Table of contents for 5 December 2025 in Guardian Weekly

CLIMATE CRISIS Africa’s forests ‘switch from carbon sink to carbon source’ Africa’s forests have turned from a carbon sink into a carbon source, according to research. The alarming shift, which has happened since 2010, means all of the planet’s three main rainforest regions – the South American Amazon, south-east Asia and Africa – have gone from being allies in the fight against climate breakdown to being part of the problem. Human activity – including farming and infrastructure projects – is the primary cause of the problem. Scientists found that between 2010 and 2017, African forests lost approximately 106bn kg of biomass per year. The worst affected were the tropical moist broadleaf forests in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Madagascar and parts of west Africa. The study, published in Scientific Reports,…

Drop a Duralex glass and it will most likely bounce, not break. The French company itself has tumbled several times in the past two decades and always bounced back, but never quite as spectacularly as when, last month, it asked the public for money. An appeal for € 5m ($ 5.75m) of emergency funding to secure the immediate future of the glassworks took just five hours and 40 minutes to reach its target. Within 48 hours, the total amount pledged had topped €19m. François Marciano, 59, the director general of Duralex, said the response had astonished everyone at the company. “We thought it would take five or six weeks to raise the €5m. When it reached nearly €20m we had to say stop. Enough,” he said. As a staff cooperative,…

Donald Trump’s hateful, falsehood-filled rant last week blaming immigrants for crime, “social dysfunction” and economic hardship is refuted by a wide range of immigration statistics, which show clearly that immigrants dramatically bolster the US economy and commit crimes at far lower rates than people born in the US. Trump condemned immigrants in a broad and vicious invective, painting them as “illegal and disruptive populations”. He vowed to block all migration from “third world countries” to allow the “US system to fully recover”. The president’s post followed a deadly shooting in Washington DC last Wednesday in which one National Guard member was injured and another killed by a 29-year-old Afghan national who assisted the US military in Afghanistan and was evacuated to the US after it withdrew. The shooting sparked more…

GIANNI INFANTINO WAS 18 YEARS OLD THE FIRST TIME HE RAN FOR OFFICE. It was a presidential election at FC Brig-Glis, the local amateur football club in the small Swiss town where he grew up. Running against two older men, and with no discernible footballing record of his own, the little red-haired kid with freckles was, unsurprisingly, the rank outsider in the race. But he had a vision. He had a ferocious work ethic, boundless enthusiasm, well-established networks in the town’s Italian immigrant community. And even at this tender age, he had a flair for an eye-catching scheme. To the shock of many veterans at the club, Infantino surged to victory: partly on the back of his pledge to attract new sponsors and revenue streams, and partly on something more…

As their 11th movie together is released, actor Ethan Hawke and director Richard Linklater discuss power, status and combovers ‘I LIKE THIS, IT’S GOOD,” ETHAN HAWKE TELLS RICHARD LINKLATER, midway through a lively digression that has already hopped from politics to the Beatles to the late films of John Huston. “What’s good?” asks Linklater. “All of this,” says Hawke, by which he means the London hotel suite with its coffee table, couch and matching armchairs; the whole chilly machinery of the press junket. “I like that we get to spend a couple of days in a room,” he says. “It feels like a continuation of the same conversation we’ve been having for the past 32 years.” It’s all about the conversation with Linklater and Hawke. The director and actor first met…

Book of the week Holbein: Renaissance Master By Elizabeth Goldring Much of what we know, or think we know, about the court of Henry VIII comes directly from the paintings of Hans Holbein. There’s the famous portrait of the king himself – puffy, phallic and cruel, looking more like a murderer than a monarch. But there is also ascetic Thomas More, hiding his cruel streak behind fine bones, and sly yet thuggish Thomas Cromwell, with those shifty eyes and the beginnings of a double chin. “Ha ns the Painter” did the wives too – an appropriately sketchy drawing of Anne Boleyn, a saintly portrait of Jane Seymour who died after giving birth to Henry’s heir, and a pin-up version of Anne of Cleves. It was this last portrait that caused…

Certain contractual terms oblige my eldest sons to periodically appear at their places of employment. On rare occasions they both go in on the same day. On this particular day, my wife and the dog are also out. I’m alone in the house. I’m lingering over lunch, when my phone pings in my pocket. It’s a text from my bank. “Your address has been updated,” it reads. “If you didn’t make this request …” I think: I certainly didn’t. “… please contact us urgently.” So much for lingering over lunch. I return to my office shed and locate the helpline number on the bank’s website. A robot asks me to speak my reason for calling. “You told me to call you,” I say. This is not satisfactory. I am given…

