Peru in turmoil Violence Power up!

How Nintendo
engulfs cradle of the Incas 28 stayed on top of the game 51

A week in the life of the world | Global edition

10 FEBRUARY 2023 | VOL .208 No.6 | £4.95 | €7.99

Brexit, three years on

SPECI A L R EPORT
10
Eyewitness  The only way is down
Malaysia A base jumper leaps off the Kuala Lumpur Tower during its annual International
Jump event. The acronym ‘base’ stands for Buildings, Antennas, Spans and the
PHOTOGRAPH:
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HASNOOR HUSSAIN/REUTERS sport can leap, using a parachute to descend safely to the ground.

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 A week in the life of the world Inside
10 February 2023

Voters rue Brexit,

brutality in Iran and
thinking inside the box
Three years have passed since Britain officially left 4 -14 GLOBAL REPORT
the European Union, but the country feels a long way Headlines from the last
from the “sunlit uplands” once memorably envisioned seven days
by Boris Johnson. Indeed, according to several polls 10 UK Bregrets, we’ve had
released last week, more of the British population than a few …
ever are unhappy with the outcomes of Brexit – including,
crucially, those who voted for it in the first place. 15-33 SPOTLIGHT
The Observer’s Michael Savage and Toby Helm consider In-depth reporting
what’s behind the upsurge in “Bregret” and ask what and analysis
realistic hopes exist of Britain ever returning to the bloc. 15 Ukraine The saboteurs
Then, Nesrine Malik warns that, while many on the left taking the fight into Russia
may see validation in the current trends, it’s important to 20 Turkey/Syria Major
understand many of the UK’s structural problems stem earthquakes strike
from before the time of the Brexit referendum in 2016. 24 Environment Dodo a go-go
The big story Page 10  26 Netherlands Vermeer’s
last great get-together
Reporting from the Iran protests is hard to come by, but 28  Peru Violence in the
Deepa Parent and Ghoncheh Habibiazad have unearthed cradle of Inca civilisation
harrowing testimony from protesters about their 30 Tech West turns on TikTok
detention and torture at the hands of police. And, also in 32 US/China Spy games
Spotlight, there’s an Eyewitness spread from the sites of 33 US Bolsonaro’s very long
the terrible earthquakes that struck the border region of Florida vacation
Turkey and Syria earlier this week.
Spotlight Page 18  34-44 F E AT U R E S
Long reads, interviews
On the features front, Amelia Tait asks what’s behind the and essays
ultra-organisational trend for needlessly decanting things 34 A gunman’s controversial
into jars. In Culture, Keza MacDonald explores the iconic assisted death
creations of Nintendo, the Japanese video games maker By Giles Tremlett
that has spent almost 40 years at the top of the industry. 40 The age of decanting
And to round things off, Tim Dowling ponders visits to his Amelia Tait
garden office by an insouciant cat and an inscrutable fox.
Everything in its place Page 40  45-50 OPINION
Next level Page 51  45 Jonathan Freedland
Tim Dowling Page 60  Netanyahu can be stopped
47 Lorenzo Marsili
Europe should follow
Biden’s green lead
48 Timothy Garton-Ash
The art of scholzing

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51 Games
How does Nintendo stay
Peru’s crisis Violence
engulfs cradle of the Incas
Power up! How Nintendo
conquered the gaming world
On the cover Is the worm of British public opinion ahead of the game?
10 FEBRUARY 2023 VOL

turning on Brexit? As Nesrine Malik writes: “It is 54 Dance

facebook.com/guardianweekly
Instagram: @guardian finally dawning on more and more people that The Leonard Cohen show
leaving the EU was a colossal mistake. Those who he never lived to see
led the project still talk the same old nonsense 55 Photography
about the purported benefits, but they, like most Mark Power is reeled in by
Brexit, three years on
government assertions these days, sound like the BBC shipping forecast
SPECI A L R EPORT

echoes of a bygone time.”

SPOT ILLUSTRATIONS:
Illustration: Guardian Design 60-61 LIFESTYLE
MATT BLEASE 60 Tim Dowling
Escaping local wildlife
4

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

Defence minister removed

report from post in reshuffle

The defence minister, under
pressure from a corruption
scandal, was reshuffled into
another government job as
Headlines from the Russian forces closed in on
last seven days Bakhmut amid heavy fighting.
The position of Oleksii
Reznikov, one of Ukraine’s
1 U N I T E D S TAT E S Blast from Arctic pushes
better-known figures
mercury to record -78C internationally, had been under
China accuses Washington
Arctic air in the north-east last threat since it emerged that the
of spy balloon ‘overreaction’ Saturday brought dangerously defence ministry had paid up to
Copyright © 2023 China accused the US of cold temperatures and wind chills, three times the supermarket price
GNM Ltd. All rights “overreaction” and the including a record-setting -78C on of food to supply frontline troops.
reserved “indiscriminate use of military the summit of Mount Washington David Arakhamia, the chief of
force” in shooting down a Chinese in New Hampshire. Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s Servant
Published weekly by balloon that traversed US airspace, Authorities in Massachusetts of the People parliamentary bloc,
Guardian News & saying that the move has damaged took the unusual step of keeping said last Sunday that the defence
Media Ltd, bilateral relations. the South Station transit hub open ministry would be led by Kyrylo
Kings Place, The Pentagon described so homeless people had a place Budanov, the head of Ukraine’s
90 York Way,
the high-altitude balloon as to sleep out of the elements. High military intelligence. Reznikov,
London, N1 9GU, UK
a surveillance aircraft able to winds brought down a tree branch he added, would become minister
Printed in the UK, manoeuvre and a US warplane on a car in western Massachusetts, of strategic industries, tasked
Poland, the US, shot it down on last Saturday over killing an infant. with strengthening military-
Australia and the Atlantic Ocean after it had The Mount Washington industrial cooperation, after a day
New Zealand crossed the entire US. China said Observatory at the peak of the of speculation about the defence
it was a weather balloon that had north-east’s highest mountain minister’s future in Kyiv.
ISSN: 0958-9996 been blown off course. recorded an actual temperature of “War dictates changes in
China’s vice-foreign minister, -44C, tying a record set in 1934. personnel policy,” Arakhamia
To advertise contact Xie Feng, lodged a formal Across the rest of the region, said on his Telegram channel.
advertising. complaint with the US embassy wind chills dropped -43C to -45C, “Times and circumstances require
enquiries@
over the incident, accusing according to reports from the strengthening and regrouping.”
theguardian.com
Washington of overreacting National Weather Service. Spotlight Page 15 
To subscribe visit to an accident “caused by
theguardian.com/ force majeure”, according to a
gw-subscribe statement. He accused Washington
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theguardian.com/ The incident came amid Priscilla Presley has filed a lawsuit The embattled New York
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over issues including Taiwan, daughter’s will. Santos has been accused of sexual
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@theguardian.com prompted Antony Blinken, the US Priscilla questioned the integrity Santos already faces local,
Toll Free: secretary of state, to postpone a of a 2016 amendment removing state, federal and international
+1-844-632-2010 visit to Beijing. her from Lisa Marie Presley’s investigations over professional
Spotlight Page 32  living trust, a legal document that and personal behaviour, campaign
Australia and serves the function of a will if finance filings and a campaign
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apac.help The filing contends that largely fabricated.
@theguardian.com Priscilla and Riley Keough – Lisa He has admitted embellishing
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UK headlines p9
8 CANADA

Ontario says it does not

6 CANADA
Birthday girl strikes it lucky
with her first lottery ticket
An 18-year-old has made history
by winning C$48m ($36m) after
entering a lottery for the first time.
Juliette Lamour, from Sault Ste
Marie, Ontario, was announced
as the winner last Friday by the
Ontario Lottery and Gaming
Corporation, making her the
youngest person to win tens of
millions of Canadian dollars.
Lamour, who bought the
ticket on her 18th birthday at the
suggestion of her grandfather,
said she had forgotten about her
flutter until she heard someone
from her home town had won the
draw on 7 January. She told Global
News: “I still can’t believe I hit
the gold ball jackpot on my very
first ticket.”
owe First Nations billions
Ontario has claimed it does not
need to pay billions of dollars
owed to First Nations over broken
treaty obligations, arguing it
has already spent the sum on
the historical costs of resource
extraction and the infrastructure
of “colonisation”.
4
The federal government and the
2
province spent last week in court
arguing neither is responsible for
3. 5 compensating Indigenous nations
for more than 150 years of lost
revenues.
9
Five years ago, a superior court
justice ruled that the Crown
had broken its pledge, made in
10 S PA I N
two 1850 treaties, that it would
increase payments to Indigenous
peoples as more natural resources
were extracted from their lands.
The province argued that it
is the federal government, not
Ontario, that owes any money.

Omelette warning after

7 CHILE
40C heat hampers effort to
stop spread of deadly fires
Record summer temperatures of
more than 40C hampered efforts
to tackle dozens of wildfires
that killed at least 23 people and
destroyed 800 homes.
Sixty-six people have been
hurt in the fires, while almost
1,500 others are seeking refuge
in shelters, according to the
national forestry agency, Conaf.
It said 87 fires were still being
fought last Sunday and 148 were
under control.
A state of emergency has
been declared in three sparsely
populated central regions –
Araucanía, Biobío and Ñuble.
9 CYPRUS
Presidential election to be
decided in surprise runoff
The race to become the eighth
president went to a runoff
vote after the former foreign
minister Nikos Christodoulides
failed to gain enough support to
win outright. The 49-year-old
independent will face Andreas
Mavroyiannis, a veteran career
diplomat backed by the leftist Akel
party, on 12 February.
Results released by the interior
ministry of the Mediterranean
island showed Christodoulides
winning 32.04% of the vote in
last Sunday’s election and an
unexpectedly strong showing of
29.6% for his opponent.
A first-round win required
a candidate to garner more than
50% of the vote.
salmonella outbreak
Spaniards with a taste for oozing,
fleetingly cooked tortilla de
patatas have been urged to
take care after more than 100
people fell ill with suspected
salmonella poisoning from eating
the omelettes at a well-known
restaurant in Madrid.
At least 101 people have become
ill – 13 of whom have required
hospital treatment – after eating
at Casa Dani, regarded as an
institution in the capital.
Casa Dani, which serves up to
700 tortillas a day, apologised last
month for what had happened
and said it would close until an
investigation had concluded.
María del Toro, a researcher at
the La Rioja Centre for Biomedical
Research in northern Spain, urged
people to be careful when eating
egg dishes in restaurants and
when preparing them at home.

10 February 2023 The Guardian Weekly


11 I S R A E L / PA L E S T I N E
Israelis say several armed
Palestinians killed in raid
Israeli forces said they killed
several armed fighters during an
army raid in the occupied West
Bank city of Jericho, the latest
violence in a period of escalating
tensions that has sparked fears
of a third intifada, or Palestinian
uprising. The UN, the US and other
international bodies have called
for restraint on both sides.
Thousands of Israelis gathered
in Tel Aviv last weekend for
the fifth consecutive week to
demonstrate against controversial
legal reforms touted by
Benjamin Netanyahu’s rightwing
government. Demonstrators also
decried proposed settlement
expansion in the West Bank.
Opinion Page 45 
13
12 CAR
Wagner mercenaries sustain
losses in fight for goldmines
Russian mercenaries from the
Wagner Group sustained heavy
casualties in a new surge of
fighting between government
troops and rebels over the control
of lucrative goldmines in Central
African Republic (CAR).
The clashes come amid
increasing instability in the
anarchic, resource-rich CAR,
which in recent years has become
one of Russia’s main hubs of
influence in sub-Saharan Africa.
The government offensive is led
by some of the estimated 1,000
Wagner fighters stationed in the
country since 2018.
The Guardian Weekly 10 February 2023
13 NIGERIA
Nigerians take Shell to court
in London over pollution
Nearly 14,000 people are seeking
justice in the high court in London
in an action against Shell, claiming
the fossil fuel group is responsible
for devastating pollution of their
water sources and destruction
of their way of life. People from
the Niger delta area of Ogale,
a farming community, lodged
their claims last month, joining
more than 2,000 people from
the Bille area, largely a fishing
community. In total 13,652 claims
from individuals, churches and
schools are asking the oil group
to clean up the pollution which
they say has devastated their
communities.
15
16
17
14 SAUDI ARABIA
Rate of executions almost 18
doubles in kingdom
The rate of executions has almost
doubled under the rule of the
de facto leader, Mohammed bin
Salman, with the past six years
being among the bloodiest in
the kingdom’s modern history,
a report prepared by the European
Saudi Organisation for Human
Rights and Reprieve has found.
19
Between 2015 and 2022, an
average of 129 executions were
carried out each year. The figure
represents an 82% increase on
the period 2010-14. Last year,
147 people were executed – 90 for
crimes that were considered to be
nonviolent. On 12 March last year,
up to 81 men were put to death,
in what activists believe was
a pointed message from the Saudi
leadership to dissenters.

Global report
15 H O N G KO N G
Trial of 47 high-profile
democracy advocates opens
Hong Kong’s largest national
security trial began on Monday,
involving 47 of the city’s
most high-profile democracy
advocates, in a hearing that
has been labelled a trial of the
territory’s pro-democracy
movement itself.
The group of former politicians,
activists, campaigners, and
community workers are accused
of “conspiracy to commit
subversion” over the holding of
unofficial pre-election primaries
in July 2020. Among the accused
are legal academic Benny Tai and
well-known activist Joshua Wong.
The case is at the centre of
the Hong Kong and Beijing
governments’ crackdown on
opposition and dissent in the city,
after the mass pro-democracy
protests in 2019.
16 M YA N M A R
Junta delays elections as it
extends state of emergency
The military regime announced
an extension to its state of
emergency, effectively delaying
elections that the junta had
pledged to hold by August, as it
battles anti-coup fighters.
The junta chief, Min Aung
Hlaing, acknowledged that more
than a third of townships were
not under full military control, in
comments reported by state media.
The admission came on 1 February,
the second anniversary of the army
power grab in 2021 when the state
of emergency was declared after
the generals toppled Aung San Suu
Kyi’s government.
Spotlight Page 23 
The big story p10 
7
17 PHILIPPINES 19 AUSTRALIA D E AT H S
US seals crucial military deal New A$5 banknote will not
close to China flashpoints feature King Charles
Washington will have access to King Charles III will not feature
four additional military bases in on Australia’s A$5 note after a
“strategic areas of the country”, decision by the Reserve Bank Pervez
the Philippines’ Department to replace Queen Elizabeth II’s Musharraf
of National Defense said. The portrait with a design “that Former president
expanded access will fill a crucial honours the culture and history of of Pakistan who
gap in US positioning in the region, the First Australians”. supported the
say analysts, and enable it to better Once the change is made, US in its war on
monitor Chinese activity in the there will be no portraits of terror. He died on
South China Sea and near Taiwan. UK monarchs on any current 5 February,
The deal has been made under Australian banknote. aged 79.
an enhanced defence cooperation The Australian Monarchist
agreement that allows the US League accused Anthony Paco Rabanne
access to Philippine bases for Albanese, the prime minister and Spanish designer
joint training, storing equipment a long-time supporter of Australia known for
and supplies, and building of becoming a republic, of “trouncing space-age
facilities, though not to establish Australian democracy”. metal dresses
a permanent presence. The US However, Australian Greens and signature
already has access to five sites. party senator Lidia Thorpe called fragrances.
US officials have previously the change a “massive win for He died on
commented that the positioning the grassroots, First Nations 3 February,
of US military equipment in Asia people who have been fighting to aged 88.
was too strongly oriented towards decolonise this country”.
north-east Asia. In its statement, Cindy Williams
the Philippines Department of Film and TV
National Defense said Washington actor who played
would allocate more than Shirley in sitcom
$82m towards infrastructure Laverne &
investments at the five previous Shirley. She died
bases where it had access. on 25 January,
China’s ministry of foreign affairs aged 75.
characterised the move as coming
from “ a zero-sum mentality”. Kit
Hesketh-Harvey
British composer,
screenwriter and
18 SOLOMON ISLANDS 20 M I G R AT I O N lyricist. He died on
1 February,
US opens embassy after Baby among nine dead
aged 65.
being absent for 30 years on boat in Mediterranean
The US opened an embassy in A baby was among nine people, Bobby Hull
Solomon Islands after a 30-year including his mother and Hockey Hall
absence as it seeks to boost a pregnant woman, who died of of Famer who
diplomatic relations in the cold and thirst on a boat carrying was the first
Pacific as a counter to China. The about 50 migrants across the NHL player to
US secretary of state, Antony central Mediterranean, Italian score more
Blinken, announced the news, authorities have said. than 50 goals in
saying that “more than any other Survivors landed on the Italian a season. He died
part of the world, the Indo-Pacific island of Lampedusa after being on 30 January,
region – including the Pacific rescued last Thursday. The boat aged 84.
Islands – will shape the world’s had left Sfax, south of Tunis, a
trajectory in the 21st century”. few days earlier and lost its way Hazel McCallion
Blinken announced plans to soon after. A Tunisian fishing Mayor of
open a diplomatic mission during boat had reported it to Maltese Mississauga,
a visit to the region last year. The authorities, saying there appeared Ontario from
last US embassy in the Solomons to be dead bodies onboard, the 1978 to 2014.
closed in 1993 amid post-cold war investigators said, but there had She died on
budget cuts. been no subsequent response. 29 January,
aged 101.
10 February 2023 The Guardian Weekly
8 Global report
SCIENCE A N D EN V IRON M EN T
POLLU TION
Poor air quality makes chess
players more error-prone
Analysis of the quality of chess
games found that a modest increase
in fine particulate matter increased
the probability that players would
make an error by 2.1 percentage
points, and the magnitude of those
errors increased by 10.8%. The
research, published in the journal
Management Science, studied the
performance of 121 chess players in
tournaments in Germany in 2017,
2018, and 2019, comprising more
than 30,000 chess moves. In the
tournament venues, the researchers
attached air-quality sensors to
measure carbon dioxide, PM2.5
concentrations and temperature.
Each tournament lasted eight weeks,
meaning players faced a variety of
air conditions.
Leonard Barden on Chess Page 62 
GENETICS
Scientist who edited babies’
genes says he was too hasty
The scientist at the heart of
the scandal involving the first
gene-edited babies has said he
moved “too quickly” by pressing
ahead with the procedure.
He Jiankui announced in 2018
that he had edited the genes of
twin girls before birth. He was
subsequently sacked by his
university in Shenzhen, received
a three-year prison sentence, and
was broadly condemned for going
The Guardian Weekly 10 February 2023
ahead with the procedure with
inadequate consent. In one of his
first interviews since his public
re-emergence last year, He said:
“I’ve been thinking about what I’ve
done in the past for a long time. To
summarise it in one sentence: I did it
too quickly.” But he stopped short of
expressing regret or apologising.
A ST RONOM Y
Universe found to be less
‘clumpy’ than expected
One of the most precise surveys of
the structure of the universe has
suggested it is “less clumpy” than
expected. Observations by the Dark
Energy Survey and the South Pole
Telescope charted the distribution of
matter with the aim of understanding
the competing forces that shaped the
evolution of the universe and govern
its ultimate fate. The analysis adds
to a body of evidence that suggests
there may be a crucial component
missing from the so-called standard
model of physics.
The results, published in the
journal Physical Review D, did not
pass the statistical threshold that
scientists consider to be ironclad
enough to claim a discovery,
but come after similar findings
from previous surveys that hint
a crack could be opening between
theoretical predictions and what is
actually going on in the universe.
NEANDERTHALS
Size of elephant prey may
have shaped social grouping
Neanderthals may have lived in
larger groups than previously
believed, hunting massive elephants
that were up to three times bigger
than those of today.
The research, published in
the journal Science Advances,
is based on examinations of the
125,000-year-old remains of
straight-tusked elephants found in
a quarry near Halle, Germany. The
bones of about 70 elephants from
the Pleistocene era were discovered
in the 1980s. Elephants of the time
could weigh up to 13 tonnes.
United Kingdom
S L AV E RY
Sugar-growing family
to set up reparations fund
An aristocratic British family
is to make history by travelling
to the Caribbean and publicly
apologising for its ownership
of more than 1,000 enslaved
Africans. The Trevelyan family
is also paying reparations to
 Magnus the people of Grenada, where it
Carlsen of owned six sugar plantations.
Norway ponders Family members met online last
a move at a chess month and agreed to sign a letter
tournament in of apology for the enslavement of
the Netherlands Africans. Forty-two members of
last week the family have signed and more
EPA/JEROEN JUMELET signatures are expected.
In 1835, the Trevelyan family
received £26,898, a huge sum at
the time, in compensation from
the British government for the
abolition of slavery a year earlier.
The enslaved men, women and
children received nothing and
were forced to work a further eight
years unpaid as “apprentices”.
A £100,000 ($120,000) fund,
donated by BBC correspondent
Laura Trevelyan, will be
formally launched in Grenada
on 27 February by Sir Hilary
Beckles, the chair of the Caricom
Reparations Commission, and
Trevelyan family members.
Caricom, or Caribbean
Community, is a group of
15 countries in the region.
Nicole Phillip-Dowe, the
vice-chair of the Grenada National
Reparations Commission, said:
“It’s absolutely fascinating that
I am seeing history being made. It
takes a leap of faith for a family to
say, ‘my forefathers did something
horribly wrong and I think we
should take some responsibility
0.4C
for it’. It is commendable that the
Trevelyan family has taken this
step and I hope it will be followed
Decrease in by others.”
temperature
that could be
achieved by
increasing the
level of tree
cover from
an average
14.9% to 30%,
according to
modelling of 93
European cities

Eyewitness
 Heart of gold
Charlie Clarke was about to
call it a day when a beep on
his metal detector led him
to dig in the Warwickshire
field he was exploring. What
he saw caused him to shriek
“like a little schoolgirl”. Clarke
had found a Tudor pendant
and chain, made of 24-carat
gold, bearing the initials
and symbols of Henry VIII
and his first wife, Katherine
of Aragon. “People say it’s
like winning the lottery,”
said Clarke. “It’s not. People
actually win the lottery. When
was the last time a crown
jewel was unearthed?”
SEAN SMITH
C O N S E RVA T I V E S
Flagship pledge on NHS
looks set to be broken
Only a quarter of the 40 hospital
construction projects that were at
the heart of Boris Johnson’s 2019
general election manifesto have
secured full planning permission.
Ministers have repeatedly
claimed that the hospitals will be
ready by 2030, despite concerns
from health chiefs and economists
that “woefully insufficient”
funding and rising costs will
scupper the plan and put NHS
capacity at risk.
However, an Observer
investigation revealed that only
10 of the 40 projects have the full
planning permissions needed to
go ahead. Those involved in some
of the projects said they faced
lengthy delays, leaving them with
decrepit buildings.
“There’s a 0% chance there
will be 40 new hospitals by 2030,”
said the boss of one of the NHS
trusts awaiting a new hospital. “At
the moment we’re doing loads of
maintenance work on an ongoing
basis. Some hospitals are literally
falling down.”
C U LT U R E
Brexit ‘may force animators
to move abroad’
The head of Aardman, the
Oscar-winning British studio
behind Wallace and Gromit and
Shaun the Sheep, has warned
that animated productions for
children’s television will have to
be made overseas because acute
challenges are taking their toll on
the UK sector.
Sean Clarke, Aardman’s
managing director, said the
company was struggling
with everything from serious
competition from other countries
on tax relief to a skills shortage.
“The ideas will still be
conceived here, but they’ll be
made elsewhere,” he said.
The big story Page 10 
9
E N E R G Y I N D U S T RY
Fury over treatment of
vulnerable customers
The energy minister has expressed
“horror” at revelations about
a British Gas contractor allegedly
breaking into vulnerable
customers’ homes as the market
watchdog Ofgem warned all
suppliers against forcibly
installing prepayment meters.
Graham Stuart met Chris
O’Shea, the chief executive of
0.5%
Centrica, which owns British Gas,
and demanded urgent answers
to issues raised by a Times
investigation into the company’s The proportion
practices, which has prompted of the total of
ministerial fury. British voters
Stuart expressed horror that might
after the Times alleged that need new
Arvato Financial Solutions, government-
used by British Gas to pursue issued ID, who
debts, had broken into homes have so far
to fit prepayment meters even applied for
when there were signs that it. The slow
young children and people with take-up could
disabilities lived there. leave hundreds
O’Shea said the allegations of thousands
around Arvato were unacceptable of people
and Centrica had suspended the disenfranchised
contractor’s warrant activity. at local elections
in May
10 February 2023 The Guardian Weekly
10
The big story
United Kingdom

The Guardian Weekly 10 February 2023


With the vaunted benefits
of leaving the European
Union still hard to discern,
polls now suggest that about
one in five leave voters have
changed their minds. But
could Britain ever go back, ask
Michael Savage and Toby Helm
The great Brexit deficit
hroughout the
turbulent years
that Michel
Barnier spent
d e a l i ng w it h
Brexit, the former
EU negotiator’s
endless talks with
British counterparts failed to help him
answer the simplest of questions –
what did they want Brexit to achieve?
“For me, for many of us, Brexit
remains a nonsense,” he told the
Observer. “Taking into account Brit-
ish national interest, there is no added
value to being outside the single mar-
ket and the customs union. Through-
out this process, I asked British leaders
every day –from all the parties, [Nigel]
Farage, trade unions or the business
community – to give me proof for the
added value of Brexit. Nobody was
able to do this.”
Barnier took to the UK airwaves last
week to promote his diaries of those
fractious talks, in which he repeatedly
used his “ticking clock” metaphor to
highlight the position Britain found
itself in as it prepared for life outside
the EU.
The clock has now ticked on three
years. Barnier is struck by the differ-
ence in the debate between the UK
and the rest of the continent. “To be
PLUS frank, coming back to London, I see
GUARDIAN DESIGN/GETTY
Nesrine Malik that Brexit is always on the front page,”
Britain was he said. “There are many questions
broken long and many polls, but it’s not the case in
before the the EU. Brexit is no longer a problem
blow of Brexit for us. We have turned the page.”
Page 14  Sure enough, the third Brexit
anniversary last week did see a resur-
gence of discussion about that momen-
tous, iconoclastic decision. Yet there
are signs that it is a different debate to
the one that engulfed the UK before
Brexit took place. Radio phone-ins
once dominated by shrill, entrenched
campaigners contained case studies
of Brexit’s banal complications. BBC
Radio 5 Live’s breakfast programme
heard from a nursery owner, a sheep
farmer, a transport company boss and a
pet food company about the complexi-
ties of cross-border trade.
“I actually voted for Brexit, and
I’ve got my own reasons for that – I
want the UK to be in charge of our
own laws,” said Alison, a caller whose
business works with manufacturers.
‘Brexit is a lose-lose
game … and will remain
a lose-lose game’
▼ Michel Barnier
11
“We were told we’d have a lot more
money in the UK. Actually, we were
totally mis-sold.”
Others who voted for Brexit talked
of incompetent ministers or a failure
of the ruling elite to “get behind” the
concept. As if to bring home the reali-
ties of life outside the bloc, Brexit’s
anniversary celebrations coincided
with a warning from the International
Monetary Fund that Britain will be the
only major industrialised country to
see its economy shrink this year – and
perform even worse than sanctions-
hit Russia.
So, three years after Britain’s EU
departure, is the country coming to
the same conclusion about the bene-
fits of Brexit that figures like Barnier
expressed from the start?
Remain campaigners have sensed
“Bregret” in the air ever since 2016, but
pollsters do now suggest that around
one in five leave voters have changed
their minds. Over the past few months,
the proportion of voters who want to
rejoin the EU has risen to about 58%,
while the proportion of those wanting
to stay out has fallen to around 42%.
Behind the shift, according to ana-
lysts, is evidence that voters have
become more negative about the eco-
nomic effects of Brexit, both on the
country and on their own personal
finances. As recently as 2021, more
people thought Brexit would have a
beneficial economic effect, whereas
the net figure is now -27%. The IMF’s
missive last week only added grist to
that mill.
Paul Johnson, director of the Insti-
tute for Fiscal Studies, said other
countries were not being affected to
the same extent as the UK by short-
ages of labour. The UK labour force, he
said, had half a million fewer people
than before the pandemic, as a result
of people retiring early and fewer EU
immigrants.
“That’s not affecting any other
country in Europe … it’s a particular
challenge for us,” he said. The continu-
ing “challenges from Brexit” and the
rapid impact of higher interest rates
on mortgage costs were also factors,
he said.
Research by the Centre for European
Reform in December showed that Brit-
ain’s economy was 5.5% smaller than
it would have been had it remained
inside the EU. The UK’s goods trade
was 7% lower, and investment 11%
down on what it would have been 
had the remain campaign won in
10 February 2023 The Guardian Weekly
12 The big story
United Kingdom

54%
Bregrets,
we’ve had a few
How support
47%
The end of 2020
The official Brexit transition period ended on
Mid 2021
By this point the tables had turned
dramatically. The Conservatives were
flying high in the polls, with a completed
Brexit. Now support for being outside the
for Brexit 31 December 2020, the final stage of Britain’s EU was the strongest, with polling for this
having reached nearly 54%, with support
has shrunk departure from the EU. At that time, despite
leavers clinking the champagne glasses in joy, for staying in at just over 46%.
support for being inside the EU was higher
than for being out, with 53% in support of
remaining compared with 47% for leaving.

