Table of contents for 22 August 2025 in Guardian Weekly

The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol213 | Issue№ 8 Guardian Weekly is an edited selection of some of the best journalism found in the Guardian’s digital editions in the UK, US and Australia, and the Guardian newspaper in the UK. The weekly magazine has an international focus and four editions: global, Europe, Australia and North America. The Guardian was founded in 1821, and Guardian Weekly in 1919. We exist to hold power to account in the name of the public interest, to uphold liberal and progressive values, to fight for the common good, and to build hope. Our values, as laid out by editor CP Scott in 1921, are honesty, integrity, courage, fairness, and a sense of duty to the reader and the community. The…

 Donald Trump portrays himself as a hard-nosed dealmaker. Yet in the run-up to last Friday’s summit with Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, his claim that the Russian leader held him in high regard and was therefore serious about ending the war in Ukraine sounded naive. Putin doesn’t let sentimentality shape his political and military decisions. Nor has he disavowed his longstanding claim to four Ukrainian provinces: Donetsk and Luhansk, which together comprise Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, and Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in the south. Despite Russia’s overwhelming numerical advantage in troops and weaponry, Putin occupies only one province, Luhansk, almost entirely. Yet he persists. In the days before his meeting with Putin, Trump said the Russian economy “stinks” and that falling oil prices would cause Russia’s war to run aground. The…

Images of Palestinian children in Gaza, emaciated by hunger under the blockade imposed by Israel, and of families grieving the more than 61,000 people killed in the territory, have stirred outrage among foreign governments and much of the global public. Inside Israel, however, the reaction has been markedly different. In a poll conducted in late July by the Israel Democracy Institute, more than three-quarters of Jewish Israelis – 79% – said they were either “not very troubled” or “not troubled at all” by reports of famine and suffering among Gaza’s Palestinian population. According to Anat Saragusti, an expert on the media, the reason is simple: most people in Israel are unaware of those reports because for months they have never seen them. “Until a couple of weeks ago, you could…

Rod Stewart had a few surprise guests at a recent concert in Charlotte, North Carolina. His friend Ozzy Osbourne, the lead singer of Black Sabbath who died last month, was apparently beamed in from some kind of rock heaven, where he was reunited with other departed stars including Michael Jackson, Tina Turner and Bob Marley. The AI-generated images divided Stewart’s fans. Some denounced them as disrespectful and distasteful; others found the tribute beautiful. At about the same time, another AI controversy erupted when Jim Acosta, a former CNN White House correspondent, interviewed a digital recreation of Joaquin Oliver, who was killed at the age of 17 in a 2018 high school shooting in Florida. The avatar of the teenager was created by his parents. In June, Alexis Ohanian, a co-founder…

IN NOVEMBER 2022, SIMON KOFE, then foreign minister of the island nation of Tuvalu, announced a sensational plan for his country’s survival. Climate breakdown poses an existential threat to small island-nations in the Pacific, but Tuvalu’s geography makes it especially vulnerable. The highest point of elevation in the country is 4.5 metres. If the water rises, there is no hill to run to. In the past four decades, local sea level has risen twice as fast as the global average. By 2050, the government expects half the capital, Funafuti, to be flooded by tidal waters. By the end of the century, more than 90% of the land could be submerged. “As our land disappears, we have no choice but to become the world’s first digital nation,” Kofe declared in a…

If the latest adaptation of HG Wells’s 1898 novel The War of the Worlds, a movie starring Ice Cube and Eva Longoria, was designed to make us pause and ask questions, it has certainly succeeded. Unfortunately, what a lot of viewers have been asking is why it was inflicted on the public in the first place. Is War of the Worlds “one of the worst movies ever made?”, asked the BBC. “Shockingly bad War of the Worlds is one of the worst movies of the decade,” said the New York Post. “Amazon’s War of the Worlds update should never have been released,” declared the Telegraph. The 2005 adaptation, starring Tom Cruise, was a smash hit. Now people are flocking to the remake to see just how bad a film can…

