about that as
an expanded part of their canvas and
where they can find more fun before
it would get to any kind of efficiency
thing.
“Efficiency only matters if you
found success with the thing that
you’re trying to grow and build.”
• Keith Stuart attended a press
trip to the Xbox Showcase in Los An-
geles with other journalists. Travel and
accommodation expenses were met by
Microsoft.
Friday 23 June 2023 The Guardian
It’s a Padam-ic! Kylie’s sex-positive hit is
brilliantly upending the mainstream
Laura Snapes
Just two days ago, a spokesperson for
BBC Radio 1 was explaining why Kylie
Minogue’s Padam Padam hadn’t made
its playlist, despite the writhing elec-
tropop song being her first Top 10
single in 12 years and now bordering
on a national obsession. (Last week, it
even made it into Hansard, referenced
by Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle in
a speech about Pride: “And finally Mr
Deputy Speaker, in the words of Kylie,
padam.”) “Each track is considered for
the playlist based on its musical merit
and whether it is right for our target au-
dience, with decisions made on a case-
by-case basis,” the spokesperson said.
Kylie turned 55 last month, leading
to accusations of ageism against Radio
1. In response, the station claimed that
“an artist’s age is never a factor” in deci-
sion-making. Technically, that bears out
– David Guetta is a perpetual figure on
the station, currently on the C-list with
Baby Don’t Hurt Me, and he’s also 55.
But Guetta is a fairly faceless dance
producer. The stakes are evidently dif-
ferent for women whose appearance
and physique contribute to an over-
all performance of pop in which the
suggestion of desirability is key. As cul-
ture perceives women to become less
attractive and sexually viable as they
hit middle age, the assumption is clear-
ly that an older female artist is of little
relevance to Radio 1’s demographic of
listeners aged 15-29, even if – or per-
A sunset, a helicopter and Hayley Atwell’s
nan: how Tom Cruise ruined romance
Stuart Heritage
Ungainly title aside, it’s hard to see next
month’s release of Mission: Impossible
– Dead Reckoning Part One as anything
other than a huge lap of honour for
Tom Cruise.
The film was shot during Covid, and
leaked on-set audio of Cruise being, let’s
say, explosively responsible about social
distancing gave him the air of the only
man alive who cared about the pan-
demic. It’s the first film of his released
since Top Gun: Maverick single han-
dedly reminded people that cinemas
still existed. And, what’s more, the
slow drip of production videos where
he flings himself from objects of va-
rying heights at varying speeds impli-
citly promises that Mission: Impossible
– Dead Reckoning Part One will basi-
cally be a sort of Competent Jackass.
In short, the film is guaranteed to be
a success. Tom Cruise has put the work
in, time and time again, to sell this film
to us. There is nothing left that he can
do. Nothing, that is, except fly Hayley
Atwell’s nan around London in a heli-
copter. And guess what? Tom Cruise
has flown Hayley Atwell’s nan around
London in a helicopter.
Arts
Kylie Minogue performing Padam Padam at Capital’s Summertime Ball, 11 June 2023.
Photograph: David Fisher/Shutterstock for Global
haps specifically because – she’s singing
about a dancefloor infatuation so deli-
rious that she and the song’s intended
have to go straight home “and take off
all my clothes”.
But the target audience had other
ideas about what is or isn’t right
for them, and petitioned the station
so hard that days later, it confirmed
Padam Padam would be added to its
C-list this Friday – Kylie’s first song to
make it into rotation since Get Outta
My Way in 2010. If this week’s midweek
chart predictions are correct, that day
the single will also climb two places to
No 7, making it her highest-charting hit
since All the Lovers in 2010. The song’s
success has been driven in large part by
social media, from the staff of Hobby-
craft Wimbledon spoofing the video to
fans who probably weren’t born when
Cruise in 2018’s Mission: Impossible –Fallout. Hayley Atwell and her family not pictured.
Photograph: Collection Christophel/Alamy
This stunning nan-based helicopter
revelation happened during an inter-
view with Entertainment Tonight.
Atwell explained that the helicopter
trip was a surprise, thanks to her grand-
mother’s determination never to get in
a helicopter as long as she lived. In-
stead, Atwell took her elderly relative
to a cafe at a helicopter base, then
ambushed her with Tom Cruise. “We
surprised her and Tom came walking
around the car. It was so sweet, because
my grandmother was like, ‘Hiya, Tom,
how are you darling?!’ and talked to him
she released 2000’s Spinning Around,
her first club comeback, dancing to it
on TikTok. “What’s interesting is it’s the
younger generation,” Minogue said re-
cently. “They are not ageist, they don’t
care, which is so refreshing: we love
that song, it’s a banger, they’re in!”
Padam Padam’s success fulfils the
prophecy in its own lyrics: there’s no
standing in the way of true infat-
uation. It also underscores the magni-
ficent reciprocity between Kylie and
her longstanding LGBTQ+ audience.
For years, she has empowered fans with
her relentless ability to reinvent and
thrive in the face of perceived obsoles-
cence (and to overcome real hardship,
such as her brush with cancer in 2005).
As Nick Cave told me when I inter-
viewed Kylie in 2020: “On some level
we understand her ordeals, yet she
like he was one of her own,” she said.
“Then he said, ‘I would love to take you
on the helicopter, on a ride of London,’
And she was like, ‘Oh, fantastic! Yes, I’ll
just put me walking stick down here!’”
Which is a lovely story. And, for
added texture, it might be important
to tell you that this flight took place on
Christmas Eve, at sunset. Which means,
sadly for you, that Tom Cruise was
more romantic with Hayley Atwell’s
nan than you have ever been in your
entire life. What’s the most romantic
thing you’ve ever done? Bought some
radiates pure joy. This is an extraor-
dinarily powerful message.” This is true
diva-dom, embodying the promise of
liberation. In return, by insisting that a
55-year-old woman singing about being
gripped by the desire to go home and
shag a perfect stranger is pop music,
isprofoundly sexy and deserves to sit
at the centre of culture, her fans are
queering the idea of the female pop
ideal sold by an industry of limited
imagination.
Written by Ina Wroldsen and
Peter Rycroft, Padam Padam continues
Kylie’s career-long ability to seize the
narrative and thrust it towards joy. The
titular phrase comes from an Édith
Piaf song released in 1951, in which
it stood in for the beat of a haunted
heart, forever reminding the chanteuse
of old follies, lost love and desultory
memories of a life spent falling for the
same old tricks. But in Kylie’s hands
it is the throb of real-time excitement
and potential, a suggestion, a wink,
an invitation to pleasure and escape.
(Sex Kylie lives.) It exists only in the
moment, just as Kylie does as a pop
star – the secret of her five-decade lon-
gevity; she knows, too, that the alchemy
of a perfect moment in the club is also
an escape for queer fans, particularly
during this hideous period of heigh-
tened assaults on LGBTQ+ rights.
It’s deep – but it’s also not deep at all.
Padam Padam is an absolutely perfect
bit of pop nonsense, an explosive awop-
bop-a-loo-mop a-lop-bom-bom! of de-
light. It can mean whatever you want it
flowers? Hired a pedalo? Listen, Tom
Cruise literally gave Hayley Atwell’s nan
a sunset helicopter tour of London on
Christmas Eve. Not Hayley Atwell, who
he was supposedly dating at the time.
Her nan.
If ever there was a sign for the rest
of us to step up, it’s this. Oh sure, Tom
Cruise might be able to give Hayley
Atwell’s nan a festive sunset tour of
London in a helicopter more easily than
the rest of us, because he has things like
an unlimited budget and a helicopter li-
cence and apparently unfettered access
to Hayley Atwell’s nan. But that doesn’t
mean that we can’t try to boost our
romance game a little. Perhaps we can
remember to hold hands with our part-
ners, or take a moment to remind them
how special they are, or – and this is
just blue sky thinking at this point – sit
them down in front of a laptop, open
Google Earth and scroll over London
while making a sort of “chookachooka”
noise with your mouth. It all counts.
In fact, so well did Tom Cruise
acquit himself with the helicopter tour
that this might present a new way for-
ward for him. Not even Tom Cruise
can keep making action films for ever,
so this might be his backroad into
romcoms. He’s a lovelorn helicopter
35
Kylie performing in New York this month.
Photograph: Slaven Vlašić/Getty Images for
iHeartRadio
to: euphemism, affirmation, declaration
of insanity, nod of recognition. (Jessie
Ware, who has collaborated with Kylie,
recently joked that she should intro-
duce herself on stage by telling her own
very LGBTQ-centric audience: “Hello,
I’m Jessie Ware: Padam! And everyone
will go: Padam!”) What’s been called the
“Padam-ic” resonates with a cultural
moment in which frivolity and light-
ness seem to be breezing back after the
pandemic and after an era in which cul-
ture has been taken very, very seriously.
(Yes, I see you, person in the comments
saying “doesn’t writing 900 words about
this invalidate your argument?” Clearly
you have not been Padam-pilled.)
It’s pop art by a master of the form
who once ensured that no one would
ever hear “la la la” the same again.
“We don’t need to use our words,” Kylie
sings. She’s singing about infatuation,
but could just as easily be speaking to
her connection with her staunch fan-
base, one that understands Kylie as
a byword for transcending limitations.
The gatekeepers never stood a chance.
Cruise and Atwell at the Rome premiere
of the new film. Photograph: Cinzia Camela/
LPS/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock
pilot. She’s Hayley Atwell’s nan. Above
the skies of London, something clicks.
Their hands touch. Their lips move
closer together.
Anyway, this is good news for me.
Ever since I was added to the Tom
Cruise Cake List two years ago, I’ve been
struggling to find a way to repay the
man for his generosity, and now I think
I’ve got it. Tom, let me take Hayley
Atwell’s nan off your hands. I might not
be able to offer her a once-in-a-lifetime
sunset helicopter trip across London
on Christmas Eve, but I do hope she
can be persuaded to accept a backie
on a Lime bike around the outskirts of
Penge. Nana Atwell, call me.
Friday 23 June 2023 The Guardian
From Bebe Rexha to Steve Lacy: why are fans
throwing phones at musicians?
Alaina Demopoulos
Why do music fans throw projec-
tiles on stage while their favorite
artist performs? Nicholas Malvagna, a
27-year-old from New Jersey, offered
one explanation after he was charged
with assault for throwing a phone at
the pop singer Bebe Rexha, who re-
quired stitches after being hit. Mal-
vagna apparently thought “it would
be funny” to whack Rexha, who later
posted a photo of her bruised and ban-
daged eyebrow.
“Im good,” Rexha captioned the
Instagram post, though some fans
noted online that if the phone had
landed just a little further down, it
could have caused serious harm to her
eye.
The projectile called to mind
recent face-offs between celebrities and
tossed items. Last year, the singer Steve
Lacy smashed an iPhone that had been
launched onstage by a fan. A few
months before that, a Toronto audience
member hurled a doll at Lady Gaga as
she sang the theme song to Top Gun:
Maverick. (Ever the professional, Gaga
did not miss a beat and continued her
performance.)
The same week as the Rexha inci-
dent, a fan stormed the Los An-
geles stage where Ava Max performed,
slapping the singer so hard that he
“scratched the inside of [her] eye”, ac-
cording to her tweet.
Artists have long dodged stray ob-
Unfinished novel by Françoise Sagan
published posthumously
Sarah Shaffi
A novel by the French author Françoise
Sagan has been published posthu-
mously – but, despite the suggestion
that a novelist such as Leïla Slimani or
Anne Berest might finish it, it has been
published in its incomplete state.
The Four Corners of the Heart, out
this week in a translation by Sophie R
Lewis, tells the story of Marie-Laure,
whose husband, Ludovic, returns home
three years after a devastating car acci-
dent that left him in a fragile mental
and physical condition.