2016. The Office for Budget Responsi-
bility stands by a prediction that Brexit
will cause a long hit to GDP per capita
of 4%. Pro-Brexit economic arguments
have become thin on the ground.
As UK public opinion turns, the
attractiveness to voters in other
member states of their nations quit-
ting the EU, which rose around the
time of the referendum in 2016, has
declined markedly. The European
Social Survey, led by City, University
of London, found respondents were
less likely to want to leave than in 2016-
17 in every EU member state for which
data was available.
economic hit should come as no sur-
prise. “The negotiations were appall-
ingly handled, but as far as Great
Britain is concerned, Brexit is now
complete,” he said.
“Brexit was a constitutional change,
and it’s been achieved. We’re not sub-
ject to European Union laws and make
our own laws. That’s what Brexit is
all about, and it has been done. If you
leave a customs union, you’re going
to trade less. It’s obvious. Why would
anybody be surprised about that?
Inevitably, it would have an effect
on trade. I didn’t think the European
Union would be so unpleasant about
the whole thing, but obviously I was
“Like many people with a Conserva-
tive disposition, I would say it’s been
very disappointing so far, but obvi-
ously the politicians and business
leaders have had many other things
on their mind,” he said.
“What I’ve concluded is that we’re
living in an era where the politicians
aren’t really interested in serving the
long-term interests of the people.
‘Brexit’ is now a slogan. ‘Get Brexit
done.’ Brexit was supposed to be the
beginning of the hard work. It wasn’t
‘Get Brexit done, and it’s done’. There
is a read across from this to all other
areas of public policy as far as I can ▼ Lorries queue
see, but nothing is happening. There’s to embark on a

R
emain c ampaign naive about that.” no problem-solving in any dimension. ferry at Dover.
veterans believe that Jeremy Hosking, a former Tory It doesn’t matter whether it’s health, Trade with the EU
the drip, drip of data donor who also handed large sums to education, trade deals, there’s no has been dented
has persuaded media Vote Leave, laid the blame for Brexit’s progress anywhere.” by Brexit
organisations once progress at the feet of the government. Lord Edmiston, the Tory donor GLYN KIRK/AFP
reluctant to attribute
such negative effects to Brexit to
raise more questions. Last Tuesday,
the BBC, criticised by some remainers
for staying out of the debate for too
long, led its news bulletins on the IMF
intervention and held a special Brexit
debate during which remainer Alastair
Campbell was regularly cheered and
leaver Jacob Rees-Mogg often jeered.
While boasts of Brexit’s positive
economic impact have subsided, it
would be wrong to say that prominent
Brexiters have had a change of heart.
The arguments deployed, however,
have shifted. Many pro-Brexit figures
now readily admit that economic
problems are a byproduct, at least for
now. Instead of economic boosterism,
three broad arguments are deployed:
that it is too early to judge Brexit, that
it has been implemented badly and
that Brexit was only ever a question
of sovereignty.
Lord Moylan, a Tory peer and for-
mer adviser to Boris Johnson, said an

The Guardian Weekly 10 February 2023


48%
Late 2021
Media coverage of shortages on supermarket
shelves and queues on petrol forecourts saw
public opinion flip the other way – blamed on
a shortage of drivers due to Brexit. Support
for being inside the EU was now at 52% versus
support for being outside of it at 48%.
who gave £1m ($1.2m) to the Brexit
campaign, said it was never likely to
be smooth in the short term and that
hiccups were to be expected and we
should judge it after a decade. “Brexit
for me was a decision about demo-
cracy and the ability to make our own
laws, control our own borders, and
trade with who we wished,” he said.
“It was never undertaken as a short-
term measure. A change like that after
more than 40 years was never going
to be achieved without a few bumps
in the road.
“Given the fact we were immedi-
ately plunged into Covid and subse-
quently the Ukraine war, it is actually
surprising how relatively smoothly
things have gone. This decision will be
best viewed after 10 years have passed.
“Other countries like New Zea-
land and Australia had to make major
adjustments to their economies after
the EU limited our ability to trade with
them. They made those adjustments
and came out stronger – so will the
UK if we commit to it and stop look-
ing back over our shoulders.”
Politically, the Brexit effect now
spells trouble for Rishi Sunak from
several directions. Gone is one of the
pillars that Tory MPs credit for deliver-
ing election success in 2019 – by most
accounts, Tory strategists believe
that if Brexit is an issue at the local
elections, it won’t be to the benefit of
their party.
Some Brexiters also said that it was
the misfiring of Brexit that – inexplica-
bly to many in the party – was keeping
Liz Truss relevant. Last weekend, the
‘Like many other
Conservatives , I would
say it’s been very
disappointing so far’
▲ Demonstrators
at a pro-EU rally
in London last
October calling for
the UK to rejoin the
European Union
ANADOLOU AGENCY
former prime minister made her first
big intervention, heaping pressure
on Sunak to cut taxes and deregulate.
Despite her complete implosion, some
Tories conclude that her high-risk,
low-tax programme is the only logi-
cal strategy for making a success of life
outside a big trading bloc.
“I always thought Brexit had the
capacity to hit the existing party
system, and Labour ran into that
head-first. But the same articulated
lorry is now about to collide with
the Tory party,” said one veteran
Conservative Brexiter.
Meanwhile, new Brexit skirmishes
13
43%
October 2022
As Liz Truss left Downing Street, support for
Brexit had reached an all-time low. Now just
43% were saying they would vote to stay out
of the EU while 57% would back rejoining.
were set to break out this week as the
plan to remove all EU laws from the
statute book was debated in parlia-
ment. Then, a deal with the EU over the
treatment of Northern Ireland could be
the basis for a fresh battle.
Yet the problems emerging with the
current Brexit settlement also load
pressure on Keir Starmer and the UK
Labour party. While the Labour leader
has talked about taking on the “Brexit
purity cult” in the Tory party, greater
evidence of economic damage will
increase pressure on him to bring the
UK closer to the EU. That risks undoing
his largely successful drive to steer his
party away from the Brexit splits that
caused such problems for Labour at
the last election.
It all allows Barnier to adopt a
more-in-sorrow-than-anger tone as
he surveys the continuing fallout,
but he added a warning for remainers
who hope that one day an EU return
could be contemplated. The further
the two parties drift apart, the harder
any return will become.
“I wish the best for the UK, sin-
cerely,” he said. “I admire this coun-
try, with respect for many of the UK’s
leaders – first of all, Winston Churchill. I
admire the culture of the UK, the capac-
ity to play a role in the world. But Brexit
is a lose-lose game … [it] has been, is
and will remain a lose-lose game.
“The door is open. The difficulty MICHAEL
could be that the gap is created, starting SAVAGE IS THE
OBSERVER’S
from now into the future in our regula-
tions. If there is too large a divergence, it POLICY EDITOR;
TOBY HELM IS
could be more difficult. But once again, THE OBSERVER’S
this is a choice for the UK.” • POLITICAL
Observer EDITOR
10 February 2023 The Guardian Weekly
 14 The big story
United Kingdom
OPINION
Broken Britain
Fissures ran deep in
the country long before
Brexit delivered its blow
By Nesrine Malik
T
here is no joy in it for those who always
knew Brexit was a con, but it is finally
dawning on more people that leaving the
EU was a colossal mistake. Those who led
the project still talk the same old nonsense
about the purported benefits of Brexit but
they, like most government assertions these days, sound
like echoes of a bygone time.
Brexit’s arrival has caused supply chain disruptions,
staffing shortages, higher food prices and extra red tape
for business. Public opinion is shifting towards remorse.
Instead of hurtling away from the EU into the swaggering
prosperity promised by the leave campaign, Britain
is receding into a dark timeline of recession, strikes
and political instability. Last week, it was forecast that
Britain will be the only G7 economy to shrink in 2023.
When it comes to questioning why Britain is in
such trouble, leaving the EU is now given as one of the
standard reasons. Around the world, Britain is twinned
with Brexit as an identity, an island plagued by its hubris.
The truth is that Britain was broken way before Brexit.
Brexit did not break the housing market, so that stock is
low and so unaffordable, nor the recent rises in interest
rates that will be passed on to tenants by landlords. Brexit
did not create the need for food banks, the use of which
increased more than tenfold between 2010 and 2014.
Brexit did not weaken the regulators’ hand so that energy
companies could make their largest profits in more than
GUARDIAN DESIGN
a century, and not be taxed properly for it. Brexit didn’t
slash NHS funding or brainwash Liz Truss so that she sent
the pound to its lowest-ever level against the dollar.
What Brexit did was heap pressure on a country
The Guardian Weekly 10 February 2023
already struggling with weak public infrastructure and
stagnant wages, mainly by limiting the labour market and
diminishing volumes of trade. Obviously, two huge events
– the war in Ukraine and the pandemic – have happened
since Brexit, and contribute to economic pain and the
strain on public services. But they arrived in a country
already compromised in its ability to deal with price
shocks, supply chain disruptions and widespread illness.
Brexit did not make our politicians less capable, or
more mendacious and prone to culture-war posturing
and misinformation. Britain had been stewing in an
anti-immigration sentiment unchallenged for years,
spawning Ukip and Nigel Farage, who did more to secure
the anti-immigrant Brexit vote than the Conservatives
ever did. Brexit did not write scores of tabloid front pages
scaremongering about immigrants and Muslims. And
Brexit did not make our left-of-centre politicians mealy
mouthed when it came to challenging xenophobia.
It is because Britain was breaking that Brexit happened.
It was a necessary, phantom new road to prosperity
when all other roads had reached a dead end. When it did
happen, the shock was so huge that it diverted attention
away from all the reasons that it had come about. To
those who opposed Brexit, leaving the EU was not only
a political event, it was an emotional and cultural one
too: a physical wrenching from a liberal fraternity.
The feelings Brexit inspires are understandably strong.
But they are also broadly wasted when their purpose
is merely to reverse Brexit, to fixate on it as a uniquely
calamitous event that is bringing about Britain’s decline,
rather than a secondary cause of that decline.
The campaign for a second referendum, always more
an expression of frustration than a viable goal, was Leaving
striking in its ability to marshal people and funds, which
were then frittered away by scattering the opposition the EU
to the Tories – the architects of Brexit – at a time when didn’t
uniting against Boris Johnson’s party in the 2019 election
was crucial. In constantly drawing our eyes towards
create
it, Brexit is both the result of Britain’s failings and the need
a smokescreen for them. It has become an obsession of for food
two extremes: those who believe we will not prosper
until Brexit is allowed to flourish, and those who believe banks or
we will never prosper unless Brexit is vanquished slash NHS
somehow, even if that is just to extract a political
expression of the fact through urging Keir Starmer to
funding
admit that it has been a failure. In the middle, another
feeling – fatigue – dominates, which forecloses any more
examination of why Brexit came about.
Brexit was always the wrong answer to the right
question that millions across the country were asking.
How do we regain a sense of identity, community,
prosperity and security in our future? Or, to put it in
the cynical language of Brexiters (and now Starmer):
how to take back control? How do we regain control
at a time when employment, healthcare and housing
are increasingly uncertain, when industries have been
shuttered and community organisations defunded?
These are the questions that the right still seeks to
exploit. Starmer can try to reclaim “Take back control”.
But if it doesn’t provide its own departure from the
status quo, then we have learned nothing, and the
uncertainties that brought about Brexit will endure,
to be exploited again.
NESRINE MALIK IS A GUARDIAN COLUMNIST
 15
In-depth reporting and analysis

IRAN
Street protesters
reveal horrors
of detention
Page 18 

UKRAINE

Behind
T
aras, Vladyslav, and their
commander, Olexiy, under-
stand that, if the worst were
kidnapping of senior Kremlin officials, ▲ Members of
to the destruction of key military the Bratstvo
infrastructure and the downing of battalion keep

enemy lines to happen, the Ukrainian

government will deny any know-
ledge of them. In western capitals,
enemy aircraft on Russian territory.
It might seem odd for a battalion
such as theirs to allow their stories to
details of their
work from
their families
Saboteurs there is a collective shudder at the
very thought of them.
be heard. But that is to misunderstand
their purpose. In everything they do,
ED RAM

take the fight They are members of Bratstvo

battalion, a volunteer group of
Ukrainian special forces, taking the
there is a single message they want to
send. “It is very easy for us to cross
the Russian border,” said Vladyslav, 21.

into Russia fight against Vladimir Putin beyond

the frontlines of the war in Ukraine,
past the occupied areas of their
country – and deep into Russia.
By Daniel Bof fey KYIV Their work ranges from the
The volunteers of the Bratstvo,
Ukrainian for brotherhood, have a
peculiar status, technically independ-
ent from Ukraine’s army but operating
Continued 
alongside the official forces. Their

16 Spotlight
Europe
arm’s-length status offers deniability.
Olexiy, 39, was in “intelligence”, he
said, but the battalion recruits mainly
civilians, or plucks the brightest from
other voluntary battalions. He under-
stood why their work must remain
apart. The reasoning is nevertheless
hard for them all to swallow.
It comes down to the west’s nerv-
ousness at the thought of Ukraine
having the capacity to hit Russia in
Russia, as highlighted by the debate
over Germany’s provision of Leopard
2 tanks, and the refusal of the US and
others to supply F16 fighter jets. Much
of that anxiety is probably linked to the
Kremlin’s threat to use nuclear wea-
pons if the “very existence of the state
is put under threat”.
“It turns out that Russians can go
to Ukrainian territory, but Ukrainians
cannot go into Russia,” Olexiy said.
Undeterred, the Bratstvo volun-
teers insist it is vital for Russia’s high
command to feel the heat of battle on
their own territory.
The men drank coffee in Kyiv’s
Shevchenko Park as they told of their
adventures. Because of their unofficial
status, their stories could not be inde-
pendently verified but they are con-
vincing and credible. Taras, 23, said
he had returned two weeks ago from
what he described as a straightforward
operation. “Our group needed to bring
a certain amount of explosives to the
territory of Russia and leave them in a
certain place,” he said. “I don’t know
what this explosive was intended for.
But I know for sure that some people
in Russia are ready to help Ukrainians.”
Six weeks ago, he had completed
‘I know for the most successful operation yet,
he said. “We had a task to destroy a
sure that Russian helicopter transporting high-
some people ranking officials of the Russian min-
in Russia istry of internal affairs,” said Taras.
“On the first time in, bad weather pre-
are ready vented the laser sight from accurately
to help aiming to hit the target. In addition,
we had internal problems within the
Ukrainians’ group, arguments, so we entered Rus-
sian territory but turned back … and
Taras in a week we made a second attempt.”
Bratstvo The taskforce of five men set off at
volunteer 7am to cross into Russia. “We walked
all day,” said Taras. “Then we spent
the night at the location and at 9am
we heard a helicopter. I had a small
reconnaissance drone with me and it
confirmed it was the same helicopter.
“We fired from a portable anti-
aircraft missile system at a helicopter
from a distance of 4km. Unfortunately,
we didn’t see the hit as we were so far
away, but we heard the explosion. And
then we quickly fled from our posi-
tions. We left behind the tripod used
for the portable anti-aircraft missile
system. We returned twice as fast.”
Whether the Kremlin officials in the
helicopter were killed or not, for Taras
it was a successful mission.
“We showed we can enter the ter-
ritory of Russia and that Ukrainians
can act,” he said. “After the Russians
find out saboteurs are working on their
territory, they need to move a lot of sol-
diers to find these saboteurs. It is very
demoralising to the enemy. The heli-
▼ Taras, Olexiy copter was for the Russian leadership.
and Vladyslav in And the fact that Ukrainian saboteurs
a Kyiv park are shooting at Russian commanders is
ED RAM
a point of tension for Russians.”
Opinion p48
The last operation in Russia in
which Vladyslav took part was a
month ago, near the city of Belgorod.
Vladyslav and his fellow fighters were
tasked with “capturing or killing one of
the high-ranking officers of the FSB”,
the Russian security services.
“He worked close to the border
with Ukraine, but on the territory of
Russia,” said Vladyslav. “We had the
route of this Russian officer’s car and
we decided to set up an ambush.”
They were in position for hours but
the car did not arrive, and the primary
goal had to be abandoned as day broke.
They needed to get out but they faced
the challenge of breaking back into
Ukraine, past the watching Russian
forces gathered at the border.
“We met a border post of Russian
border guards,” Vladyslav recalled.
“We engaged, we were four on four.
We killed three Russians and slightly
wounded one. We captured him, took
him to Ukrainian territory and handed
him over to the Ukrainian military.”
The Ukrainians survived another
day with just one of their group suffer-
ing a gunshot wound to his arm.
But it does not always go to plan.
On 25 December, four of their col-
leagues were killed 12.5km into Rus-
sia’s Bryansk region, north-east of
Ukraine. The first Olexiy knew of
the disaster was when photographs
of their dead colleagues emerged on
Russian Telegram channels the next
day. The Kremlin-supporting media
outlet RIA Novosti reported that the
men had been carrying “SIG Sauer sub-
machine guns, communication and
navigation devices, and four bombs
with a total capacity of about 40 kg in
TNT equivalent”.
They had been, the FSB said, set
on carrying out “sabotage and terror-
ist acts”. The FSB published a video
showing the bodies in a Russian forest.
“Everyone was shocked,” Olexiy said.
“They were our best fighters.”
It was a hard reminder of the risks.
Asked whether their parents know
about their work, the two younger
men exhale and laugh. “My parents
only know that I am at war,” said
Vladyslav. “But you have to under-
stand that when we plan our opera-
tions, very few people know about it.
Information about the operation can
be passed to the enemy ... It is better
for our parents not to know what we
do now.” Observer
DANIEL BOFFEY IS THE GUARDIAN’S
CHIEF REPORTER
 Spotlight 17
Europe
EU ROPE A N U N ION EU members have weathered a historic
crisis. Within eight months of Russian
troops setting foot on Ukrainian soil,
the bloc of 27 European states replaced

Putin’s plans
about 80% of the natural gas it used to
draw through pipelines with Russia,
by rapidly building up new infrastruc-

to blackmail ture for liquid natural gas (LNG), find-

ing creative ways to help each other,
and pursuing energy-saving policies.
Europe over The Netherlands, for example, the
EU’s largest natural gas producer, dou-

gas supply bled its LNG import capacity and used

the extra capacity to meet domestic
demand – which it managed to reduce

fail to ignite by 22% – and supply surplus gas to the

Czech Republic, Germany and France.
“Europe managed to avoid the
temptation of protectionism and
By Philip Oltermann BERLIN ; managed to keep its internal market
Jon Henley and Angelique Chrisafis intact,” said Simone Tagliapietra, an
PARIS ; Sam Jones MADRID ; energy expert at the Brussels-based
Shaun Walker BUDAPEST thinktank Bruegel.
Gas spot prices dropped to about
result, Spain reduced its demand for ▲ EU countries
natural gas by 15% compared with the replaced 80%
same period in the last five years. of the natural
In France, the energy-saving effort gas they sourced
became an uphill struggle because from Russia

T
he worst-case scenarios piled €55 ($60) a megawatt hour (MWh) last about half of its 56 reactors sat idle SEAN GALLUP/GETTY

up over the summer months.
Germany’s economic minis-
ter warned of “catastrophic”
industrial shutdowns, fraying supply
chains and mass unemployment.
France’s president urged citizens to
turn down the heating. Spain asked
why countries that hadn’t got hooked
on Russian gas should bail out neigh-
bours who had lectured them about
fiscal discipline in the past.
The former Russian president
Dmitry Medvedev gleefully predicted
that Europeans would be “freezing in
their homes”. “The cold is coming
soon,” he said, menacingly, in June.
But signs are becoming clearer that
Cutting the ties
EU reliance on Russian gas more
than halved through 2022
Monthly share of gas imports to the EU
100%
Monday, a level last seen before the
start of the war in September 2021,
down from €330/MWh at the end of
last August. Over the whole of last
year, gas demand in the EU was 12%
lower than the average from the period
2019 to 2021, Bruegel estimates.
Germany, always destined to bear
the brunt of Vladimir Putin’s gas black-
mail effort due to its high reliance on
energy imports from Russia, managed
to use 14% less gas in 2022 than it had
done on average in the years from 2018
to 2021. It enters February with its gas
storage tanks 80% full, compared with
36% at this point last year.
The Nordic countries were successful
at reducing gas consumption, with
Denmark cutting total demand by 24%,
Sweden by 36% and Finland by 47%
(although natural gas accounted for
only 5% of its energy needs).
Last summer, some southern
European states had initially signalled
reluctance to share the burden of
energy saving equally. Spain agreed to
a 7-8% reduction in gas use after argu-
due to repair works. By mid-January,
the situation had stabilised with 73%
of France’s nuclear fleet back in opera-
tion, helping it to regain its spot as the
EU’s top exporter of electricity.
When nuclear plants struggled,
renewables came to the rescue.
According to the thinktank Ember
Climate, the EU in 2022 drew 22% of its ‘Europe
electricity from solar and wind power,
with renewables surpassing gas for the managed
first time. Ultimately, Putin’s energy to keep its
war decision will have helped Sweden internal
produce 65% of its energy from renew-
ables by the end of the decade, Finland market
51% and Denmark 55%. intact’
PHILIP OLTERMANN, JON HENLEY,
ANGELIQUE CHRISAFIS, SAM JONES AND
Simone
SHAUN WALKER ARE CORRESPONDENTS Tagliapietra
IN EUROPE FOR THE GUARDIAN Energy expert
Going green
In 2022, EU wind and solar generated
more electricity than gas did
Share of electricity generation

75 Gas from other Nov

ing that the uniform 15% target was not 50%
countries 2022 fair on countries that were not heavily 2022
87.1% dependent on Russian gas and that it 40 32% Hydro
50 had “done our homework” when it and nuclear
30
came to diversifying energy supplies. 22.3% Wind
Yet, in July, the socialist-led coalition and solar
20
25 government announced measures 19.9% Gas
Russian gas
intended to help reduce the country’s 10 16% Coal
energy consumption – including set-
9.8% Other
0 12.9% ting strict limits on air conditioning 0
2019 2020 2021 2022 and heating temperatures in public 2000 2005 2010 2015 2020
and large commercial buildings. As a
Source: European Council analysis of European Source: Annual electricity data, Ember. Note: data excludes UK. Other includes
Commission data bioenergy, other fossil fuels and other renewables

10 February 2023 The Guardian Weekly

18 Spotlight
Middle East
O
IRAN n the evening of 15 October
2022, when street protests
in Iran after the death of
Mahsa Amini were at their
Protesters
peak, 25-year-old Dorsa* was stopped
at a checkpoint while driving through
a city in the northern Gilan province.
tell of rapes, The checkpoint was chaotic; 25 to
30 heavily armed security officers were
shouting and screaming at people to
beatings get out of their vehicles.
Dorsa was with her sister and two
and torture male friends. Their car was searched
and when two cans of spray paint
were found in her sister’s bag, all hell
by police broke loose.
The sisters said they had been
blindfolded and had their hands tied
behind their backs before they were
Human rights organisations pushed into a police car. Dorsa said
they had been forced to sign a confes-
report an escalation in the
sion saying they had been protesting,
brutal treatment of detainees before being separated. Alone in an
at the hands of security forces interrogation room, she could hear the
screams of her two male friends being
By Deepa Parent and tortured nearby.
Ghoncheh Habibiazad When it had been her turn to be
interrogated, Dorsa said, she had been
beaten and punched repeatedly while
security forces had screamed that she
was a whore and a traitor. She claimed
to have been force-fed the balloons
that protesters had been filling with
The Guardian Weekly 10 February 2023
red paint to use against police on
the streets. Finally, she was taken to
another room.
“[They] covered my face with my
scarf and I couldn’t see anything. I was
stripped naked and told that a lady
doctor would come into the room and
examine me. Minutes later, some-
one came to the room and when they
touched me, I knew it was a man,” she
said. “He kept touching me everywhere
and then took an object and inserted it
inside my vagina. He kept penetrating
me with the object, while with the other
hand, he was rubbing all over my body.”
Dorsa was driven around for hours
before being released outside the
city at 3am. A doctor confirmed she
had been sexually assaulted with an
object, which had caused an infection
that took months to heal. She said she
had had a mental breakdown.
More than four months after the
death of Mahsa Amini, the Kurdish
woman who died in custody after
being arrested for incorrectly wearing
her hijab, Iranian authorities’ attempts
to crush nationwide protests have led
to more than 500 people being killed,
including 70 children. Four protesters
have been executed by the state, with
▲ Protesters many more facing the death sentence.
in Tehran after According to the latest report by
Mahsa Amini’s Human Rights Activists in Iran, 19,603
death last year people remain in detention.
REX/SHUTTERSTOCK An Amnesty International report
has confirmed allegations of rape,
violence and “extreme torture”
of protesters in detention. It said
three young protesters – Arshia Tak-
dastan, 18, Mehdi Mohammadifard,
19, and Javad Rouhi, 31 – had been
subjected to “gruesome torture
including floggings, electric shocks,
being hung upside down and death
threats at gunpoint”. The human
rights organisation also said that one
of the men had been raped and another
sexually assaulted while in detention.
19,603
Estimated number in detention after
authorities cracked down on street
protests that began in September
500
Approximate number of people,
including children, who have been
killed during the unrest