My garden has produced an abundance of lettuce this year but there’s a limit to how much salad I can eat. What else can I use them for? Julian, by email “Start thinking of lettuce, and especially butter lettuce, as bread or a taco shell,” says Jesse Jenkins, author of Cooking with Vegetables, and happily this is a “highly adaptable” strategy, too. Sure, you could pile in grilled spicy pork belly and herbs, but this dinner fix also works well “with everything a big green salad does: a piece of nicely grilled protein, some sauce, a few pickled crunchy things, all wrapped in a big, beautiful green leaf”. But why stop there? “I also like to use butter lettuce to wrap cheese toasties,” Jenkins says. “It catches all the fatty goodness…

✱ All solutions published next week Across 9 Composer going round end of The Strand (5) 10 Deviation from a straight – old city tax to be invested in remedy (9) 11 Odd renovated jet, say, on estate, possibly as fun ride (6,3) 12 Doctor also called inside city (5) 13 At which Blackpool is the main team (7) 15 Shads sweat it out (7) 17 Fool around next to Gulf (5) 18 Drive home over a month (3) 20 Propose a pill when temperature’s taken (5) 22 Eastern politician wrong to eject Republican leader (7) 25 Confront detective at party (7) 26 Digs secondary rock group? (1,3,1) 27 Old-fashioned stage’s position on field (6,3) 30 Sweet old men, unkempt with tie cut off (5,4) 31 Succeed effortlessly when in…

1 UKRAINE/US Trump agrees to oversee security guarantees Donald Trump confirmed that the US would oversee European security guarantees for Ukraine after talks with Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European leaders on Monday. “During the meeting we discussed security guarantees for Ukraine, which guarantees would be provided by the various European countries, with a coordination with the United States of America,” the US president posted. Trump said he had begun to arrange an initial bilateral meeting between the Ukrainian president and the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin; to be followed by a trilateral meeting involving Trump as well. Friedrich Merz – the German chancellor and part of Zelenskyy’s European “bodyguard” detail in Washington – said Trump in a call with Putin had “agreed that there will be a meeting between the Russian president and…

A bilateral meeting between Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Vladimir Putin, as a means to end the war in Ukraine, is something the Russian president has always resisted, urging for a list of preconditions to be met first. But the possibility may now be nearer than ever. On Monday, according to Donald Trump and European leaders after a flurry of efforts to find a path to peace in Ukraine, Putin agreed to face-to-face talks with Zelenskyy to discuss a peace deal, although Moscow did not immediately confirm the meeting. The potential breakthrough came after a day of tense diplomacy at the White House in which Trump ruled out a ceasefire while Zelenskyy and his allies pushed for US-backed security guarantees as part of any long-term agreement. The Ukrainian president said that after…

Palestinians were gripped by fear and anxiety this week after the Israeli military said it was preparing for the forcible displacement of 1 million people from Gaza City. The announcement came days after Israel said it intended to launch a new offensive to seize control of the territory’s largest urban centre, in a plan that raised international alarm, and ahead of the IDF’s latest attacks in the Palestinian territory, which Gaza’s health officials said had killed at least 40 people last Saturday, including a baby in a tent and people seeking aid. “Based on the directives of the political leadership, and as part of the Israel Defense Forces’ preparations to transfer civilians from combat zones to the southern Gaza Strip for their safety, starting tomorrow [last Sunday], the provision of…

Images of Dover and the beaches along the Kent coastline have come to symbolise small-boat crossings in the UK, often attracting anti-migrant protests as a result. “Everyone’s like, ‘Oh look at Dover, everyone’s coming here’ – they’re really not,” said Charlie Zosseder, the director of the charity Samphire, which works to improve community cohesion between migrants and local people in the town. “When we have issues, it tends to be people coming down from London because they’ve seen the news, think all the small boats are going there, let’s go and protest,” she said. “Well, thank you, but no thank you. You don’t see many locals coming out for the anti-migrant protests.” Many people living in these areas have little direct contact with those who over the last 10 years…

Adjacent to a municipal government building in Beijing, a normally bustling restaurant is now eerily quiet. At lunchtime most of its seats are empty. The recent crackdown on civil servants frequenting restaurants – part of a government austerity drive intended to crack down on corruption – has likely affected business and caused liquor sales to plummet, admits one waitress who works in the opulent establishment. In May, China released updated regulations aimed at Communist party members and civil servants, banning them from lavish banquets and other visible trappings of extravagance. But with more than 40 million people employed in the public sector, some analysts predict the new rules will probably hamper economic growth. The policy is “undermining the impact of other policies aimed at boosting domestic spending,” said Guo Shan,…

