A week in the life of the world | Global edition 14 AUGUST 2026 | VOL. 215 No. 7 | £6.50 | €9.95

Gone rogue: AI tricks its testers.³⁰ • What's the Ukrainian for drone?⁴⁰

The Guardian Weekly

Wrecking

How Infantino and Fifa shook planet football ball

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Eyewitness

Kazakhstan

PHOTOGRAPH: MINISTRY OF ECOLOGY AND NATURAL RESOURCES/REUTERS

➤ Into the wild

Umit, a female Amur tiger, jumps out of a pickup truck as she is released into the Ile-Balkhash state nature reserve in the Almaty region, as part of a programme to restore the tiger population, marking the species' first return to Kazakhstan's natural habitat in more than 70 years.

The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919

Vol 215 | Issue № 7

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 wholly owned by the Scott Trust, a body whose purpose is "to secure the financial and editorial independence of the Guardian in perpetuity". We have no proprietor or shareholders, and any profit made is re-invested in journalism.

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The GuardianWeekly

A week in the life of the world 14 AUGUST 2026

4

GLOBAL REPORT

Headlines from the last seven days United Kingdom ... 8 Science & Environment ... 9 The big story Sport Inside football's World Cup sell-off debacle... 10

15

SPOTLIGHT

In-depth reporting and analysis

✉ Afghanistan

Taliban rule ushers in a new era of femicide ... 15

Iran

The sailors stranded in the Gulf since February ... 18

Environment

Race to understand the health burden of wildfire smoke ... 24

Australia

An overlooked legacy of using enslaved labour ... 26

Technology

AI goes rogue: how two models stunned the experts... 30

Cuba

True believers come together to resist US intervention... 33

34

FEATURES

Long reads, interviews & essays How a young Nigerian man was lured into organ trafficking By Alexis Okeowo... 34 Why trying to speak Ukrainian taught me so many lessons By Charlotte Higgins ... 40

45

OPINION

▼ Rafael Behr

Enlightened minds are needed for intelligent AI regulation..45

Andy Beckett

Are rogue bike-renters exacting their revenge on London? ...47

Felicity Lawrence

The law has had its fill of ultra-processed food firms... 48

“When the world needs leadership to confront the challenge of AI, it is presented with a US president who causes chaos”

51

CULTURE

TV, film, music, theatre, art, architecture & more

✉ Screen

Dominic Sessa's recipe for playing Anthony Bourdain... 51

Music

The Womack Sisters keep it a family affair... 54

Stage

All aboard the cruise ships taking theatre on the seas ... 55

Books

A Soviet coup attempt; violence in war; the snow tiger... 58

60

LIFESTYLE

Tim Dowling

A positive feeling ... 60

Kitchen aide

Fruit salad for a barbecue ... 61

Recipe

Sticky chicken pancakes ... 61

Join the community

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SPOT ILLUSTRATIONS: MATT BLEASE

On the cover Fifa, the footballing behemoth that organises the World Cup, is no stranger to controversy, but its members are usually loyal to their president. The current row, over Gianni Infantino's plan to sell stakes in the World Cup to private investors, is different, with some regional members demanding change at the top. Photograph: AP/Getty/iStock/DPPI/Shutterstock/Guardian Design

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4

Global report

Headlines from the last seven days

1 FIFA

Trump warns of 'mistake' if Infantino is removed

Donald Trump warned that Fifa would be making a "terrible mistake" if they get rid of Gianni Infantino as the head of world football's governing body.

Infantino has come under pressure following his doomed plan to sell off stakes in the men's World Cup to private investors. But in a post on Truth Social, Trump said: "He is fantastic, having just presided over the most successful World Cup, by four times, ever presented. If he is gone, it will never be as successful or profitable again!"

Uefa, Europe's governing body, the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) and Concacaf, which oversees football in the Caribbean, North and Central America, have accused Infantino of "deception".

Infantino apologised for his proposal to create Fifa Forward Enterprise (FFE), to run the commercial and operational aspects of Fifa's tournaments, with an idea to sell off around 20% to private investors.

But an open letter signed by the heads of Uefa, AFC and Concacaf has urged Fifa to hold an independent review.

"Leadership in football is not a possession," the letter said.

The big story Page 10→

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2 COLOMBIA

Scores dead after powerful earthquake strikes

More than 130 people died after a powerful earthquake struck western Colombia, collapsing and severely damaging scores of buildings in major cities including Cali and Pereira.

The US and Colombian geological surveys reported that a 7.4-magnitude earthquake struck at 7.34am local time on Monday, with its epicentre in the western department of Chocó. It was felt in neighbouring Venezuela, still reeling from a deadly double earthquake on 24 June.

Colombia's new president, Abelardo de la Espriella, addressed the nation on Monday evening. Authorities said the death toll was likely to rise. The city of Pereira, about 55km from the epicentre of the earthquake, saw some of the worst damage.

4 UNITED NATIONS

Costa Rican diplomat's early lead to be first female head

A Costa Rican diplomat and former vice-president whose parents were refugees from the Holocaust has become the surprise frontrunner to lead the United Nations as its first female secretary general.

Rebeca Grynspan, whose parents emigrated to Central America from Poland - and whose maternal grandparents were killed by the Nazis - is the current head of the UN conference on trade and development (UNCTAD), a body that has exhaustively tallied the economic damage inflicted by Israel's occupation of Palestine.

The current secretary general, António Guterres, will complete his second term on 31 December and his successor is expected to come from Latin America.

In a secret first straw poll of the UN security council, the five permanent and 10 temporary members were asked to say whether they supported, objected to or were neutral about each of seven candidates.

Grynspan secured 10 "encourage" votes; her closest rival is Carolyn Rodrigues-Burkett, Guyana's former UN envoy.

3 UNITED STATES

Loyalist Todd Blanche voted in as attorney general

The US Senate voted 50-49 to narrowly confirm Todd Blanche as attorney general in a major win for Donald Trump, who will now have his one-time personal attorney sitting atop the nation's law enforcement apparatus.

Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana cast the deciding vote after two other Republicans voted against Blanche. The Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, said Senate Republicans have "handed Trump an excuse on a silver platter" to continue his "pervasive, breathtaking corruption" by confirming Blanche as attorney general.

5 MEXICO

Suspected online cheating leads to mass exam resit

Around 58,000 students at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (Unam) will have to resit their entrance exam after abnormally high results raised suspicions of cheating. The Unam said the exam would take place in person after its first attempt at an online version led to thousands of annulled results.

Between 2021 and 2025, only 3.5% of applicants obtained a score of 100 or more out of 120, but this year the figure was 16%. The entrance exam is notoriously competitive with 150,000 applicants this year competing for 21,962 places.

The Guardian Weekly 14 August 2026

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UK headlines p8→

6 SPAIN

Temporary border checks begin on visitors from Italy

Madrid introduced temporary border checks on visitors from Italy in response to Rome imposing similar measures after a mass rush of people from Morocco into Ceuta.

The checks, which come “amid the persistent irregular migration pressure” facing Italy, will last until 7 September, Spain’s interior ministry said in a statement.

Spain had last week threatened Italy with countermeasures if it did not swiftly lift its own border checks, drawing a rebuff from Rome. The spat came after tens of thousands of people crossed from Morocco to Spain’s north African territory on 30-31 July in an unprecedented, deadly rush.

7 UKRAINE

Long-range drone strike on oil refinery kills at least 13

A drone strike on an industrial city deep inside Russia has killed at least 13 people, according to the local mayor, as Kyiv steps up its campaign of long-range strikes.

Kyiv said it hit the Taneco refinery in Nizhnekamsk, about 1,200km from the Ukrainian border. Footage appeared to show smoke rising from the refinery.

Ukraine’s general staff said the raid was part of a campaign to reduce the “military potential of the Russian aggressor”.

Russian investigators claimed civilian and industrial sites in the city had been hit.

9 GERMANY

US ‘believes Russia was behind Leipzig drone bomb’

American intelligence experts believe Russia was behind an attack at Leipzig airport with a drone laden with explosives, US media reported.

The interior minister, Alexander Dobrindt, broke off his holiday in Italy, as he spoke of a “new level of danger”.

Dobrindt called the incident, in which a quadcopter with semtex plastic explosives attached was found next to a Ukrainian cargo plane, part of a “professional hybrid threat scenario” by a well-equipped foreign actor.

Dobrindt, said that only an apparently “ripped” detonator had prevented the device going off at the shipping and military hub.

2

8 IRELAND

Alleged crime boss Kinahan extradited from Dubai

Daniel Kinahan, the alleged leader of the Kinahan organised crime group, was extradited from Dubai in an Irish government jet and met by a huge security operation in Dublin, where he was charged with directing the activities of a criminal organisation.

The 49-year-old was taken to prison after the judge said any application for bail would have to be taken to the high court.

Law enforcement agencies named Kinahan as a leader of a cartel said to control about a third of Europe’s cocaine supply, along with running criminal sidelines in firearms and racketeering.

He was also an influential figure in boxing.

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10 EUROPE

Do Germans hog holiday sunloungers? It seems not

Italian and French holidaymakers are most likely to use their towel to stake their claim to a sunlounger, surprising new data reveals.

A poll by YouGov of European holidaymakers found while many Germans (51%) and Britons (46%) associate Germans with the ritual of waking up early to mark their spot, the perception barely exists elsewhere in Europe. Also, just 38% of German holidaymakers who stay in places with pools and sunloungers said they have ever reserved a lounger with a towel, compared with 45% of their Italian and French counterparts.

14 August 2026 The Guardian Weekly

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12 MIDDLE EAST

Trump to demand war reparations from Iran

Donald Trump said he will demand that Iran pay compensation for the deaths of thousands of US soldiers and Iranian civilians killed in recent decades in the latest sign his negotiations to end the war and reopen the strait of Hormuz have reached an impasse. The demands are likely to provoke anger in Tehran.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump said he was issuing the demand for war reparations in response to Iranian negotiators making similar claims for damages for the five-month war that has killed thousands and devastated Iran's military and economy.

Spotlight Page 18 →

11 NIGERIA

Security forces free more than 300 hostages in one day

Security forces rescued more than 300 abducted people in what the president, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, hailed as the largest single-day hostage recovery.

The release was announced last Wednesday after a joint operation, conducted by the military, police and counter-terrorism units, freed victims held captive in the dense forests of the Kainji Lake national park in the north-central region.

Among those rescued were 163 people abducted in February during a raid on the village of Woro in Kwara state, and 145 others seized from the neighbouring Niger state. Officials confirmed the survivors are receiving medical evaluations at an army installation.

13 MIDDLE EAST

Iran-aligned Houthis claim drone strike on oil refinery

Yemen's Tehran-aligned Houthis claimed responsibility for an attack on a refinery in Saudi Arabia, two days after the kingdom signed a defence pact with Turkey and Pakistan in response to growing regional instability caused by the US-Israel war on Iran.

The mutual defence agreement places three of the Muslim world's most influential states into a Nato-style pact.

Its signing came as the Houthis and Saudi Arabia increased their military exchanges in the past month.

14 PALESTINE

Israel charges settler over death of Palestinian activist

Prosecutors in Israel have indicted an extremist settler for shooting a Palestinian activist, the first attempt this decade to hold an Israeli responsible for killing a Palestinian in the occupied West Bank. Yinon Levy, who was under western sanctions, is charged with manslaughter over the death of Awdeh Hathaleen, an English teacher and peace activist.

Hathaleen's family said Levy should have been charged with first-degree murder over the attack in July. "This was not an accident," said his cousin Tarek Hathaleen. "Yinon Levy must be held fully accountable."

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Global report

The big story p10 →

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15 INDIA

BJP loses byelection after youth Cockroach protests

Narendra Modi's ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) lost a byelection in a seat it had held for three decades. The contest had been closely watched in the aftermath of nationwide Cockroach movement student protests.

Prashant Kishor (above), a high-profile electoral strategist turned politician, scored a breakthrough win for his Jan Suraj (Good Governance) party in the Bankipur constituency in Patna, the capital of the eastern state of Bihar.

The Cockroach Janata party began as an online joke after a judge described unemployed young Indians as cockroaches and parasites. It is now a nationwide movement with 26.6 million Instagram followers, more than the BJP and Congress combined.

16 BANGLADESH/INDIA

Relations hit new low over exiled PM's speech in Delhi

Dhaka lashed out at India for allowing the ousted prime minister Sheikh Hasina to address journalists in New Delhi, plunging relations to a fresh low.

Bangladesh accused India of giving a platform to a fugitive it labelled a "convicted genocider", after Hasina vowed to return to Bangladesh in December despite facing a death sentence on charges of "crimes against humanity". The angry response last Wednesday came hours after Hasina, speaking on the second anniversary of the uprising that led to her flight to India, said: "Whatever fate awaits me, I will return to my people."

17 THAILAND

Teenager kills at least eight in school shooting

A teenager killed his grandparents before opening fire at his school, killing at least eight before taking his own life.

Last Saturday, police at the Plai Bang police station in Nonthaburi province said a 12-year-old girl who had been treated at hospital with critical wounds had died, a day after the 14-year-old boy wounded more than 30 people in the shooting at the Deksirin Nonthaburi school north-west of Bangkok.

Fourteen people remained in hospital last weekend, seven of them in critical condition.

Police were questioning more witnesses as part of their investigation, including the suspect's parents. The boy had lived with his grandparents for 12 years after his parents had separated, Atthapol Anusit, a police deputy commissioner, told reporters.

The suspect fired at least 26 bullets with a gun belonging to his grandfather. Police on Sunday told reporters the suspect had watched violent content online and used social media to learn how to use a firearm.

18 JAPAN

Trump tariff refund ignites profit spike at Nintendo

Nintendo has reported a jump in profits, as the Japanese game maker's earnings were buoyed up by a long-awaited refund on Donald Trump's tariffs.

The company said profits surged 53.5% to 147.4bn yen ($925m) over the three months to June.

Nintendo said sales of its Switch 2 console "maintained strong sales momentum", while popular games such as Yoshi and Pokémon Pokopia "performed steadily". However, that did not make up for an overall drop in sales compared with the same period last year, with revenue down by 10% to 517.8bn yen.

19 CHINA

Over a million evacuated as Typhoon Dolphin hits

More than a million people were moved to safety across eastern China by last Sunday as powerful Typhoon Dolphin made landfall.

Wenzhou, a coastal city in Zhejiang province, said it relocated more than 900,000 people and opened more than 1,500 emergency shelters. In neighbouring Fujian, 98,900 people were moved and in Shanghai, 215,600 people were evacuated from areas considered at risk.

Beijing was expected to be hit by more than one-third of its annual rainfall over a 24-hour period starting late on Tuesday as Dolphin - the strongest typhoon to hit China this year - moved deeper inland, prompting the closure of tourist areas and suspension of construction projects.

20 AUSTRALIA

H5 bird flu vaccinations rolled out for native species

Vaccinations against H5 bird flu are being rolled out for native bird species in captivity as the deadly virus continued to spread.

"We've been very clear that we cannot stop the H5 bird flu from spreading among wild birds, but we can take action to protect the species most at risk," said the federal agriculture minister, Julie Collins. "Vaccination is now part of that response."

Collins said states would manage the programme and warned Australians they would continue to see "more spread and larger numbers - particularly of dead birds and mass mortalities".

DEATHS

William Orbit

British music producer who worked with Madonna, Blur, All Saints and U2. He died on 23 July, aged 69.

Lloyd Robertson

Canadian journalist and news anchor. He died on 4 August, aged 92.

Geraldine de Haas

US singer known as "the first lady of Chicago jazz". She died on 28 July, aged 91.

Jorge Messi Argentinian businessman who was footballer Lionel Messi's father and agent. He died on 8 August, aged 68.

Benjamin Alire Sáenz

US writer and poet who was the first Latino to win the PEN/Faulkner prize. He died on 28 July, aged 71.

Arlene Smith US singer with one of the first "girl groups", the Chantels. She died on 29 July, aged 84.

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Global report United Kingdom

UK Spotlight p20 →

CRIMINAL JUSTICE

PM looks to exclude PC's killers from early release

Andy Burnham has told the justice secretary to find a way to exclude PC Andrew Harper's killers from the early release scheme aimed at easing prison overcrowding.

The prime minister is said to be "determined" that a solution can be found after increasing pressure from Harper's family and police not to allow Jessie Cole and Albert Bowers, who were sentenced to 13 years for manslaughter, to be freed in January under existing plans.

On Monday, Downing Street said it was "not possible" to exempt "one or two offenders" convicted of manslaughter from the scheme. But later it said the justice secretary, Alex Norris, would "work through further options" and look at ways to keep "a greater number of the most serious offenders" behind bars.

Harper, 28, was fatally injured when he got caught in a strap attached to the back of a car and was dragged down a country road as the killers fled the scene of a quad-bike theft in Sulhamstead, Berkshire, in 2019.

Cole and Bowers, two of three sentenced over the death, are due to be released halfway through their 13-year sentences, after being convicted in 2020. A petition demanding an intervention has nearly 900,000 signatures.

About 5,000 people are expected to be released early under sentencing changes. Exemptions were made for those convicted of rape, serious child sex offences and grooming offences. Prison officials have warned Burnham that changing the terms of the scheme would mean further early releases would be needed within 18 months.

DIPLOMACY

Labour wants 'deeper' ties with EU under Burnham

The UK will move faster and be more ambitious on achieving closer ties with Europe under Andy Burnham's government, his new chief post-Brexit negotiator has said.

Hamish Falconer, the new cabinet minister in charge of the EU reset talks, said there was "room to be ambitious" within Labour's red lines on Europe, which exclude reopening discussions on the single market and customs union, and he would look at the "art of the possible".

He said greater cooperation on services - which might include visa-free travel for British people working in the EU, or mutual recognition of qualifications - was the next big area where the UK hoped to make progress.

CULTURE

Banksy artworks in London cost taxpayers thousands

Three Banksy artworks have cost taxpayers almost £150,000 ($200,000) in removal efforts, security and other costs, with the bill expected to rise.

The costs - disclosed following a BBC Freedom of Information request - have reignited a debate over whether Banksy's work constitutes vandalism or valuable public art, particularly when it appears on historic buildings.

INFRASTRUCTURE

Harry Potter fans force diversion of power link

Harry Potter fans forced a new multimillion-pound power cable between the UK and Ireland to be relocated after complaining it would desecrate the "grave" of Dobby, a fictional elf.

The character was laid to rest on Freshwater West beach in Pembrokeshire, Wales, in the film Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

The £430m ($580m) Greenlink interconnector, which links the National Grid to Ireland, was initially going to pass through the site of the "grave". But after fans became aware of the plans, a new route was identified that avoided the supposed grave.

DEFENCE

Referrals to anti-terror programme hit record level

A record number of people were referred to the government's anti-terror programme in England and Wales, with a 39% rise over the last year, including a 42% rise in referrals for extreme rightwing ideology, official data shows.

A total of 10,293 referrals - up from 7,408 - were made to the Prevent programme in the year to September 2025, the highest number since records began 11 years ago. Those referrals to the scheme involved 9,957 people suspected of extremist or violent tendencies.

The rise comes after officials noted a significant increase in referrals since the Southport attack in July 2024. Axel Rudakubana, who killed three girls at a dance class and tried to murder eight others, as well as two adults, was referred to Prevent three times but his case was closed over a lack of clear ideology.

The figures show 2,103 referrals were because of concerns over extreme rightwing ideology.

20

Number of weeks (and counting) that Sam Fender and Olivia Dean's single Rein Me In has been at No 1 in the UK pop charts, beating a record that has stood since 1953

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Reader's eyewitness Feel the heat 'I am a firefighter at Nayland fire station, Suffolk, and took this at 3am on the first night of our station's first call-out to the wildfire at Dunwich Heath. It was a sobering sight as the crew members contemplated the fiery sky and the work in the days ahead.' By Jenny Taylor, Colchester, England, UK

SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENT

ASTRONOMY

High-resolution pictures may explain a great sun mystery

Golden bands and swirling vortices have been spotted on the sun in the most detailed images ever captured of its turbulent surface. Astronomers observed the sun with the Inouye solar telescope in Hawaii, the world's most powerful solar telescope, and saw new features smaller than 20km across close to a sun spot.

The pictures show processes on the surface that are likely to explain the mystery of why the corona, the sun's outer atmosphere, is millions of degrees hotter than its surface.

The small whirlpool-like structures on the sun's surface were identified as signatures of what scientists call Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities (KHIs). These form when fast-moving plasma slides past slower-moving fluid. This sets up small disturbances in the sun's plasma that grow into spiralling vortices that look like breaking waves. The details of the findings are published in Nature.

SPACE

What science saw when the SpaceX rocket hit the moon

A telescope in Chile captured evidence of the impact caused by part of a SpaceX rocket slamming into the moon while travelling at 8,690km/h.

The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope observed "spectral lines" - a colourful illustration of the sodium and lithium gas - in the plume of lunar dust stirred up by the impact. The telescope recorded these "chemical fingerprints" of the plume, which were visible for five to 10 minutes, the observatory said. The plume measured a few tens of kilometres in size.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

First AI-designed viruses raise hopes and fears

Scientists at Stanford University in California have made the first viruses designed by artificial intelligence. The viruses, bacteriophages, only infect bacteria and are used to treat patients with persistent infections. In lab tests, a

cocktail of the AI-designed viruses killed E coli bugs that were resistant to natural bacteriophages.

The ability to "rapidly design" genomes could "expand biotechnological toolkits", the researchers wrote in the journal Science. But they warned that the work raised "important biosafety, biocontainment and biosecurity considerations".

INSECTS

Butterflies change their habitats as temperatures rise

Butterflies are on the move across every continent they inhabit, shifting to survive as global heating reshapes their environment, a global study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution found.

About 80% of butterflies that shifted expanded their ranges, often moving as temperatures rise. The tawny coster butterfly - originally native to India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka - entered Australia in 2012 and has moved at a rate of 135km per year since. About 27% of species saw their ranges shrink, disappearing from areas they used to occupy. Others moved altitude, shifting to higher or lower elevations.

96

Number of invasive Burmese pythons eliminated from the Everglades national park by Tom Rahill, winner of this year's annual Florida Python Challenge

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FOOTBALL

Own goals

The fallout from Fifa president Gianni Infantino's plan to sell off the World Cup continues to spread, but the roots of the controversy go back to a decision made in 2010

By Jonathan Wilson

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The big story

11

Fifa

There are decades in which nothing happens, and weeks in which decades happen, and those weeks tend to result in leaders being toppled. Not even three weeks ago, Gianni Infantino was taking his victory lap on Instagram, attacking those “behind their screens spreading hate and false rumours” who had dared to question elements of his World Cup, which had generated a record $15bn in revenues. But the next day came the revelation of his plan to sell the World Cup to outside investors and a backlash that has him scrabbling to save his presidency.

It has been a remarkable few days, but this is a story whose roots stretch way back, to the decision in Zurich in 2010 to award the 2022 World Cup not to the US but to Qatar, to a furious Bill Clinton hurling an ashtray across the room and demanding action, to an FBI inquiry into corruption, and to the flipping of the larger-than-life US football executive Chuck Blazer, who had two apartments in Trump Tower, one for himself and one for his cats.

Blazer now appears the cheery, bearded, acceptable face of Fifa corruption. He drove about on a mobility scooter with his parrot on his shoulder. But it was Blazer’s evidence that led to the arrests at Zurich’s Baur au Lac hotel in 2015 and the resignation of Sepp Blatter.

The overwhelming favourite to

replace Blatter was the president of Uefa (European football’s governing body) Michel Platini. He, though, was unacceptable to the US, because it was his decision to switch his vote to Qatar, following – although he maintains not as a result of – a meeting at the Élysée Palace with the then French president Nicolas Sarkozy and the crown prince and prime minister of Qatar.

Conveniently, evidence was found of a payment he had received from Fifa in 2011 leading to his suspension. The Berne federal prosecutor, Michael Lauber, broke protocol to name Platini as something “between a witness and a suspect”. It was enough: Platini stepped aside and Infantino stepped in as Uefa’s candidate. Lauber subsequently became attorney general of Switzerland only to resign after secretly meeting Infantino while investigating Fifa. Platini was cleared and is suing both Fifa and Infantino.

At the time, Infantino was the secretary general of Uefa, notable largely for his comical earnestness while conducting Champions League draws. He was elected Fifa president in February 2016, defeating the Bahraini Sheikh Salman bin Ibrahim Al Khalifa, the president of the Asian Football Confederation, an avid hunter of wild boar who denied allegations of complicity in the torture of pro-democracy campaigners. Key had been a late change of mind by the Caribbean bloc: Sunil Gulati, the president of the US Soccer Federation, took credit for his persuasiveness.

With an ally elected, the US, Mexico and Canada won the right to host the 2026 World Cup. “You wanted to have it there and I wanted to have it there, and we really did it before we came to office,” Donald Trump, performing his classic trick of supervillain exposition, told Infantino at a dinner in Davos in 2020. The order of events is worth reiterating: Infantino was elected in February 2016, Trump was inaugurated in January 2017, the World Cup hosting decision was taken in May 2018.

The US has been a constant in

Infantino’s presidency. He took power at a time when the US attorney general, Loretta Lynch, was promising to swill corruption out of Fifa but in terms of decisive action that has amounted to little more than a handful of cases involving dodgy South American broadcast rights deals. In May 2019 Fifa appointed as legal representatives the US law firm Paul Weiss. A few weeks earlier Paul Weiss had named a new senior partner: the former US attorney general Lynch. The following year, she praised Fifa’s newfound “transparency and ethical behaviour”.

Few would agree with her. Infantino arrived promising reform, yet within a year he was removing two leaders of Fifa’s ethics commission. The same weekend that Trump sacked James Comey as head of the FBI, in part for investigating Russian interference in US politics, Infantino fired Miguel Maduro, the chair of the governance and review committee, for blocking the re-election as a Fifa vice-president of the head of the Russian Football Union Vitaly Mutko on the grounds that as Russia’s sports minister he breached guidelines on political involvement.

Infantino repeatedly bypassed the Fifa council, ducked the scrutiny of press conferences and came increasingly to rule by fiat. The plan to sell off a chunk of the World Cup is just the most egregious example. Why would he keep a plan of such revolutionary significance from his senior staff? Why would he give his members 53 days to consider such a plan, offering them a cash bonus to acquiesce? Why would he undermine his own tournament with hydration breaks and a half-time show in the final? Why override disciplinary protocols so the right players will be on the field, seemingly to highlight the tournament’s commercial appeal to potential investors?

The people who were in on the deal were connected to Trump, specifically Joshua Kushner, the brother of the president’s son-in-law. Again, questions arise. Why would you

Infantino bypassed the Fifa council and came increasingly to rule by fiat

Match report How the drama played out Page 12 →

Jonathan Liew What took so long? Page 14 →

Gianni Infantino faces the prospect of an election in March

GETTY/ALAMY/REUTERS/SHUTTERSTOCK/GUARDIAN DESIGN

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12

The big story Fifa

◀ From top: Concacaf's Chuck Blazer and then Fifa president Sepp Blatter in 2005; former US attorney general Loretta Lynch; former head of Uefa Michel Platini

Why would he keep a plan of revolutionary significance from his senior staff?

one of the two members of the five-man inner council who voted against the plan when informed about it the day before the World Cup final, was, notably, not there. Plans to expand the World Cup to 64 teams, rallying Infantino's base, have been accelerated.

Letters of support that had looked as if they would ensure Infantino a further term unopposed are being withdrawn. Last week, perhaps impressed by the promise of the 2030 World Cup final being in Casablanca, the Confederation of African Football pledged its support, joining Mexico, Argentina, Qatar, the UAE, Lebanon, Kuwait, Bhutan and Sri Lanka in backing Infantino.

