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All articles

- New study finds increasingly positive link between money and happiness

- Manchester City complete £30m signing of winger Savinho from Girona

- ‘Make Trump Human Again’ seems to emerge as Republicans’ new theme

- The Guardian view on the Covid inquiry’s first report: poor preparation with tragic consequences | Editorial

- Ollie Pope century leads England’s 416-run feast against West Indies

- Nasdaq losses deepen amid market jitters over US policy on chipmakers

- Trump’s pick of JD Vance is a clear signal: this is a fight over America’s identity | Steve Phillips

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US news

New study finds increasingly positive link between money and happiness

Data showed happiness gap between wealthy and middle-income participants was wider than between middle- and low-income participants

Erum Salam

Thu 18 Jul 2024 14.54 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 15.14 EDT

Those who say money can’t buy happiness maybe didn’t have enough in the bank. Photograph: Aaron M Sprecher/Getty Images

This just in: money apparently does buy happiness.

A new study conducted by a senior fellow at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania found an increasingly positive association between money and happiness.

Matt Killingsworth, who tracks happiness for his large-scale research project, trackyourhappiness.org, sampled 33,269 employed US adults aged 18-65 with household incomes of at least $10,000 each year, who answered questions on a scale called “satisfaction with life”.

Killingsworth also used data from the ultra-wealthy (people with a median net worth between $3m and $7.9m), which is often lacking and difficult to obtain.

“Perhaps rich people are disinclined to spend their free time taking surveys,” said the study, Money and Happiness: Extended Evidence Against Satiation, which is self-published and not peer-reviewed.

The data showed the happiness gap between wealthy and middle-income participants was wider than between middle- and low-income participants.

In a 2024 Pew Research report titled The State of the American Middle Class, middle-income Americans are defined as those “living in households with an annual income that is two-thirds to double the national median household income”, which is around $74,580, according to the US census.

“The difference in life satisfaction between the wealthy and those with incomes of $70-80,000 [per year] was nearly three times as large as the difference between $70-80,000 [per year] and the average of the two lowest income groups,” Killingworth’s study said.

His study also found wealthy individuals were “substantially and statistically significantly happier than people earning over $500,000 each year”.

Killingsworth told the Guardian he was surprised by how big the overall difference in happiness is between people who are wealthy and those who are low income.

“Money is just one of many things that matters for happiness, and a small difference in income tends to be associated with pretty small differences in happiness,” Killingsworth said. “But if the differences in income/wealth are very large, the differences in happiness can be, too.”

These findings are counter to a widely covered 2010 study that found happiness rises with income, but plateaus at around $75,000.

So why might rich people be happier? The answer may seem obvious, but Killingsworth said it’s “more fundamental and psychologically deeper than simply buying more stuff”.

He said: “A greater feeling of control over life can explain about 75% of the association between money and happiness. So I think a big part of what’s happening is that, when people have more money, they have more control over their lives. More freedom to live the life they want to live.”

Killingsworth said his interest in studying happiness stems from wanting to understand how to make life better.

“Ironically, part of the reason I’m so interested in happiness is because money alone – which we’re already pretty motivated to pursue – is just one small part of the overall equation for happiness. So part of the reason I study happiness is to broaden our horizons beyond things like money.”

He added: “What would we do differently if we took happiness seriously? As individuals, families, organizations and societies? It’s a long-term question, and not one that we will instantly have perfect answers to.”

Transfer window

Manchester City complete £30m signing of winger Savinho from Girona

- Brazilian helped La Liga side reach Champions League

- Savinho joins English champions on five-year deal

PA Media

Thu 18 Jul 2024 14.16 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 14.46 EDT

The 20-year-old Savinho has earned seven caps for Brazil. Photograph: Frederic J Brown/AFP/Getty Images

Manchester City have completed the £30.8m signing of the Brazil winger Savinho on a five-year deal after his starring role in helping Girona qualify for the Champions League.

The 20-year-old, who has seven international caps, spent last season on loan at the Spanish side from Troyes – both clubs being part of the City Football Group stable controlled by City’s owners – and contributed 11 goals and 10 assists in all competitions for the Catalan club.

After helping the team to an unprecedented third-place finish, he was selected to be part of the Brazil squad that reached the quarter-finals of the Copa América in the United States earlier this month, scoring his first international goal during a group-stage win against Paraguay.

Savinho, who is also known as Savio, said in a City statement: “I’m so happy to be joining Manchester City, the Premier League champions and Club World Cup winners. Everyone knows they are the best team in the world right now, so to be here is very exciting for me.

“I’m excited about the chance to work under Pep Guardiola, one of the greatest coaches ever, and someone I know will help me improve even more.

“I had an amazing time in Spain and I’m looking forward to a new challenge of playing in the Premier League and alongside some of the best players in the world.”

Savinho first moved to Europe from Atlético Mineiro in 2022, signing for Troyes – for whom he did not make a first-team appearance – before being immediately loaned to PSV Eindhoven where he played eight times in his debut campaign.

Last season was his first as a regular starter in senior football and saw him feature in all but one of Girona’s league matches as they earned a first-ever place in Europe’s top competition.

City’s director of football, Txiki Begiristain, said of his club’s first summer signing: “Savinho is a very exciting player and I think the City fans are really going to enjoy watching him. What he achieved last season at Girona was remarkable and he is already a full Brazil international. He has a big role to play for Manchester City this season and beyond.”

Savinho, who made his professional debut for Atlético aged 17 in 2020, will wear the number 26 shirt for City.

Donald Trump

Analysis

‘Make Trump Human Again’ seems to emerge as Republicans’ new theme

Ed Pilkington

The seemingly overnight shift to a ‘caring and loving’, pro-unity nominee is reminiscent of Biden’s approach

Thu 18 Jul 2024 14.11 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 14.32 EDT

Donald Trump interacts with his grandchildren and his son Don Jr at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on 17 July 2024. Photograph: Marco Bello/Reuters

Even before Donald Trump takes the stage at the Republican national convention on Thursday night, promising a speech on national unity rather than the usual partisan rancour, his team has laboured hard in the wake of the rally shooting to give the impression that he is a changed man.

Gone was the Trump of “this American carnage”, the victim of witch-hunts who, if returned to the White House, would unleash a whirlwind of retribution on his enemies and be a dictator on day one. In its place was Trump the candy-peddling grandfather, the kiss-me-goodnight father, the comforting mentor and patriotic healer.

It was as if the official theme of the week, Make America Great Again, had been hurriedly replaced by a new slogan: Make Trump Human Again.

Kai Trump, the former US president’s 17-year-old granddaughter, helped set the tone. In a convention address on Wednesday she shared her big secret about the 78-year-old Republican nominee.

“To me, he’s just a normal grandpa. He gives us candy and soda when our parents are not looking.”

The theme of a “caring and loving” Trump – Kai’s words – was reminiscent of the narrative that has long been projected by Joe Biden, who presents his candidacy as a choice for dignity, respect and civility. It was as if the Trump team had adopted Biden’s playbook as empathiser-in-chief.

The approach was picked up by Trump’s newly-enshrined vice-presidential running mate, JD Vance. The Ohio senator and author of Hillbilly Elegy told the convention audience that he had recently witnessed Trump tell his elder sons Don Jr and Eric that he loved them, kissing them both on the cheek as he said goodnight.

His boys “squirmed the same way my four-year-old does when his daddy tries to give him a kiss on the cheek”, Vance said.

Outside the immediate family, Trump’s political family passed the baton around in earlier speeches at the convention. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the Republican governor of Arkansas, not only portrayed Trump’s close shave in Pennsylvania on Saturday as an intervention from “God Almighty”, she also portrayed him as a champion of women’s rights as though E Jean Carroll and Stormy Daniels had never existed.

Sanders went on to laud Trump as an avuncular mentor, comforting her when she was his much-maligned White House press secretary. She recalled harsh criticism she had endured from members of the public and from journalists, especially at MSNBC.

The then sitting president pulled her aside, she said, “looked me in the eye, and said: ‘Sarah, you’re smart, you’re beautiful, you’re tough, and they attack you because you’re good at your job’”.

“That’s the Donald Trump I know,” Sanders added.

Whether Trump can sustain the new soft-soap image presented of him in Milwaukee this week remains to be seen. He is certainly trying to cement the Maga makeover.

According to Axios, he specifically instructed aides to direct prime-time convention speakers to avoid expressions of outrage in their response to Saturday’s shooting. Instead, national unity has been the name of the game.

Numerous speakers linked Trump’s fist-raised pose having survived the gunman’s bullet to his newly cast image as a unifier. “He can stand defiant against an assassin one moment and call for national healing the next,” the vice-presidential nominee said glowingly.

In the past eight years, America has become accustomed to various adjectives attached to Trump. They include “strong”, “patriotic” and “great”; and “incompetent”, “racist” and “narcissistic” – take your pick.

What neither supporters nor detractors have tended up until now to connect to him is the word “moral”.

And yet Elise Stefanik, the fourth-ranking Republican in the US House, chose just that word on the convention stage to describe a convicted felon. “President Trump will bring back moral leadership to the White House,” she said.

The new look Trump, and the political strategy that appears to undergird it, has required considerable sacrifice on the part of some of his peers. We will probably have to await Ron DeSantis’s memoir to know the emotional price paid by the Florida governor when he praised the man who had derided him as “Ron DeSanctimonious” and a “disloyal dog”.

We can similarly only conjecture what paroxysms Nikki Haley went through to give her “strong endorsement” to the man who mocked her husband for being absent while deployed to Africa with the national guard, and who butchered her birth name Nimarata, scathingly calling her “Nimbra”.

Opinion  Covid inquiry

The Guardian view on the Covid inquiry’s first report: poor preparation with tragic consequences

Editorial

Citizens were failed by a lack of planning, and Lady Hallett wants a better system to be built fast

Thu 18 Jul 2024 13.59 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 15.02 EDT

Heather Hallett, who chairs the inquiry, calls for an end to ‘the culture of consensus in which orthodoxy becomes entrenched’. Photograph: Reuters

Citizens of all four nations of the UK were failed by politicians and officials who neglected to prepare properly for a pandemic or other civil emergency. Former UK health secretaries Jeremy Hunt and Matt Hancock did not update or improve an inadequate pandemic strategy from 2011, that was geared towards flu rather than a novel virus. Resources that did exist were “constrained” by funding and, after 2018, redirected towards Brexit planning. Ministers were guilty of groupthink and did not make effective use of external experts or challenge scientific advice. The possibility of a lockdown was never seriously considered. Nor was enough attention paid to the likely impact of a pandemic on vulnerable groups.

These highly critical conclusions from the first module of the Covid inquiry are a landmark moment in the process of national reckoning being overseen by Heather Hallett. This is the first time that relatives of the 230,000 people who died of Covid have seen their anger about official failures, both before and during the pandemic, endorsed in such an authoritative way.

Lady Hallett’s six-month deadline for responses to her 10 recommendations creates a tight timeline for the new government and the devolved administrations. A decision by Sir Keir Starmer about whether to adopt her central proposal, for a new, independent statutory body, should be expected soon. The expectation is that he will follow this and other recommendations, including the creation of a UK-wide civil emergency strategy, to be reviewed every three years.

This report, focused on resilience and preparedness, is the clearest indicator to date of Lady Hallett’s approach to her mammoth task. With eight modules remaining, and more to be announced, these findings and recommendations are the first of many. Past mistakes are acknowledged, along with those responsible. Particularly concerning is the inability of politicians to respond effectively to unfolding events, to alter course and challenge advice. Lady Hallett calls for an end to “the culture of consensus in which orthodoxy becomes entrenched”. But there is more emphasis on systems than individuals. The focus is on what needs to change and how.

The inquiry process is labour-intensive; the government department tasked with responding to it has 265 staff. But Lady Hallett is clear that the response from the UK government and devolved administrations must be swift. Another pandemic is likely in the near to medium future, and another virus could be more transmissible and lethal than Covid‑19. Unless an understanding of what went wrong is absorbed quickly, the opportunity to prevent similar mistakes from being repeated could be lost.

The report recognises that the health and care systems were working “close to, if not beyond, capacity” when the pandemic hit. But while a finding that both were underfunded is arguably implicit in such findings, Lady Hallett steers clear of direct criticism of political decisions about public spending. This has understandably disappointed some members of the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK group, and other critics of previous governments. But the report is not, and should not be mistaken for, an exoneration. The scope of the issues under consideration is vast, and Lady Hallett is determined that her inquiry’s recommendations should be acted upon. At a time when a new government is faced with multiple public policy challenges including a prisons crisis, this pragmatic and purposeful document is a solid building block.

England v West Indies 2024

Ollie Pope century leads England’s 416-run feast against West Indies

- Second Test, day one: England 416 v West Indies

- Pope excels but tourists’ spinners make late inroads

Ali Martin at Trent Bridge

Thu 18 Jul 2024 13.55 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 13.57 EDT

Ollie Pope celebrates reaching his sixth Test century. Photograph: Andrew Boyers/Action Images/Reuters

It was a day of queues at Trent Bridge. There were queues for Brian Lara’s autograph during a book signing session by the great man at lunch, queues for the ice-cream vans at tea, queues for the bars throughout – pretty standard at an English Test match, admittedly – and batters positively queueing up to have a go out in the middle.

Although not every batter fancied it. There was sunshine over Nottingham, a pitch that looked well rolled, and an outfield as green as Robin Hood’s tights that had been mown to ensure an almost frictionless path for the ball. But Kraigg Brathwaite, West Indies’ captain and the sole Test centurion in his top five, won the toss and elected to bowl first.

Bazball was born on this ground two years ago, when Ben Stokes did the same against New Zealand and Jonny Bairstow utterly vaporised a fourth innings target of 299. But even factoring that remarkable last Test here, it felt like a negative move and one that had not aged massively well by stumps. Powered by Ollie Pope’s 121 and later burnished by 69 from Stokes, England raced to 416 all out in 88.3 overs.

Ben Duckett had very much signposted this possibility first thing. After the loss of Zak Crawley third ball the left-hander responded with a flurry of boundaries – including four in four off Jayden Seales’s first over – and talk of Gilbert Jessop’s cobwebbed record for the fastest Test century by an Englishman (76 balls) even began to percolate. That was until Duckett drove Shamar Joseph to slip and mooched off with 71 from 59 balls.

Ben Duckett pulls during a tone-setting innings of 71 off 59 balls. Photograph: Nigel French/PA

Instead, it was Pope who made the three-figure score that the conditions were practically begging for. The England vice-captain was not always at his fluent best and was dropped either side of his half-century and lunch. But given some nagging, admittedly external doubts about his suitability for No 3, the right-hander’s sixth Test century and first since that highwire 196 in Hyderabad in January was a welcome return to the runs column.

The same went for Stokes, who after his first half-century in 11 Test innings holed out off the part-time spin of Kavem Hodge trying to cash in before the second new ball. Stokes was not alone in this regard, Joe Root (14), Harry Brook (36) and Jamie Smith (36) all architects of their respective demises. Less culpable was Chris Woakes, whose useful 37 in his 50th Test match was ended by Seales, the second new ball, and an edge to slip.

It was tough going for West Indies who, despite bowling well in patches and throwing some late punches, did not exactly support Brathwaite’s call at the toss along the way. The first of those lives granted to Pope, on 46, was a tough one, the ball scorching off the middle to Alick Athanaze at backward point. But the second, shelled by Jason Holder at slip after going fingers-up to a chance at chest height, was a dolly.

Both were costly, while some of the ground fielding was a bit shoddy at times. The pressure felt from England’s aggressive intent only went so far by way of mitigation here.

Kevin Sinclair celebrates with a somersault after dismissing Harry Brook. Photograph: David Rogers/Getty Images

Perhaps the greatest frustration beyond the drops – four in total by the end – was Shamar Joseph who, despite halting Duckett’s early onslaught, walked off the field clutching his left hamstring for the second successive Test match. The biggest plus for the tourists was probably Kevin Sinclair stepping off the bench after Gudakesh Motie fell ill overnight. On a day when Brathwaite’s opening bowlers shipped a run a ball, the off-spinner offered control and threat for his captain with figures of two for 73 from 22 overs.

Sinclair is a bit of a showman, too, with the latest sold-out crowd treated to a wonderful somersault celebration when Brook tamely top-edged a paddle sweep after lunch. Sinclair told the BBC earlier this year that perfecting the leap was a way of staying out of trouble growing up in Berbice and Brook, whose earlier back-foot six might be the viral clip of the day, probably wished he flipping well had not.

Stock markets

Nasdaq losses deepen amid market jitters over US policy on chipmakers

Analysts play down concerns and maintain confidence in AI boom after index’s worst day since December 2022

Dan Milmo and Jack Simpson

Thu 18 Jul 2024 13.25 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 14.17 EDT

US market concerns fed into Asian stocks, with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing falling by 2.4% on Thursday. Photograph: Ann Wang/Reuters

The tech-heavy Nasdaq stock index has deepened its losses after this week’s interventions by US presidential candidates, but analysts played down market jitters over chipmakers, saying the artificial intelligence boom would continue to support demand.

New York’s Nasdaq composite index staged a brief recovery on opening on Thursday but was down more than 1% at midday eastern time, after posting its worst day since December 2022 on Wednesday.

The index and chip-related stocks were rattled on Wednesday – with the Nasdaq falling 2.8% – after Bloomberg said the Biden administration was considering limiting Chinese access to semiconductor technology.

Donald Trump compounded concerns over political risk by telling the same news organisation that Taiwan, a hub for the global chipmaking industry, should pay for its own defence – at a time when fears of a Chinese invasion or blockade are rising.

The US market concerns fed into Asian stocks, with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, falling by 2.4% on Thursday. Tokyo Electron shares fell by 8.8% on Thursday, while the Japanese precision tools maker Disco Corp sank by 8.8% and Lasertec, which makes equipment for inspecting for defects in computer chips, shed 6.3%.

ASML, the Dutch maker of chip manufacturing equipment and a key player in the industry, fell a further 3.9% on Thursday.

However, TSMC beat second quarter revenue and profit expectations in results issued after markets closed on Thursday as it said AI-related demand was boosting growth. Shares in Nvidia, a key TSMC customer, were up slightly, by 0.6%, on Thursday, while fellow chipmaker Qualcomm was down 1.9% and Intel was up 3.7%.

Dan Coatsworth, an analyst at the London stockbroker AJ Bell, said: “TSMC joins ASML this week in delivering robust figures, yet both companies are seen as vulnerable to a clampdown by the US on the semiconductor industry.

“Joe Biden seems intent on making it harder for China to access foreign chip technology, while Donald Trump has upset US relations with global semiconductor hub Taiwan. Geopolitical tensions have acted as a stark reminder to investors that even the hottest of all investment trends can meet bumps in the road.”

Analysts said chipmaker stocks should be able to shrug off geopolitical concerns.

David Harold, an analyst at Jon Peddie Research, said the market had been a “bit overheated” on chip stocks but he was not expecting Wednesday’s “massive dip”. The US is investing heavily in chip manufacturing infrastructure but Harold said there will be “no major geographical shift in chip making any time soon”, as geopolitical fears over China alarm investors.

However, AI-related demand – semiconductors are a key technology in training and operating AI models – will continue, he said, regardless of recent jitters.

“This market response is temporary as the underlying factors influencing these markets remain unchanged and AI will continue to push chip demand,” he said.

Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, said Trump’s “bark will be way worse than the bite if he wins the White House” and investors had overreacted.

Alvin Nguyen, a senior analyst at the tech research firm Forrester, said Nvidia – which last month became the world’s most valuable company – could cope with any hit to Chinese demand related to a Biden clampdown.

“There is enough demand for their products for others to buy what is left over in the short term,” he said.

Opinion  JD Vance

Trump’s pick of JD Vance is a clear signal: this is a fight over America’s identity

Steve Phillips

Vance, a Trump cheerleader, is a mouthpiece for white people unhappy with the country’s changing racial composition

Thu 18 Jul 2024 13.24 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 13.49 EDT

‘Rather than even pretend to reach out to the less rabid Republicans who backed Nikki Haley in the primaries or attempt to win greater support among Latinos by choosing Marco Rubio, the Florida senator, Trump has simply doubled down on his crusade to make America white again.’ Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/AP

Donald Trump’s selection of JD Vance as his running mate is a clear and unmistakable message that Republicans are waging a holy war over the very identity of this nation. In choosing the Ohio senator, the former US president has selected and elevated a person who is one of Trump’s biggest cheerleaders and whose primary qualification for national leadership is articulating the grievances of white people unhappy with the country’s changing racial composition.

Rather than even pretend to reach out to the less rabid Republicans who backed Nikki Haley in the primaries or attempt to win greater support among Latinos by choosing Marco Rubio, the Florida senator, Trump has simply doubled down on his crusade to make America white again.

Traditionally, vice-presidential selections aim to broaden the party’s appeal by signaling a commitment to a specific constituency or sector of the electorate. Barack Obama selected Joe Biden in 2008 to racially balance the ticket and reassure white voters that he’d have a veteran, moderate, white male political leader at his side. Biden, in turn, chose a younger woman of color to run with him to inspire and acknowledge the critical importance of women and people of color to the Democratic coalition.

Trump had the opportunity to make a similar, more traditional, move. In many ways, Rubio would have been the smart pick; he’d have been the first person of color on a Republican ticket, and could plausibly have tried to appeal to Latinos and peel off some support from that cornerstone of the Democratic coalition. Others in the Republican party wanted Trump to calm the fears of the more moderate voters who had backed Haley over Trump’s bombast and division.

But, true to form, Trump rejected all that counsel and went with the cultural warrior, Trump critic turned sycophant Vance.

By any measure, Vance – who has no prior political experience and has only been a senator for 17 months – is grossly unqualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency, but that is not surprising given that Trump himself is arguably the least qualified person to ever occupy the Oval Office. Vance’s primary qualification is his ability to articulate the anguish of white working-class Americans. Through his bestselling book Hillbilly Elegy and his rhetoric as a candidate and now senator, Vance has done little else of note in his life than complain about how America is no longer a white-dominated country, a fact that has been painful and disorienting and hard to accept for a considerable number of white people.

By picking Vance, the Republicans show they are not going to try to broaden their coalition: they’re just going to go harder with their shrinking coalition

What perhaps poses one of the greatest dangers to this country is that Vance, like Trump, has already proven that he is committed to aggressively hacking away at the fraying social fabric that binds this nation together. Most alarmingly, Vance has said that if he had been vice-president on 6 January 2021, he would have done what Trump wanted and blocked electors from states that voted for Biden. Vance has raised money for insurrectionists who tried to overthrow the elected government of the United States and who sought to block the certification of an election in which all 50 governors – Republican and Democratic alike – certified results that showed Biden won the presidency.

Vance’s contempt for democracy and democratic institutions was on full display as well in the immediate hours after the Trump rally shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, last Saturday. Before anyone even knew who the shooter was, Vance was tweeting that Biden was to blame.

Electorally, the implication of Vance’s selection is that it locks into place the contours, dynamics and stakes of the election.

The journalist and analyst Ron Brownstein presaged this reality 12 years ago when he described modern American politics as a battle between two constellations of people, which he called the Coalition of Restoration and the Coalition of Transformation.

Democrats, he observed, “are now operating with a largely coherent Coalition of Transformation that will allow (and even pressure) them to align more unreservedly with the big cultural and demographic forces remaking America”. Conversely, Obama’s 2012 re-election “clearly stamped the Republicans as a Coalition of Restoration, overwhelmingly dependent on the votes of whites unsettled by those changes”.

In my books, I describe these groupings as the New American Majority and the Modern-Day Confederates, but the concepts are the same, and the implications for contemporary elections are far-reaching and under-appreciated.

In each successive presidential election since Obama was elected, all that has really mattered is which coalition of voters the nominee is championing, AKA What Side Are You On?

That dynamic will play out again this fall, as Trump has simply doubled down on trying to rally his Coalition of Restoration to turn out in large numbers. The good news for Democrats is that the Coalition of Transformation is larger than the Coalition of Restoration. Republicans know this in their bones and in their spreadsheets, and that is why they are relentlessly focused on voter suppression, introducing nearly 800 different pieces of legislation designed to make it harder to vote, according to Ari Berman’s book Give Us the Ballot and the Brennan Center’s 2021 analysis.

Census data and election results over the past 40 years further affirm the fact that the Coalition of Transformation is larger. With the sole exception of 2004, the Democratic nominee for president has won the popular vote in every single presidential election since 1992. The logical result of one party rooting its politics in appeals to white racial fears and resentment is that the other party gets the majority of support from people of color.

In a country where nearly half of the residents are people of color (41%) the Republican party remains overwhelmingly monochromatic; according to a Pew Research analysis, 83% of Republican voters are white. Conversely, 72% of people of color supported Biden in 2020, and no Democratic nominee has ever received less than 83% of the African American vote since the advent of exit polling in 1976.

By picking Vance, the Republicans show they are not going to try to broaden their coalition: they’re just going to go harder with their shrinking coalition and focus on getting their supporters to the polls. Democrats need to have similar clarity and focus, and devote their resources and energy to maximizing voter turnout from now until election day. If they can do that, they will win – and JD Vance’s voice, and Trump’s, will remain far from the White House.

- Steve Phillips is the founder of Democracy in Color, and author of Brown Is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority and How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good

Israel

Extremist Israeli minister makes provocative visit to al-Aqsa mosque

Itamar Ben-Gvir, who seeks to disrupt ceasefire talks, makes video at al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem

Ruth Michaelson in Jerusalem and Andrew Roth in Washington

Thu 18 Jul 2024 13.11 EDT

First published on Thu 18 Jul 2024 12.25 EDT

Israeli minister Itamar Ben-Gvir makes provocative visit to al-Aqsa compound – video

Israel’s extremist national security minister has visited the holiest Muslim site in Jerusalem, recording a video saying he went to pray, in a provocative move as he seeks to disrupt ceasefire talks.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, an ultranationalist and champion of the settler movement, recorded footage at al-Aqsa mosque compound, also known as the Temple Mount, a site holy to Muslims and Jews.

In the shadow of the Dome of the Rock, Ben-Gvir spoke with his personal security visible behind him and an armed member of the Israeli border police patrolling nearby. He said he had come to the compound to pray for the return of Israeli hostages held by Palestinian militants in Gaza “but without a reckless deal, without surrendering”.

He added that he was “praying and working hard” for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to resist international pressure to sign a ceasefire deal and instead continue a military campaign in Gaza. Israeli attacks have killed more that 38,000 people in the strip since the attack by Hamas militants on 7 October last year.

His visit immediately drew condemnation from the Jordanian foreign ministry, a powerful force within the body administering the holy Islamic compound, which called it “a provocative step” and a violation undertaken by “the extremist Israeli government”.

The Israeli interior minister, Moshe Arbel, of the Jewish religious party Shas, chastised Ben-Gvir for entering the area. “One day, the era of provocations by Ben-Gvir will pass,” Arbel said.

John Kirby, a spokesperson for the US National Security Council, said without naming Ben-Gvir that the White House was “concerned about rhetoric and actions that are counterproductive to peace and security in the West Bank”.

He said: “The president has been pretty strident about his concerns over, for instance, the settler violence and we have also expressed our concerns about activities and rhetoric by certain Israeli leaders. And those concerns remain valid, and what we would continue to urge our Israeli counterparts to do is nothing that inflames passions or could lead to or encourage violent activity one way or the other.”

Biden is expected to speak with Netanyahu next week despite his recent Covid diagnosis, as part of a controversial visit by the Israeli leader to the US, where Netanyahu is expected to also address a joint session of Congress, Kirby said. He said the vice-president, Kamala Harris, who has been suggested as a potential replacement for Biden if he drops out of the election race, was also expected to meet Netanyahu.

Ben-Gvir last visited the site in May in order to state his objection to countries including Spain, Norway and Ireland recognising a Palestinian state. His latest visit is seen as additionally provoking, ahead of Netanyahu’s forthcoming visit to Washington and in the midst of negotiations for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Al-Aqsa mosque compound is a highly sensitive site, where efforts by a faction of extremist Jewish settlers to pray there are seen as a violation by Muslim worshippers and observers, symbolising efforts to bring the mosque compound and the divided holy city of Jerusalem under total Israeli control.

Visits by Israeli ministers to the site or incursions by Israeli security forces have proved to be a trigger for protests and violence in the past, notably a visit in 2000 by Ariel Sharon that fuelled an uprising known as the second intifada.

Netanyahu summed up the status quo at al-Aqsa in 2015, saying: “Muslims pray on the Temple Mount, non-Muslims visit.”

Daniel Seidemann, an Israeli lawyer and expert on the politics of Jerusalem, said the rise of a movement of extremist Israeli settlers had changed the fragile balance at the holy site.

“It’s clear in recent years that the status quo has been eroded significantly. First there were daily Jewish prayers that began with people whispering and mumbling,” he said. “Today there are groups escorted by the police, which is a major source of tension although these parties have kept a low profile.

“Over the last 20 years, the events and discourse in Jerusalem have been run by religious pyromaniacs. This conflict did not become a religious war, but the people driving events are fighting one.”

He said Ben-Gvir’s visit was intended as a symbol of “nationalistic triumphalism”, to flex his muscle and gesture at an Israeli victory in Gaza as well as control of key sites long claimed by Palestinians.

Several hardline ministers in Netanyahu’s government, including Ben-Gvir, have attempted to dissuade the prime minister from agreeing to a ceasefire deal, warning they would leave the ruling coalition.

Volcanoes

Earthquake at same time as eruption could have caused Pompeii deaths – study

Research argues tremors occurred as Vesuvius erupted in AD79, causing buildings to collapse on to people

Agence France-Presse in Rome

Thu 18 Jul 2024 13.10 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 13.31 EDT

Skeletons uncovered at the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, probably of middle-aged males who possibly died in an earthquake during the volcanic eruption that buried the Italian city. Photograph: Parco Archeologico di Pompei pre/AFP/Getty Images

Victims who perished in Pompeii after the devastating AD79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius may have been killed by a simultaneous earthquake, research has suggested.

Scholars have debated for decades whether seismic activity occurred during the eruption of Vesuvius in southern Italy nearly 2,000 years ago, and not just before it, as reported by Pliny the Younger in his letters.

The article published on Thursday in the academic journal Frontiers in Earth Science took a new look at the now world-famous archaeological site, arguing that one or more concurrent earthquakes were “a contributing cause of building collapse and death of the inhabitants”.

“Our conclusions suggest that the effects of the collapse of buildings triggered by syn-eruptive seismicity (seismic activity at the time of an eruption) should be regarded as an additional cause of death in the ancient Pompeii,” it said.

Archaeologists estimate that 15 to 20% of Pompeii’s population died in the eruption, mostly from thermal shock as a giant cloud of gases and ash covered the city.

Volcanic ash then buried the Roman city, perfectly preserving the homes, public buildings, objects and even the people until its discovery in the late 16th century.

In May 2023, archaeologists uncovered the skeletons of two men who appeared to have been killed not by heat and clouds of fiery gas and ash but from trauma due to collapsed walls – providing precious new data.

One of the victims was discovered with his left hand raised, as if to protect his head.

“It is worth noting that such traumas are analogous to those of individuals involved in modern earthquakes,” wrote the authors, who determined that the collapsed walls were not due to falling stones and debris but to seismic activity.

“In a broader view that takes into account the whole city, we consider, as a working hypothesis, that the casualties caused by seismically triggered building failures may not be limited to the two individuals,” the authors wrote.

The intersection of phenomena from both volcanic and seismic activity requires a multidisciplinary approach, the study argued, with the collaboration of archaeologists and earth scientists.

Lewis Hamilton

Lewis Hamilton hails Ralf Schumacher but insists F1 has work to do on diversity

- Schumacher ‘wasn’t comfortable coming out in past’

- Hamilton believes his on-grid protests forced change

Giles Richards

Thu 18 Jul 2024 13.08 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 14.17 EDT

Ralf Schumacher came out in a post on social media this week, one of only four former Formula One drivers to have done so in 74 years. Photograph: NurPhoto/Getty Images

Lewis Hamilton has praised Ralf Schumacher’s decision to announce he was in a same-sex relationship but insisted Formula One still has a long way to go in encouraging further diversity and inclusion.

Earlier this week former F1 driver Schumacher, the brother of seven-time champion Michael, came out on social media but he is one of only four drivers to have done so since the championship began in 1950, highlighting the paucity of LGBTQ+ representation in the sport.

