A week in the life of the world | Global edition 21 AUGUST 2026 | VOL.215 No.8 | £6.50 | €9.95

The Guardian Weekly

1815 'Godzilla' fears Amazon braces for El Niño

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CLACTON ON SEA

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Glory days The weekend at 100

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END OF THE PIER SHOW

What Farage's election gamble says about the state of British politics 10

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Eyewitness

Poland

PHOTOGRAPH:

CLAUDIA CIOBANU/AP

Hail, Mary

A statue of the Virgin Mary that, at 55.6 metres, is believed to be Europe's tallest was inaugurated in Konotopie in central Poland. The statue is close to the home of a wealthy businessman, Roman Karkosik, who commissioned the monument that dwarfs Rio de Janeiro's 38-metre-high Christ the Redeemer statue.

The Guardian Weekly

Founded in Manchester, England

4 July 1919

Vol 214 | Issue № 8

Guardian Weekly is an edited selection of some of the best journalism found in the Guardian's digital editions in the UK, US and Australia, and the Guardian newspaper in the UK. The weekly magazine has an international focus and four editions: global, Europe, Australia and North America. The Guardian was founded in 1821, and Guardian Weekly in 1919. We exist to hold power to account in the name of the public interest, to uphold liberal and progressive values, to fight for the common good, and to build hope. Our values, as laid out by editor CP Scott in 1921, are honesty, integrity, courage, fairness, and a sense of duty to the reader and the community. The Guardian is wholly owned by the Scott Trust, a body whose purpose is "to secure the financial and editorial independence of the Guardian in perpetuity". We have no proprietor or shareholders, and any profit made is re-invested in journalism.

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The GuardianWeekly

A week in the life of the world 21 AUGUST 2026

4

GLOBAL REPORT

Headlines from the last seven days United Kingdom ... 8 Science & Environment ... 9 The big story United Kingdom Nigel Farage's byelection circus ... 10

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SPOTLIGHT

In-depth reporting and analysis

Russia Will Putin order a second mass mobilisation? ... 15

Afghanistan Taliban on diplomatic offensive to end isolation ... 18

Arctic China and Russia poised to exploit 'ice silk road' ... 22

Education Why have mass exam protests gone global this year? ... 26

Science Killer fungus threatens Canada's bat colonies ... 30

Brazil Lula to face Jair Bolsonaro's son in October vote ... 33

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FEATURES

Long reads, interviews & essays The tale of a spy exposed after a bungled bomb plot By Shaun Walker ... 34 What's happened to the weekend, 100 years on? By Jess Cartner-Morley ... 40

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OPINION

Simon Tisdall Marco Rubio isn't helping his boss resolve any conflicts ... 45

Jules Darmanin Love found a way through the post-Brexit visa rules ... 47

Andy Beckett ▼ The weather is no longer a safe topic of conversation ... 48

Britons are famous for their weather stoicism. But this has been created by centuries of minor weather discomforts

51

CULTURE

TV, film, music, theatre, art, architecture & more

Music Sam Smith on finding love, health and happiness ... 51

Stage Breathing new life into Murakami's thrilling fantasy .. 54

Books How poetry is ever more vital in time of war and chaos ... 57

Books A love letter to Peru; a US family saga; Hockney's muse ... 58

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LIFESTYLE

The one change that worked I stopped hiding my arms ... 60 Kitchen aide Filling no-cook dinners ... 61 Recipe Tomato and mint risotto ... 61

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SPOT ILLUSTRATIONS: MATT BLEASE

On the cover

The curtain came down last week on the summer sideshow of the Clacton byelection, called by Nigel Farage amid mounting scrutiny of his finances. What does this campaign – in which the Reform UK leader's main challenger was a parody candidate called Count Binface – tell us about the current state of politics in Britain? Illustration: Neil Jamieson

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Global report

Headlines from the last seven days

1 UNITED STATES

Peace deal window expires as Trump threatens Oman

Iran said on Monday that it would take a more aggressive stance if talks with the US failed, while Donald Trump demanded Tehran “put up the white flag of surrender” in an interview with Fox News. The remarks coincided with the end of the two-month window to negotiate a peace deal in the US-Israel war on Iran.

Trump also threatened to bomb Oman if it “gets in the way” of his effort to end the war, the second time he has directed such a threat at the longtime US strategic partner. “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them,” Trump told Fox News. However, he also indicated he was not pressing for the war to end without Iran meeting his demand. He told the news outlet: “I have no time schedule. I’m not in a hurry.”

The latest threats against Oman, which is not a party to the war, have illustrated how Trump’s unpredictable and often outrageous approach to diplomacy has upset US partners and failed to achieve the breakthrough that he has promised to end the war.

Oman is a longtime US strategic partner that has traditionally served as a key backchannel between Washington and Tehran.

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2 UKRAINE/RUSSIA

Strike on warehouse near Moscow as air war escalates

Ukraine launched one of its largest drone attacks since the start of the war overnight last Saturday, which caused a fire at a warehouse near Moscow and killed at least six people, according to Russian authorities.

The defence ministry in Moscow said it had shot down 1,478 Ukrainian drones - the highest ever nightly total claimed - in an escalating air war. Seven Ukrainians were also killed as Russia bombed 13 locations.

A fire engulfed a 250,000 sq metre building south of Moscow, belonging to the Wildberries distribution company. Moscow threatened the UK with “consequences” after reports that British-made drones have been used to strike targets in Russia.

Spotlight Page 15 →

4 VENEZUELA

BP to develop gasfield with two firms linked to Trump

BP has answered Donald Trump’s call for companies to help rebuild the country’s fossil fuel industry.

The company will partner with two oil firms with close links to the Trump administration to develop the second phase of the Loran gasfield, in one of the first large-scale foreign investments since the US ousted Nicolás Maduro.

BP holds a licence to develop the field alongside a Qatari company owned by the Al-Khayyat brothers who are working with Ivanka Trump, the US president’s daughter, and her husband, Jared Kushner, to build a controversial multibillion-dollar resort in Albania.

BP will also work alongside the overseas investment arm of UAE’s national oil company run by the industry minister, Sultan Al Jaber, who in 2025 promised Trump that the Gulf state would increase its investments in the US energy sector more than sixfold to $440bn within a decade.

The deal makes BP one of the first large-scale international oil firms to return to the country after Shell secured a licence to develop the first phase of the Loran field.

3 UNITED STATES

President asks justices to allow building of ballroom

The Trump administration asked the US supreme court to allow construction of the $400m White House ballroom to proceed after an appeals court ordered work to halt earlier this month.

The US president, who demolished the historic East Wing of the White House last year to make way for the planned ballroom, has repeatedly touted it as “a gift” to the US people.

The administration asked the supreme court justices to keep the decision by the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit on hold while it prepares an appeal.

Spotlight Page 32 →

5 UNITED STATES

Democrats call for answers on combat ship conditions

Democrats intensified their demands for answers from the Trump administration over conditions onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln as the aircraft carrier’s nearly nine-month deployment continued fuelling concern over crew morale, mental health and living conditions.

Ruben Gallego, a Democratic senator from Arizona, blamed the carrier’s prolonged deployment on the war with Iran. He also warned that comments from defence secretary Pete Hegseth and Trump dismissing Lincoln concerns could discourage service members from staying in the military.

The Guardian Weekly 21 August 2026

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UK headlines p8→

6 MEXICO

Ex-governor charged over vanished students

The former governor of Guerrero state, Ángel Aguirre, was charged over his alleged involvement in the disappearance of 43 students in 2014.

Aguirre, who has been remanded in a maximum security jail, is accused of forced disappearance and obstruction of justice for ordering the destruction of surveillance tapes that may have shed light on what happened to the students from the Ayotzinapa teacher training college on 26 September 2014.

A lawyer for Aguirre denied his client's wrongdoing. With the remains of only three students identified, it is not known what happened to the 40 others.

7 CANADA

Court rules Toronto's bike lanes can be removed

Ontario is free to rip out Toronto's bike lanes after the region's top court overturned a lower court's decision that decreed removal would violate constitutional rights. The win is significant for Ontario's premier, Doug Ford, and his government, which in 2024 passed legislation that would allow lanes to be axed. But cycling advocacy organisations levelled a legal challenge.

The court of appeal judges explained that courts cannot find legislation unconstitutional because experts predict the government's policies will fail.

9 FRANCE

Court blocks Macron's under-15s social media ban

The constitutional council, France's top court, blocked a ban on social media access for under-15s, ruling that it infringed freedom of expression and privacy. The decision is a blow to President Emmanuel Macron as momentum builds around the world for restrictions on children's use of social media.

A law approved by parliament in July would have barred under-15s from opening social media accounts from September. Tech platforms would also have been required to close existing accounts within four months and use age-verification tools. However, the court raised concerns about the proof of age requirement.

8 CLIMATE CRISIS

Wildfires blaze across Europe as arrests made

Almost 500 people were arrested on suspicion of starting wildfires in France since the start of the summer, authorities said, as firefighters in half a dozen European countries continued to tackle ferocious blazes.

Hundreds more people were evacuated from villages in western Germany and south-west France, while the army rescued historic relics in Spain and stranded tourists were picked up from beaches threatened by flames in Greece. An elderly couple died in fires on the island of Salamis, close to Athens.

Local farmers tackled Belgium's biggest fire in a century near Liège.

Environment Page 24 →

10 BELGIUM

Student strikes gold worth $10m on holiday job

A student working on a building site stumbled across a hidden trove of gold worth an estimated €9m ($10m).

The 18-year-old, Kobe, who has not been further identified, was working on the site of a former brewery in Sint-Gillis-Dendermonde, 30km north-west of Brussels, when he made the discovery. The hoard was stashed in a bag in a cellar wall beneath the villa built for the brewery's owner in the late 19th century.

An investigation will be held to establish legal ownership of the treasure.

21 August 2026

The Guardian Weekly

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ISRAEL/PALESTINE

Netanyahu and Kushner talks stall on Gaza deal

Benjamin Netanyahu has told Donald Trump's son-in-law and envoy Jared Kushner there can be no progress on the stalled Gaza ceasefire deal or an Israeli withdrawal from the coastal strip until Hamas first disarms.

An Israeli official said there had been no breakthrough in Monday's three-hour meeting in Israel, saying Netanyahu made it clear the IDF would not withdraw and would continue to carry out operations in Gaza.

Last Sunday, Kushner met Hamas's political chief in Egypt, where Hamas insisted Israel must first withdraw its troops from the 60% of Gaza that Israel occupies.

Spotlight Page 19 →

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DR CONGO

Ebola outbreak is now deadliest in DRC's history

The Ebola outbreak is now the deadliest in the country's history with at least 2,325 people dead, according to government data, surpassing the toll from the 2018-20 outbreak.

The DRC's public health institute said confirmed cases had risen to 4,945.

The World Health Organization said the outbreak is on track to surpass west Africa's 2014-16 Ebola outbreak. The 2014-16 outbreak resulted in 28,616 cases and 11,310 deaths across Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, according to WHO data. Last Friday, the UN warned the epidemic was killing one person every 30 minutes.

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PHILIPPINES

Two dead including gunman in school shooting

A student was shot dead at a high school in the southern Philippines before the alleged killer took his own life, the local mayor said, in the second school shooting in the nation in two months.

The shooting took place at a school attached to Ateneo de Zamboanga University in the city of Zamboanga, a Catholic private institution in western Mindanao.

The incident was seemingly livestreamed on Facebook.

Another school shooting in Tacloban City two months ago left three students killed and 20 others wounded.

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MOROCCO

More than 100 arrested attempting to reach Ceuta

Police arrested 111 people as they tried to enter Spain's north African territory of Ceuta, amid tightened security after social media posts called for another mass crossing.

The attempted crossing last Saturday came two weeks after more than 72,000 migrants surged into Ceuta. At least 141 people died trying to reach European soil.

A source in Morocco's interior ministry told Reuters that those detained included 109 migrants from sub-Saharan Africa and two Moroccan citizens arrested in or around Fnideq, the Moroccan city near Ceuta.

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Global report

The big story p10 →

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15 INDONESIA

Thousands displaced as big quake hits island nation

Rescue crews dug through collapsed buildings and debris in eastern Indonesia last Sunday as they searched for bodies and possible survivors a day after a powerful earthquake killed at least 53 people, injured more than 100 and displaced thousands.

Rescuers were still searching for people feared buried beneath landslides on Flores, a predominantly Catholic island.

The magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck 68km north-northwest of Ende in East Nusa Tenggara province, the US Geological Survey said. The quake, at a depth of about 10km off the coast of Flores, rattled much of the island and sent residents fleeing in panic. Tremors were also felt in neighbouring West Nusa Tenggara and parts of southern Sulawesi.

16 NIGER

US missionary freed nine months after abduction

An American missionary who was kidnapped in the capital, Niamey, in October has been released, his organisation has said.

Serving in Mission International said Kevin Rideout “is in good health in the care of US officials” and would soon be reunited with his family. No armed group claimed responsibility for the abduction.

The US had made the release of Rideout a priority in its latest strategy on African Sahel states, after years of fighting extremism found limited success. Rideout had been in Niger for 19 years before the incident.

17 SOUTH KOREA

President looks for military control after Trump order

South Korea’s president has renewed his push to regain independent control of the military from the US in the event of war and urged faster progress in acquiring nuclear-powered submarines after Donald Trump’s order to cut joint drills.

Last Sunday, Trump instructed the Pentagon to “substantially reduce” this week’s joint military exercises with South Korea, saying the nuclear-armed North “has been unthreatening and respectful” and that the US president had a “very good relationship with Kim Jong-un”.

Lee Jae Myung said on Tuesday that Seoul should proceed without disruption with the planned transfer, during his term, of wartime operational control, or Opcon, of South Korean forces from the US - a goal he and the government have long held.

The issue dates back to the Korean war, which ended in an armistice rather than a formal peace treaty in 1953, meaning the two Koreas remain technically at war. The country now hosts Camp Humphreys, the largest American military base outside the US.

18 JAPAN

Nine dead as torrential deluge floods homes in east

Heavy rain that battered eastern Japan left nine people dead, the public broadcaster NHK said last Sunday, after an “unprecedented” deluge that flooded more than 1,000 homes and snarled up roads and rail services.

Torrential downpours that started last Thursday triggered landslide warnings and power outages, with forecasters issuing the highest-level heavy rain warning for the Chiba region.

By last Friday morning, the city of Chiba had logged more than three times the rainfall typically seen in the whole of August, Tokyo’s land ministry said.

19 CHINA

‘So bad it’s good’: the budget film that’s pulling in fans

A crude, low-tech animation about a cow and a skylark has become a sleeper hit at China’s box office, sitting alongside blockbusters such as The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day in cinema revenue rankings.

Niu Lai, which translates to The Cow is Coming, is an 86-minute budget animation about a newborn calf and a skylark whose relationship develops over the course of a dream sequence.

The film reportedly made just 7,700 yuan ($1,140) in its first 10 days of screenings. But discussion online about how bad the film was drove hordes of film fans to the cinema. It has now made more than 14.9m yuan, according to the movie tracking site Mao Yan, making it one of the top-performing films of the year.

20 AUSTRALIA

Deepfake of PM used to lure people into fake investment

There has been a steep rise in scammers luring victims into phoney investment opportunities using deepfakes of celebrities and politicians, Australia’s corporate watchdog has warned.

Anthony Albanese is the figure most commonly co-opted. Real footage of the prime minister, overlaid with fake audio promising A$40,000 ($28,400) a month from a A$4,000 investment, appears in one online video.

The Australian Securities and Investment Commission dealt with more than 19,400 scams last financial year, almost triple the amount in the year before.

DEATHS

Hayden Panettiere

US actor known for her roles in TV shows such as Heroes and Nashville. She died on 16 August, aged 36.

Zhu Rongji

Former Chinese premier who spearheaded the country’s entry into global trade. He died on 12 August, aged 97.

Finlay Tarling

British cyclist. He died on 14 August, aged 19.

Mary Heilmann

US artist. She died on 14 August, aged 86.

Johnny Young

Dutch-born Australian singer, songwriter and TV producer. He died on 13 August, aged 79.

Jimmy Rimmer

Former England, Aston Villa, Manchester United and Arsenal goalkeeper. He died on 14 August, aged 78.

Mark Rydell

Oscar-nominated US director of On Golden Pond. He died on 13 August, aged 97.

21 August 2026 The Guardian Weekly

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Global report United Kingdom

POLITICS

Reform UK backer behind probe into Tory party chair

The businessman and Reform UK backer Arron Banks commissioned a private intelligence firm to dig into the Conservative party chair, in addition to having paid for an investigation into a journalist.

Banks, above, a former Reform candidate and leave campaign donor, appeared to confirm that he was behind an investigation into Kevin Hollinrake.

The use of private investigators to look into Hollinrake was first reported by the Mail on Sunday, which said Banks had used Precision Risk and Intelligence, a firm he previously owned.

As party chair, Hollinrake has led the Conservatives' response to revelations about Nigel Farage's finances, asking questions about the £5m ($6.8m) undeclared gift Farage received from the Thailand-based crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne before the last election.

Hollinrake addressed Banks on social media last Sunday, saying: "When you can't answer the questions, investigate the people asking them. After we called for scrutiny of Reform UK's finances, a close associate of Nigel Farage reportedly hired private investigators to dig into me (and journalists covering the same story)."

In a reply on X, Banks said: "I've always come across people in this world who like to give it but can't receive it."

Pressed on whether Reform knew about the surveillance, Banks suggested he had acted alone, saying: "I row my own boat." Banks has been approached by the Guardian for comment.

The big story Page 10 →

WATER

'Surge pricing' could be allowed during droughts

Water companies could be allowed to raise bills for customers during periods of drought under proposals being considered by the sector's regulator for England and Wales.

Suppliers would be permitted to factor "water scarcity" into bills as part of efforts to reduce consumption under Ofwat's plans, which are being likened to surge pricing - the practice where private hire firms raise taxi fares at times of higher demand.

The proposals came just a few days after the prime minister, Andy Burnham, said he was angry with water companies and accused them of treating their customers like a "blank cheque" after more than a dozen firms were given the green light to raise water bills even higher.

FOOD

Sweet success for student's all-British chocolate bar

Scientists at the University of Reading created a bar with cocoa beans grown in Berkshire - the first bar made with 100% UK ingredients since 1932.

The bar was crafted to celebrate the university's 100th anniversary, and made with cocoa grown from plants in the institute's collection.

Master's student Maha Khan, below, harvested, fermented and processed beans to make the bar.

TRANSPORT

Virgin to run cross-Channel trains to rival Eurostar

Virgin Trains has been granted track access by the rail regulator to run 20 daily return services between London and Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam from 2030, moving forward its plans to break's Eurostar's passenger monopoly on the cross-Channel route.

The agreement covers the period between 1 October 2030 to 31 December 2040. It means Virgin Trains has passed another important regulatory hurdle towards starting the international services, after being granted access last October to share Eurostar's depot in east London.

Eurostar has previously faced criticism over its high prices.

EDUCATION

Cambridge under scrutiny as vigil held for Jason Arday

The University of Cambridge defended its mental health support for the academic Jason Arday, who died last Friday. The university said it had provided Arday with extensive mental health support and security measures, including installing panic alarms and screening racist emails and post, after he resigned from his post as professor of sociology of education this month.

He quit after widespread press coverage over accusations of plagiarism and inconsistencies in statements about his career and achievements.

Arday, 41, was pronounced dead after emergency services were called to his home in Battersea, London, last Friday.

Tens of thousands of people attended a vigil in Trafalgar Square, London, on Monday, organised by the campaign group Stand Up to Racism. The group's co-convener Weyman Bennett said Arday's death was the "result of a racist witch-hunt".

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The number of storks released on Bodmin Moor by the Cornwall Stork Project. It's hoped the migratory birds - the first to be returned to the wild in south-west England - will return to breed

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Reader's eyewitness

Causing a buzz

'A hornet mimic hoverfly (Volucella zonaria). In 40 years, I've never seen one before in our garden. Completely harmless, it has no sting and is an important garden pollinator. It uses its size and loud buzzing to trick predators. What a clever little creature!' By Janet Porteous, Leigh, England, UK

SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENT

ASTRONOMY

New kind of black hole 'star' seen in early universe images

Astronomers claim to have discovered a new kind of cosmic object, a black hole “star”, which is the size of the entire solar system.

The international team focused on a red spot in images of the early universe captured by Nasa's James Webb space telescope. The object was lurking in the constellation of Cetus, the Whale, and releases 100bn times more energy than any known star can produce. The object “shines with the energy typically associated with black holes but bears signatures classically associated with stars”, said Dr Rohan Naidu, who performed the work at MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.

ENERGY

Global coal demands slow but India steps up production

Enough new coalmining projects were proposed last year to increase

global supplies by 2.5bn tonnes a year, an increase of 11% from the year before, even as demand for coal plateaus, according to a report.

Global Energy Monitor, an NGO, found that India ignited a rise in new coalmine proposals in 2025. It plans to increase its coal production by 100m tonnes to 1.15bn tonnes in the 2025-26 fiscal year.

MEDICAL RESEARCH

Growing human tissue will cut back on use of animals

Miniature human organs and other tissues are to be grown from NHS patients' cells in a UK drive to improve medicine testing and reduce the number of animals used in drug development.

Scientists will use the clumps of tissue to learn how diseases vary between patients, helping identify which treatments are best.

The move marks a shift away from the use of animals as models for human disease towards what researchers believe will be more accurate and reliable tests based directly on human tissue.

"It's going to have a major impact on the numbers of animals used and the way we develop new drugs in

the future," said Matthias Zilbauer, a clinical professor of paediatric gastroenterology at the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute.

ARCHAEOLOGY

Ancient ceramic wine jars found on shipwreck off Italy

A 2,100-year-old Roman shipwreck carrying about 500 amphorae has been discovered 5km off the coast of Mazara del Vallo in Sicily.

Italy's Carabinieri cultural heritage protection squad investigated the vessel after receiving a tip-off from fishers. It was found at a depth of 46 metres and carried hundreds of amphorae - two-handled ceramic jars with a narrow neck - thought to have been used to transport wine. The wreck, measuring about 21 metres long and 6 metres wide, was described by Italy's culture minister, Alessandro Giuli, as "one of the most important underwater archaeological discoveries of recent years".

Dressel 1A amphorae can help archaeologists reconstruct the commercial networks that linked Italy with other parts of the Mediterranean between the second and first centuries BC.

5k

The percentage increase in UK Google searches for “eyes hurt”, compared with the same time the previous week, during last Wednesday’s solar eclipse

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UNITED KINGDOM

Nigel Farage won last week's byelection against Count Binface but critics called the vote he forced a waste of money

By Daniel Boffey

CARRY

ON

CLACTON

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It ended, perhaps fittingly, on a rather baffling note. After 34 days of campaigning to regain the parliamentary seat of Clacton on England's east coast, Nigel Farage, the leader of the Reform UK party, declined to turn up to the town's leisure centre to hear himself declared the winner and MP. It was quite the thing. The last high-profile winning candidate to fail to enjoy his moment of victory was Bobby Sands in 1981. The IRA man had his reasons: he was on hunger strike in a prison in Northern Ireland, and went on to die 26 days later.

Instead Farage attended a gathering of his supporters at an airfield on the outskirts of Clacton billed by his party as “Farage Fest”. He told fans he would

be damned if he was going to stand on a stage “having won a resounding victory” and “be demeaned and humiliated by nobodies”.

But he also said Essex police had advised him of an “organised campaign to disrupt and degrade the result”. A Reform UK spokesperson went further: “Essex police advised Nigel not to attend the count tonight due to a credible threat against him.”

Not true, suggested the police. No such advice had been given. One of the shoutiest members of Farage's anti-immigration party, Lee Anderson, had a slightly refreshed explanation by 8.10am when interviewed by the BBC. His leader had not wanted to disrespect those who had flocked to Farage Fest. He was, actually, if you

After a campaign of 34 days, Farage declined to turn up to hear himself declared the winner

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Under the financial spotlight Parliament reopens its inquiry

Page 13 →

A waste of energy for Farage

The route to No 10 is less certain now

Page 14 →

Count Binface (above) at the count at a leisure centre; Nigel Farage (below) arrives at a polling station to vote

DAN KITWOOD/GETTY; HENRY NICHOLLS / AFP

will just listen just for a moment, a man of principle. “It was a great occasion that it is only right that he spends that time with his members, with his activists, with his supporters,” Anderson fumed.

All this left one intergalactic explorer, with his arms raised and a bin on his no doubt sweaty head, to take the starring role at Clacton Leisure Centre. The candidate who went by the name of Count Binface made a declaration on social media: “I came first in the Clacton byelection! Of the candidates who bothered to turn up for the results.”

Count Binface, for those who have not been following this latest fever dream of a moment in British politics, is the parody figure who

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The big story^{}[] Clacton byelection

declared himself the unity candidate when Farage triggered the byelection by resigning the seat back in July.

Farage had explained his resignation at the time as a challenge to the establishment that would show them that the people did not want him scrutinised and investigated by the parliamentary authorities over an undeclared £5m ($6.8m) gift from a crypto billionaire or any of the other financial scandals orbiting Reform UK.

The other major political parties called his bluff. It was a stunt, they said, and none of them stood, leaving Count Binface, a familiar and striking figure at elections, whose real name is Jon Harvey, to harvest the anti-Farage vote. And he could be said to have done rather well, given that he won just 95 votes at the recent byelection in Makerfield, in Greater Manchester, where Andy Burnham, now the prime minister, won his parliamentary seat.

Binface, who describes himself as an “independent space warrior” from the planet Sigma IX, won 26.93% of the ballot with 9,455 votes, leaving him second to Farage who secured 22,239 votes (63.34%). Turnout was 44%.

Perhaps – and it is only a theory going round the leisure centre in Clacton – Farage was actually not at the count because he did not fancy the inevitable photograph of him next to his ludicrous competition?

“That means I’ve got – against Nigel Farage – 10,000% more votes than I got against Andy Burnham,” Binface later said of his electoral tally. “What does that tell you? Well it tells you that Nigel, who said that he didn’t want to be humiliated, maybe has been. As for me, I’m over the moon – I’m over your moon, I’m over my moons – and what comes next? Well, we shall see. But you know what, we know this for a fact: over one in four people in this constituency would rather have Count Binface as their MP than the leader of Reform UK.”

That was the Binface take on an election estimated to have cost the public purse £250,000. Others were available. For the fired-up Anderson, who scolded the BBC presenter Justin Webb for being “very rude” for interrupting him on Friday morning, there was one clear reading of that night’s events.

“[Nigel Farage is] celebrating a stunning victory in Clacton and the people have decided: they’ve stuck two fingers up to people like the BBC, the establishment, the blob, the whole of Westminster,” Anderson said.

“There has been a constant witch-hunt by people in the media. There’s been a witch-hunt against Nigel Farage and he said: ‘You know what? Enough’s enough. Meet me at the ballot box.’ And when it comes to a crunch, when he does throw the gauntlet down to the other political parties, what happens?

‘All Farage can brag about is beating a bloke with a bin on his head’

They run away like the cowards they are. He challenges them at the ballot box and he wins.”

Naturally enough, that wasn’t how the other main parties saw it.

