Category Archives: Politics

Politics: The Guardian Weekly – January 26, 2024

The Guardian Weekly (January 25, 2024) – The new issue features ‘True Colours’ – What the AFD really wants for Germany; The fading hopes for Middle East Peace; Trump’s victory and DeSantis’s doomed campaign…

Events in the Middle East continue to unfold at a bewildering pace, with pockets of conflict opening up across the region. Diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour rounds up a week of flashpoints and assesses increasingly slim hopes for controlling the situation. And Oliver Holmes provides a revealing profile of Yemen, one of the most unchanging and least visited countries in the Middle East.

The Weekly went to press before news of Donald Trump’s victory in the New Hampshire Republican primary on Tuesday night, but you can catch up with all the latest Guardian coverage and reaction here. In the magazine, David Smith delivers a postmortem on Ron DeSantis’s doomed campaign, while Jonathan Freedland argues that Trump’s march to the White House can still be stopped.

Our long-read features take somewhat divergent paths this week. First, Charlotte Edwardes meets Gary Lineker, the former England footballer turned TV presenter whose penchant for regularly airing his liberal worldviews has made him public enemy No 1 for Britain’s anti-woke brigade.

Then, Chananya Groner unearths a remarkable story of factionalism and messianic fervour within New York’s Hasidic Jewish community, stretching back 30 years, which led to secret tunnels recently being discovered beneath a Brooklyn synagogue.

And in Culture, Charlotte Higgins meets the classical musicians Dalia Stasevska and Joshua Bell, who are resurrecting a long-forgotten Ukrainian concerto as a gesture of defiance to Russia.

Finally, we’re on the lookout for your best photographs of the world around us. For a chance for your picture to feature in the magazine, send us your best shot, telling us where you were in the world when you took it and why the scene resonated with you at that particular time.

News: Far Right Stokes Europe Farmer Protests, Independents Shun Trump

The Globalist Podcast (January 25, 2024) Farmers across Europe take to the streets. Do their protests link with the far-right movement in the EU?

Then: the Philippines refuses to help the ICC’s drug-war probe, we assess the Red Sea disruption’s effect on global trade and look at the women serving in Ukraine’s armed forces. Plus: the diplomacy of alcohol as Saudi Arabia prepares to open its first liquor store – serving diplomats only.

News: Trump Wins New Hampshire Vote, Turkey Votes Sweden Into NATO

The Globalist Podcast (January 24, 2024) The latest from the all-important face-off between Donald Trump and Nikki Haley in the New Hampshire primary.

Plus: the Turkish parliament votes on Swedish accession to Nato, Germany’s six-day train strike begins and the latest business news.

News: EU Support Of A Palestinian State, Haley Vs Trump In New Hampshire

The Globalist Podcast (January 23, 2024) We discuss the EU’s role in Gaza as European foreign ministers met separately yesterday with their Israeli and Palestinian counterparts.

Plus: an on-the-ground report from the New Hampshire primary, Ukraine strikes Russian gas and Madrid’s new graffiti police.

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine- January 29, 2024

A chicken takes a bath on a rainy day in the city.

The New Yorker (January 22, 2024): The new issue‘s cover features Roz Chast’s “Bird Bath” – The artist depicts her favorite antidote for dreary winter weather: a nice, hot bath.

Rules for the Ruling Class

An illustration of a bird walking above other birds.

How to thrive in the power élite—while declaring it your enemy

By Evan Osnos

As a young man in the nineteen-eighties, Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson set out to claim his stake in the establishment. His access to money and influence started at home. His stepmother, Patricia, was an heir to the Swanson frozen-food fortune. His father, Dick, was a California TV anchor who became a Washington fixture after a stint in the Reagan Administration. For fortunate clans like the Carlsons, it was “A Wonderful Time,” to borrow the title of a volume of contemporaneous portraits of “the life of America’s elite,” which included “the Cabots sailing off Boston’s North Shore, and Barry Goldwater on the range in Arizona.”

Sofia Coppola’s Path to Filming Gilded Adolescence

Sophia Coppola sits on a stool under a bright light.

