Table of contents for 14 November 2025 in Guardian Weekly

The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol213 | 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. 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 Guardian is…

‘It broke my heart.” Surangel Whipps, president of the tiny Pacific nation of Palau, was sitting in the front row of the UN’s general assembly in New York when Donald Trump made a long and rambling speech, his first to the UN since his re-election, on 23 September. Trump’s rant on the climate crisis – a “green scam”, “the greatest con job ever perpetrated”, “predictions made by stupid people” – was an unprecedented attack on science and global action from a major world leader. Palau, threatened by rising sea levels, floods and more intense storms, is home to nearly 20,000 people, all likely to be made refugees if global heating surpasses 1.5C for a prolonged period, a likelihood they are desperate to prevent. “Our children need hope, they need to…

After the typhoon People evacuate their pigs by boat after super-typhoon Fung-wong hit their home town of Pandan in Catanduanes province. The storm blew through the Philippines, leaving at least eight dead, 1.4 million people evacuated and widespread damage. It triggered flash flooding, storm surges, landslides and gale-force winds, Philippine authorities said on Monday. The biggest typhoon to threaten the country in years, Fung-wong was forecast to cover two-thirds of the archipelago with its 1,800kmwide rain and wind band. In Pandan, footage and photos from disaster response authorities showed flood waters rising to the rooftops and houses being washed away. At least one person was killed in flash flooding. The super-typhoon was downgraded to a typhoon on Monday morning, as it crossed the Philippines’ largest island. The storm’s sustained wind…

Michael Durant watched through night-vision goggles as two 900kg laser-guided bombs slammed on to the Panamanian airbase while he hovered off the country’s south coast in a Black Hawk helicopter. “A gigantic flash, followed by a boom … [like] the largest lightning strike you’ve ever seen in your life,” the retired US army pilot recalled of the opening salvo of the Battle of Rio Hato Airfield in December 1989. The stealth bomber blitzkrieg and army ranger assault marked the start of the US invasion of Panama – Operation Just Cause – designed to dethrone Panama’s military dictator, Manuel Noriega. Durant and his colleagues had orders to capture the Panamanian Defense Force (PDF) base to stop troops coming to Noriega’s rescue. Over the coming days, the pilot and more than 25,000…

The eminent British historian Sir Richard Evans produced three expert witness reports for the libel trial involving the Holocaust denier David Irving, studied for a doctorate under the supervision of Theodore Zeldin, succeeded David Cannadine as Regius professor of history at Cambridge (a post endowed by Henry VIII) and supervised theses on Bismarck’s social policy. That was some of what you could learn from Grokipedia, the AI-powered encyclopedia launched last month by the world’s richest person, Elon Musk. The problem was, as Prof Evans discovered when he logged on to check his own entry, all these facts were false. It was part of a choppy start for humanity’s latest attempt to corral the sum of human knowledge or, as Musk put it, create a compendium of “the truth, the whole…

EARLIER THIS YEAR, Donald Trump appointed a 28-year-old Doge alumnus, Jeremy Lewin, to oversee his administration’s approach to global aid. Lewin’s primary task has been to gut the US’s aid funding. In an interview with the New York Times, Lewin argued that the traditional approach, which he termed the “global humanitarian complex”, didn’t help poor countries “progress beyond aid”, instead keeping them dependent. The system, he continued, has “demonstrably failed”. This isn’t just the Trump administration’s view. For decades, there has been a robust debate in academic and policy circles that aid isn’t working, or at least not as promised. When the news of Trump’s USAID cuts broke this year, President Hakainde Hichilema of Zambia told the Financial Times that cuts in aid were “long overdue” and would force countries…

Don’t tell your kids, but “6-7” is Dictionary.com’s “word of the year” for 2025. Of course, “6-7” is not a word in the strictest sense. It’s two random numbers strung together for the purposes of annoying parents around the world. What does it mean? Nothing. When can it be used? Pretty much whenever you want to piss off an old person. Such is the state of global linguistics. Having a purpose or meaning to what you’re articulating is cringe. The point is to troll, to frustrate and to alienate. Isn’t that the whole reason the internet exists? To organise us into factions – the smartened up and the hapless? For the childless among us, “6-7” is just online gibberish that is easily ignored – the password into a nightclub you…

I’ve accidentally bought too many boxes of dried lasagne sheets. How can I use them up? Jemma, by email This is sounding all too familiar to Jordon Ezra King, the man behind the A Curious Cook newsletter. “ I was in the same situation earlier this year after over-catering for a client dinner,” he says. The first thing to say is there’s no immediate rush, he adds: “It sounds obvious, but you can keep the boxes for a long time.” Fortunately for Jemma, however, lasagne sheets are also flexible, and their shape doesn’t have to dictate what you do with them. With this in mind, soupy things are good to get on the weekly dinner rotation, be that pasta e ceci or minestrone, the latter being the go-to of choice…