“All Farage can brag about this morning is beating a bloke with a bin on his head,” said a Conservative party spokesperson. “What he should do is answer the serious outstanding questions about why he hid his £5m from the public.”

Bridget Phillipson, the chair of the governing Labour party, said: “There’s no hiding place now and Nigel Farage needs to answer to the public as to exactly what’s going on.”

As election workers sorted through the voting ballots at the leisure centre in the early hours of last Friday morning, one moment caught by photographers also tells a story.

Across the 90cm-long ballot paper containing all the names of the parody and independent candidates for the seat of Clacton (it was the longest ballot paper in UK electoral history), a disgruntled voter had made his mark: “What a disgraceful waste of money.”

Three hours after Farage’s victory was declared, the suspended parliamentary standards investigation into the Reform UK leader over accusations he failed to declare gifts and donations had resumed.

DANIEL BOFFEY IS THE GUARDIAN’S CHIEF REPORTER

▲ Count Binface (centre) and other candidates await the Clacton byelection results

VICTORIA JONES/ SHUTTERSTOCK

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13

UNITED KINGDOM

Back under investigation

Inquiry resumes into £5m gift

Watchdog reopens probe into Farage's financial affairs as political rivals speak out over needless byelection

By Rowena Mason and Peter Walker

Nigel Farage's attempt to draw the sting from inquiries into his financial affairs appeared to have backfired last Friday as the standards watchdog reopened its investigation and MPs from all sides condemned the needless byelection.

The Reform UK leader declared victory in the Clacton vote as he was returned with an increased majority and gained more votes than in 2024, saying he had "stuck two fingers up at the entire political establishment".

However, parliament's standards commissioner immediately reopened

an investigation into whether he should have declared a series of gifts provided to him shortly before the last general election.

These include a £5m ($6.8m) personal gift from crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne, first revealed by the Guardian, and further financial support from his friend and convicted fraudster George Cottrell.

Rival parties said the reopening of the inquiry showed Farage's attempt to avoid scrutiny had failed, with the Labour party chair, Bridget Phillipson, saying he had "no hiding place" as he tries to "dodge and deflect" criticism.

But at an event to celebrate his win, the Reform UK leader attempted to diminish the significance of the allegations under investigation.

He told GB News: "If I've made one sin, it's that I haven't filled in a piece of paper. I've broken no law, I've broken no tax law, I've taken no public money ... maybe I haven't filled in a piece of paper. I'm confident I'm right."

While playing down the inquiry, Farage also appeared to acknowledge the watchdog could well find against him over his failure to be transparent. If a separate standards committee of MPs recommend a sanction of more than 10 days of suspension from parliament, it could then trigger a second byelection.

This would require the approval of more than 10% of the electorate of Clacton - about 7,800 voters - which is fewer than the number who voted for Farage's main rival, the satirical candidate Count Binface.

Farage also faced criticism for failing to turn up to the Clacton count,

▼ Nigel Farage played down the inquiry at an event to celebrate his win

AFP/GETTY

saying he had been told by police of an organised attempt at disruption.

However, police said they had given no advice to any candidate not to attend and it emerged that an anonymous art collective flashmob in masks were demonstrating 15 minutes away from the venue at Clacton town hall.

At a separate event, Farage gave an explanation for failing to attend the count saying he was "damned" if he was going to stand on a stage to be "demeaned and humiliated by nobodies". It was not clear if he was talking about the array of more than 30 independent candidates who stood against him or the possibility of a protest.

Farage called the byelection early in July saying he wanted voters in Clacton to decide if he was fit to be an MP. However, the stunt did not go to plan after all the main parties declined to stand, leaving him taking on dozens of novelty and fringe candidates, most prominent among them Count Binface.

According to one report, Farage called his own byelection after his team advised that leaving parliament would end the investigation. In fact it only pauses such processes, which resume if the person is re-elected.

Farage has said the investigation was "being used as a political tool". One Reform MP, Sarah Pochin, called the process a "kangaroo court".

Farage is expected to be interviewed by the standards commissioner when parliament returns but it is not certain when the investigation will conclude.

Labour said last Friday that the resumption of the investigation showed Farage could not outrun questions about his finances.

Phillipson said: "Now he's going to come back to parliament and have to answer some very serious questions, questions he's been seeking to dodge, distracting and deflecting from the £5m ... gift, his connections to a convicted fraudster. And now he's through that byelection, there's no hiding place."

A Conservative party spokesperson said the byelection was a "farce started by Nigel Farage to try to dodge scrutiny of his fishy £5m personal donation".

Friends of Farage suggested he intended to throw himself back into Reform campaigning and building up a presence in target seats in case of an early general election.

ROWENA MASON IS THE GUARDIAN'S WHITEHALL EDITOR; PETER WALKER IS SENIOR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT

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14

ANALYSISUNITED KINGDOM

Beyond parodyThis was a futile byelection that has done Farage no favours

By Alexandra Topping

Dawn had long broken in the Essex town of Clacton-on-Sea when the results for the

byelection came in. After a gruelling count, an atmosphere of deep exhaustion had settled over the room. Even the man with a dustbin on his head looked weary.

As it was declared that Nigel Farage had won, as expected, there was no cheering in the room, which had been boycotted by the Reform UK leader and his supporters; instead there was only an overwhelming sense of futility.

Farage forced the byelection at the start of July in an attempt take control of a narrative tide that had turned against him. After the Guardian revealed he had received a £5m ($6.8m) personal gift from Christopher Harborne, a Thailand-based crypto billionaire, in April 2024, he had been dogged by questions about his financial backing. Other revelations followed and questions mounted.

The parliamentary standards watchdog announced it was opening a formal investigation into gifts received by Farage, and his regular long press conferences abruptly stopped. When he did a very limited number of interviews, Farage, normally performatively affable, was testy and defensive.

He resigned as the MP for the Clacton constituency at the start of July, saying the “people of Clacton should be the judges of my actions”, and billing the fight as a “people versus the establishment”

byelection. The establishment, however, chose not to play. All of the major parties declined to field candidates and take part in what they called a “media circus” and “vanity project”.

Instead, Count Binface, the self-declared “entirely independent space warrior” created by the comedian Jon Harvey, stepped into the void. It felt, at times, less like an election campaign and more of a showcase for British humour, the ultimate distillation of the concept of a summer “silly season” of news.

And while the people of Clacton did back Farage again, it was no overwhelming victory. He won 22,239 votes, 63.34% of the vote. Convincing, yes, but significantly short of the 72% won by David Davis in 2008 when he resigned his seat and stood again as a protest over the issue of civil liberties.

With no other mainstream options, the parody candidate Count Binface was Farage’s nearest competitor, winning 9,455 votes, or one in four of the votes cast. In his “victory speech” posted on X, he noted that this was a 10,000% increase on the 95 votes he managed against Andy Burnham in the Makerfield byelection. “A new dawn has broken, has it not?” he wrote, echoing Tony Blair’s 1997 victory speech. “Literally, because it’s past 6.30 in the morning here in Clacton-on-Sea.”

In the end, Farage was not there for the count. Overnight, Reform UK said police had told him not to attend because of a “credible threat”

This election cost Reform £10,000. It also cost Farage time and energy

▼ An activist at an anti-Brexit protest holds a placard with pictures of George Cottrell and Nigel Farage

VUK VALCIC/SOPA/SHUTTERSTOCK

against him, although Essex police contradicted this claim. A victory press conference was also cancelled.

Labour said the result was “no victory” for Farage, with the party’s chair, Bridget Phillipson, saying the “mountain of sleaze and scandal he and Reform are now engulfed in has grown while he’s been trying to distract the public by fighting a byelection against a bin”. The Liberal Democrats said Farage had come away from the byelection “looking daft”. Farage himself was restrained, writing on X: “The result in Clacton speaks for itself.”

This election reportedly cost Reform UK about £10,000. It cost the taxpayer about £250,000, after the government said it would be illegal for Reform to cover the costs, as the party had offered. It also cost Farage time and energy.

Last summer he dominated the news agenda with a series of press conferences and public appearances. This year he held his first press briefing since May on 3 August, and another a week later. Meanwhile, the prime minister, Andy Burnham, has – unlike his predecessor – refused to cede the battlefield, taking off on a summer tour with a flurry of announcements about “everyday fixes”.

Farage has instead used his social media channels to post videos of his most loyal supporters. He may soon have to call on them again. The parliamentary standards inquiry, which will also look into allegations that Farage was financially supported by the crypto gambler and convicted fraudster George Cottrell, was paused when Farage forced the byelection, but it resumed last Friday morning.

If parliament imposes sanctions for failing to declare the gifts, Farage may be suspended from the House of Commons and potentially face a second byelection. The result and high turnout here may make the main parties wary. But they will take heart from polling: after Farage forced the election, support for Reform fell nationally, from about 27% to 24%. The MP for Clacton’s seat looks safe, but his route to Downing Street is less certain.

ALEXANDRA TOPPING IS A POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT FOR THE GUARDIAN

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15

ARCTIC

China pushes to develop the 'ice silk road'

Page 22 →

Spotlight

RUSSIA

Recruiters scramble for soldiers as mobilisation fears mount

By Pjotr Sauer

In kitchens and Telegram chats across Russia, the same question is being asked with growing frequency: will Vladimir Putin order another mobilisation?

Nearly five years into the war, Russia is scrambling to find enough soldiers to replenish its ranks, as voluntary recruitment slows and its forces suffer heavy losses on the battlefield in Ukraine.

With Putin showing no sign of abandoning his far-reaching territorial demands, even as Russia's summer offensive stalls, the Kremlin faces a growing manpower headache.

"The problem for the Kremlin is that it is getting much harder to find people willing to fight, even for crazy money," said Aleksei Tabalov, a human rights activist and director of an organisation that helps Russian conscripts.

Putin last resorted to mobilisation in September 2022, when a series of dramatic battlefield setbacks forced the Kremlin to call up 300,000 reservists to stabilise the front.

Moscow has avoided another deeply unpopular call-up by relying largely on highly paid voluntary contracts to fill the ranks with roughly 1.3 million contract soldiers since then.

▲ As Russia's summer offensive stalls, the Kremlin faces a growing manpower headache

IGDR IVANKO/AFP/GETTY

Continued

→

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Spotlight^{}[] Europe

Men, particularly from Russia's poorer regions, have been offered life-changing signing bonuses and salaries on open-ended contracts amounting to several years of local wages, alongside substantial payouts to their families if they are killed.

But Russia's heavy losses mean it must continue finding new soldiers at a high rate. Western estimates put Russian casualties at more than 30,000 killed and wounded a month, a toll that reflects the army's attritional "meat grinder" tactics.

Moscow now recruits roughly 1,000 soldiers a day, according to calculations by Janis Kluge, a Russia expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, which means most new recruits are used to replenish depleted units rather than expand Russia's offensive capacity. That has once again raised the prospect of mobilisation.

Top Russian officials have dismissed reports of an impending call-up, with former president Dmitry Medvedev describing them as "nonsense" and a "lying provocation" by Ukraine.

Two people familiar with discussions in Moscow also said there was no indication that Putin had decided

to order another mass mobilisation. A senior western official likewise said there were no signs that a decision had been taken.

But fears that another call-up may be on the way have nevertheless increasingly entered everyday conversations. In Telegram chats used by local sports teams, work colleagues and groups of friends, Russians swap rumours about a possible mobilisation and share advice on securing exemptions or avoiding the draft. Some speculate that a new call-up could come after September's elections to the Duma. "It's guesswork right now whether mobilisation will actually happen," said Ivan Chuviliaev, a spokesperson for Get Lost, a group that helps Russian soldiers desert.

But he said the renewed speculation was already being exploited to boost recruitment. "The message is: mobilisation is coming anyway, so you might as well sign a contract now and get a payout before you're forced to fight," Chuviliaev said

For now, people familiar with the Kremlin's thinking say the authorities appear determined to strong-arm more men into signing contracts rather than risk another mobilisation.

► Smoke rises from an oil refinery after a drone attack in Moscow in June

▼ A Moscow billboard advertising army contracts

Over the summer, lawyers and activists have documented increasingly coercive recruitment tactics in several regions, with men detained on the street by police, taken from workplaces or summoned to stations - before being brought to military recruitment offices and pressed to sign contracts.

"It has turned into a hunt for people," said Tabalov. "Under various pretexts, through deception, blackmail, violence and threats, they are forcing them to sign contracts."

Tabalov said recruiters were increasingly targeting what he described as "socially marginalised" men, including those with debts, criminal cases or other vulnerabilities that could be used to put pressure on them to enlist.

In the southern Penza region, where some of the most aggressive draft methods have been reported, videos posted online have shown men being driven away in vans as relatives protested outside recruitment offices. Activists say some have been threatened with prosecution or beaten until they agreed to sign.

The search has widened elsewhere too. Universities, technical colleges and vocational schools have been encouraged to recruit students into newly formed drone units, offering another source of manpower for the military. Putin recently signed a law expanding the pool of convicted prisoners eligible to sign contracts with the army, including people convicted of "serious and especially serious crimes".

Much of the responsibility for finding soldiers has been pushed down to Russia's regions.

Governors and local administrations are expected to meet recruitment targets set by Moscow, giving the Kremlin some distance from the drive while leaving regional officials responsible for finding enough men in their own territories.

Around that system, a lucrative recruitment industry has emerged. Regional governments offer thousands of dollars not only to soldiers who sign contracts but also to those who find them, with "bring a friend" schemes paying residents for every person they persuade to enlist.

Private recruiters and public-sector employees scour social media for

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ANALYSIS UKRAINE

Missile crisis

Global shortage of interceptors cancels out any Patriot gains

By Jack Watling

“Invincible.” That was how Vladimir Putin described Russia’s latest generation of ballistic

missiles in 2018. In 2022, he would unleash this arsenal to strike across Ukraine, hitting command centres, critical infrastructure and airfields. Then, in 2023, Ukraine received Patriot air defence systems from its international partners. The US-supplied missile interceptor would prove to be an effective shield against Russian strikes.

But this year, supplies of Patriot missiles have run out and Kyiv has suffered the consequences. Intercepts have gone from more than 70% to none, so that Russia strikes Ukraine with impunity.

While the military narrative of the war has largely been of cheap mass-produced Ukrainian weapons overwhelming exquisite Russian military hardware, most of the serious damage from Russia’s long-range strikes has come from cruise and ballistic missiles, and Ukraine’s campaign has suffered for want of them. Countering ballistic missiles is not a simple or cheap activity.

To intercept a tactical ballistic missile, such as Russia’s Iskander, a defensive system needs to be

“The real lesson here is that Nato members have abjectly failed in defence planning

remarkably sophisticated. Across Nato most states have been happy for Washington to invest to make the Patriot up to the job.

Even before the US decision to attack Iran, western allies were nervous about depleting their own stocks by giving Patriot missiles to Ukraine. The US attack on Iran - prompting Tehran to fire ballistic missiles across the Middle East - has created an acute global shortage. Where Russia usually fires fewer than 10 ballistic missiles in a single attack, Iran has launched upwards of 170 a day.

Ukraine is not going to receive enough Patriots between now and the winter to save its critical national infrastructure, irrespective of whether some countries release a few more from their stockpiles. At this point, Kyiv must plan for a winter with severely disrupted power, and disperse and fortify life-support systems such as water, sanitation, power and heating.

Kyiv is trying to convince the US to activate Starlink satellite navigation modules over Russian territory to enable its drones to hunt for the Russian missile launchers. But, as the US recently found in Iran, pulling off this kind of mission over a large area is extremely difficult.

Another line of effort in Kyiv is to attack the production of Russia’s ballistic missiles. These factories are well defended. To succeed, Ukraine’s partners will need to expand the funding and industrial capacity behind Ukraine’s nascent cruise-missile industry, or reopen questions of providing weapons.

But the real lesson here is that Nato members have abjectly failed in defence planning. The numbers have been known since before 2022 and yet the investments to expand Patriot production (or mature alternative systems) have not been made. Such a level of complacency is devastating for Ukraine today, but it also risks Europe being bereft of defences in the future. It remains remarkable that Europe - watching the consequences unfold on its very borders - has remained so idle.

JACK WATLING IS SENIOR RESEARCH FELLOW FOR APPLIED MILITARY SCIENCES AT THE ROYAL UNITED SERVICES INSTITUTE

Sign on Feeding the ‘meat grinder’

300k Number of reservists called up to stabilise the front in September 2022 - Russia’s last mobilisation

1.3m Number of highly paid “contract soldiers” recruited since to avoid another deeply unpopular call-up

7.7bn Amount in roubles ($90m) paid by local government to recruiters under system favoured by Moscow

candidates, while advertisements for military contracts have become ubiquitous online. Russian regions have paid recruiters at least 7.7bn roubles ($90m) since such schemes were introduced, according to the independent Russian outlet IStories.

One recruiter in central Russia, speaking to the Guardian on condition of anonymity, said his organisation was expected to find between 20 and 30 men each month. “It was easier last year,” the recruiter said. “Now it is getting harder.”

Another mass call-up would carry significant political risks for the Kremlin. The 2022 call-up triggered one of the biggest episodes of domestic disruption since the invasion began, prompting a mass exodus of Russians and a sharp drop in Putin’s approval ratings.

It would also come at a potentially sensitive moment. Recent polling suggests confidence in the course of the war is weakening, with the share of Russians who believe the campaign in Ukraine is going well falling to its lowest level since April 2022.

For now, analysts say Moscow is more likely to step up recruitment efforts through higher bonuses, pressure on regional officials and increasingly coercive tactics.

The options before the Kremlin, Tabolov said, could range from another mass call-up to a more selective mobilisation, sending existing conscripts to the front or quietly calling up reservists for frontline service.

“I don’t think they’ll be able to recruit enough people under the current system,” Tabolov said. “Then they’ll be faced with the question of what form mobilisation should take.”

PJOTR SAUER IS A RUSSIAN AFFAIRS REPORTER FOR THE GUARDIAN

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Spotlight^{}[] Asia

AFGHANISTAN

Concerns grow over deepening global ties with Taliban

By Jason Burke

The Taliban in Afghanistan have launched a diplomatic effort to end their isolation as major regional and international powers show a readiness to engage more closely with the repressive regime despite its systematic human rights abuses.

Five years after the Taliban took power, an increasing number of countries are renewing ties or scaling up diplomatic contacts with the hardline Islamists, who seized power in Kabul in 2021 after 20 years of brutal insurgent warfare. Campaigners fear that the individual contacts by different countries risk undermining “coherent, consistent” demands for an improvement in human rights in return for any diplomatic concessions.

The United Nations described a recent “cascade of [Taliban] edicts and laws” that have banned women

from universities and most employment, denied teenage girls education and imposed strict dress codes. Minorities have been persecuted, while activists and journalists face repression. Afghanistan has become a “graveyard for human rights”, the UN said in March.

India, Qatar, China, Iran and several central Asian states all recently welcomed Taliban officials or opened new channels of communication. Russia, which recognised the Taliban government just over a year ago, signed a military cooperation agreement last month. In June, the European Union held talks with Taliban officials in Brussels about returning failed asylum-seekers to Afghanistan. Individual European countries have also deepened their own contacts with Kabul.

“There is no doubt there has been an evolution. The Islamic emirate is now in a confident position. They have realised they are indispensable for regional countries right now and even with Europe and the US they have identified how to engage,” said Shivam Shekhawat, at the Observer Research Foundation in Delhi.

“There is a need for engagement even if just for aid agencies to mitigate the ongoing humanitarian crisis,” said Fereshta Abbasi, Afghanistan researcher at Human Rights Watch. “But there should be a consistent and coherent message from the international community to the Taliban that they will not have any friends if they do not show real progress in terms of the women’s rights and human rights situation.”

This year officials from Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan

◀ The UN called Afghanistan under Taliban rule a ‘human rights graveyard’

WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP/GETTY

Brussels meeting The European Commission downplayed its discussions in Brussels with a Taliban delegation as merely “technical” and focused on returns, but a Taliban spokesperson claimed it was a historic visit. The meeting prompted outrage. “You cannot condemn Taliban abuses in one breath and then announce talks on immigration in the next ... the Taliban are telling their constituency back home that they are now accepted by the international community,” said Fereshta Abbasi of Human Rights Watch.

and Kazakhstan have all visited Afghanistan, seeking trade routes and pipeline deals that would allow their landlocked countries access to seaports or third countries beyond.

India too has moved to reinforce relationships that were frosty after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in 2021.

In June, India’s UN envoy suggested a rethink was necessary on sanctions, such as travel bans, asset freezes and arms embargoes. “The political reality of Afghanistan has changed in the last five years, and the current UN sanctions regime must take that into account,” said Harish Parvathaneni.

Afghan authorities’ diplomatic strategy has involved hosting envoys in Kabul, including those from China, Japan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan “seeks relations with all countries”, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said, though “the countries of the region and our neighbouring states have particular importance, because our economic ties and interests are closely linked”.

Anna Borshchevskaya, a senior fellow at The Washington Institute focusing on Russia’s policy towards the Middle East, said Moscow had multiple reasons for recognising the Taliban regime and seeking closer relations.

“One likely objective is simply having allies... Afghanistan is also very significant for Russia geographically and Russia just wants influence in that part of the world,” she said.

Britain has said it pursues a policy of “limited and pragmatic” engagement with Taliban officials, largely through the UK Mission to Afghanistan based at the British embassy in Qatar. Discreet meetings with the Taliban have also repeatedly been held by other western countries in Qatar.

The Taliban are split, with deep disagreements on the ban on women’s education among other issues, but remain dominated by the most conservative factions.

Ramin Mansoori, a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Endowment who studies Afghan politics, said the Taliban’s priority was their domestic agenda.

“They are not going to make any significant concessions. Most of them don’t have an international perspective,” Mansoori said.

JASON BURKE IS THE INTERNATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT OF THE GUARDIAN

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Spotlight Middle East

19

ISRAEL/PALESTINE

Under siege

West Bank police plan 'step toward annexation'

By Emma Graham-Harrison JERUSALEM

Israel's defence minister wants to transfer law enforcement powers for Israelis in the occupied West Bank over to the police, a plan that Palestine's vice-president described as a "flagrant violation of international law" and step towards full Israeli annexation.

Israel Katz announced that he had ordered the military to draw up plans for the handover of responsibility for policing Israeli settlers amid domestic and international criticism of the army's failure to tackle militants that have been besieging three Palestinian families in the village of Qusra since 9 August.

The Palestinian vice-president, Hussein al-Sheikh, called for international intervention to enforce international law and stop a move that would "entrench the illegitimate annexation of Palestinian land".

Michael Sfard, a leading Israeli human rights lawyer, said a transfer of law enforcement powers could constitute a major step towards formal annexation. "If they want to create a normative legal framework that absolves the army from responsibility and transfers it to police, that would be another brick, a very major one, of annexation," he said.

However, Israel could also legally expand police powers in the occupied West Bank under the current occupation framework, he added.

There has been a surge in attacks on Palestinians and construction of new settlements across the occupied West Bank, as extremists backed by the most far-right government in

Israel's history intensify a campaign of ethnic cleansing ahead of national elections set for October.

Last Thursday, Katz celebrated the re-establishment of a settlement evacuated by Israel in 2005, under then-prime minister Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan. "Here, this is the land of Israel. Here, we are staying forever," Katz said at the ceremony in Ganim, where two dozen prefabricated homes have already been installed, and the hillside is being levelled to make space for more.

Last Friday, the commander of Israeli forces for the occupied West Bank, Gen Avi Bluth, made a second visit to Qusra. Two days earlier, he told Palestinians the army would remove the settlers, but soldiers retreated from confrontation with the group.

Instead they forced one of the Palestinian families out of their home, saying they needed it as a base for the unsuccessful military operation against the settlers. One of the homes is owned by a US citizen, and US ambassador Mike Huckabee described the Israelis besieging it as terrorists, and said he had requested the Israeli police and army act to remove them.

Huckabee generally supports the settlement movement's vision of establishing a "Greater Israel" on land seized from Palestinians and neighbouring countries.

State and settler violence has driven a surge in displacement of Palestinian communities in the past three years. Since October 2023, Israel has forcibly

'Our goal was to stand with the residents, who are very scared'

A Palestinian home in Qusra, besieged by Israeli settlers who restricted access and left its occupants dependent on outside assistance for basic necessities

displaced 64 entire Palestinian communities and parts of 15 additional communities, affecting nearly 5,000 people, according to data from Israeli rights group B'tselem.

Last Friday, Israeli gunmen opened fire at a group of unarmed Israeli and Palestinian activists as they attempted to peacefully reclaim Palestinian land seized by settlers in Beit Sahour, just outside Jerusalem. A Catholic bishop and journalists covering the event were also targeted by the attackers.

Mia Biran, from the group Combatants for Peace, said: "Our goal was to clean the area, plant some trees, to show presence and to stand with the residents who are very scared. We were on private Palestinian land."

Shortly after they started work, the group heard gunfire from the settler outpost and were forced to take cover. One gunman moved close to the group, opened fire in the air and aimed the gun at activists, in an attack videoed by the group.

He was later joined by three or four others. "We screamed in Hebrew 'do not fire' and then they understood there are Israelis among the crowd," Biran said. "I called the police to tell them we are threatened by settlers, the activists who were at the roof saw there was a military Jeep all the time in the area who did nothing."

EMMA GRAHAM-HARRISON IS THE GUARDIAN'S CHIEF MIDDLE EAST CORRESPONDENT Quique Kierszenbaum and Sufian Taha contributed reporting

SALMAN MOHSEN ALKHATIB/SWUTTERSTOCK

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20

Eyewitness^{}[] Sri Lanka

Dancing in the street

A dancer performs as the Naga Raksha - or demon king cobra - during the final Grand Randoli Perahera of the 76th Bellanwila Esala festival. The prime minister, Harini Amarasuriya, was among the crowds at the pageant, which she described as a living heritage that brings together religious beliefs.

ISURA NIMANTHA/NURPHOTO/SHUTTERSTOCK

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22

Spotlight^{}[] Global

TRADE

Conflict and drought force a change in trade routes

By Joanna Partridge and Raphael Rashid SEOUL

Commercial ships travelling through the Panama canal are facing a rise in costs amid disruption triggered by the Iran war and falling water levels linked to the intense El Niño weather system.

Highlighting the fragility of global trade, a container ship reportedly paid about $4m to jump a queue of vessels waiting to pass through the vital maritime choke point.

Ships are now waiting about 10 days for their turn to pass through the trade route linking the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, the largest backlog since May, according to Argus Media.

While shipping companies usually pay a flat fee to reserve a slot to transit the canal, the Panama Canal Authority (ACP), which manages the waterway, also runs daily auctions that allow shipowners to place bids to skip the queue. Starting bids open at about $15,000 for smaller cargo vessels and $55,000 for the largest ships.

The buyer of the $4m transit slot was reported to be the Seaspan Benefactor, according to Bloomberg. The payment was reportedly more

Dry river arteries A prolonged period of dry weather across Europe has led to record low water levels on the Rhine, with traders warning that it was not possible to book some cargo shipments on the river, forcing them to pay higher costs to transport goods by road and rail instead.

The Rhine is one of Europe's main arteries for transporting grain, fuel, minerals and goods, but manufacturers have had to reduce the amount of cargo transported on ships as a result of the low water levels.

than double the average bid placed during the previous seven days.