When Marie-Laure’s mother Fanny
visits her daughter, both Ludovic and
his father, Henri, fall for her. The book
was discovered in 2011, seven years
after Sagan’s death in 2004, by her
son Denis Westhoff, and ends on a
cliffhanger. Sagan says in the original
manuscript “some of the paragraphs
were repeated, the plot included many
inconsistencies, some sentences didn’t
work, words were missing and the novel
lacked an ending”.
Westhoff told the Guardian, in an
interview translated by Lewis, that
when the manuscript was given to its
French publisher, Éditions Plon, “there
was some brief discussion of asking a
well-known writer to provide it with an
Arts
Bebe Rexha performs in Cap d'Antibes, France, last month. Photograph: Andreas Rentz/amfAR/Getty Images for amfAR
jects thrown by fans. Tom Jones made
tossed panties part of his act for dec-
ades, the Beatles were pelted by jelly
beans, and David Bowie was nailed by a
lollipop at a Norway show.
But fans say there’s a reason these
instances seem to be happening more
often. Celebrities like Doja Cat, Olivia
Rodrigo, and Billie Eilish have taken
fans’ phones (consensually), filmed a
video mid-show, and given the phones
back to their owners. It’s a way to go
viral – so impatient fans are flinging
their iPhones in hopes that their favo-
French novelist Françoise Sagan. Photograph: LIDO/EPA
ending”.
Names put forward included Sli-
mani and Berest, as well as Anna Ga-
valda and Westhoff himself. But, says
Westhoff, “I have never wished, prin-
cipally for moral reasons, to complete
this novel”.
“I have too much respect, too high
an esteem for its author – and for the
rite singer will leave them a little gift.
Paul Wertheimer, a crowd safety
manager, also blames the apparent in-
crease on people getting out their post-
lockdown aggression. “We all said that
crowds would be more rambunctious,
disorderly, and energetic, after people
came out of being cooped up,” he said.
“When crowds get rowdy, people can
feel anonymous, and that leads them to
doing anti-social, dangerous things.”
Fans are not the only people who
throw things into crowds – singers
themselves do it, too. Beyoncé tossed
person who wrote it, my mother – to
feel competent to modify her work, to
add anything to it,” he adds.
Sagan is best known for her short
novel Bonjour Tristesse, which is told
by 17-year-old Cécile, holidaying on the
Côte d’Azur with her widowed father,
who has brought along his young
girlfriend. Sagan wrote the novel when
sunglasses into the crowd during a
recent UK show on her Renaissance
tour. In March, Chris Brown invited a
fan on stage for a lap dance, only to grab
her phone and hurl it into the crowd
because he was annoyed with her con-
stant filming. Last year, Axl Rose said he
would stop his decades-long tradition
of throwing his mic into the crowd after
an Australian woman suffered a black
eye and busted nose when it hit her in
the face.
“There is a long history of artists
throwing guitars, bottles, and clothing
she was 18, and it caused a disturbance
in French society and brought noto-
riety to its author.
It remained her most well-known
work, despite Sagan writing 20 novels,
three volumes of short stories, nine
plays, two biographies and several
collections of nonfiction pieces over
the course of her career.
37
into the crowd,” Wertheimer said. “It’s
a two-way street: if artists don’t want
to be hit by projectiles, they shouldn’t
throw projectiles themselves. There’s
mutual respect there.”
Wertheimer said that most security
guards and safety experts stand close
to the stage to protect the artist, but
they should also maintain a presence
in the crowd “Security hates to be in
the crowd because they don’t have a
good rapport with the audience,” he ex-
plained. “But if they increase staffing
in those areas, it can help subdue anti-
social behavior.”
The ever-present threat of mass
shootings, along with high-profile stam-
pede incidents at Astro World and in
Seoul at Halloween, have led safety ex-
perts to focus on crowd crushes as the
main threat during live events.
“That’s where most of the fatalities
have occurred, so that’s where the ef-
forts are being made to set safety stan-
dards,” said Bob Brecht, the CEO of TSE
Entertainment, a Texas-based produc-
tion company for live events. Phones
just do not seem as big of a threat.
Ultimately, there is no sure way to
stop people from throwing objects. “I
don’t know how you stop someone
from tossing a phone unless you seat
the crowd so far away that they can’t
reach the stage,” Brecht said. “But an
artist would never stand for that, be-
cause they get a lot of their enthusiasm
and excitement from a crowd.”
Westhoff says when the manuscript
of The Four Corners of the Heart was
found, he “didn’t dream for an instant
that this work might one day be pub-
lished, far less that it might be the
object of this level of public attention”,
partly because his mother’s books “had
hardly been selling at all” just before the
manuscript was found.
In addition, her poor health and
her “many entanglements with the
tax office and the law” meant she
was “gradually isolated from the out-
side world, drawn away from friends,
beyond the reach of her editors and
away from the ‘Paris scene’ in general”,
says Westhoff.
Éditions Stock, the publisher which
reissued Sagan’s works in France,
passed on publishing The Four Cor-
ners of the Heart. It was when anoth-
er publisher, Éditions Plon, “got wind of
the existence of this unpublished novel
and communicated its interest in pub-
lishing it and so making it available to
the world” that Westhoff decided to see
if it could be published.
Éditions Plon published the book,
under its French title Les Quatre coins
du coeur, in 2019. Westhoff has made
some changes to his mother’s text, in-
cluding removing “certain paragraphs
Continued on page 38

38
Continued from page 37
which were no more than reiterations
of substantially similar preceding pas-
sages”, and taking out “a fairly long
James Cameron on Titan submersible deaths:
‘Impossible for me to process’
Benjamin Lee
Director James Cameron has spoken
out about the Titan submersible tra-
gedy.
The Titanic film-maker appeared on
ABC News after today’s announcement
that the crew are believed to have died
in a “catastrophic implosion”. The five
men were in a remotely operated ve-
hicle to tour the wreckage of the Titanic
two miles beneath the ocean’s surface.
“Many people in the community
were very concerned about this sub,”
Cameron said in an on-air interview. “A
number of the top players in the deep
submergence engineering community
even wrote letters to the company,
saying that what they were doing was
too experimental to carry passengers
and that it needed to be certified and
so on. I’m struck by the similarity of the
Titanic disaster itself, where the cap-
tain was repeatedly warned about ice
ahead of his ship, and yet he steamed at
full speed into an ice field on a moon-
less night and many people died as a
That Peter Crouch Film review – good-
natured documentary about Premier League
hero
Andrew Pulver
In an era when anyone with a chunky
social media follower count can get
their own documentary, it’s bit of a
relief that someone as eminently lik-
able as footballer Peter Crouch is sub-
ject to the streaming-platform treat-
ment. In truth, this film is basically
a bit of brand enhancement, following
on from Crouch’s post-football podcast
and Crouchfest live show, and as such
doesn’t go anywhere particularly unex-
pected.
Crouch, of course, was the gawky
striker who, in the footballing parlance,
proved the doubters wrong by making
it into the Premier League, winning
the FA Cup with Liverpool, scoring a
hat-trick for England and – most po-
tently for the legend – improvising that
dopey robot-dance goal celebration and
marrying model Abbey Clancy. (Not for
nothing is his most famous line the one
about what he would be if he wasn’t a
footballer.)
Well, Crouch enlarges on the feel-
ings of awkwardness he felt as a tee-
nager trying to break into the game, and
even after having done so the trauma of
Arts
section describing Henri Cresson’s wife,
which did not match in the least with
the character described everywhere
else in the book”.
The novel, Westhoff admits, “brings
James Cameron in 2022. Photograph: Toby Melville/Reuters
result. For us, a very similar tragedy
where warnings went unheeded to take
place at the same exact site with all
Head and shoulders above, er, most people … That Peter Crouch Film. Photograph: Pete Dadds/Amazon Prime
failing to score in his first dozen and
a half games for Liverpool. (Improb-
ably, it turns out he met Clancy the
night he broke his Liverpool duck; as
she remarks, “That was his lucky day.”)
And for all Crouch’s sensitivity as a
nothing particularly new, nor anything
exceptional” to Sagan’s body of work.
“Having said this,” he adds, “the
novel remains a unique, singular and
unmistakably integral element of the
the diving that’s going on all around the
world, I think it’s just astonishing. It’s
really quite surreal.”
youngster, there’s one or two amaz-
ing details that suggest there was a
fair amount of gormlessness going on
as well; I’d suggest most 24-year-olds
know about the existence of bedsheets.
Crouch, however, shows his innate
oeuvre of one of the 20th century’s
greatest writers and, as such, it de-
mands to be read.”
• The Four Corners of the Heart
by Françoise Sagan is published by
He went on to call the death of
Paul-Henri Nargeolet “impossible for
me to process”. The 77-year-old sub-
shrewdness in knowing he had to try
and set up his post-football life while
he was still in the spotlight (“plenty
of ex-players told me the moment you
retire, no one remembers; so I wanted
to do things while I was still current”),
The Guardian Friday 23 June 2023
Amazon Crossing (£6.99)
mersible dive pilot, whom Cameron
calls a friend, was onboard alongside
businessman Shahzada Dawood and
his 19-year-old son Suleman as well as
Stockton Rush, co-founder of Ocean-
Gate, the company that operated the
lost sub.
In a statement released on Twitter,
the company referred to the men as
“true explorers who shared a distinct
spirit of adventure”. The news follows
a four-day search for the sub after it
went missing less than two hours into
its planned trip to the wreck.
Cameron has made 33 dives himself
to the wreck, having made not only the
Oscar-winning 1997 film but also the
documentary Ghosts of the Abyss. He
claims to have spent “more time on the
ship than the captain did back in the
day”.
The Titanic disaster occurred on its
maiden voyage in 1912, sinking after hit-
ting an iceberg. Cameron’s film about
the tragedy, starring Kate Winslet and
Leonardo DiCaprio, won 11 Oscars and
made over $2bn at the global box office.
and he certainly had the backing of a
number of big-name managers – Harry
Redknapp, Rafael Benítez, Sven-Göran
Eriksson – who kept the faith during
Crouch’s wobbliest moments.
Fortunately Crouch’s travails don’t
appear to have cut too deeply – “that
was the nearest I got to be being de-
pressed,” he says, after being booed by a
stadium full of Manchester United fans
when he was subbed on during an Eng-
land international – and if there’s a vil-
lain of the piece it might be his hyper-
competitive dad Bruce who, it trans-
pires, was one of those parents who
gets into fights on the touchline of kids’
games.
Despite all this, Crouch does seem
to be a nice guy, which is his and this
film’s USP, even if some of the film’s
key messages are repeated two or three
times. There’s a fair bit of padding, too;
it’s clear that much of his playing career,
including his time at Stoke, the long-
est spell of his career at a single club,
can’t have been that riveting. Still, this
is good-natured, entertaining stuff.
• That Peter Crouch Film is re-
leased on 22 June on Prime Video.
Friday 23 June 2023 The Guardian
Luc Besson: France’s top court rejects
request to reopen rape case against director
Agence France-Presse
France’s top appeals court has rejected
a request to reopen a rape claim against
film director Luc Besson, ending one of
the most high-profile cases to emerge
in the country’s #MeToo movement
against sexual assault.
Dutch-Belgian actor Sand Van Roy
accused Besson, director of The Fifth
Element and Leon, of raping her during
a two-year on-off relationship, and filed
a complaint against him in May 2018.
Prosecutors dropped the case in
February 2019 citing a lack of evidence.
After new charges were filed by Van
Roy, an appeals court also closed that
case in May last year.
