The Guardian US - 20 February 2023

Tributes continue to be made to the former US president Jimmy Carter, after the announcement that the 98-year-old has entered hospice care at his home in Plains, Georgia, instead of receiving “additional” medical treatment. Raphael Warnock, the Democratic Georgia senator, said: “Across life’s seasons, President Jimmy Carter, a man of great faith, has walked with God. In this tender time of transitioning, God is surely walking with him.” The oldest living president has opted to spend his “remaining time” at home, a statement by his Carter Center said on Saturday. The former peanut farmer, Georgia governor and 39th president from 1977 to 1981 has been in ill health for several years, suffering falls and skin cancer melanoma which spread to his liver and brain. “I, obviously, prayed about it,” he said in 2019, about his cancer diagnosis four years before. “I didn’t ask God to let me live, but I just asked God to give me a proper attitude toward death. And I found that I was absolutely and completely at ease with death. It didn’t really matter to me whether I died or lived.” The Carter Center did not provide details of recent hospitalisations. Jason Carter, the former president’s grandson, also referred to Rosalynn Carter, 95, when he said in a tweet: “I saw both of my grandparents yesterday. They are at peace and – as always – their home is full of love.” At the Carter Center in Atlanta on Sunday, and at Carter’s church in Plains, well-wishers came to pay tribute. At Maranatha Baptist church, where Carter taught Sunday school for decades, his niece gave an emotional address. “I just want to read one of Uncle Jimmy’s quotes,” Kim Fuller said, adding: “Oh, this is going to be really hard.” She referenced this quote from Carter: “I have one life and one chance to make it count for something. I’m free to choose that something … my faith demands that I do whatever I can, wherever I can, whenever I can, for as long as I can.” Fuller said: “Maybe if we think about it, maybe it’s time to pass the baton. Who picks it up, I have no clue. I don’t know. Because this baton’s going to be a really big one.” In Atlanta, people made the trip to the Carter Center on a spring-like day. “I brought my sons down here today to pay respect for President Carter and teach them a little bit about how great a humanitarian he was, especially in the later stages of his life,” said James Culbertson, who drove from Calhoun, Georgia. The presidential library was closed for President’s Day weekend but people could walk past the fountains and through the gardens. In the political world, tributes were largely free of partisan coloring, attesting to Carter’s oft-quoted commitment to decency. “The bond of our common humanity is stronger than the divisiveness of our fears and prejudices,” Carter said in 2002, in his lecture accompanying the Nobel peace prize, which was awarded for working to end conflicts, campaigning for human rights and working for social welfare. Maria Shriver, the niece of former president John F Kennedy, said Carter “moves humanity forward every single day”. “He is such an inspiration,” she said, saying Carter “devoted his whole life to public service”. Craig Shirley, a biographer of the Republican who beat Carter in 1980, Ronald Reagan, cited the Israel-Egypt Camp David accords as one of Carter’s lasting achievements. “While bedeviled by myriad problems during his years in office, Carter has had one of the greatest second acts in American history,” Shirley also told Fox News. In a 2018 profile, the Washington Post said Carter was “the un-celebrity president”, who eschewed the profitable speech and corporate boardroom circuit. Carter told the Post he didn’t want to “capitalise financially on being in the White House”. “I don’t see anything wrong with it; I don’t blame other people for doing it … it just never had been my ambition to be rich,” he said. Beyond his presidential pension, Carter’s post-White House income came from writing books on topics ranging from his life and career to faith, Middle East peace, women’s rights, ageing, fishing and woodworking. He did not attend Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021, but four months later Biden visited him at home in GeorJimmy Carter in August 2015. Photograph: Jessica McGowan/Getty Images ‘He’s an inspiration’: tributes pour in after Jimmy Carter enters hospice care Edward Helmore in New York and agencies Opinion The New York Times’ trans coverage is under fire. The paper needs to listen Arwa Mahdawi page 14 Monday 20 February 2023 theguardian.com/us Published in New York, United States Environment New York zoo ends attempt to recapture Flaco the owl in Central Park page 31 Continued on page 2

gia. On Saturday the White House said Biden was in touch with the family. Carter’s single term as president, between Gerald Ford and Reagan, was in some ways predicated on a need for political and social stability after the Watergate scandal and defeat in Vietnam. “If I ever lie to you, if I ever make a misleading statement, don’t vote for me,” Carter said during a campaign that saw him rise from a relatively unknown southern governor to win the Oval Office in a close race. If he lied, he said, he “would not deserve to be your president”. He was supported by southern rock musicians, including the Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Charlie Daniels, who campaigned and played benefits for a politician who as Georgia governor in 1971 declared “the time for racial discrimination is over”. His grandson said that last October, when he turned 98 and was celebrated with a parade in his hometown, Carter was “still 100% with it, even though daily life things are a lot harder now”. Jason Carter cited Rosalynn Carter as a source of strength. Habitat for Humanity, a volunteer organization Carter joined in 1984 that builds homes across the US and the world, said: “We pray for his comfort and for their peace, and that the Carter family experiences the joy of their relationships with each other and with God in this time.” Another tribute came from the US Secret Service, which has protected Carter for close to half a century. “Rest easy Mr President,” wrote spokesman Anthony Gugliemi on social media. “We will be forever by your side.” Associated Press contributed reporting The war with Ukraine will be over unless the EU finds a way in weeks to speed up the provision of ammunition to Ukraine, Josep Borrell, the EU foreign affairs chief, warned on the final day of the Munich security conference. He said a special meeting of EU defence ministers slated for 8-9 March will provide a chance for countries to offer ammunition from their existing stocks, adding it is taking up to 10 months for European armies to order and receive a single bullet. “We are in urgent war mode,” he said. “This shortage of ammunition has to be solved quickly; it is a matter of weeks.” He said if it was not the war would be over. Borrell will also table plans at a meeting of EU foreign ministers on Monday to use the existing €3.6bn (£3.2bn) European peace facility for the EU to procure ammunition jointly on the model of the procurement of vaccines during the Covid crisis, an idea first proposed by the Estonian prime minister, Kaja Kallas. Borrell said the Estonian idea would work in the medium term, but he believes the urgency of the shortages is such that it requires EU countries to draw on existing stocks. “We have to use what member states have,” he said. “Much more has to be done and much quicker. There is still a lot to be done. We have to increase and accelerate our military support. It currently takes almost 10 months for the European army to buy a bullet for the calibre of 155mm, almost one year, and almost three years to buy an air-to-air missile. This is not in accordance with the war situation in which we live.” Kallas, speaking at the same event, said Russia was in a wartime mode, producing ammunition across three shifts, adding there needed to be a similar war footing in Europe. She claimed defence industry executives had told her they had no orders from the EU. Borrell said the absence of ammunition was because “we forgot about classical wars – we were only engaged with expeditionary forces and technological Blitzkrieg.” He said some European countries, such as Poland, had doubled their defence budgets, while France was boosting its defence spending by 40%, from €39bn to €59bn. He pointed out that defence remained a national state competence in the EU, but said if the EU increased defence spending with “everyone in its own corner, we will increase our duplications and not fill in our loopholes”. He said the war in Ukraine may act as an awakening or incentive to break taboos by increasing defence interoperability across Europe but added that experience showed this would not change overnight, and bewailed a culture of delays that he said weakened the coordinating role of the European Defence Agency. “We have taken too much time to make critical decisions such as providing battle tanks,” he said, “when everybody knows that in order to win a classical war, a classical war with manoeuvres of heavy arms, you need battle tanks. You will not win this war without this kind of arms.” He said he was not seeking to militarise Europe, but was arguing for Europe to fulfil its responsibilities so it became a powerful and reliable partner to the US. Pressed by Ukrainian MPs to set a date for their country’s membership of the EU, Borrell said it was not likely to happen anytime soon. But the Polish MEP Radosław Sikorski suggested reverting to a previous model of EU membership accession whereby Ukraine is granted political membership of the EU quickly, and then has to fulfil the necessary criteria on a step-bystep process, an accession process last used when Spain joined the then European Community in 1986. Borrell also said the EU needed to do more to convince the global south that Russia was an imperialist power. Many countries in Latin America are anti-imperialist, he said, believing the west supported dictatorships in the past, and there is similar deep resentment in Africa. “People have memories, and people have feelings,” he added. Russia played on those feelings by attacking the French president, Emmanuel Macron, over remarks suggesting he wanted to see Russia defeated, saying Moscow still remembered the fate of Napoleon Bonaparte and accusing the French president of duplicitous diplomacy with the Kremlin. Macron told Le Journal du Dimanche France wanted Russia to be defeated in Ukraine but had never wanted to “crush” it. “About ‘never’: France did not begin with Macron, and the remains of Napoleon, revered at the state level, rest in the centre of Paris. France – and Russia – should understand,” Russia’s foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said. Ukraine war ‘over’ unless EU boosts military support, says top diplomat Patrick Wintour in Munich Americans are looking for greener ways to die, and a new wave of deathcare startups are rising to the occasion. After death, bodies are typically handled in one of two ways: embalmed and buried in a casket, or incinerated and turned into ashes. But both of these options have contributed to the environmental crisis – with fossil fuelintensive cremation emitting chemicals such as carbon monoxide into the air, and burials taking up large swathes of land. As interest in alternatives rises, startups aiming to disrupt these practices are gaining steam. New York in January became the sixth state in the US to legalize human composting, also known as “natural organic reduction”, which uses heat and oxygen to speed up the microbial process that converts bodies into soil. The growth in demand comes in part due to Covid-19, experts say. The pandemic brought death to the forefront of the public consciousness and exposed concerns about its environmental destruction, as places like Los Angeles had to suspend air pollution rules to allow an influx of bodies to be processed. Human composters are pitching themselves as part of the solution – and trying to dismantle the funeral industry in the process. The potential to alter an age-old practice has brought together former Silicon Valley types, celebrity investors and missiondriven entrepreneurs as interested in lofty green goals as they are in changing our relationship to death. Providers say they are seeing unprecedented demand. The human composting startup Return Home has seen 20 people from California, where human composting is not yet legal, transport loved ones to the company facilities in Washington state – including five who drove with bodies in tow. “The fact that we are now seeing so many Californians flocking to Return Home in order to pre-purchase services for themselves and their loved ones is proof-positive that [our technology] is the future of funeral services,” said Micah Truman, the company’s CEO and founder. Founders paint a picture of an industry that is both collegial and competitive, where entrepreneurs connect at meetups and through group chats but often find themselves looking over their shoulders for people entering the industry with less altruistic views. This is especially true as old guards of the funeral industry seek to cash in on the new trend, Truman said. “It’s interesting because to create disruption, we are going to have to have outsiders coming in,” he said. “Because everyone in the funeral industry is so invested in existing technologies, you need outsiders to help with thinking outside the box – no pun intended.” An industry poised to explode Natural organic reduction is a relatively new process, recognized throughout the industry as having been pioneered by a woman named Katrina Spade. In her graduate thesis in 2013, Spade investigated methods farmers had been using to compost animals and found they could be applied to human bodies. When remains are placed in a container with natural materials like straw and wood chips, the microbial process that converts bodies into soil can be accelerated. Composting a human currently takes eight to 12 weeks, and is estimated to use just one-eighth the energy required for cremation. In the ensuing years, Spade worked with lobbyists, lawmakers and investors to legalize natural organic reduction in Washington in 2019. By December 2020, her company Recompose had made it available to consumers for $7,000 – in line with the median cost of cremation, at $6,971, and the median cost of a funeral with burial, at $7,848, not including cemetery plot costs, which can run upwards of several thousand dollars. In the years since, at least three From cradle to compost: the disruptors who want to make death greener Kari Paul A dummy goes through the composting process with Recompose. Photograph: Sabel Roizen/@belroiz No sale nor distribution without permission. Katrina Spade, founder and CEO of Recompose, poses with a shrouded mannequin in front of an array of human composting vessels, in Seattle. Photograph: Mat Hayward/Getty Images for Recompose The Guardian Monday 20 February 2023 2 Headlines Continued from page 1 Continued on page 3

companies have sprung up in Washington alone, some of which have secured millions in funding from venture capital firms. And with more states catching on, entrepreneurs say the industry is livelier than ever. At least six states have legalized the process so far, and California, the most populous US state, will allow human composting in 2027 after a law passed last year goes into effect, opening up the potential for millions of new customers. “In Washington, where human composting has been legal for some time, the industry is concentrated and hyper-competitive,” Truman said. “But I’m sure everyone is going to be doing pushups and getting ready to go to California as soon as it opens.” The commercialization of alternative deathcare is already creating tension in an industry built on a fraught product.It’s difficult to get people to talk about death, much less invest in it. This has left deathcare entrepreneurs and advocates for greener death grappling to balance altruistic goals with the demands of startup culture, according to Caitlin Doughty, a mortician and author of several books about death and the funeral industry. “There is a newer disconnect between the fundamental idea of ritual around death in human composting versus a bizarre appeal to Silicon Valley that is emerging,” she said. “It is a fascinating development.” With the traditional funeral market worth $20bn, it is no surprise new technologies have piqued the interest of tech investors. A 2019 survey from the funeral directors’ association found that nearly 52% of Americans expressed interest in green-burial options, and experts have estimated that the emerging market opened by legalization efforts in Massachusetts, Illinois, California and New York could create a market value in the $1bn range. There is also a growing market in Gen Z and millennials, who have been called the “death positive” generation – more willing to discuss afterlife plans at younger ages and try green alternatives. Startups are rising to the occasion with social media outreach: Return Home has more than 617,000 followers on TikTok, where its employees answer questions like “what happens to hip replacements in the human composting process?” and “how does it smell during the process?” Human composting is not the only alternative deathcare option that is seeing increased interest. Others include aquamation, a process legal in 28 states by which the body is turned into liquid and then powder. Green burial, in which bodies are interred without embalming or a casket and allowed to decompose naturally over time, is legal in almost all states, but laws vary as to where the body can be buried. But of all the alternative options, human composting seems to have gotten the most attention, said Doughty. “I do see the composting space as being uniquely competitive in a way that I haven’t seen with [other processes] like aquamation or even cremation,” she said. “It seems uniquely positioned at a nexus of climate change policy and new technology that appeals to the Silicon Valley ethos.” A focus on ethics The environmental benefits of alternative deathcare have become a large selling point for companies as green investments trend upwards. Transcend, a New York-based green burial startup that promises to turn human bodies into trees after death, highlights its goal of mass reforestation and eco-friendly burial in its advertising, stating on its website: “Every Tree Burial creates a healthier foundation for all life on Earth.” Its founder and CEO, Matthew Kochmann, has a Silicon Valley background, counting himself as one of the first employees at Uber. He came to the deathcare industry after meditating on the spiritual nature of burial options, he says. “I was thinking about how I personally would like to become a tree after death, and I realized that there weren’t any options out there to make that happen – I’d have to do it myself,” he said. “I am a huge advocate of helping heal humanity’s relationship and fear around mortality.” Through Transcend’s process, the body is buried in organic biodegradable flax linen along with a unique blend of fungi-enriched soil, and a young tree is planted in the ground above it. The company says the mushrooms then “work their magic” to ensure “a direct connection between the nutrient-rich body and the tree’s root system so that the body can literally become the tree”. The company has piqued the interest of investors and celebrities, with Darren Aronofsky, director of Black Swan and Requiem for a Dream, counting himself among the company’s advisers. Still, fundraising hadn’t always been easy, Kochmann said, adding that some investors had told him: “We don’t invest in taboo areas like pornography or death.” “Putting death on par with pornography just shows that there’s still a lot of work to do in our culture and our society to get people more comfortable with it,” he said. Recompose, the original human composting startup, has raised nearly $18m – none of which, its founder is quick to point out, came from traditional venture capital funds, but instead from accredited “values-aligned investors”, Spade said – investors who “are first and foremost investing for the mission and the vision” of Recompose. Spade said the company had prioritized fundraising models that allow it to stay true to its roots as an advocacy group while still creating sustainable funding. It has also launched a “community fund” to help subsidize its services for clients who cannot afford to pay full price. The company has worked directly with legislators to pass laws that allow for human composting while creating a framework that supports strong ethics in the burgeoning industry. “We want to be sure that any kind of human composting operator that’s working with grieving families is doing so within the utmost ethical practices,” she said. “It is not only about how to decompose, operate, and care for our clients – but also, how can we support an industry that always has the most ethical, rigorous operations?” Spade said although her company had been the first to pioneer human composting, she was “thrilled” to see the movement grow. And although the new frontier of deathcare is getting increasingly crowded in some places, those involved say there is an environment of camaraderie and support as they work towards a common goal: taking down the monopoly that the traditional funeral industry has on death. “This is a community that has to prioritize solidarity,” said Kochmann. “You are fighting for legislation, you are fighting regulatory battles, and you are fighting an uphill consumer battle because people don’t want to think about death.” • This article was amended on 19 February 2023 to clarify details of the aquamation process. Tom Sizemore is in critical condition after suffering a brain aneurysm, a representative for the actor said on Sunday. Sizemore suffered the aneurysm at about 2am local time on Saturday at his home in Los Angeles. He was being treated in intensive care, his manager, Charles Lago, said. Lago described Sizemore’s condition “a wait-and-see situation”. “He is in the hospital. His family is aware of the situation and are hoping for the best. It is too early to know about [a] recovery situation as he is in critical condition under observation,” Lago told Fox News. Sizemore, 61, has acted in films including Saving Private Ryan, Heat and Black Hawk Down. He has also had a history of drug abuse and run-ins with law enforcement. He was convicted of domestic violence in 2003 against his girlfriend, Heidi Fleiss. In 2006, he pleaded no contest to using methamphetamine outside a motel. Sizemore was arrested in Los Angeles in 2009 for the suspected battery of a former spouse, and again in 2011 for the same offence. In 2018, a then 26-year-old actor filed a lawsuit against Sizemore, claiming he abused her as an 11-year-old during production on the film Born Killers. Sizemore denied the allegation, and the suit was later dismissed. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Sizemore’s father was a lawyer and philosophy professor and his mother was a member of the city of Detroit ombudsman staff. One of his first big screen appearances was in Oliver Stone’s 1989 film Born on the Fourth of July. He would later star in Point Break in 1991, and Quentin Tarantino’s True Romance (1993) and Natural Born Killers (1994). For his performance in the 1993 fantasy comedy film Heart and Souls, he was nominated for the Saturn award for best supporting actor. Sizemore married the actor Maeve Quinlan in 1996, but they divorced in 1999. He became a father to twins in 2005 with Janelle McIntire. His road to recovery from drug addiction was kickstarted by Robert De Niro, he said. In a 2013 interview, Sizemore told how De Niro personally checked him into rehab. Reflecting on his family, Sizemore once said he was an “anomaly” as he was from a “kind of violent” neighbourhood, but his father was a “Harvard man” from “a family of poor people”. “He doesn’t like me talking about the family, but two of his brothers were heroin dealers; one of my mother’s brothers was a pimp,” he said. “Although my mother and father were both completely legit, it was all around me, this crime and licentiousness.” Tom Sizemore in critical condition after suffering brain aneurysm Jane Clinton and agency Tom Sizemore is said to have suffered the aneurysm at about 2am local time on Saturday at his home in Los Angeles. Photograph: Graham Whitby-Boot/Sportsphoto/Allstar Monday 20 February 2023 The Guardian Headlines 3 Continued from page 2

The Ohio senator Sherrod Brown had harsh criticism on Sunday for corporate lobbyists and Norfolk Southern, the Atlanta-based operator of the train that derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, two weeks ago while carrying toxic chemicals. Speaking on Sunday to CNN’s State of the Union, the Democrat said the derailment, which released toxic chemicals including the carcinogenic vinyl chloride, was an episode of “the same old story”, and that Norfolk Southern “caused it”. “Corporations do stock buybacks, they do big dividend checks, they lay off workers,” Brown said. “Thousands of workers have been laid off from Norfolk Southern. Then they don’t invest in safety rules and safety regulation, and this kind of thing happens. That’s why people in East Palestine are so upset. “They know that corporate lobbyists have had far too much influence in our government and they see this as the result … These things are happening because these railroads are simply not investing the way they should in car safety and in the rail lines themselves.” Brown said Norfolk Southern and corporate lobbyists were wholly responsible for the accident, which has caused breathing difficulties, rashes, nausea, headaches and swollen eyes, as well as killing pets and wildlife. “There’s no question they caused it with this derailment because … they underinvested in their employees. They never look out for their workers. They never look out for their communities. They look out for stock buybacks and dividends. Something’s wrong with corporate America and something’s wrong with Congress and administrations listening too much to corporate lobbyists. And that’s got to change.” On Tuesday, Norfolk Southern pledged to distribute more than $1.2m to nearly 900 families and a number of businesses affected by the crash, spill and burn. A company spokesman said the financial assistance included direct payments of $1,000. Earlier this year, the company announced $10bn in stock buybacks. Last year, it reported $3.2bn in profits. Brown warned residents along the Ohio and Pennsylvania border to be cautious. According to Brown, the company “made promises” to him and the community. But he said: “If they write a check to an East Palestine or Unity Township resident or people even a little farther away, never sign away your legal rights. You can accept the check, but don’t sign anything that would sign away your legal rights. That’s what companies like this do.” He added that he was going to make sure Norfolk Southern “lives up to everything it needs to do”. Brown said he had urged Joe Biden and the US transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, to strengthen regulations surrounding worker safety, consumer protection and the environment. “That’s my job, to push the administration and to move in Congress on … more pro-consumer, pro-worker, proenvironment … and pro-community safety laws to make sure these things don’t happen,” he said. Republicans have criticized Buttigieg’s handling of the accident, arguing that the federal government has been too slow to respond. In a tweet on Wednesday, Buttigieg said that the administration was restricted by certain laws on rail regulation. “We’re constrained by law on some areas of rail regulation (like the braking rule withdrawn by the Trump administration in 2018 because of a law passed by Congress in 2015), but we are using the powers we do have to keep people safe,” he said. That was a reference to to an Obama-era rule the Trump administration repealed, which required trains carrying highly flammable crude oil be equipped with special brakes to halt all cars at the same time. Speaking to reporters, the Texas senator Ted Cruz, the ranking member on the Senate commerce, science and transportation committee, said: “I understand that the secretary is politically ambitious, and he’d like to move to government housing in Washington right up the street” – a reference to the White House, for which Buttigieg ran in 2020 – “but he does have a job to do. Buttigieg, Cruz said, “should focus on addressing the enormous challenges we have on our railways, with multiple derailments where the secretary has been awol”. The Ohio senator JD Vance and Marco Rubio of Florida wrote to Buttigieg, demanding “information from the US Department of Transportation regarding its oversight of the United States’ freight train system and, more generally, how it balances building a safe, resilient rail industry across our country in relation to building a hyper-efficient one with minimal direct human input”. Ohio senator blasts train operator and lobbyists over toxic derailment Maya Yang Workers remove contaminants as cleanup continues at the site of the derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. Photograph: Tannen Maury/EPA Richard Belzer, a stand-up comedian who became one of TV’s most indelible detectives as John Munch in Homicide: Life on the Street and Law & Order: SVU, has died. He was 78. Belzer died on Sunday at his home in Bozouls in southern France, his longtime friend Bill Scheft told the Hollywood Reporter. The comedian Laraine Newman first announced Belzer’s death on Twitter. The actor Henry Winkler, Belzer’s cousin, wrote: “Rest in peace Richard.” Belzer played the wise-cracking homicide detective prone to conspiracy theories over more than two decades and across 10 series, including appearances on the hit comedies 30 Rock and Arrested Development. Belzer first played Munch on a 1993 episode of Homicide and last played him in 2016 on Law & Order: SVU. Belzer never auditioned for the role. After hearing him on The Howard Stern Show, the producer Barry Levinson brought Belzer in to read for the part. “I would never be a detective,” Belzer once said. “But if I were, that’s how I’d be. “They write to all my paranoia and anti-establishment dissidence and conspiracy theories. So it’s been a lot of fun for me. A dream, really.” Munch would become one of the longest-running characters on US TV, a sunglasses-wearing presence on the small screen for more than 20 years. In 2008, with Michael Ian Black, Belzer published the novel I Am Not a Cop! He also helped write several books on conspiracy theories, about things like the assassination of John F Kennedy and the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. “He made me laugh a billion times,” his longtime friend and fellow stand-up Richard Lewis said on Twitter. Born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Belzer was drawn to comedy during a childhood in which his mother would beat him and his older brother, Len. “My kitchen was the toughest room I ever worked,” Belzer told People magazine in 1993. Expelled from Dean Junior College in Massachusetts, Belzer embarked on a life of stand-up in New York in 1972. He made his big-screen debut in Ken Shapiro’s 1974 film The Groove Tube, a satire co-starring Chevy Chase that grew out of the comedy group Channel One. Before Saturday Night Live changed the comedy scene in New York, Belzer performed with John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray and others on the National Lampoon Radio Hour. In 1975, he became the warm-up comic for the newly launched SNL. While many cast members became famous, Belzer’s roles were mostly smaller cameos. He later said the SNL creator, Lorne Michaels, reneged on a promise to work him into the show. Richard Belzer, Detective John Munch in TV hits, dies aged 78 Associated Press in New York Richard Belzer, who has died at 78, in his role as John Munch. Photograph: NBC/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal/Getty Images The Guardian Monday 20 February 2023 4 Headlines

Rishi Sunak has been warned that more than 100 Tory MPs could rebel over a deal with the EU to help break the postBrexit deadlock in Northern Ireland, as Boris Johnson launched a major intervention calling for him to take a tougher line with Brussels. Pressure is growing on the prime minister as government sources said tense talks in Downing Street over the weekend on overhauling the Northern Ireland protocol were yet to yield a breakthrough. They cautioned that the hoped-for timetable of an agreement being announced on Monday and a Commons vote on Tuesday was at risk of slipping. One insider said, “We’re ready to go,” but claimed that nervousness about opposition by the Democratic Unionist party (DUP) and Tory backbenchers was to blame for the hold-up. Ireland’s deputy prime minister, Micheál Martin, was flying to Brussels on Sunday night for a meeting with the European Commission vice-president, Maroš Šefčovič, according to reports on Irish broadcaster RTE. He was due to be at the European Commission for a meeting of the foreign affairs council before the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. There was a backlash on Sunday over details leaking out about concessions said to have been made by the UK, and a demand by Brussels that Sunak axe a controversial bill designed to unilaterally rip up some Brexit arrangements in Northern Ireland. In the first pronouncement by Johnson on Brexit since he left office, a source close to him said he believed “it would be a great mistake” to drop the legislation and hinted that it should be maintained as leverage over the EU. James Duddridge, a former Brexit minister and close ally of the former prime minister, said talk of the European court of justice retaining a role would also be a “wedge” to fulfilling Brexit. “It won’t just be the so-called ‘Spartans’,” he told Sky News, referring to the nickname given to the few dozen diehard purists. “There will be a large number of Brexiters, possibly the majority of the parliamentary party, and potentially running into treble figures.” There is no formal requirement to hold a vote, but Downing Street is considering holding one given concerns that they may end up being forced to – and would win regardless due to Labour’s commitment to support any deal. Hours after Johnson’s intervention, other Tories quickly sided with him. David Frost, the UK’s former chief Brexit negotiator, stressed there was “no deadline” for talks on overhauling the protocol. He said Sunak should “push on with the protocol bill, so that our negotiators are in the strongest possible position”. Simon Clarke, the former levelling-up secretary, signalled that he would not support “anything that keeps Northern Ireland subject to EU law or in the single market” and said the protocol bill “remains a clean solution to ensure all parts of our country are treated equally”. Dozens of MPs in the hardline group of Brexiters known as the European Research Group are planning to meet on Tuesday to discuss details of any concessions said to have been made by the UK, the Guardian understands. Despite widespread annoyance at Johnson’s intervention among his critics in the party, Penny Mordaunt, the Commons leader, claimed it was “not entirely unhelpful”. She said, “Boris is being Boris” and hinted it was “help to remind” the EU about the controversial protocol bill. Though Mordaunt said there were “optimistic signs”, she added: “Both sides of the negotiations have said we’re not there yet.” But some Tories want Sunak to keep the legislation halted. Robert Buckland, a former justice secretary, told the Guardian there was a “a narrow supporting legal argument” for the bill when it was progressing through parliament last year. But he added: “Now that the negotiations are real and progressing, I think that the situation has significantly changed. The bill is a dead letter.” Others dismissed the pronouncements by Johnson on Brexit. George Osborne, the former chancellor, said Johnson was interested solely in “becoming prime minister again”. Osborne told Channel 4’s Andrew Neil Show: “He wants to bring down Sunak and he will use any instrument to do it … If the Northern Ireland negotiations are that instrument, he will pick it up and hit Sunak over the head with it.” Naomi Long, leader of the Alliance party, also accused Johnson of thinking about himself rather than the legacy of the protocol. “He created this mess – he needs to sit this one out,” she said. The DUP has kept quiet since its meeting with Sunak in Belfast on Friday, after which its leader warned that the plan proposed “currently falls short of what would be acceptable”. While Downing Street believes its approach meets the DUP’s seven tests, it fears a three-pronged attack from the party, Johnson’s backers and the ERG. One source abreast of the negotiations said No 10 was keeping talks as secret as possible because “there would be a feeding frenzy of piranhas on both sides as soon as anything got out, killing any chance of a deal”. Rishi Sunak warned more than 100 Tory MPs could rebel over NI protocol deal Aubrey Allegretti Political correspondent Rishi Sunak, Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald, Northern Ireland secretary Chris Heaton-Harris, and Sinn Féin’s vice president, Michelle O'Neill, at the Brexit talks. Photograph: Sinn Féin The Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley’s demand for mental competency tests for politicians older than 75 is “absurd” and ageist, the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders said. “We are fighting racism, we’re fighting sexism, we’re fighting homophobia, I think we should also be fighting ageism,” Sanders, 81, told CBS’s Face the Nation. Sanders has mounted two strong challenges for the Democratic presidential nomination, the first in 2016 when he was 74. Haley, 51, launched her 2024 campaign this week, calling for a “new generation” of leaders but offering few policy specifics except a call for political term limits and mental competency tests. She has aimed that talking point at Joe Biden, the 80-year-old president, but not at Donald Trump, the 76-yearold former president who remains her only declared rival for the Republican nomination. Asked on Fox News Sunday why she was a better choice for the nomination than Trump or anyone yet to declare, the former South Carolina governor said: “Why not me?” “You know, I am a wife of a combat veteran. I’m a mother of two children.” Haley said those children were struggling with the cost of buying a home and with the challenge of “woke education”, while her Indian immigrant parents were “upset by what’s happening at the border”. Claiming she had “never worked in DC”, the former ambassador to the United Nations who was part of Trump’s White House cabinet and met with the president in the Oval Office, said it was “time that we start putting a fire on what’s happening in Congress”. Repeating her call for term limits and “mental competency tests for people over the age of 75”, she said: “And what I do strongly believe is the American people need options. I don’t think you have to be 80 years old to be in Washington DC.” Sanders told CBS: “I think that’s absurd. We are fighting racism, we’re Bernie Sanders: Nikki Haley’s demand for mental tests is ageist and ‘absurd’ Martin Pengelly in New York ‘I think we should also be fighting ageism,’ Sanders told CBS’s Face the Nation. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images Monday 20 February 2023 The Guardian Headlines 5 Continued on page 6

