Guardian Weekly - April 22 2022
Guardian Weekly - April 22 2022
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34
Snack happy
The secret life of
vending machines
A week in the life of the world | Global edition
22 APRIL 2022 | VOL .206 No.17 | £4.50 | €6.95*
10
40
PLUS
THE
Little nippers
Portraits of creatures,
SPYING
51
to haunt Boris Johnson
17
Striped away
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A week in the life of the world Inside
22 April 2022
45-50 OPINION
45 Gaby Hinsliff
Rape is a war crime
47 Rachel Connolly
Linking the unlinkable
48 Joshua Surtees
The exploitation of UK’s
Rwanda refugee plan
51-59 C U LT U R E
TV, film, music, theatre,
Join the community A week in the life of the world | Global edition
22 APRIL 2022 | VOL .206 No.17 | £4.50 | €6.95* Payback time Partygate returns
to haunt Boris Johnson 17
On the cover art, architecture & more
Twitter: @guardianweekly Reflecting the erosion of wide-scale Russian 51 Music
facebook.com/guardianweekly THE
Instagram: @guardian SPYING
GAME
espionage activities since the start of the The return of Jack White
Is Russia’s era of industrial espionage over? 10
Little nippers
Portraits of creatures,
Striped away
Jack White, on
and disinformation. A history of modern-day
Illustration: Guardian Design despots
vending machines great and small the road again
34 40 51
SPOT ILLUSTRATIONS:
MATT BLEASE
60-61 LIFESTYLE
4
Global
2 FRANCE 4 FINANCE
6 US/CUBA
7 BRAZIL
11 L I B YA
18
Up to 35 people dead after
canoe capsizes, says IOM 15
A boat carrying 35 people capsized
off the Libyan coast, the UN
migration agency said.
The incident took place last
Friday near the western Libyan
12 ISRAEL
city of Sabratha, a major launching
point for the mainly African
people making the dangerous
voyage across the Mediterranean,
said the International
Organization for Migration.
The IOM said six bodies were
pulled out of the water, while 29
others were missing, presumed
dead. In the past week alone,
at least 53 have been reported
dead or presumed dead off Libya, Palestinians and Israelis
according to the IOM. injured in clash at mosque
More than 20 Palestinians and 14 AUSTRALIA
Israelis were wounded in incidents
UN urges government to act
in and around Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa
mosque compound, two days after for citizens held in Syria
major violence at the site. United Nations experts have
The clashes last Sunday took accused Australia of failing to
the number of wounded since last prevent the “sheer obliteration
Friday to more than 170, at a tense of the rights” of its own citizens,
time when Passover coincided including 30 children, who are
with Ramadan and Easter. held in “sordid” conditions in
Early on Sunday morning, camps in north-eastern Syria.
police said “hundreds” of In a move that humanitarian
Palestinian demonstrators groups hope will intensify
inside the compound had pressure on Australia to act, 12 UN
started gathering piles of stones, special rapporteurs have written
shortly before the arrival of jointly to the government to raise
Jewish visitors. concerns about 46 Australians
held in the camps.
The letter raises deep concerns
about al-Hawl and Roj camps,
“where most are held... without
any judicial process”.
The Guardian Weekly 22 April 2022
The big story p10
Global report 7
SCIENCE A N D EN V IRON M EN T
I M M I G R AT I O N
Archbishop critical of
severe effects for billions of people. Rwanda deportation plan
Now it is more likely that the peak Boris Johnson’s plan to send
rise will be about 1.9C. However, the asylum seekers to Rwanda does
researchers said this depended on all not “stand the judgment of God”,
nations implementing their pledges Australia has according to the archbishop
on time and in full, and warned that the highest of Canterbury.
the policies to do that were not in rate of species In a scathing intervention,
place. The pledges include some that extinction. Koala the head of the Church of
developing countries have said will numbers have England, Justin Welby, used his
happen only with more financial and rapidly declined Easter Sunday sermon to say
technical support. since 2012 when that the principle of deporting
the marsupial asylum seekers 6,400km from
was listed as where they sought sanctuary
POLLU TION
vulnerable is akin to “subcontracting our
to extinction responsibilities” and the “opposite
Residues of sunscreen show MARTIN MEISSNER/AP of the nature of God”.
up in Mediterranean seagrass Welby’s intervention came
C O N S E R VA T I O N
Chemicals used in sunscreen lotions amid mounting questions over the
are accumulating in Mediterranean legality of the plans, announced
Sperm banks and IVF offer seagrass, a study has found. by the home secretary, Priti Patel,
means to save koala genetics Scientists discovered ultraviolet in Kigali last week, that would
Freezing koala sperm could become filters in the stems of Posidonia mean asylum seekers arriving in
a key part of a strategy to save koalas oceanica, a seagrass species found the UK would be given a one-way
from extinction by 2050. on the coast of Mallorca and ticket to the autocratic central
Lachlan Howell and Ryan Witt, endemic to the Mediterranean Sea. African country.
scientists at the University of The researchers believe the The government faced fresh
Newcastle in Australia, say koala contamination is the result of criticism after immigration
“biobanking” could be harnessed recreational activities and waste experts said unaccompanied
with IVF technology to help the discharges in the tourist destination. children would also be among
species reproduce. Varying concentrations of those “highly likely” to be sent
An estimated 64,000 koalas died sunscreen components, including to Rwanda because many were
during the 2019-20 black summer oxybenzone, benzylidene camphor wrongly classified as adults by
bushfires in New South Wales. and methyl parabens, were found in Home Office officials.
The federal government listed the samples; while the full effects of the The government’s intention
species as endangered in February chemicals on seagrass are unknown, is to send all single men who
and released a national plan to boost the researchers are concerned about arrive by boat or lorry to Rwanda,
their numbers on the east coast. potential harmful effects. although many question whether
“If the koala population dies in the UK’s first offshore asylum
these kind of fire events, there is no centre will even happen. The
E VOLU T ION
way to bring them back or preserve UN’s refugee agency said its legal
their genetics,” Witt said. protection team was poring over
Research published in the journal
Ancient microbes suggest the text of the Rwandan deal
Animals found biobanking would earlier dawn of life on Earth to assess its legality, although
allow the storage of live koala genes Scientists believe they have found officials already believe the plan
by freezing sex cells such as sperm. evidence of microbes that were is unworkable. Others say the
thriving near hydrothermal vents on plans – which some Tory MPs have
Earth’s surface just 300m years after criticised – will be challenged
$9bn
C L I M AT E C R I SI S
the planet formed – the strongest immediately in the courts.
evidence yet that life began far Analysis Page 19
Restraint of global heating is earlier than is widely assumed.
possible if all measures taken If confirmed, it would suggest The value of
For the first time, the world is in the conditions necessary for the worldwide sales
a position to limit global heating emergence of life are relatively basic. of vegan pet
below 2C, according to the first “If life is relatively quick to food in 2020. A
in-depth analysis of the net zero emerge, given the right conditions, new study says
pledges made by nations at the UN this increases the chance that vegan diets are
Cop26 climate summit in December. life exists on other planets,” healthier and
Before these pledges, said Dominic Papineau, of safer for dogs
a temperature rise above 2C was University College London, who than meat-
almost inevitable, bringing more led the research. based ones
Eyewitness
Dancing queens
A team waits backstage on
the final day of the World Irish
Dancing Championships last
Sunday. The contest in Belfast
was taking place for the first
time in three years after Covid
lockdowns.
CHARLES MCQUILLAN/GETTY
P OVERTY C L I M AT E C R I S I S ESPIONAGE
4.5m
Millions of women can expect were among those who climbed A report released by Citizen
to live 78.7 years, almost eight on to a Shell tanker on Bayswater Lab at the University of Toronto
fewer years than those living in Road, in west London, with a said the United Arab Emirates
England’s wealthiest areas, the banner reading “End fossil filth”. was suspected of orchestrating The number
Health Foundation discovered. Police said 40 people were spyware attacks on No 10 in 2020 of Britons who
The figure is worse than the arrested last Saturday after seven and 2021. went on camping
average life expectancy for days of protests against fossil Pegasus is the hacking software holidays for the
women in every OECD country fuels. A day earlier, hundreds – or spyware – developed, first time during
except Mexico. The UK ranks of protesters blocked Waterloo, marketed and licensed to the pandemic.
25 out of 38 OECD countries for Blackfriars, Lambeth and governments around the world Spending on
female life expectancy. Westminster bridges. by the Israeli firm NSO Group. It outdoor holidays
Ministers have repeatedly has the capability to infect phones surged to £2.7bn
promised to tackle decades of running either iOS or Android ($3.5bn) in 2021,
gender inequality and pledged operating systems. a rise of nearly
to “reset the dial” on women’s Citizen Lab added there had 80% on the
health as part of the government’s also been suspected attacks on the previous year
levelling-up agenda. But experts Foreign Office over the same two when lockdowns
say the findings show the years that were also associated decimated travel
government has a “mountain with Pegasus operators linked to plans, according
to climb”, with a “fundamental the UAE – as well as India, Cyprus to market
shift” in policy urgently needed. and Jordan. researchers
Mintel
10 UKRAINE
INVASION
RU S S I A
FROM
RUSSIA
WITH
NO LOVE
The war has prompted an exodus from the west of
Russians accused of espionage, which some feel is
long overdue. Why were the clandestine activities
of so many ‘diplomats’ indulged for so long?
T
By Patrick he unprecedented the west was picking up only 10% in breach of the Vienna convention,
Wintour wave of expul- of Russia’s espionage. Certainly the the code that governs legitimate diplo-
sions of Russian scale of the exodus of alleged Russian macy. As well as spying, this could also
diplomats from spies – probably the largest single set involve spreading disinformation on
European capitals of expulsions in history, according to social media.
– now close to 400 the distinguished former French dip- “If you spend your time sending
– is not just a sym- lomat François Heisbourg – may raise Twitter messages insulting the gov-
bolic act of revul- the question of how the west came to ernment of the host nation, if you
sion at the war crimes of which Russia indulge so many Russian “diplomats” follow the ‘wolf warrior’ diplomacy
stands accused. It is part of a decades- on European soil. So far, Malta, Cyprus undertaken by Chinese diplomats,
long battle to police the dividing line and Hungary are the only EU member that can fall under that definition of
between espionage and diplomacy, states yet to send any of them packing. making you persona non grata,” said
in which the west has been accused Heisbourg said there was a clear and Heisbourg.
of ignoring a recent resurgence in valid distinction between a diplomat He said there was an art to the tim-
Russia’s clandestine activities. and a spy, and those being expelled ing and choice of expulsions: “Self-
Sir John Sawers, the former head of from Europe are not chosen at random evidently, it is easier to keep track
MI6, said last year that he suspected but because there is evidence they are of the spy that you do know rather
Kick-started
Dynamo Kyiv
play for peace
Page 14
Clearing chaos
On the road
to Chernihiv
Page 16
ILLUSTRATION BY
than the spy you don’t know. Once MASHA FOYA
acted to expel 40 diplomats, two jour- Austria, even after the foreign minis-
you know of their existence, they nalists and five commercial officials. try expelled four diplomats. By way
become useful counter-intelligence. Heisbourg had a role in handling the of comparison, Austria has about 30
If you don’t know who they are, you case. “Even then, it was useful to keep diplomats operating in Moscow. It is
have a problem.” some names back so we had an A list true large countries have larger embas-
During the so-called Farewell affair and a B list that we kept in reserve, in sies and some of the Russian diplomats
in the 1980s, a KGB defector, Vladimir ‘It is easier case the Russians should take coun- in Vienna – possibly 100 – are attached
Vetrov, gave almost 4,000 secret tervailing action,” he said. “We made to the many UN institutions in Austria,
documents to the DST, the French to keep it known to the Russians that if they such as the UN nuclear watchdog, the
internal secret service, showing how track of did a tit for tat, they would get hit again IAEA. But the imbalance of Russian
Russia had penetrated the west to steal many times bigger.” and Austrian interest in one another’s
its technology. Vetrov also provided
the spy Heisbourg said he had little doubt countries is striking.
a list of 250 intelligence officers sta- you know that the proportion of spies operating Poland expelled 45 Russian diplo-
tioned under legal cover in embassies rather than inside the Russian diplomatic service mats on 23 March and may be won-
around the world. It was only follow- was higher than for most countries. dering why it had granted diplomatic
ing his arrest in Moscow that France, the spy you For instance, 290 Russian diplo- status to so many in the first place.
using the dossiers he had provided, don’t know’ mats will still be operating in neutral Stanisław Żaryn, spokesperson for
12 UKRAINE
INVASION
the minister for the special services It has been reported there was
coordinator, has justified the expul- evidence of contacts with four officers
sions by saying “we are neutralising working for Russia’s GRU military
the Russian special services network intelligence agency dating to 2013. One
in our country”, adding that half of them was Lt Col Sergey Solomasov,
the expelled diplomats were direct a GRU spy.
employees of the Russian secret ser- Slovak intelligence filmed Solo-
vice and half were involved in hostile masov talking in a park to Bohuš Gar-
influence operations. bár, a contributor to the now-closed
“Russia uses diplomacy not to conspiracy website Hlavné Správy. On
remain in contact with partners, but the video he tells Garbár: “Moscow has
to push false claims and false propa- decided that you will be a ‘hunter’ for
ganda statements against the west,” two types of people: those who love
Żaryn said. The 45 expelled represent Russia and would like to cooperate,
about half the country’s diplomatic who want money and have confiden-
staff in Warsaw. tial information. The second group are ▲ The bodies of planned arms shipments belonged to
Poland also saw the expulsions as your acquaintances who may or may civilians killed a firm owned by the Bulgarian arms
preventive. The risk of espionage had not be thinking about working for Rus- in Bucha are dealer Emilian Gebrev, who was poi-
risen with the influx of Ukrainians, fer- sia. I need political information and removed by soned in a Sofia restaurant in April
tile ground for Russia to stir dissent, communication between countries, volunteers 2015, just months after the explosion.
recruit agents or pick up information within Nato and the EU.” RODRIGO ABD/AP An investigation in 2019 by Belling-
about military movements. Russia, The Czechs also have reason to cat asserted that another senior GRU
Żaryn claimed, was intent on “creat- doubt the bona fides of Russian dip- officer, Denis Sergeev, was in Bulgaria
ing hostility within Poland towards lomats. In 2014, a huge explosion at the time of Gebrev’s poisoning,
Ukrainian refugees fleeing Russia”. occurred at a couple of Czech weap- which he survived.
Two other countries providing ons warehouses, including one in Sergeev is also alleged to have been
arms to Ukraine – Slovakia and the Vrbětice, close to the Slovakia border. in the UK at the time of the 2018 novi-
Czech Republic – have also been tak- At the time, Ukraine had been in the chok poisoning of Sergei and Yulia
ing action. On 30 March, Bratislava market for weapons to fight Russia in Skripal. None of this, the Czechs con-
threw out 35 diplomats and only a Donbas. The cause of the explosions cluded, would have occurred without
fortnight before, on 14 March, Slova- was unclear and the case went cold. the knowledge of the Russian state.
I
kia detained four people suspected But then investigations by the Brit-
of spying for Moscow, and expelled ish police, as well as the open-source n April last year, the then
three Russian diplomats in response. investigative news outlet Bellingcat, Czech prime minister,
Russia had paid the suspects “tens of revealed the identity of two suspected Andrej Babiš, ordered the
thousands of euros” for sensitive or GRU agents, Ruslan Boshirov (real expulsion of 18 Russian
classified information. The quality of name Anatoliy Chepiga) and Alexander diplomats, asserting the
that information is disputed, but one Petrov (Alexander Mishkin). The same GRU had been behind the
of the two men charged was head of aliases had allegedly been given by two destruction of the weap-
the security and defence department Russians who had visited a hotel near ons. Russia retaliated
at the Armed Forces Academy in the Vrbětice just before the explosion. by expelling 20 Czechs, only for the
northern town of Liptovský Mikuláš. Intelligence sources suggested the Czechs to increase the expulsions to
60, equalising the size of the two coun-
290
tries’ diplomatic missions.
Heisbourg said most European
countries were not critical of the Brit-
The number ish failure to expel diplomats in the
of Russian wake of events in Bucha. Since the
diplomats still expulsion of 29 Russian diplomats
operating in after the Skripal affair, Russia’s Lon-
Austria – which don embassy is relatively clean and
has only 30 in the UK is reluctant to see more of its
Moscow envoys sent home from Moscow. But
the contrast between the UK and Euro-
10%
pean response has been striking. After
the war crimes in Bucha were revealed,
Germany expelled 40 Russian diplo-
The level mats, France 35, Spain 25, Slovenia
of Russian 33 and Italy 30. Lithuania decided
espionage the to expel Alexey Isakov, the Russian
former head of ambassador himself.
MI6 estimates A theme has been that the diplomats
the west picked were agents of division and disinfor-
up last year mation, rather than spies. The German
▲ A poster placed near the Russian
consulate in Krakow, Poland
The Guardian Weekly 22 April 2022 ANADOLU /GETTY
13
foreign ministry, for instance, declared RUSSI A died will also renew scrutiny about the Russian
40 staff of the Russian embassy per- government’s use of conscripts in battle, some-
sona non grata because “they have thing Putin had explicitly denied was the case
worked against our freedom, against early in the war. The defence ministry was forced
the cohesion of our society, day after
day here in Germany”. Spain simply ‘They said the crew to admit it had deployed conscripts after some
were captured in Ukraine in the first weeks of
said the 25 represented a threat to the the war. It claimed it would no longer use them.
interests and security of their country.
While Denmark identified 15
was evacuated. It’s But several parents of Moskva crew members
say their sons were indeed conscripts and not
Russian intelligence officers to throw
out, Sweden has expelled just three,
a cruel, cynical lie!’ professional soldiers on contract.
