Greenhouse gases, El Niño, and cleaner air fueled record heat in 2023
Peeled-apart Indian Plate could be affecting earthquake hazards
The Guardian Weekly (January 10, 2024) – The new issue features ‘Middle East on the brink’ – The threat of a regional war. Also, Inside the Post Office Horizon IT scandal…
The assassination of a Hamas chief in Lebanon. A terror attack on mourners of an Iranian former general. Commercial shipping in the Red Sea targeted by Yemeni rebels, and a US airstrike in Iraq. All were separate events in the Middle East last week but all were linked, in one way or another, to the presence of autonomous but Iranian-backed militia forces in the region.
When asked to visualise the threat of war engulfing the Middle East, for this week’s cover, illustrator Carl Godfrey took a literal approach. “I wanted to convey the tense and unpredictable situation,” says Carl, “and there’s nothing more tense than looking down the barrel of a gun. Especially when those barrels are pointing in all directions, and the risk of war is expanding in all directions.”
Times Literary Supplement (January 10, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Have a good trip’ – On the uses of psychedelic drugs; Hisham Matar’s novel of London exile; A West Bank tragedy; Puzzled by crosswords; French Band Aid, and more…
By Carrie Cogan
I rode west with a childhood friend who was driving to a job in California. We passed through Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and still there was no sign of the Commander. My friend placed a bag of chocolate-covered espresso beans on the console between us, jumble of rich dark gems, glittering like they were wet. I crunched them in my teeth without thinking. Sometimes I drove and let her sleep. When clouds clotted the sun her hair still glowed, some mix of orange and yellow and pink. Toast, or the honey for it, or the cinnamon.
After we spent a day and a night in a certain desert town, I told my friend to go on without me. I’d stay. The town was bordered by empty hills and endless sky: room to disappear. I found an unopened pack of Juicy Fruit gum on the sidewalk, which I took for a sign.
In the past few years, chronic absenteeism has nearly doubled. The fight to get students back in classrooms has only just begun.
Absenteeism underlies much of what has beset young people, including falling school achievement, deteriorating mental health, and elevated youth violence.
From opposite directions, the revolutionary intellectual and the creator of James Bond saw violence as essential—psychologically and strategically—to solving the crisis of colonialism.
More than fifty years later, Zohra Drif could still picture the Milk Bar in Algiers on September 30, 1956. It was white and shining, she recalled, awash in laughter, young voices, “summer colors, the smell of pastries, and even the distant twittering of birds.” Drif, a well-coiffed law student in a stylish lavender dress, ordered a peach-Melba ice cream and wedged her beach bag against the counter. She paid, tipped, and left without her bag. The bomb inside it exploded soon afterward.
The Observer Magazine (January 6, 2024) – The latest issue features ‘Willem Dafoe’ – Hollywood legend, art lover, lifetime yogi and gentleman farmer; What sport can teach us about the game of life; Yalda Hakim on the human side of war reporting, and more…
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (January 5, 2024): The new issue features “Letting Naomi Die” – Treatment wasn’t helping her anorexia, so doctors allowed her to stop, no matter the consequences. But is a ‘palliative’ approach to mental illness really ethical?
Treatment wasn’t helping her anorexia, so doctors allowed her to stop — no matter the consequences. But is a “palliative” approach to mental illness really ethical?
By Katie Engelhart
The doctors told Naomi that she could not leave the hospital. She was lying in a narrow bed at Denver Health Medical Center. Someone said something about a judge and a court order. Someone used the phrase “gravely disabled.” Naomi did not think she was gravely disabled. Still, she decided not to fight it. She could deny that she was mentally incompetent — but this would probably just be taken as proof of her mental incompetence. Of her lack of insight. She would, instead, “succumb to it.”
By David Marchese
“It seems like we’ve been battling climate change for decades and made no progress,” Dr. Hannah Ritchie says. “I want to push back on that.” Ritchie, a senior researcher in the Program on Global Development at the University of Oxford and deputy editor at the online publication Our World in Data, is the author of the upcoming book, “Not the End of the World.” In it, she argues that the flood of doom-laden stats and stories about climate change is obscuring our ability to imagine solutions to the crisis and envision a sustainable, livable future.
Specific brain pathways can lower or raise the willingness of monkeys to take risks
Rethink of familiar object may boost odds that its name, offensive to some, will be changed
In failing to look past Joe Biden, Democrats have shown cowardice and complacency
To be safe, Israel needs new leadership
Israeli officials see Hizbullah as an unacceptable threat
The Guardian Weekly (January 4, 2024) – The new issue features ‘Make or Break 2024’ – The biggest election year in history.
About 2 billion people have the opportunity to cast their ballots in polls that span the globe from the United States to Taiwan, and India to Mexico in 2024. The outcomes, as our analysts and correspondents explain in our big story, have implications for us all.
Washington bureau chief David Smith looks at the likely rerun of 2020’s Biden v Trump contest in November and explores what has changed and what has not in the US as the old adversaries square up. It is an almost foregone conclusion that Narendra Modi will be back for a third term as Indian prime minster, reports Hannah Ellis-Petersen from Delhi where analysts fear his victory will further imperil the country’s Muslim minority. And while Vladimir Putin will certainly continue as president in Russia, Pjotr Sauer explains why the man about to become fifth-time president might allow other candidates onto the ballot list. From Taiwan’s poll on 13 January to the 27-state European elections in June, how citizens vote will influence the geopolitical landscape for us all, while the conduct of campaigns will reveal how vulnerable democracies now are to misinformation and cyber interference from malign actors.
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