Washington DC’s only Home Depot was busy with contractors and customers last week – but the Hispanic day labourers who usually gather and wait for work under the parking lot’s sparse trees were nowhere to be found. Masked federal agents had swarmed the area and made several arrests, which were photographed by bystanders and posted on social media. Juwan Brooks, a store employee who witnessed the raid, said the agents grabbed anyone who appeared Hispanic. “They don’t ask no questions,” Brooks said. “It was cool when Trump was saying it, but to actually see it first hand? I didn’t like it,” he said. The day labourers “are not bad people”, and he wondered what happened to the children of the men who were taken away. Last Monday, Trump ordered federal…

‘WHAT HAPPENED?” SCOTT, 82, ASKED BRUCE, 78, when his younger brother picked up the phone and called him after a 15-year estrangement. “I grew up,” Bruce said. “I’ve been stupid and I really miss you.” The brothers had missed a decade and a half of each other’s birthdays, milestones and memories made, but here they were, talking again as though no time had passed. A quarter of the adult population describe themselves as estranged from a relative; 10% from a parent and 8% from a sibling, according to research by Karl Pillemer, professor of human development at Cornell University and author of Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How to Mend Them. But when decades pass and rifts remain unhealed, what drives family members such as Scott and Bruce – or,…

Nicola Sturgeon was always afraid of failure. But it was a very particular kind of failure she feared; one that follows a very particular kind of success. Living up to being Scotland’s first female first minister became, she writes in her new memoir, “almost an obsession”. To be the first woman (or indeed the first minority) in any field is to be uncomfortably aware of being on probation: the test case that sceptics will use to decide whether women in general can really hack it, but also the yardstick by which other women will judge whether representation actually makes a difference. You daren’t betray anything that looks like a sign of weakness, yet at the same time you’re endlessly under pressure to spill your guts on all the intimate stuff…

In 1954, just a few years after the widespread introduction of antibiotics, doctors were already aware of the problem of resistance. Natural selection meant that using these new medicines gave an advantage to the microbes that could survive the assault – and a treatment that worked today could become ineffective tomorrow. A British doctor put the challenge in military terms: “We may run clean out of effective ammunition. Then how the bacteria and moulds will lord it.” What this framing overlooks is that the extraordinary power of antibiotics is not due to human ingenuity. In fact, the majority of them derive from substances originally made by bacteria and fungi, evolved millions of years ago in a process of microbial competition. This is where I can’t help thinking about another natural…

HOUSING Reeves considers replacing stamp duty with new tax The Treasury is considering a new tax on the sale of homes worth more than £500,000 ($675,000) as a step towards a radical overhaul of stamp duty and council tax. As the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, prepares the ground for tax rises in the budget later this year, senior ministers have told officials to study how a new “proportional” property tax could be implemented and model its impact before reporting back. Officials are initially examining a potential national property tax, which would replace stamp duty on owner-occupied homes, sources said. They are also studying whether, after the national tax, a local property tax could replace council tax in the medium term in an effort to repair battered local authority finances. The national…

ZAPORIZHZHIA, an industrial city in south-east Ukraine, is as good a place as any to grasp the stakes of freezing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine along its current frontlines, or of handing over unoccupied land as envisioned by Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. Since Russian troops began rolling into Ukraine in February 2022, Zaporizhzhia, with its broad avenues and Stalin-era apartment blocks, has been a 30-minute drive from the frontline. It has been under near-constant attack from missiles and drones. On 10 August, a Russian guided air bomb hit a bus station, wounding 24 people. Plenty of people here and in other Ukrainian towns close to the frontline are so weary that they are ready for Kyiv to sign a peace deal, if it means the attacks will stop. But many…

Road closures, evacuations, travel chaos and stern warnings from officials have all become fixtures of Canada’s wildfire season. But as the country goes through its second-worst wildfire season on record, the blazes come with a twist: few are burning in the western provinces, the traditional centre of destruction. Instead, the worst of the fires have been concentrated in the prairie provinces and the Atlantic region, with bone-dry conditions upending how Canada responds to a threat that is likely to grow as the climate warms. Experts say the shift serves as a stark reminder of the risk of disaster present across the thickly forested nation. In recent weeks, tens of thousands of people in communities across the country have been evacuated due to the wildfires. Saskatchewan and Manitoba have been the…