fighting sexism, we’re fighting homophobia, I think we should also be fighting ageism. “Trust people, look at people and say, ‘You know, this person is competent, this person is not competent.’ There are a lot of 40-year-olds out there who ain’t particularly competent. Older people, you know, you look at the individual, I don’t think you make a blanket statement.” Sanders also discussed age, and its relevance for serving politicians, in an interview with the Guardian published on Sunday. Speaking to promote his new book, It’s OK to be Angry About Capitalism, he said he expected Biden to run for re-election in 2024, when the president will be 82, and vowed to support that effort. “Age is always a factor,” Sanders said. “But there are a thousand factors. Some people who are 80 or more have more energy than people who are 30. “… There are a lot of elderly people with a whole lot of experience who are very capable of doing great work.” The danger of splitting anti-Trump Republicans and helping the former president win the nomination again “would be a pretty good reason to consider not running” for the White House in 2024, the former Maryland governor Larry Hogan said. “I don’t care that much about my future in the Republican party,” Hogan told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday. “I care about making sure we have a future for the Republican party. “And if we can stop Donald Trump and elect a great Republican commonsense conservative leader, that certainly would be a factor.” A relative moderate in a GOP marched far right, Hogan has long been thought likely to run. He told NBC he would decide whether to do so, as “a small government commonsense conservative”, in a “relatively short period of time”, most likely this spring. Trump and the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley are the only two declared candidates so far. Polling has shown Haley splitting a non-Trump vote dominated by Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, and thereby handing Trump the win. Trump did not win a majority of voters in 2016, when he first captured the nomination. Hogan barely registers in polling regarding 2024. On NBC, Hogan was asked about culture war issues, chiefly around education and LGBTQ+ issues, on which DeSantis has based much of his appeal to voters. Hogan said: “I was a Republican governor in the bluest state in America and got things done, working across the aisle with Democrats. So I can tell you, it’s not what everyone’s talking about. “But I think some people are making the calculation that base primary voters in the Trump lane, that’s what they want to hear about. And so a lot of candidates are focusing on that. You can’t dismiss it, but I don’t think it should be the only thing we’re talking about.” Haley said this week DeSantis’s socalled “don’t say gay” law, restricting how gender and sexual orientation are taught in elementary schools, did not go “far enough”. She has refused to comment about other Republican candidates, Trump in particular, claiming only to be interested in attacking Joe Biden. Hogan was asked about Republican attempts to have candidates commit to supporting the eventual nominee. “I think it’s kind of silly because it’s not going to happen,” he said. “We already know President Trump has said numerous times he refuses to” do so. “If they say you’re not going to be on the debate stage if you won’t commit to support the nominee, then President Trump won’t be on the debate stage. And I don’t think anybody believes that’s going to happen.” Looking to Michigan, an electoral battleground where on Saturday a supporter of Trump’s election fraud lie became head of the state party, Hogan said: “There’s a lot of misinformation out there. And I am concerned about some of the parties. “And people are taking over that are believing conspiracy theories. And I think we’ve got to get back to a biggertent party that can appeal to more people, otherwise we’re going to keep losing elections.” In 2020, while still in office, Hogan publicly refused to support Trump. He did not vote for Biden, however, writing in “Ronald Reagan” instead. On Sunday, Hogan said he wanted “to support the nominee of the party, whoever that is. However, I’ve said before I didn’t support Trump, I wouldn’t support Trump. I put the country ahead of party and not somebody [who] should not be the president.” Larry Hogan: splitting anti-Trump vote ‘pretty good reason’ not to run in 2024 Martin Pengelly in New York Larry Hogan in Annapolis, Maryland, in December 2022. Photograph: Steve Ruark/AP A court-ordered release of photos, videos, maps and other documents involving a secretive FBI search for civil war-era gold has a treasure hunter convinced of a cover-up. Dennis Parada sued to force the FBI to turn over records of its excavation in Dents Run, Pennsylvania, where local lore says an 1863 shipment of gold disappeared on its way to the US Mint in Philadelphia. The FBI went to Dents Run after sophisticated testing suggested tons of gold might be buried there but says none was found. Parada believes otherwise. He accuses the FBI of distorting key evidence and improperly withholding records. The FBI defends its handling of the materials. The dispute is playing out in federal court, where a judge must decide whether the FBI will have to release records it wants to keep secret. “We feel we were double-crossed and lied to,” said Parada, co-founder of the treasure-hunting outfit Finders Keepers. Solving the mystery is not his only goal. He also hoped to earn a finder’s fee from the recovery of hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of gold. An FBI spokesperson declined to answer questions, citing ongoing litigation. Last year, the FBI publicly acknowledged it had looked for gold in Dents Run. It said it did not find any and “continues to unequivocally reject any claims or speculation to the contrary”. There is little evidence in the historical record to suggest a US army detachment lost a gold shipment in the Pennsylvania wilderness – possibly in an ambush by Confederate sympathizers – but the legend has inspired treasure hunters for years. Parada and his son spent years looking for the gold of Dents Run, eventually guiding the FBI to a remote woodland site 135 miles north-east of Pittsburgh where they say instruments identified a large quantity of metal. A geophysical consulting firm detected a seven- to nine-ton mass suggestive of gold. A team of FBI agents came in March 2018. An FBI videoUS treasure hunter accuses FBI of covering up discovery of civil war gold Associated Press in Clearfield, Pennsylvania Dennis Parada, right, and his son stand at the site of the FBI's dig for cvil war-era gold in Dents Run, Pennsylvania, in September 2018. Photograph: Michael Rubinkam/AP The Guardian Monday 20 February 2023 6 Headlines Continued from page 5 Continued on page 7

grapher was on hand, at one point interviewing a Philadelphia-based agent on the FBI art-crime team. “We’ve identified through our investigation a site that we believe has US property, which includes a significant sum of base metal which is valuable … particularly gold, maybe silver,” the agent said, his face blurred. Calling it a “155-year-old cold case”, the agent said the FBI corroborated Parada’s information through “scientific testing”. He said only a dig would help law enforcement “get to the bottom of this story once and for all”. Parada obtained the video and other FBI records through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. He was mostly kept from the dig site and now suspects the agency conducted a clandestine overnight dig, found the gold and spirited it away. Residents have told of hearing a backhoe and jackhammer overnight, when the dig was supposed to have been paused, and seeing FBI vehicles including large armored trucks. The FBI has denied it conducted an overnight dig. Parada and a consultant, Warren Getler, have focused on FBI photos and a photo log. At issue is the presence or absence of snow in the images and the timing of a storm that disrupted operations. One FBI image supposed to have been taken about an hour after the squall does not show any snow on a large boulder. The same boulder is snow-covered in a photo FBI records indicate was taken the next morning, 15 hours after the storm. “We have compelling evidence a night dig took place, and that the FBI went to some large effort to cover up that night dig,” said Getler, co-author of Rebel Gold, a book exploring the possibility of buried civil war-era caches. There are other seeming anomalies in the records, according to Finders Keepers’ legal motion. The FBI initially turned over hundreds of photos but rendered them in low-resolution, high-contrast blackand-white, making it impossible to tell the time they were taken or in some cases what they show. The treasure hunters requested several dozen photos in color, which the FBI provided. Also, the agency did not provide any video of the second day of the dig or any photos or video showing what its own hand-drawn map described as a 30ft-long, 12ft-deep trench, which the treasure hunters claim could have only been dug overnight. Government lawyers acknowledged these gaps in the record but did not elaborate in a court filing last week. The consulting firm hired by the FBI to assess the possibility of gold produced a report on its findings, but the version given to the treasure hunters seems to be missing key pages. The FBI did not provide any travel and expense invoices. Such released records “cast doubt on the FBI’s claim to have found nothing and raise serious and troubling questions about the FBI’s conduct during the dig and in this litigation, where it has gone to great lengths to distort critical evidence”, Anne Weismann, a lawyer for Finders Keepers, wrote in a legal filing. The US justice department did not address claims of a cover-up. The government instead told a federal judge in Washington the FBI had satisfied its legal obligation to search its records, and asked for the case to be closed. The judge has yet to rule. Parada will keep asking questions. “I will stick at this until I know everything that happened to that gold,” he said. “How much, where it went to, who has it now. I gotta know.” Four weeks of prosecution testimony in the Alex Murdaugh double-murder trial has finished as the twisting case which has gripped America with its bloody story of southern gothic horror winds towards an ending. After calling more than 60 prosecution witnesses, and with the defense due to present its case next week, the case remains circumstantial, but Murdaugh’s cause has suffered brutally over a month of gripping courtroom drama. Yet with no confession, no murder weapons, fingerprint evidence, or eyewitnesses, the defense can still seek to poke enough holes in the state’s case against the 54-year-old disbarred attorney to try to establish reasonable doubt. Murdaugh – whose family has long held huge power in a slice of rural South Carolina – is accused of the June 2021 killings of his wife Maggie and son Paul, and carrying out a bizarre suicide plot three months later. While the trial in the Colleton county courthouse is focused on the homicide charges – two counts of first-degree murder and two weapons charges to which Murdaugh has pleaded not guilty – it has begun to suggest a coherent narrative explanation to a swirl of violent incidents in Murdaugh’s orbit. That includes a roadside shooting hoax Murdaugh enacted a day after partners at his family’s law firm forced him to resign after discovering funds were missing from the company. He first claimed he stopped to fix a flat tire when a man in a truck – “a real nice guy … acted like it” – offered help then shot him, grazing his head. “I turned my head and, I mean, boom,” he said in a police interview. Coming soon after the murders of his wife and son, the apparent murder attempt appeared to bolster the idea someone was out for Murdaugh. It preoccupied an army of armchair sleuths. Central to those theories was that Murdaugh’s opioid addiction had created debts with a murderous drug gang. But it was all a lie – or perhaps a convenient embellishment of some truth. On Friday, the court heard that a month before her murder, Maggie had found oxycodone 30mgs in Murdaugh’s computer bag. The prosecution included in its allegations that Murdaugh spent $50,000 a week on drugs; as his world imploded, he spent two stints in rehabilitation. “I knew that I was about to lose everything,” Murdaugh, 54, said in a taped interview, when he backtracked on claims he had been the victim of a murder attempt and confessed he had orchestrated a bizarre suicide-for-hire incident. One by one, prosecutors have presented evidence that the murders of his wife and son at the dog kennels of the family’s country estate were staged as a diversion from an unravelling cascade of Murdaugh’s financial misdeeds – and the suicide plot shared that motivation. Maggie and Paul’s murders, prosecutors argue, were committed to head off legal disclosures in a wrongful death lawsuit against Paul over his alleged involvement in 2019 boating accident death of 19-year-old Mallory Beach. Similarly, they say, the subsequent suicide plot was engaged to win a $10m insurance payout for surviving son Buster. “There’s a symmetry between what happens on the side of the road and what happens on 7 June,” prosecutor Creighton Waters told the court earlier this month. “When the hounds are at the door, when Hannibal is at the gates for Alex Murdaugh, violence happens.” The introduction of the suicide plot may only be a tributary to the murder charges against Murdaugh that, to most trial observers, have been comprehensively argued by state prosecutors – despite being unable to produce the murder weapons or clothing that could offer physical evidence to the shooter’s estimated 3ft proximity to the victims. Both victims were facing their assailant, and neither had defensive wounds, suggesting to forensic expert Kenny Kinsey that they knew their executioner. Prosecutors have also laid out evidence to the court that they believe Murdaugh was at the scene at the time of the killings – at 8.50pm – removed the weapons he used, and constructed an alibi that he was visiting his mother after taking a nap following dinner with his wife and son when the murders were committed. Extensive phone records, including steps walked before and after the murders, and a video text sent by son Paul of a family dog taken moments before the murders, which contained a background conversation in which Maggie could allegedly be heard referring to her husband by his nickname, have also damaged the defense contention the defendant was not present at the time of the killings. Time-stamp, speed and distancetravelled records recovered from Murdaugh’s car would also seem to undercut his alibi. State investigator David Owen said Murdaugh had only ever been their suspect – a belief that came before his financial misdeeds were uncovered and separately produced 85 criminal charges of fraud, including a diverted multimillion insurance payout to the family of Gloria Satterfield, the Murdaugh’s housekeeper, who died after “falling” at the family home. But the trial itself has been punctuated by unexpected twists. On 8 February, the courtroom was cleared due to a bomb threat called into clerks at Colleton county courthouse, allegedly by a South Carolina prison inmate. Murdaugh’s family were warned by the presiding judge Clifton Newman that they could be thrown out of court after Buster appeared to “flip the bird” at Mark Tinsley, the lawyer for the family of Mallory Beach. Alongside has been a Covid outbreak among jurors, and a controversial GoFundMe campaign to raise money for Mushell “Shelly” Smith, Murdaugh’s mother’s caregiver, “for her bravery” in testifying that she would be induced to tell investigators that Murdaugh has spent twice as long at his mother’s house on the night of the murders as he had. With the murder trial expected to last two more weeks, the botched suicide plot could provide the clearest evidence that Murdaugh had been mentally capable of orchestrating a murder – even if the murder in question, after the bloody murders of his wife and son, was in fact his own. South Carolina Murdaugh murder saga winds towards its end Edward Helmore A sign welcomes people to Hampton County, South Carolina. The Murdaugh family has long held huge power in this rural slice of the state. Photograph: Jeffrey Collins/AP Alex Murdaugh, center, talks with his defense attorney after a hearing in August. Photograph: Grace Beahm Alford/AP Donald Trump road-tested a new nickname for his chief rival for the Republican presidential nomination by claiming he would not use it, saying he would “never call” Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, “Meatball Ron”. No less an authority than the New York Times has reported that Trump has been floating the nickname for the only Republican who challenges him in polling regarding the forming field for 2024. Trump is one of two declared candidates so far. Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and UN ambassador, announced her campaign this week. DeSantis is expected to run. In his surge to the White House in 2016, Trump made hay by coining nicknames for Republican opponents Trump claims he will ‘never call’ Ron DeSantis ‘Meatball Ron’ Martin Pengelly in New York Monday 20 February 2023 The Guardian Headlines / News 7 Continued from page 6 Continued on page 8

he relentlessly belittled at rallies and in debates. In a late-night post to his Truth Social platform on Saturday, the former president used an extant nickname when he wrote: “I will never call Ron DeSanctimonious ‘Meatball’ Ron, as the Fake News is insisting I will.” Trump linked DeSantis to two Republican establishment figures, “lightweight” Paul Ryan, the former House speaker and Trump critic, and “Low Energy” Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor who Trump beat easily in 2016. Trump also took a crack at DeSantis’s initial response to the Covid pandemic in 2020, a strict slate of measures the governor is now trying to place in the rearview mirror, as he courts a Republican base hostile to vaccine mandates and other public health rules. “His loyalty skills are really weak,” Trump wrote. “It would be totally inappropriate to use the word ‘meatball’ as a moniker for Ron!” Earlier this month, Maggie Haberman and Michael Bender of the Times, two of the best connected reporters on Trump, reported on the former president’s preparations for an expected DeSantis challenge. According to Bender and Haberman, Trump recently “insulted Mr DeSantis in casual conversations, describing him as ‘Meatball Ron’, an apparent dig at his appearance, or ‘Shutdown Ron’, a reference to restrictions the governor put in place at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic”. They also said Trump advisers were “amassing data about Mr DeSantis’s actions in response to the pandemic, in part to try to depict him as a phony”. DeSantis has largely avoided responding to Trump’s attacks. In an interview published on Saturday by the New York Post, he remembered “bad words” being used in nicknames in his highschool baseball days but said no one called him DeSanctimonious then. “No,” he said. “There weren’t enough letters to be able to do that. I don’t know if anyone even can spell that.” Elsewhere this week, Stephen Colbert, host of the Late Show on CBS, gleefully picked up on the Times “Meatball Ron” report. “Ooooh, I do not like how much I love that,” Colbert said in a monologue this week, calling the “Meatball Ron” nickname “so dumb and accurate”. Trump, Colbert said, was “never gonna do better than the crystallized genius that is ‘Meatball Ron’”. The host proceeded to sing “Meatball Ron” to the tune of Uptown Girl by Billy Joel, a song peppered with references to culture war policies including DeSantis’s “don’t say gay” law about teaching sexuality and gender in elementary schools and his focus on critical race theory, or CRT, as a way to fire up Republican voters. “Meatball Ron/ He’s a walking talking beef baton / And he tells you that you can’t say gay / And that Covid will just go away / That’s not OK. “Meatball Ron / Marinara is his big turn on / Very scared of CRT / Loves to roll around in spaghetti / With extra cheese.” Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. Photograph: Gaelen Morse/Reuters The election conspiracist Kristina Karamo, overwhelmingly defeated last year in her bid to become Michigan secretary of state, was chosen on Saturday to lead the state Republican party for the next two years. Karamo defeated a 10-candidate field dominated by far-right candidates to win the position after a party convention that lasted nearly 11 hours. In 2022, the former community college professor lost her secretary of state race by 14 points after mounting a campaign in support of Donald Trump’s lie that his 2020 election defeat was the result of electoral fraud. Karamo inherits a state party torn by infighting and millions in debt. She will be tasked with helping win back the legislature and flipping one of the most competitive US Senate seats, while helping a presidential candidate win the battleground state. Addressing delegates, Karamo said “our party is dying” and needs to be rebuilt into “a political machine that strikes fear in the heart of Democrats”. Karamo rose to prominence following the 2020 election when she began appearing on conservative talk shows claiming that as a poll challenger in Detroit, she saw “ballots being dropped off in the middle of the night, thousands of them”. The decision to elect Karamo, who will lead through the 2024 elections, solidifies the hold far-right activists have on the state party after sweeping losses last year. It took three rounds of voting at the convention in Lansing for delegates to pick Karamo over the former attorney general candidate Matthew DePerno, who was endorsed by Trump. Contemplating a field dominated by grassroots activists running on far-right messaging, the former Republican congressman Fred Upton said: “We lost the entire statehouse for the first time in 40 years, in large part, because of the top of the ticket. All deniers. It turned off a lot of voters.” The party may take “a cycle or two to correct itself and to get out of the ditch that we’ve been in for the last couple of years”, Upton said. The Michigan Republican party has been led by figures including the former education secretary Betsy DeVos and the current national Republican chair, Ronna McDaniel. Trump won Michigan in 2016 but Democrats now control all levels of power for the first time since the 1980s. In 2022 they won both houses of the legislature and defeated Republicans by significant margins for governor, attorney general and secretary of state. Longtime donors withheld millions as Republicans grew increasingly loyal to Trump. Tudor Dixon, a Trump loyalist who lost for governor to Gretchen Whitmer, said her campaign was hurt by the state party not having as much money as in the past. Election denier Kristina Karamo chosen to lead Michigan Republican party Associated Press in Lansing, Michigan Kristina Karamo speaks at a Trump rally near Washington, Michigan, in April 2022. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images Turkey has said rescue teams have stopped recovery efforts in all but two hardest hit provinces, a fortnight after the catastrophic earthquake that laid waste to parts of the country. “In many of our provinces, search and rescue efforts have been completed. They continue in Kahramanmaraş and Hatay provinces,” said Disaster Relief Agency chief Yunus Sezer during a press briefing in Ankara. Efforts, however, will continue in the cities of Antakya and Kahmaranmaraş, which were rendered largely uninhabitable by the 7.8 magnitude quake, which killed more than 41,000 people in southern Turkey and at least 4,000 more in neighbouring Syria. The quake’s epicentre was in Pazarcik district in Kahramanmaraş, where thousands of buildings collapsed and much of the city lies in ruins. Sezer said search and rescue efforts continued at about 40 buildings in the provinces, but expected this number to fall by Sunday evening. In Antakya, rescue teams continued to pore over rubble during the weekend, rescuing a Turkey ends rescue efforts in all but two earthquake-hit provinces Agence France-Presse in Istanbul The Guardian Monday 20 February 2023 8 News / World News Continued from page 7 Continued on page 10

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man and a woman who had survived for 13 days. The couple’s three children perished. Large teams of rescuers remained at the ready, but largely confined to tented bases in parklands near the centre of the city, which was at the heart of a contentious construction boom that saw large numbers of buildings rapidly constructed over the past two decades. Hopes of finding more survivors are close to zero, as officials now turn to how to repair the devastation that has forced millions of people from their homes. Many have sought refuge in neighbouring towns and cities, where an international aid effort that was slow to begin with has now ramped up. The UK development minister, Andrew Mitchell, arrived in the Turkish city of Gaziantep on Sunday to inspect post earthquake aid projects funded by Britain, the cost of which amount to more than £34m. “As this evolving situation heads into a new phase from rescue to recovery, I’ve seen first-hand the incredible efforts on the ground at the field hospital, with UK medical teams providing live-saving operations, including to those rescued from under the rubble. “The British public’s response to the Disasters and Emergency Committee appeal, which has now reached a staggering £88m, underlines the strong support from the UK for rescue and recovery following this tragic event. The Turkish vice-president, Fuat Oktay, said on Saturday that about 105,000 buildings had either collapsed, needed to be demolished or were severely damaged in the quake. Two people were rescued from the rubble in Antakya after 296 hours. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images Capping off a remarkable journey that began with his birth in a refugee camp in Nepal, a man from Louisville, Kentucky, recently emerged as champion of the Nepali version of the singing competition The Voice. Karan Rai’s dramatic rise as the south Asian nation’s latest singing sensation was chronicled Friday in the Louisville Eccentric Observer alternative weekly newspaper, which declared his story “a classic humble-beginnings epic”. According to the alt-weekly, nicknamed Leo, Rai was born in 1994 in the Pathri Morang refugee camp in eastern Nepal. It was one of two camps remaining for people fleeing ethnic cleansing of people with Nepali roots in Bhutan – another Himalayan country – in the 1980s. Rai’s parents were born in Bhutan and were descendants of Nepalis who went there to work. But they went to the refugee camps amid conflict over speaking and teaching the Nepali language. Rai told Leo that his family didn’t feel accepted as Nepali at the camp, where life was rugged. “We just had a little house,” Rai said. “We used to get rations weekly,” including rice, potatoes and chiles, “and then sometimes we’d run out of the rations.” Other countries, including the US, began offering ways for refugees to migrate. In 2013, Rai and his family went to the US, initially spending time in Seattle, Washington, before moving to Louisville for what they considered better educational opportunities, he said. Rai had first shown a talent for singing during his days at the refugee camp. The thought of participating in a reality show always appealed to him, including NBC’s singing competition The Voice, whose 23rd American season is scheduled to air beginning in March. Then Rai learned online that the Nepali version of The Voice allowed anyone who spoke the nation’s language to audition to become a contestant – “including those who had been trapped between two lands that didn’t want them, in refugee camps, left without a country to call home”, as Leo’s Erica Rucker put it. Leo reported that Rai made an audition tape demonstrating how his range, from “hard rock to a delicate falsetto on more traditional Nepali melodies”, and submitted it to the show through its website. Producers notified him that he’d moved on to the next round, and he traveled to Nepal for a blind audition. Rai went on to spend seven months in Nepal competing on the show’s fourth season as part of a team coached by Raju Lama, one of the brightest singing stars in the country of 30 million people. The time – and money – Rai expended participating on the show were worth it. He clinched the crown as the competition’s champion in late December and with Lama performed a concert at the Pathri Morang camp, where his life began. He has also released an album, The Kites, and shot a video for his first single, Changa, which involved him collaborating with Dayahang Rai, a revered Nepali actor. “He’s the superstar of [the] Nepal industry at this moment,” Karan Rai told Leo of the actor. “I get lucky to play with him in my music video.” Rai spoke to Leo as he prepared to travel to Australia to perform as part of his contract with The Voice of Nepal. The contract calls on him to tour several countries and serve as an ambassador for the competition’s brand. But first, he returned to Louisville – more than 7,700 miles from Nepal by airplane – with his trophy in hand. A small crowd of Nepali and Bhutanese residents of Louisville gathered at the city’s airport – named after another local champion, the late legendary boxer Muhammad Ali – and greeted him as a hero. Later, he performed in a high school gym for a larger crowd of Louisville’s Nepali and Bhutanese residents. Banners at the venue read “Nepal-America Society of Kentucky” and “Bhutanese Society of Kentucky”, a striking illustration of how people from two countries that he once felt didn’t want him now claimed him proudly. “All I want to say is no matter where you come from, where is your background, just focus – just do one thing,” Rai said. “Be passionate about one thing.” Louisville singer born in refugee camp wins Nepal’s The Voice Ramon Antonio Vargas A screen capture of a telecast showing Karan Rai, of Louisville, Kentucky, singing on the Nepali version of the Voice. Photograph: Silver Entertainment An intervention by Boris Johnson in the row over solving the post-Brexit deadlock in Northern Ireland is “not entirely unhelpful”, a cabinet minister has said, as work to clinch a deal with the EU goes down to the wire. Penny Mordaunt, the Commons leader, suggested concerns reportedly raised by the former prime minister were a welcome reminder to Brussels of the threat that Britain could try to unilaterally override the Northern Ireland protocol. The bill designed to do so is paused, but Mordaunt said that “Boris is being Boris” and added: “The intervention by a source close to the previous prime minister is helpful to remind the EU of that bill”. Conservative MPs are quietly considering details about an agreement being worked up between the UK and EU to help ease trade barriers between Great Britain and Northern Ireland and reduce the jurisdiction of the European court of justice. Ahead of a crunch week for Rishi Sunak, the prime minister returned home from meeting EU leaders at the Munich security conference on Saturday and is spending Sunday in No 10 holding a series of informal meetings. Downing Street hoped to be able to announce a deal for overhauling the way the protocol works on Monday, but buy-in from the Democratic Unionist party (DUP) is viewed as key. A group of hardline Brexiters in the Tory party – known as the European Research Group – has also said it will remain in “lockstep” with the DUP, dangling the threat of a mass rebellion over Sunak. Johnson has become concerned that a successful deal will lead to the government ditching the Northern Ireland protocol bill, allowing the UK to unilaterally rip up some Brexit arrangements in the region, the Observer revealed. The Sunday Times also quoted a friend of Johnson’s as saying: “His basic worry is that we took the powers in the Boris Johnson’s intervention in NI Brexit row ‘not entirely unhelpful’ – minister Aubrey Allegretti Political correspondent Penny Mordaunt arrives at BBC Broadcasting House on Sunday. Photograph: Hollie Adams/Getty Images The Guardian Monday 20 February 2023 10 World News Continued from page 8 Continued on page 11