“A conscript who isn’t supposed to see active
despite the Swedish security service
last year telling the foreign ministry
Relatives despair for fighting is among those missing in action,” wrote
Dmitry Shkrebets, whose son Yegor was a cook on
that 11 or 12 Russians working in the
35-strong embassy were spies. Carl the Moskva’s missing the ship and is listed as missing in action. “Guys,
how can you be missing in action in the middle
Bildt, the former Swedish prime of the high seas?!!!”
minister, has been one of many to ask Photos and a video purporting to show the
what was holding Sweden back. By Andrew Roth and Pjotr Sauer Moskva shortly before it sank emerged on
Foreign ministries have been reluc- Monday, nearly four days after it sank. They
F
tant to expel unless the evidence is or days after the Moskva cruiser sank in showed that its lifeboats had been deployed,
overwhelming. Diplomats see experts the Black Sea, Yulia Tsyvova had been indicating an order was probably given to
with first-hand contacts as vital to desperately searching for information abandon ship.
conveying accurate information about about her son Andrei. Like hundreds of Eskender Djeparov said he recognised his
their host country. They also reduce other Russian families of the crew members, she brother Akbar in a video released by the defence
the risks of misunderstandings. But had not been told whether he had survived the ministry that showed sailors from the Moskva
this benign take on the value of diplo- reported Ukrainian missile attack that had sunk meeting an admiral after the ship sank.
macy with Russia is becoming a minor- the Russian flagship of the Black Sea fleet. Then “We were very happy when we saw him in
ity view. In Ireland there has been a on Monday morning, she received a call from the video of the crew in Sevastopol,” Djeparov
shift in attitude to the 31 Russian the Russian defence ministry. Her son was dead. said. “The day after the tragedy, he called our
diplomats there, with the embassy “He was only 19, he was a conscript,” said mother and said that he is alive and well. That she
having planning permission revoked Tsyvova, who wept as she spoke by telephone. shouldn’t worry about him. He hasn’t told us what
in 2020 for a new underground build- “They didn’t tell me anything else, no informa- happened, he doesn’t say much. He calls us from
ing on its site. tion on when the funeral would be. different numbers. He is a conscript, he started
“There was clear risk Ireland was “I am sure he isn’t the only one who died.” last July. He definitely never signed a contract.”
to be their spying headquarters for its Family members of sailors who served on the A relative of crew member Evgeny Grinberg
European operations,” said Keir Giles, Moskva are demanding answers as the ministry said via an online message: “His condition
senior consultant to the Chatham has sought to suppress information about what is fine and I do not intend to divulge military
House Russia programme. “They happened to the ship or its crew of about 500. secrets.” Asked how he knew about his relative’s
may have needed somewhere after so The number of dead, wounded and missing condition, he wrote: “I called into the ministry
many had been thrown out following remains a state secret. Suppression of informa- of defence.”
Skripal. The problem is Russia deters tion about the deaths has raised comparisons But many others have been less lucky.
by operating in an asymmetrical way. with the Kursk submarine incident that left 118 Shkrebets was one of the first to go public
You either respond in kind or you back sailors dead and struck a blow to the prestige of demanding answers about why his son was
down. We throw out spies and they president Vladimir Putin in 2000. sent to war. “They said that the entire crew was
throw out diplomats.” “This regime has never been very transpar- evacuated. It’s a lie! A cruel and cynical lie!”
For instance, when eight Russian ent about casualties,” said Alexander Gabuev, His wife, Irina, told the Insider, an independ-
diplomats attached to Nato headquar- a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center. ent Russian website, that they had seen about
ters in Brussels were expelled in Octo- “It’s not something very new or very surprising.” 200 injured sailors at a military hospital in Crimea
ber 2021, Russia shut down its entire New information on the young sailors who while looking for their son.
Nato mission as well as the Nato infor- “We looked at every burnt kid,” she told
mation office in Moscow. the Insider. “I can’t tell you how hard it was,
Now, with every day, the estrange- but I couldn’t find mine. There were only 200
ment seems to grow more profound. people, and there were more than 500 onboard
Free media is disappearing and VPN the cruiser. Where were the others? We looked
sites are blocked, forcing the west in Krasnodar, and everywhere else.”
and Russia deeper into their separate Others had contacted the Shkrebets family
information bubbles. Germany plans hoping to find more information.
to wean itself off Russian energy, sev- Yet some parents were clearly fearful of speak-
ering institutional, business and cul- ing out. Ulyana Tarasova, of St Petersburg, wrote
tural links developed since the 1970s. online: “My son, Tarasov Mark, is missing in
Few think that it is a decoupling that action aboard the cruiser Moskva.” Hours later,
can be reversed for decades to come. her post was gone.
PATRICK WINTOUR IS THE GUARDIAN’S ANDREW ROTH AND PJOTR SAUER ARE GUARDIAN
DIPLOMATIC EDITOR RUSSIA AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENTS
▲ An unverified image of the Russian
cruiser Moskva before it sank
REX/SHUTTERSTOCK 22 April 2022 The Guardian Weekly
SPECIAL
S
SPP EC
E C IAL
I A L RE
IA R
REPORT
E PO
P O RT
RT
14
4 UKRAINE
U KRAINE
IINVASION
NVASION
SPORT
‘I AM CRYING
EVERY DAY’
IN THE
STANDS WITH
UKRAINIANS
AS DYNAMO
KYIV PLAY
ONCE MORE
F
ar away, at the other end many have arrived through necessity.
Football club kicks off its ‘match for peace’ of the pitch, a Ukrain- They are nominally here to watch
series in Warsaw, watched by thousands of ian footballer is scoring Dynamo Kyiv play the host club in the
refugees and fans seeking national solidarity what later turns out to first of a “match for peace” series that
have been a beautifully will raise money for the response to
worked goal. That is Russia’s invasion and see them face
By Nick Ames WARSAW something remarkable in itself but several other European teams.
Oksana is talking and the backdrop has To some, a match represents
become a detail. She is thinking about welcome diversion; to others it is the
▼ Players and the train she will board in around nine first opportunity to be together in
mascots wear hours; it will return her to Kyiv, at last, numbers like this. “Maybe not every-
Ukrainian flags and from there she will join the volun- body would understand this kind of
before the match teer effort in Bucha. The home she left event but it helps to raise the feeling of
in Warsaw is 15km further south, in Boyarka. Like belonging to the Ukrainian nation,” says
ADAM NURKIEWICZ/
most of the capital’s satellite towns, Oksana, who left Boyarka for Warsaw
GETTY it has undergone its own visit to hell. with her children after the war began
“Tomorrow they are burying one but has made regular journeys to Lviv
more of my friends, but I won’t make with supplies for soldiers and medics.
it in time,” she says. “Two close friends “We are fighting a war between light
were killed while they were helping to and darkness, and light will succeed.”
evacuate people. They were found in Mykola, 21, has been in Warsaw
a mass grave with evidence that they since moving from the central Ukrain-
were tortured. And I know that there ian region Kirovohrad, and is working
is more of this to come.” as a barman. As people pass, he helps
Oksana’s story drowns out the to staff a makeshift stall accepting
clamour of a football game. It is deliv- donations that will go towards bullet-
ered matter-of-factly. “My mind is just proof vests, helmets and other protec-
trying to reject the reality,” she says. “I tive equipment for those defending
just disconnect my feelings. It’s going
to come later, I’m aware.” ‘This kind of event
She has wrapped herself in a
Ukraine flag and is far from alone in helps raise the feeling
that. About two-thirds of an 18,000
crowd inside Legia Warsaw’s stadium
of belonging to the
are her compatriots. Some live here; Ukrainian nation’
Fans light flares feel pain constantly and cry every day.” Zelinskiy vows to repel Russian
in Ukrainian The participants walk around the pitch advance to capture Donbas region
colours. Proceeds and dance on a Ukraine-shaped stage Russia has begun large-scale military
from the game alongside musicians such as Kateryna action to seize the east of Ukraine,
went to those Pavlenko of Go_A, who represented the country’s president Volodymyr
affected by the the country at Eurovision in 2020. The Zelenskiy said in a video address on
Russian invasion Ukrainian anthem, played shortly after Monday night. “A significant part
KACPER PEMPEL/ the teams have walked out, makes the of the entire Russian army is now
REUTERS
hair stand on end. concentrated on this offensive,” he
Dynamo have been staying in the said. “We will not give up anything
Regent hotel, a pleasant walk away Ukrainian.” Vladimir Putin has
through Lazienki Park. Friends drop declared his intention to seize
by to visit, including fellow football- Donbas, the industrial heartland
ers; Ihor Litovka, goalkeeper from the in the east of the country already
top-flight club Desna Chernihiv and partly controlled by pro-Russian
now a temporary resident in Warsaw, separatists. Zelenskiy made clear that
catches up with the defender Olek- the Ukrainian army would battle any
sandr Karavayev. Litovka’s home sta- attempted advance by Moscow. “No
dium has been bombed; he dreams of matter how many Russian troops are
returning to Chernihiv after the war. driven there, we will fight,” he said.
Since leaving Ukraine, the Dynamo
players have been training in Bucha- Captured Britons put on Russian TV
rest under the veteran coach Mircea Two British fighters captured in
Lucescu. Those players with rooms at Ukraine by Russian forces have
the front of the hotel can look out of been paraded on Russian state
their windows to see a banner reading television asking Boris Johnson to
“Putin go fuck yourself” in Ukrainian help free them. Shaun Pinner and
and “Glory to Ukraine” in Polish. Aiden Aslin were shown calling on
When Vitaliy Buyalskiy puts the British prime minister to help
Ukraine. A similar collection in Dynamo ahead against Legia within free them in exchange for Ukraine
Warsaw’s old town raised 8,000 zloty three minutes, he does so in front of a releasing pro-Kremlin politician
($1,800); that tally will be exceeded by Game on “Stop the War” banner emblazoned on Viktor Medvedchuk. It was unclear
the takings from this game. His father Ukraine holds the lower tier behind the goal. Buyals- how freely the two men were able to
is with him, handing out bread with kiy drops to his knees; there are loud talk in the video, aired on the Rossiya
charity event
pork and pickles, but he thinks about cheers but this is no ordinary football 24 state TV channel on Monday. At
his grandparents back home. crowd and it is hardly a night for cel- the same time, Ukraine’s foreign
Katya is with her sister Nastya and The town of ebrations. A section of Legia’s ultras intelligence service released a video of
brother-in-law Ihor, who have lived in Ivano-Frankivsk have boycotted the game, alleging that Medvedchuk asking to be swapped.
Warsaw for five years. Katya studies in western Dynamo’s ownership is pro-Russia,
in Kyiv but left in March. “I feel safe Ukraine staged which has been denied. Those fans are Mayor slams attacks on civilians
in Warsaw but can’t say I am calm,” a charity football not around to present the kind of spec- Lviv’s mayor accused the Kremlin of
she says. “I worry about my parents. tournament tacle they did in Poznan earlier in the “genocide” after four Russian missiles
Every night, in my dreams, I just see in support of month, when an image of Putin with smashed into the western Ukrainian
bombs and people dying.” the Ukrainian a noose around his neck was unfurled. city on Monday (" below), killing
Further along, Yulia is pacing up armed forces Legia equalise but Dynamo score seven people and injuring at least 11.
and down with a clipboard. Every last weekend. again through Artem Besedin and the Andriy Sadovyi said: “What we see
few seconds someone presents her The event, same player makes it 3-1. At full-time today is genocide. It’s a deliberate
with their blue Ukrainian passport thought to be the the song Imagine is played, the flags action by the aggressor to kill peaceful
and has their name ticked off a list of first organised wave in unison and Benjamin Verbic, a civilians. All our cities and villages
participants in a pre-match concert. football to be Slovenian winger who joined Legia on are in the same situation.” Russia
The vast majority of refugees in Poland played in the loan from Dynamo after the invasion, carried out the long-range airstrikes
are women and children, because most country since the cannot hold back the tears. early on Monday against what it
men under 60 are required to stay in start of the war, “We will be dealing with this war claimed were military targets.
Ukraine. Nowadays they are mainly featured local for many years,” says Oksana. “But my
from the country’s east and arrive at players as well view, and I don’t think it’s just a roman-
Warsaw’s central station, where two as professionals tic one, is that there are much more
tents offer food and assistance. Yulia, displaced by powerful tools than firing weapons.
a student producer in Kyiv before the the war. There is the human face, the brain, the
invasion, gathers 100 of them to join soul and love inside. I think this is what
Ukrainian musicians on the pitch. the Ukrainians have and the Russians
“I’ve been trying to help people don’t. We’ve seen it here again tonight.
with their basic needs since I got here And that’s why we are going to win.”
because we all have to be together,” she NICK AMES IS A GUARDIAN FOOTBALL
explains. “But everything is difficult. I WRITER
G
By Luke Harding alina Muzyra moved around relations with Belarus, whose with a V. They had herded several hun-
CHERNIHIV her front garden as she president, Alexander Lukashenko, dred people at gunpoint into the base-
cleaned up the mess left by facilitated Vladimir Putin’s attempt ment of the village school. There was
occupying Russian soldiers. to seize Kyiv and to topple its govern- little oxygen. Eleven people, includ-
“They parked two armoured vehicles ment. Belarusians came to Chernihiv ing a 13-year-old girl, died there, amid
on my lawn,” she said, pointing to a to go shopping, Vyacheslav said. “Our choking darkness. Last Sunday, medi-
flattened blue fence next to her neat biggest fear is that the Russians come cal investigators had parked outside.
vegetable patch. Nearby was a large back,” he admitted. One resident, Nina Alexeevna, said
crater. Her yellow-painted dacha was In his latest video address, the she had spent an entire week cleaning
perforated with holes. Ukrainian president, Volodymyr the mess left by soldiers who squatted
Shrapnel had wrecked the wooden Zelenskiy, pledged to modernise urban in her home. Alexeevna showed the
summer house, too. It was a birthday areas destroyed by Russia. The prior- bedrooms and kitchen – a feral jumble
gift from her late husband, Nikolai, ity was to find temporary housing for of clothes, upturned drawers and scat-
Muzyra explained. “We don’t under- tered books. “This is Russky Mir,” she
stand why the Russians did this. We said ironically, referring to the idea of
▲ The trail of are a small, quiet country. If it wasn’t a Kremlin-dominated, Russian-speak-
destruction on for our president, I don’t know what ing cultural world.
the road from we would do,” she added, throwing Amid the horror and large-scale
Kyiv to Chernihiv splintered branches and other rubbish vandalism there was a symbolic
on to a spring bonfire. return. The white stork, Ukraine’s
Galina Muzyra Muzyra and her son, Denis, live national bird, had taken up residence
clears debris from in Zalissya, a village on the highway as usual along the road that the Rus-
her garden between the capital Kyiv and the sians had used in their unsuccessful
SVIATOSLAV MEDYK northern Ukrainian city of Chernihiv. and apocalyptic advance towards
For 20 days, between 8 and 28 March, ‘We don’t understand Kyiv. Several storks sat on giant nests,
Russian troops took over her home, built on top of telegraph poles. One
sleeping on top of her kitchen stove. why the Russians did soared high above over the carcass of
The property survived better than a Russian armoured vehicle.
many others. The house next door is
this. We are a small,
LUKE HARDING IS A GUARDIAN
a charred, roofless shell. quiet country’ INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT
FRANCE
Which way
will leftist
voters swing?
Page 20
UNITED KINGDOM
A fine mess
I
t wasn’t as if things had been the Metropolitan police. The prime ▲ Parties at
going brilliantly for Boris John- minister would be among those fined Downing Street
son as he attempted to spend for attending a Downing Street gather- during lockdown
… but how is
side tranquillity away from the esca- that last weekend, after the deploy- for the prime
lating cost of living crisis and political ment of a hugely controversial asylum minister and the
woes that had punctuated his year. policy and a concerted campaign to chancellor
The local elections have become ▼ Migrants A N A LY S I S Labour to the Conservatives – often
pivotal to test public support for John- arrive in Dover UNITED KINGDOM via Ukip and the Brexit party – stick
son. Out on the campaign trail, Tory after crossing with Johnson at the next election.
candidates were shifting the focus the Channel As such, it was with much fanfare
away from national politics. Walking
around the Milton Keynes ward of
STUART BROCK/EPA
Out of sight that Johnson wanted to announce
a tough new immigration policy
Tattenhoe, Shazna Muzammil talked on asylum seekers who make the
about parking, potholes and litter.
A Tory council candidate, she has
What will Tories perilous journey across the Channel
from France via “irregular” routes.
centred her campaign on the things
she believes matter most to local
achieve by But while it came as welcome
news to many Tory MPs, there are
people. But it is becoming trickier to
keep conversations on track. National
sending asylum still concerns about the detail: the
cost and the choice of Rwanda as
issues keep coming up on doorsteps.
“It does definitely make it harder,” seekers abroad? the country where some asylum
seekers will be sent.
said Muzammil. “The prime minister Just last month, Conservative
is doing well on Ukraine, but people peer Lord Kirkhope warned that
never talk to you about that because By Aubrey Allegretti “the costs of offshoring would be
they have nothing to complain about.” exorbitant”, citing “conservative
Tory MPs critical of Johnson Cost check When Boris Johnson’s estimates” of about £2m ($2.6m)
confirm that voters were not yet Overheads position was at its most a person a year. So far, £120m
switching allegiance. “Our view on precarious two months has been committed by the UK
and arrivals
the doorstep was people are pissed ago, he had to convince government to fund the scheme.
off with us, but there’s no appetite for Conservative MPs sticking by his Despite repeated promises from
Labour,” said one northern MP.
The Downing Street strategy until
the elections is simple: keep busy.
$2.6m
Estimated cost
side was worth it. A plan – dubbed
“Operation Red Meat” – was devised
to give those losing faith in his
the home secretary, Priti Patel, to
bring the number of arrivals down,
they remain at their highest on
After the announcement that asylum per person, per administration some belief that record: 4,600 people have arrived
seekers would be sent to Rwanda, year, of proposed there was a higher purpose than on small boats on the Kent coast this
which pushed Partygate off the front asylum scheme just defending their leader through year, with about 600 in a single day
pages, the prime minister was due to scandal after scandal. this month – and “hundreds” more
make a high-profile trade trip to India.
One minister said the sudden 4.6k The prime minister knew he
needed to shore up support, prove
last Thursday alone.
The Conservatives have risked
outburst of activity, particularly the Number of himself a proper conservative and being outflanked on traditional turf,
Rwanda policy, bore the hallmarks ‘irregular’ enact more of the policies that had such as law and order, but know that
of the Australian strategist Lynton arrivals on him clinch an 80-seat majority at the subject of border controls allows
Crosby, who has always remained Britain’s Kent the last election. them to exploit the old divisions
close to Johnson. “I find it repug- coast so far A major theme of the Tories’ of the Brexit years more easily
nant, but it’s just from that classic this year campaign in 2019 was Brexit – and, – and try to paint Labour as soft
playbook,” they said. in the years since, Johnson has been on immigration.