The Guardian has spoken to 11 pro-
testers, women and men, who say they
were subjected to rape, sexual vio-
lence, beatings and torture while being
detained by security forces. Some say
they were assaulted in a police van or
on the streets; others while in custody
in police stations or prisons.
Sara*, a woman in her 40s from
Sanandaj in the Kurdistan region,
said security forces had used sexual
violence and beatings to quell the pro-
tests since they erupted across Iran
last September. She had been arrested
during that first wave of protests and
sexually assaulted by security officers.
When the police finally took her
to prison, she said that there had been
70 other women there, all showing
signs of beatings and assault. Sara
was interrogated for hours every day
for two weeks before being released.
“I haven’t told my husband about
being sexually assaulted. He loves me
and this will break him,” she said. “I
don’t know if I should confide in my
family. I guess this is the price to pay
for freedom.”
Human Rights Watch, which has
also documented serious abuses and
sexual assault of protesters in deten-
tion, said the international community
was failing to try to stop the torture.
Condemning the reports of torture
and rape, members of the European
parliament have called on the western
authorities to designate Iran’s Revolu-
tionary Guards as a terror group.
Kamyar*, a 30-year-old from
Mashhad, said he had been sexu-
ally assaulted by police in a van on
9 November as he joined protests to
mark 40 days after “Bloody Friday”,
where dozens of demonstrators were
gunned down in the city of Zahedan
by security forces. “There were two
of them – one rubbed himself on my
penis from the front, and the other
assaulted me from behind. I still find it
hard to talk about. I don’t even remem-
ber their faces. I don’t want to.”
Kamyar said the security forces
believed sexually assaulting activists
would stop them from protesting.
“But I don’t pity myself, I pity these
men who are disgusting and live small
lives. They should be the ones who feel
humiliated, instead of us victims.”
* Names have been changed
DEEPA PARENT IS AN INDEPENDENT
JOURNALIST WHO COVERS CONFLICT
AND ITS CONSEQUENCES ON HUMAN
RIGHTS; GHONCHEH HABIBIAZAD
IS AN IRANIAN JOURNALIST BASED
IN LONDON
IRAN
Supreme
leader to
pardon some
detainees
By Patrick Wintour
A
limited amnesty is to be
offered to many of those
detained in the recent Ira-
nian protests, the country’s
supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khame-
nei, has agreed. But the amnesty does
not apply to dual nationals, those
convicted of offences carrying the
death penalty or those who refuse to
admit and regret their crimes, Iranian
officials said.
The amnesty will not apply to
those deemed to have cooperated
with foreign agents, or those charged
with committing acts of arson against
government buildings. Those “affili-
ated with groups hostile to the Islamic
Republic” will also be excluded, a
catch-all that suggests the authorities
may only be interested in releasing
youngsters with minimal political
motives, who can be portrayed as
being swayed by emotion or foreign
propaganda online.
The conditional amnesty was pro-
posed to the leader of the Islamic
Republic by Gholamhossein Mohseni
Ejei, the head of the judiciary, and was
presented as an act of reconciliation
now that the street protests have been
quashed. Requesting the pardon he
19
said: “During recent events, a number
of people, especially young people,
committed wrong actions and crimes
as a result of the indoctrination and
propaganda of the enemy. Since
the foreign enemies and anti-revo-
lutionary currents’ plans have been
foiled, ma
many of these youth now regret
their actions
ons.”
The government
me has yet to give a
definitive figure off th
the number of those
arrested who are stilll ddetained or likely
to be eligible for the a amnesty. Some
reports said tens of thousands would
be subject to the amnesty, and official
news sites portrayed it as an important
act of reconciliation, showing foot-
Clampdown age of prisoners apparently jubilant
Human rights at the news. The NGO Iran Human
agencies have Rights dismissed the announcement
claimed that so as propaganda, adding no one should
far as many as be charged for exercising the legiti-
20,000 people mate right to protest.
have been arrested. The amnesty came as two senior
Four people have reformist politicians warned the gov-
been executed, ernment was facing a political dead
with a further end. In a message coinciding with
100 still at risk of the 44th anniversary of the revolu-
execution based tion, Mohammad Khatami, a former
on the charges laid president of Iran, called for the free-
against them. ing of political prisoners, freedom of
the press, detaching the military from
politics and improving the country’s
judicial process and procedure.
A more radical reform message
was issued last Saturday by Mir Hos-
sein Mousavi, one of the leaders of
the 2009 Green Movement. He called
for a nationwide referendum and the
changing of the constitution.
Mousavi, who has been under
▼ Iran’s supreme house arrest since 2011, said: “Iran
leader, Ayatollah and the Iranians need a fundamental
Ali Khamenei, change, that takes its main features
prays with a from the pure movement of ‘Woman,
group of girls at Life, Freedom’.” Those three words
a ceremony in were “the seeds of a bright future, free
Tehran last week of oppression, poverty, humiliation
and discrimination”, he said.
He also urged the armed forces to
stand on the side of freedom, urging
them not to forget “their covenant in
protecting our land, Iran, and the lives,
property and rights of the people”.
Opposition leaders remain con-
vinced that sections of the security
forces are acutely aware that the
regime is being held together primar-
ily by endless domestic repression as
opposed to popular support and are
starting to fear the personal conse-
quences if an uprising takes place.
PATRICK WINTOUR IS DIPLOMATIC
EDITOR FOR THE GUARDIAN
10 February 2023 The Guardian Weekly
Eyewitness
Turkey and Syria
 Buildings
reduced to
rubble as
cities sleep
By Ruth Michaelson ISTANBUL
and Deniz Barış Narlı
T
housands of people died
when an earthquake struck
central Turkey and north-
west Syria, in one of the most
powerful quakes in the region in at least
a century. A second powerful seismic
event, hours later, threatened rescue
efforts. Thousands more were injured
as the quake wiped out entire sections
of cities in a region populated with mil-
lions who fled the civil war in Syria.
The magnitude 7.8 quake, which
hit in the darkness of a winter morn-
ing, was followed by a 7.7 quake in the
middle of the day on Monday.
Turkey’s vice-president, Fuat
Oktay, said the death toll had sur-
passed 1,500 people in Turkey alone
by the early evening. President Recep
Tayyip Erdoğan described Monday as
the worst disaster for the country since
1939, when an earthquake killed over
32,000 people .
The death toll in government-held
areas of Syria on Monday stood at 968
people, with 1,280 injured, according
to data from the Damascus govern-
ment. By late Monday the death toll
in both countries had reached more
than 2,600 and was expected to rise.
The quake occurred at 4.17am at
a depth of about 18km near the Turk-
ish city of Gaziantep, which is home
to about 2 million people, the US Geo-
logical Survey said. Television images
from Turkey showed shocked people
standing in the snow in their pyjamas,
watching rescuers dig through the
debris of damaged homes.
“We woke up with a jolt. The elec-
tricity was off. We laid still and waited
for the shaking to finish. Our house
was full of broken glass,” said Sinan
Şahan, a tradesperson, in Gaziantep.
“We used our phone’s flashlight so
we could get dressed, and hurried
out of the house. Anyone able to
The Guardian Weekly 10 February 2023
save themselves has now fled. I have
relatives in Kahramanmaraş [close
to the epicentre], their houses were
destroyed.” He added: “I was in Istan-
bul when the big earthquake hit in
1999, this was more severe than that.”
Images from Gaziantep appeared
to show that the city’s historic castle,
an imposing stone structure atop a hill
used as an observation point during
Roman times, had collapsed.
The head of the Turkish Red
Crescent, the biggest humanitarian
organisation in Turkey and part of the
International Red Cross, said it was
mobilising resources and urged peo-
ple to evacuate damaged homes. The
head of Turkey’s disaster management
agency asked civilians to keep com-
munication to urgent texts only to help
emergency services find survivors.
The Syrian health ministry reported
damage across the provinces of Aleppo,
Latakia, Hama and Tartus, where Rus-
sia is leasing a naval facility. Tremors
were felt as far away as Lebanon,
Greece, Israel and the island of Cyprus.
Even before the tragedy, buildings
in Aleppo, Syria’s prewar commercial
hub, often collapsed due to the dilapi-
dated infrastructure after more than a
decade of war as well as little oversight
to ensure safety of new construction
projects, some built illegally.
The Syrian Civil Defence, a rescue
service known as the White Helmets
that works to save those trapped
under debris from airstrikes, said it
had declared a state of emergency to
rescue the many people feared trapped
under collapsed buildings in areas
around Idlib and across opposition-
held areas in north-western Syria. The
organisation described “a catastrophic
situation with buildings collapsed or
suffering major cracks, hundreds
injured and stranded, dozens dead
and a lack of services as well as safe
shelters and assembly points in stormy
and snowy weather conditions and
low temperatures”.
It added a plea for aid from the
international community “to prevent
the situation from worsening” and to
pressure both the Syrian government
and their backers in Moscow to hold
back on airstrikes in the area to prevent
further tragedy.
RUTH MICHAELSON IS A JOURNALIST
BASED IN ISTANBUL; DENIZ BARIŞ NARLI
IS A JOURNALIST AND VIDEOGRAPHER
BASED IN TURKEY
▲ Search and
rescue efforts in
Idlib, Syria
MUHAMMED SAID/
ANADOLU/GETTY

A child is A building in ▲ An aerial view

carried from Adana, Turkey, showing damage
danger in split open by in Osmaniye,
Jandaris, Syria the earthquake south-east Turkey
KHALIL ASHAWI/ OGUZ YETER/ANADOL/ MUZAFFER CAGLIYANER/
REUTERS GETTY ANADOLU/GETTY

10 February 2023 The Guardian Weekly

22 Spotlight
South Asia
PA K I S T A N
Peshawar
at the heart
of a deadly
Taliban
resurgence
By Shah Meer Baloch WAZIRISTAN
and Hannah Ellis-Petersen MUMBAI
T
he bomber struck shortly
before afternoon prayers,
when the mosque in Pesha-
war’s bustling Police Lines
district would be at its busiest. Hun-
dreds of people, including many police
officers, were inside as the device
detonated, creating a blast so strong
the roof and a wall collapsed and 100
people were killed.
The attack last Monday was among
the worst in years to hit Peshawar, a
city in north-west Pakistan that has
been ravaged relentlessly by deadly
terrorist violence over decades. Hours
after the attack, responsibility was
claimed by a low-level commander
from one faction of the Pakistan Tali-
ban, known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Paki-
stan (TTP), as revenge for the death of
a fighter in Afghanistan.
Later, an official spokesperson
The Guardian Weekly 10 February 2023
from the TTP distanced themselves
from the incident, stating it was not
their policy to target mosques. Yet
it was just the latest escalation in an
onslaught of violence claimed by TTP
in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province,
which in recent months has been in
the grip of a deadly Taliban resurgence
that the government and Pakistan’s
military appear powerless to control.
Only two weeks previously, a police
station on the outskirts of Pesha-
war was targeted in a coordinated
onslaught by well-equipped Taliban
fighters. “The terrorists were armed
with modern weapons and night
vision glasses,” said Irshad Malik, an
assistant sub-inspector who was in the
police station during the attack. “They
targeted officers with snipers and
hurled hand-grenades at the police
station.” Three officers were killed.
TTP, which is separate from the
Taliban in Afghanistan but shares a
similar hardline Islamist ideology, has
waged a bloody insurgency in Paki-
stan for the past 15 years, fighting for
stricter enforcement of Islamic sharia
law. The group has been responsible
for some of the deadliest terrorist
attacks on Pakistan soil, including
the 2014 Peshawar school massacre
in which 132 children were killed.
Since November, it has stepped up
attacks after peace negotiations with
the government failed.
The seemingly uncontrollable
resurgence of the TTP in Pakistan had
been forewarned by many observers
since the return of the Taliban to power
in Afghanistan in August 2020. The
triumph of the Taliban in Afghanistan
was celebrated in Islamabad includ-
ing by the then prime minister, Imran
A soldier Khan, who said the country had broken
and rescue from “the shackles of slavery”. But
workers survey promises by the Afghan Taliban not
the damage at to shelter TTP fighters proved hollow.
the mosque in “The Taliban’s track record has been
Peshawar consistent: the group doesn’t turn on
FAYAZ AZIZ/REUTERS its militant allies,” said Michael Kugel-
man, a senior associate for south Asia
at the Wilson Center.
Meanwhile, misguided efforts by
Khan’s government included 5,000
g
TTP fighters being brought back to
Pakistan from Afghanistan
Afgh to be
set
rehabilitated and resettled in the
tribal area of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
khtu
The programme failed after ce ceasefire
negotiations broke down and fun funding
could not be found to resettle thee fight-
ers, leaving Pakistan with more TTP T
fighters freely roaming on home ssoil.
Living in fear The defence minister, Khawaja Asif,
Khawaja Asif said who serves under the new government
the TTP fighters of Shehbaz Sharif, accepted the failed
“did not settle rehabilitation plan had helped fuel
down like normal
recent terrorist activity in the country.
citizens. Instead “They know it, we know it, everyone
they are going knows that Pakistani Taliban are using
back to their old
activities, creating
an atmosphere of
Afghan soil for terrorism in Pakistan,”
he said.
In Waziristan, a militarised moun-
fear in these areas.”
He described the
tainous region bordering Afghanistan,
locals said the Taliban were now con-
situation in Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa as
“bad without a
trolling the many security checkpoints
at night, and claimed militants had
been involved in ransom, kidnapping
doubt”. “We would
like to avoid a
military operation
and extortion of local businesses.
Local anger at the government and
military was potent. “We had peace
but if we are
for a very short period, and it seems
compelled to use
the terrorists are back. We are tired of
force then we will
war,” said Malik Ala Noor Khan, 40,
have to,” he said.
who lost 14 family members.
Manzoor Pashteen, the founder
of the Pashtun Tahafuz movement
(PTM) that works for peace in tribal
areas, said all the government’s nego-
tiations with the Pakistan Taliban had
“never yielded us peace”. “In a way,
these negotiations were a justification,
a gateway to allow militant organisa-
tion in tribal areas,” he said.
As hundreds of locals gathered
recently in Wana, a town in Waziristan,
they waved white flags of peace to pro-
test against the violence that had once
again imposed itself on their lives.
“Through peaceful protests of the
people, we will continue to challenge
this war being fought on our soil,” said
Pashteen. “This is not our war.”
SHAH MEER BALOCH COVERS PAKISTAN
FOR THE GUARDIAN AND HANNAH
ELLIS-PETERSEN IS THE GUARDIAN’S
SOUTH ASIA CORRESPONDENT
 Spotlight
South-east Asia
M YA N M A R
Two years
on from
coup, junta’s
airstrikes
intensify
By Rebecca Ratcliffe and Min Ye Kyaw
I
t was early evening, and people
had gathered at a pandal in Moe
Dar Lay village, in Myanmar’s
Sagaing region, to prepare for a
Buddhist novice ordination ceremony
the following day. Just as they began to
cook, fighter jets appeared in the sky.
Then the sound of explosions boomed
through the air.
“The jets dropped the bombs out
of nowhere,” said Naing Ko*, who
was just a few houses from the pan-
dal when the attack happened last
month. He recalled grabbing his wife
and son and rushing to see what had
happened. His parents’ home, a few
kilometres away, was engulfed in
flames. His mother, 68, was among
eight people killed. She died instantly.
Such attacks have become an almost
daily occurrence across Myanmar,
where the military junta, which seized
power in February 2021, is increasingly
launching airstrikes across swathes of
the country in an attempt to suppress
a determined opposition. A report by
Myanmar Witness identified 135 “air-
war” incidents over the last six months
of 2022 – with each most likely repre-
senting more than a single airstrike.
“The count of airwar incidents in
the report are almost certainly con-
servative,” said Daniel Anlezark,
deputy head of investigations at
Myanmar Witness. Regular internet
shutdowns, the remoteness of some
events and the fear of reprisal all hin-
der the reporting of airstrikes.
The junta, which relies upon Russian
and Chinese aircraft, has launched air-
strikes in 10 out of 14 of the country’s
administrative divisions, according to
Myanmar Witness. Schools, medical
facilities and religious sites have all
been struck.
Separate data, collated by the
monitoring group Acled, suggests the
number of air or drone strikes by the
military launched outside battles more
than tripled, to 312 incidents, in 2022.
People are living in a constant state
of fear, said Aung Myo Min, human
rights minister of the national unity
government, which was set up to
oppose junta rule. “They call them a
kind of monster from the sky,” he said
of the airstrikes.
Since the military ousted the
democratically elected government
of Aung San Suu Kyi, the military has
faced dogged opposition from peace-
ful protesters and armed resistance
groups, which have received support
from some ethnic armed organisa-
tions. In September, the Special Advi-
sory Council on Myanmar estimated
that the junta had stable control over
just 17% of the country – while oppos-
ing groups have effective control over
more than half. But the junta’s ability
to launch airstrikes gives it an advan-
tage over its opponents.
Myanmar’s military is hedging its
weaponry portfolio between Russia
and China and has moved closer to
both countries since the coup, said
Hunter Marston, a researcher and
analyst at the Australian National
University in Canberra. “They have
been relying on their air advantage and
using it indiscriminately,” he added.
For Naing Ko, the violence of the
airstrike has had a lingering effect on
23
his family and his community. His ▼ A man sits in
father, who was out at the time of front of a house
the airstrike, was hit by shrapnel and burned by an
remains in hospital. “We have not told airstrike in
him about my mother in case he gets Shan state
shocked and something might happen MAI THOMAS/SOPA /
LIGHTROCKET/GETTY
to him,” said Naing Ko. “I cannot lose
both of them now.”
The family can barely sleep at night,
afraid the military will come again.
The military’s strategy of airstrikes
has been deployed in tandem with
scorched earth tactics. December
2022 saw an above average number
of airstrikes and the highest number
of intentionally lit fires since moni-
toring by Myanmar Witness began in
September 2021, with more than 132
such incidents recorded.
According to the UN, an estimated
1.5 million people are internally dis-
placed within Myanmar. The number
of people in need of humanitarian
assistance has soared, from 1 million
before the coup, to an anticipated
17.6 million in 2023. ‘They
Anti-coup activist Thinzar Shunlei call the
Yi said the international response since
the coup has been slow and uncoordi- airstrikes
nated. She welcomed the assistance a kind of
given to Ukraine, but noted Myanmar
was not offered the same help. “For
monster
resistance forces in Myanmar we don’t from the
get any support, even from our neigh- sky’
bouring countries,” she said.
* Name changed
Aung Myo Min
REBECCA RATCLIFFE IS THE
GUARDIAN’S SOUTH-EAST ASIA
National unity
CORRESPONDENT; MIN YE KYAW IS A government
CORRESPONDENT COVERING MYANMAR minister
 24 Spotlight
Environment
U N I T E D S TAT E S already embarked on projects to revive
the woolly mammoth and the Tasma-
nian tiger. But the dodo would be its
first bird, which would mean changing

Back to life the gene editing technique to accom-

modate an external egg.
This could bypass at least some of
Could gene the ethical dilemmas for scientists.
With the mammalian species, the

editing revive technique requires implanting gene-

editing material into the reproductive
system of an existing relative of the
the dodo? species, such as an elephant in the case
of the mammoth. It could take many
pregnancies to create viable offspring.
By Fiona Harvey Using the same technique,
researchers will be able to work with

T
he dodo, a Mauritian bird
last seen in the 17th cen-
tury, will be brought back to
at least a semblance of life if
attempts by a gene editing company
are successful.
Gene editing techniques now exist
that allow scientists to mine the dodo
genome for key traits that they believe
they can then effectively reassemble
within the body of a living relative.
Dodos are most closely related to
pigeon eggs, and use genetic material
from pigeons that can be modified to
reflect dodos’ traits, including flight-
lessness. But this will also be techni-
cally challenging, as no one has yet
used gene-editing for birds in this way.
Beth Shapiro, lead palaeogeneticist
at Colossal, said there were hundreds
of dodos in collections around the
world, meaning it had been possible
to sequence the dead bird’s genome.
But she warned that the revived dodo

pigeons, according to sequencing of
the proverbially dead bird’s genome.
The scientists in question said their
work, beyond providing an insight into
the extinct dodo’s existence, could
help inform the conservation of rare
species that are not yet extinct. How-
ever, there is a fierce debate among
biologists over whether this sort of
research should be pursued.
Colossal Biosciences, the US-based
gene editing company involved, has
Deforestation piles
could never be an exact replacement
for what has been made extinct. “What
we are trying to do is to isolate the
genes that distinguish the dodo,” she
said. “It would be crazy to think the
solution [to the world’s biodiversity
pressure on elusive
crisis] was to bring back a proxy.”
Ben Lamm, co-founder and chief
Chacoan peccary
executive of Colossal, said the com-
pany – whose attempts on mammoths
and the Tasmanian tiger have not yet With just 3,000 of the pig-like animals still
produced new animals – was raising roaming the Gran Chaco region, a community
a further $150m from investors to
pursue its research on the dodo.
conservation effort is fighting for its future
He said the research could assist

conservation efforts for other threat-
ened species, as it would develop tech-
niques that could allow scientists to
discern and preserve key traits in those
species that could be vital to helping
them adapt in a changing climate.
Prof Ewan Birney, deputy director
of the European Molecular Biology
Laboratory, who was not involved
with Colossal’s work, said it raised
MARC ANDREU/COLOSSAL BIOSCIENCES
T
A RGEN TINA he Chacoan peccary is
so elusive that scientists
believed it was extinct until
its “discovery” in 1975 .
By Patrick Today, only 3,000 remain in the
Greenfield inhospitable forests and lagoons of the
Gran Chaco region, which stretches
across northern Argentina, Paraguay
and southern Bolivia, and comprises
more than 50 different ecosystems.

questions. Micaela Camino, who works with

“The question is not just can you the Indigenous Wichí and Criollo com-
do this but should you do it,” he said. munities to protect the animals and

$150m
The sum Colossal Biosciences is
raising from investors to pursue
its research on the dodo
“I’m not sure what purpose it serves,
and whether this is really the best
allocation of resources. We should be
saving the species that we have before
they go extinct.”
FIONA HARVEY IS THE GUARDIAN’S
ENVIRONMENT EDITOR
their land rights in Argentina, knows
how difficult to find they can be. She
has only seen one Chacoan peccary,
or quimilero, in 13 years since she set
up her NGO, Proyecto Quimilero, but
has fallen in love with the critically
endangered mammal, which looks

The Guardian Weekly 10 February 2023


like a peculiar cross between a boar
and a hedgehog.
“I was told that the Chacoan pec-
cary was extinct outside protected
areas when I first started,” said
Camino. “So when we found it, I
thought it was great. We set up moni-
toring to find more in one of the most
isolated parts of the dry Chaco. But
then the loggers started to come.”
The Gran Chaco, South America’s
second-largest forest after the Ama-
zon, is one of the most deforested
places on Earth. Every month, more
than 344 sq km is lost, cleared for vast
soya farms and cattle ranches that
export to markets in the US, China and
Europe – including UK supermarkets,
according to a joint Guardian inves-
tigation in 2019. However, the loss is
largely ignored on the international
stage, receiving little conservation
money or celebrity attention in com-
parison with the Amazon.
In the area where Camino works,
the land clearing was turbocharged by
Argentina’s 2001 economic collapse.
Tree loss highlighted by Global Forest
Watch shows the extent of the dam-
age over the past 20 years. The area is
home to charismatic species such as
the maned wolf, the giant armadillo
and the jabiru, many of which are not
found anywhere else on Earth.
At current rates of deforestation,
the mosaic of life in the Gran Chaco
could collapse entirely. The loss of the
Chacoan peccary would be guaranteed
this time. Unlike the Amazon, there
are few academic studies on tipping
points and the forest’s waning ability
to support itself as the climate changes
and land is cleared, but people who
live here are seeing the changes.
“The Chacoan peccary cannot sur-
vive with such a rapid advance of defor-
estation. It doesn’t exist anywhere
else. Locally, the animal is a good
flagship. Jaguars and pumas are char-
ismatic but nobody really likes these
animals in the forest,” said Camino.
More than 140 countries, includ-
ing Argentina and Paraguay, signed
an international agreement at the
Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow in
2021 to halt and reverse deforestation
by 2030. However, economic realities
have complicated the picture.
Argentina’s economy is collapsing
once again, with the annual inflation
rate in 2022 hitting its highest level in
30 years, and the country is desperate
for dollars, which can be earned by
trading commodities such as soy
and beef.
In Paraguay, the success of Menn-
onite communities has transformed
the country into one of the most
important beef producers in the world,
largely at the expense of the forest,
25
dubbed “the green hell” by early
settlers from Canada.
“The Gran Chaco has been at a
crossroads for a long time,” said Gastón
Gordillo, a professor of anthropology
at the University of British Columbia.
“The 2007 forest law in Argentina
did manage to slow some deforesta-
tion, but it also created the paradox
by establishing legitimate ways of
destroying the forest.”
Before the Covid pandemic, civil
society organisations teamed up to
launch the 2030 initiative to protect
what is left of the Gran Chaco in
Argentina, the part most affected by
land clearing. They called for a change
in the economic model of the region,
urging local and national governments
to move away from extraction, and
pushed for greater compliance with
forest law. However, a new motorway
in Paraguay appears likely to open up
more of the region to ranching.
“The agribusiness sector in Argen-
tina is very powerful,” said Gordillo.
“We are going through a profound eco-
nomic crisis. There is a lot of anxiety
about what is going to happen. The
▲ The Chacoan major concern for the government
peccary is at risk; right now is to get US dollars, and
land clearance in exports from the agribusiness sec-
the Gran Chaco tor are the main source. That means
DMITRY/2020 WHITLEY there’s a strong incentive to continue.
AWARDS; MARTIN KATZ /
GREENPEACE “The dichotomy is clear. You
either continue destroying forests
and the environment or you don’t.
But this is an uneven confrontation,
unfortunately.”
For the Chacoan peccary, research
indicates there are only 30 years left to
save the species, with current defor-
estation rates meaning all of its habi-
tat outside protected areas will have
gone by 2051.
Camino’s conservation efforts, for
which she won a 2022 Whitley prize,
awarded to grassroots conservation
leaders across the Global South, will
‘The only focus on priority areas for saving the
way we can mammal and helping local people to
resist corporate land grabs and stay
save the in their Indigenous lands. She hopes
Chacoan the mammal can become a flagship
species to protect the region.
peccary “The only way we can save the
is by Chacoan peccary is by protecting
protecting the forest. It represents a unique
evolutionary path. It’s an umbrella
the forest’ species for working with the whole
ecosystem,” she said.
Micaela Camino PATRICK GREENFIELD IS A
Proyecto BIODIVERSITY AND ENVIRONMENT
Quimilero REPORTER FOR THE GUARDIAN
10 February 2023 The Guardian Weekly
26 Spotlight
Europe
THE NETHERLANDS
Vermeers
gathered for
blockbuster
‘party’ – but
is it the last?
By Jon Henley
F
or once, say its curators, “the
chance of a lifetime” may be
right: never before have so
many works by Johannes
Vermeer, the luminous 17th-century
Dutch master, been assembled in the
same place – and it is highly unlikely
they will be again.
Of the fewer than 40 paintings
most experts currently attribute to the
artist, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam
has obtained 28. Opening this week,
its first Vermeer retrospective has sold
more advance tickets than any show
in the museum’s history.
“Vermeer makes the clock stop,”
Taco Dibbits, the Rijksmuseum’s
general director, said. “He gives you
the feeling you are there, with that
person, in that room, and that time has
stopped. And time, most especially
today, is what we all long for.”
Born in 1632, Vermeer is the most
enigmatic of the Dutch masters.
Besides his canvases, nothing of
him remains: no letters, writings or
diary. Trained as an artist, his work
was barely recognised during his life-
time, mainly because, in a strongly
Protestant country, he converted to
Catholicism when he married at the
age of 21.
Museums and private owners in
seven countries have loaned master-
pieces for the blockbuster show,
including almost all of the intimate,
atmospherically lit domestic scenes
for which Vermeer is best known.
London’s National Gallery has sent
Young Woman Seated at a Virginal and
the Louvre in Paris supplied The Lace-
maker. Others have come from Dublin,
Berlin, New York and Tokyo.
The Guardian Weekly 10 February 2023
Some have not journeyed far,
of course: the Rijksmuseum’s four
Vermeers, including The Milkmaid,
are on show, and perhaps the artist’s
most famous work of all, Girl With a
Pearl Earring, was just down the road
at the Mauritshuis in The Hague.
But the great fragility of the paint-
ings, most completed between 1655
and 1670, their value, and the fact they
have become the prize possessions
of many of the museums that house
them, mean they very rarely travel.
“It’s been incredible to see,” Dibbits
said. “This is an artist who produced
45, maybe 50, paintings. We know of 37
of them, and to get 28 together … When
you have a party, you hope everyone
you invite will come. Well, pretty much
everyone who could, has.”
The initial spark for the show came,
he said, when the Rijksmuseum’s team
of curators realised the Frick Collec-
tion, in New York, which has not
allowed its three Vermeers to travel
for more than a century, would close
in 2023 for refurbishment.
It took “a lot of hard work”, but in
the end just nine known works by the
artist will be missing. One was stolen
from a Boston museum in 1990. Two,
from the Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York, cannot be loaned
because of the terms of their bequest,
and another, from the Louvre, is on
loan elsewhere. Most of the rest are
too frail to travel.
The exhibition is not without con-
troversy. Late last year, the Rijks-
museum said that after painstaking
scientific and comparative research,
it was confirming the attribution to
Vermeer of three works whose authen-
ticity some experts had questioned.
The most surprising was Girl With
a Flute, which the National Gallery of
Art in Washington said as recently as
last October it did not believe was a
genuine Vermeer, but had probably
been produced by an unspecified
associate.
Dibbits said: “Look, there are dif-
ferences of opinion over Rembrandts,
with more than 300 paintings to com-
pare. When you have so few works to
go on, you can draw different conclu-
sions from the same data. Attribution
is not a hard science.”
He said recent exhaustive study
had shown that beneath the meticu-
lous detail of Vermeer’s pictures
were broad, vigorous strokes that ran
counter to previous notions of how
he worked.
▲▲ The The research also revealed the pro-
Milkmaid, found Jesuit influence on his art. Light,
c 1658-59 optics and focus were a recurring
theme in Jesuit literature: the order
▲ The Glass of
regarded, for example, the camera
Wine, c 1659-61
obscura, a forerunner of the camera
RIJKSMUSEUM
that projects an image on to a surface
from a small hole in the opposite side,
as a tool for the observation of God’s
divine light.
One of the camera obscura’s effects
is to focus the light on one point, while
blurring and distorting the rest; pre-
cisely the effects found in many of
Vermeer’s tranquil, atmospherically
lit interiors. This was clear evidence,
Dibbits said, of a Jesuit connection that
was “not just religious, but artistic”.
Vermeer runs to 4 June at the Rijks-
museum, whose groundbreaking
exhibition of slavery – the source of
so much of the wealth generated by
the Dutch Golden Age – goes on display
this month at the UN headquarters in
New York: timely recognition, Dibbits
said, of “the continuing impact of slav-
ery on world history”.