Rumours around Ralf Schumacher’s sexuality existed during his time in the sport between 1997 and 2007 and speaking before this weekend’s Hungarian GP, Hamilton appeared to intimate that Schumacher had not felt able to come out until long after he left the sport.

“Clearly he has not felt comfortable to say it in the past and it’s definitely not a new thing,” he said. “It just shows we are in a time that finally you can take that step and don’t have to fear. So far he has had only positive feedback from people and that’s because of the time we are living in.”

Hamilton has been outspoken in support of LGBTQ+ issues and rights in the past, specifically alongside Sebastian Vettel in Hungary in 2021, with both drivers protesting against the government’s repressive LGBTQ+ laws. His determination to speak out on issues that concern him was criticised in the past by Schumacher, who called it polarising and dangerous, but the British driver still hopes the German’s actions would have a positive effect.

“The change all started from Seb and I standing on the grid, fighting against what the government was doing here,” he said. “Even though Ralf said it wasn’t a good idea to do these things, perhaps today he may have changed his mind. Him taking that step makes such a positive message, it liberates others to be able to do the same, we need more and more people to be able to do that.”

F1 is committed to improving inclusivity and diversity but Hamilton noted there was still much to be done.

“It still has a long way to go,” he said. “There is one thing saying it is inclusive, another thing actually making sure people feel comfortable in the environment. This is a male-dominated space and as far as I know he is one of the first to be publicly speaking in that respect. We are very inclusive in our team but the sport needs to continue to do more to make people feel more comfortable.”

On Thursday the Haas team also confirmed it would drop Kevin Magnussen for next season. The team has yet to announce who will replace him to partner the British driver Oliver Bearman, who will make his F1 full season debut in 2025.

It is believed the French driver Esteban Ocon is lined up to take the seat, with his contract at current team Alpine having not been extended for next season. The other Haas driver, the German Nico Hülkenberg, is to join Sauber in 2025, before it becomes the Audi works team in 2026.

Caribbean

Caribbean leaders call for ‘Marshall plan’ to help rebuild after Hurricane Beryl

Three prime ministers write to UK government saying islands cannot sustain debt from repeated rebuilding

Natricia Duncan Caribbean correspondent

Thu 18 Jul 2024 13.05 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 13.46 EDT

Hurricane Beryl demolished more than 90% of buildings in parts of Grenada and St Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG). Photograph: Lucanus Ollivierre/AP

Caribbean leaders struggling to raise hundreds of millions after Hurricane Beryl wiped out entire islands have asked the UK government to back a “Marshall plan” to rebuild their devastated countries.

The hurricane, which made landfall in the Caribbean on 1 July, killed at least 11 people, demolished more than 90% of buildings in parts of Grenada and St Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG) and left thousands homeless and without running water, electricity and food.

The letter, addressed to the foreign secretary, David Lammy, and the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, points to the continuous pattern of destructive hurricanes in the Caribbean, with Dominica losing more than 200% of its GDP after damage from Hurricane Maria in 2017.

The letter, signed by the prime ministers of Antigua and Barbuda, SVG and Grenada, warns that Caribbean countries cannot sustain the rising debt from rebuilding again and again.

The letter calls for “immediate debt cancellation provided through a pre-arranged mechanism that triggers automatically in the event of a qualifying disaster such as the current one”.

Likening the impact of hurricanes on Caribbean nations to a nuclear Armageddon, the letter proposes an initiative similar to the US’s $13bn Marshall plan to rebuild Europe after the second world war. That $13bn is equivalent to $227bn (£175bn) today.

The Caribbean version would include cheaper loans, debt restructuring options, improved access to grants for climate-related damage and a large-scale programme to build green and resilient infrastructure and stronger economies.

On 5 July Lammy announced a £500,000 package for Caribbean countries affected by Beryl and promised to prioritise the climate emergency. But the SVG prime minister, Ralph Gonsalves, and his Grenadian counterpart, Dickon Mitchell, have described the money raised so far from insurance policies and contributions as a “drop in the bucket”.

In a joint appeal on 11 July they implored “major emitters” that “engineered the climate crisis” for the sake of prosperity to do the morally responsible thing and offer meaningful support for their relief and recovery.

“How is a country with very little fiscal space going to rebuild 2,500 houses, as in the case of SVG? Even a larger country, [with a] larger economy will find that very problematic, much less to a country as small and fragile as ours … we really need your help. It’s as simple as that. If you have a sense of responsibility and humanity, and I believe you do have, I think you will assist,” Gonsalves said at the press conference.

Coordinated by the ODI thinktank and signed by climate experts, the letter to the UK government supports the argument that Caribbean islands should not be left to bear the financial burden of a crisis they did not cause.

Emily Wilkinson, ODI’s principal research fellow and director of its Resilient and Sustainable Islands Initiative, said the UK’s support for the Marshall plan could help small islands “avert a debt crisis”.

Bangladesh

Protesters attack Bangladeshi state broadcaster after PM’s call for calm

Incensed crowd facing riot police set BTV building on fire as students demand end to discriminatory job quotas

Agence France-Presse in Dhaka

Thu 18 Jul 2024 12.05 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 12.19 EDT

Anti-quota protesters clash with police and Awami League supporters in the Rampura area of Dhaka. Photograph: Mohammad Ponir Hossain/Reuters

Bangladeshi students have set fire to the state broadcaster’s building a day after the prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, appeared on the network seeking to calm escalating clashes that had killed at least 32 people.

Hundreds of protesters demanding reform of civil service hiring rules clashed with riot police who had shot at them with rubber bullets on Thursday, chasing the retreating officers to BTV’s headquarters in the capital, Dhaka.

The incensed crowd then set ablaze the network’s reception building and dozens of vehicles parked outside, a BTV official told AFP.

The broadcaster said “many people” were trapped inside as the fire spread. Another official from the station later told AFP they had safely evacuated the building.

The government of Hasina, 76, has ordered schools and universities to close indefinitely as police step up efforts to bring a deteriorating law and order situation under control.

The premier appeared on the broadcaster’s station on Wednesday night to condemn the “murder” of protesters and vow that those found responsible would be punished regardless of their political affiliation. But violence worsened on the streets despite her appeal for calm as police again attempted to break up demonstrations with rubber bullets and teargas volleys.

At least 25 people were killed on Thursday in addition to seven killed earlier in the week, according to a tally of casualty figures from hospitals compiled by AFP. Hundreds more people were wounded. Police weaponry was the cause of at least two-thirds of those deaths, based on descriptions given to AFP.

“We’ve got seven dead here,” said an official at Uttara Crescent hospital in Dhaka, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal. “The first two were students with rubber bullet injuries. The other five had gunshot injuries.”

Nearly 1,000 others had been treated at the hospital for injuries sustained during clashes with police, the official said, adding that many of those people had rubber bullet wounds.

Didar Malekin, of the online news outlet Dhaka Times, said one of his reporters, Mehedi Hasan, had been killed while covering clashes in Dhaka.

There was violence in several cities across Bangladesh throughout the day as riot police marched on protesters, who had begun another round of human blockades on roads and highways.

Helicopters rescued 60 police officers trapped on the roof of a campus building at Canadian University, the scene of some of Dhaka’s fiercest clashes on Thursday, the elite Rapid Action Battalion police force said.

Almost every day this month, people on marches have demanded an end to the quota system that reserves more than half of civil service posts for specific groups, including children of veterans from the 1971 liberation war against Pakistan.

Critics say the scheme benefits children of pro-government groups that back Hasina, who has ruled the country since 2009. She won her fourth consecutive election in January after a vote without genuine opposition. Her administration is accused by rights groups of capturing state institutions and stamping out dissent, including by the extrajudicial killing of opposition activists.

Mubashar Hasan, a Bangladesh expert at the University of Oslo, said the protests had grown into a wider expression of discontent with Hasina’s autocratic rule. “They are protesting against the repressive nature of the state. Protesters are questioning Hasina’s leadership, accusing her of clinging on to power by force. The students are in fact calling her a dictator,” Hasan said.

Bangladeshis reported widespread mobile internet outages around the country on Thursday, two days after internet providers cut off access to Facebook, the protest campaign’s key organising platform.

The telecommunications minister, Zunaid Ahmed Palak, said the government had ordered the network to be cut off. He earlier said social media had been “weaponised as a tool to spread rumours, lies and disinformation”, forcing the government to restrict access.

Along with police crackdowns, demonstrators and students allied to the premier’s ruling Awami League party have also battled each other on the streets with bricks and bamboo rods.

Artificial intelligence (AI)

AI is overpowering efforts to catch child predators, experts warn

Safety groups say images are so lifelike that it can be hard to see if real children were subject to harms in production

Katie McQue

Thu 18 Jul 2024 12.00 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 14.21 EDT

A single AI model can generate tens of thousands of new images in a short amount of time, flooding the internet. Composite: The Guardian/Getty Images

The volume of sexually explicit images of children being generated by predators using artificial intelligence is overwhelming law enforcement’s capabilities to identify and rescue real-life victims, child safety experts warn.

Prosecutors and child safety groups working to combat crimes against children say AI-generated images have become so lifelike that in some cases it is difficult to determine whether real children have been subjected to real harms for their production. A single AI model can generate tens of thousands of new images in a short amount of time, and this content has begun to flood both the dark web and seep into the mainstream internet.

“We are starting to see reports of images that are of a real child but have been AI-generated, but that child was not sexually abused. But now their face is on a child that was abused,” said Kristina Korobov, senior attorney at the Zero Abuse Project, a Minnesota-based child safety non-profit. “Sometimes, we recognize the bedding or background in a video or image, the perpetrator, or the series it comes from, but now there is another child’s face put on to it.”

There are already tens of millions of reports made each year of real-life child sexual abuse material (CSAM) created and shared online each year, which safety groups and law enforcement struggle to investigate.

“We’re just drowning in this stuff already,” said a Department of Justice prosecutor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. “From a law enforcement perspective, crimes against children are one of the more resource-strapped areas, and there is going to be an explosion of content from AI.”

Last year, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) received reports of predators using AI in several different ways, such as entering text prompts to generate child abuse imagery, altering previously uploaded files to make them sexually explicit and abusive, and uploading known CSAM and generating new images based on those images. In some reports, offenders referred to chatbots to instruct them on how to find children for sex or harm them.

Experts and prosecutors are concerned about offenders trying to evade detection by using generative AI to alter images of a child victim of sexual abuse.

“When charging cases in the federal system, AI doesn’t change what we can prosecute, but there are many states where you have to be able to prove it’s a real child. Quibbling over the legitimacy of images will cause problems at trials. If I was a defense attorney, that’s exactly what I’d argue,” said the DoJ prosecutor.

Possessing depictions of child sexual abuse is criminalized under US federal law, and several arrests have been made in the US this year of alleged perpetrators possessing CSAM that has been identified as AI-generated. In most states, however, there aren’t laws that prohibit the possession of AI-generated sexually explicit material depicting minors. The act of creating the images in the first place is not covered by existing laws.

In March, though, Washington state’s legislature passed a bill banning the possession of AI-generated CSAM and knowingly disclosing AI-generated intimate imagery of other people. In April, a bipartisan bill aimed at criminalizing the production of AI-generated CSAM was introduced in Congress, which has been endorsed by the National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG).

Child safety experts warn the influx of AI content will drain the resources of the NCMEC CyberTipline, which acts as a clearinghouse for reports of child abuse from around the world. The organization forwards these reports on to law enforcement agencies for investigation, after determining their geographical location, priority status and whether the victims are already known.

“Police now have a larger volume of content to deal with. And how do they know if this is a real child in need of rescuing? You don’t know. It’s a huge problem,” said Jacques Marcoux, director of research and analytics at the Canadian Centre for Child Protection.

Known images of child sexual abuse can be identified by the digital fingerprints of the images, known as hash values. The NCMEC maintains a database of more than 5m hash values that images can be matched against, a crucial tool for law enforcement.

When a known image of child sexual abuse is uploaded, tech companies that are running software to monitor this activity have the capabilities to intercept and block them based on their hash value and report the user to law enforcement.

Material that doesn’t have a known hash value, such as freshly created content, is unrecognizable to this type of scanning software. Any edit or alteration to an image using AI also changes its hash value.

“Hash matching is the front line of defense,” said Marcoux. “With AI, every image that’s been generated is regarded as a brand-new image and has a different hash value. It erodes the efficiency of the existing front line of defense. It could collapse the system of hash matching.”

Child safety experts trace the escalation in AI-generated CSAM back to late 2022, coinciding with OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT and the introduction of generative AI to the public. Earlier that year, the LAION-5B database was launched, an open-source catalog of more than 5bn images that anyone can use to train AI models.

Images of child sexual abuse that had been detected previously are included in the database, which meant that AI models trained on that database could produce CSAM, Stanford researchers discovered in late 2023. Child safety experts have highlighted that children have been harmed during the process of producing most, if not all, CSAM created using AI.

“Every time a CSAM image is fed into an AI machine, it learns a new skill,” said Korobov of the Zero Abuse Project.

When users upload known CSAM to its image tools, OpenAI reviews and reports it to the NCMEC, a spokesperson for the company said.

“We have made significant effort to minimize the potential for our models to generate content that harms children,” the spokesperson said.

In 2023, the NCMEC received 36.2m reports of child abuse online, a 12% rise from the previous year. Most of the tips received were related to the circulation of real-life photos and videos of sexually abused children. However, it also received 4,700 reports of images or videos of the sexual exploitation of children made by generative AI.

The NCMEC has accused AI companies of not actively trying to prevent or detect the production of CSAM. Only five generative AI platforms sent reports to the organization last year. More than 70% of the reports of AI-generated CSAM came from social media platforms, which had been used to share the material, rather than the AI companies.

“There are numerous sites and apps that can be accessed to create this type of content, including open-source models, who are not engaging with the CyberTipline and are not employing other safety measures, to our knowledge,” said Fallon McNulty, director of the NCMEC’s CyberTipline.

Considering AI allows predators to create thousands of new CSAM images with little time and minimal effort, child safety experts anticipate an increasing burden on their resources for trying to combat child exploitation. The NCMEC said it anticipates AI fueling an increase in reports to its CyberTipline.

This expected surge in reports will affect the identification and rescue of victims, threatening an already under-resourced and overwhelmed area of law enforcement, child safety experts said.

Predators habitually share CSAM with their communities on peer-to-peer platforms, using encrypted messaging apps to evade detection.

Meta’s move to encrypt Facebook Messenger in December and plans to encrypt messages on Instagram have faced backlash from child safety groups, who fear that many of the millions of cases taking place on its platforms each year will now go undetected.

Meta has also introduced a host of generative AI features into its social networks over the past year. AI-generated pictures have become some of the most popular content on the social network.

In a statement to the Guardian, a Meta spokesperson said: “We have detailed and robust policies against child nudity, abuse and exploitation, including child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and child sexualization, and those created using GenAI. We report all apparent instances of CSAM to NCMEC, in line with our legal obligations.”

Child safety experts said that the companies developing AI platforms and lawmakers should be largely responsible for stopping the proliferation of AI-generated CSAM.

“It’s imperative to design tools safely before they are launched to ensure they can’t be used to create CSAM,” said McNulty. “Unfortunately, as we’ve seen with some of the open-source generative AI models, when companies don’t follow safety by design, there can be huge downstream effects that can’t be rolled back.”

Additionally, said Korobov, platforms that may be used to exchange AI-generated CSAM need to allocate more resources to detection and reporting.

“It’s going to require more human moderators to be looking at images or to be going into chat rooms and other servers where people are trading this material and seeing what’s out there rather than relying on automated systems to do it,” she said. “You’re going to have to lay eyes on it and recognize this is also child sexual abuse material; it’s just newly created.”

Meanwhile, major social media companies have cut the resources deployed towards scanning and reporting child exploitation by slashing jobs among their child and safety moderator teams.

“If major companies are unwilling to do the basics with CSAM detection, why would we think they would take all these extra steps in this AI world without regulation?” said Sarah Gardner, CEO of the Heat Initiative, a Los Angeles-based child safety group. “We’ve witnessed that purely voluntary does not work.”

America's dirty divide  US news

‘It is devastating’: unprecedented floods in US strain small businesses

As the climate crisis causes heavier and more frequent floods across the US, one in four small businesses are one disaster away from shutting down

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About this content

Mary Cunningham

Thu 18 Jul 2024 12.00 EDT

A flooded street during a heavy rainstorm in Brooklyn, New York, on 29 September 2023. Photograph: Yuki Iwamura for The Washington Post via Getty Images

Alejandra Palma lives in perpetual fear of the next storm.

“We are constantly checking the weather,” said Palma, who co-owns Root Hill Cafe in Brooklyn’s low-lying Gowanus neighborhood. “If we see that there’s a hurricane in Florida, it’s like, oh my God, please let it not come here.”

Last September, when record rain hit New York, it flooded her small businesses, damaging walls and floors already weakened from previous flooding and causing gasoline from a nearby construction site to leak into her basement. It took almost two days to clean up and reopen the shop.

Last year wasn’t entirely a fluke: Palma said that each year she loses about five business days to flooding and estimates that each day Root Hill is closed, it costs her business about $3,500 in lost sales and employee pay.

Those losses, coupled with lingering hardship and debt from Covid and what she says are prohibitively expensive flood insurance rates have her questioning whether the business will survive.

“We as small business owners have to realize at [some] point where we’re going to cut our losses,” Palma said.

As the climate crisis causes heavier and more frequent floods across the U the costs associated with flooding – among them insurance, infrastructure upgrades, flood prevention measures, damages, and lost revenue – are straining businesses like Root Hill.

According to the US Chamber of Commerce, one in four (27%) of small businesses say they are one disaster away from shutting down.

“In the past two years, businesses experienced disaster damages and closures not only in higher-risk states like Florida and California but also in Vermont, Iowa, Minnesota, Kentucky, Colorado – the list goes on,” said Benjamin Collier, a professor at Temple University’s business school. “These events have been devastating.”

That carries major economic implications. Small businesses employ nearly half of US workers and represent 43.5% of America’s GDP.

In New York, the September flooding event led to $100m in total economic losses across the New York metro region, according to a report by the city comptroller.

“Many retail and restaurant establishments occupy both ground floor and basement spaces, making them highly susceptible to flooding and sewer backup damage,” said a SBS spokesperson who asked not to be named. They said most NYC small businesses lack plans to mitigate, respond to and recover from unexpected events like floods.

Alejandra Palma at her establishment, Root Hill Cafe, in Brooklyn, New York. Photograph: Mary Cunningham

Small businesses across the US face similar threats.

In January, rains blanketed southern California, affecting more than 100 businesses, many of which were in a low-income, formerly redlined section of San Diego.

“Financially, it is devastating. It has wiped out savings accounts,” said Donna DeBerry, CEO of the county of San Diego Black chamber of commerce. “People are trying to get loans, but because they’re a small, underserved, underrepresented business, they may not be credit-qualified.”

In Vermont, some businesses devastated by last summer’s severe floods still haven’t gotten back on their feet, while others have decided to close their doors permanently. Reports estimate $300m in economic damage with businesses losing an average of nearly $200,000 in equipment and inventory. (In July 2024, the state suffered major flooding again when passing remnants of Hurricane Beryl dumped 6in of rain in certain areas.)

First Street, a climate risk data non-profit, projects the US commercial sector stands to lose $16.9bn in damages over the next 30 years due to flooding. Experts say small businesses struggle to afford insurance that might help them weather future storms – especially as rates increase and insurers exit the market in certain states due to climate risk.

“Small businesses are often less likely to have other resources that are available to larger clients,” said Collier. “They are dealing with cashflow constraints, which means they’re not buying the same insurance or the same amount of insurance.”

According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), as of April, only a fraction of the country’s small businesses – about 120,000 – carried insurance through Fema’s National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), the country’s largest insurance provider for small businesses.

Experts, advocates and business owners said local governments can help small businesses by investing in infrastructure upgrades for things like sewage, drainage and water catchment systems; funding flood prevention and resilience programs; and requiring greater transparency on flood history.

“You should be able to find out about the flood history of a property before your purchase or rent,” said Chloe Demrovsky, a risk and resilience expert who teaches at New York University. “A public-private partnership with real estate websites could be helpful here.”

She said expediting federal aid could also provide a lifeline. “It might be two years for you to wait for your Fema recovery grant and by then, the businesses have often run out of cash,” she said.

Mark Caserta, vice-president of small business support at the Brooklyn chamber of commerce, said cities should also improve emergency alert systems, which he said don’t always reach small business owners. “I think there needs to be more targeted alerts for businesses and more methods of alerting,” he said.

Joshua L DeVincenzo, a lecturer at Columbia University’s Climate School said: “If there’s incentives for small businesses to actually start thinking about business continuity, management, disaster recovery and preparedness, and the financial resources to do so, I think that’s kind of a missing gap.”

As the first anniversary of the flood approaches, Palma is unsure whether she will renew Root Hill’s lease. Investing more money to fix the flood-worn floors and porous walls would cost thousands. Plus, after 10 years of fighting floods and other small business owner battles, Palma doesn’t want to sacrifice her mental health any more.

“I think our peace of mind is more valuable than whatever little money we make as a small business owner,” she said.

Fashion Statement newsletter  Fashion

You’ve heard of nepo babies, but what about nepo dogs? The rise of the Very Important Pooch

From hobnobbing with the Kardashians to brushing shoulders with the royals, celebrities’ dogs are having a busy summer. But what should they do if the high life gets too much?

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Ellie Violet Bramley

Thu 18 Jul 2024 12.00 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 12.01 EDT

Demi Moore at Cannes with her dog, Pilaf, who has also attended fashion week. Photograph: Christophe Simon/AFP/Getty

At the $600m wedding to end all weddings, of Anant Ambani – the son of Asia’s richest man – and Radhika Merchant, a very good boy was pictured looking bored. The family dog, Happy, perhaps didn’t realise how lucky he was to be a guest at the celebrations in Mumbai last weekend. But even in the presence of Priyanka Chopra, a few Kardashians, a clutch of Bollywood stars, and Tony and Cherie Blair, the golden retriever still gave the impression there were places he would rather be.

Happy is not the only pooch in the spotlight recently. His nonchalant hobnobbing came hot on the paws of the rescue terrier-poodle Brisket, who appeared on the red carpet at the premiere of Twisters in LA last week, the ward of the film’s lead actor, Glen Powell. At the weekend, Sir Pippin of Beanfield – or Pip to his friends – attended the Wimbledon finals. Belonging to actor Glenn Close, the Havanese did well to not chase the tennis ball around Centre Court.

If those last few paragraphs read like a canine iteration of Tatler’s Bystander, then let me introduce you to the Princess Beatrice of the pack: Demi Moore’s chihuahua, Pilaf. As at home on the front row at fashion week as on the red carpet at Cannes, she was apparently recently “quite moved” by Tom Holland’s performance in Romeo and Juliet in London’s West End.

Red carpet star … Brisket the dog with actors Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones at the LA premiere of Twisters. Photograph: Mario Anzuoni/Reuters

Our canine companions increasingly seem to be enjoying the high life, melding into human ways of being in a way that would make their forebears howl. At one dog-friendly members’ club in Mayfair, where a pair of bronze german shepherds guard the door, the capital’s discerning spaniels and dachshunds can enjoy dog caviar in lavish surrounds. Is it any wonder that the case against pet ownership is growing?

All the glitzy tail-wagging is in line with the rise of fancy dog togs – pooches need something to wear to all these events and the global pet clothing market is expected to be worth $7bn by 2032. Last year, numerous fashion houses, from Gucci and Celine to Tommy Hilfiger and Hugo Boss launched ranges for pets.

Mytheresa sells nylon hooded dog coats by Prada (£580), Christian Louboutin rubber dog toys (£185), Gucci canvas pet carriers (£2,290) and slightly bigger bags intended to hold the slightly smaller bags used to scoop up dog poo, embellished and yours for £485. For pooches whose aesthetic is more quiet luxury than conspicuous consumption, there are Loro Piana cashmere dog coats, a snip at £420.

Dressing dogs is “immensely popular because it not only enhances their cuteness but also gives them a distinctive identity and personality”, says Mytheresa chief buying officer, Tiffany Hsu. It is, she says, an extension of the owner: “This trend allows pet owners to express their own personalities and tastes through their pets … a delightful form of self-expression that strengthens the bond between owner and pet.”

Glenn Close with her Havanese Pip and actor Cailee Spaeny promoting Ralph Lauren at Wimbledon. Photograph: Darren Gerrish/WireImage for Ralph Lauren

While dog fashion has, according to Hsu, been common in Asia for some time, elsewhere the trend gained “further momentum during the pandemic, which saw a rise in pet adoptions. This increase in pet ownership has driven the demand for pet products to unprecedented levels.”

If all of this feels like late-stage capitalism incarnate, it’s wise to heed some sage advice from Bill Lambert at the nonprofit Kennel Club: “It is important that owners remember that dogs are not fashion accessories. Of course, we can’t help but want to spoil them, but this can be done very simply, without the need for fashionable clothes or extensive pampering.” He offers some lo-fi ways: “taking them for walks, providing social and mental stimulation and giving them lots of attention is all the indulgence they need”.

There may be a large gap between the lifestyle of dogs belonging to actors and multimillionaire business people and those cared for by the rest of us. Research carried out by the Kennel Club after the pandemic found that almost six in 10 Britons (58%) said they’d like to see more places open for dogs, and almost half (47%) didn’t believe there were enough dog-friendly places. Some dogs seem to have access-all-areas while others are relegated to boring old parks and pavements.

But if other places do open up, Lambert has more wisdom: “It is vital that owners who wish to bring their dogs with them to events first consider whether their dog will be comfortable and happy in that environment and that they have access to water.”

Back to Happy and his options for avoiding social burnout. If ever the partying gets too much, he can see himself out in style – in his very own Mercedes SUV.

To read the complete version of this newsletter – complete with this week’s trending topics in The Measure and your wardrobe dilemmas solved – subscribe to receive Fashion Statement in your inbox every Thursday.

Tour de France 2024

Campenaerts denies Ineos elusive Tour de France stage win with late surge

- Kwiatkowski outfoxed by Belgian breakaway specialist

- More disappointment for team that once dominated Tour

Jeremy Whittle in Barcelonnette

Thu 18 Jul 2024 11.59 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 14.33 EDT

An emotional stage winner Victor Campenaerts shares a video call with his partner and young child. Photograph: Dario Belingheri/AFP/Getty Images

Ineos Grenadiers suffered another bitter disappointment in the Tour de France after Victor Campenaerts, of Lotto-Dstny, outsprinted the former world champion Michal Kwiatkowski to win stage 18 in Barcelonnette.

Kwiatkowski, a winner of Tour stages in 2020 and 2023, took third from a three-rider breakaway, which also included the French rider Mattéo Vercher, after being outfoxed by the breakaway specialist Campenaerts, one of the peloton’s classic baroudeurs.

It was yet another body blow for the British team, who had already suffered disappointment on stage nine, when Tom Pidcock finished second after being unexpectedly outsprinted by Vercher’s TotalEnergies teammate Anthony Turgis.

If Kwiatkowski was disappointed, the 23-year-old Tour debutant Vercher was inconsolable, sobbing uncontrollably beyond the finish line. “You don’t get a chance like this every day,” he said, after finishing second.

With Ineos Grenadiers struggling to rekindle past glories, Kwiatkowski may second that emotion.

Victor Campenaerts of Belgium celebrates at the finish line. Photograph: Tim de Waele/Getty Images

For have-a-go-hero Campenaerts, the impact of his first Tour stage win was overwhelming. He too was in tears, as he spoke to his partner and baby son, Gustaf, on FaceTime as soon as he had rolled to a halt.

“I always have big objectives,” the Belgian, who spent nine weeks training at altitude before the Tour, said. “To race the Tour is special, to finish is great and to win a stage is incredible.”

On another hot day, with temperatures peaking in the mid-30s, the overall contenders finally took a back seat. In a Tour that has been bereft of breakaways, this was finally the big chance for the escape artists, as the race leader, Tadej Pogacar, of UAE Team Emirates, second-placed Jonas Vingegaard, of Visma-Lease a Bike, and Remco Evenepoel, of Soudal Quick-Step, finally allowed them free rein.

Most teams were represented in the initial break of 37 riders, which included the Ineos Grenadiers pair Geraint Thomas and Kwiatkowski, as well as Richard Carapaz, of EF Education-EasyPost, the winner of stage 17.

As the day wore on, the lead group gradually reduced in number, but with the peloton riding 10 minutes in arrears, it was clear that the stage winner would come from the escapers.

Richard Carapaz descending with the breakaway. Photograph: Dario Belingheri/Getty Images

Thomas and Kwiatkowski were among the most active in the final hour of racing, with the Welshman trying his hand on the bridge crossing the Lac de Serre-Ponçon and Kwiatkowski then riding clear towards the top of the final recognised climb, the category three Côte des Demoiselles Coiffées.

Kwiatkowski’s lone initiative was followed by Campenaerts and Vercher, but the trio were chased all the way to the finish by a five-rider group that included the former Giro d’Italia champion Jai Hindley, of Bora-Hansgrohe.

With his track record in tight sprints, the smart money was on Kwiatkowski, but it was another disappointing result for a team that now find themselves struggling to make a meaningful impact in a race they once dominated.

Tadej Pogacar and the peloton cross Lac de Serre-Ponçon well down on the day’s leaders. Photograph: Daniel Cole/AP

“When we started the race, we certainly had aspirations,” Ineos’s newly appointed performance director, Scott Drawer, told the Guardian. “You come here to win, to get on to the podium and to win stages. Things haven’t necessarily played out our way and it’s unfortunate that we have been hit by illness.”

But Drawer acknowledged that there was much ground to be made up. “There is no doubt, and the evidence shows, that racing has changed,” he said. “The data doesn’t lie. You look at some of Pogacar’s performances and Vingegaard’s performances, on some of the climbs, and they are the best there has ever been.

“From our perspective we know there’s a gap. We’re trying to study and understand that, and we will certainly be looking to close that gap in the next few years.”

Geraint Thomas of Ineos Grenadiers speaks after the stage. Photograph: Dario Belingheri/Getty Images

Friday’s stage 19, from Embrun to Isola 2000, is perhaps the hardest of the Tour, given that it falls only 48 hours before the closing time trial in Nice.

The 144.6km stage includes three monstrous climbs, the Col de Vars, at 2,109 metres altitude, the vertiginous Cime de la Bonette, at 2,802 metres, and the 16km haul to another high-altitude summit finish at Isola 2000.

Nato

Stoltenberg assures EU that Nato would survive second Trump presidency

Secretary general says politicians should build a relationship with the Republican like they did in 2016

Lisa O'Carroll

Thu 18 Jul 2024 11.49 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 14.27 EDT

Jens Stoltenberg talks with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, at Blenheim Palace. Photograph: Kin Cheung/AFP/Getty Images

Europe must not fall into the trap of creating a “self-fulfilling prophecy” that Nato would die under a second Trump presidency and that the transatlantic bond would be over, the secretary general of the military alliance has said.

Jens Stoltenberg said leaders must engage with Donald Trump in the same way they did in 2016, no matter what the rhetoric during the US election campaign.

“I worked with him for four years,” he said. Asked if he thought Trump had changed since the end of his presidency in 2020, Stoltenberg said he could not answer but added: “I think it’s important not to create self-fulfilling prophecies in a way that assuming that a new administration in the United States will mean the end of Nato. There were concerns about that also in 2016. The reality was that Nato is stronger after four years … more troops, high readiness.”

European leaders are growing increasingly concerned about the prospect of Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, taking a controlling position in foreign policy if Trump wins in November. Vance was one of the leading opponents of the new US aid package to Ukraine, held up for months but finally approved in the spring.

On Wednesday night, Vance signalled that the US’s commanding role in global security would not be a given in a Trump administration, telling party faithful gathered at the Republican national convention in Milwaukee that US soldiers would no longer be sent overseas unnecessarily. “We will send our kids to war only if we must,” Vance said.

In an interview with the Guardian on the sidelines of the European Political Community meeting at Blenheim Palace in the UK, Stoltenberg said he remained optimistic about the future of Nato.

When the he joined in 2014, only two member states were spending 2% of their budget on defence. He said that now stood at 23 of 31 members, and he said Trump’s complaint during his presidency that Europeans were not contributing their fair share had merit.

“The reason why I’m expecting the United States to remain a strong ally … is that the main criticism from President Trump but also from the candidate for vice-president, JD Vance, has not primarily been against Nato. It has primarily been against Nato allies not spending enough on Nato on defence and that is changing.”

He said that if Trump gets in this year, all Europe would have to do is repeat its 2016 strategy.