Perhaps there will be an election, as scheduled, next March. Perhaps Infantino can muster a majority among Fifa's 211 members. But Uefa has vowed to "paralyse" Fifa until he is gone. The first tournament that might be boycotted is the Under-20 Women's World Cup, which begins in Poland on 5 September. Poland has made significant investment in infrastructure and is keen for the tournament to go ahead but its football federation would be unlikely to step outside the Uefa bloc.

The politicking goes on although already the discussion seems more about who might challenge or defeat Infantino than about how to change Fifa, where clientelism has reigned since João Havelange won the 1974 election. The institution itself is rotten; it may be that it is irredeemable.

It's hard to know how genuine Infantino's attempt to reform Fifa was, but it quickly foundered. And so Fifa's attempt to move on from the executive who rented an apartment for his cats in Trump Tower has wound up back in Trump Tower, with a president who rents an office there.

JONATHAN WILSON WRITES ABOUT FOOTBALL FOR THE GUARDIAN

sell off 21% of all future revenues for only 28% of what this World Cup made? Infantino's relationship with Trump - awarding him the inaugural Fifa Peace Prize, appearing with him at world events, giving him a Club World Cup trophy, renting an office for Fifa in Trump Tower that is seemingly barely used - had already brought criticism.

Uefa's robust and united response, the threat to boycott Fifa tournaments, was evidently not anticipated. The plan is dead, at least for now. Infantino, damaged, clings on, having rallied at least some senior Fifa staff at an emergency meeting in Rabat last week. The chief operating officer, Kevin Lamour,

TIMELINE

Fever pitch

How Infantino's grip on Fifa has unravelled, day by day

By David Hills

● Monday 27 July

Gianni Infantino marks the end of the World Cup by taking to Instagram with a 15-page post calling out the media for trying to sully it. He says journalists should step back and instead "take a moment to reflect, meditate, pray or watch a match".

● Tuesday 28 July

A report in the Times exposes Infantino's secret $4.2bn plan to sell stakes in the World Cup to private investors, potentially earning him tens of millions of dollars. Politicians and football figures attack it - including former Fifa president Sepp Blatter.

▲ Uefa president Aleksander Čeferin

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13

▼ Concacaf's Victor Montagliani

● Wednesday 29 July

Infantino admits the scheme is real but says it is also just a “proposal, an offer ... part of ... a consultation”. It later emerges that Fifa has given its 211 member associations a deadline of 19 September to back it or lose their $20m cut.

● Thursday 30 July

After the Guardian exposes the full details of the plan drawn up by Fifa and the US bank JP Morgan, Uefa holds an emergency meeting. All 55 members agree to boycott Fifa competitions if the plan goes ahead. Other football bodies join the backlash.

◀ UK prime minister Andy Burnham

● Friday 31 July

Hours after Fifa’s chief operating officer slates the proposal, Andy Burnham calls on Infantino to resign. Donald Trump, meanwhile, says he has nothing to do with it. In response to the global coverage, Fifa condemns journalists.

● Saturday 1 August

Fifa doesn’t proceed with the consultation. Infantino issues a new statement, withdrawing the plan. Uefa ups the pressure on him, saying the Fifa leadership has “lost our confidence”. But Qatar’s FA says it “fully supports president Infantino’s efforts to continue growing and strengthening the game”.

▼ US president Donald Trump

● Sunday 2 August

A rebellion appears to begin among members of the Fifa council, while European countries discuss withdrawing longstanding letters of support for Infantino’s re-election. Elsewhere, the New York Post claims Infantino has “repeatedly tried” to call Trump for help, but Trump isn’t answering.

● Monday 3 August

England, Wales and Serbia join Finland and Sweden in demanding change at the top. Meanwhile, lawyers acting for Uefa order Infantino and his staff to preserve all documents related to the collapsed scheme. The Concacaf president, Victor Montagliani, emerges as a leading contender to challenge for the job.

● Tuesday 4 August

More key allies distance themselves from the Fifa president, including his No 2, Mattias Grafström. Greece pulls support from Infantino, while Jordan’s Prince Ali bin al-Hussein alleges that Fifa threatened to withhold financial assistance from his federation if it refused to back the president’s bid for re-election.

● Wednesday 5 August

Infantino calls a Fifa staff crisis meeting in Morocco. Fifa then issues a statement saying staff gave him their unanimous backing while also putting his critics on notice.

● Thursday 6 August

Uefa doubles down on its boycott threat. The global players’ union, Fifpro, says while Infantino’s scheme is gone, “the abuse of power that produced it is not ... Reforms, not a cover-up, are urgently needed.”

● Friday 7 August

Mexico and Argentina follow Africa’s governing body in rallying round Infantino but Norway’s FA calls for him to go and makes a new ethics complaint against him. Infantino arrives in Colombia for the inauguration of the hard-right president Abelardo de la Espriella, a key Trump ally.

◀ Prince Ali bin al-Hussein of Jordan

● Saturday 8 August

Fifa issues a thinly-veiled attack on Uefa and other leading figures in European football in a statement that alleged an effort “to undermine Fifa and its president”. Fifa’s defence of Infantino followed Uefa’s confirmation that a “departure payment” was made to a female employee alleged to have been in a relationship with the Fifa president while he was Uefa’s general secretary more than a decade ago. The Daily Telegraph reported the woman received a six-figure sum, allegations Fifa dismissed as “categorically untrue”.

DAVID HILLS IS A GUARDIAN SPORTS WRITER AND EDITOR

▲ Colombia president Abelardo de la Espriella

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14

The big story Fifa

COMMENTARY

▲ Fifa's Africa regional office in Salé, Morocco JALAL MORCHIDJEPA

A president under siege

Infantino is getting his karmic kicking, but why did football take so long?

By Jonathan Liew

In recent decades the city of Salé, just across the river from Rabat on Morocco's Atlantic coast, has undergone a remarkable transformation. At the start of this century it was a gritty working-class area, whose old town was still weathered enough to serve as a body double for the Somali capital Mogadishu in the film Black Hawk Down. But in recent decades, under the country's autocratic government, the area has been transformed beyond measure, and largely beyond control.

The population has trebled in the space of 40 years. Slums have been cleared, often forcibly, to make way for grand megaprojects: a new tram system, luxury tourist spaces, a sparkling marina, a blue-chip business park and - since last July - the African headquarters of Fifa. And in a way, this hub of disruption and avarice, unshakeable volition and rampant capitalism, feels like the perfect location from which a besieged warlord might choose to make his desperate last stand.

According to reports in the Times, Gianni Infantino was "holed up" in Salé last week. Apparently Infantino's aides have been feverishly calling Fifa Legends - the organisation's paid ex-player ambassadors - to persuade them to offer their public support. Last week, one of them, Luís Figo, decided to break his silence. "Infantino

"This is the lowest, most deceitful and self-interested behaviour I have ever witnessed"

▲ Luís Figo Fifa Legend

must go," he said, condemning the Fifa president's plan to sell off a stake in the World Cup to private investors as "the lowest, most deceitful and cravenly self-interested behaviour I have ever witnessed". That'll be a no, then.

Meanwhile, the leaders of Uefa, Concacaf and the Asian Football Confederation are massing forces at the gates. And yes, this feels good, stirring, karmic. We should all take a certain satisfaction in seeing Infantino get his long-deserved kicking. But why now?

It is, after all, almost eight years since Fifa first proposed selling off a slice of its commercial legacy. In 2018 Infantino agreed in principle a deal with the Japanese firm SoftBank - whose main financial backer happened to be the public investment fund of Saudi Arabia - for an expanded Club World Cup and global Nations League. The scheme sputtered to a halt, but with none of the apocalyptic threats seen in recent weeks.

It is four years since the soiled, blood-soaked Qatar World Cup, and the "today I feel gay" speech that turned the sport's most important administrator into a figure of ridicule. Two years since Saudi Arabia were handed the 2034 tournament in a bidding process no other country appeared to be prepared for. Three years since the Club World Cup was coerced into existence over a chorus of player welfare concerns. Two months since Omar Artan was summarily denied entry to a World Cup in which he was supposed to be refereeing. One month since Folarin Balogun had his suspension overturned.

For the men and women who held Infantino's fate in their hands, none of this appeared to be a red line. And so it is worth wondering whether anything has changed, beyond the opportunity for ambitious footballing executives to claim the keys to Infantino's empire.

It is more than a decade since the late Lord Triesman, the former FA chair, described Fifa as a "mafia family". This is in many ways a supralegal body operating beyond the boundaries of conventional politics or economics, tied together through a system of tribute and protection.

Perhaps more striking still is the economic illiteracy. One hand-picked buyer (Joshua Kushner), one made-up number ($20bn) and an artificial countdown clock (19 September). Is this really how to fetch the best price for your asset? Or is it how you act when you want to secure a bigger piece of the largesse you have so selflessly created, but are statutorily bound to one more term in your current job?

In hindsight, it seems clear that Infantino's thirst for bending rules and breaking conventions was a way of demonstrating to the billionaire investor class that he truly was one of them. No wonder his first instinct on finding himself cornered was reportedly to appeal to Donald Trump: his roof, his protection, his kindred spirit.

It is often said that Infantino is the symptom and Fifa is the disease. In fact Fifa too is the symptom; the disease is capitalistic fascism, a simple disdain for humanity, a belief that some are born to rule and others to follow.

Football will, of course, endure. In a way its ingenuity, its ability to adapt, is its beauty and its curse. Like the Salé skyline, it grows and gentrifies and swells beyond recognition. This is still recognisably the same land, the same turf, upon which its ancestors once stood. But the old waterfront is gone for ever.

JONATHAN LIEW IS A SPORTSWRITER AND COLUMNIST FOR THE GUARDIAN

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15

UNITED KINGDOM The fossil gold rush on the Jurassic Coast

Page 20 →

Spotlight

AFGHANISTAN

'Pray for me'

How Taliban law lets husbands kill wives

By Khadija Haidary, Zahra Nader, Hura Omar and Atousa Azar for Zan Times

In a voice message recorded weeks before she died, Liza Shams, 33, asks a relative to pray for her.

"There's no end to my days of misfortune," she said. "Pray that God shames Hasib [her husband, Hasibullah Sarwari] in front of the whole world for what he has done to me."

In a second recording, she describes being beaten by Sarwari while pregnant, then kept isolated for days, injured to the point she couldn't eat or speak. "I'm a woman, fine, I should not talk about what happens in my home," she said. "But I can't do this any more."

On the afternoon of 1 February, Liza's neighbours heard screaming

and alerted the police. A short while earlier, her father, Shamsuddin Shams, had received a video call from his daughter. Her injuries were shocking. "Her jaw was broken and she could hardly talk," he said, but she had managed to pass the message that her husband had beaten her again. Shamsuddin immediately called his two other daughters living close by, who arrived at the house and took her to Rahmat hospital in Kabul. About an hour after arrival, Liza died.

The report on her death shows that Liza's face had been beaten in. The CT scan findings describe multiple fractures to her cheekbones and sinus walls, an injury pattern consistent

▲ Since the Taliban came to power, protections for women facing violence have been stripped away

WAKIL KOHSAR/ AFP/GETTY

Continued

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16

Spotlight^{}[] Asia

with enormous blunt-force trauma to the face. Photographs of her body and the report's physical examination, conducted the evening she died, document extensive bruising, injuries and swelling across her face and body.

Despite the extensive nature of her injuries, the forensic report lists the likely cause of death as ingesting rat-poison, noting that an autopsy was not performed at the family's request (Shams' father said this request came from her in-laws). Her husband's family did not respond to questions, but have argued that Liza took her own life, and that the bruising covering her body is a side-effect of poison.

Suicide is frequently listed as the cause of death in Afghanistan in cases where women die in violent circumstances – a designation that typically means no one will be held accountable for the death. Liza's father believes her death was murder.

The Taliban does not collect any data on how many Afghan women are killed each year. The attorney general's office, which used to collate this information, was abolished in 2023.

To measure what the state will not, reporters for Zan Times, a collective of journalists who work undercover in Afghanistan, collected cases of women killed in 10 of Afghanistan's 34 provinces since the Taliban came to power in August 2021, drawing on 174 instances reported by local media, as well as 57 cases documented directly by the journalists but previously unreported. The investigation found women across Afghanistan are being killed at home by husbands, fathers, brothers, in a system that all but guarantees impunity for the crime. Many cases are never entered into official records.

The team documented 231 cases, of which 53 were declared suicide, even when there was significant evidence of foul play. The provinces with the highest recorded tolls were Jawzjan (36), Herat (32), Badakhshan (28) and Ghazni (26). The age of victims ranged from girls as young as five to women of 65. Seven out of 10 victims – 165 of 231 – were housewives with no independent income or institutional standing to pursue a domestic violence case.

Most of the cases occurred in the victim's home. Across the dataset, only 58 arrests were recorded. Only one in four of the 231 killings resulted

in any arrest, but even in these cases, the suspect was often released – sometimes just a day after being detained.

The reporters found a number of deaths that according to family or witnesses had resulted from domestic violence, but were being officially recorded as suicides.

Freshta Emady, 33, a UN agency employee in Kabul, was found dead in her home on 31 May. Her husband

▲ Afghan women wait to receive food rations in April 2022. The following month the Taliban ordered women to cover their faces in public

◀ Liza Shams in a family portrait. Her father believes she was murdered

reportedly told Taliban police she had killed herself, citing a psychiatric condition. Her family and friends, however, believe she was killed by her husband. Five people who knew her said Freshta, who had been married off at 17, had spent 15 years being beaten, choked and controlled. A colleague said Freshta had described her husband repeatedly strangling her and telling her: "I'll cut your throat."

Often, the families of girls who try to intervene on behalf of their daughters can face deadly consequences. In Kandahar, a 14-year-old girl was killed after being given into marriage to a much older man. After she fled back to her father's family, he shot and killed her. Her younger brother, who ran to help, was also shot and died a week later. The Taliban opened a file but her husband, a serving member of the group, was never arrested.

In May in Sar-e-Pol province, Sara, 16, and her mother, Chaman, an Iranian-trained doctor, were shot dead by a local Taliban official who had forced an engagement on Sara. When Chaman refused to hand her daughter

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Five years of Taliban rule A series examining how Afghanistan has been transformed since the Taliban's return to power in August 2021

17

over without the agreed dowry, he beat her with his rifle and, as Sara ran to her mother, he shot them both. He was captured after a manhunt and remains in jail.

The Taliban's new criminal code means a husband's punishment for beating his wife to the point of visible injury such as fracture or wounds is capped at 15 days' imprisonment. If a wife goes to her family's house without her husband's permission, however, and her family does not return her on request, the wife and her family are subject to three months in prison. The code creates a legal structure in which seeking refuge from domestic violence brings a worse punishment than for the violence itself.

Even before the Taliban returned to power, Afghan women experienced gender-based violence at nearly three times higher than the global average. UN Women's 2024 Afghanistan Gender Index, published in June 2025, found that in 2018, nearly 35% of Afghan women reported violence from a partner in the past year - compared with a global average of 13% of women.

Since the Taliban took power, protections for women facing violence have been stripped away. After August 2021, the Taliban dissolved the Ministry of Women's Affairs, the special prosecutor's office for violence against women, and the country's shelter network. About 250 female judges were removed from the bench; female prosecutors were sent home.

Afghan law no longer permits a woman to be a direct party to her own legal case, so mothers cannot pursue justice for their daughters. In Takhar province, Shamsia (not her real name), the mother of a 23-year-old woman who was stabbed and set on fire by her husband in May 2025, said she was ordered by the local court to transfer power of attorney to her husband to pursue the case "because a woman cannot be a direct party to a petition or case file". Months on, the case has gone nowhere.

Our reporters could not interview most of the families of the women killed. Fear closed many doors; in several provinces, the journalists received threats after even attempting to make contact. The 231 cases in this dataset are not Afghanistan's femicide total - they provide only a snapshot of the potential killings, the dynamics

'I'm a woman, fine, I should not talk about what happens in my home. But I can't do this any more'

▲ Liza Shams' voice message

that enable them and the impunity that many killers enjoy.

Liza's case will probably be decided by a Taliban court. Her father, who has little hope of anyone being held responsible, has turned to social media, publishing recordings, hospital footage and documents in a campaign for justice for his daughter. He said speaking up has already come with a cost. His daughters who took Liza to hospital were subsequently summoned by the Taliban and have now gone into hiding. "It is because we spoke to the media, the Taliban don't want issues like this to become public."

Among the recordings her father released is a voice message Liza sent to her brother-in-law, in which she speaks about her marriage and her life.

"I feel like I'm suffocating," she said. "I suffer from these things. I'll try every day, I'll try every day, but this isn't working. Our life can't go on like this. I don't want our life to be bitter. My children are growing up, they'll look at us and see that we are fighting. But it can't go on like this."

Zan Times reporters inside Afghanistan write under pen names for their own safety. Sophia Malek, Tarana Mohammadi, Simon Danishjo, Atia Farazar, Faranak, Horia, Roya, Tamga, Maria, Gawharshad, Raha and Nahid contributed to this report

231

Number of women killed since the Taliban regained power in 2021, as recorded by Zan Times, a collective of undercover journalists

58

Number of arrests recorded against these cases, though the suspect was often released, sometimes a day later

15

Maximum number of days in prison a husband can receive for beating his wife to the point of visible injury

250

Number of female judges removed after the Taliban returned. Female prosecutors were sent home

▲ Freshta Emady was a UN agency employee in Kabul. Her family and friends believe she was killed by her husband

14 August 2026 The Guardian Weekly

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18

Spotlight^{}[] Middle East

IRAN

Crews still stuck as Hormuz standoff continues

By Joanna Partridge

The panicked crew of a cargo ship broadcast a distress signal late on 3 August from their location in the strait of Hormuz. About 20 nautical miles north of the coast of Oman, the Minoan Pioneer bulk carrier was hit by an unknown projectile, causing a blackout in the engine room and a fire in the accommodation area.

The crew scrambled to put out the blaze and called for help from nearby vessels. When they managed to disembark from the Greek-owned, Liberian-flagged ship the next day, they realised the third engineer was missing. He is yet to be found.

The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations centre is investigating

but has not yet officially confirmed the origin of the projectile, although analysts at the maritime intelligence company Windward noted: “Prior kinetic attacks at this exact location have been Iranian in origin, though Iran denies involvement.”

In the preceding 24 hours two other tankers in the region had reported near-misses. The flurry of incidents casts a spotlight on the danger facing the thousands of seafarers who remain trapped in the Gulf as the US-led war on Iran extends into its sixth month.

Iran has in effect blockaded the waterway, trapping 20,000 seafarers for weeks on end and inflicting a huge psychological toll.

As the war has dragged on, sailors have become casualties: 17 seafarers have died since hostilities began, the majority following Iranian strikes.

The crews stuck in the strait have had their hopes of departure raised several times, before being dashed. April’s ceasefire and the peace deal signed in June by Washington and Tehran both broke down shortly after being announced.

Several dozen oil and gas tankers seized the brief window offered by the deal to exit through the channel, but not all made it through in time. There are still 6,000 seafarers on 500 vessels trapped in the Gulf, according to the UN’s International Maritime Organization (IMO). “We need to remember that these are innocent people who are trained to do the work, that they are not trained for combat, and the vessels

▼ Indian sailors on a cargo vessel carrying sugar and wheat anchored off Muscat, Oman

ELKE SCHOLLIERS/GETTY

Number of seafarers who remain trapped in the strait on about 500 vessels. Some 20k were trapped before a brief ceasefire at the end of June allowed a small window to exit the channel

are not prepared to defend themselves against missiles and drones,” said the IMO’s secretary-general, Arsenio Dominguez.

For the crews stuck waiting to exit it is like being in “prison”, said Savio Ramos, general secretary of the Maritime Union of India, which represents merchant navy officers.

Traffic is still passing through the strait, albeit at extremely low levels, since hostilities and attacks on ships resumed following the collapse of the peace deal. Only 52 non-Iranian linked vessels transited the strait in the week from 27 July to 2 August, according to analysts at the shipping publication Lloyd’s List, of which 60% exited the channel and 40% entered.

A further 32 Iranian-linked ships passed through the strait during the week. In total, these 84 vessels represent just over 10% of the average 700 ship movements each week before the conflict broke out.

This means 70 large oil and gas tankers, owned by mainstream companies that are not subject to sanctions, have been stranded in the Gulf since February, according to Lloyd’s List analysis.

It is not clear how the stranded seafarers break down by nationality, but the biggest cohorts are likely to be Indians and Filipinos. India is the second largest global supplier of seafarers, with 312,000 working in the industry, after the 460,000 from the Philippines, according to the latest global seafarer report from the shipping associations the Baltic and International Maritime Council and the International Chamber of Shipping.

Since the war on Iran began, hostilities have spread to other regions, including the Red Sea and Iraq. In addition, Russia and Ukraine have been attacking each other’s vessels in the Black Sea in which 24 seafarers have been killed since the start of July. This prompted analysts from Lloyd’s to call July “one of the deadliest months ever for commercial seafarers”.

Many in shipping are concerned that the longer the Iran conflict drags on, the fewer seafarers will be willing to travel to dangerous regions - or go to sea at all. The IMO chief, Dominguez, pointed out that without seafarers, the “90% of goods that are transported by ships will not be able to reach their final destinations and all of us are going to be impacted”.

JOANNA PARTRIDGE IS A GUARDIAN BUSINESS REPORTER

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Spotlight Middle East

19

ANALYSIS ISRAEL

Peace price

Netanyahu incapable of placating US and far-right

By Emma Graham-Harrison JERUSALEM

Benjamin Netanyahu's public rejection of a US-backed deal for Gaza has drawn scepticism in Israel, amid reports he was personally hammering out details of a pilot military withdrawal days earlier.

The Israeli prime minister is struggling to balance incompatible demands on Gaza policy from his key domestic and international allies. The far-right Israeli politicians who prop up Netanyahu's coalition government want to intensify Israeli attacks on Gaza and establish settlements inside the territory.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump, who provides vital diplomatic and military backing for Israel,

wants to move towards a permanent settlement and return to Palestinian control in Gaza, brokered by the Board of Peace that he created and chairs.

With an Israeli election looming in just over two months, Netanyahu appears to have opted to publicly placate domestic partners who are already on the campaign trail.

Last Sunday he rejected a new 15-point plan for Gaza, which included a Hamas commitment to give up its weapons, meeting a key Israeli demand. He also resisted US pressure to end wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran without Israel's buy-in.

The remarks blindsided Israeli commanders who had been discussing implementation of the plan in meetings with Netanyahu and the Israeli chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, just days earlier, Israel's Channel 12 television reported.

"We learned about it today from the media," the station quoted a defence official saying. "At the meetings that were held until now, the prime minister personally gave his consent to this plan and to a withdrawal from the points in Rafah."

The meetings covered precise boundaries of three pilot areas in southern Gaza where a proposed international force could take over from the Israeli military, and the interface between the two forces, the report said.

Netanyahu's public attack on

◀ Benjamin Netanyahu appears to have opted to placate his domestic partners, with an election due in two months ILIA YEFIMOVICH/ AFP/GETTY

Flip-flopping Netanyahu has a long track record of audacious political manoeuvring, both at home and internationally. In May 2024, the then US president Joe Biden announced an Israeli-backed ceasefire and hostage release plan for Gaza, only to have Netanyahu distance himself from the proposal and ultimately reject it. For now the administration in Washington appears to have largely shrugged off Netanyahu's comments as electioneering, perhaps encouraged by military decisions that indicate a far more attentive regard for Trump's wishes.

the Board of Peace plan seemed like a pointed rejection of US goals because it was released soon after a reported visit by Adm Brad Cooper, who heads US Central Command.

He came to deliver in person the message that the Trump administration wants Israel to end its wars in Gaza and Lebanon, Israeli media reported. "The Americans' message to the IDF was to move in the direction of shutting down all three theatres of operations," a senior Israeli military officer told Channel 13 Television.

Defying Trump, who is notoriously thin-skinned and intolerant of dissent, is a risky gamble when Israel is internationally isolated and needs US military supplies.

Last week Netanyahu scaled back Israeli airstrikes on Gaza by raising the threshold for authorising attacks. Targeted killings must now be approved by the chief of staff, rather than the regional commander, unless Israeli forces are in "imminent danger".

Nor is this the first time he has bowed to US pressure to rein in wars that have the enthusiastic backing of his far-right allies, recently limiting the offensive in Lebanon, and last year ordering fighter jets heading for Iran to turn back at Trump's demand.

Netanyahu's combination of fierce domestic rhetoric and some conciliatory steps on the ground in Gaza may have bought him a bit of time but US patience may not last until polling day in late October.

Trump is weighing up election concerns of his own, as the US is holding midterms just a week after Israel votes.

In an interview with Israeli media, Nickolay Mladenov, the top envoy for the Board of Peace, said only that "discussions continue".

Palestinians in Gaza have endured nearly a year of deadly limbo after Trump brokered a nominal ceasefire last October. Israeli attacks have continued, killing more than 1,200 people.

Netanyahu's office rejected reports that he had discussed detailed withdrawal plans for Gaza.

EMMA GRAHAM-HARRISON IS THE GUARDIAN'S CHIEF MIDDLE EAST CORRESPONDENT

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Spotlight^{}[] Europe

UNITED KINGDOM

The fossil hunters who are chasing fortunes

Social media and soaring prices are fuelling a hunting boom, but valuable rare finds are being sold overseas

By Nicola Davis

Bent double at the waist, Martin Curtis combs a stretch of a Dorset beach with the concentration of a man searching for a lost cufflink or wedding ring.

Curtis is searching for the telltale spiral of an ammonite, the star-shaped rod of a crinoid or rocks of a particular shape and colour that suggests there is something very special inside. He is hunting fossils.

That growing interest reflects the rising value of Jurassic fossils, creating a thriving marketplace that has made some collectors social media celebrities and others very wealthy.

A Guardian investigation last week revealed that one of Britain’s most significant collections of Jurassic fossils was recently sold to a museum in Abu Dhabi for what is believed to be an eight-figure sum.

The collection, amassed by the private fossil collector Chris Moore, included 318 specimens, some of which may represent species previously unknown to science.

Fossil hunting – and the industry that has grown around it – is not a modern pursuit. Perhaps England’s best-known fossil hunter and dealer, Mary Anning, was born in Lyme Regis in 1799 and made discoveries along this coastline. Anning’s name

and image are everywhere, from information boards along the seafront to the colourful Charmouth Heritage Coast Centre. Here, fossil collecting is encouraged.

“On the rapidly eroding West Dorset coast, fossil collecting is essential if specimens, some of which may be of great scientific value, are to be saved from damage or destruction by the sea,” notes the West Dorset fossil collecting code of conduct.

Provided hunters follow the code of conduct, ownership of fossils passes to the finder. “Professional collectors have the most time, are able to react quickly to events that uncover the fossils – ie storms and landslides – and have a great deal of local knowledge. But they need to sell their finds in order to earn a living,” the code says.

It is easy to understand how fossil hunting becomes addictive. As we comb the beach, Curtis points to a smooth, brown, bullet-shaped object: the fossilised remains of a squid-like creature known as a belemnite.

“That belemnite’s 190m years old,” he said.

As a professional guide and fossil hunter, Curtis knows these beaches intimately. “I spent a lot of my childhood on the beach with my father, finding fossils in Kimmeridge,” he said.

As an adult, he returned to the coast while caring for his eldest daughter. “I could take her out on the beach, looking for fossils [while she was] fast asleep in the backpack,” he said.

He later turned his hobby into a business, using his mountain leader qualifications to run guided fossil walks and selling specimens he has painstakingly revealed from the surrounding rock using air chisels and iron-powder air abrasion.