BELGIUM
EU tube
Immersive
show aims
to demystify
Eurozone
By Jennifer Rankin BRUSSELS
T
here is a virtual reality plane
trip, a quiz, a presentation
from the world’s “most
powerful woman”, and a
souvenir photo: it is all part of the offer
at one of the latest tourist attractions
to arrive in Brussels – the European
Commission exhibition centre.
Experience Europe, which has been
open just under a year, seeks to explain
the work of the commission, which
proposes and enforces EU law, and for
many is the epitome of “Brussels”. It
is the latest example of how the bloc is
trying to appeal to the public. Stung by
criticism of being an elite project with
bamboozling and opaque processes,
the EU has sharpened up communi-
cation efforts in the past 15 years. The
European parliament opened a visi-
tors’ centre, the Parlamentarium, in
2011, followed by a museum dedicated
to European history in 2017.
Even the most secretive EU
institution, the European Council,
where ministers and government lead-
ers negotiate, has a visitors’ centre and
an app, called EUcraft, where players
can negotiate laws on behalf of their
governments; for example, lobbying
to delay the introduction of a ban on
single-use plastics – a fair reflection of
how governments tend to slow down
ambitious EU proposals.
The €4.2m ($4.5m) Experience
Europe space has features common
to other EU exhibitions in Brussels: it
is free and largely paperless.
Visitors can put on heavy, virtual-
reality headsets to get a 360-degree
view from inside a Spanish fire-
fighting plane, or an EU aid mission to
a Bangladesh refugee camp. “Meeting
the European Commission president”
turns out to be hearing Ursula von der
Leyen’s reflections on being the com-
mission’s first female leader and how
she spends her free time. She tells
viewers she likes to listen to Adele
while running through the forest, as
well as taking care of ponies and chick-
ens in her German country house.
Elsewhere there are short films of
fictional Europeans, such as a jaunty
romance involving an Italian farmer
called Federico that weaves in ref-
erences to EU policies on regional
produce, capitals of culture and the
abolition of roaming charges.
Opened with little fanfare,
Experience Europe is aiming for a
modest 30,000 visitors a year. When
the Guardian called in, only two visi-
tors were there but they were enthu-
siastic. “In the Czech Republic people
have concerns about the future of our
country and they are looking for some-
one to blame for current problems and
it usually [is] the European Union,”
said Tomas Novotny, a 29-year-old
research analyst, who was on a week-
end break in Brussels from Prague.
He and his travelling companion,
Tomas Braha, took part in the EU’s
Erasmus exchange programme in Ire-
land. If people were better informed
they would not believe what they read
on disinformation websites about the
EU, Novotny said. “I think this kind of
exhibition should be everywhere in
every country,” Braha added.
It was much busier at the
Parlamentarium, where students
27
queued for security checks. The centre ▼ Inside the
is much larger and has welcomed European
2.5 million people since opening in Commission’s
2011. Telling the history of the conti- Experience
nent from the first world war to Brexit, Europe exhibition
it also informs people about how the JENNIFER RANKIN
parliament works, with pen portraits of
its 705 members. After Britain left the
EU, British MEPs were removed over-
night. Eva Kaili, the Greek politician
charged with bribery and corruption,
remains on the wall of MEPs but with-
out formal titles or party affiliations.
Kaili has denied any wrongdoing.
Othmar Karas , a European
parliament vice-president, said the
accusations against Kaili and others
were “shocking” and had “potential
to hurt the reputation of the European
parliament and the trust of citizens
in the EU institutions”. Nevertheless,
Karas, who co-leads the parliament’s
work on public information, was opti-
mistic that places such as the visitors’
centre helped the EU reach people.
“Only if you talk to each other, interact
and explain the way the EU is working
and how we all benefit you can keep
the spirit of our common Europe
alive,” he said in emailed answers.
It will probably never be enough ‘People are
to appeal to the very toughest audi- looking for
ence – a bored German teenager on a
school trip. Ivan, 17, from Dusseldorf, someone to
said he and his friends largely skipped blame and
the exhibition: “It’s way too much
information, it repeated the history
it is usually
we learned about already in school.” the EU’
JENNIFER RANKIN IS THE GUARDIAN’S Tomas Novotny
BRUSSELS CORRESPONDENT Czech visitor
28 Spotlight
South America
anti-government rebels who have been
in open revolt against president Dina
Boluarte since early December when
her leftist predecessor, Pedro Castillo,
was removed from power and arrested
after allegedly attempting a coup.
“We will stay here until this lady
resigns,” one female objector shouted
of Boluarte as she guarded a roadblock
of burning tyres and cardboard boxes
last week. As she spoke, a male pro-
test leader, who declined to give his
name, arrived to voice his fury that
so many protesters had been gunned
down “like animals” by security forces
since the uprising began. So far at least
59 people have reportedly been killed,
including one police officer.
“My friend, it was here in Puno that
the Inca empire was born – and that is
what gives us courage,” the man said.
“We must fight on,” he added, calling
for Russia or the European Union to
send weapons to the unarmed rebels.
The army general in charge of
reclaiming control of Juliaca voiced
PE RU exasperation at the “shattering” of
this city of 300,000 residents. Gen
Manuel Alarcón Elera, the head of
Peru’s fourth mountain brigade, said

City limits
B
urning pyres of rubbish and
bullet-pocked walls. Troops
holed up in the airport with
▲ Anti-govern- his soldiers had been tasked with
ment protesters in clearing the blockaded roads in the
Juliaca last week highlands around Juliaca in the com-

‘I fear AK-47s and riot shields, wait-

ing for a truce. A mayor holding court
behind the broken windows of a van-
RODRIGO ABD/AP ing days. But asked when normality
might return, he said: “That’s a really
complicated question. I don’t believe
something dalised city hall. “I feel that my city
is destroying itself,” lamented Oscar
there is an answer to it.”
A solution to Peru’s political crisis

very violent Cáceres as angry protesters gathered

outside his municipal headquarters to
demand political change and justice
looks equally elusive, two months
after it began last December when
Castillo’s dramatic downfall saw his

will happen ’ for the 17 people killed here during

the most deadly day of violence in
vice-president and former leftwing
ally, Boluarte, take power.
the two-month uprising against the The campesino rebels, who have
government of Peru. locked down huge swathes of the
By Tom Phillips JULIACA The political upheaval in the country ▼ A woman looks Andes, have made four main demands
has given the Andean city of Juliaca – out over the city’s if their roadblocks are to be disman-
the biggest in the southern department streets blockaded tled: the resignation of Boluarte,
of Puno – the atmosphere and appear- by protesters who they say has been co-opted by
ance of a war zone. Near the pulver-
Brazil
ised international airport – the scene
Peru
of ferocious clashes between protesters
and security forces on 9 January, dur-
Lima ing which the 17 people were killed – a
graffiti artist has left a message. “El
Puno
Lake Pueblo Manda” – “The People are in
region
Titicaca Charge,” it says. Spend time in Juliaca
Juliaca and it is impossible to disagree.
During three days in the city, only
Bolivia once did the Observer see members
of the police or military outside the
300 km command centre that has been set up
300 miles at the airport. Instead, Juliaca’s barri-
caded streets have been taken over by

The Guardian Weekly 10 February 2023


the right; the dissolution of congress;
fresh elections; and the rewriting of
Peru’s 1993 constitution, which was
enacted during Alberto Fujimori’s
authoritarian 10-year presidency and
is blamed for profound inequality.
Deep-rooted rural anger at the
neglect by Peru’s largely white,
Lima-based political elites has been
exacerbated by the killing of so many
protesters – the majority in agricultural
backlands, such as Puno, where the
profits of gold and copper mining have
failed to reduce poverty.
The government has, without offer-
ing evidence, cast the demonstrators
as terrorists and vandals whose insur-
gency is being supported by drug
traffickers, illegal mining mafias and
Bolivian leftists. Rightwing voices, also
without proof, have alleged the insur-
rection is part of a conspiracy funded by
Cuba and Venezuela. Protesters reject
those portrayals and claim authorities
are trying to silence their legitimate
calls for political change with guns.
The violence has brought back pain-
ful memories of the 12-year war waged
by communist Sendero Luminoso
(Shining Path) guerrillas between 1980
and 1992, when about 70,000 Peru-
vians lost their lives and hundreds of
thousands fled to the cities to escape
the bloodletting in the Andes.
Boluarte has declined to stand
down but last week urged Peru’s pro-
foundly unpopular congress to bring
elections forward to this year to defuse
the crisis. In an illustration of the polit-
ical dysfunction that has seen seven
presidents in six years, congress has
repeatedly shunned the call.
In Juliaca, where black flags of
mourning hang from shuttered shops
and homes, many fear the worst vio-
lence is still to come as troops prepare
to confront demonstrators who have
blocked nearly 100 roads and high-
ways across Peru, causing hundreds of
millions of dollars of economic losses.
Last week, as the city braced for
another day of confrontations, volun-
teer nurse Yulisa Luque Jacho took to
the streets in a white builder’s helmet
and blue scrubs with her name, date of
birth and blood type written on the right
sleeve. “The government is sending the
army in … I fear something very violent
will happen because of all the rage,” said
the 22-year-old as her team waited to be
called to the frontline. Observer
TOM PHILLIPS IS THE GUARDIAN
AND OBSERVER’S LATIN AMERICA
CORRESPONDENT
Spotlight
Caribbean
HAITI
Police revolt
as gang
warfare goes
unchecked
By Luke Taylor
M
asked men raced around
Port-au-Prince on motor-
bikes, firing their guns
into the air, blocking
roads with burning tyres and bring-
ing the Haitian capital to a standstill.
At one stage, the rioters flooded into
the airport, trapping prime minister
Ariel Henry inside, and also attempted
to break into Henry’s residence.
Given the gang violence that has
seized Haiti in the past year, the dis-
order was in some ways unsurprising.
This time, however, it was not the
bandits terrorising the capital, but the
country’s police force: enraged by a
spate of police killings, officers took to
the streets latee last month to demand
a governmentt response.
The riots were
we initially attributed to
Fantom 509, a group
g of renegade cops
who broke rank nk in 2020 and 2021, but
as the protests spspread it became clear
it was not just a disr
disruptive minority.
“Fantom 509 is veryery llikely involved,
but the protests are wider der th
than that,”
said Renata Segura, deputy director t ffor
Latin America and the Caribbean at the
International Crisis Group.
Haiti has long been plagued by polit-
ical turbulence and gang warfare, but
has been plunged further into chaos
29
since 2021 after the assassination of
president Jovenel Moïse.
The country does not have a single
elected official, and gangs control two-
thirds of the capital. In their wake,
criminals have left unprecedented
hunger, rampant human rights abuses
and a deadly outbreak of cholera.
And now the police force itself is
in revolt.
“Police officers feel the authorities
do not care about their lives and tak-
ing to the street is the only way to be
heard,” said Francisco Occil, spokes-
person for Synapoha, a police union.
▲ Police escort Officers feel their lives are worth-
a funeral convoy less to the authorities and “they are
of three officers being used as pawns in power games
killed by gangs controlled by politicians”, said Diego
RICARDO ARDUENGO/
REUTERS
Da Rin, an International Crisis Group
consultant and expert on Haiti.
The Caribbean nation has only
9,500 police officers serving its 12 mil-
lion people and they must fulfil many
security roles, including those of the
army. Haiti’s military was disbanded
in 1995 for launching a series of coups
and committing human rights abuses.
But Haiti’s security forces are out-
gunned by the gangs. They are also
poorly led, said Louis-Henri Mars, the
director of the Haitian peacebuilding
Flashpoint nonprofit Lakou Lapè.
The catalyst that When the latest killings were met by
set off the latest silence from public officials, it added
rebellion was to officers’ suspicions that they are
a grisly video viewed by elites as cannon fodder.
showing the bodies The bodies of those killed in com-
of six young police bat are frequently left rotting in gang
officers lying naked strongholds, Occil said.
on the floor, their More than 3,000 officers have left
weapons laid on the force since the beginning of 2021,
top of them. The Occil added, many as families asked
six officers, killed them to drop out to avoid being killed.
in a shootout with a Henry requested international mili-
gang in the town of tary support to help take on the gangs
Liancourt, brought in October 2022 but western nations
the total number
have been reluctant to dispatch troops.
of officers killed in
Like every institution in Haiti, the
January to 15. At
police force is highly infiltrated by
least 54 officers
criminal networks. Low-grade offic-
were killed by the
ers paid less than $200 a month are
gangs in 2022.
easily bought off by warlords. But
in a failed state with no military, the
force remains the last line of defence
between criminals and the Haitian
population, said Occil.
A day after the riot, Henry and
the country’s police director, Frantz
Elbé, made a public call for calm and
pledged new actions to respond to the
attacks against police officers.
LUKE TAYLOR IS A JOURNALIST
COVERING LATIN AMERICA
10 February 2023 The Guardian Weekly
30 Spotlight
Technology
T
SOCIAL he FBI has called it a national
MEDIA security threat. The US gov-
ernment has passed a law
forcing officials to delete it
By Laurie Clarke from their phones. Texas senator Ted
Cruz has denounced it as “a Trojan
horse the Chinese Communist party
can use to influence what Americans
see, hear, and ultimately think”. And in
March its CEO will defend its existence
before the US Congress. The target of
this strong rhetoric might prove sur-
prising to some: an app best known for
Western fears that the
video platform harvests
user data and promotes
Beijing’s worldview could
lead to an overhaul
of global privacy laws
Is TikTok spying for China?
viral dances, launching generation Z
media stars, and sucking teens down
an hours-long content abyss.
In addition, at least 27 US states
have blocked TikTok on devices
they’ve issued, affecting state schools
and universities, too. A bipartisan bill,
introduced in Congress last Decem-
ber, stipulates banning the app’s use
by everyone in the country.
TikTok scepticism is spreading to
Europe too. Some politicians contend
it could potentially hand user data to
ILLUSTRATION BY MICHAEL DRIVER
Chinese authorities, and/or be wielded
as a propaganda tool – subtly influenc-
ing TikTok’s 1 billion monthly active
users in a direction that dovetails with
Chinese foreign policy goals.
In the age of the “splinternet” –
which has seen the once-open web
fracturing across different jurisdic-
tions – anxieties over data sovereignty
and information flows are on the rise.
The app’s claims over its trust-
worthiness took a blow in December
with the revelation that employees at

ByteDance (TikTok’s parent company)
accessed TikTok data in an attempt
to track the whereabouts of several
western journalists in order to discover
their sources within the company.
TikTok said the incident involved
improper data access and that the
employees responsible have been
fired, but the transgression added to
apprehensions surrounding the app’s
data privacy protocols.
Alicia Kearns MP, the Conservative
chair of both the foreign affairs select
committee and of the China Research
Group, has previously called upon Tik-
Tok to provide testimony about the
data privacy of UK users. “In their evi-
dence, they said something like, ‘This
could never happen’,” said Kearns.
“Well, obviously that is not true, and
it has happened.”
TikTok met European commission-
ers last month to discuss data privacy
and content moderation. “They’re
starting to realise that TikTok is not
just another app to communicate,
or send videos to one another, or for
amusement,” said Belgian MEP Tom
Vandendriessche.
TikTok is not the only company that
has engaged in this practice: American
businesses, including Microsoft and
Uber, have also been found guilty of
tracking individual users through their
products in the past.
T
he conversation in Europe
is a little different. So far,
the bloc has been less will-
ing to single out TikTok on
the basis of the location of its parent
company. It is scrutinising the app over
data privacy concerns: Ireland’s data
protection commissioner opened two
probes in 2021 – one focusing on its
handling of children’s data, the other
to check that its data transfers to China
complied with EU data legislation.
However, this is not unique to
TikTok. The likes of Facebook and
Google have also become ensnared in
Europe’s data privacy laws, and the EU
is currently wrangling with the US over
whether EU data should be allowed to
be sent there, for fears it could be hoo-
vered up by US intelligence agencies.
“While some questions about Tik-
Tok and our Chinese heritage have
become politicised, we take national
security concerns very seriously,” said
Theo Bertram, vice-president of pub-
lic policy and government relations,
Europe, at TikTok.
Some technology experts say the
1bn
The number of users who are active on
TikTok each month
$1.5bn
Cost of Project Texas, a scheme overseen
by Oracle to monitor TikTok’s operations
accusations are overblown. Both the
data privacy and content manipula-
tion threats cited by politicians lack
convincing evidence, said Graham
Webster, research scholar and editor
in chief of the DigiChina Project at
the Stanford University Cyber Policy
Center in California. He doesn’t think
it’s unreasonable to think that Chinese
officials might have unauthorised
access to TikTok user data. “But you
would have to make an argument for
why that access can be used in such a
way that constitutes a national secu-
rity threat,” he said.
This is because the data held by
TikTok isn’t unique. The app can col-
lect location data, but must ask users
before tracking detailed GPS data. If
the user declines, only their rough
whereabouts can be gathered. (In
fact, a TikTok spokesperson claims
its employees didn’t succeed in the
attempted tracking of journalists pre-
cisely for this reason.) What’s more,
the same data is gathered by any num-
ber of apps – and is routinely sold on to
third-party data brokers who make it
available to prospective buyers.
“There are lots of ways that foreign
governments can access data in the
US,” said Anupam Chander, professor
of law and technology at Georgetown
University Law Center, Washington DC.
“TikTok seems to be an unlikely target
of data gathering by the Chinese gov-
ernment, because of the largely public
nature of the activity on the app.”
A 2021-22 study by Nato’s Strategic
Communications Centre of Excel-
lence found that TikTok compared
favourably to other platforms on
combating inauthentic manipula-
tion (coming second to Twitter, and
ahead of Facebook, Instagram and
YouTube). The report recommended
more cooperation with external
researchers to make it easier to study
content moderation on the platform,
which TikTok says it is aiming to grow.
31
Although TikTok has said that
western user data is not stored in
China, that it would never share user
data with Chinese officials, and that its
global content moderation strategy is
not beholden to Beijing, over the past
six years, TikTok and Washington’s
committee on foreign investment in
the United States (CFIUS) have been
negotiating a deal aimed at finally
allaying the concerns of US politicians.
The $1.5bn Project Texas involves
the establishment of a data centre
that will store US user data in Texas,
under the watchful eye of Oracle, the
American software giant headed up by
billionaire GOP funder and Trump ally
Larry Ellison. To address fears about
content manipulation, Oracle will also
inspect the app’s source code and con-
tent algorithms.
TikTok is now making similar
arrangements for Europe. The com-
pany is setting up a data centre in
Ireland that will store the data of users
in the UK and EU.
These measures would place
the app’s data practices under far
more scrutiny than its Silicon Valley
competitors, according to Webster.
Whether it will be enough to satisfy
regulators is another issue.
One party eyeing the negotiations
with interest is Facebook, which views
TikTok as an existential threat. Last
year, the Washington Post revealed a
Facebook-backed lobbying campaign
targeting TikTok that specifically
played on data privacy fears. This
could prove money well spent, given
that TikTok users say in the event of
the app being banned they would prob-
ably pivot to (the Facebook-owned)
Instagram or other social media apps.
The obvious parallels between
banning apps and the Chinese gov-
ernment’s strict internet controls have
been widely noted – a phenomenon
‘They’re that’s particularly ironic for Repub-
licans, who have spent the past few
starting years pounding the drum for supposed
to realise freedom of speech.
TikTok is But there is agreement that this
should serve as a catalyst for the US to
not just finally start thinking about data privacy
another more generally. “The idea of foreign
ownership as being the critical basis
app to send for intervention [on TikTok] seems
videos to unwise,” said Chander. “We should
one other’ have a broader approach that exam-
ines the national security risks posed
Tom by data flows more generally.” Observer
Vandendriessche LAURIE CLARKE IS A TECHNOLOGY
Belgian MEP JOURNALIST
10 February 2023 The Guardian Weekly
32 Spotlight
North America
A N A LY S I S
U N I T E D S TAT E S
All blown up
What was
the Chinese
‘spy balloon’
actually for?
By Julian Borger WASHINGTON
A Chinese balloon was
brought down in a puff
of smoke and debris by
an air-launched missile,
after perplexing Washington with
its three-day odyssey over the
continental US. The question is:
what was it all for?
Once the balloon had been
spotted, Beijing claimed it was
a weather observation airship
blown off course, drawing a snort
of derision from the Pentagon,
which said the balloon had made
some deliberate turns, bringing it
at one point over Montana, home
of some of the US arsenal of nuclear
intercontinental ballistic missiles.
If it was indeed a spy balloon,
the whole episode raises a lot of
questions about decision-making
in Beijing. It was quite predictable
The Guardian Weekly 10 February 2023
that the balloon would be spotted,
tracked and even shot down, and
that all this would happen in the
run-up to a visit by the secretary of
state, Antony Blinken, to Beijing.
That visit had been welcomed by
Xi Jinping, who intended to meet
Washington’s top diplomat, and the
talks were meant to address a series
of serious potential flashpoints
between the two superpowers.
Either this was a case of the
left hand not knowing what the
right was doing, or it was possibly
a deliberate attempt to sabotage any
tension-soothing that Blinken’s trip
might have achieved.
Another question is technical.
Why send a balloon to do your
spying in an age of satellites?
Balloons are cheaper and can get
closer to surveillance targets.
However, it is unclear what a balloon
could see in the missile silos of
Montana that was not already
known to the Chinese.
The Pentagon did not seem overly
worried about what the balloon
might have seen, and claims to have
been able to block at least some of
its intelligence collection, while
turning the tables by studying the
balloon and its payload.
Perhaps the intention was to see
how soon the balloon would be
spotted and how quickly fighter jets
would be scrambled.
The political response may be
interesting to Beijing. Pentagon
officials say China sent three
balloons over US territory during
the Trump administration, without
a military response, but those flights  The suspected
do not appear to have traversed Chinese spy
so much US territory. Beijing was balloon drifts to
possibly testing Joe Biden’s mettle. the ocean after
Balloons are better than satellites being shot down
at rattling the targeted country, and RANDALL HILL/REUTERS
caused a minor political storm in the
US, with Republicans calling for the
balloon to be shot down over land,
despite risks to lives and property.
The Biden administration will
now have to test Beijing’s response
in an effort to gauge its intentions.
Officials will soon be able to
approach the Chinese government
in possession of the balloon’s
payload and an understanding of
its technology.
So far, China has stuck to the
story that it was a weather balloon
and that the use of force was a “clear
overreaction and a serious violation
of international conventions”.
The switch from contrition to
indignation will make it harder for
Beijing to stand down. China may
demand the return of the wreckage
without US scrutiny, as Washington
unsuccessfully tried when one of
its spy planes was forced to land on
China’s Hainan island in April 2001,
causing a diplomatic crisis until the
crew, and later the disassembled
aircraft, were returned.
It was with one eye on potential
legal disputes that the US air force
made sure it downed the balloon
over US territorial waters.
“I expect that the US will attempt
to promptly retrieve the balloon to
ascertain why it was flying across
the country,” said Carl Tobias,
a law professor at the University of It is unclear
Richmond. “If the US finds that the
balloon was engaged in surveillance what
of America, [China] would have a balloon
difficulty in demanding its return.” could see in
Some US pundits argued that
Blinken should have flown to Beijing the missile
regardless, to use the shooting down silos of
of the balloon as an illustration of
Washington’s resolve. Others said he
Montana
was right to postpone, as the furore that was
would have crowded out everything not already
else on the agenda. No new date has
been set for his visit, and how long known to
it takes to get discussions back on the Chinese
track will depend to a large extent
on Beijing’s motives in sending the
balloon and how much Xi knew.
JULIAN BORGER IS THE GUARDIAN’S
WORLD AFFAIRS EDITOR
 Spotlight
North America
U N I T E D S TAT E S
Bolsonaro
‘clears head’
in Florida as
anger grows
in Brazil
By Richard Luscombe KISSIMMEE
Constance Malleret RIO DE JANEIRO
A
mong the most popular
traditions at Florida’s Dis-
ney World are the daily
character appearances that
allow the public to get up close to the
theme parks’ star attractions.
Just a few kilometres down the road,
beneath the palm trees of the lushly
landscaped Encore resort at Reun-
ion, Brazil’s exiled former president
appears to have embraced the custom.
From the rented villa where he’s been
holed up for a month, Jair Bolsonaro
regularly steps out to mingle and be
photographed with adoring support-
ers, many of them holidaymakers from
his own country.
Now, after more than 30 days as a
temporary guest in the US, since his
tearful farewell from Brazil two days
before the inauguration of leftist
successor Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva,
Bolsonaro has decided he likes Florida
so much that he wants to stay longer.
Apparently fearful he could be
arrested if he sets foot back in Brasília
as the investigation continues into the
8 January attack by his supporters on
the country’s democratic institutions,
Bolsonaro has applied to US authori-
ties for a six-month visitor visa.
“He would like to take some time
off, clear his head, and enjoy being a
tourist in the United States for a few
months before deciding what his next
step will be,” his immigration attorney
Felipe Alexandre said in a statement.
The implications of the move
are potentially significant in both
countries. In the US, Bolsonaro’s appli-
cation poses a tricky dilemma for the
Biden administration, already under
33
pressure from Democrats who wrote ▼ Jair Bolsonaro more of them – will start saying, ‘Well,
a letter on 12 January urging the presi- poses for photos why should we have this guy here?’”
dent to revoke his diplomatic visa. with supporters said Anthony Pereira, professor of
It has also disappointed some in Kissimmee, international relations at Florida Inter-
among Bolsonaro’s legions of sup- Florida national University’s Kimberly Green
porters at home and in Florida, (where PAUL HENNESSY/ Latin American and Caribbean Center,
ANADOLU /GETTY
an estimated 130,000 Brazilians live, and founder of the Brazilian Studies
according to the US census bureau).
Presumably mindful of the need
to avoid upsetting his US hosts, Bol-
Institute at King’s College London.
“I don’t know all the calculations
on the US government side, but you’d
sonaro condemned the violence and
“pillaging and invasions of public
think they would wait to see if the
Brazilians request extradition. If the
buildings” by his supporters. But most
Bolsonaristas remain unswervingly
loyal to their ex-leader.
US were somehow to deny him this
request for six months or kick him out
with nothing coming from the Brazil-
“Lula is a criminal, vermin,” said
Maria Fatima Cordosa, 71, a Brazilian
ian side they might look a bit biased.”
Political commentator Kennedy
expatriate who made an eight-hour Alencar said that Bolsonaro’s attempt
drive with her American husband from to remain abro
abroad is as good as an
their South Carolina home to Kissim- admission of guilt.
uilt
mee for an emotional meeting with the “He is one of the
e instigators,
in one of
man she calls her “forever president”. the main instigators,, o
of the attempted
Efforts to ask the prickly Bolsonaro Home discomfort coup on 8 January, there
th is not the
about his status were thwarted by a Bolsonaro faces slightest doubt aboutt that. He gave
minder, who intervened quickly to a number of guidance, encouragement,em and he
halt this reporter’s questions and criminal inquiries knows that he can be heldh responsi-
ensure exchanges with his supporters in Brazil, including ble,” Alencar told news
ws site UOL.
were restricted to pleasantries. an investigation Adding to the inquiries stacking
But experts in Florida say Bolsonaro into his alleged up against the former president, the
is in an undesired and somewhat role in the Brasília supreme court justice Luís Roberto
awkward position, at risk of appear- uprising. The Barroso last week authorised an inves-
ing increasingly weak to supporters supreme court tigation into whether the Bolsonaro
by disengaging from developments has launched five government committed crimes includ-
at home, while uncharacteristically parallel inquiries, ing genocide against the Yanomami
having to refrain from his trademark while prosecutors Indigenous people, who are suffering
fiery rhetoric and bombast. have presented a humanitarian crisis.
“He knows that he needs the good- charges against
nearly 500 people RICHARD LUSCOMBE IS A JOURNALIST
will of the Biden administration now, BASED IN MIAMI, FLORIDA;
involved in the
and he better not be doing too much CONSTANCE MALLERET IS A
ransacking.
agitprop or Democrats in Congress – JOURNALIST BASED IN RIO DE JANEIRO
In 2021, a security guard in Spain stormed into
his workplace and shot four people. He was caught
and badly injured after a standoff with police,
and a trial was set – but his victims would never get
to see him punished. Should a mass shooter have
been allowed the right to die by euthanasia?

