Table of contents for 16 May 2025 in Guardian Weekly

Tartan army More than 1,600 people took part in the first Edinburgh Tartan parade through the Scottish capital last weekend. The event, which was inspired by New York Tartan week, a festival of Scottish heritage, included pipe bands and dancers from around the world, as well as Vikings from Shetland and a gathering of Bay City Rollers fans. The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol212 | Issue№ 20 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.…

Robert Francis Prevost – who has chosen the papal name Leo XIV – may not be the Latin American Jesuit wild-card his predecessor, Pope Francis, was, but his election is similarly historic. In the figure of the 69-year-old former head of the Augustinian order, the Roman Catholic church has its very first US leader. Until last Thursday evening, the idea of the fisherman’s ring being slipped on to a North American hand was seen as a fairly distant possibility. The Vatican’s longstanding opposition to a US pope stemmed largely from the optics of having a pontiff from a political superpower and a country with such a hegemonic cultural and secular global influence. But all that changed after a short conclave that chose a man who had been a cardinal for…

Europe’s biggest blackout in over 20 years on the Iberian peninsula unleashed hours of chaos for people in Spain, Portugal and parts of France late last month. But in the aftermath it has raised a question for governments across the world: could it happen here? Europe’s political leaders and energy system operators have given assurances that such blackouts are rare, and that European power grids are some of the most stable in the world. Yet energy experts have warned that no grid is infallible. Prof Jianzhong Wu, the head of the school of engineering at Cardiff University, said blackouts “can happen anywhere”. “Despite today’s high standards of reliability, low-probability but high-impact blackout events can still happen. These networks are not designed to be completely blackout-free because achieving such a level…

‘All that I did over 40 years has turned to ashes before my eyes,” said Prof Ahmed Fahal, of the destruction of his research centre in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum. His once-gleaming laboratory, where a team of expert clinicians worked, is now little more than rubble. “I built everything from scratch. I knew every corner, every brick. I can’t describe the pain,” he said. As Sudan enters its third year of war, its infrastructure has been decimated and scientific, educational and research institutions have ground to a halt. According to the Sudanese National Academy of Sciences, more than 100 universities and research centres – among the most reputable in Africa – have been damaged or looted. Since 1991, Fahal has headed the Mycetoma Research Center (MRC): the only such institution in…

When Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, met Donald Trump at the White House last week, the notoriously over-prepared former central banker was no doubt expecting to discuss tariffs, trade and defence policy. But as he sat beside the president, he was instead treated to a discourse on one of Trump’s more recondite fixations: the centuries-old border between Canada and the United States. “Somebody drew that line many years ago with, like, a ruler – just a straight line right across the top of the country,” he told Carney. In recent months, Trump has fixated both on the idea of annexing Canada – his nation’s closest ally and one of its largest trading partners – and the idea that the border between them is no more than an “artificially drawn line”…

Hang out the bunting and let the church bells ring. A VE Day trade deal with Donald Trump is done, and in the car plants of the West Midlands as well as the backrooms of No 10, there will be relief that, for now at least, America’s phoney war on them is over. It’s true that the easing of arbitrary tariffs on cars, steel and aluminium that didn’t even exist until two months ago falls far short of being an actual trade deal, not least because the president could rip it up again tomorrow. But the terms agreed between London and Washington could save thousands of jobs, even if they’re jobs that need never have been at risk in the first place. More surprisingly, Rachel Reeves seems to have managed…

Do whales make you horny? How about UFOs? Maybe you’ve always dreamed of having a tryst in a fairytale castle, or making love inside a gigantic biscuit tin? Whatever your weird fantasy may be, it can probably be catered for on a roadside somewhere in Japan, if a new book on the curious phenomenon of love hotels is anything to go by. French photographer François Prost has been on a 3,000km pilgrimage of passion, driving from Utsunomiya, north of Tokyo, to the island of Shikoku in the south, to document Japan’s unique architecture of furtive liaisons. What he found spans from manga-embellished motels and Christmas-themed love nests to pastel-hued stage sets worthy of Wes Anderson. And some things stranger than your most eccentric kinks could dream of. “I find love…

This place, which straddles two eastern European countries, has a reputation as the continent’s last primeval forest – a glimpse of a world before it was smothered in ourselves and the homolith. To arrive at night is to tunnel through trees for mile after mile without end. And this, you realise, represents a fraction of the whole. Because beyond the border the Belarusian section of Białowieża is larger still. Overall, it extends to 149,000 hectares, but there is a further buffer forest of 131,000 hectares. It is during the day that you can separate the trees from the wood, when the wealth of detail and experience is so great it’s almost overwhelming; such as the black woodpecker drinking sap at the tree base and flying off with its forest-piercing kreee-kreee…