1 Which famous portrait is claimed to be of Magdalena van Ruijven from Delft? 2 Charon, Styx and Nix are satellites of which body in the solar system? 3 What type of passport was abolished in 1996? 4 Which Commonwealth capital was built by the Knights of St John? 5 Which African-born influencer is the most followed person on TikTok? 6 Whose Book of Household Management was a Victorian bestseller? 7 Whose backing band included Wendy & Lisa, Dr Fink and Bobby Z? What links: 8 Derwent; Dove; Etherow; Goyt; Wye? 9 Crucifixion; assassination of Abraham Lincoln; signing of Belfast agreement? 10 Ani Mikheeva; Bella Baxter; Evelyn Quan Wang; Tammy Faye Bakker? 11 Lift; drag; thrust; weight? 12 Singer Marc Almond; comedian Thomas Derbyshire; chemist John Farrow? 13 Golden (English);…

WELBURN North Yorkshire, England, UK I love that our house is built from stone hewn from the ground just metres away. The original mortar and plaster would have been similarly local, from kilns next to the ancient quarry that were used as far back as Roman times, perhaps further – people have been using fire and water to unmake and remake limestone in new forms with new properties since at least the Neolithic. We’ve known for some time that cement used in a 1980s repointing job was trapping water and “rotting” our walls, and it’s high time we did something about it, so I’ve booked the whole family on a lime-pointing workshop in Dewsbury. Our teacher, Ian Womersley, guides us through processes and techniques that have changed little in four…

What is methanol poisoning? Methanol is a poisonous form of “industrial alcohol” that is very difficult to distinguish from ethanol – the alcohol that can be drunk. It is sometimes mixed into drinking alcohol as a cheap filler. Methanol is not toxic itself but breaks down into very dangerous formaldehyde and formic acid when metabolised. As little as 30ml, less than a shot glass, can kill. How do you recognise it? Methanol symptoms often do not show for 12-24 hours, then, unlike a hangover, they worsen over time. They include vomiting, loss of balance, impaired judgment and drowsiness, escalating to vision changes, convulsions, coma and death. How should you respond? Go straight to hospital if you suspect methanol poisoning. If this is not possible, the victim should drink uncontaminated alcohol, because ethanol…

Raccoons living wild in cities in the United States are beginning to show physical changes that resemble early signs of domestication. A recent study found that urban raccoons had developed shorter snouts than rural raccoons. It is a physical trait that appears across domesticated animals that have adapted to living in close proximity to humans. Other changes such as smaller teeth, curlier tails, smaller brains and floppier ears also appear over time. “I wanted to know if living in a city environment would kickstart domestication processes in animals that are currently not domesticated,” said the study’s lead author, Dr Raffaela Lesch, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Lesch and her team analysed nearly 20,000 photos of raccoons uploaded from the US to iNaturalist,…

Founded 1821 Independently owned by the Scott Trust When Swiss tycoons handed Donald Trump a gold bar and a Rolex watch – gifts that were followed by a cut in US tariffs – it was no diplomatic nicety. It was a reminder of how concentrated wealth seems to buy access and bend policy. It may, alarmingly, become the norm if the global “inequality emergency” continues. That’s the message of the most recent work by the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz. The economist sees the yawning gap between rich and poor as a human-made crisis that is destroying politics, society and the planet. The problem is no longer confined to a few fragile states. It is a global harm, with 90% of the world’s population living under the World Bank’s definition of “high…

Blue Moon This witty and heartbreakingly sad chamber piece from screenwriter Robert Kaplow and director Richard Linklater tells the story of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart just after his split from Richard Rodgers. He is played with campy brilliance, an unspeakable combover and fake smallness by Ethan Hawke. Hart’s sexual identity is complex: this film effectively triangulates his hidden gayness with the straight persona invented for him in the 1948 musical Words and Music; it cleverly extrapolates a kind of bisexuality from Hart’s letters to his protege: young Yale student and would-be stage designer Elizabeth Weiland, played here with heedless girlishness by Margaret Qualley. As part of the legendary Broadway songwriting team with composer Rodgers, Hart was responsible for numbers like The Lady Is a Tramp, My Funny Valentine and of…

STAGE Paddington: The Musical Savoy theatre, London Here is the Peruvian bear as we have never seen him before – or so we are led to believe from the marketing of this musical, based on the beloved 2014 film, based on Michael Bond ’s beloved books. But this is exactly how we have seen him before: alone in Paddington station with marmalade sandwiches under his hat and a pleading look for strangers to be kind to outsiders such as him. Why do we need this Paddington? Because it comes together so well. This is the new Mary Poppins: a well-known story imaginatively staged, immaculately performed and utterly winning. Tom Fletcher’s songs are marvellous, Ellen Kane’s choreography vigorous. The set design is beautiful, beginning in Mr Gruber’s shop of curiosities. There…

The School of Night By Karl Ove Knausgård Karl Ove Knausgård’s Morning Star cycle may turn out to be even larger in scope than his six-volume autofictional bestseller, My Struggle. Four books deep, this gargantuan work of supernatural existentialism is an unsettling account of the occult phenomena that attend the appearance in the sky of a bright new star. Mysteries from the first three volumes include: who killed the musicians in the forest? What’s going on with the local wildlife? By the end of The School of Night, the most burning question may sound comparatively mundane: who is Kristian Hadeland ? Scattered references appeared in the saga’s first 2,000 pages. Kristian Hadeland was the 67-year-old man buried without mourners by doubting priest Kathrine Reinhardsen in The Morning Star (2021). In…

