Guardian Weekly

Trucks lie submerged beneath volcanic ash in the village of Sumberwuluh, east Java, after last Saturday’s devastating eruption of Mount Semeru. At least 15 people were killed, with dozens more missing, after the volcano spewed thick columns of ash an

A leading infectious diseases specialist who monitors variants for a research collaboration led by Harvard Medical School believes the world is seeing “what appears to be a signal of exponential increase of Omicron over Delta”. “It’s still early days

Public opinion on abortion in the US has changed little since 1973, when the supreme court in effect legalised the procedure nationally in its ruling on the case Roe v Wade. According to Gallup, which has the longest-running poll on the issue, about

About 11 minutes into last week’s hearing on abortion rights at the US supreme court, Sonia Sotomayor, one of the three liberal-leaning justices left on the court after its sharp rightward shift under Donald Trump, took the floor. Sotomayor began by

When Valérie Pécresse crossed rural France this year, visiting farms and villages to escape what she called her grotesquely unfair image as a “blonde bourgeoise” from Versailles, she promised to smash the French Republic’s glass ceiling. “I will be t

They began heading for the shopping mall exit when they saw the police. One of the four gang members, a rapper called Lelo whose music videos venerate handguns and violence, turned to exchange pleasantries with Mike, an officer with the Swedish polic

Last Sunday morning, a small group of protesters walked together in Kyimyindaing township, Yangon, waving bunches of eugenia and roses. They carried a banner reading: “The only real prison is fear and the real freedom is freedom from fear.” The words

When scientists predicted, months ago, that Covid-19 could be entering an endemic phase, many felt ready for the crisis period of the pandemic to be over. The tantalising suggestion that coronavirus might, at some foreseeable point, be just another s

Trust in politicians to act in the national interest rather than their own has fallen dramatically since Boris Johnson became prime minister, according to figures in a disturbing study of the state of British democracy. The polling data from YouGov f

The 1940s and 50s are often seen as a golden era for democracy, when Britain and its allies triumphed against fascism before the postwar consensus powered the formation of the welfare state and National Health Service. Britain was a nation broadly co

When the X-Press Pearl container ship caught fire and sank in the Indian Ocean in May, Sri Lanka was terrified that the vessel’s 350 tonnes of heavy fuel oil would spill into the ocean, causing an environmental disaster for the its pristine coral ree

Rain will become more common than snow in the Arctic as the climate crisis heats up the planet’s northern ice cap, according to research. Today, more snow falls in the Arctic than rain. But this will reverse, the study suggests, with all the region’s

For decades, more than a hundred mouse-nibbled fruit boxes, tea chests and old leather suitcases sat untouched in a 3-metre pile in the backyard shed of Frances Newell’s home in suburban Melbourne. They were stuffed with thousands of letters – some i

Thirteen camels amble across the dusty, drought-stricken landscape, accompanied by seven men in bright yellow T-shirts and three nurses. The camels are loaded with trunks full of medicines, bandages and family planning products. It’s a mobile health

In a warehouse laboratory in Berkeley, California, Nicholas Flanders stands in front of a shiny metal box about the size of a washing machine. Inside is a stack of metal plates that resembles a club sandwich – only the filling is a black polymer memb

The graphic testimony presented to jurors in the opening days of Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal sex abuse trial last week seemed at times to echo broader theories – criminal, conspiratorial or both – about Jeffrey Epstein’s world. For the prosecution,

On 4 November 1981, five Black men in matching shirts filed into a narrow, well-lit room at a police station in Syracuse, New York, and turned to face a one-way mirror. On the other side, a 19-year-old white student stepped towards the glass, and tri

ON 14 MARCH 2020, I LEFT MY HOME in the Orkney Islands to drive to Edinburgh international airport. I was due to travel to Germany for a research trip. Full of nervous anticipation, and making frantic last-minute preparations, I hadn’t paid as much a

THE ASSAULT WAS ALREADY UNDER WAY in September when, having hastily collected her youngest child from a neighbour, Baraa Hamamda, 24, ran home to find her three-year-old son, Mohammed, lying in a small pool of blood and apparently lifeless on the bar

A friend’s grandmother once told me a story about her late husband’s English golf club. It was the 1960s, and she was having a drink on the club’s terrace with some of the other wives. The men played golf on the links below, and one of them would swe

The far-right journalist and polemicist Éric Zemmour went on trial in Paris on 17 November on charges of incitement to racial hatred. In September 2020, he had said on the French news broadcaster CNews that unaccompanied foreign minors were “thieves,

Jack Dorsey is resigning from Twitter to spend more time with his other company, Square. In some ways, the choice between Twitter and Square is a straight choice between political clout and profit. Square, a payments platform co-founded by Dorsey in

IN AUGUST 2020, ONLY DAYS BEFORE the pilot episode of Mandy was set to be broadcast, Diane Morgan picked up her phone and prepared to call a bigwig at the BBC. “I’m really sorry,” she’d envisioned herself saying, “but there’s absolutely no way you ca

When it comes to outsized projects with geopolitical undertones, Walter Smerling has form. Between 2015 and 2017, the chairman of the Stiftung für Kunst und Kultur (Foundation for Art and Culture) in Bonn organised the largest ever exhibitions of Chi

Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story 2.0 is an ecstatic act of ancestor-worship: a vividly dreamed, cunningly modified and visually staggering revival. No one but Spielberg could have brought it off, creating a movie in which Leonard Bernstein’s score

The journalists who nowadays report on happenings in Washington work at a frantic, flustered tempo, racing to catch up with the chaos of breaking news. Jonathan Karl, a correspondent for ABC News, seems to be permanently breathless. In Betrayal, he r

Retellings of classical myths may be all the rage in publishing but, as Charlotte Higgins notes in the introduction to Greek Myths, her own erudite and exhilarating collection, it’s a trend as old as the stories themselves. Though certain versions ca

As Laura Whitmore, the elegant, highly aspirational TV presenter, squirted cold mayo into an upturned, raw mushroom cap, I realised that my Comfort Eating podcast had reached new levels of unfettered honesty. “It’s fancy, like an hors d’oeuvre!” she