‘All
we
wanted

was
justice’

By Giles Tremlett ~

The Guardian Weekly 10 February 2023

10 February 2023 The Guardian Weekly
36 ‘All we wanted was justice’
T 11.09AM ON 14 DECEMBER 2021,
a man wearing a black baseball cap and a long auburn wig rang the
bell at the Securitas offices in the Spanish city of Tarragona. It was
a poor disguise, and when he entered the reception area on the first
floor, staff quickly recognised Marin Eugen Sabau, a burly 45-year-old
security guard who had been on sick leave for the previous six months.
Securitas is one of the world’s biggest security companies, with
345,000 employees worldwide, but this local office was nothing fancy
– grey floor tiles, white laminated furniture, corporate advertising on
the walls. “We help make your world a safer place,” read one slogan. In
the main office, Luisa Rico, a 58-year-old junior manager, was printing
out documents. She recognised Sabau’s voice. He sounded calm as
he talked to a colleague in the reception area. She did not know he
was carrying a pistol, or that he planned to shoot her.
Over the next few minutes, Sabau’s voice grew louder as an
argument broke out. When Rico opened a security door to see what
was going on, Sabau was just a short distance from her. He had dis-
carded the wig and was pointing a pistol with a long black silencer
into a meeting room. He fired at José Manuel Maestro, the company’s
provincial manager, who fell to the floor. Then Sabau spun around to
face Rico. In the instant before she slammed the door, he pulled the
trigger again. “A puff of smoke rose from my sleeve,” Rico recalled.
“The pain was terrible.”
As Rico stared at her arm in disbelief, another junior manager, Juan
Hernández, tried to wrestle the gun away from the shooter. Sabau
shot him in the leg. He let three other Securitas employees go, waving
them away with his pistol. Then he looked for Rico. Bleeding heavily,
she had crawled into a nook beside some stacked boxes of copy paper
in the main office. The only other person in the room, a clerk named
Carmen Bonilla, hid under her desk and called the police.
A trail of blood gave Rico away. She looked up as Sabau stood over
her. “He smiled,” Rico told me. Then he fired again. The bullet struck
her upper thigh, cutting through her bladder and hip. “It hurt so badly,
I actually wished I would die,” she recalled.
With that, Sabau was done. He packed his guns and wig into a
Securitas carrier bag, placed them inside a sports holdall, and left. As
he stepped outside into Plaza Prim, the small public square outside
the office, the clock on the building above him showed 11.15am.
The shooting spree, in a provincial Mediterranean port city of
135,000 people, in a country with strict gun laws, was almost unim-
aginable. “You just don’t think it is going to happen in this country,
and certainly not in a city like Tarragona,” Rico said. As startling as
Sabau’s crime was, the events that followed were even more extra-
ordinary. Just a few months later, the survivors of Sabau’s attack
would find themselves arguing for his life to be saved, while Sabau
himself sought his own death, in an unprecedented case that will be
cited in courts and ethics classes for years to come.
A few minutes after Sabau left the office, Plaza Prim was full of
sirens and flashing lights, as ambulances and police cars rushed to
the scene. Rico, who was bleeding internally, was taken to the city’s
Joan XXIII hospital. Hernández’s injuries were not life-threatening.
Maestro was in a far worse condition, with five bullet wounds in his
stomach, hip, neck and shoulder.
The Guardian Weekly 10 February 2023
Just after the shootings, a passerby, hearing screams from the
building, had snapped a picture of Sabau’s licence plate as he drove
off. Within minutes, his name and number plate were circulating on
police radios, and soon after on local news websites. On WhatsApp,
someone found Sabau’s profile picture – a photo of him proudly pos-
ing in his Securitas uniform – and stamped “WANTED” on it. It flew
from phone to phone. Everyone had the same question: what had
made Sabau do this?
An answer of sorts landed in Bonilla’s inbox at 12.47pm, as she was
being questioned by police. It was a 3,500-word email from Sabau,
with the subject line: “Happy holidays, you thieving, racist bastards!!”
It was copied to Securitas bosses across Spain, including two of his
victims, Maestro and Rico. “I don’t want to kill them,” he wrote. “I’m
not crazy. I have it all perfectly planned.”
Sabau had worked for Securitas for more than a decade. As a police
officer’s son, he was a stickler who lived by the rules and expected
others to do the same. “Our father taught us that,” his older sister,
Eugenia, told me. As a young man Sabau had applied to join the police
in Romania, but was turned down, and in 2003, he emigrated to Spain.
At first, he worked in poorly paid farm jobs. When he was hired
by Securitas in 2009, he was overjoyed. “For him, it was the greatest
company,” Rico said. “He was very meticulous, and got upset with
colleagues who weren’t.” Eugenia also spoke of her brother’s pride
in the job. Securitas became part of his identity. He even added its
name to his personal email address.
The email that reached Bonilla came from this address, and showed
how far the relationship had soured. “I’m so stressed that I am no
longer a person,” Sabau wrote. The company had mistreated him
for the past nine years, he said, and it was time to put a stop to it.
“Lessons learned with blood are not quickly forgotten. Securitas will
remember me for years.”
SABAU’S RELATIONSHIP WITH HIS EMPLOYERS had fallen apart in
January 2013, when – after failing to persuade the company that it
owed him money – he sued Securitas for allegedly cheating him out
of €5,700 ($6,200) in travel and meal allowances, equivalent to half
a year’s salary. Sabau won the case, only to lose on appeal. “My hell
started then,” he wrote. From that point on, he embarked on a one-man
war against the Swedish multinational. He carefully studied a 72-page
agreement signed by security companies and trades unions, which
laid out his rights. Armed with this information, over the next eight
years he lodged seven separate complaints alleging abuse of those
rights with government labour inspectors, who enforce Spanish work
regulations; but they found no grounds to sanction the company. In
turn, Securitas issued at least two formal reprimands against Sabau,
mostly to do with his allegedly overbearing attitude to clients. (One
of these was later struck out after Sabau challenged it.)
For Rico, the once-dependable Sabau became a nightmare. Sabau’s
deluge of complaints were pushed up to the company’s regional
headquarters in Barcelona. According to Rico, local managers repeat-
edly told Securitas that they could no longer work with Sabau, but
the company did not sack him. Had Securitas done so, it would have
been obliged to compensate Sabau with 33 days’ pay for each year
worked and admit this was technically an “unjustified dismissal”.
“The company worries about its reputation,” Rico said.
Sabau stayed, and tension built. After Sabau’s father died in 2017
while he was on holiday, a Securitas worker said Sabau fought with
the company over whether he was owed extra days’ leave under
Spanish law for attending the funeral. In 2019 and 2020, according
to Sabau’s family, doctors twice signed him off work for stress. “I’ve
suffered heart problems, memory loss, vomiting, can’t sleep, feel
pain in my chest and have passed out several times at home,” he
wrote in his email.
Apart from his job, Sabau’s only release was the shooting range. In

‘He has stopped
suffering, but we
are still suffering.
It feels like he’s got
off completely free’
Bullet points
Luisa Rico with her husband, Jaime Abrio,
shows the scar on her arm where she was
shot. A second bullet struck her upper
thigh, cutting through her bladder and hip
CRISTOBAL CASTRO
2012, he joined the Jordi Tarragó shooting club. Police officers practised
alongside him. No one found him suspicious. “If we see a Rambo type,
they are expelled,” club president Xavier Fau told reporters.
Sabau was no Rambo, but he was dedicated to his work. On 12 May
2021, he chased a shoplifter at Tarragona’s Wala sports store and tore
a tendon. He claimed that the Securitas employee sent to relieve
him of his duties did not arrive for three hours, and he then had to
drive himself to a doctor. “They don’t give a shit about my health,”
he said in his email. He was placed on sick leave. At first, he needed
crutches to walk, and the injury lingered on through the year. “When
I sit down, it feels like I’m being poked with pins,” he wrote. Cooped
up in his apartment in the nearby town of Alcover, he mulled over
his battle with Securitas. “He got into a loop,” Eugenia’s husband,
Mugurel Ciocan, told me.
In the summer, Sabau’s landlord gave him notice that he needed
the apartment for his ex-wife. The rejections Sabau received as he
looked for a new home piled pressure on an overstressed mind. Still,
he cleaned the place thoroughly, ready for a handover. Then, on
14 December he left the flat before 10.30am, drove to the Securitas
office in Tarragona and began shooting.
Police believe that, after leaving the crime scene, Sabau drove
to an out-of-town shopping centre, where he parked and spent 45
minutes finishing his email. Shortly after 1pm, he was spotted driving
through Reus, a city 8km inland. Three police officers in an unmarked
car stopped him at a roundabout. An officer who knew Sabau from
the gun club walked towards his car, with his pistol raised. “Throw
37
away the gun Eugen,” he shouted. Instead, Sabau opened fire, hitting
him in the arm. In the ensuing shootout, the police car was struck by
three bullets, while Sabau’s car took five rounds before he sped off.
Sabau swung the car on to a farm track and pulled up behind a small
shed. A neighbour spotted him ducking into bushes. Snipers took up
position 150 metres away on the roof of a three-storey farmhouse. By
3pm, the police had Sabau surrounded.
The events of the next 90 minutes remain unclear. After calling
his phone and getting no answer, police opted against negotiating.
They later said that using a megaphone would have given away
their location, endangering them. Sabau later said that he was out
of ammunition by that point and was lying in bushes in his bullet-
proof vest, listening to the birds. Police allege that he opened fire
as soon as he saw them.
Whatever the truth, the standoff ended in a fusillade of police
bullets at about 4.30pm. According to police, two snipers initially
aimed shots at a wall, in an attempt to make Sabau surrender. The
police special intervention group then approached on foot, firing at
least 36 rounds. “Given the imminent and grave risk to the agents’
own physical wellbeing and the high stress provoked by the situation,
the final shots were aimed towards non-vital parts of the aggressor’s
body,” according to a police report. (“They fired without warning,”
Sabau claimed later. “No one spoke.”)
When officers reached Sabau, he was unconscious, bleeding from
at least three gunshot wounds. A helicopter airlifted him to a hospital
in Barcelona, 80km to the north-east. “He has been neutralised,”
provincial police chief Josep María Estela announced to the media.
It seemed the story was over. Sabau was expected to face trial and
receive a long jail sentence – but only if he survived.
In Barcelona, Sabau was stabilised, sedated and moved early the
next day to a second hospital. A ventilator kept him breathing as he
lay in an induced coma.
THREE WEEKS LATER, Sabau recovered consciousness. He was
paralysed, and in intense pain. Doctors feared that the wounds on
one of his legs might lead to an infection, further endangering his
life, but Sabau refused to have an amputation. He finally allowed
surgeons to remove his leg on 23 February.
During these months, the criminal investigation was getting under
way. It was overseen by Sònia Zapater. In Spain, magistrates like
Zapater supervise the investigation, prepare charges and ready the
case for trial. At witness hearings, Securitas lawyers appeared intent
on protecting the company from any accusations of negligence. “At
times, it seemed as if [Securitas] lawyers were actually prosecuting
the employees,” Rico’s outraged lawyer, Rubén Viñuales, told me.
Rico said that the lawyers focused on whether she had pressed the
panic button, as if she had not done enough to save herself. “I hadn’t
pressed it, because you have to wait for a call-back. It was better to
call police,” she said.
I sent Securitas a detailed list of questions concerning the criticisms
of the company by both Sabau and his victims. In response, I received
a short statement that addressed few of them. Securitas praised “the
courage of our wounded colleagues”, thanked the healthcare workers
who treated them, and claimed that it last received a complaint from
Sabau “of the kind that happen occasionally in every work context”
in 2017. However, his relatives showed me four complaints sent from
his email between April and May 2021. Rico was astounded to hear
Securitas had claimed otherwise. She told me that such emails were
routinely passed on to senior managers outside Tarragona.
At the beginning of March, frustrated with their first lawyers,
whom she found inefficient, Eugenia hired a brother-and-sister team
of criminal defence attorneys in Reus. The case was unlike
any Gerard and Anna Amigó had taken before. There was no 
doubting Sabau’s guilt. CCTV footage from the Securitas office
10 February 2023 The Guardian Weekly
38 ‘All we wanted was justice’

showed him waving a gun, clumsily dropping a silencer, pulling the It fell to Zapater to weigh the conflicting demands of Sabau and
trigger, jumping over the counter and standing over Luisa Rico to his victims. In her view, the answer was, from a legal perspective,
shoot her. But what happened next was murkier. straightforward. The law defined euthanasia as a medical issue,
The Amigós felt that the police’s version of events at the farm did which meant that she had no legal grounds to override the decision
not add up. Why hadn’t they tried to negotiate, or to wait out a man of Sabau and his doctors.
who was surrounded? And while a ballistics report on the shootout at In her written response, Zapater recognised that prioritising Sabau’s
the roundabout, with precise details of shell casings, trajectories and decision to end his life would inflict “emotional damage” on victims
impacts, was presented to Zapater, nothing of the kind was ever pro- and slow the financial compensation process. (As there would be no
duced for the shootout in the field. Sabau’s family claimed that they trial, the victims would have to start a separate civil process to claim
had seen medical reports showing that he had been shot nine times, compensation.) Even so, she declared: “In the conflict of rights, those
not three. Sabau’s protective vest, presumably showing impacts, was conferred by the euthanasia law clearly win.”
missing. “One officer even said they didn’t know who gave the order Yet on 20 July, in response to complaints from Rico and other
to fire,” Gerard said. He could not establish how many police bullets victims, a judge in Tarragona suspended the euthanasia procedure.
had hit Sabau. Despite these unanswered questions, in April 2022, Rico told me that she wanted to stare into Sabau’s face in court, see
the special intervention officers were decorated for bravery by their him publicly declared guilty and sentenced to punishment. She did
superiors. (The Catalan police declined to comment for this article.) not mind if he was euthanised after that. “We don’t want to prevent
That same month, not long after his 46th birthday, Sabau was it. We just want a trial first,” Bitos agreed.
transferred to the prison wing of a hospital in Terrassa, just north of Rather than defending Sabau, as they had initially expected to do,
Barcelona. The medical crises continued. the Amigó siblings found themselves demanding his death. “After
Sabau’s only encounter with criminal investigators was a brief video 25 years, I thought I’d seen it all,” Anna told me as we drove back
conference on 11 July. “The witness says he is a paraplegic, that they to Reus from Terrassa. “This is one of those days when you real-
have amputated his leg, he has 45 stitches in his hand, cannot move ise you haven’t.” She had just listened to Sabau serenely explain
his left arm, has had screws inserted and cannot feel his chest,” the why he wanted to die.
official record stated. Drugs helped, but the pain was constant. Even
touching his forearm or cutting his fingernails provoked jolts of pain.
“I can’t put up with it much longer,” he told Eugenia. ‘For big firms, workers
DISCREET, UNSANCTIONED EUTHANASIA, understood as “mercy
killing”, has always existed, the Belgian philosopher Willem Lemmens
are just numbers.
told me, but it often placed doctors who performed it in legal jeop- Someone should have
ardy. In 2002, the Netherlands became the first country in the world
to implement a national euthanasia law. In June 2021, Spain became listened. There were
the fourth country to follow suit. According to polls at the time, 87%
of Spaniards supported the new law. many cries for help’
The new laws “don’t so much give rights to the patients, as to the
doctors who perform euthanasia”, Lemmens said. The process is
subject to strict oversight, but places great power in medical hands.
Spain’s euthanasia law is so recent that challenges are still going
through the constitutional court. In some countries, euthanasia laws
cover release from incurable suffering, including psychological pain. Family ties
Spain is among the most liberal regimes, allowing doctors to end life Eugenia, sister of Eugen Sabau, and her
in order to relieve non-terminal suffering. husband, Mugurel Ciocan, hold the urn
Even critics of the new law had not imagined that a case like that containing her brother’s ashes
of Sabau would be among the first to provoke public concern about CRISTOBAL CASTRO
its use. On 20 June 2022, Spain’s biggest radio station broke the news
that Sabau had requested euthanasia. As in all such cases, he had to
make two written requests, 15 days apart, and await the decision of
doctors on whether his condition fitted the law’s concept of “unbear-
able suffering … that cannot be acceptably relieved”. His wish was
granted, and a date set for 28 July.
There was, however, an obvious problem. Sabau had shot four
people, but no trial had been held. The criminal investigation had
been so slow that formal charges had not even been brought. Sabau’s
victims, all of whom had survived, were outraged. They felt that
if Sabau died before he was put on trial, justice could not be done.
“Their suffering and dignity must be taken into account,” argued José
Antonio Bitos, the lawyer for the injured police officer.
Lemmens told me that in many places euthanasia laws had gone so
far beyond the limited way in which they first proposed – essentially
as a means of providing a “good death” to terminally ill people – that
he was not surprised by the Sabau case, or the outrage it provoked.
By avoiding trial, Sabau was, in effect, permitted to opt out of our
“moral community”, he said. “The idea that someone can choose to
step outside that is very threatening.”

The Guardian Weekly 10 February 2023


IN MID-JULY, Gerard Amigó introduced me to Eugenia and Mugurel.
They were Sabau’s only support. Eugenia, with her dark hair dyed
blonde and an embroidered blouse, was tearful. Mugurel, a muscu-
lar man with a dense black beard, who is a varnisher and painter by
trade, did much of the talking. They were a team. They were sorry
for Sabau’s violence, relieved he had not killed anyone, and angry at
Securitas. Above all, Eugenia wanted her brother freed from pain.
In early August, an appeal court in Tarragona overturned the
suspension of the euthanasia procedure. The panel of three judges
supported Zapater’s view that “the right to human dignity [of someone
in unbearable pain] … outweighs the right to judicial care” of victims.
Bitos took the challenge to the constitutional tribunal in Madrid, which
threw it out on 12 August. It seemed Sabau’s wish would be granted.
In mid-August, as the day of his death approached, Sabau agreed to
speak to me on the record. Prison authorities and Zapater intervened,
restricting visits to family only and banning recording devices.
A week before he was due to die, Gerard Amigó asked Zapater to
release Sabau on bail. In practice, this meant wheeling his bed down a
corridor into a ward without guards, where Eugenia could accompany
him. Zapater refused on the improbable grounds that someone might
help him escape. Three days before Sabau died, prison authorities
relaxed family visiting rules so that either Eugenia or Mugurel could
be there day and night. There were tears, but also laughter as Sabau
insisted his bad luck had finally turned, that it was a privilege to be
able to die and stop suffering. “He didn’t want to show sadness, for
our sake,” Mugurel said.
On 22 August, with Sabau set to die the following day, Anna Amigó
and I drove to Terrassa. I was not allowed into the two-storey prison
wing, but Anna scribbled down Sabau’s words on a legal pad and he
signed it. It was the closest thing to a final testament. Sabau spoke
for a long time, Amigó said. He repeated his claim that the police had
lied about the shootout by the farm. He said he felt most regret about
shooting Hernández, the man who tackled him. He cried only once,
when asked about dying. “What future do I have? I can’t describe
the pain,” he said.
Otherwise, Sabau was remarkably upbeat, insisting death was a
welcome release. He had recently learned that he could donate his
organs. As macabre as it sounds, organ donations from those dying
from euthanasia are ideal, since the task of prepping patients and
delivering organs in good, fresh condition is made easier. By dying,
he would be saving lives. That felt virtuous. “I’m a good man,” Sabau
told Amigó. “I’m ready. I’m very happy.”
On the morning of 23 August, a clutch of journalists, myself
included, gathered at the hospital. By then, the case had become
international news. As I waited in the hospital cafeteria, I listened to
the lawyers from both sides being interviewed on the radio, as news
stations covered the final stage of this long-running drama. During one
interview, Gerard Amigó floated the idea of suing police for shooting
Sabau. I called Bitos. “If that is what they want, they should stop him
from dying right now,” he snorted. The case would be shelved after
Sabau’s death, he explained. There was no other suspect to investi-
gate. It seemed that the questions around the police’s handling of
the incident would be shelved, too.
Eugenia and Mugurel spent the morning with Sabau. Again, he
insisted on maintaining a happy, even jokey, disposition. “Come on,
let’s go!” Sabau urged the doctors. At 2.30pm, doctors told Eugenia
and Mugurel that it was time. They said goodbye, held back tears and
watched as the sedative was delivered. A holdup in the complex set
of medical procedures necessary when euthanasia is combined with
organ donation meant it wasn’t until four hours later that Mugurel
returned to watch, alongside doctors, nurses and police in medical
gowns, as the lethal drug was applied. Later that evening, Anna Amigó
called me to say Sabau had died at 6.30pm. Ambulances stood nearby,
waiting to transport some of Sabau’s organs to operating theatres with
39
prepped recipients in other hospitals. Eugenia and Mugurel waited
into the night as his body was removed by an undertaker, smartened
up for an open casket ceremony and then taken to the crematorium to
be incinerated two days later. At 11pm, a doctor phoned to tell them
the transplants had been a success. “They said he had saved five lives,
and there would be more, that we could feel proud,” Eugenia said.
HEN I VISITED EUGENIA AND
Mugurel in Alcover three weeks later, they were struggling to make
sense of it all. “We were concentrating so hard on the fight to end his
pain that we hadn’t thought what it would be like. In a way, it was a
victory, but it’s also the loss of a loved one,” Mugurel said. We sat in the
living room of their apartment in Alcover and watched a video Sabau
had left behind. Eugenia served sponge cake and juice as her brother’s
face appeared on the screen. He sat at a table with his short dark hair
slicked neatly to one side, wearing a grey Securitas zip-up fleece and
a fluorescent orange vest with a badge saying “Security guard”. Over
18 minutes, he delivered the now-familiar narrative of persecution,
larded with paranoia. Eugenia sighed. “For big companies, workers
are just numbers,” she said. “Someone should have listened. There
were many cries for help.”
She and her husband did not condone her brother’s violence,
but remembered a man “with a huge heart”. His ashes sat in a
brushed metal urn on their bookshelf. They had bought hollow
necklace pendants to fill with ash. “We don’t want to whitewash his
reputation,” Mugurel said. “Everybody knows the facts.” They just
wanted people to know Sabau was not always like this, that something
had happened to him.
A few days earlier, I had visited Luisa Rico at a Mediterranean
beach campsite south of Tarragona, where she was trying to recover
from injury and trauma. After the initial operations to stem internal
bleeding, stitch up her bladder and fix hip bones, Rico still walked
with a crutch and was awaiting further surgery to pin her hips into
place. Her boss, Maestro, had suffered a stroke and now has serious
heart and kidney problems, while also struggling with acute anxiety.
The other two victims were recovering from lesser wounds. Bitos was
not sure the police officer would ever return to active duty.
Before the attack, Rico had been fearless, said her husband, Jaime.
Now her self-confidence was shattered. She constantly replays
the moment when Sabau stood over her with his gun. “I thought I
wasn’t going to escape, that he would kill me. I couldn’t do anything
at all,” she said.
There are bad days and less bad days. The day Sabau died was one of
the worst. “We all know that when you break the law, there is reaction
and punishment. All we wanted was justice, to see him declared
guilty,” she said. “You try to do everything right in life, then some-
one suddenly decides to destroy your life. He has stopped suffering,
but we are still suffering.”
She still sees his face in the shadows, she told me, her eyes filling
with tears. His death had not changed that. “It feels like he’s got off
completely free.”•
GILES TREMLETT IS A HISTORIAN, AUTHOR AND JOURNALIST BASED
IN MADRID
10 February 2023 The Guardian Weekly
It’s the age of decanting – never before have household perfectionists
removed so many things from packages, only to put them in other packages.
Extreme tidiness is a modern obsession. But is it healthy? By Amelia Tait
TRANGERS JOKE THAT JACQUELYN
Everything in its place
RENDALL SHOULD STICK A LABEL ON TO
ADAM RENDALL’S HEAD. “Husband,” it
would read, in the curved typeface Rendall
designed based on her own handwriting,
the Pretty Perfect Font. If Adam had a
label on his head – some of the 400,000
people who follow Jacquelyn on TikTok
say – then he would match everything else in the couple’s
home in Rochford, Essex.
It starts at the front door, where the words “Thank you
postie” are stuck on the silver letterbox, followed by a car-
toon heart. There’s nothing too unusual about this, nor the
drawers in the corridor that hold separated bits and bobs
labelled “cables”, “batteries” and “tools”. It is Rendall’s
six-doored pantry that has the power to inspire a thousand
envious and incredulous comments online. Starting at
the top left, there are nine transparent containers full of
white, brown, pink and yellow powders, each marked by
its identity: “sugar”, “hot chocolate”, “banana milkshake”.
Below that are miniature acrylic drawers of stock cubes
and tiered rows of spices. The word “cereal” adorns six
canisters in the next cupboard; “tagliatelle”, “spaghetti”,
“conchiglie” and “penne” are also spelled out on clear con-
tainers (use-by dates are written in chalk pen on the back).
Behind the next set of doors are dishwasher salt, stain
remover and softener decanted into corked glass bottles.
In the fridge, an open-topped container of apples reads
“apples”. The words “ties and cufflinks” adorn a drawer
in Adam’s office. The couple’s young daughter, Sienna,
knows where to put her things, thanks to baskets marked
“dress up”, “sports” and “dolls”. Everything has its
(labelled) place.
One thing that is hard to label is the period of history in
which we are living. Will our descendants call us Caroleans?
Is this the plastic age? I think you could compellingly argue
that we are actually living in the decanting era. Never before
have things been removed from packages and put into
other packages at such a pace. More than 6.7 million people
have watched a YouTube video in which Khloé Kardashian
stacks Oreos around the edges of a glass jar so that they look
aesthetically pleasing. Meanwhile, professional declutterer
Marie Kondo sells packs of 90 labels, including ones for
bread crumbs, chia seeds and, alarmingly, food colour-
ing, the least decantable substance sold in supermarkets.
In their bestselling 2019 book The Home Edit: A Guide to
Organizing and Realizing Your House Goals, professional
organisers Clea Shearer and Joanna Teplin jokingly label
their own (inexplicably joint) gravestone, speculating
that it will read: “Pantry perfectionists who were canis-
ter enthusiasts, turntable advocates, and women entirely
committed to labelling all things.”
The Guardian Weekly 10 February 2023
Although excessive organisation began as a hobby of
the ultra-wealthy – Shearer and Teplin once sorted Reese
Witherspoon’s closet, and charge around $250 an hour for
their services – storage-stuffed homes are increasingly
commonplace. A spokesperson for bargain homeware
chain B&M says home organisation sales have seen “sub-
stantial growth for the last few years” and “show no signs
of stopping”. Clear storage containers are particularly
popular, as well as nestable boxes that allow customers
to maximise space.
It’s easy to dismiss this as a fad, but look closer at 10
glass jars lined neatly on a shelf and you’ll see a reflec-
tion of yourself. The rise of the highly organised home
reveals something deeper about the way many live today
– and it can’t be separated from modern capitalism, the
pressures of domestic labour, social media and ever-
increasing anxiety rates.
“All I felt I was doing was working, then coming home,
cleaning up, making dinner and going to sleep, and that
was literally my life,” says 32-year-old Rendall, who
worked as a PE teacher until April 2022. To gain control,
she started waking up at 4.40am in 2021 – she exercises,
tidies, does laundry and showers before her daughter and
husband wake up.
“Everything I do – everything – is centred around time
and saving it and maximising it,” Rendall says, sitting in
her kitchen in an oversized white jumper, black leggings
and pink slippers. Rendall’s food is organised so she can
bulk buy and cook once a month – meals are kept in fridge-
freezer drawers marked with the days of the week. It’s faster
to write shopping lists now she can see with a quick glance
what she’s running low on, and Rendall says she never has
to clean spilled flour, thanks to her containers. Snacks are
categorised to save time packing Sienna’s lunchbox, while
her clothing is laid out in seven separate drawers every
Sunday, making it easier to dress her each morning.
Of course, Rendall admits decanting and organising
“does take a bit of time initially” and some critics are
adamant she should “get a job” and stop “wasting time”.
“People don’t see the long-term benefit,” she says – yes, it
might take her an hour to unpack her monthly shop and six
hours to bulk cook on a Saturday, “but then in the evening,
other people have to think, go to the shops, cook, tidy away.
Times that by seven.”
The “turning point” for Rendall was when her father
died in her arms after having gall bladder cancer. She was
just 19. “I realised that actually, I don’t want to waste time,
I want to maximise it … I don’t want Sienna to just work
FELICITY MCCABE
and be bathed, I want time with her.”
To stay organised, Rendall designed her own
planner – it’s pink, gold and thicker than most bibles. 
She sells it for £48.99 ($60) on her website Pretty
41
42 Everything in its place