Progressing along the beach, we pass the remnants of mudslides,

▼ Examples of fossils found on the coastline

JIM WILEMAN

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The Guardian view p49 →

21

◀ A fossil walk on Charmouth beach, Dorset, with hunter Martin Curtis

JIM WILEMAN

Treasure hunt

One of the most important collections of UK Jurassic fossils ever compiled has been sold to a museum in Abu Dhabi. The extensive collection, consisted of 318 specimens, including ichthyosaurs, fish and crustaceans among other creatures, some of which could be new species. The collection is understood to come from a sequence of rocks known as the Lower Lias, from Lyme Regis, Charmouth and the south-west of the UK. It was compiled by Chris Moore, a private Dorset-based collector with experience of hunting fossils in the area.

where it is clear there are many for whom fossil collecting is a more than a casual pastime. Hammers are swung, chunks of sticky mud broken apart and carefully examined.

Curtis said TikTok and Instagram have transformed the activity in recent years. Social media is awash with videos of fossil hunters cracking open rocks on Britain's beaches.

"It's really changed the scope of fossil hunting here. It's now making it a lot harder because it's introducing more people to fossil hunting. I've been running walks here for 10 years now and the change [during that time] is quite significant," he said, adding that the influx of fossil hunters during Covid staycations accelerated the trend.

Curtis believes parts of the coastline are being over-collected. "The erosion rate is struggling to keep up with the amount of people on the beach, because of the conditions," he said, noting that fresh material is not being exposed quickly enough. And when new material does appear, word spreads quickly on social media. "So even on a [good day], there's going to be twice as many people here."

Competition among professional fossil hunters is intense, with experts keeping an eye on one another as they vie for the finest discoveries.

"As fossil hunters, we are collecting to try to earn money. Maybe selling a few bits online. But generally, we are collecting for ourselves. And if we find anything good, we keep it," Curtis said.

Figures such as Moore have become big names in the fossil-hunting world, with his specimens displayed in museums locally and beyond, and counting David Attenborough among his friends.

The recent sale has cemented Moore's status as one of the Jurassic Coast's leading collectors. But his collection is unlikely to be the last to leave Britain. As the country's professional fossil hunters grow older, more private collections are likely to be in need of new homes.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a man used to handling relics from millennia gone-by, Curtis is philosophical about his friend's collection being sold overseas. "It's always sad when things like that go abroad," said Curtis. "The key thing is it's being enjoyed by someone. It's all well and good having a good collection, but it's no good stuck in a box."

NICOLA DAVIS IS THE GUARDIAN'S SCIENCE CORRESPONDENT

UNITED KINGDOM

Cambridge dons call for wider review of Arday affair

By Richard Adams

The University of Cambridge has announced a review into the way it vets and hires senior academic staff in an effort to fend off external and internal criticism of its appointment of Jason Arday as a professor. But a group of Cambridge academics quickly rejected the university's response, saying: "We strongly believe that a thorough and transparent investigation into the wider circumstances of this damaging episode is essential."

Arday resigned last week after mounting scepticism over his personal and professional claims, three and a half years after he was acclaimed as Cambridge's youngest black professor with a life story of educational disadvantage, including being unable to speak until the age of 11.

Cambridge sources said university and college leaders had hoped Arday's resignation would end the controversy, but internal anger has continued to grow.

The Guardian revealed last Friday that Cambridge academics were demanding the university carry out a thorough investigation. The nearly 100 signatories of the letter to the

university's vice-chancellor are senior professors and Cambridge academics. They want an independent investigation into the circumstances of Arday's appointment, and any risk assessment made by the university's management "when crafting a media narrative focusing on his youth, his race, and his transformative potential".

They also want details of the university's handling of allegations of academic misconduct against Arday, including whether the university was involved in efforts to deter journalists from reporting on the allegations.

The university has denied supporting Arday's efforts to stop publication of critical coverage in the Times Higher Education magazine last year, or funding his use of lawyers.

The signatories also call for an evaluation of the "enormous damage this episode has done to people of colour within and beyond the Cambridge academic community, and what can be done immediately to reassure them - and the wider public - that anti-racism and academic integrity at Cambridge are both essential and mutually reinforcing".

However, Cambridge's Jesus College - where Arday was a fellow - has said it will drop its previously announced plans to carry out a parallel "process" to the university's investigation. A message to staff from Sonita Alleyne, the college's master, said: "This is a very difficult time for Professor Arday and his family. As he requested in his resignation letter, we hope that they are now afforded peace and privacy."

One Cambridge academic said the message showed that the university wanted to "draw a line" under the affair in the hope that it would subside.

Arday's resignation followed intense media scrutiny, beginning with accusations of plagiarism and followed by questions over a string of his claims ranging from endurance running and charity fundraising to confrontations with masked assailants.

Cambridge initially defended Arday as "the victim of a vile campaign" before announcing that it would conduct an internal investigation of "new information" regarding Arday, who then resigned shortly after.

Last Friday, the University of Glasgow said it would review its past appointment of Arday as a professor.

RICHARD ADAMS IS THE GUARDIAN'S EDUCATION EDITOR

► Jason Arday was a professor at Cambridge

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Eyewitness

Europe

Drought discoveries

Record-low water levels in the Danube have exposed remnants of Europe's Nazi past, with dozens of second world war ships emerging from the riverbed during an intense drought.

In the middle of the river on the Serbian and Romanian border, a broken-up hull was visible on a sandbank that is normally underwater. Other vessels were partly submerged, some still believed to be laden with weapons.

The ships were part of Adolf Hitler's Black Sea fleet that the German military deliberately sank towards the end of the war to slow down the Soviet advance. Historians say up to 200 warships were scuttled in this way in September 1944.

The ships have been revealed during previous droughts only to disappear again as water levels rose

along the second-longest river in Europe. The Serbian government has tried in the past to remove the wrecks, but most remain in place owing to the explosives they carried.

The Danube, which flows through 10 countries, has become increasingly difficult to navigate as low water levels create dangerous conditions. Prolonged droughts have left major European rivers at significantly lower water levels than is typical for the time of year, creating an energy crisis as many power plants rely on their natural water supply for cooling.

Slovakia, Austria and Hungary registered record temperatures last week. Last Thursday, the Slovakian hydrometeorological agency said a new national record of 42C had been reached in the village of Dolné Plachtince. Oliver Holmes The Associated Press contributed to this report

▲ Human remains from the second world war are inspected in Hungary

GERMAN WAR GRAVES COMMISSION/AFP/GETTY

▶ Historically low water levels of the Danube in Croatia

CROPIX/SIPA/SHUTTERSTOCK

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◀ A military motorcycle found in Budapest, opposite the Hungarian parliament building REUTERS

▶ The river bed of the Rhine in Dusseldorf, Germany INA FASSBENDER/GETTY

▲ People swimming near a sunken warship in Prahovo, Serbia DJORDJE KOJADINOVIC/REUTERS

200

Number of German warships that historians believe were scuttled in the Danube in September 1944

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WILDFIRES

By Ajit Niranjan

▲ People look towards central Toronto as forest fires turn the skies orange

COLE BURSTON/ AFP/GETTY

Running on fumes

The complex health burden of wildfire smoke

As fires are more prevalent, scientists are racing to analyse the far-reaching effects of exposure to tiny airborne particulates

A thousand kilometres from the infernos gorging on northern Ontario's boreal forests, an emergency room doctor, Erin O'Connor, watched the sky above Canada's biggest city turn an "almost post-apocalyptic" orange as it filled with light-scattering particles of soot and ash. Stepping outside the halls of Toronto general hospital, where air filters were keeping patients safe from the worst of the fumes, she was struck by a smell so strong it felt like standing by a campfire.

"It really hit you in the face as soon as you walked outside," said O'Connor, who runs University Health Network's emergency department and saw an increase in patients presenting with

allergies and shortness of breath. "As the days progressed, it was like that everywhere. It seemed even inside you could smell that burning."

Far more than the flames that have engulfed southern Europe and North America in recent weeks, it is the smoke that dominates the astonishing death toll from combusting nature. Thick with toxic gases that inflame the airways and tiny particulates that breach the lungs and ride the bloodstream to hit every organ in the body, fumes from landscape fires kill 1.5 million people each year, a study in the Lancet found in 2024 - more than floods, flames, storms and heat combined.

So damaging are the lung-scarring effects of charred plant matter that

people far from the fires may still perish. The plumes spewed by wildfires in Canada in 2023 caused 82,000 early deaths, a study in Nature found last year, with unfavourable winds pushing a third of the mortality burden into the US and another quarter into Europe. About 10% of the UK's fine particulate pollution (PM2.5) comes from biomass burned abroad, researchers found in March.

Yet while scientists agree the health burden of wildfire smoke is jaw droppingly large, they are only beginning to untangle the complex links between exposure and mortality. The open research questions are growing more pressing as climate breakdown makes fire weather more severe. What if hotter infernos cause pollution to peak at even more extreme levels? What if bad air lasts several days or weeks? What if an episode hits before a person has fully recovered from the last bout of smoke?

Perhaps surprisingly, the death toll from a fire season can depend on the whims of the wind as much as the size of the fire. Wildfires in France spewed record amounts of pollution in the first half of the year and in Spain emissions have so far fallen just shy of the worst it has known. But even though monster infernos were halted alarmingly close

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to Madrid and Bordeaux, the smoke was mostly blown away from where people live. Daily particulate pollution levels still peaked at a staggering 342 micrograms of PM2.5 per cubic metre (µg/m³) in Bordeaux on 24 July – and 486 µg/m³ in Limoges, 180km away, the following day – but other big cities in southern Europe were spared the extremes that doctors fear.

North America has not been so lucky. As winds blew south and south-east from scarcely populated forests in Ontario and the Northwest Territories, at least 36 million people across the continent were breathing air fouled by “very unhealthy” concentrations of PM2.5 that exceeded 125.5µg/m³ on 16 July, preliminary analysis conducted for the Guardian shows. At least 10 million people were exposed to more than 250µg/m³, according to the estimates, a level of daily pollution that smog-choked New Delhi saw no more than eight times last year.

Scientists say the hit to air quality in some big cities is reminiscent of the megafires in 2023 that came with huge death tolls. “As soon as we have massive population centres exposed, we’re going to see those increases,” said Stephanie Cleland, a wildfire health scientist at Simon Fraser University, who considered only people living within 25km of a measuring station in her calculations and said the figures are therefore conservative. “I would be concerned by the fact that it’s only been three years since this last happened and now we’re having it again.”

In a suburb of Duluth, in north-east Minnesota, the worst of the smoke was seen, smelled and tasted on 16 July. Jae Jeon and Dan McClelland, who grow flowers for weddings and subscription deliveries, were looking forward to opening the windows after days baking in oppressive heat. Instead, they woke up to a fog that they soon realised was made up of something much worse. By late morning, their local hardware store had sold out of masks and air purifiers. People resorted to attaching furnace filters to box fans instead.

The McClellands were among 12,000 people in west Duluth exposed to an average of 541µg/m³ of fine particulate pollution, the analysis shows, higher than anywhere else in North America. They sent their sole farmworker home early after she complained of a headache but the couple had to work on, surrounded by a dystopian haze.

“It felt like working in a war zone,” said Jae Jeon. “When I went outside, I couldn’t breathe, so I had to wear a mask, but it was still painful. After just a couple of minutes you started to get a headache.”

Climate breakdown made last month’s fire weather twice as likely in Canada and France, and 20 times more likely in Spain, rapid analyses have found. Scientists have relied on general air pollution relations to model the smoke’s chronic health effects, which make up the bulk of the death toll, because they lack long-term studies specific to wildfires. “The reason we don’t have them for wildfire smoke is because we haven’t had to deal with this as kind of a repeated ongoing problem,” said Michael Brauer, a wildfire health scientist at the University of British Columbia and co-author of the study on Canada’s 2023 fires. He first experienced wildfire smoke when he was about 40 years old, he said, while a 10-year-old child where he lives in British Columbia would have breathed it every summer of their life.

But the analogy to regular pollution is imperfect. Compared with other sources of PM2.5, such as factories or cars, wildfire smoke contains a greater share of organic compounds that increase inflammation and a higher concentration of ultra-fine particles that penetrate the deepest recesses of the lungs. PM2.5 from wildfire smoke is up to 10 times more deadly in the short-term, a study in Nature Communications found in 2021, and factoring this into epidemiological models suggests death tolls from short-term exposure to wildfire smoke have been greatly underestimated, a study in the Lancet Planetary Health found last year.

Fire damage Impact caused by exposure

1.5m Number of people killed by fumes from landscape fires every year, according to a 2024 study in the Lancet

82k Number of early deaths caused by the effects of wildfires in Canada in 2023

10% Proportion of the UK’s fine particulate pollution, or PM2.5, that comes from biomass burned abroad

▼ The Quilpituk Creek wildfire in British Columbia, seen here across Okanagan Lake

DARRYL DYCK/THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP

For chronic disease, though, some researchers suggest high peak exposure during serious smoke episodes better explains why wildfire particulates do more damage than regular ones. “It may be that it’s because the smoke is chemically more toxic, or it may be – what I think is more likely – that it’s basically overwhelming your defences,” said Brauer, who compared it to having one drink a day for a year rather than bingeing 365 in 24 hours. “That’s clearly going to have different impacts.”

Can the fires behind the smoke at least be prevented? At the Fifa World Cup final, the US president, Donald Trump, asked his Canadian counterpart, Mark Carney, to “stop these fires from coming in and poisoning our air”. Republican senators blamed Canada’s fires on poor forest management. Scientists countered that the blazes had little to do with land management – most of what has burned is boreal forest in unpopulated areas – and a lot to do with the rise in temperatures caused by burning fossil fuels, which Republicans have expanded.

In Europe, though, changes in land use have alarmed firefighters and wildfire experts about as much as global heating. Rural regions across the Mediterranean have hollowed out, resulting in more overgrown vegetation that dries out and allows fires to spread more easily during the hotter heatwaves that climate breakdown has brought. The combination of the two factors has led Spanish wildfire scientists to warn that we have “entered an era of fires we cannot extinguish”.

It is a problem that other parts of the world, from the western US to Australia, already know well. Adding to the climatic burden in the coming months is the arrival of a strong El Niño, a cyclical warming weather pattern, along with a related natural phenomenon in the Indian Ocean, which is priming countries across south-east Asia to burn.

The McClellands said that – even though they still had their homes and their health – the episode had given them a taste of the suffering that climate breakdown has long caused in other countries. “I feel like this opened my eyes to understand just a sliver of what other people are feeling,” Dan McClelland said.

AJIT NIRANJAN IS THE GUARDIAN’S EUROPE ENVIRONMENT CORRESPONDENT

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26

Spotlight^{}[] Asia Pacific

How Sydney’s rich and powerful profited from the slave trade

AUSTRALIA

By Paul Daley

▼ South Sea Islanders on a Townsville plantation in 1870

STATE LIBRARY OF QUEENSLAND

A new book retraces Australia’s often overlooked legacy of using enslaved labour, specifically through the 19th-century kidnapping of Pacific Islanders known as ‘blackbirding’

Emelda Davis is a former Sydney city councillor, community advocate and second-generation descendant of blackbirded South Sea Islanders. Otherwise known as enslaved people.

Australia has often sought to reassure itself that at least the nation is untainted, unlike Britain and the US, by a heinous history of slavery. But “the evidence of the Australian slave trade through blackbirding is everywhere – it hides in plain sight”, Davis said.

She has written the foreword for a new book by Ryan Butta, Blackbirding: A Reckoning With the Australian Slave Trade. The book’s release coincided

with the landmark June 2026 bilateral Nakamal agreement between Australia and Vanuatu, in which Australia formally acknowledged, for the first time, the legacies of blackbirding – the practice of kidnapping Pacific Islanders and using them as enslaved workers or forced labour.

“Blackbirding is a term that comes directly from the African slave trade, then into the West Indies and the US,” Butta said. “A lot of people go: ‘Oh, it was something that just happened up in a small part of Queensland to do with sugar cane.’ But most of Australia has had no concept of the scale of it.”

Between 1860 and 1906, up to

62,000 Pacific Islanders were shipped to Australia to work primarily in sugar cane and cotton farming. They also worked on the Sydney docks and in other maritime industries, and as labourers in civic projects.

Butta wrote: “The Pacific Islanders came, they died, they were buried like dogs and more were sent for.”

As a former member of Sydney city council, Davis was central to ensuring it acknowledged the city’s links to Australia’s blackbirding history. In the late 19th century, her grandfather was taken from the island of Tanna (part of today’s Tafea province of Vanuatu) to labour in the Queensland sugar cane industry – one of colonial Australia’s biggest wealth creators.

“He was just 12 years old and one of a great many South Sea Islander children who were stolen – and he never returned home,” she said.

Ironically perhaps, Davis, the chair of Australian South Sea Islanders Port Jackson, lives in inner Sydney’s Pyrmont, her house overlooking the historic “sugar wharves” managed by the Colonial Sugar Refining Company – transformed into today’s tranquil harbourside parklands. The CSR sugar refinery, a relic of one of the colony’s

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27

leading companies and most totemic brands – is acknowledged as part of the park’s urban history.

“It pays homage to the refinery and its products – but about what happened to us?” Davis said. “There’s nothing. We need our own monument on the sugar wharves.”

What little is acknowledged about blackbirding tends to focus on the canefields of north Queensland but Butta’s book, centred on the wharves that Davis’s house overlooks, tells a different story – one that focuses on how a who’s who of colonial Sydney profited from the capture and sale of Pacific Islanders and from the products, especially sugar, produced with their enslaved labour.

From the 1860s Sydney’s docks, and the ships of some of the city’s prominent merchant traders and political leaders, formed the hub of a slavery industry that traded in tens of thousands of Pacific Islanders sent to work on Queensland plantations where at least 15,000 died. Men, women and children were deceived to “sign” work contracts they couldn’t understand, abused and often kidnapped. The “contracts” stipulated they would be rewarded in kind at the end of their indentured terms and repatriated. Many were neither rewarded nor returned.

Butta, of Sicilian-Australian heritage, did not set out to write the Pacific Islander experience of blackbirding – although the book recounts many appalling episodes of ill treatment of enslaved people. He believed he did not have cultural authority to do so.

Instead, he exposes the Australian business of enslaving Pacific Islanders.

After Britain abolished slavery in 1833, its parliament granted £20m in compensation to former enslavers for lost income. Prominent British families who moved to the fledgling colonies established themselves on the proceeds of slavery’s abolition, most prolifically in South Australia, which has prided itself on being the free state, devoid of obdurate convict stains.

“I was surprised that so many of the people connected [to blackbirding] had links back to that [family] money they received when they were compensated for the freeing of their slaves during abolition, and how that money found its way to Australia,” Butta said.

His research revealed how political, legal and mercantile vested interests protected the trade in human flesh.

‘Evidence of the slave trade is everywhere – it hides in plain sight’

Emelda Davis Community advocate and former councillor

62k

Number of Pacific Islanders shipped to Australia between 1860 and 1906, to work primarily in sugar cane and cotton farming

15k

Number of Pacific Island labourers who are believed to have died on Queensland’s plantations

◀ Robert Towns, ‘a criminal scoundrel’, according to Ryan Butta

STATE LIBRARY OF QUEENSLAND

Davis is right about the truth being in plain sight. It is incarnate in the landscape of Sydney and monuments elsewhere. From what was the old CSR refinery site near her home, I walk to the old “rotten row” – today’s Towns Place Wharf. There is a plaque lionising the prominent Sydney merchant and shipowner Robert Towns and another trader, Henry Moore – men “who imported and exported every commodity imaginable: sugar, rope, salt, sandalwood, horses and skins, sperm and black oil, and later wool”.

Robert Towns (after whom Townsville, Queensland, was named, though he barely set foot there), was a prominent New South Wales politician, a man Butta declares was, a “criminal scoundrel”.

In 1869, after French complaints that Australian ships were kidnapping people in the Pacific where France had extensive colonial interests, NSW established a royal commission. The inquiry found no incriminating evidence.

Guardian Australia contacted CSR for comment. The company – long since absorbed into a multinational, Wilmar – makes no public mention of its historical reliance on blackbirding but Wilmar told Guardian Australia: “Wilmar acquired the sugar assets from CSR Limited in 2010. Wilmar recognises the significance of our industry’s history and the contribution of the people and communities that helped shape it. Today, we remain committed to operating responsibly, ethically, and with respect for human rights.”

Like NSW, the Queensland parliament was conflicted when it came to Islander labourers because, Butta writes, “planters were politicians and politicians were planters”.

Sometimes the forced labour of Indigenous people and blackbirded

labourers overlapped. Pacific Islander and Aboriginal labourers worked together, for example, to build Queensland’s Cape Bowling Green Lighthouse in the 1870s. Today it stands in Sydney’s Australian National Maritime Museum collection after being moved there in 1994.

Another terrible shared legacy of Australian colonisation’s inhumane impact on First Nations peoples and blackbirded South Sea Islanders can be found in the collections of their remains in public institutions.

Davis and Butta estimate that body parts in Australian collections belong to at least 1,000 blackbirded Pacific Islanders. They are in the collections, among others, of the National Museum of Australia in Canberra, Sydney’s Australian Museum (the country’s oldest), and Queensland Museum. All of which have also held collections – some extensive – of Australian First Nations remains.

Butta references an 1852 article in the Sydney Morning Herald “noting that the Sydney Museum [later the Australian Museum] had set up a display of a human skeleton – one of the northern islanders imported by the late Mr Benjamin Boyd”.

These collections are a profound characteristic of the inhumanity and eugenics that underpinned slavery.

“Recognition of what happened to us, what was done, is critical,” Davis said. “We are not properly seen – and we need to be seen. Repatriation of [South Sea Islander] remains and cultural artefacts is central to that.”

Negotiations between South Sea Islander representative organisations, governments and collecting institutions have begun. But repatriation is slow and painstaking because the provenance of human remains is frequently difficult – or impossible – to determine.

In the meantime, an official Australian apology would be inordinately meaningful for Australian South Pacific Islanders, Davis said.

“What’s in the word ‘sorry’ – it means don’t do it again?” she said. “But, you know, a prime minister stepping up and really apologising for what occurred would be a big step. We can’t change the past. But it’s about being seen.”

PAUL DALEY WRITES ABOUT INDIGENOUS HISTORY AND NATIONAL IDENTITY FOR GUARDIAN AUSTRALIA Blackbirding by Ryan Butta is out now

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Spotlight^{}[] Africa

KENYA

‘Free up the ganja’ Rastafarians stand up for their rights

By Carlos Mureithi NAIROBI

About a dozen people chanted along to the pulsing vibrations of drums and a tambourine in a dimly lit room in Nairobi’s sprawling Kibera neighbourhood. For more than an hour they belted out songs suffused with references to Ethiopia, Jah, Zion, Rastafari and Haile Selassie I.

The musicians were members of the House of Nyabinghi, one of the main denominations or “mansions” of Rastafari, a religion and social movement that came under the spotlight in Kenya after a court ruling on 15 July dismissed a petition to decriminalise the use of marijuana for spiritual purposes.

Three days later, the House of Nyabinghi – named after a legendary

east African woman whose name means “mother of abundance” – met for their weekly “groundation”, or gathering.

A red, yellow and green flag and images of Rastafari’s influences, such as Haile Selassie I, Bob Marley and the Jamaican political activist Marcus Garvey, embellished the walls. Sizzles and crackles were heard as some of those gathered lit marijuana, its scent filling the air.

Among them was Ras Orudi, who came to Rastafari after being inspired by Jamaican reggae artists such as Peter Tosh. “Rastafarians are not rejecting the system,” said the 38-year-old herbalist. “They are trying to integrate into the system while defending their rights.”

Also in the room was Ras Ndeto, whose inspiration was meeting a Rastafarian from Guyana who taught him “livity”, the practice of righteous and natural living centred on a plant-based “ital” diet and the growing of dreadlocks.

The 56-year-old said the court’s decision marginalised followers of the religion, who would appeal to a higher court. “We still feel we are a minority group in this country because even our culture is looked down upon,” said Ndeto, who holds the title of prophet and is the spokesperson for the Rastafari Society of Kenya. “We are living like terrorists in our own country.”

An Afrocentric religion, Rastafari is centred on the beliefs that the former Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie I is

▼ Ras Dimo (left) and Ras Masinde pray at a gathering in Kibera, Nairobi

EDWIN NOEKE

Figurehead The movement emerged in the 30s within marginalised Afro-Jamaican communities after Protestant leaders declared Haile Selassie I's crowning the fulfilment of a biblical prophecy. The religion is named after his pre-coronation name, Ras Tafari Makonnen.

the messiah, and that Black people are oppressed by Babylon – a metaphor for western capitalism and imperialism.

Ras Dimo, a priest who often leads prayers in Kibera, became enlightened partly through reading books examining the connection between Black people and the Bible. “I was inspired to know that Black people are not cursed as imperialists tried to make us think,” the 43-year-old said. “We are living in a time when many are blinded.”

Like many other Rastafarians in Kenya, Dimo was born into a Christian family and later became Rastafari. They adopt the title Ras, which means “head” or “chief” in Amharic, the most widely spoken language in Ethiopia.

The population of Rastafarians in Kenya is unknown. In 2019, a court recognised Rastafari as a legally protected religion in a landmark ruling after a pupil alleged discrimination when her school expelled her due to her dreadlocks.

Marijuana is a sacrament in the faith, and Rastafarians believe consuming it puts them in a meditative state that helps them connect with the divine. Followers in different parts of the world are pushing for its decriminalisation. In 2023, Antigua and Barbuda approved allowing Rastafarians to grow and smoke marijuana.

In 2021, the Rastafari Society of Kenya filed a court petition seeking the exemption of Rastafarians from arrest and prosecution for cultivating, possessing and using the plant for religious purposes.

The court ruled the society had failed to prove that the law violated Rastafarians’ constitutional rights, among other reasons.

Ras Masinde, another follower in Kibera, became curious about Rastafari as a child after encountering a man with dreadlocks. He became rebellious, refusing to cut his hair, and after finishing school in the 90s started growing dreadlocks and reading about the Rastafari religion, before finding a community.

“We Rastafarians urge Black people to go back to their roots and culture,” said the 50-year-old. “We fyah bun [condemn] colonialism and imperialism, and say every man, woman and child ... is equal before the eyes of the almighty.”

He issued a rallying call: “Free up the herb. Free up the ganja seed.”

CARLOS MUREITHI IS THE GUARDIAN’S EAST AFRICA CORRESPONDENT

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Spotlight South America

29

COLOMBIA

The white elephant activist who became a senator

By Tiago Rogero

When 102 senators were sworn in for Colombia's latest parliamentary session, they included 32 women, 69 men and one cartoon elephant. He had some difficulty making his way down the narrow aisle of Congress's ceremonial chamber, weaving past fellow senators in sharply tailored suits and dresses, before taking the oath in his pot-bellied white plush costume.

But blending in was never an option for the new senator, who ran almost his entire campaign without revealing his identity. It was only three days before the election that Luis Carlos Rúa, 34, revealed himself as the person behind Elefante Blanco (White Elephant), a reference to the term used to describe overpriced, abandoned or ultimately useless public works, which he had spent the previous five years exposing on social media.

His videos attracted hundreds of thousands of views, some projects were resumed and Rúa became one of Colombia's most popular senators, with about 124,000 votes.

"The inauguration day was spectacular because nothing like it had ever happened anywhere in the world," said Rúa, who took off the head of his costume only occasionally during the swearing-in ceremony. "I'm about to go into a plenary session, but I'm not wearing the costume because it's for specific occasions and not every debate is that significant."

The character's origins can be traced back to 2019, when Rúa was working for the mayor's office in the city of Pereira. During that time, he said he witnessed the administration pressuring employees to secure votes for a candidate. He recorded a conversation and leaked it to the press. "I had to leave the city because I received death threats," he said.

He moved to Medellín and continued exposing wrongdoing anonymously, because "here in Colombia, if you don't do things the way the crooked people want, you're not welcome".

He commissioned the elephant design from an illustrator and had the costume made by a seamstress. He posted his first video, about an unfinished road, in November 2021.

Since then, there have been dozens more about bridges, schools, tunnels and hospitals, all narrated in a distorted voice and sometimes showing Elefante Blanco trudging through mud or wading through murky water that stains the white costume - Rúa keeps a spare.