1 UNITED STATES Mamdani makes history after winning NYC election Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani was elected last Tuesday as the 111th mayor of New York City, defeating the former governor Andrew Cuomo and Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa and making history as the city’s first Muslim mayor. The 34-year-old democratic socialist and state assembly member from Queens, secured victory with more than 50% of the vote. Cuomo, 67, finished second with just over 40%, while Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa received just over 7% of the vote. Mamdani’s historic victory was announced amid a slew of Democratic wins across the country, with Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger becoming Virginia’s first female governor, Mikie Sherrill defeating her Trump-backed gubernatorial opponent in New Jersey, and California voting for Gavin Newsom’s push for redistricting maps that would yield…

When Deborah Turness, the now departed BBC News chief, was first invited to a meeting with the corporation’s board a few weeks ago, there was little to suggest it would be a significant encounter. But instead, she came under attack over an item added to the agenda. The lengthy confrontation that followed set off an extraordinary series of events that ultimately ended in her resignation and that of the BBC director general, Tim Davie – and raised questions about politically motivated interference with the corporation’s news operation. The board wanted to discuss a letter – and accompanying 8,000-word memo – it had received from Michael Prescott, a former external adviser to the BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards committee (EGSC), who was making broad claims of bias at the organisation. The…

Argentinians are used to the large rubbish containers in Buenos Aires. A more observant passerby, however, might notice a recent addition: a red warning reading “Danger, do not enter”, accompanied by a pictogram showing a person halfway inside. “Unfortunately, it’s a safety measure,” said Evelyn Bierbrauer, who works with Manos Abiertas, an NGO supporting people experiencing homelessness. “Many people were taking refuge inside the containers – to look for food and even to spend the night there,” she added. There were at least 4,522 people living on the streets of Buenos Aires in May, according to the latest municipal data – a figure some say is underestimated, but still a 38% increase compared with November 2023. Since the far-right president, Javier Milei, took office in December 2023 and implemented…

Shell-shocked, Democrats entered Donald Trump’s second term in a political stupor – unsure of who they were or what they stood for. Their base had lost faith in its ageing leadership class, and their brand, in Democrats’ own words, had become “ toxic”: a party increasingly confined to coastal states, big cities and college towns. And even there, warning signs were flashing. Then came last week’s coast-tocoast romp in the first major elections of Trump’s turbulent return to the White House that exceeded even the party’s most optimistic projections. “What a night for the Democratic party,” California governor Gavin Newsom marvelled, after news networks projected the redistricting ballot measure he spearheaded had passed so decisively that some voters were still queueing to cast ballots. “A party that is in…

AMID THE ONGOING WAR IN UKRAINE and between the fragile borders that crisscross the former Soviet Union, the self-proclaimed Republic of Transnistria, which broke away from Moldova more than 30 years ago after a brief but bloody conflict, remains locked in deep political and diplomatic isolation. Home to about 450,000 people, Transnistria is a narrow strip of land wedged between Moldova and Ukraine, along the eastern bank of the Dniester River. Its de facto capital, Tiraspol, lies less than 100km from the Ukrainian port city of Odesa. Though small in size – about 200km long – the region holds outsized strategic importance, sitting on a key corridor between the Black Sea and central Europe. Tanks on display in the streets of Tiraspol come from the Dniester war, also known as…

Westminster has a habit of staging occasions that are at once both lacklustre and ridiculous, and last Tuesday saw yet another. Rachel Reeves’s speech, we were told, was an act of “pitchrolling”, performed because – in the words of Treasury sources – the chancellor and her colleagues were “desperate” to get her message across to the public. Here was the essence of the event’s absurdity: as if to confirm people’s most cynical views of politics, she served notice that she is about to do something hugely significant, but refused to explicitly say what it is. But thanks to nods, winks and the usual anonymous briefings, what she was signalling was obvious: she could no longer honour her party’s manifesto pledge not to raise national insurance, VAT or income tax –…

In 1982, artist Agnes Denes planted almost a hectare of wheat on waste ground in New York’s Battery Park, near the World Trade Center. The twin towers soared over a golden field, as if dropped into Andrew Wyeth’s bucolic painting Christina’s World. Denes’s Wheatfield: A Confrontation was a challenge to what she called a “powerful paradox”: the absurdity of hunger in a wealthy world. The global population in 1982 was 4.6 billion. By 2050, it will be more than double that, and the prospect of feeding everyone looks uncertain. Food insecurity already affects 2.3 billion people. Covid-19 and extreme weather have revealed the fragility of the food system. Denes was called a prophet for drawing attention to ecological breakdown decades before widespread public awareness. But perhaps she was prophetic, too,…

Across 1 Underwater shelf (4) 3 Debacle (8) 8 Smoke (4) 9 Person with a mortgage (8) 11 Bland (5-5) 14 Medicinal herb (6) 15 Categorise (6) 17 Baku’s country (10) 20 Refutation (8) 21 Boas (anag) (4) 22 Most outstanding woman – or insect? (5,3) 23 Page (4) Down 1 Manufacturing path where cords are twisted (8) 2 Gushing (8) 4 Pipe for flavoured tobacco (6) 5 If it can fail, it will (7,3) 6 Weld (anag) (4) 7 Airs (anag) (4) 10 Bishkek’s country (10) 12 Right word at the right time (3,5) 13 Mexican deadlock? (5-3) 16 Refined (6) 18 Baghdad’s country (4) 19 Reed instrument (4) Solution No 17,310…