1 Jumblies Rearrange DOVETAIL to make another word. 2 Dropouts Replace each asterisk with a letter to make a word: *O*P*U*S 3 Cryptic How a boxer wins and a candle is extinguished? (4, 2, 4) 4 Missing Links Find a word that follows the first word in the clue and precedes the second, in each case making a fresh word or phrase. a) driven mobile b) rose get c) football fare d) light cone e) night sandwich © CMM2025 Puzzles 1 VIOLATED. 2 SOAPSUDS. 3 Blow by blow. 4 a) driven/snow/mobile; b) rose/bud/get; c) football/fan/fare; d) light/traffic/cone; e) night/club/sandwich.…

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France has become the latest EU country to set out plans to expand its army, with Emmanuel Macron last week announcing that military service will be restored – albeit on a voluntary basis – nearly 30 years after the end of conscription. In the face of Russia’s military threat and uncertainty over the US’s commitment to defending its transatlantic allies, Europe is rushing to bolster its defence industry and its deployment capability after radically cutting them back since the cold war. Despite significant losses in its war on Ukraine, Russia is perceived by European militaries as a potential direct threat within two to five years. Meanwhile, Washington has made it clear that it expects its EU allies to take care of much more of their own defence. Fabien Mandon, France’s…

The new leftwing party founded by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana will be called Your Party after a vote by members, but its first conference last weekend laid bare bitter divisions. Just over 37% of members voted for the name Your Party, provisionally adopted when it was launched earlier this year, to become permanent. Sultana, who has been at loggerheads with Corbyn, reignited tensions with a blistering attack on those “at the top” of the party after boycotting the conference’s first day in protest at the expulsion of several members belonging to the Socialist Workers party. Members meeting in Liverpool and those online had narrowly voted by 51.6% to 48. 4% for the party to be steered by a member-led executive. Corbyn, whose preferred model was for a sole leader,…

The Free Birth Society (FBS) is a business run from North Carolina that promotes the idea of women giving birth without midwives or doctors present. It is led by Emilee Saldaya and Yolande Norris-Clark, ex-doulas turned social media influencers who have gained a global following through the FBS podcast, which has been downloaded millions of times. FBS profits from sales of its instructional video guide to freebirthing, and access to a paid-for membership group for pregnant women. It runs two online schools that train “radical birth keepers” and “authentic midwives” to support women when giving birth. In a year-long investigation, we reviewed hundreds of hours of FBS podcasts, videos, documents and course materials, interviewed 10 former insiders, and analysed thousands of pages of journal entries, medical notes, message threads and…

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All the best dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. The achievement of Tom Stoppard, who has died aged 88, was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from chaos theory to moral philosophy – and turn them into inventive and often moving dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance. From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and plot. But we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest it is…

Jeeves Again By Roddy Doyle, Dominic Sandbrook, Scarlett Curtis et al As with most of the giants of late 19th- and early 20thcentury English literature, the vast majority of PG Wodehouse’s readers today are nonwhite. Perhaps it was brutal colonial indoctrination that ensured the modern descendants of the aspirant imperial middle classes from Barbados to Burma still devour Maugham, Shaw and Kipling. Perhaps they just have good taste. Wodehouse’s detractors are many, but for millions around the world he remains the greatest comic writer Britain has ever produced. And he clearly still sells here, as this collection of a dozen new officially sanctioned stories by writers, comedians and celebrity admirers attests. These aren’t the first modern Jeeves stories, but they’re the first attempt at the form that made Wodehouse one…

Prep 10 min Cook 10 min Chill 4 hr+ Serves 6 • DAIRY FREE Ingredients 12 amaretti biscuits, roughly crumbled10 egg yolks250g sugar200ml marsala50ml whisky50ml brandy When you’re the cook of the house, you spend quite enough time in the kitchen on Christmas Day as it is. And, after those time-consuming nibbles, the smoked salmon starter and the turkey-with-all-the-trimmings main event, the last thing you want is a pudding that demands even more hands-on time at the culinary coalface. For me, the main requirement of any Christmas dessert is that it can be made well in advance, not least because, by the time the pudding stage comes around, I’ll be completely knackered and more than ready to put up my feet and finally relax (or, more likely, fall asleep on…

Javokhir Sindarov, 19, became the youngest ever winner of the Fide knockout World Cup last week when the Uzbek teenager defeated China’s Wei Yi 2.5-1.5 in the final in Goa. Ukraine’s Ruslan Ponomariov had been a year younger in 2002, but that World Cup had also doubled as the Fide world championship in a period when the global title was disputed. Sindarov won $120,000 and qualified for the 2026 Candidates in Cyprus, which will decide the official challenger for Gukesh Dommaraju’s world crown. Wei had been the favourite, but handicapped himself by poor time management in the decisive game. He declined a draw and right at the end could have drawn. Instead, he blundered into a checkmating attack. The candidates and their November world rankings are: Hikaru Nakamura (2), Fabiano…