Johnson’s allies see the final threat mindful that the message about Government insiders said they
as 9 May, when Russia could in theory “taking back control of our borders” had been hoping to announce the
end its attacks on Ukraine to coincide was particularly potent for some. migration plan months ago, to
with the anniversary marking its Senior advisers have been keen to try moving attention away from
defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945. ensure the voters who swung from the initial Partygate scandal. And
At that point, the invasion will Johnson was said to have pushed
no longer be a viable excuse for MPs hard for it to be announced before
refraining from calling on Johnson the local elections in early May.
to go. Critics of the prime minister Rwanda’s human rights record
also know that, even with a general has also prompted concern – given
election likely to be two years away, the UK does take in refugees who
their time to act is limited. Many have say they are fleeing the threat of
given themselves a summer deadline persecution there.
to decide whether to depose him. Finally, there is the issue of
In his Easter message, Johnson whether the tough talk will translate
said: “Easter tells us that there is light into a dramatic reduction in the
beyond the darkness,” he said. “That number of people crossing the
beyond the suffering lies redemption.” Channel, or simply draw attention to
He will have to hope his gloomy MPs an issue the government has so far
take his message as more than just a appeared unable to solve.
seasonal platitude. Observer AUBREY ALLEGRETTI IS A POLITICAL
CORRESPONDENT FOR THE GUARDIAN
MICHAEL SAVAGE IS THE OBSERVER’S
POLICY EDITOR; SHANTI DAS IS AN
OBSERVER REPORTER
Round two
ist party who campaigned for Mélen- disdain for as an “Islamic Republic”.
chon, said: “If Macron is going to say At Trappes market last Friday,
something it should be a clear message the working Clement Likwengi, 52, a fire safety
Le Pen battle
retirement at 65 to 64-and-a-half.” that she represents the politics of divi-
Mélenchon has advised support- disdain sion. I think people in France forget
ers that “not a single vote should go for race’ that Macron has revived the French
E
mmanuel Macron is engaged who will suffer most. I’m not going to Mélenchon in the first round but said
in the battle of his career to campaign for Macron, but I don’t think he would not support either candi-
persuade leftwing voters – we have any choice.” date in the second. “There is nothing
many of whom have taken The first round saw an unexpected Macron can say to me to make me
to the streets to oppose his govern- surge for Mélenchon, who finished change my mind. He’s already had 10
ment over the past five years – to turn close behind Le Pen. Almost 22% of years in public life, five at the finance
out this Sunday and give him a second voters chose the radical left La France ministry and five as president, so we
term in office. Both Macron and Le Pen Insoumise (France Unbowed) leader know what he has done and will do. Of
need to win over a chunk of the 7.7 mil- and now feel “politically orphaned”, course, I worry that Le Pen will win,
lion people who voted for the radical Rabeh said. Polls suggest 30% of especially for the community here in
left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Mélenchon voters might vote Macron, Trappes, but, as we say, fear will not
narrowly knocked out in the first- 23% Le Pen, and the rest will abstain or stop the danger.”
round ballot on 10 April. vote blank in the second round. ▼ A Macron Mélenchon is consulting 315,000
In Trappes, south-west of Paris, Trappes has a large immigrant campaign poster party members to decide a collective
where almost 61% of voters chose population, many with north Afri- in Paris is covered response to the question of who to vote
Mélenchon, opinion was divided can roots. The far right has claimed with a Mélenchon for. In a letter to supporters he wrote:
this week about what to do next. Le that the town is a hotbed of religious sticker “The one and the other are not the
Figaro newspaper suggested that “on radicalisation. In February, Jordan JOEL SAGET/AFP/GETTY same.” Manon Aubry, of Mélenchon’s
La France Insoumise, said: “We know
Le Pen is dangerous. If both candidates
have a disdain for the working class,
she adds a disdain for race; if both offer
liberal politics, she adds xenophobia.”
Describing Macron as “the least
worst”, she added: “We have noth-
ing to negotiate with him. It’s for
him to say what he will do to address
the anger many feel towards him.” It
was this anger that sparked protests
at several universities including the
Sorbonne and Sciences Po last week.
Last Friday, a group of elderly men
from the Maghreb – chatting near Trap-
pes market – said they had no right to
vote in France, but were not worried
about the outcome. “Macron will win
and life will go on as before,” said one.
Rabeh fears this nonchalance is mis-
placed. “Unfortunately, I think we’re
just going to have to pinch our noses
and vote for Macron.” Observer
KIM WILLSHER IS A JOURNALIST BASED
IN PARIS
Protests in
of lockdown. In Shanghai, a fortnight ▲ A volunteer “The Chinese leadership has been
of confinement has produced a sense speaks to locked- cornered,” said Yanzhong Huang, a
of hopelessness and desperation down residents in senior fellow at the New York-based
A
t about noon last Tuesday, reappeared on western platforms, responding to the pandemic, then
Yu Wenming, an 82-year- such as Twitter and Facebook – both China deserves it,” Xi said, according
old man in Shanghai, of which are blocked in China. to the Xinhua news agency.
called his local residential “Every day there are incidents that What has happened in Shanghai and
committee for help. “I’ve used up my break one’s bottom line,” wrote a “nor- elsewhere in the country will also have
medicines. Nor do I have anything to mal Shanghai resident” last week in political consequences, according to
eat. I’m feeling awful,” Yu, who had a Weibo article entitled Shanghai’s Victor Shih, an expert on Chinese elite
tested positive for Covid, told the party Patience Has Reached the Limit. politics at the University of California,
secretary, Zhang Zhen. Yet, there is little sign the authorities San Diego. “Covid and the different
Zhang said he had already referred are going to change course. Distress- ways Chinese cities are responding to
the case to his superiors and there was ing tales of exhausted officials have it will create a very challenging envi-
nothing he could do. “Do you mean I been widely read online in recent days, ronment for the party,” he said.
should just wait here until I die, then?” including one about a 55-year-old local Towards the end of his call last
Yu asked. Zhang responded with an public health officer, Qian Wenxiong, Tuesday, Yu posed a question to
angry rant, complaining that he, too, who was said to have taken his own life Zhang: “Is this what it’s really like
was completely powerless in this situ- in his office because of the pressure he in our country?” “I don’t know how
92m
ation: “I’m worried too … But there’s was under. Shanghai ended up like this,” said
nothing we can do …” Hu Xijin, the former editor of the Zhang. He sighed and ended the call.
Zhang revealed calls for help had state-run tabloid Global Times, said “I’m sorry, Mr Yu … Goodbye.”
been piling up but that his superiors in a commentary that Qian’s death Number of A recording of this went viral on
were not dealing with them. “Perhaps had intensified the impression that Chinese citizens WeChat, before the censors removed
one day, when I cannot put up with the fight against Covid in Shanghai aged 65 or above it. Last Thursday, state media said Yu
it, I’ll quit. Will this day come soon?” was “overwhelming” officials. But who have still had been sent to a hospital. Observer
In economic terms, the equivalent he insisted that, despite the tragedy, not received VINCENT NI IS THE GUARDIAN
of 40% of China’s gross domestic prod- Shanghai “must achieve Covid clear- three doses of AND OBSERVER’S CHINA AFFAIRS
uct is estimated to be under some form ance” for the benefit of the country. vaccine to date CORRESPONDENT
TECHNOLOGY
Facebook in Africa
Campaigns on Facebook appear to there. The Wagner group has deployed
have prepared the ground for many of between 400 and 600 fighters, trainers
the coups, pushing an anti-western, and support staff to Mali.
F
By Jason Burke acebook is struggling to year after the overthrow of President promoting Wagner as an alternative to
contain pro-Russian and Bah N’daw by the military. the French forces, and posted identical
anti-western posts that are The US and others allege that Wag- content, often less than 20 seconds
contributing to political ner is funded by the powerful busi- apart, the DFR Lab found.
instability in west Africa, investiga- nessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, who DFR investigators found that pro-
tors and analysts have said. is closely linked to Vladimir Putin. Russian content spread on Facebook
The platform, which has expanded Prigozhin and the Kremlin have in west Africa in the months before
rapidly across the continent, has made denied any knowledge of Wagner. the military takeover in Burkina Faso
significant investment in content Western officials described Wagner in January. Hours after the coup there,
moderation, but still faces challenges as a “Trojan horse” for a Russian effort demonstrators in Ouagadougou, the
in curbing deliberate disinformation to extend its influence covertly in the
campaigns. One major area of concern continent. France announced this year ‘It’s not bots any more.
is the Sahel region, which has suffered that it was withdrawing troops from
a series of military takeovers in the Mali, ending a near decade-long effort There are real people
past 18 months. to fight Islamist insurgents from bases behind the accounts’
capital, chanted pro-Russian and anti- NIGER IA Ogun. Edo’s civil service has adopted
French slogans. a Microsoft-based government por-
The DFR Lab has a partnership tal using fibre-optic internet access
with Facebook to monitor the plat- provided by MainOne and Facebook,
form for disinformation campaigns,
and receives funding from Facebook’s
owner, Meta. Facebook declined to
Meta pays according to Emmanuel Eweka, who
worked as a senior official for the Edo
government until last September.
take down the pages described in
the reports when alerted, saying that
for cables “The level of accountability this
system brings is so effective,” Eweka
though posts were clearly part of a
coordinated effort, they did not appear to reach said. “If a case file is sent to a civil
servant from the governor’s office,
to be a front for unidentified users and the governor can see exactly when
so “inauthentic”.
Toussaint Nothias, the research
new users it is opened, and whether it has been
actualised. So the days where you send
director at the Digital Civil Society one file somewhere and it gets lost in
Lab of Stanford University, said the By Emmanuel Akinwotu LAGOS the system are gone.”
decision was surprising. Schools have benefited from sub-
W
“The boundary between inau- hen government officials sidised internet connectivity and are
thentic and authentic coordinated in the Nigerian state of also working with Microsoft-based
behaviour is very tricky to manage. Edo set about radically programs, improving the quality of
Authentic coordinated behaviour can improving poor internet education, officials say.
often resemble social movements, and access for its population of 4 million, Edo Tech Park, 200,000 sq km of
determining when this behaviour is they didn’t have to look far for help. land that developers envision will be
harmful depends largely on the con- MainOne, a company responsible for the centre of the state’s growing tech
text and standpoint,” Nothias said. laying a vast network of fibre-optic ecosystem, was launched in Novem-
A Meta spokesperson said the com- cables across west Africa, was an ber. Access to faster and cheaper inter-
pany took the problem of coordinated obvious partner. Another, perhaps net services that Meta has helped pro-
campaigns seeking to manipulate pub- less obvious one, was Facebook. vide are fundamental to the residential
lic debate seriously and was taking As Facebook has come under rising and commercial scheme.
aggressive steps to fight the spread of legislative pressure in the west, it has Stephen Osawaru, a business con-
misinformation in Africa as elsewhere. increased its focus on Africa, particu- sultant in Benin City, the state capital,
“While nobody can eliminate larly in countries where the regulatory works with more than 300 startups in
misinformation from society entirely, and legislative environment tends to the state. “Many internet businesses
we continue to consult with outside be looser. Weak and expensive inter- in education, agriculture, health and
experts, grow our fact-checking net coverage for most of Nigeria’s finance didn’t exist five years ago,” he
program, and improve our technology fast-growing population of more than said. “Internet penetration is grow-
to tackle it on our services in the most 200 million has driven companies hop- ing at an exponential rate and creating
comprehensive and effective way pos- ing to tap a potential goldmine of users more opportunities.”
sible,” the spokesperson said. – and their data – into the business of Funke Opeke founded MainOne in
In October 2019, Facebook took getting those people online. 2008. She describes the public-private
down three networks of accounts In places such as Edo, where gov- partnerships in Edo as “a model” for
linked to Prigozhin. The accounts ernment officials are committed to how internet access in Nigeria can be
were seeking to influence the domestic overhauling internet access, there rapidly increased. “It’s accelerating
politics in Madagascar, Central African are ripe opportunities for Meta, Face- development and state services to the
Republic, Mozambique, the Demo- book’s parent company. people – a win-win for the government
cratic Republic of the Congo, Ivory In 2019, Facebook invested $20m and the private sector,” she said.
Coast, Cameroon, Sudan and Libya. in internet infrastructure in Edo, Others are more circumspect.
In 2020, Facebook targeted and committed alongside MainOne When partnership announcements are
a Russian-led network of trolls ILLUSTRATIONS:
GUARDIAN DESIGN/
to laying 750km of fibre-optic cables made, the tone had been “quite altru-
outsourced to Ghanaian and Nige- REUTERS in Edo and the south-western state of istic”, said Gbemisola Alonge, from
rian operatives. Stears, an economic analysis company
The DFR report on the Mali accounts in Lagos. “But it’s never like that. It’s to
– and Facebook’s decision not to take expand their reach and increase their
down the network – underlines the risk [user] base.”
of actors exploiting loopholes in the Meta said it worked with partners
company’s policies. “to drive innovation on all aspects of
“It’s not bots any more. The major performance and efficiency”, and its
[social media] firms are very good partnership with MainOne had helped
at identifying bots … There are real bring online training to 2,000 teachers
people behind the accounts,” said in Edo and connectivity to four schools
Shelby Grossman, a research scholar and their surrounding communities.
at the Stanford Internet Observatory. EMMANUEL AKINWOTU IS THE
JASON BURKE IS THE GUARDIAN’S GUARDIAN’S WEST AFRICA
AFRICA CORRESPONDENT CORRESPONDENT
‘A disaster’
Raptors in
peril from
poison and
persecution
By Peter Muiruri
D
arcy Ogada rarely spots ▼ A secretary bird ▼▼ A bateleur ▲ Numbers of
raptors from her home in and a Rüppell’s eagle in the the white-backed
central Kenya any more. vulture, which Masai Mara. vulture have
The birds were once a com- are endangered The species has fallen sharply
mon sight in the industrial town of and critically declined by and it is now a
Thika, 40km north of Nairobi, but the endangered 46% in the last critically endan-
region’s forests are rapidly declining, WESTEND61 GMBH/ 40 years gered species
ALAMY
and the few remaining raptor popu- NILESH SHAH/ALAMY ANDRE MARAIS/ALAMY
“Our findings highlight the stark Latta himself saw the bird fly
contrast between raptor trends in upwards in front of him, showing the
protected areas and in unprotected distinctive white edges to its wings. “It
land. Outside Kenya’s protected area flew up at an angle and I watched it for
network there is evidence that raptor about six to eight seconds, which was
populations have almost collapsed, fairly long for an ivory-billed wood-
and this cuts across species size, diet or pecker,” he said. “I was visibly shaking
ecological requirements,” said Philip afterwards. You realise you’ve seen
Shaw at the University of St Andrews. something special that very few peo-
Simon Thomsett, a director at ple had the opportunity to see.”
Kenya Bird of Prey Trust, a raptor The size and markings of the bird in
rescue and rehabilitation organisation, the photos is strong evidence that it is
said there has been little effort to save not a different woodpecker, such as a
raptors compared with animals such as pileated or red-headed woodpecker.
elephants, lions or rhinos, which rank “It reinforced to me that, yes, this bird
highly in the tourism world. U N I T E D S TAT E S ▲ Ivory-billed does exist and left me feeling a sense
“You have some conservationists woodpeckers of responsibility to protect it for the
who judge the health of the ecosystem were once fairly future,” Latta said.
with the increase in elephants. But the common in the Ivory-billed woodpeckers were
‘Extinct’ US
elephant would hardly survive if the US. Numbers once found from the Carolinas to
raptors were not there to clean up the started to decline Texas. They were, or are, the largest
environment,” he said. “If the figures sharply in the woodpeckers in the US, with the males
[of raptor decline in Kenya] were wit-
nessed in Europe, Japan or any other
woodpecker 19th century
TOMASZ COFTA/
sporting a distinctive red crest. They
feast on insects that accumulate in the
sighted again,
BIRDLIFE
part of the developed world, there INTER NATIONAL/PA bark of recently deceased trees.
would be panic and people would do Their numbers started to drop
everything to save them.” sharply in the 19th century due to
The experts are concerned about
deliberate and incidental poisoning
scientists say human interference with their habi-
tat and overhunting, with their scar-
of raptors, and fear the long term city spurring collectors to hunt them
effects of recent large-scale spraying By Oliver Milman further as valuable specimens. They
of locusts in northern Kenya on rap- were also among the wildlife eaten by
I
tors that fed on the dead insects. The n terms of elusiveness, it is the Lost species poverty-stricken people of the time.
UN’s Food and Agriculture Organiza- Bigfoot or Loch Ness monster The ivory-billed With just a few of the birds occu-
tion said: “Chemical pesticides used in of the bird world, so rare and woodpecker was pying largely inaccessible forests,
locust control can pose risks to human undetectable that the US gov- perhaps the best confirmed sightings, let alone clear
and animal health … Some do pose low ernment declared it extinct last year. known species pictures, became almost impossible.
to medium risk to mammals, includ- But the ivory-billed woodpecker is, in declared extinct Last year, the US Fish and Wildlife
ing domestic livestock and fish. Most fact, alive and pecking in the forests of by the US Fish and Service (FWS), after years of listing the
present high risks to honeybees and Louisiana, researchers have claimed. Wildlife Service woodpecker as critically endangered,
other beneficial species.” A series of grainy pictures and last September. declared the species extinct.
Poisons used to kill predators such observations of the bird, which had Twenty-two other “No one has held a camera and got
as lions and hyenas that attack live- its last widely accepted sighting in bird, fish and a picture of one in years because it’s a
stock are also taking their toll on birds 1944, show that the scrupulously fur- animal species scarce bird in tough swampy habitat
of prey. While the poison may succeed tive woodpecker is still holding on in were also declared and they don’t want people close to
in killing a few predators, it is raptors, the swampy forests of the US south, lost for ever. Their them because they’ve been shot at for
especially vultures, that die in large according to the team’s new research, disappearance 150 years,” said Geoffrey Hill, a biolo-
has been blamed
numbers. Thomsett said: “Farmers which is yet to be peer-reviewed. gist at Auburn University, who took
on a number of
may be targeting hyenas, but it is the A three-year quest to find the wood- part in another, largely frustrating,
factors including
vultures that eat the carcasses. Now, pecker involved scientists trudging trip to find the bird in Florida in 2005.
over-development,
we are having plenty of carcasses with through an undisclosed portion “They have better eyes than we do,
water pollution,
fewer scavengers. Killing a raptor is of Louisiana woodland to observe they are high in the trees and actively
logging,
still a wildlife crime like killing a rhino, the bird and take audio recordings. flee people. They aren’t great thinkers
competition from
yet we rarely hear of any arrests.” Unmanned trail cameras, set up to take but they have developed a pretty sim-
invasive species
Despite the threats to Kenya’s rap- pictures on a time lapse, and a drone and the killing or ple strategy to avoid people.”
tors, the authors suggest that declines were used to capture photos. capture of birds Hill said Latta’s research was “very
could be reversed through enhanced Steve Latta, the director of conser- and animals by interesting” and that he thought the
management of protected areas, the vation at the National Aviary in Pitts- private collectors. bird pictured was indeed an ivory-
mitigation of specific threats, and burgh, who led the effort, said each In each case, billed woodpecker. He said the FWS
the implementation of species recov- member of the team had encounters humans were the was premature to declare the bird
ery plans. with the ivory-billed woodpecker and ultimate cause. extinct and that several dozen could
PETER MUIRURI IS A KENYAN
often heard its call, which has been remain in forests across the south.