bill and we are not using them, and we haven’t got as good a deal as we would have because we didn’t stick with it.” Though some government insiders are frustrated given they feel Johnson is being a thorn in their side at a key stage in negotiations, Mordaunt said his purported interventions were “not entirely unhelpful”. She suggested reminding Brussels of the bill was helpful leverage, telling the Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg show: “The EU is talking about things it previously said it wouldn’t talk about.” Ensuring the support of the DUP for any deal is paramount, Mordaunt insisted. “Unless we have every community in NI behind this deal, it won’t last, it won’t work,” she told Sky’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday programme. Given the DUP has refused to reenter power-sharing, leaving Northern Ireland without an executive for a year, citing concerns with the protocol, Mordaunt admitted that a “key part” of any deal would be “getting the assembly stood up again”. She dismissed the potential for any rebellion by Tory MPs, saying “that is irrelevant unless it works for the whole of Northern Ireland”. Downing Street has not yet decided whether to hold a vote on any deal, Mordaunt added. However, Wendy Morton, the former chief whip under Liz Truss, urged ministers to keep all backbenchers on side. “We have to have something that works and that takes all our communities and our party with us,” she told the BBC. Labour repeated its offer to provide political cover to Sunak by supporting any deal agreed with the EU, meaning the prime minister would easily be able to win any vote on it regardless of a rebellion in his own party. Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, said she hoped a deal was imminent as one was “strongly needed”. Residents of southern Italy’s picturesque and ancient “city of stone” have been gripped by another rocky phenomenon after a meteorite crash-landed on the balcony of a home in Matera’s suburbs. The space object, which had been travelling at about 200mph, was spotted in the skies above the Puglia and Basilicata regions on 14 February, becoming known as “Valentine’s fireball”, before falling on to the balcony of the home of brothers Gianfranco and Pino Losignore and their parents. Not that they realised at first: the two were carrying out checks on the property’s solar panels when, three days later, they noticed a damaged panel and tile, along with grey fragments scattered across the balcony. “I wasn’t at home when it happened, but my mother was in the basement at the time and heard a loud bang,” said Gianfranco. “She was worried, but it was quite a windy day and so thought it might have been the branch of a tree. Never would we have expected it to have been a meteorite.” The meteorite’s fireball had been observed on the surveillance cameras of Prisma, a project run by the Italian institute of astrophysics, enabling experts to track where it might have fallen. More than 70 grams of the fragments have so far been gathered for study, which will eventually be put on display in a museum. Carmelo Falco, a representative of Prisma who travelled to Matera straight away, said that while many meteorites hit the Earth, what is rare about the event in Matera is that the meteorite landed on a clean surface, so it has not been contaminated. It is also rare for meteorites to fall in an area from which their fragments can be easily recovered. “We have to analyse the remnants of the meteorite, but what is unique with this one is the situation in which it was found,” said Falco. “The material, which is soft, much like sand, is very pure, as it did not touch soil or water – it is almost as if we collected it directly from space.” This is the second time in recent years that a meteorite has fallen in Italy. In January 2020, one was found near Modena in Emilia-Romagna. Domenico Bennardi, the mayor of Matera, a city famous for its sassi, cave dwellings carved out of limestone, said the discovery had triggered much “enthusiasm and emotion” among residents. “Matera is one of the oldest cities in the world, where many discoveries have been made,” he said. “It’s incredible that fragments of rock from space have now fallen on the city of stone.” The meteorite will be named after Gianfranco and Pino. Fragments of ‘Valentine’s fireball’ meteorite fall in southern Italy Angela Giuffrida in Rome Matera is renowned for its limestone buildings and cave dwellings. Photograph: rudi1976/ Alamy Fragments of the Matera meteorite. Photograph: Gianfranco Lossignore A body has been found in the search for the missing woman Nicola Bulley after a tipoff by members of the public, police have said. Bulley, 45, a mortgage adviser from Inskip, Lancashire, vanished while walking her dog after dropping off her daughters, six and nine, at school more than three weeks ago, on 27 January. Lancashire constabulary said on Sunday no formal identification had yet been carried out on the body, but that Bulley’s family had been informed. On Sunday evening Bulley’s partner Paul Ansell spoke of his “agony” at the discovery. “No words right now, just agony,” he told Sky News’s Inzamam Rashid. “We’re all together, we have to be strong.” The police force said it received a call at 11.36am on Sunday about a body in the River Wyre, close to Rawcliffe Road, within a mile of where Bulley was last seen. “An underwater search team and specialist officers have subsequently attended the scene, entered the water, and have sadly recovered a body. No formal identification has yet been carried out, so we are unable to say whether this is Nicola Bulley at this time,” Lancashire constabulary said in a statement. “Procedures to identify the body are ongoing. We are currently treating the death as unexplained. Nicola’s family have been informed of developments and our thoughts are with them at this most difficult of times. We ask that their privacy is respected.” The discovery came three days after the Lancashire force was heavily criticised for releasing a statement referring to Bulley’s struggles with alcohol and the perimenopause. It was these “vulnerabilities”, coupled with the numerous sightings before she went missing, which led detectives to believe that she was more likely to have fallen into the river than been harmed by a third party. The body was found just after a sharp bend in the river, about half a mile downstream from the village of St Michael’s. Police divers were seen searching an area of undergrowth at the river’s edge on Sunday morning, several metres below the banking on Rawcliffe Road. A dead tree appeared to have fallen into the river there some time ago, with decaying reeds obscuring the water’s edge. Within a week of her going missing, police said they believed she had fallen into the river while walking her dog, Willow, along the Wyre. Piecing together CCTV footage, mobile phone data and sightings from people who knew Bulley, detectives believed there was only a 10-minute window when she was out of sight. Her phone, which was still connected to a work call, was found on a bench by the river, alongside Willow’s harness. Bulley’s disappearance sparked unusually strong public interest, with amateur detectives and YouTubers making ghoulish pilgrimages to the area as they shared their unsubstantiated theories on the case. Some were served with dispersal notices, forcing them to leave the area, amid reports that properties near to the river had been broken into by would-be sleuths. Rawcliffe Road was closed for several hours on Sunday so that the body could be recovered and removed. As Body found in search for missing woman Nicola Bulley, say police Helen Pidd North of England editor Nicola went missing more than three weeks ago. Photograph: Family handout/PA Media Monday 20 February 2023 The Guardian World News 11 Continued from page 10 Continued on page 12

soon as the road reopened, a steady stream of local people and crime scene tourists visited the spot, after seeing photographs of the search on social media. For more than three weeks, the community in this small Lancashire village had been desperate for news of the missing mother. Every other lamp-post and telegraph pole bears laminated “missing” posters, appealing for information about Bulley’s disappearance. Photographs of her smiling face were printed on banners placed at road junctions, in the hope of jogging the memories of motorists who may have seen her the morning she went missing. A footbridge over the Wyre in St Michael’s has become a focal point in the hunt for Bulley, with well-wishers encouraged to leave messages on yellow ribbons tied to the ironwork. “We will never give up” reads one. “We all miss you so much. Please come home Nikki,” reads another. A child’s drawing is attached to one ribbon, showing a big red love heart and a bright yellow sun. An eight-yearold has written: “I hope you get found today!” But as the days went on and detectives stuck to their hypothesis that the river had claimed Bulley, the chances of her being found alive grew ever slimmer. Though the identity of the body had not been confirmed on Sunday night, there was widespread acceptance that it was almost certainly Bulley. The home secretary, Suella Braverman, tweeted: “These are heartbreaking and distressing developments. My thoughts remain with Nicola’s family at this extremely difficult time.” On Friday Braverman demanded that Lancashire constabulary explain why it released personal information about Bulley. Police took the unusual step of revealing last week that Bulley had previously had “significant issues with alcohol which were brought on by her ongoing struggles with the menopause and that these struggles had resurfaced over recent months”. A response car staffed by both police and health professionals attended the family home on 10 January amid a “report of concern for welfare”, the force said. The disclosure of such personal information prompted widespread consternation, with the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, saying he was “concerned” about the disclosures. Lancashire constabulary admitted that it was “an unusual step for us to take to go into this level of detail about someone’s private life”, but said it did so to avoid speculation or misinterpretation. Midway through the investigation, the force released a statement decrying “the huge amount of commentary from so-called experts, ill-informed speculation and conspiracy theories which is damaging to the investigation, the community of St Michael’s and, worst of all, to Nicola’s family”. The case had resulted in the “groundless and hurtful abuse of innocent people, including witnesses and local businesses, which is totally unacceptable”, the constabulary said. As night fell on Sunday, some locals asked why it had taken so long to find a body when police divers and drones, including a private contractor who conducted extensive searches of the riverbed using sonar technology, had failed to find any trace of the missing woman. Earlier in the search, Ansell said he was “100%” sure she was not in the water. Her family also felt police were too quick to reach their conclusion that she had most likely fallen into the river. Peter Faulding, chief executive of Specialist Group International, whose dive team joined the search for a number of days using sonar scanners, said last week that he did not think Bulley was in the river. Had she fallen down the bank, she would have been easily able to stand up and wait for help rather than be swept away with the current, he told the Daily Mail. But he changed his mind after hearing of Bulley’s issues with alcohol and her mental health. “I can confirm that my usually trusted team and I were not passed this crucial information during our search, which would have changed search strategy,” he tweeted. The hunt for Bulley was one of the most substantial missing person searches in England for years, involving underwater search teams, drones, mounted police and a police helicopter. Cattle-ranching, not cocaine, has driven the destruction of the Colombian Amazon over the last four decades, a new study has found. Successive recent governments have used environmental concerns to justify ramping up their war on the green shrub, but the research shows that in 2018 the amount of forest cleared to cultivate coca, the base ingredient of cocaine, was only 1/60th of that used for cattle. The study’s findings vindicate conservation experts who have long argued that Colombia’s strategy to conserve the Amazon – often centered on combating coca production – has been misplaced. “We want to finally eradicate this narrative that coca is the driver of deforestation,” said Pablo Murillo-Sandoval at the University of Tolima, who led the study. Deforestation spiked after the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) signed a landmark peace agreement with the government in 2016 and laid down their weapons. As the rebels came out of the jungle, land-grabbers took advantage, clearing trees with chainsaws and burning vast areas. Deforestation reached a record high of 219,973 hectares (543,565 acres) in 2017, up 23% from the previous year. Then president Iván Duque used the environmental destruction caused by coca cultivation to justify stepping up military action against coca farmers. Prohibited from spraying coca crops with glyphosate after the chemical was banned in 2015 for health concerns, the Duque government sent in choppers and armed troops into the Amazon rainforest, sometimes into deadly confrontations with coca farmers. Yet while cattle ranches cleared more than 3m hectares (7.4m acres) of Amazon rainforest in 2018, coca’s impact was negligible. Only 45,000 hectares (111,200 acres) were cleared for coca in 2018, the latest year available in the study. Using a deep learning algorithm to differentiate between land used for coca and cattle, Murillo and his colleagues were for the first time able to distinguish between the activities on a mass scale from 1985 to 2019. “We have always contested the government’s argument that coca was driving deforestation but lacked the evidence,” said Angelica Rojas, liaison officer for Guaviare state at the Foundation for Conservation and Sustainable Development, a Colombian environmental thinktank. “Now we have real data with which we can oppose this mistake.” The figures show that previous governments have used the environment as a false justification to wage war on coca farmers, said Rojas, who was not involved in the study. “They didn’t want to prevent deforestation, they just wanted to justify spending more money and resources on their real political goal: eliminating coca,” she said. The study also adds to evidence that despite lives being sacrificed and billions of dollars being spent, Colombia’s “war on drugs” has failed to halt coca production – and in some cases it may have even made it worse. When farmers have their crops eradicated they simply establish new plots, often just a few kilometres deeper into the forest canopy, Murillo said. “The war on drugs started 40 years ago now, yet everyone knows where coca is: in the same place they have always been.” As the government has engaged in a game of whack-a-mole with coca farmers, the real driver of deforestation, cattle farming, has been allowed to swallow up vast swathes of land, the authors argue. Flaws in Colombian land regulation have incentivised the conversion of biodiverse tropical rainforests into barren pastures. To get their deeds recognised, landowners must demonstrate that 75% of their plots are productive, and it is far easier for farmers to use cows than crops, said Carlos Devia, a forest engineer at Bogotá’s Javeriana University who was not involved in the study. “Ranching is the easiest way to show you’re using land, as it’s unregulated. You could have 100 hectares of land and just throw 10 cows in there, whereas for potatoes or corn only a hectare would require a year of great work,” Devia said. Landless farmers often clear a few hectares of rainforest and sell them illegally to members of criminal organisations who then join up multiple small lots, transforming them into vast swathes of lifeless, arid pasture. Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who took office in August last year, is proposing a U-turn on Colombia’s failed anti-narcotics strategy. Petro, a former member of the defunct M-19 rebel group, has turned the focus away from forced coca eradication, and is buying up millions of hectares of land to give to farmers. “Reducing drug use does not require wars, it needs us all to build a better society,” Petro told the UN general assembly in September last year. Cattle, not coca, drive deforestation of the Amazon in Colombia – report Luke Taylor in Bogotá An illegal road made during deforestation in Caquetá, Colombia, in 2021. Photograph: Luisa González/Reuters Cattle roam the deforested Amazon in Guaviare, Colombia, in 2022. Photograph: Mauricio Dueñas Castañeda/EPA An award-winning Taiwanese film was shown on Saturday to two very different audiences One, at the Beijing Queer Film festival – an event cautiously held inside the French Institute – had little public promotion. The mostly young crowd was sombre and serious, even unreactive, as they watched Tank Fairy, a 10-minute musical comedy about a dancing, dragged-up, cigarette-smoking, magical figure who delivers gas tanks. At the same time in Sydney, Tank Fairy’s director Erich Rettstadt was accepting the Asia-Pacific Queer Film Festival award, after a screening during which people laughed and cried. The event was part of the twoweek WorldPride celebrations. “There are rainbow flags everywhere and it does feel very gay,” said Rettstadt. The film has now been selected for more than 100 film festivals across 32 countries. Those involved say it has ceJokes, dancing, drag: hit short film honours Taiwan’s defiant queer scene James Chater and Helen Davidson in Taipei The Guardian Monday 20 February 2023 12 World News Continued from page 11 Continued on page 13

mented Taiwan’s place on the queer cultural map and shown that Taiwan is more than just a geopolitical flashpoint. Local drag queen and trans performer Marian Mesula plays the eponymous heroine, who inspires a young boy called Jojo to follow his dreams of dancing, drag and colour. Tank Fairy plays on a uniquely Taiwanese cultural trope: older buildings often aren’t connected to mains gas supply, so tanks are hand-delivered, usually by motorbike. Delivery people, according to the film, are “usually male, pot-bellied, and lacking in glamour”. Marian’s character inverts the stereotype in a whirlwind of glitter and skintight leather, accompanied by sequined rats as dancing support characters. Since a screening at SXSW, where it won an audience award, Tank Fairy has won accolades at the Los Angeles LGBTQ+ film festival and the UK’s Iris prize. It has been shown at New York’s Lincoln Center and San Francisco’s Castro theatre; its Pakistan premiere just took place in Lahore. When filming Tank Fairy’s opening sequence at a Taipei market mostly frequented by the elderly people, they anticipated capturing some surprised reactions. But when no-one batted an eyelid at a drag queen carrying gas tanks through quiet city streets, the team had to request local residents to do some acting. Even the photoshoot for this article was interrupted by an octogenarian couple inviting Marian and the team for tea. “Taiwanese are used to doing their own thing,” Marian says. Yet, they say, Taiwan is far from a queer utopia; cultural and religious conservatism remains common outside the big cities. But Marian says drag artists are a force that’s propelling Taiwan – and the region – forward. “Drag performers are at the forefront of Taiwan’s LGBT community,” Marian says. “A lot of people in Asia can’t be themselves. But when they see us, they feel braver.” Ryan Lin was just 10 when he played Jojo in Tank Fairy. “After I knew about the film, I was really moved,” says the now 12-yearold from his home in southern Taiwan. “Jojo works so hard to prove that he’s talented.” “There are so many kids like Jojo in Asia,” says Marian. “But now Taiwanese drag performers are seen more, it’s like they’ve found a new hope.” Since decades of martial law ended in the 1980s, Taiwan has become a trailblazer for equality in the region. It was the first place in Asia to legalise samesex marriage in 2019 and hosts one of Asia’s biggest Pride festivals. “Taiwan’s queer culture has a vitality because it’s changed so quickly,” says local queen Yolanda Mesula. “Taiwan is still young [when it comes to LGBTQI rights], but it’s full of life.” The difference now, Tank Fairy’s creators say, is that Taiwan feels more confident telling the world of its successes. “Taiwan has been limited by politics and other burdens,” says Anita Tung, Tank Fairy’s producer. “In the past, Taiwan has not been as unimpeded. We didn’t know how to tell the world that we can accept all these ideas.” An expansion of Tank Fairy into a TV series is now in development, titled Fanteasia (a double-entendre on the “fantasy” genre, and “spilling tea” – drag lingo for gossiping). Like Tank Fairy, each episode would put a queer twist on a uniquely Taiwanese social identity, including funeral pole dancers, traditional market butchers, and betelnut sellers at neon-lit city stores. “My style comes from that local Taiwanese culture. The way I do drag is like the women who dance on the electronic floats,” says local queen Honey Ji Mesula, referencing the erotic dancers often appearing at Taiwanese religious and cultural events, including funerals. “I’m a signature Taiwanese drag queen.” Fanteasia’s characters have already made their public debut at a Taipei Pride event last year. One performance – representing Taiwan’s famously soundtracked garbage workers – quickly went viral. “To see the way [Taiwan] is now, I just could never believe,” says Dr Wang Newton, a Taiwanese-American drag king who is set to feature in Fanteasia.Wang was born in Taiwan, but is now based in the US. “To have that kind of Taiwanese representation. It’s not just China. It’s us; it’s the Taiwanese queer community. It’s the me that I never could be.” International awareness of Taiwan has increased dramatically in recent years, primarily because of the growing risk of conflict over Beijing’s threat to annex it. Rettstadt, who has lived in Taipei with his Taiwanese husband for five years, wants the project to reflect his experience on the ground: “I want to collaborate with the Taiwanese drag community, to build a new platform for local queer artists here, to create a project showcasing Taiwan’s unique cultural identity on the international stage.” He emphasises Tank Fairy’s success with audience awards. “The response was mindblowing, but it’s also not. Because I believe queer joy is truly transcendent.” There is a sense of urgency in Taiwan’s promotion of its equality and freedom. In China, government crackdowns have targeted queer communities and activists, making celebratory events more difficult to hold openly. At the Beijing screening, one of the Chinese directors told the crowd that Tank Fairy stood out against their more solemn films, because “we can’t yet afford to discuss things in such a lighthearted way”. Should Beijing forcefully make Taiwan a Chinese province, many Taiwanese queer people fear their hardwon rights to free expression could be eroded, or eradicated completely. “Of course I worry about it,” says Alvin Chang, the 51-year-old owner of Café Dalida, the Taipei drag bar where Erich first saw Marian perform. Chang grew up during martial law when Taiwan was less accepting of queer people. He says being ruled by China would be tantamount to going back into the closet: “It would be like going back to the environment of my childhood.” Honey tries not to think about China. “I want people to know that Taiwan is more than the pressures we face,” she says. “Just because we have these limitations, we won’t change. We’ll continue to innovate and become who we are supposed to be.” Marian Mesula as the heroine in Tank Fairy. Photograph: Manbo Key/The Observer The filmmakers are expanding the film into a series focusing on other figures from Taiwan society, including the local market pork seller, played by Yolanda Mesula. Photograph: Manbo Key/The Observer Lawyers have called on the Australian government to “stop playing with people’s lives” as it moves to re-detain dozens of people who were released from immigration detention over Christmas. About 160 people had been released from detention due to a full federal court case ruling that aggregate sentences do not count for the purposes of the Migration Act’s automatic visacancellation provisions. An aggregate sentence refers to when a person is given a single sentence for more than one offence. Rather than appeal, the Albanese government pushed legislation through parliament restoring its original interpretation. It passed the Senate with the Coalition’s support on Monday despite outcry from refugee and asylum seeker groups about its retrospective provisions. Dozens of people whose visas were affected by the bill are now being told they will be re-detained. Crossbench MPs and lawyers have raised concerns about the impact on individuals with a series of low-level offences. ‘‘These are some of the hardest conversations I’ve ever had with clients,” said Rachel Saravanamuthu, a senior solicitor at the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre. “People have just begun to rebuild their lives – reunite with family, start new jobs and have hope for their future. All of their dreams have been ripped away so suddenly and they are devastated.” Saravanamuthu said people had “already endured a traumatic visa cancellation process and protracted time in detention, and now have to experience this all over again which is particularly cruel”. Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoonemail newsletters for your daily news roundup “The government must stop playing with people’s lives.’’ A official notice, seen by Guardian Australia, says: “Your visa cancellation under section 501 of the Migration Act has been validated by operation of the Aggregate Sentences Act and is legally effective, and you no longer hold a visa. As such you are an unlawful non-citizen and may be detained and removed from Australia. “As you no longer hold a valid visa to remain in Australia, you are liable for immigration detention and we encourage you to self-report to the Australian Border Force … Alternatively, it is open to you to depart Australia voluntarily.” The Human Rights Law Centre, the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre and the Visa Cancellation Working Group issued a joint statement expressing “serious concern at the re-detention of people without regard to their personal circumstances, including whether they are refugees and owed protection”. “Lawyers are aware of at least one Australian government urged to ‘stop playing with people’s lives’ as people returned to detention Ben Doherty, Daniel Hurst and Paul Karp The independent MP Zoe Daniel says she is concerned ‘people with a series of low-level offences’ will be ‘caught up’ in the approach ‘designed to protect the community from serious offenders’. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP Monday 20 February 2023 The Guardian World News 13 Continued from page 12 Continued on page 14

person from a refugee background who had not received the letter and was taken back into immigration detention suddenly on their way to work, and must now restart what is an uncertain, intimidating and traumatic process to have their visas reinstated,” the statement said. “The people who received letters on Friday and are now faced with re-detention were allowed to live in the community with their families for weeks.” The independent MP for Goldstein, Zoe Daniel, said the government, having forced legislation through the parliament to effectively overrule a court decision, began re-detaining refugees immediately “putting them into what appears to be indefinite detention”. “My concern was always that people with a series of low-level offences aggregated into one sentence would be caught up in an approach stated to be designed to protect the community from serious offenders,” she said. “It appears this is what is happening.” The government has argued its newly legislated amendments “make clear that a person who is sentenced to a term of imprisonment of 12 months or more does not pass the character test on the basis of having a substantial criminal record”. That will apply regardless of whether the sentence is for a single offence or two or more offences and “regardless of the perceived seriousness of any individual offence”, according to the bill’s explanatory notes. Ian Rintoul from the Refugee Action Coalition said the government “must stop its indiscriminate re-detention raids”. “Section 501 was always an unjust and discriminatory section of the Migration Act, that allowed the government to hold people, potentially indefinitely, even for minor crimes, just because they are non-citizens,” he said. “There must be complete transparency and full accounting of the fiasco surrounding the releases. Labor should spell out who was released and the circumstances of their re-detention.” Comment was sought from the office of the immigration minister, Andrew Giles, on Sunday. But Giles has previously told parliament the court judgment had “created an inconsistency in Australia’s visa cancellation regime, where some noncitizen offenders who, for multiple offences, receive an aggregate sentence of 12 months or more do not meet the criteria of having a substantial criminal record under section 501 of the Migration Act”. “For example, a person who is sentenced to a term of imprisonment for 10 years for committing a violent offence would be found to have a substantial criminal record and would be liable for mandatory cancellation of their visa whereas if they were convicted for 15 years on the basis of two offences, they would not, simply because that sentence was in respect of more than one offence,” he said. Touching on the prospect of redetention for those recently released, Giles said retrospectively amending the Migration Act to validate past decisions was “important to enable those decisions that were to protect the Australian community to stand”. ere’s a little thought experiment: imagine if an alien managed to avoid getting shot down by the Biden administration and landed its UFO safely in the US. Imagine if it picked up a year’s worth of copies of the New York Times, the paper of record, in order to do some due diligence on how us earthlings live. What would it come away thinking about life in America? I obviously can’t speak for extraterrestrial life, but I’ve got a feeling the poor alien might get the impression that every third person in the US is trans – rather than 0.5% of the population. They (I assume aliens are nonbinary) might get the impression that nobody is allowed to say the word “woman” any more and we are all being forced at gunpoint to say “uterushavers”. They might get the impression that women’s sports have been completely taken over by trans women. They might believe that millions of children are being mutilated by doctors in the name of gender-affirming care because of the all-powerful trans lobby. They might come away thinking that JK Rowling is not a multi-multi-multi-millionaire with endless resources at her disposal but a marginalized victim who needs brave Times columnists to come to her defense. None of that is true, of course, but you’d understand why they might get that impression. As Populapointed out in a recent piece (headlined “Why is the New York Times so obsessed with trans kids?”): “In the past eight months the Times has now published more than 15,000 words’ worth of front-page stories asking whether care and support for young trans people might be going too far or too fast”. Those, to reiterate, are newspaper front-page stories. As Popula notes, that number “doesn’t include the 11,000 or so words the New York Times Magazine devoted to a laboriously evenhanded story about disagreements over the standards of care for trans youth; or the 3,000 words of the front-page story … on whether trans women athletes are unfairly ruining the competition for other women; or the 1,200 words of the front-page story … on how trans interests are banning the word “woman” from abortion-rights discourse.” Popula isn’t the only one wondering why the Times is so obsessed with trans people. On Wednesday, two open letters were sent to the New York Times critiquing their coverage of trans issues. The first was signed by nearly 1,000 current and former Times contributors including well-known names like Cynthia Nixon, Chelsea Manning, and Roxane Gay. This letter, addressed to the paper’s associate managing editor for standards, accused the Times of treating gender diversity “with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language, while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources”. That relevant information being that some of those sources have affiliations with far-right groups. That “charged language” being phrases like “patient zero” to describe a transgender young person seeking gender-affirming care, “a phrase that vilifies transness as a disease to be feared”. The second letter was signed by more than 100 LGBTQ+ and civil rights groups, including Glaad and the Human Rights Campaign. It expressed support for the contributor letter and accused the Times of platforming “fringe theories” and “dangerous inaccuracies”. It noted that while the Times has produced responsible coverage of trans people, “those articles are not getting front-page placement or sent to app users via push notification like the irresponsible pieces are”. And it observed that rightwing politicians have been using the Times’s coverage of trans issues to justify criminalizing gender-affirming care. Was the Times open to this criticism? Did it take some time to reflect on why so many people are upset about its coverage and how its coverage is influencing increasingly dystopian legislation? Perhaps. But if it did it certainly didn’t make it obvious. Instead it went on the defensive. Charlie Stadtlander, the Times’ director of external communication, put out a statement stating that the organization pursues “independent reporting on transgender issues that include profiling groundbreakers in the movement, challenges and prejudice faced by the community, and how society is grappling with debates about care”. While that was all very diplomatic, the executive editor, Joe Kahn, and opinion editor, Kathleen Kingsbury, sent around a rather more pointed newsroom memo condemning the letters on Thursday. “It is not unusual for outside groups to critique our coverage or to rally supporters to seek to influence our journalism,” Kahn wrote in the memo. “In this case, however, members of our staff and contributors to The Times joined the effort … We do not welcome, and will not tolerate, participation by Times journalists in protests organized by advocacy groups or attacks on colleagues on social media and other public forums.” I’m going to pause for a moment here and address the elephant in the room. You don’t need to @ me on Twitter, I’m fully aware that I’m writing this in the Guardian, which has received its own open letter from staff about the paper’s willingness to publish “antitrans views” and “transphobic content”. (FYI, I didn’t sign this letter because I’m a freelancer who doesn’t hang out in media circles and I had absolutely no idea they were happening.) I’m not trying to pretend the Guardian is perfect when it comes to LGBTQ+ issues and the Times is uniquely awful. But I do think the Times possesses a unique haughtiness in thinking it is above everyone else and that it performs “pure” journalism that has nothing to do with advocacy. Here’s the thing: there is no clearcut line between advocacy and journalism. All media organizations have a perspective about the world and filter their output (which will, of course, strive to be fairly reported) through that perspective. To pretend otherwise is dishonest. Like it or not, the Times is involved in advocacy. It just needs to step back for a moment and think about who it’s advocating for. Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist The New York Times’ trans coverage is under fire. The paper needs to listen Arwa Mahdawi H ‘Imagine if an alien picked up a year’s worth of copies of the New York Times.’ Photograph: Mark Lennihan/AP The Guardian Monday 20 February 2023 14 World News / Opinion Continued from page 13 Like it or not, the Times is involved in advocacy. It just needs to step back for a moment and think about who it’s advocating for

or a top Ugandan general trained by the British army at Sandhurst, Muhoozi Kainerugaba is an unorthodox kind of guy. Last October he offered 100 cows as a bride price for Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni. In another reportedly well-lubricated Twitter escapade, Muhoozi threatened to invade Kenya and conquer Nairobi, which led to his removal as commander of the Uganda People’s Defence Force. Bizarrely, he was simultaneously promoted to fourstar rank. In other late-night online interventions, Muhoozi has backed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and praised Donald Trump as “the only white man I have ever respected”. He also has a much darker side. While leading the Special Forces Command, he was implicated in the abduction and torture of political opponents. In 2021, in a chilly echo of Idi Amin, he defended his right to take decisions after having “woken up from a drunken stupor”. As Ugandans know to their cost, Muhoozi gets away with it because he is the son and presumed heir of Yoweri Museveni, Uganda’s authoritarian president. Museveni may finally step down in 2026 after 40 years in power. By creating a political dynasty and securing the succession before he quits, he can argue that “continuity” best serves Uganda’s interests while ensuring his own future safety. Dynastic politics, broadly speaking, come in three main forms – dictatorial, democratic and royal – and there are signs of a resurgence. Earlier this month, Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s dictator, used an anniversary parade of long-range ballistic missiles as the intimidating backdrop for a sort of coming-out party for his daughter, Kim Ju-ae, who is thought to be 10 years old. Who knows what the little girl made of it all? For his part, her alternately jolly and sinister dad, dubbed “little rocket man” by Trump, sent a message to the watching world: namely, “there are many more Kims where I came from”. The son of the Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il, and grandson of North Korea’s founding father, Kim Il-sung, was clearly indicating that talk of regime change is pointless. The west would have to deal with him and his kin, indefinitely. Hun Sen, Cambodia’s Beijingbacked strongman, has similar ideas about succession. Last week he shut down one of the country’s last remaining independent media platforms, Voice of Democracy, after it supposedly criticised his son. In charge for 35 years, Hun Sen, 70, may be nervous about what comes next. In his view, it should be Hun Manet, the favoured son he has made armed forces deputy commander. Amnesty International says anyone remotely critical of Hun Sen’s family faces “ongoing repression”. The persistence and proliferation of dictatorial dynasties reflects both familial insecurities and a global trend towards authoritarianism. In Iran, whose post-1979 democratic system is crumbling, Mojtaba Khamenei, son of the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is mentioned as a possible successor. In Nicaragua, President Daniel Ortega and his vice-president wife, Rosario Murillo, the world’s most notorious revolutionary apostates, are said to be prepping their son, Laureano Ortega, for the top job. In Syria, the mismanaged aftermath of recent earthquakes has underlined just how disastrous an impact a self-perpetuating, unaccountable and incompetent family dynasty can have on ordinary lives. President Basharal-Assad inherited the job from his father, Hafez al-Assad, infamous for massacring opponents. Fighting Syria’s civil war, Bashar resorted to the same brutal tactics, learned at his father’s knee. He has learned nothing since. Willingly or not, his eldest son, Hafez, may follow in his wake. Angola, in contrast, provides a case study of how political dynasties fail. José Eduardo dos Santos ruled the country for almost four decades as president and party leader. Yet gross corruption associated with his family contributed to his downfall. His hand-picked successor, João Lourenço, turned on him, launching investigations into his children, including Isabel dos Santos, described as Africa’s richest woman. The ex-president died in exile last year. Political dynasties have long existed within functioning democracies, too – with mixed results. The Kennedys are the best-known US example, although their prominence is diminished these days. George HW Bush unhappily begat George W Bush. At one time Trump talked up his daughter, Ivanka, as presidential heir. Canada has the Trudeaus, Pierre and Justin. In India it is hard to escape the Gandhi clan, whose latest scion, Rahul, has gone walkabout nationwide. In Pakistan, Bhuttos abound. Fortunately for Britain, there’s only one Boris Johnson. The third category of dynasty – royal families – is, in one sense, the most threatening to a well-ordered society. Members of ambitious political families scramble to the top through ability and energy. Hereditary rulers and their offspring often lack both. They instantly acquire honoured public positions by being born, mostly, between the royal bedsheets. Then, as the UK’s young Prince Charles discovered, they begin a lifelong battle with irrelevance. King Maha Vajiralongkorn, who ascended the Thai throne in 2016, is among the more scandal-prone royals. Dubbed the Caligula of Siam, he promoted his pet poodle Foo Foo to the post of air chief marshal and committed many other follies while crown prince. Maha seems to have calmed down of late. Now the international focus has shifted to another monarchic monster – the Saudi crown prince and alleged assassin, Mohammed bin Salman. The arbitrary, unchecked exercise of hereditary power is a boom business in the Gulf. In Europe and elsewhere, less so – witness the Spanish monarchy’s embarrassments. In Britain, the terrible trio, Andrew, William and Harry, unwittingly conspire to advance the republican cause. Warring and arrogant princelings give dynasties of all varieties a bad name – and potentially destroy them. That’s a welcome thought. Dynasties obstruct free choice and political change and distort open societies. They should be resisted. As a general rule, voting is always preferable to saluting. Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at [email protected] What do Prince Andrew, Kim Jong-un and a Ugandan general have in common? Simon Tisdall F The North Korean leader Kim Jong-un celebrates the 75th anniversary of the Korean People's Army on 7 February with his wife Ri Sol-ju and daughter Kim Ju-ae. Photograph: KCNA via KNS/AFP/Getty Images ’ve been trying to work out what the most stressful moment of my day is and I think I’ve got it: 5.38am, or thereabouts. That’s when I realise that, having been woken by the dog (erratic, ancient) sometime between 3am and 4am, none of my getting-back-to-sleep strategies are going to work and instead turn to catastrophising about the day ahead, reminding myself insomnia is probably worse than smoking, sitting down and snorting asbestos combined. The question arose because according to what I suppose we could call research (a survey commissioned by Rescue Remedy, the flower-based potion for modern malaises), 7.23am is the “most stressful” time of the day. I get it. Bad things tend to happen around then: verticality, showering and dressing for starters. If you are a parent, you may also be upbraided for human rights violations in the fields of “breakfast”, “teeth” or “shoes”. Possibly a child will pull a dog-eared letter out of a book bag with the triumphant air of a conjurer with a rabbit, informing you they need to come in this morning dressed as Pope Pius VII and bring a scale model of the Sistine Chapel made of “widely recyclable materials only, please”. If you’re commuting, any number of exciting developments are likely to be poised to ruin your day and, if you’re Mark Wahlberg, you’re an hour and 23 minutes into your shower and have to start playing golf in seven minutes. But I’m not convinced 7.23am is really the worst. For one thing, that seems likely to be a transitory stress peak – the kind you get through by gritting your teeth (possibly trying not to crush the pipette delivering flower essences into your gullet as you do) and reminding yourself that later you’ll be able to snatch a few moments to quietly stare into space and regret your life choices. But it’s more that the real problem with stress is the relentless way it accumulates, like heavy metal in your blood; the way it keeps coming back to deliver a top up. After the 5.38am witching hour, I have multiple sweaty, chesttightening peaks throughout the day. It’s a cruise ship buffet of cortisol and my life is laughably low-stress, so surely everyone feels like this? Maybe there wasn’t a tick box on the survey for: “It’s Modern stress never stops. When will our nervous systems catch up with the 21st century? Emma Beddington I Alarming … Photograph: PeopleImages/ Getty Images/iStockphoto Monday 20 February 2023 The Guardian Opinion 15 Members of political families scramble to the top through ability and energy. Hereditary families often lack both Continued on page 16