Shipowners are willing to pay higher prices to avoid queues, as more vessels stay away from the Gulf and the Red Sea as fighting in the Middle East has effectively closed the strait of Hormuz and the Bab al-Mandab, the narrow waterway between the Arabian peninsula and the Horn of Africa.

Prices to travel in the Panama canal's busiest shipping lanes have hit record highs, according to the Financial Times, at a time when water levels are falling amid the rapidly developing El Niño weather system.

Earlier this month, the ACP said it would impose limits in late August and early September on how low vessels can travel through the water, known as a ship's draft, in an effort to keep traffic flowing.

The authority had also cut the maximum authorised draft in July, in a measure forcing ships transiting its Neopanamax locks - a wider and deeper lane - to carry lighter cargoes.

The decision was based on water levels and projected conditions for Gatun Lake, an artificial reservoir that feeds the canal, the ACP said, adding it was "ready to implement preventive measures" during El Niño based on lessons learned in 2023-4.

The Panama canal is not the only crucial trade route affected by low water levels, amid growing international concern over the economic consequences of the climate emergency.

Another effect of the disruption caused by the Iran war comes from data showing that South Korea's Incheon airport has become the world's busiest for international passengers. The growth has been, in part, attributed to disruption in the Middle East. Passenger traffic to Asia-Pacific rose 7.9%, while capacity to the Middle East fell 16.5% owing to the conflict.

The airport handled 38.39 million international passengers in the first half of 2026, according to figures compiled by Airports Council International, the global trade body for airports. It is the first time Incheon has topped the international passenger rankings since opening in 2001.

Incheon's international passenger traffic was up 6.3% year on year overall, with rising numbers of foreign visitors also contributing to the increase.

JOANNA PARTRIDGE IS A GUARDIAN BUSINESS REPORTER; RAPHAEL RASHID IS A SEOUL-BASED WRITER

ARCTIC

China and Russia eye north's 'ice silk road'

As the first regular container ships pass through, concerns remain about political and environmental risks

Jonathan Yerushalmy

When Marco Rubio suggested that the world should look to new shipping lanes to bypass the logjammed strait of Hormuz, it's unlikely he had the Arctic's northern sea route in mind.

And yet in recent months the promise of this 5,500km channel - cleaved through frozen seas by nuclear-powered icebreakers and illuminated in the summer by a sun that never dips below the Arctic horizon - has grown.

Japan, Korea and India have all expressed interest in sending cargoes through the northern sea route (NSR),

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◀ Russia's shadow fleet accounts for much of the traffic on the NSR

PHOTOXPRESS/ZUMAPRESS

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container service via the Arctic route. That direct journey from Ningbo-Zhoushan to Felixstowe in the UK takes as little as 18 days – according to the company – compared with more than 40 days via the Suez canal. Experts say the route is ideal for cargo that is sensitive to temperature, including electric vehicles, lithium batteries and solar products – among which China has become a dominant global exporter.

The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, first publicly called for China and Russia to develop Arctic shipping routes and build a “polar Silk Road” in 2017. Russia, which controls much of the northern sea route, was initially wary of China’s growing presence in the Arctic. But after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has been left increasingly dependent on Beijing in the high north, giving China greater leverage and access.

Russia’s state nuclear company Rosatom issues navigation permits and oversees shipping along the route, while also providing the nuclear-power icebreakers that are needed to accompany most vessels.

Sea Legend said the Arctic route will roughly halve emissions because of the shorter sailing time between China and Europe, but according to experts, the environmental risks inherent in the journey could easily erase any emissions savings.

Some shipping companies have faced criticism for operating vessels that use heavy fuel oil (HFO), which was banned from the Arctic in 2024.

According to a 2025 report from the Bellona Environmental Foundation, fuel spills pose huge dangers in the Arctic because HFO is thicker than other types, making it difficult to clean up. Oil also decomposes more slowly in colder weather and is almost impossible to remove once trapped in ice.

Their report argues Russia is completely unprepared to deal with such a disaster should it occur. The distances of the NSR – along with its isolation – mean that specialised recovery teams could take weeks to reach a spill site.

“Due to the remoteness of the region and lack of logistical support, the probability of a prolonged machinery breakdown and consequential grounding is much higher,” said Capt Nitin Chopra, Allianz principal marine risk consultant for Asia.

Bellona also flagged the danger of potent solar radiation absorber, black carbon, which is emitted by HFO.

Li Xiaobin, chief operating officer of Sea Legend, said this month that the crisis in the Middle East has exposed the vulnerability of the Suez canal and strait of Hormuz to regional turmoil.

Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, has echoed those comments. Moscow would like to redraw the map of world trade, but its control of the NSR – which is largely in Russia’s exclusive economic zone – is seen as too great a risk for many operators. International sanctions imposed on Russia after the invasion of Ukraine could complicate rescue efforts if a vessel gets into trouble and requires assistance.

Experts say that for now, much of the traffic along the NSR is taken up by Moscow’s shadow fleet: tankers often operating without insurance or proper regulatory oversight, making ad hoc journeys to evade sanctions on Russia’s oil. “In 2025 there were a hundred such ships under international sanctions – or nearly a third of the cargo ships sailing the route,” Bellona’s Ksenia Vakhrusheva wrote in a report last year. In 2026, reports suggest shadow fleet shipments through the NSR are happening at an even faster rate.

“With the current climate change, we may be able to see more time of the years that the northern sea route will be open for commercial shipping,” said Vinh Thai, professor of logistics and supply chain management at RMIT University in Australia.

A Russian transporter of LNG was able to start an early transit through the route in May, thanks to the shrinking summer sea ice. This month, ship-watchers spotted an unprecedented convoy of Russian tankers taking an unusually northern path through the NSR.

Despite Russia’s bold – perhaps reckless – efforts to push the NSR as a viable alternative for international shipping, experts say that for now the economics don’t add up. Safety concerns, high operating costs, a short sailing season and sanctions risks will probably continue to constrain Arctic shipping. “So can the northern sea route be used as a substitute for the strait of Hormuz and the Suez canal? The short answer is no,” said Thai. “Not for the moment.”

JONATHAN YERUSHALMY IS GUARDIAN AUSTRALIA’S UK/US SITE EDITOR Alicia Chen also contributed to this article

but it’s China that has established the first scheduled transit, with shipping company Sea Legend launching a regular service in recent days.

The NSR, which cuts through the Arctic Circle along Russia’s northern coast, is only navigable during warmer months, but that window has widened due to shrinking summer sea ice. For some vessels, the route can more than halve the time it takes to get from China to Europe, but the benefits come with serious environmental and political risks.

After a single pilot voyage in 2025, Sea Legend has launched a regular

18

Journey time in days for ships travelling from Ningbo in China to Felixstowe in the UK via NSR, instead of 40 days via Suez, according to Sea Legend

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24

Spotlight^{}[] Environment

Scorched Amazon faces the wrath of 'Godzilla' El Niño

Scientists predict the supercharged climate pattern will peak at the end of the dry season, when the rainforest is at its most vulnerable

BRAZIL

By Jonathan Watts

As a supercharged climate scorches Europe with wildfire and deluges Asia with floods, the Amazon is bracing for a drought that strikes fear into the hearts of forest defenders and food producers alike. But it should worry even more of us.

Scientists are predicting that the peak of El Niño will occur at the worst

possible time for the world's biggest tropical rainforest: the end of the dry season between October and December, when rivers are at their lowest and undergrowth is tinder dry. This will be a period of extreme vulnerability for the forest, which plays a globally important role in stabilising the climate and irrigating crops.

Human-driven climate disruption, caused by burning fossil fuels and trees, is relentlessly heating the world and amplifying extreme weather events, such as heatwaves and storms. On top of this long-term trend is the latest El Niño, a naturally occurring phenomenon of high Pacific Ocean temperatures that leads to warming – and drought and fire – for much of the rest of the world.

Scientists say this El Niño is on course to be the strongest in 150 years by a "mind-blowing margin". Even in its incipient phase, it is wreaking havoc across the planet.

Western Europe has endured the hottest June and July in history, with exceptionally low rainfall, sparking extreme wildfires in France, Greece and other Mediterranean countries and water shortages in the Seine, Rhine and Danube basins. Three-quarters of England is in drought and baked by what is forecast to be the hottest UK summer on record.

In Asia, South Korea and Japan are sweltering in a record heatwave, while China has been battered by Typhoon Dolphin, which has turned Shanghai's streets into rivers, torn roofs from houses and forced the evacuation of more than 1 million people. Floods have killed more

El Niño is on course to be the strongest in 150 years by a 'mind-blowing margin'

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Opinion p48→

25

than 100 people in India's Assam state, with more rain forecast.

In Canada, "out of control" wildfires have forced tens of thousands to flee British Colombia and darkened the skies of distant New York. Huge fires are raging on Java Island in Indonesia and Utah in the US, which has been scorched by a record July heatwave.

In Africa, the UN is predicting a severe hit to food production. In the Middle East, local temperature records are being broken almost every day, with the United Arab Emirates registering 51.2C in Al Dhafra.

Meanwhile, sea surface temperatures are trending far outside previous parameters, threatening coral reefs and other marine life. Because the oceans are the world's main heat absorber, their temperatures are a prelude to what follows on land.

Among the greatest concerns about what comes next is the Amazon, which is essential for maintaining biodiversity and ensuring rainfall for food-producing regions across South America.

The idea of drought in the rainforest used to be outlandish. The Amazon is the world's biggest river and its principal tributaries - the Xingu, Negro, Tapajós, Madeira, Purus, Juruá and Japurá - are among the planet's main sources of freshwater. The forest has always been famed for humidity, with giant trees that sucked up moisture and pumped it into the atmosphere, generating "flying rivers" that cooled and watered an entire continent. Trillions of trees and plants in the Amazon also draw down huge quantities of carbon dioxide with benefits to the entire planet. Any weakening of this function adds to the risks of instability, food insecurity and extreme weather.

Now, the Brazilian meteorological agency has released a forecast that the unusually strong El Niño will delay the onset of the Amazonian rainy season, raise temperatures, deplete rivers and intensify fire risks.

As in many other parts of the planet, this creates an emergency within an emergency: the onset of a natural but extremely powerful "Godzilla" El Niño that could last well into the new year, on top of human-driven warming.

Scientists and Indigenous residents say the Amazon is struggling to recover from the devastation caused during the last El Niño in 2023-24, which left some of the world's greatest rivers at

Scorched earth

The maximum temperatures for western Europe as forecast last week

Source: German Weather Service, Icon model

The global average surface air temperature has broken daily records in 2026

Source: Copernicus, ERAS

record-low levels, sparked unprecedented fire outbreaks and caused mass deaths of dolphins and fish.

With a third of the Amazon now degraded by farming, mining and human-caused climate disruption, the trees and undergrowth are more flammable and vulnerable to "megafires", raising concerns that many parts may tip beyond the point of no return.

The government is trying to address this with satellite monitoring, enforcement operations and more investment in firefighting. This produced positive results last year, when the burned areas of the Amazon fell to their lowest level since records began in 1985.

But one year is not long enough for the forest to recover, and it now faces a far greater threat.

◀ Fires smoulder along the Trans-Amazonian highway near the Aripuanã national forest in the state of Amazonas, Brazil

Three previous El Ninós (1997-98, 2015-16 and 2023-24) proved disastrous for the Amazon. Prof Jos Barlow, an Amazon specialist at the Lancaster Environment Centre, said the prospect of a still stronger phenomenon was deeply worrying: "It is hard to imagine the outcome of even more severe droughts and heat."

The Amazon fire season has already started but the peak is still a couple of months away.

Indigenous communities are setting up their own firefighting units to cope with outbreaks in deeper parts of the forest. Dr Erika Berenguer, a forest expert at Oxford University and author of a book on how to deal with rainforest fires, said: "It's crazy. The humid forest should not be burning."

A major part of the problem, Berenguer said, was multiple El Niños hitting in a relatively short space of time: "It's similar to if you are already sick and then you get an infection. That infection is going to have much greater impacts on your body because your immune system is already compromised fighting the sickness."

The brutal conditions are likely to drag on - and could intensify - in 2027 because there is a lag of about three months between the peak of El Niño warming in the Pacific Ocean and temperature rises elsewhere in the world.

The government has warned that traditional lands will face increased fire risks, and has stockpiled food in case of shortages. During the previous El Niño, some forest communities in the Xingu and Tapajós basins were left isolated, thirsty and worried about hunger when rivers - the main transportation route - ran dry and vegetable gardens shrivelled up. Anything worse next year and Brazil could face the apocalyptic scenario of drought refugees in a rainforest.

That this is even a possibility should alarm the world. A severely weakened Amazon will further disrupt the climate and agricultural production at a time when farmers across many parts of the world are already saying that changes are too quick for them to adapt. Global food prices are at a three-year high as falling harvests combine with the fuel inflation caused by the US-Israeli attack on Iran. The UN is predicting that 49 million more people are likely to face acute hunger because of El Niño.

JONATHAN WATTS IS THE GUARDIAN'S GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT WRITER

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Spotlight^{}[] Global

EDUCATION

High stakes Mass exam protests have gone global

Student unrest sweeps India, Portugal and Mexico as the pressure for good grades in tough job markets increases

By Deborah Solomon and Oliver Holmes

Families with teenagers in education know the private, hidden pain of exam season. But this year what might have been a summer of quiet family anxiety has erupted in several countries into public unrest.

Exam-related turmoil has led to mass student protests in Mexico after nearly 60,000 university applicants were forced to resit tests amid suspected cheating, while Portugal's disastrous attempt to digitise school exam marking sparked the country's worst education crisis in decades.

By far the largest and most ground-shaking incident was in India, where an exam paper leak affected millions of students and was linked to more than a dozen taking their own life. The scandal forced the education minister to resign and challenged the government's hold over its 1.4 billion citizens.

Why does this exam season seem tense and volatile? Experts say the growth of AI cheating and attempts by academic institutions to digitise examinations are at the heart of the issue. When coupled with the high stakes of good grades in a precarious global economy, the result can be explosive.

"It would seem that exams are getting more fraught," said Dr Sarah Eaton of the Werklund School of Education

▲ A protest at Mexico's Unam university after allegations of cheating forced a mass resit

MARIO GUZMAN/EPA

▼ Candidates in India wait to resit an exam after the paper was leaked

FIRDOUS NAZIR/NUR/SHUTTERSTOCK

at the University of Calgary, a leading expert on academic ethics. "We've seen the economic situation change around the world in the last decade. And the results of one examination determining a person's entire future really creates untenable pressure on young people. This is a tragedy when young people are dying by suicide because of an examination outcome."

When a single test can determine a young person's future, cheating is a systemic issue, said Eaton. This is compounded when illicit commercial industries, known as the "education mafia", exploit student desperation by stealing and then selling exam papers, something that has become widespread in India and elsewhere.

Students from across India joined the mass demonstrations led by the Cockroach Janta party, a youth-led protest campaign that began as an online satirical joke and grew into an outcry posing an unprecedented challenge to Narendra Modi's government.

"When you get large-scale fraud combined with systemic failure, there's almost a guarantee of a breakdown of public trust," said Eaton.

In Portugal, the fallout from a failed push by its education minister, Fernando Alexandre, to fully digitise the exam marking process has landed the government in a crisis. Parents, teachers and students have been protesting, demanding Alexandre's resignation.

Similar demonstrations took place in Mexico. The National Autonomous University of Mexico (Unam), the country's most prestigious university, announced that due to abnormally high marks in entrance exam results, which raised suspicions of widespread cheating, approximately 58,000 students would have to retake the exam.

Schools worldwide are rushing to deal with AI use by students, either

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27

through bans or teaching AI literacy and ethics to pupils. Denmark announced this month that from the new term, teenagers would have to make a verbal defence of their written essays to combat AI cheating.

Eaton has implemented similar reforms in her class. “AI can generate a perfect essay in seconds. So an essay is no longer a viable way to demonstrate students’ learning,” she said. “We should let it die with dignity and find other ways to assess student learning.”

In Eaton’s view, cheating is a “human problem”, so grading and assessing student learning has historically also been a human responsibility, which she said cannot easily be offloaded to tech. But institutions around the world have been hoping that tech can be easily and cheaply used to prevent cheating en masse.

Dr Thomas Lancaster, a computer scientist at Imperial College London who researches the educational use of generative AI, has studied how cheating has gone hi-tech. He says it has become far easier, with pupils using earpieces or miniature cameras, and communicating with friends or family with access to internet searches.

“I think the number of notes you sneak in – they’re only useful if they’re the right notes and if you can interpret them very quickly,” he said.

“But with any kind of communication technology, you can have that expertise waiting outside for you in a human form. They either know the answers, they’ve got the expertise or they can look them up online. You can go further than that now and have access to AI to communicate directly during the exam as well,” he added. “It’s spy technology, really.”

Eaton said the failure to properly train educators was forcing students to spend valuable time trying to navigate these “broken” systems rather than focusing on learning.

“This idea of these mass examinations happening at scale – it sort of dehumanises the learning process and the assessment process,” she said.

This, she said, “sort of perpetuates this idea that examinations are the most important thing for students. I think we’ve lost the thread. Learning should be the most important thing for students.”

DEBORAH SOLOMON IS AN INTERN ON THE GUARDIAN’S POSITIVE ACTION SCHEME; OLIVER HOLMES IS A GUARDIAN JOURNALIST

UNITED KINGDOM

International student crisis looms for UK universities

By Richard Adams and Rowena Mason

University leaders are warning of financial turmoil in British higher education after new figures suggested a collapse in international student numbers would deprive the sector of vital income and undermine its future.

The sector’s leaders called on the government to rethink the levy on international student fees imposed under Keir Starmer as a former universities minister warned that there was a risk of a university “going under” because of the financial crisis.

While UK sixth-formers enjoyed improved A-level results, and a record 194,800 English 18-year-olds were accepted by their first choice of university, vice-chancellors who spoke to the Guardian said it would not be enough to stave off further erosion in staff numbers and courses.

Home Office figures show student visa applications to the end of July fell 11% compared with the previous year. The gloomy figures mean many UK universities will see significant losses if the trend continues. Some fear international enrolments will drop by 30%.

Prof Shitij Kapur, the vice-chancellor of King’s College London, said

▲ Students at Manchester University CHRISTOPHER THOMOND

Live and learn Jacqui Smith, the skills minister whose portfolio includes higher education, told the BBC that the government was concerned that university courses should be good value for money. “For most people, going to university is a very good and important investment in their future earning potential and in their life,” she said.

the fall in international student numbers was “in line with the pessimistic expectations” and may reflect a drop in postgraduate applications this year.

Kapur said: “The simple rubric is that every five international students impact one university job. And these falling numbers will invariably impact the financial health and staff complement of universities.”

Governments froze domestic undergraduate fees at £9,250 ($12,500) from 2017 to 2025, allowing inflation to erode their value by a third. Subsequent increases will be largely wiped out by universities paying a £925 levy on each international student.

Members of the Russell Group of universities are being affected, with the University of Exeter announcing last Thursday that it was immediately scrapping geography courses at its Penryn campus in Cornwall.

Libby Hackett, the CEO of the Russell Group, warned: “This isn’t just worrying for universities – it’s not good news for the UK as a whole. Analysis shows that the decline in international students means the UK has lost out on a net economic benefit of nearly £3bn.

“The Burnham government recognises the critical role universities play in our national and local economies and our position on the world stage. We look forward to more consistent decision-making across government in support of economic growth, including measures that enable us to continue welcoming global talent.”

Vivienne Stern, the CEO of the Universities UK group of vice-chancellors, said the student visa figures “should be a wake-up call” for policymakers.

“Plenty of people in government understand the pressure on the sector – they understand how important universities are for local economies and for domestic students,” Stern said. “I hope those people are knocking on the door of the [Department for Education] and the Home Office, and saying that they can do one thing tomorrow that will help universities – and that is to quietly drop the idea of taxing international student fees.

“If the government was seeking to reduce overseas student numbers, I think they have overcorrected. What we need is stability and a bit of help to recover our competitive position internationally.”

RICHARD ADAMS IS THE GUARDIAN’S EDUCATION EDITOR; ROWENA MASON IS THE GUARDIAN’S WHITEHALL EDITOR

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Spotlight^{}[] Africa

MOROCCO

Footballing dreams lost at sea on the crossing to Ceuta

By Soraya Aybar Laafou TÉTOUAN

Football was the life Faten Ben Omar El Azizi had wanted. She had long played in Morocco's regional league for Moghreb Atlético Tetuán, whose striking kit replicates the colours of the famous Spanish club Atlético Madrid.

And in the cruellest of ironies, on the day she drowned last month - one of nearly 150 people who died in the illegal mass crossing into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta - her mother was told that her daughter had just been granted a visa to go to Spain.

El Azizi loved training, said her coach: Tuesdays on the pitch and Thursday at the beach, near the city of Tétouan in northern Morocco, where the 26-year-old lived with her mother and the rest of her family.

But making a living from playing in a women's football league in Morocco had proved impossible for El Azizi. She

received only a small payment of about 260 dirham ($28) when her team won and nothing when it lost - not enough to support her mother, two siblings and other relatives. Her father died when she was 12.

Alongside her football, she had been working in Tétouan's oldest cemetery, cleaning graves and selling mourners bunches of rayhan (basil), which is associated with blessings in Muslim funeral traditions.

"She dreamed of reaching Europe through football," said her mother, Jamilla.

Instead, El Azizi is now buried in the cemetery she once worked in after she drowned on 30 July while trying to swim from Morocco to Ceuta, the Spanish exclave near Tétouan.

El Azizi was among at least 141 people who died during last month's extraordinary mass crossing to the Spanish territory in north Africa, according to the migrant rights group Caminando Fronteras.

It is believed most of those who died - drowning or crushed at the land border - were under the age of 35.

Their deaths have come less than a year after a wave of youth-led demonstrations swept across Morocco - the biggest since the 2011 Arab spring. The protesters had criticised underfunding of healthcare and education amid spending on expensive stadiums as the country gears up to co-host the 2030 World Cup with Spain and Portugal.

For Morocco, the 2030 World Cup has become a symbol of national ambition, although it has also sharpened the debate over public priorities. Nearly 40% of young people aged 15 to 24 were unemployed in Morocco

◀ Faten Omar Ben El Azizi died with dozens of others trying to reach Ceuta in Spain

last year, while for those who do find work, wages can be low - Morocco's gross minimum wage in the non-agricultural private sector is about $360 a month.

Simo, 20, who recently returned to Morocco after the mass crossing into Ceuta last month, said: "Like Faten, many of my friends and myself cannot find work in our country. It's difficult to build a future here."

Jamilla said her daughter dreamed of training and developing as a player, but the family could not afford to help her.

On the morning of 30 July, Jamilla said she received a phone call from someone who asked to speak to Faten. "No, I am her mother," Jamilla replied. An official then told her that her daughter's Spanish visa had been approved and that Faten should travel to the consulate in Tangier with her identity card to collect it.

Jamilla said she had not known her daughter was applying for a visa or, given that she had applied for one, why she spontaneously decided to try to reach European territory by crossing to Ceuta.

Her mother believes Faten had been applying for a visa informally and did not expect to get it approved. She does not know what type of visa it was or where her daughter intended to travel.

In recent weeks, she said, her daughter had become unusually quiet, sad and distant. "She seemed switched off," Jamilla said.

After Faten disappeared, her family said they searched through the night. A young man eventually came to the house and asked whether she had been wearing a tracksuit. He said that she had struck her head during the crossing.

Jamilla said she could not bring herself to enter the room where the bodies of those who died were being kept. "I did not want that image engraved in my memory," she said. Instead, her sister went in to identify the body.

For Jamilla, the heartache continues. After learning that Faten had made the crossing, she found out that her other two children had gone too.

Her eldest son reached Ceuta and phoned her, but Jamilla is still awaiting news of her 14-year-old daughter, who is also believed to have reached Ceuta. "Now I am alone without my children," she said.

SORAYA AYBAR LAAFOU IS A JOURNALIST AND POLITICAL SCIENTIST

'My daughter dreamed of reaching Europe through football'

Faten Ben Omar El Azizi's mother

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Spotlight Asia Pacific

29

TAIWAN

'No TikTok'

China threat prompts drill to switch off internet

By Yu-chen Li TAIPEI

In Taipei, the streets swiftly emptied as air raid sirens rang out and alerts pinged on mobile phones. Police officers ushered any stragglers into shelters, leaving the capital suddenly deserted.

In cities across Taiwan, these kinds of drills are a fact of life every year, amid the growing threat posed by China across the strait, but last Thursday internet speeds were drastically cut, simulating a coordinated attack for the first time. Data-heavy services such as video calls, streaming and mobile payments became difficult or impossible to use, while videos on social media barely loaded.

However, Wang Chen-wen knew how to reach others. When the sirens sound and her mobile internet began to grind to a halt, Wang went to the roof of her 25-storey apartment building, searching for a better radio signal. She connected her phone via Bluetooth to a small flat device hanging from her bag. Within seconds, she was sending messages. Minutes later, some reached a friend in a neighbouring district.

"Testing from Beitou district, Taipei." "Xinyi district, Taipei." Messages began coming in as users shared their locations in a group chat being tested on an open-source platform that allows people to use text messages via long-range, low-power radio signals.

"You can't wait until something actually happens to realise you should have prepared," said Wang, who leads a local group that provides civil defence training and started learning to use the platform six months ago.

Authorities said the drill was designed to encourage people to

prepare alternative means of communication in an emergency - part of Taiwan's efforts to strengthen its civil resilience in the face of military threats from Beijing, which claims the self-ruling democracy as its own territory.

The internet disruption exercise took place on two separate days last week across 14 cities and counties in northern and central Taiwan, home to roughly 70% of the island's 23 million people.

"If the idea is to recreate what it might be like during a war, it's definitely inconvenient, but I can understand why they're doing it," said Jimmy Chu, a 22-year-old worker.

Tzeng Yi-suo, an associate researcher at Taiwan's Institute for National Defense and Security Research, said the inconvenience itself was intentional.

"It's a starting point for raising public awareness," Tzeng said. "Through repeated exercises, people will gradually understand that this is about experiencing that inconvenience and testing the backup systems we may need."

For Chen Hui-xuan, an 18-year-old who tried to use her phone on the metro, the inconvenience was real. "TikTok wouldn't open at all. Facebook worked, but it was really slow, and messages on Instagram took around 30 seconds to send," she said.

There is growing concern about the vulnerability of Taiwan's submarine cable network - 16 international cables and 10 domestic ones - which the government has called

▲ Sending a message without internet through low-power radio signals

▼ People attempt to use their phone while sheltering inside a metro station during the air raid drill in Taipei

YU-CHEN LI

an "irreplaceable digital lifeline". Several cables have been damaged in recent years in incidents involving Chinese or China-linked vessels, which Taiwan's coastguard has called a "grey zone" strategy aimed at depleting the island's resources without crossing the threshold into an act of war.

In 2025, a Chinese captain was convicted of deliberately damaging a cable linking Taiwan's main island with the offshore Penghu archipelago. Another Chinese fishing boat captain was later convicted of negligently damaging a cable serving Matsu, another outlying archipelago administered by Taiwan.

Taiwan is seeking to build multiple layers of backup communications so that no single disruption can cut off the island. The options include low-Earth-orbit satellite services that could help people stay connected should terrestrial networks be disrupted.