JOURNALIST SPECIALISING IN TRAVEL described like hearing a child puff into OLIVER MILMAN IS AN ENVIRONMENT
AND CONSERVATION a tin trumpet. REPORTER FOR GUARDIAN US
Foraging free
in January. A survey of 1,600 custom-
ers by Westpac NZ this month found
83% were worried about rising prices
N
estled in the golden pine vines among its cracking footpaths Joanna Wildish founded Ōtautahi Urban
needles that carpet the and expanding meadows, the zone is Wildish, above, Foraging group, where people
forest floor, Dylan Parker a favourite destination for foragers. gathers fruit and exchange tips about ripe fruit crops,
finds his prize: a cluster “It turned from urban exploring into nuts while Dylan locations of productive trees and
of dusty-brown slippery jack mush- fruit and nut collection,” says Sandi Parker, below, recipes for foraged foods. It helped
rooms, barely visible at first glance, Bobkova, who has brought her three- sniffs out seeds “relieve the stress of poverty”. Over
hollow-sounding when tapped – per- year-old son, Leon, out food-gather- NAOMI HAUSSMANN time, numbers in the group have
fect for eating. He gives them a quick ing. They pick apples, pears, grapes, grown as have the number of people
slap to release the spores, trims the feijoas, walnuts and the occasional she sees out and about gathering food.
stipes, and slots the mushrooms into lucky haul of apricots. Leon proudly “I wonder whether that’s out of neces-
his basket, where the ingredients of brandishes a porcini mushroom. (Bob- sity for a lot of people,” she says.
dinner are slowly accumulating. kova, a horticulturist, advises caution Foragers say gathering food is also a
Increasing numbers of people are eating wild mushrooms unless you are source of pleasure – a way to develop
turning to foraging to supplement absolutely sure of their safety.) a stronger sense of connection to
the contents of their pantries. Com- Foraging has been fun, but also a place and season. There’s a thrill in
munities map out fruit and nut trees, way to keep food bills down. “If you noticing the grassy flavour of a fresh,
alert one another to potential wind- have a toddler, you know they’re wee undried walnut, the earthy odour of
falls, develop a working knowledge of apple munchers,” she says. “I can’t a mushroom pulled from under the
edible weeds, and teach themselves to believe the cost of apples.” birch leaves, the sweet aniseed taste
distinguish a tasty birch bolete mush- In February, New Zealand’s food of pollen from a wild fennel flower.
room from a poisonous lookalike. “Being in touch with the seasons is
Competition can grow fierce. Forag- ‘We were struggling a really powerful thing that you gain
ers reluctant to give away their prized from foraging,” says Parker. “Things
porcini mushroom spots will rustle financially and really are ripe when they’re ripe, and every-
stealthily through the leaf litter, trying thing has a season. You can come out
to conceal their intentions. “You’ll see
wanted to just see here and pick yourself the most nutri-
these old guys, and they won’t even what was out there’ ent dense salad.”
tell you what they’re doing,” laughs After an hour of walking around,
Parker. “They’re like, ‘Oh, I’ve just lost his basket is full: mushrooms,
a ring!’ holding a bag full of lumps.” miner’s lettuce, mallow, parsley and
Foraging is popular in Christchurch, fennel. Most of his meals make use of
the largest city of the South Island, foraged ingredients.
where earthquakes in 2010 and 2011 “I think a lot of people are catching
demolished large chunks of the city. on to that,” he says. “I’m noticing the
Gaps remain and, in some, nature has effect on spots where I do forage and
taken over. The red zone, a ribbon seeing more traffic from more people
of land from the coast to the inner – it’s something that I find really excit-
city, was designated too unstable for ing. I love having more and more forag-
construction, and 8,000 houses were ers out. I think there’s always enough
demolished or removed. Abandoned for everyone.”
cul de sacs and deserted gardens were TESS MCCLURE IS AOTEAROA
left to go wild. NEW ZEALAND CORRESPONDENT
With thousands of fruiting trees and FOR THE GUARDIAN
Michelin-
approved space food were the salmon for a
renowned French chefs Thierry Marx French astronaut
and Alain Ducasse, each of whom SEBASTIEN SALOM-
W
hen a trio of paying sought to recast freeze-dried crea- The entry of chefs into an area long
customers and their tions such as a marshmallow-like cau- dominated by food scientists, how-
astronaut chaperone liflower with strawberry cream as the ever, is far from a seamless transition.
were blasted off to the perfect space food, marrying nutrition The team behind Andrés spent more
International Space Station, their voy- and functionality while also playing than a year tweaking the paella and
age was touted as a milestone for the to a sense of taste that can at times be secreto de cerdo y pisto – a cut of Iberian
commercialisation of spaceflight. dulled by microgravity conditions. pork with tomatoes, onions, aubergine
For the Michelin-starred Spanish Aduriz pointed to the commerciali- and peppers – that were sent to space,
chef José Andrés, however, the mis- sation of space to explain the inter- said Charisse Grey, who leads research
sion ushered in another – albeit more est. “Until now, space travel was done and development for the chef’s Think-
niche – breakthrough: the first time by men and women who were very FoodGroup.
paella was sent into orbit. trained to have a spartan spirit and “Food scientists think a lot about
“Astronauts from different coun- mentally prepared to live in extreme ▼ Spanish chef nutrition, they think a lot about calo-
tries and nationalities and back- situations,” he said. José Andrés’ ries,” said Grey. “My goal is to meet
grounds – and they are all going to be With companies such as Blue Origin team spent more your palate’s expectations for food.”
eating, at once, paella Valenciana,” he and Virgin Galactic looking to court than a year devel- The rules were strict; dishes had to
said on social media. deep-pocketed passengers, this profile oping the paella be nutritious, survive microbe-killing
Andrés is the latest in a string of top is set to change. “We’re talking about that was sent into sterilisation of 121C, and largely avoid
chefs who have turned their attention people who will likely not want to do space the use of free-floating liquids.
to space food, seeking to push fine din- without anything and who will want JOHN PARRA/GETTY “Things that are crumbly, like cook-
ies and chips, won’t make it up there
because if there’s little crumbs that
come off it while you’re eating, they
just float into space and can get caught
up in the air filtration systems and cre-
ate issues,” said Grey.
There was also no escaping the
foil-laminated pouch used to serve
the meals. “I recall one of my first con-
versations that I had with Nasa and
some of the food scientists … They
were, like, ‘You have to let go of the
feeling that the food has to look good.’”
While the team had yet to hear any
feedback from the crew, Grey said she
had been impressed by the dishes.
“I won’t say that they’re perfect and
I won’t say that they’re exactly what
you would get out of a paella pan,” said
Grey. “But they’re probably some of
the best meals I’ve had out of a pouch.”
ASHIFA KASSAM IS A JOURNALIST
BASED IN SPAIN
T
he focus of Japan’s quest 3.2 million people – about 3.6% of the T A I WA N
to open its first casino is adult population – were thought to be
a human-made island in High stakes addicted to gambling, far higher than
Osaka that, if the city’s Community v France’s 1.2%, for example.
War games
government gets its way, will end dec- Teruo Sakurada, a professor at Han-
big business
ades of wrangling over poker tables nan University in Osaka, believes the
and slot machines. central government will reject Osaka’s
Six years after the government
legalised casino development, Osaka
is vying with Wakayama and Nagoya to
100
Number of
bid owing to “irregularities” in its
application. “This is all about money
for the operator and the Japanese
Taipei
open Japan’s first “integrated resort”
– a ¥1tn ($8bn) complex of hotels,
conference halls and entertainment
petitions
demanding the
casino plan be
firms involved in building and run-
ning the resort,” said Sakurada, who
heads a group campaigning to scrap
rehearses
facilities, with a casino as its money-
spinning centrepiece.
abandoned the Yumeshima casino plan.
Osaka and its rivals will be keen to for invasion
Osaka is considered the frontrun-
ner after the local assembly, where the 79bn learn from the experience of Yoko-
hama, whose former pro-casino mayor
As Ukraine conflict revives
rightwing populist Osaka Ishin no Kai Projected cost, in pushed ahead with an integrated
is the strongest party, approved a bid yen, to taxpayers resort bid despite public opposition, fears over China, interest is
that will be sent to the central govern- in Osaka only to be voted out in favour of a can- growing in grassroots groups
ment by the 28 April deadline. of earthworks for didate who promptly ditched the city’s
The envisaged resort will “be Dream Island casino ambitions. that train civilians in disaster
an engine of sustainable economic Joji Kokuryo, managing director management response
growth”, Osaka’s mayor, Ichiro Mat-
sui, told assembly members. He has 3.2m of Tokyo-based casino industry con-
sultancy Bay City Ventures, said: “If
an ally in the prime minister, Fumio Number of the Yokohama story has taught us
Kishida, who said integrated resorts people in Japan anything, some form of local consent
were the “key to Japan’s efforts to thought to have looks to be a necessary step for inte-
become a leading tourism nation”. a gambling grated resort development to start on
But despite campaigning in local addiction the right foot.”
elections on a pro-casino platform, JUSTIN MCCURRY IS THE GUARDIAN’S
Matsui and his allies face a backlash TOKYO CORRESPONDENT By Helen Davidson TAIPEI
O
n a muggy night in a Taipei added first aid … A lot of people want to ▲ A first aid ters, both natural and manmade. A
park, a dozen people spread learn these skills but don’t have access, and combat year ago, 49 people were killed and
yoga mats and plastic bags so this is a start.” fitness session more than 200 injured in a train derail-
on the ground. The invasion of Ukraine has pro- at Da’an Park in ment in Hualien. Unable to access
The atmosphere is relaxed as they vided a powerful lesson for people in Taipei. Interest in crushed carriages, first responders
warm up, taking turns to lead the Taiwan: that a smaller party can resist, defence training were luckily able to rely on commu-
group through exercises copied from and even fight back against a mightier has grown in nication with some uninjured passen-
US army basic training videos online. invading force. Residents said Taiwan the wake of gers who had trained or served with
They practise drills, dragging each should not rely on others for its sur- Russia’s invasion the military and fire departments.
other as injured deadweights, out of vival, pointing to the lack of interna- of Ukraine People like Enoch Wu want to broaden
the way of a fictional harm. tional boots on the ground in Ukraine, HELEN DAVIDSON these skills out to everyone.
There is a seriousness among those and delays in coordinating sanctions. But the government does not
here. The group is preparing for, well, A 2021 survey found public support appear supportive of a civilian combat
anything. Taiwan has been under the for better training, longer national ser- force. And not everyone who wants
threat of invasion for decades, but the vice and even conscription of women. more training believes in a formalised
ratcheting up of Chinese military mis- Anecdotally, there is an even greater citizens’ army.
sions and government rhetoric, and hunger for civilian defence pro- Chen is laughing after the drills but
the invasion of Ukraine by Xi Jinping’s grammes. Community groups and sombre when asked about her reasons
ally Vladimir Putin, have set nerves courses have reported up to 10-fold ‘It feels like for taking part and said she understood
on edge. Beijing claims Taiwan as increases in inquiries, and new grass- the end of how life could change quickly. She had
a Chinese province and has sworn to roots initiatives have sprung up. joined the group several months ago
“unify” it, by force if necessary. Enoch Wu, the founder of one of the world and felt vindicated when she saw vid-
Those gathered on this night – men the more high-profile and professional ... A lot of eos of older Ukrainians saying if they
and women of various ages and occu- civil training courses, says demand held a weapon it lessened the burden
pations – joined the group months ago, had been there for some time, but
people on young people.
but membership has tripled since the events in Ukraine had driven more want to “Maybe one day I can use this,” she
Ukraine invasion. They are learning people to “take immediate action”. learn says. “The preparation isn’t perfect but
first aid, self-defence and military fit- Taiwan has spent billions buying you have to prepare.”
ness, others practise firearms drills. weapons from the US and strength-
these skills’ Additional reporting by Chi Hui Lin
“It feels like the end of the world,” ened its international relationships. It Lin HELEN DAVIDSON IS A GUARDIAN
says 34-year-old Lin. “It was just is reforming its reservist programme, Training INTERNATIONAL CORESPONDENT,
fitness [when we started], but then we and the defence minister has flagged participant BASED IN TAIWAN
What
put the biology – the sex – back into It was only by accident,
gender. For too long, De Waal thinks, De Waal says, that
gender was regarded as a purely social explorers stumbled on
chimps first and they
primates
construct and talk of inborn sex dif-
became our go-to model
ferences was taboo. “The fact that we of primate behaviour rather
have genders is related to the fact that than, say, bonobos, which
we have sexes and sexual reproduc-
reveal
tend to be less aggressive.
tion,” he said. “That’s an undeniable
fact, in my opinion, even though the
gender concept is obviously more flex-
S
ex and gender have come to “Kama Sutra apes” for whom sex is as
represent one of the hottest banal as a handshake, though much
‘We have
fronts in the modern culture more fun. Since chimps are generally no evidence
wars. Now, on to this bloody more aggressive than bonobos, this that any
battlefield, calmly dodging banned skewed emphasis gave rise to a bleak
books, anti-transgender laws and view of human nature, he feels.
species
political doublespeak, strolls the dis- Among his accumulated titles, De other than
tinguished Dutch-American prima- Waal is professor of psychology at our own
tologist Frans de Waal, brandishing Emory University in Atlanta, Geor-
nearly half a century’s worth of field gia, and from the first pages you know knows that
notebooks and followed, metaphori- you’re in the presence of someone who sex leads
cally speaking, by an astonishingly feels beyond the slings and arrows of
diverse collection of primates. the culture wars. “You wouldn’t write
to progeny’
Given the world it enters, De Waal’s a book like that if you were 40 and try-
new book, Different: What Apes Can ing to get tenure,” remarks Meredith Frans de Waal
Teach Us About Gender, would argu- Small, an anthropologist at Cornell Author
ably have failed if it didn’t stimulate University in Ithaca, New York, and
debate. It seems safe from death by an admirer.
indifference, however, since it is divid- De Waal is comfortable sharing per-
ing opinion even before it is published. sonal reflections on growing up as one
“I found the book to be as wise as it of six brothers and describing himself
was humane,” the American primatol- as a feminist who nevertheless refuses
ogist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy told me, while
US palaeontologist and writer Riley Frans de Waal
Black, a non-binary trans woman, at his home in
is disappointed the author didn’t Smoke Rise,
attempt a more radical overhaul of sex. Georgia
Princeton University primatologist BEN ROLLINS
to denigrate his own gender. He’s also De Waal says we’re more similar to
critical of what he sees as the contra- other primates than we think. (Years
dictions of modern feminism, in par- Parallel lives ago, he coined a term for those who
ticular the idea that gender is socially Characters of warned against anthropomorphising
constructed until it comes to gender other primates: “anthropodenialists”.)
the ape world
identity and sexual orientation, which Yet humans do seem to be unique in
are innate and immutable. one way. We are apparently the only
De Waal’s ape that attaches labels to sexual or
P
rimatology is a relatively entrancing gender diversity and prejudices to the
young field that was founded descriptions labels. In other primates, he says, “I
by men but came to be domi- of apes show don’t find the kind of intolerance we
nated by women, which how “female have in human societies”.
means it is acutely aware that who is choice became He expects blowback from two
looking is as important as what they an important broad camps – the feminists whom he
see. This cisgender, straight, 73-year- issue”. Among criticises in the book and those con-
old white man is no exception. He them are servatives who claim that men are men
describes how the field broadened Princess Mimi, and women are women and never the
its horizons thanks to feminisation. the “bonobo with twain shall meet, wrongly asserting
“When the women came, we got staff ” who grew that science supports their position.
more interested in female-female up pampered in Black says he fails to ask the most
and mother-offspring relationships,” a human home; fundamental question: what is bio-
he said. “Female choice became an and the gender- logical sex? “Is it chromosomes or hor-
important issue.” nonconforming mones or gametes, or some combina-
Both males and females strive – chimp Donna tion thereof, or is it a concept we need
non-consciously – to maximise their and the gay to go back and start over?” she asks.
evolutionary fitness, but because they capuchin Until we’ve answered that, she feels it’s
differ biologically, their methods for monkey Lonnie, unreasonable to assume sex is essen-
achieving this goal differ too. Protect- both of whom tially binary, even if De Waal does allow
ing offspring from male infanticide is were fully for some blurring and acknowledges
a common female preoccupation, De integrated into non-binary and transgender people.
Waal says, which is why one rule holds their colonies. Fuentes wonders why he overlooks
across species: “The typical primate research on human sex and gender –
society is at heart a female kinship net- work by the American neuroscientist
work run by older matriarchs.” Lise Eliot, for example, showing that
Males and females are both hierar- male and female brains aren’t that dif-
chical, but these hierarchies are based ferent, or British psychologist Cordelia
on more than just physical prowess. Fine’s probing of the complex feed-
Prestige, which is less visible, counts back loops between sex and gender. In
too. In most primates, the alpha female the introduction to Different, De Waal
ranks below the alpha male. explains that he will not discuss areas
As a result, the female has been of human behaviour for which there
underrated, an argument the Brit- are no animal parallels, such as eco-
ish zoologist Lucy Cooke also made nomic disparities, household labour
recently in her book Bitch. De Waal and dress. “But you can’t discuss gen-
challenges the idea that non-humans der without these!” Fuentes says.
are “natural” while humans are “cul- De Waal makes some thought-
tural”, arguing that nature and nurture provoking observations, such as:
are entwined in both; apes may have “Most beauty in nature exists thanks
gender as well as sex, but you can’t to female taste.” Or: “We have no evi-
take the sex out of human gender. ‘You dence that any species other than our
wouldn’t own knows that sex leads to progeny.”
Different is worth reading for its
write a anecdotes alone. The description of
book like two grizzled male chimps who were
In most primates, the
alpha female ranks below
that if you normally sworn enemies, arms slung
around each other’s shoulders, form-
the alpha male. Bonobos were 40 ing a barrage between a newborn and a
have reversed this order:
females invest everything
and trying young alpha male with possibly infan-
to get ticidal intent, is one of many that will
LIFE ON WHITE/ALAMY
If Netflix is
last month when Coda beat Jane ▲ Despite There has been a “reset”, said Brian
Campion’s Power of the Dog for the investor worries, Wieser, from media agency GroupM.
year’s best picture Oscar. The heart- South Korea’s In part that reset was an “acknowl-
H $45bn
it after hit – from Stranger kind of growth Wall Street has become Squid Game and All of Us Are Dead
Things to Bridgerton – accustomed to. show that Netflix remained the leader
cemented Netflix’s position “Originals and entertainment Amount wiped in that global market.
as the leading streaming content is no longer enough,” said off Netflix’s “Sometimes we lose a sense of
service. Subscriber numbers at the Laura Martin, an analyst at Needham value after it perspective on these things,” said
pioneering digital disrupter rocketed & Co. “Our thesis is that you must have announced it Wieser. “Were the last results really
during lockdowns. And then, in Janu- news and sport. You must have break- expected to add disappointing or was it about expecta-
ary, the boom appeared to be over. ing news because that brings in people only 2.5 million tions being mismatched?”