a constant roiling churn – please help.” The thing is, we’re still evolutionarily maladapted to deal with the world in which we find ourselves. None of our fight-or-flight stuff is turning out to be particularly helpful for dealing with constant aggressive digital stimuli, the melting Antarctic, zoonotic bird flu, flesh-eating opioids, alien balloons et al. We’re reporting higher levels of stress all the time: according to Ipsos research last year, 60% of participants across 34 countries report that they have felt stressed “to the point where they felt like they could not cope or deal with things at least once in the past year”. Women, people under 35 and on lower incomes suffered worse, unsurprisingly. Goodness knows what can be done about the big stuff while we wait for the human central nervous system to catch up with the 21st century, or for one of the smörgåsbord of potential catastrophes to return us to calm, preagrarian living. But in terms of getting us through those stress crunch points in the day, there are so many little things that would help. Put phone chargers, public toilets and water fountains everywhere, for a start. Require all customer service helplines to give you £10 for every minute you wait and let you choose your hold music: birdsong, Bach, death metal, or Kate Winslet saying “Everything’s going to be amazing – you’ve got this” . Don’t just renationalise public transport – nationalise wifi, too, and liberate us from routerbased suffering. Introduce a compulsory module on Stem degrees called “revolutionising printers” and one on arts degrees called “improving autocorrect”. Ban the sale of sticky tape that splits into multiple tiny unmanageable ends, ditto aluminium foil. Ah, I feel calmer already. • Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist f you write about yourself, you learn how to choose which of your selves to write about. Half art, half admin, some light savagery is required as you tell the other ones to wait in the bedroom and be extremely quiet. You organise the mirrors so that readers see the correct parts in the correct light, to protect the softer selves, or those with parts still moving. There’s a conversation happening right now about the support offered to those writing memoirs, typically people publishing their first books, writing about their most traumatic experiences, then breathing into a paper bag as their family, strangers, lawyers and the internet itself judges and pities them across 24 time zones. Blake Morrison talked recently about the sneers an author gets when writing about their family. “The accusation any memoir writer has to face,” is “that to publicise difficult family stuff is mercenary, opportunistic and, worst of all, un-literary.” But that’s the least of it, really. Writing in the Bookseller about the ethics of publishing memoirs, agent Rachel Mills said the bleakest moments of her career had been with authors for whom the process had been horribly destructive, financially and mentally, including, “The Black author who cried… feeling that the hardback not meeting sales expectations meant the publisher would never acquire a book from someone who looked like her again and that this was her fault.” And last week Terri White, who’s currently developing her brilliant memoir about poverty, abuse and mental illness for Netflix, wrote about the pain of “excavating memories I buried decades ago. I had to not just dig them out, but summon the life itself… There’s something almost masochistic in resurrecting that.” Every “life-writer” I know has felt at best a psychic unmooring upon exhuming their history for loved ones and critics, at worst a series of small explosions. Sylvia Plath (Mills points out) “died of suicide shortly after her autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, came out. I wonder: did the telling of her story to the world contribute to her desperation?” A similar discussion happened recently around the aftercare of realityshow stars, who typically return to real life cast as villains or sluts, and must find strategies to work and walk calmly through a world that loves to hate them. After the death of a Love Island contestant, the show started offering its stars therapy, and training in social media and financial management. It was an acknowledgment of the abusive relationship we have, as audiences, with those who offer a flake of their lives for our entertainment. This subject is something I think about not just when I’m watching telly, or writing these weekly columns about myself, or when I’m reading memoirs about grief or divorce – but when I hear again the insistent plea that everybody must talk about their mental health. This is where we are all memoirists, encouraged to speak up, speak loudly, go deep, own our shame, post our tears on Instagram, ask for help. And then, what? Sometimes it is liberating. Sometimes it’s necessary. But sometimes it leaves a person feeling worse and less heard than before they spoke, whether that’s because they then get lost in the waiting lists and crumbling infrastructure of modern healthcare, or because the people they talked to didn’t react in a way that was helpful. Those writing memoirs or being interviewed on TV don’t have a choice about who hears their story, but the rest of us do. And while showing vulnerability can be important, it’s crucial to be cautious and sensible about who we are vulnerable to. This bit gets lost sometimes I think, in the modern rush to share our feelings. I’m pro-memoir, of course. Pro-feelings, too, to a point. I’m all for the spilling of trauma, the lancing of boils, the dragging of stories up from the cellar and spreading them all over Twitter for the afternoon crowd. But in the same way pregnant people go to classes to learn how to breathe through labour before waddling off with not even a leaflet about how to navigate the unknown rest of their parenting lives, it becomes more and more clear how little attention has been paid to the complex world a person finds themselves in after they have bared their soul. Every story told has consequences; they sprout in unexpected and unmanageable directions. There are the people discussed, whose own tellings of the story will differ, and who may be hurt or shocked by the revelations. There are the people the story resonates with, who get in touch with their own traumas, and then those who have opinions on the storyteller and feel the need to tell them these opinions, all through the night, perhaps with a dick pic for colour. The lessons the storytellers learn often involve a kind of therapy and some combination of wizardry and Beyoncé, where they manage to keep a pocket of private life, which is only theirs to witness. And then something else happens to them, and they sit for a while, and then they organise the mirrors and go again. E m a i l E v a a t [email protected] or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman What happens after you tell your story? That’s a story in itself Eva Wiseman I Keep it close: Blake Morrison spoke talked recently about the sneers an author gets when writing about their family. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian fter the State of the Union address at the beginning of this month, the Wall Street Journal ran an opinion piece that argued: “Joe Biden is Bernie Sanders.” By this it meant that, somehow, by stealth, under the cover of darkness, a “democratic socialist” – both words apparently terms of abuse in the WSJ commentator’s lexicon – had invaded the White House and was now making policy for ordinary Americans, interfering in the unjust struggle of their lives, trying to help them get decent jobs and provide them with affordable healthcare. The implication was clear: offshore your assets and offer unhinged prayers to Marjorie Taylor Greene! Speaking to Sanders last week, I wondered if that was how it felt to him. The 81-year-old senator for Vermont gave one of his brief, gravelly guffaws, his concession to small talk. “Not quite,” he said. “I do go to the White House every now and then and chat with the president but no, I’m not in the White House. But that’s the Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch’s paper – you know Rupert Murdoch in the UK, right?” I confirm a passing acquaintance. “Well, the fact is the Wall Street Journal is shocked – flabbergasted! – that an American president would have the courage to mention in his speech, say, that the oil industry made $200bn in profit, while jacking up prices for everyone; they are shocked to hear that a president wants to take on the greed of the pharmaceutical industry; shocked to hear a president talk about the need to raise teacher salaries. Joe Biden is far more conservative than I am. But to his credit, I think he has seen what the progressive movement is doing in this country. And he feels comfortable with some of our ideas – and I appreciate that.” In some ways, the Wall Street Journal was more on the money than Sanders allows. Many of Biden’s proposals did appear to come verbatim from the manifesto that saw Sanders twice beaten to second place in the race to become the Democratic candidate for the presidency in 2016 and 2020 – policies that Sanders has been pressing since he first ran for the office of Vermont senator in 1972, on behalf of Bernie Sanders: ‘Oligarchs run Russia. But guess what? They run the US as well’ Tim Adams A The Guardian Monday 20 February 2023 16 Opinion Continued from page 15 This is where we are all memoirists, encouraged to speak up, speak loudly, go deep Continued on page 17

the Liberty Union party, and finished third with 2% of the vote. For much of that time Sanders – the longest-serving independent representative in congressional history – sounded a lot like a prophet railing in a wilderness of Reaganite deregulation (he has been arguing for a $15 minimum wage for two decades; it still hasn’t come to pass). In the years since the financial crash, however, and particularly since the start of the pandemic, many more people have listened. For a generation of millennials raised on digital noise, Sanders became, in 2016, the political equivalent of a rare vinyl record: tangible, authentic, a reliable source of timeless indy riffs. For all but the most self-righteous of those fans – a strident few believed him a sellout for eventually endorsing the “centrist” Biden – he retains that appeal (strange to think that the progressive hero of the land-of-the-next-new-thing is an octogenarian – stranger that both of his most visible political rivals are, too). Sanders has written a new book partly aimed at that millennial generation – its Day-Glo title is It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism – reminding the young of their age-old rights and responsibilities. The driving narrative of the book is outrage at the obscene wealth inequalities in the world’s richest economy. One of the things that Biden had the temerity – in the Wall Street Journal’s view – to raise in his State of the Union address was a billionaire minimum tax, “because no billionaire should pay a lower tax rate than a firefighter or a schoolteacher”. Under the proposed tax on annual gains in wealth, tech billionaire Elon Musk, for example, would have paid upwards of $20bn a year through the pandemic. Sanders would go further, but he concedes it’s a start. In his book he refers to America’s billionaires as oligarchs. He hopes the pejorative will finally start to catch on. “One of the points that I wanted to make,” he says, “is yeah, of course the oligarchs run Russia. But guess what? Oligarchs run the United States as well. And it’s not just the United States, it’s not just Russia; Europe, the UK, all over the world, we’re seeing a small number of incredibly wealthy people running things in their favour. A global oligarchy. This is an issue that needs to be talked about.” There are plenty of others. Sanders writes, likably, as he talks – straight to the point, low on personal digression, high on public policy. A keen admirer of his once observed how “Bernie’s the last person you’d want to be stuck on a desert island with. Two weeks of lectures about healthcare, and you’d look for a shark and dive in.” In this determination, he says, he wants to be an antidote to the oligarch-owned American media, which would have its audience think and talk about anything else – celebrities, the ballgame, the latest “woke” meme – than the stuff that might loosen their control of politics and the economy. “We don’t talk about our dysfunctional healthcare system. We don’t talk about income and wealth inequality. We hardly talk significantly about the existential threat of climate. The purpose of my book is to begin that discussion.” *** It is one flank of what might yet be the beginning of the closing chapter of Sanders’s unique career, a suitably raucous throat-clearing for a last hurrah. There is another thrust to that campaign. Sanders has just become chair of the Senate health, education, labour and pensions committee. He clearly intends to use that office not only to pursue his primary long-term aim – Medicare for all – but to create some proper political theatre along the way. His opening acts have seen him request the presence before the committee of Stéphane Bancel, the chief executive of Moderna, who Sanders argues “has become a multibillionaire” by creating a coronavirus vaccine with government money. Calls have also gone out to Howard Schultz, the chief executive of Starbucks, to address his “union-busting” policies and their relation to his staggering personal fortune. Jeff Bezos, of Amazon, a long-term bete noire of Sanders, should also look out for an invitation. Expect TV ratings of Senate hearings to soar. One of the inspiring things about Sanders’s devotion to his cause – in light of the factional divisions of the British left – has been his grownup willingness to get behind Biden’s programme and try to influence it from within. The two of them have profound political differences, but, as he outlines in the book, a sincere personal respect; their wives get along well. Sanders would probably hesitate to use a term as emotional as friendship for a political adversary, but that’s how it sounds. “For us to get along was a) the right thing to do,” he says. “And b) good politics. If you’re a smart guy and you want to win an election, why wouldn’t you sit down and work closely with the person who came in second place? The results didn’t go as far as I would like, but there are solid ideas which have been incorporated, in some cases, into governmental policy.” Having ceded the nomination, he was not interested in any kind of pious sulk that might have divided the Democrats and allowed Trump to return. He is very clear about the existential threat that Trump posed to American democracy. To what extent does he think that threat still will be a factor in 2024? “Well,” he says, “just before talking to you, I came from a meeting with Lula [Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva], the president of Brazil. That is exactly what we talked about. He had the same phenomenon with a rightwing authoritarian, [Jair] Bolsonaro, refusing to accept the election result.” He had been discussing with Lula something Franklin Roosevelt argued in the 1930s: “FDR said freedom is not just the right to vote. It is the right to healthcare, housing, a secure job. When [government] works to do that rather than looking after the interests of billionaires, then people will say ‘you know what, I think democracy works’. If it doesn’t do that, bad things happen and Trump and Bolsonaro gain a foothold.” The 6 January hearings about the insurrection at the Capitol were important historically but had a limited political effect, he believes. “Trump supporters don’t sit around watching CNN. Many of them still believe that the election was stolen and Trump is right.” He points to an ABC-Washington Post poll of a couple of days earlier that, while expressing little excitement about either candidate, had put Trump three points ahead of Biden in a presidential race. One of the causal factors Sanders addresses in his book is the alarming growth of news deserts in the US: cities and regions where there are no local news outlets at all. In the absence of knowing what is happening in their neighbourhood, people become entangled in the seductive conspiracy threads of social media. But as well as proposing a method of federal funding for local news, Sanders also keeps the faith that social media – a powerful personal campaigning platform for him – can be redeemed. Isn’t there a certain naivety in this? Isn’t the divisive anger that drives the revenues of Twitter and the rest always more likely to be a reactionary than a progressive force? “Well,” he says, “I think, the more we know, the more positive options are open to us. And in terms of anger, I think people do have the right to be angry. In America right now, weekly inflation-adjusted wages for workers are lower than they were 50 years ago. Should people be angry that their bosses now make 400 times what they make? I know in the UK you have in a lot of strikes and turmoil. It is about the fact that in the last 40 years, 50 years, there has been an unprecedented transfer of wealth, from the working families to the top 1%. Should people be angry about that? Damn right they should.” The hero in his book is Eugene Debs, five times presidential candidate of the Socialist party of America at the turn of the 20th century. Before Sanders went into politics – when he was living somewhat off-grid in Vermont (“definitely not a hippy”) – he made a documentary about Debs, designed to be sent to schools across the country. He is the figure he has always tried to live up to. “Debs is almost unknown now, but he was a remarkable man. A great orator, a great organiser. Contemporaries referred to him as almost a Christ-like figure, prepared to give you the shirt off his back. He ended up spending three years in jail for his opposition to world war one.” I wonder, in relation to this, if any of his early interest in socialist history came from his family. He suggests not. “My father immigrated to the United States from Poland at the age of 17, without any money at all. He got a job as a paint salesman and was a paint salesman his whole life. He was never a union man.” What would his parents have made of how things have turned out for their son? “Both of them died young. To be honest, I think they would have been delighted to discover I graduated college. Being a United States senator, running for president, all that would have been unthinkable.” And would it have seemed unthinkable for him at the time too? “It was never about a career,” he says. “When I was in college I got involved in the civil rights movement, then I worked for a union. Those were the things that I was motivated by. Eventually I ended up becoming mayor of Burlington, Vermont by 10 votes. But no, I never thought that I would get elected anything.” With Sanders making noises about his schedule, this leads us to the billion-dollar – or $15 – question. His booklength manifesto ends with something of a rallying cry: “Let’s do it!” Is he still thinking of another run for the Democrat nomination for 2024? “I think what’s going to happen,” he says, “is that President Biden is going to run for re-election. And if he does, I will support him.” And does he think age is a key issue in that choice – for Biden and for himself ? “Age is always a factor,” he says. “But there are 1,000 factors. Some people who are 80 or more have more energy than people who are 30. I would hope,” he says, warming, as ever, to his theme, “that we will fight ageism as much as we fight sexism and racism and homophobia, judge people on how they are and not simply by their age. There are,” he says, “a lot of elderly people with a whole lot of experience who are very capable of doing great work.” Even the Wall Street Journal should be grateful he still counts himself among them. It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism is published by Penguin (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply Bernie Sanders will be in conversation with Owen Jones at a Guardian Live event at Oxford Playhouse and livestreamed globally, Sunday 26 February, 5pm. Tickets here Senator Bernie Sanders in Washington, DC. Photograph: Stephen Voss/The Observer With Joe Biden, 12 September 2019, when both men were Democratic presidential hopefuls. Photograph: Frederic J Brown/ AFP/Getty Images 16th-century drawing of a nude man, seen from behind, has been identified as a study by Michelangelo for his monumental masterpiece, the ceiling fresco of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. The red chalk drawing has been linked to one of the figures battling serpents on the Worship of the Brazen Serpent painting. It is thought to date from 1512, shortly before Michelangelo painted that final section of one of the world’s most famous works of art, which he had started in 1508. The attribution has been supported by Paul Joannides, emeritus professor of art history at Cambridge university and one of the world’s leading authorities on Michelangelo, who will publish it in the scholarly Burlington Magazine. He told the Observer: “For an artist of Michelangelo’s greatness, and greatness as a draughtsman, any new discovery has some level of excitement. But this is a drawing by Michelangelo for one of the greatest masterpieces of western art.” It is one of relatively few developed drawings for the Sistine ceiling to have survived. Giorgio Vasari, the Italian renaissance master best known for his 1550 book The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and ‘When we rotated it 90 degrees it was obvious’: mystery sketch is rare Michelangelo draft for Sistine Chapel Dalya Alberge A Monday 20 February 2023 The Guardian Opinion 17 Continued from page 16 Continued on page 19

Architects, wrote of Michelangelo: “Just before his death, he burned a large number of his own drawings, sketches and cartoons to prevent anyone from seeing the labours he endured or the ways he tested his genius, for fear that he might seem less than perfect.” The male figure in the newly discovered drawing is shown from another angle in the final painted version. “Looking at the drawing, one would assume that the figure was intended to be seen horizontally. It isn’t. It’s intended to be seen with the drawing rotated 90 degrees clockwise. Put the two images side by side and there it is. Once examined, it was obvious that the drawing is preparatory for this figure.” Joannides said. In the Burlington, he writes: “Michelangelo reminded himself of the figure’s final orientation by a sequence of short lines at the right edge, which mark the vertical when the page is rotated.” Michelangelo’s masterpieces include the marble sculpture of David, and the new drawing shows he was adopting an increasingly sculptural style in the later stages of the Sistine fresco. Joannides said: “He developed enormously as he progressed along the ceiling. His figures became larger, more energetic. The sculptural element of his forms plays an increasing part as he comes to the end of his work.” The drawing – which measures 15.7 by 19.3cm – came to light after its owner, an anonymous European collector, sent Joannides a photograph through an intermediary. It had been purchased privately in 2014, when it had a tentative attribution to Rosso Fiorentino, a 16th-century follower of Michelangelo. Although the drawing had never been reproduced, Joannides immediately remembered seeing a poor black-and-white photograph of it many years ago in the Witt Library at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. He writes: “I had filed it mentally as being ‘of interest’. It was therefore intriguing to be able to study the drawing in the flesh and satisfying to conclude that it was indeed by Michelangelo.” The drawing bears 19th-century collectors’ marks and inscriptions. Its lower left shows the handwritten initials ‘JCR’, relating to Sir John Charles Robinson, a leading connoisseur of Michelangelo drawings, and its backing sheet has the stamp of Chambers Hall, a collector who donated many drawings to the nation. Joannides paid tribute to the drawing’s owner for having first realised that it related to a figure within the “turbulence of struggling men” in the Brazen Serpent fresco. In the Burlington, he acknowledges that, despite Michelangelo’s supreme knowledge of male anatomy, there are weaknesses in this drawing, including a near-impossible pose, a left thigh that is too long and a “block-like” depiction of vertebrae. N o t i n g t h a t M i c h e l a n g e l o represents the bones of the back in a similar way elsewhere, he adds: “This assessment by the surgeon Francis Wells substantiates Michelangelo’s lack of concern for skeletal and muscular accuracy… As Vasari remarked in a famous passage: ‘he used to make his figures with nine, 10, or 12 heads, seeking only to create, by placing them all together, a certain harmonious grace in the whole which Nature does not produce, declaring that it was necessary to have a good eye for measurement rather than a steady hand’. Michelangelo’s concern was dynamic expression, not anatomical fidelity.” • This article was amended on 19 February 2023 to correct a misspelling of Giorgio Vasari’s first name, which occurred during editing. The red chalk drawing, which was bought by a anonymous European collector in 2014. Photograph: Alex Corp Visitors gaze at the Sistine Chapel. Photograph: Andreas Solaro/AFP/Getty Images or the whole of human history, we have shared our world with birds. We have hunted and domesticated them for food; worshipped them in our religions; placed them at the heart of our myths and legends; poisoned and persecuted them; and celebrated them in our literature, art and music. Even today, despite a very worrying disconnection between ourselves and the rest of nature, birds continue to play a role in our lives. The current official list of the world’s birds stands at roughly 10,800 different species. But there are 10 whose stories stand out, for the way they influenced a crucial aspect of our history, and shaped our lives. Raven Mythology The raven – the world’s largest species of crow – is at the heart of creation myths all around the northern hemisphere, from the First Nations of North America through Norse culture to the nomadic peoples of Siberia. It is also the first bird mentioned in the Bible, when Noah sent one out from the ark to discover if the flood was finally over; true to this bird’s independent character, it failed to return. The raven still resonates with us today: when Game of Thrones author George RR Martin wanted a species of bird able to see into the future, he chose the raven. Pigeon Communication As humans switched from huntergathering to agriculture, they began to domesticate wild birds. One of these was a shy, cliff-dwelling species of pigeon, the rock dove, originally bred for food but later used to communicate over long distances. Our relationship with pigeons is a complex one: often dismissed as “rats with wings”, they nevertheless carried messages that saved thousands of lives during the two world wars, some even changing the course of those conflicts. Wild turkey Food and family Soon, birds were not just providing food but spiritual and social nourishment, too. Without the sustenance the wild turkey provided for the early European settlers of the Americas, it is likely that the colonisation of the New World might never have come about. It soon became the centrepiece of Christmas feasts in Britain and Europe, and Thanksgiving in North America. Dodo Extinction From the Renaissance onwards, exploration and colonisation kickstarted the globalisation of today’s world. But there were casualties, most famously the dodo, a huge relative of the pigeons which lived on the oceanic island of Mauritius. This flightless bird could not survive the 17th-century invasion of humans, and the dogs, cats, rats and monkeys they brought with them. At first, the church would not entertain the idea that the creator could let any living species go extinct. Ultimately, the dodo became an icon of extinction. Darwin’s finches Evolution The key turning-point in the rise of science came when Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859. Although Darwin’s finches of the Galápagos islands are often said to have provided him with the “eureka moment” for his revolutionary theory of evolution by natural selection, in reality he showed little interest in these curious birds. It was not until long after his death that scientists realised their importance – they revealed that evolution can take place in a much shorter timescale than was once thought. Guanay cormorant Agriculture We often assume modern agriculture began after the second world war, when chemical fertilisers massively increased crop yields. Yet a century earlier, droppings harvested from vast colonies of the guanay cormorant, off the coast of South America, provided the phosphate needed to launch a boom in intensive farming. This altered the landscape of North America and Europe for ever, and hastened the decline of farmland wildlife. Snowy egret Conservation The snowy egret of North America was one of many species of bird that fell victim to the fashion trade, its plumes adorning women’s hats and dresses, and resulting in the murder of the brave men who tried to protect the birds from the plume collectors. A backlash against such wanton cruelty was organised by pioneering women in Britain and North America. This led to the formation of today’s bird protection organisations, which saved the egret and other victims just in time. Bald eagle Politics Eagles have always been associated with the strength of nations and empires, through their symbolic use in ancient Greece, Rome and other early civilisations. They also appear on more flags around the world than any other bird. But the Nazis changed both the direction of the eagle – making it face right – and its meaning: turning it into a symbol of totalitarianism. Tree sparrow Hubris The story of China’s Chairman Mao is a salutary one: he took on nature and lost. Mao’s war against the humble tree sparrow for eating grain seed resulted not just in the bird being wiped out, but the deaths of millions of his own people, too, in a terrible famine: the worst human-made disaster in human history. Crops were left vulnerable as the sparrows had controlled the insect population, particularly locusts. Emperor penguin Climate crisis The fate of the emperor penguin – the only bird that breeds during the harsh Antarctic winter – is now potentially the fate of us all. As we career towards oblivion, the world’s largest penguin has become, along with the Arctic polar bear, the “canary in the coalmine” of the climate crisis. Bluntly, if they fail to survive, then so might we. Will the crisis result in the catastrophic extinction of thousands of species – including, perhaps, us – or will we manage to pull back from the brink? Ten Birds That Changed the World by Stephen Moss (Guardian Faber, £16.99). To order a copy for £14.95go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply Dodo, eagle, sparrow … the 10 birds that changed the world for ever Stephen Moss F A snowy egret. The campaign to save the species from the ravages of the fashion trade led to the creation of today’s bird protection organisations. Photograph: Ben Queenborough/ Raven Photograph: Arto Hakola/Alamy Monday 20 February 2023 The Guardian Opinion 19 Continued from page 17