Across 1 Indifference (6)  4 Ciggy butt (3,3) 8 Flower (5) 9 Victoria Falls river (7) 10 Bottle-in-a-basket Italian wine (7)  11 Tries (anag) (5) 12 Scotch bonnet? (9)  17 Single (5) 19 Iberian king’s daughter (7) 21 Leafy (7) 22 Indonesian cloth dyeing method (5)  23 Blush (6)  24 Snub (6) Down 1 Church jurisdiction (6) 2 Gordian (anag) (7) 3 Studmuffin (2-3) 5 Fan (7) 6 Big cheeses in business (5) 7 Delicate and charming (6) 9 Spirit of the time (9) 13 Part of chess match where few pieces left (7)  14 River flowing north of Shanghai (7) 15 Container for arrows, crossbow bolts or darts (6) 16 Sachet (6) 18 Weird (anag) (5) 20 Brief (anag) (5) Solution No 17,154…

1 UNITED STATES Americans hold back on life plans due to Trump anxiety Americans are reconsidering major life events including marriage, having children and buying a home amid economic anxiety in the opening months of the Trump presidency, according to a Harris poll for the Guardian. Six in 10 Americans said the economy has affected at least one of their major life goals citing either lack of affordability or anxiety around the current economy. Though Donald Trump’s tariff policies have only been in place for a few weeks, and though the president has temporarily walked back on some of his harshest measures, the findings are a sign that Trump’s economic agenda could have long-term effects. A large percentage of those surveyed said they wanted to make a major financial decision, such…

After a fortnight in which former allies in a redividing globe separately commemorated the 80th anniversary of the end of the second world war in Europe, the sense of a runaway descent towards a third world war draws ever closer. The implosion of Pax Americana, the interconnectedness of conflicts, the new willingness to resort to unbridled state-sponsored violence and the irrelevance of the institutions of the rules-based order have all been on brutal display. From Kashmir to Khan Younis, Hodeidah, Port Sudan and Kursk, the only sound is of explosions, and the only lesson is that the old rules no longer apply. Indeed Fiona Hill, the policy analyst and adviser to the UK government on its imminent strategic defence review, argues the third world war has already started, if only…

Church unity Within hours of his election as the 267th pontiff, Leo was being talked about as a bridge builder, a pope who would continue in Francis’s footsteps but without alienating traditionalists as his predecessor sometimes did. He is “known for solid judgment and a keen capacity to listen, and someone who doesn’t need to pound his chest to be heard”, according to a profile on Crux, a Catholic news website. Although he is expected to follow Francis in many respects, he is likely to do so in a more emollient manner than his predecessor. In his opening remarks as pontiff, Leo said: “We have to be a church that works together to build bridges and to keep our arms open.” He will try to be a symbol of greater…

She considers herself a die-hard South Island girl, but Harriet Baker, 33, won’t be raising her children in the city where she’s spent most of her life. “When we bought our house I said, ‘You’ll be taking me out of here in a casket,” she said, of the Dunedin home she and husband Cameron Baker, 33, sold last month. “But the living costs keep climbing, you’re working hard and you can’t put any money away — it felt like we were treading water.” Their possessions are now winding their way to Western Australia, where the couple, their son Teddy, 2, and dog Hiccup, 8, relocated last week. Cameron will work as a heavy diesel mechanic in the mines while Harriet, formerly a public servant, will be the primary caregiver. Harriet…

When the coronavirus pandemic hit in 2020, Roxana Borda Mamani had to leave Mexico, where she was studying for her degree in rural development and food security, and return to her remote village in the Peruvian Amazon. At the time, the Indigenous community in Alto Mishagua had neither an internet connection nor a reliable energy source. “How am I going to study?” Borda asked. “With energy from the sun,” replied her friend, a fellow member of the Latin American Observatory for Energy Geopolitics at the Brazil-based Federal University of Latin American Integration (Unila). Borda began researching an offgrid solar energy system. Five years later, her community has a 400W solar system powering a 24-hour satellite internet connection and charging points next to a small school that was set up thanks…

In an unassuming building on an industrial estate outside Oxford, Michal Bilski sits in a windowless room with electric fly swatters and sticky tape on the wall, peering down a microscope. On the slide before him is a line of mosquito eggs that he collected less than an hour previously and put into position with a brush. Bilski manoeuvres a small needle filled with a DNA concoction and uses it to pierce each egg and inject a tiny amount. “Each slide has between 50 and 100 eggs on it, and it takes from 15 minutes to half an hour to inject them all,” he said. “Normally in a day we would inject between 500 to over 1,000 eggs.” Bilski, a research and development team leader for the biotechnology company Oxitec,…