In a ruling seen by the AFP news
agency, France’s Cour de Cassation, the
court of last resort for criminal cases,
said there was “no reason to justify pur-
suing an appeal” of the previous rul-
ings.
“The Cour de Cassation has decided
Kim Petras: Feed the Beast review – a missed
opportunity for a groundbreaking figure
Alexis Petridis
These are high times for Kim Petras.
Previously a marginal figure in the
world of pop – she attracted a degree of
notoriety for 2022’s spectacularly potty-
mouthed EP Slut Pop – she was cata-
pulted into mainstream consciousness
when she appeared on Sam Smith’s
global chart-topper Unholy. It made
Petras the first openly transgender
artist to have a US No 1 and the first
trans artist to win a major category
Grammy. There followed other mark-
ers of the German pop star’s newfound
celebrity. In May, she appeared on the
red carpet at the Met Gala, clad in
Marc Jacobs, and was announced as
one of four cover models for Sports Illu-
strated’s annual swimsuit issue.
If only the music on her major label
debut album was as interesting and
innovative as its author is, or even as
diverting as Unholy, the gothic theatr-
icality of which sounded markedly dif-
ferent to any other recent No 1. It’s
tacked on to the end of Feed the Beast,
but its presence only serves to under-
line that there’s nothing else like it here
either. Instead, the album occasionally
lunges towards some well-worn cur-
rent pop trends. The clipped 80s sound
familiar from the Weeknd’s Blinding
Lights and subsequent hits including
Ed Sheeran’s Bad Habits and Harry
Styles’ As It Was gets another airing
on Minute. Alone, meanwhile, fits with
the vogue for borrowing huge chunks
Arts
A French court has rejected a request to reopen a rape claims against director Luc Besson. Photograph: Alberto Pizzoli/AFP/Getty Images
not to hear my appeal, which means
‘Wilfully slight and tinny’ … Kim Petras. Photograph: Luke Gilford
of immediately recognisable old hits by
sticking a trap beat under Alice Deejay’s
pop-trance smash Better Off Alone, a
trick already pulled on Wiz Khalifa’s
2008 single Say Yeah.
But what the pumping four-four
beats, Giorgio Moroder-ish sequenced
synths, ravey electronics and dinky-
doo melodies of the title track, King of
Hearts and Hit It From the Back most
closely resemble is the 90s European
pop-dance of the Real McCoy, Clock and
Capella; the frantic Castle in the Sky,
meanwhile, sounds remarkably like 2
Unlimited. You could argue that this
is a timely move. This stuff was never
intended for the ages, and appeared
to have been quietly written out of
history, redolent of an era when pop
music was tackier, cheesier and less
artful than it is today, but Radio 2’s
relentless recent pursuit of a very spe-
once again the French judiciary refuses
cific late fortysomething demographic
means that in 2023 you’re substantially
more likely to hear Alex Party’s Don’t
Give Me Your Life or Mr Vain by Culture
Beat than you might have expected.
You can even see its appeal, evok-
ing an ostensibly less complicated time,
during which pop was less freighted
with responsibility: no one ever en-
quired after Haddaway’s views on
intersectional feminism or body posi-
tivity; no one expected Dr Alban to
give soul-bearing interviews in which
he detailed his mental health struggles.
But there’s something about the music
itself that resists successful revival: it’s
too wilfully slight and tinny-sound-
ing, too concerned with immediacy, to
really develop a nostalgic patina. So it
proves here.
Feed the Beast might have worked
had the songwriting been a bit more
to examine the evidence in this case,”
robust. Something flickers into life on
Bait and Brrr, but for the most part, the
melodies are so flimsy a light breeze
would knock them flat. They’re not
much helped by the Auto-Tune that
lends Petras’s voice a brittle, nasal qual-
ity. The lyrics, meanwhile, are frightful,
the kind of racy material that made up
Slut Pop dialled down and denuded of
its edge in the quest for mass appeal.
Why anyone would think that neces-
sary in a post-Wap world is a mystery,
but it would at least account for Coco-
nuts, which is a song about how much
breasts look like coconuts. “My coco-
nuts, you can put them in your mouth,”
sings Petras, “my coconuts watch them
bounce up and down.” It apparently
took eight people to write this, one of
them presumably a 12-year-old boy.
You’re left wondering what hap-
pened, given the array of tried-and-
tested songwriters and producers on-
board. Perhaps they’ve saved their best
stuff for their more established clients:
it’s quite hard to picture New Rules’
co-author Ian Kirkpatrick presenting a
song like Uh Oh to Dua Lipa with
a straight face. The more dispiriting
interpretation is that they didn’t think
they had to try, that Petras’s increas-
ing celebrity profile would just sell
the album regardless of its contents:
anyone swayed by that argument might
note that Petras recently appeared on
a remix of Stars Are Blind, a pallid bit
of cod-reggae from Paris Hilton’s epo-
nymous 2006 debut, an album that
owed its very existence to precisely
39
Van Roy said on Twitter.
“I will pursue these cases and will
file a request with the European court
of human rights,” she said.
A lawyer for Besson, who has
denied the claims, said the decision
“ends all the procedures of the past
five years, which have found him not
guilty”.
Besson has admitted having a rela-
tionship with Van Roy, who had minor
roles in his films Taxi 5 and Valerian and
the City of a Thousand Planets.
She filed the initial complaint for
rape in May 2018 hours after meet-
ing Besson, before filing another com-
plaint two months later for other al-
leged rapes and sexual assaults.
At least three other women have
made allegations of sexual harassment
against Besson, which he has also
denied.
The artwork for Feed the Beast. Photo-
graph: Luke Gilford
that kind of thinking.
It’s a risky strategy at the best of
times, but one that feels like insanity
in a world where pop fans are spoilt
for choice, where 49,000 new tracks
are uploaded to Spotify every day: you
struggle to imagine Feed the Beast cut-
ting through. It’s a missed opportunity.
Kim Petras is both a groundbreaking
figure and – as anyone who saw her
with Smith at the Grammys knows –
a charismatic performer. She deserves
better than this, and so does everyone
else.
This week Alexis listened to
Raye – Oscar-Winning TearsA low-
key but killer support slot at SZA’s
blockbusting O2 gigs reminded me
how fantastic Raye is: no elaborate
production needed, just talent. This
sounded particularly amazing: emotive
but never overwrought.

40
Chris Whitty: UK should have focused more
on stopping Covid-type pandemic
Robert Booth Social affairs
correspondent
England’s chief medical officer, Sir Chris
Whitty, said the UK “did not give suffi-
cient thought” to stopping Covid in its
tracks as he listed multiple problems
with preparedness in his first cross-
examination at the pandemic public in-
quiry.
Whitty said the “big weakness” was
a lack of “radicalism” in thinking before
the crisis took hold, and he said govern-
ment scientific advisers would not have
thought to have considered national
lockdowns without it being requested
by a senior politician.
He also warned of a weakness in
future defences, noting the scientific
advisory committee Nervtag, which
looks at new respiratory viruses, does
not cover other possible pandemic
threats such as sexually transmitted
diseases.
He spoke on the same day as Sir Pa-
trick Vallance, the government’s chief
scientific officer during the pandemic.
Vallance, who stood down in March,
called for more attention on the impact
of pandemics on society’s most vulner-
able people. He said it was a “terrible
truth” and “tragedy” that “pandemics
feed off inequality and drive inequality”
and said while “we did pick up on it,
[the knowledge] needs to be embedded
right from day one”.
Whitty called for a national plan
for a non-flu pandemic to go alongside
the existing flu pandemic plan. He said
there had been a failure in the way the
UK planned for emergencies by trying
to have “a plan for every eventuality ….
[so] you can tick off all the things you
got to do” rather than having the “build-
ing blocks of lots of different capabil-
Chris Paul to be traded for second time in a
week – this time to Warriors
Associated Press
Chris Paul could get a final shot at an
NBA championship after the Golden
State Warriors agreed to the framework
of a trade on Thursday that will send
Jordan Poole to the Washington Wi-
zards, according to a person with know-
ledge of the matter.
ESPN first reported the agreement
was struck by the teams.
The Wizards agreed to acquire Paul
from Phoenix last week, in a deal that
sent Bradley Beal from Washington to
the Suns. Paul said he was only in-
formed of the deal after his 14-year-old
son texted him with the news.
Paul had two of his title-hope sea-
sons thwarted by the Warriors. In 2018,
Paul and the Houston Rockets had a 3-2
series lead in the Western Conference
finals before he missed the final two
games through injury and Golden State
prevailed on the way to the NBA title.
And in 2019, the Warriors beat Paul and
the Rockets again, that time in the West
Science / Sport
Sir Chris Whitty arrives to give evidence to the Covid inquiry at Dorland House in west London.Photograph: DW Images/Shutterstock
ities”.
He also warned that public abuse of
and threats to scientists was “extremely
concerning”.
In February 2021, video emerged
of Whitty being abused in the street.
Asked about the possibility of short-
ages of experts in the future he said
it was essential to make clear “so-
ciety very much appreciates the work
of these people who put in enorm-
ous amounts of time, usually at no
recompense”. Some universities were
also becoming “more hawkish” about
monitoring experts’ time off to help the
nation, he said.
The inquiry chair, Lady Hallett,
said to Whitty: “I was astonished and
sorry to hear about the abuse of you
and other colleagues. It’s wrong for so
many reasons … There’s so many dif-
Chris Paul has never won a championship in his long career. Photograph: Matt York/AP
semifinals before ultimately falling to
Toronto in the NBA finals.
ferent ways to express different opi-
nions. Why do we have to have personal
abuse?”
Whitty, who stressed to the inquiry
how he worked in Covid wards for 12
weeks, started his evidence by address-
ing the bereaved and said: “I can say to
the families that are here that I saw the
extraordinary devastation that it had
on individuals and families.”
Asked about the effectiveness and
breadth of thinking of the Scientific
Advisory Group on Emergencies (Sage),
he said during the time pressures of
Covid there was “a reasonable balance
between coherence and challenge”. But
he supported the idea of “red teams”
outside Sage providing more “chal-
lenge”.
It was the period between crises
where Whitty said more radicalism was
The move could also provide the
Warriors with financial flexibility in
needed.
Taking lockdowns as an example,
he said: “It would be very surprising,
without this being requested by a
senior politician or similar, that a
scientific committee would venture in
between emergencies into that kind
of extraordinarily major social inter-
vention with huge economic and social
impact ramifications.”
Hugo Keith KC, counsel to the in-
quiry, said Matt Hancock, the former
health secretary who will appear on
Tuesday, had told the inquiry that be-
cause the government focused on the
worst that could realistically happen
insufficient thought was given to pre-
venting the worst from happening at
all.
Whitty said: “I half agree with
the distinguished previous secretary of
future seasons. Poole is about to begin a
four-year, $128m deal. Paul is due about
The Guardian Friday 23 June 2023
state.
“I certainly agree that we did not
give sufficient thought to what we
could do to stop in its tracks a pan-
demic on the scale of Covid,” he said.
“[But] it is sensible to have a plan for
if everything fails, what are we going to
do … if we could end up with 750,000
people dying.”
Earlier the inquiry heard from
Roger Hargreaves, the director of the
Cabinet Office briefing room unit, the
government’s Cobra crisis management
hub. He was previously director of the
civil contingencies secretariat in the
Cabinet Office, which covered longer-
term planning as well as crisis response.
He said the crisis response system
had been “pulled out of shape by ter-
rorist incidents in 2017, by planning
around Brexit, by Covid, by Afgha-
nistan, by Russia, Ukraine”.