s Davangere Devanand, a neurologist at Columbia University Medical Center, combed through the reams of scientific data on Alzheimer’s, he stumbled across a surprising idea – could an infection be involved in driving the disease? “I was looking for an Alzheimer’s treatment approach that had a reasonable shot of working,” he says. “I found this old theory, going back 35 years, which linked herpes viruses to the disease, and there were all these indirect lines of evidence.” The further Devanand looked, the more he found. Since the mid-80s, a handful of scientists around the world had doggedly pursued the idea that either a virus or a bacterium could play a role in Alzheimer’s, despite almost complete antipathy from those studying more accepted theories about the disease. Colleagues snubbed them, leading scientific journals and conferences rejected their work and funding had been threadbare, but slowly and surely, they built an increasingly compelling case. In particular, evidence pointed towards herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1) – a pathogen found in 70% of the UK population, and the cause of oral herpes – as a prominent suspect. Studies in the UK, France and Scandinavia suggested that people who had been infected with herpes were more likely to get Alzheimer’s. When Prof Ruth Itzhaki from Oxford University’s Institute of Population Ageing – who has done more than any other scientist to advance the HSV-1 theory of Alzheimer’s – examined postmortem brain samples from patients, she found greater amounts of the virus’s DNA than in people who had not died of the disease. “Then there was this 2018 study from Taiwan, which was quite dramatic,” says Devanand. “When people with herpes were treated with a standard antiviral drug, it decreased their risk of dementia nine-fold.” Devanand was intrigued because while the major hallmarks of Alzheimer’s are well-known, we still have little idea about what triggers it. We know that toxic plaques and tangles form inside the brain, causing damaging inflammation and the death of brain cells. Certain genes and lifestyle factors such as loneliness, lack of exercise and poor diet can all increase the risk of developing Alzheimer’s, but how and why it begins remains a mystery. Could a virus be the smoking gun that scientists have been looking for? Others have suggested that various bacteria may also be capable of initiating the neurodegeneration that leads to Alzheimer’s. Chlamydia pneumoniae,which causes lung disease, Borrelia burgdorferi,which is associated with Lyme disease, and even gum infections have all been put forward as possible triggers. The main idea for why viruses like HSV-1 and possibly bacteria may be capable of triggering Alzheimer’s is that they invade the body before burrowing into the central nervous system, and travelling to the brain sometime in midlife. Once there, they stay dormant for many years before being reactivated in old age, either because the ageing immune system can no longer keep them in check, or something else – a traumatic episode, a head injury or perhaps another infection – spurs them to life. Once awakened – so the theory goes – they begin to wreak havoc. For a long time, neurologists treated these ideas as fanciful, until more and more irrefutable evidence arose for the role of pathogens in chronic illness. Last year, the Epstein-Barr virus was identified as the main risk factor for multiple sclerosis, while other studies have shown that a bout of measles can lead many years later to a progressive neurological disorder called subacute sclerosing panencephalitis. So when Devanand approached the US National Institute on Aging for a grant of several million dollars to run a clinical trial investigating whether a herpes antiviral drug called valacyclovir could slow the progression of Alzheimer’s in patients in the early stages of the disease, they agreed to back him. The ongoing trial, which is expected to be completed by early 2024, could have significant implications for how we look at the disease. * * * For decades, the number-one focus of almost all Alzheimer’s endeavours has been a protein fragment called beta-amyloid, often referred to as simply amyloid. Orthodox Alzheimer’s theories suggest that this accumulates in the brain as a kind of toxic waste, causing the signature plaques that kill brain cells and lead to the disease. Funding bodies and drug developers have largely shunned alternative explanations for why Alzheimer’s may occur, and instead have continued to pump resources into amyloid research. But scientists are starting to show that the amyloid and microbial theories of Alzheimer’s may not be mutually exclusive. For while amyloid has long been seen as the villain of the story, some scientists believe it is actually a key element of our brain’s defence mechanisms against external threats. Fifteen years ago, Rudolph Tanzi, a neurology professor at Harvard Medical School who has discovered many of the key genes linked to Alzheimer’s, made a surprising discovery – amyloid has antimicrobial properties, helping to defend the brain against any invading pathogen. More than a decade’s worth of experiments later, he has developed a viable theory for why plaques form. “When an infection attacks your brain, your first response is these little sticky peptides that bind to the microbe, glutinate it into a ball and trap it,” he says. “We found that amyloid is one of the major peptides in the brain that goes after microbes. I believe the plaques we see in Alzheimer’s brains actually evolved as a way to protect the brain.” According to Tanzi, for much of our lives our body is able to seamlessly clear these clumps of amyloid. Immune cells known as microglia, which cleanse the brain of debris, gobble them up during deep sleep. But as we age, this finely tuned system can break down, and if amyloid is left lingering in the brain, it ends up harming us. People with certain genetic vulnerabilities – such as the APOE4 gene variant found in up to 25% of the general population – are unable to shovel out amyloid quite as efficiently as others, meaning it is more likely to accumulate. Ageing also weakens the immune system, making it easier for pathogens to access the brain and more amyloid to form. “As you get older, your immune system starts to wane, and the barrier between your bloodstream and the brain is not what it used to be,” says Tanzi. “So you’re creating a perfect storm because microbes can proliferate better, and the brain does not clear amyloid as well as it used to.” Hugo Lövheim, a researcher in geriatric medicine at Umeå University, says that we also know that lifestyle factors such as social isolation and lack of exercise can weaken the immune system. He suggests this could have two consequences – making it harder for the body to keep microbes such as HSV-1 in check, and then being unable to clear the resulting plaques. “We know that psychological factors or stress can affect the risk of being unable to control a herpes virus infection at a particular time point,” says Lövheim. * * * The burden of Alzheimer’s and all forms of dementia on patients, families and society at large is unspeakably huge. By next year, it is predicted that there will be more than 1 million people in the UK living with dementia, numbers that our healthcare system is not equipped to deal with. The total cost of dementia care in this country stands at around £34.7bn a year, but the starkest statistic is that two-thirds of this burden is being covered by families themselves, either in unpaid care or private social care. But the landscape of Alzheimer’s treatments could not be sparser. Almost all clinical trials testing drugs attempting to reduce the amount of amyloid in the brain have failed to stop the disease. Even lecanemab, the new amyloid-targeting Alzheimer’s medication that hit the headlines towards the end of 2022, only offers marginal benefits in slowing down memory loss. Medicinal chemist Derek Lowe, who writes a blog on the pharma industry for the journal Science, commented that lecanemab shows that while amyloid is definitely involved in Alzheimer’s disease, it is perhaps unlikely to be the underlying cause. “Lecanemab did indeed show substantial amyloid clearance in the brain, so it is definitely working on target,” wrote Lowe. “The fact that the drug has such effects on amyloid and still just barely slows the course of the disease, argues for that point of view.” Some scientists suspect that the reason why anti-amyloid drugs have been ineffective in stopping Alzheimer’s is because we give them too late in the disease course, years or decades after the plaques have started to accumulate. By this point, it is widespread neuroinflammation that is killing off cells, which is why some companies, such as Switzerland-based AC Immune, are now looking to target the inflammation pathways in the Alzheimer’s brain. While anti-amyloid drugs could be tried on people in midlife to see if it stops them developing the disease, Tanzi says that the costs of this are likely to be impractical. “If every American had a blood test for amyloid today, 40 million would find out that they need to do something about it,” he says. “But if you have anti-amyloid treatments that cost $26,000 a year, good luck getting those to 40 million people, especially when each one would need three MRI scans a year to make sure that they don’t have any brain swelling or haemorrhaging as a side effect.” Instead, if scientists can generate some more proof that a microbe is definitely instigating the disease in at least a proportion of patients, it could open the door to some more practical disease prevention initiatives. Making antivirals available to all people who have been infected by herpes could be one idea, or even encouraging more midlife vaccinations, for example against the varicella zoster virus (VZV) that causes shingles. It has been suggested that VZV is capable of reactivating the HSV-1 virus from a dormant state, and Itzhaki has found that giving people a shingles vaccine seems to lessen their risk of developing Alzheimer’s. But Alzheimer’s is a devilishly complex disease and there is still much to be done in order to convince the majority of scientists that infections are involved. For while epidemiology and lab studies seem to show that it is possible, several clinical trials have ended in failure. When Canadian scientists gave Alzheimer’s patients multiple antibiotics, it showed no benefit. San Francisco-based biotech Cortexyme – now known as Quince Therapeutics – spent years developing a drug that could target Porphyromonas gingivalis, a bacteria that causes gum disease and secretes harmful enzymes that can leak into the brain. But when it has been tried clinically, it also failed to work. Tanzi suspects that once again, we may be giving treatment to patients too late in the day. “If an infection drove the amyloid formation, it could have happened 30 years ago,” he says. “It just took 30 years before you got enough neuroinflammation to get the disease.” Devanand’s trial will provide crucial evidence regarding where to go next. If it shows some sign of benefit, it may help persuade funding bodies to stump up money to give antivirals to people in their 40s and 50s who are genetically at risk of Alzheimer’s, or vaccinate a large number of people against various common viruses. Devanand, and scientists such as Itzhaki who have dedicated their lives to this line of research, are hoping for just some hint that they are on the right track. “We’re not curing the disease in this trial,” he says. “We’re looking to see if patients who get an antiviral experience less decline than those who get a placebo. And if herpes is a contributing factor, it should be good to treat it.” Could Alzheimer’s be caused by an infection? David Cox A Illustration by Philip Lay. A rendering of amyloid, a protein that accumulates as plaques in the brain. Photograph: Science Photo Library/Alamy The Guardian Monday 20 February 2023 20 Opinion I believe the plaques we see in Alzheimer’s brains actually evolved as a way to protect the brain Rudolph Tanzi

ven if Ke Huy Quan fails to win a Bafta, his joyful Instagram account and own personal Hollywood happy ending have already secured him the unofficial accolade of “2023 awards season breakout star”. Quan – up for a British Academy award for his role as affable laundromat owner Waymond Wang in Everything, Everywhere, All At Once – arrived in America as a refugee from Vietnam in 1979. Aged 10, he tagged along with his brother to an open audition for a film and ended up winning the role that turned him into one of the most recognisable child stars of the 1980s. He played Chinese orphan Short Round in 1984’sIndiana Jones and the Temple of Doom – Harrison Ford taught him to swim during the shoot in Sri Lanka. A year later, he starred as Data in The Goonies, the seventh highest-grossing US film of 1985. After a fantastic start, Quan quickly found that good roles for Asian actors were few and far between. “When there was one,” he has said, “the role was very stereotypical, and you had every Asian in Hollywood fighting for it.” In his 20s, he pivoted to work as a stunt choreographer and was sure his acting career was over. Watching the hit 2018 romcom Crazy Rich Asians made Quan want to give it one last shot, and his first audition led to Everything, Everywhere. But production finished in March 2020, just as Covid lockdowns hit the world, and Quan didn’t work until after the film finally made it into cinemas last year. By then, he was so broke he had lost his medical insurance. Now the film has turned out to be a massive hit, and Quan has been nominated for every major acting award for his comeback role. In an interview on American TV, Quan said: “I thought everybody had forgotten me, but since the movie came out, there’s been so much positivity and kindness.” Understandably, it has been a lot to take in. He told W Magazine: “I grew up in a very traditional Chinese family so I worked hard to keep a lot of my emotions within. I’ve cried more in the last six months than I cried in the previous 20 years. Hearing all these wonderful comments from people about how much they’ve missed me on the screen has made me very emotional.” Rebecca Sun, senior editor for diversity and inclusion at the Hollywood Reporter, said: “Comeback stories don’t get much more perfect than Quan potentially becoming an Oscar winner with his first major role in 40 years. But it’s infuriating that his talent was riding the bench for four decades – it’s an indictment on Hollywood’s imagination and creativity that no one gave him an opportunity to show what he could do.” Nowhere is Quan’s kid-in-a-candyshop delight more apparent than on his Instagram account. There he records the events, dinners and ceremonies he once dreamed of attending. Now he is a guest of honour. If you have ever wondered what it would be like if Indiana Jones and Short Round reunited after 38 years, that photo is now out there. And at a gala in December, actors Sean Astin and Jeff Cohen climbed on stage for a mini-Goonies reunion and to present him with an award. Quan has also proved a master at selfies, posting snaps with everyone from Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise to activist Malala Yousafzai, all looking as delighted to be with him as he clearly is to be with them. He has even developed a signature accessory: a googly eye lapel badge – a nod to his Everything, Everywhere’s character’s love for stickers with the same design. With upcoming roles in the Disney + show Loki and the TV adaptation of graphic novel American Born Chinese, this could be only the first of many award seasons spent on the red carpet. Win or lose at the Baftas, Goonies star Ke Huy Quan takes award for best Hollywood comeback Alice Fisher E Ke Huy Quan’s Instagram selfie with Tom Cruise. Photograph: @kehuyquan/Instagram With Michelle Yeoh in Everything, Everywhere, All At Once. Photograph: Allyson Riggs/AP ivision may have been the main characteristic in Scottish politics in recent years but, at the end of a momentous week, voters in East Lothian were temporarily united. From the dog walkers in picturesque Dunbar to the few shoppers braving high winds in nearby Prestonpans, shock was the initial reaction at the news that Nicola Sturgeon, for so long the most dominant figure in Scottish politics, had resigned. In most cases, once the initial surprise and surmising over Sturgeon’s motivations had subsided, the old divides returned over whether her departure could have an impact on how Scottish people vote come the next election. “I’m devastated,” said Daniel Tulloch, a 29-year-old barber busy with a haircut in Prestonpans, who described himself as “staunch pro-independent”. “I genuinely think that everything she did was for the people in Scotland,” he added. Yet it was the response of Marianne Wheelagher, 64, on the nearby high street, that hinted at the political possibilities – in theory at least – that Sturgeon’s departure could open up. She liked Sturgeon and voted for the SNP previously. However, the first minister’s departure “might change how I feel about politics”, she said. “It depends on who the new leader will be, what they’ll do … and what Labour do.” In the short term, it was a row over gender recognition legislation and selfidentification for those who wish to change legal sex – as well as her unusually unsure handling of the case of a transgender prisoner initially remanded at a women’s prison – that seemed to have been the last straw for Sturgeon, after a sustained political backlash she had never before endured. She had taken on the UK government after it blocked her bill, yet even prominent SNP figures were concerned by the tactic. “I think this is something she feels quite passionately about – even assuming it’s the right thing to do, is this really something we want to keep going?” asked one. When weighing up the reasons for her departure, however, those closest to the machinations of Holyrood have concluded that it was a lack of a popular plan to further the cause of independence that really drove her decision to quit. Even some on the pro-independence wing of Scottish politics believe her attempt to pick a battle with Westminster over her gender recognition bill was a sign that she was running out of ideas for furthering the independence cause – and making mistakes in the process. The idea of fighting the next election as a “de facto referendum” had become a huge problem for Sturgeon, with the idea very unpopular with SNP MPs in Westminster and with the public. A conference to confirm that plan has already been cancelled, in effect rendering it dead. Meanwhile, the SNP is now plunging headlong into weeks of internal debate over finding a new leader and their plans for achieving independence – a debate, hope their opponents, that will finally expose the weak points in the SNP’s hitherto formidable election-winning machine. “I think if there was one single issue that led to the first minister making her call, that’s probably it – the lack of an ability to be able to secure a second referendum with no prospect of that in sight,” said a close SNP watcher, strategist Mark Diffley. It is no wonder, then, that there was also wild celebration from some senior Labour figures last week. While they currently have only one Westminster seat, some are talking excitedly about targeting well over 20 at the next election in Scotland, which would play a big part in returning a Labour majority. Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader, said there was now a “generational opportunity” for his party. In East Lothian, evidence that Labour senses a return to government is personified in the figure of Douglas Alexander, the former cabinet minister recently selected to contest the seat for Labour. He lost Paisley and Renfrewshire South in the 2015 wipeout. He clearly saw this past week as a significant moment for Labour’s fortunes. “This week has been a good week, personally and politically,” he said. “I think it’s right to see it as an opportunity, rather than a guarantee. Whoever they choose will not have either her visibility, particularly post pandemic, or her authority after eight years as first minister. Whoever they choose still faces the same strategic dilemma – there’s a discernible sense that their old approach of manufacturing grievance, picking fights with Westminster and pretending that Conservatives and Labour are one and the same just isn’t working as well as it has worked for them over the last dozen years.” In truth, his East Lothian seat does not require winning over a chunk of “soft” SNP voters to be won by Labour. Like other constituencies in the small group briefly won back in the 2017 election, Alexander can secure victory on the back of winning over pro-union Conservative voters. The nationalist vote could also be split in his seat if Alba, the party set up by Alex Salmond, runs there again. Squeezing the Tory vote will only take the party so far, however. “That might give them a handful or somewhere between five and 10 Shock and wild celebration: exit of Sturgeon upends Scottish politics Michael Savage Policy editor D Scotland’s first minister Nicola Sturgeon announcing in Edinburgh last week that she would stand down. Photograph: Jane Barlow/PA Douglas Alexander in Prestonpans. The former cabinet minister has been selected as the Labour candidate for the East Lothian seat. Photograph: Katherine Anne Rose/The Observer Monday 20 February 2023 The Guardian Opinion 21 Continued on page 22

seats overall,” said Diffley. “Actually, the real prize here is whether they can stick the ball in the net by eating into the SNP vote.” Labour has been working on how to target these voters. Internal work by the party has identified a slice of “middle Scotland” – those with weaker affiliation to independence than other SNP voters – that could be won over. They are generally younger, more female, more remain. A package of devolution reforms devised by Gordon Brown’s commission, including the abolition of the House of Lords, more power for Scotland within the UK government and the possibility of more financial powers in Scotland, was drawn up with them in mind. One of the candidates who will need support from SNP switchers is Gordon McKee, a young, charismatic party official selected last week to contest Glasgow South. For him, it is not constitutional or devolution issues that will be at the forefront of the campaign, but the things Labour has always prospered talking about: good public services and a progressive Labour government. “There is huge overlap in what many SNP and Labour voters want,” he said. “What unites most SNP/Labour voters is a desire for change. And what we’ve got to capture is that mood for change.” Keir Starmer will target those voters directly in his speech to Scottish Labour’s conference on Sunday, addressing “those who had given up on Labour” and staying within Britain. “I know the people of Scotland want change and hope,” he will say. “Not a showy, grandiose hope. What I mean is the basic, ordinary hope we used to take for granted. The sort of hope you can build your future around. That aspirations are made of.” The idea that at some point a virtuous circle will be created in which SNP voters back Labour as the quickest way to remove the Tory government is the device that many in Labour are championing. Sarwar suggested the conditions were already present. “People in Scotland believe UK Labour can form the next government – that has not been the case for the last 12 years,” he said. “It is partly saying to people, ‘look, you might disagree on independence, you might disagree on whether there should be a referendum or not. But what the vast majority of us can agree on is we need to get rid of this rotten Tory government’.” There is a problem, though. Some of Scotland’s most prominent political brains think there are still some heroic assumptions going on to prop up the idea of a significant Labour recovery. While it is true that Labour’s support has increased in the polls in Scotland, it has coincided with Tory immolations rather than Labour success. As elections guru Sir John Curtice points out, Labour was stuck in third place on 19% of the vote in Scotland before the “Partygate” scandal that led to the departure of Boris Johnson as prime minister. It rose to 24% as a result of those revelations, then increased to 27% after Liz Truss’s disastrous premiership. The latest polls have Labour on 29% or slightly higher. And that success has come from a relentless squeeze on the pro-union Tory vote, which cannot be squeezed much further. “Basically, I think the Scottish Labour party has been riding on the coat-tails of the UK party which, of course, has been heavily riding on the coat-tails of the Tories’ misfortune,” said Curtice. “There still isn’t a broad, synoptic message … The idea that the prospect of a UK majority Labour government has made people who are supporting the SNP into saying ‘we don’t have to vote for the SNP any more’ – there is no evidence of that.” Diffley added: “The kind of cast-iron law here of public attitudes in the last 10 years in Scotland is that you can pretty much map on people’s constitutional preference to their party support preference. So, in a sense, it does feel quite a heroic assumption [that many will switch], but perhaps Sturgeon’s departure gives them the opportunity to try to actually make that happen.” SNP figures, meanwhile, point out that many were also suggesting the party’s electoral fortunes would dip after another dominant leader, Alex Salmond, stepped down in 2014. Like Sturgeon, the new SNP leader will be first minister and, with the structural support of nationalists, may be able to build up public recognition just as quickly. Labour’s position on Brexit is also a difficulty, said Diffley. Its success in neutralising the issue in the English red wall by saying it will stick with the project but improve its workings may hinder its standing among progressive SNP voters. “I’m afraid to say, I suspect every time Keir Starmer or one of the Labour frontbenchers in London opens their mouth on Brexit, basically saying, ‘look, we’re not going to change anything on this, we’ve just got to live with it’, Anas Sarwar will be pulling his hair out,” Diffley said. “The people that he needs to persuade are pro-EU and pro-independence. And if your corporate position is unmovable on Brexit and unmovable on the constitution, the Brown commission aside, then it sort of stands to reason that that’s going to be a really, really tricky sell.” Ultimately, to make those further inroads, Labour faces the same challenge it has in the rest of the UK – switching public disdain at the Conservative government’s various crises into a positive embrace for its programme. It is a criticism implicitly accepted by Sarwar. “I’m not just going to spend my time telling people why I think the Tories and the SNP deserve to lose,” he said. “The easy part of the job is to list all the failures of the two governments and say this mob deserves to lose. The harder part is to be worthy of people’s support – to positively have people’s support, and to see why we positively deserve to win. That, for me, is the project between now and the next general election.” If nothing else, there is a window where a crucial slice of the electorate are at least listening. “I was a member of the Labour party until they took us into a war that we shouldn’t have ever been near and then went to the Scottish nationalists,” said John, sorting through secondhand records in Dunbar’s “old and new” store. “I probably won’t vote unless I can see something in that Sarwar guy. If I could see some kind of leadership, I’d be for him.” ccording to a new report, the US government “isn’t doing enough” for small businesses. I’m calling baloney. “Business owners don’t feel like the programs are all that effective and they also don’t even feel like they have a sense of what’s available, some of which maybe is effective,” said Joe Wall, national director of Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Voices, of the survey of more than 1,800 small businesses in 48 states. Well, Wall is right. There are many programs, credits and financing opportunities available from the government for small businesses that often get overlooked – by small businesses. For example, few of my clients are aware of the work opportunity tax credit, a tax incentive that was extended through 2025 that can give businesses up to a $9,600 credit against the taxes they owe if they hire someone out of prison, on welfare, from the military or who has been unemployed for more than six months. Many small business owners I meet remain ignorant of the thousands of dollars potentially available to them if they take advantage of the employee retention tax credit. And countless others don’t realize that there are credits and deductions available to them for offering paid leave, paying for their employees’ educational expenses and reimbursing for childcare expenses – all benefits that could be used to attract talent in this tight labor market. Even if your accountant isn’t making you aware of these incentives, there are plenty of webinars and other training programs available for free from the IRS. Some say that the government doesn’t do enough to help find skilled workers. Actually, that’s a problem that many states are already addressing. For example Georgia, Indiana, Minnesota and – frankly – most other states have subsidized workforce training programs and other initiatives that help small businesses afford to get new employees up to speed on their jobs. And, speaking of the government, while I agree that new laws like the Infrastructure and Investment and Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act are potentially budget-busting and may further fuel deficits, the fact is that no small business in the construction or any other related industry will turn their nose at their share of the trillions of dollars coming their way as part of this legislation. Want more government help for your small business? The Small Business Administration is offering billions in governmentbacked loans through its network of lending partners, loans that come with market competitive interest rates and can be used for anything from working capital to buying equipment and property. Most government agencies and departments offer grants to small businesses doing work in areas that are of interest to them. And let’s not forget the $10bn being distributed to states around the country from the Treasury Department in the form of grants, loans and equity investments as part of its state small business credit initiative. The US agriculture department has a special loan guarantee program for rural businesses. Trying to make it in retail or in the restaurant industry in the big city? If you do a little digging you’ll find that your local governments offer programs to help you. For example, in my home town of Philadelphia there’s funding available for store and restaurant owners to put in security systems and beautify their storefronts. The city of Denver offers free counseling to startups, Little Rock, Arkansas, has an online portal to help small businesses get and track government bids, Burlington Vermont – population 44,781 – has a community and economic development office, a micro business development program and a women’s small business program all dedicated to helping their local businesses. Nevada just made available $5.3m in capital for its small businesses. The city of Albany recently announced small business grants. New York City just launched a new loan fund for small businesses. Need help running your business? You can get it for free from the Small Business Administration,Score or a local small business development center. Want to find and get connected to suppliers and customers oversees? The department of commerce’s international trade association will help you do that. So, really, is the government not doing enough? How much more help do we need? The fact is that that there are many government resources available for small businesses offering free or low-cost capital, free counseling, generous tax incentives and free training and educational programs. So why aren’t more small business owners taking advantage of these programs? Yes, the government can do a better job of making us aware that all of these resources exist. However, that doesn’t exonerate us. No one’s going to knock Why aren’t more small business owners taking advantage of government help? Gene Marks A A street vendor in San Francisco, California. Photograph: Directphoto Collection/Alamy The Guardian Monday 20 February 2023 22 Opinion Whoever they choose will not have either her visibility … or her authority after eight years as first minister Douglas Alexander Continued from page 21 Continued on page 23

on our door to inform us of these programs. We have to seek this information out ourselves. And for those businesses that do the legwork, they’ll find more help available than they ever knew about. ‘Becoming a mum put me in the supercrip camp’: Lucy and James Catchpole live in Oxford with their two young children Lucy: We are both disabled, but our disabilities are very different, and the world has always treated us very differently. James is the epitome of the “good disabled”, as far as everyone is concerned. When we met, you simply had to adjust slightly to the unusual shape of him – and that was it. And isn’t that just the dream disabled person, really? A whole leg missing – the clarity of it! But, like many disabled people, I was a category error. People seem to be particularly suspicious of significant disability when it’s invisible. So when we met, I was the bad disabled. The hard-to-categorise. Back then, I could pass as non-disabled, but was actually very limited. At first, I appeared to be the nondisabled girlfriend of an amputee – a “carer”, perhaps? Then we were both crutch or walking-stick users – did we meet at some sort of special club? After that, the tragic phase: a wheelchair user pushed by a man with an artificial leg. A terrible accident, maybe? Now that I’m a full-time wheelchair user, society finds me far less troubling. Now there’s a clarity to my situation, just like James. I miss walking, but it’s a relief to fit so neatly into people’s expectations. Parenthood was something I desperately wanted. We both did. And feared it, too. For both of us, putting my capricious, fragile body through pregnancy and birth was terrifying. But for me, there was an extra dose of fear. I was terrified of the world’s response to my pregnancy. Really, the idea that I would selfishly use my difficult, burdensome body to grow an entirely new human – completely unnecessarily – felt like taking the piss. So, when I became pregnant, I steeled myself for our first, difficult meetings with midwives and doctors, expecting to have to justify my decision. To be infantilised. And, of course, at times I was. But largely, that isn’t how it turned out. Instead of the disapproval I expected, the doctor at my first scan responded very differently. “I don’t think anyone could fail to be impressed by you,” he said. This was totally new to me. Somehow, by becoming pregnant, I had jumped out of the difficult-disabled category and joined my husband in the supercrip camp. I did not expect motherhood to legitimise me. And yet it has. I think motherhood, or at least my motherhood – as the wheelchair-using mother of non-disabled children – acts to cancel out a lot of the things about me that the world found so disquieting. There are so many ways disabled people are infantilised – we’re frequently just not seen as adults. But now, whereas before I had been infantilised, my children seem to act as an automatic pass to adulthood. Where I expected motherhood to open me up to even more judgment, it has had the opposite effect. James: We were matchmade by a friend who has always said – only slightly defensively – that the match occurred to her not because we were both disabled, but because we had other things in common and, anyway, she just thought we’d get on, all right? And our friend was right. On our first evening together, we worked out we had a lot in common. But when it came to our disabilities, we discovered our experiences could not have been more different. I’m an amputee – missing all of one leg – and have been for as long as I can remember. I get around on crutches. For me as an amputee man, I’ve always found public perception to be ostensibly positive. You’re thought of as heroic – superheroic, even. As a kid, you’re “amazing”, “a trooper”. In your 20s, people start assuming you were a soldier and that you gave your limb for king and country. Then if you walk fast, climb stairs easily or do any kind of sport, you’re “inspirational”. So that was my life as Amputee Man. But then I morphed into Amputee Dad… As you might imagine, having a baby just added a new dimension. There’s already a brilliantly unearned halo effect in being a dad out and about with a young baby. You’re clearly doing better than just “helping out” and that’s enough to buy you some very indulgent looks. The bar is low, let’s face it. Being a capable father of a newborn on one leg and crutches clears that bar with some room to spare. Women have cried, then come over to tell me they are crying.Follow the Catchpoles on Instagram @thecatchpoles ‘I defy all the things that people think’: Cathy Reay is a writer based in southeast England. She is a queer single parent of two children As I grew up, I began to desire children who would create the kind of bustling, noisy home I had always craved. But I was conflicted by the ableism I faced, both in society and internally. I didn’t think I would ever meet somebody who would want to have children with me. When I did eventually fall in love, our relationship blossomed sure and fast, as did our family. It was like I’d been holding my breath and I could suddenly exhale. People with achondroplasia, which is the type of dwarfism I have, have children by caesarean section. My partner and I both worried about how I would recover, how I would manage the physical part of being a parent. These worries were never a reason to deter either of us, though. For my first child, I remember being at an ultrasound scan and my doctor’s stand-in asked me: “You know, it looks like the baby is going to have dwarfism, is this something that’s going to be a problem for you?” I was taken aback. What they were really saying was, “This baby has something wrong with it. Do you want to keep it?” It was a reminder that people view our lives as faulty and less than. I felt so othered, and I worried that my baby was going to experience that, too. When I was seven months pregnant, I fell over, landing on my stomach. As soon as I stood up, I had a horrible feeling something wasn’t right. An ambulance was called, but staff at the hospital refused to see me. I had to really fight to be taken seriously. They did a scan and found that the baby was suffocating, so they performed an emergency caesarean, the rushed process of which felt very undignified and at times unsafe. My daughters knew early on that we are all disabled. I’ve always named our disability and we talk through the things they’re concerned about. Nondisabled parents don’t know what to do with me, because I am defying all the things they think about disability. I am pushing up against misconceptions like: “Disabled people don’t have sex” or “No one would ever be attracted to a disabled person” or that “Disabled people can’t conceive” and “Disabled people can’t look after other people, they can’t have dependents”. My kids are marginalised in more ways than I am, and it’s vital that I help them to understand how the world sees their disability, their race, their gender. Their identities aren’t a problem – ableism, racism and sexism are. They’re both very aware that they’re disabled. People’s attitudes are something I constantly have to navigate with them as a parent. ‘Disabled people are seen as totally sexless’: Nina Tame is a disability advocate, writer and content creator and has four children I was at a petting farm with my two youngest kiddos. It was the first time I’d been out with them in my wheelchair. My six-year-old was off with his dad and I was with my toddler in his buggy. We were approached by a person holding a cute baby chick. I say we, but it was really just my toddler as, apparently, at that moment I had become completely invisible. This person began to pass the cute baby chick to my toddler and I said loudly and clearly: “Please don’t give him that. He’ll try to eat it.” I was glanced at, dismissed, then watched as my son held out his greedy little mits, took the chick then immediately went to put it in his mouth. Told you so, Sandra. That was the first time I realised that people didn’t expect me to be a mum. I’m now 41 and I have four kids. I was born disabled with spina bifida. Looking back to my first pregnancy in 2004, I didn’t even identify as disabled, and my SB was something I tried to keep as hidden as possible. My own internalised ableism was huge, and the excitement of being pregnant was overshadowed with a sense of but… But what if the baby has SB like you? But what if the baby makes your SB worse? So, the relief that my first two pregnancies were indeed “healthy” was palpable. Well, like a eugenicist’s worst nightmare, I eventually (third time lucky) did have a baby like me. A gorgeous, wonderful, beautiful baby with spina bifida. I remember the doctor telling us: “Your baby has SB. We don’t know how serious it is. He might not be able to walk. Would you like a termination?” A termination of my very, very wanted baby, purely because he was like me. Because a life like mine isn’t worth living? What a load of bollocks. I’ve never felt guilty for giving my baby SB, because I don’t see my SB as a negative thing. Most of the time, it’s neither positive nor negative, it’s just a part of who I am. Still, I feel the judgment, I see the looks. Oh, the horror that I bred. How awfully irresponsible of me. I think it’s hard for society to view disabled people as being parents for so many reasons. First, we’d have to be having the sex to have the babies, and for some reason disabled people are all seen as pure and good and totally sexless. In reality, some of us are proper little filthy minxes having all the amazing saucy sex. Then there’s this idea that someone in a wheelchair must be totally broken. If my legs don’t work, then surely nothing works. Then, of course, there’s the idea that surely if we need extra care, we can’t possibly give care. If people can get past these outdated attitudes and realise I am indeed the Mama, then I am inspirational by default. Proper cream-your-pants inspirational. Someone saw me taking my kids to school once and cheered in delight. ‘You’re doing so well!’ My youngest child’s favourite game is riding around on my lap pretending Mummy is a bus. Or busting out some moves in our regular kitchen discos. You know that a kid’s favourite things are wheels and bubbles, right? My youngest is delighted when he sees another chair user, and he went through a stage of being really sad that he wasn’t disabled, too. That was a strange conversation. “It’s OK, baby. You might be one day.” Disability doesn’t make you a lesser parent. That’s just ableism whispering in your ear – and that guy’s a total wanker. It’s not a shame that you’re a disabled parent, either. It’s a shame we live in a hugely inaccessible world that totally erases disabled parents.Follow Nina on Instagram @nina_tame ‘Autistic is only one thing that I am’: Joanne Limburg is a writer and creative-writing lecturer. She lives in Cambridge with her husband and son When a psychologist confirmed that I was, as I’d long suspected, an autistic mother, my (non-autistic) son was nine. I held off sharing this information with him until he was 13, when he was given The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time to read at school. “You know the boy in that book?” I said. “I should probably tell you I’ve got the same sort of brain as he has.” To which my son’s response was: “But you’re nothing like him!” “I know I’m not,” I said. “Go figure.” My early memories feature very few faces. One snapshot that springs to mind is that of a line of great-aunts, sitting on chairs arranged in a row: shoes, knees, handbags – and a twisting blur of smoke where each head should be. For years, I thought that the vagueness of this image must reflect the fact that grownups’ heads were too far above my eye level for my memory to get the details down clearly. I now realise that it was because I tended not to seek out adult’s faces, and I came to this realisation because my baby son couldn’t get enough of them. At some point, he must have realised that his mother’s face didn’t behave like most people’s faces. When he was about five or six, he would ask me, “Why is your face like that?” This would usually happen when my mind had wandered to a strange place, and obviously my face had wandered with it. It does that sometimes. My son kept watch on my face because children watch their caregivers’ faces and because my face sometimes did strange or interesting things. I kept watch on my son’s face out of my love for him, for the gratification of a shared smile and because I was an anxious mother who wanted to make sure nothing was ever wrong. ‘I did not expect motherhood to legitimise me’: parenting with a disability Eliza Hull ‘Before, I was often infantilised, but my children seem to act as an automatic pass to adulthood’: Lucy and James Catchpole in their garden. Photograph: Jon Attenborough/The Observer ‘I have to push against misconceptions all the time’: Cathy Reay with her two girls. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer Monday 20 February 2023 The Guardian Opinion 23 Continued from page 22 Continued on page 24