Netflix announced it expected to when, say, Russia invades Ukraine or new subscribers Competitors may have crowed at
add only 2.5 million new subscribers sports because when there is a really in the first three Netflix’s slip but the fall has dented
globally in the first three months of good game, people flock to you and months of the neither the scale of its ambitions nor
the year, well down on the 4 million stay there.” year, down from the depths of its pockets.
in the first quarter of 2021. The news Entertainment alone, she argues, 4 million in the Arguably even its recent loses show
has helped wipe almost $45bn from is too narrow and success may have first quarter that Netflix is winning. The fact that
its value as investors worried that the blinded the company to the need to of 2021 this year’s best picture battle was
glory days were over. offer a wider variety of content. When between Apple and Netflix shows
This week Netflix was due to release Netflix started, its main rivals in the just how firmly the streamers, once
its latest quarterly results. And some US, its largest market, were cable com- upstarts, are embedded.
analysts were predicting beforehand panies that offered sports and news The days when Netflix was an
that competition from Apple, Amazon, as well as entertainment but at a far outlier may be over, but all media com-
Disney and traditional media players higher price. panies are facing the same struggles.
may have put a stop to its stellar growth. “At the beginning when it was $15 DOMINIC RUSHE IS BUSINESS EDITOR
The narrative was further reinforced a month and they had great library FOR GUARDIAN US
(ALMOST)
Almost invisible by virtue of costumed kids issue their demand for treats via prodded
forefinger. With his brother Peter and his father, John Sr, he
their ubiquity, automated runs the vending empire Broderick’s Ltd, its 2,800 machines
occupying some of the most sought-after corridors and cran-
snack dispensers work around nies of the UK. The Broderick family sugar and sustain office
workers, factory workers, students, gym goers, shoppers
the clock to those in need of and schoolchildren. They pep up breaktimes in a nuclear
a little pick-me-up. But who power station. If you’ve ever wolfed a postpartum Snick-
ers in the maternity ward at Chesterfield Royal Hospital or
keeps hold of the levers? Leeds General Infirmary, or turned thirsty while waiting
to fly out of Stansted or Birmingham airports, then you’ve
almost certainly shopped with Johnny Brod. He thanks you.
The coffee we drank that morning had trickled into card-
board cups from one of his own hot-beverage makers. Busi-
ness had been hurt badly by Covid, he said. There had been
one wretched day in the spring of 2020 when he awoke to
find himself not the owner of the second-largest fleet of
A
MINUTE BEFORE MIDNIGHT ON 21 JULY 2021, vending machines in the UK but “timebombs”.
as passengers staggered sleepily through “All these machines of ours in places we couldn’t access.
Manchester airport, I stood wringing my All full of perishable food.” After enduring months of closed
hands in the glow of a vending machine that workplaces, abandoned airports and dead campuses, the
was more than 2 metres tall, branded with Brodericks had lost millions on foregone Twirls and Mini
the name of its owner – BRODERICK – and Cheddars. Even so, Johnny Brod was bullish, insisting that
positioned like a clever trap between arrivals and the taxi the pandemic presented him with opportunities, too.
rank. Standard agonies. Sweet or savoury? Liquid or some- As he led me on a tour of his Wythenshawe headquarters,
thing to munch? I opted for Doritos, keying in a three-digit I told him about my early hours purchase at the airport. Talk
code and touching my card to the reader so that the packet about a smooth transaction, I said. No snagging! I imagined
moved jerkily forwards, propelled by a churning plastic he would be pleased to hear this, but he twitched his head
spiral and tipped into the well of the machine. My Doritos in frustration, as if at a grave breach of etiquette. Vending
landed with a thwap, a sound that always brings relief to the people hated it, he explained to me, this unexamined expec-
vending enthusiast, because there hasn’t been a mechanical tation of mechanical failure. Modern machines contained
miscue. Judged by the clock, which now read midnight, it many failsafes against botched vends. Despite this, the
was the UK’s first vending-machine sale of the day. one time that Johnny Brod could remember his beloved
Nine hours later, I was sitting in a spruce office in the industry trending on Twitter, a cruel joke had done the
Manchester suburb of Wythenshawe, drinking coffee with rounds. “About change being inevitable. Except from a
John “Johnny Brod” Broderick, who owned and operated vending machine.”
that handsome airport machine. I’d had an idea to try to Every one of his machines, he countered, was fitted
capture 24 hours in the life of vending machines. These with a contactless card reader. Since Covid, people didn’t
weird, conspicuous objects! With their backs against the want to touch anything they didn’t have to. Big change was
wall of everyday existence, they tempt out emotions from sweeping through automated vending, and the first thing
relief to frustration, condescension to childish glee. For to go was small change. As cash sales tumbled in 2020 and
decades I’d been a steady and unquestioning patron. I fig- 2021, and contactless sales climbed, the Brodericks had
ured that by spending some time in the closer company of been the beneficiary of new and better information about
the machines and their keepers, by immersing myself in their customers. Pre-Covid, not only did they have to go
their history, by looking to their future, I might get to the and fetch someone’s coppery quid, then count it – they
bottom of their enduring appeal. What made entrepreneurs didn’t even know whose quid it was. Now the tycoons of
from the Victorian age onwards want to hawk their goods in vending understood us better. Johnny Brod had released
this way? What made generations of us buy? Johnny Brod a smartphone app that tempted people with discounts in
seemed a good first person to ask. return for permission to track their vending habits.
Freckle-tanned, portly and quick to laugh, Broderick has He led us into a control room that had large screens
a playful exterior that conceals the fiery heart of a vending mounted on the walls and employees arranged Nasa-
fundamentalist. He is so invested in the roboticised trans- style, facing screens on which stationary dots and
mission of snacks that, come Halloween, he has been known travelling arrows identified thousands of vending
to park a machine full of sweets in his driveway, letting any machines and the technicians who roved between
By Tom Lamont
them. We watched a live record of the day’s sales, north to ground. Profits are ruthlessly haggled over. Competition
Aberdeen, south to the Isle of Wight. A couple of clicks on for spots is intense. Broadly speaking, the vending game
a computer and we were marvelling at the snacking history is built on deals between operators (who own machines
of a loyal, I would say fanatical, Broderick customer in and have the skills to install them, fix them, constantly fill
Manchester, someone who must have been sourcing two them with fats and sugars) and site owners (who have the
full meals a day from behind glass. While Johnny Brod made rights to advantageous pieces of land). Either a machine is
a note to slip this customer a thank-you tenner via the app, placed on private property – say, a factory, where the site
I asked his team if they’d be able to find the record of my owner surrenders profits to the operator in return for keep-
midnight Doritos. A few keyboard taps and there it was. ing a workforce fed and present – or, a machine is placed
The Doritos fell from their spiral at midnight, closely somewhere public, inside a teeming airport, for instance.
followed by a sachet of peanut M&Ms, a stubby Mars and Here the site owner will expect a cut of each item sold,
a bottle of water. What happened next in the wider world anywhere from 10% to 30%.
of these machines? I contacted a number of Johnny Brod’s Those midnight Doritos at Manchester airport cost me
competitors, outfits of all sizes, and asked them to share £1.10. Though Johnny Brod, the operator, would not say
with me similar sales data for that day in July. I enlisted how much went to the site owner, Manchester Airports
volunteers to help me track vending activity around the Group, he did acknowledge that he made 22p in profit per
globe. Everywhere mouths watered, spirals turned. A world Doritos packet. (And that Manchester Airports Group made
of people bent double, their hands patting blindly inside more.) We were discussing this in headquarters when his
retrieval wells, claiming juice boxes, cola bottles, cereal father, John Sr, wandered through the office, ready to
bars, gum, whatever they’d bought, whatever they craved. reminisce about the old days. John Sr explained how he
founded the business in the 1960s with a single machine,
A
T 12.45AM, A WHITE-CHOCOLATE TWIX imported from the US. He struck a deal to put it in the foyer
dropped into the well of a machine in Black- of Macclesfield baths. Everything escalated from there. ▲ Family concern
friars in London. At a taxi depot in Belfast, As the Broderick business grew, the family watched their Johnny Broderick
drivers on overnight standby thumbed in rivals big and small start to eat each other. For the past 20 (far left), John Sr,
coins to buy keep-awake Cokes. Cans of years or so, global vending has been dominated by corpora- George (the son
sugar-free Tango slammed down in the tions that have carved up the world into domains, buying of the company’s
surgeons’ staffroom at an Edinburgh hospital. Bottles of and absorbing regional operators. The big fish in Japan is a accountant),
Mountain Dew, already long past expiry, turned another vending company called Glory. In the US, it’s Crane. Europe Hayley and Clarke
hour older inside a Covid-shuttered office in North Carolina. is ruled by Selecta, founded in Zurich in 1957 and owned JOEL GOODMAN
A Japanese accountant, several hours ahead of Europe and by the Swiss private-equity firm KKR since 2015. From its
the US in a southern prefecture called Ehime, eyed the English outpost in Hemel Hempstead, Selecta rules its UK
familiar choices in a cup-noodle machine by his desk. At market, with 80,000 machines scattered around hotels,
4.14am, UK time, a night owl in Newcastle bought Haribo. transport hubs and petrol stations. On more than one occa-
As the sun rose on Dundee, an employee at a packing fac- sion, Johnny Brod said, he had received calls from Selecta
tory turned the Perspex carousel of a chilled food machine, about the possibility of a buyout. But the Brodericks always
sliding back a sprung door, choosing for breakfast a shrink- told Selecta no. Unfinished business.
wrapped sausage roll. As Johnny Brod explained, the post-pandemic world
At 7.31am, on a railway station platform in Wakefield in was one that needed feeding to an ever-greater degree by
West Yorkshire, a machine was tapped for Tango Orange unmanned food stations. He had secretive concept sketches
as the first morning commuters came through. Wakefield on his phone, and prototype machines behind a locked
is the birthplace of automated vending. This is where the laboratory door at his headquarters, all part of a plan to
world began its determined effort to uproot the salesperson help usher in a new vending age. I made him promise to
from the sale. In the 1850s, an inventor here patented a show me the secret lab after lunch.
“self-acting machine” for the dispensing of stamps. Later,
L
in the 1880s, a cast-iron contraption shaped like a trident UNCHTIME. IN BELFAST, THAT SAME DAY,
and painted post-box red, patented by the Sweetmeat Auto- Emmet Oppong walked into a taxi depot near
matic Delivery Company of London, was the first machine his home carrying as many Cokes as he could
to vend comestibles. Every ve vending machine is a battle- handle. He also had pouches of Midget Gem
sweets, massive Twix Xtras and three types
of Wrigley’s gum. Weeks earlier, this 21-year-
old business graduate had become the owner of a vending
machine that was, in fact, a little older than Oppong himself.
SE
SEWELL LIKES TO He bought it from an online broker for £100 ($131) and had
since spent about £500 trucking it around, renting storage,
KKEEP COLOURFUL pondering locations, till he found it a home among the taxi
drivers. Oppong unlocked the machine’s front and began
IT
ITEMS TO THE EDGES, to feed in packets and cans.
He was drawn to vending because he liked the idea of
TO CATCH THE EYE earning money while he applied his energies elsewhere.
AN
AND DRAW ATTENTION
Ignoring for a moment the fierce battle for plots, the mainte-
nance stresses, the logistical feats required to keep far-flung
AC
ACROSS HIS RANGE machines stocked and clean, at the core of any vendor’s
ambition there is often a dream of becoming rich while
37
A
Oppong followed certain fundamental laws of vending. FEW TIMEZONES WEST, THE US AWOKE,
He put his Twix Xtras and some Maltesers down on the its 7 million vending machines getting
bottom shelves, nearest the SnackMart’s fridge unit. Crisps busier and busier as another working day
were placed in the warmest part of the machine, up at the began. An IT analyst in North Carolina,
top. The Midget Gems could go anywhere, really, and today returning to his office for the first time since
he decided to give them a try in the prime spot – halfway the start of the pandemic, decided to buy a
along, halfway up. Mountain Dew from the break-room machine. He noticed
In vending, this part of the job, as delicate as flower too late that the bottle had expired 16 months earlier. “If I
arrangement, is known as planogramming. How best to die,” the analyst tweeted, opening the Dew anyway, “just
spread the wares? Fiona Chambers, who runs the vend- know I died doing what I love.” I got in touch with him. He
ing company SV24-7 in the Scottish town of Alloa with survived. His drink was only a little flat.
her husband, Ian, puts much thought into planograms. Vending machines do kill their human patrons every so
She told me she likes two central spirals of KitKats, two of often. A US study in 1998 recorded 37 deaths and 113 inju-
Twirls, these being her champion sellers. Declan Sewell, ries over a 20-year period, which amounted to an average
the young and ambitious chief executive of Decorum Vend- of 1.85 kills per annum. This statistic sometimes prompts
ing in Portsmouth, will always, always put Snickers in the the claim that vending machines are deadlier than sharks.
middle. Sewell told me he preferred to keep more colour- In the 1980s, cans of drink were left for the taking on top
fully packaged items to the edges of his machines, to catch of vending machines near Hiroshima in Japan. These cans
the eye and draw attention across his range. had been deliberately laced with a potent herbicide. Twelve
Oppong closed the front of his SnackMart, locking it people died and their killer was never caught.
carefully. The names given to vending machines are reliably If Wakefield is the literal birthplace of the automated
charming, sometimes hinting at their places of manufac- sale, Japan is its spiritual home. There they vend umbrel-
ture. Spain makes Mistrals. The US makes Cascades. Ger- las, ice-cream, fancy dress. In Nagasaki, there is a machine
mans make Bistros! (exclamation mark included). Italian that sells the edible chrysalises of silkworms. Machines
machines tend to be given musical names: Operas, Melo- vend fresh tomatoes in Kobe and, in Tatsuno, fresh oysters.
dias, Sinfonias, Jazzes. There are machines out there called At the last formal count in December 2020, there were
Shoppers, Shoppertrons, SuperStacks, NarrowStacks. There 2.7m vending machines around Japan: one for every 46 citi-
are Brios, Astros, Tangos, Sambas, Festivals, Visions. There zens, the highest density anywhere. Affection for vending
are BevMaxes, Polyvends, Merchants – and SnackMarts, is so pronounced that a machine selling something unique
which were created by a British engineer called Richard may become the subject of fascination, even pilgrimage.
Brinsley and his company, Westomatic. On 21 July, while I was in Manchester with the Brodericks, a
Something of a pioneer when it came to vending English Japanese accountant named Masaharu Mizota was coming
tea, Brinsley was the first to bring to market a machine that to the end of his day in Ehime. Mizota had recently
brewed from leaves, not powder, in the 1980s. He called learned about an unusual machine in Uchiko, a small
it the Temprano, “because it was ahead of its time”, he town on the Oda River, and he daydreamed about
A
as he would have been to visit a monument or a place of T 5.51PM, THE SNACK MACHINE IN BLACK-
natural beauty. Mizota was eight hours ahead of me in the friars in London sold a porridge-to-go bar.
UK, almost ready to go to bed. Before he did so he checked At 6.04pm, a mango drink. It was one of
his maps, figuring out a route for the morning. those newer vending machines that could
talk, and it did so with a robotic, feminine
I
N MANCHESTER, IT WAS MID-AFTERNOON. voice, advising, apologising. Spend any
Leading me into a room he called his concept lab, time immersed in the vending world and you start to see
Johnny Brod waved an arm at a pair of unplugged that these machines are repositories for the most unlikely
prototypes. “My babies,” he called them. His actual human notions and emotions. There was once a drinks
children and even a couple of grandchildren hap- dispenser in Singapore that had to be cuddled before it
pened to be visiting that day. If everything went to would unloose a can.
plan, Johnny Brod said, these prototypes would secure his We bring our prejudices to these machines. We
family’s fortune long into the future. He was nervous about have ungracious feelings for them that they know
me repeating details, lest his competitors gain a jump. But nothing about; we anticipate their betrayal. There
the gist of what Johnny Brod was plotting went as follows. was once a Seinfeld episode dedicated to George
Many workplace canteens, closed during the lockdowns Costanza’s furious efforts to secure a snagged
of 2020 and 2021, had not reopened, or not at their for- Twix. When Johnny Brod lent a branded coffee-
mer scale. Yet, for reasons of in-house virus management, maker to the producers of the ITV drama Cold Feet,
employers were not eager to have employees roaming off he was pained to see it malfunctioning for dramatic
to the sandwich shop or supermarket. Those high-street purposes. (“And our competitors love putting clips
retailers still wanted to reach a hungry workforce, however, of that online.”) In one of my earliest London mem-
and Johnny Brod hoped to become the bridge. He wanted to ories, I am on an underground platform, watching
run new-wave machines of his own design inside offices and a disgruntled man in a raincoat apply a handmade
factories, as one-stop robotic canteens. There was a proto- out-of-order sign to a Cadbury’s chocolate dis-
type in the distribution centre of a well-known UK retailer, penser. He’d fed in his coin. But no Dairy Milk. I still
from which the Brodericks vended salad bowls, fruit bowls. remember his appalled expression, his wounded
“Soon we’ll be diversifying into sushi. Crudités!” grace as he warned off others.
LE
LEAVE MANCHESTER,
water after all. Fanta, too.
I
HHE SAID, WITHOUT N BELFAST, WHEN EMMET OPPONG LOOKED
in on his machine before bed, no Midget Gems
TA
TAKING ME ON had been sold. Crinkle-cut crisps had done bet-
ter and, as usual, every Coke was gone. Oppong
SA
SAFARI TO VISIT clicked his pen and did some sums. As long as he
wrote off the personal labour, he was satisfied his
A PRIZED SPECIMEN SnackMart had paid for itself. He was newly in profit: a
vending entrepreneur. Months later, in autumn 2021, and
trading as Em Vending Solutions, Oppong would go on to
This initial encounter did not set me against the triple the size of his operation, purchasing a pair of silvery
machines. Instead, I’ve always found them to emanate machines covered in cartoony decals of Homer Simpson
reassurance, particularly so during moments of disloca- and the Tasmanian Devil, £750 the pair.
tion: jetlagged layovers, late-night jobs, early starts. I first As I came away from Manchester that night in July, I took
noticed their palliative effect at school, when we called with me a final image of Johnny Brod, expansionist-king
it going venders (“You going venders?”) and when a visit of UK vending, owner of a thousands-strong fleet – stand-
to the machines meant a respite from classwork, junior ing in front of an empty wall in the Trafford Centre. He
lust, the bickering over which bands were best. One day a couldn’t believe, he said, he hadn’t thought to put a vending
savvy pupil set himself up in competition with the school machine there yet. The last time we spoke, in spring 2022,
venders. He started to sell the same snacks, cheaper, from he was about to take delivery of his 25 Autoristas. He was
his backpack. I stayed loyal to the machines. They had considering an expansion into London Heathrow, “where
inexhaustible patience, they let you ponder every option, they still have the same shit machines you saw in Love
walk up, walk away, malinger at the glass, wallow in pre- Actually, 20 years ago. And you can print that.”
purchase indecision. I think what comforted me then, as But back on that July night, at 8.08pm, a swimmer in
now, was their height, their stuffedness, their immobility, Glasgow bought a bottle of energy drink from Fiona Cham-
their always-on-ness, their middle-of-the-night-ness, their bers’ machine near a public pool. At 9.53pm, Declan Sewell’s
there-till-the-end-ness. chatty machine in Blackfriars sold a final peppermint Aero.