Covid was one example of the
case “for having capabilities that are
able to run an enduring response, not
just a short-term response”. He said
“poor performance in relation to inter-
national emergencies versus domestic
emergencies” had caused a desire for
“a more common purpose around crisis
management inside the central govern-
ment”.
He said: “I think one of the broad
themes of this inquiry might well turn
out to be whether government takes
civil protection seriously enough in the
round. In fact, not just government, but
whether the UK does. … A statutory
obligation is a very effective way to do
that. It is not that I think that govern-
ment departments don’t take this se-
riously. I just think there may be room
to take it more seriously.”
The inquiry continues.
$31m this coming season and has noth-
ing guaranteed after that.
It may also usher in something to-
tally new and different for Paul – a
bench role.
He has appeared in 1,214 regular-
season games and another 149 in the
playoffs, and has started every single
one of them. But it is unlikely that he
would supplant guards Stephen Curry
or Klay Thompson in Golden State’s
starting lineup.
So, at 38 and about to enter his 19th
NBA season, Paul could find himself
in a new position. But there is an ob-
vious tradeoff, since the Warriors will
almost certainly be considered a title-
contender going into next season after
winning four championships in the last
decade – and Paul has never gotten the
title he craves. He went to the NBA
finals with Phoenix in 2021, but the
Suns blew a 2-0 series lead and lost to
Milwaukee in six games.
The 12-time All-Star averaged 13.9
Continued on page 41
Friday 23 June 2023 The Guardian
Continued from page 40
points and 8.9 assists this past season
for Phoenix.
‘Ayahuasca: 48 touchdowns, MVP’: Rodgers
says psychedelics helped NFL career
Guardian sport
Aaron Rodgers has once again praised
psychedelics, saying using them helped
him in his professional and personal
life.
The four-time NFL MVP, who joined
the New York Jets from the Green
Bay Packers this offseason, was speak-
ing at a psychedelics conference in
Denver on Wednesday. Colorado, along
with Oregon, recently decriminalized
the use of psychedelic mushrooms, al-
though they remain illegal at a federal
level in the United States.
“Is it not ironic that the things that
actually expand your mind are illegal
and the things that keep you in the
lower chakras and dumb you down
have been legal for centuries?” said
Rodgers, who has spoken in the past
about his use of ayahuasca, a strong
hallucinogen.
On Wednesday Rodgers said taking
the substance with teammates had
been “life altering”, adding other ath-
letes had reached out to him about the
subject.
Bale says Messi will enjoy MLS because
losing has ‘no consequence’ there
Guardian sport
Gareth Bale believes Lionel Messi will
enjoy life away from the crucible of
European and international football
when he starts his new career in MLS.
The World Cup winner is scheduled
to make his debut for his new club,
Inter Miami, on 21 July. And while his
imminent arrival has generated plenty
of interest in the US, Bale believes the
pressure will be negligible compared
to Messi’s experience playing for Bar-
celona, Paris St-Germain and Argentina.
MLS has long been derided by many
as a “retirement league” where aging
European stars go for one final payday.
The league and teams have changed
that narrative as younger, homegrown
talent has become more prominent but
Bale, who ended his career with LAFC
and played for Real Madrid in La Liga,
suggested the 35-year-old Messi would
find MLS a relatively comfortable expe-
Sport
Poole, who turned 24 earlier this
week, joins a Washington team now
fully in the midst of a rebuild. He
averaged 20.4 points this past season,
Aaron Rodgers appeared at the conference in Denver on Wednesday. Photograph: David Zalubowski/AP
“The response from other people in
the sports industry has been incred-
ible,” said the 39-year-old. “To see
basketball players and baseball players
Lionel Messi is joining Inter Miami after spurning offers from Barcelona and Saudi Arabia. Photograph: Lintao Zhang/Getty Images
one that began with Golden State vet-
eran Draymond Green punching Poole
at practice during training camp before
taking a brief leave of absence from the
and surfers, entertainers and my own
teammates and colleagues across the
league reach out and either share their
story about their own medicine journey
team.
Green is set to become a free agent,
although the Warriors want to keep
him.
or ask to be a part of an upcoming one
was pretty special.”
Interest in psychedelics as a treat-
ment for issues such as PTSD, as well
41
as a gateway to self-knowledge, has in-
creased in recent years. However, ex-
perts caution that substances such as
ayahuasca can be dangerous.
Rodgers said ayahuasca helped him
win back-to-back MVPs after expe-
riencing a down year by his high stan-
dards in 2019.
“You know, it’s going to be hard
to cancel me, because, you know, the
previous year, 26 touchdowns, four
interceptions. We had a good season.
Ayahuasca, 48 touchdowns, five inter-
ceptions, MVP. What are you going to
say?” he said.
Rodgers has been mocked for his
lifestyle, including a four-day darkness
retreat he underwent before deciding
to leave the Packers for the Jets. On
Wednesday, the quarterback dismissed
those criticisms.
“I guarantee you all these bums who
want to come after me online about
my experience and stuff, they’ve never
tried it,” he said. “They’re the perfect
people for it. We need to get these
people taking it.”
rience.
“It is a lot more chilled,” Bale told BT
Sport. “If you lose at Real Madrid, it is
like the world has ended. You are cru-
cified. You feel down. You go home and
you’re not happy.
“They accept losing a bit more [in
MLS]. There is no consequence. You
can’t get relegated over there. When
you lose a game you go on to the next
one. They accept losing a lot better over
there. They know how to lose but they
celebrate every win like you have won
the championship. He will definitely
enjoy it.”
Bale achieved success during his
time in MLS. He scored a last-gasp
equalizer in last season’s MLS Cup final
as LAFC beat Philadelphia Union to
claim their first title. Messi faces a
struggle to match that feat: Inter Miami
sit bottom of the Eastern Conference,
eight points adrift of a chance to play in
the postseason.

42
Declan Rice keen to join Arsenal despite
Manchester City’s plan for a rival bid
Jacob Steinberg
Declan Rice remains keen to join Ar-
senal despite Manchester City planning
to enter the race to sign the West Ham
midfielder. Arsenal’s first two bids for
Rice have been rejected, leaving Mikel
Arteta at risk of missing out on his top
target. City have the financial where-
withal to meet West Ham’s asking price
of at least £100m, and it would be hard
for the 24-year-old to turn down the
chance to play for Pep Guardiola.
Rice spoke to Guardiola towards the
end of last season and City are plan-
ning for life without Ilkay Gündogan,
who has decided to join Barcelona on
a free transfer. However, the treble win-
ners are not short of options in cen-
tral midfield. They are close to signing
Mateo Kovacic from Chelsea and have
Rodri and Kalvin Phillips to play in cen-
tral midfield.
Rice would be more likely to start
regularly at Arsenal and his preference
remains to stay in London. The England
international became a father last year
and is extremely close to his family.
Carlo Ancelotti held talks over Everton bonus
fund with Alisher Usmanov
Exclusive by Simon Goodley
Carlo Ancelotti, the decorated manager
who is suing his former club Ever-
ton, held discussions with a contro-
versial Russian oligarch about a series
of incentive payments that were depen-
dent on Everton’s performance in the
Premier League.
The Russian-Uzbek billionaire
Alisher Usmanov proposed the bo-
nuses at about the time Ancelotti was
in talks to take the Everton job in 2019,
sources say. The suggestion raises ques-
tions about whether a proposed side
deal between Ancelotti and Usmanov
is behind the manager filing a claim
against Everton in London’s high court.
The talks will also add to the re-
peated intrigue over Usmanov’s alleged
influence over Everton’s owner, Farhad
Moshiri, with football regulators and
fans likely to be curious about anybody
other than a club’s owner or directors
offering incentives to a coach.
Usmanov’s spokesperson said: “In
his personal interactions with Mr Ance-
lotti, Mr Usmanov, as the largest share-
holder of the club’s main sponsor, dis-
cussed the hypothetical possibility of
creating an additional bonus fund for
the club in the event that the latter
achieved a significant success – namely,
entering the League of Champions [sic]
– an event which, as we know, did not
ultimately take place. There were no
Sport
Declan Rice helped lead West Ham to victory in the Conference League final this month. Photograph: Bradley Collyer/PA
Rice also admires Arteta’s football and
Arsenal should not have any problems
when it comes to personal terms.
Arsenal’s problem remains agreeing
Carlo Ancelotti pictured in 2020 during his time as manager of Everton. Photograph: Dave Thompson/PA
legally meaningful arrangements made
in this regard, while the club’s results
were far from even being considered a
success.”
Further sources suggested to the
Guardian that the high court claim con-
cerns a bonus that Ancelotti believes he
negotiated with an individual outside
the club, and that one target may have
included a top-half finish, which Ance-
lotti did achieve in the 2020-21 season.
One former Everton director said the
a fee. Their first offer was £60m plus
£15m in add-ons and that was followed
this week by a bid of £75m plus £15m in
add-ons. West Ham were unimpressed
Italian, now the coach of Real Madrid,
had been “promised something … and
now it clearly hasn’t gone away”.
It is understood that Everton’s posi-
tion is that no bonus payments were
offered on behalf of the club and that
it would not have authorised any such
payments.
Ancelotti’s legal case – which relates
to “general commercial contracts and
arrangements”, according to the claim
filed at court, was first reported by the
with Arsenal’s attempt to spread the
£75m payment over five years and un-
happy with what they deemed a series
of unrealistic add-ons.
Guardian on 12 June.
The club is facing the legal claim
at a time when its board has just one
member – the chairman, Bill Kenwright
– after Everton were hit last week by the
resignations of three directors.
More than a week later, none of the
directors have been replaced, but the
club have issued a statement implying
that new appointments are imminent.
The connections between Moshiri
and Usmanov have long been a source
The Guardian Friday 23 June 2023
West Ham want the guaranteed por-
tion of the fee to be paid in fewer instal-
ments to boost their financial position.
The expectation remains that Rice will
join Arsenal for a fee that could top
£100m once add-ons are taken into
account. There were indications on
Thursday night that the transfer was
rumbling towards a conclusion, though
suggestions Arsenal have lodged their
third bid have been denied.
Arsenal will need to make Rice
their record signing. Arteta wants more
physicality in midfield and is also tar-
geting Southampton’s Roméo Lavia,
who is valued at £45m. Arsenal are
close to completing an initial £60m deal
for the Chelsea forward Kai Havertz,
who is due to have a medical. Havertz is
expected to be unveiled next week.
Arsenal are prepared to make room
for Rice by selling Granit Xhaka, who
has an offer from Bayer Leverkusen,
and Thomas Partey. There is interest in
Partey from Saudi Arabia and Juventus
and he would prefer to stay in Europe.
of controversy. This has included a
series of managers raising fresh ques-
tions in January over the ownership of
Everton, after claiming they were inter-
viewed for the top job in the presence
of the oligarch.
Usmanov was barred from entering
the UK by the Home Office in 2021, at
a time when companies in which he
was the largest shareholder were major
sponsors of Everton. At the time, the
club said it was aware that Usmanov
had been barred from the UK but that
the club had not broken any laws or
Premier League rules.
Usmanov had sanctions imposed
on him by the Foreign Office last year
after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when
Everton announced it had cut ties with
the tycoon.
When the sanctions were imposed
in March 2022, he described the Foreign
Office citation as “false and defamatory
allegations damaging my honour, dig-
nity and business reputation”, and
vowed to fight it.
Responding to the Guardian’s ques-
tions about discussing bonuses with
Ancelotti, Usmanov’s spokesperson
said the tycoon “has always carefully
observed the Premier League’s rules
and legal requirements. He has never,
and could never, make any decisions
within FC Everton.”
Everton, Moshiri and Ancelotti did
not provide a comment to the Guar-
dian.