Small children’s faces are generally easier to read than adult faces, and their speech is easier to interpret. Small children say what they mean. I have never found it difficult to interact with small children. The problem is that, in order to be a mother, you have to navigate interactions with so many different adults: other parents, teachers, health professionals. The last can be particularly difficult. Autistic people often approach a question by researching it. We prefer to find the correct word for something and to use it correctly. The problem arises when you come across the kind of professional who thinks that clinical words should be controlled like clinical substances, and therefore that if you, a parent, use them without being given them first you must be up to something – questioning their authority, faking a diagnosis. I once mentioned my son’s hypermobility during an appointment. “Who told you he was hypermobile?” someone snapped. Perhaps the correct term for a mummy to use was “bendy”. Autistic is only one thing that I am, and there are very few characteristics I can identify as flowing directly from it. I know there are times when I get it wrong as a mother, but try showing me a mother – dead or alive – who didn’t. I’ve rarely met a person whose mother wasn’t, in some way, a problem. Autistic or otherwise, all mothers are destined to be impossible. We might as well accept it. As my son was in the habit of saying as a toddler: “Never mind.” Follow Joanne on Twitter @JoanneLimburg We’ve Got This: Essays by Disabled Parents, edited by Eliza Hull, is published by Scribe at £9.99. Buy it for £9.29 at guardianbookshop.com Wanted: a new president for the World Bank, a venerable global institution with a mission to eradicate poverty. The successful candidate will have a plan for tackling the crisis in human development caused by the global pandemic. Climate-change deniers and non-Americans need not apply. By all accounts, the US has already made up its mind who it wants to run one of the two bodies established at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944. Rajiv Shah, who runs the Rockefeller Foundation and was formerly the head of the US agency for international development (USAID) is the hot favourite to take over from the departing David Malpass. The idea that the White House should have the right to appoint the president of such an important organisation is a scandalous anachronism. But that has how it has been since the Bank and its sister organisation, the International Monetary Fund, were created as the second world war was drawing to a close. A deal was done in which the Europeans got to pick the managing director of the IMF, while the Americans got the Bank. Much has happened in the intervening eight decades, not least the growing share of the world economy accounted for by emerging and developing countries. Unsurprisingly, the stranglehold advanced countries continue to exert over the IMF and the World Bank rankles in Beijing, New Delhi, Brasília and elsewhere, too. There’s been talk since Malpass announced his departure of a campaign to persuade Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados, to be the candidate for the developing world. No question, Mottley would give the World Bank the direction it has lacked in recent years. She was responsible for the Bridgetown Initiative – a plan for the reform of development finance that would involve automatic debt relief for countries faced by pandemics or natural disasters; an extra $1tn of funding from development banks (including the World Bank) for climate resilience; and a new mechanism for channelling private sector investment into climate mitigation. Certainly, the Bank needs to start punching its weight in a way it hasn’t under Malpass. Sustainable development goals set by the United Nations for 2030 will not be hit on current trends, yet the World Bank has been overly cautious in its lending approach. A report prepared for the G20 group of developed and developing countries found that with a less conservative approach, multilateral development banks could increase their lending by hundreds of billions of dollars. Malpass jumped before he was pushed. Being handpicked by Donald Trump for the job was one reason Joe Biden would have denied him a second term. The other was that he was seen as insufficiently exercised by the threat posed by the climate crisis, if not an outright climate-change denier. His departure, Biden believes, will enable the Bank to focus on the provision of climate finance to poor countries. It might be assumed that developing countries would be pleased by such a prospect. In fact, they are alarmed by it for two reasons. The first is concern the Bank will be diverted from its core development agenda. The emerging world certainly wants more cash for climate mitigation and adaptation but not if it is at the expense of finance for energy, transport, schools and hospitals. The second reason developing countries feel uneasy about the World Bank morphing into a World Climate Bank is that its record has been less than stellar. Developing countries rightly ask the following question: why would the World Bank be any better at financing our green transition than it has been at lifting us out of poverty? It is a good question. Climate change is an issue of growing importance for the World Bank, but it also has work to do in helping developing countries strengthen their economies, build resilience against future pandemics, reduce inequality and ease debt burdens. If the focus on climate crisis starts to crowd out other issues, the result will be a further fragmentation of the multilateral system, with poor countries increasingly tempted to borrow from China’s rival to the World Bank – the Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank. Malpass was not the disaster some of his detractors imagined when he was appointed by Trump, although that’s largely because he didn’t do very much. Neither, to be frank, has any president since James Wolfensohn (1995-2005) left much of a mark either. It is now time to rethink both the way the Bank operates and whether the multilateral institutions are fit for purpose. The immediate task is to appoint the right person to run the Bank, that means someone with a development plan. Realistically, the White House will get the candidate it wants, but Biden needs to choose carefully. The pandemic has put the anti-poverty agenda back by years. Inequality and debt have become ever-more serious threats, and the person running the World Bank needs to have an answer to them. More fundamentally, an overhaul of the Bretton Woods system is long overdue. The World Bank is being given extra responsibility for climate finance not because it is the ideal choice for the task but because there is no perceived alternative. In an ideal world, there would be a new multilateral bank dedicated to climate finance and energy transition, with an international debt authority that would replace the current inadequate framework for dealing with sovereign indebtedness. Developed countries are strongly opposed to setting up new multilateral institutions, but they need to recognise there is little future in trying to tackle problems of the 2020s with institutions created in the 1940s. Winning the battle against climate change also means winning the battle against global poverty. To do that requires new organisations, new approaches and a new urgency. It’s high time to rethink how the World Bank operates Larry Elliott Barbados's Prime Minister Mia Mottley. Some hope to persuade her to run for World Bank president. Photograph: Dante Carrer/Reuters “The tragic death of Awaab Ishak should never have happened,” Michael Gove said recently during a visit to Rochdale. Despite repeated complaints from Awaab’s father about the black mould that ultimately caused the death of his two-year-old son, Rochdale Borough Housing failed to act. The problems in England’s social housing extend far beyond this single tragedy. Formal complaints to the housing ombudsman about damp and mould doubled this year. The TV programme “Help! My Home is Disgusting!” tells of insect infestations, overflowing plumbing and leaks. In January, the housing ombudsman found Clarion, the UK’s largest social landlord, responsible for “severe maladministration” for the third time in three months. Mr Gove has now pledged to introduce “Awaab’s law”, an amendment to the social housing regulation bill that will require landlords to fix health hazards within strict timeframes. The bill, which is awaiting its third reading in the Commons, reverses over a decade of Conservative reforms and gives new powers to England’s housing regulator to conduct inspections, issue unlimited fines, and charge landlords for emergency repairs. The former social housing regulator was abolished by Grant Shapps in 2012 as part of a bonfire of quangos, and replaced with a body that focused on financial stability alone. The job of ensuring the quality of homes was left to landlords, effectively allowing housing associations to mark their own homework. Many still provide decent homes, but the sector has been cut adrift from its original social purpose, a fact recently acknowledged in a self-critical report from the National Housing Federation (NHF) trade body. This is partly the result of funding pressures. In 2011, the government slashed funding for subsidised housing and redirected remaining funds away from social rent and towards more expensive “affordable” housing. This forced housing associations to borrow in order to build, using tenants’ rent to pay off borrowing costs instead of investing The Guardian view on housing associations: tenants must be listened to Editorial The Guardian Monday 20 February 2023 24 Opinion / Finance / The Guardian View Continued from page 23 Continued on page 25

in existing homes. As housing associations have merged and grown, local offices have been centralised. Complaints become easier to ignore when registered in a distant call centre. “Tenants’ voices can too easily be drowned out,” the NHF admitted. The housing bill shows the government is taking poor conditions seriously, but more needs to happen to ensure tenants are treated as empowered citizens who have democratic influence. The government has pledged £500,000 to help train tenants in how to make their voices heard. Giving lessons in how to complain better is a condescending response to a systemic issue. Many tenants are already all too familiar with complaints procedures but have seen their complaints ignored, while services that would allow them to bring claims against their landlords, such as legal aid, have been eviscerated by cuts. The death of Awaab Ishak and the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017 both illustrated the grave risks of ignoring tenants. The social housing regulation bill will introduce a new advisory panel allowing tenants to inform the regulator of problems. In her new role as housing minister, Rachel Maclean should go further. A democratic national tenants’ body would give social housing tenants a say in shaping policy and greater power to raise complaints. Under Gordon Brown, Labour established the National Tenant Voice organisation in 2010, but the coalition government abolished it less than a year later. Reviving a similar initiative is key to ensuring that tenants are listened to – and tragedies are prevented. Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. Protesters at a rally against poor conditions in rented homes in London. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images During a famous sequence in his film Aprile, the Italian director Nanni Moretti rages at the television as Silvio Berlusconi bullies a centre-left politician in debate, on his way to becoming prime minister in 1994. “React! Say something leftwing,” Mr Moretti urges the hapless socialist. “Say something that isn’t leftwing! Say anything at all!” If Mr Berlusconi’s first victorious election represented a traumatic low point for the Italian left, its current predicament is just as bleak. Last week, in regional elections in the north and south, Italy’s radical right government won even more handsomely than anticipated, albeit on a low turnout. Lombardy has always been a rightwing stronghold. But the centre-left had run the southern Lazio region for a decade. In all, the right now runs 15 of the country’s 20 regions. Meanwhile, prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party has gained in popularity since the autumn election, and stands at 30% in the polls – almost double the dismal score of the centre-left Democratic party (PD). Ms Meloni is enjoying an extended honeymoon period, as her personal approval ratings approach 50%. A pragmatic decision broadly to stick to economic parameters set by her predecessor, Mario Draghi, has reassured the markets. Robust support for Ukraine’s resistance to Vladimir Putin has had the same effect in Brussels, on whose goodwill Italy depends for the full release of almost €200bn from the EU Covid recovery fund. Italian progressives understandably fear that Ms Meloni is skilfully striking a pragmatic note, while saving for later her culture wars on issues such as LGBTQ+ rights, migration and abortion. But, in the face of such electoral dominance, what is to be done? In a week’s time, the PD will elect a new leader following the election debacle. Barring a seismic shock, the race will be a runoff between the moderate party stalwart Stefano Bonaccini and the more radical Elly Schlein, sometimes described as Italy’s version of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Mr Bonaccini, the president of the Emilia-Romagna region, aspires to a big tent coalition containing both the populist Five Star Movement and centrist parties, including that led by former prime minister, Matteo Renzi, now deeply unpopular on the left. Ms Schlein – whose campaign was launched against a backdrop of supporters singing the resistance anthem Bella Ciao – believes the PD must present a bold “progressive, environmentalist and feminist” alternative to the challenge from the radical right. Both approaches come with problems attached. Mr Bonaccini’s broad alliance proved impossible to forge at the last election and, if anything, seems still less likely in the foreseeable future. Ms Schlein’s emphasis on civil rights and the climate emergency is popular among the young and in liberal cities such as Milan. But the election demonstrated that the PD needs to dramatically expand its appeal beyond its comfort zones. Above all, a clear and fresh identity is needed for a party that has become associated with propping up technocratic and crisis-torn governments, as opposed to offering its own compelling vision. After the devastating autumn defeat, the then PD leader, Enrico Letta, was justifiably criticised for running a campaign that focused too much on attacking Ms Meloni’s farright roots and not enough on the party’s own positive message. For one of Europe’s most significant and underperforming centre-left parties, next Sunday’s leadership contest needs to be the start of rectifying that mistake. The Guardian view on Italy’s failing left: time to rethink and reset Editorial The PD leadership candidates – Stefano Bonaccini, Elly Schlein, Paola De Micheli and Gianni Cuperlo – on Italian television. Photograph: Roberto Monaldo/LaPresse LaPres/Rex/Shutterstock Revisionist German war drama All Quiet on the Western Front has swept the board at the British Academy Film Awards in London, taking a remarkable seven awards, including best picture and best director for Edward Berger. The Netflix film, an adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel about an idealistic German soldier sent to the trenches, scored a record-equalling 14 nominations last month but few anticipated it would capitalise on so many of them. “It’s just incredible,” said producer Malte Grunert, picking up the best film prize. He spoke of how the story, about a generation “poisoned by right-wing propaganda into thinking war is an adventure” spoke to today as much as to the time in which the book was written or set. The film also took awards for best film not in the English language, cinematography, adapted screenplay, original score and best sound: an extraordinary run of success that makes it the first foreign language film to win more than four Baftas (as Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, did in 2001) and bodes well for the nine prizes it is in the running for at next month’s Oscars. Picking up his best director prize, Berger asked the audience to remember the people of Ukraine ahead of the one-year anniversary of the start of the war with Russia. The night’s other big winner was The Banshees of Inisherin, which also All Quiet on the Western Front sweeps Baftas as Banshees also gets an Oscar boost Catherine Shoard and Nadia Khomami Monday 20 February 2023 The Guardian The Guardian View / Arts 25 Continued from page 24 Continued on page 26

gained significant momentum in this year’s Oscars race. Martin McDonagh’s black comedy, about a falling out in 1920s Ireland between friends played by Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, took outstanding British film, best original screenplay and best supporting actor for Barry Keoghan and best supporting actress for Kerry Condon. Picking up the outstanding British film prize, McDonagh sought to explain his movie’s unlikely qualification in the outstanding British film category: Film4 contributed significant funding – and Rosie, the stand-in donkey, hails from Stoke-on-Trent. Austin Butler was the surprise winner of the leading actor prize for Elvis, one of four awards won by Baz Luhrmann’s biopic (the others were casting, costume and makeup and hair). Butler, who beat nominees including Farrell, Brendan Fraser and Bill Nighy, ended his speech by paying tribute to the Presley family. “I cannot thank you guys enough,” he said. “Your love and for showing me who Elvis truly was. I hope I’ve made you proud.” Speaking to reporters backstage, Butler touched on the death of Lisa Marie Presley, shortly after the Golden Globes last month. “It’s an unimaginably tragic time,” he said. “Grief is a long process.” Meanwhile Cate Blanchett was named best actress for her role as an imperious conductor in Todd Field’s Tár, a film she described on stage as “a very dangerous and potentially careerending undertaking”. Blanchett thanked for family as “it took me away from you an enormous lot”. She singled out her “mum for holding the fort and my four extraordinary children” before ending her speech by paying tribute to Field. “This is wonderful,” she said, looking at her award, but Tár “has changed my life.” Speaking to reporters backstage, Cate Blanchett said she was “slightly overwhelmed” by her victory. “It’s been such an exceptional year for female performers. There have been so many idiosyncratic, particular performances which I’ve been inspired by. For me to receive this is extraordinary and a very meaningful honour.Blanchett added that the character of Lydia Tár “couldn’t be further away” from her own experience, “but perhaps where I deeply connected with her circumstance – she’s more than a character, she’s a special crisis – is that she’s coming to the end of something, the end of a teaching cycle, an artistic cycle”. She compared this to her own experience of turning 50, adding that the only opportunity out of the pandemic, was to “make changes you’ve wanted to make for a very long time”. Meanwhile Condon’s win heralded an early moment of drama in the ceremony – one which was edited out of the TV broadcast. Her award was presented by Troy Kotsur, winner of last year’s supporting actor Bafta for his role in Coda. Kotsur, who is deaf, signed the announcement, but this was misread by his interpreter as Carey Mulligan, who was nominated for her role in little-seen Harvey Weinstein drama She Said. An audible gasp rang around the Royal Festival Hall as Mulligan’s name was spoken, as she was considered an outsider for the prize. About 10 seconds later, after Mulligan had taken to her feet and was en route to the stage, the error was corrected. This commotion meant the ceremony kicked off with an unexpected echo of the climax of 2017 Academy Awards, when Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty incorrectly named La La Land best picture, before eventually correcting it to Moonlight. Otherwise, the 76th Baftas were a good-natured affair, presided over by incoming host Richard E Grant in breathless form. A mild script made Grant’s own ambition and excitability the butt of the joke, while genuflecting to everyone else in the room. “Nobody on my watch gets slapped tonight,” he said, in reference to Will Smith’s attack on presenter Chris Rock at last March’s Oscars. “Well, only on the back.” Grant was briefly overcome while introducing the in memoriam section of the show; he lost his wife, the dialect coach, Joan Washington, in 2021. Stars and film-makers remembered this year included Hugh Hudson, Angela Lansbury, Raquel Welch, Jean-Luc Godard, Leslie Phillips, Ray Liotta, Anne Heche, Sylvia Syms and Robbie Coltrane. Such success for Berger and McDonagh’s films came at the expense of another Oscars frontrunner: Everything Everywhere All at Once. The wacky multiverse comedy directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert came away with a single prize, for best editing, while Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical drama The Fabelmans failed to take the original screenplay prize – the only category in which it was Bafta-nominated. Charlotte Wells, the young Scottish film-maker whose film Aftersun topped many critics’ polls last year – including the Guardian’s – took outstanding debut. The film, which stars Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio as a father and daughter on holiday in Turkey in the late 1990s, was inspired by a similar trip she took with her own late father. In her speech, Wells said that the film had been described as “a eulogy of sorts to my dad”. “By definition,” she continued, “he’s not here. But my mum is and always has been, so this is for her. Literally, as I overpacked.” Best documentary was won by Navalny, Daniel Roher’s film about the 2020 plot to kill Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny by poisoning. The film features extensive interviews with the recuperating Navalny, and follows the efforts of investigative journalist Christo Grozev and Maria Pevchikh to uncover the truth of Putin’s possible involvement. Last week, Grozev tweeted that he and his family had been banned from attending the ceremony because he poses “a public security risk”. On stage, Roher said the world “must not be afraid to stand against authoritarianism in all its forms”. Speaking backstage, Navalny producer Odessa Rae said: “It’s deeply saddening for us. Christo was actually the introduction to this film for us, he led us to meet Alexei Navalny. He’s such an important part of this film.” The Prince and Princess of Wales were in attendance at the ceremony, but did not speak on stage. Helen Mirren, who took the title role in Stephen Frears’ 2006 film The Queen, presented a segment paying tribute to the late Queen Elizabeth II, who had served as president of Bafta. Mirren described her as “the world’s leading lady but as mysterious as a film star”. Cinematographer James Friend, producer Malte Grunert and director Edward Berger. Photograph: Ian West/PA Patrick Stewart presents the outstanding British film winner award to Martin McDonagh for The Banshees of Inisherin. Photograph: Stuart Wilson/Bafta/Getty Images for Bafta When it comes to fashion’s classic colour combinations, there’s not much better than black and white, which brings to mind references from Coco Chanel to Audrey Hepburn. And it is the tried-and-tested formula that stars at the Baftas wore at the award ceremony on Sunday night. The red carpet was a sea of monochrome. If this is the ultimate in “safe pair of hands” evening dressing, there were deviations. Some stars combined different pieces – in a way that felt a little more like “real life” dressing. The Princess of Wales wore a flowing white frock combined with long black gloves, while Julianne Moore had a Saint Laurent column black dress with a fluffy white marabou coat. Jamie Lee Curtis wore an outfit that would work just as well off the red carpet – a white satin skirt and black jacket. Other stars combined this classic colour combination with more of-themoment fashion trends. Hayley Atwell wore a white top and black skirt, with a sliver of midriff visible between the two. Fashion designer Vera Wang wore a simple black crop top underneath a long white asymmetric dress. She accessorised it in a very fashionindustry way, adding sunglasses and shrugged-on jacket. Glass Onion star Jessica Henwick also wore a crop top, adding a long black skirt and matching blazer. Most men conformed to this trend too, of course, simply by wearing their black tuxes with white shirts. There were some fun examples of not entirely sticking to the script. Costume designer Sandy Powell, a woman who always pushes at red carpet traditions, wore a black suit with a white shirt, with trousers that had a zigzag shape. Nicole Coughlan, of Bridgerton fame, looked like a mid-century star in a pretty white dress with black flowers and cobalt blue accents. All black was also popular. Cate Blanchett and Yvonne Orji wore long black dresses with white accents (pearls for Blanchett, shoes for Orji). There was something of a goth feel, too – Munroe Bergdorf wore layers of black lace, and Carey Mulligan was in a simple long black Dior dress. Gwendoline Christie’s tiers of black would have been approved of by the costar of her recent Netflix series, Wednesday. If all black is classic with dark tendencies, wearing all white has an impact too. Emma Thompson wore head-to-toe white, including a white coat by sustainable designer Laura Pitharas, with trainers. Lily James and Naomi Ackie had white dresses, with a slightly “sci-fi” feel – Ackie’s dress, with metal peplum, was a highlight. Beyond monochrome, the sci-fi feel was something of a micro-trend. Anna Taylor-Joy wore a futuristic hooded minidress, while Cynthia Erivo’s copper dress with asymmetric neckline looked like something from another planet, as did Florence Pugh’s orange tulle design and Sheila Atim’s silver “foil” dress with matching gloves. If black and white dominated, purple – not typically a red carpet colour – had something of a moment. Viola Davis wore a Stella McCartney design in amethyst, while Angela Bassett and Aimee Lou Wood went for the lighter violet shade currently loved by fashion. Jodie Taylor-Smith wowed in a way that classic black and white could never hope to – she wore a dress made of mauve marabou feathers, matched with makeup in the same shade. Baftas in monochrome: black and white dominates red carpet fashion Lauren Cochrane Catherine, the Princess of Wales, wore a flowing white frock combined with long black gloves, the dominant colour combination at the Baftas. Photograph: Reuters Julianne Moore wore a Saint Laurent column black dress with a fluffy white marabou coat. Photograph: Ian West/PA The Guardian Monday 20 February 2023 26 Arts Continued from page 25

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Thirty years on, the Bosnian war still has the power to horrify, with its genocidal massacres and concentration camps in the heart of Europe even as international leaders solemnly avowed their determination never to repeat the nightmare of the second world war. Even now, cultural commentators call the 1990s the “Seinfeld decade” where nothing happened, disregarding the carnage in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Nenad Cicin-Sain’s music documentary gives us an unofficial, unlicensed look at the nightmare of Sarajevo and the way that rock music kept humanity and hope alive: the roughand-ready gigs and discos happening in Sarajevo’s battered garages and bomb shelters, while war raged above. It also tells the story of a maverick American journalist and film-maker called Bill Carter, a member of the ragtag expat group of aid workers, musicians and artists in Sarajevo, who was electrified by the sight of U2’s Bono on MTV talking about the Bosnian war. With extraordinary persistence, Carter got an interview with Bono for Bosnian TV, induced the band to do live TV linkup interviews on stage with Bosnian people during their colossal Zoo TV Tour and finally inspired the band to mount a giant concert in Sarajevo in 1997 supported by local bands and a Muslim women’s choir, after the Dayton Accords peace agreement. People interviewed here believe that the Bosnian war only properly ended when Bono took to the stage and yelled: “Fuck the past, kiss the future!” Of course, it isn’t that simple. The globalist grandiloquence of U2 is always in danger of looking naive. But the documentary is an interesting reminder that it is precisely that naive, ahistorical, ungrownup quality of rock music, its youth, its (arguable) callowness, its idealism, which is what made it so potent and so inclusive. And Bono himself, a man who has – in the Scots phrase – no small opinion of himself, was the guy to make it happen: he had the audacity and the imagination. There were limits to what he could do during the war itself, and the Sarajevo people themselves began to suspect that their pain was being used as set-dressing for U2’s tour; it caused a temporary rift in the love affair between the band and the Bosnians. But U2 became an important part of keeping the world focused on the Bosnian war when plenty of influential people on the left and right were in favour of forgetting all about them. And music reminded Sarajevans that they were human and they had a way of defying the carnage. Perhaps there was no place in this documentary to say it, but it’s important to realise just how much the word “Sarajevo” scared the geopolitical classes: the thought that intervention would risk replaying August 1914. As it turned out, one reason why western military activity was thinkable was that Russia was too demoralised by the collapse of communism to respond in the interest of its traditional ally: the Serbs. Which brings us to what that future was which everyone kissed in that huge and euphoric U2 concert in Sarajevo. The grim answer is obvious before the film explicitly raises it in a final TV news montage. Serbia’s president Slobodan Milošević provided a model of belligerent ethnic fascism and landgrabbing tyranny that is now written large by Vladimir Putin. One interviewee says that a Bono/Sarajevo concert is needed again, but the thought that it can only be staged after the war is over must give us pause. This movie is a time-capsule of Europe’s recent tragic past. • Kiss the Future screened at the Berlin film festival. Kiss the Future review – Bono and U2 keep hope alive in Sarajevo Peter Bradshaw Fans at U2’s Sarajevo concert. Photograph: Anja Niedringhaus/EPA At 15, Bukky Bakray was in drama class at school in east London, working her way through lines she can no longer remember, when she spotted two unfamiliar figures at the back of the room. “We all thought they were Ofsted inspectors,” she says. “We just ignored them and carried on.” It turns out they were director Sarah Gavron and casting director Lucy Pardee, who were dropping into schools across London to find young actors for Gavron’s new film, following her star-studded 2015 historical drama Suffragette.Bakray’s presence stood out among the hundreds of students they went on to observe and she was cast in her debut role, as the lead in what would become 2019’s Rocks. In the film, Bakray delivered a startlingly affecting performance as teenager Olushola “Rocks” Omotoso, who is left to care for her younger brother after their single mother abandons them. Dashing through east London, only a few miles from Bakray’s own home, Rocks enlists the help of her school friends to try to avoid social services. Part uplifting coming-of-age story, part heart-wrenching domestic drama, Bakray’s unbridled emotionality lent Rockspoignant realism, making the film as much a depiction of a family in crisis as it was a statement on the myriad pressures of growing up in contemporary London. Since its release, Bakray has had a whirlwind four years. Her performance was critically acclaimed, earning her a nomination for best actress at the 2021 Baftas and making her the youngest winner of Bafta’s rising star award, an honour previously won by names such as Letitia Wright and Daniel Kaluuya. Now 20, Bakray is on the cusp of an international breakthrough, starring in Netflix thriller The Strays,the feature debut of the writer, actor and director Nathaniel Martello-White, and Apple TV+ drama series Liaison, alongside Eva Green and Vincent Cassel. She is also about to make her stage debut in Matilda Feyisayo Ibini’s Sleepova,directed by Jade Lewisat the Bush theatre. “It all just happened so fast,” Bakray says, sitting in the studio where she has been rehearsing with her Sleepovacastmates for the past few weeks. “When I got the role in RocksI wanted to be an actor as much as I wanted to be a chef after watching MasterChef – it was all just a dream for the future – and then it became a reality. I’m lucky that this is now my career, but I still have to audition like everybody else. I’m finding my way as I go.” The journey from school drama class to leading a movie might have been a quick one for Bakray, but she didn’t focus on whether Rocks was going to be a hit. “None of the cast really concerned themselves with whether anyone was going to care about the film, since if we did then the joy in making it would be gone,” she says. “I just knew that I needed to take what I could from the process and not worry about the rest.” That pragmatism is still with Bakray today. She is grounded and softly spoken, dressed unassumingly in a black hoodie and often focused on the floor as she thinks and talks. She is yet to move out of home and has just started an undergraduate course studying art at a London university. “My life has changed as much as I want it to right now,” she says. “If I wanted to leave home I could but I need to go at my own pace, so I’m just taking things slowly.” She is still close with Gavron, Pardee and her young female costars, and they often get together to watch one another’s new projects, such as Ruby Stokes’s Netflix series Lockwood & Coor Kosar Ali’s Dangerous Liaisons,which launched on streamer Lionsgate+ in November.“We spent nine months workshopping Rocks,” she says. “We grew up together and they showed me the power of female friendship – it was like a community. That film opened me up physically and mentally.” Bakray describes getting on a plane for the first time when promoting Rocksand landing at the Toronto film festival for the premiere, but when she viewed her performance, she says: “I thought it was a waste of everyone’s time and money. I was really disappointed. I know now that it was just my insecurities playing out and I had to get used to seeing myself on screen.” It must have been particularly hard watching herself act out vulnerable moments. “When we shot the emotional scenes, my brain didn’t understand what was going on but my body just did it,” she says. “I was so young, it would have this knock-on effect where I might fall out with my chaperone or I would be moody on set and it was because it was a day when we had filmed a lot of crying. Rocks really made me understand how spontaneous feelings can be and that could be hard to watch back.” That raw performance in Rocksmight have set Bakray up as one of the go-to faces for young Londoners on screen, but her subsequent choices look set to ensure she is not typecast. In The Strays, for instance, she Actor Bukky Bakray: the Rocks star hitting the big time Ammar Kalia Bukky Bakray. Photograph: Adama Jalloh/The Observer From left, Kosar Ali, Ruby Stokes and Bukky Bakray in Rocks. Photograph: Aimee Spinks/AP The Guardian Monday 20 February 2023 28 Arts Continued on page 29