The approach has drawn on lessons learned in Ukraine, where Elon Musk's Starlink has played a role after infrastructure was damaged during Russia's invasion. Last month, Taiwan's legislature approved amendments that could clear the way for Starlink to enter the market, although relying on the network raises concerns because of Musk's business interests in China.

In a crisis where internet access was limited, Tzeng said people would face "a high degree of uncertainty and fear", which hostile forces could exploit. "The question is how you use the backup communications channels available to get reliable information to people and reassure them."

For Wang, knowing she has another way to communicate has made a difference. "At least I already have a basic plan and know what to do, so I won't face whatever disaster may come with fear or panic," she said.

YU-CHEN LI IS A GUARDIAN RESEARCHER ON CHINA AFFAIRS

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Spotlight^{}[] Science

BIOLOGY

Flight risk

The rapid spread of white-nose syndrome to Canada's northernmost bat colonies from the US has shocked experts. Now, the race is on to find a cure before species disappear

By Trina Moyles

Crawling through a narrow passage in a cave beneath a boreal forest near Fort Smith in Canada's Northwest Territories in May, two biologists spotted a lifeless bat on a limestone ledge, its body covered in a spindly white fungus. When they shone their headlamps to get a closer look, they saw another bat with the fungus on its forearms. "It hissed at us and crawled back into a crack," Jesika Reimer said.

For Reimer, an ecologist specialising in bat populations in northern Canada and Alaska, there was little doubt. For 20 years, white-nose syndrome, a lethal disease caused by the fungus Pseudogymnoascus destructans (known as Pd), has swept west across North America, spreading from bat to bat and cave to cave, killing more than 6.7 million bats.

The fungus attacks their face, wings and arms while they are hibernating. They stir from rest and groom themselves, burning through the fat and energy reserves they need to survive the winter, and eventually die from dehydration or starvation.

Now it had reached Fort Smith, a town about 725km south of the Arctic Circle. "For 20 years, we've been tracking the spread of white-nose syndrome across the continent," said Reimer's colleague, Joanna Wilson, a biologist for the Northwest Territories government. "We always knew it would eventually get here."

Even so, the biologists were shocked by what they saw. They had hoped to do a survey of healthy, stable populations before the fungus arrived. In 2025, white-nose syndrome had been discovered in a cave in Fort McKay, Alberta,

nearly 320km south. "We thought we'd have a year or two," Reimer said.

Now the fungus has reached the northernmost-known hibernaculum, where bats shelter during the North American winter, it has raised urgent questions about its potential impact on bat populations in Canada and Alaska, Reimer said.

The caves near Fort Smith were first discovered in 2010, when a wildlife technician flying over the area noticed a distinctive karst feature below. A karst landscape is formed when bedrock such as limestone or dolomite dissolves, forming underground caves and sinkholes that provide an ideal habitat for wintering bats. The technician later hiked back on foot and confirmed it was, indeed, a hibernaculum.

Until then, biologists had not known where the Northwest Territories' hibernating bat species - including little brown bats (Myotis lucifugus), big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus) and northern long-eared bats (Myotis septentrionalis) - were spending the winter.

They had located summer colonies, or roosts, which tipped them off that bats were sticking around through the winter months, but they did not know where or in what numbers. The 11-chambered cave shelters an estimated 3,000 bats,

6.7

The number of bats in millions killed over the past 20 years as the lethal disease has swept west across North America

▼ A brown bat with white-nose syndrome

RYAN VON LINDEN

making it the largest hibernaculum in western Canada. It has been key to understanding the behaviour of northern bats.

In 2011, Reimer focused her post-graduate research on the cave to discover how bats survived at such an extreme northern latitude, where the summer months are cooler, shorter and the sun hardly sets. She found that northern bats had to adapt to survive, such as taking more risks than their southern counterparts, flying at dusk instead of in true darkness to forage for mosquitoes and moths, and eating more orb-weaver spiders - higher in energy content - to keep fuel levels up.

But no matter their adaptive abilities, smaller species of bats, such as little brown and northern long-eared myotis bats, are particularly susceptible to white-nose syndrome. Both are listed as species of special concern in the Northwest Territories. Since the fungus arrived in New York state in 2007 - thought to have been brought over from Europe on the shoes of a caver - it has killed 90% of

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little brown and 99% of northern long-eared myotis bats.

Some little brown populations are slowly rebounding, Reimer points out. They are genetically adapting their metabolic rates to burn less fat and withstand infection.

However, there is a less hopeful prognosis for the northern long-eared myotis, a species that weighs only 6-9g, and lacks the fat and energy reserves to outlast white-nose syndrome through the winter. “If it hits them as hard as it has elsewhere in their range, we can expect them to completely disappear from the ecosystem,” Reimer said.

In May, Reimer and Wilson led research efforts to capture bats outside the cave entrance using lightweight mist nets, documenting little browns and northern long-eared myotis with white fungus “riddling the wing membranes”, Reimer said, adding that there were clear signs of necrosis, when living tissue dies. They also used a UV

light to scan for orange fluorescence on their wings, which indicates Pd.

They witnessed other unusual behaviours, too, including bats flying outside the cave in daylight. “That can be a sign of bats that are sick, or trying to recover,” Wilson said.

One of their colleagues discovered an infected bat, badly dehydrated, at a nearby lake. “It couldn’t fly,” Reimer said. When they examined its wings they found they were as “brittle as tissue paper”, she said.

While laboratory tests recently came back positive for white-nose syndrome, Reimer and Wilson were relieved that they did not see the same

The fungus arrived in New York in 2007 and has killed 90% of little brown and 99% of northern long-eared myotis bats

▼ Ecologist Jesika Reimer freeing a bat from a net MICHAEL CODE

mass die-offs as documented in large caves in the south, including most recently in Alberta’s Rocky Mountains. They are not sure if it is because the fungus has only just arrived and has not yet become established, or if the cave’s sub-arctic latitude gives bats an adaptive edge.

One factor could be the temperature of caves. While the fungus thrives at 10C, Reimer said, the northern caves are much cooler. And while Pd can still grow, it might not grow as quickly as it would in a warmer cave. That gives researchers some cautious hope.

And there is an additional reason for hope. Researchers are applying an experimental “probiotic cocktail”, developed by scientists at Ontario’s McMaster University from samples taken from the microbiomes on bats’ wings, to the surface of summer roosts. The substance gets on to their body and spreads from bat to bat in much the same way that Pd spreads.

It is thought that the probiotic – beneficial microbes that have anti-fungal properties – could improve the bats’ resilience to Pd infection by slowing its growth. Early field trials in British Columbia and Washington are yielding promising results: among Pd-infected bats, those with the highest amount of probiotic microbes had the least Pd.

But further complicating the advance of white-nose syndrome is another big factor: wildfires. In 2023, large wildfires torched the trees surrounding the caves near Fort Smith. The loss of habitat forces bats to fly longer distances to find food, summer roosts in old decayed trees, and mates during the autumn breeding season.

Reimer also wonders if wildfires could have played a role in the rate at which the fungus spread, forcing bats from the Northwest Territories to move south and mix with Pd-infected bats – then bringing it back to the northernmost caves.

For now, there are more questions than answers, including what mitigation measures biologists will take – and if they will choose to mitigate at all, said Reimer. While the little brown bats may be able to bounce back on their own, interventions could give the northern long-eared myotis a “fighting chance” to survive and adapt.

Next spring, Reimer and Wilson will return to the caves to see how the bats have fared.

TRINA MOYLES IS AN AUTHOR, JOURNALIST AND CREATIVE PRODUCER

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Spotlight^{}[] North America

Opinion p45→

UNITED STATES

A gilded White House is no cure for midterm malaise

By David Smith WASHINGTON

He was always one step ahead. Donald Trump won the US presidency as a wildly unlikely outsider in 2016 and staged an astonishing comeback to win it again in 2024. Even his foes grudgingly called him a political savant with an intuition for exploiting grievances that left so-called experts floundering.

But now they are asking if the dark genius has lost his touch. Trump is trapped in the quagmire of an unpopular war, obsessing over monuments in Washington and looking for a new spokesperson after his White House press secretary quit. If the 80-year-old was deliberately trying to sabotage his Republican party in November's mid-term elections, it is not clear what he would do differently.

"He's always had a reptilian political instinct for public opinion that has

served him well," said Charlie Sykes, a conservative author and broadcaster. "You're not seeing that much any more. You're not seeing his ability to read the room. He seems tone-deaf on issues like the cost of living, the war, and the optics of gilding everything in sight and enshittifying Washington and he doesn't care."

Trump campaigned on promises to lower prices and keep the US out of foreign entanglements and forever wars. The opposite has happened. Voters say they are suffering a cost of living crisis, exacerbated by Trump's sweeping tariffs. Buying food to eat at home has become 33% more expensive in US cities since the beginning of 2019, according to government figures.

Petrol prices are at a record high for this time of year, in part thanks to the US war in Iran, which drags on with no end in sight. While Trump claims to have destroyed Iran's military capabilities, it emerged last week that he was forced to hide in a catering truck and secretly swap planes after a Nato summit in Turkey because of a possible Iranian assassination plot.

The administration's entanglement has metastasised into a gruelling, daily haemorrhage of resources, currently costing the taxpayer an estimated $1bn a day. Critics argue the administration has strengthened Iran's resolve and provided it with global leverage, specifically over the strait of Hormuz. They see it as betrayal of the non-interventionist posture that fuelled Trump's rise to power and attracted a generation of disaffected voters.

Kurt Bardella, a political commentator and former congressional aide, said: "What we're watching right now

◀ Donald Trump shows off his White House ballroom plans

CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY

is the complete unravelling of everything that Donald Trump, Maga and Republicans said they were about."

Yet the president appears to have other, more aesthetic concerns. Since returning to power last year, the long-time property developer has invested much time and energy in construction projects across Washington.

Bardella added: "As he continues this misadventure in the Middle East that has resulted in the cost of living going up, and continues to pour resources into putting his name on shit and building ballrooms and monuments to himself, the American people are going: 'what the fuck?' That's the only realistic reaction you could have when you objectively look at the circumstances."

The president's preoccupation with whether columns for his ballroom are more evocative of Athens or Rome, and with other efforts to preserve his legacy in marble, come as little surprise to Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill and longtime Trump critic.

"Donald Trump has been an egomaniac, a narcissist his entire life," she said. "The problem has been that the Republican party has enabled him to get away with this and to their own detriment."

Indeed, Republicans are said to be quietly panicking about Trump costing them the House of Representatives and putting even the Senate in jeopardy. A national Quinnipiac University Poll released late last month showed his job approval rating dropping to an all-time low of 32%, with 58% disapproval. It found six in 10 Americans oppose the US military action in Iran.

The sense of malaise deepened last week when Karoline Leavitt, the youngest person ever to serve as White House press secretary, announced that she will be stepping down at the end of the month. The official explanation was that the 28-year-old wants to spend more time with her young family but the timing was unfortunate for an administration struggling to spin its way out of one crisis after another.

Trump's cloud does have a golden lining, however. He made an estimated $2.2bn during the first year of his second term thanks to cryptocurrency holdings, foreign interests and his Truth Social business.

DAVID SMITH IS THE GUARDIAN'S WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF

\$1bn

Daily cost to the taxpayer of the Trump administration's haemorrhaging of resources – despite promises to lower prices

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Spotlight South America

33

BRAZIL

New old foe

Lula to face Bolsonaro's son in October poll

By Tom Phillips SÃO BERNARDO DO CAMPO

Brazil's leftwing president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, launched his campaign for a historic fourth term last weekend and vowed that as long as he lived he would not allow the "shameless" right to return to power.

Addressing a sea of supporters in São Bernardo do Campo, the industrial city where his political career began nearly half a century ago, the 80-year-old politician reminded voters of the chaos and violence that unfolded during the 2018-22 presidency of his far-right predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, whose son, Flávio Bolsonaro, Lula will face in October's presidential election.

Lula recalled how hundreds of thousands of citizens died during a Covid outbreak Jair Bolsonaro was accused of bungling with his anti-science policies. Gun ownership soared as laws were relaxed, allowing criminal groups to expand their arsenals. "They handed out ... more than a million weapons," Lula said, promising to dedicate a fourth term to improving education and healthcare as well as developing Brazil's rare earth deposits, the world's second largest after China's.

Lula was speaking at the Vila Euclides football stadium, where his rise to the presidency began in 1979 when, as a 33-year-old union leader, he spearheaded two strikes that helped end the military dictatorship, making Lula a household name; and in 2002, after three failed attempts, he won a landslide victory to become his country's first working-class president.

During Lula's first two terms, from 2002 until 2010, he was credited

with fighting hunger, dramatically expanding social welfare programmes and access to higher education and improving Brazil's global standing, although his administration was blighted by corruption scandals.

In 2018, Lula was jailed for alleged corruption and he spent 580 days in prison before the supreme court quashed his conviction. In 2022 Lula won his third term, defeating Bolsonaro by a razor-thin margin and vowing to end "one of the worst periods in Brazilian history". "This nightmare is over," Lula declared at his January 2023 inauguration. A week later, far-right radicals rampaged through the capital, Brasília, in a botched attempt to bring Bolsonaro back.

Bolsonaro was jailed in 2025 for 27 years for plotting that failed post-election power grab. Flávio Bolsonaro, a 45-year-old senator, also launched his campaign last Sunday with an event on Rio's Copacabana beach, previously the scene of huge rallies in support of his father. "I am going to be Brazil's next president because I'm going to fight this system," Bolsonaro, who wore a bullet-proof vest under a yellow Brazil shirt, told supporters.

Polls suggest Lula holds a slender advantage over Bolsonaro, with 43% of intended votes to his rival's 40% in a run-off, which will take place on 25 October if, as expected, no candidate secures 50% of the vote in the 4 October first round.

André Pagliarini, the author of a book about Lula called A People's

'Bad people' During a visit to a jungle training camp in Panama last Friday, the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, said Washington planned to "ruthlessly" pursue Latin American drug traffickers, "just like [they did with] Isis and al-Qaida". The idea, Hegseth said, was to "do bad things to bad people - because for too long, bad people did bad things to good people inside the United States of America and across Central and South America".

▼ Lula hopes for a historic fourth term in October's general election

MIGUEL SCHINCARIOL/ AFP/GETTY

President and the Fight for Brazil's Future, said the showdown would be "the single most important electoral contest this year in the world".

Pagliarini said he believed a Bolsonaro victory would be a significant boost for the pro-Trump "reactionary bloc" that has won elections across Latin America, from Argentina and Chile to Colombia, where the far-right lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella recently took office.

Donald Trump's administration has repeatedly asserted its leadership over the region. Last week, the US state department published an incendiary video declaring that "American dominance in the western hemisphere will never be questioned again".

In recent months Trump has turned up the heat on Brazil, designating its two biggest organised crime groups, the Red Command and the PCC, as terrorist organisations. That has kindled fears of a US military intervention on Brazilian soil or interference in Brazil's presidential election.

In Rio, Flávio Bolsonaro praised Trump's decision to target the groups and said he was the only politician capable of "sitting down with the US".

In Vila Euclides, Simone Tebet, a centrist Lula ally, urged voters to do everything they could to stop Brazil falling back into the hands of far-right politicians who wanted "to kill Brazilian democracy" and create "a country of hate".

TOM PHILLIPS IS THE GUARDIAN'S LATIN AMERICA CORRESPONDENT

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31

I know he talks to someone on this phone.

I need to find out what happened to him.

Did you know that too? has been informing on you

and others to the

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35

When Igor Rogov was accused of working for the Kremlin, his friends were shocked and questioned whether the activist really was an agent. By Shaun Walker

A BUNGLED BOMB PLOT

IN POLAND EXPOSED

A SPY. BUT

WHOSE SPY WAS HE?

T

HE POLICE CAME FOR IGOR ROGOV because someone had mailed him a bomb-making kit. The eclectic mix of items – a chrome vacuum flask, a pair of marker pens, a power bank and a bottle of antifreeze fluid – might have seemed innocuous to an untrained eye, but Poland was on high alert in July 2024. Two months before, a shopping mall in Warsaw had burned down in an arson attack; an Ikea in neighbouring Lithuania was also set on fire. Authorities believed it was a sabotage campaign masterminded by Russia’s intelligence services, intended to sow panic and undermine support for Ukraine. They feared it was only a matter of time before the Kremlin escalated further.

A security officer at the parcel company’s warehouse was suspicious enough about the package to call in the authorities, who arrived with sniffer dogs and special equipment. X-rays of the marker pens showed they had 1980s Soviet-produced detonators concealed inside, while the flask had a false bottom containing a sachet of metallic powder. The power bank appeared to have been tampered with, and a probe of the bottled liquid showed it contained a highly volatile nitroglycerine solution. With the right expertise, the items could be turned into a powerful bomb.

Police ascertained that Rogov, the parcel’s addressee, was a 27-year-old Russian political activist who had campaigned for the opposition leader Alexei Navalny and other anti-Kremlin groups. He had fled Russia two years before, fearing arrest, and been granted asylum in Poland. He won a scholarship to attend university in Sosnowiec, an industrial city in the south-west of the country. His wife, Irina Rogova, followed him to Poland and also enrolled at the university; the couple lived in a student dormitory. It was there that authorities arrested him.

Rogov’s phone contained photographs of urban scenes in the vicinity of Sosnowiec overlaid with red arrows, apparently indicating

Top secret

Igor Rogov, from Russia, lived in exile in Poland

GUARDIAN DESIGN/GETTY

places to hide or retrieve items. One photo was of a gas pipeline on the outskirts of town, an appealing potential target for a Russian bomb attack. The chance discovery of the package, it seemed, had led authorities to a participant, perhaps a coordinator, of Russia’s sabotage campaign against Poland, living under deep cover.

FSB?

21 August 2026

The Guardian Weekly

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36

How a spy was exposed

In October 2025, Polish authorities accused Rogov of longstanding collaboration with the FSB, Russia’s feared security service. This suggested that his career as an anti-Kremlin activist might have been a cover story for his FSB work. When the case came to court, however, the judge closed proceedings to the public and press on national security grounds, fuelling speculation and rumours about what exactly Rogov had done – especially among Russia’s exiled political opposition, where infighting, suspicions and accusations are commonplace.

Although Rogov’s trial was closed, I discovered thousands of pages of documents about him and his wife in the court papers of a related case. (Some files had been reported on by the Polish news site Wirtualna Polska.) Those files, as well as interviews in several countries with intelligence sources and with those who knew Rogov, helped piece together a tale of exile and espionage that involved blackmail, deception and a marital crisis with dramatic consequences. (In accordance with Polish law, people mentioned in court files are identified in this story by first name only, except where they have given their consent to be interviewed and named in full.)

Many who knew Rogov were shocked by his arrest. They described their friend as likable, easygoing and somewhat hapless, and struggled to imagine him as a cunning superspy or a bomb courier with a secret life blowing up European cities on behalf of Vladimir Putin. “This is a guy who once accidentally sent half-naked photos to the group chat,” said Milia Kashapova, who was Rogov’s campaign manager when he stood in city council elections back in Russia. “It’s hard for me to believe that all that time he was playing a double game, that he didn’t once come unstuck. If he was really collaborating all along, well, then I’d have to say that Igor Rogov is a genius.”

AT THE BEGINNING, the only thing Polish investigators had on Rogov was the fact that someone had mailed him the suspicious package. In his first jail interrogations, Rogov gave his version of how his name had come to be on the package. His friend Emil, also a Russian opposition activist, had told him that a contact was bringing a parcel from Ukraine and needed someone in Poland to leave it with. Emil said it contained “presents from Ukraine”. Some days later he received a call from a woman who introduced herself as Kristina. “I’ve got a package for you from Diesel,” she told him, adding that she had just arrived in Kraków from Ukraine. Rogov assumed this was the package Emil had asked him about. He told Kristina he was away visiting friends but gave her his address in Sosnowiec and explained how she could mail it to him using a courier service.

Polish authorities soon identified Kristina as a Ukrainian model from Odesa and put out an international arrest warrant for her. She was detained in August at Amsterdam airport before boarding a plane to the US. In Polish custody, she explained that Diesel – a nickname because he worked with secondhand cars – was her old acquaintance. He found out she was driving to Poland and asked if she might take a package. “He said he needed to distribute this stuff to poor people and was helping women and families,” Kristina told investigators. “I did think it was a weird set of things, but Diesel is a pretty weird guy.”

Kristina told investigators that Diesel had put the items in her Mercedes before she embarked on the long drive to Kraków. There, she had a rendezvous with a Czech businessman who had offered her €3,000 ($3,460) if she would spend a week with him at a luxury hotel. She ate oysters and drank champagne with him, though at night they retired to separate bedrooms, the case files suggest.

After she bade farewell to her friend, Kristina remembered the package. She was meant to hand it over in person, but when she called the number Diesel had given her, the man on the other end – Rogov – told her to send it via parcel courier instead. She retrieved the empty shoebox from a pair of €500 Golden Goose trainers the Czech had bought her and filled it with Diesel’s items. Then she took the package to a bank of automated parcel lockers, as instructed by Rogov.

She shoved it into a locker that was a shade too small, causing the packaging to tear. That damage meant the courier company opened the parcel when it reached their sorting facility and raised the alarm. This set in motion the arrests of Rogov and Kristina. Had she picked a larger locker, the package might have gone undetected and the bomb been assembled and detonated. But by whom? And on whose orders?

IN THE DAYS AFTER SHE SENT THE PACKAGE, but before she was arrested, Kristina said she received a call from Diesel’s number. “Listen and stay quiet,” said a male voice. The man told her the person she had mailed the package to had been detained, and that if she were also detained, she should invent a story about how she had come by the package. “All the correspondence between you and Diesel has been erased. Don’t mention Diesel to anyone,” said the man.

Whoever Diesel was working for, one thing became clear: Kristina knew nothing about the parcel’s purpose or destination. She was released in summer 2025 after a brief trial in which the prosecutor accepted that she had carried the items without realising they were dangerous. She was sentenced to time already served – 304 days – and fined. She did not respond to my requests for further comment.

It was starting to look as if Rogov, too, could be a tangential player in the bomb plot. He insisted he knew nothing of Diesel, and that the package had his name on it because he had agreed to help out Emil. The biggest red flag was the set of photos of urban scenes in Sosnowiec on his phone. But he had sometimes ordered recreational drugs via a Telegram bot, he admitted, and would receive a photo of the pickup location with an arrow marking the drop spot. The only reason some of the locations were close to pipelines or other infrastructure was because these were desolate, empty places where hiding or retrieving a package would draw less attention, he said.

The investigation, which had initially seemed like it would uncover a major Kremlin terror plot against Europe, was not going to plan. There was no proven link to Russia, and the only two arrests were of a clueless Ukrainian model and a young Russian who was apparently guilty only of buying recreational drugs.

But Polish investigators were to learn that Rogov had been accused of working for the FSB, spying on friends and colleagues in the Russian opposition. The source of the accusations was Rogov’s wife, Irina.

Far afield Activists Igor Rogov, right, and Danila Buzanov met in Poland

IGOR MET IRINA WHEN THEY WERE TEENAGERS. They were studying veterinary medicine in Saransk, a drab city about 500km south-east of Moscow. Rogov had a cheeky smile and easygoing demeanour that made him friends easily. He got into activism as a student, though to start with he was mostly

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37

drawn to local environmental issues. He was one of thousands of young Russians who helped out with Navalny's ill-fated attempt to stand against Putin in the 2018 presidential election, and he later became part of the opposition movement Open Russia.

Rogov won respect in opposition circles after an incident in Minsk, in neighbouring Belarus, in August 2020, when Alexander Lukashenko, a close ally of Putin, declared victory after a rigged presidential election. Protesters took to the streets and Lukashenko launched a violent crackdown. Rogov was in Minsk as part of an informal monitoring mission organised by Open Russia. On the second evening of protests, Rogov and a fellow activist, Artem Vazhenkov, got caught up in an ambush outside a shopping mall. Black-clad riot police grabbed anyone they could lay their hands on; Rogov and Vazhenkov ended up at

THE MESSAGE READ: 'DID YOU KNOW THAT IGOR HAS BEEN INFORMING ON YOU AND OTHERS TO THE FSB?'

Minsk's notorious Okrestina jail with hundreds of others.

After three days of beatings, Rogov was released and deported to Russia. At the Open Russia office in Moscow, he alternated between laughing and crying as he recounted the ordeal, still moving gingerly from the bruises. 'We sent him to a holiday guesthouse for a couple of weeks to recover,' said Andrei Pivovarov, Open Russia's executive director.

A few weeks later, Igor and Irina, then 23 and 24 years old, got married in Saransk. Vazhenkov, who attended, said it was a 'typical Russian wedding', with vodka, toasts and lots of dancing. Rogov also became more active in Open Russia, becoming the head of its Saransk branch. But a few months later, Open Russia dissolved itself, because its designation as 'undesirable' by Russian authorities meant activists could be arrested just for being linked to it.

So when Rogov ran for a seat on Saransk's city council in the summer of 2021, he stood as an independent candidate. Getting registered to stand, even in such a low-level vote, required organised and sustained campaigning. The police showed up at most public events to intimidate supporters, but this was standard practice in Russian regional politics and Rogov ploughed on. He and his team went door to door, promising that, if elected, he would bring a breath of fresh air into the corrupt city council. In a campaign post on Telegram, he posted a picture of him and Irina with one of their cats accompanied by the slogan: 'Love and fidelity are the foundations of my family.'

When polling day came, Rogov won 16% of the vote in his district, finishing third behind two broadly pro-Kremlin candidates. He thanked his supporters and announced that he planned to launch several court cases to protest against procedural violations. But in the following weeks, with a political crackdown on opposition groups under way, the Rogovs decided to leave Russia. They went to Georgia, then to Poland. They arrived in Sosnowiec on 28 February 2022, four days after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Henceforth there would be only two choices for most political opponents: jail or exile.

THE ROGOVS' NEW HOME WAS A BOXY ROOM in a student dormitory, where their neighbour was Danila Buzanov, another exiled Russian activist. Buzanov had spent several years working as a Navalny coordinator in Balakovo, a gritty industrial town known for its nuclear power plant. He had done multiple stints in jail and fled Russia in late 2021.

Buzanov was also starting a new life from scratch in Sosnowiec, and he bonded with Igor and Irina over stories from Russia. 'Igor was just a solid, straightforward guy - always joking, always pleasant to talk to,' Buzanov told me. The trio's closeness was amplified by the living arrangements: they shared a bathroom and a kettle, and the doors to their bedrooms were usually left open so the cats - which Irina had managed to exfiltrate from Russia - could roam freely.

Rogov always seemed to have money to go out and socialise. 'Absolutely any meeting, with anyone, he was always there, always ready to have a beer and talk,' said Buzanov. Irina worked long hours doing manicures at a beauty salon to supplement her miserly university stipend - but Rogov had no job. When Buzanov asked him where the money came from, he said he had sold his car before leaving Russia. Rogov was also ever-present at the political demonstrations in nearby Katowice, where the small community of Russian exiles would gather to protest against the war in Ukraine or commemorate the death of Navalny in a Russian jail. Irina rarely joined. 'She was completely apolitical; she'd rather go clubbing than go to a rally,' said Buzanov.