Friday 23 June 2023 The Guardian
Cash dictates the UFC won’t cut ties with the
troubled Conor McGregor
Karim Zidan
Conor McGregor – the ‘Notorious’ face
of the Ultimate Fighting Championship
(UFC) – has once again found himself
mired in controversy as serious alle-
gations of sexual assault cast a shadow
over his anticipated return to the sport.
Last week, the Irish mixed martial
artist was accused of assaulting an un-
named woman at the Kaseya Center
in Miami during Game 4 of the NBA
finals. In a demand letter, attorney Ariel
Mitchell described her client’s alleged
encounter with McGregor, which took
place in the VIP men’s bathroom. The
letter also claimed that McGregor was
“aided and abetted by the NBA and
Miami Heat Kaseya security.”
In a statement, Miami Heat revealed
the organization is “aware of the alle-
gations” and is “conducting a full inves-
tigation.” The NBA is assisting the Heat
while the Miami Police revealed it is
investigating a report filed Sunday.
Through a lawyer, McGregor said he
has not been charged with a crime and
denied the accusations and vowed “not
be intimidated.”
The incident marks the latest in
a long series of accusations, litigation,
and criminal conduct on McGregor’s
part. It is also the fourth time that
McGregor has been accused of sexual
assault in the last five years.
In March 2019, reports emerged that
McGregor was under investigation in
Ireland after a woman accused him of
sexual assault in a Dublin penthouse
the previous December. McGregor was
arrested and questioned but was re-
leased pending further investigation. In
October 2019, police received anoth-
er complaint against McGregor from
a woman who said he had sexually
assaulted her in a car outside a
Dublin pub. The UFC fighter denied
both claims and did not face criminal
charges in either case.
In September 2020, McGregor was
detained and questioned by authorities
on the French island of Corsica for al-
leged indecent exposure and sexual as-
sault in a bar. He spent two days in
custody. However, the case was later
The USWNT enter the World Cup loved,
despised and still influential
Beau Dure
A seven-a-side match featuring a collec-
tion of retired Wrexham pros and
guests against a team of mostly re-
tired US women’s players isn’t partic-
ularly newsworthy. But when the score
wound up 12-0 in favor of the men, the
knives were out.
Some outlets, notably Fox News,
either ignorantly or deliberately
misidentified the American players as
“the US women’s team”. Some played
up Heather O’Reilly’s playful callout of
Wrexham’s celebrity owner Ryan Rey-
nolds as a hysterical, delusional fit.
Sport
Conor McGregor has been a money spinner for the UFC during his fight career. Photograph: Brian Lawless/PA
dropped due to lack of sufficient evi-
dence.
McGregor was also sued in 2021 by
the woman who accused him of raping
her in Dublin. The woman filed the
civil suit after prosecutors declined to
pursue criminal charges against McGre-
gor.
Despite the shadow of another
sexual assault allegation, the UFC and
ESPN remain reluctant to distance
themselves from their controversial
cash cow. Instead, the entities have
opted to continue profiting from the
34-year-old’s presence by proceeding
with Season 31 of The Ultimate Fighter,
where McGregor is featured as a coach
opposite another veteran mixed mar-
tial artist, Michael Chandler. The fourth
episode of the season aired on Tuesday.
“The organization is aware of the
recent allegations regarding Conor
McGregor and will continue to gather
additional details regarding the inci-
dent,” the UFC said in a statement last
week. “UFC will allow the legal process
to play out before making any addi-
tional statements.”
ESPN declined to respond to the
Guardian’s request for comment.
For the UFC, a McGregor fight
From newsrooms to their parents’ base-
ments, men rejoiced at the supposed
humbling of women who dared to
demand a place in the sports market-
place.
Why? Simple sexism surely ex-
plains some of it, but the mainstream
and social media harrumphing also
brings up an inconvenient truth – as
we head into the World Cup, a lot of
people in the United States are wait-
ing for the women to fall flat on their
faces, the result of years of political pro-
tests, questionable sportsmanship, and
an “equal pay” war in which truth was
the first casualty and money to develop
the next generation of players was the
– which could take place later this
year – will fatten its bottom line.
The former UFC featherweight and
lightweight champion has not fought
in nearly two years due to a broken
leg suffered during his bout against
Dustin Poirier but he has headlined five
of the six most profitable pay-per-view
events in UFC history. And despite a
lengthy layoff, McGregor remains the
organization’s most recognizable star,
for better or worse.
It is also worth noting that the
UFC continues to generate record reve-
nues. According to its parent company
Endeavor’s SEC filings, the organization
generated $1.4bn in revenue in 2022,
nearly 40% more than the $890 mil-
lion it reported in 2020, which was also
the last time McGregor won a profes-
sional fight. The UFC is also expected
to merge with the WWE into a new
sports entertainment entity called TKO
Group Holdings, which is expected to
be valued at more than $20bn – a signif-
icant increase from the $4bn valuation
the UFC achieved when it was pur-
chased by Endeavor in 2016.
In light of the UFC’s continued suc-
cess and profitability, the organization
may no longer be in desperate need
last.
But despite that pushback among
sections of America, USA women’s
soccer players have never been this
popular for this many years. The 1991
and 1999 Women’s World Cup cham-
pions could be outspoken as well, play-
ing hardball in labor negotiations that
paved the way for their successors
to make a living in the sport. But
women’s soccer struggled in the US
after the WUSA, at the time America’s
only women’s professional league in
the sport, collapsed in 2003.
That 1999 team made ads like the
classic “I will have two fillings,” a tri-
bute to their team-first attitude. This
of McGregor’s services, which makes its
continued links with him notable.
MMA is also a sport that has long
been plagued by incidents of violence
against women. In 2015, HBO’s Real
Sports revealed that MMA fighters are
arrested for domestic violence at more
than double the average national rate.
Since then, the sport has continued
to serve up high-profile domestic as-
sault cases. In 2021, UFC heavyweight
champion Jon Jones was arrested fol-
lowing an alleged incident involving his
wife while their children were present
just hours after he was inducted into
the UFC Hall of Fame. He was in-
itially charged with domestic violence
but the charge was dropped following
a plea deal with prosecutors. Months
later, former UFC champion Chuck Lid-
dell was arrested following an alleged
domestic violence incident involving
his wife. No charges were filed due to
a “lack of sufficient evidence.”
Most recently, UFC President Dana
White was caught on camera in a phys-
ical altercation with his wife, Anne, at a
New Year’s Eve party in Cabo San Lucas,
Mexico. Footage showed Anne slapping
White at a nightclub, which White re-
turned before attempting to strike her
time around, marketing has kicked off
with an ad in which the US women
sneer and scoff at the very idea of
anyone dethroning the two-time de-
fending champions. Why stick with
that cold, hard braggadocio? Because
it’s working. Mostly.
The National Women’s Soccer
League, launched with a shoestring
budget in 2013 as a third attempt
at a professional competition in the
US, now commands expansion fees
reported to exceed $50m. Teenagers
are passing up the security of college
scholarships to turn professional, just
in time to push their way into a national
team pool that was creaking with age.
43
again as others intervened. White later
apologized for his actions but did not
face any professional consequences.
While McGregor has not been ac-
cused of domestic violence, he has
had his fair share of violent encoun-
ters away from the Octagon. In 2018,
McGregor and his entourage attacked
a bus carrying UFC fighters at the
Barclays Center in Brooklyn. McGregor
shattered the vehicle’s window with a
hand dolly, injuring multiple fighters
onboard. The former UFC champion
later turned himself into the NYPD but
reached a plea deal that saw his assault
and felony criminal mischief charges
dropped. The following year, McGregor
pleaded guilty to assault after punching
a pub customer who refused to drink
a shot of his whiskey brand. McGregor
was also accused of assaulting a woman
on his yacht in Ibiza, Spain, in January
2022. McGregor denies the accusation
and has not been charged.
The fact that the UFC, which clearly
has an image problem when it comes to
violence away from the fight area, is still
happy to associate itself with McGregor
raises questions about its priorities.
Besides, beyond his string of contro-
versies, McGregor is no longer the figh-
ter he once was. The Irishman has lost
three of his last four bouts and has
not won a fight in more than three
years. The last time McGregor was able
to string together consecutive victories
was in 2016. The UFC’s fanbase appears
to have caught on, as McGregor’s return
to The Ultimate Fighter has not been
the ratings success the organization
anticipated.
Nevertheless, a potential McGregor
fight in the foreseeable future will still
garner more attention than anything
else the UFC could offer in its place.
The UFC would also never risk part-
ing ways with McGregor when count-
less other organizations would jump at
the opportunity to sign him. Given the
UFC’s penchant for profit, it seems like
wishful thinking to believe that the UFC
would part ways with McGregor unless
it absolutely had to.
As long as McGregor can continue
to fight, you can expect the UFC to be
there to promote it.
To an extent, the surge of interest
is merely part of a larger wave of sup-
port for women’s sports, not just in the
US but globally. Professional women’s
soccer in Europe has soared in popu-
larity since the last World Cup. In the
US, this year’s women’s college basket-
ball tournament obliterated records for
TV viewership.
But women’s soccer players and
agents have surely learned that it’s
not too difficult to parlay infamy into
fame. Embracing their own polarizing
personae didn’t hurt Charles Barkley,
Randy Moss or John McEnroe, so why
Continued on page 44

44
Continued from page 43
would it hurt Megan Rapinoe or Alex
Morgan?
And unlike Barkley, Moss or McE-
nroe, the USA women – whose World
Cup roster was named on Wednesday –
have no shortage of advocates who will
back them no matter what. To highlight
just a few examples:
Celebrating wildly upon scoring
goals 11, 12 and 13 against an over-
matched World Cup opponent? No
problem.
Morgan pretending to sip tea after a
goal against England? A meme-worthy
moment, even though many couldn’t
tell whether it was a dig at the team’s
tea-crazed opponents, a homage to
Game of Thrones star Sophie Turner’s
Instagram account, or a shoutout to
Kermit the Frog. (As it turns out, the
correct answer was Turner.)
Rose Lavelle diving to get a call at
the World Cup? Either we all missed the
foul, or, hey, the men do it all the time.
(Sadly, that’s not wrong.)
Underneath those viral moments,
much of the antipathy – as it so often
is in America – is political. First, Ra-
pinoe followed Colin Kaepernick’s lead
in kneeling for the national anthem
in 2016. Before the 2019 World Cup
she found herself pitted against the
US president himself, Donald Trump.
Kneeling became an issue again lead-
ing up to the Tokyo Olympics in 2021,
‘I’m so lucky’: Once in a generation
Wembanyama prepares for NBA draft
Associated Press
Victor Wembanyama’s NBA story is
now underway. The NBA draft – one
that Wembanyama’s towering shadow
has hung over for months, blocking
much of what is usually part of the
process – is on Thursday night, and he
will be selected No 1 overall by the San
Antonio Spurs.
“Ever since I knew about the draft,
exactly how it worked, I wanted to be
first,” Wembanyama said on Wednes-
day. “I think I started to realize I could
be a professional basketball player at
the age of 12. Tomorrow, something’s
going to happen, something that I’ve
been thinking [about] for years and
years, I can’t really describe how I feel
right now. I just know I’m going to have
trouble sleeping tonight, for sure.”
There has been no debate about
who the Spurs should take with the No
1 pick, no discussion of which player
might be a better fit, no real attempts to
raise any red flags about the presumed
selection.
When a player like Wembanyama
comes along – and maybe none ever has
– there’s no real reason to drum up any
drama. The Spurs are not going to pass
up someone who is listed at 7ft 4in but
has the skills of a player much smaller.
The decision is certain, but not offi-
cial until Commissioner Adam Silver
says Wembanyama’s name on Thurs-
day night. And Wembanyama playfully
corrected a reporter in New York who
welcomed him to San Antonio.