The more time I spent with Johnny Brod, the more I saw A smoked-salmon sandwich and a Pepsi were bought for
how sincerely concerned he was for his fleet. He had a horror somebody’s dinner from East Croydon. It was nearly mid-
of unclean machines, having once inherited a secondhand night when I arrived back in London. As I had made the
BevMax that had mould in its corners. He’d been known to day’s first vend, I thought it would be neat if I made the
clamber down on his belly in malls or on airport concourses, last. I wandered around St Pancras station, trying to find a
to peer under retrieval wells, dragging out chocolate wrap- machine that would suit my appetite, as I provisioned and
pers, recovering abandoned flip-flops. His machines were planogrammed ideal arrangements of confectionery and
▼ Fresh approach like his pets or his zoo animals. He maintained them with crisps in my head.
Richard Brinsley, fastidious care, and he couldn’t let me leave Manchester, he Under an escalator, a couple were dancing in front of
the head of said, without taking me on safari to visit a prized specimen. an automated jukebox. On a concrete walkway beyond,
Westomatic Over in Leeds General Infirmary, said Johnny Brod, he a machine waited to dispense foldable Brompton bikes.
Vending Services, owned an absolute beauty by the benches in A&E, a machine I checked the Google alerts on my phone, scrolling through
in his Devon much used by fight-night drunks. “Insane on weekends social media, too, learning that a radio producer in Chicago
warehouse … we can’t fill it fast enough.” And he loved his BevMaxes had at that moment bought an attractive sugar-dusted
JIM WILEMAN by the luggage belt in the local airport. “Because if that ganache from a machine in a garage off Interstate 55. A
belt breaks down, I’ve got you cannabis-oil manufacturer had put a dispenser on top of
trapped.” But the machine he a mountain in Utah, to deliver balms to achy hikers. An
wanted to show me was in animal sanctuary in Colorado had been awarded a patent on
Manchester’s Trafford Cen- a vending machine to be used exclusively by captive apes.
tre shopping mall. No gim- In Japan, Mizota woke earlier than usual and got on his
micks, no tricks, just a boss motorbike. He drove south, between mountains, crossing
dispenser in a prime location, bridges, paying at tolls, following a map that was mounted
capable of slurping in thou- on his handlebars. He pulled into sleepy Uchiko about
sands of pounds a month. He 7.30am and parked by the one-of-a-kind vending machine
drove us over in an SUV. he’d read about. Of all the things to be sold from an ungainly
“There,” Johnny Brod glass-and-steel machine, pieces of fragile and beautiful
whispered, signalling for us origami were its wares. Folded-paper sea creatures. Delicate
to halt on a concourse near flowers and birds and stars. After his long journey, Mizota
a spotless, richly stocked fed in a 50-yen piece, about 40 cents, and ran a gloved finger
BevMax. “Wait,” he mut- over the buttons, trying to choose •
tered. It was like watching a TOM LAMONT IS A REGULAR FEATURES CONTRIBUTOR
well-baited snare. He knew it TO THE GUARDIAN AND OBSERVER
Great
and
small
By Cal Flyn
There’s a sweet
spot after a few
days when they
can stand up,
open their
eyes, show that
first bit of life
T
Too young, and they can’t support
themselves. They’re just a blob.
There’s a sweet spot after a few days
when they can stand up, open their
eyes, show that first bit of life. It’s
really fascinating.”
Gethings captures his babies at
the sweetest spots of all: a creamy
lamb standing four-square, its
spindly legs braced shakily against
the ground; a donkey foal whose
ears are entirely out of proportion
to its dainty velveteen muzzle;
a duckling dressed in primrose
yellow fuzz, caught mid-quack.
The quality of “universal
hey say cuteness” that Gethings alludes
not to work with babies or animals, to is something that has been
but the photographer Gerrard carefully studied. In the 1940s, the
Gethings chose to combine the two Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz
for his latest project, young animals – who became world famous for
alongside their adult counterparts. demonstrating that baby goslings
Baby Animal Match was would bond to and follow the first
conceived as a memory card moving thing they saw, whether
game; players are asked to pair that be mother goose or Lorenz
duckling with duck, owlet with himself – outlined what he called
owl, hoglet with hedgehog, piglet the Kindchenschema (baby schema):
and pig – and so on, through a number of features common
44 combinations. These fluffy, among babies of different species
tousled, bug-eyed babies are, that elicit a positive response from
inevitably, adorable. But not always humans. These included a large
in obvious ways. cranium and eyes; small nose and
“There is a universal cuteness,” mouth; plump body and chubby,
Gethings says. “But that wasn’t squeezable cheeks.
exactly what I was looking for. The It’s an appealing aesthetic. For
baby racing pigeon, for example species whose young are born
– that goes through an incredible needy and reliant on their parents,
transformation from an awful yellow attracting attention might make all
hairy squab to a beautiful iridescent the difference for survival. More
bird that can fly 100 miles an hour.” recent research supports Lorenz’s
Gethings, who is based in London, belief that the appeal transfers
grew up in Lancashire, and worked across the species divide – that the
for the photographer Terry O’Neill same psychological mechanism
for a decade before striking out on is involved in appreciating the
his own as one of Britain’s finest cuteness of babies, puppies and
animal portrait photographers. kittens alike. It’s an evolutionary
Previous projects have included explanation for why we find small,
human subjects – such as 2018’s wet-eyed pups so appealing,
Do You Look Like Your Dog?, in and may be what drives
which an Afghan hound needs us (and other animals) to
For species
born needy,
attracting
attention
might make all
the difference
for survival
care for the orphaned young of that – the portraits had to stand up in
other species. their own right.”
Not all of Gethings’ baby animals Unexpectedly, it was the donkeys
fall into the straightforwardly that caused most issues. “They’ve
adorable category: in one pairing, been portrayed as docile and cute,
a swivel-eyed adult chameleon but, in reality, they were quite wild.”
clings to a bare branch, tail tightly While shooting a jenny and her foal,
coiled and its back crenellated with Gethings spotted a male donkey
a fine, teeth-like crest; its baby watching nearby and suggested they
hatchling – though smaller and let him in. Big mistake. “He came
more delicate – also has an eerie, charging in, making a horrific sound
alien aspect. As does the bristling and jumped on the female donkey.
caterpillar, its etched-bronze He really wanted to make some more
body carefully illuminated against baby donkeys. We were in a confined
a black background, intricate as space and couldn’t get him out, it
a museum piece. was terrifying! Amorous donkeys –
Even the downy white owl chick there’s no stopping them.”
retains an air of menace, opening its Gethings’ portraits act as a clear
beak to screech in complaint, eyes visual shorthand for how we all
pressed shut with the effort of it, grow and change – whether man
outsized talons outstretched. or mouse, horse or hedgehog.
That was one of his favourite Other features catch up with those
shoots. “You don’t get to handle plaintive, oversized eyes, the teacup
owls every day. And barn owls in piglet on its tiny trotters will morph
particular are so beautiful that to get into a whiskered, squinting sow.
the opportunity to photograph them I just wish that, like the squab,
was dreamy.” my own trajectory was to grow only
The proximity to the animals was more beautiful with the years •
one of his main motivations for the Baby Animal Match: A Memory Game
project, he says. “Getting to hold by Gerrard Gethings is published on
a baby hedgehog is reason enough to 26 April
be there. The animals are, inevitably, CAL FLYN WRITES ON NATURE
cute. But I didn’t want to rely on AND THE ENVIRONMENT
RACHEL CONNOLLY
Our strange
need to link
unrelated things
Page 47
T
hey read like messages from one of and terrify civilians, and in some cultures to ensure
the creepier dating apps, or else the victims are rejected by their own families. But some of
sort of unwanted lechery with which the stories emerging from Ukraine have a particularly
many young women on social media chilling dimension, one all too familiar in wars of ethnic
are grimly familiar. cleansing, which is the attempt to force women to bear
One man suggests sharing “a large the invading army’s children.
bed, we could sleep together” and In the rape camps set up by Serbian soldiers during the
then letting “what we both want Balkan wars, victims were told they would be forced to
happen”. Another is keen to let the recipient know she bear Serbian babies. In Iraq, Islamic State systematically
is “so beautiful”, while a third immediately asks, “Are trafficked and sexually enslaved women from the Yazidi
you single?” But these aren’t just any old clumsy sexual minority as part of a campaign to destroy the community
overtures. These are messages left for women fleeing from within, knowing the children born of rape would be
war-torn Ukraine, on a Facebook group seeking to match deemed Muslims and not Yazidi.
refugees with Britons offering sanctuary.
The grotesque parody of shelter that some men see fit Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, Lyudmyla
to offer is a chance to flee the threat of rape by Russian Denisova, reports that in Bucha, 25 girls and women
soldiers, but to somewhere you might want to barricade aged 14 to 24 were held in a basement by Russian soldiers
yourself into the spare bedroom. An undercover reporter who threatened to “rape them to the point where they
posing as a refugee found more than half the messages wouldn’t want sexual contact with any man, to prevent
sent to her came from men living alone, some explicit them from having Ukrainian children”. Nine of them are
about the strings attached to their offers. pregnant. The brutal message is that, even if Ukrainians
What kind of man, you may wonder, sees in won’t submit to being Russian, their unborn children
a tragedy a sexual opportunity? Well, in Haiti after the have no choice.
2010 earthquake, it was British aid workers who paid Meanwhile, Kyiv claims Ukrainian children from
desperate locals for sex. In Somalia, ravaged by war, it occupied cities have been forcibly moved across the
was Belgian and Italian peacekeepers sent by the UN. border, fast-tracked for adoption by Russian families.
In the makeshift refugee camps of northern France, it When the US president, Joe Biden, talked last week
was people smugglers preying on potential clients. And of genocide in Ukraine, lawyers
now on the borders between Ukraine and its neighbours, Gaby Hinsliff responded that there wasn’t yet
it is sex traffickers, masquerading as good Samaritans is a Guardian enough evidence to meet the legal
offering unwary women a lift. columnist threshold for such a charge. But at the
Wherever there is conflict, there is chaos and very least, the propaganda coming out
disruption and unguarded moments for women and of Moscow suggests this war isn’t simply over territory
children, and with depressing predictability some will or strategic interests; that it is increasingly about
always seek to exploit that. But it is the predictability eradicating the very idea of being Ukrainian, submerging
that makes it preventable. national identity into some twisted fantasy of a Greater
The UN has asked the British government to ban single Russia. These are war crimes, every bit as much as
men from housing female refugees, advice that Michael chemical weapons attacks, and must be prosecuted
Gove (the cabinet minister in charge of the refugee as vigorously.
matching scheme) should act on and make policy. The The foreign secretary, Liz Truss, last week launched
more complex emerging challenge, however, is what to the Murad Code – named after Nadia Murad, a Nobel
do about the horrific scale of systematic sexual violence peace prize-winning Yazidi woman who survived
emerging inside Ukraine itself, as the Russian retreat capture by IS – which is a welcome move to improve the
from occupied towns and villages frees victims to collection of evidence from survivors worldwide.
emerge and tell their stories. Ukraine is already diligently gathering evidence. What
As the war correspondent Christina Lamb writes it needs is help bringing the perpetrators to justice.
bleakly in her book Our Bodies, Their Battlefield, The Tory peer Arminka Helic has called for the creation
rape is “the cheapest weapon known to man”, one of a permanent international body to investigate,
deployed every bit as strategically and deliberately as prosecute and stamp out rape as a war crime. Helic
bombs and bullets. The aim is to intimidate, degrade knows what she’s talking about: a refugee from the
Bosnian war, she went on to become special adviser to
William Hague when he was foreign secretary. In 2012,
she persuaded him to set up an initiative on sexual
exploitation in war zones that is still active today.
The brutal message is But, as Helic puts it, “impunity is the norm” still for a
war crime that is less visible than bombed-out cities or
that, even if Ukrainians mass graves, and often taken less seriously.
Training and culture within armed forces worldwide
won’t submit to being can start to change that, but it’s only when commanding
Russian, their unborn officers actually end up in the dock for overseeing sexual
war crimes that the message will really hit home. We
children have no choice can, and must, do better than this •
A
become so widespread and misused
s a child, in the back of the car on that they aren’t meaningful. Nothing is in proportion.
drives along the motorway, I would Even death is strangely meaningless. One illustration
look for connections between the of this is how normal it has become for people to send
number plates on surrounding cars. strangers messages telling them to kill themselves
How many started with an odd (I received such a message a few weeks ago). I doubt
number? How many with an even anyone who sends a message like this even means it.
number? The search for patterns Because killing yourself is just like violence, which is
is a common human trait. People practically Harvey Weinstein, which is basically a slap at
also see images in TV static, or nonexistent patterns in the Oscars, which is more or less a Russian tank, which
the goals scored in football games. There is a term for is, for all intents and purposes, a toxic ex-boyfriend.
this: illusory pattern perception, the human tendency to I don’t know what we gain from treating cultural
try to make sense of the world by finding relationships events and life experiences as interchangeable units of
between stimuli. It has been found to be a “central information that can be easily linked. But I think we lose
cognitive mechanism” accounting for conspiracy our sense of life as it really is. When we see the meaning
theories and supernatural beliefs. of an event in terms of its relationships to something
I see this in the inclination to stitch together disparate different, it is the relationship we consider rather than
cultural events (see, here I am, looking for meaning) that the event itself. And I wonder if this is the point. If this is a
has become widespread on social media. The tendency way to insulate ourselves from the true weight of certain
to think that everything can be linked to something facets of reality. A way of addressing wars and suicides
else, or compared, or both, and hence explained. The and sexual assaults and so many other brutalities without
recent Oscars slap by the actor Will Smith was compared, really considering them; of touching everything without
nonsensically, to Harvey Weinstein’s sustained history feeling it. Because, who really wants to take it all in?
of sexual abuse and harassment, and to Russia’s invasion When I think of the cars on the motorway, it was rare
of Ukraine. This is a recent example of something that that I could connect the numbers. Mostly it worked if
happens all the time. I cheated a bit. I could count two odd starting numbers
There are the associations drawn between politicians in a row and if the next was an even, I could look to the
and the types of boyfriends common to stock internet second in the row for an odd, maybe count two more like
jokes. The wildly inappropriate and crass comparisons that. Or start again, looking for prime numbers this time.
between geopolitical disasters such as the US invasion And then three plates later, a new rule. But it was a good
AFP/GETTY of Afghanistan and interpersonal conflict such as distraction. I could do it for hours •
I
is a cynical ploy or a thought-through policy.
n my time working for the office of the UN Is it because Rwanda has more geographic capacity,
High Commissioner for Refugees, a stark fact perhaps? More free land or housing infrastructure?
was often mentioned: the vast majority of Is Britain really bursting at the seams? Rwanda’s
the world’s displaced people are hosted by population density is almost double that of Britain’s. Yet,
the world’s poorest countries. Today, 85% of per capita, it already hosts five times as many refugees
refugees live in developing countries, while as the UK. As well as hosting Congolese and Burundian
the richest nations host just 15%. refugees, Rwanda has recently offered itself for the
While Rwanda might be developing emergency evacuation of refugees trapped in Libya.
economically, it is still among the world’s 25 poorest In the introduction to the Home Office’s
countries. The UK is among the world’s 10 richest memorandum of understanding with Rwanda, the
countries. To acknowledge the disparity of wealth UK boasts of having taken in 25,000 Syrian refugees,
between the two nations and decide that Rwanda is as a way of demonstrating its “long, proud history of
better able to accommodate people attempting the providing protection to those who need it”. This claim
MUHIZI OLIVIER/AP treacherous journey across the Channel takes a huge is laughable. More than 6 million Syrians have fled their
T
the burden. The UK comfortably has the capacity to take he UK is sliding into a 260 million people will be
in people crossing the Channel. social and economic pushed into extreme poverty
crisis, the likes of this year alone – that is to say,
When Australia utilised the tiny island state of Nauru which its people living on $1.90 a day or less. At
for a similar purpose, it gave aid in return. Australia – a have not seen for decades. the start of this year, the FAO
privileged country – effectively paid a less economically Household fuel bills are on appealed for $138m in aid for
fortunate country to take desperate people off its hands, course to top £2,400 ($3,120), farming families in Somalia;
in some cases for years. The British government is while the price of shopping four months later, it is still
callously copying the Australian playbook, while its PR is rocketing. The average nearly two-thirds short.
agents in the press trumpet this as some kind of triumph. employee’s pay keeps falling Some basic things can be
“Rwanda plan to smash the Channel gangs,” read the behind inflation, which hit done. The UK chancellor, Rishi
Daily Mail’s front page. “Bold plan to send boat migrants 7% in March, the highest rate Sunak, could immediately
to Rwanda,” said the Daily Express. When Boris Johnson since 1992. No wonder that restore the billions he has cut
referred to people “illegally entering the country” the charities and analysts that from the aid budget. This week,
he was using the worst kind of semantics. Refugees work on poverty and inequality finance ministers from around
fleeing conflicts or persecution do not have the luxury are issuing dire warnings. On the globe were due to attend
of entering Britain legally. Seeking asylum routinely one projection, one in three the spring meetings of the
involves entering a territory without prior permission. Britons – 23.5 million people – International Monetary Fund
When UNHCR’s Asia and Pacific director, Indrika will be unable to afford the cost and World Bank in Washington.