Prince Harry wanted a completely new life and he has got one. He is no longer a working royal, but a rich person. His Rich Highness. This involves a change of mindset in a mind that is somewhat hard to describe as quick on the uptake. Being rich is all well and good, of course, and the duke certainly moaned enough about money when he was still within the confines of royal duty, to hear insiders tell it. But the reason you don’t see Beyoncé out there on the talkshow circuit whining about how much money she has to spend on security – easily eight figures a year – is that she, a very rich person, seems to understand that regrettably it goes with the territory, and that you have…

What’s the difference between green and black cardamom, and when should I use pods or ground? “Cardamom is my favourite spice,” says Cynthia Shanmugalingam, chef/proprietor of Rambutan in London. “It smells like childhood puddings and sweets.” Cardamom can bring a “piney, eucalyptus-like fragrance and warmth” to desserts, Shanmugalingam adds, but it also “adds depth” to savoury dishes. Cardamom pods commonly come in green and black (also known as brown) form, as well as red (used mainly in Chinese and Asian cuisines) and white, which are bleached green pods. While Roopa Gulati, author of Indian Kitchens, often uses both black/brown and green in the same dish, she says you “have to be aware that they are totally different in flavour. You’re not going to make a lovely, aromatic rice pudding and…

✱ All solutions published next week Across 1 Like Florence’s work, organising aid and care with lamp (11) 9 More vulgar applause drowning a prince (7) 10 Sort of child’s little bit of nonsense in game (7) 11 A fuss started by some Parisian criminal (9) 12 Cereal drowned in milk – a shame! (5) 13 A fellow in church as provider of hot drinks (4) 14 Men get on or collapse in the country (10) 16 Flatmate maybe in old dress – sanctimonious talk about that (10) 19 Rolling over, vessels go no further (4) 21 Cockney’s trouble reported in French town (5) 22 Naughty fun – oh dear! – shocking? (7-2) 24 Humble son John, one that’s quiet (7) 25 Composer has piano at front of old city…

TRADE Starmer hails ‘historic’ US and India trade deals The UK and US agreed a “breakthrough” trade deal slashing some of Donald Trump’s tariffs on cars, aluminium and steel, which the prime minister said would save thousands of British jobs. Keir Starmer said it was a “fantastic, historic day” as he announced the agreement, the first by the White House since Trump announced sweeping global tariffs last month. Starmer said the agreement had saved jobs in the car and steel industries that had been under threat. The US agreed to cut the 25% tariff rate on British steel and aluminium exports to zero. The concession will be seen as a lifeline to the steel industry, for which the US is an important export market and which has been on the…

Many Americans and western Europeans believe an even more devastating third global conflict could break out in a decade. Between 41% and 55% of respondents in the five European countries polled by YouGov – Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain – thought another world war was very or fairly likely within the next five to 10 years, a view shared by 45% of Americans. Majorities of 68% to 76% said they expected any new conflict would involve nuclear weapons. Many (25% to 44%) believed it would kill most people in the world. Most said they would expect their country to be involved in such a war – but only minorities thought their armed forces would be able to defend them. In contrast, 71% of Americans had confidence in their military.…

Indian surface-to-air missiles were already soaring towards Pakistan’s most significant military bases when the first call came from the US. It was 4am in Islamabad and Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state and recently appointed US national security adviser, was on the line to the man everyone knew was calling the shots in Pakistan: army chief Gen Asim Munir. It was the beginning of eight hours of negotiations, mediated by the US, that finally secured a fragile ceasefire between India and Pakistan at midday last Saturday, according to two Pakistan security and intelligence officials who spoke to the Guardian. The agreement was first publicly announced by Donald Trump on his Truth Social platform, although Pakistan said the US president never personally made any calls to their side during negotiations.…

“We must never accept the Tory or media narrative that often scapegoats and demonises migrants,” Keir Starmer wrote in 2020. “Problems of low pay, housing and public services are not caused by migrants – they are caused by a failed economic model.” Much has changed since Starmer was running to be leader of the Labour party – not least, that as prime minister he now has a broader electorate to keep on side. His aides argue he has long made the case for tougher rules on immigration, but the rise of Reform UK, and Nigel Farage’s success among voters disillusioned with the political mainstream, has added a new political imperative. Announcing his immigration policies on Monday, Starmer warned the UK risked becoming an “island of strangers” without a tougher approach,…