Over time, the psychological pressures of a life in exile began to take their toll on the Rogovs' marriage. Irina found Igor distant and moody, and he was using recreational drugs. At some point Irina moved out to a room on a different floor, taking the cats with her. Igor grew a moustache and started working out more. He began spending time with another Russian exile studying at the university, Polina. In April 2023, Irina walked in and caught him and Polina having sex. She shouted at them and stormed out. A few minutes later, Buzanov's phone buzzed with a Telegram message from Irina: 'Did you know that Igor has been informing on you and others to the FSB?'

Irina sent a similar message to a group chat of her husband's old political contacts from Russia, and within minutes Igor's phone was lighting up with queries that could be loosely summarised as: 'WTF?' After a frenzied discussion, Igor persuaded Irina to give him her phone and he unsent her message. Later, she and Igor both messaged the group to say it had been a bad joke, apologising for any confusion. But Rogov swiftly confessed to his neighbour, Buzanov: 'He was close to tears and he didn't try to justify himself. He just began apologising: 'I'm so sorry, I was forced to do it' - that sort of thing,' Buzanov told me.

The marriage crisis put Irina in a difficult position, as her Polish residence permit was tied to Igor's asylum status. She even discussed with friends whether it would be safe for her to move back to Russia, given that she had never directly been involved in opposition politics. But she was still in Sosnowiec in July 2024, when Igor was arrested.

When the news broke, the friends from the group chat assumed it was confirmation that Irina had been telling the truth about Rogov's FSB collaboration, and that Polish authorities had found out. In reality, for the first few months of his detention, investigators were focused only on the explosive parcel and had no idea about anything else.

FROM THE FILES I WAS GIVEN ACCESS TO, it is not clear how Polish authorities first became aware of Rogov's alleged FSB links. But on 13 November 2024, roughly four months after Rogov was arrested, investigators added a second charge to his file: along with the charges linked to the explosive, he was also under investigation for espionage. On the same day, Polish authorities arrested Irina, grabbing her as she crossed the street in Sosnowiec and accusing her of being her husband's accomplice. Through a series of interrogations of both, the story of Rogov's collaboration came into focus.

Rogov said he had been recruited during his university years,

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How a spy was exposed

before he even started out in opposition politics, by a local Saransk FSB officer he knew as Yevgeny. To start with, he was proud of the collaboration, believing the FSB to be a patriotic organisation and grateful for the small amount of extra income it provided. After some time, Yevgeny gave Rogov a burner phone and told him to keep it hidden at home - it would be their way of communicating.

It is not clear from the files if the initial impulse to get involved in opposition politics came from Rogov or from Yevgeny, but once Rogov started his political activism, the FSB man pushed his recruit to make as many contacts as possible. "I was supposed to keep doing the things I wanted to: climb up the ladder in opposition circles, meet new people, help people, and then tell the FSB everything," Rogov recounted. Whenever he came back from a trip to an opposition conference in Moscow or abroad, he told Irina he needed to spend some time working up a report to pass to Yevgeny.

The ideal scenario, Yevgeny told Rogov, would be if on one of these trips abroad, he was approached and pitched by a western intelligence agency. "The point was I was supposed to become a double agent," said Rogov. That plan never worked out, but it suggests that Yevgeny had big plans for his agent.

This may also explain Rogov's trip to Minsk in August 2020. A report detailing the mood on the Belarusian streets would have been attractive

WHO COULD BEST SOLVE THE PUZZLE OF THE EXPLOSIVE PACKAGE? DIESEL, THE MAN WHO SENT IT

with Irina for contacting Yevgeny. He hid the secret phone somewhere she could not find it.

In the months after Minsk, Rogov could sense that Yevgeny was delighted as he rose to prominence in the local opposition scene, he recalled. But he also claimed to have become genuinely engaged in the opposition struggle and regretted that he had ever agreed to collaborate. "If I had a choice I wouldn't have done it ... but to function in politics and maintain relationships I had to pass information on, because [Yevgeny] could have made everything impossible with one click of his fingers," he said.

currence for Yevgeny, an FSB man in the provinces, with his superiors in Moscow.

A few days after Rogov left for Minsk, he went dark. There were widespread reports of mass arrests, and Irina was in such a panic that she retrieved the burner phone and called the single number saved in it. When a man picked up, she said: "I'm Igor's fiance and I know he talks to someone on this phone. I know that Igor went to Belarus because of you, and I need to find out what happened to him." The man on the other end said little, then hung up. Soon after, Belarusian authorities released Rogov.

It is not clear whether the FSB intervened with Minsk to facilitate his liberty, but his fellow activist Vazhenkov, who was detained at the same time, was not freed for another two days.

When Rogov returned, shaken and bruised from Minsk, he was angry

In Rogov's telling, when he arrived in Poland in February 2022, he thought he had finally escaped Yevgeny's clutches. He broke off contact, he claimed, and was focused on building a new life in Poland. But three months later, he got a message from an unknown number on Telegram and guessed immediately it was Yevgeny. "In a very veiled way he asked me to bring him some car parts, and I knew that he was demanding I pass on information," Rogov told investigators. He ignored the message, but Yevgeny kept sending new ones. "Each of his messages caused huge stress for me, because I had family in Russia and I was really afraid of that," he said. Rogov claimed that his father, still in Saransk, had been approached and told he could be mobilised into the army to fight in Ukraine, even though he was over 50 and should not have been eligible. Rogov assumed it was Yevgeny cranking up the pressure.

Eventually, Rogov said, he collected some fairly mundane information about Buzanov and a few other exiled opposition activists he knew, wrote it up into a Word document and put it on a USB stick that he gave to Irina, who was taking a trip to Russia in summer 2022 to visit her parents. (Irina claimed he did not tell her what was on the stick or who it was for until after she arrived in Russia.)

Back in Saransk, she visited the couple's old flat, which was now empty, and on her husband's instructions, retrieved his old burner phone from the back of a kitchen cupboard, where it had remained undisturbed since their emigration. She charged it and called the one number saved in its contacts, as Igor had ordered her to, but there was no reply. She left Russia without handing over the USB stick. When she returned to Poland, she asked her husband if he was still in touch with Yevgeny. "He said no, and that he doesn't want to maintain contact with him but he doesn't know how to get out of it," she said.

Some months later, around the time the marriage started disintegrating, Rogov got a message from another of Yevgeny's alias accounts. By now, the couple's asylum papers had come through and Rogov said he had been ready to start a new life, without Russian politics and without the FSB. "I wrote back saying I don't work in politics any more and I won't be passing any more information," he said.

Later in 2023, Vazhenkov - the activist who had also been arrested in Minsk - visited Rogov in Sosnowiec and found his old friend to be a changed man. "We hardly discussed politics ... He said he's no longer political, he's focused on studying hard. And he was really upset about the breakup with Irina," Vazhenkov told me. Irina seemed to be adjusting better: "She had a lot of plans and she had learned good Polish."

But neither Igor nor Irina would get to live the new lives they had envisioned. Last month, three years after Rogov claimed he had broken off contact with Yevgeny and two years after his arrest, a court in Sosnowiec sentenced him to seven years for espionage. Irina was sentenced to three years for aiding him by taking the USB stick to Russia.

The trial was held behind closed doors, and even information about how the defendants pleaded is classified. But lawyers for Igor and Irina told me they were planning appeals. Both lawyers said they would have preferred an open trial, suggesting that if the public knew the facts of the case, they might be less inclined to view the couple as Kremlin superspies. "It's a shame my client's case couldn't be looked at in a more transparent and nuanced way," said Irina's lawyer, Katarzyna Matejczyk. However, at a time when Moscow is waging war in Ukraine and organising sabotage attacks in Europe,

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39

Polish authorities have little time for shades of grey when it comes to Russian spying. “In the current geopolitical situation, there is no chance of any verdict other than a conviction,” she said.

I HERE WAS ONE REMAINING LOOSE END: the explosive package. Rogov was found guilty on charges relating to the package, but there were few details in the short public verdict. Jacek Dobrzyński, a spokesperson for the Polish minister who coordinates the country’s security services, told me the parcel’s trail had led back to Moscow. “There is no doubt that this was a Russian plot orchestrated by the Russian secret services,” he said.

However, the court files I was able to see yielded no evidence of a Russian link and pointed to a different possibility. During the investigation, one source told Polish authorities they believed Diesel, the Odesa car salesman who had given the package to the model Kristina to bring to Poland, had links to Ukrainian military intelligence.

This suggested the package might have been a Ukrainian bomb transiting Poland and destined for Russia. Since 2022, Kyiv has been running its own campaign of sabotage inside Russia, targeting military officials or pro-war cheerleaders. The latest such attack came this month, when an improvised bomb exploded in a Moscow restaurant during the birthday celebrations of a Russian army general. Three people were killed. My Ukrainian intelligence sources claimed no knowledge of the package sent to Rogov, but one said Kyiv’s sabotage campaign was a delicate issue with allies and usually organised behind their backs: “Almost every European country agrees that it’s legitimate for us to do this, but almost none of them want to cooperate on it.”

The person who could best solve the puzzle of the package, I thought, was the man who sent it, the mysterious Diesel - real name Yuriy Kovalenko. Finding him was easier than expected: he replied to my Facebook messages and agreed to meet at the offices of his lawyer in Odesa, on condition that she be present. He was wearing a shell-suit jacket, jeans and trainers, and a kippah - he had rediscovered his Jewish identity in recent years, he said. He told me that these days most people just called him Yuriy.

Kovalenko categorically denied any links to the Russian intelligence services. He also denied links to the Ukrainian services, but made it clear through his answers that he believed the explosive package had been Ukrainian. The final destination was meant to be Kaliningrad, the Russian exclave that borders Poland, he said. However, he insisted he had only found this out later, and that he, too, had been merely a link in a chain of unsuspecting couriers. He claimed he had been given

Out in force Anti-government protests in Minsk, Belarus, in 2020 TAIYANA ZENKOVICH/EPA

the items by a friend who “possibly had some kind of link” with Ukrainian intelligence services. That friend asked him to send some items to Poland, so he asked an old acquaintance in the Russian opposition, Emil, if he knew anyone reliable there. Emil gave him Rogov’s name.

Kovalenko refused to give further details about the person who supposedly gave him the package and he would not say how he knew the explosives were bound for Kaliningrad. Nor could he explain how they were meant to get there. In addition to his lawyer, he was accompanied to the interview by a man who sat silently next to him and did not introduce himself, claiming to be there “by chance” when asked.

In the shadow world of intelligence games and sabotage plots, it can be hard to discern where the true loyalties of each individual player lie. To add a final complication, Emil is suspected by many former colleagues in the Russian opposition of being an FSB informer. The full story of the bomb and its various couriers might be lost to history, but the very fact that Ukraine has not arrested Kovalenko, given Poland warned Kyiv of his role in the bomb plot and requested his extradition, points in the direction of the explosives being Ukrainian, not Russian.

That would be a strange twist in the story of Igor Rogov, making him both a Russian FSB informant and a would-be Ukrainian bomb courier.

N THE TWO YEARS SINCE ROGOV’S ARREST, his old roommate Buzanov has been conflicted over what to think about his former friend. At first he felt sorry for Rogov and wrote him letters in prison. Then he was angry that Rogov’s treachery had led to Irina being jailed simply for carrying the USB stick into Russia. He also fears the story could prompt unfounded doubts, among Polish authorities or his friends, about his loyalties. “Our biographies are so similar, and that’s uncomfortable,” he said as we chatted in a cafe in a city not far from Sosnowiec. Many of Rogov’s friends rejected my interview requests, saying they did not want to be linked to a convicted spy, but Buzanov was happy to talk for hours, keen to show he had nothing to hide.

This is one of the most damaging consequences of Rogov’s collaboration: it has intensified suspicions about Kremlin infiltration among the thousands of Russian opposition and civil society activists who have fled the country. These suspicions corrode the effectiveness of the exiled opposition, already weak and divided, as they struggle to remain relevant from their new homes in Warsaw, Berlin or Vilnius.

Increasing the sense of paranoia among the opposition is probably part of the FSB strategy. Kashapova, Rogov’s former campaign manager, told me she used to brush off concerns about infiltration but had become “suspicious of everything and everyone” since Rogov’s arrest.

If the FSB’s goals are clear, Rogov’s motivations remain more elusive. From the testimony I saw, it is hard to say just how reluctant his cooperation was, where his real loyalties lay or whether the information he passed on caused anyone real harm. His friends, without access even to that testimony, have drawn a range of conclusions: some refuse to believe the charges, others accept he may have been an informant but presume he was subjected to unbearable pressure by the FSB, while a third group is furious at him and believe there can be no excuses for collaboration. None can quite square the idea of Rogov as a long-term FSB plant with the young man they thought they knew.

Buzanov, who testified as a witness at the trial, is convinced that Rogov was genuinely against Putin but suspects he was so weak-willed that he was co-opted into working for the FSB, thinking he could make some money without doing anyone much harm. In the same vein, he assumes, Rogov agreed to receive the suspicious package without asking too many questions. “I don’t think he’s some superspy sent on a special mission to Poland,” he said. “I think he’s just a fool.” ●

SHAUN WALKER IS THE GUARDIAN’S CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE CORRESPONDENT

Additional reporting by Ada Petriczko

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Living

for the

MON	TUE	WED	THU	FRI
W	E	E	K

It's 100 years since Henry Ford gave his employees weekends off. As the modern workforce fragments into those on flexible time and those tied to shifts, is our shared experience of downtime being undermined? By Jess Cartner-Morley

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42

Living for the weekend

ROR 11 YEARS, FROM 1929 TO 1940, the Soviet Union did not have weekends. Instead, to increase productivity, citizens were allocated a day off in every seven at random. With 80% of the population at work on any given day, factories never had to power down.

A letter from a disgruntled worker to Pravda newspaper, published soon after the implementation of this new working calendar, outlined the problems: “What is there for us to do at home if our wives are in the factory, our children at school, and nobody can visit us?” the letter-writer asked. “It is no holiday if you have to have it alone.” Parents found themselves at home while their children were at school, or with kids unsupervised while they were on shift. With no shared day off, extended family gatherings became impossible. The workforce became demoralised and listless, the projected spike in productivity never materialised, and the policy was first modified, then abandoned altogether.

Eleven years, though. Is that not absolutely wild? A world without weekends feels impossible. A world without Saturday Night Fever, without Manic Monday. We may no longer go to church on Sunday, but we still worship the weekend. “The weekend looms large because it represents the triumph of collective time over market time,” says Brad Beaven, professor of social and cultural history at the University of Portsmouth. “It is not just about rest, but about reclaiming autonomy from the industrial clock.”

Saturday and Sunday, sacred to the dignity and humanity of working people, are laden with mythology and ceremony. We romanticise the weekend, even the prosaic bits – the distant roar of a lawnmower, the rattle of classified football results on the radio. Everyone knows what a weekend means. The snap of a laptop cover at 4.58pm on a Friday. The clink of the first pint glass and the smell of chips on the way home. The slow-motion pace of a weekend pavement, the gear change from hustle to meander. The rituals have changed with the times, of course, and people-watching at brunch on Saturday is now as much of a tradition as cooking a roast at home on Sunday. A weekend changes shape as you move through life stages, but in each iteration it remains a shared experience between you and your peers.

“The weekend that I had when I was 20 was very different from the weekend that I have now, at 40 and with kids,” laughs Pedro Gomes, professor of economics at Birkbeck, University of London and author of the book Friday is the New Saturday. “When you are young, you are bonding with your friends, and then when you get older, you might be with your family. Eventually, you might be with grandchildren. We move through different manifestations of the weekend, in our lifetimes.”

But it can be hard to pin down, these days, where a weekend begins and ends. Laundry gets done on a work-from-home Friday, but emails are answered on Sunday. A shopping splurge is as likely to be a cheer-up treat on your phone after a tough Wednesday as a Saturday outing. The traditional Saturday 3pm football kick-off has been stretched across the television schedules all the way to Monday evening. The four-day week – first predicted by Richard Nixon, of all people, in 1956 – has become a reality in the Netherlands, with people working an average of 32.1 hours. Friday is forging ahead with a quiet secession from the working week without anyone signing off the paperwork. It raises the question: what even is “the weekend” in 2026?

Remarkably, the concept of the weekend as we know it is only 100 years old. In 1926, Henry Ford changed the shape of the week, announcing that the workers at his factories would now do five eight-hour days instead of six, with no cut in pay. Ford did not invent the weekend – the idea had been bubbling under for a century, in campaigns by trade unions, religious groups and progressive employers – but by putting his considerable industrial weight behind it, the two-day chunk of freedom was born.

JOE GOVICH/STOCK/GETTY, ZAVE SMITH/UPPERCUT, NEIL SETCH/ELD/ALAMY, DAVID SILLITTE, PICTURESBYROB, SERGEY SPRITNYUK, TOM WERNER, DORLING KINDERSLEY, BRICOLAGE/SHUTTERSTOCK, ARTIST/GRIDPHOTOGRAPHY, JILL MEAD

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43

LAUNDRY ON A WORK-FROM-HOME FRIDAY, EMAILS ANSWERED ON SUNDAY. WHAT IS "THE WEEKEND" IN 2026?

"It is high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either lost time or a class privilege," Ford wrote in his company's Ford News in October 1926. Ford's innovation was in part a response to his earlier invention: the assembly line, which had increased productivity but exhausted workers, with absenteeism up to 10% in factories; in his article he did not disguise that there was self-interest involved. "People who have more leisure require more transportation in vehicles," he continued. The new fashion for day trips was an effective marketing device to sell cars. Meanwhile, his factories maintained a steady level of productivity despite the reduced hours. In 1938, faced with rising unemployment levels in the Great Depression, the five-day week was officially adopted across the US.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Boots the Chemist was the pioneer. In 1933, the company opened a new factory in Nottingham, which proved so efficient that there was soon a surplus of stock. Reluctant to lay his staff off with unemployment running at 25%, John Boot ended the Saturday morning shift, reducing hours for the 5,000-strong workforce without cutting wages. It was commercially successful, resulting in lower rates of absenteeism, and was adopted as Boots policy in 1934. A government inquiry led by Richard Redmayne - great-grandfather, fun fact, of actor Eddie - published a "review of the experimental working of the five days week", which noted "an improvement in stamina and animation of the employees arising from the physiological and psychological effects of a long weekend's rest and relaxation". Slowly, the weekend gathered momentum. In the UK, "the early 20th-century version of the weekend was generally recognised as a half-day Saturday and Sunday off," says Beaven. "The full two-day weekend only really became widely adopted after the second world war."

Before industrialisation, there was little concept of consecutive days of leisure, because animals and crops could not be so long neglected. Work was dictated by the weather and the seasons, the clock mattering less than the sun. Factories, with their whistles and watches, changed the way time worked. A mechanised drumbeat of shifts and paydays drowned out the old rhythms of seasons and saints days.

As work became more rigidly organised, the possibility emerged that leisure could be, too. Time off wasn't merely a concession to workers, but also an engine of consumer capitalism. People with

weekends would go to sport stadiums, buy picnic baskets and new clothes, need cinema tickets. By the late 20th century, with the arrival of cheap flights, this had evolved into the minibreak: a miniature holiday, designed to fit into a weekend. Leisure time, once the opposite of the economy, became part of it.

For generations, the British weekend revolved around one immovable appointment: the 3pm Saturday kick-off. "The weekend is about rest, but it is also about passion," says Gomes. "Most of us are not lucky enough to be passionate about our jobs, but at the weekend we can follow our passions." The link between football and the best day of the week is intrinsic to the national love affair with the sport. It is probably partly because football symbolised the best bit of the weekend that we ended up so obsessed with it.

Morals - and the absence of them - have always been a theme of the weekend. When Sunday, a time of worship, was the only day off, skilled workers developed a habit of extending their free time into "Saint Monday", by not turning up for work after a particularly enthusiastic day of drinking. Saturday afternoons off - and then the whole day - were granted by employers partly in the hope of bringing the hangovers forward by a day. Victorian reformers, obsessed with drunkenness, hoped that free Saturdays would encourage respectable recreation: organised sport, gardening, family outings. Ford, a vehement supporter of Prohibition, believed that the illegality of alcohol made his move towards a two-day weekend safe. ("A day off is no longer a day drunk," he said.)

THE REALITY HAS NEVER BEEN QUITE SO CLEANCUT. Weekends are naughty and nice, both bad behaviour and Sunday best. These are the days for shopping splurges and drinking sprees and hook-ups, but also for penance, whether by parkrun, DIY or actual prayer. Though perhaps less so the prayer bit: around one in three Britons attended church regularly in 1900, according to the National Centre for Social Research; now, this is number is around one in 20. Two moments stand out in the story of how Sunday lost its special place as a day, if not of worship, then of higher purpose. In 1994, the Sunday Trading Act allowed large shops in England and Wales to open on Sundays. Then, a quarter of a century later, pandemic lockdowns broke the now-fragile bonds between churches and their communities, and left many older parishioners with a wariness of gathering in ill-ventilated churches that might be bad for the health, even if good for the soul.

The late, great Maggie Smith had, as she so often did, the best line. "What is a weekend?" she asked, in Downton Abbey, with the entitled bewilderment of a dowager countess for whom income is spoonful in silver from birth, not doled out in a brown envelope on a Friday night. The weekend is time carved out of, and in tension with, someone else's ownership of your time. Not to mention that for aristocrats, who had servants for everything from laying fires to buttoning their dresses, every day was a day of leisure. The weekend feels like a cornerstone of civilisation, of democracy, because it matters most to those who spend the majority of the week following orders instead of giving them.

These days, the upstairs-downstairs division is between the hybrid workers and those whose work can never be done remotely. An age-old division between shift work and the relative flexibility of white-collar jobs has deepened. Thinkers like Liselotte Lyngsø, founding partner of the Copenhagen-based consultancy Future Navigator, have argued that the workforce is splitting into "time owners" - knowledge workers who increasingly choose where and when they work - and "time slaves", whose jobs, such as healthcare, manual shift work or gig economy roles such as Amazon or Deliveroo driving, remain stubbornly tied to the clock.

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Living for the weekend

For the “time owners”, Friday is rapidly turning into the modern Saint Monday. The last day of the working week has become, for many remote workers, an unofficial half shift: calendar open, but both brain and laptop mostly on standby. When Gomes ran a six-month trial of four-day-week working in Portugal in 2023, with more than 41 public and private firms involved, “organisations that can’t reduce hours – a nursery, for example – worked in shifts with a different day off within each week. Other firms made the decision to cut Friday out. Whenever their weekday off was, we found that many employees approached that day a little differently, using it to get ‘life admin’ done so that they could have their Saturdays and Sundays free. The weekend isn’t just about the number of hours, it is also a coordination device for communities to connect.”

As with Saint Monday, “Skiveday Friday” has proved in the UK to be stubbornly, if silently, adhered to. In 2024, Transport for London ran a three-month trial scrapping peak fares on Fridays explicitly in order to lure commuters back into central London. For the laptopped-classes, there has been a shift in what Friday is for. Several major rail companies, including LNER and Avanti, have now made Fridays an entirely off-peak day like Saturday and Sunday, acknowledging that the weekend now begins earlier for many.

Though it should be noted that, for those same workers, Saturday and Sunday themselves are under constant siege from the mission creep of work emails and contactability outside working hours in the age of the smartphone. “These are two sides of the same coin,” says Gomes. Work intensifies, and the weekend expands in order to absorb the pressure. “The speed of communication means that we now live with constant interruptions, and it is hard to find space either for deep work or for real rest. And yet we continue to structure the work week in much the same way as we did 100 years ago. It is no surprise that this isn’t working.”

Hence why a three-day weekend is being suggested as a way to balance the books. But is it all woke nonsense? A pie in the sky idea, dreamed up by a lazy workforce that no longer knows the meaning of hard work? The Green party supports a “move towards” a four-day week, but other politicians are wary. In 2025, the Liberal Democrat-led South Cambridgeshire council, which had been operating a four-day week for two years, was attacked by the then local government secretary, Steve Reed, who said that local governments “should not be paying full-time wages for part-time work”. In April this year, the shadow local government secretary, James Cleverly, announced that a future Conservative government would look to ban four-day weeks for council staff, denouncing the “push from the left of centre in British politics” towards a four-day week as “completely wrong”.

THE 4 DAY WEEK FOUNDATION, which is leading the drive for change in Britain, says that 56 out of the 61 companies who signed up for its four-day week pilot decided to stick with it after the scheme ended. It cites an average of 35% increased revenue, and 57% decline in staff leaving rates, during the trial. There are now 260 companies in the UK officially signed up to the four-day week.

The divide – between time sharers and time slaves, those working five-day weeks, four-day weeks or more ad-hoc, less weekend-friendly shift work – is problematic because the weekend is designed to be shared. It’s where British culture learned to gather, a collective experience. Every generation has its own shared rituals. Boomers love a Saturday night movie, generation X are obsessed with Sunday lunch, millennials love to flock to a farmers’ market, while gen Z, for some reason, get their kicks standing in line for baked goods that have gone viral on TikTok. Even the Sunday scaries – that dread of Monday morning – is made manageable by the knowledge that everyone out there is feeling the same. As a gulf widens – between the time owners and

AS A GULF WIDENS

BETWEEN THE

TIME OWNERS

AND TIME SLAVES

THE WEEKEND

FEELS LIKE A

NOSTALGIC MEMORY

time slaves, between inherited wealth and the increasingly weedy salary pipeline – the weekend starts to feel less like an experience, and more like a nostalgic memory.

It is funny to think that, at first, technology expanded our horizons. Railways gave ordinary people access to the coast; mass production made bicycles and cars affordable. It is only recently that technology has mutated into the energy vampire it is today, sucking the life from the weekend.

Only in the last decade has online autobiography become everybody’s unpaid side hustle, so that your friends have already seen your holiday photos before you meet them for brunch. It is a very modern phenomenon that our friendships have migrated online, this week’s boy drama or family quarrel already debated at length in text bubbles and voice notes without the need to meet in the pub. Add to this the post-pandemic normalisation of the “soft commitment”, in which making plans and cancelling them have become two parts of the same social ritual and “I’ll see how I feel” has become an acceptable RSVP, and we have become less good at a core element of the weekend, which is actually seeing other people.

Perhaps we shouldn’t fret so much. Ever since we invented the weekend, we have been anxiously taking its pulse. The Victorians worried that workers would waste their precious leisure days drinking. Mid-century Britain feared television was keeping families indoors. Today’s concern is that we spend Saturday scrolling Instagram and Sunday answering emails. The rituals change; the suspicion that the weekend is being ruined remains. Yet the weekend survives, perhaps because it has never demanded perfection. The lie-in and the late night are equally valid forms of resistance. Its holiest rites – the greasy fry-up, the football terrace, Saturday-night shiny-floor television – are gloriously unrefined. The weekend is where a good time still trumps good taste.