“What we decided in 2016 was of course engage with the new administration, not least because the questions were asked about whether they [the US] were supportive of Nato, so we engaged, we sat down, and the reality was that some of the messages were very valid,” he said.

He also argued that the US would stay in Nato because the alliance’s members represented 50% of the world’s “military might”. If the US leaves it would stand alone and represent just 25% of that military capability.

Making Europe Trump-proof was high on the list of concerns raised by European leaders gathered for the EPC meeting, amid fears that not only could Trump abandon the US’s position on Ukraine but he could put pressure on Volodymyr Zelenskiy to accept a peace plan involving the loss of Russian-occupied territory.

The Norwegian prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, said that “Europe will have to do its part by taking a larger share of the costs than we now do” in Nato. “We have to demonstrate the value of this alliance and why we stand together. And I think that case is pretty strong,” he said.

Støre said proofing Europe against Trump was on the agenda on the sidelines of the conference, opened by Keir Starmer and Zelenskiy who recalled Winston Churchill’s resilience and bravery. “We need to be in a good discussion with the US,” he said.

Ireland’s taoiseach, Simon Harris, said he was prepared to use his country’s special relationship with the US to try to bridge any gaps after the election.

An “incoming president may or may not wish to utilise that bridge, but we will stand ready to work with whoever is the democratically elected president of the United States,” he said.

Transfer window

Borussia Dortmund bolster forward line with deal for Serhou Guirassy

- Guinea forward scored 28 goals in 28 Bundesliga games

- Striker aiming to ‘win titles’ after move from Stuttgart

Huzaifah Khan

Thu 18 Jul 2024 11.33 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 12.26 EDT

Serhou Guirassy has shone in the Bundesliga since arriving from Rennes. Photograph: Alex Grimm/Getty Images

Borussia Dortmund have sealed the signing of the highly rated Guinea striker Serhou Guirassy on a four-year deal from Bundesliga rivals Stuttgart.

The 28-year-old scored 28 goals in 28 league games last season, finishing behind only Harry Kane in Germany’s top-flight goal scoring charts. Dortmund have paid the player’s release clause of €17.5m (£14.7m). Guirassy declared that he has made the move to last season’s Champions League finalists “to win titles”.

“It’s special when Borussia Dortmund want to sign you,” he said. “Every child around the world who likes football knows about this club, the black and yellow shirts and the Yellow Wall. And it’s important for me to say that I have come here to win titles. That’s my aim, that’s what spurs me on. BVB showed last season what the club is capable of by reaching the Champions League final.”

Guirassy joined Stuttgart from French side Rennes in a loan deal at the start of the 2022-23 season, and after he scored 11 goals in 22 league appearances, the move was made permanent prior to the start of the following campaign. Guirassy, who also played for Cologne between 2016 and 2019 and has scored three times in 18 appearances for Guinea having been capped by France at youth level, continued to shine at the MHPArena, leading to his move to Dortmund.

“Serhou is an all-round striker who poses a serious goal threat, and he will be a huge asset for us and our squad with his qualities,” Sebastian Kehl, Dortmund’s sporting director, said. “We’re thrilled that after his medical examination he will soon be wearing a BVB shirt and scoring goals for us.”

Before Guirassy’s move, Dortmund wanted to check an injury he sustained while playing for his country at the end of last season. A specialist decided that he would not require surgery and he will instead follow an individual fitness programme and is expected to be back to full fitness later in the summer.

“We felt it was important in the interests of BVB and Serhou to get as detailed a diagnosis as possible of his injury from a specialist,” Lars Ricken, Dortmund’s managing director for sport, said. “It was much more important to be thorough than to be quick. Now we know all the facts, and we’re confident that we’ve made the right decision by signing him.”

Argentina

Hugo Lloris says Fernández video is ‘attack on French people’ as Argentinian minister sacked

- Chelsea midfielder has already said sorry for the video

- Undersecretary of sport sacked for urging Messi apology

Ed Aarons

Thu 18 Jul 2024 11.16 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 12.12 EDT

Hugo Lloris, the former France goalkeeper and captain, says the Argentina players should have shown ‘more responsibility’. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Argentina’s undersecretary of sport has been sacked after calling for Lionel Messi to apologise for the racist and transphobic song about France’s players that the former captain Hugo Lloris has described as “an attack on French people”.

Chelsea said on Wednesday they had “instigated an internal disciplinary procedure” against Enzo Fernández after the midfielder posted a video on Instagram that showed him and some of his Argentina teammates involved in the chants as they celebrated their victory against Colombia in the Copa América final. He later apologised, saying the video did not “reflect my beliefs or my character”, and is expected to be fined by his club.

Fifa has confirmed it is investigating the incident, which Julio Garro had also urged Messi – who captained Argentina at the Copa América – and the Argentinian Football Association (AFA) president, Claudio Tapia, to apologise for.

But the office of Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, issued a strongly worded statement on X confirming that Garro had been dismissed. “The president’s office says that no government can tell the Argentina national team – world champion and two-time Copa América champion – what to comment, what to think or what to do, or to any other citizen,” it said. “For this reason, Julio Garro is no longer undersecretary of sports of the nation.”

La Oficina del Presidente informa que ningún gobierno puede decirle qué comentar, qué pensar o qué hacer a la Selección Argentina Campeona del Mundo y Bicampeona de América, ni a ningún otro ciudadano. Por esta razón, Julio Garro deja de ser Subsecretario de Deportes de la… pic.twitter.com/o4JRC7gGB1

— Oficina del Presidente (@OPRArgentina) July 17, 2024

The vice-president, Victoria Villarruel, also hit back at the country’s critics on social media. “No country with a colonial history is going to put us down for a song sung on a field nor for speaking a truth that nobody wants to admit,” she wrote. “Enough of pretending to be offended, hypocrites. Enzo I am with you, Messi thanks for everything! Argentines always keep your heads high! Long live Argentina!”

Villarruel said Argentina’s history had been forged by people of all races: “We never forced our way of life on anyone, nor will we tolerate that someone tries to do the same to us.”

Lloris, who captained France at the past two Word Cups – including their run to the final at Qatar 2022 when the chant was first sung by Argentina fans – said the players involved should have shown “more responsibility”.

“They deserve a lot of credit for what they have done on the field for the last four or five years,” Lloris said. “But when you win, you are an example for others, especially kids. It was a proper attack about the French people, especially for the French people who have African origin and family.”

Demba Ba, the former Chelsea and Senegal striker, wrote on X: “Argentina, land of asylum for former Nazis on the run. From 1945, [Juan] Perón hosted war criminals. And it surprises you …”

Tom Cruise

‘Tom Cruise is writing stories for Tom Cruise’: Manny Jacinto on why Top Gun lines were cut

The Good Place actor speaks out about the ‘flattering’ outcry over his role being reduced to non-speaking

Benjamin Lee

Thu 18 Jul 2024 11.10 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 12.23 EDT

Manny Jacinto at the premiere for the film The Acolyte on 28 May 2024 in London. Photograph: Vianney Le Caer/Invision/AP

The Good Place actor Manny Jacinto has spoken about his Top Gun: Maverick dialogue being cut, explaining that “Tom Cruise is writing stories for Tom Cruise.”

Jacinto, recently seen in Star Wars spin-off series The Acolyte, was cast as one of the fighter pilots in training in the big-budget sequel alongside Miles Teller, Glen Powell and Lewis Pullman. The Filipino-Canadian actor underwent “superhero” training but when he watched the film, he found that all of his dialogue had been cut and he was reduced to a few background scenes.

“It’s flattering that there was a little bit of an outcry, but it wasn’t shocking to me,” Jacinto said in an interview with GQ. “There was this sense of where the film was going [on set], like I can see them focusing the camera more on these [other] guys and not taking so much time on our scenes. Fortunately, it still was a great experience – you get to see this huge machine at work, see how Tom Cruise works, and you get to be a small part of this huge franchise.”

He admitted that the disappointment has spurred him to take a more integral part behind the scenes in the future.

“It kind of fuels you, because at the end of the day, Tom Cruise is writing stories for Tom Cruise,” he said. “It’s up to us – Asian Americans, people of color – to be that [for ourselves]. We can’t wait for somebody else to do it. If we want bigger stories out there, we have to make them for ourselves.”

Last year a study showed that while the number of Asian characters in the top 100 films and series on streaming platforms has seen an increase of 13% from 2007 to 2022, only 6% of those roles were leading.

Top Gun: Maverick went onto make $1.5bn worldwide and helped to propel the career of Powell who can be seen headlining this week’s disaster sequel Twisters before taking on the lead in Edgar Wright’s remake of The Running Man. The film was also nominated for six Oscars.

Jacinto, whose previous credits also include Nine Perfect Strangers and Bad Times at El Royale, will next be seen alongside Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis in Freaky Friday 2 and fencing thriller Balestra.

Leading questions  Life and style

How people vote affects my life and relationships – how do I explain that to my apolitical friend?

It would be weird to associate only with those who agree with us, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. But we do eventually have to take responsibility for life’s editorial decisions

- Find more Leading questions here

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

Thu 18 Jul 2024 11.00 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 11.29 EDT

‘As with all political exchanges, the mission can’t just be to get them to see things your way,’ writes Eleanor Gordon-Smith. Painting: Politics in an Oyster House by Richard Caton Woodville. Photograph: Heritage Image Partnership Ltd/Alamy

My friend describes themselves as apolitical and thinks I shouldn’t allow how somebody votes to have any impact on our relationship. How do I explain that they are in a privileged position to be able to think that way and how people vote does matter to me and my life?

Eleanor says: I’m always curious where people draw the line on this. You hear your friend’s idea rehearsed in all sorts of circles, from politics or bad personal conduct to attitudes on race and gender: “We can set that aside” or “They’ve never been a bad friend to me.”

In fairness, most of us have a loved one with whom we just agree to disagree. But equally, all of us have something that would be a dealbreaker. There are extremes of conduct or belief that we just won’t permit. So when someone says they don’t let these topics affect their relationships, I always think that’s a little self-deceptive: presumably they don’t really mean that. There is something out there they wouldn’t associate with. What they mean is that very little rises to that level.

And that might be the right decision! It would be weird and bad to only associate with people who agreed with us. But one does eventually have to take responsibility for the editorial decisions one has made in one’s life. Hard cases confront most of us: friends who use certain slurs, family who cast certain votes, very different attitudes to violence. To pretend to recuse oneself from making a judgment in these moments is to dodge the responsibility of thinking. Besides, as you point out, even that pretence is political.

It might be interesting to see what challenges you’d encounter from your friend if you could get them to see they’ve already made a decision instead of exempting themselves from one. They might have interesting things to say about why they’ve made the call they have.

Perhaps they value a kind of liberal toleration: they might think the fact they believe something doesn’t give them the authority to enforce it interpersonally. They might think of politics as quasi-aesthetic – “Just a matter of opinion”, said with upturned palms and the tone of wrapping up a phone call. They might think nobody really knows enough to have views on these things, themselves included: it might be a kind of humility. You could get into some really friendship-enriching (and just plain interesting) conversations about this, but they’ll all start with shifting the question from “Should we make political judgments?” to “Why have we made such different ones?”

One way into that shift might be to point out that finding this stuff boring depends on the presumption that it’s all low stakes – when for lots of people, that isn’t true. Or you could ask them what kinds of things would colour their relationships. What sorts of conduct would make them like someone less? If all the answers are to do with how a person treats them, that’s an interesting discovery; why is that what matters most? Do they think that everyone else should have that attitude too?

As with all political exchanges, the mission can’t just be to get them to see things your way. Discussion may eventually hit the bedrock where all you can say to each other is “I think my thing is true” and “Well, I think my thing is true”. At that stage nobody’s claim to the truth will get any special purchase in the argument. But at least once you’ve classed this as a political disagreement, your friend should be compelled to stick to their guns by loving you just the same.

The age of extinction  Biodiversity

Colombia gives assurances over UN biodiversity summit after rebels’ threat

Organisers working to ensure safe environment for attenders in October after guerrillas’ warning of disruption

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Patrick Greenfield

Thu 18 Jul 2024 10.55 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 11.29 EDT

The last UN biodiversity summit took place in Montreal, Canada, in 2022. Photograph: Andrej Ivanov/AFP/Getty Images

Colombian authorities have insisted it will be safe to attend a UN biodiversity summit in Cali later this year, after a dissident rebel group threatened to disrupt the event.

This week Central General Staff (EMC), a guerrilla faction that rejected the country’s 2016 peace agreement, said the UN nature summit Cop16 would “fail”, in a post on X addressed to the Colombian president, Gustavo Petro.

The warning comes amid a government clampdown on the EMC, which is active in the region near Cali where the summit will be held.

The Colombian defence ministry said on Tuesday it had ended a ceasefire with parts of the EMC because of ongoing violence. A series of bombings and shootings have been blamed on the group.

The Cop16 organising committee said it was working with local and national authorities to ensure a safe environment during the summit, which is due to begin on 21 October. They said they were closely monitoring the situation and working to establish the validity of the messages circulating on social media.

“The safety and wellbeing of all participants, attendees and collaborators are our top priority. All security guarantees are in places to have a successful and smooth conference. We convey to all participants, delegates, media and stakeholders a message of reassurance,” the statement read.

About 12,000 soldiers and police are expected to be deployed for the summit, which Colombia announced it would host during UN climate talks at the end of last year.

The new UN biodiversity chief, Astrid Schomaker, said she was satisfied that Colombian authorities were taking the situation seriously and she was in regular contact with the Colombian government.

She said: “We’ve all watched the recent tweets and other manifestations of armed groups in Colombia. The Colombian government is taking that very seriously. They’re trying to track where this is coming from. There are a lot of conversations going on. I am confident that the Colombians are taking it seriously and that everything is being put in place to make Cop16 a safe and successful event.”

The 2016 peace deal between the Colombian government and the country’s biggest guerrilla army, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), formally ended the longest-running war in the western hemisphere, which killed more than 260,000 people and forced 7 million from their homes. Thousands of rebel fighters demobilised but about 1,500 refused to sign up to the deal, and many more are likely to have returned to arms.

Under Petro’s presidency, Colombia has positioned itself as an international leader on environmental issues, becoming the first major oil, gas and coal producer to join an alliance calling for a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty at Cop28 last year.

Petro’s government has had success in reducing deforestation. But the progress has been hampered this year by El Niño and tensions with the EMC, which controls large areas of rainforest and has been encouraging people to cut down trees.

At the last UN biodiversity summit, Cop15 in Montreal in 2022, governments agreed a once-in-a-decade deal to halt the destruction of Earth’s ecosystems.

- Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow the biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on X for all the latest news and features.

The Bear

The Bear is not a comedy and it’s time to stop pretending it is

Stuart Heritage

The restaurant drama broke an Emmys record for a comedy show, but how is a tense series about stress, trauma and suicide supposed to be a comedy?

- Emmy nominations 2024: the full list and the biggest surprises and snubs

Thu 18 Jul 2024 10.45 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 12.20 EDT

Ayo Edebiri and Jeremy Allen White in The Bear. Photograph: FX Networks

Yesterday The Bear made Emmys history after receiving 23 nominations, an all-time record for a comedy series. And yet the reception to this news has been decidedly muted, partly because – and this won’t exactly be news for anyone who has seen the show – The Bear isn’t a comedy.

The Bear is a lot of things. It’s stressful. It’s gripping. It’s beautiful. It’s wildly indulgent. But a comedy? Obviously not. It’s a television programme about an ambitious chef whose role models are either horrifically abusive or dead by suicide. One recent episode took the form of an extended trauma montage set to a downbeat Trent Reznor soundtrack. In other words, it isn’t exactly the sort of thing you watch if you fancy jollying yourself up a bit.

But you knew this. We all knew this. The writers of Abbott Elementary knew this because, after the nominations were announced, one of them tweeted: “Proud of Abbott Elementary for all of its Emmy nominations this year, especially Outstanding Comedy series as we are definitely a program where the majority of the running time of at least 6 episodes are primarily comedic, as defined by the TV Academy.”

This isn’t to say that The Bear is bad. The second season (the one nominated yesterday) was easily one of the five best shows to be broadcast last year. But it isn’t a comedy. In fact, it’s worse than that. So long as The Bear keeps submitting itself as a comedy, it is actively hurting comedy.

Last year, for example, Jeremy Allen White won outstanding lead actor in a comedy. But his role wasn’t comedic. Not even slightly. It was compelling, sure, but unless glaring into the middle distance and attempting to clench your way out of internalised anguish is suddenly extremely funny, it was not a comedy performance.

And look who he beat to get it. He beat Jason Segel. He beat Jason Sudeikis. He beat Martin Short and Bill Hader, for crying out loud. Those are comedy actors. They arguably deserved that specific award more than him.

Jeremy Allen White. Photograph: Ashley Landis/AP

Although, actually, maybe not. Segel, remember, was nominated for Shrinking, in which he played a man so devastated by the death of his wife that he turns to substance abuse while breaching his professional code of ethics. In the most recent season of Only Murders in the Building, Short’s character suffers two near-fatal heart attacks. And while my love for Hader’s Barry will never die, it is by all accounts as funny as drinking bleach.

What all these shows are, though, are 30 minutes long. And because of old misconceptions of the format, a 30-minute show – even one as relentlessly grim as Barry – will always be partly considered as a comedy. Meanwhile, even though it often had a laugh-out-loud sitcom engine behind it, the 60-minute Succession was always deemed a drama.

Sneaking dramas into comedy categories is nothing new. Almost a decade ago, Transparent was winning comedy Emmys all over the place, even though you couldn’t locate a single joke in the entire thing if you went searching with some tweezers and a magnifying glass. But the debate over the comedic merit of The Bear is such that it might be time for the Emmys to start paying attention.

Were something to change – were, for instance, the Emmys to introduce a new 30-minute drama category – then this would free up the actual comedies to stand a hope in hell of winning. For example, as things stand Matt Berry doesn’t stand a hope in hell of winning best comedy actor this year, because he’s up against Jeremy Allen White. But with The Bear out of the way, his swaggeringly uninhibited turn on What We Do in the Shadows would be recognised for what it is: a technically brilliant performance of sustained comic intensity. Similarly, the sheer mathematical density of jokes packed into Girls5Eva would be given more space to be properly recognised. And yet that won’t win either this year, because it faces our old friend The Bear (it wasn’t even nominated in the first place).

On the plus side, a brighter future might be just ahead of us. Talk to any comedy commissioner on either side of the Atlantic right now and they’ll tell you that they want to make proper, unrestrained comedies. Traditional, laugh-out-loud, funny-for-the-sake-of-funny comedies. Not comedy dramas. Not semi-autobiographical trauma memoirs. Actual comedies.

And while this won’t stop networks from taking short dramas and passing them off as comedies, it will help to unblur the lines somewhat. You won’t have to squint at a 30-minute show like The Bear and try to work out if it’s trying to be funny or not. There will be comedy and there will be drama. Let’s hope that, when it comes to awards, comedy will finally win.

Football Daily newsletter  Soccer

The world’s best male footballer doesn’t play for Madrid, but he was born there

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Michael Butler

Thu 18 Jul 2024 10.26 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 11.07 EDT

The main man in the middle. Photograph: Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters

TALKING BALLONS

When is “last season” last season? Is 2024-25 now “this season”, or is it still “next season”? These are among the blue-sky, big-picture questions being forensically contemplated by this particular tea-timely email, alongside other cheese-based queries like: “Why does Babybel have such a stranglehold on the casual snack-sized cheese market?” And: “How long can Roquefort last without going off?” It’s practically 40% mould anyway! The point is, between the end of Euro 2024, Copa América and Euro 2025 qualifying until the beginning of the domestic league seasons in just under a month from now, there isn’t a whole lot going on right now outside of Big Website’s transfer interactives and possibly some Olympic footy to keep us going. Some people are even turning to cricket and golf to distract them from their day jobs. So, we are forced to rank things, inventing something, anything, to fill the void. Teams of the tournament, six contenders to replace Southgate, who shone and who flopped for England and the 18 best everyday items (No 7: funnels, apparently). All good lists.

But this hiatus of football is also forcing people to consider who might win this year’s Ballon d’Or [easy there, Rio Ferdinand – Football Daily Ed]. Theoretically, this should be a fun exercise, especially as Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo no longer have a monopoly over it. But, rather depressingly, almost all of the favourites to win the male prize play for Real Madrid – Jude Bellingham, Vinícius Júnior, Dani Carvajal and now Kylian Mbappé – who have the enviable/unenviable task of fitting them all into a starting XI this/next season alongside Rodrygo and Endrick. However, despite being born there, the clear winner doesn’t play in Madrid. That choice is, of course, Rodri.

It’s not very $exy for male football to have a defensive midfielder as its best player – the last time that was true was 28 years ago with Matthias Sammer (no, Luka Modric is not a No 6, get a grip) – but that’s the way football is going right now. And nobody can say Rodri doesn’t deserve it. In the past year, he has won the Uefa Super Cup, Club World Cup and a fourth successive Premier League title, plus Euro 2024 (where he won every game and was named player of the tournament). He is the most important player in arguably the best club side in the world. Manchester City’s FA Cup final defeat to United in May ended his 74-game unbeaten streak in all competitions. Just outrageous stats, even if the “Rodri – Right Place, Right Time, Crazy Interceptions – HD 4K” YouTube compilation doesn’t exactly get the pulse racing.

If Real Madrid fans are upset about all that, fear not, you’ll almost certainly sign him soon. Carvajal has spent most of the summer in Rodri’s ear, with the right-back admitting last week: “I tell him: ‘Leave Manchester, there is no sun there, and come to Madrid, we need you. He says he has a contract, that there aren’t release clauses [in England]. He gives me the runaround basically, but he would be the perfect signing, no doubt.” So, just a few more weeks of waiting and then we can enjoy the next transfer debacle and another season being dominated by Real Madrid and Manchester City. Pass the Roquefort.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“I am at the start of pre-season and am the Tottenham manager, so I have got nothing else [on my mind] but trying to bring success to this football club. Until I do that, there is no point in me thinking about anything else. I had a nap this afternoon, so I have no idea what is going on [it]” – Ange Postecoglou responds to flamin’ reports that the FA is keeping its beady eyes on the Spurs boss over the vacant England gig.

Ange Postecoglou at Hearts, earlier. Photograph: Bruce White/Colorsport/Shutterstock

FOOTBALL DAILY LETTERS

Re: Justin Kavanagh’s missive over having both Lampard and Gerrard as co-managers for England (yesterday’s Football Daily letters). I believe the most important detail missing is what we would call the new hybrid boss? LampGerr? GerrLamp? I personally hope we go meta with ArdArd, and Ard² is the end result” – Rasteen Nowroozi.

If Lampard and Gerrard are both in the running for the gig, presumably, based on historical precedent, Paul Scholes should be there as a left-field choice too?” – Noble Francis.

One glaring omission from Richard Hirst’s Gareth Southgate valediction (yesterday’s letters) was surely a reference to his famous waistcoats. To add to his undoubted knighthood for services to sartorial elegance and, in recognition of his near-200 appearances for Aston Villa, may I suggest the Villans bestow upon him the honorary title of ‘Beau Brummie’?” – Adrian Irving.

Send letters to the.boss@theguardian.com. Today’s prizeless letter o’ the day winner is … Rasteen Nowroozi. Terms and conditions for our competitions can be viewed here.

- This is an extract from our daily football email … Football Daily. To get the full version, just visit this page and follow the instructions.

European Commission

Ursula von der Leyen wins second term as European Commission president

Mainstream groups unite to grant her an emphatic victory and defeat anti-EU and extreme-right forces

Jennifer Rankin in Brussels

Thu 18 Jul 2024 10.05 EDT

First published on Thu 18 Jul 2024 08.50 EDT

'Emotional moment': Ursula von der Leyen re-elected European Commission president – video

Ursula von der Leyen has won a second term as European Commission president, securing an emphatic victory in the European parliament as mainstream lawmakers united against anti-EU and extreme-right forces.

The Strasbourg chamber erupted in applause when it became clear that von der Leyen, the first woman to lead the EU executive, had cleared the hurdle by 41 votes – a stronger result than her first election in 2019.

The German Christian Democrat will now be the head of the EU’s lawmaking and enforcement body until 2029.

“I can’t begin to express how grateful I am for the trust of all MEPs that voted for me,” she tweeted minutes after the results.

The victory cements von der Leyen’s status as one the most consequential commission presidents in the 67-year history of the European project. She has been feted for her unequivocal and early support for Ukraine, a pioneering response to the pandemic that led to the joint purchase of vaccines and the first-ever joint borrowing with the creation of the Covid recovery fund.

She has also been criticised, however, for relying heavily on a narrow coterie of advisers and avoiding scrutiny. On Wednesday the European court of justice found that her commission had failed to give the public “sufficiently wide access” to the purchase deals for Covid vaccines.

In an attempt to meet these concerns, on Thursday von der Leyen promised “more transparency, more accountability” and more frequent visits to the parliament.

Speaking on the floor of the Strasbourg chamber before the vote, she appealed to “all the democratic forces in this house” to support her, and announced a wide-ranging set of priorities for her second term.

“I will never accept that demagogues and extremists destroy our European way of life,” she said.

Far-right gains in recent elections, coupled with the tumultuous international backdrop, explain why von der Leyen was returned with a bigger vote than in 2019.

In total, 401 MEPs voted in her favour, 284 against, 15 abstained and seven votes were void. She needed 360 votes to be re-elected.

The result will be a relief to EU leaders who nominated her for a second term last month after European elections shifted the parliament to the right.

The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, congratulated von der Leyen, saying her re-election was “a clear sign of our ability to act in the European Union, especially in difficult times”. Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, said: “I’m sure you’ll do a great job. We will do, together.”

Von der Leyen’s European People’s party (EPP), the Socialists and Democrats and the centrist Renew group had announced they intended to support her, although some members had said they would vote against.

The Greens, who voted against von der Leyen in 2019, had said they would support her to keep the far right out of power.

“Is this a green programme that she has provided us? I can tell you no,” Terry Reintke, a co-leader of the Greens, said on the chamber floor before the vote. But, she added, it was crucial that a majority of pro-European democratic groups holds to “keep the far right from getting into power”.

The Eurosceptic European Conservatives and Reformists grouping, which includes Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party and Poland’s Law and Justice, was split. It planned a free vote but had said “a large majority” of its MEPs would oppose von der Leyen.

The EPP leader, Manfred Weber, who has cool relations with von der Leyen, had urged his group to back her, telling them: “If you want to defend democracy, vote today for Ursula von der Leyen.”

Against a backdrop of the war in Ukraine, widespread concern about foreign interference in European elections and the potential return of Donald Trump, his words appeared to underscore the view of many MEPs that the vote was something bigger than the choice of another commission president.

The shifting balance in the parliament was underlined when the French far-right leader Jordan Bardella was the third group leader to speak before the vote, reflecting the status of his Patriots group as the third largest force in the parliament behind the EPP and Socialists.

Soon afterwards an extreme nationalist Romanian MEP was removed from the chamber after heckling a liberal lawmaker, while a far-right Polish MEP who spoke for the newly formed extremist Europe of Sovereign Nations group attacked EU migration policy – and von der Leyen personally – in lurid terms.

Some insiders suggested the presence of these noisy voices on the far right could have helped tilt the balance in von der Leyen’s favour by underlining the stakes.

In an appeal to her own centre-right EPP, von der Leyen had promised a “burden reduction” of EU law to help small businesses, describing her first priority as competitiveness and prosperity.

Nodding to the Greens, liberals and Socialists, she vowed to stay the course on EU climate plans, promising in her first 100 days a new “clean industrial deal” to channel investment into decarbonising manufacturing and green tech.

Reflecting the French president Emmanuel Macron’s vision, she promised “a true union of defence” to develop common projects, suggesting a European air shield to protect shared airspace.

Under her programme, the EU will have a commissioner in charge of housing for the first time, although the bloc has no policymaking power on the issue. Nonetheless, she promised a “European affordable housing plan” to address a crisis of high rents and unaffordable homes, a key priority for the Socialists.

Von der Leyen reaffirmed the EU’s support for Ukraine and issued her strongest criticism yet of the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s recent trip to Moscow. “This so-called peace mission was nothing but an appeasement mission,” she told MEPs, generating the biggest applause of her 50-minute speech.

Global development

Film honours 41 ‘heroines’ lost in Guatemala children’s home fire

As their families await justice, Jayro Bustamante’s movie, Rita, highlights the bravery of victims of 2017 blaze, and the authorities’ failure to protect them

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About this content

Aisling Walsh

Thu 18 Jul 2024 10.00 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 10.10 EDT

A still from Rita. The director Jayro Bustamante says the act of rebellion by the girls at the children’s home is at the heart of the film. Photograph: Handout

Ada Kelly Alfaro says the cries from friends asking for help still haunt her daughter, Cynthia Phaola Morales, seven years after she survived a fire at a children’s shelter in Guatemala that killed 41 girls.

Cynthia was one of only 15 survivors of the blaze at the Virgen de la Asunción (HSVA), in San José Pinula, just outside Guatemala City, which broke out on the morning of 8 March 2017.

She and 55 other girls had been locked in a tiny room with no food or access to a toilet, as punishment for an attempted escape from the shelter. The fire started when one of the girls set a mattress alight in protest at their treatment. Despite the girls’ pleas for help the doors of the room remained locked for nine minutes.

Rita, a film inspired by the tragic events at the shelter and the failure of the authorities in Guatemala to protect the girls, who were mainly from low-income families, will premiere next week at the Fantasia international film festival in Montreal.

Rita tells the story of a 13-year-old girl who is taken to a state-run home after running away from her abusive father. The centre’s oppressive conditions soon lead Rita and other youngsters to plan their escape to expose abuse.

The act of rebellion by the girls at HSVA is at the heart of the film, says its award-winning writer and director, Jayro Bustamante. “The moment they took matters into their own hands and decided to stand up against these dark beings who take advantage of their fragility, they became heroines.”

Bustamante says what most interested him was the hostility directed towards the girls in the aftermath of the fire. “Our first reaction as a society was to criminalise the girls, to say that they deserved what had happened to them because they were delinquents.”

The objective of the film is to talk about our responsibility as a society towards children

Jayro Bustamante, director

The film uses fantasy and magic realism to challenge that narrative and create empathy for the girls. “The objective of the film is not only to talk about this case, because that would minimise what really happens with children [in Guatemala], and especially girls. The objective is to talk about our responsibility as a society towards children.”

In January, the trial of eight government officials and police officers charged in connection with the fire finally got under way. They are charged with the abuse of minors, breach of duty and manslaughter.

Firefighters and rescue workers outside the children’s shelter on 8 March 2017. Photograph: Sipa US/Alamy

Edgar Pérez, a lawyer at Bufete Jurídico de Derechos Humanos en Guatemala (the Guatemalan Human Rights Law Firm), which represents 14 of the girls’ families, says the charges do not correspond to the severity of what happened in 2017.

But, he says, the case is significant because it will expose the failings of the country’s child protection system and the attitudes of the authorities towards poorer families and single mothers. “This case reveals who we are as a society,” says Pérez.

The beginning of the trial “offered a ray of hope that we might finally get justice”, says Alfaro. “Justice seemed very far away.”

Cynthia was sent to HSVA in 2016 when she was 13. Her mother was accused of neglect when Cynthia failed to come home from a party at a friend’s house. Alfaro was told by the courts that she couldn’t adequately supervise her daughter because she was a widow and had to go to work.

Alfaro, who had no legal representation, was told Cynthia would receive education, psychological support and medical attention at the shelter, and “that she would be better off than at home”, she says.

Alfaro, who had to wait two months for permission to visit her daughter, soon discovered the promised support was not forthcoming. Cynthia said the food was bad and there was no privacy when using the bathroom. During their periods, the girls had to cut the sponge from their mattresses to use as sanitary towels. Abuses at the shelter, including severe overcrowding, the use of confinement as punishment and physical and sexual abuse, had been documented in multiple reports dating back to 2012.

Graffiti on a wall on International Women’s Day, 8 March 2020, reads ‘rapists priests’. In Guatemala City that day, women protested against gender-based violence, the church and the deaths at the Virgen de la Asunción shelter. Photograph: Esteban Biba/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

The trial is expected to last for months, as only one hearing is held each week. Pérez says that from the testimonies given at the trial so far, “if the staff at the home had acted more promptly, many lives would have been saved”.

“In fact, [the fire] could have been avoided altogether if there had been trained personnel, people with conscience [working there] and real policies for the care of children and adolescents in the country.”