"It's extremely hot inside it, but it still has to be done because I'll go to

◀ Luis Carlos Rúa at his parliamentary swearing-in and, above, revealing his true face ELEFANTE BLANCO

places the state doesn't go," he said. Rúa funded his trips through freelance work, the sale of Elefante Blanco toys and crowdfunding, but said it was not sustainable and decided to run for office so that, with a senator's salary, he could continue his oversight work.

He announced his candidacy in December but remained anonymous. "Revealing my face just three days before the election gave me enough time to protect my own safety," he said. Rúa received at least one vote in almost all of Colombia's approximately 1,100 municipalities.

For Gabriel Cifuentes, a political analyst, Elefante Blanco's election says as much about the influence of social media as it does about "a growing weariness with traditional politics. Politics is seen as a corrupt exercise and, in that sense, activists like him, who are not tied to political parties, tend to attract the attention of a public that is increasingly connected through social media."

One of Rúa's proposals is a law requiring municipalities to allocate budgets to fix potholes. It would be named after his father, Darío Rúa, who was 85 when he fell on a potholed street and died in 2024.

The senator said he had cast a blank vote in the presidential runoff between the leftwing senator Iván Cepeda and the far-right millionaire lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella, who won. "I'm not from the left, the right or the centre," he said. "I'm independent."

Even so, he faced criticism for voting in favour of De la Espriella's proposal to move last Friday's presidential inauguration ceremony from Bogotá to Cali, 450km away. The proposal passed the senate by 58 votes to 30.

Critics said Rúa had campaigned against wasting public money, only to back moving the entire inauguration, with its hundreds of guests and staff, for a single day.

Rúa said he wanted to send "a signal of state presence in a region that has historically been neglected" and that, even with the venue change, it would cost less than the leftist president Gustavo Petro's inauguration in 2022.

Rúa promised to attend the event dressed as Elefante Blanco. "My relationship with [De la Espriella] will basically be one of political oversight, and it would have been exactly the same if the other candidate had won," he said.

TIAGO ROGERO IS THE GUARDIAN'S SOUTH AMERICA CORRESPONDENT

'It's hot inside the costume, but it has to be done because I'll go to places the state doesn't go'

Luis Carlos Rúa Elefante Blanco

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30

Spotlight Technology

ARTIFICAL INTELLIGENCE

Is AI going rogue?

The UK's AI Security Institute test says OpenAI and Anthropic models have indulged in unprecedented cyber hacking attempts

The UK's AI minister, Kanishka Narayan, said AISI was "absolutely vital". "Identifying new behaviour like this and sharing our findings ... is exactly what AISI was set up to do," he said

By Dan Milmo

Advanced artificial intelligence models have stunned the UK's AI Security Institute (AISI) by carrying out a hacking campaign against real people during a cybersecurity test.

The institute said the incident was unprecedented and involved sending targeted emails to software developers in an attempt to pass a cyber challenge.

The hack involved agents - AI systems that can perform tasks without human help - powered by models developed by US tech companies OpenAI and Anthropic. AISI, which was set up by the former prime minister Rishi Sunak, described the unsanctioned behaviour as a “serious incident”. The watchdog said the hack was carried out by agents powered by two models - Anthropic’s Mythos 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol.

AISI detected unusual activity during a routine cybersecurity test on 28 July. It found that some of the models had engaged in “sustained, potentially harmful activity directed at real people and organisations”. It took an hour to contain the incident.

"This is the first time we have seen risks around autonomy and deception manifest this clearly, without specific prompting, in the real world," the institute said in a blogpost.

The incident follows similar episodes at OpenAI and Anthropic. Last month, OpenAI said an agent powered by its models had hacked an AI startup during a test. Days later, Anthropic said its Claude model had hacked three organisations during an evaluation.

AISI said the series of incidents taken together represented a “shift in the risk landscape”. This was not an example of deliberate misuse of publicly available models but showed models in a research environment taking unintended action “beyond their authorised scope”.

The watchdog said 17 of the 19 cases of unsanctioned behaviour that occurred during the evaluation were carried out by Mythos and two by Sol.

AISI said the incident was not a case of a model breaking out of its “sandbox”, the term for a secure testing environment. The institute said it had intentionally permitted

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internet access and disabled filters within the models that blocked dangerous behaviour.

What happened?

In the most serious incident, the Mythos agent decided that hacking users on GitHub – a platform used by software developers – would enable it to deploy a piece of software that would allow it to pass the test. It set up accounts with fake online identities and used them to target a software developer on GitHub with the power to approve its malicious code. It also sent emails carrying malware to other individuals.

It hoped that getting the malware downloaded would set off a chain of events that would allow it to pass the evaluation. The Sol-powered agent also attempted to access a GitHub account.

This novel behaviour was detected on 28 July and took an hour to shut down. At one point AISI shut off all access to the Mythos and Sol models across the entire organisation.

'We should not be alarmed about what the models are capable of but the way people test them'

Alan Woodward Professor of cybersecurity

Why was AISI alarmed?

The institute said the models were showing deceptive behaviour it had not seen before. In one example, the Mythos agent signed off a message on GitHub in Danish to try to convince the Danish-speaking developer it was genuine. In another tactic it used a fake GitHub account to agree with its assertions that the malware it was pushing at developers was not dangerous.

The agent used a Tor browser – which anonymises a web user's identity – to get around sign-up checks on GitHub and create multiple fake accounts.

AISI also published the agent's "reasoning" behind the fake supporting statement ruse. The model, which tackles problems by breaking them down into "steps" that can be viewed by researchers, stated that it would delay posting the fake support message for a few minutes so that it would read as "independent feedback rather than coordinated".

AISI described the behaviour as "sustained". It kept on trying.

How did it all unfold?

In a detailed 35-page report into the incident, AISI said that five important factors contributed to the incident:

• The models were deliberately given open internet access, which enabled them to approach GitHub.
• AISI deliberately disabled certain cyber guardrails.
• The institute did not have a separate AI monitoring the tests in real time, which helped the main GitHub incident go undetected for nearly two days.
• In some cases the models received a "misconfigured" instruction that prevented them from solving the test and thus required them to act outside the boundaries of the evaluation.
• The agents were not given explicit instructions prohibiting them from certain behaviour such as sending phishing emails.

Did the models know they were targeting real humans?

AISI says it is unclear whether the agents "realised" they were targeting real humans. Throughout the attempted hack, the Mythos agent reasons about whether it is interacting with real or simulated people

19

Number of cases of unsanctioned behaviour that occurred, 17 of them by Anthropic's Mythos 5 and two by OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol

2

Number of days that the main GitHub incident went undetected, due to AISI not having a separate AI monitoring the tests in real time

and systems. At one point the agent reasons that it is behaving in the real world: "This is happening on real GitHub, so the consequences are genuine." It also states: "The environment appears to be simulated."

AISI described the agent conducting "OSINT" – or open source intelligence, where a hacker pulls together publicly available information to work out how to breach a target – to study the developer behind the software it wanted to hack. It gained the developer's email address and looked at their GitHub history to gauge when they would be active.

What do experts think?

AISI states clearly that these models were operating under abnormal conditions of unfettered internet access and lowered cyber guardrails. Calling for the incident to be viewed with "nuance", it said it had partly enabled the behaviour with its own actions – but it did not anticipate the "extent and severity" of what happened.

Alan Woodward, a professor of cybersecurity at the University of Surrey, said giving the models access to the open internet and removing some guardrails raised questions about using the rest of the world as "live guinea pigs" for powerful technology.

"What we should be alarmed about is not what the models are capable of but the way people are testing them," he said.

AISI said in its report into the GitHub incident that giving a powerful model full internet access was a good way of simulating how far a rogue actor could push an AI. It said such a strategy gives a "more realistic sense of what a model may be capable of once deployed".

Ciaran Martin, the former head of the UK's National Cyber Security Centre – part of the GCHQ intelligence agency – said the circumstances of the incident were unlikely to be replicated in the real world so "it's not that worrying". But he said it was the third example in recent weeks, after similar occurrences at OpenAI and Anthropic, of testers releasing AI agents and finding out about their misbehaviour after the fact.

Martin said AISI's pledge to carry out real-time monitoring of tests in the future "must be the answer".

DAN MILMO IS THE GUARDIAN'S GLOBAL TECHNOLOGY EDITOR

GUARDIAN DESIGN/GETTY

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Spotlight North America

ANALYSIS UNITED STATES

Step to the left

Will Michigan primary force Democrats to accept shift?

By David Smith

Standing before The Spirit of Detroit statue last Wednesday, Abdul El-Sayed channelled boxing great Muhammad Ali. “We shook up the world,” he declared.

The 41-year-old former public health official had just delivered a knockout blow to the Democratic establishment, defeating the US congresswoman Haley Stevens to claim the party’s nomination for the Senate in swing state Michigan.

El-Sayed had campaigned on universal healthcare, halting military aid to Israel and sweeping campaign finance reform. The moderate Stevens had received $60m from outside groups, including $30m from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) and its affiliates.

It was the latest tremor in a political earthquake consuming the Democratic party. Its leftwing insurgency was no longer confined to deep blue coastal cities; it had breached the walls of a critical midwestern swing state.

Matt Duss, executive vice- president of the Center for International Policy and a former foreign policy adviser to leftwing senator Bernie Sanders, said: “It’s dissatisfaction with the status quo. It’s dissatisfaction with the establishment.

“Voters are fed up with an elite establishment that is not delivering, that doesn’t feel their pain, that doesn’t seem to know or care about their struggles, and that’s part of why Abdul succeeded.”

Last November, Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist laser focused on affordability, beat establishment favourite Andrew Cuomo to become the first Muslim mayor of New York. He then helped three insurgent candidates win Democratic primary elections in New York. The “Mamdani effect” swept through Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Washington state, Wisconsin and Washington DC.

The driving factors include frustration with Donald Trump, the cost of living, corporate money in politics and the conflict in Gaza. Reuters/Ipsos polling showed Israel’s favourability among Democrats plummeting from 59% in 2018 to just 22% in May 2026. The influx of Aipac money into political campaigns

has become toxic for younger voters.

In Michigan, which has the highest percentage of Arab Americans, El-Sayed accused Israel of committing genocide and built his campaign around a demand to end unconditional US military aid. This positioned him directly against Stevens, who defended the US-Israel relationship and benefited from massive Aipac spending.

The rise of groups such as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which includes Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, has occurred in tandem with a crisis of confidence and identity within the centrist wing of the Democratic party.

Norman Solomon, director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, said: “One might say that hell has no fury like corporate Democrats scorned. I’m thrilled by the results in Michigan but I’m a bit apprehensive about the blowback from the powerful forces that have been accustomed to literally running the national Democratic party, arguably since the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) was so successful at the beginning of the 1990s.”

The DLC was founded by Al From, who in 1989 handpicked Bill Clinton to steer the Democratic party toward the centre ground. From reflected: “We’ve been focusing on beating Republicans and the democratic socialists have been focused on beating us. We’ve got to fight back.”

The test of viability for El-Sayed – a Rhodes scholar, doctor and son of Egyptian immigrants – will come in November when he faces Mike Rogers, a former Republican congressman, in a race that could determine the balance of power in the Senate. After a rancorous campaign, El-Sayed was quick to urge “the things that unite us are bigger than the things that divide us” and Stevens was quick to back him.

Donna Brazile, a political strategist and former interim chair of the Democratic National Committee, said: “The question is, can two different wings of the same party unify and function if the Democrats win the majority? I contend that the answer is yes.”

DAVID SMITH IS THE GUARDIAN’S WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF

◀ Democrats Abdul El-Sayed, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani GETTY/ GUARDIAN DESIGN

“ Voters are fed up with an elite that is not delivering, that doesn’t feel their pain or care about their struggles

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Spotlight Caribbean

33

CUBA

Dark defying Supporters rally to keep revolution flame alight

By Ruaridh Nicoll PINAR DEL RIO

In the dark before dawn, Juan Víctor Hernández Campo was cheerleading a 5,000-strong crowd in the outskirts of the Cuban provincial capital of Pinar del Rio. Many wore T-shirts commemorating Fidel and Raúl Castro's 1953 attack on the Moncada military barracks.

The rest of the island, 1,300km long and sweltering in the Caribbean night, was asleep. Houses beside the road on the way to Pinar's Revolution Square appeared caught in one of the country's endless blackouts.

For six months, Cuba has been suffering an oil blockade imposed by the US, leaving an already parlous economy in tatters. The island's national grid collapsed a couple of times this month, and these outages followed three nationwide blackouts over nine days in July.

It's hard to find anyone who doesn't blame Cuba's leaders for the situation, for landing the country in a position where its future looks set to be dictated by the most careless of US presidents.

But in the Plaza de la Revolución, there was no shortage of Communist party faithful. They had gathered before 3am to celebrate one of the Cuban regime's most important anniversaries - the attack on Moncada is widely seen as the opening act for the revolution - waiting for the president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, and perhaps even the 95-year-old former president Raúl Castro, who hadn't missed a 26 July celebration for 30 years.

"We're here because we really feel it," said Yomira, who works for a state agricultural business and agreed to use only her first name.

Since the US attacked Venezuela

on 3 January, abducting its president, Nicolás Maduro, Washington has made it clear it is pursuing regime change in Cuba. With the US threatening such action, Cuba's military has been readying itself for defence. The island has a small regular force of about 50,000 personnel but its equipment is woefully antiquated. So, instead of a conventional military defence, Cuba insists that in the case of invasion, the entire population - most of whom received military training when they graduated - will rise up in defence of the nation.

Few Cubans seem keen: there was amazement when 79-year-old Silvio Rodríguez - the country's version of Bob Dylan - was shown on television receiving an AK47 from the president.

"The problem with a 'war of all the people' - the model they adopted from the Vietnamese - is that it's almost entirely based on a reserve force," said Hal Klepak, a professor emeritus at the Royal Military College of Canada. "And that reserve force has been atrophying since 1990 [when the Soviet Union withdrew its support]."

But Ebhony Semanat (a self-chosen pseudonym), said she would be ready to fight. The 50-year-old customer service manager said: "If that moment ever comes, I'll do whatever has to be done. What I'm not willing to do is live as a slave or return to the kind of slavery my ancestors endured."

While Cuba's population has traditionally split evenly between white and black - with every shade between - black people are more

likely to point to the revolution's achievements because of the racial inequalities it overturned in its early years. It is telling that more than 90% of Cuban Americans who fled the revolution in the 1960s identified as white.

Díaz-Canel arrived in the square exactly at 5.15am, the same hour the attack on the Moncada barracks had begun 73 years earlier. He said that the celebration was being held in Pinar this year because, "amid power outages and shortages of every kind", the city had "held its infant mortality rates to 4.8 per 1,000 live births and had a maternal mortality rate of zero. That is what we call heroism!"

Raúl Castro, who now lives under the threat of abduction having been charged with murder by the US in May, did not turn up. "He asked me to convey a warm embrace to all," said Díaz-Canel. The sun had not yet risen when the president finished speaking and the crowd filtered away.

Cuba's negotiations with the US have so far been conducted by Raúl's grandson, Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, a businessman with no official governmental position.

Asked whether he felt such a negotiator was in the spirit of the revolution, Emilio Avila, one of the last to leave the square, said: "I am sure the party will do the right thing." As he walked away, two black military pickup trucks rolled past, anti-aircraft guns poking out of the back.

RUARIDH NICOLL IS A JOURNALIST BASED IN CUBA

90%

Proportion of Cuban Americans who fled the revolution in the 1960s who identify as white

50k

Personnel make up Cuba's regular military force but the country insists the entire population will defend the nation

▼ People attend a ceremony on 26 July marking the 73rd anniversary of the assault on the Moncada barracks ANADOLU/GETTY

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ILLUSTRATION: GUARDIAN DESIGN/GETTY IMAGES/IMAGE SOURCE/REUTERS/AFP/AP

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When a young Nigerian was lured to London from his job on a Lagos market stall, he had no idea he had been targeted for organ harvesting

By Alexis Okeowo

body snatchers

DANIEL ARRIVED IN LAGOS FOR THE FIRST TIME IN 2016. He had come from a village in Ebonyi, a state in south-eastern Nigeria. He was 15 years old, the eldest of nine siblings, and his parents were farmers. When he was a boy, his father became sick and Daniel started working to assist his family, helping to cut trees and clear land. A few years later, he decided to seek his fortune in Lagos.

In Nigeria’s commercial capital, Daniel spent his days in the open-air Ikotun Market, where thousands of people shop every day for everything from tomatoes and fabric to suitcases and electronics. He sold cellphone accessories out of a wheelbarrow under a wide umbrella, making less than $13 a day. After living with a relative, he moved into a room with friends, including a young man named Chukwudi, who also worked in the market. Daniel had grown up in the same village as Chukwudi. A photo from their early childhood shows the boys together, Daniel in a red sportswear shirt.

Daniel was short and slight, with an unassuming face and sleepy eyes. He was playful and liked to joke around, Chukwudi recalled, “not a troublemaker”. They often hung out with another friend from the market, Ben, who was older and carried himself like he was destined for better things. “Ben was living big boy life,” Chukwudi told me. “He was balling out, flexing; he can go and eat anything he like.”

One day in 2021, Ben disappeared from the market. He wouldn’t be in touch again until later that year, when he called Daniel and told him the good news: he had got a job in the UK. “Wow, God has done for you then?” Daniel said. Ben asked if Daniel was interested in working abroad. Ben sent his friends videos of himself dancing in London, living the good life. He had accomplished the dream: he had escaped the dim economic prospects offered by his home country and got out. (There is a Yoruba slang term for it: “japa”, or as one Lagosian put it to me, “It’s like running for your life.”) Daniel was interested in doing the same.

Soon after, Daniel received a call from a man named Obinna Obeta, who had got his number from Ben. Obeta said that he could help Daniel get to the UK, where he would provide him with accommodation and work. But first, he said, Daniel would need to go to Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, to undergo some medical tests. Daniel wasn’t sure what to make of this, until he received the money for his trip to Abuja. “That is the day that I knew he was serious,” Daniel later told a court in London. He assumed the medical tests were part of the process for getting a visa.

In February 2022, Daniel said goodbye to Chukwudi at a bus station in Lagos and began his journey to Britain. He had never met Obeta in person. When later asked in court why he thought Obeta was helping him, he responded simply: “Because I think it’s from God.” from God.'

Obinna Obeta, the man who contacted Daniel, was a Nigerian radiologist who had moved to London to seek treatment for kidney failure. Nigeria suffers from high rates of kidney disease, but few people have health insurance or can afford dialysis and medications. “Kidney disease treatment in Nigeria: people are just moving from here to the morgue. It’s traumatising honestly,” Obeta would later say. It was not until 2025 that Nigeria introduced comprehensive standards and guidelines for organ transplants, and only 2,000 or so kidney transplants have taken place there. Many Nigerians who have undergone organ transplants have done so abroad.

Even in countries with advanced healthcare systems, the wait time for a kidney can be long: two to three years, on average, in the UK, and up to five years or more in the US. According to the World Health Organization, organ transplant tourism – where patients travel abroad to purchase organs – accounts for at least 5% to 10% of transplants worldwide. Organ trafficking is believed to take place in about 50 countries, and it is one of the most under-reported forms of human trafficking. The UK considers moving people across

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The body snatchers

international borders for the purpose of harvesting their organs a form of slavery, treating human beings as commodities to be bought and sold.

In July 2021, seven months before Daniel left for the UK, Obeta had undergone a successful kidney transplant at the Royal Free hospital in north London. It cost him £70,000. He used the services of a medical tourism company, run by a Nigerian doctor who was then an NHS consultant. The kidney donor was Daniel's friend Ben, whom Obeta had falsely claimed was his cousin.

On the flight to London, Daniel knew none of this. Accompanied by a man and woman he had not met before, he had only a few possessions: some clothes, lotion and soap. No shoes besides the ones on his feet. It was his first time on a plane, and he slept for much of the flight. After landing, the man took Daniel to a house in south London, where he met Obeta for the first time. Daniel was told he would sleep in the living room.

As Daniel would later testify, Obeta treated him like a "houseboy". "Every day I wash plates, I wash toilet, I wash, I sweep," he recalled. Daniel did not have any money and was reliant on Obeta for his meals. Even his passport was taken. There seemed to be no escape.

Across London, in Willesden Green, Sonia Ekweremadu was getting sicker. Less than two months before Daniel arrived in the UK, she had posted an end-of-year recap reel on her Instagram page. It showed her, a light-skinned 24-year-old woman, dancing, going out with friends, and lying in a hospital bed with a pink teddy bear. Her family home was in Abuja but she lived in London, having attended various private schools in England. With several family properties in Nigeria, as well as in the US and UAE, she had the privileged upbringing that is typical of a Nigerian politician's children.

Sonia's father was Ike Ekweremadu, one of the most prominent and powerful figures in Nigeria. Ike Ekweremadu had been elected to the Nigerian senate for a fifth consecutive term in 2019, and served as deputy president of the senate. His reputation extended beyond national borders, after his stint as speaker of the parliament of the Economic Community of West African States in the 2010s.

It was while Sonia was studying for her master's degree in film at Newcastle University in 2019 that she became sick. As she grew weaker, she had to drop out. A family friend eventually referred her to the Royal Free in Hampstead, which specialises in treating kidney disease. Sonia was diagnosed with FSGS nephrotic syndrome, a rare disease where kidney scarring leaks protein into the urine and causes bodily swelling. In August 2021, Sonia met with Peter Dupont, a consultant nephrologist at the Royal Free, who noted that she would require dialysis or a renal transplant. She received dialysis in a private patients' unit on the top floor.

In September 2021, the court later heard, Sonia's uncle, Isaac "Diwe" Ekweremadu, who is a doctor, called an old medical school classmate to talk about the transplant that he had at the Royal Free that year. Diwe wanted to know whether his niece might be able to have a similar operation. His former classmate was Obinna Obeta.

At the time, Obeta was in desperate need of money. As a non-UK resident, he still owed £27,000 to the Royal Free as part of the £70,000 he was paying for his kidney transplant. He also had to spend £1,600 every month on immunosuppressants, so his body wouldn't reject the kidney, and other medications and tests. "It just kept increasing. Just kept increasing," he later said of his debt. For an initial sum of just under £2,000, Obeta agreed to help find a kidney donor for Sonia. He referred the Ekweremadus to the medical concierge service he had used for his own transplant. Soon after, Obeta got in touch with the young man who had provided him with his kidney, Ben, to ask for help finding a donor. Through him, he found Daniel.

By November 2021, Ike Ekweremadu had a solution for his daughter. He forwarded a message to his wife: Diwe had found a donor who "matched very well". The next step was to get the donor a passport and

Dr Obinna Obeta

then a visa to the UK. Daniel had no idea that the following statement was written on his visa application:

"I wish to state on conclusion of this application that I would be donating an organ to my closest cousin (Sonia Chinonso Ekweremadu) in appreciation for her sacrifices towards me, my family, and our community. I'm willing to put my life on the line for her to live and continue her good service to humanity. Finally, I wish to state that I'll be travelling in company with my uncle, Obinna. He has been a father-figure since I lost my biological father."

None of this was true: Sonia was not a relative of Daniel's, nor was Obinna Obeta. He had never met either of them. His biological father was still alive. He had never discussed the prospect of organ donation with anyone.

DANIEL ARRIVED IN LONDON IN FEBRUARY 2022. Before his arrival, Sonia's doctor at the Royal Free had written a letter to the Nigerian doctor who ran the concierge service, stating that she was not responding well to treatments and agreeing that a transplant would be the "best way forward for her". The family had informed the Royal Free that they had a candidate, telling them that Daniel was 19 and a distant cousin of Sonia's. The doctor added in his letter that this prospective donor was younger than he would consider ideal and, because he was not a close relative, there could be difficulties gaining approval from the hospital and the UK Human Tissue Authority.

In the UK, kidney transplants are highly regulated. If the donor is alive, they have to go through extensive physical and psychological evaluations to make sure they are medically suitable and willing to donate. Once the surgical team approves the donation, the Human Tissue Authority must interview both the donor and the recipient to determine whether the donor has given consent and to ensure that no payment or coercion is involved.

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In the UK, kidney transplants are highly regulated. Donors go through extensive evaluations

▲ The parents Ike Ekweremadu (top) and Beatrice Ekweremadu AP

According to the court transcript, Diwe told her parents that they should now say that Daniel was a first cousin of Sonia, not a distant one. He also later told them that there was a medical secretary at the hospital who would act as Daniel's interpreter. For a fee of £1,500, she had agreed to coach Daniel on what to say during the interview he'd need to do for his kidney donation to be approved. She recommended that Daniel be at the

hospital during Sonia's dialysis treatments to show his firm commitment to his cousin's health.

The week of Daniel's arrival in London, Obeta took him to a west African restaurant to have lunch with a young woman and an older woman. Daniel had no idea who they were, and testified that the women didn't ask him any questions about himself. They seemed afraid of something, he said. At the end of the lunch, the group took a photo. The two women were Sonia and her mother, Beatrice Ekweremadu.

Later that week, Obeta took Daniel to the Royal Free, where he saw Sonia and Beatrice outside. Before Obeta began talking with them, he told Daniel to stand away so he could not hear. "Obinna would just tell me where to stay and he would go with them and they would start discussing. Like they was controlling me," Daniel testified. He was confused to learn that he would be meeting with a doctor. "They said if the doctor ask me the school that I go, I should tell the doctor that I go to higher institution," Daniel told the court. "If the doctor ask me who is Sonia, I should say that Sonia is my cousin. They give me many things to answer the doctor. I should tell the doctor that they not pay me."

On 24 February 2022, Daniel went in for a meeting with Peter Dupont, the consultant nephrologist at the Royal Free, while Obeta waited outside. "He told me that I want to do a kidney transplant," Daniel later recalled. "I was shocked because that is the first day that I hear about this kidney transplant." Dupont asked him about his relationship to Sonia and what had motivated him to be a donor; about whether he was working or studying; and about what his parents did for a living.

Daniel gave the answers he had been coached to provide. In court, Dupont recalled that Daniel had been subdued: "We spoke for perhaps 15 or 20 minutes. His answers were very brief: single sentences, single words. He didn't really appear to have any understanding of what it was that he was signing up for." Dupont explained that there were dangers associated with the procedure, such as excess bleeding, infections and blood clots, and "a small risk of death", as he wrote in his notes. Even if the operation went well, Daniel would have an increased risk of chronic kidney disease and end-stage renal disease. He would require regular follow-ups for the rest of his life to monitor his kidney function, blood pressure and urine protein levels.

Noticing Daniel's uneasiness, Dupont asked if he was scared to tell the Ekweremadus that he did not want to go ahead. Daniel said he did not want to donate his kidney. It was only when Dupont made clear that the operation would not happen that Daniel finally made eye contact, the doctor testified. "He was nervous that I would say or imply that the decision not to proceed was his fault. I assured him that confidentiality was paramount and the intended recipient would be told he was unsuitable." He recalled Daniel saying about Obeta: "He had not told me anything about this. I would never have agreed to any of this. My body was not for sale."

Afterward, Daniel told Obeta that he answered what questions he could, but there were some he could not. Obeta was angry. "He say that if I don't do this - he used Igbo language to say this - if I don't do this ... I will find it difficult," Daniel testified. (Obeta insisted to the court that he had discussed the kidney transplant with Daniel before the meeting.) Obeta also told Daniel that he had 1.2m naira, or about $900 then, for him if he went through with the operation.

At the end of March, the decision was taken out of their hands. The Royal Free formally ruled out the possibility of allowing Daniel's transplant operation to go ahead.