MEDIA Trump threatens BBC over edit of documentary speech Donald Trump threatened legal action against the BBC and welcomed the resignations of two senior figures after a campaign against the broadcaster over criticism that its flagship documentary programme in 2024 used a misleading edit of one of his speeches. Lawyers for the US president said the BBC must retract the Panorama documentary by 14 November or face a lawsuit for “no less” than $1bn, according to US media outlets who cited the letter. On Monday the BBC said it would respond in due course. The resignations of the BBC director general, Tim Davie, and its News CEO, Deborah Turness, came after the rightwing Telegraph newspaper published a leaked internal report by a former BBC standards adviser alleging failings in the…

After the joy, the trepidation. Or at least the preparation. Democrats, along with many others around the world, cheered last week’s wins in a clutch of off-year elections that saw Donald Trump’s Republicans defeated. But now they need to brace themselves for the reaction. Because Trump does not like losing. And he will do all he can to ensure it does not happen again – by means fair and, often, foul. Indeed, that effort is already under way. The most dramatic win was Zohran Mamdani’s history-making victory in America’s most populous city, New York. Voters in California backed Democrats on an apparently technical measure that could prove hugely significant. Democrats won the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia by double-digit margins. All this has displeased Trump, but it is the…

Israel is holding dozens of Palestinians from Gaza isolated in an underground jail where they never see daylight, are deprived of adequate food and barred from receiving news of their families or the outside world. The detainees have included at least two civilians held for months without charge or trial: a nurse detained in his scrubs, and a young food seller, according to lawyers from the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) who represent both men. The two men were transferred to the subterranean Rakefet complex in January, and described regular beatings and violence consistent with welldocumented torture in other Israeli detention centres. Rakefet prison was opened in the early 1980s to house organised crime figures in Israel but closed a few years later on the grounds it was…

As she reeled from the discovery of a pornographic website featuring AI-generated images of herself naked, the prominent Italian journalist and writer Francesca Barra said the question that struck her the most came from her young daughter. “She asked me: ‘ How do you feel?’ ” Barra, 47, said. “But what I heard was another more subtle question that my pre-adolescent daughter perhaps didn’t have the courage to ask, and that was: ‘If it happened to me, how would I handle it?’ ” Social Media Girls, which has more than 7 million worldwide subscribers and includes a section dedicated to “Italian nude VIPs ”, is the latest in a series of sexist online forums to have surfaced in Italy’s public domain in recent months. It follows Mia Moglie (My Wife),…

Growing up in rural India, Shafali Verma always knew she had a hunger to play cricket. But in her small town of Rohtak, in the north Indian state of Haryana, cricket was not a game for girls. Aged nine, desperate to play, she cut her hair short, entered a tournament disguised as her brother, and went on to win man of the match. Verma’s determined father, Sanjeev, in the face of refusal from every cricket academy or training centre that would not accept his daughter, enrolled her as a boy. “Luckily, nobody noticed,” he recalled, as Verma made her debut for the national women’s team at 15 years old. Earlier this month, Verma stood triumphantly with her teammates as they held aloft the Women’s Cricket World Cup, making history as…

‘Machismo in Mexico so fucked up not even the president is safe,” said Caterina Camastra, a professor and feminist, when I talked to her in Morelia, a city west of the Mexican capital last week. Succinct and to the point, it is a sentiment shared by many women in Mexico after watching the now viral video of a man groping the country’s first female president, Claudia Sheinbaum, as she walked from the National Palace to the education ministry on 3 November. The drunken man tried to kiss her neck and embrace her from behind as she mingled with citizens on the capital’s streets, before she removed his hands and an aide stepped in and placed himself between them. Sheinbaum, who has pressed charges against the man and has called for…

Nick Cave claims that at least four different production companies have tried to turn his frequently hilarious, always disturbing, sexfilled novel The Death of Bunny Munro into a film or TV show in the 16 years since its release. The problem? “No one would play the character!” he says, sitting, impeccably suited as always, in a room at London’s Corinthia Hotel. As it turns out, the material was just waiting for the right actor. Step up Matt Smith to play the titular sex-addicted travelling makeup salesman. It’s not surprising that it ended up being Smith. Since his Doctor Who days, he has tended to pick roles that trend slightly twisted – and the role of Bunny, who in Cave’s book is depicted as a borderline animalistic misogynist who sweats pure…

You need a little luck to see some species of wildlife, and fortune was on my side as I peered into the River Laxey on the Isle of Man’s east coast. There, holding in a pool, was the first wild Atlantic salmon I’ve ever seen. At this time of year, salmon run up the Laxey to return to their breeding grounds, and the locals aren’t far behind – angling for them and sea trout in the rivers forms part of the government’s unseen economy. The thing that I needed to look closely at was the tail: if it was square-cut, the fish was a sea trout, but in this case, the concave fin was conclusive. The fish and I were in the middle of Laxey village, whose name is derived…