“Not there yet,” Wembanyama said.
“But thank you.”
The 19-year-old from France has
been called the best prospect since
Sport
The US celebrate their victory at the 2023 SheBelieves Cup. They enter the World Cup as betting favorites. Photograph: Patrick T Fallon/
AFP/Getty Images
when the USWNT echoed other teams’
actions in kneeling before the game but
not, despite erroneous reports to the
contrary, during the anthem.
Second, the team’s quest for “equal
pay” – with the blame aimed squarely
at US Soccer though the problem lies
mostly with Fifa, which is more difficult
to sue in US courts – led to some murky
economic and legal arguments, along
with some unnecessary bashing of the
Victor Wembanyama attended a New York Yankees game this week as he prepared for the NBA draft. Photograph: John Minchillo/AP
LeBron James came out of high school
20 years ago, perhaps with some phys-
ical gifts that even the NBA’s career
scoring leader didn’t possess.
Expectations from the outside
world are sky-high. Wembanyama in-
sists that won’t bother him.
“I don’t let all this stuff get into my
head,” Wembanyama said. “I’ve got such
high expectations for myself that I’m
immune to all this stuff. I really don’t
care.”
He arrived on Monday in the New
York area, surprised that some fans
were waiting for him when he landed
at Newark Airport. On Tuesday, there
was his first subway ride – and a trip
to Yankee Stadium to throw out the
ceremonial first pitch (it was well out
US men’s team, many of whom sup-
ported their female counterparts.
US Soccer brought peace by settling
with the women’s team, coming up
with a unique revenue-sharing agree-
ment between the federation and the
men’s and women’s national teams, cle-
verly ensuring that each team would
benefit from the success of the other
where it apparently matters most – the
wallet.
of the strike zone). And on Wednesday
morning, before his NBA duties began,
he had a weightlifting workout with a
coach.
He has been a big kid in a grown-
up world. He signs autographs with
a smile, pokes fun at himself, doesn’t
mind that everyone tends to stare at
someone of his height.
“Crazy,” he said of that first subway
ride, with New Yorkers all around him.
Silver will call his name Thursday
night, shake his hand, and before too
long Wembanyama will be on a plane
for San Antonio to start the first chapter
of his NBA life. Wembanyama said he
will play in Summer League that starts
in early July, though it remains unclear
if he’ll be participating with the Spurs
But these settlements added to the
perception among US Soccer’s gras-
sroots organizers that the federation
only cared about the senior national
teams. Voters nearly returned ousted
president Carlos Cordeiro to office de-
spite sponsor and player objections.
Cindy Cone, herself a retired women’s
player now in the Hall of Fame, retained
the seat by a narrow margin.
Rapinoe is the personification of
in the Sacramento summer league, the
primary NBA Summer League in Las
Vegas, or both.
“Wembanyama is built for the
modern game,” said analyst Jay Bilas,
who has been part of ESPN’s coverage
for every draft since James topped the
2003 one. “We’ve never seen anything
quite like him on a basketball floor.”
The modern NBA game requires
big men to be comfortable playing
away from the basket, able to handle
the ball and defend opponents on the
perimeter. It’s a league where 7-footer
Nikola Jokić just guided the Denver
Nuggets to their first championship by
becoming the first player to lead the
postseason in total points, rebounds
and assists, where first-team All-De-
The Guardian Friday 23 June 2023
these disputes. To some, her protests
are about satisfying her ego more than
supporting any particular cause. To
others, she is a powerful icon of gay
pride and defiant activism.
When those opinions are weighed,
the latter argument wins – Rapinoe
has inspired many advocates and awa-
kened many journalists in and out of
soccer who had previously paid spo-
radic attention to the women’s game.
But Rapinoe’s cult of personality is so
strong that she has claimed prizes for
on-field play ahead of more deserving
teammates such as Lavelle, Morgan,
Crystal Dunn, Julie Ertz or Becky Sauer-
brunn.
And so Rapinoe shows the influ-
ence of this team – and influence
female athletes have been fighting for
for years. Lightning rods draw lightning,
and while that’s surely difficult at times,
she and her teammates are sure to
get attention and build an intimidating
mystique as the World Cup approaches.
The US women’s team have made a
few enemies, not just knuckle-dragging
men on social media but also the rank
and file of US Soccer. They’ve made
many more fans. They’ve also made
many more people interested in their
fates.
And they know that, whether
people are watching to see them suc-
ceed or fail, people will be watching.
fense centers Jaren Jackson Jr and
Brook Lopez block shots on one end
and shoot three-pointers on the other.
Wembanyama can seemingly do all
that. He was the MVP and Defen-
sive Player of the Year in the French
league, leading the league in scor-
ing, rebounding and blocks. The al-
most-unbelievable highlights of some
of those plays, a slam or a swat when
he seemed too far away to pull it off
even with his enormous wingspan, had
basketball fans and even future oppo-
nents on both sides of the Atlantic
buzzing throughout the season.
He will go to a San Antonio team
that won five titles after selecting Tim
Duncan the last time they had the No 1
pick in 1997. Duncan is a Hall of Famer
and one of the best power forwards in
NBA history, and maybe it’s too much to
ask Wembanyama to become quite like
that.
But he’s the best of the bunch this
year, and maybe of the last 20 years.
“I’m trying to be the best,” Wemba-
nyama said. “Being the best, it’s not
only on the court. There’s whole dimen-
sions in the job of basketball player, an
NBA player. I want to be the best also at
the media, the press conference, all this
stuff. I don’t like to do things halfway.”
Charlotte are expected to decide be-
tween Alabama forward Brandon Miller
and G League Ignite guard Scoot Hen-
derson with the No 2 pick, with Port-
land perhaps taking the other at No 3.
The Rockets and Pistons round out the
top five.
Those teams have been recent regu-
lars near the top of the draft and should
add another good young player for new
Continued on page 45
Friday 23 June 2023 The Guardian
Continued from page 44
coaches Ime Udoka in Houston and
Monty Williams in Detroit. But those
clubs shared the best odds with the
Spurs of winning the No 1 pick in
Southampton announce new manager
Russell Martin after Swansea exit agreed
John Brewin
Southampton have appointed Russell
Martin as their new manager, following
the club’s relegation to the Cham-
pionship. Martin, 37, has left Swansea
to take up his new position, having
managed in south Wales since August
2021, putting to an end a dispute be-
tween the two clubs over compen-
sation.
The former Scotland international
led Swansea to within three points of
a Championship playoff berth in the
most recent campaign, but has now
been tempted to a club who finished
bottom of last season’s Premier League,
after a campaign that featured three
managers in Ralph Hasenhüttl, Nathan
Jones and latterly Rubén Sellés. He has
signed a three-year contract.
Martin said: “It’s a privilege to
accept this opportunity at Sou-
thampton, a club with such a long and
rich history. My aim is to get this club
back where it belongs – in the top flight
of English football.
“I am ready for this challenge and
will give everything to achieve this aim
and to give the supporters a team that
makes them proud. I’m thrilled to be
Carlos Alcaraz admits Andy Murray videos
have aided grass game at Queen’s
Sean Ingle at Queen's Club
He’s a fast learner, that Carlos Alcaraz.
Two days after struggling to decipher
the peculiar cadences of lawn tennis in
his opening match at Queen’s, he raced
into the first grass court quarter-final
of his career with a whip-smart 6-2, 6-3
win over Jiri Lehecka.
Yet even after his 85-minute vic-
tory, the 20-year-old Spaniard was keen
to further his education. For moments
after stepping off Centre Court he made
his way to practice court No 7 to put
more work into his game – and his
movement – for another 45 minutes.
As Alcaraz later revealed, he had
been spending his spare time watch-
ing videos of Andy Murray and Roger
Federer to learn how to play on grass
and was keen to apply the lessons he
had learned.
“I have a lot of time to watch videos,
to learn from the best players in the
world: Andy, Roger and Novak Djo-
kovic,” he said. “Right now we are on
grass and I want to look up to the best
players on grass and movers.”
That, it transpired, did not include
Djokovic when it came to the green
stuff. “For me Roger and Andy are the
Sport
last month’s draft lottery, so there was
disappointment to wipe away before
thinking ahead.
That’s because, while every draft
has good players, very few will ever
offer the chance to draft one like
Russell Martin took Swans to the brink of the playoffs last season. Photograph: David Davies/PA
here and cannot wait for the work to
begin.”
Henrik Kraft, the club chairman
who is a member of the Sport Repub-
lic consortium which bought Saints in
January 2022, said: “We are extremely
excited to welcome Russell to Sou-
Carlos Alcaraz serves to Jiri Lehecka en route to an 85-minute victory at Queen’s Club. Photograph: John Patrick Fletcher/Action Plus/
Shutterstock
best players that are moving great on
grass,” added Alcaraz. “So I want to be
the same. I’m not talking about Djo-
kovic because he slides, like on clay
court, and not my case. But I try to
put similar stuff in my game that Roger
Wembanyama.
“Everybody’s been a unicorn over
the last few years, but he’s more like
an alien,” James said last fall. “No one
has ever seen anyone as tall as he is but
as fluid and as graceful as he is out on
thampton.
“Russell was the standout can-
didate throughout our recruitment
process and we are confident his strong
track record, alongside the experienced
leadership of our new director of foot-
ball, Jason Wilcox, will deliver great re-
and Andy do in grass.”
Alcaraz, who will play Grigor Dimi-
trov in Friday’s quarter-finals, did not
look entirely comfortable in the first
set against Lehecka, and in successive
games he hit drop shots that did not
the floor.”
James will get an up-close view this
coming season when his Lakers plays
against the Spurs. So will the rest of the
league. Wembanyama’s time starts now,
and he sounds as ready as can be.
sults.”
Wilcox, who has joined from Man-
chester City, where he was previously
academy director, said: “Russell has
shown fantastic qualities in his mana-
gerial career so far and is someone who
we believe will thrive in the great envi-
even reach the net. But it was not long
before he began to dominate his oppo-
nent. After breaking the Czech at the
start of the second set following a mus-
cular forehand winner and successive
passing returns, he never looked back.
45
“I just feel really, really lucky to be
able just to live this life,” Wembanyama
said. “I’m just so lucky.”
ronment we have here at Southampton.
“He is a fantastic fit for what we are
trying to achieve, with a strong record
of developing and nurturing young, ta-
lented players to fulfil their potential
and deliver results on the pitch.”
Martin’s appointment, agreed with
the club last month, was delayed by
negotiations over compensation with
Swansea, who have appointed Michael
Duff as a replacement from Barnsley.
Swansea had argued Southampton
should pay maximum compensation
for a manager with a year left on his
contract, after approaching them while
still a Premier League club but an
agreement has now been reached, with
announcements on Martin’s coaching
staff to follow in due course.
Duff’s appointment was confirmed
on Thursday evening, with the North-
ern Irishman signing a three-year deal
with Swansea.
“Michael has a proven track record
of galvanising a group of players into a
collective unit, and he has consistently
outperformed expectations at his pre-
vious clubs,” said Swansea City chair-
man Andy Coleman. “Every conver-
sation I had with him only reinforced
the view that he is exactly the type of
leader we need here at Swansea City.”
“You have to be more focused on
the footwork here,” said Alcaraz, who
hit 21 winners to just seven unforced
errors. “Moving on grass is the key to
everything on grass. I can’t slide as I do
on clay or on a hard court.
“I played great. I’m really happy with
my performance, and I feel really com-
fortable on grass, but I can be better.”
Home interest in the quarter-finals
rests on Cameron Norrie, the British No
1, who faces an intriguing clash with 22-
year-old Sebastian Korda.