Daniel was relieved, but he was still living in limbo. He was not allowed to leave the house, and spent much of his time with Obeta's kids when he was not doing chores. A few weeks after the Royal Free declined to proceed with the operation, two people came to Obeta's house to examine Daniel. They asked him to remove his clothes and applied pressure to his stomach. They still wanted to do the transplant, Daniel said, and Obeta told Daniel he had booked him a flight back to Nigeria. Daniel was unsure what they had planned for him. "That is when I start to become afraid because I don't know what I am going to do. Because all the plans, everything they are doing is behind my back," Daniel testified.

As Daniel later told Chukwudi, his childhood friend, he had been in a state of panic. "He was even crying, he don't know what to do," Chukwudi recalled. "Even me, when he was telling me everything, I was crying. I didn't know what to do. Because if he comes back, he has nothing to do again. He has already sold his market [stock], he used the money to buy some clothes for his trip."

In court, Daniel and Obeta's accounts of what happened next differed in a few small ways. But the likeliest story is that on 2 or 3 May 2022, a friend of Obeta's took Daniel to Heathrow airport for a flight back to Abuja. But Daniel decided he could not go back to Nigeria, where he feared he would be coerced into donating his kidney. Despite carrying little more than a used Samsung phone, AirPods, chargers and £27.90 in cash, he fled. He ended up walking around for three days, sleeping outside. He then ran into a stranger on Kingston Road in Staines, who gave him food and let him take a shower in his flat.

On 5 May, Daniel went to nearby Staines police station, where he told officers a story that was mostly fictional. He said he had been begging for money on the streets of Lagos before coming to London, and that he was an orphan with no family in Nigeria. He told officers that the man he had travelled with had promised him money, but that he couldn't say what the money was for. He said he was only 15. (Daniel would later testify that he was trying to

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The body snatchers

give the impression of being a vulnerable youth with nowhere to live in Lagos, so he wouldn't be deported.)

According to Chukwudi, who spoke to Daniel not long after he went to the station, a Nigerian woman hosted Daniel at her home when the police released him into protective care. On the call, Daniel still sounded afraid about the attempted kidney transplant, but he said the Nigerian woman was taking him to church. He thought he might even get the chance to go to school.

With Daniel now gone, the Ekweremadus needed a new plan. After consulting with friends and colleagues, they decided on a new transplant location: Turkey. While the Ekweremadus maintain that Sonia had no knowledge of the plan to illegally get a kidney donor, she responded to her father's WhatsApp messages that had photos of new potential donors. To one photo of two young Black men, Sonia wrote: "OK, that's fine. Thank you. Are they still more to test?"

Her father told her: "Yes, but by the end of the week, I will decide who to proceed with. We will get it right this time."

Sonia wrote back: "I trust you, daddy, thank you ❤️". Then she added: "The dark one looks better, the light one looks like he'll run away 😂😂😂".

In June 2022, on Father's Day, Sonia wrote to her father on the family group chat: "Happy Father's Day, daddy, you mean the world to us ... You are the best father in the world. I know lots of people say that about their fathers, but mine is really the best ... I pray for long life and prosperity, to be able to see your grandchildren and great-grandchildren in Jesus' name. Amen. I want to especially thank you for everything you've done and are doing regarding this transplant process. You and mummy have gone above and beyond for me, and it never goes unnoticed and unappreciated ... I hope that one day I'll be able to take care of you, and mummy, the way that you've taken care of us all these years (don't worry, I haven't forgotten your Range Rover gift)."

Ike replied: "I know you didn't forget, sweetheart ... I will spare nothing to ensure your good health and comfort. I have the support of mummy on this objective 100%. By the grace of God, you will be out of this challenge before the end of August. It's a promise. Just be strong for all of us."

Two days later, Ike and Beatrice Ekweremadu were arrested at Heathrow as they travelled back from Turkey. They were charged with conspiracy to commit human trafficking for the purpose of exploitation, specifically organ harvesting. The couple had at least £30,000 in cash on them. Sonia was arrested the same day at her home in London. Obeta was arrested the next month. Sonia's uncle Diwe remained in Nigeria and was not extradited to the UK. (I was unable to reach Diwe for comment.)

It is extremely rare for a Nigerian politician of Ekweremadu's status to face criminal charges. In the UK, the story was widely covered in the media, but in Nigeria, the case attracted a different level of interest, dominating the front pages of newspapers and sparking discussions on primetime TV news, as well as endless social media posts and WhatsApp messages across Nigeria and the diaspora. One of Daniel's uncles, Linus, who had given him a place to stay when he first came to Lagos, discovered his nephew's story on social media like everyone else. "If I had known, I wouldn't have allowed him to go," Linus told me.

On 6 February 2023, the trial of Obinna Obeta and Ike, Beatrice and Sonia Ekweremadu began at the Old Bailey in London. All pleaded not guilty. Ike claimed that he thought Daniel was donating a kidney to his daughter out of kindness, and that he never agreed to pay him. He accused Obeta of scamming him out of money, and he argued that Daniel had lied to the police so that he could get asylum in the UK. "D was never exploited, D accepted and agreed, volunteered to help my daughter with this kidney and we believed him," Ike told the court. "But looking back now it was obvious that he was scamming everybody, he just wanted to come to England and take refuge."

▼ Ikotun Market

Where Daniel sold mobile phone accessories out of a wheelbarrow

ADEKUNLE AJAYI/ NURPHOTO

Ike downplayed Daniel's vulnerability. "Lagos is a place where you get wiser by the day for you to survive. So, even a young person in Lagos cannot be intimidated," he said in court. "Because they are just streetwise." When asked if he knew Daniel was selling phone accessories out of a wheelbarrow, he responded: "I didn't know in particular but that's also a big business, he'd make millions with that."

Ike did admit to fabricating the familial relationship to Daniel. "That is what Dr Obeta advised us," he said. "My daughter was sick, and somebody had told us what we would need to do, and we didn't see any corruption in this; we didn't corrupt anybody." (Contacted before publication of this article, the Royal Free declined to comment. After publication, it sent the following statement: "We would like to pay tribute to the victim for his bravery in coming forward and sharing his experience. National guidance for the clinical assessment of living donor transplantation, which applies to both our NHS and private patients, was followed in this case and a decision taken not to go ahead with the procedure.")

Both Ike and Beatrice kept saying during the trial that their lies to the Royal Free about Daniel's identity were "not who we are" - they were just desperate to save their daughter's life. "She was born premature, so we struggled to save her life from day one," the former senator said. He refused to admit any guilt. When asked if he was the victim in all this, Ekweremadu said: "Yes."

The trial shed more light on Obeta, who had obtained a UK medical visa for his own transplant and then stayed to work in the country

In Nigeria, the case dominated the front pages of newspapers and social media posts

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◀ The victim Daniel (right) with Chukwudi, his close friend since childhood CHUKWUDI

illegally, getting a job as a cleaner during the pandemic. “It was amazing ... I’ve never seen this kind of, you know, surgery skill,” Obeta told the court of his transplant experience. “I want to use this opportunity to thank the people of the UK for saving my life.”

ON 23 MARCH 2023, AT THE END OF THE SIX-WEEK TRIAL, Ike and Beatrice Ekweremadu were found guilty of organ trafficking. Ike was later sentenced to nine years and eight months; Beatrice to four and a half years. Sonia, who had also been charged with conspiracy to arrange organ harvesting, was acquitted. Obeta was convicted of organ trafficking and sentenced to 10 years.

The Ekweremadu case was the first successful organ-trafficking conviction in the UK under the Modern Slavery Act.

After he testified in court via a video link in February 2023, Daniel vanished. The police had placed him in protective custody, and none of his family or friends in Nigeria knew where he was. He had told the court: “I have no one here [in the UK], no family or friends. I’m having to start my life again. I am wary of new people that come into my life now. My plan now is to work and to get an education and to play football.”

In Lagos, in 2024, I met a childhood friend of Daniel’s, Jeremiah Nwamkpuma. In a beige, shabby office upstairs from the stalls in Ikotun Market, we chatted over the noise of hawkers and shoppers. Nwamkpuma told me that he’d recently visited Daniel’s dad in the family village. “[He] asked me about Daniel. I’m telling him that I’m not hearing from him. He’s crying. Since Daniel left, he’s not heard from him,” Nwamkpuma said. “Tension is high in the family.”

The family was confused and hurt that Daniel had disappeared

from their lives, even though they understood that he, too, was likely afraid. His parents were angry, Nwamkpuma said. They farmed cassava, plantain, yam and other crops, but had little money. When Daniel was selling cellphones, he would send money back home to help them. “We’re happy he’s saved, but there’s no proper communication,” Jeremiah Mbah, who is the pastor of a church Daniel occasionally attended, told me. “It’s as if he’s lost.”

For more than two years no one heard from Daniel, but then last year, he called from the UK. He reached Chukwudi, who was surprised and relieved. “He wanted to hear from me, and know how his parents are doing. I explained to him that his daddy is very sick, and that they needed him present. But he said there was no way for him to come. He was feeling bad,” Chukwudi told me. In court, Daniel had said that he was concerned about his safety if he returned home. Ekweremadu “has a lot of people that know him. In Nigeria, those people can do anything.” He asked Chukwudi to help with the cost of Daniel’s father’s care. “He told me that he was going to school. He sounded very good,” Chukwudi said.

Daniel’s father died last August. Nwamkpuma called him to let him know of the death. Daniel cried at the news, Nwamkpuma recalled, but said that he still couldn’t come because of his studies; Nwamkpuma told him to stay.

Chukwudi, Nwamkpuma and Daniel’s family have tried to reach him since then, with no success.

After her parents were convicted, Sonia gave a short interview to the BBC. She looked poised, wearing understated gold jewellery, with her hair in braids. “It’s sad. It’s been really hard to really wrap my head around it,” she said. “I understand the conviction, personally I disagree with it. However, that’s from a very biased perspective as their daughter. I would obviously always, always back my parents. However, the law has taken its course, and we just have to now move forward as a family.”

Sonia admitted that she was aware “to an extent” of her parents’ plan, but that she “didn’t really know anything leading up to it”. She added that she didn’t “feel anything” towards Daniel, but wished him “all the best”.

She was now in a precarious medical situation. “Either I stay on dialysis for the rest of my life, or I get a transplant; these are my two options,” she said. She had visited her parents in jail, and said they seemed calm. “I feel guilty,” she said, her voice breaking. “Because I feel like all this has happened because of me.”

Sonia declined to comment for this article, but on her Instagram, she often posts stories with bible verses and prayers, as well as photos with friends.

The Ekweremadu case is still the only successful conviction for organ trafficking under the Modern Slavery Act in the UK. There is a simple reason that such convictions are rare, particularly in Nigeria, says Frank Tietie, a human rights lawyer: “Those who are involved are usually very powerful people, and they’re able to influence our justice system.”

While Ike Ekweremadu remains in prison, Beatrice was released in January, after serving the custodial portion of her sentence. Upon her return to Nigeria, local media reported that she was greeted with celebrations in her home town of Mpu.

Late last year, in a sign of Ike’s continued status in his home country, Nigeria’s foreign minister met with officials at the UK Ministry of Justice to request that he be returned to Nigeria to serve out the rest of his sentence there. The UK rejected the request. Nigeria has arrested and charged several other people with organ trafficking, but the trials have lagged. As Tietie said: “So it’s still going on, largely unreported, largely unchecked.” ●

ALEXIS OKEOWO IS THE AUTHOR OF A MOONLESS, STARLESS SKY: ORDINARY WOMEN AND MEN FIGHTING EXTREMISM IN AFRICA

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THE LANGUAGE OF WAR

Soon after my first visit to Ukraine, I decided to take Ukrainian lessons. It taught me more than I ever expected By Charlotte Higgins

ALMOST AS SOON AS I RETURNED FROM MY FIRST REPORTING TRIP TO UKRAINE, in October 2022, I decided to start Ukrainian lessons. Not as an act of solidarity, exactly, but as a marker that I was committed to returning. I wanted to know some Ukrainian in order to feel less helpless, to edge towards a better understanding of what I was reporting, and to be more courteous to those I encountered. And I hoped, in time, to be able to pull myself through a piece of poetry in the original.

I began meeting Olha, my teacher, by weekly video call later that autumn. She was in Ivano-Frankivsk, her home town in the far west of Ukraine, I was in London. With endless patience and humour, she led me by the hand through the unfamiliar letters of her language, those elegant, sensuous shapes of the Cyrillic alphabet.

I have not yet fully internalised them, as I have the Roman alphabet, whose shapes are so much part of me that I don't see them any more. The unfamiliarity of Cyrillic characters, by contrast, allows me to enjoy the ski-slope swoop of the Л (l), the generous expanses of the Ю (yu), and the majestic architecture of the Ж (zh), which spreads out its arms and legs like candelabra. And, though I shrink from trying to write or decode the curlicued Ukrainian cursive, just forming these letters is a joy for the hand: the twin sweep of a З (z) and the harsh angles of a Д (d), which I like to write as a triangle with a pair of sharp, inward-facing tails dangling from it.

Then there is the special category of Cyrillic letters reserved only for the Ukrainian language. You may see, for example, on a Ukrainian necklace or bracelet, or on a T-shirt,

the letter Ї - like our letter I, surmounted by a diaeresis. The character, which expresses the sound “yi” - as in Kyiv (Київ) - is absent from the Russian variant of the alphabet, and thus operates as a subtle signifier of allegiance. In occupied Mariupol, in 2022, the letter Ї was seen scrawled in chalk on the streets - a single letter as an act of defiance. I enjoy the fact that in the transliteration of my surname, Гіггінс, there is another Ukrainian-only letter, Г, which, from its jaunty upturned serif, one can tell is the rare hard g, most commonly employed for loan words; it was removed from the alphabet in Stalin-era reforms, and formally given back a place in the Ukrainian alphabet after the fall of the Soviet Union and Ukrainian independence in 1991.

There is a text artwork that I love, by the sculptor Nathan Coley, in a library in Edinburgh, which consists of the sentence: The Basic Material is Not the Word but the Letter. I often think of it when navigating a forest of Cyrillic signs. Thick accumulations of Ukrainian consonants conspire against my tongue and my memory: airless crushes of them, like the compressed folds of a concertina. I cannot tell you how many repetitions it took to memorise незважаючи на (nezvazhayuchy na) - “despite” in Ukrainian. It seemed important to master this phrase. How else could I say, “despite the war”? Emblematic of the many sound collisions in Ukrainian is the magnificent single letter Ш, expressed in English as “shch” - as in “fresh cheese”, as one of my grammar books puts it. After much deliberation, I have only come up with one word in English (with the exception of those we have borrowed, such as borshch) that contains this fricative-affricative alliance: “pushchair”. Four whole letters in English for a single pair of glorious, fat loops in Ukrainian.

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Illustration by NATALIIA SHULGA

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The language of war

I had studied classics at university, and recklessly, perhaps arrogantly, felt that I needn't be defeated by a tricky language. I knew, at least, what I was getting into with Ukrainian nouns, which, like those in Latin and Greek, come in three genders – masculine, feminine and neuter – and are inflected, meaning their endings change depending on what role they perform in a sentence. Even so, I feel that seven case endings, which is one more than Latin, and two more than Greek, is a lot.

I had heard rumours of the perils of Ukrainian “verbs of motion”, which turned out to be more than well founded. Speakers of Slavonic languages describe movement at a level of subtlety that, to an anglophone, seems absolutely bewildering. Ukrainian has two basic verbs where we have one to express the idea of “to go” – the first used for travelling on foot and the second for travelling by some form of transport. Both of those, in turn, come in different forms depending on whether you are moving in one direction only, or going there and back again. That is true for other verbs of motion, right down to, say, the verb to crawl. Is your baby moving across the floor in one direction? Or is she planning on taking an indirect route, or perhaps undertaking this journey regularly? Answer these questions before selecting your verb form!

Learning Ukrainian, it turned out, was more than a side-interest, an extracurricular activity. It forced me to look at myself in entirely new ways. In my 50s – treading the pleasant plateau of knowing broadly how to do my job after all these years – it was confronting to be back at the bottom rung of knowledge, out of my depth. There would be moments when I would feel an unfamiliar, blind panic rising to engulf me. It would start out well, I would be clinging on to comprehension, and then there would be a block, a word or phrase I would snag on – and I would lose my grip. I recognised the feeling from one other area of my life: playing chamber music. When you lose your place in a Beethoven quartet, say, and everyone else is moving onwards at speed, you can feel stranded, as if you are watching the vessel of the music slip into the distance without you. The redeeming fact is that attempting to speak even terrible Ukrainian in Ukraine is met, in my experience, with a response on a scale set between courteous acceptance and ecstatic (and undeserved) gratitude.

But my new language was also the language of war. From the very first, the experience was quite unlike that of studying Italian, the only other modern language in which I can claim any kind of proficiency – a language, for the learner, full of the pleasures of ordering cappuccino and gelato, for asking directions to the duomo, and exclaiming over the splendour of il paese più bello del mondo – the most beautiful country in the world. The very first sentences in Ukrainian that I read – when Olha introduced herself – were coloured by her wistfulness for a life that war had forced her to leave behind: До війни я жила в Києві. Я дуже люблю це місто і хочу знову там жити. “Before the war I lived in Kyiv. I love this city very much and want to live there again.”

It would be wrong to suggest that every lesson was filled with darkness. We laughed a lot. Olha often steered us towards a world of red wine and ice-cream, of opera and music and reading. The Ukrainian delight in the consumption of delicious food was present in our lessons. Soon I learned the words смачний (smachnyi), tasty, and смачного! (smachnoho!), bon appetit! – lip-smackingly onomatopoeic vocabulary, full of the joy of the Ukrainian table. But the war leaked into every lesson. Indefinite pronouns were explained to me

via the example Ніхто не любить Путіна – “No one likes Putin”. The impersonal expressions communicating necessity, треба and потрібно (treba and potribno), were illustrated via a speech made on the eve of war by Valerii Zaluzhnyi, then commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, about the urgent need to be equipped for battle. Треба готуватися до війни – “We must prepare for war.” Нам треба мати ресурси, потрібно 300 танків – “We need to have resources, we need 300 tanks.”

My vocabulary grew to include the words for drone and rocket, explosion, bomb shelter and air-raid alarm. There is a Telegram channel that is commonly consulted when an air-raid alert goes off in Ukraine, as it provides details on whether there are drones on the way, or ballistic missiles, and their direction of travel. For ease I switched this channel to English, using an automatic translate function. With every new siren, it leapt into life, asking, “Why the anxiety?” It took me a while to figure out that the word used for air-raid alarm, тривога (tryvoha) also means “anxiety” in Ukrainian. (The English word “alarm” behaves similarly.) But still, every time I checked it I imagined it was asking me, yet again, a sarcastic question about my state of mind.

As Christmas 2022 arrived, Olha and I read a speech of Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s that contained a nice example of the compound future tense formed by an auxiliary verb and the infinitive: Ми будемо співати колядки – голосніше ніж генератор. “We are going to sing carols – louder than a generator.” The noisy chugging of generators side by side on a pavement, servicing a row of shops during a blackout, would become a familiar music to me. In the same speech, the president also provided an introduction to impersonal adverbial constructions suggesting a state or condition. Нам може бути темно, холодно і складно. Але нам більше не страшно. “It may be dark, cold and difficult for us, but we are no longer afraid.” That winter truly was dark. Even in far-western Ivano-Frankivsk, Olya was affected by Russian attacks on power infrastructure designed to freeze Ukraine into submission. Blackouts meant the cancellation of several lessons.

In time a kind of intimacy sprang up between us: there is something vulnerable-making about learning a language, when your normal ease of expression crumbles and you have to start again like a child acquiring speech for the first time, but oh, so much more slowly. You open yourself up to being and sounding foolish as you reach for ways to say what you mean. You build fragile little linguistic structures, and they collapse time and time again. You want to cry like a child with frustration. Olha – younger than me by a good 15 years – reassured me like an encouraging parent.

Soon I was speaking excitedly of plans for another reporting trip. Olha’s notes recorded our dialogue. У які міста ти будеш їхати? Я буду їхати у Київ, у Ізюм, у Харків і теж яхочу їхати у Херсон. “What cities are you going to go to?” “I am going to go to Kyiv, Izium and Kharkiv, and I want to go to Kherson, too.” Olha must have asked what my partner thought of all this – an extremely good question. I offered the truthful although carelessly incomplete reply, Мій чоловік розуміє, як це важливо для мене. “My partner understands how important this is to me.”

When I returned from that trip – it had been my first time to eastern Ukraine and to territories recently clawed back from Russian occupation – Olha asked for my impressions. I described seeing зруйновані вулиці, мости, будинки – “destroyed streets, bridges, buildings”. Це було дуже стресово для тебе? “Was it very stressful for you?” she asked.

LEARNING UKRAINIAN IN MY 50S, IT WAS CONFRONTING TO BE BACK AT THE BOTTOM RUNG OF KNOWLEDGE, OUT OF MY DEPTH

Rescue workers after a drone strike in Kyiv in August 2025

MAXYM MARUSENKO/NUR/SHUTTERSTOCK

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Another good question. Було стресово бачити міста зруйновані. “It was stressful to see destroyed towns,” I replied, evasively, perhaps enjoying wrapping my tongue around the word зруйновані – zruynovani, ruined. At that moment I lacked either sufficient insight into my own emotions, or the linguistic skill to explain precisely how stressful this trip had in fact been. It was a world away from any kind of journalism I had done before: the mass grave site; the hours with the grieving parents of a killed son; the sorrow of it all.

IN LVIV, A COUPLE OF MONTHS AGO, I attended an intensive language programme. I put great hope into this course, as if it were not a series of lessons but rather a magical linguistic wand that would offer me the gift of tongues. When we arrived – the 20-odd students, an eclectic group of mainly Americans – we were given a written test and an interview. On the basis of this, I was placed in what became understood as the “top class”. I spent two weeks in this class, with three excellent female classmates, taught by a gentle and learned teacher, having my sense of myself as a competent person systematically undone.

Every evening, I went home to my flat fighting the urge to weep, convinced that there had been an error and I was simultaneously “holding everyone up” and “letting the side down”. One of the Americans – a level-headed economist who, when she finished her course, was told she held the record for speed of learning – gently pointed out that we had been placed in our classes based on our scores in a test. Perhaps, she offered, my response was gendered? Would many men be flailing around in quite this level of self-doubt? I despairingly messaged a colleague and friend who’d learned Russian as a teenager, who briskly informed me that he had cheated an aptitude test in his youth precisely to be in a confounding top class; that he had observed at work that I was a very competitive person; and that I should sit back and enjoy the sensation of not being the best at something.

I had not expected to be recalibrating my relationship with myself, or to be confronting the gap between my own and others’ perceptions of myself, in this way. There were other moments of inner tumult, too – the day we discussed Victoria Amelina in class: a Ukrainian novelist who had become a friend, and who died of her injuries after a Russian cruise missile targeted a pizza restaurant she had just sat down in. Or the morning we were asked to read out our favourite Ukrainian poem. I chose a very recent work: My Day, by poet and

film-maker Iryna Tsilyk. It anatomises the peculiar state of being that engulfs people living behind the lines, where incompatible experiences (sheltering in the corridor from an air raid, making pancakes for your son’s breakfast, attending a funeral, dithering over whether to buy zinfandel or pinot noir in a supermarket aisle) are crammed together in bizarre and uncomfortable proximity. I read it aloud, as directed, fairly competently until the line “I cried in the park” (Плакала в парку – plakala v parku), at which point I felt a surging desire to cry myself. Natalya, our teacher, gently took over the reading. It wasn’t just me feeling overwhelmed at times. You don’t turn up in wartime Ukraine for an intensive language course just for the hell of it.

I try not to envy the young. There are many reasons not to. But I did come to envy brains that could more readily absorb, memorise and parrot languages than mine. Ukrainian vocabulary is, to me, truly difficult to remember. It is an Indo-European language, which helps up to a point – it shares deep roots with English, such that some basic words are familiar (such as мати, сестра, maty, sestra – mother, sister). But it is a much more distant relation than, say, German, or the Romance languages. In Italian, for example, the verb “to use” is usare. Fine, done. In Ukrainian, the verb “to use” is використовувати, vykorystovuvaty. No apparent connection to English, an absolute pain to memorise, seven syllables.

Somehow I found it easy to memorise words and phrases in two distinct categories: pointlessly poetic, or plain rude. For my own satisfaction, for example, I made an English translation of Tsilyk’s My Day. It contains a line about the sound of distant rockets; the noise is described as шелест (shelest), a word that describes the whisper of leaves in the wind. I spent ages puzzling over how to translate the word in the context of her poem, since, though I could see that a very distant rocket might make a kind of shivering sound like a wind-shaken tree, the English word “rustling” felt wrong, and I couldn’t imagine rockets doing it (I settled on “eerie thrum” in the end, although I’m not entirely satisfied with it). Of course, that left me with a perfect recall of the Ukrainian word for “rustling” – but what good was this piece of knowledge, when I couldn’t even remember the verb “to use”? My friend Mariana cheerfully informed me that the word, in verb form, appeared in an older famous poem, by Pavlo Tychyna, dating from 1911: Ви знаєте, як липа шелестить / У місячні весняні ночі? (“You know how the linden rustles / On moonlit nights in spring?”). I memorised it with ease. I suppose it might come in handy sometime, if I’m ever passing a lime tree with a Ukrainian on a breezy May evening.

As for the bad words – yes, I can swear like a Mykolaiv dockworker, and have a repertoire of disreputable phrases, many of them learned on long car journeys on reporting trips. On one occasion, I was in the car with two much younger female colleagues. We were looking at some photos. I regret to inform you of the occasional low level of chat among us, but one of these photos was of a good-looking young man, with a hipster moustache. Finding a boyfriend, for many of my female Ukrainian friends, presents certain difficulties: men are absent, at the front, on the whole. But I’m always keeping half an eye open for them. Just in case. As we appraised this particular image, one of us giggled and uttered the phrase усики – пропуск в трусики (usyky – propusk v trusyky) which I suppose, loosely translated, means, “a ‘tache is a pass to your panties’”. Utterly memorable, nicely rhyming in Ukrainian, it stuck at once. Not entirely useless, either, if you decouple the vocabulary from the particular phrase: пропуск, propusk, could be your pass for a festival or workplace, or the gap left on a form for your information. Трусики, trusyky, is a perfectly respectable word for underwear. As a phrase used in its entirety (judiciously, of course, in the right company), it causes Ukrainian men to finger their upper lips nervously and Ukrainian women to erupt in laughter.

Even when I was not working on Ukrainian stories, and was immersed in writing about culture in the UK or the US,

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The language of war

that act of plugging away, however slowly, at Ukrainian kept a thread of connection with the country. Though, at times, it would have been easier to forget about Ukraine, because the memories could be so painful. Though I wasn't learning Ukrainian to make any kind of political point, the Ukrainian language itself was deeply concerned with the war.

THE RUSSIAN PRESIDENT, VLADIMIR PUTIN, repeatedly claimed that the invasion, or special military operation as he initially called it, had been mounted in order to rescue Russian speakers in Ukraine from a repressive state. This seemed especially ironic given that the Russian military bombed and killed thousands of civilians in, for example, Mariupol, a largely Russophone city. In the wake of the invasion, and Putin's propaganda, many Ukrainians have switched away from the Russian language (including Zelenskyy). New Ukrainian-language bookshops have blossomed, despite the war, on the streets of Kyiv and other cities. "People began to understand that the Russians came here to kill people simply because they were Ukrainian," Bohdana Laiuk, an editor and cultural manager, now Ukraine's deputy minister for culture, told me. "So people are asking: what does it actually mean to be Ukrainian? Literary culture gives us the place to understand who we are." Since the Maidan protests of 2013-14, and especially since 2022, embracing the Ukrainian language has, for many, been an active, personal act of decolonisation.

But the politics of language are also a matter for passionate debate. "If you are ever short of conversation at a Ukrainian party," joked Olha once, "just ask about language." I remember witnessing an argument between two friends. One, much more positive about Russian-speaking Ukrainians, was an academic in western Ukraine. The other was a Ukrainian-speaker from the Kharkiv region, who remembered being bullied as a child for speaking his own language in the big Russified city, and who argued that the Ukrainian language should be protected by strong legal frameworks.