The Soviets discovered that a day off is not much use unless other people are off, too; Ford understood that workers needed time in which to become themselves again, even if he hoped they would spend it buying cars. At 100, the two-day weekend is fraying at the edges, leaking into Friday and nibbled away by Sunday night emails. The weekend will keep changing, because work keeps changing. But it will still always be the best thing work ever invented ●

JESS CARTNER-MORLEY IS ASSOCIATE EDITOR (FASHION) AT THE GUARDIAN

NICK DAVID, PHILIPPE LE JEANVRE, GUARDIAN DESIGN

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Comment is free, facts are sacred CP Scott 1918

45

JULES DARMANIN

The wedded bliss of getting married abroad

Page 47 →

Opinion

UNITED STATES

Rubio could help Trump solve his foreign policy mess, but he hasn't Simon Tisdall

TIERNEY L. CROSS/AP; GUARDIAN DESIGN

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46

Opinion

Viewed from the state department in Washington DC, the world is on fire - but record heatwaves are not to blame. The unresolved Iran war has badly burned Donald Trump. His military campaign conclusively failed, energy and food prices are still rising, and a Republican rout in November's midterm elections looms. Humiliatingly, Israel flatly rejected his latest Gaza peace proposals. In Europe, Russia's attacks on Nato allies grow increasingly brazen. The Ukraine war, which Trump vowed to end, is now well into its fifth year. And these are just the bigger firestorms. There are plenty more.

Rarely has the need for effective, professional diplomacy been more pressing. So step forward Marco Rubio, US secretary of state. These are challenges that, if successfully tackled, could propel the 55-year-old son of Cuban immigrants and the former US senator for Florida into pole position in the 2028 Republican presidential nomination race. Here is a chance for Rubio to transform himself into respected global statesman. His boss mocked him as "little Marco" and a "loser" when they were election rivals in 2016. (Rubio called him a conman.) Now is Rubio's opportunity to go big, be brave and prove he's a winner. Or maybe not.

Rubio is unlike recent US secretaries of state - heavyweights such as Hillary Clinton and Antony Blinken, or John Kerry. Rubio has little time for "peace processes". Instead, he projects brute US power to impose take-it-or-leave-it "solutions" that advance US interests, as defined by Trump. It's a modern form of imperialism. Target countries have a choice: become client states, like Venezuela and, prospectively, Cuba and Greenland, or be crushed. In Iran, the policy is not regime change, let alone democratic renewal. It is regime compliance. Rubio behaves less like a peace-broker, more like a pith-helmeted colonial viceroy.

Speaking in February, Rubio aired his hawkishly retro doctrine of US primacy. He lamented the decline of "the great western empires ... accelerated by godless communist revolutions and anti-colonial uprisings" and warned Europe faced "civilisational erasure". The US didn't want milksop allies "shackled by guilt and shame" about their imperial past, he said. "We want allies who are proud of their culture and heritage." It sounded a death knell for diplomacy. Trump has attacked eight countries in the past year. Cuba, Rubio's obsession, could be next.

Rubio's reluctance to get personally involved in peacemaking may be partly explained by his other,

Rubio's slipperiness is rooted in a childhood need to belong, to be on the winning side, no matter the price

contradictory role, as Trump's national security adviser. He has accepted the White House's outsourcing of negotiations over Ukraine and Palestine to amateur envoys of limited ability - namely Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and business crony Steve Witkoff. Broadly speaking, Rubio has steered clear of direct involvement in the Iran talks, too, leaving JD Vance, the vice-president and his main potential rival in 2028, to take the flak. Rubio's arm's length approach smacks of calculation. Or maybe he's just out of his depth.

This perception of a political chameleon lacking firm principles, consistent opinions and a strong moral compass is reinforced by his record. His biographer, Manuel Roig-Franzia, believes Rubio's personal and political slipperiness - he once became a Mormon, then reverted to Catholicism - is rooted in a childhood need to belong, to be on the winning side, no matter the price. Senator Rubio was a China hawk. Now he toes Trump's ingratiating line on Beijing. He used to castigate Russia; now he's an appeaser. He championed overseas assistance but, in office, has gutted USAID and seeks to dismantle the international criminal court. He blasted Barack Obama's Iran nuclear deal. Now he backs an accord that would offer additional concessions to Tehran. Accused by the Vatican of waging an immoral war, he travelled to Rome and set the pope straight.

The irony, or tragedy, of the Rubio conundrum is he has the power to do great good, if only he would stand up and be counted. Russia's Vladimir Putin is weaker than at any time since 2022. Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelenskyy is short of missile interceptors, soldiers and political support. A ceasefire deal freezing the conflict is there for the making by the US. Likewise, in Israel, there's a rare opportunity to halt Jewish settler violence in the West Bank and make a fresh start based on UN resolutions.

Rubio could also do the Middle East, the global economy, American consumers and himself a power of good by taking charge of moribund peace talks with Iran and resuscitating the June memorandum of understanding that Tehran insists is the only route out of the strait of Hormuz logjam. Trump knows he is in a hole. He needs someone to dig him out.

The fact that Rubio is unlikely to do any of the above marks him out as the most dangerous man in the US

* Simon Tisdall administration after Trump himself. He enables and facilitates Trump's worst instincts - and neglects his duty. He is dangerous because he provides pseudo-intellectual respectability to far-right fantasies about unfettered

US supremacy. More so than the impetuous Vance, indulging in puerile name-calling on social media, and the "secretary of war" Pete Hegseth, a ranting ultra-nationalist, Rubio is dangerous because he can look and sound reasonable. He stands a fair chance of becoming Trump's chosen successor and heir to the Maga brand.

Maybe, before that happens, he will change again. Maybe he will rediscover a few principles, find a diplomatic backbone, extinguish a few fires. Rubio could yet do great things. Or he could become a problem as great or greater than Trump ●

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47

SOCIETY

I just got married in the Vegas of Europe. It was a romantic 20 minutes

Jules Darmanin

Consider your ideal wedding. You may picture religious pageantry, majestic domes and the auspicious light of the Divine beaming on a white dress. Maybe you see friends cheering for you in front of a town hall, or anywhere really – the people you love are there, and it's all that matters. What you are probably not picturing is a meet-up with Chris and Mitch, two complete strangers waiting for you and your future spouse by a nondescript fountain in the middle of Copenhagen. Judging by my soon-to-be-wife's bewildered laugh throughout the 20 minutes of our wedding, this is not what she was picturing either. Should I add that neither of us is Danish or lives in Denmark?

My wife is British-Polish. I am French. Brexit means Brexit. To live happily ever after under the same London roof, we had to prove our commitment to the relevant authorities. Our immigration adviser was unsubtle about it. On a Zoom call about a year ago, he mimed a rifle being reloaded. To end our long-distance relationship and build a life together, it was time for a shotgun wedding.

But while love doesn't wait, administrations around Europe like to take their sweet time. Marrying in Britain required a "fiance visa", which would have allowed me to stay in the UK while waiting to get married, but not to work, making it financially unviable. Doing it in my home country would have required dealing with French bureaucracy – you can appreciate why we ruled that out. If only there was a simple way to marry abroad, we thought.

GUARDIAN DESIGN/GETTY

A Google search was enough to find an agency called Marry Abroad Simply. Despite the hundreds of five-star reviews, I couldn't shake the feeling that getting wed with Marry Abroad Simply was a bit like going for a haircut to a salon named Best Haircuts. One would hope for a bit more mystique. I dialled the number on the website and mumbled something like: "Hello, I'd like to marry my partner as soon as possible, please." A charming woman called Leanne laid out her fast-and-furious pitch.

Plan A, she said, was Gibraltar, the easiest option when it comes to paperwork. However, the marriage certificate can take a few weeks to arrive in the post. Plan B was Denmark, but city halls were crowded, so we would need to pay extra for a quicker ceremony in the park. Finally, she added: "I can get you married in Georgia in a couple of weeks." We picked the "Copenhagen Express" package.

Denmark, we found out, is the Vegas of Europe. Thanks to its lenient multilingual administration, couples from around the world flock to the kingdom to elope. It's not a bad business: international couples bring about 120m kroner ($18.5m) to the economy every year.

Leanne reckons her company helps 150 couples in Denmark every month. She often deals with cases more complex than ours, such as same-sex unions where one spouse comes from a country still denying them their rights. She joined this industry in 2013, specialising in quick, fuss-free wedding planning.

• Jules Darmanin is a French journalist Our own wedding attained summits of fusslessness you wouldn't believe. The day before, we got to Copenhagen city hall and queued with other couples to prove our identity to the Danish government.

The next morning, after a 15-minute stroll through Copenhagen's Latin Quarter, we arrived at our venue: the gardens of the Royal Library. We had no guests, as you can imagine, and Marry Abroad Simply procured us Chris and Mitch.

They – bless them – were our professional and only witnesses. They introduced us to our officiant, a mild-mannered gentleman named Jesper. We then stood awkwardly in front of the building that housed centuries of Danish literature. Jesper gave a brief speech about how we, too, were writing the first page of our common book.

We were so engrossed in the absurdity of the situation that we didn't pay that much attention to Jesper's speech. We said our vows, exchanged our rings and kissed under the golf clap of onlookers. After some pictures, we crouched down on a bench to sign the papers. My wife and I were married.

You might find this unromantic, but I couldn't disagree more. Throughout our Danish escapade, we kept bumping into other couples roaming in and around city hall. We could often guess from their looks and their accents that they were there for reasons similar to us. They were lovers seeking to tear down the borders erected between them.

That day was for us against the world. It was a day of boldness and belief in a bright future. To my readers longing for marriage, I say: forget bridesmaids, distant cousins and nervy photographers. What I wish for you is to marry abroad simply ●

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Opinion

CLIMATE CRISIS

The British weather is

no longer a safe topic of conversation

Andy Beckett

In Britain, this fragmented but supposedly mild country, watching and talking about the weather forecast is meant to be a reassuring, unifying activity. The first weather forecaster to appear on British TV, George Cowling, made his debut on the BBC in January 1954, predicting that “tomorrow would be rather windy”, but “a good day to hang out the washing”. For most of the 72 years since, such brief, carefully calibrated broadcasts have provided people from Aberdeen to Penzance with practical information, small talk and minor grumbles about essentially the same situation: living in a country where the weather is constantly changing, in a paradoxically unchanging way.

Yet like the traditional British climate, that common weather culture may now be evaporating. “Met Office considers issuing red ‘extreme heat warning’ across Britain while nation enjoys ‘incredible summer’,” said the headline above the forecast on the GB News website last Monday, caught between terror and delight at the latest heatwave. As the climate crisis has affected this country in more and more unmistakable but uneven ways, TV weather forecasters have struggled to find the right language to describe this transformation’s daily consequences. Across all the British TV broadcasters, weather forecasters now present sunshine as welcome and oppressive; high temperatures as miraculous and unbearable; rain as an inconvenience and desperately needed; cloud cover as depressing and a relief.

Meanwhile, the wildly differing effects of the climate crisis on different areas, and from one season to another, are further fracturing Britain’s weather conversation into a babble of separate, sometimes conflicting discourses. This year, parts of the country have experienced such contrasting summers – wetter than usual in western Scotland, desert-like in southern England – that we can no longer say they share broadly the same northern European climate, as had been assumed for centuries. In an era of separatism and nationalism, another major binding element of the UK may be falling away.

Illustration Nate Kitch

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Beneath the relatively placid surface of our previous weather culture, there were always some tensions and contradictions. In a 2025 academic paper, British Heatwave Discourse (1985–2023): from Ice Cream to Armageddon?, Thijs van Dooremalen and Philip Smith analysed articles about heatwaves in the national press. They found that until 2000 positive and negative coverage coexisted in roughly equal quantities. From 2000 to 2014, the balance shifted slowly towards the negative, as the climate crisis became a mainstream worry. Yet only from 2015 did an “Apocalyptic genre” of heatwave articles begin to become dominant; and a “Romantic genre” of celebratory coverage remains. In a country where many people still spend much of the year feeling cold, the idea of hot weather as a liberation is likely to linger, for some, for decades to come.

For other Britons, heatwaves have become political flashpoints, their causes to be furiously contested, their existence even denied. During the record heat of 2022, “weather forecasters faced unprecedented levels of trolling”, the BBC reported, including “hundreds of abusive tweets or emails questioning their reports and telling them to ‘get a grip’... ‘it’s just summer’”. Some of these climate crisis deniers described advice on how to stay cool as “pandering to the ‘woke brigade’”, and accused the BBC and Met Office of “scaremongering” to help the then Conservative government impose unneeded green policies. This summer, some of these conspiratorial arguments have re-emerged. But with the Tories having in effect turned against net zero,

★ Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

joined by Reform UK, Restore Britain and most of the rightwing media, disagreeing with weather forecasters who express alarm about our changing climate has become more

mainstream. Discussing the weather is no longer just small talk, but also a battlefield in the culture wars.

No wonder forecasters often sound unsure or extremely cautious about what tone to adopt on air. In 2023, the BBC’s Tomasz Schafernaker gave a very careful interview to the Big Issue. “While our language remains largely the same,” he said, “we have adapted it to include references to climate change.”

Yet three years on, his broadcasts have become less neutral. “The savage summer continues across Europe,” he said on the BBC weather website last Thursday afternoon. “It’s been excruciatingly hot ...”

“The climate of the 20th century has now gone,” says Mike Kendon, a Met Office scientist and co-author of State of the UK Climate in 2025, published last month. So far, this year’s weather has been more extreme. Even more than the heat, summer drought and winter floods, its key feature has been the weather getting stuck in one state for months – a characteristic of harsh continental climates, rather than the changeable one around which our society has been built. Britons are world famous for their weather stoicism. But this stoicism has been created by centuries of relatively minor weather discomforts and disasters. How the forecasters, and the rest of us, will react as the climate crisis intensifies is a question we are only in the early stages of answering ●

The solar eclipse reminds us that shared experiences can unite all of humanity

“I’d describe it as a magical eeriness.” Lisa Redfern’s description to the Guardian conveys the strange beauty that accompanied last Wednesday’s partial solar eclipse in Britain. Crowds across the country assembled as the sun’s power seemed to wane, twilight changed tone, the temperature fell and the landscape took on an unnatural appearance. In a divided world, there is comfort in coming together in awe. Ms Redfern, speaking from Cornwall, was right that Britons “have to make the most of these moments”. The country has to wait 55 years for another comparably deep partial eclipse.

To experience the true marvel of the eclipse, one had to be in the path of totality – which crossed over Greenland, Iceland and Spain. There the sun was completely obscured. Britain saw a partial version, with the moon covering part of the sun, with only a thin yellow crescent showing. In totality, for a few minutes a black disc appears where the sun should be, surrounded by a fiery corona in a purplish firmament. It is 64 years before a total eclipse of the sun will be seen over Britain.

Today we understand that eclipses occur when the moon passes directly between the sun and the Earth, a rare three-way alignment known as a syzygy. For ancient peoples without such knowledge, something appeared to be eating the sun.

In China, the cosmic order appeared threatened by dragons. In India, the disruption was attributed to a demon’s disembodied head. It was a Greek philosopher,

Anaxagoras, who arguably first proposed the correct theory of eclipses after experiencing one in 478BC. Astronomical knowledge became political power most memorably in 1504, when Columbus exploited his knowledge of an approaching lunar eclipse – “blood moon” – to frighten Jamaica’s Indigenous people into giving him food.

Britain and its empire turned eclipse expeditions into laboratories for the emerging science of astrophysics. The 1868 solar eclipse over colonial India led to the element helium being discovered by the astronomers Pierre Janssen of France and Norman Lockyer of Britain. By the late 19th century, the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society had a “joint permanent eclipse committee”, government funding and access to the navy and colonial administrations.

The committee organised the 1919 eclipse expeditions to Principe island, off west Africa, and Brazil. Their observations found that the sun’s gravity deflected light from distant stars, just as Einstein’s theory of general relativity had predicted four years earlier. Though the 1919 results remain debated, the irony was that British imperial scientific power ended up making a German-born physicist the most famous scientist in the world, just months after the end of the first world war. Then science transcended divisions; today the eclipse itself does as we gathered beneath it in shared amazement. It is also a reminder that some experiences still belong not to nations or individuals, but to humanity as a whole ●

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Canada needs to act now to withstand Trump

In addition to Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia, Panama and Greenland, Donald Trump has overbearing hostility also to Canada (Trump has blundered into a new “forever war” that he cannot win, Opinion, 7 August).

Trump calls Canadian prime minister Mark Carney “governor” and threatens to make Canada a 51st state. Carney’s Davos speech, advocating an alliance of middle powers, made Trump furious, so he accelerated his tariff war and Canada is now as if on a war footing. As a result we are no longer complacent about our sovereignty, need to beef up our military and have to quickly find new trading partners.

Trust has been lost, and that will be difficult to regain. The big question is if Trump is just a phase in American history or part of a fundamental change in American society. Reiner Jaakson Oakville, Ontario, Canada

The FSA’s role in the processed food fight

Felicity Lawrence’s alarming piece on ultra- processed foods made no mention of the UK’s

Food Standards Agency, whose primary statutory objective is to protect public health from risks arising from the consumption of food (Why are food firms panicking? They know time is running out, Opinion, 14 August).

The FSA is an independent, non- ministerial government department. Its advice to ministers, and guidance to consumers, is informed by the most up-to-date scientific evidence, free of political or commercial considerations.

As Lawrence pointed out, food manufacturers see government action as a threat. And regulation is surely the most effective way to control profit- oriented companies, many of which pay little regard to the possible negative impact of their products until compelled to do so.

The FSA last published guidance to consumers on ultra-processed foods in February 2025. Given that “the science on harm caused by foods high in fat, salt and sugar is now settled”, it is perhaps time for it to consider updating this guidance and also whether to recommend government intervention. Mike Pender Cardiff, Wales, UK

Don’t set any expectations that limit children’s aims

Emma Brockes writes about the future she and other parents might want for their children (I’m torn over hard hats, but still want my kids to go to uni. Is that wrong? Opinion, 7 August). Apart from the fact that parents’ own experience of young adult life is outdated, it may be better to let children find their own path without any expectation. My parents simply wanted me to be happy. I followed a conventional path. I am very happy to see my young adult daughter thrive on an unconventional path. Neil Mathur Cambridge, England, UK

● In conversations with university students, when they were asked what profession or job they aimed for after obtaining a degree, they regularly answered: “Oh, I don’t know yet. I did not think that far ahead.”

This attitude carries a fundamental dilemma: youngsters are deciding on their further education on the grounds of “enjoying” a particular subject to study, but with a lack or remote interest about their subsequent profession/

job intention. Would it be desirable and feasible for youngsters to reverse their attitude? To choose at some time between GCSEs and A-levels their favourite intended profession/job aspiration, which would determine the corresponding higher education or training diploma requirements.

Shifting the current targeting priority, from study/education towards work/employment, may be difficult at a younger age. However, such a change may turn out to be beneficial for the young generation and in line with the proposed new trends. Juraj Ivanyi London, England, UK

A perfect substitute to bring on for Infantino

Calls for Gianni Infantino to resign as president of Fifa raise the question of who is available and suitable to replace him (Own goals, Big story, 14 August). This calls for a figure who is passionate about football, has international stature with a network of major political players, and has a reputation for decency and integrity. Step forward, Sir Keir Starmer. David Cronin Stockport, England, UK

BECKY BARNICOAT ON MILLENNIAL LIFE

A GERIATRIC MILLENNIAL’S GUIDE TO SUMMER

1. YOU MAY HAVE FOUND THAT SOME SUMMER THINGS YOU LIKE ARE NO LONGER SOCIALLY DESIRABLE.

YOU MIGHT FEEL SAFER DOING THESE THINGS IN PRIVATE, OR WITH A TRUSTED GROUP WHO WON’T JUDGE YOU TOO HARSELY.

4. YOU NOW HAVE THE OPTION TO BLAME BEING HOT AND STRESSED ON CLIMATE BREAKDOWN OR YOUR AGE, OR BOTH.

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51

BOOKS

Poetry fills a gap in times of chaos and violence

Page 57 →

Culture

Eyes on

the prize

Sam Smith's new album subverts their roots to tell their love story. They discuss health, happiness—and finding a new home

INTERVIEW

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52

Culture^{}[] Music

am Smith logs on to our video call with the username “Lily of the Valley”, the May-born singer’s birth flower. It sets a serene tone. They’re in Guadalajara, Mexico, for the latest stop of a residency tour, titled To Be Free, in support of their fifth studio album. Instead of Smith’s usual jet-lagged arena itinerary, this lower-key excursion stops at smaller venues in only six cities and sheds the ostentatious theatricality of their last outing.

“I was flailing around on a massive gold bum [on stage] on the last tour and had, like, seven costume changes,” Smith says with a chuckle. It’s intimacy they’re after now, the ability to satisfy their “craving to look at people again”, which matches the romantic feeling of their fifth album, Hazel Eyes. But for Smith, whose genre-shifting stardom has been accompanied by harsh controversies, it’s also a chance to observe who’s still in their corner: “There’s some wonderful people that have stayed, but it’s a completely different room than it was with In the Lonely Hour.”

Smith broke out at 20, as the featured vocalist on

INTERVIEW By Juan A Ramírez COVER PHOTOGRAPHS Collier Schorr

Disclosure’s massive 2012 hit Latch. Their own 2014 debut album, In the Lonely Hour, featuring the mega-hit Stay With Me, heralded them as a soulful chart-topper. It was good enough for Bond: in 2015, Smith sang the Spectre theme Writing’s on the Wall.

Their subsequent releases veered into a glossier pop sound and generally remained as successful. But since coming out as non-binary in 2017, the British singer has frequently been attacked and vilified by rightwing commentators. The peace that emanates from the 34-year-old during our call, and from this latest album, was largely achieved after relocating from the UK to New York three years ago to be with their fiance, the (hazel-eyed) designer Christian Cowan.

“When I got here and was able to walk in the street and feel no judgment, I realised that I was very happy to have found a sanctuary in New York City as a queer person,” they say. Smith, who has been wearing “makeup and wild femme clothing from a very young age”, found that “tensions were a little high” after the 2023 release of their expressive last album, Gloria. “With a body like mine and the person that I am, it created a bit of a media storm.” (The videos for Unholy and I’m Not Here to Make Friends were accused of being oversexualised, with a rhetoric that felt transphobic to many observers.)

After Gloria, Smith “was looking for safety and comfort in music”, something to capture “the bloom of falling deeply in love” and buoy their cross-continental move. Simon Aldred, with whom Smith had co-written one song on their 2014 debut, had long told Smith to call whenever they were ready for a more intimate collaboration. For Hazel Eyes, Smith took him up on it.

The result is a more clear-eyed assessment of the reality of relationships than Smith’s lovelorn previous albums. They wrote the first half of what became the smoky opener, Everlasting Love, the night before meeting Cowan; the second half reflects on their three years together. Hazel Eyes’ soundscape channels a dusky, 70s-sounding blend of blues and folk, R&B and outlaw country.

The process was looser than Smith’s past experiences in more professional, structured writing rooms, where they felt that recording had to be done “completely sober and all had to happen between the hours of 10am and 5pm”.

Hazel Eyes is also a return to the singer-songwriter style of Smith’s debut. They don’t see it as a rehash, but a new angle on traditional songwriting tropes. “A song like My Guy, that lyric is so simple and one that maybe we’ve all heard before – ‘He’s mine, mine, mine, he’s my guy’ – but you haven’t heard it from a non-binary person who’s 34 years old in 2026. I was very interested in that type of lyric-writing for this album, to take the traditional and sing it through my lens and sing it freely.”

It was only after the success of Unholy, their 2023 duet with Kim Petras, that Smith found the freedom to return to that classic sound. With its baroque electropop and panic-baiting live performances (at the Grammys, Smith sported a pair of devil horns in a red-lit, fire-filled set), the global No 1 single earned them a Grammy – and condemnation from conservatives. “When Unholy happened, I felt like I’d been fighting for that song for a long time,” says Smith – they had always wanted to top the US charts, having previously peaked there at No 2 with Stay With Me.

Global competition is no longer a concern for Smith. “As a queer artist, I have different parameters and rules, so it’s

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◀ Opening night

Sam Smith performs on their To Be Free residency at the Castro theatre, San Francisco, in February

STEVE JENNINGS/GETTY

▶ Golden

On stage on their previous tour in Berlin, 2023

FRANK HOENSCH/REDFERNS

▼ Debut moment

Sam Smith won the 2014 Brit Awards critics' choice award

JM INTERNATIONAL/GETTY

just not a healthy way for me to think,” they say – that for any artist whose existence is, to some, contentious, fame is always rigged with a nasty undercurrent, no matter how quantifiable their success. Smith says they were at their “most depressed or creatively stunted” during that chase. With Hazel Eyes, they wanted to focus on emotional truth rather than “worrying about hooks, even though I love hooks”. This led to some “uncomfortable moments” with their label, with Smith having to say “I just wanted to keep the business out of the music”.

It’s a point of pride for Smith to have reset their relationship to the public on their own terms. At 20 that meant they quickly found an “incredibly traumatic” side to fame, “especially to a younger, queer brain, because it felt quite lonely at times within the industry”. For a few years, from 27, they shunned the “huge part of the job” that is constantly taking selfies with fans. Doing so allowed them to recover some semblance of privacy, but led to depression, “because I felt like I was upsetting people all day”.

After a lot of therapy, they say, “I have started to find the happiness and the joy of meeting people. I’m a healthy person now, so I’m able to juggle more. The trajectory of fame that I went through at such a young age, and trying to navigate my life as a gay person, then changing my pronouns – the weight of doing that so publicly in my 20s meant that I could juggle less.”

Occasionally, there is a defensiveness to Smith’s conversation, such as when they point out that they “juggled a lot, because I brought out four records and toured the world multiple times”. But it doesn’t feel confrontational; more demarcating well-defined boundaries and a hard-won ability to claim their achievements.

It’s true that controversy has hounded Smith from day one. They have never concealed their sexuality and have evolved almost entirely in the public eye, which has included some stumbles. In 2016, when collecting the Academy award for best original song for their Bond theme, they incorrectly claimed to be the first openly gay Oscar winner (that was John Schlesinger as best director of Midnight Cowboy, in 1970); shortly into the 2020 lockdown, they were ridiculed for sharing photos depicting their “quarantine meltdown” that some felt to be tone deaf.

Whatever anyone says, Smith’s sales and streaming figures put them in the echelons of Elton John and Freddie Mercury in terms of queer pop success, although Smith is cautious about placing themselves within that legacy. “George Michael was always a beautiful inspiration to me,” they say, but they’ve found a “deep comfort and understanding about the type of artist I am” from conversations with the artist Anohni, with whom they’ve grown close, “because I am not like George Michael. I’m a femme queer and it’s a different type of lineage.

“What I’ve experienced as a queer femme artist on the global pop stage, I don’t think there’s others that I can compare my career to,” they continue. “I’ve learned to see that as a strength when, at times before, I just found that incredibly isolating. I’m trying not to compare in that sense any more.”

Smith finds that, after a period of increased LGBTQ+ acceptance in the UK and abroad, the pendulum has swung back. “For trans people in the UK, it’s incredibly hard.” I ask if they ever find solace in the thought that history will probably only remember their successes: Michael’s cruising scandal, I point out, has been almost entirely vindicated on queer social media. Smith takes a beat to think.

I have started to find the happiness and joy of meeting people. I’m a healthy person now

“I want to answer this honestly,” they say. “I’m encouraged sometimes, especially by straight people around me, to think of that. It doesn’t necessarily bring me comfort, because of the state of things. I think it’s important to be educated as a queer person, to know that things could get better, but things could also get worse in my lifetime, and we have to work hard for kindness and peace.” Two years ago, they established the Pink House foundation, a charity that will provide support for the LGBTQ+ community. It gives Smith a chance to “hope for a better future”, they say, more than focusing on their own legacy.