The American could yet prove to be
the real deal and his height and vicious
serve makes him a real danger here,
but he is on the comeback trail having
suffered a wrist injury after reaching
his first grand slam quarter-final at the
Australian Open in January.
That left Korda unable to play for
three months and he has also suffered
with foot problems. However, he ap-
pears to be reaping the benefits of
working with Jez Green, a strength and
conditioning expert who spent seven
years with Murray, during his come-
back.
“We did seven or eight good weeks,
probably the longest block that I or Jez
Continued on page 46

46
Continued from page 45
have ever done in our lives,” Korda said.
“It was a lot of fun.”
He added: “I have gained a few kilos
Report: Porzingis goes to Celtics in three-
team deal that sends Smart to Memphis
Associated Press
The Washington Wizards have agreed
to trade center Kristaps Porzingis to the
Boston Celtics as part of a three-team
deal that also includes Marcus Smart
heading to the Memphis Grizzlies, two
people with knowledge of the deal said
on Thursday morning.
The deal also includes the Griz-
zlies acquiring Smart, the 2022 Defen-
sive Player of the Year, from Boston
in exchange for first-round draft picks
in 2023 and 2024. ESPN reported the
Wizards are also receiving guard Tyus
Jones from Memphis, and forwards
Mike Muscala and Danilo Gallinari and
a second-round pick this year from
Boston.
The Celtics add the 7ft 3in Porzingis
after they lost in seven games to Miami
in the Eastern Conference finals. Por-
zingis is coming off a solid season in
Washington in which he averaged a
career-high 23.2 points per game along
with 8.4 rebounds. Most importantly,
he stayed healthy enough to play in 66
games, his most since 2016-17 when he
was with the New York Knicks.
Rob Page has some serious thinking to do as
Wales suffer from new expectation
Elis James
“We need to remember how to enjoy
this again,” said my friend Garmon,
pointing at his plastic cup of lager and
the exposed concrete concourse of the
Cardiff City Stadium’s Canton Stand.
“Because we won’t be enjoying the foot-
ball.” Wales were 2-1 down to Armenia
at half-time, losing to a team 71 places
below them in the rankings , in a Goul-
dian throwback to the mid-90s, when
Bobby’s team turned humiliation into
a habit, losing 7-1 to the Netherlands,
2-1 to Leyton Orient and getting locked
in the prison Bobby Gould had inex-
plicably decided to train in.
Wales hadn’t lost a home European
Championship qualifier since 2011, and
home defeats in competitive matches
over the past 10 years are still rare
enough to stupefy. For Wales fans of
a certain vintage, watching the team
crumble in a vital qualifier we expected
to win prompted an unpleasant Prous-
tian rush. I wonder whether that term
has ever been used in relation to watch-
ing players you’ve never heard of from
a former Soviet state waltzing through
your midfield.
After a surprisingly good start to
the qualifying campaign for Euro 2024,
with four points from the first two
games, including the bonus of a joyful
Sport / Soccer
since Australia and grown into my body.
I was very skinny, very tall. The more
matches I play, the more difficult, more
sore here and there, but I think the
expertise of Jez is really just building
Kristaps Porzingis, left, and Marcus Smart will be moving teams as part of the deal. Photograph: Steven Senne/AP
Porzingis’ departure completes a
swift breakup of Washington’s core
after the Wizards agreed to trade Brad-
ley Beal to Phoenix, and Kyle Kuzma
declined his option. Washington have
Questions are being asked of Rob Page after his Wales side were beaten by Armenia and
Turkey in Euro 2024 qualifying. Photograph: Michael Zemanek/Shutterstock
point gained in Croatia, Rob Page had
targeted two wins from this inter-
national break, but the more cir-
cumspect Wales supporters would have
been quietly delighted with a draw in
Turkey if Armenia had been dispatched
in Cardiff. With Page’s coaching staff re-
vamped after the disappointing perfor-
mances in Qatar, a sell-out crowd at the
Cardiff City Stadium was in buoyant
mood before kick-off.
Cardiff is an event city, and how
Wales supporters felt sorry for the fans
making their way to watch Blondie at
the castle or Peter Kay at the arena. On
a warm summer’s evening, Armenia at
home was the hottest ticket in town.
the body, and so far I’m very happy with
everything.”
At Queen’s Korda has also been
helped by Mark Bender, the physio-
therapist who worked with Murray
missed the playoffs the past two sea-
sons and are now clearly in rebuilding
mode under new team president Mi-
chael Winger.
Smart has played in Boston all nine
Wales immediately clicked into gear,
Kieffer Moore heading wide before Dan
James opened the scoring. At this point
everything seemed so simple, until Ar-
menia equalised, the game became
pandemonium and I began to wish I
was singing along to Heart of Glass or
buying an unofficial Peter Kay tea towel
with the words “garlic bread” written on
it from a shifty bloke outside the venue.
James and Harry Wilson provided a
stream of crosses, which Moore and Joe
Rodon failed to convert. In a throwback
to the World Cup Wales failed to track
midfielders into the box and appeared
grimly vulnerable whenever Armenia
were in attack, the life being sucked out
until 2018 and was once described as
his “back whisperer”. But Korda knows
he faces a tough test against Norrie,
who reached the semi-finals of Wim-
bledon last year.
of his NBA seasons, was their longest-
tenured player and one of the strongest
presences in the locker room. He also
ranks fourth on the franchise’s career
lists for three-pointers (911) and assists
of the stadium as 32,000 people watch-
ed a calamity unfold.
For the best part of a decade, Welsh
success was built on the foundations
of being a street-smart team who were
hard to beat. We now seem to be sliced
open with alarming ease. In a dizzying
12 minutes Wilson pulled one back, Ar-
menia scored twice and Moore was sent
off for kicking out at Armenia’s goal-
keeper, Ognjen Cancarevic, after a piece
of gamesmanship as dastardly as it was
effective. Cancarevic got himself tan-
gled with the striker, complete with the
exaggerated flailing of Marcel Marceau
pretending to wash a big window, held
on to Moore’s legs, and in frustration
the striker lashed out, inviting the goal-
keeper to react as if he’d been dipped in
lava.
“It’s a red card in the modern game,”
bemoaned the pundits. I found myself
becoming momentarily attracted to
that rare, medieval form of football
that still exists in Derbyshire, where on
Shrovetide you can kick your next-door
neighbour’s head in outside Super-
drug and everyone laughs it off. Moore
looked to the heavens as he trudged
from the pitch, and Armenia players
celebrated wildly with their goalkeeper.
It summed up our night.
And so to Turkey, a tricky fixture
that suddenly had enormous signi-
ficance. Page brought in Joe Morrell to
The Guardian Friday 23 June 2023
“He’s probably one of the biggest
fighters on tour. He doesn’t get tired,
he doesn’t cramp, and he brings a big
intensity to the courts. I’m expecting a
good battle.”
(2,700). His departure leaves the Cel-
tics with Derrick White and reigning
Sixth Man of the Year Malcolm Brogdon
as the top two candidates to replace
Smart.
Smart brings much needed expe-
rience to a young Memphis team that
needs help at point guard following the
announcement of Ja Morant’s 25-game
suspension for next season. Smart also
brings postseason experience to the
Grizzlies, who haven’t been able to win
a playoff series despite finishing second
in the West the past two seasons.
The Celtics reached the NBA finals
in 2022, but were unable to make it
back this season despite their talented
tandem of Jayson Tatum and Jaylen
Brown.
Boston becomes Porzingis’ fourth
NBA team. Drafted in 2015 by New York
with the fourth overall pick, he played
three seasons with the Knicks before
being traded to Dallas before the dead-
line in 2019, when he was recovering
from knee surgery. The Wizards ac-
quired him from Dallas 16 months ago.
Wales’s Kieffer Moore is shown a red card
shortly after Armenia’s fourth goal. Photo-
graph: Athena Pictures/Getty Images
sit alongside Ethan Ampadu, to shore
us up defensively and allow Aaron
Ramsey to play further up. The 1,200
or so Wales fans created a party atmos-
phere in a torrential downpour, and one
dropped his wallet down a drain only
for it to be retrieved by a local with a
fishing rod. At this point, the impending
football was an unwelcome distraction.
Despite having a Chris Mepham
own goal disallowed for offside, Wales
were tentatively coping in the first
half, until Morrell was given a straight
red on 41 minutes, at which point an
onerous task became seemingly insur-
mountable. If Friday night was sham-
bolic, Monday night became chaos. In a
humid, hostile atmosphere, Turkey had
another goal disallowed, Wales dug in,
Wilson had a fizzing free-kick turned
round the post and Danny Ward gave
a fantastic wink to the camera before
Continued on page 47
Friday 23 June 2023 The Guardian
Continued from page 46
saving a penalty. We wondered whether
we were seeing things.
The relentless pressure became
overwhelming however, Umut Nayir
breaking the deadlock on 72 minutes
before Arda Guler scored with a fan-
tastic effort 10 minutes from time. After
four games our hopes of qualifying
Chelsea launch multi-club project by buying
majority stake in Strasbourg
Jacob Steinberg and Ed Aarons
Chelsea have kickstarted their multi-
club project by buying a majority stake
in Strasbourg. The deal is a major boost
for the Premier League club’s owners,
Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital, who
have been looking for suitable clubs to
purchase since last summer.
The initial expectation had been
that Chelsea would be forced to settle
for a minority stake in Strasbourg, leav-
ing them unable to exert full control
over the French club. Sources ques-
tioned whether there would be any
benefits to such a deal for Chelsea and
further talks were held.
The size of the stake is unknown
but it is understood Chelsea will have
close to a 100% ownership. Reports in
France have claimed Chelsea are paying
€75m (£65m) for their share.
“It is an honour for us to be part
of this historic club,” said BlueCo, the
consortium which purchased Chelsea.
It said it was “committed to preserving
the heritage” of Strasbourg and that the
deal was designed to “further our pres-
ence in European football” and would
“create huge opportunities to share
knowledge and expertise”.
Boehly has spoken about a multi-
club model being a method of making
sure “we can show pathways for our
young superstars to get on to the Chel-
Tottenham lead race to sign James Maddison
as Newcastle’s interest cools
Jacob Steinberg and Louise
Taylor
Tottenham have emerged as the fron-
trunners in the race to sign Leicester
City’s James Maddison. Newcastle have
also shown a strong interest in buying
the England attacker this summer, but
it is understood their priorities lie else-
where.
Maddison is to leave Leicester fol-
lowing their relegation from the Prem-
ier League and Spurs are expected to
make a fresh move for him. Spurs had
a joint bid for the 26-year-old and the
winger, Harvey Barnes, turned down by
Leicester last week.
Newcastle tried to buy Maddison
last year and they have not given up
on him yet. However sources have ex-
pressed doubt over Newcastle, who are
close to strengthening their midfield by
signing Sandro Tonali from Milan for
Soccer
automatically lie in tatters, and ques-
tions are being asked of Page. In this
brave new world where expectations of
Wales are at an unprecedented high,
there was an anger at the Cardiff City
Stadium that felt different to the resig-
nation of the past.
Thoughts turned to previous dif-
ficult periods. History has been kind to
John Toshack, because by Euro 2016
Todd Boehly said a multi-club model “can show pathways for our young superstars to get on to the Chelsea pitch while getting them real
game time”. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian
sea pitch while getting them real game
time”. Gaining influence at Strasbourg
will give Chelsea a footing in a country
that produces some of the best players
in the world.