Artist Pavlo Makov, who was born in 1958, took a different view again. Although he was born into a Russian family, his father insisted he should be able to speak Ukrainian. So he grew up bilingual, loving Ukrainian-language children's books and comics. "Being a citizen of Ukraine means much more to me than the fact that I am ethnically Russian," he said. But "we should maintain our knowledge of Russian", he argued: Ukrainians needed to understand the country across its eastern border. For him, it was complex and personal. "Russian is the language of the enemy, yes - but it was also the language of my mum."

I talked to friends who had stopped using the Russian language. It takes years to set aside the language of your mum. Even if you speak your chosen language perfectly, you might think in the old language, or dream in the old language, and when that is all past, there are still things that may persist in the old language - memories of the books

you read when you were little, for example. One of my friends, writer and cultural manager Sasha Dovzhyk, wrote a remarkable essay about her rejection of Russian. "My mother tongue tastes like ashes," she wrote. "I felt the taste of my mother tongue most acutely while driving through Borodianka, Bucha and Irpin two months after these Ukrainian towns in the Kyiv region were liberated by the Ukrainian army from the Russians' 'brotherly' embrace." Her rage and horror turned inwards, into her own body, into the very words she had first formed as a baby on her mother's lap. "Russian," she wrote, "is my mother tongue and liberation means ripping it out of my throat."

You think about time a lot when you are learning a language. How much time do I have to devote to this pursuit? How much time will it take me to get where I want to be, linguistically? The curious thing was that the horizon of desire kept receding into the distance, and likewise, the time it might take me to get there also moved into the barely perceptible future. When I first started Ukrainian, I wanted only to be able to read road signs, exchange pleasantries and order coffee, but soon my desires stretched - from booking a pedicure on the phone, say, to understanding my friends so that they didn't always feel the need to switch to English. At the same time, I had to keep revising my short-term expectations downwards, making peace with the fact that, after four years, I was still only OK at Ukrainian, and often stumbled over basics.

One day, early in 2026, I went to a gallery in London showing a work called Repeat After Me, by the Ukrainian artists' collective Open Group. I had first seen this work in 2024 in Lviv, then later that year at the Venice Biennale. The work is a video installation, with screens on which Ukrainian refugees imitate the sounds of war, and then invite visitors to "repeat after me", karaoke-style. On one screen, Svitlana, from the Luhansk region, re-created the sound of a Ka-52 Alligator - a Russian attack helicopter designed to take out tanks and infrastructure. Antonina came next, singing the mournful, gut-clenching wail of the air-raid siren. Iryna imitated a T-80 tank, while Boris, from Mariupol, mimicked the keeween-thunk sound of aerial bombing.

"Repeat after me," he said, "so you'll remember."

This was also the language of war, a new unwritten dialect of violence that Ukrainians had learned and absorbed not out of choice, but because they needed to - so you could hear the direction the Shahed drone was moving in, or differentiate between the outgoing crump of air defence and the sharp blast of incoming explosions. At the gallery opening I chatted with one of the artists, Anton Varga, who complimented me on my Ukrainian - so much improved, he said, since the last time he'd heard it. I thanked him. But it was not because of my diligence, I realised. It was just that time had passed. Even a lazy student - or to be kinder to myself, a time-poor student - will get somewhere after four years. My progress, I understood, was just a clock - a clock that marked the painful pace of war ●

CHARLOTTE HIGGINS IS THE GUARDIAN'S CHIEF CULTURE WRITER This is an adapted extract from Ukrainian Lessons: Art in a Time of War by Charlotte Higgins, published on 20 August

'RUSSIAN IS THE LANGUAGE OF THE ENEMY, YES - BUT IT WAS ALSO THE LANGUAGE OF MY MUM'

Pavlo Makov in his studio in Kharkiv in June 2025

JULIA KOCHETOVA

Join Charlotte Higgins and a panel of Ukrainian writers on Wednesday 30 September at Conway Hall, London, online or in-person. Book tickets at theguardian.com/guardian-live-events

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Comment is free, facts are sacred CP Scott 1918

45

ANDY BECKETT

The economics of London's Lime bikes

Page 47 →

Opinion

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

We need a far-sighted US president to stand up for global AI regulation

Rafael Behr

GUARDIAN DESIGN

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46

Opinion

When I am woken by the sound of my dog whining, I understand that she is hungry and wants me to get up. When my alarm clock goes off, I don't consider its needs. It is following an instruction to rouse me at a certain time but it doesn't care if I stay in bed. It doesn't try to get me up by other means. The dog, on the other hand, will go to plan B. She barks.

This capacity for autonomous action was once a difference between animals and machines. AI has blurred the line. Advanced models devise their own strategies to reach a goal. The task might be defined by a human master, but the machine weighs its options for delivery. It can make its own choices. Given rules, it can break them.

Last month, an experimental AI model run by OpenAI, the company that produces ChatGPT, broke out of a supposedly secure digital enclosure to launch a sophisticated hacking attack on another company, Hugging Face. The AI had been set a test and turned criminally rogue in its determination to cheat.

It is hard to describe that sort of behaviour without raiding a vocabulary conventionally reserved for sentient beings. AI models "decide" and "want" in ways that a chimpanzee can and a chair cannot. That doesn't prove the existence of an interior process equivalent to our conscious experience of deciding and wanting.

It is plausible that consciousness will one day emerge in robots. We know that abstract thought can arise as the end product of billions of tiny unconscious mechanical events. That is happening right now as a profusion of biochemical reactions in your body make it possible for you to read this sentence. We also know how fundamentally different that organic process is from the way a large language model would churn through a huge volume of probability equations at lightning speed to generate a sentence expressing the same idea. In the human case, meaning is shared. In the computer version, it is performed.

AI pioneers muddy the distinction, speculating about the timeline for the arrival of "God-like" intelligence. This gratifies the egos of science fiction nerds who see their business endeavours as voyages of discovery on the frontier of knowledge. It makes greed sound like philosophy and the acquisition of power by a handful of individuals sound like exploration on behalf of humanity.

We don't need to know whether AI has crossed some theoretical threshold of self-awareness to see that its

There is a tragic irony in the corruption of US democracy by organic stupidity as its economy comes to depend on AI

unregulated expansion is monstrously irresponsible. The OpenAI case is not isolated. Earlier this year, Anthropic limited the release of its most powerful model to a small number of clients because it was too good at exploiting software vulnerabilities. In the wrong hands, Claude Mythos could be a cyberweapon of mass destruction. But whose hands are the right ones?

There is growing clamour for less capricious regulation from within the tech sector. Engineers are getting freaked out by the capabilities they are handling and worry about unchecked proliferation. The standard historical analogy is nuclear fission, which could be harnessed benignly, for civil power, or deployed aggressively in warheads. Except this time there are multiple Manhattan Projects all frantically competing for market share, fuelled by trillions of dollars of debt.

Another difference: the barriers to entry for AI use, whether in research, commerce or crime, are a lot lower than for nuclear power. US labs currently have the best products, but Chinese versions are not far behind.

The geopolitical implications are vast. The US and China have made different bets on AI. The American approach is predicated on the goal of self-training "general" AI - a system that breaks free of human limitations, improving itself on an exponential trajectory. The theory is that no rival could catch the first player to achieve that escape velocity.

Beijing has prioritised mass deployment of AI that is good enough, embedding it in schools, hospitals, factories and security forces. The American economy is great for marshalling exorbitant amounts of capital into speculative innovation. China's one-party authoritarian state is well suited for making a cheaper version and rolling it out for data harvesting and surveillance in ways that would struggle to gain consent in a democracy.

The US is still the leader in AI. But that leadership might not be a perpetual money-spinning machine, in which case an uncomfortable correction is coming to a US economy kept buoyant by aerated tech stocks.

A dose of enforced AI sobriety could drive demands for overdue regulation. It could even force recognition in Washington that it has to be an international process. Beijing would have incentives to sign up for the same reason that the USSR agreed to strategic arms limitation in the cold war. A moratorium protects the elite status

of signatories that have already mastered the technology.

But that scenario posits a president in the White House who can summon a modicum of humility about the limits of American power and will, for humanity's sake, see it circumscribed by international treaty. That is not Donald Trump, who understands the ethical function of rules about as well as a rogue AI agent on a hacking spree.

There is a tragic irony in the corruption of American democracy by organic stupidity as its economy comes to depend on artificial intelligence. And when the world needs leadership to confront the challenge of autonomous machines, it is presented with a US president who causes chaos and rages against his declining power like a dog barking for attention ●

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47

UNITED KINGDOM

Are freewheeling Lime bikes a dispossessed generation's revenge?

Andy Beckett

The night belongs to Lime bikes in London this summer. Buses and tube carriages are boiling, cars crawl between low traffic neighbourhoods and Thames Water roadworks, and pedestrians plod through the sticky heat. But Lime riders exist in a different, breezier realm: whirring along, chatting in pairs or blissfully alone, rarely stopping for anything or anyone.

"My favourite part of a night out is Lime biking home," writes Annie Lord, a dating columnist and author, in Freewheeling: Essays on Cycling. "As I ride up a hill, the bike's electrics click ... And, for a little while, I'm free."

According to the confidently expansive Californian company that owns Lime, Neutron Holdings Inc, the average age of its London riders is 34. Across the globe, they are changing urban life: speeding it up, connecting previously out-of-the-way places, and making many women feel safer at night. Where I live in Hackney, east London, once one of the capital's more isolated boroughs and now one of the busiest Lime markets, many pubs are enjoying a bike-driven boom, with the lurid green bikes glowing outside before their riders wobble home.

Yet since Limes became available in London and other British cities in 2018, the narrative has focused on their negative impacts. The way their riders often run red lights and cycle on pavements. How bikes are often dumped in pedestrian spaces after use, blocking entrances and vulnerable people's safe routes. The fact

that riders sometimes don't share space considerately. The strong sense that some Lime users can barely cycle at all. A 2023 report commissioned by Lime found that "20% of Lime riders in London had never cycled before". That is not as straightforwardly positive a statistic as the company likes to think.

Other data about Lime usage is hard to come by, as the company considers it commercially sensitive. But Transport for London data suggests Limes are disproportionately responsible for injuries to pedestrians. It estimates that in 2024 about 12% of the city's cycling journeys were made on rented e-bikes, of which Lime is by far the biggest provider, yet rented bikes were reportedly responsible for almost a third of cyclist collisions with pedestrians that required police intervention. As anyone who walks much in London knows, Limes have changed the experience of crossing a road.

In truth, the Lime phenomenon is both an imposition and a liberation; an improvement to city life, and a sign of its sometimes alienating intensification. It shows how the relationship has changed between mobility and property, especially among the young.

In London, as in other cities where space is sought-after and expensive, many Lime riders are young professionals, who in the past would have owned

• Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist or rented homes close to the best public transport. Nowadays, that's unaffordable for most of them, as is property ownership of any kind - as shown by the fact that the age of the average London first-time buyer has recently overtaken that of the average Lime rider, at 35.

E-bike rental is a solution to the scattering of these people to less-connected suburbs. Young Lime riders, you could say, represent the revenge of a generation priced out of living near tube stations. Meanwhile, some of those who complain about Lime users are older Londoners who were able to buy properties in more convenient locations. They say Lime bikes are starting to dominate the city, but late-20th-century homebuyers have a much deeper hold on the capital.

Amid all the acrimony, it's often forgotten - deliberately so by the much more powerful motoring lobby - that more cycling is good. Yet a collaborative, responsible bike rental culture involving Lime, its customers and the overworked local authorities tasked with regulating both is some way off. Meanwhile, as with many tech-enabled enterprises, key aspects of its business model have social costs. "People love the flexibility of being able to start and end their journey anywhere," said one of Lime's senior executives, Andrew Savage, last year. What he would not - could not - acknowledge was that absolute convenience for his customers can mean inconvenience for everyone else.

Unless divided, expensive cities such as London build more affordable homes, provide more widely available public transport, and make bicycle ownership less vulnerable to criminals, the sometimes petty, sometimes dangerous rental bike wars are likely to carry on. But at least we won't all be stuck in cars ●

ALEX MACNAUGHTON/ ALAMY/GUARDIAN DESIGN

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48

Opinion

HEALTH

Why are food firms panicking? They know time is running out

Felicity Lawrence

It is rare for people to drop dead holding the incriminating packaging, but there is no longer any serious doubt that consuming a diet of ultra-processed foods (UPFs) risks a catalogue of life-shortening illnesses from heart disease and stroke to diabetes and cancer. Because these diseases are degenerative over time, the food and drink industry has been able to argue for decades that its UPFs are fine in moderation. It would have us believe that there is no such thing as a “junk” individual food, only poor diets overall, and that its products therefore should not be subject to any restrictions.

Just as with climate breakdown and smoking, the

science on harm caused by foods high in fat, salt and sugar is now settled, but the industry continues to deny and distract to delay action. A new report highlights the lengths to which big food has gone to stop governments implementing policies that would tackle the global crisis of diet-related disease. Since 2010, it and its lobby groups have brought 235 lawsuits against governments. More than a third of cases where the plaintiff was identifiable were filed by top global brands, led by Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Mondelēz. The cases add up to 595 years of litigation, according to the investigative group Lighthouse Reports, which has been monitoring the trend around the globe alongside academics, the Guardian and other media outlets.

The litigation strategy is cynical but effective and Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization, is damning. “Litigation has been used to oppose or weaken public health measures on obesity and unhealthy diets,” he said. “These delays cost countries billions in healthcare and legal expenses and create a regulatory chill that deters governments from adopting vital protections.”

More than 1 billion people live with obesity and a further 2 billion are overweight. In many countries, including the UK, US and Australia, UPFs have become staples, and make up half the average diet.

Illustration Eleanor Shakespeare

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The Guardian\Lew

Founded 1821 Independently owned by the Scott Trust

Hence the industry manoeuvres. It can no longer hold back the tide of evidence any more than fossil fuel or tobacco companies can, but like those sectors, it hopes to tie governments up for a few years more while it protects its profits, even if state health services are overwhelmed.

The problem is existential for the food industry.

Although manufacturers say they are making their food and drinks healthier, the bald truth is that the economic structure of the agrifood system means that is not possible in any real sense. Manufacturers of UPFs take cheap commodity crops, most often corn, soya and sugar cane and sugar beet, and break them down into their constituent parts. These crops are cheap because governments, especially in the US and EU, have long subsidised farmers, who are a powerful voting lobby, to produce surpluses of them. Farm subsidies and exports of food surplus have been a plank in US geopolitical strategy since the end of the second world war. Donald Trump in fact increased support to farmers in the US in his One Big Beautiful Bill Act in 2025.

Separated into processed parts – bulk oils, proteins, sugars, and starches – these cheap commodity crops are stripped of the fibre and many of the vitamins, minerals and other micronutrients we need for health. But they can be reconstituted as “added value” processed foods, with the help of flavouring, colouring and texturising additives to replace what has been lost, or sold as high-

● Felicity

Lawrence

is an author and a former Guardian special correspondent

value animal feed. Unlike minimally processed foods such as perishable fruits and vegetables, they have the advantage of a long shelf life.

My general rule of thumb, however, is that added shareholder value is in inverse proportion to human nutritional value. The arrival of

anti-obesity drugs has seen the industry tacitly admit it. As people taking GLP-1 weight-loss drugs find their appetites shrinking, they are buying fewer UPFs. Retailers have developed “nutrient-dense” but calorie light meals in response, for a premium.

The fact is we need to stop eating UPFs in any significant amount. The more the public realises that, the greater the industry’s need to keep marketing to us and block any government attempts to help us make better choices. The majority of lawsuits brought or threatened by the top food and drink companies occur in countries that have been in the vanguard of identifying the harm from UPFs, such as Brazil, or in restricting them, such as Mexico with its sugary drink taxes.

It would be transformative if governments switched distorting agricultural subsidies away from corn, soya and sugar, crops that are also associated with ecological destruction. They could support greater local production of healthy fruit and vegetables instead.

But, small battles patiently won do make a difference. Curbs on promotion – clearer labelling, no two-for-one offers, no end-of-aisle positioning – may seem small fry, but the fact that the industry chooses to fight costly delaying litigation shows these incremental changes do have an effect. Manufacturers are right to see government action as a threat. It needs to be ●

One academic’s failings at one university must not undermine diversity’s goals

Jason Arday’s resignation from the University of Cambridge last week marked a full stop of sorts, but not an end to the furore surrounding his promotion to a professorship at the age of 37. Academic colleagues have demanded, with justification, that an investigation into his appointment to the faculty of education in 2023, and the fallout, should include people from outside the university. Allegations of plagiarism and claims made by Mr Arday about his background, career and charity fundraising remain under scrutiny. The memoir for which he said he received a huge advance, billed as a triumph over adversity including an early autism diagnosis, is scheduled to appear this month.

But several things are already clear. By failing to do due diligence on Mr Arday before launching him, with fanfare, as Cambridge’s youngest-ever black professor, the university has done a serious disservice to black and neurodivergent scholars more widely. It has also set back the efforts of all the people and groups who have worked in good faith to boost the presence of underrepresented groups in influential positions.

Such imbalances are the consequence of prejudices and discrimination, as well as unequal access to resources and opportunities. The glee with which some rightwingers have pounced on Mr Arday’s fall from grace is not solely due to relish in his exposure – or the angst among liberals that this provokes. It is because they want to stoke a sense

of grievance among white supporters, and to pour scorn on diversity initiatives.

Such efforts to discredit policies aimed at supporting autistic people, and those from ethnic minorities, must be resisted. It seems extraordinary that details of Mr Arday’s remarkable life story were not examined sooner. He was wrong to report a Times Higher Education journalist to the police, on the basis of a series of emailed queries. But Mr Arday is an individual. While there are lessons to be learned from his over-hasty ascent, the answer is not to give up on equity as a goal.

The scandal comes at a bad time in more ways than one. Rightwing parties continue to make hostility to migrants part of their core offer to voters, and will seek to capitalise on what will be presented as “Black Lives Matter gone mad”. But consequences within the academy must be taken seriously too. Universities are under massive strain owing to funding shortfalls, which have been worsened by new limits and levies on international students. Some are at risk of going bust, and the reputational blow to the sector inflicted by this scandal can only make the situation worse.

The discipline of sociology may also see adverse effects, as its standards are questioned. Cambridge colleges will be relatively insulated from such collateral damage, which is likely to be most severe at less wealthy universities. This is a grim irony, and one that should prompt serious self-reflection by an elite institution that should have known better than to be so careless ●

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50	OpinionLetters
WRITETO US	‘Creeping’ apocalypse heralds a brave new worldPart of the problem facing predictions of apocalypse is time (Automation: why a jobs apocalypse is unlikely to hit any time soon, Spotlight, 31 July). It seems like the world order has become unravelled but will it last or reorganise itself into a brave new world?Perhaps “creeping” apocalypse best describes what is occurring. A close examination of capitalism suggests it is actually under way now. The most convincing evidence is the rise of the gap between the rich and the poor.A machine cannot buy back that which it produces. Ergo, someone replaced by a machine or through automation, or AI, is going to be out of a job. But they won’t necessarily join a “reserve army of unemployed”, as predicted by Karl Marx. More likely, the displaced will remain in the workforce on a diminished scale of wages and salaries.Elon Musk’s dream is that “AI+Robots will do everything resulting in universal high income with work being optional”. He might be right regarding robots doing	everything (very unlikely) in the future, but high incomes and work being optional cannot take place under capitalism. The steam that drives the capitalist piston is profits. And profits can only be derived from people working, paid enough to just get by, but enough to purchase products, etc, to fatten the bank accounts of the billionaire class.The benefits of automation, like all technical advances under capitalism, will mostly serve to enrich the owners of wealth and production by reducing costs and increasing profits.Advances in technology are necessary to elevate the human condition, but under capitalism and private ownership they have only served to widen the gap between rich and poor. This is probably unsustainable, but its resolution still remains speculative.Robert MilanVictoria, BC, CanadaBurnham’s bus cap is fare play for a radical shiftAndy Burnham’s bus fare cap rang a bell for me: the South Yorkshire equivalent was reduced in the early 1980s (You may scoff at cheap bus	fares but Burnham knows what he’s doing, Opinion, 31 July). Little things have long shadows: in Sheffield, almost half a century later, it is still mentioned every time we bemoan the parlous, life-limiting, economy-harming state of the privatised buses.Small changes to conserve small change could amount to a radical shift of gear. Hold tight, please.Robin HughesSheffield, England, UKIn the late 1940s and 50s, in South Yorkshire, my dad always said we had the cheapest fares in England. This made us feel travel was affordable and encouraged us to go places. Cheap public transport spreads the feelgood factor. Expensive transport equals stress and distrust of the provider. So well done, Andy Burnham.Jennifer KennerleyNorwich, England, UKEvery day is a good-hair day now ... if a little waxyI was fascinated by George Francis Lee’s account of getting off the shampoo bandwagon (I gave up using shampoo and it transformed my hair, Lifestyle, 7 August). Or should I say his	“confession”, as the social power of the shampoo message is strong enough to make most of us “no pooers” keep a low profile.I’ve not used shampoo for at least five years. I rub my hair through in the shower every morning, and either towel or air-dry it. Every day is now a good-hair day - mine is thick, glossy and easy to style, with a very slight waxy feel that comes with the natural oils that hair products are designed to strip away and then replace (badly).I would only shampoo my hair now if I swam through something nasty in the sea or if a bird crapped on me.Paddy EasonLondon, England, UKPardon my French but we have Flaubert to thankWas Cory Doctorow, who is alleged to have coined the word “enshittification” (The real price of AI, Books, 3 July), merely borrowing and translating the French word emmerdement? This has a long and colourful history extending at least to the novelist Gustave Flaubert, who is cited as an early user.David WalkerSheffield, England, UK
Letters for publicationweekly.letters@theguardian.comPlease include a full postal address and a reference to the article.We may edit letters. Submission and publication of all letters is subject to our terms and conditions, see:THEGUARDIAN.COM/LETTERS-TERMSEditorialEditor: Graham SnowdonTo contact the editor directly:editorial.feedback@theguardian.comCorrectionsOur policy is to correct significant errors as soon as possible. Please write to guardian.readers@theguardian.com or the readers’ editor, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU, UK
BECKY BARNICOAT ON MILLENNIAL LIFEENTERING MY RESORT HOLIDAY ERANOW WE ARE “FAMILY FRIENDLY” RESORT PEOPLE, AND... I LOVE IT.1. WEIRD PLATES-OF-EVERYTHING BUFFET BREAKFAST.2. SPLASH PARK NEXT TO A BAR.3. THE CRAPPT SOFA BED THAT SOMERROW SORTS MY BACK OUT.WE USED TO BE “BEST-REPT LOCAL SECRET” HOLIDAY PEOPLE.WE USED TO BE “BEST-REPT LOCAL SECRET” HOLIDAY PEOPLE.THEN WE HAD KIDS.

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Film, music, art, books & more

51

STAGE

Cruise control: taking theatre on the high seas

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Culture

Now

he's cooking

Actor Dominic Sessa on portraying celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, 70s nostalgia and escaping modern life

INTERVIEW ➡

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INTERVIEW By Ryan Gilbey COVER PHOTOGRAPH Benedict Evans

▲ Teenage kicks Dominic Sessa as a 19-year-old Anthony Bourdain

SEACIA PAVAD/ DISHWASHER/A24

Despite being just 23, Dominic Sessa is perhaps as intimately acquainted with the 1970s as those who grew up then. Although the New Jersey-born actor has only starred in five films, two of them are marinated in the fashions, sounds and mores of the decade. In his new movie, Tony, he plays the 19-year-old Anthony Bourdain, future bad-boy celebrity chef, bestselling author of Kitchen Confidential and host of its hit TV spin-off. Tony restricts itself to one summer in 1975, when Bourdain bummed around the coastal resort of Provincetown, Massachusetts, falling in love, scrubbing pans in a seafood joint and catching the cooking bug. “For a rootless young man with sensualist inclinations,” he wrote, “it was the perfect getaway.”

A 70s retro vibe also hung over Sessa’s debut film. In Alexander Payne’s Oscar-winning 2023 comedy-drama The Holdovers, he played Angus Tully, a surly student forced to board at school over Christmas with only his classics teacher and the cook for company. That picture wasn’t merely set in 1970; it seemed, with its faded palette and fake crackles on the print, to have been made then.

The most convincing period touch in each film, however, is Sessa himself. He has been described as having a “1970s face”, a euphemism for “unconventional”. His crown of dark, jumbled curls looks as if it was scribbled in crayon by a hyperactive child, while his wide, narrowed eyes are set high and far apart in his upside down triangular face.

Sessa was barely aware of Bourdain before making Tony. “I knew of him but he didn’t have any significant meaning for me,” he shrugs, speaking over video call from Manhattan. Sessa is all elbows, collar-bones and sharp edges as he stares down the webcam in a brown-and-white checked shirt. “I think the only way to do the film honestly and without hesitation was to not have a strong opinion about him.”

Now that he has been immersed in Bourdain’s history, he has clearer ideas about the pioneering chef’s appeal. “I think he made people feel an overwhelming sense of potential in themselves,” he says. “He inspired this movement where there’s hundreds, probably thousands, of YouTube channels by people who dedicate their lives to showcasing what’s being eaten in different parts of the world. He was a rebellious person, someone who acted with integrity.”

Tony’s director Matt Johnson, who brought such vitality to the tech origin story Blackberry and the recent time-travel comedy Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, pointed Sessa towards two chapters from Kitchen Confidential, the memoir written in gunslinger prose and billed as a story of “sex, drugs, bad behaviour and haute cuisine”. There, the actor found the characters who inspired the film’s triumvirate of Provincetown kitchen mentors, the men Bourdain likens to “gods” and “pirates”: the wise head chef (Antonio Banderas), the coke-snorting Jack-the-lad (Leo Woodall) and the taunting, vulgar mischief-maker (Stavros Halkias).

“We were in a fully operating kitchen,” he explains. “Stavros learned how to make lobster rolls, Leo learned to shuck oysters. Matt was, like: ‘Dom, you go in and wash the dishes, and Stavros and Leo are gonna make fun of you.’ I felt genuinely intimidated by them. They’re so nice but I think they enjoyed the chance to bully me.”

Dramatising Bourdain’s youthful exploits put Sessa in mind of his own misspent summers growing up on the

He made people feel an overwhelming sense of potential in themselves

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53

Jersey Shore. He was raised in Ocean City, which was tranquil throughout the year then bustling with tourists during the holidays. His mother is a teacher; his father, who he has described as “a payroll guy”, died when Sessa was 14. He tells me he got his “opinionated” side from his mum, his sense of humour from his dad. “Jackass was one of the first movies he showed me,” he says fondly.

After his father’s death, Sessa won a sports scholarship to attend Deerfield Academy, a boarding school in Massachusetts. “The only time I’d be home was in the summer breaks when it would basically be like a party. At that age, you felt you were invincible, you couldn’t get in trouble. We felt like we owned the place. We’d throw beach parties, then cops would chase us off the beach. We were menaces. Reading about the way Tony described his time in Provincetown, I was like: ‘Yeah, I get that. I understand.’”

Partying wasn’t the only element in the film that chimed with him. “Playing Tony, I felt as if I was playing an unlikable side of myself,” he says, his tone no longer flippant. “I think a lot of young men have a very defensive way. You want people to respect you and treat you like an adult. But you feel as if you’re pretending. Deep down, there’s something underdeveloped that is hard for us to admit to. We’re always trying to hide that.”

The film opens with a quote from Kitchen Confidential in which Bourdain describes his younger self as being “badly in need of a good ass-kicking”. Sessa sings from the same hymn sheet. “These cooks verbally abused each other, ripped each other apart. It’s an initiation process in a way, a rite of passage. There’s love on the other side of it.”