Perfect Products, where she also sells labels. Booming sales

in the pandemic enabled Rendall to leave her teaching job;
her products have caught the attention of UK TV personali-
ties Dani Dyer and Alison Hammond (Rendall even visited
the latter’s home to help organise her cupboards).
Still, not everyone loves Rendall’s lifestyle. “I don’t
understand why it gets people so mad – like, SO mad,”
she says. Rendall sees it as her job to educate hateful
commenters about the benefits of home organisation, but
she knows they’re right about one thing: the squash. In
a cupboard that holds cups and mugs, Rendall has three
corked glass bottles filled with red and yellow liquids; on
the side of each is a swirly white word, “squash”. “This
one is my only thing that is for aesthetic,” Rendall says,
conceding that moving juice from a plastic to a glass bottle
is not time-saving. “It gets people really mad. I do get that.”
It is hard to imagine that anyone would ever decant their
squash in a world without social media. While people’s pan-
tries used to be private spaces, they’re now shared across
the internet. (Singer and TV presenter Stacey Solomon
went viral in 2020 for sharing a video of crisps hanging on
a curtain pole inside her cupboard. She now has her own
decluttering TV show.) As well as busy parents, children
and teens enjoy home organisation content that provokes a
satisfying autonomous sensory meridian response (better
known as ASMR): when Coco Pops cascade into a plastic tub
or lids are clicked on to containers, the sound gives some
people pleasant tingles. “Satisfying” is a word that recurs
under Rendall’s videos.
Design researcher Lisa O’Neil says that this is all part of
something called “metaconsumption”. Metaconsumers,
O’Neil explains, “consume content about consumption”
– there are almost 4m posts tagged #organization on Insta-
gram, while Rendall makes 10 TikToks a week. Home Edit
authors Shearer and Teplin got a Netflix series in 2020,
while Kondo showcases her “KonMari” tidying method in
two shows of her own. “Idealistic real estate shows make
people feel like they need to aspire to these perfect homes,”
O’Neil says.
There is another aspect of metaconsumption, which
O’Neil describes as “consuming objects that act in service of
other objects” or buying things for your things. In Kondo’s
bestselling 2010 decluttering book The Life-Changing Magic
of Tidying Up, she told readers to store possessions in shoe-
boxes – today, she peddles $35 bamboo storage bins on her
site (while also admitting last month that tidying is less of
a priority, personally, now she has three children).
The solution to overconsumption has become yet
another form of consumption: if you have too many
clothes and devices, simply buy somewhere to store them.
Decluttering, perversely, now involves acquiring more
stuff – an abundance of bins, boxes, labels. Rachel Burditt,

The Guardian Weekly 10 February 2023


Decluttering, perversely, now involves acquiring more
stuff – an abundance of bins, boxes and labels
Clean sweep a 42-year-old Leicestershire-based professional organiser
Organising known as the Declutter Darling, believes demand for her
influencer services has increased because of Amazon. “There’s a lot
Jacquelyn Rendall more accessibility for buying things,” she says. “I’ve been
and her neatly in people’s kitchens with Amazon boxes all over the place.
stacked and Quick shopping has made people fill their homes.”
labelled home O’Neil, whose master’s thesis was titled Declutter or
KAREN BUTLER Die: How the Home Organization Industry Designs the
Metaconsumer, has researched which brands benefit. In
the US, storage chain the Container Store saw sales increase
27% between 2019 and 2022. In the UK, John Lewis now has
the Home Edit range – a single cereal canister will set you
back £20 ($25). When Burditt started organising in 2015,
she could find storage boxes only in her local hardware
store, “whereas nowadays, every store has something”.
So, where did it all start? Netherlands brand Curver
launched its first big plastic box in the 80s – its cream,
latticed storage boxes are now available in most UK
homeware stores. Japanese brand Muji arrived in the UK
in 1991, bringing a range of acrylic storage units that inspired
coverage in Time Out and teen magazine J-17. In 2016, Ikea’s
43
chief sustainability officer said the world had reached “peak
stuff ” – yet in 2022 the company released Snurrad, a clear
plastic refrigerator turntable that swivels around to allow
easier access to those back-of-the-fridge condiments. It
exploded across the internet, with one TikTok alone earning
2.8m views.
“You’ve got to be honest with people, it does cost money,”
Rendall says – she tells viewers to buy organisation products
gradually from discount stores Home Bargains and B&M.
Still, the highly organised believe they’re not just investing
in their homes – they’re investing in their mental health. For
many, organisation is a way to find control in an increasingly
out of control world.
Ellie Killah started organising after experiencing post-
natal depression following the birth of her first child. “I
never had any mental health problems before children,”
says the 32-year-old mother of two from Somerset, who
posts organisation content on her YouTube channel
Ellie Polly. “I can be up and down with my mood, but if
I’ve done a full restock and clean, I feel so calm and in
control – it is a control thing.”
IKE MANY ORGANISING INFLUENCERS,
Killah stocks snacks like a shop, lining
them up in neat rows in her pantry.
Organising makes her feel “euphoric”
– she compares it to the endorphins
experienced by gym-goers. Before
seeking therapy and medication, she
suffered from anxious thoughts about
her children: “Morbid thoughts about them dying and
constantly worrying about them.” She considers staying
on top of her home another type of treatment: “Mental
health-wise, it just saves me. It is my therapy, I think.”
Kate Bartlett concurs. The 27-year-old marketing
specialist from Bath says organisation has been a “coping
mechanism” and “creative release” since her student years,
but more recently it has helped her prepare for mother-
hood. “When I found out I was pregnant, I really struggled
at the beginning with having that lack of control,” Bartlett
says – organising her baby’s clothes by colour helped, as did
stocking a hospital bag with labelled pouches. “I find that
looking at the things I can control really helps me mentally.”
Hsin-Hsuan Meg Lee is a marketing professor at ESCP
Business School in London who has researched the relation-
ship between Marie Kondo-style decluttering and happi-
ness. Lee says many people see decluttering their spaces
as akin to decluttering their minds. “There’s a concept
called symbolic pollution,” she says. “In the context of
household organisation, this term refers to items that
are out of place and violate the rules we set for our 
surroundings … For some, the process of removing
10 February 2023 The Guardian Weekly
44 Everything in its place
‘I can be up and down with my mood, but if I’ve done a
full restock and clean, I feel so calm and in control’
this pollution and putting things in order causes them to
feel they are in control.”
Yet organisation is not always beneficial for men-
tal health. While it’s a myth that obsessive-compulsive
disorder (OCD) is only about cleaning, some OCD suffer-
ers do have compulsions around cleanliness and order.
Psychologist Tara Quinn-Cirillo, who runs her own practice
in West Sussex, advises looking out for intrusive thoughts
such as excessive worry about germs. Warning signs include
missing out on valued activities because you prioritise
organising routines, limiting activities in your house
because you’re afraid it will get messy and a preoccupa-
tion with rituals (for example, vacuuming in a set pattern
from the same corner of the room).
There is also the risk that watching organisation content
could damage viewers’ mental health – being bombarded
with polished perfection could make some feel inferior,
anxious or out of control. In 2009, psychologists at the
University of California asked working parents to give
guided tours of their homes and monitored the “stress-
ful” words they used, before measuring the levels of the
stress hormone cortisol in their saliva. Wives who described
The Guardian Weekly 10 February 2023
their homes as more stressful had flatter slopes of cortisol
throughout the day – a phenomenon linked to chronic
stress, psychological distress and higher mortality. Hus-
bands with stressful homes were mostly fine. The study’s
authors noted that women may feel greater “responsibility”
and “guilt” about clutter – idealistic organisation content
could entrench such feelings.
BY NOW YOU MAY HAVE NOTICED A WORD CONSPICUOUSLY
ABSENT FROM THIS ARTICLE: “he”. In 2019, researchers
from University College London found that women still do
more housework than their male partners, even when the
woman earns more money. Between 2014 and 2019, the
number of women earning the majority of their household’s
income increased by 30% – but 45% of female breadwinners
still did most of the household chores, as opposed to 12% of
male breadwinners. Juggling teaching, mothering, cooking,
cleaning and managing her planner business ramped up
Jacquelyn Rendall’s organisation habits, and her customers
are “mainly women, mainly mothers”.
When her husband did a food shop, TikTok commenters
praised him: “Everyone said he was amazing. He’s doing
the shop I do every week! I don’t get a ‘Well done’,” Rendall
says. Might she consider resetting the balance and challeng- Out of the box
ing society’s expectations by creating organisation plan- Professional
ners for men? “No,” Rendall says, “because I am my target declutterer Marie
audience … I just feel like I need to help women because Kondo says
we have more pressure.” tidying is less of a
It’s not up to organisation influencers to fix gender personal priority
inequality, but could their content entrench it? After all, now she has three
when excessive organisation stops feeling remarkable – when children
it stops being something worthy of writing an article about DENISE CREW
– won’t it just be another expectation placed on women?
Rendall says she shows “the dodgy side” and isn’t afraid
to be honest about mess. In 2023, she also wants to start
visiting mothers in need and organising their homes for free.
For now, home organisation booms unabated. The
Association of Professional Declutterers and Organisers
has more than 400 experts across the UK – professional
organiser Caroline Rogers says that when she first joined
nine years ago, there were only 100 members. Back then,
clients used to be ashamed about employing her. If she
met someone in a client’s life, “I’d have to say, ‘Oh, I’m her
friend.’ Now people say, ‘This is Caroline, she’s my profes-
sional organiser.’”
When I speak to Rendall, she’s in the process of
reorganising her office – pink Post-its adorn 12 white drawers,
marking the future homes of her possessions, which lay jum-
bled in baskets and boxes around the room. “This makes me
feel a little bit on edge,” Rendall says, looking around. “But
I know that once it’s done, I’ll sleep easy.” •
AMELIA TAIT IS A FEATURES WRITER
 45
Comment is free, facts are sacred CP Scott 1918

EUROPEAN UNION
The 27 should
heed Biden’s
green lead
Page 47 

ISR AEL
Netanyahu can be resisted – but
only with Palestinian support
▲ Protests have
taken place for
five consecutive
Jonathan Freedland
~
weekends
ABIR SULTAN/EPA

10 February 2023 The Guardian Weekly

46 Opinion
spoke last week to Daniel Kahneman, who
is known for winning a Nobel prize for
economics and soon turns 89. The professor
told me: “This is the worst threat to Israel
since 1948 [the year it was founded].” It was
worse even than the Yom Kippur war of 1973,
when Israel’s survival seemed to hang in the
balance – because this time the damage “may
be impossible to repair”.
Kahneman was not speaking about a foreign army
massing on the country’s borders, an Iranian nuclear
bomb or the gathering prospect of a third Palestinian
uprising, but rather something Israel is doing to itself:
what Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu,
gently calls his “judicial reform” plan, but what others
describe as the evisceration of the Israeli courts, handing
unchecked power to the government.
The visiting US secretary of state, Antony Blinken,
delivered a diplomatic version of the same warning
last week, giving Netanyahu a civics lesson on the
importance of an independent judiciary and the rule
of law. Meanwhile, hundreds of notables, Kahneman
among them, signed an “emergency letter” denouncing
the proposed changes.
Their objection is to a plan that would limit the
supreme court’s power to strike down the decisions
of politicians, allow Netanyahu or any future prime
minister to override a court ruling by a simple majority
in parliament, and make judges the handpicked
appointments of politicians. As things stand, the supreme
court is the only major curb on government power:
the country has no written constitution and no second
chamber. If the court is gutted, that will let Netanyahu
rule unrestrained – and let him off the hook, as he stands
trial and faces the possibility of jail on corruption charges.
“Israel will be a pseudo-democracy,” says Kahneman.
Many will say Israel has been a pseudo-democracy ever
since it became the military occupier of the Palestinian
territories gained in the 1967 war. For them, the current
gloom of Israel’s scholars might seem a welcome sign that
the whole Israeli edifice is about to come tumbling down.
However, the changes afoot will include dissenting Israeli
Jews, to be sure, but among those to suffer most directly
will, inevitably, be Palestinians.
By serving as a brake on the tyranny of the majority,
the supreme court has regularly protected the rights of
minorities – including the 20% of Israeli citizens who are
Palestinian Arab. The judges’ record has been far from
perfect, but if these reforms go ahead and the courts are
reduced to toothless creatures of the government, things
If the supreme court
is gutted, that will let
Netanyahu – and any
future prime minister –
rule unrestrained
The Guardian Weekly 10 February 2023
will be far worse. One example: Netanyahu’s far-right,
ultra-nationalist coalition partners are itching to ban
Israel’s Arab parties from standing in elections and sitting
in the Knesset. If the supreme court is stripped of its
powers, there will be nothing and no one to stop them.
But this goes wider. At that Jerusalem press
conference, Blinken reiterated Washington’s
longstanding support for the two-state solution: the
hope that the conflict will be solved by a secure Israel
existing alongside an independent Palestine. That’s been
the boilerplate position of the international community
for decades.
There’s just one problem: it is all but dead. Talk to
those on the ground and they describe not a two-state
solution, but a one-state reality. The green line between
the Israel established in 1948 and the post-1967 occupied
territories has been steadily erased, with settlements,
roads and infrastructure ensuring the two are so
entwined that disentanglement is practically impossible.
The result is that de facto single state, in which the
Israeli government is the master. In this situation, the
removal of the last restraints on Israeli executive power
becomes all the more alarming. At Netanyahu’s side are
ministerial allies who do not hide their determination to
make life ever more unbearable for the Palestinians who
inhabit the one-state reality.
A future looms in which the kind of violence
witnessed recently – 10 dead Palestinians in Jenin;
seven Jews killed leaving a synagogue in Jerusalem – is
repeated in endless, degenerating bloodshed. There is
no desire or capacity for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations;
the two sides are too far apart. The US has apparently
abandoned its role as would-be broker.
And yet, there is one weapon the opponents of
Netanyahu have barely picked up. Look at the results
that brought this far-right government to power: in
terms of votes cast, the Netanyahu bloc’s victory was
narrow. Netanyahu’s opponents were split and failed
to draw in enough of the constituency that could make
all the difference: the one-fifth of Israeli citizens who
are Palestinian Arab. Overall turnout in the November
election topped 70%, but among Israeli Arabs it was just
53.2%. Had Arabs voted in the same numbers as Jews,
Netanyahu would not be prime minister.
To remedy that will require a
Jonathan change in mindset of the mainstream
Freedland is Israeli left, one that at last listens to
a Guardian Palestinian demands for equality inside
columnist the green line and an end to occupation
beyond it. That could prompt a sea
change among Palestinian-Israelis, a recognition that a de
facto boycott of Israel’s political institutions might have
made sense when a separate Palestinian state seemed on
the horizon, but makes no sense now. It only strengthens
those bent on making their lives worse.
Netanyahu is on the brink of a power grab that
will destroy Israel’s oft-repeated boast to be the only
democracy in the Middle East. That may be too late to
avert, but it would be one of history’s great ironies if the
only people who can save Israel from itself turn out to
be the Palestinians •

C L I M AT E
CRISIS Europe needs to copy
Biden’s green deal – not
resort to its old ways
Lorenzo Marsili
uropean governments have for many
years basked in a sense of climate
superiority over the US. We had the
most ambitious climate goals; we
were the constructive actor at Cop
conferences; we had carbon-pricing
mechanisms; and since 1990, we have
reduced emissions by 28% against
just 2% in the US. The US, by contrast, had climate-
denying Republicans.
The Biden administration now has the world’s most
generous package of climate incentives – a $370bn
green subsidy package, which goes by the misnomer
Inflation Reduction Act. But instead of celebrating the
US handouts and tax breaks for investment in such
things as electric vehicles and solar panels, many
European governments are furious.
Yes, it’s good for the planet. But it’s even better for
American industry as the new US green subsidies are
only available for products “made in America”. The
scale of financing is such that some European companies
are already making plans to shift production across the
Atlantic. Europe fears deindustrialisation and accuses
the US of protectionism and unfair competition.
Just do the same, Washington argues. Develop your
own green industrial policy and both sides of the pond
can then lead the climate revolution together.
Europe should indeed understand that industrial
planning – or what some now call the designer economy
ELIZABETH FRANTZ/
REUTERS; GETTY – is back in fashion across the political spectrum.
47
The European Commission seems to understand
this: along with a temporary relaxation of state aid
rules to stimulate green projects, Brussels wants a
joint European sovereignty fund to channel money to
green industry. If taken seriously, this would trigger
the emergence of a continent-wide industrial policy,
accelerating Europe’s green transformation and the EU’s
economic integration.
If you think the Americans getting ahead of Europe on
climate sounds like the world upside down, wait until
you hear this: the main opponents of a bold response
are the supposedly great Europeans Olaf Scholz and
Emmanuel Macron – with the forever despondent Dutch
premier, Mark Rutte. And the main supporter? The far-
right nationalist Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni.
Germany’s finance minister, Christian Lindner, has
firmly opposed repeating the Covid-era joint borrowing
fund for climate purposes. The pandemic fund was not
intended as the beginning of a federalised treasury, he
said. Much better, Berlin argues, to allow each country to
subsidise industry nationally as it sees fit. France agrees,
and suggests merely rebranding unspent pandemic
money for the purposes of green investment.
This, however, would be no better
Lorenzo than the economic nationalism that
Marsili is a Europe accuses the US of. When the
philosopher, EU relaxed state aid rules for energy
activist in response to the war in Ukraine last
and social year, nearly 80% of new subsidies
entrepreneur were found to have been dished out
in Germany and to a lesser extent
France. Authorising more national industrial subsidies
would open the floodgates to beggar-thy-neighbour
competition, with Germany and France siphoning off
clean energy industry from the rest of the continent.
Italy’s Meloni, by contrast, demands that the EU act
as a single economic power with a common industrial
policy and joint funding to match. Of course, she hasn’t
overnight become a European federalist. She simply
understands that Italy’s national interest lies in a united
response. Her Europeanism is the rational consequence
of Italy’s fragile financial and geopolitical position.
Divided, the 27 are bound to be bullied by foes and
friends alike – the American Inflation Reduction Act is
the clearest reminder of that. Without unity, the EU’s
role as a world leader in the fight against climate change
all but withers away. Allowing Meloni – who until
recently was branded a fascist – to pass as the advocate
of a united Europe is the undesirable consequence of
protectionist thinking in Paris and Berlin.
The European governments’ plan could embrace the
44 countries of the newly launched European Political
Community, thereby including the UK and Turkey.
The EU lobbied the US to join the climate struggle and
wanted the new rightwing Italian government not to sow
discord and division. On both accounts, it got its wish.
It’s now time to deliver.
The Green party shares power in Germany and Macron
stands as a driver of European integration. Will they now
pull Europe together around an ambitious climate plan,
or will they let Meloni grandstand as the new Macron? •
10 February 2023 The Guardian Weekly
48 Opinion
GER M A N Y
I went viral for a meme,
but Scholz’s hesitancy
over Ukraine is no joke
Timothy Garton Ash
couple of weeks ago, at a moment
of huge frustration over Chancellor
Olaf Scholz’s foot-dragging on
allowing Leopard tanks to go to
Ukraine, a Ukrainian friend sent me
a satirical mockup on “Scholzing”.
Next to a photograph of the
chancellor, it defined Scholzing,
dictionary-style, as: “verb: communicating good
intentions only to use/find/invent any reason imaginable
to delay these and/or prevent them from happening”. I
found this amusing, quickly retweeted it, and thought
GUARDIAN DESIGN/
no more about it. My Twitter account seemed to be
TWITTER buzzing, but then I’d been writing a lot about the issue.
The Guardian Weekly 10 February 2023
Six days later, I was watching an interview with Scholz
on German television when the interviewer confronted
him with “Scholzing”, attributing the coinage to “a
British historian”. I went back Twitter to find that this
one quick tweet had been viewed 1.1m times. In German
and international media, the definition was being widely
quoted as mine. Since, as we all know, the internet
never lies, it has now become a historical fact that I thus
defined “Scholzing”. (I subsequently clarified this on
Twitter, but no one reads the clarification.)
I asked my Ukrainian friend if he knew who was
actually behind this satirical mockup. He didn’t, but
Ukrainians have been using the word for months.
Already last June, a tweet from @biz_ukraine_mag
reported that “to ‘Scholz’ is now an accepted term in
Ukraine meaning to continually promise something
without ever actually having any intention of doing it”.
Still, the reactions have been interesting. One of
the editors of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,
Germany’s leading conservative paper, wrote a semi-
humorous editorial commentary in which he said that
“our English-speaking friends” would be better advised
to reflect first on “Bidening, Trumping, Trussing and
Johnsoning, not to mention Harrying and Meghaning”.
The clear implication, albeit lightly expressed, was that
we Anglo-Saxons should mind our own business. Since,
 Founded 1821 Independently owned by the Scott Trust

however, the coinage comes from Ukraine, not the UK,

this little sideswipe need bother us no longer.
More significant was Scholz’s own response. Having
History is not just stories
dilated on the amount of support Germany has given
to Ukraine, he said “the translation of Scholzing is
‘Germany is doing the most’”. It’s true that German
of battles and coups, but
support for Ukraine has been considerable, as you would
hope from the democracy with the EU’s biggest economy
and the most extensive ties to eastern Europe. Yet to say
how people feel about life

‘E
“Germany is doing the most” is not merely self-satisfied, ras have their limitations of glasnost. The few
even self-righteous, but also self-evidently false. surfaces,” writes addressing the camera are not
the German experts but ordinary citizens.
It’s the United States that has done the most. Indeed, for historian Karl A woman observes that she
all the courage and skill of the Ukrainian armed forces, Schlögel. “They can be smooth “used to dream, to make plans,
were it not for the scale and speed of US military support or rough. They can vanish but nothing worked out ... I
much more of Ukraine might today be occupied by or dissolve. They can be felt. won’t dream again ... I don’t
Russia. So we Europeans should be reflecting on why it What wrapping paper was and believe in anything or anyone.”
is that, nearly 80 years after 1945, we still rely on Uncle what it meant is something one The series is subtitled What It
Sam to defend European soil, freedom and security. only begins to understand now Felt Like to Live Through the
Meanwhile, a huge tragedy is unfolding before our that it has disappeared … in the Collapse of Communism and
eyes. What we – and democratic Germany more than flood of plastic bags.” Democracy.
anyone – swore after 1945 would “never again” happen Even when it focuses on These works seek not the
is happening again: a European country is subjected to a ordinary people, we tend to objectivity we associate with
war of terror that has clearly genocidal aspects. think of history as a narrative academic tomes and high-
Now a new Russian offensive seems imminent. More of wars and laws, replete brow factual programming,
people will be killed, maimed, orphaned, marked for an with stark facts: 13 million but subjectivity. They evoke
entire lifetime. In such a situation, time is of the essence. unemployed, 40 million dead an understanding of how it
“Scholzing”, in the sense of careful, slow, decision- in a famine. But it is also how felt to live through the Soviet
making, is fine in peacetime economic people experienced these Union and its collapse, as the
Timothy policymaking, but gives the other side things, and how they felt about Belarusian Nobel laureate
Garton Ash the advantage in war. (One should them, and the places, objects Svetlana Alexievich did in
is a historian, note that there are a few Scholzers and habits that constitute what her extraordinary polyphonic
political writer inside the Biden administration, and Prof Schlögel calls a “lifeworld” oral history Second-hand
and Guardian in some other European capitals.) in his forthcoming book The Time. This is a chronicle told
columnist It would have been possible to start Soviet Century: Archaeology not from offices of state, but
preparing a European Leopard of a Lost World. It is a kind of from kitchens where onions
initiative six months ago. Germany would have been at montage of coarse wrapping sprout in old jars. “I don’t ask
the heart of a European concert of nations. This would paper, dusty museums and people about socialism, I want
have been true “European sovereignty” in practice – and Lilac eau de parfum. It nods as to know about love, jealousy,
welcome German leadership. well to what is missing – the childhood, old age. Music,
Nobody knows what will happen on the battlefield lost sounds of a ring at the dances, hairdos,” the author
this year, but one quite probable result of the slowness door, announcing your house writes. “It’s the only way to
and hesitancy exemplified by the German chancellor was about to be searched; the chase the catastrophe into the
is a kind of escalating stalemate, with ongoing trench turn of a key in a cell’s lock. contours of the ordinary.”
warfare resembling that of the first world war. When It has striking parallels with Dictators understand
the shooting war eventually winds down, there could Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone, the importance of feelings.
be a semi-frozen conflict, with Russia hanging on to a the new documentary series Prof Schlögel, who began
significant part of the territory it has occupied by force from director Adam Curtis, work on his project in 2014 –
since 24 February 2022. At home, Putin could then claim taken from thousands of urged on by Vladimir Putin’s
a kind of victory, a historic reconquest of at least part hours shot by BBC news crews annexation of Crimea – writes
of Catherine the Great’s Novorossiya (New Russia). His before and after the collapse of the way that the political
example would encourage Xi Jinping to have a go at of the Soviet Union. We see leadership has maintained
Taiwan, driving a bigger nail into the coffin of a “rules- scientists entering Chernobyl its own power by exploiting
based international order”. This would be the negation in suits they made from plastic “post-imperial phantom pains,
of everything democratic Germany has stood for. and tape; the body of a young nostalgic yearnings and fears
These are the real stakes, the reason “Scholzing” is woman killed in the crackdown of the loss of social status to
no laughing matter. I believe passionately that Germany on pro-independence protests pursue an aggressive policy,
should be in the lead, not the rear, in a shared, Euro- in Tblisi; and a phone-in with not excluding war against
Atlantic effort to bring lasting peace. If the term actually KGB generals who assure neighbouring states”. Material
came to signify “Germany is doing the most” – also viewers that they do not keep and emotional experience is
acting fast and decisively – I would be the first to sing files on individuals – neatly how we encounter the world –
hymns of praise to Scholzing. If only it would be true  illustrating the impact and the and also shapes it 