Alfaro is determined to see justice for Cynthia, who is now 21 and married with two children, and other survivors, as well as the families of the girls who died. She wants to make sure this never happens again. “My daughter didn’t deserve to be there, she didn’t deserve what happened to her.”

- Rita premieres at the Fantasia international film festival in Montreal, which runs from 18 July to 4 August.

Classical music

Review

Lang: Composition as Explanation album review – Gertrude Stein set to music

Eighth Blackbird

(Cedille)

David Lang has created a freewheeling concert/lecture mashup based on a 1926 Gertrude Stein lecture and ushered into being by the imperious Eighth Blackbird

Andrew Clements

Thu 18 Jul 2024 10.00 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 10.29 EDT

Multitalented … Eighth Blackbird.

Composition as Explanation, David Lang says, is “super chamber music”. In the hour-long piece, first performed in 2016 but subsequently developed and much expanded, the members of Eighth Blackbird have to deliver lectures as well as playing their instruments – piano, violin, cello, flute, clarinet and percussion. Lang suggests the work may be staged too, and in any case insists that a theatre director should be involved in any live performance, blurring the boundaries between concert work and music-theatre still further.

Cover art for David Lang: Composition as Explanation. Photograph: Cedille Records

The spoken texts are taken from a lecture that Gertrude Stein gave in 1926, in which she explained, with her typical repetitions and circumlocutions, what she was setting out to achieve in her writings. As well as playing and delivering their speeches in suitably arch ways, the instrumentalists also play “surfaces” that imitate the sounds and actions of writing. The result is a brilliant showcase for the multitalents of Eighth Blackbird which is ultimately unclassifiable, though there are parallels with some of Heiner Goebbels’ theatre pieces, particularly Black on White, which was written for Ensemble Modern. But the wonderfully compelling musical journey that Lang has created is uniquely his own, as it takes the listener through moments of chiming, crystalline beauty, stomping free-for-alls, vertiginous instrumental solos and insistent minimalist repetitions. You never know what’s going to turn up next.

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The reader interview  Movies

Interview

Rob Delaney: ‘The average British citizen is funnier than the average American’

As told to Catherine Shoard

The American comedian returns to the big screen next week in Deadpool & Wolverine. He answers your questions on comic-book heroes, the end of Catastrophe, being attractive, Richard Linklater and full English breakfasts

Thu 18 Jul 2024 10.00 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 11.02 EDT

Rob Delaney … ‘Good-looking? That’s in the eye of the beholder.’ Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

You have no superpowers in Deadpool. If you could have one superpower in real life, what would it be? TopTramp

Time travel. Even if I could go back 15 years and walk around the neighbourhood we’re in right now, that would just be amazing. And then do 30 years, 80 years, 1,000 years; I would never get tired of that. Then I would try to climb a pyramid. I don’t know if they let you do that or if they were guarded. Or go to an early Stevie Wonder concert.

If someone were to write you a lead in your own superhero movie, what would that role’s power be? What would they be called? Would you like a catchphrase? And who would play his sidekick/patsy? ShivvieMullen

Time travel guy, but I wouldn’t do anything helpful. I would just go to Stevie Wonder concerts and climb pyramids. And they’d be like: “That guy screwed up! My mom wasn’t born because instead of killing Mussolini or Hitler, that guy decided to climb a pyramid.” So they would chase me through time. My catchphrase would be: “Hmm, this is terrific,” right before I get shot by a time warrior. Samuel L Jackson would be my boss, who’d operate the time travel software and chastise me regularly. His catchphrase would be: “Come on, man! Again?!”

Delaney as Pete in Deadpool 2. Photograph: Marvel

If you could work with one director/writer/actor in the world who would it be? mesm

I’m on a big Richard Linklater kick right now, because of the sheer tonnage of excellent movies he piles up. I was so impressed that Hit Man cost $9m. I love “cheap” movies, and, of course, it was excellent.

I was heavily influenced by Before Midnight, which seemed to me the truest account of the energy and effort required to maintain a marriage that I’d ever seen. His curiosity and his talent as a writer and director in tandem is pretty spectacular. He’s underrated despite being award-winning and very successful, because he’s rarely flashy. He’s also so consistent that maybe people take him for granted.

Dream project if money, rights (if relevant) and availability of other actors no issue? catmoderm

I love writing for TV, because it’s often about characters and whether you like them and how they do things rather than necessarily what happens. They’re not as plot-dependent as films. I could conceivably write something, I could conceivably get it on the air and I could conceivably rope in whomever to do it, maybe. That’s not impossible to imagine. It is impossible for me to imagine being able to afford all the music I’d want to put in. So: a Steely Dan-based kitchen sink drama. Ken Loach with jokes.

Would you say your finest acting is in Bitz & Bob? dothestrand

That’s a wonderful question. I’d say it’s up there. It’s a CBeebies show I am very proud to be a part of. As everyone knows, CBeebies is like the third parent in any family that raises children, and I love it so much that to be even a small part of something on there is such an honour. So yes, I absolutely put my best foot forward with Bitz & Bob and I’m so glad I was on it.

Do you ever think about where Rob, Sharon and family could be now, and if there’s more story to tell as Frankie grows up? BenRider92

That’s a great question. I don’t so much think about that because Catastrophe for me is like a snapshot, or a briefish family movie. So could something like Catastrophe work revisited years later? Absolutely, because the way that it looked at things could be useful and entertaining at different phases in a different part of life.

Delaney as Rob and Sharon Horgan as Sharon in Catastrophe. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy

I hope we don’t make any more Catastrophe. I hope that I’m responsible enough with my family’s finances that I don’t feel that I have to. You should always leave them wanting more. Most reboots stink. You have to have a real reason for doing it and have something new to say, such as Steve Coogan and the Gibbons brothers have with This Time with Alan Partridge. That is vital, necessary art we would all be poorer without.

Maybe I haven’t lived enough since the last Catastrophe to feel justified in doing more of it. Also, I love disappointing people. People will hear there’s no more and they’ll be like: “Oh, darn.” I get a high off that.

Do you think your characters died at the end of Catastrophe? Ketchup_Catsip

I don’t. But that doesn’t matter any more than what any viewer thinks. We very much wanted to give the viewer the opportunity to make that decision. For me – and this is only one interpretation – they are in peril at the end, but they’ve been in peril for four whole series. And what have they done? They’ve banded together and worked through it and made it out the other side. So why would the ending be different? That is my feeling. I love that a lot of people think that they die, so feel free to disagree with me.

I found the ending of Catastrophe almost horrific. It was dreamlike and sinister, so I probably mean nightmarish. Did I get it completely wrong? Kbkc

No, I love hearing that. I co-wrote a situation-comedy and someone found the end of it sinister, horrific and nightmarish: that is gonna get me through the next month. That’s the greatest thing I’ve heard in a very long time.

When we were looking for reference stuff for that finale, we watched the beginning of the director’s cut of Michael Mann’s Miami Vice, which has go-fast boats and a camera coming in and out of big waves, way out in the ocean and is kind of scary. We also watched There Will Be Blood, when Daniel Plainview swims in some pretty big scary waves and that’s nightmarish.

Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball in I Love Lucy. Photograph: CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images

What’s your favourite sitcom? And what’s your favourite episode of Curb? mesm

I think about I Love Lucy a lot. In this modern age of streaming, when an episode can be whatever length you want, I think it’s really important to respect your elders and remember to entertain. I don’t like things that are bloated. I am never not thinking about the audience and it’s much more important to me how they feel than I do. So I think about Lucille Ball just metronomically dropping the jokes around a good story, with a commercial break. You have to hit in that way. Even if the streaming service you’re on says they don’t care how long your episode is. There’s some laziness in modern TV, and a self-indulgence I don’t think I allow myself.

I have seen maybe a 20th of Curb Your Enthusiasm. I really like it a lot, it’s just having the number of children that I have, I can’t watch all the TV that I want. I will say that I have watched some Vince Vaughn episodes of Curb and I’m very grateful that Larry David and Vince Vaughn found each other. A lot of people slot into that show well and surprise you. I was shocked at how good Lin-Manuel Miranda was. He was amazing. And some people have not slotted in as well; they don’t quite get the rhythm.

How do you find comedy differs between the UK and the US? Do American audiences get it? Vammyp

I do think that American audiences get British comedy and I think British audiences get American comedy. When you get up to the big leagues professionally, if someone is funny here, they’re funny there. The difference for me is that I find the average British citizen to be funnier than the average American citizen. My theory for this is greater population density. In gigantic Oklahoma you spend your whole day without seeing anybody. Here, you’re bumping into people all the time and you have to lubricate that with some levity. New Yorkers are funnier than people from Oklahoma on average because of proximity. Living in a city is psychologically healthy.

Rob Delaney photographed in Islington in 2020. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

How do you get to be good-looking, clever, funny and nice? Is that fair? Misadventurer

Thank you. Good-looking? That’s in the eye of the beholder. There are people who think I’m good-looking and there are people who don’t. They’re both right. If I’m clever, it’s maybe because I read a lot. Funny? I’m grateful that the way that I synthesise information and send it back to people means they laugh at it sometimes. Nice is the only one that I think is a decision. I do try to be nice because it takes just as much time to be nice as it does to be a jerk. Why not be nice? Life is very, very difficult and very painful a lot of the time. Why would I add to that? Is it fair? No, it’s not fair. Life is not fair. It’s awful. And then you die.

I can imagine that you’ve got an interesting collection of CDs, vinyl and – maybe – some cassette tapes as well. Which or who would be your go-to band/musician/album and why? Sungold01

I am doing a forensic study of Beck right now. Really listening to the albums from top to bottom, again and again, and finding that very rewarding. Also the band Grizzly Bear and any side projects or solo projects. I really do like to break it down and just focus on one instrument, and I find that the music of both those groups rewards that sort of very nerdy, academic listening style.

I once walked by you in Camden in north London and wanted to approach you and say hi, but stopped myself. How do you feel about celebrity, and about complete strangers approaching you to have a chat? cocteau88

I have two different feelings about that. If I’m with my kids or my wife, turn around and walk in the opposite direction, even if it means you don’t get to go where you’re going. Don’t look at me, don’t even breathe. If I’m by myself, come on up and say hi! It’s not that I don’t wanna meet you when I’m with my family, it’s just that I don’t want my kids to think that their dad is anything other than a normal person. So I’m trying to preserve that for as long as possible.

Hash browns in a full English? A slice or two of black pudding? And, of course, how do you like your eggs? What is your go-to full English combo and how do you like it served? (Baked beans in a ramekin?!) Murdomania

I love a full English. Really important to me is the half a tomato. I’ve read that by cooking the tomato, it releases more lycopene, which they say is very good for you. Why does black pudding taste good? It’s gross that it exists, but Christ, it’s good. So those are the two things I think most deeply about.

As a short-arse, I’ve often found myself blocked from any view behind a less vertically challenged individual. On realising this, most people insist I move in front, even though I probably still can’t see much. I often wonder how far back the tall people end up, and how fair this is. Do you ever get to be at the front? Is there a correlation between longsightedness and tallness to compensate? bigflatfeet

That’s a good question. I can see very well from far away, but even as I read this question, I’m wearing my glasses because I can no longer see things up-close. I am conscious of it and I do deliberately stand at the back in all situations because I’m 6ft 4in, which is not freakishly tall, but it’s too tall. It can ruin things for people.

Promoting Deadpool & Wolverine in London with

Ryan Reynolds, Emma Corrin and Hugh Jackman. Photograph: Hollie Adams/Reuters

How important is your Irish heritage in all you do, be it politics or screen? Are you aware of those who have gone before you within your family, and do you tap into it as you write? EmperorofCork

Not in any way. Couldn’t be less important. Yes, my Irish heritage is important to me emotionally, and in the context in which I experience things and see things. But how would I put in specifically Irish politics? I guess the relationship between Ireland and the UK has a very lopsided, terrible dynamic. So if I were to interpret that, then, yes, I do fight for the underdog and I am willing to die for ideals. I think that is important to my politics, but how that translates to screen, I have no idea. I’m reading Neil Jordan’s recent autobiography. That might help me to better answer that question because he’s one of my favourite artists in any medium.

In terms of the second part: my dad died a couple years ago of leukaemia that he got from Agent Orange, during an American war of empire he was drafted to go and fight because he was poor. So that’s bad and sad. That couldn’t not inform the writing that I do now because that’s very unfair. It’s not unique, and it’s nothing compared to what happened to people in Vietnam as a result of what the American military did there. But I am in the process of dealing with and metabolising the fact that my dad died earlier than he would have otherwise for a pretty bad couple of reasons that were a result of political decisions. So I like that question. It’s something I’m thinking about.

Deadpool & Wolverine is out on 25 July

Boeing

Boeing faces fresh safety questions after engine fire on flight from Scotland

Passengers saw flames soon after flight left Edinburgh for New York in 2023, leading to emergency Prestwick landing

Severin Carrell Scotland editor

Thu 18 Jul 2024 09.41 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 13.49 EDT

Flames were filmed by a passenger en route to Prestwick. Photograph: AAIB

Boeing faces fresh questions about the safety of its aircraft after an engine fire on a transatlantic flight from Edinburgh caused an emergency landing soon after takeoff.

Flames were seen by passengers briefly shooting from the engine of a Delta Air Lines 767 soon after it took off for New York in February last year, after a turbine blade broke off during takeoff.

The flames subsided while the plane was airborne but it made an emergency landing at Prestwick airport south of Glasgow, where ground crew noticed fuel leaking from the plane’s right wing.

The Air Accidents Investigation Branch, the UK government agency that investigates aviation safety, has written to the Federal Aviation Administration in the US asking it to take action with Boeing, which has its headquarters in Virginia.

The AAIB said the fractured turbine blade damaged five other blades in the engine. Vibrations from the “out of balance turbine” caused a tube carrying fuel in the wing to fracture, leading fuel to escape from the wing’s fuel tank.

The fuel was ignited by the engine’s hot air exhaust, with footage of the flames captured by a passenger sitting near the wing.

In a statement, the AAIB said: “A safety recommendation has been made to the Federal Aviation Administration that requires the Boeing Aircraft Company to demonstrate that following this serious incident, the design of the slat track housing drain tube on the Boeing 767 family of aircraft continues to comply with the certification requirements for large transport aircraft.”

The Delta flight to JFK airport in New York was carrying 211 passengers and 10 crew. It said two members of the cabin crew had heard a rattling sound as the Boeing taxied for takeoff, which appeared to come from the cargo hold.

Nothing abnormal was seen or heard by the pilots, but the noise continued during takeoff. They warned the flights purser, who tried but failed to warn the pilots on the plane’s internal phone. She made contact at the second attempt and said passengers were alarmed by the “quite bad” noise.

A temperature indicator for the right engine began fluctuating. The flight commander walked the length of the aircraft but could not locate any specific issues. He decided to divert the plane to Prestwick, which has long runways, as a precaution.

An excerpt from the Air Accidents Investigation Branch report. Photograph: AAIB

En route to Prestwick, the flames were filmed by a passenger. The flames disappeared and the commander decided to fly on with the right engine at reduced power.

There were no injuries as a result of the incident but the AAIB said all those onboard were “rapidly disembarked” once the fuel leak was spotted at Prestwick.

Boeing has been contacted for comment.

This is the latest in a series of safety incidents involving Boeing aircraft, which have contributed to company executives leaving in a management shake-up. It pleaded guilty to US criminal charges over the crashes of two 737 Max jetliners in 2018 and 2019 after violating an agreement with regulators in 2021.

It has also been sanctioned after a 737 Max 9 cabin panel blew out in mid-air on an Alaska Airlines flight from Portland, Oregon, in January this year. A number of whistleblowers have gone public with concerns about safety culture and management at the company.

In 2021, the UK government temporarily banned from British airspace Boeing 777 aircraft which used the same type of engine which caught fire over Denver, Colorado.

This article was amended on 18 July 2024. An earlier version showed an aircraft that was not appropriate to the story. This has been replaced.

Opinion  Covid inquiry

The Covid inquiry report makes it clear: Britain was completely and fatally unprepared

Devi Sridhar

The UK must never succumb to such shocking complacency again. Planning for the next pandemic must start now

Thu 18 Jul 2024 09.12 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 13.07 EDT

Boris Johnson prepares to give a Covid press briefing, 17 March 2020. Photograph: Matt Dunham/EPA

In 2002, Sars, a dangerous coronavirus, spread across the world with a fatality rate of around 10%. Although it was contained relatively quickly, east Asian countries learned from this experience and updated their pandemic preparedness plans. Their governments wanted to be ready if the virus returned. On the other side of the world, the UK didn’t react or adapt. Complacency was at play, especially with the assumption that Britain was one of the most prepared countries in the world for a pandemic.

The consequence, as Lady Hallett’s first report from the Covid inquiry notes, is that the UK government failed in its basic responsibility to its citizens of keeping them safe. The UK had too many preventable deaths, not only from Covid, but also from the shutdown of health services and a long lockdown that would have been unnecessary had public health systems been in place.

There’s not much positive in the report about government preparedness in the years before 2020. It points to the lack of a containment strategy: why was so little planning or thought given to public health infrastructure – namely test, trace, isolate – prior to 2020? Why did officials initially think that the virus was unstoppable when other countries were showing that containment was possible in 2020 (and had shown it was possible with two other coronaviruses, Sars and Mers, in the years before)? Hallett pointed specifically to the health secretaries – Jeremy Hunt, then Matt Hancock – who not only maintained the flawed plan in the years before the Covid pandemic, but also left things in such a state that the wider government was not prepared to coordinate a wider response to what she called “whole-system civil emergencies”.

Those who faced the cost of this were social care and health workers sent on to wards and into care homes without appropriate PPE; people who lost their businesses and income as a result of lengthy lockdowns; the children who faced months of closed schools; and all those whose lives were adversely affected by the pandemic and the kneejerk response to managing it.

On top of the lack of preparedness and strategy, the UK was further hindered by underlying health inequalities. Britain fares badly when compared with other European nations in terms of chronic disease, obesity and poverty, which were all risk factors for hospitalisation and death from Covid. Sizable segments of the population faced health issues that made them vulnerable to becoming severely ill from the disease. There is a longer trail of failure, less directly acknowledged by the report, that leads to the austerity policies in the decade before 2020 that left people poorer and sicker, and public services unable to cope.

Fortunately, the report comes with 10 sharp recommendations and a six-month timeline for a response and a plan of action. At their core is the charge that the bureaucracy governing pandemic preparedness, and who is responsible for what, is too complex. When too many agencies and groups are involved, then no single one is accountable for a response. The report calls for a radical simplification of the system, including a single, independent body responsible for running pandemic-planning exercises every three years and informing the public of the outcome; for assessing health inequalities in the population and identifying at-risk groups; and for ensuring that a diverse set of voices is brought to the table to avoid groupthink. All of these would make the UK better prepared.

This report throws British complacency into stark relief. UK officials and experts were used to going into less developed countries in Asia and Africa to tell them how to do things in health. Britain thought it knew best, instead of learning from the outbreak-response systems these countries had set up over years of managing various outbreaks. When it came time to act, rather than lecture, other countries outpaced Britain immediately because they had a clear plan. Those countries that managed to contain without strict lockdown measures saved lives and their economies, and then quickly pivoted to mass vaccination and opening up in 2021. Just compare the death rates of Japan and South Korea to the UK and Sweden.

We will have another pandemic. It’s not if, but when. Already avian flu (H5N1) is mutating in cows and other mammals in ways we haven’t seen before, increasing the risk of a human pandemic. The report’s call is a powerful one: let’s not let the loss and grief of 2020 to 2022 be in vain. Let’s learn now and do better next time. That’s something that, regardless of your position on the pandemic and the restrictions, we can all agree on.

- Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh

Ranked  R&B

So good, so good, so good: Destiny’s Child’s greatest songs – ranked!

As their classic album The Writing’s on the Wall turns 25, we appraise the best of a girl group whose futuristic sound still sounds fresh – and who gave the world Beyoncé

Alexis Petridis

Thu 18 Jul 2024 09.09 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 09.10 EDT

Kelly Rowland, Beyoncé and Michelle Williams of Destiny’s Child in Melbourne, 2005. Photograph: Martin Philbey/Redferns

20. Temptation (1999)

There is no getting around the fact that Temptation is a deeply weird idea on paper: a dreamy ballad about contemplating infidelity (“I’ma write your number in the palm of my hand / Oops, I forgot I got a man”) with a melody stolen from the children’s song This Old Man. But the strangest thing about it may be how well it works.

19. Brown Eyes (2001)

Amid the Survivor album’s Stevie Nicks samples and futuristic beats, Brown Eyes is an old-fashioned pop-R&B ballad that wouldn’t be out of place on Mellow Magic – tellingly, it was co-written by Mariah Carey’s longstanding collaborator Walter Afanasieff. The great vocals from Kelly Rowland and Michelle Williams are proof that, for all that Beyoncé was now co-writing and co-producing everything, Destiny’s Child were never a one-woman show. What a song.

18. Nasty Girl (2001)

Destiny’s Child: Nasty Girl – video.

It’s hard to work out whether Nasty Girl is aimed at someone in particular, or is a general complaint about the oversexualisation of female artists. Either way, it would doubtless get condemned for “slut-shaming” today. Unsisterly, perhaps, but the insults it throws its subject’s way are wickedly bracing and the suitably tough music is terrific.

17. Cater 2 U (2004)

Beyoncé also wouldn’t release Cater 2 U today; its vision of how women should behave within a relationship seemed unnecessarily subservient even 20 years ago. But ignore the lyrics, which stop just short of offering to wipe her boo’s bum for him, and it’s musically superb – a sparklingly original take on a slow jam.

16. Apple Pie à la Mode (2001)

Home to the oddest lyric in the Destiny’s Child oeuvre – “Starin’ at me, had my nostrils open wide” – Apple Pie à la Mode is fabulous nonetheless: super-cool, low-slung funk with a supremely creative vocal arrangement that weaves the three singers’ contributions intricately around each other. Sorry, did you say nostrils?

15. Girl (2004)

Destiny’s Child: Girl – video.

Girl reaches back into soul music history – it’s based around a luscious sample from a heavily orchestrated 1977 single by the Dramatics. Dismissed by some critics as sappy, there is darkness at its centre: the conversational lyrics were inspired by an abusive relationship in which Rowland was embroiled.

14. Through With Love (2004)

The album version is great, but the take on Through With Love you want is the one recorded live on the Destiny Fulfilled tour: wind machines turned up to full, gospel choir on stage and – for once – Williams’ super-powerful testifying vocal stealing the spotlight.

13. Emotion (2001)

Destiny’s Child didn’t record many covers, but their most famous displays excellent taste. It’s an imperial-phase Barry and Robin Gibb ballad, intended for the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, but turned into a 1978 hit by Samantha Sang. The melody is pure Bee Gees. (The Neptunes’ breakbeat-driven remix is worth seeking out.)

12. Soldier (ft TI and Lil Wayne) (2004)

Destiny’s Child: Soldier (ft TI and Lil Wayne) – video.

History has Soldier down as the moment when Beyoncé went public about her relationship with Jay-Z – or at least a mysterious “boy from the BK” – but the sharp take on southern hip-hop has more to commend it than gossip value. Lil Wayne later claimed his guest verse kickstarted his career.

11. Bug a Boo (1999)

A commercial disappointment, so much so that the Refugee Camp remix opens with an admission: “We’re gonna do it right the second time.” No need: the original is a perfect mix of ping-ponging synths and salty lyrics (“Even if the pope said he liked you, too / I don’t really care”).

10. Bills, Bills, Bills (1999)

Destiny’s Child: Bills, Bills, Bills – video.

Destiny’s Child’s answer to former tourmates TLC’s No Scrubs, which spikes its no-romance-without-finance narrative with moral indignation – not only is he less flush than he pretended to be, he’s maxed out her cards and drained her petrol tank. The fabulous staccato rhythm track is filled with pregnant pauses.

9. Get on the Bus (1998)

The great overlooked Destiny’s Child single found its co-producer, Timbaland, at the peak of his visionary form. The lurching, frantic bassline is spliced with scatterings of acoustic guitar and moments where the vocals are battling for space with samples of birdsong. A minor hit – perhaps too wacky for mass consumption – it still sounds amazing.

Four-piece Destiny’s Child – LaTavia Roberson, Kelly Rowland, Beyoncé and LeToya Luckett – in 1998. Photograph: Fred Duval/FilmMagic

8. Survivor (2001)

Survivor threw so much shade the way of two former Destiny’s Child members that it occasioned a lawsuit. Beyoncé, Rowland and – in an awesome middle eight – Williams sing up a ferocious storm, but its greatness isn’t really in its lyrics, rather the melody and backing to which it harnesses them: forceful and epic enough that their vitriol sounds like empowerment.

7. No, No, No Part 2 (1997)

No, No, No Part 1 was a fairly standard slow jam, but Wyclef Jean’s remix transformed it into something out of the ordinary. It’s faster and tougher, the sound stripped back to a beat, a killer bassline and a Love Unlimited Orchestra sample (there is a nod to Sly and the Family Stone in the vocals, too).

6. So Good (1999)

The first, and possibly best, of Destiny’s Child’s diss tracks, aimed at persons unknown who “said we wouldn’t make it” (“Stop smilin’ at me,” offers an enraged Beyoncé). So Good’s genius lies in its lightness of touch: a warped acoustic guitar sample and perky – if bizarre – scratching effects amplify the heartfelt ire.

5. Jumpin’, Jumpin’ (1999)

A backing track intended for a hip-hop album, but mistakenly sent to Destiny’s Child by the producer Chad Elliott, was transformed by Beyoncé into Jumpin’, Jumpin’s irresistible evocation of the dancefloor as a cure for life’s ills. The vocal ties Beyoncé’s old-school R&B voice to rap-inspired phrasing and the spiralling bridge is exhilarating.

4. Say My Name (1999)

Destiny’s Child: Say My Name – video

By Say My Name’s release, Destiny’s Child were in turmoil – half the band left before the video was made. But it’s an assured, spectacular single – its leaps into double-time are electrifying – and early evidence of Beyoncé’s steely approach: the producer Rodney Jerkins was forced to rework the whole song on her say-so.

3. Lose My Breath (2004)

They may have stronger songs melodically, but is any Destiny’s Child single as flat-out exciting as Lose My Breath? Beats courtesy of a university marching band (an idea Beyoncé evidently filed away for future use), dramatic synth stabs, sampled gasps and panting; this is Jerkins at his far-out best.

2. Independent Women Part 1 (1999)

The solitary Destiny’s Child single to feature Farrah Franklin proved rather more enduring than her tenure in the band – she was gone before it was released. An ode to empowerment with a monster-sized chorus, it also long outlived the Charlie’s Angels film it soundtracked.

1. Bootylicious (2001)

Destiny’s Child: Bootylicious – video

The usual line about Bootylicious is that it provoked an addition to the Oxford English Dictionary (“esp. of a woman, often with reference to the buttocks: sexually attractive, sexy, shapely”). That tells you something about its commercial success, but not about the song’s quality. There is genius in how the guitar and hi-hat from Stevie Nicks’ Edge of Seventeen are repurposed – the sample is immediately recognisable and transformed by the beat underneath it – as well as in the rawness of Beyoncé’s vocal and the abundance of hooks. Perhaps the best tribute you can pay it is that, 20-plus years of ubiquity later, it still sounds thrilling.

Brazil

Violence against women in Brazil reaches highest levels on record

Brazilian Forum on Public Safety finds every indicator of gender-based violence increased in 2023, including murder, harassment and stalking

Tiago Rogero in Rio de Janeiro

Thu 18 Jul 2024 09.07 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 14.36 EDT

Women protest in São Paulo against a bill that would equate an abortion carried out after 22 weeks of pregnancy with the crime of murder. Photograph: Amanda Perobelli/Reuters

Brazil has recorded unprecedented levels of rape and other forms of gender-based violence for the second year running, amid growing concerns over rightwing efforts to criminalize rape victims who have an abortion.

The data, released on Thursday in the annual report by the Brazilian Forum on Public Safety, showed that reported cases of rape rose by 6.5% from the previous year to a new historic high of 83,988 – or one every six minutes.

Experts say the figures are “even more alarming” against a backdrop of far-right activism, which includes a bill currently before the lower house of Congress that seeks to penalize rape survivors who seek a termination.

Every single indicator of gender-based violence increased in 2023 compared with the previous year, including murder (0.8%), sexual harassment (48.7%) and stalking (34.5%).

In contrast, the total number of homicides (against men and women) fell for the sixth consecutive year, dropping 3.4% from 47,963 in 2022 to 46,328 last year.

One possible explanation for the continued increase in gender-based violence may be the lingering after-effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, said the forum’s executive director, Samira Bueno.

“Since 2021, the figures for violence against women have been increasing at an accelerated rate, and they’re much higher than in the pre-pandemic period,” she said.

“Brazil has always been a very violent country … but it seems that the pandemic changed something. The tensions that arose in the domestic environment potentially exacerbated all these forms of violence,” she said.

Many states do not record details of the racial background of rape victims, but the data where available suggested that at least 52% of them were black.

Children continued to be dramatically overrepresented among rape survivors, with 61.6% aged 13 or younger – most of whom who were assaulted by family members or acquaintances (84.7%), a profile that remained unchanged.

Activists warn that they risk further victimisation under proposed legislation in the chamber of deputies which would penalise women who undergo an abortion after 22 weeks, even in cases of rape.

Abortion is illegal in Brazil, but there is an exception for rape. The new legislation, backed by supporters of the rightwing former president Jair Bolsonaro, would impose prison sentences of up to 20 years for a termination – equal to that for homicide and longer than that for rape (up to 15 years).

After an outcry from feminist and human rights movements, the legislation is now dormant in the lower house, but activists fear it could be revived – and warn that it would inevitably penalise victims of child sexual abuse.

“These are children who don’t have the maturity to understand that they’re being victims of rape,” said Bueno, who added that many young victims do not even realise they are pregnant.

“So criminalising the victim for a supposed ‘delay’ in having an abortion is yet another form of violence against these girls,” she said.

“Our Congress is completely disconnected from what is happening to the population, especially to girls and women,” said Bueno. “Shouldn’t we be discussing how to support these victims?”

For the first time, the report also ranked rape rates in cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants. The highest rate was record in in Sorriso in Mato Grosso state.

There were 77,000 cases of stalking reported in 2023, an increase of 34%. “This data is particularly relevant because stalking is a crime that often precedes other forms of violence – such as murder,” said Bueno.

Stalking was recognised as a crime in Brazil only in 2021, so the rates are expected to increase yearly as more people become aware of the law.

Despite a new decrease in the total number of homicides, Brazil still accounts for 10% of the world’s murders from just 3% of the global population.

“Brazil was able to reduce murders for another year, but it has also become much more unsafe for girls and women,” said Bueno.

Black farmers

‘The beginning of Black liberation’: photographs tell the real story of the Mississippi Delta

The work of Justin Hardiman documents the lives of Black southern farmers, long sidelined in mainstream narratives

Adria R Walker

Thu 18 Jul 2024 09.00 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 09.02 EDT

The Soil exhibition showcases the work of Justin Hardiman, center, whose photography tells the story of Black farmers in the Mississippi Delta. Photograph: Courtesy Raven Barnes

On a hot afternoon in June, four people stood in the lobby of Travelers Hotel off Third Street in Clarksdale, Mississippi, each taking in the images that lined its walls. The photographs are part of Soil, an exhibition depicting Black farmers in the Mississippi Delta.

The town’s art and culture district, where Travelers Hotel is located, serves as a living monument to the region’s history – with signs, murals and banners every few feet that immortalize famous current and former residents, such as Early Wright, the first Black disc jockey in Mississippi, and the musicians Leo Welch and “Kingfish” Ingram. If Mississippi is known as the birthplace of America’s music, Clarksdale is the home of the blues.

Created in the Mississippi Delta, which stretches from Vicksburg, Mississippi, to Memphis, Tennessee, the blues is a genre inextricably linked to the back-breaking work of Black farmers, descendants of enslaved people, who created a new form of music as they toiled. The exhibit seeks to highlight that connection and pay homage to the continuing legacy of those farmers. The photographs, shot by the Jackson-born photographer Justin Hardiman, and co-curated by his fellow Jacksonian Adrienne Domnick, counter dominant narratives about Black life and Black farmers in the delta, showing the pride, history and dignity of their labor.