Ratwatte, visited Nauru in 2018, he reported his shock of living this year. There, they could make up the
at the immense toll that long-term The rest of the world is humanitarian aid needed in
Joshua detention had taken on people’s being buffeted by the same the Horn of Africa, Afghanistan
Surtees is a mental health – more than 80% storms: Covid, followed by and elsewhere. They could
feature writer, had been diagnosed with PTSD, soaring prices for food and restructure poorer countries’
reporter and trauma and depression. “The sense fuel, and then Russia’s invasion debt, and increase the financial
columnist of hopelessness and despair was of Ukraine. The difference reserves or strategic drawing
extremely tangible,” he told the press. is that most other countries rights provided by the IMF,
Rwanda has internal transit centres where people do not have the UK’s wealth, while stipulating that they
deemed “undesirable” are sent in order to keep streets or social security system, or must go to poorer countries
looking appealing for tourists. Rwandans who criticise the infrastructure. So imagine the without the usual conditions
government are liable to be informed on by neighbours, devastation felt elsewhere, imposed by economists.
placed under surveillance, blackmailed, tortured, sent to in countries less wealthy, less It remains an outrage that
rehabilitation camps or even killed. stable and less powerful. In the rich world hasn’t waived
The Daily Telegraph said that “migrants will be Somalia, the UN’s Food and patents on Covid vaccines or
encouraged to settle” in Rwanda. Their options, should Agricultural Organization (FAO) supported poorer countries in
Rwanda not turn out to be a safe or sustainable place for predicts more than 6 million manufacturing them. And it is
them, will be somewhat limited. people will fall into “crisis, high time that a wealth tax was
“Rwanda will ensure that it will treat each relocated emergency, or catastrophic introduced, taking from those
individual, and process their claim for asylum, in levels of hunger” within the who prospered wildly during
accordance with the refugee convention,” says the next two months. the pandemic, then spent their
memorandum. But what about the UK’s obligations to Add in southern Ethiopia proceeds on space travel or
abide by the convention that it is a signatory to? What and Kenya, and the total facing shares in social media firms.
about that long and proud history of protection? “crisis or worse” jumps to 16 The cost of not doing at least
UNHCR, the organisation designed to uphold the million. A terse, bureaucratic, some of the above will be high:
convention, has said it will delay its judgment on the economical phrase – “crisis or in human lives, in geopolitical
legality of Patel’s deal until its legal teams in Geneva worse” – denotes unimaginable stability, in financial markets.
have analysed the details. Its position, though, is clear. human trauma: selling all you Last week, Sri Lanka warned
“UNHCR does not support the outsourcing of asylum have to feed your children, it would renege on its foreign
states’ obligations,” it said in a statement. leaving your family home debts, even as thousands of
A fundamental principle of any morally functioning and wandering miles for protesters took to the streets to
government is to uphold the human rights of people to sustenance. You need a lot of demand the overthrow of their
seek safety, and not shift that responsibility to states luck to survive such rigours. president. More dominoes are
with less developed asylum systems • Oxfam projects that bound to fall •
WRITE It serves Russia’s interest rest of the world called the technology on our public responsible for policy
TO US the longer the war goes on war in Northern Ireland roads. We, the taxpayer, on non-domicile status,
Patrick Wintour explains “the Troubles”. bought and maintain Rishi Sunak took steps to
how Biden’s words – “For Maurice Herson these roads with our tax formally remove himself
God’s sake, this man Leamington Spa, dollars, which are for from any consideration of
Letters for cannot remain in power” England, UK the use of human-driven policy on the issue, and to
publication – may have indicated motor vehicles. notify his officials of this.
weekly.letters@ regime change and have • A major reason for If these experimenters If not, he was guilty of
theguardian.com thus altered the US’s Putin’s failures in Ukraine want to test their product, a clear conflict of interest.
—
stance on Russia and is the force of resistance they should use their Adrian Carter
Please include a
Ukraine (Ukraine invasion, that echoes the words of own private test roads Penselwood, England, UK
full postal address
and a reference
1 April). its national anthem. These and tracks. Until we, the
to the article. Following the vote in include “we’ll not spare public, demonstrate desire Ignoring lockdown rules
We may edit letters. the UN general assembly either our souls or bodies for driverless cars, and would have cost my job
Submission and in which 141 countries to get freedom”. show willingness to risk Regarding politician and
publication of all condemned the invasion, Robert Logan our lives in their testing, civil servant lockdown
letters is subject there emerged an Carterton, New Zealand keep them off our roads! breaches (UK reports,
to our terms and assumption in the US Don Youngblood 8 April): I abided by
conditions, see: and Europe that the • Could the same approval Greenville, S Carolina, US lockdown rules because
THEGUARDIAN.COM/
LET TERS-TERMS
international alignment process used to speed up the government told me
amounted to Russia PPE contracts be used to The Sunaks’ finances need to. Furthermore, if I had
versus the rest. In reality, deal with the Ukrainian more than crossed fingers been caught in breach
Editorial
Russia versus the west visa blockage (Ukraine Just as concerning to me I could have lost my job as
Editor: Graham
Snowdon may be a truer description. invasion, 15 April)? as the Sunaks’ financial a teacher. Enough said?
Guardian Weekly, Wintour goes on to remind Tom Dougan arrangements is that Alexandra Cassam
Kings Place, us that 35 other countries, Dalgety Bay, Scotland, UK both of them made Dereham, England, UK
90 York Way, including powerful players legal declarations that
London N1 9GU, such as China and India, The public has no appetite they regarded the US as
COR R ECTIONS
UK were not party to the vote. for self-driving cars their permanent place
Not mentioned as The problem with of residence (Spotlight, A story about the EU and
To contact the a factor and possible self-driving cars is that 15 April). He is a British Ukraine (The Bucha effect,
editor directly: outcome is that, with the they are being foisted citizen and a British 8 April) misidentified
editorial.feedback
passing of every week and upon the public, whose politician living in Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s
@theguardian.com
month, accommodations citizenry exhibit no England; she is an Indian former president, as an
Corrections of one type or another demand for such citizen who has stated her architect of the 2014-15
Our policy is to may occur to Russia’s (Spotlight, Science, intention to live there. Minsk peace process.
correct significant advantage. Slowly but 1 April). This is an These positions cannot be
errors as soon as surely, self-interest rears example of technologists honestly reconciled – at In a feature about the
possible. Please its ugly head. experimenting with what point did they cross origins of the invasion (The
write to guardian. David Catchlove another way to enrich their fingers? war that nobody wanted
readers@ Newport, NSW, Australia themselves, while Angela Barton to see coming, 25 March),
theguardian.com claiming that driverless Bishop’s Stortford, Slovenia was not part of the
or the readers’
• To George Monbiot’s cars are “the wave of the England, UK Soviet bloc as stated.
editor, Kings Place,
thoughts (Cruel Britannia, future”. All this disregards
90 York Way,
London N1 9GU,
Opinion, 8 April) we can the risks imposed on • I trust that Lord Geidt There was no oil tanker in
UK add that, while we berate society that isn’t in will examine in his review a picture on page 19 of the
Putin for calling his war need of the product. an issue that has received 25 March edition, despite
a “special operation”, Technologists have no relatively little attention the caption suggesting
Britain called what the right to test any dangerous – whether as the minister otherwise.
A WEEK
IN VENN
DI AGR A MS
Edith Pritchett
PHOTOGRAPHY
Edward
Burtynsky’s epic
landscapes
Page 54
True
stripes
Ja
ack
k Whiittee
W
HEN JACK WHITE WAS 14, HE WAS ALL
set to become a priest. “I’d been
accepted at the seminary and every-
thing,” he grins, and it’s not too hard
to imagine Father Jack White preach-
ing with missionary zeal, even with
his hair dyed blue, as it is today. “But something happened
to me in that summer. The priests seemed really old and
I thought, ‘Who’s gonna speak for my generation?’”
White was raised a Catholic, and his conversation is still
peppered with words such as “sinner” and “judgment” – but
that didn’t stop him changing his mind about holy orders.
“To be fair, they don’t turn anyone into a priest unless they
really want to be one,” he says. “I never got the calling.”
Instead, of course, he found music.
Born Jack Gillis in downtown Detroit, to a Polish mother
and Scottish Canadian father who both worked for the interesting.’ Nobody patted me on the back for any of it.”
church, he was the youngest of 10 siblings. They would But that didn’t stop him.
subject him to the usual indignities, such as knocking down Today, wearing a Batman T-shirt, White, 46, is video-
the card houses he liked to build, “because that’s how broth- calling from another project, the bowling alley on his Nash-
ers and sisters are”. But his brothers had a drum kit, which ville estate, which he designed himself. It’s decked out in
he played from the age of five, before graduating to other dazzling orange stripes, which make for quite a combina-
instruments in his mid-teens when his father unexpectedly tion with his blue hair. He puts much thought into minor
brought home a piano. “That piano, which I have in front details. Where the White Stripes presented in red and
of me now, changed my life.” He never thought he could white (inspired by peppermint candy), orange and blue is
make a living out of music, though. Even when he joined a homage to the multitude of movie posters, notably Star
bands and was on “so many bills people were sick of me”, Wars, that used “supposedly the most attractive colours
he would hear musicians talk about going in the studio to boost ticket sales, hyuk, hyuk”.
and think: “Is your dad a millionaire or something?” His He was still at school when he met Meg White, who would
expected career was furniture. “When I was 16, I would become the other half of the White Stripes. They married in
have bet $1,000 that I’d only ever have an upholstery shop.” 1996 and he took her surname. One day, he recalls, “to help
Within a decade, however, his supercharged garage rock me out while I was setting up a microphone or something”,
duo the White Stripes was a global phenomenon, and he’s Meg got behind the drums. “And what she was playing was
barely paused since. He fronted the Raconteurs and played so cool. I thought, ‘Oh wow, please keep doing that,’ never
drums in the Dead Weather, and has been a producer and thinking, ‘Oh we’re going to write songs or form a band or
video-maker, while his eclectic Third Man operation takes play on stage or anything.’” But they did all that and, after
in everything from a record label and record shops to a two under-the-radar albums, they suddenly exploded dur-
publishing imprint. His three solo albums have all been ing a 2001 visit to the UK, when DJ John Peel said they were
US No 1s. A fourth, Fear of the Dawn, arrived this month the most exciting thing he had heard since Jimi Hendrix.
with another, Entering Heaven Alive, following in July. He “We were staying on the drummer from [Billy Childish’s
has 12 Grammys. band] Thee Headcoats’ floor that whole trip,” White remem-
He is the first to admit that he isn’t always in control of bers. “We thought we’d just play with a couple of garage
what he calls a “compulsion” to create. “It’s more in con- rock bands and go home. That’s not what happened.”
trol of me,” he says, “but it’s always been like this. When White Blood Cells, released in July 2001 and featuring the
I was 19, I was a drummer in two different bands. I had breakthrough single Hotel Yorba, saw them become one of
the upholstery apprenticeship and a business in the base- the hottest bands in the world. The follow-up, Elephant,
ment. I was recording music in my bedroom, but nobody released in 2003, was a UK No 1, and reached No 6 in the
ever came up and said to my parents, ‘Wow, this kid’s US, triggering an imperial period lasting almost a decade.
Footprints of ruin
E
dward Burtynsky has been organising Ukraine last year, he adds; a project exploring
From toxic lakes to barren a print sale for Ukraine: editions of two the country’s industrial history and his own
landscapes scarred by large-format photographs, which raise roots. Perhaps even portraits – something he
mining, Edward Burtynsky nearly $600,000 in a matter of hours. hasn’t done for ages. It’s not going to happen
This is personal. Burtynsky grew up on the shore- for the moment, though as soon as it’s safe
has chronicled mankind’s line of Lake Ontario but his parents emigrated he is determined to get out and collaborate
devastating impact on the from Ukraine in the late 1940s. with a Ukrainian photographer he admires,
His mother fled starvation under the Soviets, Maxim Dondyuk.
planet like no other before being forced into a labour camp by the He is shaking his head. “Unbelievable, the
Nazis. Now 97, she has been watching the news amount of hate and trauma that’s being inflicted.”
By Andrew Dickson obsessively. Burtynsky’s sister has been fielding Burtynsky may generally focus on landscapes
texts from relatives in and around Kyiv, with an rather than faces, but trauma – and its lasting
eye to getting them to Canada if necessary. impact – is very much his subject. There is per-
“It’s kind of surreal,” says the artist, his voice haps no greater chronicler alive of the injuries
flat. “They’re frightened, they’re hearing bombs that humans have inflicted on the planet. From
all the time. It feels very real, you know?” They’re teetering tyre dumps to toxic lakes, oilfields
OK? “Currently.” stained acid yellow and hills stripped bare by
He should have been making photographs in drought, Burtynsky has crisscrossed the globe in
search of images that show what we have really a galumphing 8x10 bellows field camera, heavy
done to the world. lenses, tripods – a car boot-full of equipment that
The interesting paradox, though, is the Look around … would enable him to make prints large enough
epic allure he finds in such scenes. Looking at to show these scenes in all their brutal majesty.
vertiginous quarries in Portugal (“inverted sky- We are all Problem was, no one wanted to buy them. The
scrapers”, he’s called them) or green farmland
somehow conjured out of the arid Texas plains,
participating in few people who were interested in large-format
colour photography (then largely used in adver-
you don’t always know whether to feel awe at the these landscapes tising) didn’t want railway cuttings or contami-
ingenuity by which such resources are extracted, nated watercourses on the wall, no matter how
or despair at whether the damage can ever be aesthetically impressive. With Jeannie Baxter,
healed. Sometimes, all you can do is admire the his wife at the time, he set up a specialist photo
formal power of these photographs, which are lab in Toronto to provide an income; it was only
in museums worldwide and as intricately com- when a collector offered to bankroll him that he
posed as abstract paintings by Willem de Kooning was able to devote himself to picture-making.
or Clyfford Still. Other times, you need to look Study in depth ▼ Role reversal He chose quarries as his first project: “I had
close to convince yourself they’re not paintings. Coal Mine #1, A portrait of never seen a picture of one, and that began my
North Rhine, the photographer research. Where are these places? What do they
S
peaking as he’s about to receive a life- Westphalia, 2018 Edward Burtynsky look like?” Burtynsky’s work since has been
time award from the World Photography patient and consistent, almost as relentless as
Organisation, Burtynsky admits he the processes he documents. One strand has
doesn’t always know what to feel. “I focused on mining. Another series visited the
don’t quite have an explanation for why it’s shipbreaking yards of Chittagong in Bangladesh:
interesting, but I take the photograph anyway,” mighty rusted hulls being dismembered, lit by
he says cautiously. “I trust my instincts.” Turner-esque oxyacetylene sparks.
Growing up in the blue-collar city of Multi-year, multi-continent projects on oil
St Catharines, Ontario, during the 1960s, he and water have led inexorably to the biggest sub-
saw industry everywhere. General Motors was ject of all, the climate crisis, which culminated
the biggest employer, and noise from the car in 2018’s Anthropocene, a photobook and film.
plant “pounded through the city all the time”. Burtynsky’s current assignment, images from
His father worked there until being diagnosed which will be on display in London, traverses
with cancer – a result, Burtynsky believes, of Africa – a continent he has visited often – and
chemicals on the welding line. He was dead at 45. includes landscapes more conventionally pic-
It was his dad who gave him his first camera, turesque than many he has made before.
a 35mm Minolta. You don’t need to be a psycho- Wherever you look, it’s impossible to escape
analyst to see some connection between what climate, he says. “We’re on
Burtynsky does and his father’s experience, or ▼ Off colour the very edge of losing it,
the fragile balance his images find between life Oil Bunkering whether it’s corals, ancient
and death, beauty and creeping horror. Later, #9, Niger Delta, forests, flora and fauna ,
to pay himself through art school, Burtynsky Nigeria, 2016 the oceans and fish.”
also worked at GM, helping clean up some of the
toxic sludge that he suspects had killed his father.
“Men were still working up to their elbows in the
oil at the time,” he remembers, “which felt almost
EDWARD BURTYNSKY/ FLOWERS GALLERY/ NICHOLAS METIVIER GALLERY; BIRGIT KLEBER
T
hese days he works with enough assis- ART murdered his father and married his
tants and fixers to man a Victorian widowed mother; it’s the tale that
expedition, but his workflow remains inspired Shakespeare’s play Hamlet.
essentially the same: research locations Raphael Among its many acts of hysterical
(often using Google Maps), negotiate access (he’s National Gallery, London violence, this film hacks away
relaxed if his prints of factories or refineries end the Elizabethan melancholy
★★★★★
up on boardroom walls, he says; a price worth and existential hesitation that
paying), hire drone operators or helicopter pilots Shakespeare grafted on to his
to get his cameras to where he wants to get them, Raphael is a revelation. It could anguished hero, and turns him into
and then spend months editing. hardly be otherwise, since this is a single-minded warrior.
Though the technology he uses is state of the the first exhibition outside Italy This drama takes Amleth away
art – his current squeeze is a 150-megapixel Dan- ever to encompass every aspect from the thespian green room and
ish model that costs around $50,000 – every print of his stupendous career. It runs simplifies the story.
is meticulously produced by his team in Toronto, through paint, chalk and print, wool, Alexander Skarsgård plays
with Burtynsky controlling every aspect. bronze and ink, and from the earliest Amleth, who as a boy witnessed the
Perhaps needless to say, these days he has drawing of himself at 15 to the last murder of his father King Aurvandil,
no sales problems: his pictures go for tens of startling self-portrait ( above) played by Ethan Hawke. The culprits
thousands of dollars, though Burtynsky seems where Raphael paints himself with were henchmen in the pay of his
discomfited by the glitzier reaches of the art a fellow artist who points to the saturnine, duplicitous uncle Fjölnir,
world. “It gets a little distasteful,” he says. “The mirror as if looking to the future, at played by Claes Bang. The murderer
commoditisation of it.” themselves and also us: one of the then marries Aurvandil’s queen
The pandemic grounded him, but also forced greatest double acts in art history. Gudrún, played with a willowy yet
him back to basics. He spent much of 2020 prowl- It is a testimony to the steely and gimlet-eyed presence by
ing the backwoods near his house in rural Ontario, extraordinary pulling power of the Nicole Kidman (who later gets an
camera in hand, working alone for the first time National Gallery and its exemplary absolute showstopper of a scene).
in many years. The pictures that resulted, a series curators that they have been able to Amleth grows to hunky manhood
he called Natural Order, seem quieter and more bring together 89 works from all over obsessed with his brutal destiny:
meditative than in a long time: tangled under- the world. Here are his apprentice the story unfolds in a stark vista of
growth, splodges of bright lichen on tree bark, works and the final masterpieces unremitting violence, periodically
crimson-coloured dogwood springing out of the made just before his death at 37; here switching from plangent colour to
tawny spring earth. are his visions of tranquil saints and a bleak monochrome.
I’m struck by the fact that, much like in his tense philosophers, sultry beauties The Northman is a nihilistic,
Africa photographs, the impact of humans is and soaring apostles, his friends, chaotic story about the endless cycle
less obvious here; if there’s trauma in these his colleagues, his amused and of violence, the choice between
images, it’s hard to detect. Is he softening in his flirtatious lover. loving your friends and hating your
late 60s? He chuckles. “I’ve always come back In room after room singing with enemies, which turns out to be no
to this landscape to re-centre myself and decide his radiant red-blue-green palette, choice, and the thread of fate down
what’s important. Being in nature is not a cliche. you are able to walk through which masculinity’s toxin drips.