Chelsea have looked at a number of
clubs in France, Belgium, Portugal and
South America. There have been talks
with Bordeaux but sources indicated a
deal with Strasbourg made more finan-
James Maddison is expected to leave Leicester following their relegation from the Premier
League. Photograph: Plumb Images/Leicester City FC/Getty Images
€70m plus add-ons, bidding for Mad-
dison during this window.
That would potentially leave the
path clear for Spurs to push ahead with
a move for the former Norwich City
playmaker, although sources close to
the performances that were so stul-
tifying at the time felt like the pain-
ful part of a grand plan. The success
of Chris Coleman’s side, which has so
few survivors, was built on tactics de-
vised to get the most out of Gareth Bale
and Ramsey. It’s difficult to work out
what Page’s preferred system is. A back
five seems to have been replaced with
a back four.We are neither a possession-
cial sense. The price was dependent on
Strasbourg winning their battle against
relegation from Ligue 1, which they did
by finishing 15th.
Chelsea stepped up their interest in
Strasbourg after Boehly was unable to
reach a deal with Bordeaux’s president,
Gérard López. Boehly has held produc-
tive discussions with Strasbourg’s pres-
ident, Marc Keller, in recent months.
Leicester have suggested that it could
be a while before the north Londoners
lodge their next bid. It remains to be
seen if Leicester’s financial issues force
them to accept a lower fee.
Manchester United have also
based team nor a side that play on the
counterattack.
If Page is in charge of a team’s shape,
one thing he cannot control is how few
minutes his players get at the top level.
Of the team that started against Ar-
menia, only Wilson and Ben Davies play
regularly in the Premier League. Not
only does Page need to find a system
that works, it needs to suit a squad
There were 11 shareholders at Stras-
bourg and Keller’s 27% stake gave him
the biggest share.
Keller, a former Strasbourg player
and a frontrunner to become the next
president of France’s football feder-
ation, has an emotional connection
with the club. He has rebuilt the side
since becoming president in 2012 and
has stressed the importance of the club
watched Maddison, although it is be-
lieved that they are unlikely to sign a
No 10 given they already have Bruno
Fernandes. Chelsea scouted Maddison
extensively when they were managed
by Thomas Tuchel but they have other
priorities this summer.
Ange Postecoglou is expected to
line Spurs up in a 4-3-3 system fol-
lowing his appointment as their new
head coach and the Australian needs
reinforcements in the middle. Signing
Maddison would provide Postecoglou
with more creativity.
Spurs, who used a back three under
Antonio Conte, lacked poise in mid-
field last season. Maddison is one of
the most creative players in the Premier
League and scored 10 goals last season.
His form earned him a place in Eng-
land’s World Cup squad. He has been
capped three times by his country and
needs a move to ensure he remains in
contention for a place in Gareth South-
47
often out of favour with their clubs and
the worrying lack of match fitness that
brings. As a legacy of the Bale era, our
season in Nations League A means a
playoff for Euro 2024 is very likely. Page
has some serious thinking to do.
staying true to its values.
He said the deal with Chelsea would
“enable the club to further its ambition,
with responsibility. We’re doing it for
our fans, for our partners, for our town
and our region.” Keller is staying as pres-
ident, supported by the same manage-
ment team.
Buying Strasbourg will offer Chel-
sea a way of giving experience to young
players who could then be brought to
Stamford Bridge. The practice has been
followed by Manchester City’s parent
company, City Football Group, which
has satellite clubs around the world.
Brighton’s owner, Tony Bloom, owns
the Belgian club Union Saint-Gilloise.
Kaoru Mitoma, outstanding for Brigh-
ton this past season, thrived on loan at
Union SG last season.
Uefa’s president, Aleksander Ce-
ferin, recently hinted at relaxing restric-
tions on clubs with the same owner
playing in the same European compe-
tition. A change in the regulations
would be a boost for Chelsea’s owners.
Meanwhile, Manchester United
remain confident of signing Mason
Mount despite Chelsea rejecting their
first two offers for the midfielder. Chel-
sea are holding out for £70m.
United had their latest offer of
£45m plus £5m in add-ons rejected on
Wednesday and are biding their time
before returning with a third bid.
gate’s squad for Euro 2024.
Newcastle would have the finan-
cial muscle to outbid Spurs and would
be able to offer Maddison Champions
League football. Eddie Howe’s current
focus is on sealing a deal for Tonali.
Newcastle’s talks with Milan have gone
well and the 23-year-old Italy midfielder
is awaiting permission to undergo a
medical.
Newcastle hope to conclude
Tonali’s transfer on Friday when
the midfielder - who captained Italy
under-21s last night against France in
Cluj-Napoca etc - is expected to un-
dergo a medical at Italy’s base camp
in Romania.
After concluding talks with Milan in
Italy, Dan Asworth, Newcastle’s direc-
tor of football flew to Cluj-Napoca along
with Tonali’s agent on Thursday when a
medical team from St James’ Park also
departed for Eastern Europe.

48
Smith Rowe ensures England U21s start with
win over Czech Republic
PA Media
England Under-21s got their Euro 2023
finals campaign off to the perfect start
against the Czech Republic in Georgia.
The midfielder Jacob Ramsey broke the
deadlock at the start of the second half,
with the substitute Emile Smith Rowe
adding another in stoppage time to seal
victory.
There was a lively start to the Group
C opener at the Batumi Arena, with
Noni Madueke’s early effort from the
edge of the penalty area clip the cross-
bar while at the other end James Traf-
ford saved from Vasil Kusej.
England, who beat the Czech
Republic home and away in qualifying
as they topped their group, remained
on the front foot, with Anthony Gordon
close to converting a cross from Morgan
Gibbs-White.
A defensive mix-up when trying to
play out from the back against a high
press led to a chance for Vaclav Sejk on
the right of the England area, but his
shot flew into the side netting. There
was another major let-off for England
in the 18th minute when Kusej was
sent racing clear down the right and he
Uefa’s Aleksander Ceferin admits to
‘problems’ at Champions League final
PA Media
Uefa’s president Aleksander Ceferin
has admitted “not everything was per-
fect” for supporters at the Champions
League final in Istanbul.
Manchester City supporters re-
ported issues with transport to the out-
of-town Ataturk Stadium for the show-
piece match on 10 June against Interna-
zionale, as well as a lack of toilets and
limited access to water.
Football Supporters Europe is ga-
thering fan accounts from Istanbul in
order to compile a report to present to
Uefa.
Ceferin, speaking at the European
Football Fans Congress in Manchester,
said this year’s men’s and women’s club
competition finals “proved Uefa had
learned from past mistakes”, but he
added: “We’re well aware that in Istan-
bul not everything was perfect and I’m
certainly not playing down the prob-
lems encountered by some.
“But let us continue working to-
gether to improve what we can im-
Soccer
Emile Smith Rowe slots home England’s second goal against the Czech Republic. Photograph: Álex Caparrós/Uefa/Getty Images
charged into the area, only to fire wide
as Trafford came out.
England created an opening in the
25th minute when Gordon clipped
the ball across the six-yard box and
Ramsey’s header dropped on to his
Manchester City fans on a shuttle bus to the Ataturk Olympic Stadium. Some reported they did not return to their accommodation until
past 3am. Photograph: James Manning/PA
prove. I’m thinking in particular of
transport links, to better understanding
boot and wide at the far post. Madueke
continued to carry a threat and he cut
in from the right to curl a shot just wide.
The Czechs, though, should have
taken the lead five minutes before half-
time. Sejk surged forward down the
the hosting of disabled supporters and
access to water and toilets for everyone.
left, holding off Taylor Harwood-Bel-
lis before cutting back inside the area
and clipping a low drive towards the far
corner, which Trafford tipped wide at
full stretch.
England took the lead two minutes
“I can assure you that next year’s
Champions League final at Wembley
The Guardian Friday 23 June 2023
into the second half when Gordon com-
bined with Ramsey on the edge of the
area and the Villa midfielder carried the
ball on before coolly slotting home.
The Czechs immediately went on
the offensive as Pavel Sulc got clear of
Harwood-Bellis, but Trafford was out
quickly to smother the danger.
England, who face Israel on Sunday
and the reigning champions, Germany,
on Wednesday, had the ball in the net
again with 20 minutes left, but the goal
was disallowed. Gibbs-White blocked a
quick free-kick, the ball bounced out
to Madueke on the right and his low
cross was swept in by Gordon. Eng-
land’s celebrations were cut short as
the referee ruled the goal out and
showed Gibbs-White a yellow card for
not having retreated 10 yards at the
free-kick.
After the let-off, the Czechs pressed
for an equaliser and substitute Krys-
tof Danek headed over from Adam
Karabec’s floated free-kick. However,
Smith Rowe made sure of victory
when he slotted in a pass from his
fellow substitute Cameron Archer after
a break down the left.
and Euro 2024 in Germany will be a
unique experience for fans.”
Close to the start of his address,
Ceferin referenced the extremely se-
rious issues which faced Liverpool fans
in particular at the 2022 Champions
League final in Paris.
An independent report into the
chaos at the match in the French cap-
ital found Uefa bore “primary respon-
sibility” for what almost became “a
mass fatality catastrophe”.
Ceferin said: “Given what some of
you experience recently, I would under-
stand if I got a cold reception. I also
came here to say sorry. We would love
to erase events that happened last year.
Everyone welcomed the decision to
move the Champions League final from
St Petersburg to Paris and we know
what happened.
“Good intentions are often not
enough, we know that and we are sorry
for that. I think we should roll up our
sleeves and ensure that attending a
football match remains a unique and
unforgettable experience for everyone.”
Friday 23 June 2023 The Guardian
Manchester United confident of Mason
Mount deal despite Chelsea knockbacks
Jacob Steinberg
Manchester United remain confident of
signing Mason Mount despite Chelsea
rejecting their first two offers for the
midfielder.
Chelsea are holding out for £70m,
even though Mount’s contract runs out
next summer. United had their latest
offer of £45m plus £5m in add-ons re-
jected on Wednesday and are biding
their time before returning with a third
bid.
Erik Ten Hag is keen to add more
athleticism in midfield and admires
Mount’s pressing and versatility. United
hope Chelsea will be forced to lower
their asking priceafter talks over a con-
tract extension hit a brick wall over
wages.
Chelsea have a policy of selling play-
ers who enter the final year of their
deals and there is hope at United that
they will accept a bid that comes close
to £60m. The danger for Chelsea is that
they could lose Mount on a free if they
refuse to sell this summer. Mount will *
Soccer
Mason Mount applauds Chelsea’s fans in April. Talks over a contract extension have hit a brick wall. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The
Guardian
be free to sign a pre-contract with a for-
eign club from January. Bayern Munich
have shown an interest.
Mount’s relationship with Chelsea
has grown frosty since last summer
and it is likely that a parting of the
ways would suit both parties. There is,
however, concern about United walking
away if Chelsea refuse to budge from
49
their valuation. It is understood United
could switch focus to a deal for Brigh-
ton’s Moisés Caicedo if they end their
interest in Mount. Chelsea are pushing
to sign Caicedo.
United’s stance on a fee for Mount is
that his contract is running down. Chel-
sea have accepted an offer of £25m plus
£5m in add-ons from Manchester City
for Mateo Kovacic, who has a year left
on his deal. They are also selling Kai Ha-
vertz, who has two years left on his deal,
to Arsenal for an initial £60m. Chelsea
paid £47.5m for Raheem Sterling when
he had a year left on his deal at City last
summer.
Arsenal and Liverpool explored
deals for Mount but United are his like-
liest destination. Personal terms with
United will not be an issue.
There could still be a way back for
Mount at Chelsea if he stays. Mauricio
Pochettino, Chelsea’s new head coach,
would like to work with the 24-year-old.
Pochettino could push for talks over a
new deal to resume if Mount is not sold.