Chain smoking under the fluorescent lights of a cavernous billiards hall in Beijing, Brother Yuan can’t stop smiling. The previous day, along with 150 million other people across China, he was at home watching the snooker world championships final. Now he’s with his fellow cue-heads, celebrating the win of China’s first snooker world champion, Zhao Xintong. “He’s a great role model for young people in China,” Yuan, 55, said of the generation Z upstart who last Monday claimed snooker’s top prize. “He’s bringing the excitement back.” It’s a far cry from the 1980s when Yuan was a young player in Beijing with dreams of going professional. The industry wasn’t well developed and the money wasn’t there. He remembers vividly the 1987 Kent Cup, a snooker tournament held in Beijing. “All…

In a small village deep within the Bolivian jungle, hundreds of people brandished wooden spears and improvised shields. Behind them a wooden fort – with an observation post where a man held a bow and arrow – blocked the path leading to a radio station, where Bolivia’s former president Evo Morales, 65, has been entrenched for seven months, seeking to avoid arrest. Reaching the building is impossible – even, apparently, for the police – without the authorisation of the hundreds of coca farmers who guard every access route in Lauca Ñ, a tiny village in the coca-producing Chapare region. Morales faces an arrest warrant, accused of fathering a child with a 15-year-old girl during his presidency in 2016. Bolivia’s first Indigenous president and the country’s longest-serving leader denies having committed…

Donald Trump will inevitably claim Monday’s temporary truce in the US-China trade war as a victory, but financial markets seemed to have read it for what it is – a capitulation. Stocks were up and bond yields were higher after US treasury secretary Scott Bessent’s press conference in Geneva, where he has been holding talks with China. As with the UK “trade deal” last week, the US is not reverting to the status quo before Trump arrived in the White House. Instead, tariffs on Chinese goods will be cut from 145% to 30% – initially for a 90-day period. In return, China has cut its own tariffs on US imports to 10%, from the 125% it had imposed in retaliation against the White House. That still marks a big shift…

EVERY FRIDAY NIGHT, Claire, a 50-year-old woman in Berkshire, waits until her husband and son have gone to bed. When she is sure the house is quiet, she tiptoes out to her garage, and over to a tin tucked away in the corner. It is chilly out there, but she doesn’t mind; that’s the point. Inside the tin, away from the prying eyes of her family, is a vial of the GLP-1 medication Mounjaro, which needs to be kept at about 8C. Claire has been taking it without them knowing for several months. “It would have been harder to get away with in summer,” she says. As weight-loss medications have become more and more popular, lots of people in the public eye have been dramatically changing shape, walking the red…

Last month, a few weeks into the random detentions and denied entries at the US border, I was supposed to go to Princeton University as a guest lecturer to discuss global fascism. I asked the professors who invited me whether they thought it was safe to come. When I was in Turkey, European journalist friends once similarly asked me whether they’d be detained. And just as I did then, the American professors hesitated with half sentences: “Well, you know …” It was decided that a law firm should be involved. After some back and forth, the final assessment remained unsettlingly ambiguous: “A detention is unlikely, but we cannot be sure.” Eventually, to be on the safe side, we choose the online option. In the end all was fine on the…

As always with pronouncements by President Trump, once you had peeled away the xenophobia, removed the stew of resentment, ignored the sheer idiocy and asterisked the possible illegality, there was a small kernel of truth to his posting on Truth Social last Sunday. “The Movie Industry in America is DYING a very fast death,” he wrote, pointing to the nefarious tax breaks other countries gave film-makers as “a National Security threat” and proposing an 100% tariff on films made oversees. “It is, in addition to everything else, messaging and propaganda! WE WANT MOVIES MADE IN AMERICA AGAIN!” How would a 100% tariff on films made oversees work? Just movies shot overseas? What about movies set overseas? And who would pay? How do you impose tariffs on goods without a port…

Given that a staggering 1,500 languages could vanish by the end of this century, by some estimates – close to a quarter of the world’s total – some may find it obscene to even ask whether the English language could die. English is certainly not on the endangered list. As the one truly global language, it is more often labelled an exterminator, a great lumbering titanosaur that unwittingly crushes hapless smaller languages underfoot – or undertongue. The fact is, though, that no language has yet proved eternal. Subjects of the Roman or Egyptian empires might once have assumed that their languages would last for ever, like their hegemony, but they were wrong. Latin and Egyptian were eventually transformed into languages that would have been unintelligible to Augustus or Ramses the…