It’s very real.” Raphael’s art and life as never It’s entirely outrageous, with some
Perhaps the dogwood – a wily survivor – holds before. Laura Cumming Observer epic visions of the flaring cosmos.
a lesson, he adds. “If we are eliminated from the Until 31 July I couldn’t look away. Peter Bradshaw
world, if we somehow screw this up, what I’m
looking at in those pictures will endure.”
He glances towards the window. “We may not Podcast of the week It’s a Continent
survive, but what’s out there will.” African history is rich and complex, yet written and oral history,
ANDREW DICKSON IS A CULTURE especially as captured or retold by Africans, can be difficult to
JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR
Edward Burtynsky’s work is on display as part come by. Hosts Astrid Madimba and Chinny Ukata break apart
of the Sony World Photography Awards 2022 at the view of the continent as a single entity, unpacking the unique
Somerset House, London, until 2 May nature of each of its 54 recognised countries. Oyinkansola Aderele
T
POLITICS he odd thing about “strongman” leaders to understand. His government blamed mysteri-
is that they are often quite weak in terms ous foreign forces – and Greta Thunberg.
of their personal attributes and political Like many strongmen, Mohammed bin Sal-
ideas. Vladimir Putin comes across as man, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, was initially
Iron brood an insecure, embittered little man, marooned feted as a reformer. Then he triggered a humani-
in a cultural time warp, whose vision of Russia’s tarian disaster in Yemen. The murder in 2018 of
Putin’s rise inspired a future is propelled by a backward-looking, sen- Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi critic, all but destroyed
timental nostalgia for the Soviet era. his reputation in the west. Yet the global trophy
generation of hardline Donald Trump, by instinct a fellow authori- for sheer bloody incompetence must go to Brazil’s
populist leaders, tarian and avid Putin admirer, is thin-skinned, hard-right populist president, Jair Bolsonaro, the
seemingly incapable of tolerating the slightest “Trump of South America”, whose lethally irre-
argues this accessible criticism and vindictive towards those who chal- sponsible mishandling of the pandemic stunned
but disquieting history lenge him. Xi Jinping, China’s president, exhibits even his most ardent apologists.
similar chronic fear of dissent. As Rachman notes, authoritarian rulers have
of modern-day despots Gideon Rachman’s accessible new book, The helped to undermine democratic ideals and
Age of the Strongman, examines these and other practices around the world since 2000, and with
By Simon Tisdall formidable, deeply flawed figures in a series of growing success following the financial crash
fluent, well-informed essays about the global of 2008. “The last 15 years have seen the most
rise of authoritarian, nationalist-populist leaders sustained decline in political freedom around the
and its corrosive impact on the liberal democratic world since the 1930s,” Rachman writes.
tradition. Rachman’s central thesis is that this “We have learned again that democracy is
is a modern phenomenon, roughly beginning precious,” Joe Biden proclaimed at his inaugu-
with Putin’s rise to national power in 1999-2000. ration, two weeks after a mob of Trump support-
Rachman, a columnist and experienced for- ers stormed the Capitol and tried to overturn
eign correspondent, views Putin as “the arche- the 2020 election. “Democracy is fragile … and
type and model for the current generation of democracy has prevailed.” But the fact it very
strongman leaders”. His trademark tactics – rein- nearly didn’t is Rachman’s whole argument.
ing in independent sources of power, asserting Most Republicans still believe Trump’s big lie.
the central authority of the state and It’s easy to be pessimistic.
using warfare to bolster his personal Strongman leaders are a perennial
position – have been emulated by other blight. Before Putin, there had been
reactionaries hostile to globalisation, Stalin. Before Xi, Mao, and before
liberalism and the western-led, rules- Erdoğan, Atatürk.
based international order. All the same, to the many
▲ Young gun Lies, disinformation, institutional oppressed, brutalised and disenfran-
vandalism, the cult of personality, sys- BOOK OF chised peoples of the world – and espe-
Vladimir Putin
temic corruption, ethno-nationalism, THE WEEK cially to those now living in Ukraine
in 2000, early in
his first stint as culture wars, historical revisionism The Age of – today’s age of the strongman feels
Russia’s president and the ready use of violence at home the Strongman all too terrifyingly real.
ALEXANDER
and through external aggression – By Gideon Rachman SIMON TISDALL IS A FOREIGN
ZEMLIANICHENKO/AP these are the ugly tools of Putinism. AFFAIRS COMMENTATOR
T
NAT U R E here’s a dreamy moment halfway himself from the forest plants, differentiating
through Geoffroy Delorme’s brief, the textures of leaves to forage in the dark. But
sensuous book in which one of the we are spared the true privations he must have
young deer he gets to know curls up endured: Delorme is both stoical and tight-
Herd mentality beside him, its head resting on his leg. The image lipped. We are only glancingly told that he sur-
is both touchingly familiar and surreal. A couple vived hypothermia on several occasions, that he
Geoffroy Delorme’s of walkers nod in greeting as they pass, as if it’s learned to sit with one leg tucked under him to
customary for a wild deer to snooze in the lap of keep the water from impregnating his clothes,
memoir recounts how a human. No doubt, Delorme notes, they mistake that he wore three woollen jumpers. Delorme
he spent seven years the deer for a dog. Even more startling, the little never dwells on himself, stubbornly training
deer, whom Delorme names Daguet, begins to the lens on the animals alongside him. Admit-
living in a forest, and twitch and wriggle. “He is clearly dreaming,” tedly, there were times when I found his distance
the bond he built with Delorme writes. Of what, one won-
ders, do roe deer dream?
frustrating. Too often he skates over
what must be fascinating territory for a
the roe deer there Deer Man follows the story of some- reader. Opportunities for development
one who turns his back on society and are lost throughout the book. Yet one
By Melanie Challenger spends seven years living in a forest suspects this is the only kind of testi-
among roe deer. We discover very little mony that could come from someone
about the events that preceded this who has, in many ways, eschewed the
decision. Exclusively home-schooled, Deer Man: Seven human world. That is the price.
the young man was clearly lonely. And Years of Living By the end, I took pleasure in how
there’s something amiss in his rela- in the Forest the tight, spare writing conveys the
tionship with his family. Yet a fleeting By Geoffroy inadequacy of language to properly
encounter with a young buck draws Delorme, translated render the experience of living in
him into the woods around Louviers, by Shaun Whiteside the wild. As the chapters unfold,
France, and off he goes. It’s fairytale Delorme recedes even further from
stuff, both in its transformational force and its the narrative, mirroring his gradual withdrawal
unspoken darkness. The lack of information from civilisation and home. At first, he returns
about his life – the ruthless absence of autobi- a few times a month to shower and recharge his
ography – can seem odd to a modern reader. batteries (Delorme is a photographer, and his
Yet the strength of this book is its singular focus images hugely amplify the text). But, over time,
on the deer. he returns less and less. And he takes less each
As readers, we yearn to know the nitty-gritty time from his old life as his skills and confidence –
of how he made it in the wild. In his time there, and indeed appetite – begin to transform. Eventu-
he must survive the damp and cold and feed ally, he no longer lives “in” the forest but “of” the
I
FICTION t’s easy to imagine a conversation about invites Cushla to an “Irish language evening” with
Louise Kennedy’s debut novel, Trespasses, his bourgeois-bohemian friends, liberals who toy
that goes something like this: “What’s it with pro-Republican politics. Thus commences
about?” “Well, it’s about a young Catholic an affair that Cushla must keep secret from every-
The great divide woman in Belfast in the 70s, at the height of the one, on pain – literally – of death.
Troubles.” “Punishment beatings, bomb scares, Technique, too, is traditional. The point of
An affair between a all of that?” “Yes, all of that.” “Does her dad die?” view is third person. The prose is in the past
“Well, yes, actually. Her dad is dead when the tense. This is not a book that is interested in per-
Catholic woman and book begins.” “Does she fall in love with a Protes- forming radical aesthetic surgery on the realist
a married Protestant tant?” “Well, yes, she does fall in love with a Prot- novel. In fact its mode is what you might call low-
estant, as it happens. In this case an attractive realist: the strain of dogged unromantic telling
barrister drive Louise married lawyer who’s committed to civil rights that descends from Ernest Hemingway and the
Kennedy’s debut novel for Catholics.” “Do things go tragically wrong early James Joyce through (in Ireland) writers
for sectarian reasons?” “It is strongly intimated such as Brian Moore and Colm Tóibín. But after
set in 1975 Belfast that this is what will happen, yes.” a very few pages, it becomes clear how little any
Plotwise, then, we’re in traditional of this stuff is relevant. Trespasses is a
territory. The year is 1975. Cushla novel distinguished by a quality rare in
Lavery is 24 and works as a primary fiction at any time: a sense of utter con-
teacher in a school on the outskirts of viction. It is a story told with such com-
Belfast. She also does the odd shift in pulsive attention to the textures of its
the family pub, which is frequented by world that every page feels like a moral
leering and aggressive British soldiers. and intellectual event.
Here she meets Michael Agnew: hand- Kennedy, by her own account, came
some, middle-aged, sophisticated, Trespasses late to fiction writing. Born a few miles
married. Michael is a Protestant barris- By Louise outside Belfast, she spent almost three
ter who defends young Catholic men Kennedy decades working as a chef, before writ-
By Kevin Power who have been unjustly arrested. He ing the stories that made up her first
forest. He uses “we” freely, not only to tell us BOOKS OF THE MONTH
what he and the deer are doing but in ways sug- The best recent crime stories and thrillers
gestive of emotional and psychic entanglement.
What the whole book recognises is the agency
of the animals Delorme meets. Sure, he has By Laura Wilson a woman of dual heritage, to leave town. While her
sought out a relationship with this wild crea- decides to track down husband, Terry, spends
ture. But so, too, has the animal. And this isn’t her birth parents after his free time in front
inevitable, as he points out. He tries the same Cherry’s death and her of the television, she
with some foxes. They won’t tolerate him. suspension, on spurious dreams over the upmarket
What we are left with is a startling portrait grounds, from her work catalogues that arrive
of an animal that is both familiar to us and yet as a hospital doctor. for the house’s previous
shockingly misunderstood. Roe deer – Capreolus Eva’s white father, occupant, Rebecca, whom
capreolus – have been around since Homo sapiens a rich businessman, is she decides to find and
emerged as a distinct species. In the UK, we’ve easily found – although befriend. Meanwhile,
lived alongside them since at least the last ice age. he may not be all that he neighbourhood gossip
We’ve worn them, eaten them, revered them, City on Fire seems – but her mother is in overdrive because
and etched early texts on their antlers. Today, By Don Winslow proves more elusive. local girls have been going
we know them best on the bumpers of our cars This first book in Ex-police officer Sugar missing. Compellingly
and on our plates. The story is much the same a projected trilogy about seems to know more creepy, with precisely
in Delorme’s native France. warring mobster families than he is letting on and observed characterisation,
Yet, for Delorme, each deer is unique. Each, is set in Providence, is evasive when asked A Tidy Ending combines
for him, has a name and a personality. Unsurpris- Rhode Island, in 1986. why he left the force. pathos with lovely flashes
ingly, then, Delorme returns from the woods an The Italians and the Irish Eva’s journey takes of humour and a wholly
advocate. He wants the deer – and not us with our have carved up the city, her back to 1994 and unexpected ending.
rifles – to be responsible for their own manage- controlling the trucking the disappearance – barely
ment. And he wants us to consider our forests and industry and the docks. acknowledged by the
woodlands in radically new ways that recognise The author makes overt police, let alone the media
the meaningful lives of the species within them. comparisons with the – of four Black women.
Some readers may consider him mad. And, Iliad, and modern-day Say Her Name offers an
while I won’t give away the ending, we all know Helen of Troy Pam engaging narrative as
that Delorme is not, after all, a roe deer. It’s clear provides a convenient well as a heartfelt and
that this can’t go on for ever. Yet it is a delightful, excuse for a bunch of eloquent exploration of
moving read – and a quietly revolutionary one. men trapped in a cycle the iniquities of racial bias.
MELANIE CHALLENGER WRITES ON of violence to embark on
NATURAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY a disastrous feud. In the Miss Aldridge Regrets
middle is docker Danny By Louise Hare
Ryan, his dreams of escape In 1936, Lena Aldridge
book, The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac. stymied by his connection is singing in a seedy
In her short fiction, Kennedy goes at her sub- to the Murphy clan. nightspot in London’s
jects obliquely, as the best short story writers Winslow’s previous Cartel Soho when its owner – the
often do. But as a novelist, she plays it straight. trilogy is an astonishing cheating husband of her
The details of 1970s Belfast become potently achievement that will best friend – is murdered;
vivid. “On the bypass, a fleet of grey Land Rovers be hard to beat, but on the she takes up an out-of-the-
was on the inside lane, bomb-proof maxi skirts strength of this immersive A Tidy Ending blue offer of a first-class
skimming the tarmac”; a street decked out in tale of fate, free will, By Joanna Cannon ticket on the Queen Mary
union jacks, “like Nuremberg”. loyalty and betrayal, Cannon uses her chosen and a role in a Broadway
Kennedy is also quietly great at the smaller his new series will rank milieu – the suburban show. Lena has secrets:
details. The “soft dunt” of a fridge door closing. alongside it. street where curtains she has disposed of
Cushla waking with her face in “the hot, scalliony twitch, the chintzy evidence from the murder,
hair” of Michael’s armpit. cheeriness of the old folks’ and is also “passing”
In Belfast in 1975, as the half-embittered home, quotidian tragedies for white. When she
Michael tells Cushla, “it’s not about what you do” and buried truths – to becomes involved with
but rather about “what you are”. Kennedy knows, explore the inner lives the wealthy, dysfunctional
of course, that only bigots and fanatics imag- of outsiders. In her third Abernathy family and
ine that “what you do” and “what you are” are novel, Linda takes centre people start dying, she
separable by fiat. Her novel therefore addresses stage: a socially awkward realises there might be
itself to the ambiguities inherent in the whole mixture of naive and more to her lucky break
concept of “what you are” – that is, to realism’s sly, she was already the than she’d imagined. The
great traditional subject, here given a shock of Say Her Name odd-girl-out at school conflicted, appealing
new life. Trespasses may be a novel built along By Dreda Say Mitchell when her piano teacher heroine and Christie-type
conventional lines. But it thrums throughout and Ryan Carter father’s inappropriate mystery make this an
with the passion and poise of mastery. Adopted at the age of eight behaviour towards engrossing read.
KEVIN POWER IS A WRITER AND by Cherry and Carlton young students meant LAURA WILSON IS A BRITISH
ACADEMIC BASED IN IRELAND “Sugar” McNeil, Eva, she and her mother had CRIME FICTION WRITER
A
word I have returned to very ordinary, and life is about
My husband is involved, present, being led by their needs (what are you can’t If you would like advice on a family
kind and caring, but serious and they?), playing quiet games … these matter, please email ask.annalisa@
quiet – so he does not bring a zest are all important.
care for theguardian.com. See gu.com/letters-
for life or a fun side with the kids. I consulted child and adolescent others terms for terms and conditions.
STEPHEN COLLINS
T H E W E E K LY R E C I P E
By Jane Baxter
№ 165
Spinach and
ricotta crespelle
Save the last of the anchovies to salt and rest for at least five minutes.
Melt a little butter over a medium
M
1 Which British monarch scarlet; northern bald; Guess the hero’s journey in literature y name is Oleksandr
from the emoji symbols.
had a dragon tattoo? Australian white? Ruchko and I am
2 Which city has hosted 10 Julian Assange; Dominic 1 a birdwatcher. Because
both the summer and Cummings; Alan Turing; I am 59, there are still
winter Olympics? Louis Wain? a few more months when I could be
3 Virginia Woolf 11 Gott! Welch’ Dunkel 2 called to fight in the war with Russia.
co-founded which hier!; E lucevan le stelle; Lately, I have been leading
publishing house? Vois ma misère, hélas!? birdwatching tours around the
4 What should be back in 12 32 London Bridge St; 3 parks in Lviv, my home. The tours
2061? 30 St Mary Axe; 1 Canada are for refugees from cities around
5 Which drug is named Square? Ukraine, including Kyiv and
after an ancient god of 13 Punta Gallinas, 4 Kharkiv. These people have lost
dreams? Colombia and Cape their homes and some of them have
6 Who painted himself Froward, Chile? lost family members. I’m trying
and his wife naked with a 14 Celtic; Mogul; Renegade; 5 to help them take a break from
leg of lamb? Trailblazer; Eagle? thinking about what is happening.
7 The 92220 Evening Star 15 Mars-la-Tour; Spring is the best time for
was the last of what? Gravelotte; Sedan; birdwatching here and the best
8 Drop, cover and hold on Le Mans? Rings. 5 The Wizard of Oz. thing to see is the white stork,
3 Great Expectations. 4 The Lord of the Ukraine’s national bird. It is sacred,
PUZZLES 3 N or M a symbol of spring, of babies, and
Emoji 1 Northern Lights. 2 Moby-Dick.
DRAWERS, BLOOMERS.
Chris Maslanka Identify the words that differ WARMING. 4 Which is it? PANTS, of peace, believed to protect your
only in the letters shown: house against evil.
VOLUNTEERS. 3 N or M WARNING,
Maslanka 1 Wordpool d). 2 EPU
***N*** (caution) Prussian war battles. At the moment, it is a problem
1 Wordpool ***M*** (temperature rise)
Obama; W Bush; Clinton. 15 Franco-
names for US presidents: Biden; Trump;
to watch birds with binoculars or
Find the correct definition: South America. 14 Secret Service code telescopes. Using them will cause
RACHIS 4 Which is it? north and south points of mainland suspicion, so we must use our ears
Short breaths, rubbish or and eyes instead. Sometimes that is
Canary Wharf tower. 13 Extreme
a) French drink London skyscrapers: Shard; Gherkin;
b) looting underwear (5) Samson and Delilah. 12 Addresses of all you need.
c) short-handled axe Artists, sliding My wife and I were driving back
arias sung by prisoners: Fidelio; Tosca;
by Benedict Cumberbatch. 11 Opera
d) spine of feather compartments or 9 Species of ibis. 10 Played on screen from the Carpathian mountains last
underwear (7) built by British Railways. 8 Earthquakes.
6 Stanley Spencer. 7 Steam locomotive
week, where we had gone for a few
2 E pluribus unum Flowers, embarrassing days to escape the air-raid sirens,
On the website Notes and Queries theguardian.com/notes-and-queries
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Quick crossword
No 16,202
9 10 1 2 3 4
11 12 6 7
8 9
13 14 15 16
All solutions published next week
17 10 11 12
18 19 20 21
22 13 14 15
23 24 25
16 17 18
26 27
19
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