Bolivia’s presidential election will go to a runoff for the first time, with two rightwing candidates, marking the end of nearly 20 years of dominance by the leftist Movimiento al Socialismo (Mas). The candidate with the most votes, centre-right senator Rodrigo Paz Pereira, 57, started the campaign with just 3% support in opinion polls. In second came Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga, 65, a former president who briefly led the country in 2001 after the resignation of ex-dictator Hugo Banzer. With just over 95% of ballots counted in the electoral court’s “preliminary” tally, Paz Pereira was on 32.1% and Quiroga on 26.8%. “I want to thank all the men and women who made this possible and gave a voice to those of us who had none, who didn’t appear in the polls,…

When they toured overseas in the 1970s, West Indies cricketers were sometimes subjected to barrages of racist abuse. But back home in the Caribbean, they were heroes, with families huddled around radios and televisions whenever they played. Today, the generation of players who won two World Cups, in 1975 and 1979, are acclaimed as living legends for stepping up to the crease regardless of the challenges – and triumphing over teams from larger, more developed nations. And as the region celebrates Emancipation Month to commemorate the end of slavery, those cricketers have been hailed as figures of regional pride whose mastery of a game imported by the British became a powerful symbol of political and cultural resistance. Earlier this month, St Vincent and the Grenadines hosted the firstever Emancipation Cricket…

The Apple CEO, Tim Cook, visited the White House bearing an unusual gift, a glass plaque, engraved for its recipient, and a slab for the plaque to sit on. “The base was made in Utah, and is 24-karat gold,” said Cook. Donald Trump appeared genuinely touched by the gift. But the plaque wasn’t Cook’s only offering: Apple announced that day it would invest another $100bn in US manufacturing. The Art of the Deal looms large in the White House, where Trump is brokering agreements with tech companies, reminiscent of the real estate transactions that launched him into fame. But this dealmaking has entered uncharted waters. Two days after Cook’s visit, the Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang, had a closed-door meeting with Trump. The president later announced that Nvidia, along with its…

In 2009, Matt Aston was watching Wedding Present frontman David Gedge perform a “bizarre and brilliant” gig with the BBC Big Band when he was struck by a notion: that the combination of the singer’s conversational lyrics and brassy, orchestrated new arrangements felt a bit like, well, watching a musical. “I parked the idea,” says Aston, a theatre director and writer. “Then some time later, I saw David’s other band Cinerama with a 16-piece orchestra and thought, ‘This could be musical theatre!’” Aston had had a few drinks and remembers sitting afterwards, trying to convince his mate – screenwriter and playwright William Ivory, who hadn’t been drinking – that this wasn’t the daftest idea ever. “Billy said: ‘You can’t make a musical out of Wedding Present lyrics. It’s not that…

Here at 57 degrees latitude, I’m woken early by the light, well before the 5am sunrise. More than a month past the solstice, our nights are still short, and darkness brief. Surrendering to the day’s pull, I head out on my favourite walk beside the River Spey, where it swells into a loch. The marshy land is rich with green rushes, willows and a thicket of bog myrtle, fragrant when crushed in the hand. I pass under an avenue of great oaks where the rooks rise and resettle, and on across an open field, rippling with summer grasses and wildflowers; one sweep of grass bears a froth of seedheads, now glittering mauve in the morning dew and laced with the tiniest of spiderwebs. The colour theme is echoed by the…

Across 1 Gulp (from the bottle?) (4) 3 Representation of stats by box height (3,5) 8 Dodgy (4) 9 Soldier quickly attacking enemy areas (8) 11 Go too soon (4,3,3) 14 Irritable in old age – like bread? (6)  15 Essence (6)  17 Finally (with some relief) (2,4,4) 20 Set of bell tower’s bells (8)  21 Pound coins and tenners etc. (4)  22 Collaboration (8) 23 Gusto – piquancy (4) Down 1 Tuna type (8) 2 Notorious and vile (8) 4 Bird emblematic of the RSPB (6) 5 Disguise (10) 6 Tuna (anag.) (4) 7 Supporter of extreme left – horse’s pace (4)  10 Tautest awl (anag) – system approved by parliament (7,3)  12 Uncover (historical remains) (8)  13 Two quavers (8)  16 Complexion (6) 18 Glaswegian, e.g. (4) 19…