But there’s at least one tribute to Smith’s life in New York. Julius’ is a gay bar in the city’s West Village with a history of community and rebellion. Alongside shots of icons such as Judy Garland and John Cameron Mitchell, some images of Smith line its walls. They were taken there by a friend, years ago, and it became an instant attraction. “I’m English, right? I love a pub.” It’s since become their favourite haunt; some of Hazel Eyes was written on the counter.

With a self-effacing grin, they point out that those photos are “in the back” of the venue. Still, one is by the noted fashion photographer Alasdair McLellan. “I love Alasdair McLellan – so that’s just a slay.” The other is of Smith and Alicia Keys from a performance they hosted at the bar for a 10th anniversary celebration of In the Lonely Hour. “It was such a triumphant moment for me, as someone who was moving to New York, to get to sing with Alicia fucking Keys in this gay bar.” Smith beams. “If I could be part of the legacy of Julius’, that’s a legacy I’m proud to be a part of.”

With all but their third album topping the UK charts (Love Goes peaked at No 2), there’s a confidence that, no matter what they release, Hazel Eyes will find an audience. “I’m a political artist, whether I want to be or not, so my audience is in flux at times,” Smith says. “I am singing for me, ultimately, and I’m singing to the sky and whoever hears it.”

JUAN A RAMÍREZ IS A NEW YORK BASED WRITER AND CRITIC Hazel Eyes is out now

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54

Culture^{}[] Stage

Beyond borders

A play based on author Haruki Murakami's most ambitious sci-fi work is touring the world, riding a wave of interest in Japanese culture

By Marigold Warner

Tatsuya Fujiwara is no stranger to London's Barbican theatre. It was here nearly 30 years ago that one of Japan's biggest film stars, now 44, made his stage debut. He was just 15, plucked out of an audition of more than 5,000 hopeful youngsters by the revered theatre director Yukio Ninagawa for his play Shintoku-Maru. It kickstarted Fujiwara's career, and three years later he landed a role in the cult dystopian film Battle Royale, going on to star in hit TV dramas and blockbuster films, all the while continuing to perform in Ninagawa's acclaimed productions.

Now, Fujiwara returns to perform in a stage adaptation of Haruki Murakami's science fiction novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the

World. The story alternates between two seemingly unrelated narratives: a cyberpunk thriller set in Tokyo, and a surreal fantasy that unfolds in a mysterious walled town. Directed by the French choreographer Philippe Decouflé, the play premiered in Tokyo in January and toured Japan until March, then Singapore in April. After the Barbican run this autumn, the tour will wrap up in Paris.

"When performing in Japan, you become accustomed to your own audience," says Fujiwara. "You develop a feel for what reaches them and how they receive you. The moment you cross a border, that certainty disappears."

We meet in April, backstage at the Esplanade theatre in Singapore just a few hours before the production's first performance to an English-speaking audience. (The play is performed in Japanese, with English surtitles.) The response was rapturous, the audience more animated than with any performance during the Japan run, according to the director and cast.

Whether that's due to cultural differences in self-expression or humour is up for debate, but backstage during intermission the cast is giddy. "It definitely gives us confidence for London," says the director.

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This play arrives at a time when Japanese culture is experiencing a global boom, particularly in London. The last five years alone have seen a cluster of UK exhibitions about Japan. The British Museum has curated shows on manga, Hokusai and the samurai; the V&A did the history of kimonos; Oxford's Ashmolean explored art and photography from Tokyo; and Somerset House celebrated 50 years of Hello Kitty. However, productions that have broken through to a mainstream audience overseas have largely been based on anime and manga. This summer saw a musical adaptation of Death Note at the Barbican, as well as Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon at the West End's Here at Outernet and Koko in Camden Town, and Spirited Away, which enjoyed a six-month run at the London Coliseum in 2024.

"The barriers are considerably lower," says Miyako Kanamori, senior executive and veteran producer at HoriPro, which has been exporting Japanese theatre to the UK for many decades. "Thirty years ago, when we first brought [Yukio] Ninagawa's productions to Britain, that cultural landscape simply did not exist," says Kanamori. "Today, there is a far broader curiosity about Japanese storytelling and aesthetics, and I feel audiences approach our work with a greater sense of familiarity."

However, the world of Murakami does not naturally lend itself to the stage. His novels can be cryptic and allegorical, making them hard to adapt. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World spans 400 pages and features curious creatures such as unicorns and Murks, monsters that lurk in the sewers. Fujiwara plays Watashi, the protagonist of the cyberpunk narrative the Hard-Boiled Wonderland.

The parallel narrative is even more peculiar. End of the World unravels in a mythical walled town. After entering, the second protagonist, Boku is stripped of his shadow and all his memories, and tasked with reading dreams from the skulls of dead unicorns. The two plots eventually converge, and while they are both totally removed from the reality we know, the stories are strangely relatable. Murakami wrote the novel more than 40 years ago, but in an age of AI and algorithmic control, his questions about what remains when memory and selfhood are stripped are more pertinent than ever.

"At first I thought it was impossible to do anything with [the material]," says Decouflé, who is best known for directing music videos for New Order and Fine Young Cannibals, as well as France's 1992 Winter Olympics opening ceremony. "I'm not Japanese, so I can never fully grasp what lies beneath the text, but then I thought: 'They've asked me to do it, so I'm going to do it my way, with my dreams, my ideas, my vision.'"

For the production company, bringing in a European director with a background in movement was a deliberate decision. Having worked on several adaptations of Murakami's novels - Ninagawa's Kafka on the Shore in 2015 and Simon

I feel that audiences approach our work with a greater sense of familiarity now

A novel approach

Tatsuya Fujiwara, opposite page, and cast in End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland

TAKAHIRO WATANABE

McBurney's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in 2023 - producer Kanamori learned that expressing the spiritual and psychological dimensions of the author's world through dialogue alone was "profoundly difficult".

She came to realise that "music and physical expression might offer a more truthful theatrical language for his work", particularly for a play that was intended to be performed to a non-Japanese-speaking audience. Working with Japanese scriptwriter Ako Takahashi to decode the text, Decouflé has made a highly visual adaptation.

Murakami came to rehearsals himself. "He was always very contained, very still," says Decouflé. "And then suddenly he saw the stage. He saw it alive. And I could see that he was happy - happy that I had given life to his dreams, to his book." After the premiere, the author made a short speech. "He said something like: 'I wrote this novel 40 years ago, and I had forgotten everything. Tonight, you all reminded me of what I created.''

Decouflé had made two productions in Japan before and has observed the rise of Japanese dance in that time. "Thirty years ago, we could not find dancers of the quality we needed. Even 15 years ago it was so-so. And now Japan has some extraordinary dancers." He was also impressed by the professionalism of the performers. "I never heard anyone complain," he says. "I really pushed them. And at the end they were overjoyed. It was a great luxury to work that way."

Cultural exchange has always been a crucial part of Japan's story and how its art travels. Back in the Edo period, artisans commonly used discarded Ukiyo-e prints to package ceramics. These were later discovered by the impressionists, inspiring the Japonisme movement and artists such as Monet, Van Gogh and Klimt. The dialogue that followed, between eastern aesthetics and western modernism, moulded the development of modern art on both sides.

Perhaps something of that pattern persists here. The play's star hopes that international interest in Japanese theatre will also ignite a new energy back home. "It would be amazing if theatre in Japan could one day command the kind of broad cultural engagement it has in the UK, where it's truly part of public life," says Fujiwara, who knows better than most what it takes to carry culture across borders. At the Barbican in 2015, performing Ninagawa's Hamlet on Shakespeare's home turf, the pressure was paralysing.

"It's a bit like a British company staging kabuki in Japan," he says. "But this time it's different, because it's Murakami. There's more room to breathe, and more hope that we can offer something that reaches people broadly."

MARIGOLD WARNER IS AN ART AND CULTURE JOURNALIST

End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland is at the Barbican, London, 8 to 11 October and the Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris, 16 to 21 October

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Culture^{}[] Reviews

STAGE

QFWFQ

Summerhall, Edinburgh

How to adapt an unadaptable novel famed for its postmodern surrealism and authorial intrusions? For Los Angeles performer Gregory Nussen, there can be only one solution: a play built out of postmodern surrealism and authorial intrusions.

That is what becomes of Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller as reinvented by Nussen and directed by Hannah Pilkes. This is a playful one-person show that has a fierce political heart.

QFWFQ, the name adopted by Calvino as a narrator, is about the power of storytelling and the power of those who tell the stories.

But the polemical force of the show lies in Nussen's own story and their American Jewish upbringing. They describe a teenage summer-camp trip to Israel via Auschwitz as a form of coercion, not just to do the invaluable job of remembering the Holocaust, but to promote a sense of perpetual threat and victimhood.

Nussen rails against dominant narratives that have no place for them as a queer artist or for the 700,000 Palestinians displaced in the foundation of Israel. If those other stories cannot be told with empathy and openness, they imply, then it is time to call the unreliable narrators to account. Mark Fisher To 31 August

▲ Queer eye

Gregory Nussen SONYA KATARINA

► Sexed up

Hannah Reilly in Roleplay MIHAELA BODLOVIC

More online

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STAGE

Roleplay

Summerhall, Edinburgh

Roleplay is star-producer Francesca Moody's latest fringe find (previous wins: Baby Reindeer and Fleabag) and has queues around the corner.

Australian writer-performer Hannah Reilly's one-woman show features Danni, whose podcast is near-ambushed by a producer who promises her the world, if only she will sex up its content. She does so to become a "slutfluencer", her product falling between sex-positive feminism and an OnlyFans page.

Danni - bold, brazen and ambitious - is a romantic at heart who finds casual sex deadening, even though her feminist forebears have won her the right to it. Her podcast begins as a feminist inquiry into young women's explorations of sex but leads her to commodify herself for likes.

It's dynamically directed by Paige Rattray, and Reilly is a confident and deft performer.

The branding of female sexual empowerment is problematised, from how sex positivity is packaged online and sold to young women, to the ways in which men exploit or benefit from it. The story becomes darker, entering into the terrain of a psychological thriller perhaps too late, and only briefly, but it still chills. Arifa Akbar To 31 August. Then at Soho theatre, London, 22 October-21 November

ART & DESIGN

Edinburgh art festival

Various venues, Edinburgh

Edinburgh art festival is a celebration of the underground and unheralded. You can't walk into a gallery without learning about some subcultural genius or long-lost creative you've never heard of.

But EAF is also an unwieldy, confusing thing. There are curated displays, satellite exhibitions, performances, off-site projects - and it's impossible to figure out how any of it fits together.

The whole thing starts with US photographer Del LaGrace Volcano, whose images of queer nightlife in 1980s London are great. When it comes to untold stories, that of Sandra George (1957-2013) is worth telling. She was a black photojournalist who documented life on the margins of inner city Edinburgh but was only discovered after her death in 2013.

When it's not photography, EAF trades in hard-edged contemporary art. Irish sculptor Eva Rothschild has taken over Fruitmarket with a disparate exhibition that feels like someone saved a collection of modernist sculpture from a skip.

Emii Alrai's huge monument overlooking the city is meant to reference Sumerian deities, standing in opposition to the National Monument of Scotland.

The group show at Ingleby Gallery is good. It's all centred on Frank Walter (1926-2009), an Antiguan painter, writer, poet and polymath whose work is small, subtle, strange. Another largely undiscovered artist, Sadao Hasegawa (1945-1999), really ramps up the eroticism with an eye-popping display of throbbing members at Custom Lane.

There are lots of good shows here and plenty of bad ones too. But EAF is big and complex, with too many moving parts and clashing ideas to really make sense. Eddy Frankel To 30 August

Podcast of the week History Hit: The Rise of the Maya Two new episodes make up this special release from Dan Snow's super-popular pod - one on the rise of the advanced ancient civilisation and another on its fall. Direct from Belize (the series is co-signed by the country's tourist board), Snow looks at Mayan society and its darker recesses. Hannah J Davies

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COMMENTARY

Why poetry speaks to us in these brutal times

From ancient Greece to the scorched earth of Gaza and Ukraine, the power of verse is unique in the way that it can conjure up a moment, or feeling, or thought

By Charlotte Higgins

▼ Well-versed

Clockwise from right: Lucas Jones; Serhii Zhadan; fellow Ukrainian the late novelist turned poet Victoria Amelina

The biggest sales of poetry since records began are expected this year. The reason? The movies. UK print sales of The Odyssey increased by 1,400% in the four weeks to 25 July compared with the same period last year. In the US, year-to-date sales of The Odyssey are up 76% so far.

Strip out the Odyssey factor, though, and poetry is still doing exceptionally well, driven by writers whose work is often mildly denigrated as “Instapoetry”, such as Lucas Jones. His is a kind of versifying that delivers immediate uplifting aphorisms rather than the dense, allusive play with language that might reward repeated reading; or the sort of limpid, performable music that propels a Homeric epic. And readers respond to it.

Sales figures are a rough metric, though. They don’t tell us how someone feels when they read a good poem, what it expands for them, what memories it brings. What shiver of alienation it offers; what moment (often) of puzzlement. By its nature, poetry expresses what can’t be said in prose; it can be resistant. Poetry is needed in an emergency, when ordinary ways of writing can’t get at the moment, or the feeling, or the thought.

What poetry is not, however, is peripheral to human life. What I have learned by reporting from Ukraine is that when catastrophe hovers overhead, poetry seems more vital. The most rapt poetry reading I have ever attended was in the city of Kharkiv, the border with Russia only 30km away, when one poet described scratching poems into the wall of her Russian prison cell and audience members silently mouthed the learned-by-heart words of writer Serhii Zhadan’s poems as he performed them.

The foreign correspondent Lindsey Hilsum, who has covered wars and humanitarian

crises for decades, has long understood this, which is why I Brought the War with Me, her anthology of work by poets across time and geographies, accompanied by her stories, is such a treasure. The poetry emerging from Gaza, and from Palestinian poets scattered across the world - figures such as the young writer Haia Mohammed, or the Palestinian-American poet Fady Joudah - provides the most arresting document of lives lived amid cataclysm: such poetry is composed with an urgency and compression that no other art form can achieve.

As the Ukrainian poet Halyna Kruk said in 2022, “no metaphors work against a man with a machine gun ... no poetry can save you from a tank”. It is true, as her fellow Ukrainian writer Kateryna Iakovlenko has put it, that the poetry created most obviously by war is asemic, ugly and inscribed into the very land.

And yet, with remarkable speed, and despite its failure either to deflect bullets, or keep its writers and readers physically safe, poetry quickly began to be written in Ukraine after the full-scale invasion. Poems could be written quickly, with limited means, and even in inhospitable places (the shelter, the trench).

The novelist Victoria Amelina, who was later killed by a Russian bomb, stopped writing novels and started writing poetry. Some of it denied its own status as poetry, as if it were just the shrapnel-hit remnants of language. One poem, Not Poetry, translated by Uilleam Blacker, contains the lines, “But the reality of war / devours punctuation / plot structure / structure ...”

The young writer Artur Dron’, who served in the Ukrainian armed forces for more than three years, did not write about bravado or heroism, but made small, delicate memorials for fellow soldiers who had been killed. Or sometimes he built encapsulations of seemingly insignificant moments.

One of his poems is about a child in some unnamed village near the frontline, who becomes the unofficial mascot of the soldiers posted there. At Christmas, they leave the young boy “a bag with our crushed Snickers bars / and tangerines. / The ones with seeds, / but oh so sweet.” It was a fleeting incident: not newsworthy, not impressive, nothing for the history books - but it was material for a poem.

In the midst of a cataclysm, poems survive, often stripped back to their most essential forms, which are surely universal and primordial human forms of expression: the lament for the dead, the lullaby for the child, the curse. In the end, humans need those things: those songs, those poems. They are proof of life. They may not be remembered; but poetry has a better chance at survival than much else that humans do or make.

CHARLOTTE HIGGINS IS THE GUARDIAN’S CHIEF CULTURE WRITER

CHAD MOORE, JULIA KOCHETOVA; LES KASYANOV/GLOBAL IMAGES UKRAINE/GETTY

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Culture^{}[] Books

FICTION

The last dance*The Nobel laureate's

final novel is a poignant love letter to Peruvian music and culture*

By Marcel Theroux

Book of the week I Give You My Silence By Mario Vargas Llosa

When I Give You My Silence was published in Spanish in 2023 its author, the Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, rightly predicted that it would be his final novel. He died last year at the age of 89. I Give You My Silence may have been completed with the spectre of death approaching, but there is nothing morbid about this fascinating and engaging book, which is an eccentric love letter to Vargas Llosa's native country and, in particular, its music.

The novel's quixotic hero is a music journalist called Toño Azpilcueta. Toño always hoped to be a professor of Peruvian music, but as the novel opens, he's earning a meagre living teaching at a girls' school and writing articles for specialist magazines. Luckily, he's subsidised by his longsuffering wife, Matilde. Toño is a recognisable type: the impecunious cultural obsessive. His infatuation is the vals, a Peruvian musical style that fuses the European waltz with African and indigenous Latin American traditions.

One evening, Toño gets an invitation to see an unknown guitarist called Lalo Molfino. Before Toño has time to digest the musician's brilliance, he learns of his sudden death. With the help of a small gift of money from a friend, Toño embarks on a project to write a biography of Molfino. "This book would be an homage to his talent, but also much more: he would at last put to paper those ideas about the Peruvian vals he had entertained so often."

Toño's Big Idea is that the vals is going to save Peru, and possibly humanity. Its blended heritage, he explains, points a way past the trauma

that colonialism, racism, dictatorship and terrorism have inflicted on his country. Toño's quest involves sleuthing, research, a journey along Peru's Pacific coast to Molfino's birthplace, and battles with his own demons – in particular, a phobia about rats.

Coming to this book, I knew nothing about Peru's music and I didn't realise that Cecilia Barraza, an important recurring character, is a real-life Peruvian singer. (It's a bit like having Patti Smith turn up in a novel.) Nor did I clock to begin with that the novel is really two books in one. The odd-numbered chapters are a third-person account of Toño's attempt to research and write the biography. Most of the even-numbered chapters are excerpts from the final work, I Give You My Silence. These form a quirky primer on Peruvian music and culture. It includes essays on the history of the vals; the lives of its musicians; the cajon, a distinctive Peruvian percussion instrument; Spanish as a regional lingua franca; and huachafería, a concept that Toño sees as a key part of Peru's identity. The novel's translator, Adrian Nathan West, tells us in a helpful afterword that "dictionaries typically define it as pretension". Toño is much more effusive: "Huachafería can be brilliant, but it is rarely intelligent: it is intuitive, verbose, solemn, melodic, imaginative and above all maudlin."

This is, in fact, a perfect description of the book that Toño himself is writing, which includes the grandiose and impossible claim that "this book you hold in your hands, reader, will be the starting point of a true revolution that will pull our Peru up from poverty and sorrow, restoring its glory and its creativity, making it a place where all are truly equal and putting an end to the sad divisions of its people".

Toño's mission is clearly bonkers, but he approaches it with a heroic single-mindedness that wins the reader over. And the form the novel takes allows Vargas Llosa to have his cake and eat it: giving Toño space to explore his ideas in detail, while having fun pointing out how overheated they are.

For instance, one of Toño's chapters tells the story of a love affair between Toni Lagarde and Lala Solórzano, a white man from a middle-class neighbourhood and a poor black woman from a rough one. Thanks to a shared interest in music, they meet, fall in love and get married. For Toño the polemicist, it's proof of the

Audiobook of the week Universality By Natasha Brown

A stinging dissection of wealth, class and the media, Natasha Brown's satire begins with a man named Jake gazing at a gold bar he has found at a farm in West Yorkshire, while an illegal rave takes place outside. Pondering what to do with the ingot that he has just used to bludgeon a stranger, Jake decides to do a runner. Universality goes on to dissect the fallout from a magazine article about the stolen gold via the varying perspectives of its protagonists, voiced by Norma Butikofer, Anushka Chakravarti, Clare Corbett and Daniel Weyman. Fiona Sturges

redemptive power of the vals. But Toni and Lala reappear through the novel as he works on his book, gently pushing back at Toño's efforts to make them emblematic of anything.

Vargas Llosa's own implied verdict on Toño's idiosyncratic attempt to save the world by writing a book about Peruvian music is more nuanced and tender. Vargas Llosa, of course, shared his central character's idealism. At the time the novel takes place, in the early 1990s, Vargas Llosa was also on a failed mission to save Peru, running unsuccessfully to become president. And just as Toño sees something poignant and important in the maligned quality of huachafería, Vargas Llosa finds heroism in his unworldly protagonist.

Gentle, impractical dreamers like Toño, he seems to be saying, bring their own kind of changes into the world. One small proof of this is that by the novel's end, I had followed Toño up the Pacific coast of Peru on Google Maps to the tiny settlement of Puerto Etén, tried to find a recipe for Lala's quince marmalade online, made a vals playlist on Spotify and searched the prices of return flights to Lima.

MARCEL THEROUX IS A NOVELIST AND CRITIC

FICTION

American excess

Bold and ambitious US family saga about a great power in decline is a late-career triumph

By Jake Arnott

Can Nothing Save Us? By Irvine Welsh

Why expect unconditional love from somebody you've brought into a fucked, dying planet, who then has to sit around and watch you screw it up even more?" So muses twentysomething college dropout Luke Ayrton as he works the Las Vegas Strip, "comping girls for clubs" in Sin City. His job is to

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trawl the “plankton” of bachelorette parties in order to lure the “whales” – rich men willing to spend to try to impress young women.

Irvine Welsh’s 16th novel Can Nothing Save Us? comes as something of a surprise. An epic American family saga, it explores a collective emotional malaise at the heart of a great power in decline. A bold and ambitious work, Welsh deftly shifts point of view with confidence and conviction: his ability to jump generations and to capture the voices and feelings of his characters is at times quite astonishing.

Welsh’s ear for the demotic is as strong as ever as he conveys the slang and grammar of Luke’s world, as well as the sense of being a small player on the periphery of a bewildering, drug-addled circuit. The theme of generational trench warfare is neatly set up at a legal meeting where Luke’s parents, Gina and Don, are informed of their disinheritance by Luke’s grandparents Molly and George. “Me grow up?” Gina retorts at maternal accusations of immaturity. “You drink your own urine and walk around naked.” Welsh’s knack for absurd social satire is regularly deployed to interrogate serious themes and visit dark places.

In Vietnam, George was a witness to the My Lai massacre, when hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians were murdered by US soldiers. He is also a survivor of a lone gunman’s attack on the Las Vegas Strip from the Mandalay Bay Hotel in 2017.

The plot develops a mercilessly ballistic energy of its own as multiple storylines converge on another mass shooting, this time at an outdoor festival called Our Rave’s Electric. A complex and explosive denouement almost succumbs to the chaos it depicts, though in the end the only control on the narrative seems the fateful trajectory of a familiar American tragedy. Its inevitability only makes it all the more pitiful.

We are left with a poignant coda of post-trauma, and a disturbing sense that this is merely part of an unending, generational cycle. Can Nothing Save Us? was at one time in development as a TV project. That Welsh has finally realised this story in such an expansive, compelling and heartfelt novel is something of a literary triumph, proof that this medium remains the best kind of long-form narrative. And it’s certainly a late-career tour de force.

JAKE ARNOTT IS A BRITISH NOVELIST

ART

Outside in Anecdote and art history combine in this deep dive into the LA of David Hockney

By Ben Eastham

The Beverly Hills Housewife By James Cahill

David Hockney was 29 years old when he came to Betty Freeman’s house to photograph her swimming pool. Scouting locations for the pool paintings that would make him a household name, he took snaps of his partner, Peter Schlesinger, emerging naked from the water. And yet something about his aloof and quietly eccentric host, who dusted the hunting trophies while a handsome young man padded around her patio naked, intrigued the artist. So he asked whether he might photograph her too, and she agreed.

Completed a year later, Beverly Hills Housewife (1966/7) shows a beautiful woman standing outside a beautiful house. The scene is lit by an unbroken sun, her blond bob is undisturbed by any breeze, a lush fern sets off her popping pink dress. She is surrounded by

the symbols of mid-century American prosperity: a chair by Le Corbusier, a tasteful modernist sculpture.

In this polished mix of anecdote and art history, James Cahill uses Hockney’s painting as a “primary source” for his own portrait of the working-class Yorkshireman who fell in love with Los Angeles, of the wealthy art collector who became his friend and ally, and of the city that would go on to shape the culture in which we now live.

The difficulty the book runs into is that there is only so much to unpack. Hockney was a painter of enclosed worlds, from which the inescapable facts of LA life – the Watts riots, choking smog, Vietnam – are excluded.

So, rather than digging up the painting’s glossy surface, Cahill glances off it into anecdotal histories of vanguard American music (of which Freeman was an influential supporter), the mythologised Los Angeles art scene (with Edward Kienholz’s darkness as counterpoint to Hockney’s light), and much else besides. There are heroes (the hobo composer Harry Partch) and villains (the painter Clyfford Still, whose egomania and vanity is entertainingly monstrous).

At times this can feel tendentious but it is testament to the agility of Cahill’s prose that the reader is unlikely to mind, and so this portrait of multiple subjects continues to feel engaging long after the painting at its heart has been exhausted. His book is in this respect much like its primary source: charming, clever and difficult to pin down.

BEN EASTHAM IS A WRITER AND EDITOR

Feel the burn Why holidays from hell make for blistering fiction

TOM GAULD

WHO IS HAUNTING THE LIBRARY OF FORBIDDEN TOMES?

22% - TORMENTED SOULS, FROZEN BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH

4% - DANK, FETID HORRORS FROM THE ICY DEPTHS BELOW

15% - COLD, LIFELESS BONES POSSESSED BY A CORRUPT SORCERY

11% - FRIGID AND MALEVOLENT ECTOPLASMIC VAPOURS

48% - REGULAR READERS, HAPPY TO BE AWAY FROM THE HEATWAVE

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Lifestyle

THE ONE CHANGE THAT WORKED By Amy Annette

I learned to

love my arms – after decades of hiding them

It took a heatwave to get me to shed my shame and my sleeves, but now there is no stopping me. Life is so much cooler in every way

Aren't you hot in that?" was the question that plagued my summers as a teenager. I would never bare my arms; instead, I would cover up with a trusty black cardigan. I needed layers to feel comfortable. Well, comfortable isn't the right word. I was never comfortable, despite telling everyone I was.

In my 20s and 30s, I collected a hot-weather capsule wardrobe of T-shirt dresses in various sizes, all baggy and sleeved. But why? I'm someone who should know better. I've read the books, I've shared the memes. I know, from body-positivity activists, that you don't have to deny yourself the joy of being at the beach or pool just because a magazine says you have to get yourself "beach-body ready": slimmer, hairless, perfect.

I also understand logically that a cardigan may cover you, but it doesn't hide your body shape. When I hide my skin, I don't make myself magically disappear, but I do make myself smaller. I'm showing the world that I respect beauty norms and that I know I don't meet them.

I learned to hate my arms by listening to other women talk about theirs. Arm hatred feels like a homegrown industry – by women for women. Arms don't have the mainstream attention of beauty standards. Perhaps it's because they aren't sexualised. I don't remember seeing a lads' mag spread on "Barbara from Bradford's biceps" when I was growing up.