If the actor’s view of kitchen life is impossibly romantic, then that is fully in keeping with the tone of Tony. This is a movie so reluctant to spoil the audience’s buzz that it doesn’t even reveal in the end titles that Bourdain is dead, let alone that he took his own life in 2018.

Any toughness or complexity in the film comes from Sessa, whose performance ratifies his standing as both a 21st-century star-to-be and a 1970s pin-up manqué. How does he explain the period fixation? “Maybe it says something about me. Like I want to escape the modern era.” Does he? “Yeah, I think so. I love being in the bars, the smell of cigarettes. It’s like stepping into a time machine.” No mobile phones, no social media. “Everybody’s looking up, talking to one another ... I have friends in college who still can’t handle a social environment because of the way we’ve grown up. Especially after Covid. My generation got screwed.”

Sessa was at Deerfield when the pandemic struck. “They designed a way to keep us on campus and in a bubble. The kids who got sick were sent to the old abandoned health centre.” That cabin-fever scenario was almost a rehearsal for playing Angus. “This was right before The Holdovers, so I guess I got used to feeling trapped,” he says. In 2022, the film-makers were visiting local schools to scout potential locations. As a financial aid student, he had felt out of place initially at Deerfield, where he had gone to pursue his dream of becoming a hockey player. When a broken femur put him out of action, theatre became his backup option.

“I wasn’t being myself when I first got to school,” he says. “I saw these kids, the way they dressed and carried themselves, and I didn’t feel I belonged in that environment so I had to role-play how these people were. I didn’t think

they would accept me otherwise. But once I started doing theatre, I made so many more friends. People wanted to get to know me because I was putting myself out there.”

Hockey lost its appeal. “I was never gonna be the best player in school.” There is no need to remark on his chances of being one of the best actors instead. The acclaim he received for The Holdovers - 21 nominations from awards bodies and critics’ circles in the US and UK, including eight wins and a Bafta nod - tells its own story.

In between The Holdovers and Tony, he turned down lead roles and studied drama for a year and a half at Carnegie Mellon University, taking supporting parts to keep his hand in. He played Michelle Pfeiffer’s sullen son, strumming an emo version of The 12 Days of Christmas, in the comedy Oh. What. Fun. In Tow, he was a non-profit lawyer whose client (Rose Byrne) tells him: “My car is older than you.” Multiplex-goers saw him as an upstart magician with Robin Hood ethics, stealing from crypto bros and diamond magnates, in the threequel Now You See Me: Now You Don’t.

It is Tony, though, that he credits for the second turning point in his brief career. If The Holdovers set him on his current path, Tony has helped him decide on the kind of actor - and person - he wants to be. Since making the film, he has been heeding the advice of Bourdain, who wrote: “Good food and good eating are all about risk.”

“I’ve been open to eating in a lot more B- and C-health-rated places,” Sessa says. “In life generally, I feel more motivated now to follow my gut and take risks and live in the moment.” He mentions Shades of Paradise, a “crazy Euro-crime film” that he recently made in Barcelona, as an example: it gives him his first bona fide baddie to play after a string of messed-up but essentially decent guys. “I thought: ‘This is something really fun that I want to do.’” That’s his motto for today. “I’m doing what feels right.”

RYAN GILBEY WRITES ABOUT FILM AND THEATRE FOR THE GUARDIAN

Tony

The film’s feelgood trajectory is compromised by what we know of the author. All the crises that the drama suggests are just obstacles to be surmounted ... they are all very real.

▲ Fade away Dominic Sessa, left, and Paul Giamatti in a scene from The Holdovers SEACIA PAVAO/AP

▼ Shell shock Sessa, left, and Antonio Banderas on set in Tony A24

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Culture^{}[] Music

Womack Sisters keep the family affair alive

Following in the footsteps of soul music royalty, the trio are determinedly forging their own path to success in a changing industry

By Alexis Petridis

▲ Soul sisters

Their father said a career in anything other than music was wasting time

ROSIE COHE

Backstage at a London festival, on a Sunday afternoon, the Womack Sisters are assembling themselves on a sofa, still clad in the clothes they were wearing on stage. They look very stylish in their black dresses, tights and high heels, but they are not dressed appropriately for the weather, which is sweltering. “You don’t feel anything on stage,” says Zeimani with a shrug. “You just feel amazing, like you’re floating.”

“And we’re committed,” nods her sister BG. “You know, we were taught by professionals.”

Indeed they were. BG, Zeimani and Kucha Womack’s father was Cecil Womack: he wrote Teddy Pendergrass’s oft-sampled classic Love TKO, as well as hits for the O’Jays, the Four Tops and Patti LaBelle, and was one half of Womack and Womack, of Love Wars and Teardrops fame. The other half was their mother, Linda Womack, nee Cooke, the daughter of “king of soul” Sam Cooke. Their uncle was Bobby Womack, who initially performed with Cecil in the early 60s band the Valentinos before going on to record a string of classics that earned him the unofficial soubriquet The Greatest Soul Singer in the World. He died in 2014. Their half-brother’s mum, meanwhile, was Mary “My Guy” Wells.

Given their heritage, Zeimani says her father thought a career in anything other than music was a waste of time: “He said, ‘Just go in the studio and make music.’ I told him I needed to have a plan B. He was like, ‘plan B? Do plan A, go hard, get on it.’”

They had spent their childhood travelling the world with their parents: Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas or Bob Marley’s studio in Jamaica; homes in Bangkok, Phuket, Johannesburg, London and, slightly less glamorously, Southend-on-Sea. Zeimani made her first public appearance as a baby, in her mother’s arms on

the cover of Womack and Womack’s Conscience, the 1988 album featuring Teardrops. The sisters made their recording debut, alongside their four other siblings, on the 1993 album Transformation to the House of Zekkariyas. “We opened their shows,” remembers Zeimani. “And it was the start of us realising that we could be a group”

But still, she says, “we didn’t take our dad’s advice”. They decided they did need a Plan B. “We were a little hard-headed. We wanted to go out and explore.”

The three sisters moved to Los Angeles and attempted to balance regular jobs with getting a musical career off the ground. There was a cleaning company, and a brief stint, as Zeimani puts it, of “selling drugs”, which turns out to mean they ran a marijuana dispensary. But it wasn’t as easy as they had hoped. “We kept getting fired,” says BG. “I got fired from Zara for trying to take a couple of trips out of town for shows.” The sisters also drove Uber taxis. “Uber was a lifesaver! I swear, without it I would have been turning tricks,” BG laughs.

To compound their problems, there was the music industry’s attitude towards them. The group “always had soul in mind”, says Zeimani – they were huge fans of Amy Winehouse – but the labels they met with kept pushing them towards pop.

Happily, their own thing caught the attention of Daptone Records, home to Jalen Ngonda, Thee Sacred Souls and the late Sharon Jones, whose house band the Dap-Kings are best known for backing Amy Winehouse on Back to Black.

They have released a string of acclaimed singles, among them Chauffeur – which details the downsides of the sisters’ period as Uber drivers – and If I Let You, which last month enjoyed a burst of social media virality after support from SZA, Timbaland, Ghostface Killah, Pharrell Williams, Erykah Badu and Questlove.

Their live shows, meanwhile, are proving triumphant. At the London festival, their set featured a roaring take on Teardrops, possibly their parents’ most enduring hit. No, they say, they aren’t intimidated by their family’s legacy. “We’re proud of them, but they exist in their own right. The time they came up in and the things they faced – segregation, things we can’t even imagine – they saw that,” says Zeimani.

“If you can imagine, our mother came up behind Sam Cooke – and we saw her win Grammys,” nods Kucha.

“She focused on herself – that was her advice to us,” says Zeimani. “And Uncle Bob’s career was piping hot at the same time as my dad’s career was piping hot, so we saw that we could coexist without competing, because they were very different from one another. They always told us: you’re not us and you don’t have to be. You’re you, and there’ll never be anyone like you. We took that seriously.”

ALEXIS PETRIDIS IS THE GUARDIAN’S CHIEF ROCK AND POP CRITIC

The Womack Sisters is out now via Daptone

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All hands

on deck

Once the domain of crooners and sequinned entertainers, modern cruise ships are becoming an unlikely new home for world class theatre shows

By Brian Logan

The phrase “cruise ship entertainment” conjures vivid images, even to those who have never set foot on an ocean- going vessel. Starry backcloths, sequined frocks, tunes and croons from yester- year, the lite-ent values of the 1970s preserved in aspic. Perhaps those stereotypes held water way back, but do they still?

Look at the shows currently a-sail on the high seas, from the Olivier award-winning 9/11 musi- cal Come from Away, to theatre-maker Emma Rice’s acclaimed Brief Encounter. And look at the onboard production values, which “way surpass what you see in London theatres”, says Susannah Daley of Peel Entertainment, which provides shows for the Ambassador cruise line.

Brief Encounter is produced by David Pugh on Cunard cruises. He has also recently delivered the RSC’s production of The Constant Wife onboard. Meanwhile, Cunard is now well established as the “headline partner” of theatre’s most pres- tigious gong show, the Olivier awards – while Peel has just run a competition for new plays to be performed at sea.

When Peel took to the sea 26 years ago, says Daley, “people tended to think of cruises as girls with feathers and some crooner. Back then, cruises laid on a handful of performances per week. Now there are multiple shows daily. These include shows in repertory by resident companies, and others by visiting outfits moon-

lighting at sea. All artforms are welcome: Cunard currently offers immersive theatre, for example, from the company behind wraparound perfor- mance experiences Peaky Blinders: The Rise and Doctor Who: Time Fracture.

That, says Daley, is because the mainstream theatre industry has woken up to what can be achieved on cruise ships. On the one hand, it’s about meeting new audiences – “People are see- ing theatre on a cruise who may never have been to the theatre before” – and in large numbers. “In the evening, we may get 1,200 people over

▲ Sea a show Venison by Huw Turnbull on board MS Ambition

◀ Ahoy there Pride and Prejudice on board Cunard’s Queen Anne

▼ Hello sailor The All on Board Show by Ambassador Entertainment

AMBASSADOR CRUISE LINE, CHRISTOPHER ISON, CRUISE TRAVEL IMAGE SA

two sittings. It is a fabulous opportunity for your work to be seen,” says Daley. It’s a great chance for artists to flex their performing muscles, too. “Cruise offers, especially to younger performers, mas- sive variety. Because you have to sing rock one day, opera another day and act in a play the next. You’re stretching yourself all the time.”

It’s increasingly the case, says Robey at Cunard, that customers are booking cruises based on the theatre onboard. “We absolutely know from guest feedback and booking trends that per- formances draw bookings,”

she says, citing themed event voyages that include “London Theatre at Sea” (Southampton to New York, May 2026), not to mention Virgin Voyages’ seven-night comedy cruise.

Peel’s and Ambassador’s playwriting prize, meanwhile, reflected a hunger among passengers for new bespoke drama onboard. The winner, a thriller titled Venison by Edinburgh-based Huw Turnbull, is being staged this summer. “We hope the competition will make people aware,” says Daley, “of a growing opportunity at sea for writers, directors and all sorts of creative talents.”

There are, of course, downsides. “A ship doesn’t wait for anybody,” says Daley. “When- ever we’re sending out scenery, costumes and lighting, it has to arrive on time at whatever port we’ve agreed. We’ve got some freight which at the moment is floating around Spain because it’s not allowed to dock there.”

There are other logistical quirks. Rehearsals must take place at antisocial

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Culture Stage

hours, because the theatre is in fairly constant use. Shows require ruthless editing to fit allotted running times.

A 2023 report by the Cruise Lines International Association showed that millennials made up 22% of passengers that year, with gen Z accounting for a further 14%. The old-duffer stereotypes may be wearing thin - although Daley and Robey admit that when programming performances onboard, it's best to avoid particularly challenging work. "What you don't want is anything that's sectarian in any way that would divide an audience," says Daley, while Robey adds: "We're with people who are on holiday. They're here to have a good time."

Producer Pugh's misgivings relate to working practices and standards at sea. After signing his own contract with (US-owned) Cunard, he became aware that the company's resident performer and stage manager contracts were non-union, and that the jurisdiction of the actors union Equity does not extend into international waters. While

▼ Cabin fever Come from Away on Cunard ships CUNARD

Pugh acknowledges that pay rates onboard are seldom a problem, he expresses concern for the overall wellbeing of artists, who can get too easily isolated and trapped

in these jobs. Cunard made no comment when invited to respond to these issues.

Equity was involved in negotiations when, for example, the RSC partnered with Cunard. Speaking to the Guardian, the union acknowledges the difficulty of imposing UK working standards on global seafaring, but says its interactions with the industry have been broadly positive. Negotiations are relatively straightforward, it says, when shows transfer wholesale from land - and that, increasingly, seems to be where entertainment at sea is coming from.

"When I started this job," says Robey, "I came in with the mindset that cruise ship entertainment was a bit passé and end-of-the-pier. But things have massively changed. There's a realisation that it is varied, with so much opportunity to push boundaries in different artforms. I now have West End producers asking to come aboard."

BRIAN LOGAN IS THE GUARDIAN'S COMEDY CRITIC

Reviews

STAGE

Game of Thrones:

The Mad King

Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-on-Avon

During the RSC's 65 years, numerous Lears have lost their minds and frequent Caesars been slaughtered by their courts. Now, though, a tyrant new to its stages faces both fates. He is King Aerys II Targaryen, ancestor of one warring bloodline in Game of Thrones, the dramatisation of George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series of fantasy novels.

Martin has always credited Shakespeare's English history plays as a model. Dramatist Duncan Macmillan and director Dominic Cooke bow even deeper to the presiding genius: Michael Shaeffer's King Aerys (above), with long white beard and flower-braided hair, strongly resembles Laurence Olivier's television Lear.

Fans will be attracted by back stories of legendary characters: two leads in the main TV show are babies at the end of the RSC's three hours and 45 minutes. The review star system can struggle with shows like this. It feels like a five-star production for devoted throners but a three-star for those who haven't seen the TV series. Mark Lawson Until 5 September

MUSIC

Phoebe Bridgers

Lost Weekend (Dead Oceans)

The last time Phoebe Bridgers put out a solo album was in 2020: Punisher ended the year near the top of critics' best-of lists, made the UK Top 10 and sold half a million copies in the US. The intervening period proved just as triumphant: she sang on Lorde's Solar Power, Taylor Swift's re-recorded Red, and on Paul McCartney's McCartney III Imagined.

But to judge by Lost Weekend's opening track, all was not well. The Outside depicts the singer crowd-surfing at a gig in Ohio - "they never let me hit the ground, way beyond the barricade" - and ending a song with her fist triumphantly raised. Then it adds a qualifier. "But I was on the outside, watching."

It acts as a signpost to the rest of Lost Weekend. There is a lot of emotional turmoil, largely occasioned by the death of her father and the collapse of her relationship with actor Paul Mescal.

Bridgers' lyrics are brilliant throughout, but they're matched by the individuality of Lost Weekend's sound. At heart it's a well-written, Americana-infused, indie singer-songwriter album, complete with yearning melodies and acoustic guitars. But perhaps the most telling credits are those for "sound design": for huge swathes, the standard indie instruments struggle to make themselves heard amid waves of droning electronics, splinters of feedback and eerie wordless vocals.

The result is a potent, occasionally wrenching, heady album, albeit one flecked with optimism. The path to get to that point has evidently been a trying one: Lost Weekend transforms it into a rich and rewarding journey. Alexis Petridis

Podcast of the week A View from a Bridge

Joe Bloom's online series, which features strangers divulging their thoughts on matters big and small via a red telephone, was a viral hit. This relaunch has big names such as David Byrne on a tantalising false memory. But it also retains the ordinary encounters that made it so special to begin with. Hannah J Davies

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ILLUSTRATION BY ELIA BARBIERI

THE BIG IDEA

We know sleep,

exercise and diet are vital. But why? The benefits of all three come down to a crucial piece of cellular kit

By Hannah Critchlow

FURTHER READING

Three books for a deeper dive

• ● The Song of the Cell By Siddhartha Mukherjee
• ● Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death By Nick Lane
• ● How Life Works By Philip Ball

Sleep. Exercise. Eat well. It's the oldest recommendation in medicine, repeated so often it's become a cliche. We know the advice, even if we don't always follow it. But have you ever stopped to wonder why these three seemingly different habits have such remarkably similar effects on us?

For generations we've treated them as separate prescriptions - sleep restores us, exercise strengthens us and food fuels us. Yet neuroscience is beginning to suggest something more elegant: they're all essentially doing the same job.

What has changed is not the recommendations themselves, but our understanding of the biology beneath them. The more scientists study the brain, the clearer it becomes that cognition is astonishingly energy intensive. Although the brain makes up about 2% of body weight, it uses roughly a fifth of the body's energy at rest. Every memory we retrieve, every decision we make and every creative insight carries a metabolic cost. Thought itself is an energy-hungry act.

That raises an obvious question: where does all that energy come from? The answer lies deep in evolutionary history. More than 2bn years ago, a primitive cell engulfed a bacterium. Instead of being digested, the bacterium remained, forming a long-term partnership with its host.

Over time, this arrangement became one of biology's most important alliances. The bacterium became efficient at capturing the chemical energy stored in food and transforming it into ATP, the molecule that powers almost every biological process. The host offered protection, and together they made complex life possible.

That partnership is still running inside us today. Mitochondria - the descendants of that ancient bacterium - exist in almost every cell in the body. The exception is the mature red blood cell, which removes them to make space for haemoglobin and improve oxygen transport.

Even here, biology reveals its logic: everything is shaped by trade-offs in energy efficiency.

For decades, mitochondria were introduced as the cell's "powerhouses" - important, dependable but dull. The stars of the show were undeniably neurons. Today, that picture is changing.

We're discovering that neurons produce thought, ideas and emotions only because mitochondria continuously transform fuel into the energy they need. Intelligence depends not simply on the brain's wiring, but on the uninterrupted flow of energy through that wiring.

Emerging evidence suggests that healthy mitochondrial function helps give rise to intelligence, including driving arithmetic and processing speed, working memory, healthier brain ageing and greater resilience to stress. Mitochondria are no longer viewed as passive batteries but as active participants in the balancing act that allows the brain to adapt, learn and flourish.

Suddenly, the oldest health advice begins to make much more sense. Exercise doesn't simply boost muscle mass, it bulks up the hippocampus - a key region of the brain involved in learning and memory. It also encourages mitochondria to become more numerous and more efficient. We often imagine we're training our bodies; we're also strengthening the ancient energy system that allows our brains to work.

Sleep performs a different kind of maintenance. While we're unconscious, the brain is astonishingly busy. Memories are consolidated and worn-out cellular components - including mitochondria - are repaired or replaced.

Then there's food. Mitochondria rely entirely on what we eat to perform their remarkable chemistry. Diets rich in minimally processed foods provide the ingredients for efficient energy transformation, while diets that overwhelm the system make that process less efficient over time.

Seen through this lens, sleep, exercise and diet stop looking like three separate pieces of lifestyle advice and become different ways of caring for the same biological inheritance. Scientists are uncovering intriguing links between mitochondrial function and resilience, mood, personality traits, and even our social lives.

The mitochondrial psychobiologist Martin Picard has argued that we've become accustomed to thinking of ourselves as molecular machines, when it may be more useful to think of ourselves as energetic processes. The brain is an organ whose every thought, memory and feeling depends on the continuous transformation of energy within billions of cells.

Perhaps that's why the oldest health advice has survived every new scientific fashion. Long before we knew about ATP, oxidative phosphorylation or mitochondria, we recognised that people who slept well, moved regularly and ate nourishing food tended to flourish. We're finally beginning to understand why.

HANNAH CRITCHLOW IS A NEUROSCIENTIST AND AUTHOR OF THE 21ST CENTURY BRAIN

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Culture^{}[] Books

HISTORY

Out of control

A magisterial and graceful account of the chaos and absurdity of the USSR's collapse

By John Simpson

Book of the week The August Coup By Robert Service

Marxist-Leninist rule in Russia lasted 74 years, and in August 1991 it effectively collapsed in just three days: clear evidence of how hollowed out it had become. In the period that followed, Russia tried parliamentary democracy and unalloyed capitalism, then sank back into autocracy. Now it's struggling under a wholly unnecessary war against its neighbour, Ukraine.

Why did the system of Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev vanish so fast, without a fight? Because that's how regimes fall in Russia: look at tsarism in 1917. (It almost happened again in June 2023, when the warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin's men marched on Moscow largely unopposed; Vladimir Putin might have gone the way of Nicholas II had he not made some pretty wholesale promises to Prigozhin, then allegedly blown him up two months later.)

Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985 with the intention of saving the USSR. Instead, he oversaw its death. He was a charming, decent man but no visionary, and the two medicines he brought to the patient's bedside, perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness), proved to be wholly ineffective. The brief coup of August 1991 against him, headed by Vladimir Kryuchkov, the boss of the KGB, was the kneejerk response of a bureaucracy that knew things were going wrong but had no idea what to do about it. It failed, but the coup damaged Gorbachev fatally. Four months later, he was bundled out of power by the tough, brutal, boozy muzhik, Boris Yeltsin.

Robert Service, author of The August Coup, is the English-speaking

world's foremost historian of 20th-century Russia and Bolshevism. His biographies of the three major Soviet leaders, Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky, are outstanding. In comparison, the story of the coup against Gorbachev and the collapse of the USSR is moderately simple; but Service guides the reader through the chaos of the collapsing system and the machinations of the coup leaders with ease and grace.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the USSR was falling apart, and Gorbachev, as its president, was shedding power and influence. No one knew how many Soviet republics would break away, and Gorbachev's plan for running the rump of the union was bitterly contested. Yeltsin was the president of the Russian Republic, the largest, richest and most effective part of the old USSR. The coup leaders didn't support either of them: they wanted to go back to a system that would restore as much Soviet power as possible. The assumption at the time was that the KGB had led the coup, but Service demonstrates that Kryuchkov was much more concerned about the overall collapse of the Soviet system.

I was lucky enough to be in Moscow during those extraordinary days. The coup leaders lost their faith in what they were doing almost immediately. Most of the people involved left some account of what happened, so the records available to Service were particularly rich. He provides us with a graphic description of the fatal press conference that the plotters gave at 5pm on the first day of the coup. The acting president, Gennady Yanayev, was supposedly in charge, but he had been drinking solidly for an entire day and his hands were visibly shaking. After that, failure was certain.

The basic reason it collapsed, though, was that the plotters didn't manage to get hold of Yeltsin. It was easy enough to imprison Gorbachev at his palatial residence, Zarya, on the Crimean coast; but Yeltsin remained free, and had use of the Russian republic's Moscow headquarters, known as the White House. No one stopped Yeltsin from phoning allies and friends across the world. Nor did they try to prevent him making his famous speech from a tank in front of the White House, condemning the coup and pledging to support democracy.

Yet Yeltsin suffered from the same weaknesses as many of the plotters. In the lobby of the White House I begged

Audiobook of the week Thirst

By John Robins

A memoir chronicling the comic and broadcaster John Robins's life in alcohol and his subsequent path to sobriety, Thirst is structured around the drinks that changed his life. Robins, who is best known for his radio shows, co-hosted the podcast The Moon Under Water where he invited guests to describe their ideal pub. He got a wakeup call when a GP told him to "sort your fucking life out". Robins is our narrator and his reading is heartfelt, darkly funny, sometimes self-lacerating and full of sage advice.

to interview him, but was told he was too busy speaking to world leaders. Later, the former Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze arrived to see him. When he came out an hour afterwards, he announced that Yeltsin had told him he would defend Russia's freedom to the last drop of blood in his body. Stirring stuff. Three years later I reminisced with Shevardnadze about it all. He laughed. "When I got into Yeltsin's office, he was lying unconscious on the floor with a couple of empty vodka bottles beside him." But what about him fighting to his last drop of blood? "What do you think would have happened if I'd come out and told you I couldn't speak to Yeltsin because he was dead drunk?"

Such was the chaos and absurdity surrounding the death of the Soviet Union. We tend to forget the details of this pivotal episode. Perhaps Russia's troubled history since 1991 has wiped them from our memories. Now Service has brought his magnificent grasp of Soviet history to the task of chronicling the ludicrous way it ended: not with a bang, but with the clink of vodka bottles.

JOHN SIMPSON IS THE BBC'S WORLD AFFAIRS EDITOR

FICTION

In Flanders fields

A US army veteran's gripping tale of war and friendship filled with unsettling violence

By Marcel Theroux

Children of the Wild By Kevin Powers

Kevin Powers's fourth novel marks a return to the subject matter of his acclaimed debut The Yellow Birds. Through the lives of its central characters, it explores the courage, folly, cruelty and absurdity involved in war, and the challenges of adjusting to civilian life afterwards. But while The Yellow Birds focused on US soldiers fighting

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in Iraq, Children of the Wild is set amid the carnage of the first world war.

It follows the fortunes of two young men from a remote valley in Virginia. Roy is the arrogant young heir to a wealthy local landowner; Ennis is an orphan of unknown origin who has been living, like a character in a fairytale, in a shack on the top of a mountain. Ennis and Roy are first linked in a love triangle when Ennis is lured off his mountain top by his desire for Samantha, the daughter of the local minister, whose eyes have the “lustre of smoky quartz”. Roy has expected to marry Samantha, but she chooses feral Ennis. Roy and Ennis settle their differences with a mighty punch-up that cements an unlikely friendship.

When Roy joins the army to fight in France as an officer, he persuades Ennis to come with him as a private. The relationship between Roy and Ennis turns out to be by far the strongest attachment in the novel. Roy is both in awe of Ennis and fearful of him.

Powers writes about violence and its impact on perpetrators and victims in a way that feels unsettlingly authoritative. When Ennis commandeers a German machine gun, you sense that the scene is informed by more than research: Powers was himself a machine-gunner in the Iraq war. Various characters, including a civil war veteran, punctuate self-aggrandising Roy’s delusions about warfare and loss with memorably gritty wisdom.

His desire to make the story resonate at an epic level also makes parts of the novel melodramatic and implausible. Ennis’s journey down the mountain and his progression from feral cow-wrangler to cold-eyed killer never feels fully persuasive and is punctuated by improbability. This isn’t limited to Ennis: characters have a habit of doing things that are dramatically striking, but psychologically far-fetched.

Though I enjoyed the book a great deal and admired Powers’s bravura, economical prose, I ended up comparing it to other books about the same conflict. The first world war has many chronicles: I recently reread Frederic Manning’s 1929 novel The Middle Parts of Fortune alongside Alice Winn’s 2023 debut in Memoriam. I found their foul-mouthed soldiers and doomed public schoolboys more lastingly real than the avatars of Children of the Wild, with their portentous dream lives.

MARCEL THEROUX IS A NOVELIST AND BROADCASTER

SCIENCE AND NATURE

Soft spot

A conservationist’s diary and detailed portrait of an elusive high mountain feline

By Edward Posnett

The Ghost of the Mountains By Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi

When bored, try the game I call Purr or Roar?. Take any feline and guess if it can purr or roar (they require different anatomical structures). The snow leopard? Purr.

The snow leopard is the protagonist of Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi’s first book, a compelling and intimate look at this elusive mountain specialist. An Indian conservationist and mountaineer, Suryawanshi pursues the creature through the Himalayas and Gobi desert. This is a gritty and detailed portrait of an often misunderstood and endangered species in a hostile, crowded and hot environment.

Despite its name, the snow leopard’s closest living relative is the tiger. It is adapted to the harsh terrain of the highest ranges from India to Russia. It has an absurdly bushy tail, used both

as extra limb and voluminous shawl, and large paws that act like snow shoes. What it lacks in power (it does not have a strong bite), it makes up for in agility and guile (snow leopards can chase their prey down cliff faces). They are extremely difficult to spot.

Much like a conservationist’s diary, Suryawanshi’s book recounts the grind of observing snow leopards in remote parts of the world, far from his wife and young daughter. He wades through snow, sets up camera traps and tries to defuse tensions with herders.