In one of the images, The Harvest, the essence of the blues comes to life: Jeremy Miller, a young farmer clad in a blue T-shirt and bluejeans, holds a mesh sack full of recently harvested greens. He stands firmly planted in rows of collard greens with the sun glistening on his skin. Like generations of Black farmers before him, Miller reaped the greens himself – through Hardiman’s lens, he holds his abundant yield as evidence of the continuation of that work.

“When people think about Mississippi, they never center the Black people of Mississippi,” Hardiman said. “My work is about centering us, making the story about us. Don’t forget about us.”

‘Folks talk about us, but not necessarily to us’

In the antebellum period, the Mississippi Delta was one of the richest regions in the country, due to wealth generated by enslaved people on cotton plantations. But while the music that accompanied their labor is celebrated throughout the region and world today, the modern Black farmers whose ancestors fueled the area’s economy are largely rendered anonymous.

Since slavery and the years after reconstruction, art, news and other media depicting Black Deltans have remained relatively consistent: they are often faceless, out-of-focus Black bodies; anonymous figures in large, white fields. But in Soil, Black farmers are the focal point.

One exhibit photo, The Fruits of Our Labor, depicts three men and one woman in a field with a church visible in the far distance. The farmers’ gaze is firm and proud; they appear to be staring back at the viewer. The group represents three generations of Jonestown, Mississippi, natives, standing on land owned by the Swan Lake Association, founded in 1870, as a partnership among multiple Black churches in the delta. The churches purchased more than 600 acres (243 hectares) of land together, in hopes that people who moved out of the state would have land whenever they came home.

“Justin was really adamant [about] focusing on the people, and that speaks directly to what the work is about: documenting and immortalizing Black folks in the south,” said Jasmine Williams, whose organization ’Sipp Talk Media produced the exhibition. “Folks talk about us, but not necessarily to us. I think it gave us an opportunity to show what the alternative narrative of Mississippi could look like outside of what mainstream media tells us Mississippi is.”

‘This is about being one with our ancestors’

At the opening event, farmers were able to sell some of their produce to attendees as they explored the exhibit. By marrying the exhibition to the land, the collaborators erased a distance that often exists between the subject and the work produced.

“It was really important for folks who were a part of the photoshoot to have it in their backyard,” said Tyler Yarbrough, a manager at Rootswell, a group working to “shift the paradigm of food apartheid”. “Having the exhibition in the town gave the farmers a chance to see the power in their work … and also to have more buy-in on what we’re trying to do.”

The exhibition ‘gave us an opportunity to show what the alternative narrative of Mississippi could look like’, said Jasmine Williams, whose organization produced it. Photograph: Raven Barnes

Changing the narratives around Mississippi and the delta is key to all of the partners behind Soil. For his part, Hardiman said he thinks about soil and the delta as “the genesis”.

“That’s the beginning of all Black liberation,” Hardiman said. “It’s a lot of history in the delta that’s not talked about and it’s a lot of stories not being told from people who look like us, so it’s just me doing my part in trying to contribute something to the world and leave something behind.”

Soil creates a record of both the seasoned Black farmers who have worked the land for decades and the younger generations who are beginning to come into their own.

Bennie Brown, a farmer who’s photographed in The Fruits of Our Labor, is continuing the legacy started by the Swan Lake Association, for instance. As president of the group, Brown has created an incubator to train the next generation of Black farmers.

Following in his grandfather’s footsteps, Robbie Pollard became a farmer after a long career in IT. Pollard, who created the healthy food initiative Happy Food Project, is pictured in a photo called Farmer’s Market – he sits on the back of a bus that he plans to turn into a mobile farmers’ market and food truck.

And in Sowing Seeds, Robert Miller II is pictured with his arm wrapped around his son, while standing on the 1,400-acre Bland Family Farm, which has been owned by four generations of Black farmers.

These photographs represent not only the delta’s present, but also the future that Rootswell and other community advocates are building. As the exhibit’s statement reads: “It is a testament to the enduring legacy of Black farmers whose labor sustains not only their communities but also the very fabric of Mississippi.”

Meta

Meta pulls plug on release of advanced AI model in EU

‘Unpredictable’ privacy regulations prompt Facebook owner to scrap regional plans for multimodal Llama

- Business live – latest updates

Dan Milmo Global technology editor

Thu 18 Jul 2024 08.51 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 15.01 EDT

Meta’s decision on the multimodal Llama model relates to whether it complies with GDPR rules. Illustration: Sopa/LightRocket/Getty

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta will not release an advanced version of its artificial intelligence model in the EU, blaming the decision on the “unpredictable” behaviour of regulators.

The owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp is preparing to issue its Llama model in multimodal form, meaning it is able to work across text, video, images and audio instead of just one format. Llama is an open source model, allowing it to be freely downloaded and adapted by users.

However, a Meta spokesperson confirmed the model would not be available in the EU. The decision underlines tensions between big tech and Brussels amid a tougher regulatory environment.

“We will release a multimodal Llama model over the coming months – but not in the EU due to the unpredictable nature of the European regulatory environment,” the spokesperson said.

Brussels is introducing the EU AI Act, which comes into force next month, while new regulatory requirements are being put in place for big tech firms in the form of the Digital Markets Act (DMA).

However, Meta’s decision on the multimodal Llama model relates to whether it complies with GDPR (general data protection regulations). Meta has been ordered to stop training its AI models with posts from Facebook and Instagram users in the EU because of concerns it may violate privacy rules.

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, which oversees Meta’s compliance with GDPR, said it was continuing discussions with the company over its model training.

However, Meta is concerned that other EU data watchdogs can intervene in the regulatory process and bring approval to a halt. Text-based versions of Llama are available in the EU and a new text-only version will be released in the EU soon – but those models were not trained on EU Meta user data.

The move follows Apple’s announcement last month that it will not roll out some of its new AI features in the EU owing to concerns about complying with the DMA.

Meta had been planning to use its multimodal Llama model in products such its Ray-Ban smart glasses and on smartphones. The Llama decision was first reported by Axios.

Meta also announced on Wednesday that it had suspended use of generative AI tools in Brazil after the government raised privacy concerns over the use of user data to train models. The company said it had decided to pause use of the tools while it held talks with Brazil’s data authority.

Italy

Italian journalist ordered to pay €5,000 damages over Giorgia Meloni height jibe

Giulia Cortese convicted of defamation over two tweets that judge in Milan said amounted to ‘body shaming’

Angela Giuffrida in Rome

Thu 18 Jul 2024 08.42 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 13.37 EDT

Meloni’s lawyer said she would donate the €5,000 to charity when a definitive sentence was confirmed and the money was paid. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

An Italian court has ordered a journalist to pay €5,000 in damages to the prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, for mocking her height over social media in what was defined as “body shaming”.

Giulia Cortese, a journalist based in Milan, was also given a suspended fine of €1,200 over the jibe, which dated back to October 2021, a year before Meloni’s far-right coalition government came to power.

The pair clashed after Cortese, 36, published a mocked-up photo of Meloni with the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in the background on Twitter, now X. In reaction, Meloni wrote on Facebook that the “falsified photo” was of “unique gravity” and that she had instructed her lawyer to pursue legal action against the journalist.

In two further tweets on the same day, Cortese wrote messages that translate as: “The media pillory you created on your Facebook page qualifies you for what you are: a little woman,” and “You don’t scare me, Giorgia Meloni. After all, you’re only 1.2 metres (4 ft) tall. I can’t even see you.”

Cortese was acquitted over the tweet comparing Meloni to Mussolini, but convicted of defamation over the latter two, which the Milan judge said amounted to “body shaming”.

Cortese said that being convicted over a “joke phrase” was “scandalous”. “There’s [a] climate of persecution. I don’t feel I have the freedom any more to write about this government, because once you are identified as an inconvenient journalist for this government, they don’t let anything pass,” Cortese told the Guardian.

Cortese can appeal but is undecided about whether to do so. “Going ahead with it risks costing me a lot, and I don’t know how it would end,” she said.

Meloni’s lawyer said she would donate the €5,000 to charity when a definitive sentence was confirmed and the money was paid.

According to various Italian news outlets, Meloni is 1.63 metres (5ft 3in) tall.

It is not the first time she has taken legal action against a journalist or someone who has criticised her publicly. Since coming to power, her government has been accused of making strategic use of defamation suits to silence journalists and public intellectuals.

In a high-profile case last autumn, the anti-mafia writer Roberto Saviano was found guilty of libelling Meloni and fined €1,000 for calling her “a bastard” over her migration policies. The case dated back to a TV interview in December 2020 in which Saviano, author of the bestselling book Gomorrah, castigated Meloni and her fellow far-right leader Matteo Salvini on TV over their vitriol towards charity-run ships rescuing people in the Mediterranean.

Meloni is also suing the Palestinian journalist Rula Jebreal, who has Italian and Israeli citizenship, over a tweet dating from September 2022. In addition, Jebreal is being sued by Fabio Rampelli, a politician from Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, and vice-president of the lower house of parliament, over a tweet in January.

Meloni’s government has been accused of exerting its influence over the state broadcaster, Rai, and other Italian media. In April, Rai came under fire for alleged censorship after the abrupt cancellation of an anti-fascist monologue that was due to be read by the author Antonio Scurati.

Meloni attacked Scurati on social media while accusing the left of “crying at the regime”.

Covid inquiry

‘Fatal strategic flaws’: first report of UK Covid inquiry pinpoints serious errors of state

Health secretaries failed to amend contingency planning before Covid killed more than 230,000, report says

- Covid inquiry – live updates

- Five key takeaways from Covid report

Robert Booth and Peter Walker

Thu 18 Jul 2024 08.40 EDT

First published on Thu 18 Jul 2024 07.00 EDT

Pandemic planning 'failed' people in Britain, Covid inquiry finds – video

The UK’s pandemic planning was beset by “fatal strategic flaws” and citizens everywhere were failed, a damning first report from the UK Covid-19 public inquiry has found, putting pressure on the prime minister to overhaul the national civil emergencies system.

Lady Hallett, chair of the statutory inquiry into the pandemic that claimed more than 230,000 lives, pinpointed “serious errors on the part of the state” in the way it prepared for the risk of a pandemic. “Never again can a disease be allowed to lead to so many deaths and so much suffering,” she said.

The former Conservative health secretaries Jeremy Hunt and Matt Hancock were criticised for their failure to better prepare the UK.

But as Hallett predicted the arrival of another pandemic, possibly more transmissible and lethal, in the near to medium future, the Nuffield Trust health thinktank warned that neither the NHS nor social care services were “in a much more resilient state and in some areas they are weaker”.

Hallett said it was now time to treat preparedness and resilience for a whole-system emergency like a threat from a hostile state. She made 10 “far reaching” recommendations to “avoid the terrible losses and costs to society that the Covid-19 pandemic brought” and said she expected them all to be acted upon.

In response, the prime minister, Keir Starmer, said: “The safety and security of the country should always be the first priority, and this government is committed to learning the lessons from the inquiry and putting better measures in place to protect and prepare us from the impact of any future pandemic.”

The recommendations included:

- The leader or deputy leader of each of the four nations should chair a cabinet-level committee responsible for civil emergency preparedness.

- A UK-wide pandemic response exercise to run at least every three years and a new whole-system civil emergency strategy be put in place.

- External “red teams” should regularly challenge groupthink on the principles, evidence and advice on emergency plans.

- A radical simplification of civil emergency preparedness and resilience systems, (the current system’s flow chart looked like “a bowl of spaghetti”).

Hallett found that the government had focused largely on the threat of an influenza outbreak despite the fact that coronaviruses in Asia and the Middle East in the preceding years meant another coronavirus outbreak at a pandemic scale was foreseeable. To overlook that was “a fundamental error”.

“It was not a black swan event,” she said in a 240-page report, the first of at least 10 due to come from the multi-strand inquiry which will run into at least 2026.

The report concluded: “The processes, planning and policy of the civil contingency structures within the UK government and devolved administrations and civil services failed their citizens. Ministers and officials were guilty of ‘groupthink’ that led to a false consensus that the UK was well prepared for a pandemic.”

Hunt, who was the health secretary from 2012-18, and Hancock, who took over until 2021, were named by Hallett for failing to rectify flaws in contingency planning before the pandemic. Hallett said the “harrowing accounts of loss and grief” she had heard during evidence gathering “serve to remind us why there must be radical reform”.

The Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group, representing about 7,000 families many of whom had pushed for an inquiry, welcomed the report as a “hard-hitting, clear-sighted and damning analysis of how and why the UK found itself to be fatally underprepared”; the report was “a huge milestone”.

Hallett said preparations for a no-deal Brexit caused work on pandemic preparedness to be paused. She touched on the impact of austerity, saying in the years preceding the Covid-19 outbreak “there had been a slowdown in health improvement, and health inequalities had widened, public services were running close to, if not beyond capacity”.

But bereaved people said the conclusions had not “gone far enough in setting out how [to] challenge, address and improve inequalities and capacity of public services”.

Thea Stein, chief executive of the Nuffield Trust thinktank, said the worrying reality was that more than four years on from the start of the pandemic “short-termism and ad-hoc funding decisions” remained rife across the NHS and social care.

Daisy Cooper, the Liberal Democrats’ health spokesperson, said : “Today must be a moment for change. The country was badly let down during the pandemic and this new government must ensure that lessons are learned swiftly.”

Paul Nowak, general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, described the report as a moment of truth. He said austerity had left the UK underprepared and that “faced with the biggest crisis since the second world war our defences were down as a result of severe spending cuts”.

Key flaws in preparedness identified by Hallett included:

- The UK being prepared for the wrong pandemic, focusing on influenza.

- The institutions responsible for emergency planning being “labyrinthine in their complexity”.

- The government’s sole pandemic strategy (for flu, dating from 2011) being outdated and lacking adaptability.

- Failure to appreciate the impact of the pandemic, and the response to it, on minority ethnic communities, and people in poor health and with other vulnerabilities.

- Failure to learn from earlier civil emergency exercises and disease outbreaks.

- A “damaging absence of focus” on systems such as test, trace and isolate that could be scaled up.

Regarding lockdowns, Hallett highlighted Hancock’s evidence that the 2011 flu strategy was not for preventing a pandemic having a disastrous effect but “a strategy of dealing with the disastrous effect of a pandemic”. The strategy gave no consideration to legally mandated lockdowns as a response and Hallett said they must in future “be considered properly in advance of a novel infectious disease outbreak” alongside ways to prevent a lockdown.

She said all health secretaries who adhered to the 2011 strategy, including Hunt, bore responsibility “for failing to have these flaws examined and rectified”.

“This includes Mr Hancock, who abandoned the strategy when the pandemic struck, by which time it was too late to have any effect on preparedness and resilience.”

Hancock had told the inquiry he was “assured that the UK was one of the best-placed countries in the world for responding to a pandemic” and that he viewed the World Health Organization, which ranked the UK as a world leader, as an authoritative source.

Hallett said: “There were a great number of ministers who could have done more by asking questions about it. Mr Hunt accepted that ‘collectively we didn’t put anything like the time and effort and energy’ into understanding the dangers of pathogens and challenging the consensus’. This inquiry agrees.”

There was implicit criticism of George Osborne, the chancellor from 2010-16, for the Treasury failing to plan for non-economic shocks. Hallett said it could have “identified, in advance … major economic policy options that could be deployed in the event of a pandemic”.

Osborne had told the inquiry “there was no planning done by the UK Treasury or indeed, as far as I am aware, any western treasury for asking the entire population to stay at home for months and months on end”.

Hallett said that had the UK been better prepared some of the human and financial cost might have been avoided.

“Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic there was no ministerial leadership within the UK government and devolved administrations that could consider strategy, direct policy and make decisions across the whole of government to prepare for and build resilience to whole-system civil emergencies,” she said.

The Covid inquiry has not yet produce its report on political decision-making, and evidence will be taken this autumn on the impact of the pandemic on the health systems of England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.

Next year witnesses will be asked about vaccines and therapeutics. Investigations are under way on procurement, the test, trace and isolate system, and the care sector. Future investigations into children and young people, and the economic response, have been announced.

Hancock and Hunt have been contacted for comment.

Food

Cheesy tart and roast cauli salad: Margot Henderson’s picnic recipes

Pack a basket and head to the park or countryside with a courgette, feta and red onion tart and a cauliflower, leek and chickpea salad

Margot Henderson

Thu 18 Jul 2024 08.00 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 10.49 EDT

Margot Henderson’s courgette, feta and red onion tart. Photograph: Ola O Smit/The Guardian. Food styling: Esther Clark. Prop styling: Louie Waller. Food styling assistant: Clare Cole.

I love tart – wouldn’t that make a good T-shirt caption? But I really do. Especially savoury tarts, which are great for using up bits and pieces that might be in the fridge. That said, I don’t like to overcomplicate them – instead, I let the ingredients speak for themselves, such as in this courgette, feta and red onion number, which is perfect on a picnic blanket with a good, crunchy salad and cold white wine. This and the roast cauliflower salad are great choices to pack up for a day in the park.

Courgette, feta and red onion tart (pictured top)

Prep 20 min

Chill 30 min

Cook 1 hr 35 min

Serves 6

240g shortcrust pastry

For the filling

70ml olive oil

2 garlic cloves, peeled and finely chopped

2 red onions, peeled and cut into thin wedges

25g unsalted butter

4 courgettes, washed, trimmed and cut into 1cm-thick discs

3 eggs

2 egg yolks

250ml double cream

Flaky sea salt and black pepper

1 tsp chilli jam (optional)

180g feta

1 handful finely chopped mint leaves

Roll out the pastry to 2mm thick, then lay it over a greased 30cm fluted tart tin, pressing it into the contours of the tin, and chill in the fridge for half an hour.

Heat the oven to 160C (140C fan)/325F/gas 3. Line the surface of the chilled pastry with greaseproof paper, fill with baking beans or rice, and blind bake for 15 minutes. Remove the beans/rice and paper and bake for a further 10 minutes, then take out of the oven and set aside.

Put the olive oil in a large, heavy-bottomed pan on a low heat, add the garlic and red onions, and cook gently for 10-15 minutes, until the onions have softened. Add the butter and courgettes, and cook, stirring every now and then, for another 10 minutes, until cooked through and golden, without turning them to mush. Once cooked, take off the heat and leave to cool.

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Whisk the eggs, egg yolks and cream in a bowl, then season and, if using, add the chilli jam (I happened to have some in the cupboard, so popped it into the mix). Crumble in the cheese, then stir in the cooled courgette mix and chopped mint. Check again for seasoning.

Pour the mixture into the tart case – make sure it’s nice and full – then bake for about 45 minutes, until the centre is just firm to the touch. Remove and leave to cool.

If you are taking the tart to a picnic, leave it in its tin and put that in a cardboard box, because it is quite delicate. To serve, gently press the tart out of the tin, slice and serve with salad and cold white wine.

Roast cauliflower, leek and chickpea salad

Margot Henderson’s roast cauliflower, leek and chickpea salad.

Prep 20 min

Cook 20 min

Serves 4-6

1 cauliflower, leaves on

Flaky salt and freshly ground black pepper

Extra-virgin olive oil

2 leeks, outside leaves discarded, split down the middle, thinly slicedand washed

400g tin chickpeas

1 bunch flat parsley, washed, dried and finely chopped

1 handful dill, washed, dried and chopped

1 handful coriander, washed, dried and chopped

2 tbsp capers

Lettuce leaves, to serve (optional)

For the dressing

1 garlic clove, peeled and finely grated

1 tsp red-wine vinegar

100ml extra-virgin olive oil

50ml yoghurt

50ml tahini

1 tsp sumac

Heat the oven to 180C (160C fan)/350F/gas 4. Cut the cauliflower in half, rub it all over with salt and olive oil, then roast for 15-20 minutes, until golden. Once roasted, cut or break the cauliflower into small florets.

Meanwhile, blanch the leeks in salted boiling water for two minutes, then drain. Whisk all the dressing ingredients in a large bowl, taste and season accordingly.

Toss the cauliflower, leeks and chickpeas into the dressing bowl, add all the herbs and capers, mix again and leave for at least 20 minutes, so all the ingredients get to know each other.

Before serving, check again for seasoning, then serve in paper cups or lettuce leaves.

- Margot Henderson is co-owner/chef at Rochelle Canteen, London E2, and the Three Horseshoes, Batcombe, Somerset

- Discover more recipes from your favourite cooks in the new Guardian Feast app, with smart features to make everyday cooking easier and more fun. Start your free trial today.

Theatre

Review

La Vie Secrète des Vieux review – older people reveal the full glory of their sex lives

Chartreuse de Villeneuve, Avignon

There is gallows humour and unzipped ribaldry as a mischievous group share stories that are joyful, tender and sometimes eye-watering

Chris Wiegand

Thu 18 Jul 2024 07.56 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 11.18 EDT

A kaleidoscopic portrait of pleasure … La Vie Secrète des Vieux. Photograph: Christophe Raynaud de Lage

Warning! The people in this show are likely to die at any moment, we are told. Don’t believe them? They are already one fewer in number than they were in rehearsals. But, as the disarming introduction suggests, surely it is better to die on stage than in a nursing home.

The gallows humour in this absorbing hour of documentary theatre at the Avignon festival is outdone only by its unzipped ribaldry. Mohamed El Khatib invited people aged over 75 to tell him about their experiences of sex and love. His resulting show, performed by a motley assortment of non-actors sharing their stories, is joyful, tender, sad, riotous and eye-watering in its kaleidoscopic portrait of pleasure from first fumblings to happy endings.

The cast gather on Frédéric Hocké’s sparsely decorated set, which combines elements of a fabulous ballroom and a run-of-the-mill coffee morning. One 91-year-old woman says she feels like having sex every day and reflects that she “misses the feeling of being missed”. An 80-year-old declares that she has the same desires she had at 20. A man remembers losing his virginity in 1953 and explains how every time he has sex nowadays he thinks it will be the last. In these accounts, sex and death are often a breath away from each other.

Enlightening … La Vie Secrète des Vieux. Photograph: Christophe Raynaud de Lage

A reverie about kitchen masturbation may lead you to wonder where the root vegetables have been the next time you have soup. But while the dominant tone is frank humour, poignancy regularly seeps in. The group’s late friend, Georges, is remembered as his gold-lidded urn is brought on stage. Other losses are considered, such as the years of intimacies denied by strict religion.

The suggestion is made that older people’s sex lives lead them into a reversal of Romeo and Juliet’s tragedy: it is the younger generation who censure them, unable to deal with the idea of their elders’ passions. This has a poignant parallel in one of the personal stories and is also explored in a run-through of the play’s balcony scene. There is a section styled as standup, some karaoke, a dance break and a dash of shade thrown at the venerable Comédie-Française and Odéon. The show asks what we want from theatre yet does not linger on how invisible older people’s sex lives generally are on stage and screen. While the emotional freight of the group’s sexual scenarios is enlightening, the physical sensations are mostly undocumented.

The structure wavers towards the end but the air of mischief is irresistible as this liberated gang – with the additional perspective of 35-year-old nurse Yasmine – recount witnessing illicit care home affairs, enjoying gay sauna rendezvous, cherishing platonic partnerships and making love at all stages of life. It’s a memorable meditation on la mort, both grande and petite.

At Chartreuse de Villeneuve, Avignon, on 19 July. Then touring until 28 May

Alexis Petridis's album of the week  Glass Animals

Review

Glass Animals: I Love You So F***ing Much review – bland bathos from one-time biggest band in the world

(Polydor)

The British band’s fourth album smooshes interesting influences into pleasant homogeneity that won’t wash in today’s personality-led pop world

Alexis Petridis

Thu 18 Jul 2024 07.43 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 13.57 EDT

‘Easy to misplace’ … Glass Animals, with Dave Bayley, right. Photograph: Lillie Eiger

There was a point in 2022 when Glass Animals could reasonably describe themselves as the biggest British band in the world. Their single Heat Waves was certainly the biggest-selling track in the world: it spent six weeks in May that year at the top of Billboard’s Global 200 chart and wound up the second-biggest song of the year overall, beaten only by Harry Styles’ As It Was. No song has ever spent longer than Heat Waves on the US singles chart (91 weeks). In Australia it enjoyed a staggering 86 weeks in the Top 10. It went multi-platinum in 17 countries.

Cover art for I Love You So F***king Much. Photograph: Publicity image

It’s all the more surprising because Glass Animals are a band who – to borrow Peter Cook’s waspish old line about David Frost – rose without trace. Their other big hit, 2014’s Gooey, went double platinum in the US without ever breaching the Billboard Hot 100 – the sign of a song that has been streamed consistently over a long period of time without making a big splash – while a Guardian report could find no obvious explanation for Heat Waves’ overwhelming success, despite quizzing Glass Animals’ record label and indeed their frontman, Dave Bayley. He made a vague suggestion about its melancholy fitting a TikTok trend involving videos about absent loved ones, but then shrugged that he’d also seen it soundtracking videos “where it’s just someone putting mustard on a watermelon or jumping over milk crates”.

Meanwhile, the band themselves are weirdly anonymous. Close your eyes and try to picture the four members, or conjure up a fact about them that isn’t related to their sales figures: you can’t, can you? Perhaps that makes them the perfect group for an era in which music has become decontextualised, thanks to a strip-mined music press and streaming platforms which remove an album’s liner notes to leave a two-inch image of the cover and – at a pinch – a few seconds of looping video.

Certainly Glass Animals’ fourth album is the work of a big act, as signified by its backstory – an existential crisis brought about by overwhelming success, which played out in a rented house on a cliff in the Los Angeles area – and the fact that, despite the aforementioned death of liner notes, they have commissioned some from bestselling novelist Gabrielle Zevin. These turn out to be the very definition of a mixed blessing (“You are a sock. You are an earplug. You are a miniature glass horse. You are easy to misplace,” she offers of the single A Tear in Space), but clearly bestselling novelists don’t get involved with just anyone.

Nevertheless, listening to I Love You So F***ing Much, you are struck by the sense that everything about Glass Animals, not only the members’ faces, is hard to place. They present as a band but seem to be essentially a solo project. Bayley isn’t just the frontman; he writes and produces everything and handles the interviews. Their sound encompasses a lot of different things: mainstream electronic pop, psych-y alt-rock guitars, occasional trap beats and rap-influenced vocal cadences, Coldplay-esque stadium-scale anthemics, and both the mid-tempo chug and echoing high-pitched vocal samples of tropical house. But rather than flitting between diverse styles, it smooshes everything into pleasant homogeneity.

There are nice sounds and touches. Whatthehellishappening, a song in which the protagonist imagines himself trapped in a car boot, ends suddenly with a thump as if someone has slammed the lid. The doo-wop-influenced vocals that open On the Run suggest someone has been listening to the Flamingos’ otherworldly 1959 version of I Only Have Eyes For You. And there’s clearly real skill involved in marshalling everything into something cohesive. But as the album glides along, conjuring a mood of vaguely nostalgic sadness as it goes – nothing too wrenching, more a kind of Instagram-filtered melancholy – you do find yourself wondering if there’s anything really characteristic about the end result, beyond the occasional odd lyric (“Sometimes I find, every time, that I shit the bed anyway,” Bayley sings at one juncture, thus ruling himself out as an overnight guest). Lacking the kind of big hooks that anchored Heat Waves, it doesn’t feel eclectic so much as nonspecific.

Glass Animals’ anonymity didn’t matter in 2022 when pop culture was still gathering itself together after Covid. In 2024, though, it feels like a problem, dominated as pop is by big, fun personalities – Sabrina Carpenter, Charli xcx, Chappell Roan et al. Glass Animals’ new music seems destined to be ignored by active listeners and instead to be played by those doing something else or wanting something unchallenging (just look at those asterisks in the album title). It’s telling that the band’s success sprang in part from soundtracking TikTok videos – an accompaniment rather than an end in itself. “You just want something nice,” sings Bayley on Wonderful Nothing. It’s intended as an admonition, but it sounds as if he’s addressing I Love You So F***ing Much’s target market.

This week Alexis listened to

Tom Noble – Times Are Changing

A perfectly turned summer night soundtrack: just on the cusp of disco and house, with live instrumentation, and a bit of the late Patrick Adams’ productions in its DNA.

Dining across the divide  Life and style

Dining across the divide: ‘I think the electric car is going to be the most enormous white elephant’

They had differing views on the future of transport, but could they agree on the Tories’ handling of Covid?

Zoe Williams

Thu 18 Jul 2024 07.30 EDT

Stuart (left) and Stephen. All photographs: Andrew Fox/The Guardian

Stuart, 61, Staffordshire

Occupation Works in a car dealership

Voting record Labour in every election

Amuse bouche Is a vinyl collector whose prize possessions are two original copies of Queen’s A Day at the Races – one to listen to, one to keep pristine

Stephen, 61, Birmingham

Occupation Retired drama teacher

Voting record Normally tactically and left of centre. Really wants a change to everything about our electoral system

Amuse bouche Has a podcast called Vita Anima in which his alter ego, Emanuel le Brocq, interviews people

For starters

Stephen My first impression of Stuart was really good. Not that it would have been bad if it had been somebody at the opposite end of the spectrum, but he wasn’t like that at all.

Stuart We actually bumped into one another at the bar. He was a very sociable person and I enjoyed his company.

Stephen Stuart didn’t drink and I don’t really drink. I mostly don’t eat any dead things either, though I occasionally eat fish.

Stuart We both had fish and chips – it wasn’t an exciting choice, but we saw someone have some delivered to another table and it looked stunning.

The big beef

Stuart On sustainability, Stephen’s all for major pushing forward, trying to get everything right now, whereas I think we’re all being pushed too quickly. I think the electric car is going to be the most enormous white elephant. You look at where all the minerals come from to produce the batteries: that is a hidden scar on the landscape. The amount of poisons that are being thrown back into the ground is unbelievable.

Stephen He came up with some very valid points why he was against electric cars: the costs; the extraction of the metals that are used in battery manufacture; and the fact that the companies making them are screwing working people and putting the price up and so on.

Stuart I look at life logically. You consider the infrastructure, especially in London where you’ve got families living in high-rises – how the hell will they all charge their cars? My belief is that people at the top have vested interests in those electric vehicles. They’re benefiting from it financially.

Stephen I’m a great advocate for mass transport, and I’m against all cars, really. Whether it’s electric or petrol or diesel, I’m just not a fan. So he’s against the transition and I believe in the transition, but not like this. It’s a wider issue about capitalism. I’m against this whole reliance on replacing something with something else that’s more or less the same. I’m against private car ownership. Why don’t we have a system where you can rent a car in a community hub?

Sharing plate

Stuart Stephen is of a similar age to me, and we talked about the 80s. A lot of my friends were gay, and we discussed how the Conservatives went so huge on homophobia and their advertising campaigns about Aids. I think they did exactly the same with Covid: they created this huge spectre when they should have channelled money into looking after vulnerable people and let reasonably fit people get on with life.

Stephen I grew up through the Aids period and lost a lot of my friends. That brought us together; he was really horrified by how people were treated. You couldn’t really grieve. If you said you were going to a funeral, people would back off. I was lucky in that my parents were very supportive. That was the one silver lining in a pretty dire time. I think there’s a lot of guys my age who have PTSD from that.

For afters

Stuart We were in agreement about the Tories. Stephen is from a socialist background; he supports the Greens because Labour backtracked on its £28bn green efficiency plan.

Stephen I’m not a diehard socialist, I’m probably a Marxist. I’ll just take anything that challenges the Tory hegemony. I’d vote Lib Dem – it really depends who’s going to win the support of the people.

Takeaways

Stuart I wouldn’t say Stephen changed my views, but he got me to look at things from a different angle. My dial is still pretty much where it was.

Stephen I’m performing in the play Charley’s Aunt and we’re doing a mini-tour of the Midlands. Stupidly I forgot the flyers, otherwise I would have liked to get Stuart to come along.

Additional reporting: Kitty Drake

Stephen and Stuart ate at The Old Joint Stock in Birmingham

Want to meet someone from across the divide? Find out how to take part

The new vegan  Korean food and drink

Meera Sodha’s vegan recipe for bibim guksu, or Korean-style cold noodle salad

Picnic-able noodles, radishes, sugar snaps and red cabbage dressed in a sweet, spicy and gently sour chilli sauce

Meera Sodha

Thu 18 Jul 2024 07.00 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 10.50 EDT

Meera Sodha’s Korean-style cold noodle salad, or bibim guksu. Photograph: Louise Hagger/The Guardian. Food styling: Emily Kydd. Prop styling: Jennifer Kay. Food styling assistant: Laura Lawrence.