But last month it was my friend's birthday. The temperature was more than 30C in London. I looked at my small selection of heatwave- appropriate clothes. None of them were very celebratory.

My eye was drawn to a white sleeveless shirt. I'd bought it thinking I'd wear it one day, probably with a jacket. At that moment, something shifted and, despite years of conditioning to hate my arms, my hatred for the heat won. I put the sleeveless shirt on. (I added a pair of navy culottes with a white band at the bottom that made me feel like a fancy little Victorian boy, if he had access to Asos.) At 37, outside a swimming pool, I was bare-armed in public for the first time.

And, of course, it was fine. No one cared. If they did, they didn't tell me. I can't believe it took me this long.

▲ Amy Annette wearing the white sleeveless shirt that helped her reconsider her wardrobe

You do keep a lot of heat in if you cover the upper arms and shoulders

The next day, I posted about it on Instagram. I have a video series called Diary of a Sweaty Girl, where I chronicle my life as, you guessed it, a sweaty girl. I shared that the climate crisis had overtaken sexist body standards and had somehow freed me from my besleeved burden. Others shared that they too were experiencing their "first year arms out no shame" because they "couldn't be bothered any more". That's how I felt. Yes, it was lovely to have my arms out, but it wasn't a celebratory feeling. It was more like waking up: a softer, quiet change.

And did it make things cooler? Yes, it turns out you do keep a lot of heat in if you cover the upper arms and shoulders.

The week after, I went on holiday with a group of friends. The change stuck. Instead of always having some sort of cover-up to hand, I was happy to be in my swimsuit. During hot French evenings, I didn't find a way to fashion a shirt over my outfit; I wore a sleeveless dress and danced the night away, getting more mosquito bites on my shoulders than ever before.

Now, I'm reconsidering my wardrobe and no longer letting friends talk about their arms negatively in front of me. I'm trying to quell that inner voice that whispers: "But is it flattering?" I'm still figuring out this new version of myself. And if it gets any hotter, I'm wondering what other internalised standards I can sweat out. AMY ANNETTE IS A COMEDIAN

STEPHEN COLLINS

Stephen Collins

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KITCHEN AIDE By Anna Berrill

Cool as a cucumber: tips to save you from cooking in a heatwave

It's too hot to turn on the oven or stove - what can I make for dinner that's still substantial?

Mark, via email

This sounds like a job for Lucy Carr-Ellison, of Tart London, who is fully functioning in a no-oven household. "We moved in last year and there's an Aga, which we can't have on in summer," she says, so toast toppers have become crucial: "Try rubbing toasts with garlic, adding a bit of olive oil, some grated tomatoes, lots of salt and tinned anchovies."

Mark could do away with the toaster and get some focaccia, suggests Jamie Pickles, chef/co-owner of Stow and The Trof, both in Manchester. "Mix picked brown crab meat with mayo, lemon juice and mustard, and spread that over the bread. Combine the picked white meat with chopped chives and coriander, lemon juice, creme fraiche and black pepper, mix through some tinned sweetcorn, then spread that over the brown crab mayo and finish with watercress."

"I make a lot of rice noodle bowls," says Alexandra Dudley, author of Cooking Made Simple. "Soak the noodles in hot water while you make a dressing of peanut butter, miso, tahini, sesame oil, garlic and lime juice or rice-wine vinegar, then mix the two with cooked prawns from the supermarket and some smashed cucumbers."

Cool cucumbers are also a go-to

at Pickles', where they're marinated and served with salmon and rice. "Roughly chop a cucumber, throw it in a tub and add soy sauce, lemon juice, sesame oil, fish sauce and chilli crisp," he says. "Put on the lid, shake and put in the fridge." Some smoked salmon would be just the ticket alongside: pile some into bowls with cooked rice ("jasmine, ideally") and finish with sesame seeds, chopped coriander, a touch of lime, plus the cucumbers.

You can also widen the parameters of pesto. "Switch out pine nuts for more affordable walnuts, and the same goes for the cheese," says Pickles, who uses any firm cheese. Blend with fresh herbs ("basil or flat-leaf parsley"), olive oil, garlic and lemon juice, plus ice to emulsify. Then get some courgettes: "Slice into strips using a peeler, dress with the pesto and leave the courgettes to soak up the flavour." Finish with torn mozzarella, black pepper and pickled raisins - "they'll bring a pop of life".

If all else fails, the assembly dinner is a classic move. "Learn to love your deli section," says Dudley, who has jars of artichokes, capers, olives and peppers to hand, ready to chop and chuck into a bowl with cooked lentils ("tinned or from a pouch"). Crumble over feta, and there's nothing better on a summer's night. Or any night, really.

ANNA BERRILL IS A FOOD WRITER Got a culinary dilemma? Email feast@theguardian.com

THE WEEKLY RECIPE By Chris Shaw

Nº 379

Risotto with tomatoes, mint and pecorino

Prep 15 min Cook 1 hr 20 min

Serves 4

● GLUTEN FREE

Ingredients For the stock 4 shallots, peeled 2 sticks celery, trimmed 1 vine of tomatoes 2 carrots

For the roast tomatoes 500g datterini tomatoes, washed Salt Olive oil 4 garlic cloves, peeled

For the risotto Olive oil 2 shallots, peeled and finely diced 1 garlic clove, peeled and crushed Salt and black pepper 350g risotto rice 2 tbsp tomato puree 150g pecorino romano, grated 30g fresh mint, leaves picked and finely chopped

This is a really light risotto. There's no butter in it - just olive oil and cheese - and the richness comes predominantly from the roast tomatoes.

Method To make the stock, roughly chop all the vegetables and put them in a saucepan. Cover with two litres of cold water and bring to a boil. Turn down the heat and leave to simmer for 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, heat the oven to 170C (150C fan)/gas 3½. Put the tomatoes in a roasting tray, season with salt and drizzle with olive oil. Add the garlic, then roast for about an hour, until the tomatoes are jammy.

Bring a large, heavy-based pan to a medium heat. Add a generous glug of olive oil, followed by the diced shallots, crushed garlic and a pinch of salt. Once the shallots are soft, add the rice and stir well to coat. Add another pinch of salt, then toast the rice for a minute or two, until the edges begin to look translucent. Add the tomato puree and cook for two to three minutes.

Strain the stock, discarding the vegetable solids, and add to the rice one large ladleful at a time, stirring continuously and allowing each addition to be absorbed before adding the next.

After 18-20 minutes, when the rice is just cooked but still has a little bite, take the pan off the heat and stir in the roast tomatoes, roast garlic, grated pecorino and chopped mint. The tomatoes should break up nicely once incorporated into the hot rice.

Season to taste, finish with a generous glug of olive oil, if desired. Serve immediately.

RITA PLATTS

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Diversions

Notes and Queries The long-running series that invites readers to send in questions and answers on anything and everything

QUIZ

Thomas Eaton

1 Which English cheese cannot be made in its namesake village? 2 What did George W Bush describe in January 2017 as "some weird shit"? 3 What is the UK's only aquatic songbird? 4 In the church year, what is Ordinary Time? 5 Clara Rockmore was a virtuoso on what electronic instrument? 6 Carling Lane, off the Strand, has London's last type of what lamp? 7 Which 1980 TV docudrama caused a crisis in Anglo-Saudi relations?

▲ What links Spider-Man with the chair of British Rail and the chief mourner at Nelson's funeral?

SONY PICTURES RELEASING/ ALLSTAR

PUZZLES

Chris Maslanka

1 Wordpool

Find the correct definition: NACKET a) small snack b) worn out c) football rattle d) the trick of a thing

2 E pluribus unum

Rearrange NUCLEAR FEUD to make a single word.

CHESS

Leonard Barden

A new generation took over at the top of British chess this month when a trio of youthful talents demonstrated their skills on a national stage. Shreyas Royal, 17, of Dartford, Kent, became the youngest ever British champion, breaking Michael Adams's 1989 record by two months and underlining his status as an emerging world-class talent. Bodhana Sivanandan, 11, and Supratit Banerjee, 12, also delivered memorable performances.

The established

3 Cryptic

She's from Tijuana - we hear she dines alone (7)

4 Missing Links

Find a word that follows the first word and precedes the second, in each case making a fresh word or phrase.

a) hot top b) log roll c) riding yield d) picture work © CMM2026

grandmasters did not go gently into that good night. Adams finished just short of what he needed to equal Jonathan Penrose's record of 10 championship wins, while top-seeded Luke McShane also tied for second, half a point

4037 Frederick Waldhausen Gordon v Supratit Banerjee, British Championship, Coventry 2026. Black to move and win.

What links:

8 Chief mourner at Nelson's funeral; chair of British Rail; Spider-Man? 9 Batgirl; Coyote vs Acme; Nothing Lasts Forever; The Day the Clown Cried? 10 Barbary; Gold; Grain; Ivory; Pepper; Skeleton? 11 Infant; schoolboy; lover; soldier; justice; pantaloon; second childishness? 12 Wooderson; Bannister; Ibbotson; Coe; Ovett; Cram; Kerr? 13 Juliet; Reach Out I'll Be There; December 1963? 14 Middlemarch; Das Kapital; The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; Watch Out?

Answers: Quiz 1. Stillion (must be made in Derbyshire, Leicestershire or Nottinghamshire). 2. Trump's first inauguration speech. 3. Digger. 4. Period outside the seasons of Advent, Christmas, Lent or Easter. 5. Theorem. 6. Sewer gas (destruction lamp). 7. Death of a Princess. 8. Various Peter Parkers. 9. Films that were stinting, unrelapped or abandoned unfinished. 10. Names (some historical) for coastal areas of Africa. 11. Seven Ages of Man, as defined in his You Like It. 12. Male British runners who have held the world mile record. 13. His 1 hits for the Four... bands: Penrose, Tops, Sessions. 14. Books by residents of Highgate Cemetery, George Eliot, Karl Marx, Douglas Adams, Jeremy Beadle, Puzzles 1 (a), 2 FRAUDULENCE. 3. HANFIL. 4. (a) hot/desk/top; b) log/jam/roll; c) riding/crop/yield; d) picture/frame/work.

behind Royal. (Correction: Adams's 38-year unbeaten record in British Championships was 118 games, not 87 as stated here last week.)

The final British Championship scores were Royal 7.5/9, Adams and McShane 7, Harry Grieve, Svyatoslav Bazakutsa (Ukraine), Siva Mahadevan (India) and Simon Williams 6.5, Banerjee and nine others on 6. Sivanandan and Trisha Kanyamarala (Ireland) tied for the British women's title, with 5.5/9. Sivanandan won the playoff 1.5-0.5.

R01 made.

4037 1. QX1+1 2 Bx1 N13 3 QX3

COUNTRY DIARY

LYME REGIS Dorset, England, UK

My favourite beach at Lyme Regis is the capricious East Cliff, visible only at low tide. The best way to reach it is down a 114-step walkway.

The path drops through rough scrub, a feral mix of wild plants and garden escapes, sizzling with grasshoppers. Buddleia flourishes next to sallow bushes, hazel and gorse. Sour blackberries are reddening among the brambles, and somewhere in the tangle a stonechat calls. The sound, like two dry pebbles clicked together, echoes the faint tap of fossil hammers audible from the beach below.

You emerge on the sea wall, a wide, curving promenade edged with metal railings. Lyme Bay spreads before you, sparkling in the sun all the way to the Isle of Portland on the distant horizon.

Below the wall lies a tidal stretch of flat rock, thickly colonised by periwinkles, limpets and barnacles.

As I walked, I passed a small child banging away with her fossilising hammer. Her mother caught my eye and smiled. I realised that the child was not bashing a rock as I had supposed, but a large limpet. Before I could think, I said: "She's hammering a limpet, which is a live creature." "Oh," said the mother, at a loss how to respond.

This was the second time in a few weeks I have seen kids killing limpets with the knowledge of nearby adults, who do nothing. The first occasion was at Battery Rocks in Penzance, where a couple sat watching a boy eviscerating a mollusc. Noticing a stranger looming near, the man said to his partner: "Is that a vegan coming to protest?"

Does this matter? I think so. As adults it's up to us to guide kids' natural curiosity so it becomes care for the living world. Sara Hudston

ILLUSTRATION: CLIFFORD HARPER

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63

All solutions published next week

The Weekly cryptic

No 30,082

By Anto

Across

1 Splitting payslip results in bad service? (4,5) 6 Occasional brewers who will deliver honey? (4) 10 Deceive friendly bank (5) 11 Gutsy Nero wrestled child (9) 12 Suckers taking shelter before short game (7) 13 Sacred music at heart of saintly shroud rite (7) 14 Acute harm horrible images aroused (7,6) 17 For example, Apple devices providing gambling opportunities (5,8) 21 Assigns blame when returning vegetarian food (7) 22 Chap so excited as couple make comeback in film (7) 24 Passes on instruction to tellers when bank heist's over (5,4) 25 All together now - express disappointment at what comes before do (5) 26 Sentimental short message made even shorter (4) 27 Catalogue standard no good bugs (7,2)

Down

1 One telling stories featuring fantastic, very minor celebrities (8) 2 Beneficial to add oxygen to blend (2,3) 3 Internal enemy in appropriate position here? (5,9) 4 Element of July's session is something hard to understand? (7) 5 Travel around Wigan central to find Portuguese wine (7) 7 Mrs Sprat's dietary requirement processed at lane one (3,2,4) 8 Gutted scientific programme providing containers for seed producers (6)

9 She made crime novels airtight as each evolved (6,8) 15 Endorsement after president would indicate top choice (9) 16 Conservative faction working to gather information for delivery option (1-7) 18 Labour adopts works creating best medium for growth (7) 19 In Scotland all large trees produce small flowers (7) 20 Trophies stolen, clubs eliminated - it's a result! (6) 23 Heads or livers chopped up? Depends how you say it (5)

Solution No 30,076

Quick crossword

No 17,555

Across

1 Big mistake (6) 4 One quarter of a deck (6) 8 Conditions of a business deal (5) 9 Big lie (7) 10 Insipid (7) 11 Old-fashioned anaesthetic (5) 12 Record player (9) 17 Hurled (5) 19 Big fire (7) 21 Warning signal (3,4) 22 Extract (5) 23 Bear - stick (6) 24 Close-fitting necklace (6)

Down

1 Contract killer (6) 2 Gym session (7) 3 Attempt (5) 5 'Actions speak louder than words', for instance (7) 6 It goes from top to bottom (5)

7 French existentialist Jean-Paul (6) 9 Hulk Hogan's line of work (9) 13 Frequent customer (7) 14 Identify (7) 15 Rollercoaster effect? (1-5) 16 Take trouble (6) 18 Reversed (5) 20 Pollution - vulgarity (5)

Solution No 17,549

Sudoku

Hard

Fill in the grid so that every row, every column and every 3x3 box contains the numbers 1 to 9.

Last week's solution

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制度与权力批判深度研判：The Guardian Weekly (2026-08-21)

▌ 本日全报思想与文化深思雷达 (Intellectual & Cultural Significance Radar)

在系统通盘梳理本期报纸所涉及的所有国际政治、经济、社会与文化报道后，以下 3 个具体事件在制度结构、权力技术与法理合法性层面最值得学者进一步深思：

1. 【克拉克顿补选与法拉奇的财务审查】 [F10_20, F12_23, F14_27, F17_33]（版面：深度报道/英国）

   • 事件简述：奈杰尔·法拉奇（Nigel Farage）在赢得补选后，仍面临关于 500 万英镑未申报礼金的议会调查，且其领导的改革英国党（Reform UK）全国支持率有所下降。
   • 制度批判切入点：探讨代议制民主中的“程序性操纵”与“财务透明度”的张力。分析政治行为体如何利用补选机制作为应对制度审查的策略，以及议会制裁权力（如暂停议员资格）在面对民粹主义合法性挑战时的运作逻辑。

2. 【美以对伊战争和平协议窗口期届满】 [F3_5, F3_6]（版面：主报深度版面）

   • 事件简述：美以对伊战争和平协议的两个月谈判窗口期结束，特朗普要求德黑兰“举起投降的白旗”，而伊朗则表示将采取更强硬立场。
   • 制度批判切入点：分析“最后通牒”作为一种权力施压技术。探讨在外交谈判中，人为设定的“时间窗口”如何被用作制造危机感、强迫对方接受非对称条款的心理与政治工具。

3. 【数字化伪造视频诱导投资】 [F7_13, F7_14]（版面：专业栏目）

   • 事件简述：澳大利亚总理安东尼·阿尔巴尼斯（Anthony Albanese）的深度伪造（Deepfake）视频被用于虚假投资诈骗，通过叠加虚假音频承诺高额回报。
   • 制度批判切入点：批判“技术中介”对政治信任的解构。分析当最高权力者的视觉/听觉符号被数字化剥离并商品化时，传统的政治权威如何失去其认知的唯一性，以及制度如何应对这种新型的“认知战争”。

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▌ 精选核心专题深度思想论证 (In-Depth Dialectical Monograph)

专题一：程序合法性与实质审查的博弈——基于法拉奇补选事件的剖析

在当前的英国政治生态中，奈杰尔·法拉奇（Nigel Farage）的补选行为呈现出一种极具研究价值的权力运作逻辑：他试图通过一次“徒劳的补选” [F16_30 🔍] 来重新定义其政治合法性，从而抵消制度性的财务审查压力。

首先，制度现实的冲突在于“选举授权”与“议会纪律”的对立。法拉奇通过赢得克拉克顿（Clacton）的席位 [F17_33 🔍]，在形式上获得了选民的直接授权。然而，这种授权并不能自动豁免其在财务申报上的法律责任。针对 500 万英镑礼金的调查重启 [F13_26 🔍]，揭示了代议制民主中一个核心矛盾：一个被选民选出的代表，是否可以因为违反议会内部的透明度规则而被暂停资格 [F17_33 🔍]？

其次，这种权力运作体现了民粹主义对制度程序的“工具化”利用。保守党发言人将其描述为一场“旨在逃避审查的闹剧” [F14_28 🔍]。在这种逻辑下，补选不再是为了代表选民，而是一种防御性的政治操纵——通过制造一个“获胜”的事实，将财务丑闻转化为“建制派对民意代表的迫害”。

然而，事实清单显示这种策略存在边际递减效应。改革英国党的全国支持率从 27% 下降至 24% [F17_33 🔍]，表明这种通过程序操纵获取的短期合法性，无法在长期的制度信任危机中提供有效掩护。这证明了在成熟的法治框架下，程序性的选举胜利无法完全替代实质性的法理合规。

专题二：认知符号的异化与权力权威的崩塌——基于深度伪造视频的分析

澳大利亚总理阿尔巴尼斯被利用于深度伪造投资视频的事件 [F7_13 🔍]，不仅是一起金融诈骗，更是一次关于“权力符号学”的深刻危机。

在传统的政治传播中，国家领导人的影像和声音是主权权力（Sovereign Power）的延伸，具有某种程度的“真理效力”。当公民看到总理在视频中承诺投资回报时，其信任的底层逻辑并非是对投资项目的信任，而是对“总理”这一权力符号所代表的制度权威的信任。

然而，深度伪造技术实现了对权力符号的“去中心化”剥离。诈骗者通过叠加虚假音频 [F7_14 🔍]，将总理的真实画面转化为一个纯粹的、可操纵的“视觉外壳”。这意味着，权力行为者的生物特征（面孔、声音）不再是身份的唯一证明，而变成了可以被任意编辑的数字化资产。

这种异化导致了严重的认识论后果：当最高权力者的符号可以被如此轻易地伪造并用于低级诈骗时，公众对所有官方信息的预设信任将被系统性地削弱。这产生了一种“说谎者的红利”——真正的权力行为者在未来面对真实的丑闻时，可以轻易地将其指责为“深度伪造”。这种技术治理带来的后果是，政治沟通从“基于事实的辩论”转向了“基于技术验证的怀疑”，制度性的信任基础在算法的侵蚀下趋于瓦解。

---

▌ 面向学者的制度研究开放性追问 (Open Research Horizons)

1. 【关于民粹主义与议会制裁的兼容性研究】：当一名议员在拥有极高民意支持（通过补选证明）的同时，违反了议会内部的财务透明度准则，制度应如何平衡“民意合法性”与“程序合法性”？是否存在一种机制能防止补选成为逃避法律审查的避风港？
2. 【关于数字化主权符号的保护研究】：在深度伪造技术普及的时代，国家领导人的视觉/听觉符号是否应被定义为一种“公共制度资产”而非个人生物特征？如何构建一套技术与法理相结合的验证体系，以防止权力符号被商品化地用于解构社会信任？

理性与情感辩证深度研判：The Guardian Weekly (2026-08-21)

▌ 本日全报生活世界痛感与情感政治深思雷达 (Lifeworld & Affective Significance Radar)

在系统通盘梳理本期报纸所涉及的所有报道后，以下 4 个具体事件在个体生命体验、情感撕裂与生活世界崩解层面最值得学者进一步深思：

1. 【地缘政治的极限施压与投降话语】 [F3_5, F3_6]（生活领域：国际政治与生存）

   • 事件简述：在美以对伊战争和平协议谈判窗口期届满之际，特朗普要求德黑兰“举起投降的白旗”，而伊朗则表示将采取更强硬立场。
   • 情感政治切入点：分析“投降”这一极具羞辱性的词汇如何被用作外交工具，探讨在宏大叙事的权力博弈中，个体生命如何被简化为地缘政治筹码，以及这种极限施压如何制造集体性的生存焦虑。

2. 【算法伪造与信任崩塌】 [F7_13, F7_14]（生活领域：技术与认知）

   • 事件简述：澳大利亚总理阿尔巴尼斯的深度伪造（Deepfake）视频被用于诱导虚假投资，通过叠加虚假音频承诺高额回报。
   • 情感政治切入点：探讨技术理性如何通过精准模拟“权威形象”来操纵个体的贪婪与信任，揭示在后真相时代，数字化身（Digital Avatar）如何剥离真实人格，使社会信任基础在算法操纵下迅速瓦解。

3. 【补选闹剧中的权力逃避】 [F12_23, F14_27, F16_31]（生活领域：政治伦理与法律）

   • 事件简述：奈杰尔·法拉奇在赢得补选后拒绝出席获胜仪式，且面临关于 500 万英镑礼金申报不实的调查，被指利用补选逃避审查。
   • 情感政治切入点：剖析“程序正义”（补选获胜）如何被用作掩盖“伦理缺失”（隐瞒捐款）的屏障，分析支持者在结果宣布时的“徒劳感”与政治人物利用制度漏洞进行情感操纵的辩证关系。

4. 【自然灾害中的肉身搜寻】 [F6_11, F6_12]（生活领域：自然与生存）

   • 事件简述：印度尼西亚东部遭遇强震，造成至少 53 人死亡，救援人员在坍塌的建筑碎片中挖掘搜寻幸存者。
   • 情感政治切入点：分析在巨大的自然毁灭面前，人类救援行为中蕴含的“绝望的希望”，探讨个体在面对不可抗力导致的流离失所时，肉身之脆弱与生存意志之间的剧烈冲突。

---

▌ 精选核心专题理性与情感辩证论证 (The Dialectic of Logos and Pathos Monograph)

专题一：【程序正义的掩体与伦理真空：法拉奇补选事件中的权力辩证法】

在奈杰尔·法拉奇（Nigel Farage）的补选事件 [F10_19, F16_31] 中，我们观察到一种典型的“程序理性”与“伦理痛感”的脱节。从系统理性模型来看，补选是一套标准的民主程序：提名 $\rightarrow$ 竞选 $\rightarrow$ 投票 $\rightarrow$ 获胜。法拉奇通过这次补选成功获得了议员席位，在法律逻辑上，他完成了从候选人到立法者的身份转换，获得了制度性的合法性。

然而，这种程序上的“成功”在现象学层面却呈现出一种极大的荒诞感。当结果宣布时，现场没有欢呼，而是一种“压倒性的徒劳感” [F16_31 🔍]。这种情感反差源于一个核心的伦理冲突：法拉奇利用补选这一民主程序，试图将其转化为逃避 500 万英镑礼金审查的“掩体” [F14_28 🔍]。这里存在着深刻的辩证摩擦：制度设计的初衷是让民众选择代表，但在此案例中，程序被异化为一种“转移注意力”的工具 [F14_27 🔍]。

结合政治心理学分析，法拉奇拒绝出席获胜仪式 [F10_19 🔍] 这一行为，实际上是对其获胜逻辑的某种潜意识背离——他需要的不是代表民众的荣誉，而是通过获胜而获得的政治豁免权或议程主导权。当工党主席菲利普森指出“现在已经没有藏身之所了” [F12_24 🔍] 时，实际上是在试图打破这种用程序理性掩盖伦理缺失的局面。这种冲突揭示了当代代议制民主中的一个危机：当程序理性被纯粹的权力技术所操纵时，它不再产生共识，而只产生一种被操纵后的集体徒劳感。

专题二：【算法拟像与信任剥削：深度伪造视频中的认知异化】

澳大利亚总理阿尔巴尼斯被用于深度伪造视频的案例 [F7_13, F7_14]，提供了一个关于技术理性如何工具化人类情感弱点的样本。其系统理性模型不再是传统的政治宣传，而是一套基于 AI 的“认知操纵系统”。通过将真实画面与虚假音频叠加，技术实现了对“权威性”的低成本复制。

在现象学深描层面，这种伪造视频精准地捕捉了受众的“生存焦虑”与“获利心理”。承诺“每月投资 A$4,000 可获利 A$40,000” [F7_14 🔍] 的话术，将复杂的经济逻辑简化为极具诱惑力的数字对比。在这种逻辑下，受众对总理身份的信任被算法转化为一种可被收割的“信任资产”。个体在面对视频时，其感官接收到的“真实性”掩盖了逻辑上的“不可能”，导致认知在情感驱动下发生短路。

这种 Logos 与 Pathos 的辩证摩擦 体现为：技术理性（AI 生成）通过模拟人类的情感触点（信任、希望、贪婪），实现了对人类理性的反向解构。当一个国家的最高行政首脑被如此频繁地利用为诈骗工具时，受损的不仅是个人名誉，更是公共领域中“真实”这一概念的基石。

运用鲍德里亚的拟像理论，这些深度伪造视频不再是对现实的模仿，而是一种“超真实”的构建。在这种构建中，真实的阿尔巴尼斯已经不重要，重要的是那个能够承诺财富的“拟像”。这种从“利用信任”到“制造伪信任”的过程，揭示了在数字化治理时代，当技术理性完全脱离伦理约束时，它将如何通过精准识别个体的心理漏洞，将社会信任转化为资本套现的燃料。

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▌ 面向学者的伦理与社会心理开放性追问 (Open Research Horizons)

1. 【关于程序正义异化的政治学研究】：当选举程序被个体用作逃避法律审查的策略时，民主制度如何构建有效的“伦理防火墙”以防止程序理性被权力技术所异化？
2. 【关于 AI 拟像对公共信任侵蚀的认知研究】：在深度伪造技术普及的时代，个体如何重建对“真实”的感知？我们是否需要一种全新的、基于数字签名而非感官经验的“认知信任协议”？
3. 【关于地缘政治话语中的羞辱政治研究】：在国际外交中，如“投降白旗”等极具情感冲击力的词汇如何影响谈判的理性空间？这种“情感武器化”在何种程度上增加了冲突升级的风险？