plays an unsettlingly mysterious figure confronting a Black woman trying to suppress her past, while in Liaison, she is drawn into an international cyberterror plot. “It’s been fun getting to work out the different Bukkys,” she says. “I found such empathy for my character in The Strays and Liaisonwas incredible because it was so expansive. That kind of budget allows for you to build the world as you want it. When we filmed a train crash, they actually had a whole train on set!” There will be no big-budget set pieces for Sleepova. Instead, Bakray comes full circle: the show is a kind of introspective companion piece to her debut. Centring on four Black teenage girls as they grow up, Sleepovadocuments their confrontations with sexuality, identity and differing upbringings during nights at each other’s houses. “I love coming back to exploring adolescence, since it always feels like such an exciting and emotional time,” Bakray says. “It’s when you feel things without really knowing why and this play has been a really nurturing space in which to do that. Outside in the real world, everyone thinks I’m older than I am, but here I get to play more and be my younger self. It’s a nice break from having to be an adult.” * * * The youngest of four siblings from an estate in Lower Clapton, east London, for Bakray those teenage years of self-discovery were filled with excitement and a hustling sense of creativity. “I call me and my brothers the Black Sopranos because we were always in the basement at home discussing our business plans,” she laughs. “We had to pay for everything ourselves so we were always grinding. My side job was that I did people’s makeup for money. I started doing it when I was 14 and I was getting £60 a week. When it was prom season, I would wrap up about £500 – it was amazing! That was the first taste I had of making money from my artistic skills.” Bakray may have other people ready to do her makeup for the red carpet now but she is careful to keep prioritising her artistic side. “It’s why I chose to study art, not drama, since I want to keep learning in different ways,” she says. “ Lucy [Pardee] saw something in me that I never saw in myself and maybe someone else will do the same.” Having worked solidly since the release of Rocks, and with a six-week run of Sleepovaahead, does she have plans to take some time off and live the life of a 20-year-old too? “The nature of my work means I don’t really have the luxury to plan ahead, so I’m turning into one of those people who just up and go. I just got back from [a holiday to] Jamaica, which I only booked a few days before,” she says. “That’s a champagne problem though. I can’t believe I’m even talking like this!” It’s a long way from her 15-year-old self who had yet to get on a plane, but Bakray is enjoying the change. “It’s a blessing to be here and to do work that can make people feel so deeply,” she says. “I just want to keep shapeshifting and I can’t wait for people to discover the new versions of me.” Sleepova is at the Bush theatre, London W12 from Friday 24 February to 8 April; The Strays is on Netflix from Wednesday 22 February; and Liaison debuts on Apple TV+ on Friday 24 February There are some bands for whom a performance in a student union building feels entirely fitting, and London’s Dry Cleaning is one of them. Heroes of the post-punk sprechgesang movement, their wordy delivery is unmistakeably borne of an art-school background, balancing knowing pretension with cutting social realism. This is some seriously smart art. With two albums to draw from, Dry Cleaning’s live show comes together in a unified whole. Scratchcard Lanyard (the flagship single of their acclaimed 2021 debut, New Long Leg) is dropped early, easily the fan favourite of the night. But choice cuts from last year’s Stumpwork – so named for a twee, intricate style of flocked embroidery – take a slightly more expansive vocal approach, weaving new flecks into their tapestry. Conservative Hell (“am I part of the meal deal?”) elicits an excited whoop from one eager crowd member, as does Gary Ashby, an ode to a missing tortoise that sees frontwoman Florence Shaw intone a semblance of a melody with infectiously droll panache. “Someone sent us an Instagram thing saying RIP Gary, just assuming that he’s dead,” she offers by way of commentary. “It was upsetting.” The deadpan capers continue. Bassist Lewis Maynard shines on the PFunk of Hot Penny Day, while debut single Magic of Meghan gets anti-royalists in the room bopping, gleefully lampooning our collective fascination with celebrity. Shaw remains stock-still in front of her mic stand, but allows her face to indulge in some artfully suppressed theatrics: raised brows and pursed lips that satirise the uptight, oat-latte-sipping hypocrite busybodies among us. A wry eye-roll creeps in on Liberty Log’s strangely fortuitous chorus: “Weird premise for a show, but I like it.” Indeed, there is plenty to enjoy about a Dry Cleaning show. The band are sonically airtight, and Shaw’s loquacious live recall is a feat worth witnessing; she apologises, unnecessarily, on the rare occasions when she is forced to consult her notes. But as the formula of their surrealist newspaper-headline songwriting starts to get familiar over a 90-minute set, it becomes difficult to pinpoint exactly what would differentiate a very good Dry Cleaning show from an excellent one. In delivering songs of such technical complexity, there is little room left for spontaneity, few allowances made for the kind of tangible interactions or communal singalongs that distinguish a truly memorable gig from a night of passively enjoyable performance art. For the diehard faithfuls in the room, this is hardly a problem; Dry Cleaning’s style of disciplined delivery is exactly why bands of this genre appeal. But for those really looking to get lost in an experience, sprechgesang still risks leaving some of its listeners out in the cold; fun to study at your own pace, but a little less invigorating in the classroom. • At Invisible Wind Factory, Liverpool, on 20 February. Then touring. Dry Cleaning review – artful theatrics and clever songwriting, but no singalongs Jenessa Williams Florence Shaw of Dry Cleaning performing in summer 2022. Photograph: Jim Dyson/Getty Images How does Sunday start? I’m up between 4am and 5am. I go downstairs, feed the dog, make a coffee, and take my supplements. As a health nut, I always do something to set the tone for the day – meditation, breath work or gratitude lists. Work or play? Ideally I’ll sit on my ass on the couch and remain there all day. Yes, I might cook waffles for break- fast, or treat myself to a facial, but otherwise I’m staying horizontal. Sundays are all about indulgence and doing everything I can’t when on the road all week. Sundays growing up? When I was really young we’d go to church every week. But other than that, I don’t remember much, pre-music. Performing and travelling started when I was a little kid – mostly I was on a tour bus. Being home with the family still feels like a luxury. A religious day still? My new album is called God’s Work, but I ran as far as I could from organised religion when I was young. It’s been a long path to find my own spirituality. Sunday sounds? Ray LaMontagne or David Gray – soothing, chilled out listening. We have a record player in the living room and I let their albums run through. And it’s the perfect music to make soup to. Do you work out? A jump on my trampoline or yoga if I need a boost. In my 20s and early 30s I worked out for vanity. Now in my 40s, I’m focused on hormones and brain health. I want to feel good, not look it. And Sunday might? We eat dinner early, 5pm, and I’m in bed by 7pm. My marriage has one recurring argument: I want quiet and darkness, he likes to fall asleep with the TV on. So I put on my eye mask and cuddle up to him, waiting for the screen to be switched off. LeAnn Rimes’s latest single, Awakening, is out now Sunday with LeAnn Rimes: ‘Ideally I’ll sit on my ass on the couch all day’ Michael Segalov ‘My new album is called God’s Work, but I ran as far as I could from organised religion when I was young’: LeAnn Rimes. Photograph: Paul Archuleta/Getty Images Monday 20 February 2023 The Guardian Arts 29 I love coming back to exploring adolescence… It’s a nice break from having to be an adult Continued from page 28

Fans of The White Lotus will be familiar with the classic Sicilian vases known as testa di morothat adorn the fictional luxury hotel in the second season of the TV drama. The handpainted faces hark back to the legend of a Moorish man who fell in love with a local woman, only to have his head cut off when she discovered he had a wife back home. The director uses these ornaments as a powerful visual motif to remind viewers to be wary of the guests and their actions. But their appearance in the hit show has also prompted a surge of interest in Italian maximalism and ceramics. The British-based online seller Bettina Ceramica, which specialises in handmade traditional Italian ceramics, has been inundated with messages. Meanwhile the online retailer Etsy reports an increase of more than 20% in searches for testa di moro and Italianinspired pieces compared with a year ago – a trend it expects to continue growing. While maximalism – and Italy in general – are already having a pop culture moment, evident in fashion, television and interiors, The White Lotushas only helped to drive the trend. “Overthe-top seems to be the rule of the day,” said Carl J Dellatore, the New York writer, textile designer and author of More Is More Is More. “And Italian maximalism, specifically the Memphis movement, is playing a part.” The Sicilian interiors of The White Lotus provided “endless inspiration”, he said. “I expect them to influence contemporary interiors.” Since the Memphis group, the 80s Italian design and architecture collective founded by Ettore Sottsass, there have been many versions of Italian maximalism. Its latest evolution was defined by audacious colour and colour combinations, a vibrant mix of patterns and juxtaposed silhouettes, he said. “The new rule? Take chances – break the rules.” The trend is in keeping with a wider move, particularly among Gen Z, away from big mass-produced brands towards limited-run, exclusive, sustainably made products. Natalie Sytner, founder of Bettina Ceramica, said the small-batch nature of Italian ceramics was central to its appeal, with demand fuelled by social media. “When I was a student and it was just 100% Ikea, you didn’t think about doing anything different,” she said. “And now, in all age groups really, everybody is keen for something new, different, interesting, sustainable, with a story, handmade and handpainted.” Some of the pieces she sells – which include acquasantiera, or holy water vessels, figurine candlesticks, Santa Croce ornaments and Gigli jugs and bowls – have been made for hundreds of years. Increasingly, people are taking a mixed media approach to decorating their walls – combining ceramic wallhangings with paintings and other artwork. It’s helping to revive a trade that until recently was almost dormant, she said. “Lots of my artisans and makers had stopped making a lot of the designs I’ve recommissioned them to make, and we’ve redesigned them together. So a lot of people are loving that – the resurgence of a style which maybe wouldn’t be here otherwise.” Among artists and artisans outside Venice and Florence, there was “excitement brewing and bubbling”, she added. “I think they all realise that, hopefully, it can be a bustling trade again.” Cristina Onori, production designer on the second season of The White Lotus, said her original aim was to bring life into the hotel using symbols of Sicily’s heritage and transporting them into the modern world. Onori, who is based in Rome, has been surprised and delighted by the wide-reaching international impact the show has had since its release. “I love the fact that people can start to put colour and shining ceramics all around.” Design writer and photographer Claire Bingham said Italy’s design culture was about “pushing boundaries with a no-rules approach”, but that it was the escapism of maximalism that made it so compelling today. “The bright colours of the Mediterranean, the traditional craft of the Majolica ceramics and the opulence of a Murano chandelier represent a mood that’s escapist, flamboyant and fun. All this is attractive right now.” While mid-century pieces will always have appeal as design staples, the author of More is More: Memphis, Maximalism and New Wave Design, said 1980s pieces that “combine extravagant shape and colour” were the contemporary designs to invest in. Examples of modern maximalism cited by Bingham include the frescoes, furniture and azulejo tilework of the new Christian Louboutin Vermelho hotel in Portugal; JJ Martin’s La Double J boutique in Milan; Buchanan Studio’s interiors; and the new salt and pepper grinders by Fabien Cappello for the Swedish brand Hem. To that she adds Harry Lambert’s styling for Harry Styles. “The harlequin sequin jumpsuit is a maximalist dream.” Bethan Laura Wood, the British designer, said maximalism was increasingly present in design, each iteration adding another layer. Life in a multiscreen, data and image highspeed world also suited the aesthetic, she said. “During lockdown and post-lockdown, we haven’t been able to avoid our interiors, we’ve been stuck with them. And so that also has opened the gateway to people to play with their interiors more, or consider their interiors more, because they’re no longer so private.” Escapist, flamboyant, fun: White Lotus inspires love of Italian maximalist look Miranda Bryant Meghann Fahy as Daphne Babcock in The White Lotus, with a testa di moro, a motif in the series. Photograph: HBO Acquasantiera from Bettina Ceramica. Photograph: Bettina Ceramica It was 23 years ago, as Erdem Moralioğlu sat cross-legged on the late Vivienne Westwood’s studio floor during an internship, that he decided to try his luck at becoming a fashion designer. “She was just such an extraordinary, amazing woman. She and [her husband and creative partner] Andreas would let the work placement students watch fittings and watch as they draped fabric on the stand. It was a very important time for me,” he said. Five years later he staged his first show, and he has been a fixture of London fashion ever since. “Naturally, she is very much on my mind,” said Moralioğlu, who attended Westwood’s memorial service two days before his latest show on Sunday. “I love her.” Ghosts of Westwood seem to appear on every catwalk at a London fashion week that is dedicated to her memory. At this Erdem show, they were glimpsed in the shadows cast by corsets and bodices, by bustle skirts made saucy rather than staid – that Westwood would have approved of – by the slivers of bare skin exposed by twists and explosions of taffeta. But Moralioğlu also had two other ghosts in mind, former occupants of the Georgian townhouse where he now lives, which 150 years ago was a “House of Hope” providing sanctuary to “fallen and friendless” women, with the aim of providing them with “habits of sobriety, industry and obedience” and the domestic skills that would give them the means of earning a living. “When we moved in two years ago, we were handed a thick pile of documents about the history of the house, and I began researching. One story that caught my imagination was of two women who missed their curfew and were locked out for the night – they were intoxicated, apparently, and started a riot in the street.” Moralioğlu makes party dresses that have the grandeur of ballgowns but none of the stuffiness. Organza ruffles end in ravaged hems. Creamy knits are punctured all over with punkish piercings of jet embroidery. Taking a deep dive into the story of his stop-out Victorian minxes, Moralioğlu crushed floral taffeta dresses under heavy coats, added stompy boots, gelled hair into bedraggled kiss curls at the throat. “I love the idea that they’d been locked out in the rain and kind of went on a hallucinogenic bender” he said. It is a folk tradition of London fashion week, which sets it apart from the more sanitised catwalks of Milan and Paris, for the shows to tell stories about the female experience that are salty and earthy, bawdy and raw. This heritage, which prizes the rawedged glamour of high drama over the unwrinkled polish of high maintenance, owes much to Westwood and her influence on subsequent generations of designers. But this show was also personal for Moralioğlu, who is as at home in a library as in a design studio and has always been tickled by Victoriana, with its cross-currents of propriety and undoneness. Absinthe greens and frosted lilacs in the collection were taken directly from layers of wallpaper he found when renovating and researching his home. For this Sunday morning show, lightbulbs flickering just above head height and a soundtrack of footsteps on creaking floorboards brought a sense of claustrophobic intimacy to the Sadlers Wells venue. Erdem Moralioğlu’s new collection inspired by Georgian ‘fallen women’ Jess Cartner-Morley The London fashion week Erdem show on Sunday. Photograph: Charles McQuillan/BFC/ Getty Images An Erdem model: the grandeur of ballgowns but none of the stuffiness. Photograph: Charles McQuillan/BFC/Getty Images The Guardian Monday 20 February 2023 30 Fashion

For two weeks, an owl that escaped the Central Park Zoo has eluded capture as legions of fans worry about its ability to survive in New York City. Would Flaco, a majestic Eurasian eagle-owl, go hungry because he had not developed an ability to hunt while in captivity? The answer was a resounding no: Flaco is feeding on park rats. Zoo officials said they were suspending recovery operations but would keep a close eye on the owl. “We are going to continue monitoring Flaco and his activities and to be prepared to resume recovery efforts if he shows any sign of difficulty or distress,” officials said. The bird’s name in Spanish means “skinny”. In the early days of his escape he was not seen eating. But when he started coughing up fur and bones, it was proof he had been hunting. Officials acknowledged that recovering Flaco was difficult, especially “since he has been very successful at hunting and consuming the abundant prey in the park”. The Eurasian eagle-owl is one of the larger species, with a wingspan of up to 2m, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society. They have large talons and distinctive ear tufts. Zoo officials tried to lure Flaco with bait and recordings of eagle-owl calls. He showed interest but didn’t fall for the ruse. The search was launched on 2 February after the discovery vandals had cut the bird’s enclosure. Flaco has not strayed far from the park. He flew to Fifth Avenue, where police tried to catch him, and visited the park skating rink. “Flaco has been doing well,” said David Barrett, who runs the Twitter accounts Manhattan Bird Alert, Brooklyn Bird Alert and Bronx Bird Alert. “That’s amazing. He’s made a remarkable move from being a captive owl to being in the wild much faster than anyone would have expected. He’s catching prey on his own. He continues to fly better and better. He seems to be enjoying himself out there.” Flaco was less than a year old when he came to the Central Park Zoo in 2010. Owls are mostly solitary and usually only interact with another animal during breeding season. “Is he going to be lonely out there?” said Barrett. “That’s a good question.” New York zoo ends attempt to recapture Flaco the owl in Central Park Associated Press in New York Flaco sits in a tree in Central Park in New York. Photograph: Seth Wenig/AP During his Thursday visit to the site of a fiery train derailment that may have poisoned a small eastern Ohio town with a range of highly toxic chemicals, the Environmental Protection Agency chief, Michael Regan, told residents: “All families need to know that they are safe.” But Regan’s words, along with those from the Ohio governor Mike DeWine’s administration and Norfolk Southern officials, have been of little comfort to Jami Cozza. After evacuating for days after the 3 February derailment, she was told it was safe to return home, but a chemical odor still lingers in her flat. She urged a Norfolk Southern official to visit, and the company is now offering to pay for her relocation over safety fears. Cozza noted East Palestine residents were told the municipal water was safe to drink, but also advised to buy bottled water, and many have complained of rashes after they shower. Residents were told they only had vinyl chloride to fear, then the list of dangerous chemicals spilled by the train grew. Federal agencies may not release the full list of chemicals for months. Each day seems to bring new contradictions and every bit of information from officials feels like it raises more questions than it answers, Cozza said. The uncertainty is generating a deep sense of distrust. “People are just angry but they don’t know who to be angry with because we’re not getting enough information to know who to be mad at,” Cozza added. “‘The air is fine, but don’t go outside. Your water is fine, but drink bottled water.’ You can’t trust them.” About 50 out of 141 cars on the Norfolk Southern train derailed and exploded in a towering fireball over the town of 4,700 at the edge of the Appalachian hills. The fire burned near tankers carrying vinyl chloride but caused no immediate injuries. Two days later, officials feared a “major explosion” and conducted a controlled burn of vinyl chloride as a prevention measure. Most residents had evacuated, and on 8 February they were given clearance to return, but many still see dangers. At the site of the wreck, crumpled and charred tanker cars still lay in the mud aside the tracks. In the immediate vicinity and in pockets throughout the city, a potent chemical odor hangs in the air. Residents have described it as similar to turpentine or bleach, and said it “sticks to your nose”. Breathing it in for a few minutes may leave a metallic taste “like pennies”. In recent days, some have reported dead pets or foxes, and the birds or outdoor cats they feed have disappeared. A chemical sheen still coats parts of small creeks that run through town, and dead fish have been found throughout local waterways as the pollution plume moves downstream. Temporary dams placed throughout the creeks pool the chemicals, which are sucked out with industrial pumps that filter the water. The ongoing issues are what alarms Candice Desanzo. Like many neighbors, she wants to leave, but her family does not have enough money. She fears for her children and husband who have developed rashes after bathing. As she discussed the plight on her front porch, her eyes were red and swollen, and one of her children had gone hoarse, symptoms she said developed after the wreck. “I can’t help but feel like I’m slowly poisoning my kids by staying,” she said. Some suffering from symptoms are skeptical of local physicians’ diagnoses. They have been told they have eczema or a sinus infection, or have been given antibiotics. Some scientists have advised residents to call the Poison Control Center because family physicians are not trained to treat chemical exposure. Children returned to school early in the week only to find a chemical smell in the East Palestine high school hallways, despite the fact that custodians had cleaned, said Jenna Cozza, niece of Jami Cozza. A contaminated creek runs next to the school, and children are “stressed [and] worried” she said, adding that she lives in “constant fear of this tragedy happening again. “When I smell that chemical smell it takes me back to when all this happened, and I panic and get anxiety from it,” she said. Some also question air test results. Though the EPA website states it has tested air in nearly 500 homes, Norfolk Southern hired contractors to conduct the studies, so some are skeptical of the results. The rail company depleted more of its remaining credibility when it refused to take part in a Wednesday town hall meeting over alleged threats it had received. “At this point nobody trusts them, so we don’t want to hear what they say is going on in our homes … they’re going to tell us whatever the hell they want,” said resident Chris Wallace. A company spokesman on Wednesday highlighted more than $1.5m spent on resident assistance, including direct payments of $1,000. Norfolk Southern this year announced $10bn in stock buybacks and reported $3.2bn in profits last year. Residents say $1,000 will not cover much of the fallout. As Jackie Johnson picked up sticks in her large yard just a few blocks from the wreck site, she said she no longer feared the health threats, but said her life had been damaged in a different way. She and her husband just retired from the Federal Bureau of Prisons and had planned to sell their house so they could buy a new home in Columbus near their grandchild. They were waiting for home prices to inch up a bit further before selling their tidy house, but the wreck has likely cratered their property value. Their life plans are indefinitely on hold. “It might get to a point where we don’t have an option – we’ll have to sell it for what somebody will buy it for,” Johnson said. Cozza said Norfolk Southern has offered to pay for her relocation because her front door is mere steps from a creek; the contaminated water will likely leak into their basement and she has a three-year-old child. But standing outside her home, she motioned toward her neighbors, who are also within about 50ft of the creek. They have not received the same offer. “Their kids deserve to live, just like mine do,” Cozza said. Up Market Street, about 0.6 miles from the wreck, Desanzo wonders why the company is not paying for her to ‘We just need answers’: distrust grows in Ohio town after toxic train derailment Tom Perkins in East Palestine, Ohio Residents have received contradictory information as to how to clean their homes. Photograph: Michael Swensen/Getty Images A chemical sheen still coats parts of small creeks in the town. Photograph: Michael Swensen/Getty Images Monday 20 February 2023 The Guardian Environment 31 Continued on page 32

relocate, or for more of her costs. Officials considered Cozza’s home to be safe, she noted, until Norfolk Southern later changed its assessment. Desanzo wonders about her home’s safety. She has received contradictory information about how to clean her home and suspects she made her clothes worse by washing them with city water. “We just need answers,” she said in tears. “This city deserves answers and compensation.” Mac McClung went some way to singlehandedly restored the shine on a dunk contest that has been widely panned in recent years. McClung, the 6ft 2in Philadelphia guard on a two-way contract, defeated New Orleans’ Trey Murphy III in the finals of the dunk contest. “I’m truly blessed and grateful for the NBA giving me this opportunity,” McClung said. A 540-degree dunk – one-and-a-half rotations in the air – was his third perfect score of the night out of four dunks. By the time the judges’ scores came up it was already decided. Everyone in the building knew he’d already won. He immediately committed to defending his title next year. “If you guys will have me, I’ll be back,” McClung said. The final score, not that it mattered, was McClung 100.0, Murphy 98.0. His is an unbelievable story: McClung has played mostly in the G League, where he ranks 36th in scoring this season at 19 points per game. He was undrafted in 2021 after spending three college seasons at Georgetown and Texas Tech. He was signed by Golden State last year but never played in a regular-season game for the Warriors, and spent a little time on USA Basketball’s World Cup qualifying team last year as well. “Ever since the beginning, I was the underdog,” said McClung, who put on a Gate City jersey – his high school and hometown in Virginia, population 1,600 – for the final dunk. “Proving others right instead of others wrong brings a little more satisfaction.” Philadelphia are his third NBA team, and he hasn’t even played for the 76ers yet. He played in one game last season for the Chicago Bulls, one other game for the Los Angeles Lakers. He has scored a grand total of three NBA baskets. McClung set the tone for the night on Saturday with a dunk that had NBA superstars in disbelief – he leaped over two people, took the ball out of the hands of one of them, tapped it on the backboard and then threw down a reverse slam. McClung was nearly perfect on his second dunk as well; four judges gave him a perfect 50, Lisa Leslie gave him a 49 as the only dissenter, but it didn’t matter – he was already assured a spot in the final round against Murphy. Damian Lillard, the Portland star, won the three-point contest by topping Indiana teammates Buddy Hield and Tyrese Haliburton in the final round. “They say the third time’s the charm,” said Lillard, who got his first three-point title in his third try at the event. “And I’m happy that it happened here. It’s a perfect situation. I’m happy that I did it in my home, coming back here to Utah.” Lillard won the final round with 26 points. Hield had 25 and Haliburton scored 17. Mac McClung seals improbable NBA Dunk Contest win with 540-degree jam Associated Press Mac McClung intends to defend his title next season. Photograph: Patrick T Fallon/AFP/Getty Images It has become almost impossible to guess which face Spurs will show so this was, for those invested in their fortunes, an evening of welcome stability. An ultimately routine win brought appreciable rewards: it put them in the top four for the first time since New Year’s Eve and, seemingly despite themselves, Tottenham find their season wide open. Antonio Conte will not have liked watching from home after his brief return to touchline duty but he still had his say and there was plenty to take from an aggressive, insistent, smart second-half performance that bore no relation to what had passed earlier. Their fans enjoyed imploring Emerson Royal to shoot whenever the ball reached him after the oft-derided wingback opened the scoring, his goal the product of an incisive combination with his left-sided colleague Ben Davies. But the supporters took even more pleasure from a player who is far likelier to take aim. Son Heung-min had been demoted to the bench in another suggestion Spurs have been unable to count on him as usual this season. He scored his first league goal since 4 January four minutes after coming on, the smiles indicating exactly what that meant, and if it sets a tone for the next three months then this may yet have been a transformative occasion. “We knew Sonny’s response would be perfect because he’s a perfect guy,” said Cristian Stellini, the Tottenham assistant manager, suggesting the player had not been fully fit since the World Cup and needed managing carefully. “You have to take a decision. It’s difficult with a player like Sonny but we have to do it because we have a lot of matches and the risk is that you lose a player for a long time.” What a disappointment this was, in the end, for a West Ham side that must have fancied their chances at the interval. They had been focused during a largely turgid first half and arguably enjoyed the best of what passed for its openings. But a loose five minutes after re-emerging dug them into a hole from which they never emerged. Errors from Nayef Aguerd and Declan Rice had brought chances for Richarlison, who started in Son’s place, and Harry Kane. Lax play from Vladimir Coufal set another dangerous Spurs attack in motion and, while West Ham survived, it was clear something had shifted. Spurs, by contrast, were far removed from the ponderous outfit whose only serious first-half threat had come right at the end when Richarlison, sent away but slightly wide by Kane, made Lukasz Fabianski save with his legs. Their starting XI had looked workmanlike, Davies and Emerson hardly dynamic attacking presences on the face of things while Pierre-Emile Højbjerg and Oliver Skipp grafted in the middle. So it was that, in the 56th minute, they issued a reminder not to judge a book by its cover. First Højbjerg, deep in midfield, curved a long, low and exquisitely weighted pass beyond Coufal and Angelo Ogbonna. It sent Davies, a buccaneering presence now, into the box with a similarly marauding colleague to his right. That was Emerson, who took Davies’s pass and finished coolly across a static Fabianski. West Ham had it coming and a fightback always looked a tall order. Had Jarrod Bowen scored, rather than giving Fraser Forster the chance to save, immediately afterwards the pendulum might have swung back towards an away-day masterclass from David Moyes. Instead Son, freshly introduced, bent the narrative to his will. Kane had battled Ogbonna for a high ball and forced a loose header that let him slip his trusty accomplice through; Son finished coolly, and characteristically, to offer hope that a return to his best form lies ahead. Any kind of form would be progress for West Ham, who have won once in the league since October and surely cannot afford defeat at home against Nottingham Forest on Saturday. “We gave them encouragement to come at us and didn’t get over it really,” Moyes lamented of that slapdash start to the second period. “Ultimately it came down to a couple of really poor actions defensively.” Moyes accepted, though, that West Ham need more further forward. Bowen had half-volleyed a chance wide after 53 seconds but, other than his later effort, that was about the best of their attacking endeavours. Stellini acknowledged Spurs, demolished at Leicester and outdone in Milan on the back of eclipsing Manchester City, need to “be consistent in this kind of performance”. He had Conte in his ear remotely during the match, consulting over substitutions and tactical tweaks, and that will be the way of things for another fortnight or Son Heung-min seals win against West Ham to take Tottenham into top four Nick Ames at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium Son Heung-min thanks Harry Kane for his assist. Photograph: Tottenham Hotspur FC/ Getty Images Emerson Royal opens the scoring for Tottenham. Photograph: Paul Childs/Action Images/Reuters The Guardian Monday 20 February 2023 32 Environment / Sport Continued from page 31 Continued on page 33