Many foods from far-flung places are now commonly available on UK shores, from sushi to curry, bubble tea to hummus. If curating this international menu were up to me, I’d put Korea’s bibim guksu on there, too. It’s made up of cold noodles dressed with a sweet, spicy and gently sour gochujang sauce and topped with anything crunchy and fresh. Moreover, there’s barely any cooking involved, other than the noodles, meaning it’s very simple to throw together and much greater than the sum of its parts to eat. Especially when eaten on a picnic rug under the sun.

Korean-style cold noodle salad

Gochujang, the sweet, spicy Korean red pepper paste, and smoked tofu are both widely available in major supermarkets. As for the garnishes, feel free to sub any of my suggestions for your favourite summer vegetables.

Prep 10 min

Cook 30 min

Serves 4

For the dressing

3 tbsp gochujang

4 tbsp rice vinegar

2 tbsp light soy sauce

1 tbsp dark agave syrup

3 tbsp sesame oil

For the noodles

Fine sea salt

250g soba noodles

2 tbsp rapeseed oil

150g radishes, thinly sliced

200g sugar snap peas, finely shredded

150g red cabbage, finely shredded

280g extra-firm smoked tofu (I like Taifun), cut into ½cm-long matchsticks

4 tsp toasted black sesame seeds

Put all the ingredients for the dressing in a large bowl and mix until smooth.

To cook the noodles, bring three litres of water to a rolling boil, add a tablespoon of salt and mix. Drop in the noodles, stir vigorously to stop them from sticking, then cook according to the packet instructions, moving them around with a fork or tongs to stop them from sticking together. Drain, rinse under cold water until really cold, then drizzle over a couple of tablespoons of oil and toss or stir to coat.

Click here or scan to try this recipe and lots more with a free trial of the Feast app.

Add the cold noodles to the dressing bowl, then tip on to a large platter and arrange the vegetables and tofu in little piles around the outside, and sprinkle liberally with toasted sesame seeds. Toss everything together at the table, then divide into four individual bowls.

- Meera Sodha’s new book, Dinner: 120 Vegan and Vegetarian Recipes for the Most Important Meal of the Day, is published by Fig Tree at £27. To order a copy for £23.76, go to guardianbookshop.com

- Discover Meera’s recipes and many more from your favourite cooks in the new Guardian Feast app, with smart features to make everyday cooking easier and more fun. Start your free trial today.

Five of the best  Books

Five of the best body horror novels

Tackling social issues with often grisly violence, you’ll need a strong stomach for these stories by authors from Han Kang to Stephen King, but they make an indelible impact

Monika Kim

Thu 18 Jul 2024 07.00 EDT

Fan fiction … Kathy Bates as Annie Wilkes in the film version of Misery. Photograph: Cinematic Collection/Alamy

Body horror is a genre that features the mutilation or transformation of the human body. Always graphic and usually grotesque, its trademark terrors range from dismemberment to cannibalism, which some authors use as a vehicle for political commentary or social critique.

In my novel, The Eyes Are the Best Part, Ji-won is a seemingly normal college student whose life unravels after her father’s departure and the arrival of her mother’s creepy new Caucasian boyfriend, George. After eating a fish eye for luck during a traditional Korean meal, Ji-won develops a morbid obsession with George’s blue eyes, culminating in acts of violence that confront the white male gaze in a very literal fashion.

If you have the intestinal fortitude for body horror tales, here are five of my favourites.

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

Yeong-hye is stuck in a nightmare. Against her family’s wishes, she has become a vegetarian. When her family physically forces her to eat meat, they set in motion a series of events that will change her life for ever. Han Kang’s writing is beautiful and evocative, and her ambitious novel tackles mental illness, consent, misogyny and autonomy.

Earthlings by Sayaka Murata

Murata’s novel is compulsively readable in spite of the many disturbing themes it covers. Natsuki, who is neglected by her family, seeks meaning in her existence after a series of traumatic events cause her to question gender norms and societal expectations. Bizarre and unpredictable, Earthlings features plenty of unsettling moments and will stay fixed in your mind long after you turn the last page.

Misery by Stephen King

Novelist Paul Sheldon finds himself in a dire situation after waking up from a car accident that left his legs completely shattered. He’s been found by superfan Annie Wilkes, who decides to hold him captive while he rewrites the ending of his bestselling romance series to her liking. Annie goes to great lengths to make sure that Paul behaves – and can never leave. A classic, must-read horror novel with plenty of moments that will leave you squirming.

Natural Beauty by Ling Ling Huang

In this debut novel, we follow an unnamed protagonist working at Holistik, a beauty and wellness store. Her work begins to take over her life, even as she starts to uncover terrible secrets about the cult-like company. Natural Beauty is a sinister and entertaining exploration of the cost of assimilation, toxic beauty culture and capitalism.

Boy Parts by Eliza Clark

Irina is a photographer who focuses on taking explicit images of average-looking men. After being offered an exhibit at a respectable London gallery, she revisits old photographs and begins to descend into madness, leading her down a path of destruction. This dark and unsettling novel looks at power, gender roles, class and sexuality, and is sure to be a hit with fans of Bret Easton Ellis.

- The Eyes Are the Best Part by Monika Kim is published by Octopus. To support the Guardian and the Observer order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Happy eater  Olympic Games

I know how to improve the Olympics. First up, the burger-stacking contest

Jay Rayner

I’m not one for competitive sport but if the Games added the long lunch mixed doubles I’d be in with a shout

Thu 18 Jul 2024 07.00 EDT

Illustration: Sarah Tanat-Jones/The Observer

In a few days the Paris Olympics will begin. This should be a moment of true joy and excitement but, honestly, I’m not feeling it. This is because I find the whole sporting shebang terribly unrelatable. It’s about people who can jump high, throw things a long way or run fast. I can do none of these things; I haven’t run anywhere since that unfortunate incident during cross-country in 1980. The Olympics weren’t always like this. From 1912 to 1948, they included cultural contests in things such as painting, music, literature and town planning. That’s more inclusive but I’m still not sure I’d thrive. I’m not up to planning a whole town under competition conditions.

What’s needed, so that people like me can get involved, is a food aspect. I am of course aware there are already a bunch of competitions that style themselves as culinary Olympiads, but those mostly involve intense, young people in chefs whites fashioning the Wreck of the Hesperus out of pulled sugar and aspic, or a fully functioning submarine entirely out of chocolate. That’s about as relatable as a bout of acrobatic gymnastics to the theme from Succession.

No, what we need are proper food contests that challenge the very character, good taste and stamina of the competitors. And I am the man to shape those events. Let’s start with the edible decathlon, a gruelling series of 10-course tasting menus. Points are awarded for clearing each plate and saying smart things about them, and deducted for rolling your eyes and muttering “Christ, is there much more of this?” under your breath. In a similar vein there’s the long lunch mixed doubles, in which two couples join each other at a restaurant at 1pm and attempt to make it through to the dinner service, without running out of things to say, visibly getting drunk or lapsing into unconsciousness. There will, of course, be strict rules defining gaps between courses and portion size. This is a serious competition. That demands an internationally recognised set of regulations.

Who among us would not want the gold for the oldest verifiable tub or jar in the spice cupboard?

We need something a little nostalgic, so how about the cheese and pineapple hedgehog gala? Alongside points for technical skill, awarded for how many portions of cheese and pineapple you can use, and how evenly the cocktail sticks are spaced, the entries would also be scored on artistic interpretation. Prettiest hedgehog wins. Then there are the domestic challenges. Who among us would not want the gold medal for having been judged to possess the greatest number of bottles of sticky condiments in our fridge, or the oldest verifiable tub or jar in the spice cupboard? The boost to national morale if one of our own could bring home those titles would be immense.

Finally, we get to the blue-riband events; the most coveted medals of all. Key among these is the stacked burger competition. How many toppings can you get on a burger without a) undermining its structural integrity (no cocktail sticks allowed) and b) coming over as an irritating tosser? That’s serious stuff, but it’s not quite as serious as the ultimate event, the equivalent to the 100m sprint: a global contest to crown the maker of the greatest bacon sandwich on the planet. There are so many acute variables here. It’s about the balance of back to streaky, of crispness to softness. There are bread choices and condiment choices and lettuce choices. This is a competition in which I would be hugely proud to represent my country. And I am stone cold certain I would be crowned Olympic champion. These food Olympics would surely produce a gold rush for our proud nation. Come on Paris, what’s stopping you?

Opinion  Donald Trump

To his supporters, Trump is a martyred messiah, resurrected after crucifixion

Sidney Blumenthal

His near assassination transformed Trump’s theology, giving the decidedly earthly ex-president a powerful spiritual sheen

Thu 18 Jul 2024 06.00 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 06.29 EDT

‘He has long portrayed himself as an innocent lamb falsely accused. Now the bullet and the blood of Butler, Pennsylvania, have sanctified him for the faithful and brought forth a new gospel.’ Photograph: Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump has transformed the theology of Trump. He has long portrayed himself as an innocent lamb falsely accused, the target of slings and arrows to bear the suffering of believers. Now the bullet and the blood of Butler, Pennsylvania, have sanctified him for the faithful and brought forth a new gospel.

Earlier this month, the Republican National Committee endorsed the party platform, a document that contained a plank pledging to create a new federal agency to defend Christian nationalism: “To protect Religious Liberty, Republicans support a new Federal Task Force on Fighting Anti-Christian Bias that will investigate all forms of illegal discrimination, harassment, and persecution against Christians in America.” The document casts Christians as though they are a sect still persecuted by the Romans, about to be dragged into the Colosseum to face ferocious beasts.

But after the shooting, there was no mention of a platform. There was no reference to the political party. Trump had not simply survived crucifixion. He was not only resurrected. He became his own second coming. He was washed in his own blood. Divine intervention proved he was destined to return. All that is required from followers are declarations of faith. The return is a restoration of the grand course of events that was unjustly detoured by a stolen election. Trump is now a martyr, resurrected and the second coming all at once. All power is invested in the messiah on day one.

“The doctor at the hospital said he never saw anything like this, he called it a miracle,” Trump explained. “I’m not supposed to be here, I’m supposed to be dead. By luck or by God, many people are saying it’s by God I’m still here.” He was reborn.

His sanctification has produced a new narrative by those who wish to be seen as his most fervent apostles. They compete to proclaim the new gospel. “GOD protected President Trump yesterday,” tweeted House speaker Mike Johnson. “God’s hand of protection” held Trump safe, the Rev Franklin Graham told Fox News. “The devil came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle,” said Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina. “Listen, if you didn’t believe in miracles before Saturday, you better be believing right now.” They are the chosen messengers of the chosen one. The fervor with which they tell the story reveals more than their faith, but also establishes their seat at the table of the apostles.

The most important revelation was written within hours of the shooting by Senator JD Vance, now Trump’s running mate. His was not a gospel of peace, but of wrath. “Today is not just some isolated incident,” Vance wrote. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

Pointing his spear at the enemy, Vance settled the apostolic succession. He is a changeling, who once compared Trump to “heroin” and “Hitler”, but his conversion into Trump’s warrior has vaulted him to become the anointed disciple and chief of the praetorian guard of the living godhead.

Before the assassination attempt, the Christian nationalists’ narrative awkwardly tried to fit the licentious, sinful and predatory Trump into a framework in which his apparent absence of virtue and religious faith served virtue and faith. They commonly referred to him as King Cyrus, after the Persian ruler, who did not “recognize” God but was described in Isaiah 45 as “anointed” by the Lord to free the exiled Jews in Babylon.

Trump’s origin story as the son of the brutish real estate operator Fred Trump and the pupil of the nefarious fixer and Mafia lawyer Roy Cohn was always problematic. None of his followers ever acknowledge it, except perhaps for Cohn’s protege Roger Stone, who was handed Trump to run as a client when Cohn was dying of Aids. That true crime story remains dangerous to the Trump mythology.

A movie about Trump’s relationship with Cohn, The Apprentice, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, has not yet found an American distributor. Media companies have been intimidated at the possibility of Trump’s vengeance. “If you do not immediately cease all publication and marketing of the movie, President Trump will pursue every appropriate legal means to hold you accountable for this gross violation of President Trump and the American people’s rights,” Trump’s lawyer wrote the producers of the film.

So, as in Isaiah 45, the 45th president was the king whose “right hand” was invisibly guided from above. “He, like King Cyrus before him, fulfilled the biblical prophecy of the gods worshiped by Jews,” proclaimed Jeanine Pirro, a Fox News host. The Trump Prophecy, a film hailing his presidency as divinely ordained, produced with faculty and students from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, also cast him as King Cyrus. An evangelical preacher, Paula White, whom Trump invited to speak at his 2017 inauguration ceremony and welcomed to the White House to bless him for nominating Neil Gorsuch to the supreme court, declared: “Because God says that he raises up and places all people in places of authority, it is God who raises up a king.”

After Trump’s multiple indictments and felony conviction, he intensified his image-making as a martyr, the victim of conspiratorial forces, of the “Deep State”, “radical left Democrats” and “globalist elites”. He presented himself as selflessly absorbing the blows that were really meant for his supporters, whom he was shielding from “poisoning of the blood” from immigrants. But he instantly translated his supposed self-sacrifice into cries of revenge.

On 4 August 2023, the day after he was formally charged in the January 6 case, Trump posted on Truth Social: “If you go after me, I’m coming after you!” By April of this year, Trump had made numerous threats against the judges, court staff and witnesses in all of his cases, who have received death threats and are under the protection of security details, including the US marshals. Trump’s courtroom outbursts forced judges to issue 14 gag orders. In the New York hush-money case, he violated 10 gag orders, which may be pertinent in his sentencing on 18 September. In that case, after Trump attacked Judge Juan Merchan’s daughter, Merchan said, in issuing one of the gag orders: “The threat is very real.”

On 4 June, after his conviction on 34 felonies in the New York hush-money case, Trump told Sean Hannity on Fox News: “Look, when this election is over, based on what they’ve done, I would have every right to go after them. And it’s easy because it’s Joe Biden and you see all the criminality.” Biden, of course, had nothing to do with the New York case.

Two weeks earlier, Trump had appeared before the National Rifle Association convention to warn: “If the Biden regime gets four more years, they are coming for your guns, 100% certain.” He conflated gun control with his trials: “No, they want to take away your rights. Well, I know that better than anybody. They want to take away my rights better than anybody, worse than Alphonse Capone.” He returned to guns. “We have to have a gun,” he said. “If we don’t have a gun, we’re dead people.”

On 6 January 2024, a week before the Republican Iowa caucuses, 17-year-old Dylan Butler entered his school in a small town in Perry, north of Des Moines, killed one student and wounded seven more people before he shot himself. He also had an explosive device. “Two friends and their mother who spoke with the AP said Butler was a quiet person who had been bullied relentlessly since elementary school,” the Associated Press reported. After 36 hours of silence, Trump called the incident “very terrible”, adding: “But we have to get over it, we have to move forward.”

Back in 2015, after Trump announced his first candidacy, he gave an interview to a gun blog called Ammoland. He had previously supported the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, passed in 1994 under the Clinton administration, which a research team at New York University’s Langone Medical Center for the National Institute of Health calculated reduced mass shootings by 70%. That ban was allowed to lapse in 2004 under the George W Bush administration.

Trump wanted to reassure the gun lobby that he was emphatically against gun control. “To the left, every gun is an assault weapon,” he said. “I certainly stand by my opposition to gun control when it comes to taking guns from law-abiding citizens. You mention that the media describes the AR-15 as an ‘assault rifle,’ which is one example of the many distortions they use to sell their agenda. However, the AR-15 does not fall under this category. Gun-banners are unfortunately preoccupied with the AR-15, magazine capacity, grips and other aesthetics, precisely because of its popularity.”

On 9 August 2016, Trump delivered a stemwinding speech against gun control and threatened the assassination of Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent. He ridiculed the idea of “gun-free zones” and hypothesized being shot by a gunman from the side, saying: “Do you know what a gun-free zone is? That’s like – they study where the gun-free zones – if they would have known you had guns, if they would have known that they were going to be shot at from the other side, it would have been a whole different story. Maybe it wouldn’t have even happened in the first place.”

Then, he incited the crowd against Hillary Clinton. “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” Trump said. “Although the second amendment, people – maybe there is, I don’t know.”

Four years later, Hillary Clinton still appeared as a target for Donald Trump Jr, who posted a picture of himself on Instagram on 4 January 2020, holding an AR-15 etched with a Crusader’s Cross, a far-right symbol, and Hillary Clinton’s image behind bars on the magazine. “Nice day at the range. @rarebreedfirearms and @spikes_tactical adding a little extra awesome to my AR and that mag,” he wrote.

On January 6, according to testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to the White House chief of staff, when Trump was informed that thousands in the crowd on the Ellipse whom he urged on to the Capitol refused to be screened for weapons at the magnetometers set by the Secret Service, he shouted: “I don’t fucking care that they have weapons! They’re not here to hurt me. They can march to the Capitol from here.”

Among the banners carried by the mob assaulting the Capitol was a large Confederate flag adorned with an AR-15 and the inscription “Come and Take It”. Other flags depicted Trump carrying an assault rifle. One of the rightwing militias staging the attack, the Oath Keepers, stashed a small armory of AR-15s and other weapons at the ready in a suburban Virginia motel.

On 13 July, earlier this month, Trump stepped onto the stage in Butler county, Pennsylvania, where he began by denouncing “the fake news” for not reporting the size of this “big, big, beautiful crowd”. He falsely claimed that Joe Biden had lied about his own crowd sizes, and said: “And we got to bring our country back to health, because our country is going to hell, if you haven’t noticed. Millions and millions of people are pouring in from prisons and from mental institutions.” Trump ripped into “Crooked Joe Biden and laughing Kamala Harris”. He said: “Our country’s been stolen from us … one of the greatest crimes is what they’ve done over four years and hiding what the obvious facts are … .”

He was referring to the election of 2020: “I tell you what, we did fantastically in 2016. We did much better in 2020. You know we did much better, and it was rigged. It was a rigged deal.”

He turned to talking about people crossing the southern border: “Criminals, we have criminals. We have drug dealers. We have people who should not be here.” On a large screen to the right of his stage, a chart showed how immigration had increased under Biden, though not its recently rapid decrease; he said: “The worst president in the history of our country took over, and look what happened to our country.” Trump turned his head slightly to look at the chart, and said: “And if you, uh, want to really see something that’s sad, take a look at what happened … .” Then the bullet clipped his ear. The shooter with a semi-automatic rifle killed a bystander and critically injured two others.

The reborn Trump announced that he would rewrite his acceptance speech to the Republican convention. “It is a chance to bring the country together. I was given that chance,” he said. On the first day of the convention, a Trump-appointed judge, Aileen Cannon, issued a ruling in the national security documents and obstruction case stating that the special prosecutor was illegal, and dismissed the entire case against Trump – a ruling nearly all legal experts regarded as bizarre, partial and likely to be overturned.

Trump’s continuing streak of remarkable luck inspired him to descend from his heavenly state into his usual pit of grievance. His idea of bringing the country together is a lengthy self-interested checklist of settling scores. Uneasy rests the crown of thorns. On 15 July, he posted:

As we move forward in Uniting our Nation after the horrific events on Saturday, this dismissal of the Lawless Indictment in Florida should be just the first step, followed quickly by the dismissal of ALL the Witch Hunts – The January 6th Hoax in Washington, D.C., the Manhattan D.A.’s Zombie Case, the New York A.G. Scam, Fake Claims about a woman I never met (a decades old photo in a line with her then husband does not count), and the Georgia “Perfect” Phone Call charges. The Democrat Justice Department coordinated ALL of these Political Attacks, which are an Election Interference conspiracy against Joe Biden’s Political Opponent, ME. Let us come together to END all Weaponization of our Justice System, and Make America Great Again!

The motive of the 20-year-old shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, remains obscure. From the accounts of those who knew him, he was a quiet boy, awarded a $500 high school prize for his talent at math, who spent two years at a local community college studying engineering, worked as a dietary aide at a nursing home and lived at home. He once gave $15 to a liberal organization, but was a registered Republican. Fellow students remember him as always being a conservative.

“He definitely was conservative,” one former classmate told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “It makes me wonder why he would carry out an assassination attempt on the conservative candidate.” In a school mock debate, the classmate said: “Tom, no matter what, always stood his ground on the conservative side. That’s still the picture I have of him. Just standing alone on one side while the rest of the class was on the other.”

Another student recalled that others “tormented Crooks ‘almost every day’ and that he often wore ‘hunting’ outfits to class”. Crooks seems to have recently spent time down the rabbit hole of a pro-gun YouTube channel called Demolition Ranch; when he shot Trump, he was wearing one of its T-shirts, with the slogan “What The Hell”. He had parked his car nearby filled with explosives. Perhaps he intended to ram it into the crowd in a spectacular suicide.

Crooks left no letter, no manifesto and no clues on social media. His premeditation did not involve making known his personal motive. He wrote no political statement. Trump’s appearance near his home suddenly gave him an opportunity to strike back. He was a bullied boy.

- Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist

How we met  Friendship

How we met: ‘I told her all about my wild exploits in college – I wanted to shock her’

Joanna, 52, and Julie, 49, met on a school exchange trip in 1989, then lost touch. An early email directory brought them back together and led to some of the best times of their lives

Lizzie Cernik

Thu 18 Jul 2024 06.00 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 06.29 EDT

‘We have a similar sense of humour and she made me laugh a lot’ … Jo (left) and Julie in Greece in June this year.

When Joanna’s school in Worcestershire planned an exchange trip to the US in 1989, she had no idea what to expect. “I was in the lower sixth form, and a group of us went for a month to Columbus in rural Georgia,” she says. “It was a culture shock. You had to recite the pledge of allegiance at the start of every day and all the kids seemed more confident and outgoing.”

She was being hosted by one of the teachers at the school, who had a daughter a few years younger than Joanna. For the first few days of her stay, the girls didn’t click. “I wasn’t convinced that Julie was happy I was staying with them,” she laughs. “I think her mum thought it would be good for her but she didn’t seem sure.”

Julie now says that she was being “a brat”. “I’m an only child and I wasn’t used to sharing a bathroom,” she says. She thought Joanna seemed “cool and reserved”, and says the cultural barrier seemed huge in her teens. “I’d never met anyone from a different country before.”

Although they didn’t share any classes, they saw each other during the evenings and weekends. “The first weekend, Jo didn’t want to come to church with us,” says Julie. “It blew my mind. I’d never met anyone who didn’t go to church at Easter.”

Julie (left) and Joanna preparing for a school ball in Worcestershire in July 1989. Photograph: Supplied image

But Julie soon adjusted to having someone else in the house. “We have a similar sense of humour and she made me laugh a lot,” she says. That summer, the US students travelled to the UK, and Julie stayed with Joanna’s family in Worcestershire. “Jo’s family were so nice to me, it was a really great trip,” she says.

At first, the pair stayed in touch via letters, but they lost contact a few years later. In 1997, Joanna used an early online directory of email addresses to find Julie, as she missed her penfriend. By then Joanna was a trainee solicitor in Worcester and Julie was studying religion in Athens, Georgia.

“When she emailed me, I told her all about my wild exploits being a rocker in college. I wanted to shock her with my anecdotes,” Julie laughs. They both got married and both had two children, and they shared pictures and stories about their experiences through emails and phone calls.

By 2004, Joanna was a stay at home mum, while Julie was studying for her graduate degree in religion. For her 30th birthday, she decided to visit the UK on a solo trip. “I stayed with Jo, and I got to know her husband and her two girls,” she says. “It was the best two weeks of my life.” Joanna was impressed by how open-minded her friend had become. “I always knew she was someone I wanted to be friends with, even when she was a teenager, but by then her horizons had been broadened by travel and meeting new people.”

Two years later, Julie’s mother moved to York in the UK for work, and she began to visit more regularly. “I’d always go and see Jo. It was like going home, because she’s my family.” In 2009, they went on a joint family trip together to Florida, where they all got on brilliantly.

When Julie’s mother died in 2011, Joanna flew out to see her friend in the US. “She was such a huge support to me,” says Julie. “At Christmas, she invited me to stay at her house while she was away in Australia because I couldn’t bear being at home, being reminded of growing up with my mum.”

The two women have also supported each other through their career moves: Julie became a teacher in 2011, while Joanna has had a range of jobs, including a teaching assistant, library assistant and most recently starting a recruitment company with her sister. “She’s always there and I know I can talk to her with no judgment. I’ll get wisdom and laughter,” says Joanna. While Joanna still lives in Worcestershire, Julie moved to Charleston in 2014.

Joanna loves how accepting her friend is. “Julie makes people feel good about themselves and she’s genuinely interested in their stories,” she says. “She’s got a wise head on her shoulders and I can see people warming to her as soon as they talk to her.”

Julie describes Joanna as practical and caring. “She puts everyone else first. Being friends with someone from a different culture and background has been one of the greatest gifts in my life.”

Thursday quiz  Life and style

Charmed sisters, footballing mammoths and leaders who quit – take the Thursday quiz

Questions on general knowledge and topical trivia, plus a few jokes, every Thursday. How will you fare?

Martin Belam

Thu 18 Jul 2024 06.00 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 06.28 EDT

What is the nickname of the woolly mammoth recently sparking scientific discoveries? See question 13 for more details. Photograph: David Fleetham/Alamy

As the only topical news quiz that also sometimes includes questions about the middle ages, the Thursday quiz is proud of its track record of making sure people read every news item during the week and have to subscribe to the Encyclopaedia Britannica in order to cover all possible bases. Fifteen questions await you, with varying degrees of difficulty and subtlety. There are no prizes, it is just meant to be for fun. Let us know how you get on in the comments!

The Thursday quiz, No 169

1. 1.Which gloriously gorgeous French cathedral survived a fire last week?

2. 2.Who has Donald Trump picked as his running mate?

3. 3.Despite the good folk of South West Norfolk unequivocally voting for her to do one, Liz Truss decided she should go to the Republican National Convention. Lucky, lucky them. Where is it being held?

4. 4.Vaughan Gething has also had to sling his hook. He was first minister of Wales for slightly longer than Liz Truss was prime minister. When was he appointed?

5. 5.We lost Shelley Duvall, who famously starred in The Shining. But which director cast her in seven different movies between 1970 and 1980?

6. 6.We also lost Shannen Doherty. Which sister did she play in Charmed?

7. 7.True or false: the Christian conservative Federal Democratic Union of Switzerland party has announced it is to try to use referendums to ban Eurovision?

8. 8.This week's geography question is about Saudi Arabia. Which coast is the port city of Jeddah on?

9. 9.Haile Gebrselassie (not pictured) is one of the greatest distance runners of all time. He won two consecutive gold medals in the 10,000m in the Olympics. In which years?

10. 10.On 18 July, King Edward I of England issued the Edict of Expulsion, banishing Jews from the country. When?

11. 11.It is the anniversary of the computer chip giant Intel (not pictured) being founded in 1968 under a different name. It swiftly changed to Intel. What does Intel stand for?

12. 12.Who scored Spain's second and winning goal in the Euro 2024 final?

13. 13.Talking of heroic England defeats, researchers have reconstructed the genetic code of a 52,000-year-old woolly mammoth sample that they have named after one of England's Italia 90 squad. Who?

14. 14.Willow, the official dog of the Guardian Thursday quiz, knows that there is a mathematical operation denoted by the symbol !. Evaluate 9! for her …

15. 15.Katy Perry has been getting absolute pelters over her new single. What is it called?

If you really do think there has been an egregious error in one of the questions or answers, there isn’t much you can do about it because the quiz master is off sick at the moment, so why not watch the oddly titled new the The single instead …

The The – Linoleum Smooth to the Stockinged Foot

Stock markets

Chip stocks fall further after Trump’s remarks on Taiwan defence

Semiconductor and related tech shares hit hard by former US president’s calls for Taipei to pay for US protection

- Business live – latest updates

Jack Simpson

Thu 18 Jul 2024 05.50 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 09.24 EDT

Donald Trump claims Taiwan ‘doesn’t give us anything’. The country produces more than 90% of the world’s most advanced chips. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

The stocks of some of the world’s largest chipmakers have fallen further after comments by Donald Trump that Taiwan, which is central to the global industry, should pay for its own defences against China.

Shares in semiconductor and related tech companies had already plunged on Wednesday after the former president’s comments, as well as a report that suggested Joe Biden’s administration was considering the strictest controls on the trade of chips to China.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, fell by 2.4% on Thursday. That followed a 7% fall the previous day, when Trump questioned why the US was acting as Taiwan’s “insurance” when, he claimed, it had taken away America’s chip business.

On Wednesday, the US’s tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index had its worst day since December 2022, falling 2.8%, after an unconfirmed Bloomberg report suggested Biden was considering introducing the most severe restrictions on companies if they continued to give China access to semiconductor technology.

It said the US president was considering whether to impose a measure called the foreign direct product rule, which would allow the US to impose controls on foreign-made products that use even tiny amounts of US technology.

That would have a particular impact on companies such as ASML, the Dutch manufacturer of machines used to produce microchips, and Japan’s Tokyo Electron, which some in the US government believe are giving China too much access to their advanced semiconductor technology.

Tokyo Electron shares fell by 8.8% on Thursday, while the Japanese precision tools maker Disco Corp sank by 8.8% and Lasertec, which makes equipment for inspecting for defects in computer chips, shed 6.3%.

Shares at ASML fell by a further 2% in the early hours of trading on Thursday, after an 11% plunge the previous day. The US chipmaker Nvidia was also caught up in the market slide, falling by 6% on Wednesday.

The comments by Trump, who is the favourite to win the US presidential race in November, indicate that military support for Taiwan in the event of action from China would not be guaranteed if he re-entered the White House.

Commenting on China’s aggression towards its neighbour, Trump said he “wouldn’t feel too secure” if he were Taiwan. He said the US was “no different than an insurance company”, suggested Taipei should be paying the US to defend it and claimed Taiwan “doesn’t give us anything”.

Taiwan produces more than 90% of the world’s most advanced chips, mostly through TSMC, and is a big supplier to Apple and Nvidia.

The country’s premier, Cho Jung-tai, said on Wednesday he was grateful to the US for its support, and that Taiwan was “working hard” to maintain the relationship while also increasing its self-defence capabilities.

This article was amended on 18 July 2024. An earlier version incorrectly described ASML as a “chipmaker”; rather, it manufactures the machines used to make chips.