There are few Hollywood families in which one famous director has spawned another. Coppola says, “It’s not easy for anyone in this business, even though it looks easy for me.”

By Rachel Syme

When Eleanor Coppola went into labor with her third child, on May 14, 1971, at a hospital in Manhattan, her husband, the director Francis Ford Coppola, was on location in Harlem, shooting a scene for “The Godfather.” Hearing the news, he grabbed a camcorder from the set and raced over to capture the moment. “When they say, ‘It’s a girl,’ my dad gasps and nearly drops the camera,” Sofia Coppola told me recently, of her birth video. “My mom is there, just trying to focus.” The footage—which has been screened by the family multiple times over the years, and as part of a feminist art installation designed by Eleanor—was the first of many instances in which Sofia would be seen through her father’s lens. When she was just a few months old, Francis cast her in her first official film role, as the infant in the dénouement of “The Godfather,” in which Michael Corleone, the ascendant boss of the Corleone crime family, anoints the head of his newborn nephew as his associates murder rival gangsters one by one.

News: NATO’s Massive New Military Drills, Israel Spurns Hamas Truce Offer

The Globalist Podcast (January 22, 2024) .We discuss Nato’s preparations for the ‘Steadfast Defender 24’ exercises, which will test the alliance’s ability to defend its eastern flank that borders Russia.

Plus: a flick through the day’s papers, the latest climate news and a dispatch from Singapore Art Week.

Sunday Morning: Stories And News From London, Paris And Granada, Spain

Monocle on Sunday, January 21, 2024 – Georgina Godwin, Charles Hecker and Latika Bourke on the weekend’s biggest talking points. We also speak to Monocle’s editorial director, Tyler Brûlé, in Paris and Monocle’s correspondent, Mary Fitzgerald, reporting from Granada, Spain this week.

Saturday Morning: News And Stories From London

Monocle on Saturday, January 20, 2024: What are the key takeaways from the interview with German defence minister, Boris Pistorius? Which country is the common link in the recent Middle Eastern conflicts, and why?

Join Georgina Godwin and Austrian journalist Tessa Szyszkowitz for this and more from the week’s news and culture. Plus: Monocle’s Lilian Fawcett visits Singapore’s international art fair, ART SG, to find out how Singapore is trying to establish itself as a global art hub.

The New York Times Magazine- January 21, 2024

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THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (January 19, 2024): The new issue features ‘The Whale Who Went AWOL’ – How do you solve a problem like Hvaldmir?; How Group Chats Rule the World – They quietly became the de facto spaces to share dumb jokes, grief or even plans for an insurrection…

The Whale Who Went AWOL

Hvaldimir escaped captivity and became a global celebrity. Now, no one can agree about what to do with him.

By Ferris Jabr

On April 26, 2019, a beluga whale appeared near Tufjord, a village in northern Norway, immediately alarming fishermen in the area. Belugas in that part of the world typically inhabit the remote Arctic and are rarely spotted as far south as the Norwegian mainland. Although they occasionally travel solo, they tend to live and move in groups. This particular whale was entirely alone and unusually comfortable around humans, trailing boats and opening his mouth as though expecting to be fed. And he seemed to be tangled in rope.

How Group Chats Rule the World

An illustration of people falling into chat bubbles.

They quietly became the de facto spaces to share dumb jokes, grief or even plans for an insurrection.

By Sophie Haigney

I am texting all the time. I am, at the very least, receiving texts all the time, a party to conversations in which I am alternately an eavesdropper and an active participant. This is because I am in a lot of group chats — constant, interlinked, text-message-based conversations among multiple friends that happen all day long. I dip into and out of these conversations, on my phone and on my computer. Sometimes I will put both away for two hours and return to find 279 new messages waiting.

News: Pakistan And Iran Border Missile Strikes, Somalia-Ethiopia Dispute

The Globalist Podcast (January 19, 2024) We discuss the regional fallout following Pakistan’s retaliatory strikes in Iran.

Plus: the Somalia-Ethiopia dispute over the Somaliland maritime deal, media freedom in Ukraine following reports of press intimidation and a special interview with Alexander Payne, the director of ‘The Holdovers’.