so. Conte, he said, will not be around for next Sunday’s meeting with Chelsea as he continues to recover from gallbladder surgery but should be back by the second leg against Milan. Perhaps he will return to a team with galvanised prospects. “It was an important game in an important moment,” Stellini said, and Spurs must not relinquish the grip they have found. Marcus Rashford’s 23rd and 24th goals of a campaign he will long cherish were taken with cool aplomb and sent Manchester United en route to the perfect start of what they hope proves a landmark eight days. Erik ten Hag’s men are again five points behind Arsenal, having played a game more, and entertain Barcelona here in Thursday’s Europa League playoff second leg, the tie poised at 2-2. Knock the Catalan side out and beat Newcastle in Sunday’s Carabao Cup final and United will have enjoyed their finest week of recent memory. Rashford’s first-half opener, against a Leicester team that might have already been 4-0 up, made him the first United player to score in seven consecutive Premier League home outings since Wayne Rooney in 2010. For the centre-forward’s second, after the break, he skated on to Fred’s pass and beat Danny Ward through the goalkeeper’s legs, while Jadon Sancho’s finish derived, too, from a smart United sequence: Lisandro Martínez pickpocketed Kelechi Iheanacho and passed to Rashford, who pinged the ball to the wide man. After he swapped passes with Bruno Fernandes, Sancho’s left foot did the rest. United had initially taken the contest to their visitors, as Fernandes and Rashford claimed corners via barrelling runs along the right. Luke Shaw executed these but they amounted to nothing and Leicester began counterpunching. Wout Faes, Victor Kristiansen, and Tetê knitted passes together and the last of these zipped down the right for Timothy Castagne and turned United on their heels. They escaped but more dangerous Leicester play ensued. Harvey Barnes procured the ball from Iheanacho, shot and saw David de Gea’s right mitt repel his strike. Then, Iheanacho weak effort was blocked by Victor Lindelöf. “Champions of England more recent than you,” sang Leicester’s support gleefully to their hosts, who were soon again back-wheeling frantically: Tetê’s cross would have been met by the unmarked James Maddison if not for Fred, who had sprinted back to cover for his side. Tetê, signed from Shakhtar Donetsk on loan in January, was raiding those in red for fun along his right flank: the next time he cut inside and blazed across De Gea’s goal, deepening Ten Hag’s unhappiness at what he witnessed from the sideline. When Iheanacho rose to head at goal the manager seemed about to curse the opener before De Gea made another sparkling save to his right, this one not unlike Gordon Banks’s famous stop from Pelé at the 1970 World Cup. It was vital because United soon scored. A loose Faes pass was gobbled up by Marcel Sabitzer, who fed Fernandes. The playmaker’s outside-of-aboot release had Rashford padding in and, on pulling the trigger, the No 10 beat Ward to the latter’s right. Ten Hag hailed the strike while pulling Diogo Dalot over for a stern word about positioning, the manager conscious of his team’s vulnerability. In this tale of two leaky defences Leicester’s was the next to be breached when Wout Weghorst tapped to Dalot who after surging forward relayed the ball to Fernandes. He delivered a daisy-cutter back to Dalot and the defender, yards out, should have doubled the lead. Ten Hag’s verdict on the opening period was pithy. “We have to follow the rules of our way of playing,” he said. “When we don’t it is a mess. We were really lucky at half-time to be up. Great goal, for the rest it is rubbish.” When the sides changed ends Sancho had replaced Alejandro Garnacho for United, who soon had Martínez crashing a header off the bar, Fernandes warming Ward’s digits, and Rashford slaloming through but unable to score. Weghorst, with an overhead kick plus two late fluffed chances, and Fernandes, shooting into Ward’s hands, joined the list of those in United livery suffering from profligacy before Rashford showed how to do it, for the second time. Sancho’s goal was his second in three league appearances, killed off those in blue and ensured United took seven of the nine points available during the three-match suspension of their lead midfielder, Casemiro. The clean sheet resulted in De Gea equalling Peter Schmeichel’s record of 180 for the club. Rashford and Sancho fire Manchester United to victory over Leicester Jamie Jackson at Old Trafford Marcus Rashford celebrates scoring his second goal with Wout Weghorst. Photograph: Richard Heathcote/Getty Images Jadon Sancho celebrates scoring Manchester United’s third goal. Photograph: Ash Donelon/Manchester United/Getty Images “If I say Istanbul, he says Athens.” Rafa Benítez smiles. It is almost 18 years since Liverpool’s comeback against Milan in the 2005 Champions League final, but everywhere he goes, everyone he speaks to, it is always there. Well, almosteveryone. “When I see Carlo Ancelotti we don’t talk about it much,” the former Liverpool manager says. “He doesn’t like talking about it and I don’t like talking about the final two years later. In Athens we were better and didn’t win; in Istanbul they had a great team and didn’t. That’s football.” For Benítez, it is the moment and it helped form Ancelotti, who often cites that night as a lesson. “Experience is a rank,” Benítez says, a recurring theme soon revealing itself: the defence of a generation. Two years later, Ancelotti’s Milan team defeated Liverpool in the final. The Italian then won Madrid’s 10th European Cup, rescued by a 94thminute goal, in 2014. And he travels to Anfield on Tuesday for the first leg of their last-16 tie defending probably the most extraordinary Champions League campaign there has been, a collection of ridiculous comebacks last season that lacked only an Istanbul at the end. “One thing that’s not up for discussion is that Istanbul was the best European Cup final in history in emotional terms and probably will be for many years,” Benítez says. “All those things. The atmosphere, the fans singing. [Gennaro] Gattuso: did he touch the cup? The turnaround. The amount of times I have been asked about half-time. That can never be repeated. And for both of us, it was an experience. I’m a better coach for it; a better coach now than I was years ago.” There is a warmth as Benítez talks about Ancelotti, one year his senior and with a career path that crossed his, coaching at Madrid, Everton and Napoli. There is also a warmth for the clubs that meet this week and that made the greatest impact on him. There is an analysis to be made too, of course: there always is with him, coach by vocation, a man unable to sit still, a picture drawn up of the game he anticipates. It is only nine months since Liverpool and Madrid met in the final, but things look different now, especially at Anfield. Why? Context, Benítez says first: everything has to be analysed in context. “This is a Liverpool team with injuries, not getting the results expected,” Benítez says. “Players like [Roberto] Firmino or [Diogo] Jota, who connected with [Mohamed] Salah, have been missing. The departures, especially [Sadio] Mané, change the structure. Signings should compensate for that but Darwin Núñez or [Cody] Gakpo are different – especially Núñez, who moves into space more. No one expected Firmino and Jota to get injured at once and maybe that obliges you to accelerate a process. “Sometimes that’s good: I had Raúl at 17 and he went straight into the first team at Real Madrid. But there are other players who need time to mature. The demands are there though. They have to perform now and sometimes that pressure is too great, which can affect everything. “Jürgen is still a great coach, but if you take away a series of important elements like [Virgil] van Dijk who gives you defensive solidity or Mané then add the absence of Firmino and Jota, that’s going to be felt. The midfield has had to take on greater responsibility, a more central role. [Stefan] Bajcetic is playing very well and there are players who bring a freshness but you want veterans for them to develop alongside – like the transition with [Toni] Kroos and [Luka] Modric at Madrid. [Dani] Ceballos and [Federico] Valverde are fundamental too and maybe Liverpool lack those players having the time to develop. “At the same time Arsenal, [Manchester] City, [Manchester] United are growing, your objectives become harder to meet, and that can create nerves, doubts, a lack of confidence. Players start to commit errors and that brings insecurity. When you lose Van Dijk who was the player upon whom the defence was sustained, you start to doubt and when you start to doubt …” So how do you fix that? “The only way to solve that problem is a good game, a good result. I think Everton was Rafael Benítez: ‘When I see Ancelotti, we don’t talk about Istanbul much’ Sid Lowe Rafael Benítez celebrates winning the Champions League final in 2005 in Istanbul with Liverpool. Photograph: Rebecca Naden/PA Liverpool’s Stefan Bajcetic has caught Rafael Benítez’s eye and he could feature against Real Madrid on Tuesday. Photograph: Carl Recine/Reuters Monday 20 February 2023 The Guardian Sport 33 Continued from page 32 Continued on page 34

a key game that could be the starting point, the beginning of growth. “Klopp is a great coach who will recover the team and no one can question Ancelotti,” Benítez says. For a while, though, it appeared that they could question him. It is remarkable to think that, past 60, coaching at Everton, Ancelotti seemed lost to the European elite where his career had unfolded. A chance phone call about something else entirely brought him back to Madrid. Now he is a European champion with a record no one can match and even Brazil want him. “Ancelotti is a good coach wherever you put him,” Benítez says. “If you put him in at Brazil, with the tools they have, his ability and capacity to manage a group, he’ll do well. Of course he will be good for them. You say ‘disappeared’ before, but if you have coaches with experience – Ancelotti, Klopp, [Manuel] Pellegrini, [Luciano] Spalletti – and you give them the tools, they get results. Young coaches: maybe 5% can do it but others need time. That’s natural. Ancelotti has shown repeatedly that experience is a rank, a quality. There are so many good coaches we don’t value because they’re not in big leagues or [talked about] on social media.” Coaches like you? There is something in what Benítez says that feels as if it applies to him too, some sense that he has slipped from those conversations or the public eye, no longer seen as one of those managers linked to the biggest clubs: a little like Ancelotti a couple of years ago. Their shared club offers an example: Everton have not exactly improved since their departures. Does he feel like that? Yes, he does. “Look, when I left Everton they were six points off relegation with two games in hand having spent £1.7m,” Benítez says, referring to his pre-season outlay. The spending started to become far more generous shortly before he was sacked and a year later,despite an outlay of more than £100m, the club were in the relegation zone. “Where we had never been,” Benítez says. “They had signed 11 players. People said: ‘Yeah, but the errors of the past …’ What errors of the past? Eleven signings is a new team. So, the feeling is that what was done is not valued enough because there isn’t a proper analysis. “You have the image of Istanbul, say, but there’s loads of work to get there. People say it was lucky. It’s not lucky. We had beaten Juventus, we had beaten Chelsea, we beat Milan, who were the best team around. You don’t win all those games through luck: you win through work, ability, tactical analysis, etc. “The problem is that everything moves on fast, [people say] you have to get a modern, attacking coach. I have the latest software and I analyse every game. I look at players and I learn every day. I am up to date with big data. Experienced coaches have more chance of being successful. Young coaches can succeed of course – I did at Valencia – but older coaches have more because they’re learning all the time. I am better than 10 years ago.” Talk returns to the Champions League and to the accusations faced by Juventus and Manchester City. Benítez suggests that financial fair play has offered control and protection but has to be looked at and “done differently so that the teams at the bottom can get closer to the teams at the top, “rather than having that distance growing all the time”. That, he suggests, creates a race and he adds: “If you go very fast with the car, OK, but if the police get a radar they can catch you. We have to let justice follow its path; we don’t have all the details.” City will of course be among the favourites, while the winner between Liverpool and Real, his former clubs, will be there too. Who then does Benítez see winning it? “I like Napoli,” he says. “People talk about Madrid, the usual teams. But Napoli are confident, playing well, strong in the league, so that’s not so much of a distraction, and the further they progress the more they will grow. And why not? I’m not saying they will win it, but why not?” Why indeed? After all, anything is possible and Rafa Benítez knows that better than anyone. Except Ancelotti. The remains of the former Ghanaian international footballer Christian Atsu, who died in the devastating earthquake in Turkey, were being flown home on Sunday, the country’s foreign ministry said. Atsu, 31, was caught up in a 7.8- magnitude quake that rocked Turkey and Syria on 6 February, killing more than 44,000 people in both countries. There were initial reports the former Chelsea and Newcastle player had been rescued a day after the quake, but these turned out to be false and his body was found on Saturday. “The remains will be accompanied by his family and Ghana’s ambassador to Turkey on a Turkish Airlines flight and will arrive in Accra at 7.40pm Sunday,” Ghana’s foreign ministry said. On Saturday, the ministry said Atsu’s older brother and twin sister were present at the site of the rescue when his body was recovered. His widow, Marie-Claire Rupio, and their three children were in the stands at St James’ Park on Saturday to join in a tribute to the player before Newcastle’s Premier League match against Liverpool. Atsu scored the last of his 33 career goals for Hatayspor in Turkey’s Super Lig on 5 February, hours before the quake struck. “There are no words to describe our sadness,” tweeted his Turkish top-flight club in homage to him. “We will not forget you, Atsu. Peace be upon you, beautiful person.” Atsu previously played for his national team the Black Stars. Ghana’s president, Nana Akufo-Addo, said”: “Football has lost one of its finest ambassadors, one who will be difficult to replace.” Earthquake victim footballer Christian Atsu’s remains to be flown home to Ghana Agence France-Presse in Accra The coffin containing the body of Christian Atsu is loaded into an airplane bound for Ghana. Photograph: Can Erok/AFP/Getty Images The Manchester United Supporters Trust (Must) has voiced concerns over Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad al-Thani’s proposed purchase of the club due to Qatar’s human rights policy, especially in regards to women and the LGBTQ+ community. Thani, the chairman of QIB, a Qatari bank, tabled a minimum £4bn bid for United on Friday via his Nine Two Foundation, which led to United’s LGBTQ+ supporters’ group, the Rainbow Devils, raising “deep concern” over a possible takeover from a fund linked to Qatar given same-sex relationships are criminalised there. Must has shown support for that stance via a statement that also made clear its unease with Thani’s bid given the ownership of Paris Saint-Germain by Qatar Sports Investments (QSI). That part of Must’s statement, touching on “sporting integrity”, equally relates to Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the billionaire who also wishes to buy United and via his company, Ineos, owns Ligue 1 side Nice. “We note the importance that any owner respects the rights of all people, particularly women and the LGBTQ+ community. Concerns have been raised by other fans groups which we fully support,” read the statement, which was released during United’s 3-0 victory over Leicester on Sunday afternoon, a result that moves Erik ten Hag’s side within three points of second-placed Manchester City. “There are questions about sporting integrity given the exceptionally close links between some bidders and the owners of other European clubs including PSG [Paris SaintGermain] and Nice. We urge all bidders to open a dialogue with fans groups alongside the bidding process with the club, in order to discuss their proposals including the above issues. “A list of requests to any new owner was laid out by Must in December, with how the bid is financed among the utmost importance given the Glazer family’s contentious leveraged takeover. There are also questions about whether any bids will also be based on high levels of debt. Everyone can see the progress the team is making under Erik Ten Hag,” the statement added. “Any prospective bidder needs to explicitly commit to backing Erik and his plans to restore United to glory.” Thani’s and Ratcliffe’s bids for United were confirmed on Friday, with both expressing a desire to bring longterm success to the club, each also insisting that unlike the Glazers’ period of ownership, which began in 2005, no debt will be loaded on the club should they take charge at Old Trafford. Speaking after the win over Leicester, in which Marcus Rashford scored Manchester United supporters’ group voices concerns over Qatari bid for club Jamie Jackson at Old Trafford Manchester United Supporters Trust and the Rainbow Devils have made clear their concerns over the Qatari bid. Photograph: Richard Heathcote/Getty Images The Guardian Monday 20 February 2023 34 Sport Continued from page 33 Continued on page 35

United’s first two goals and Jadon Sancho the third, Ten Hag made reference to Must’s statement and specifically the backing it called for him to be shown by whoever purchases United. “I thank the fans that they trust me,” he said. “I feel committed with this club, I love to be here but it is not in my influence. What I can influence is the performance of this team and I will do everything to do this.” The managing director of Bolton’s new stadium sponsors says he hopes its dash of “schoolboy humour” will tie television pundits in knots when its name-change comes into effect this summer. The naming rights deal with a Bolton-based recyclable building product manufacturer ensures the League One promotion hopefuls will be playing at the Toughsheet Community Stadium for the next five years. “We’re happy to have a bit of fun with it,” Doug Mercer told the Bolton News. “Obviously the brand name is a bit tongue-in-cheek, a bit schoolboy humour. “But I can’t wait to see them try and make each other say it on Sky Sports, it’ll be a great laugh!” Bolton say the partnership with the company, based in nearby Westhoughton, represents the largest sponsorship deal in the club’s history. But how it will go down with fans remains to be seen. Many have already taken to social media to express misgivings only to concede: if we don’t like it, it’s Toughsheet. Unlike Bolton, Southend United showed less self-awareness last summer when they renamed a part of their stadium after one of their sponsors, Gilbert & Rose, leading to a reference to one of Britain’s most notorious serial killers. Unfortunately the estate agents’ name adorned the west side of Roots Hall, leading to the Gilbert & Rose West Stand. The juxtaposition of Gilbert & Rose with West Stand inadvertently saw Rose and West appear next to each other on season ticket cards and the National League club’s website. One Southend fan, Paul Napper, wrote on Twitter: “Only Southend United could have a sponsor for the West Stand called Gilbert & Rose, inevitably leading to the Gilbert & Rose West Stand.” More innocent is the Dripping Pan, in Sussex, where non-league Lewes play. The name’s origins are uncertain but possibly came from a medieval salt pan that linked to the nearby priory where there was also a cricket club. York City displayed their sweet side when they announced Bootham Crescent was being renamed the KitKat Crescent, a deal with Nestlé that lasted from 2005 to 2010. On the other end of the spectrum to York’s 8,200 capacity, proof that no one is immune to a sponsor’s chequebook: Barcelona’s ground – capacity 99,000 - is officially called the Spotify Camp Nou. In rugby league, two names jump out: The Mend-a-Hose Jungle is Castleford Tigers’ stadium while the Totally Wicked Stadium has been St Helens’ ground since 2012. No matter the sport, it’s all in the name. ‘Don’t like it, it’s Toughsheet’: Bolton announce new stadium sponsor PA Media Doug Mercer, Bolton’s managing director: ‘I can’t wait to see them try and make each other say it on Sky Sports, it’ll be a great laugh!’ Photograph: Ryan Browne/Shutterstock Don’t mess with the formula. With 71 minutes gone at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, the first 45 of them a haze of empty content and trapped energy, Harry Kane bumped Angelo Ogbonna away with his back to the West Ham goal, flexing his glutes, aware of the beeping, flashing light on his internal radar. Behind him Son Heung-min had already begun to sprint. Son knew, even before that surge of static had begun to crackle around the stands. We have seen this picture before. The pass from Kane was instant, fizzed with a kind of celebratory excitement. Son flexed his hip to alter the angle and rolled the ball into the far corner of the West Ham goal to make it 2-0 and kill a game that had only briefly flickered into life. It is a source of pride at Spurs that Son and Kane hold that record for most mutually assisting couple in Premier League history. It has been a wonderful partnership. But it also points to a certain static quality. You two? Still? Other attacking players have drifted in and out, a mercurial winger here, a jinking creator there, ghosts in the machine. But for all the churn around them, the procession of fill-ins and pressed-men, this Spurs era has still found nothing even close to the synergy, the basic magic of Kane-Son. Son did start on the bench here, consequence of his own recent poor form. And in fairness Spurs were already 1-0 up against a doggedly mediocre West Ham by the time he came on. But somehow it all still felt a little in the balance, if only because everything is in the balance right now, even by the standards of a club where, let’s face it, things are pretty much always in the balance. “We haven’t lost to West Ham in our last 10 meetings! Win today and we go fourth!” You do have to hand it to the Spurs stadium announcer, whose job it is to emote Spurs-ness into the surrounding air, to amplify essence of Spurs across the rooftops. He is a master of his job. You could almost hear the old lags wincing in the stands at this show of brittle, fate-tempting hope just five minutes before kick-off. We know. Everyone knows. Just, you know, don’t say it. It had been a horrendous week for Spurs to this point, with two defeats, a manager sans gallbladder confined in Italy, and season-ending injury to their best midfielder. Here, though, was a chance for redemption. Somehow, despite seeming to lose pretty much every single game so far this season, Spurs could reclaim fourth spot with a win. It is a part of the strange gravity of this team that for all the bruises along the way their season is still very much alive right now on three fronts. Who knows: enough collapses, enough disappointing afternoons from here and they might even mount a title challenge. Here Spurs also had to overcome the stodginess of their own starting XI, as Conte and Cristian Stellini picked a team that looked heavy on the carbs and light on sauce. With David Moyes remaining steadfastly David Moyes there were 15 mainly defensive players on the pitch at kick-off. This was to be expected from West Ham, who have scored seven goals away from home all season. But did Spurs really need to be quite this austere? To go full Moyes in reply, deeper Moyes, more Moyes than Moyes? The first half was the most Sundayish of things. Spurs counter-pressed well, often winning the ball back 40 yards from goal, then seeming to abruptly run out of ideas. But there was an instant change of tone and tempo after half-time, as the whole team stood further up the pitch and the wing backs Ben Davies and Emerson Royal stormed upfield à deux to fillet the West Ham defence. The opening goal came from a brilliant forward pass from Pierre-Emile Højbjerg, threaded with just enough fade and cut to spin into the path of Davies. His pass inside was rolled into the corner by Royal, on a thrilling run through the centre. Where does victory here leave this Spurs team? With Manchester United winning in the same afternoon there is now a clear sense of separation in the Premier League table. We have a top three; and we have everyone else. Spurs, Newcastle, Fulham, Brighton and Brentford are all in the mix for fourth place. Liverpool, busy wrestling with their own invisible demons, seem the most likely to hit a consistent pitch of form. For Spurs hope will lie in the second 45 minutes here, not the clenched and cautious first period. Stellini suggested afterwards that the first half was necessary to create the second. Maybe. More likely this was Brittle Spurs ditch full Moyes caution to offer Conte renewed hope Barney Ronay at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium Tottenham’s second-half performance offered hope for the rest of the season after a stodgy opening 45 minutes. Photograph: Tottenham Hotspur FC/Getty Images David Moyes remained steadfastly David Moyes, packing his team with defensive players. Photograph: Ryan Pierse/Getty Images Monday 20 February 2023 The Guardian Sport / Soccer 35 Continued from page 34 Continued on page 37

simply Spurs being Spurs, a slightly brittle thing, always reaching for the same emergency button in moments of doubt, but with a season that remains unexpectedly vital. With an opening victory safely under their belt, a much-changed England side edged to a win over Italy in the Arnold Clark Cup. In front of 32,128 fans in Coventry, the Lionesses retained their unbeaten run despite conceding a controversial goal. Rachel Daly headed a double as she continued her claim for a striker’s role while Sofia Cantore scored for the visitors. Sarina Wiegman was pleased with her team’s performance. “I’m very happy,” the England manager said. “Of course, I’m happy with the win because we always play to win. But today we saw many players on the pitch. We saw different players than last Thursday and that’s exactly what we wanted.” As a manager renowned for her stable selection, it was perhaps a little surprising to see so many changes from Wiegman. Just two players remained from the opener against South Korea, with Jess Carter in defence and Alex Greenwood captaining the team. Then again, England’s squad depth is no secret and with just one international window left after this tournament before the World Cup, this encounter presented the perfect opportunity to look at those knocking on the door. Young talents Katie Robinson, Jess Park and Maya Le Tissier added to their caps while Laura Coombs started after making her first appearance since 2015 against Korea. “The players are competing with each other because of course everyone wants to go to the World Cup and every moment you get to show yourself,” Wiegman said. “But we’re also playing as a team and collaborating really well ... I think that’s really good.” Wiegman’s counterpart, Milena Bertolini, was equally in the mood for changing things up with eight alterations to her team. After defeat to Belgium, she called on her more established players as they faced the European champions. It was a landmark occasion for stalwart Cristiana Girelli, who further established her status in Italian football with her 100th appearance. Wiegman had anticipated a different tactical game, with Italy’s adaptability well known. It was, therefore, important for the Lionesses to hit the ground running. In front of a favourable crowd, tThey dominated the ball in the first half with Park enjoying space in the pocket and Robinson’s technical ability causing problems. Laura Giuliani was forced into a series of early saves to deny the energetic Daly up front. While in control, the Lionesses were not at their fluid best as they tried to problem solve against a resilient Italy. Just as the match was starting to get disjointed, however, England found the breakthrough through a trademark Daly goal. Robinson’s whipped delivery found the striker soaring high above Valentina Bergamaschi to power home the opener. Similar to the Korea match, England went up a level after the break, aided by the addition of Katie Zelem’s and Jordan Nobbs’s energy in midfield. Daly should have had a hat-trick, first volleying over Le Tissier’s delivery before heading a Robinson cross wide. Meanwhile, Nobbs was denied by the strong hand of Giuliani in goal. With half an hour left to play, England’s rhythm was delivered a blow in controversial fashion when the ball looked to have crossed the line before Barbara Bonansea delivered a cross. Unseen by the referee and her assistant, the dellivery found substitute Cantore who headed past Ellie Roebuck. Wiegman immediately turned to her established attackers, with Lauren James and Chloe Kelly entering the fold. Within minutes, England’s lead was restored. James was afforded space, controlling the ball with time to assess her options. She picked out Daly in the middle with a sumptuous cross, who duly headed home. It was a performance from one of England’s most versatile players that reignited the discussion around her best position on the pitch. “I think they’re both [Daly and Alessia Russo] very good strikers,” Wiegman said. “We all know that Rachel is very versatile so she can play in different positions ... What we want to see this week is what options we have.” It was just the tonic the Lionesses needed as they controlled the match to its conclusion. A second win in the tournament for Wiegman’s side sees England top the group going into the final match day. They will face Belgium in Bristol on Wednesday with ambitions to retain their trophy. Rachel Daly’s double gives England Arnold Clark Cup win over Italy Sophie Downey at the Coventry Building Society Arena Rachel Daly heads England’s winner against Italy. Photograph: Tim Goode/PA England’s Jess Carter reacts after Italy score a controversial equaliser. Photograph: Mark Thompson/Getty Images Lionel Messi scored a stunning freekick in added time to earn Paris SaintGermain a 4-3 comeback win over Lille and lift them eight points clear at the top of the Ligue 1 standings. PSG, who have struggled for consistency since their return from the World Cup break, extended their lead over second-placed Marseille who travel to Toulouse later on Sunday. Kylian Mbappé, making his first start after a two-week injury layoff, opened the scoring in the 11th minute with a brilliant piece of individual skill. “The match was not great, we made a lot of mistakes but we have shown that even when the context is not favourable, we can get through. We are a different team, we can get by all the time,” Mbappé told Prime Video. Christophe Galtier’s side doubled their lead six minutes later when Neymar tapped in a Vitinha cross to finish off a flowing move. However, Lille were far from passive and Bafodé Diakité nodded home an André Gomes cross to pull one back in the 24th minute. PSG suffered a blow early in the second half when Neymar was taken off on a stretcher with a suspected ankle injury. Lille won a penalty after Marco Verratti tugged Tiago Djaló’s shirt and Jonathan David coolly converted the spot-kick to level the scores. Lille piled on the pressure and were rewarded when Gomes pinged a long ball into the feet of Jonathan Bamba, who smashed his effort past Gianluigi Donnarumma to give his side the lead. The visitors let their intensity drop, however, and they were punished when Mbappé turned in Juan Bernat’s cross to make it 3-3. Messi won a free-kick five minutes into stoppage time and the Argentinian curled it into the bottom corner to score his 11th league goal of the season.. In Germany, Borussia Dortmund crushed Hertha Berlin 4-1 with a goal and an assist from Karim Adeyemi to join leaders Bayern Munich at the top of the Bundesliga. Adeyemi, the Germany international, put the hosts ahead with a superb backheel flick from a Marco Reus assist in the 27th minute before turning provider to feed Donyell Malen at the far post for their second goal four minutes later. Adeyemi then had to be taken off after pulling a thigh muscle while setting up their second goal. The visitors cut the deficit one minute after the restart through Lucas Tousart but a sensational Reus free kick into the top corner in the 76th minute restored order for Dortmund before Julian Brandt netted their fourth. Meanwhile, Union Berlin missed the chance to move top after stumbling to a 0-0 draw against bottom side Schalke to slip to third place on goal difference. Atlético Madrid’s Antoine Griezmann scored a brilliant late goal to claim a battling 1-0 win at home to Athletic Bilbao and strengthen their grip on fourth place in La Liga. Atlético were the better side for large parts of the game but were left to rue a flurry of missed chances until Griezmann broke the deadlock in the 73rd minute. Elsewhere, Barcelona secured a hard-fought 2-0 victory against Cádiz. Goals from Sergi Roberto and Robert Lewandowski were enough to re-establish their eight-point lead over secondplaced Real Madrid. Goals by forward Moises Kean and winger Angel Di María gave Juventus a 2-0 victory at Spezia, extending their winning streak in Serie A to three games. Juve moved up to seventh on 32 points from 23 games. They are 10 points off fourth spot. European roundup: Neymar carried off before Messi’s late winner for PSG Reuters Neymar expresses his agony as he is taken off on a stretcher during PSG’s dramatic Ligue 1 win against Lille. Photograph: Xavier Laine/Getty Images Lionel Messi scores Paris Saint-Germain’s winning goal with a trademark free-kick. Photograph: Sylvain Lefevre/GetMonday 20 February 2023 The Guardian Soccer 37 Continued from page 35

Neil Critchley has been sacked as the head coach of Queens Park Rangers after a desperate run of form. Critchley’s assistants, Iain Brunskill and Mike Garrity, have also left the club. The move to dispense with Critchley’s services comes after QPR’s 3-1 defeat by Middlesbrough on Saturday, a result which left them 17th in the Championship. The 44-year-old joined QPR on a three-and-a-half-year deal in December after Michael Beale left for Rangers but the Championship club have won just once in 12 games. They are now eight points above the relegation zone. The QPR chief executive, Lee Hoos, said: “It is hugely disappointing to have to make such a decision so early into Neil’s tenure with the club. However, after seeing the team slip from playoff contenders to one being drawn into a relegation battle, the board felt it had to act. “There is no doubt Neil inherited a difficult situation and we would like to acknowledge his superb work ethic and professionalism throughout. He is a fantastic man and we have no doubts he will go on to be a success elsewhere, just as he was at Blackpool.” The director of football, Les Ferdinand, added: “Unfortunately, things have not worked out how any of us would have liked. As we enter into a critical stage of the season, we understand the need for a swift appointment to be made. “Stability is key to the success of a football club and this season has presented challenges which have denied us that stability. “For us to move forward we must all learn from what has happened and pull together.” QPR sack Neil Critchley after 12 games as manager Guardian sport Neil Critchley was sacked as manager of QPR after their 3-1 defeat by Middlesbrough on Saturday. Photograph: Anna Gowthorpe/ Shutterstock The Guardian Monday 20 February 2023 38 Soccer *