10 February 2023 The Guardian Weekly

50 Opinion
Letters
WRITE ‘Two posh boys’ laid the
TO US foundation for today’s ills
Nesrine Malik’s excellent
article (The old boys’
club has evolved into
Letters for “the network” of rich
publication financiers, Opinion,
weekly.letters@ 3 February) calls to mind
theguardian.com
the two great architects of
—
Britain’s recent decline,
Please include a
full postal address
George Osborne and
and a reference David Cameron – network
to the article. insiders who exemplify
We may edit letters. the blurred vision of
Submission and the public that Malik
publication of all describes. This enabled
letters is subject the “two posh boys who
to our terms and don’t know the price of
conditions, see: milk” (Nadine Dorries)
THEGUARDIAN.COM/
LET TERS-TERMS to do the financials over
public sector cuts without
caring about the effects.
Editorial
Editor: Graham Their austerity, and
Snowdon Brexit, decimated services
Guardian Weekly, for the poorest and
Kings Place, reduced our resilience to
90 York Way, cope with the events of the
London N1 9GU, last few years. The current
UK refusal to properly fund
health, social care and
To contact the
education by the joyriders
editor directly:
who followed them is, as
editorial.feedback
@theguardian.com
Nesrine says, not because
the money isn’t there but
Corrections because of where it might
Our policy is to have to come from.
correct significant Gary Woodhouse
errors as soon as Radcliffe-on-Trent,
possible. Please England, UK
write to guardian.
readers@ • Nesrine Malik should be
theguardian.com
exalted for her wonderful
or the readers’
sentence on the sleaze
editor, Kings Place,
90 York Way,
at the heart of this
London N1 9GU, government: “Democracy
UK doesn’t ‘die in darkness’, it
dies at dinner.”
Roger McGarva
Nottingham, England, UK
Millions of reasons to give
Zahawi some leeway
Nadhim Zahawi (Spotlight,
3 February) writes to the
prime minister about his
fleeing to Britain as a child:
“I believe that in no other
country on earth would
my story be possible.”
Fortunately for him,
neither Suella Braverman
nor Priti Patel were home
secretary at the time.
Henry Spyvee
Guildford, England, UK
• No one should criticise
Nadhim Zahawi for his
careless error unless they
can say, hand on heart,
that they have never
forgotten to pay £3m
($3.7m) of tax they owe.
Mike Cashman
Milton Keynes, England, UK
UK’s Covid record is poor
compared with Europe
George Monbiot’s
concerns over long-term
Covid and repeating Covid
are very well grounded,
but there is a key aspect
of Covid in the UK that he
doesn’t mention (Opinion,
3 February). This country,
for months now, has been
the worst in western
Europe for Covid deaths
per million people.
According to the Johns
Hopkins Coronavirus
Resource Center, Norway
has a death rate less
than a third of the UK’s.
Spain, Portugal, France,
Italy, Belgium and the
Netherlands all have lower
death rates than we have.
Had the UK done as well
as Germany in controlling
the virus, we would have
had thousands fewer
deaths than the 217,000
to date. The government’s
record on Covid is
shamefully poor.
Cameron Miller
London, England, UK
• Well said, George
Monbiot! “My mask
protects you, your
mask protects me” has
become “my liberty
infects you”. This has to
change before anyone
can say the pandemic is
anywhere near over – I
write as someone who
is approaching her third
anniversary of shielding.
Joan Twelves
London, England, UK
The approach to ageing is
just the same old story
Your story The grey leap
forward (The big story,
27 January), like so much
discussion on ageing,
defines this stage of the
life cycle largely in terms
of capitalist economics,
a reductionist mindset
I find as guilt-inducing
and life-denying as any
other fundamentalism.
What would happen if
the debate were reframed
with Theodore Roszak’s
statement at its heart:
“The ageing population is
not a problem, it is the true
wealth of nations”?
Annie March
West Hobart, Tasmania,
Australia
Jamaica’s royal escape is a
blueprint for republicans
Barbara Blake-Hannah’s
article on Jamaica (Our
island nation isn’t nearly
so keen to sing God
Save the King, Opinion,
27 January) should act as a
beacon for Australians.
The suggestion is that
a presidential candidate
be identified by the prime
minister and leader of
the opposition. This
candidate would then be
confirmed by two-thirds
of parliament for an initial
term of six years and a
limit of two terms.
Sadly, the current state
of Australian politics
makes such cooperation
positively utopian.
Dr Juliet Flesch
Kew, Victoria, Australia
An obscene take on
humans’ effect on Earth
Please allow me to join
what I believe will be
a tsunami of readers’
comments on the article
regarding the dawn of the
Anthropocene era (Are we
... related?, 13 January).
Of course, you missed
the obvious new era: the
Obscene era. It is filled with
overfed little men who
have destroyed our planet
for their gluttonous little
selves: all the resources; all
the money; all the power;
unfortunately, none of the
foresight. And we did not
stop them.
Kate Delano-Condax Decker
Moorestown, New Jersey,
US

A WEEK
IN VENN
DI AGR A MS
Edith Pritchett

The Guardian Weekly 10 February 2023

 51
Film,, music,, art,, books & more

DANCE
Moves like …
Leonard Cohen?
Page 54 

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10 February 2023 The Guardian Weekly

52 Culture
Games
By Keza MacDonald

VERY NINTENDO FAN REMEMBERS

THE GAME THAT CONVERTED THEM.
Perhaps it was running and jumping
around as Mario in an abstract, toylike
playspace, thrilling at the lightness and
precision of his movement. It could have
been becoming hypnotised by falling
Tetris blocks on the Game Boy’s tiny
monochrome screen, or choosing a first Pokémon, mar-
velling at how the little collection of fat pixels representing
your chosen critter instantly assumed an imagined person-
ality. Millions of people had their first Nintendo moment
during 2020’s lockdowns, moving to a virtual deserted
island full of quirky neighbours in Animal Crossing.
For more than 40 years, this Japanese giant of
entertainment has been making video games that have
shaped the tastes of the people who played them as chil-
dren; there is surely no game developer working today who
is untouched by its influence. Its latest console, meanwhile
– the Nintendo Switch, released in 2017 – recently became
the fastest ever to reach 100m sales, and stands a good
chance of becoming the bestselling console ever. Barring an
extremely unlikely sales slump over Christmas, the Switch
will leapfrog to No 3 on the bestselling list when Nintendo
announces its quarterly results this month. Only the DS
and Sony’s PlayStation 2 are ahead of it.
Few companies enjoy such staying power in the nov-
elty-hungry, fast-moving world of video games – or even
the wider world of pop culture. Mario first appeared in
Donkey Kong in 1981, and is about to make a mid-career
pivot and star in his first animated film this year. (Shh,
nobody mention 1993’s utterly bizarre live-action Super
Mario Bros movie, featuring Bob Hoskins as Mario: every-
one, including the actors who starred in it, would rather
forget that ever happened.) And for those who want to
immerse themselves further, there is even a California
theme park: Super Nintendo World. Yes, others have chal-
lenged Nintendo’s creative and commercial dominance,
sometimes successfully – particularly Sega in the early
1990s, and Sony throughout the 00s. Smartphones and
online gaming have reshaped video games and how we play
and think about them since we first picked up a sword in
The Legend of Zelda. But whatever else has been happen-
ing in the world, Nintendo has kept quietly doing its own,
inimitable, sometimes weirdly archaic thing in its secluded
Kyoto HQ, seemingly unbothered by the competition.

WHAT IS BEHIND THIS SUCCESS? The obvious answer is

that Nintendo’s games are really, really good; colourful
capsule universes that spark imagination and playfulness,
however old they (or their players) are. Its technological
innovations are significant, too: the directional buttons
and analogue sticks that still appear on practically every
video game controller were first seen on Nintendo’s con-
soles. But if you look closely at the history of the company
and its creative output, you’ll see something else: a thirst
for experimentation that comes with a willingness to fail.
“It’s crazy that Nintendo has stayed so relevant for so
long. Is any other stable of characters developed in the
1980s still so commercially and culturally relevant today?”
says Chris Kohler, editorial director at video game preser-
vationists Digital Eclipse and author of Power-Up: How

2023
2023

Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life. “How
is this even possible? I think Nintendo has been great at
growing and retaining talent and ensuring that continuity
of game design knowhow … Nintendo has always followed
a gameplay-first design philosophy: get something down
that’s fun to play, and then start thinking about the story,
the characters.”
Fun first is a principle that can be traced back to before
Nintendo made video games. Before Mario, Nintendo was a
toymaker; before that, from 1899 until the 1960s, Nintendo
made hanafuda playing cards, favoured by everyone from
families to, reportedly, yakuza gangsters. Hiroshi Yamauchi,
Nintendo’s president from 1949 until 2002, was the person
who led the company’s transformation; starting in the 60s,
he encouraged the engineer Gunpei Yokoi – first hired to fix
the machines that made its playing cards – to experiment
with electronic and mechanical toys.
“It seemed as if the designers at Nintendo at the time
almost got carte blanche,” explains Erik Voskuil, who has
collected Nintendo curios for more than 20 years and runs
Before Mario, a site dedicated to the company’s pre-video
game history. “They tried many ideas to see what would
sell, including some truly wacky ones: a remotely controlled
racing car that can only steer left, a mini-vacuum cleaner
and a walkie-talkie that transmits sound through light.”
Some of Yokoi’s toys were commercially successful:
1966’s Ultra Hand, an extendable gripper toy; the Love
Tester, from 1969, which asked couples to hold an electrode
each and then scored their chemistry out of 100. (His most
successful invention would be none other than the Game
Boy, released in 1989). “People working at Nintendo today
are very much aware of the company’s history,” says Voskuil.
“The company culture formed at that time largely endures
to this day: daring to be innovative, which also includes
accepting the occasional failure, and getting the maximum
amount of fun out of clever use of modest technical means.”
The weirdness of Nintendo’s toys lives on in many of its
games consoles. Nintendo has rarely been at the cutting
edge technologically; instead, its research-and-develop-
ment engineers have found ways to do unexpected things
with technology that already exists. When Microsoft’s Xbox
was perfecting online play on a home console in 2006,
Nintendo released the resolutely offline multiplayer-
focused Wii and its novel motion-powered controller,
which instantly became a bestseller. A few years before
the dawn of the age of smartphones, Nintendo put out
the DS, which looks like a cross between an old Japanese
mobile phone and a Palm Pilot.
Not all Nintendo’s consoles have been wild successes.
Two of its biggest flops were the headache-inducing Virtual
Boy, a bright-red set of 3D goggles that debuted in 1995, and
the awkward Wii U. Because Nintendo has always sought
to make money on everything it sells – instead of spend-
ing fortunes manufacturing and selling technologically
advanced consoles at a loss before making its money back
through the games themselves, as Microsoft and Sony do
– it has a multibillion-dollar war chest.
Another huge component in Nintendo’s enduring
success is that its games were the first to become truly
multigenerational. Kids who grew up with Mario, Zelda and
Pokémon on the Game Boy are now playing those games
with their own kids on the Switch – both the newer itera-
tions and the originals. It may seem weird that fully grown
adults would continue to love games that are overtly and
53
unashamedly family-friendly, but for some Nintendo fans,
that’s part of the point. Nintendo represents an uncompli-
catedly fun approach to video games, a bridge back to the
joy and excitement of childhood play.
The visual style of Nintendo, too, radiates joy: colourful,
cartoonish, cute but not infantile. It’s Pixar, not Fisher-
Price. The aesthetic varies from game to game, from mod-
ern Zelda’s wistful watercolour landscapes to Splatoon’s
harajuku-esque street-fashion to Animal Crossing’s cute-
but-weird, intentionally lo-fi vibe. It has inspired legions
of artists and fashion bloggers, who fill Instagram with
Nintendo-inspired art, interior design, outfits, even food.
“Nintendo’s games are a welcome alternative to the real-
istic but rather grim and foreboding titles on rival systems,”
says Damien McFerran, editorial director at retro games
site Time Extension, who previously ran specialist site
Nintendo Life for many years. “It might seem rather childish
for someone in their 40s to say this, but I’m a sucker for the
bright colours and breezy, inoffensive atmosphere fostered
in Nintendo’s games. I can safely play a title such as Super
Mario Odyssey and not only be sure it’s not going to cause
upset but know, too, that I’ll have a good time myself.”
A LOT OF NINTENDO’S GAMES HAVE THEIR ROOTS
IN CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCES. Its most famous game
In the end, designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, was inspired to create The
Legend of Zelda in the 1980s by his own youthful explora-
it comes tions of the woodlands and caves of the Japanese coun-
down to tryside. Pokémon’s mastermind, Satoshi Tajiri, used to
capture and collect bugs as a kid, and imagined the virtual
this: critters in his games crawling across the link cables that
Nintendo joined players’ Game Boys together. There is a difference
makes between childlike and childish. Nintendo trades in fun and
wonder, in little “wow” moments, in the words of veteran
people Nintendo designers Shinya Takahashi and Hisashi Nogami.
smile To protect that, Nintendo has to preserve its willingness
to mess around, take risks and occasionally release games
that aren’t destined to be bestsellers. Chris Kohler wonders
whether the wildness of “weird Nintendo” – the Nintendo
that put out a series of bizarre, sometimes side-splitting
musical skits in the form of Rhythm Paradise, or the
WarioWare mini-game collection that you controlled by
rotating the Game Boy Advance – is fading, now that the
elders who built the company’s creative culture have left,
aged out or passed away. “I feel like Nintendo of late has
retreated into safe mega-brands,” says Kohler. “We’re seeing
a lot of Mario, Zelda, Kirby and [anime strategy series] Fire
Emblem, which, it should be noted, has been probably the
biggest surprise success of the last few years for Nintendo.
The weird experimental stuff that we used to see a lot of on
Wii and 3DS is nowhere to be found on the Switch.”
A successor to the Switch has been rumoured for some
time, and conventional wisdom suggests that the company
should be hard at work on a more technologically advanced
 In control successor. But since when has Nintendo ever followed con-
Designer Shigeru ventional wisdom? For Erik Voskuil, familiarity is no bad
Miyamoto and thing. After all, Nintendo makes some of the best games
a selection of in the world; is it so bad to have more of the same? “From
Nintendo’s best- the time Nintendo reached global success in the 1980s,
known creations it has managed to stay both familiar as well as exciting; a
NINTENDO/GUARDIAN golden formula,” he says. “In the end, it comes down to
DESIGN; WILL IRELAND/
EDGE/FUTURE/GETTY; this: Nintendo makes people smile.” •
GAME/PA; JH PHOTO/
ALAMY; JARRETERA/
KEZA MACDONALD IS THE GUARDIAN’S VIDEO GAMES EDITOR
ALAMY The Super Mario Bros Movie is in cinemas from 7 April
10 February 2023 The Guardian Weekly
54 Culture
Stage
T
DA NC E he voice is unmistakable. That rich grain
and mournful, lived-in tone can only
be Leonard Cohen. His song Suzanne
plays, while on stage a woman falls
Famous
into the arms of a man. He curls then lifts and
balances her body again and again, without her
feet ever touching the ground. The dancers are
blue from Canadian company Ballets Jazz Montréal,
and Cohen gave his blessing to the creation of
this show set to his songs. He agreed to the music
leotard selections and chose specific recordings, but died
in November 2016 at the age of 82, before the
rehearsal process had begun.
“He was supposed to be at the premiere,” says
Leonard Cohen gave his dancer Andrew Mikhaiel. “He was supposed to
see the show. So the moment we stepped into the
blessing to a dance show studio on the first day, there was a weight to it.
set to his songs, but did not We had to represent him and deliver something
live to see it. On tour, its quite magical. He’s a Canadian icon: it was such
a huge responsibility. But at the premiere – I will
performers recall feeling never forget this – we were all in a circle together
his presence on stage and we felt his presence.”
The show, titled Dance Me, has been touring
By Lyndsey Winship since 2017. In 2021, a new director, Alexandra
Damiani, took over from Louis Robitaille, who
commissioned the work. Often new bosses want
to put their own stamp on things – and Damiani
did initially have doubts about dancing to such
distinctive, well-loved music. “I could see all
the traps it could fall into,” she says. “The work
of Leonard Cohen can stand on its own. I don’t
need a dance to enjoy it, so they had better give
▼ Boogie Street me another way of experiencing it.” Then she
The show saw the show. “I was disarmed by the beauty of
performed by it,” says Damiani. “It’s such a poetic homage.”
Ballets Jazz She can’t have been blind to the commercial
Montréal appeal either, nor the instant connection audi-
MICHAEL SLOBODIAN
ences have with the music – although Dance Me
The Guardian Weekly 10 February 2023
is not like a jukebox musical, where you use the
songs to tell stories or illustrate a singer’s biogra-
phy. There’s no straightforward narrative here:
instead there are moods and themes, flickers of
imagery, hints of relationships. “There’s sensual-
ity, depression, love, loss – Cohen’s body of work
represents everything about life,” says Mikhaiel.
“It’s like we take a walk with the dancers,” says
Damiani, “through fall, winter, spring and sum-
mer. We go through time with them. Cohen did
say, ‘There is a crack in everything. That’s how
the light gets in.’ To me, the dance is almost going
through the cracks of the songs.”
Despite their name – they started out in 1972,
performing ballet to jazz – Ballets Jazz Montréal
are now a contemporary company, and Dance
Me was created by three choreographers: Bel-
gian Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, Greek choreogra-
pher Andonis Foniadakis and the Swiss-based
Briton Ihsan Rustem. Each have different styles,
although in the final piece you can’t always be
sure who made what. Foniadakis brings “life
force and bite”, says Damiani. “In Boogie Street,
it feels very sexy, uber-energetic and dynamic,
which is part of the essence of the company.”
Mikhaiel says: “I see the music when I watch
Andonis’s work.”
Rustem, meanwhile, was most interested in
the stories and poetry of the songs, arriving at
rehearsal with his “bible” full of lyrics. While
Lopez Ochoa, known for making the Frida
Kahlo ballet Broken Wings for English National
Ballet and A Streetcar Named Desire for Scottish
Ballet, is described by Damiani as “geometric and
clean – but also very human”.
The performers are very easy to watch, quick
and lithe, semi-clad, molten bodies and long legs
everywhere, all very seductive (as Damiani puts
it, “bare-chested and giving it 200%”). But they
also feed on some of the layers and contradic-
tions of the music, which moves from ominous to
yearning, haunting to sweet; dark and light at the
same time. “Dance Me to the End of Love is the
most beautiful sad song – it sounds gorgeous but
the message is so heavy,” says Mikhaiel. “Famous
Blue Raincoat sounds like a lullaby, but it’s about
a love triangle. In our show, it’s visually beauti-
ful but Andonis does a good job of showing how
chaotic relationships can be.”
Mikhaiel finds himself tuning into different
elements of the music with each performance.
“Sometimes you dance to the tone of his voice.
Sometimes you react more to the musicality, the
instruments. Sometimes you find yourself lost in
the story of the song.” Despite dancing in more
than 180 shows, Mikhaiel still finds it a thrill to
move to Cohen’s voice. “I get chills listening to
the songs,” he says. “Every time the beat kicks in
in Nevermind, my heart flutters.”
LYNDSEY WINSHIP IS THE GUARDIAN’S
DANCE CRITIC
Dance Me is at Sadler’s Wells, London, until
14 February, with further shows in France
and Germany during March
 Culture 55
Photography

Sea change
BBC radio’s shipping forecast holds
a special place in British culture.
Mark Power tried to capture its
mystery in his 1996 book, which
has been updated with new images

By Sean O’Hagan

T
hough the shipping forecast is still
broadcast daily on BBC Radio 4, the
strange resonance of what Seamus
Heaney called “that strong gale-warn-
ing voice” may not, in an age of digital informa-
tion overload, cast quite the same spell it once
did on the collective imagination. It nevertheless
remains a constant for many listeners, reassur-
ing in its steadiness even as it gives notice of
unruly swells and approaching storms in those
faraway-sounding hinterlands of Dogger, Viking
and German Bight.
“It occupies a deeply rooted place in our cul-
ture,” says Mark Power, whose book The Ship-
ping Forecast comprises photographs from the 31
sea areas that are enumerated in the daily radio
litany. “For many of us there is an essential mys-
tery to the shipping forecast that perhaps comes
from hearing it in the background as a child, but
not really understanding it. And, even as we grow
older, it’s difficult for most of us to understand
it, because we’re not depending on it the way
sailors or trawler crews depend on it.” ▲ Coast is clear
The new edition of his book expands on Fastnet, Sunday
the original, which was published in 1996 and 9 April 1995.
became a surprise bestseller. Variable,
The idea for the project came to him in 1990, becoming mainly
when he spotted a tea towel imprinted with a southerly 3 or 4.
map of the areas listed in the shipping forecast Fair. Moderate
in a Royal National Lifeboat Institution gift shop. or good
Then, in late 1992, he began photographing
around sea area Wight, which includes Brighton, Line in the sand
where he still lives. Initially he approached the Fisher, Friday
project with no real understanding of what it 11 August 1995.
would entail in terms of the distances involved. Variable 3,
“I knew what I didn’t want to do, which was becoming
to make heroic or romantic pictures of man southwesterly 4.
battling the elements at sea. Instead, I wanted to Fair. Moderate
approach it from the point of view of an ordinary or good
person, so I chose places that could be reached
by public transport – bus, train and ferry.” The
exceptions were the remote sea areas of Sole and
Bailey, which he accessed by hitching rides on
Met Office helicopters.
As the project progressed, he bought a camper Photographs by
van, travelling alone or with his wife for  Mark Power/
weeks at a time, usually in the summer break Magnum Photos

10 February 2023 The Guardian Weekly

56 Culture
Photography
from his teaching job. “There were many dark
moments of self-doubt,” he says, “but slowly,
through doing it, the nature of the project began
to reveal itself.”
As with the original edition, each photograph
in the new book is accompanied by the location
and the 6am forecast for that area on the day the
picture was made. The effect is slightly disori-
enting, even surreal, as with a shot of two bare-
chested boys in tracksuit bottoms and trainers,
bracing themselves against the cold spray of a
petrol station hose. Taken somewhere in Ice-
land, the caption reads: “South-easterly backing
north-easterly 3 or 4. Occasional rain or drizzle.
Moderate with fog patches.”
Elsewhere, there are brooding images of
elemental emptiness and
▼ Shore shot subtle geometric landscapes
Cromarty, that hint at the more formally
Wednesday 18 rigorous conceptual thrust of
August 1993.
Power’s later work.
Variable 3 or The new edition adds
less, becoming 100 images to the original
southwesterly 3 63. Power tells me he was
or 4, occasionally taken aback by what he calls
5. Occasional rain “moments of complete blank-
later. Mainly good ness” while re-editing the
14,000-plus photographs he
made while on his epic voyage of discovery. “I
realised that if it were not for the photographs,
I would never have known I’d been to this Heb-
ridean island,” he says of one image in the book
of an old man standing, bent over, behind some
austere buildings. “It was never about creating
the definitive photograph of these places, it’s just
fleeting impressions that in some way relate to
the peculiar fascination of that mysterious voice
on the radio.” Observer
SEAN O’HAGAN WRITES ON PHOTOGRAPHY FOR
THE GUARDIAN AND THE OBSERVER
The Shipping Forecast is published by Gost
The Guardian Weekly 10 February 2023
MUSIC
Abri Cyclonique
Polobi & the Gwo Ka Masters,
Real World
★★★★☆
The voice of 69-year-old
Guadeloupean singer Moïse Polobi
is a uniquely powerful presence.
Deep, laden with heavy vibrato and
rasping through yearning melody,
his voice has been honed through
a lifetime spent performing in rural
performances where groups sing
and play gwo ka drum in unison in
the forests near his home town of
Petit-Bourg, fighting to be heard
among the beats of the drum and
the surrounding sounds of nature.
In 2020, an impromptu concert
with percussionist and Petit-
Bourg local Klod Kiavué sparked
the idea of Polobi’s solo debut.
Produced by Mbongwana Star
collaborator Doctor L, the result is
Abri Cyclonique. Doctor L’s work on
the album transposes a remarkable
voice on to a musical backing
embellished with electronic effects.
Opener Kawmélito lets Polobi’s
vocal power ring out through delay,
turning his creole song into a kind of
freeform dub poetry.
The genre-bending continues:
Nèg Africa places Polobi’s longing,
ascending vocal line over a Cuban
percussion rhythm and high-register
guitars, while Ojéliya skitters over
an Afrobeat funk.
Throughout, the unwavering
strength of Polobi’s baritone
lends the genre-hopping a sense
of coherence, rather than playing
like an uneven pastiche. Although
the traditional drum and vocal
minimalism of gwo ka music is
discarded, these embellished
arrangements bring Polobi’s voice
to a wider audience and showcase
his dexterity, heralding a new talent
born from a lifetime’s experience.
Ammar Kalia
Podcast of the week I Am America
This new series from Black-ish star Tracee Ellis Ross profiles people
of colour whose unconventional success stories are “redefining …
the possibility of our country”. Interviewees largely tell their own
stories, but it’s Ellis Ross’s weirdly profound intro and outro that’s
most affecting: “These stories are ... the best of us.” Alexi Duggins
FILM
Saint Omer
Dir: Alice Diop
★★★★★
Documentary maker Alice Diop
delivers a piercing fiction feature
in the form of a courtroom drama,
based on a real-life case. The
severity and poise of this calmly
paced movie, its emotional reserve
and moral seriousness make it an
extraordinary experience.
Kayije Kagame plays Rama, an
author and academic who lives
in Paris and heads to the coastal
town of Saint Omer to write
what her publishers hope will be
commercially delicious literary
reportage about a shocking case.
Laurence Coly (superbly played
by Guslagie Malanda, above) is on
trial for murdering her 15-month-
old daughter, by leaving her on the
beach to be drowned by the tide.
Rama is overwhelmed by what
she witnesses and by Coly’s defence:
that she was subject to sorcery and
spells from her aunts in Senegal.
This is inspired by the case of
Fabienne Kabou, who relied on the
same argument and whose 2015 trial
was attended by Diop.
The gripping legal proceedings
touch on race, class, gender, culture
and the tide of history and power. It
is vital film-making. Peter Bradshaw
On release in the UK and Australia
 Culture 57
Books
founding myth from the bare bones of history.
He’s enjoying the enterprise and his sense of
fun is infectious.
As for Pampa Kampana, she’s both mediator
and participant, blessed (she thinks cursed) with
an extended lifespan that roughly corresponds
with that of the empire itself (1336-1565). Pampa
grows a mighty city, Bisnaga, from a handful of
beans and okra seeds. She breathes life into its
inhabitants, handpicks a cowherd as her king, a
Portuguese merchant as her lover. But, in true
mythic fashion, the demigod’s authority is fitful.
She’s variously powerful and weak as the story
demands, frequently at the mercy of the men
she’s put on the throne. Sometimes she’s wor-
shipped, more often she’s hounded. But by dint
of her sex she’s denied the chance to be monarch;
the role, she admits, “I wanted most of all”.
Every futuristic science fiction tale is unavoid-
ably concerned with the here and now. The same
surely goes for historical fiction. In the course
of Victory City, Rushdie sporadically frames his
invented past as a window on the present. There

T
FICTION he Vijayanagara empire covered most are protests that recall China’s current “white
of south India in the 15th and 16th paper revolution” plus a heroine who’s pushing
centuries. Viewed from one angle, it was for gender parity and religious tolerance, a king-
a seedbed for the globalised modern dom where women “are neither veiled nor hid-
Lightning seeds world, in that it became a haven for art and new den”. And yet each time Pampa’s mission seems
ideas and an economic powerhouse that traded to be gaining momentum, it is dashed. Bisnaga,
Completed before he with China and Venice. Viewed from another, it we soon realise, is less a grand utopian project
was a thicket of intrigue, rocked by rival factions, than a beach being dragged by the tides. The arc
was attacked last year, foreign wars and palace coups. Which is to say it of Pampa’s history bends towards wreckage,
Salman Rushdie’s book was everything: noble and vile, progressive and despair and realignment.
regressive, the Hindu heaven of Svarga twinned If this sounds fatalistic, the tone is anything
about a 15th-century with Game of Thrones’ King’s Landing. Only the but. On the page, Rushdie’s fairytale of futility
Indian empire has an most brilliant or foolhardy scholar would dream feels positively jaunty, very nearly a romp,
of tackling its history in a single volume. and it covers the ground at a brisk, steady clip.
infectious sense of fun According to Victory City, one such scholar Victory City folds historical figures in with fic-
was the demigod Pampa Kampana, the empire’s tional jokers. It frames its myriad support play-
By Xan Brooks mother, midwife and general overseer, who ers in literary medium shot, never granting us a
documented the era in a narrative poem she then closeup, so we know them by their actions and
sealed in a pot and buried in the ground. Victory their most basic traits (the clever one; the aggres-
City, we are assured, is the abridged translation sive one). As the years pile up, even these figures
of Pampa’s epic Jayaparajaya (a compound word begin to echo and recur. “I’ve had enough of your
meaning victory and defeat), retold in “simpler reappearances,” sighs the longsuffering Pampa.
language” and stripped back from its original The goddess grows weary; happily the tale
24,000 verses. And if the result, while involving remains buoyant. Rushdie, it should be noted,
and enjoyable, rarely troubles the realms of the finished Victory City months before last August’s
divine, that’s probably what happens when a onstage attack at Chautauqua Institution in New
mortal rewrites a deity’s prose. York state, so that it reaches us like something
This lowly narrator is never named. But for freshly unearthed and unbottled, this tale of a
the sake of convenience – and at the risk of world-building poet who toils to outpace her
letting daylight in on magic – let’s foes. Rushdie’s heroine is alive to the
assume it’s Salman Rushdie himself, dangers but swept up in the story, as
disguised as a goddess and made up though believing that by spinning a
as a scribe, like the smallest in a set tale she might ward off evil, or at least
▲ The fable man
of nesting dolls. “[I’m] the humble leave something good and lasting
Rushdie spins an author,” he tells us, the old bamboo- behind in her wake. Pampa accepts
elaborate
zler. “Neither a scholar nor a poet but that all empires eventually collapse
merely a spinner of yarns.” Humble BOOK OF into dust. “Words are the only victors,”
founding myth
or not, Rushdie’s lavish, playful 15th THE WEEK she concludes, and stories, at their
from the bare
bones of history
novel plants him firmly back on Indian Victory City best, cheat death and live on.
JOEL SAGET/
soil, cooking up an alternative Mahab- By Salman Rushdie XAN BROOKS IS A WRITER AND
AFP/ GETTY harata and spinning an elaborate BROADCASTER