David Squires on …  England

David Squires on … the end for Gareth Southgate with England

Our cartoonist reflects on the England manager calling time on the job and clearing out his office at St George’s Park

- Buy a copy of this cartoon in the Guardian Print Shop

- Like what David does? Support our journalism

David Squires

Thu 18 Jul 2024 05.29 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 06.09 EDT

Illustration: David Squires/The Guardian

Movies

From Twister to Titanic: writers on their favourite disaster movies

As the tornado-chasing sequel Twisters arrives, Guardian writers pick the films that have stuck with them the longest

Benjamin Lee, Pamela Hutchinson, Andrew Pulver,Radheyan Simonpillai, Veronica Esposito, Catherine Shoard, Andrew Lawrence, Adrian Horton and Bryan Armen Graham

Thu 18 Jul 2024 05.00 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 09.47 EDT

Twister, The Poseidon Adventure and Don't Look Up. Composite: Alamy/Netflix

Deep Impact

Photograph: 09/Allstar

While sadness is never too far from the frame in the disaster genre – the majority of films, after all, do involve the mass erasure of life – it’s rarely felt quite as heavy as it did in 1998’s other comet movie Deep Impact. It unfolds with the frightening urgency of a serious-minded political thriller, as Téa Leoni’s ambitious journalist realises her big scoop is far bigger than she had initially thought, a misunderstood acronym leading her to realise the world might be coming to an end. What always struck, and scared, me as a teenager was just how hopeless things then felt – an aborted mission to throw it off course, a limited and unjust lottery for some to stay safe in shelters, a host of horrible choices to be made – with so much of the film then haunted by the thoughts and fears of people truly facing their own mortality (James Horner’s crushing score is an added killer). It’s most painfully felt in Leoni’s fractured family, her parents played by the Julia co-stars Vanessa Redgrave and Maximilian Schell with far more punch and complexity than one expects in this territory. While the world might not ultimately end, it’s hit by devastation of an unfathomable scale, a reminder of how powerless and unprepared the world would be if such a day were to ever come. It still gives me a chill. Benjamin Lee

The Day the Earth Caught Fire

Photograph: British Lion/Allstar

There’s something about the phrase “black-market water” that will always be deeply unsettling. In Val Guest’s grimly realistic disaster movie from 1961, The Day the Earth Caught Fire, we watch the apocalypse creeping into view from the perspective of a Fleet Street newsroom. The alcoholic reporter Peter (Edward Judd) and his gruffly supportive editor Bill (Leo McKern) gradually realise that two simultaneous nuclear bomb tests, by the US and the Soviet Union, have thrown the Earth off its axis, leading to a lethally escalated global warming. The Express’s then recent editor Arthur Christiansen plays himself, to add extra authenticity to this portrait of a world spinning towards destruction. First the water rationing, then the spread of disease, and finally, with the world on the verge of catastrophe, orgiastic social disorder. It is the 1960s after all. With the help of his source, a temp typist at the Met Office (Janet Munro), Peter pieces together the story, but our last sight of him is labouring at an isolated typewriter in the sweltering heat, producing some ripe prose to accompany one of two front-page splashes, ready to go to press – “World saved” or “World doomed”. Pamela Hutchinson

Titanic

Photograph: 20th Century Fox/Paramount/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

While any disaster movie connoisseur would have to doff their cap to the works of Roland Emmerich (signature move: cars somersaulting in the street) and the 70s pioneers of Poseidon/Earthquake/Airport legend, in the end I think you have to hand it to James Cameron for a supremely supercharged treatment of the concept. If you look past all the floating-door guff, Irish dancing and Billy Zane waving a pistol about, what is pretty remarkable about Titanic – especially so for a $200m blockbuster – is how plausible it made things seem. Most directors with access to a large FX budget go massively overboard, to coin a phrase, and turn their film into a cartoon (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but Cameron – amazingly, kept Titanic on a low throttle for what seems like an age, rather brilliantly pointing up the fact that the actual ship took over two hours to sink. Although of course we get the FX fireworks towards the end, Titanic is really an incremental disaster movie, one that tells us about the actuality of real events that say Emmerich, for all his films’ virtues, would never have taken the time over. Andrew Pulver

Twister

Photograph: Universal Pictures/Allstar

You can feel the twin forces that are Steven Spielberg and Jan De Bont swirling around in Twister, the earnestly exciting blockbuster about storm chasers throwing themselves in front of tornadoes. Spielberg was meant to direct the picture before he handed it off to Speed director De Bont, who was retreating from a failed attempt at making a Godzilla movie. With Twister, De Bont essentially made his Godzilla movie, replacing the atomic kaiju with destructive winds that top the Fujita scale, while mixing in that Spielberg-ian sense of wonder with the simple and unrelenting adrenaline rush he gave his bomb-on-a-bus thriller. Twister – with its flying cows, welcome reliance on practical effects and a delightful supporting turn from the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman, who was as scenery chewing as the cutting edge CGI-tornadoes – kickstarted a late-90s disaster movie renaissance, the movie also tipping its hat to that genre’s appeal. Remember the moment when Helen Hunt appears hypnotized by the tornado that sneaks up on a drive-in, struck by the awe-inspiring beauty of that thing she fears as it tears through a movie screen. She is us and that moment is what all disaster movies should aspire to. Radheyan Simonpillai

Melancholia

Photograph: Magnolia Pictures/Allstar

What makes Lars von Trier’s literally Earth-shattering apocalypse movie so different is that it completely ignores the tropes of so many other such movies – the miles-long traffic jams, the throngs of screaming rioters, the death-defying escapes. Instead, it plays out on the intimate scale of one of the Dane’s classically screwed-up families, with sisters Justine and Claire working through their entwined forms of dysfunction while the rogue planet Melancholia makes its inevitable way toward the Earth. It starts with Justine’s disaster of a wedding, which she herself smashes to bits when her depression gets the better of her. Fast forward to weeks later, when Justine’s depression has flared up into disturbing proportions, and Claire is falling to bits amid fears that Melancholia’s flyby will end in disaster. Von Trier’s gift for the intimacy of dysfunction – and standout performances by Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg – hugely accentuate the eerieness and emotional poignancy of the apocalypse. This is arguably far more evocative of what disaster is really about than millions of dollars spent on CGI explosions: its overwhelmingness, the way it forces one to work through emotions like denial, grief and acceptance, and its ultimate implacability. Add in absolutely brilliant use of Wagner’s Prelude, as well as indelible images like Justine finding respite from her depression by spending nights bathing in the rogue planet’s light, and you get a film that is devastating as few can be. Veronica Esposito

The Poseidon Adventure

Photograph: 20 Century Fox/Sportsphoto/Allstar

Early TV exposure to the mothership of disaster movies meant a lot of shuffling feet at the ferry port at Ramsgate, but also a generation too traumatised to clock just what a copper-bottomed masterpiece this is. No fewer than five Oscar-winners are among the passengers on the doomed HMS Poseidon: Gene Hackman’s maverick priest, Shelley Winters and Jack Albertson’s Jewish grandparents, Ernest Borgnine as a mouthy cop and Red Buttons as a lovelorn haberdasher. It’s this immaculate character detail that elevates Ronald Neame’s massive smash most: every time a cast member is picked off (or, more usually, sacrifices themselves) in one or other of the breathtakingly brutal set pieces, the time and space already devoted to them anchors and amplifies the impact. The pace is perfect, the sound design extraordinary, and beefy, balding, God-baiting Hackman is a total marvel. Fifty-two years on this is still absolutely shipshape. Yes, there’s entirely too much sweat, the polonecks are a pity and why even charred corpses have the bright blue eyes shared by almost all key cast I can’t explain. But what a trip. Catherine Shoard

Don’t Look Up

Photograph: Niko Tavernise/Netflix

“This is a Christmas movie?!” my father spouted minutes into our two-man streaming of Don’t Look Up. And what a gift it was. Here’s a film that doesn’t romanticize the end times, that keeps it real about how events would actually react in our panicky, polarized, post-truth era: The government would let us down, the rich guy would cash in, the media would get the story wrong – and all while the scientists who saw the meteor coming with time to spare are driven loony by this deeply unserious civilization. (Spoiler: Tyler Perry and Cate Blanchett’s ditsy presenter characters don’t make it, a shame given their world-starting chemistry.) Don’t Look Up’s true ring springs from the Leo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence-led cast, killer music scored by Succession’s Nicholas Britell and cracking writing and direction from Adam McKay – whose tendency to overstate the obvious is tonally appropriate here. Just as the Simpsons gets credit for seeing the future, don’t be surprised if it’s the forecast in Don’t Look Up that stands the test of time. Well, at least until time runs out. Andrew Lawrence

The Perfect Storm

Photograph: Warner Bros/Sportsphoto/Allstar

The Perfect Storm, Wolfgang Petersen’s 2000 adaptation of Sebastian Junger’s nonfiction book, terrifyingly combines my two nightmare disaster fascinations: being stuck on a sinking ship in the freezing North Atlantic (I am and always will be a Titanic fangirl) and big waves (I am haunted by footage of the 2004 tsunami on YouTube). More specifically, if maybe not historically accurately, in this depiction of the Perfect Storm of 1991: a massive 100-ish foot rogue wave during the nor’easter to end all nor’easters. There are non-disaster reasons to enjoy this tale of an ill-fated shipping vessel from Gloucester, Massachusetts: George Clooney doing his best New England everyman, Mark Wahlberg giving a different flavor of Massachusetts working class, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as the flinty female captain of another fishing boat. But this film is primarily enjoyed as a horribly tragic, unimaginably cold, mostly true chapter in the age-old tale of man v sea. One that may also lead you to bone-chilling videos of actual monster open-sea waves, and which (spoilers), as in real life, left no survivors. Adrian Horton

Avalanche

Photograph: Moviestore Collection Ltd/Alamy

Chances are you can suss out what happens in this one from the title. Checking in amid the death rattle of the 70s disaster pic cycle, this Roger Corman special leaves no hammy box unticked. The shady millionaire land developer Rock Hudson persuades his magazine reporter ex-wife Mia Farrow (he can’t remember if it’s for Harper’s Bazaar or Vogue) to attend the grand opening of his fancy new ski resort, where she winds up falling for the doomsayer environmental photographer Robert Forster. Subplots involving an arrogant downhill skiing champion, a suicidal jilted ex-girlfriend and a figure skating rivalry (among others) are rendered pointless when nearly every character is killed off by oddly formed chunks of Styrofoam and plastic snow. But not before surprise bursts of nudity and drawn-out party scenes with a comical excess of cable-knit sweaters and baked alaska. Hudson and Farrow make for one of the most breathtakingly mismatched screen couples imaginable, but Forster and Jeanette Nolan do good jobs with the material. So kitschy and cliched it may as well be called Airplane in the Rockies, it’s an almost platonic distillation of the genre (and in my head canon exists in the same universe as Force Majeure). Bryan Armen Graham

This article was amended on 18 July 2024. An earlier version said that Shelley Duvall, rather than Shelley Winters, was in The Poseidon Adventure.

Opinion  Rwanda

Paul Kagame banned opponents like me from Rwanda’s election. No wonder he cruised to victory

Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza

The president won 99% of the vote. But that isn’t a sign of popularity – it’s a sign of a ‘democracy’ that silences all dissent

- Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza is a Rwandan opposition leader

Thu 18 Jul 2024 03.00 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 03.01 EDT

Paul Kagame casts his vote in the presidential election, Kigali, Rwanda, 15 July 2024. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

Since the end of the civil war and the genocide against the Tutsis in 1994, Rwanda’s ruling party, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), has dominated the political space. Its leader, Paul Kagame, scored upwards of 90% in the previous three presidential elections, and this week appears to have beaten his own record, with provisional results showing that he has won 99.15% of the vote. But this victory has been won while excluding several prominent opponents from standing – including me. This makes the just-concluded elections no different to previous ones, and only underscores the country’s lack of democracy.

In 2010, I willingly returned to Rwanda from exile in the Netherlands with the intention of registering my political party and running in the presidential election scheduled later that year. But I was arrested immediately after openly criticising the Rwandan government’s reconciliation policy in relation to the 1994 genocide, and convicted following a trial that was widely condemned as politically motivated and grossly unfair.

I was released from prison by Kagame in 2018, but was still banned from leaving the country. Five years after my release, I applied for rehabilitation to the high court of Rwanda so I could run in the most recent presidential elections and travel abroad to visit my family in the Netherlands. The court refused my application. Over the past 14 years, I have been not only blocked from standing as a political representative, but also from reuniting with my loved ones. I have missed my children’s weddings, the birth of my grandchildren, and been unable to visit my seriously ill husband.

Amnesty International described the 2017 elections in Rwanda as having taken place in a “climate of fear and repression”, while in 2024, other credible challengers to the ruling party, such as Bernard Ntaganda, have also faced unfair systematic legal issues. Like me, he was arrested at the start of the presidential candidate registration period in 2010, and went on to serve four years in prison. Like me, he applied for rehabilitation, hoping to participate in the 2024 elections, but the court rejected his appeal. It’s all part of the silencing of dissent that has characterised Kagame’s 24-year rule.

But legally barring candidates from standing is not the only way the system has prevented differing opinions being heard. The constitution was amended last year to allow presidential and parliamentary elections to be held at the same time. But state-owned and independent media in Rwanda overwhelmingly covered the presidential campaign over parliamentary candidates. This skewed media landscape prevented aspiring parliamentarians from adequately communicating their political programmes, thereby stifling comprehensive public discussion on Rwanda’s future. This phenomenon only reinforces the lack of diversity that exists as a result of barring presidential candidates like myself.

If I had been allowed to stand I would have discussed the need for governance reform in Rwanda to enable our country to achieve genuine democratisation through inclusive dialogue among political and civil society stakeholders. I would also have emphasised the importance of reinforcing our existing reconciliation policy by remembering all victims of Rwanda’s troubled history.

Instead, voters were presented with no concrete plans for how to tackle real issues, such as growing inequalities and increasing debt, the deteriorating relationships with neighbouring countries – especially the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burundi – or the Rwandan refugees who are settled in neighbouring states or scattered across the world. Those challenges risk bringing more insecurity to Rwanda in the near future. The RPF is keen to take credit for Rwanda’s economic recovery, which has seen GDP grow by an average of 7.2% a year between 2012 and 2022. It is less vocal about reports from the World Bank that almost half the population lives on less than $2.15 (£1.65) a day.

During the campaign, Kagame was at pains to defend Rwandan democracy – which he says is based on the uniqueness of the country. He called upon Rwanda’s youth to defend it against those who criticise the government on social media. He even found time to mention my name in a derogatory manner twice during the campaign, even though I was barred from taking part.

When asked about his priorities for the next five years, Kagame responded that he plans to continue on the same path towards rebuilding Rwanda. But my country will only truly thrive when it has a functioning democracy that allows dissent, debate and different perspectives.

Continually winning presidential elections with close to 100% of the vote is not a sign of popularity, but of a lack of competition. My question is, if Kagame is so popular, why are his credible challengers barred from running against him in elections? This election result has once again demonstrated that Rwanda still has a long way to go on its path to democracy.

- Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza is Rwandan opposition leader, a campaigner for governance reform in Rwanda and leader of the Dalfa Umurinzi party

Estonia holidays

Baltic beauty: exploring Estonia’s northern coast

Sunny beaches, summer cabins and mossy marshes surrounded by flowers recall the childhood idyll of Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book, set in the Gulf of Finland

Kevin Rushby

Thu 18 Jul 2024 02.00 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 02.03 EDT

Summer cabins in the fishing village of Altja at the eastern end of Lahemaa national park. Photograph: Alamy

Draw a horizontal line west across the globe from the northern coast of Estonia and it will pass through the southernmost tip of Greenland. Hence my surprise to be looking out on an Estonian beach and seeing sunny sand where children are playing while their parents get the picnics out.

My guide, Signe, is foraging along the line of vegetation between the sand and the pine trees.

“There will be wild strawberries here next month,” she says.

The sun sparkles out in the Gulf of Finland where a white sail appears. An old man sits on a log, methodically carving some driftwood into what looks like it might become a bear. Signe has found wild blackcurrant bushes and is picking the leaves, apparently they are good when added to pickled cucumbers. I wander along the foreshore, stopping to examine an old boathouse and some tracks, possibly of an elk, then watch a gang of wading birds tiptoeing around the giant boulders, ice-age leftovers, that are dotted along the coast. It could be a scene from Tove Jansson’s luminous idyll of Baltic beach life, The Summer Book.

My journey to Estonia had begun with a train from London to Vilnius, bus across Latvia, then bicycle up through Estonia to a bear-watching hide. Now I’m walking and driving along the Gulf of Finland coast, heading west from close to the Russian border towards my final destination, the Estonian capital, Tallinn.

I get the feeling that the beach is where Estonians reconnect with an older, slower style of life, a style that also involves quite a lot of eating

Signe has got her blackcurrant leaves, but is looking doubtfully at a patch of ground-elder and nettle.

“It’s too late for this season. When the shoots are young, I chop them up with flour and egg then fry them. Delicious.”

I get the feeling that the beach is where Estonians reconnect with an older, slower style of life, a style that also involves quite a lot of eating.

Like Sophia, the main character in The Summer Book, Signe used to come here with her grandmother who always had an eye for wild seasonal produce.

“Spruce tips dipped in chocolate were a favourite,” she says.

The real culinary feast, however, is the berries. Wild strawberries in June are followed by cloudberries, lingonberries and raspberries, then by August come blueberries and cranberries. “But the best berries are not here,” says Signe. “They are up in the raised boglands. There’s a good one at Viru – we have to go there.”

That’ll be a squelchy, marshy misery, full of mosquitoes, I think. Let’s stick with the coast.

The sun sparkles on the Gulf of Finland. Photograph: Prisma by Dukas Presseagentur GmbH/Alamy

We are at the fishing village of Altja at the eastern end of Lahemaa national park which is formed by four peninsulas and bays. The plan is to explore westwards so we drive to Käsmu, a small seaside town with a big history.

In the 1880s this was an outpost of the Russian empire and the tsar built a customs house next to one of those ice-age giant boulders. These days it’s a museum, but not quite like any other. Inside we find the owner, Aarne Vaik, a white-haired professorial type, talking to a Japanese tour guide. The fame of this small quirky museum is spreading, and I am about to find out why.

“I’m originally from Tartu,” Aarne tells me, with Signe translating. “But when I came here in the 1980s, I became fascinated with the history of the town. It was renowned for the number of sea captains who lived here. At one time there were so many ships coming from places like Hull and Newcastle that sterling was legal tender.”

Inspired by the town’s 19th-century past, Aarne had started collecting maritime memorabilia and artefacts, tracking down anything from the captains’ uniforms and letters home, to their preferred tins of pipe tobacco (it was Waverley Virginia). As communism collapsed in the early 90s, the collection became impossibly vast and Aarne needed a home for it. The customs house had been a Soviet naval station. “I marched in and told them I was requisitioning it to be a maritime museum. In those crazy times, they just accepted it and moved out.”

Triin with part of the old photographic collection at Käsmu museum. Photograph: Kevin Rushby

The founding story somehow reflects the kick-ass eccentricity of both man and museum. The first room I enter is draped with dried herbs, oil paintings and maps. There are piles of antiquarian postcards, letters and books – a wonderful cornucopia of artefacts. There’s also a red setter asleep under a table laden with mysterious objets trouvés, a brass telescope and a half-eaten sandwich – this treasure-chest of a house is also home for Aarne and his wife, Triin.

Next door is a room that recreates a 19th-century sea captain’s parlour with original furniture and possessions. What’s his most prized exhibit, I ask. He rummages in a corner and picks out a black crusty sword. It’s a Viking weapon dug from a bog by a local farmer.

“It was dated to the 11th century, a period when the Vikings came through here en route to Byzantium.”

In another room I meet Triin, who shows me postcards and letters that the old sea captains sent home, then sepia-tinted photographs of the women they left behind, sometimes for years. “The women were so heroic and I’m proud that our museum includes their stories too.”

We move on along the coast, exploring villages of beautiful summer cabins buried in flower gardens. We have lunch in one, Restaurant MerMer, by the sea, then explore an abandoned Soviet submarine base at Hara. A top secret facility in its day, we scramble over broken concrete jetties and offices, the sea visible through holes in the floor. All the metal was looted after the Russians abandoned it in 1991. Now it’s becoming a seabird colony and graffiti archive.

Finally Signe asserts herself. We are going to Viru bog, it’s too good to miss.

A couple of miles into the rolling wooded countryside, we park and walk through some trees. Let’s just get it over with, I’m thinking, five minutes should be enough.

Sunset over Viru bog with a boardwalk that zigzags across a great dome of sphagnum moss. Photograph: Maria Vonotna/Alamy

We come to the start of a boardwalk that zigzags across a great dome of sphagnum moss. I find I am looking down on the forest: tiny stunted trees couched in a micro-world of water droplets, green starry moss and pink flowers. We reach an observation tower from which it’s possible to see a vast network of ponds, the black mirrors of water catching the puffs of white cloud. Birds and dragonflies move through. Back at ground level, Signe shows me how the “land” is just a sponge. “When we come to collect cranberries in August, we bring our winter snowshoes. Otherwise you’d sink.”

I’m starting to see the magic that Seamus Heaney captured in his poem Bogland:

The ground itself is kind, black butter / Melting and opening underfoot, / Missing its last definition / By millions of years

Raised bogs are formed as moss slowly builds up on top of itself until the entire landscape is lifted several metres above the water table and becomes exclusively rain-fed. Mineral levels then decrease and the giant sponge becomes acidic, creating a unique and wonderful environment, one that has its own lexicon. Water running off the burgeoning dome creates ridges, or strings, where trees might grow. In between are flarks, elongated ponds of dark water that drain down into a lagg, a wet rim. And at the centre, as we discover, is a central pond, the kolk or bog-eye, a name that captures its fathomless pupil-like darkness.

We reach an observation tower from which it’s possible to see a vast network of ponds, the black mirrors of water catching the puffs of white cloud. Birds and dragonflies move through

Around the soft, treacherous edges are carnivorous sundew plants, the sun sparkling on their pinky-green jaws. With no nutrients or soil, these plants have evolved to capture insects that are drawn to the water. Europe was once full of such places, but relentless plundering for peat has made them rare. Swimming in these ponds is a special experience: like diving into a black mirror and becoming part of the bog world.

Today, however, I’ve left it too late. The warm sun has dipped behind the trees. I lie down on the boardwalk and examine the tiny cosmos of the bog close up. I test the surface with my hand. It’s soft and wet. My hand slides in and I wriggle my fingers through the layers of fibre. Perhaps somewhere down here is another Viking sword. I touch something. It’s only a fallen log, but in my mind it becomes a sword.

In Jansson’s book, nothing much ever happens, except moments like this. In one scene the girl, Sophia, finds her grandmother picking up bones from the beach and placing them in trees. She asks what she’s doing.

“I’m playing,” says the old woman.

Having been reluctant to visit, Signe has to drag me away.

The Telliskivi area is a former Soviet industrial zone reborn as an arts hub centred on the Fotografiska building, a photographic gallery with a restaurant. Photograph: Ingus Kruklitis/Alamy

I spend the night in a forest cabin on the coast, then next day explore the coast all the way into Tallinn. In the town I wander through the Telliskivi area, a former Soviet industrial zone, now reborn as an arts hub, centred on the Fotografiska building, a photographic gallery with a restaurant. But it’s the narrow alleys of the old town that finally draw me in, stopping to sit in the cool tranquility of the church of the Holy Spirit, its galleries and walls beautifully painted by 17th-century artists.

In the evening I head back to the sea, walking down to the old Gulf of Finland port facilities, the Noblessner, that’s been turned into a stylish neighbourhood of bars and restaurants. It’s a great area to spend an evening, finishing with a stroll along the seafront (there’s a fine maritime museum).

I gaze out across the Baltic towards Finland, the light of midsummer evening plays on the water. A necklace of terns dances past and I imagine Jansson’s characters, the grandmother and six-year-old Sophia, strolling along looking for things that have washed ashore, things to play with long into the white summer night.

Kevin was a guest of Visit Estonia, travelling to the Baltic states by rail. A four-day EURail or Interrail (for UK residents) pass costs about £245 (27 and under: £183, over 60s: £220). In Laheema, Kevin stayed at ööd mirror house forest cabins from £118; in Tallinn at Nunne Boutique Hotel, doubles from about £65

Israel-Gaza war

National religious recruits challenge values of IDF once dominated by secular elite

Two-fifths of infantry graduate officer cadets now come from section of Israeli society aligned with far-right parties and settler movement

Peter Beaumont and Quique Kierszenbaum in Jerusalem

Thu 18 Jul 2024 01.00 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 04.26 EDT

Israeli army vehicles transport a group of soldiers and journalists inside southern Gaza in early July. Photograph: Ohad Zwigenberg/AFP/Getty Images

Israel’s army, for much of its seven decades the country’s pre-eminent secular institution, is increasingly coming under the sway of a national religious movement that has made bold moves across Israeli society in recent years.

About 40% of those graduating from the army’s infantry officer schools now come from a national religious community that accounts for 12 to 14% of Jewish Israeli society and is politically more aligned with Israel’s right and far-right political parties and the settler movement. Critics charge that its growing influence – including from the more orthodox portion known as Hardalim – is pursuing its own agenda within the army.

The views of the national religious community are shaped by the teachings of Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of pre-state British Mandatory Palestine, who saw the foundation and settlement of the “land of Israel” as a divine mission. For today’s national religious community, that land also encompasses the West Bank and in Gaza.

Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, 1924.

The war in Gaza has seen some soldiers from the community, including officers, involved in statements and religious activities promoting the Jewish resettlement of the Palestinian territory that have drawn rebukes from the senior leadership of the Israel Defense Forces.

Known as national religious, religious Zionist or, colloquially, “knitted kippah” (for the style of head covering favoured by men), the community stands in contrast to the ultra-Orthodox Jews, known as Haredi, who have long resisted military service. They see the army as a route to promote values that some of its key thinkers say are in tension with more secular and progressive Israeli society.

“That’s [secular and progressive Israelis’] fear, that if the national religious are in the most influential positions in the army, that not only will determine the character of the fighting but also the character of Israeli society as a whole,” said Rabbi Oury Cherki, a prominent spiritual leader in the national religious community.

Yagil Levy, a professor of military relations at the Open University of Israel, has documented the campaign to make inroads into the IDF over the last decades, in particular the impact of national religious pre-military academies and yeshivoth established to promote the community’s influence.

“The academies provide a religious education to reinforce those recruits when they join the military and to enhance their motivation to join in combat roles and as officers,” Levy said. “Twenty years later what we see is growing the presence of graduates of pre-military colleges in senior command roles as well as at a less senior level.”

Family and friends attend the funeral for IDF soldier killed while serving for the 900th (Kfir) Brigade in January. Photograph: Amir Levy/Getty Images

Critics of the academies include the former IDF deputy chief of staff Yair Golan, the leader of the Democrats party, who said some teach “anti-democratic values”.

The rise in national religious representation in the army has in turn seen the community’s leaders point to what they say is the disproportionately high number of their own among the soldiers killed in Gaza.

As well as documented incidents in Gaza, units operating in the occupied Palestinian territories on the West Bank that recruit heavily from people with national religious backgrounds have been accused of failing to intervene in violent Jewish settler attacks or human rights abuses carried out by IDF troops.

Israeli forces are deployed as Jewish settlers stage a provocative march around the old town in Hebron, West Bank, in July 2024. Photograph: Amer Shallodi/Anadolu/Getty Images

A key turning point, said Levy, was the 2005 decision of the then prime minister, Ariel Sharon, to order the withdrawal of the Israeli settlements in Gaza – a move enforced by the army in the face of resistance from settlers.

“The disengagement from Gaza was perceived by the national religious as a failure and a betrayal. They came to the conclusion they would have to increase their presence in the military, to create another army that would not disengage from the West Bank,” he said.

As a consequence, tensions have arisen between the IDF’s most senior commanders and the wider national religious community and the far-right politicians who speak for it, in regards to high-ranking military appointments.

Supporters claim Brig Gen Ofer Winter, who was released from service earlier this year, was passed over for a divisional command. Photograph: Operation 2021/Alamy

The highly controversial figure of Brig Gen Ofer Winter, the most prominent graduate of the Eli pre-military academy, has served as a lightning rod for this tension in recent years. Supporters claim Winter, who was released from service earlier this year, was passed over for a divisional command. As a colonel during the 2014 Gaza war, Winter had described that conflict with Hamas in terms of a religious battle against “a blasphemous enemy that defiles the God of Israel”.

For some, the influence of the graduates of the national religious pre-military academies and yeshivoth has come to represent a question about Israel’s democracy. When Golan took aim at the academies earlier this year, he suggested they were at odds with the IDF and that some national religious recruits should have democracy education.

Denying that he was “against the religious Zionists” in the army, Golan said: “I came out against those institutions that teach anti-democratic values with a racist, fascist flavour that should not be heard in any educational institution in the state of Israel.”

Yair Golan has suggested that some national religious recruits should have democracy education. Photograph: Eloisa Lopez/Reuters

Yehuda Shaul, a co-founder of the thinktank Ofek: the Israeli Center for Public Affairs, described the growing influence of the academies as part of a “larger effort in Israeli society to attempt a change of the elites from old school, middle- and high-class secular to national religious … that has been going across the board for years”.

He said that in the IDF it had been a long-term process. “In 1990, 2.5% of the graduate officer cadets of the infantry came form the national religious,” Shaul said. “By 2014 it is 40%. That is three times the representation of the national religious in Jewish Israeli society.”

The progress of those cadets through the ranks would gradually result in more senior national religious officers, he said. “At present we see a large representation of the national religious up to the level of brigade commanders. But every five to 10 years, it climbs up one more rank,” Shaul said.

“The highest generals may still come from the old elite, but below it is the new elite and you can see that in the attitudes coming from the field. Inevitably there will be a point where a large part of the high command are from a national religious background – and in the future that will have implications for any government that wants to take decisions that oppose that ideology.”

He added: “Already we have seen discipline issues [related to national religious ideology] become almost unenforceable, and that has consequences elsewhere, including on issues like the rules of engagement.”

In units with a high representation of national religious recruits, the war in Gaza has, according to some, produced an atmosphere of extreme nationalistic sympathy and desire for revenge. However, the latter has not been limited to the national religious community.

Luiz Aberbuj, a Brazilian-born soldier who served in the Kfir Brigade during his national service from 2014 to 2016 and now serves as a reservist in a home front combat battalion, noted attitudes in his unit that predated the current war.

Members of the Kfir Brigade take part in an operation in Gaza last year. Photograph: IDF/GPO/SIPA/Shutterstock

“Very fast there was some friction based on ideology with the Israeli guys. I heard some very radical ideologies during my service,” he told the Guardian, adding that attendance at some religious events, including talks and classes by rabbis, was compulsory.

“I am sure that it affected the consciousness of some of the soldiers and how they see their role in this complex situation. I remember it disturbed me during my service,” Aberbuj added.

During the current Gaza conflict, it was not only rabbis whose views were being shared. “We saw a big mobilisation of people coming to the base to bring donations, to empower soldiers,” he said.

“There were a lot of religious aspects. Someone would put a phylactery [the small black boxes worn for prayer] on the table or they would give you small prayer books you can carry to the front.

“The same discourse is very rightwing, very religious, even messianic, talking about Gaza as ‘ours’ and ‘we deserve it’ … with a lot of prejudices about the Palestinians. There is a heavy atmosphere of revenge.”

Among soldiers in Gaza that has been reflected in behaviour, documented on their own social media accounts, that has drawn condemnation from the IDF.

Videotaped speeches speak in messianic terms of retribution, sometimes quoting religious texts. Soldiers have set up makeshift synagogues in the Palestinian houses they have taken over.

Israeli soldiers fold the national flag during a ceremony at the evacuated Gaza settlement of Atzmona in September 2005. Photograph: Gali Tibbon/AP

Tanks in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, have been seen flying the orange and black flag of Gush Katif, the former Israeli settlement in the Palestinian territory that was evacuated in 2005. There has been a slogan written on the flag: “We will build it, we are returning to Gush Katif.”

Elsewhere, a unit posted a video on Telegram with one soldier addressing Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, by his nickname.

“We are here adding light after the black sabbath that the people of Israel had. We are occupying, deporting and settling. Occupying, deporting and settling. Did you hear that Bibi? Occupying, deporting and settling.”

For Cherki, settlement has been the key motivation for national religious army service going back to the occupation of Palestinian territories after the six-day war in 1967.

Israeli soldiers and Orthodox Jews pray at the Western Wall in Jerusalem after capturing the eastern part of the city in the six-day war, 1967. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

“Because of this, many religious joined the army, which [in turn] saw religious schools created that combined military service with the religious study,” the rabbi said.

“As the state advanced, the national religious got more and more space in the Israeli society, reaching the point where many of the fighters in the combat units come from the movement. That is the reason why so many of the casualties in this war are coming from the national religious movement.”

Cherki is among those who believe the IDF have acted to block members of his community from promotion to the highest ranks. He cites the case of Winter, though the IDF have long denied claims that his membership of the community was related to his not being promoted to divisional command.

Israeli soldiers from the Netzah Yehuda Battalion take part in a swearing-in ceremony in Jerusalem at the end of their military training last week. Photograph: Abir Sultan/EPA

“Among the high commanders there is a ‘glass ceiling’ [for national religious officers]. The Matkal [the high command] worry about an ideological change in the army,” Cherki said. “The national religious soldiers who come to the army come with their own ideology … and that has consequences in thinking of the morality of the fighting.”

An IDF spokesperson said: “The IDF does not distinguish or differentiate between its recruits based on their religious identity. IDF units are made up of personnel from diverse backgrounds, both secular and observant of different religions, who all serve together.

“As to the specific cases mentioned regarding IDF soldiers filming, taking pictures and participating in both provocative or political videos or pictures, the IDF acts to address exceptional incidents that deviate from the orders and expected values of IDF soldiers.

“The IDF examines events of this kind as well as reports of videos uploaded to social networks and handles them with command and disciplinary measures.”

European Union

Proposed UK-EU security pact ‘will be welcomed in Brussels’, MEP says

Glad to draw line under poisonous Brexit era, diplomats say Starmer’s new approach to EU brings ‘good vibes’

Jennifer Rankin in Brussels

Thu 18 Jul 2024 01.00 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 02.23 EDT

David McAllister (pictured above with Ursula von der Leyen), a German MEP and chair of the European parliament’s foreign affairs committee, said Labour’s proposed foreign policy and security pact with the EU sounded ‘quite promising’. Photograph: Patrick Seeger/EPA

Labour’s proposed foreign policy and security pact with the EU sounds “quite promising”, the head of the European parliament’s foreign affairs committee has said, adding that the British government should use the next weeks and months to come up with proposals that are “as concrete as possible”.