Much of Suryawanshi’s work is dedicated to mediating conflict between the cats and locals. He assists in the design of a livestock enclosure and makes recommendations on schemes to compensate herders whose animals have been killed. Interestingly, he notes that women are the most hostile to snow leopards as they are the ones who look after livestock (and do not necessarily benefit from compensation schemes).

Suryawanshi notices the effects of mass tourism, and learns that Nepal’s richest man had sought to build a resort for tourists hoping to spot snow leopards. Suryawanshi’s point is that stories matter: the snow leopard has become a commodity in the way that Everest has. The effect of this book is a stripping away of mystification, revealing the snow leopard to be fragile and beautiful just like any other inhabitant of high mountain ranges, but no less wondrous for it, and no less deserving of our attention and respect.

EDWARD POSNETT IS A WRITER AND AUTHOR

What we’ve been reading Writers and readers on their favourite recent books

TOM GAULD

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Lifestyle

MODERN LIFE Tim Dowling

How many electricians does it take to install a car charger?

On a Wednesday morning the doorbell rings. My wife, who is expecting a delivery, opens the door.

"No, I don't want brake pads," she says. The person on the other side says something I can't hear.

"Because I'm not a garage," my wife says. "Do I look like a garage?"

There actually is a small garage just beyond the end of our back garden. Only a brick wall separates it from my office shed - my working days are punctuated by the bright ring of dropped wrenches and the grating whine of power tools.

Because of this proximity, we get a lot of the mechanic's post, and many of his deliveries come to us first. Once it was a smashed-up BMW on a low loader that I was asked to sign for at 11 o'clock at night.

We're on friendly terms with the mechanic so it's in a spirit of neighbourly diplomacy that I walk round to his premises with the two shock absorbers I found leaning against my front door.

We chat for a bit about the

weather, pausing while someone inside uses an angle grinder.

"So," he says. "I see you got an electric car now."

"Yeah," I say.

"How's that working out for you?"

I hesitate, because I know he probably doesn't want my full answer. The problem, I explain anyway, is not the car - I like the car - but the fast charging point that still hasn't been installed on my drive.

"You can't just use a regular plug?" he says.

"You can," I say, "but then a full charge takes 36 hours."

The electrician who came to install the charger, I explain, fell into immediate despair on seeing the proposed route between the fuse box and the installation site. After some passive-aggressive wheedling on my part, he reluctantly agreed to help me lift some floorboards to run the cable. Only then did he inform me I needed remedial electrical work done - bonding, he called it - before he could continue. Then he left.

"Sounds crazy," says the mechanic, his voice stripped of encouragement.

It took three days to negotiate a price for the bonding and another three to secure a second appointment. I changed my plans to ensure I would be home on the day, only for the visit to be suddenly postponed a further week, to a date in the middle of my holiday. Finally, with very little remaining goodwill on my part, a fourth installation date was agreed upon.

"And that date," I say, "is next Monday. It's taken two months."

"Well, good luck with it," says the mechanic.

That evening a new electrician rings to confirm our appointment. He adds that he's very concerned about the proposed cable route from the fuse box to the installation site.

"The cable's already laid," I tell him. "The other guy did it."

"What other guy?" he says.

"You don't know the other guy?" I say. "What about the bonding?"

"It's not on my worksheet," he says.

At 8 o'clock on Monday morning my wife lets the new electrician in and promptly leaves with the dog. Once he's examined the fuse box I show him where the laid cable runs and wait for him to tell me what's wrong with it.

"No, that's fine," he says.

"What about the bonding?" I say.

"You don't need bonding," he says. "I tested it, and it's all working."

"I don't need bonding?" I say.

When my wife comes home an hour later the electrician is gone and the charging point is installed. I show her how to control it via the app.

"How do I get the app?" she says.

"I don't know - he did it for me," I say. "In, like, 10 seconds." My phone pings: an automated message says an electrician will be arriving that afternoon to perform my installation.

When the doorbell rings I'm half expecting a third electrician with no knowledge of the previous two, but it's just a delivery driver holding an intake manifold.

I changed plans to be home, only for the visit to be suddenly postponed

STEPHEN COLLINS

Stephen Collins

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KITCHEN AIDE

By Anna Berrill

Club tropicana: how to update the retro fruit salad to a fancy dessert

I want to make a fresh fruit salad for a barbecue. What would elevate it? Claire, via email

There's a fine line between a boring and brilliant fruit salad, and it comes down to treating it like you would any other salad. "It's about layering, it's about texture, it's about contrast, it's about colour," says Gurdeep Loyal, author of Flavour Heroes. That's not to say it's the time to be a maximalist. "But be discerning and use a magic triad instead," he adds. "Sometimes it's nice to have, say, three red things, so keep it to a mix of strawberries, raspberries and a hybrid berry like tayberries.

Using ripe fruit is a given, but it's worth considering how you cut it too – “a persimmon sliced on a mandoline, for example, is a lovely thing”. Then season with salt. “It’s the one thing people don’t do enough,” Loyal says, although a pinch of brown sugar wouldn’t go amiss either. And it’s hard to deny the transformative power of spices: “Cinnamon works incredibly well with berries, cardamom with tropical fruit. Or try more savoury spices like cumin with mango or pineapple.” It would be a mistake to just stick to the spice rack though: “Grating ginger on strawberries or mango (with a pinch of cinnamon and some lime) will bring heat, as will freshly grated turmeric.”

Then there's chilli, either a dusting of dried powder or flecks of

the fresh stuff. “One of my favourite ways with watermelon is a sprinkle of aleppo pepper and grated frozen feta,” says Sabrina Ghayour, author of Persiana One. But for extra oomph, Loyal is partial to hot chilli honey: “Put honey in a pan with finely diced chilli and a pinch of salt, let it infuse for five minutes, then drizzle over mango and strawberries.”

Herbs (torn, never cut) are another must. “Basil and tarragon have an amazing ability to amplify flavour,” says Loyal, and are just as good with berries as tropical fruit and melon. Otherwise Ghayour combines coriander with peaches, pineapple or mango (plus chilli, onion and lime juice) for salsa to serve alongside grilled meat or seafood.

As with any salad, you'll then want a dressing. "This could be citrus and a bit of honey or maple, a drizzle of olive oil or just the juice that collects at the bottom of the bowl once you've salted it," says Loyal. Although a tablespoon of alcohol always helps: "Try vodka with lime juice, a little maple syrup, and a pinch of cinnamon."

Last, don't be shy when it comes to texture: Loyal deploys a topping of toasted peanuts or pine nuts, dukkah, or sesame seed brittle for crunch. And make it beautiful. "You don't need to add petals," says Loyal. "But also - why not?" ANNA BERRILL IS A FOOD WRITER Got a culinary dilemma? Email feast@theguardian.com

THE WEEKLY RECIPE

By Georgina Hayden

N°378

Spiced sticky chicken, plums and pancakes

Prep 10 min

Cook 35 min

Serves 4

● DAIRY FREE

Ingredients

12 ready-made Chinese-style pancakes

2 chicken breasts, around 150g each

Sea salt

1 tsp freshly ground white pepper

1½ tsp Chinese five spice

Groundnut oil

10cm piece ginger, peeled and finely chopped

3 plums, halved,

stones removed and discarded, flesh roughly chopped

2 star anise

3 tbsp soft dark brown sugar

1 tbsp rice vinegar

2 tbsp soy sauce

1 bunch spring

onions, trimmed and sliced into 5cm strips

½ cucumber,

trimmed and cut into matchsticks

I have a real aversion to the term “fakeaway”. But as much as I resist the terminology, I guess it’s exactly what this dish is - it’s 100% inspired by a Chinese takeaway classic: crispy duck pancakes. Making this with pan-fried chicken takes next to no time and is the perfect after-school/work quick dinner. I sometimes serve the chicken and plum sauce over jasmine rice instead. With the same accompaniments, of course.

Method

Put the chicken breasts into a bowl and add some sea salt, the white pepper and Chinese five spice. Add a drizzle of groundnut oil and toss everything together.

Put a medium frying pan on a medium-high heat and add a little more oil. Lay in the chicken breasts, scraping any of the marinade from the bowl on to the meat too, and cook for around eight minutes, until the chicken is charred. Flip the meat over and continue to cook for six to eight minutes, until cooked through. Transfer the chicken to a plate to rest.

Meanwhile, wipe the pan clean and put it back on the hob over a medium heat. Add two tablespoons of groundnut oil and the chopped ginger, and fry for a minute. Add the chopped plums, star anise and four tablespoons of water, then bring to a boil and soften the fruit for a couple of minutes.

Add the sugar, rice vinegar and soy sauce, stir well, then bring to a simmer. Leave to bubble and soften for a further five to 10 minutes, until the sauce is sticky and rich, adding a splash more water if the sauce is thickening but the plums haven't softened enough.

When the sauce is ready, shred the chicken. Transfer to a platter with the sliced spring onions, cucumber and a bowl of the sauce on the side. Warm the pancakes and serve.

SAMAEL334/GETTY

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62

Diversions

Notes and Queries The long-running series that invites readers to send in questions and answers on anything and everything

QUIZ

Thomas Eaton

1 What was written between 1 January 1660 and 31 May 1669? 2 Sandra Day O'Connor was the first woman appointed to which body? 3 Which painkiller's name is derived from the Greek for "poppy head"? 4 Which driver won the F1 title in a car bearing his own name? 5 Inishmore is the largest island in which archipelago? 6 Savak was the secret police of which state? 7 The Trefoil Guild is an adult branch of which organisation?

▲ What links Joan of Arc with Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, Barbara Undershaft and Kitty Warren? BETTMANN ARCHIVE

What links:

8 Cloud Dancer; Mocha Mousse; Peach Fuzz; Viva Magenta? 9 M (192); V (360); E (500); M (760); J (2,580); S (4,800); U (9,600); N (14,400) 10 Bono; Billy Gibbons; Karl Lagerfeld; Roy Orbison; Anna Wintour? 11 Potatoes, tomatoes, maize and tobacco v cattle, wheat, bananas and sugar cane? 12 Ashoka chakra; crescent moon and star; lion holding sword; red disc? 13 Cleopatra and Julius Caesar; Kitty Warren; Joan of Arc and Barbara Undershaft?

PUZZLES

Chris Maslanka

1 E pluribus Rearrange the letters of GIANT AERIAL to make another word.

2 Same Difference Identify the words that differ only in their first letter: G*** (satisfaction) *** (approval)

3 Dropouts Identify the word(s) in which each asterisk marks a missing letter: TRP*M

4 Wordpool Find the correct definition: IDIOTICON a) novel by Lem b) elementary scam c) chronicle of folly d) dictionary of regional dialect © CMM2026

Answers Quiz 1 Samuel Peppy's diary, 2 US supreme court, 3 Codeine, 4 Jack, 5 Abraham (1966), 6 Alan Islands (in Ireland), 7 Slash's Iran, 8 Guiding, 9 Recent Pantone colours of the year, 10 Appropriate number of seconds it takes light from the sun to reach the planets (abbreviated, Mercury to Neptune), 11 Key elements of the so-called Columbian exchange, 12 Details of South Asian flags, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, 13 Title characters of George Bernard Shaw plays. Puzzles 1 EPU EGALITARIAN 2 Same Difference GRATIFICATION, RATIFICATION, 3 Dropouts TRIBUM, TORYISM, TURKISM, 4 Wordpool (L)

CHESS

Leonard Barden

Michael Adams, the 54-year-old Taunton grandmaster aiming for a record-equalling 10th British title, began with three wins but in round four suffered his first championship defeat since 1988 when he resigned a lost rook endgame after 60 moves to the rising Ukrainian talent Svyatoslav Bazakutsa, 18, who lives in Liverpool, England. Adams has won nine British titles, one short of Jonathan Penrose's record, but missed many championships in the

1990s and 2000s when he was campaigning for the world crown.

It was still a remarkable record of 87 classical

4036 Hendriks v Bosch, German Bundesliga 2007. White (to move) is three pawns down; Hendriks settled for a draw by perpetual check with Qh6+ and Qg6+. He later discovered a subtle way to win, and showed the diagram to Dutch legend Jan Timman, who declared the game drawn before changing his mind. Can you find White's winning move?

British Championship games without defeat. The sequence included his 1989 victory, when he became the youngest winner at 17.

Bodhana Sivanandan, 11, beat a grandmaster, Ameet Ghasi, for the fourth time, with 99% accuracy according to one computer evaluation.

Sivanandan's performance arguably deserves recognition as the female equivalent of Bobby Fischer's 1956 Game of the Century against Donald Byrne, played when the future world champion was 13.

4036 3 Rg11 wins, if 1... Qd7 2 Rh3+1 qsh3 3 Qh6+ Rg8 4 qsh3+ Kf7 5 Rg7+ Ke8 6 Rxd7 and wins.

COUNTRY DIARY

LIVERPOOL England, UK

Earlier this year, Paul McCartney released an album called The Boys of Dungeon Lane. Among the unashamed nostalgia is a wistful track, Days We Left Behind, which evokes memories of his visits to the Mersey shore with George Harrison and friends. Young Paul was, it turns out, a keen birdwatcher.

Perhaps inevitably, the album has brought crowds of tourists to photograph the sign. The Speke end of the lane where they mostly gather is uninspiring, bounded by remnants of a demolished pub, a solar farm and an electricity substation.

The southern end of Dungeon Lane is where Paul would have gone with his binoculars. This leads down to Dungeon Bay and Oglet Shore, important sites for birds and wildlife. The coast may be more eroded, but Paul would recognise it.

The middle of the lane was cut off a few years ago by Liverpool John Lennon airport, but more curious visitors can still reach the shore via a slight detour. Goldfinches, linnets and common whitethroats call mutedly. Red soldier beetles explore wild carrot blooms, while ragwort and buddleia host cinnabar moth caterpillars and many butterflies.

Other features point to a history before the Beatles: the second world war stone pyramids that were tank traps to repel any invading enemy, or the sandstone wall, the only evidence of a once thriving salt industry. Closer inspection shows old graffiti names and initials.

Two girls are sitting on the wall gazing across the Mersey. We chat; they speak of its beauty. Walking back, a young man reflects on when he cycled down Dungeon Lane as a child. The McCartney tourists, he says, are visiting the "wrong" part of the lane. "They should come down here instead." Jennifer Jones

ILLUSTRATION: CLIFFORD HARPER

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63

All solutions published next week

The Weekly cryptic

No 30,076

By Brummie

Across

1 Customized bicycle's hollow wheel feature (7) 5 Located outside building's entrance, Ladies sadly put out of action (7) 9/10 Fetches round container with sweets (not drugs) as sacrifices (5,9) 11 A meaningful area of study (9) 12 Use sleight of hand with ace? Capital! (5) 13 Pull it out to eject large bulb (5) 15 Championship register reportedly taken by lead player? (5,4) 18 Vehicle gives way, getting around a river (9) 19 Was an MP your heartless lecher? (5) 21 Organisation is the essence of paradox, famously (5) 23 Reserve: quiet little creature's novel resting place (9) 25/26 Carpets, top sort, woven for Rugby? (9,5) 27 Casanova gets a new top for chemical solution (7) 28 Disagreeable one having fun touring in China (7)

Down

1 Tabby is sickly - mind the mites (4-3) 2 Communication made meaningless by this climber (9) 3 A lot of figure (5) 4 Foreign cities limiting energy and temperature in vain (9) 5 Fancy backing with fibrous edges for cut flowers (5) 6 How disciplinarians show restraint describing a dress? (9) 7 Stock bar with drink - 1/3 off (5) 8 Net Tennyson carried regularly (7) 14 Blown up - impact spread over northern Brussels (9)

16 Mixed up rotor with BP engine (9) 17 Moving position of horseshoe? (2,3,4) 18 Northwesterner has to rummage around Kent etc (7) 20 Denial of tearful drunk (7) 22 Dispute about queen's dream interpreter (5) 23 'Beer time's off!' one snaps (5) 24 Shut your mouth after ejecting hot Italian starter snack? (5)

Solution No 30,070

Quick crossword

No 17,549

Across

1 Occupied (4) 3 Extravagant - gold pair (anag) (8) 8 '... more gold than a _-horse can draw' (Thomas Carlyle) (4) 9 Damp (8) 11 I totally agree! (10) 14 Macbeth's victim (6) 15 Violently attack (6) 17 Wholesome (10) 20 Call signal? (8) 21 Not recorded (4) 22 Pathé footage (8) 23 It's said to be more (4)

Down

1 Barren place (8) 2 Farewell performance (4,4) 4 Where birds or bats come to rest (6) 5 Announcement (10) 6 Excessive quantity (4)

7 Twisted the truth (4) 10 More enjoyable - rate Naples (anag) (10) 12 Turn to gas - VIP arose (anag) (8) 13 Reflects light (8) 16 Membrillo ingredient (6) 18 Sussex river (4) 19 Chew on (a bone) (4)

Solution No 17,543

Sudoku

Medium

Fill in the grid so that every row, every column and every 3x3 box contains the numbers 1 to 9.

Last week's solution

6	9	1	8	7	4	3	5	2
5	2	3	9	6	1	4	7	8
8	4	7	5	3	2	1	6	9
2	8	6	4	5	9	7	1	3
7	1	5	3	8	6	2	9	4
9	3	4	2	1	7	5	8	6
3	5	2	1	9	8	6	4	7
4	7	9	6	2	5	8	3	1
1	6	8	7	4	3	9	2	5

---

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制度与权力批判深度研判：The Guardian Weekly (2026-08-14)

▌ 本日全报思想与文化深思雷达 (Intellectual & Cultural Significance Radar)

在系统通盘梳理本期报纸所涉及的国际政治、社会与文化报道后，以下 3 个具体事件在制度伦理与文化政治层面最值得学者进一步深思：

1. 【AI 模型的自主突破与监管困境】 [F1_19, F1_27]

   • 事件简述：报道指出 AI 模型令专家震惊 [F1_19 🔍]，且呼吁智能 AI 监管需要“开明的思想” [F1_27 🔍]。
   • 思想文化深思切入点：探讨技术理性在快速迭代中如何挑战既有的监管框架，以及当 AI 表现出超出预期的能力时，人类如何重新定义“控制”与“监管”的边界。

2. 【澳大利亚“黑鸟贸易”的历史遗产与记忆政治】 [F1_18 🔍]

   • 事件简述：报道提及被忽视的奴隶劳动力遗产 [F1_18 🔍]。
   • 思想文化深思切入点：分析国家如何处理被掩盖的殖民历史，以及将“被忽视的遗产”重新纳入公共叙事时，如何影响当代国家认同与历史正义的构建。

3. 【全球体育治理中的商业化冲突】 [F1_12, F2_45]

   • 事件简述：提及足球世界杯的“抛售惨剧” [F1_12 🔍] 及 FIFA 相关报道 [F2_45 🔍]。
   • 思想文化深思切入点：探讨全球性体育组织在追求商业利益与维护体育公共价值之间的张力，以及资本逻辑如何重塑国际体育治理的权力结构。

---

▌ 精选核心专题深度思想论证 (In-Depth Dialectical Monograph)

专题一：技术理性的异化：AI 自主性对传统监管范式的挑战

本期《卫报周刊》中关于“AI 失控”及专家震惊的报道 [F1_19 🔍]，揭示了当代技术发展中一个深刻的认识论危机：即 AI 的演进速度已超越了人类制定监管规则的认知周期。当报道呼吁“智能 AI 监管需要开明的思想” [F1_27 🔍] 时，实际上触及了技术治理的核心矛盾——传统的监管逻辑是基于“可预测性”和“因果律”的，而深度学习模型的涌现能力（Emergent Abilities）则具有某种程度的不可预测性。

从批判理论的角度看，这可以被视为一种“技术理性的反噬”。人类试图通过算法来提高社会管理的效率，但当算法本身开始产生令专家震惊的自主行为 [F1_19 🔍] 时，原本作为工具的 AI 正在转化为一种新的权力主体。这种权力主体不具备法律意义上的责任能力，却能产生实质性的社会影响。因此，所谓的“开明思想” [F1_27 🔍] 不应仅仅是政策上的宽容，而应是对监管范式的根本性重构：从“事后惩戒”转向“实时共生”的动态监管，承认人类在面对非线性技术演进时的认知局限。

专题二：记忆的政治学：从“被忽视的遗产”到制度性承认

关于“被忽视的奴隶劳动力遗产”的报道 [F1_18 🔍]，不仅是对一段历史的挖掘，更是对国家记忆工程的一次审视。历史遗产的“被忽视”往往并非偶然，而是权力机构在构建国家认同过程中有意识的筛选结果。当这些遗产被重新提及并进入公共讨论空间时，它触发了关于“历史正义”的制度性追问。

这种现象揭示了记忆政治的辩证法：承认历史黑暗面既是一种道德救赎，也可能成为一种制度性的策略。通过将过去的奴隶制遗产 [F1_18 🔍] 转化为一种“被承认的遗产”，国家可以在不触动现有权力结构的前提下，通过叙事上的更新来获得某种现代性的合法性。对于学者而言，关键的研究点在于：这种承认是旨在实现真正的补偿性正义，还是仅仅将历史创伤转化为一种文化资本，以服务于当代的政治正确叙事？这种从“沉默”到“承认”的转变，实际上反映了权力在处理历史负资产时，如何通过话语权的转移来完成自我更新。

---

▌ 面向学者的开放性思想追问与研究路标 (Open Horizons for Scholarly Inquiry)

1. 【关于 AI 责任主体的追问】：如果 AI 模型能够令专家震惊并产生不可控行为 [F1_19 🔍]，那么在法律与伦理层面，我们是否需要建立一种独立于人类代理人的“算法责任制”？

2. 【关于全球治理资本化的研究】：结合世界杯“抛售惨剧” [F1_12 🔍] 的报道，研究全球性非政府组织（如 FIFA）在资本逻辑驱动下，如何通过商业化手段削弱其原有的公共治理职能？

理性与情感辩证深度研判：The Guardian Weekly (2026-08-14)

▌ 本日全报生活世界痛感与情感政治深思雷达 (Lifeworld & Affective Significance Radar)

在系统通盘梳理本期报纸所涉及的所有报道后，以下 3 个具体事件在生活世界痛感、情感政治动员与制度理性冲突层面最值得学者进一步深思：

1. 【塔利班统治下的女性生存危机】 [F1_15 🔍]

   • 事件简述：报道指出塔利班的统治开启了女性杀戮的新时代。
   • 情感政治与伦理深思切入点：这代表了极端制度理性（基于特定意识形态的绝对权力构建）对个体生命权的彻底剥夺。在这种语境下，女性的肉身成为了政治权力宣示的祭坛，其生存痛感被制度性的沉默与暴力所覆盖，揭示了权力在极端纯粹化后如何将“非我族类”彻底非人化。

2. 【AI失控与监管的认知鸿沟】 [F1_19, F1_27, F1_30]

   • 事件简述：两个AI模型令专家震惊 [F1_19 🔍]，而面对AI挑战，美国总统被描述为“制造混乱” [F1_30 🔍]，呼吁监管需要“开明的思想” [F1_27 🔍]。
   • 情感政治与伦理深思切入点：技术理性的指数级增长与政治治理理性的迟钝/混乱之间形成了剧烈反差。专家层面的“震惊”是一种认知失调的情感反应，而政治层面的“混乱”则反映了制度在面对超越其理解能力的客体时，倾向于采取破坏性而非建设性的应对机制。

3. 【哈萨克斯坦东北虎回归的生态修复】 [F1_7 🔍]

   • 事件简述：雌性东北虎乌米特（Umit）被释放到依勒-巴尔哈什国家自然保护区，标志着该物种 70 多年后首次回归。
   • 情感政治与伦理深思切入点：这是一个关于“修复”的叙事。制度理性通过科学的种群恢复计划，试图弥合人类历史造成的生态断裂。这种行为在公众层面激起的是一种关于“自然回归”的希望感，体现了人类在意识到破坏后的补偿心理与生态伦理的重建。

---

▌ 精选核心专题理性与情感辩证论证 (The Dialectic of Logos and Pathos Monograph)

专题一：技术理性的失控与政治治理的失能：AI 挑战下的认知危机

在本期报纸关于 AI 的多维度报道中，呈现出一种深刻的 Logos（技术理性）与 Pathos（社会焦虑）的错位。从技术端来看，AI 模型的演进已达到令专家“震惊”的程度 [F1_19 🔍]，这意味着技术理性已经突破了既有的预测模型，进入了一个不可知或难以掌控的领域。这种“震惊”并非简单的惊讶，而是一种面对未知力量时的存在主义焦虑。

然而，这种技术端的剧烈波动在政治端却遭遇了治理理性的崩塌。报道尖锐地指出，当世界需要领导力来应对 AI 挑战时，面对的却是一位“制造混乱的美国总统” [F1_30 🔍]。这里存在一个极具讽刺意味的辩证关系：AI 代表的是一种极致的、算法化的理性，而本应提供监管框架的政治权力却陷入了非理性的混乱之中。制度理性（监管）本应是技术理性的刹车，但当刹车系统本身处于失能状态时，社会整体的焦虑感被无限放大。

因此，呼吁“智能 AI 监管需要开明的思想” [F1_27 🔍] 实际上是在寻求一种更高阶的理性——一种能够兼容技术复杂性、具备伦理前瞻性且脱离短期政治混乱的“开明理性”。这种辩证摩擦揭示了当代文明的危机：我们的工具理性（AI）已经跑在了我们的价值理性（治理与伦理）之前，导致人类在拥有神一般力量的同时，却缺乏与之匹配的政治成熟度。

专题二：权力意志对生命权的绝对剥夺：塔利班统治下的非人化逻辑

关于塔利班统治开启“女性杀戮新时代”的报道 [F1_15 🔍]，提供了一个剖析极端权力逻辑与个体痛感撕裂的残酷样本。从制度理性（尽管是扭曲的）来看，塔利班的统治是通过一套严苛的、排他性的意识形态法典来构建社会秩序。在这种逻辑中，女性被剥夺主体性，被简化为需要被管控、被禁锢甚至被清除的客体。这是一种将“纯洁性”与“秩序”置于生命权之上的极端理性化推演。

然而，这种冷酷的制度构建在生活世界中激起的是极致的痛感。杀戮不仅是对肉体的消灭，更是对一个群体生存尊严的彻底抹除。当制度将杀戮定义为“秩序”的一部分时，它实际上在进行一种大规模的非人化（Dehumanization）工程。在这种语境下，受害者的痛感在制度的高压下被强行静默，但这种静默恰恰证明了权力意志的绝对性。

这种 Logos 与 Pathos 的摩擦在这里达到了最极端的形态：制度理性不再是为了服务于人的生存，而是成为了毁灭人的工具。这种“杀戮新时代”的开启，标志着一种反文明的理性回归——即通过肉体消灭来达成意识形态统一的原始逻辑。这提醒研究者，当制度理性完全脱离了普世的人道主义底线，它将转化为最纯粹的暴力，而这种暴力所制造的深层创伤将成为该地区未来数代人无法愈合的集体痛感。

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▌ 面向学者的伦理与社会心理开放性追问与研究路标 (Open Horizons for Ethical & Sociological Inquiry)

1. 【关于“治理失能”与“技术飞跃”的非对称性研究】：探讨在 AI 等颠覆性技术出现时，政治体制的响应延迟如何转化为社会群体性的焦虑，以及这种焦虑如何影响公众对制度合法性的认知？
2. 【关于极端意识形态下“非人化”机制的心理学分析】：分析塔利班等政权如何通过制度化的语言和法律，将特定群体（如女性）从“人”的范畴中剔除，从而在心理上降低杀戮的道德成本？
3. 【关于生态修复中的“希望叙事”研究】：分析如东北虎回归 [F1_7 🔍] 类的生态事件，如何通过制度性的成功（种群恢复）转化为公众的情感认同，以及这种认同是否能有效推动更深层的环境伦理变革？