10 February 2023 The Guardian Weekly

58 Culture
Books

T
S C I E NC E A N D NAT U R E he physicist Stephen Hawking once For her, the original philosophical sin is the idea
hosted a party for time travellers, but that animals are “dumb beasts … automata with-
only sent out the invitations after the out a subjective view of the world”.
date had already passed. No one came. As Justice for Animals rigorously argues, the
Creature comforts If people from the future had turned up, what latest scientific research reveals that the opposite
would most appal them about our society today? is true: “all vertebrates feel pain subjectively”,
This scholarly look at For the prominent American philosopher Martha many animals “experience emotions like
C Nussbaum, the answer is our treatment of compassion and grief” and display “complicated
how badly humans animals, which her sober and sobering new book social learning”. For Nussbaum, the implications
treat animals employs argues is a moral crime on a monumental scale. are “huge, clearly”. Once we recognise there’s no
To make her scholarly case, Nussbaum points easy demarcation between human sentience and
moral principles to the “barbarous cruelties of the factory meat that of animals, “we can hardly be unchanged in
to shame us into industry”, “habitat destruction” and our ethical thinking”.
“pollution of the air and seas” – but Make no mistake, this is a serious
recognising their rights casts the ethical net even more widely work of philosophy – and probably not
to ensnare all of us who “dwell in areas most people’s idea of an ideal beach
By Rohan Silva in which elephants and bears once read, with its earnest interrogation of
roamed” or “live in high-rise buildings Kantian ethics and utilitarianism. That
that spell death for migratory birds”. being said, the book does tell the sad
We’re all complicit, she argues, no Justice for stories of specific animals, such as Hal
matter how right-on we think we are Animals the humpback whale whose complex
– and we have “a long overdue ethical By Martha C song constantly changed “apparently
debt” to work off. Nussbaum out of sheer fashion and interest in
Over the years, there’s been no novelty”, but who starved to death
shortage of Cassandran prophets alerting us to with 40kg of plastic waste in his guts.
the cosmic tragedy of species loss and biodiver- Some readers may view these tales as tacky
sity destruction. Elizabeth Kolbert, in The Sixth emotional vibrato in what is otherwise a scholarly
Extinction, attempted to bludgeon us into seeing read. Nussbaum defends herself, making the-
sense with flinty facts and hard logic. Harvard point “extinction never takes place without the
biologist EO Wilson tried by showing us the suffering of individual creatures”, whether that’s
wondrous complexity and interconnectedness “the hunger of a polar bear, starving on an ice
of life on Earth. floe” or “the mass extinctions of songbird species
Nussbaum is going a different way, taking aim as a result of unbreathable air, a horrible death”.
at the entire system of moral thought that, con- Having forensically dismantled other philo-
sciously or not, has led us to treat living things as sophical arguments for protecting animals, such
objects and trash the Eden of our natural world. as the “So Like Us” school of thought that only
STEPHEN FRINK/GETTY

S
MEMOIR hortly before dropping out of medical were marked by stories of dashed hopes, rac-
school in the early 1980s, Colin Grant ist violence, stoic resignation and an uncertain
stumbled upon his long lost Uncle Castus sense of belonging. “Motherland” or “home-
in London. A Windrush-era arrival, land”? Where were they really from? During the
Family fortunes remembered as a man of promising intellect, 1960s and 1970s, home for Grant’s family was
Castus was working in an East End off-licence. Luton – and a now-vanished world of linoleum
A personal account The older man berated the younger with his catch- flooring, paraffin heaters, plastic pineapple ice
of the emergence of phrase: “I’m Black so you can do all those white buckets and The Black and White Minstrel Show.
things. I’m Black so you don’t have to be.” The list Much of I’m Black … focuses on the spaces that
British-Caribbean of white things would stretch over the years to both link and separate the generations. A portrait
encompass cycling, drinking chardonnay, read- of Grant himself is revealed through collisions
identity and its place in ing feminist literature and living in Brighton. But with family members and others. Grant’s father,
the Black community on that day, Grant was being accused of almost Clinton George (better known as Bageye), first
the whitest thing possible: turning down an appeared in the picaresque 2012 memoir Bageye
opportunity. By rejecting medicine at the Wheel. Physically present and
By S I Martin he seemed to be distancing himself emotionally distant, he is almost a
from the humiliations and privations stranger in the family home. Even so,
his family had undergone in order to “Bageye took up so much space in all of
facilitate his place at the Royal London our heads there was no room to think
hospital. Picking the arts over medi- about anyone else”.
cine was a luxury – choosing to live a Before meeting Bageye, Grant’s
more precarious life was indulgent. I’m Black So mother Ethlyn had enjoyed a comfort-
In Grant’s previous book, Home- You Don’t able Jamaican middle-class lifestyle,
coming: Voices of the Windrush Have to Be complete with uniformed servants.
Generation, we encountered many By Colin Grant “I was too proud. Look at me now,”
people like Castus. Their oral histories she declares from their Luton council

The Guardian Weekly 10 February 2023

 59

bestows special treatment on species such as apes BOOKS OF THE MONTH

and dolphins that are closest to us in intelligence The best recent poetry
and behaviour, Nussbaum sketches out what a
more all-encompassing morality may look like.
Her vision is a global legislative framework By Kit Fan uncanny territory: the and Edward Lear’s
that acknowledges and protects animal rights, newly dead speaking back. tongue-twisting music,
but she understands full well this won’t hap- Written after the Reid combines humour
pen overnight. “The world’s legal systems are removal of her voice and rhyme to help us
in a primitive condition,” she writes, highlight- box and part of her see sense in nonsense.
ing, among many examples, the way the US tongue due to laryngeal Jokes aside, the book
Animal Welfare Act completely excludes cold- cancer, The Hopeful contains many poignantly
blooded creatures. Hat is a masterclass candid poems that are
She draws a parallel with how women were in premonition and self-mocking about
once treated under the law – as objects or departure. Satyamurti has “the elusive self, /
property controlled and used by men. Fast- written some of the most the imp of oddness”.
forward to today and women have rights and Content Warning: discomfiting meditations At 73, he remains
freedoms that would have been unthinkable two Everything on the human voice. Like invigoratingly impish.
centuries ago. “The same thing can happen,” By Akwaeke Emezi blind Tiresias seeing the
writes Nussbaum with a righteous optimism, It may seem a frightening future, she touches the
“with the rights of animals.” idea that everything peculiarity of aftermaths:
It was John Maynard Keynes who, in his in one’s life requires in Inheritance, what
quaintly gendered way, observed that “practical a content warning, but would happen to “the
men who believe themselves to be quite exempt fear isn’t the currency Zanzibar chest, / the
from any intellectual influence, are usually the in Emezi’s mighty cupboard with the painted
slaves of some defunct economist”. In other poetry debut. birds” “after I’m dead”.
words, ideas matter. If we’re to have any hope The book begins with She’ll be remembered
of resetting our abusive relationship with the What If My Mother Met for big-hearted, socially
natural world, a foundational shift in our moral Mary, a whimsical yet responsible poems that The Fourth Sister
philosophy may be essential. Or as Nussbaum poignant conversation are intent on change but By Laura Scott
puts it: “The remedy really requires the evolving over a game of Scrabble. reconciled to limitation. Anton Chekhov’s
consciousness of humanity.” A daunting pros- Emezi is an expert This is a moving book interrogative power
pect, but Justice for Animals is a timely and in transtemporal, that feeds our yearning of storytelling flows
weighty reminder that a positive future is transcultural exchanges. for hope, while also through Scott’s dazzling
possible and worth fighting for. Observer Outrageously spiritual questioning the meaning second collection, which
ROHAN SILVA IS A BUSINESSMAN AND A FORMER yet relentlessly self- of hopefulness. questions our obsession
UK GOVERNMENT ADVISER exposed, the poems with conclusiveness.
recycle biblical materials These eclectic poems
to articulate deep-seated range from Jules et Jim to
house. Can the politics of respectability save familial wounds with Goya’s Black Paintings,
Ethlyn or any Black Lutonian? Will private scarcely an ounce of self “peeled and pulled
educations protect Colin or his sister Selma? pity. Alternative realities from the walls after he
Most of the Windrush generation never give voice to harrowing died”. Strongly rooted in
returned to live in the Caribbean – they rest in experiences of domestic reality, the poems hinge
cemeteries across London, Birmingham, Shef- and sexual violence. on the hidden meaning
field, Ipswich, Bedford, Reading. Despite having Emezi has combined Maya of word play, and the
three or four generations of “blood in the soil”, Angelou’s passion and Toys/Tricks/Traps thrill of witnessing a line
Black British people of Caribbean backgrounds Sylvia Plath’s devastating By Christopher Reid unfolding beyond its
are outnumbered by those from continental self-inquisition to create Turning Wordsworth’s reach. We’re engrossed
Africa. We have been a minority within a minority an edgy music that Intimations of Immortality not because something
for more than two decades. As Blackness has frightens and astonishes. on its head, Reid’s version is being understood, but
become virtually synonymous with big city life, it features “my father’s because it is deeply felt.
is refreshing to see depictions of Black identities morning cough” and “his Scott is also game
in Britain’s small towns and suburbs. car on the driveway / to explore the darker
Under Grant’s meticulous gaze, layers of refusing to start”. Reid is corners of life, with
historic Black British familial dysfunction are a fine craftsman of poetic poems describing dying
peeled back and subjected to loving scrutiny. understatements: his parents as “the punchline
The Caribbean code of silence, that resistance poems often catch us off of a joke you don’t quite
to interrogation, remains for many. But is it still guard by excavating the get”. Her meticulously
wise or necessary to shield future generations mundane. In Toys/Tricks/ constructed poems
from our trauma? Who knows? Perhaps they’re Traps, he invites us to a exhibit a unique comic
the ones who’ll finally be able to tell us where The Hopeful Hat private cinema showing timing that gives them an
they’re really from. By Carole Satyamurti his childhood memories. elusive spontaneity.
S I MARTIN IS AN AUTHOR, HISTORIAN AND Posthumous poetry Echoing Lewis Carroll’s KIT FAN IS A POET, NOVELIST
JOURNALIST collections occupy an perverse inventiveness AND CRITIC

10 February 2023 The Guardian Weekly

60 Lifestyle
MODER N LIFE
Tim Dowling
No get-out claws
to escape my
view of savage
local wildlife
T
he cat is lying on the kitchen
floor like a spreading spill,
soaking up underfloor
heating. The tortoise is
under the washing machine, and will
probably be there until March. We are
all just waiting out the winter now.
Except the fox. The fox is busy.
On my way to the shops the previous
evening, I’d seen him dragging a dead
pigeon by one wing.
“Did you kill that?” I said. The fox
said nothing, only stopping briefly to
reposition the bird in its mouth.
“Fine,” I said. “We’re not friends.”
I make coffee, step over the cat,
open the back door and crunch my
way across the frozen grass to my
office shed. The portable electric
heater is on, but I can still feel the
cold of the floor through my shoes.
The sun has yet to rise over the
frost-rimed rooftops. I sit at my
computer, fold my arms and watch
a squirrel hanging upside down from
a bird feeder. Then I go back inside.
“Where are you going?” my wife
says when she finds me standing
in the kitchen.
STEPHEN COLLINS
The Guardian Weekly 10 February 2023
“Nowhere,” I say.
“Why are you wearing a coat and
a hat?” she says.
“Because it’s freezing in my
office,” I say.
“But you’re in here,” she says.
“I know,” I say. “I just came in to
put all this stuff on.”
I return to my shed. Eventually
the sun finds a gap between the
houses. The dog walks by. The cat
stares at me through the glass.
“Miaow,” it says.
“You want to come in?” I say. “Are
you sure?”
“Miaow,” it says. I open the door
and let the cat in, along with several
cubic metres of freezing air. The cat
sits down on the cold floor, stands
up again immediately, and walks
back to the door.
“Miaow,” it says. I open the
door and the cat exits, along with
several cubic metres of expensively
heated air.
After lunch, my office heater is
set to shut off for a few hours, but
I override the timer so I can continue
typing without gloves. In the late
afternoon, the office finally gets
warm, and then a bit sauna-like.
Long before it occurs to me to turn
the heater off, I fall asleep at my
desk, mouth open.
It’s dark outside when I wake
up, just after the security light on
my shed snaps on, in response to
some kind of motion in the garden.
Peering into the gloom, I see the fox
rounding the corner. It appears to
have an ear of corn in its mouth.
“What are you doing back here?”
I say. “Your territory is the streets.”
The fox pauses to look in.
“That’s right,” I say. “It’s me.”
Then I notice the thing in its
mouth isn’t an ear of corn.
“It was a headless parakeet,” I tell
my wife a few minutes later.
“Ugh!” she says.
“Then he dropped it right in front
of the door, like an offering,” I say.
“What did you do?” my wife says.
“I was like, wait! Don’t leave
that there!” I say. “I don’t need
a headless bird!”
“Quite,” she says.
“But you know the fox,” I say. “He
doesn’t give a shit.”
“He doesn’t,” my wife says, her
eyes shining. She loves a first-hand
account of my cowardice.
“So then there was a bit of
a standoff,” I say. “He was about to
just wander off, like, ‘Your Package
Has Been Delivered’. And I was
like, I did not order this! Finally, he
picked it up again, climbed up on to
my office roof and disappeared.”
“Oh my God,” my wife says.
“So I thought I’d come up here
and work in your office with
you,” I say.
“I’m afraid that won’t be
possible,” she says.
My wife “Please,” I say.
“No,” she says. “I’m too busy.”
loves a “Just until winter’s over,” I say.
first-hand “I can’t be sitting there in the dark,
surrounded by wild animals.”
account “It’s only 4:30,” she says. “Get
of my back out there.”
TIM DOWLING IS A REGULAR
cowardice GUARDIAN CONTRIBUTOR
 KITCHEN AIDE
By Anna Berrill

T H E W E E K LY R E C I P E
By Thomasina Miers

№ 204
Lamb birria

Prep 20 min Birria is a sensational dish from

Cook 4 hr + northern Mexico. It’s designed for
scraggy, cheap cuts of lamb, goat or
Serves 4-6 beef, which is marinated in a blend

How to buck up buckwheat so of dried chillies, herbs and classic

Mexican spices, then slow-cooked.

you’re not stuck with a gluey mush Method

I see buckwheat in lots of recipes.
How best to cook it? Mine turned
out mushy.
Zeena, London, England, UK
When Alissa Timoshkina was
growing up, buckwheat was
something of a staple: “We’d have
it for breakfast with milk and sugar,
as a side to savoury dishes, or as
a stuffing for pies or cabbage rolls,”
says the Russian author of Salt
& Time: Recipes from a Russian
Kitchen. “It’s not just comforting
because it tastes like childhood, but
it’s nutritionally good as well.”
The first thing to note is that
buckwheat comes two ways: green
(or untoasted) and toasted (known
as kasha, or kasza in Polish). “It
makes a big difference,” Timoshkina
says. While the toasted stuff “has
a lovely, nutty quality”, green has
a habit of “coming out gloopy and
almost gluey”. That said, Zuza Zak,
author of Pierogi: Over 50 Recipes
to Create Perfect Polish Dumplings,
keeps both in her cupboard:
“Sometimes I want that strong,
toasted buckwheat – and that really
is the taste of eastern Europe – but
at others I want the milder flavour of
untoasted buckwheat.”
What you don’t want, however,
is a mushy texture, and one
explanation for Zeena’s botched
buckwheat could be that it was
soaked before cooking. “It will fall
apart if you do that,” Timoshkina
says. Much better to add it straight
ANNA KURZAEVA/GETTY
to the pan or, as Zak does, rinse it
first under cold water. Cooking it in
too much water, or overcooking it
could be mush-making culprits too.
So, what is the best way to cook
buckwheat? Timoshkina treats hers
like couscous, putting it in a pan
with salted boiling water “to just
above ‘grain’ level”, then covering
and leaving overnight. Granted,
this requires a degree of forward
planning, but when dinner time
arrives the next day, all that’s left to
do is incorporate the buckwheat into
herby salads or a mushroom stir-fry,
or stuff it into cabbage rolls.
Another strategy that requires
some forethought is one Zak learned
from her grandmother, for which
buckwheat is cooked in salted water
for about 15 minutes (until the liquid
is absorbed), then covered. “Wrap in
a tea towel so the lid is secure, then
wrap in a big towel or blanket.”
If you don’t have the time or
inclination for this, Zak suggests
cooking it like rice. Again, cover the
groats with salted water (“maybe
1½cm over the top”), bring to a boil,
cover and simmer until the water
disappears. Take off the heat and
leave to steam for 20-30 minutes.
If you’re still in doubt,
Timoshkina’s “foolproof option”
would be to cook the groats in
“double the amount of salted water”
then, once al dente, strain.
ANNA BERRILL IS A FOOD WRITER
Got a culinary dilemma? Email
feast@theguardian.com
Remove and discard the stalks and
seeds from the guajillo chillies, and
Ingredients ancho, if using. Put the chillies in
For the lamb birria a small bowl, cover with boiling
1kg neck of lamb water and leave to soak for 15
600ml stock minutes. Meanwhile, cut away and
40g butter
discard any excess fat from around
2 red onions,
peeled and sliced
the lamb, then cut the meat into
large pieces and set aside. Heat the
For the birria adobo oven to 170C (150C fan)/325F/gas 3.
3-4 guajillo chillies Drain the soaked chillies, then tip
1 ancho chilli into a blender and add the chipotle,
(optional) vinegar, white onion and garlic.
1 tbsp chipotle en Blitz, scraping down the sides as you
adobo go, then add half the thyme leaves,
2 tbsp cider vinegar
the bay, spices and half the yoghurt.
1 large white onion,
peeled and roughly
Blitz again, then add the rest of the
chopped yoghurt to make a smooth paste.
3-4 large garlic Put the lamb in a deep baking
cloves, peeled tray and pour over the adobo mix,
1 small handful fresh rubbing it into the meat with your
thyme, picked hands. Pour over the stock, cover
2 bay leaves the tray with foil and bake for four
1 tsp ground cumin to five hours, until the meat is soft
½ tsp ground
and falling apart. (You can also do
allspice
A large pinch of
this very successfully in a pressure
ground cloves cooker in a fraction of the time.)
80g natural yoghurt While the meat is cooking, melt
the butter in a frying pan and add
To serve the red onions and the rest of the
Corn tortillas thyme leaves. Season generously,
1 small onion, then cook slowly, stirring, for about
peeled and finely 10-12 minutes, until soft and sweet.
diced
Once the meat is tender, lift it out
2 limes,
cut into wedges
of the tray, leaving behind the
Slaw consommé. Pull the meat apart and
Soured cream or mix it with the onions.
creme fraiche To serve, skim off any fat from
Hot sauce the consommé and heat it gently.
Heat the meat under a grill or in
a large ffrying pan, until caramelised
and cris
crisp in parts. Serve at the table
with sm
small bowls of the consommé,
tortillas and the accompaniments.

10 Fe
F
February
e 2023 The Guardian Weekly
62 Diversions
QUIZ
Thomas Eaton
1 Who lived in Brussels at
23 quai du Commerce?
2 Where has the euro
replaced the kuna?
3 Which vitamin is
named from the German
for coagulation?
4 Nasa’s Tess mission is
looking for what objects?
5 Which drummer led the
Jazz Messengers for 35 years?
PUZZLES
Chris Maslanka
1 Find two positive
numbers whose squares
differ by 55.
2 Wordpool
Find the correct definition:
THELEMITE
a) Babylonian priest cult
b) inhabitant of the moon
c) type of soapstone
d) libertine follower of
Aleister Crowley
3 Same Difference
Identify these two words
differing only in the
letters shown:
*R*** (mechanical bird?)
**** (sweet stick?)
CHESS
Leonard Barden
Chess tournaments can be
decided by the tiniest of
margins, and that
certainly happened in last
month’s final two rounds
at Tata Steel Wijk aan Zee,
the “chess Wimbledon”.
The world champion,
Magnus Carlsen, missed a
winning opportunity in
the penultimate round,
while the Dutch home
favourite, Anish Giri,
received a gift point in his
final game.
Giri had finished
second on five previous
occasions at Wijk, which
has a long tradition of
Dutch victories dating
The Guardian Weekly 10 February 2023
6 Which learned Knight; Prince Harry? COU N T RY DI A RY
society met at Soho House 11 1900; 1924; 2024? RY E DA L E
in Handsworth? 12 St Kilda, Scotland; North Yorkshire, England, UK
7 What is the lowest Blasket Islands,
O
number not allocated to Ireland; Ambae, nly one other human
a UK motorway? Vanuatu? has set foot up this
8 Frederick Belmont 13 Adams; de Blasio; Moors-edge dale since a
established which cafe in Bloomberg; Giuliani; sprinkling of snow fell,
Harrogate in 1919? Dinkins? and as I ascend a lone oak-bark grey
14 Burchell’s; Chapman’s; roebuck melts into the trees.
What links: Crawshay’s; Grant’s; I emerge on to a plateau where a
9 Jenny Lind; Jenny Grévy’s? band of starlings roves along a row of
Berggren; Nina Persson; 15 Lucy Munro’s face; spindly pines which do little to curb
Marie Fredriksson? Neville St Clair’s lip; the icy wind. Chattering goldfinches
10 Andre Agassi; Phil Victor Hatherley’s thumb? and twite racket about a cover crop
gone to seed. There’s little to suggest
4 Dropouts what else is hidden here, among the
Replace asterisks by a letter dry stems, until I’m just a few paces
to complete the word: f) orc/hid/den. away. If not for a rusty iron frame,
*G*O*A*T I’d maybe notice nothing until an
e) can/can/teen
d) stars/truck/driver
c) magic/mushroom/cloud ill-fated step sent me down a brutal,
5 Missing Links b) fresh/air/cover
5 Missing Links a) farm/hand/some
near vertical 20-plus-metre fall.
Find a word that follows 4 Dropouts IGNORANT. Most unsettling of all though,
the first word in the clue 3 Same Difference CRANE, CANE. this ominous pit is breathing. A soft,
and precedes the second, warm, continuous animal-vegetal-
2 Wordpool d).
784 – 729 = 55).
in each case making a = 64 − 9 = 55); and 28 & 27 (282 – 272 = mineral exhalation.
fresh word or phrase. The windypits of Ryedale are
Maslanka 1 Two answers: 8 & 3 (82 – 32
Engineer’s Thumb.
Eg the answer to fish mix stories: … Yellow Face; … Twisted Lip; … deeply, darkly uncanny, even before
could be cake (fishcake & parts in the titles of Sherlock Holmes
(1990-present). 14 Zebras. 15 Body
you know that some have yielded of
cake mix) 13 Mayors of New York City an array of bones, including those of
a) farm some evacuated islands/archipelagos. people, some ritually killed.
b) fresh cover But it’s not all death down there.
11 Olympics in Paris. 12 Permanently
ghostwritten by JR Moehringer.
c) magic cloud Roxette. 10 Autobiographies all There’s luscious-looking hart’s
d) stars driver tongue fern, feathery mosses,
singer; Ace of Base; the Cardigans;
8 Bettys. 9 Swedish singers: opera
e) can teen Birmingham. 7 Seven (there is no M7). assorted grasses and herbs, and in
f ) orc den 5 Art Blakey. 6 Lunar Society of
2 Croatia. 3 Vitamin K. 4 Exoplanets.
the sultry microclimate around the
edge, freshly sprouted mushrooms.
On the website Notes and Queries theguardian.com/notes-and-queries
acclaimed Chantal Akerman film).
1 Jeanne Dielman (in the title of the I can’t resist going again three
days later, on the frozen night of the
Answers
© CMM2023
new moon. The stillness and chill
right back to Max Euwe Richard Rapport, was mean the geothermal gust is even
in 1940. He now has his settled by a one-move more intense – a scorchy mineral fug
sights on qualifying for blunder when Black’s between moulder and solder, with a
the 2024 Candidates and 34…Kg6?? (Kg8 is level) slight acridity that lingers at back of
a new shot at the world allowed the cheapo the throat for hours.
championship. 35 Rxd6 when Qxd6 We flick on our torches and find
The final-round 36 Qxf5 is mate. ourselves surrounded by a belching,
decider, which gave Giri Carlsen said he will now reflective fog. It takes almost no
an easy point against take a rest from classical imagination, now, to visualise the
tournaments. His next pit as a wyrm-hole – the lair of a
3853 White to move and win. This
scheduled appearance is coiled, somnolent dragon. We are
Henri Rinck endgame looks trivially
drawn by 1 exd7 Kxd7 2 Ke3, but not until his home event approaching Imbolc, the pagan
White has a subtle tactic. at Stavanger in May. festival of incipient spring, when
The world No 1 has thoughts turn to rising and greening
8
stated his interest in and growth. Amy-Jane Beer
7 expanding his career as
6 a streamer, and within a
5 couple of days of pushing
4 his final Wijk pawn, he
was viewable live on air
3
on Twitch.
2
1 3 d8=N! g1=Q 4 c4 mate.
a b c d e f g h 3853 1 Bd5+! Kxd5 2 exd7 g2
ILLUSTRATION: CLIFFORD HARPER
Like Puzzles? Try the new Guardian Puzzles app. Download from the App Store or Google Play
Read more: theguardian.com/puzzles-app 63

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Quick crossword
No 16,454
9 10 1 2 3 4

11 12 6 7

13 8 9

14 15

All solutions published next week

16 17 10 11 12

18

19 20 13 14 15

21 22 23

24 16 17 18

25 26

19

27 28

The Weekly cryptic By Paul Across 4 Bickering (4)

5 Breed of tiny dog, originally 6 District whose residents are
No 28,981 from Mexico (9) mainly of east Asian origin (9)
8 Sound of heavy object hitting 7 Big ask (4,5)
the ground (4) 12 Place selling deep-fried food
Across 15 Go rambling and get lost! (4,1,4)
9 Singing celebrity (4,4) (4,4)
1,2 Winning spirit with just defeat and a tie – a 16 Evangelist affable? Not that interested (8)
10 Haughty (6) 14 Like lemons or custard? (6)
draw in 17? (7,6) 17 O constant plecity? (8)
11 Use fingertips to excite another 15 Look around for food (6)
5 God, one with a magic bullet? (7) 19 See 23
(6) 17 Jot down (4)
9 Conceal a capital city on island (5) 20 Harden, if held captive by authoritarian,
13 Heavy and unappetising (6)
10 See 24 blowing top (6)
15 Home for Franciscans, say (6) Solution No 16,448
11 Separation of state and religion curses Mali 23,19 Are they riding up and down? (5,6)
after Reformation (10) 24,10 Irish county where one goes, in a failed
16 Con (8) P E R C E N T A G E
18 Player ranked according to B E O N E A
12,21 A law committed to memory by 1st of state (4,3,6)
their ability in a knock-out I N S T A N T L I V I D
October for test (4,4) N K R R L O U
competition (4)
14 Allergic reaction having taken LSD, perhaps:
19 Safe (9) O R Y X T E E T O T A L
expression of support welcomed (11) C G E A T L
18 Appalling? It’s impossible to say (11) U N S H O D A L I E N S
21 See 12 L U D T E V
Down A L P H A B E T Y E T I
22 Those carrying lots of money in shops act 1 Great number (8) R P W N C S L
stupid (10) 2 Annoyed (informal) (6) S C O F F P A R A S O L
25 Delicious salami in the soup, sibling tucking in 3 Adopted symbolic character, S U I O E E
(9) animal or object (6) S E A L I N G WA X
26 Tree in lime, leaning backwards (5)
27 Cocktail fruit dropping on needle shortly (7)
Solution No 28,975
28 Boris playing intellectual game, heavens
above, admitting ‘I haven’t a clue’ (7)
Sudoku
B O U N D L E S S S U S S Medium
E T E L U C P Fill in the grid so
Down W A V E R L E Y C R A D L E that every row,
1 Key worker is involved in exercise after
N N F S C N I every column
Tuesday’s vacation (6)
C O R S E T I N U N D A T E and every 3x3
2 See 1 across
I A L A E box contains the
3 A huge organ, always (2,3,5)
S T I L T S N E E D L I N G numbers 1 to 9.
4 Cap removed from playwright put in grave (5)
H T N D
5 Where reporters meet with two irons? (5,4) Last week’s solution
G R O S S O U T T H R A S H
6 Gas in 7 only (4)
E T N H O
7 Backbone injected with liquid initially, or gas
(8) R E T R I E V E F I E L D S
8 Contra gets deal after revolution in Caribbean I A W R O B U
islands (8) P R O T E A M O R T U A R Y
13 Hashemite city rising up on account of a O U L O U C E
creative movement in Italy (4,6) G N U S L O S S M A K E R

10 February 2023 The Guardian Weekly

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