David McAllister, a veteran German MEP and close ally of European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said such a pact should cover economic, climate, health, cyber and energy security. His list overlaps with the sweeping set of ideas proposed by the UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, who recently met his counterparts in Berlin, Stockholm and Bydgoszcz in northern Poland.

Speaking to the Guardian before the European Political Community (EPC) summit that will bring together leaders from about 45 European countries at Blenheim Palace on Thursday, McAllister said: “We have always wanted closer post-Brexit security cooperation. At the moment we have as the EU more structured ties with the US, Canada and Norway than we do with the UK. So if David Lammy and [the defence secretary] John Healey are calling for a security pact with the EU, I think that this will be welcomed in Brussels.”

The EPC, proposed by France’s Emmanuel Macron, is not intended to discuss EU-UK relations, but it gives Keir Starmer a stage to showcase a new approach to the union. For the new government it is a powerful, symbolic moment. EU diplomats are glad to draw a line under the poisonous exchanges of the Brexit years, while saying relations had already improved with the signing of the Windsor framework agreement under Rishi Sunak.

“Hopefully this election result will allow us to build on the trust and progress already made with prime minister Sunak’s government,” said McAllister, a member of Germany’s centre-right CDU party who is widely expected to be confirmed for a fourth straight term as chair of the European parliament’s foreign affairs committee next week. “One thing is clear: a period of calm, predictable and constructive diplomacy will be very beneficial for our bilateral partnership.”

Separately a senior EU official said there were “good vibes” from early contacts with the new British government and that any proposal on foreign and security cooperation “will be looked at with an open mind”.

The EU always wanted a foreign and security agreement with the UK but Boris Johnson abandoned this idea in his quest for a “Global Britain” foreign policy that shunned engagement with European institutions.

Brussels officials have no wish to reopen the post-Brexit deal signed with Johnson’s government, although they would like new agreements on youth mobility and fisheries when the current arrangements expire in 2026.

McAllister said he would like to see the UK “quickly rejoin” the Erasmus student exchange scheme and the two sides should “try and bring down as many barriers as possible for young people when it comes to mobility”.

The European parliament has only a limited role in foreign policy, but sets and reflects the EU agenda.

The EU has regular summits with Switzerland, Norway, Canada, New Zealand, China and Japan but no top-level gathering with its near neighbour across the Channel. Both London and Brussels are interested in having regular EU-UK summits.

McAllister said the two sides should have “regular strategic consultations at political level”, which he defined as invitations to the British prime minister to join EU heads of state and government, or the foreign secretary to meet his EU counterparts, on relevant agenda points.

However, he cautioned that the UK could not expect a permanent invitation to the EU’s monthly meetings of foreign affairs ministers. Lammy has been invited to the gathering in October – the next available slot – but officials have ruled out a standing invitation. “Absolutely not, it’s unthinkable,” a second EU official said.

While the bloc regularly invites non-EU guests to foreign minister meetings, the UK has only attended once, in March 2022, when Liz Truss as foreign secretary went to Brussels in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In what is likely to be music to Whitehall’s ears, McAllister suggested the UK could play a part in a nascent programme to increase European weapons and ammunition stocks, the European Defence Industry Programme. Traditionally, France has been influential in limiting defence programmes to EU companies.

Stressing that negotiations on EDIP has not been completed, McAllister said: “Of course it’s about buying European, but it’s not exclusively buying European. It’s about buying the best for our armed forces. And this is where I think the UK defence industry brings real added value for us.”

McAllister is a member of the Christian Democratic Union party, which is riding high in opinion polls, far ahead of the three governing parties in the chancellor Olaf Scholz’s unpopular coalition.

The CDU leader, Friedrich Merz, recently told the FT that continental Europeans could have done more to help the UK come to a different referendum result in 2016. Asked about these comments, McAllister struck a different note, suggesting the UK would always be more special than a typical non-EU country.

“Brexit has happened … I believe that we have to make the best out of this situation, and try to have the best possible cooperation with the UK, which will never be [just] a third country for us … but an important trading partner, a rock-solid Nato ally and a neighbour,” he said.

“Germany has, in particular, a vested interest in integrating the UK into European security and defence cooperation,” he added, welcoming the commitments in the Labour and Conservative election manifestos for increased defence and security cooperation with his country.

The EU-UK trade deal will be reviewed in 2025 and McAllister said supplementary agreements “very much depend on the UK side to present the proposals”, reflecting the Brussels consensus that Britain has to make the first move.

Asked why the EU could not present proposals, McAllister said: “Until now, the EU has dealt with UK governments who weren’t always 100% clear what they actually wanted.”

New Zealand

New Zealand will fail to meet 2050 net zero targets, data shows, after climate policies scrapped

Scientists say government’s approach to emissions cutting is ‘high risk’ and reliant on ‘immature technologies’

Eva Corlett in Wellington

Thu 18 Jul 2024 01.00 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 01.02 EDT

New figures show New Zealand is on track to miss its 2050 net zero target, with scientists saying the government is too reliant on underdeveloped technologies. Photograph: Geoff Marshall/Alamy

New Zealand’s ambitious plan to reach net zero emissions by 2050 is at risk of being derailed, as the government backslides on climate policies, new figures show.

In 2019, the Labour government passed landmark climate legislation, committing the nation to reducing its carbon emissions to net zero by 2050 and meeting its commitments under the Paris climate accords. It requires future governments to detail how New Zealand will meet its greenhouse gas targets on the way to a carbon-neutral future.

The coalition government – made up of the centre-right National party and two minor partners, the libertarian Act party and populist New Zealand First party – released its first draft emissions reduction plan on Wednesday.

Figures published alongside it show the country is on track to reach its first and second emissions budgets, covering the years 2022-2030, but will overshoot its third budget and will fail to meet its long-term 2050 goal.

The country had been poised to meet its third budget but the projections have been updated, partly because the government has yet to announce robust new climate policies after scrapping a number of the Labour government’s carbon reduction plans.

Changes outside the government’s control, including a new supply agreement that will see the Tiwai Point aluminium smelter continue to operate through to 2044, have also altered projections.

The new projections show New Zealand will still be emitting a net 5m tonnes by 2050, unless the government can adopt new policies or technologies to reduce levels.

Climate change minister Simon Watts said the government was committed to the overarching 2050 target and “understands the need for action in climate change” but the government would “not accept shutting down productive sectors of the economy to meet emissions targets”.

“Instead, we will use a technology-led approach to allow production to increase as our emissions come down,” he said, adding that the government would orient resources towards research and development.

While New Zealand’s total contribution to global emissions are small, its gross emissions per capita are high, with nearly half of its emissions attributed to agriculture.

“Farmers need the tools in order to be able to reduce their emissions,” Watts said. “Simply implementing a pricing regime without those tools is not a feasible mechanism to help our agricultural sector, which is the backbone of this economy.”

The government has also signalled its interest in scaling up tree-planting, which it says is an affordable way to lower emissions.

“If it removes carbon, we should be looking at the opportunity to leverage that more,” Watts said.

A 2023 climate commission report warned that achieving a net reduction in emissions primarily through planting trees would be impossible to sustain in the long term.

Reliance on ‘immature technologies’

Earlier this month, the government released its climate strategy, which included policies to double renewable energy, boost the number of public electric vehicle chargers, lower agricultural emissions, invest in resource recovery through the waste minimisation fund, and invest in carbon capture, utilisation, and storage.

But other government policies have been described by climate scientists and conservation groups as “antagonistic” to the environment.

These include: reversing the ban on offshore oil and gas exploration, introducing legislation that could override environmental protections to make way for major infrastructure projects such as mines, scrapping financial incentives for electric-car buyers, and reducing funding for cycleways and public transport.

The 2025 start date for pricing agricultural emissions has also been pushed back to 2030.

In May, the government announced sweeping cuts to climate action projects in its first budget, while making no significant new investments in environmental protection or climate crisis-related policy.

This week’s draft plan has done little to allay climate scientists’ fears, many of whom believe too much stock is being put in undeveloped technology and offsetting, rather than stopping, emissions.

“Many of their policies to date will result in higher annual emissions that will not be offset by either planting trees or the emissions reduction scheme,” said Ralph Sims, a professor emeritus in sustainable energy and climate mitigation at Massey University.

“The apparent reliance by government on immature technologies that may or may not one day reduce ruminant methane [methane from livestock] significantly, or could perhaps sequester some carbon by capture and storage systems in decades to come, is high risk given such technological solutions might never become commercially viable – and will also take many years to evolve,” he said.

Lawyers for Climate Action NZ said the draft plan raises “significant concerns” about whether New Zealand will achieve its targets.

Meanwhile, projections estimate there will be a shortfall in New Zealand reaching its first Nationally Determined Contribution under the Paris Agreement, which would force the country to buy international carbon credits.

“This shortfall will come at a significant financial cost to the government, and it’s still not clear what the plan is for meeting that,” said Jessica Palairet, executive director of Lawyers for Climate Action NZ.

JD Vance

JD Vance pushes Republicans as champions of working class in first speech as Trump’s running mate

Vance denounces Biden and Democrats at Republican national convention, saying: ‘the people who govern this country have failed and failed again’

Joan E Greve in Milwaukee

Thu 18 Jul 2024 00.45 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 12.54 EDT

JD Vance attacks Democrats in first speech as Republican vice-president nominee – video

JD Vance formally accepted the Republican vice-presidential nomination on Wednesday with a deliberate, and at times divisive, pitch to re-elect Donald Trump in November.

Addressing delegates in Milwaukee on the third night of the convention, Vance, the junior senator of Ohio, presented the Republican party as a champion of working-class Americans while denouncing Democrats as out of touch and ineffective. The populist-tinged rhetoric offered the latest sign of how Trump has reshaped the Republican party and rejected much of the traditional conservatism of its past.

“From Iraq to Afghanistan, from the financial crisis to the Great Recession, from open borders to stagnating wages, the people who govern this country have failed and failed again,” Vance told the energized crowd. “That is, of course, until a guy named Donald J Trump came along. President Trump represents America’s last, best hope to restore what, if lost, may never be found again.”

Vance leaned into his own personal story, first shared in his bestselling and controversial memoir Hillbilly Elegy, to bolster his message. He recounted experiences with childhood poverty in Middletown, Ohio, and his later acceptance to Yale Law School as he introduced himself to a much larger audience of Americans for the first time. In an emotional moment, Vance acknowledged his mother in the crowd and celebrated her 10 years of sobriety after decades of struggling with drug addiction.

With a mention of the battleground states that could determine the outcome of the election, he vowed that a Trump-Vance administration would deliver economic opportunity for working-class communities.

“In Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio and every corner of our nation, I promise you this: I will be a vice-president who never forgets where he came from,” Vance said. “And every single day for the next four years, when I walk into that White House to help President Trump, I will be doing it for you, for your family, for your future and for this great country.”

Democrats scoffed at Vance’s attempt to appeal to working Americans, accusing him of backing “an economic agenda that will raise costs on American families, while giving billionaires and corporations tax cuts”.

Michael Tyler, communications director of the Biden campaign, added, “JD Vance is unprepared, unqualified and willing to do anything Donald Trump demands.”

In his speech, Vance joined the scores of Republican lawmakers who have condemned the assassination attempt against Trump on Saturday. Vance urged Americans to unify in the face of violence, even as he vilified Democrats who previously criticized Trump.

“I want all Americans to go and watch the video of a would-be assassin coming a quarter of an inch from taking his life,” Vance said. “Consider the lies they told you about Donald Trump, and then look at that photo of him defiant, fist in the air. When Donald Trump rose to his feet in that Pennsylvania field, all of America stood with him.”

In another sign of Trump’s takeover of the Republican party, Vance echoed the former president’s “America first” approach to foreign policy. Since joining the Senate last year, Vance has become one of the most outspoken critics of US aid to Ukraine and he doubled down on that isolationist stance in his speech.

“Together we will make sure our allies share in the burden of securing world peace – no more free rides,” Vance said. “We will put the citizens of America first, whatever the color of their skin. We will, in short, make America great again.”

The selection of Vance has unsettled some Republican lawmakers who embrace America’s active role on the global stage, and his speech underscored how Trump’s re-election could fundamentally reshape the relationship between the US and its European allies at a perilous moment. One senior European diplomat told the Guardian that Trump’s choice of running mate was “terrible news” for Ukraine, adding, “[Vance] is not our ally.”

Nodding at the ideological differences within his party, Vance encouraged Republicans to engage in a robust debate over key policy issues.

“Shouldn’t we be governed by a party that is unafraid to debate ideas and come to the best solution?” Vance said. “That’s the Republican party of the next four years, united in our love for this country and committed to free speech and the open exchange of ideas.”

Voters will determine in November if that Republican party will indeed have the opportunity to govern for the next four years.

Democrats

Biden faces renewed pressure to step aside as Democrats’ rift widens

Tensions amid party members rise as Biden tests positive for Covid and will be in self-isolation in Delaware

Joan E Greve and David Smith in Milwaukee and Martin Pengelly in Washington

Thu 18 Jul 2024 00.22 EDT

First published on Wed 17 Jul 2024 14.20 EDT

Disagreements over the president’s candidacy are stoking public feuds. Photograph: Kent Nishimura/AFP/Getty Images

Pressure for Joe Biden to step aside as the Democrats’ presidential pick to face Donald Trump had eased since the Republican survived an assassination attempt last weekend, but began to rise again on Wednesday.

The tension rose as Biden was diagnosed with Covid and cancelled events to self-isolate at his home in Delaware.

Adam Schiff, the influential US representative from California, said publicly that Biden should quit, becoming the most well-known lawmaker so far to do so openly.

Then ABC News reported that Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader and the most senior Democrat in Congress, had told Biden in a meeting on Saturday it would be better for the country and the Democratic party if the president ended his re-election campaign.

However, a spokesperson for Schumer called the report “idle speculation”.

“Unless ABC’s source is Senator Chuck Schumer or President Joe Biden, the reporting is idle speculation,” the spokesperson said. “Leader Schumer conveyed the views of his caucus directly to President Biden on Saturday.”

Later on Wednesday a second report from CNN said the former house speaker Nancy Pelosi told Biden that polling showed he could not beat Trump, and that would affect the Democrats’ chances in the House of Representatives this November.

Also on Wednesday afternoon, David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Barack Obama as president, increased his persistent pressure campaign on Biden as he warned that the president had not done enough to relieve voters’ concern about his age since last month’s hapless debate performance.

“I’ve said for a long time, it’s not in any way a commentary on his record, which I think will be honoured more by history than it is by voters right now, but it’s a very hard case to make that anyone should be elected president in the United States at the age of 82, not for political reasons but for actuarial reasons,” Axelrod told the Guardian in Milwaukee.

Having already riled Biden with criticism of his re-election bid, Axelrod continued the attack at an event on the sidelines of the Republican national convention, where Trump is expected to receive the official party nomination on Thursday.

Asked whether he thought Biden can survive as the Democrats’ presumptive nominee, the chief strategist for the 2008 and 2012 Obama presidential campaigns replied: “That’s entirely in his hands.”

His and Schiff’s comments followed those of a “prominent strategist” who, in a sign of how sharply divided the party stands, was moved to say of the internal rebellion against Biden’s candidacy: “It’s over.” The strategist spoke anonymously to the Hill.

At a press conference in Milwaukee, Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor and a party grandee, said Biden would be confirmed as the Democratic nominee by virtual vote between 1 and 7 August, before the Chicago convention.

Walz told reporters: “We need to get these things done. We need to get the roll call done. But it won’t happen before 1 August.”

The debate over Biden’s age and cognitive fitness is likely to stoke more nasty public splits.

On Wednesday morning, as a new ABC-Norc poll found nearly two-thirds of Democrats saying Biden should withdraw, the blogger and podcaster Nate Silver linked to video of moments in a speech in Las Vegas the night before, in which the 81-year-old president seemed to struggle.

Silver said: “It’s just so weird living through this real-life Emperor Has No Clothes Moment. He obviously shouldn’t be president for four more years. Everyone knows this.”

This is from Biden’s speech to the NAACP yesterday.

He loses track of what he’s saying constantly. Asking people to ignore what’s right in front of them is absurd. pic.twitter.com/b2IVsFStIe

— AG (@AGHamilton29) July 17, 2024

Schiff followed reports that he had predicted heavy Democratic losses under Biden by going public on the matter.

Biden “has been one of the most consequential presidents in our nation’s history” but it was time “to pass the torch”, Schiff, now a Democratic candidate for US Senate, told the Los Angeles Times.

“A second Trump presidency will undermine the very foundation of our democracy, and I have serious concerns about whether the president can defeat Donald Trump in November.”

Biden insists he is up to the job, telling one interviewer he will be the nominee “unless I get hit by a train”.

The White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement on Wednesday: “The president told both leaders he is the nominee of the party, he plans to win, and looks forward to working with both of them to pass his 100 days agenda to help working families.”

Silver also said it was “incredibly revealing which people are willing to lie” about Biden’s age and the problem facing his party.

That was a reference to Silver’s public argument on Tuesday with Jaime Harrison, the Democratic National Committee chair, over plans to confirm Biden’s nomination before the convention, officially related to uncertainty over election law in Ohio and the deadline for ballot inclusion.

Harrison wrote: “Love y’all but when it comes to election law and ballot access, I put my trust in our legal team who make a living understanding these laws and processes and not in the pollster who promised us the red wave. #ClassDismissed.”

He was referring to predictions that the 2022 midterms would see Republicans retake the Senate and strengthen their hold on the House, which did not transpire.

Silver answered: “Jaime, I’m not a pollster and I didn’t promise a red wave. The data is here. Actual experts have weighed in and said you’re spreading misinformation. You should probably stop lying.

“You and the White House have run the whole campaign on the premise that you could bullshit your way through things. It’s early enough so as not to be unsalvageable, but you’ve put Democrats in an incredibly difficult position. Enough with the BS.”

Silver also accused Harrison and the Democratic National Committee of “blatantly lying” about a need to confirm Biden before the convention, adding: “The good news is that there very much will be consequences if they force Biden’s nomination [through] and he loses.”

Harrison said: “Nate … you can call me a lot of things but a liar is definitely not one of them. I know you THINK you know every thing but class is now truly in session. Pull up a chair.”

He then offered an explanation of the plan for an early confirmation, in light of events in Ohio. Silver said he was “trying to gaslight people based on a technicality”.

Elsewhere, the Ohio secretary of state said the election law issue was “resolved”, adding that Democrats “know that and should stop trying to scapegoat Ohio for their own party disfunction”.

Amid it all, Ron Klain entered the chat.

The former White House chief of staff, who remains close to Biden and his campaign, posted a FiveThirtyEight prediction of a Biden electoral college victory and said: “But I thought he had ‘no path’ according to donors and the electeds following the donors?”

Klain added: “Based on working in two campaigns against Trump I am unchanged in my view that Joe Biden is uniquely capable of defeating him – that’s my gut view based on experience.”

Silver said: “You’d say that whether you really believed it or not. But come on the podcast Ron and we’ll see how many mental gymnastics you’re willing to do to defend this position.”

Klain, Silver added, was “the one person on the campaign who might be smart enough to know he’s full of shit and will write a memoir in five years saying Biden’s inner circle was incorrigible and he had to provide the most help he could to Biden under the circumstances”.

Also on social media, Simon Rosenberg, a pollster and strategist who correctly said there would be no “red wave” in 2022, made an appeal for sanity, posting on X, in part: “Fellow Dems, every moment you attack other [Democrats] you are helping Trump win. Stop it.”

Harrison reposted the message.

Health & wellbeing

The power of proprioception: how to improve your ‘sixth sense’ – and become healthier and happier

It is our physical sense of where we are in space and is essential to our quality of life as we age. Here are simple, everyday ways to test and train it

Joel Snape

Thu 18 Jul 2024 00.00 EDT

It’s becoming clear that improving or maintaining our proprioceptive ability is key to our quality of life as we age. Illustration: Gus Scott/The Guardian

The next time you’re somewhere non-embarrassing, try this quick test: stand on one leg with your arms stretched out to the sides, imagining that one hand is holding a rock. Next, the tricky bit: “pass” the rock overhead to your other hand without putting your leg down, then pass it back, and repeat the whole movement 10 times without losing your balance. Don’t worry if you can’t manage it: that means you’ve got something to work on.

Dan Edwardes, one of the UK’s most experienced coaches in the athletic obstacle-leaping discipline of parkour, calls this the “rock pass” drill – and says it’s one of the simplest ways to check up on your proprioception, or your body’s sense of where it is in space. Sometimes referred to as our sixth sense, proprioception is what helps high-level athletes take a penalty without looking at the ball, or orient themselves in the air while doing a twisting somersault. But it’s also what lets you touch your nose with your eyes closed, push open a door without shoving it too hard, or adjust your gait when you hit an unexpected root on a trail run.

“Any complex movement skill, from jumping to vaulting to climbing, requires a high level of proprioception,” says Edwardes. “Think of adding these moves to your daily movement ‘diet’ to keep yourself strong and functional.” Or, in other words, it’s becoming clear, as our understanding of it improves, that improving or maintaining our proprioceptive ability is key to our quality of life as we age.

“In the last five years, we’ve learned a lot about the brain through functional MRI studies, and that’s allowed us to more deeply understand which regions of it are most involved in proprioceptive processing,” says the exercise physiologist Dr Milica McDowell. “Research has identified specific neural pathways and brain regions, such as the cerebellum and somatosensory cortex, that are involved – and that’s allowing us to understand a lot more about how to protect our proprioception throughout our lives.”

Proprioceptors are receptors mainly located in the muscles, tendons and joints, which work in conjunction with our body’s other sensory systems to deliver us information on our movements and environment. These let you sense the position of your limbs or even digits – “Think about splaying out your toes: you know it’s happening without looking at them, right?” says McDowell – but also gauge the weight of objects you’re interacting with, or pick up on changes in the surface you’re walking on.

Some people seem to have more finely tuned proprioceptors than others, but it can also depend on the task. It’s possible, for instance, to be rock-steady in a yoga pose but have below-average hand-eye coordination, or vice versa. It’s also something that can be affected by health issues including stroke, neurological disorders or even diabetes.

It also worsens when we get older. “As we age, proprioceptive abilities can decline, leading to increased risk of falls and reduced coordination,” says McDowell. “If you notice your elder family members having a tough time with coordinated movements or fine motor tasks like typing or playing cards, proprioceptive decline is at least partly to blame.” But, crucially, studies on everyone from pensioners to military personnel suggest that proprioception can be improved – or at least maintained – if it’s worked on, with results that can reduce the risk of falls or injury.

“Proprioception is one of those things that no one thinks about until they realise they’re not great at it,” says Jarlo Ilano, a physical therapist and managing director at Gold Medal Bodies. “But it’s something that separates good athletes from better ones – or it can be the difference between falling and breaking a bone or just scuffing yourself up a little.”

So how can you improve it? The simplest option is to add more movements to your everyday life that challenge your balance, hand-eye coordination or sense of movement – or embrace the opportunity as it arises. “Standing on one leg while you’re brushing your teeth or chatting on the phone is one of the simplest things you can do, but using movements that include reaching, bending or twisting is important, too,” says the physiotherapist Calum Fraser. “Things as simple as practising movements with your eyes closed can challenge your proprioception – forcing the body to depend more on internal signals than visual feedback, and strengthening the neural pathways responsible.”

Add movements to your everyday life that challenge your hand-eye coordination. Illustration: GUS SCOTT/The Guardian

In the gym, using bodyweight exercises or “free” weights such as kettlebells, barbells and dumbbells beats sticking to the machines. “Try exercises like planks or leg lifts, which emphasise core stability,” says Fraser. “Strong cores help with posture and better proprioceptive abilities. Another thing to try – if you’ve already got a base of strength – is plyometric movements like jump squats or bounding drills (basically, jumping from one foot to the other, like you’re taking very long strides), which strengthen how quickly muscles react to positional changes.”

Also a good idea are forms of exercise that use slow, purposeful movements that build a sense of where your body is in space – recent studies suggest that pilates and tai chi can both be effective for building proprioception in the regions they focus on (trunk and core for the former, legs for the latter). A systematic review of studies on yoga’s relationship with proprioception concluded that more research is needed, but the combination of balance, deliberate movement and closed-eye exercises is likely to be beneficial.

“The concept of our five senses is generally attributed to Aristotle, though much older Hindu scripts talk about these senses and more,” says Bassanti Pathak, founder of the London-based Pathak Yoga.

Pathak teaches her students to draw on less talked-about senses, with proprioception being taught and honed by letting students close their eyes in postures or in movements such as the sun salutation, as long as they feel balanced enough to complete the movements safely. “The more you practise, the easier it becomes,” she says. “It’s definitely a sense that can be honed. One of my students, who is in her 70s, told me that it wouldn’t scare her to lose her eyesight, because in my classes she is getting a glimpse of how other senses would take over and heighten her enjoyment of the world in a different way.”

Proprioception is also useful, of course, for faster and less predictable movement. It’s what allows veteran trail runners to run efficiently on mud, sand and gravel, but it’s also what helps road runners avoid injury – according to a recent review of studies, people who undertake proprioceptive training suffer fewer ankle sprains, whether they’ve had them before or not. And for anyone who wants to take things a bit further, there are more adventurous options.

“Almost everything in parkour requires and improves proprioception,” says Edwardes. “Regular parkour training hugely improves your ability to navigate space and overcome movement tasks – from simple, everyday things like getting up and down from the floor to more advanced problems you may have to solve like climbing over a gate, playing a sport or even dodging a car when crossing the road.”

Research to back this up is fairly limited, but one study found that experienced parkour athletes (also known as traceurs) had a better sense of balance with their eyes closed than a control group. And even for people too risk-averse to scale walls or tightrope-walk along rails, managing imbalance while in motion causes more motor neurones to fire and many more neuromuscular connections to coordinate throughout the body. “Essentially, it’s far more complex than just balancing on one leg and far more ‘functional’ in terms of movement outcomes,” says Edwardes.

To sum up, then: improving our proprioception has a positive knock-on effect on our health and our lifespan – and it seems to be very trainable. It will reduce the chance of a fall in later life, help us avoid injury in daily activities, and the improved coordination helps us to enjoy movement – which makes us more likely to keep moving on a regular basis.

But what if you struggle to even pass an imaginary rock overhead? “Everyone can benefit from moving more mindfully, but if you have poor proprioception, it’s even more important,” says Ilano. “Being present in your body and paying attention to your movements and your surroundings means fewer accidents and better success with whatever skills you’re trying to learn.” In other words, concentrate on what you’re doing as you move – and take every opportunity you can to challenge yourself in everyday life. You might surprise yourself with what you’re capable of.

How to check and improve your proprioception

Want to see what you can already do? Try these simple tests.

Heel-toe walking

It’s like tightrope walking, but without the risk. Find a straight line on the ground – or mark one out with tape – and walk along it, touching your front heel to your rear toe at each step. Try not to wobble, or step off to the side.

Wall bounces

This one’s about hand-eye coordination. Grab a small, bouncy ball – a tennis ball will do – and throw it underhand into a wall, then catch it with the other hand as it bounces. Repeat as many times as you can.

Ball pickups

You can use the same ball for this one. Put it down either in front of or behind you, then pick it up again with the other hand. Repeat, trying to get more creative with the ways you lower yourself to the ground (think squats, lunges and splits) or the spots where you put the ball.

Jumping turns

Don’t do this one if you aren’t confident about your coordination – or your knee health. Bend your knees slightly and then jump, aiming to do a quarter, half or even full 360-degree turn in the air. Land as softly as you can.

To improve your movement, try these parkour-inspired exercises

Easy: mobile balance “Whenever you can, walk along a thin surface such as a kerb or a low railing in the park,” says Edwardes. Before you go for height, work on your movement: use your free leg as a counterweight, and keep your knee slightly flexed. Try to keep your upper body relaxed – this will improve with practice – and once you get the hang of walking, try turning or even squatting on the object you’re balancing on.

Challenging: precision jumps Practice small, accurate steps or two-footed jumps onto a target, like a bench, kerb or – if you’re feeling confident – a low railing, so that you have to maintain your balance after the jump. Work on taking off and landing softly, and use an arm swing to build momentum before your jump and to control your body afterwards. As you improve, try jumping for distance or height, or putting more than one jump together.

Hard: rail crawl For a more advanced movement, try crawling on all fours along a low railing – moving one hand and the opposite foot at almost the same time. Parkour practitioners sometimes call this the “cat balance”, so think feline: try to keep your back parallel to the rail and your hips not too high.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

China

‘Garbage time of history’: Chinese state media pushes back on claims country has entered a new epoch

Authorities unhappy as Chinese chat groups and WeChat feeds buzz with discussion of whether China has entered period of inevitable failure

Amy Hawkins

Wed 17 Jul 2024 20.16 EDT

Last modified on Thu 18 Jul 2024 13.37 EDT

A man looks on as a bulldozer piles up garbage to burn on the outskirts of Baoding, Hebei province, China. In recent weeks, Chinese chat groups and have been buzzing with discussion about whether China is in a “garbage time of history”. Photograph: China Stringer Network/REUTERS

First, there was the century of humiliation, in which China was subjugated by western powers. Then there was the era of reform and opening up, where China’s rapid economic development paved the way for what was supposed to be the Chinese century. But now, according to social media users , China is in another epoch worth naming: the garbage time of history.

In recent weeks, Chinese chat groups and WeChat feeds have been buzzing with discussion of whether China has entered a period of economic stagnation or regression in which failure is all but inevitable, called a “garbage time of history”.

The sentiment can be summed up by a graphic, widely shared on social media – and since censored on Weibo.

Entitled the “2024 misery ranking grand slam”, it tallies up the number of misery points that a person might have earned in China this year. The first star is unemployment. For two stars, add a mortgage. For a full suite of eight stars, you’ll need the first two, plus debt, childrearing, stock trading, illness, unfinished housing and, finally, hoarding Moutai, a famous brand of baijiu, a sorghum liquor.

“Some people say that history has garbage time,” wrote one Xiaohongshu user who shared the graphic, along with advice about self-care. “Individuals don’t have garbage time.”

The phrase is inspired by – and has been misattributed to – the Austrian free market economist Ludwig von Mises, who argued against government intervention in the economy.

In February, Ma Xiangyang, an author for The Economic Observer, a business publication, wrote an article that some analysts interpreted as being a coded reference to the Xi era. “As far as Chinese history is concerned, the Ming dynasty opened by Zhu Yuanzhang is a typical ‘historical garbage time’. He started his empire dream with severe punishments and harsh laws and wanted to protect the family name for generations. Objectively, it only extended the length and depth of this period of darkness,” Ma wrote. Zhu was the founding emperor of the Ming dynasty in the 14th century.

Ma added that the ghost of “garbage time” was starting to return to “the heart of Asia”.

The phrase has since caught on among Chinese people disappointed with China’s flagging economy, who are feeling increasingly hopeless about the so-called “Chinese century”. In recent years, other phrases such as “lying flat” or “involution” have become similarly trendy among young people who feel that society is no longer rewarding their efforts.

State media and certain influential commentators have not taken kindly to the latest viral phrase.

Last week, Wang Wen, executive dean of the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, a thinktank at Renmin University, wrote an article lambasting the “falsification of academic concepts”.

“A closer look at this pseudo-word reveals that it is more dangerous than the ‘lying flat theory’ in recent years,” Wang wrote, referring to the “historical garbage time” phrase. “It completely denies China’s current development situation and attempts to create public expectations that the country will eventually fail”.

Beijing Daily, the official newspaper of the Beijing branch of the Chinese Communist party, also recently responded to the trend, with an article entitled: “‘History’s Garbage Time’? True or False?”

“Is there any ‘garbage time’ in our history? This is a false proposition that is not worth refuting,” the Beijing Daily writer declared in the 3,000-character piece refuting the proposition.

The Chinese authorities have become increasingly concerned about negativity dragging down the country’s recovery. Social media users have been instructed not to “bad-mouth” the economy. Qiao Liu, dean of Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management, recently gave a commencement speech, in which he warned graduating students to reject “narrative traps” about China’s economy having peaked. The “garbage time of history” was one such trap, he said, according to a translation published by Pekingnology, a newsletter.

But some social media users are sanguine about being online in such an era. One Weibo blogger, who feared his account might soon be deleted because of a post he made about a recent food safety scandal, wrote a farewell to his followers. “No matter what happens, I am very happy to spend the garbage time of history with you”.

Additional research by Chi Hui Lin

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‘Garbage time of history’: Chinese state media pushes back on claims country has entered a new epoch