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The troubled history of Zaha Hadid's Tokyo Olympic stadium project | Architecture | The Guardian

Fri, 15 May 2026 23:46:38 +0000

It was to land in the middle of Tokyo’s Meiji Park like an intergalactic bike helmet, bulging above its low-rise surroundings in futuristic white arcs, but now Zaha Hadid’s design for the 2020 Olympic stadium will be no more. With costs escalating to 252bn yen (£1.3bn, $2bn) – almost double the original budget and making it the most expensive stadium of modern times – the oversized arena has finally been scrapped.

For many, the project’s cancellation is almost two years overdue. Ever since it was unveiled in 2013, the design has faced fierce criticism from all quarters, suggesting it was doomed from the start. Japan’s most eminent architects came out all guns blazing when the designs were first released, organising a symposium against the scheme which resulted in a petition calling for the project to be stopped, describing the design as a “monstrosity completely out of scale with the surrounding mixed-residential environs”.

They highlighted the fact that the stadium sits in a historic area with a 20-metre height limit on new buildings, yet Hadid’s scheme would have risen to 70 metres, looming over the gardens of the Meiji shrine. Led by Pritzker prize-winner Fumihiko Maki, along with Toyo Ito, Kengo Kuma and Sou Fujimoto, the petition gained over 80,000 signatures – the same as the capacity as the planned megastructure.

The petition was swiftly followed by a blistering assault from Arata Isozaki , architect of Barcelona’s Olympic stadium, who described Hadid’s project as a “monumental mistake” and warned it would be a “disgrace to future generations”. In a lengthy open letter to the Japan Sports Council, the government body in charge of plans for the 2020 games, he railed against the “distorted” process that had led to “a dull, slow form, like a turtle waiting for Japan to sink so that it can swim away”.

Go-kart, helmet, potty? Alternative uses for Zaha Hadid's Olympic stadium

“Tokyo has the chance to be the first to set a new precedent,” he wrote, arguing that the scale of the project was driven by the desire to have a wasteful centrepiece for the opening ceremony. He set out detailed recommendations for how the stadium could be downsized and a separate temporary structure erected for the opening extravaganza outside the Imperial Palace moat, using the Edo castle walls and keep as a dramatic backdrop. But his sensible proposal for a lightweight, low-cost alternative fell on deaf ears.

As ever, Hadid was quick to bat away her critics, describing the attacks from her fellow architects as “embarrassing for them”. “I understand it’s their town,” she said. “But they’re hypocrites because if they are against the idea of doing a stadium on that site, I don’t think they should have entered the competition. The fact that they lost is their problem. They don’t want a foreigner to build in Tokyo for a national stadium. On the other hand, they all have work abroad.”

But the opposition went far beyond the rarified realms of the architectural community and its professional infighting. Community groups were up in arms about the proposed destruction to be wrought on one of the few green spaces left in the city, an area of gardens and gingko trees built in the early 1900s to commemorate the Meiji emperor who dragged the isolated country into the modern world.

“This place is a kind of oasis,” said Nobuko Shimizu, co-chairwoman of the pressure group Custodians of the National Stadium. “We can walk and chat and hold picnics here. If the new stadium is built, we would lose those parks and greens. It is not acceptable.”

Environmental concerns aside, there was also mounting anger about the fact that Hadid’s supersized plans entailed evicting 300 households from the nearby Kasumigaoka apartments, as well as a handful of homeless men who sleep in the park.

“Lots of elderly people live in the apartment blocks, and the stress of moving to a new place will be too much for them,” Tetsuo Ogawa, a member of pressure group People Against the Olympics, told the Guardian. “There is a real sense of community where they are now, but that will be destroyed when they move out.”

Japan PM Shinzō Abe scraps Zaha Hadid’s Tokyo Olympic stadium design Guardian

And there were alternative options on the table that would have been neither as costly nor as destructive. The site was home to the 1964 Olympic stadium, a 54,000-capacity venue, which many argued could be upgraded and reused, in the same way that successful refurbishments had been made to the Olympiastadion in Berlin, host of the 1936 Games, and to the Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles, Olympic host in 1932 and 1984.

Toyo Ito went as far as drawing up an alternative proposal , which could now have been revived – if the original stadium hadn’t already been demolished. It was finally reduced to a heap of rubble in May to create a landing pad for Hadid’s spaceship.

“It was a white elephant waiting to happen,” said Jeff Kingston, professor at Tokyo’s Temple University.“There are very few events that will require such a massive stadium, one that blights one of Tokyo’s greenbelts. For a fraction of the cost they could have retrofitted the old stadium that requires far less maintenance than the new facility. So taxpayers will be handed a gift that keeps on taking.”

A spokesman for Zaha Hadid Architects said that spiralling costs should not be blamed on the design, adding that the practice is continuing to work with their client in Tokyo.

“It is not the case that the recently reported cost increases are due to the design, which uses standard materials and techniques well within the capability of Japanese contractors and meets the budget set by the Japan Sports Council,” the architects said in a statement. “The real challenge for the stadium has been agreeing an acceptable construction cost against the backdrop of steep annual increases in construction costs in Tokyo and a fixed deadline.”

It is a problem the London 2012 Olympic committee attempted to avoid in the procurement of its own main stadium, which did away with the usual format of an international competition – to much criticism at the time – and instead went out to tender for a contractor-led consortium, hoping it would be quicker and cheaper. It may have come in on time, but London’s stadium budget also spiralled out of control, from an initial £280m to £496m. Intended to be dismantled , it has stayed put and is currently undergoing alterations to make it suitable for football – bringing the total budget to over £700m.

Originally billed as the “compact Olympics”, Tokyo’s organisers have similarly struggled to retain control over their slimline vision, with Hadid’s extravagant stadium at the centre of rising discontent over the costly endeavour. Prime minister Shinzo Abe’s approval ratings have recently plummeted to a new low, which government officials blame partly on festering public anger over the games. With only five years to go until the Olympics arrives, they must be wishing they had heeded their own architects’ desperate warnings and taken their eminently sensible advice – while they still had a stadium left to reuse.

Rukmini Iyer’s quick and easy recipe for artichoke, olive and feta pithivier | Food | The Guardian

Fri, 15 May 2026 23:28:47 +0000

Rukmini Iyer's artichoke olive and feta pithivier. Photograph: Kim Lightbody/The Guardian. Food styling: Tamara Vos. Prop styling: Anna Wilkins. Food styling assistant: Thea Hudson.

Rukmini Iyer’s quick and easy recipe for artichoke, olive and feta pithivier

A simple, moreish meat-free main that looks as wonderful as it tastes

Pithiviers look absolutely beautiful at the table. For the classic shape, you can buy circular all-butter puff pastry (Picard does an excellent one, with two sheets in one packet) or cut regular puff pastry into circles. That said, it’s just as delicious and there’s more bang for your buck with a big rectangle. Either way, it’s filled with moreish artichokes, olives and feta, with fresh lemon and parsley to lift the flavours. It’s 100% the type of meat-free main that everyone else wants to try, too.

Artichoke, olive and feta pithivier

Prep 10 min
Cook 30 min
Serves 4

100g baby spinach
15g flat-leaf parsley, finely chopped
200g ricotta
200g feta, crumbled
60g pitted olives (green for preference), chopped
120g jarred artichokes, roughly chopped
½ lemon, juiced
Salt (optional)
2 320g rolls puff pastry (ideally all butter)
1 egg, beaten

Heat the oven to 200C (180C fan)/390F/gas 6 and line a baking tray. Put the spinach in a heatproof bowl, cover with a plate and microwave on high for two minutes. (If you don’t have a microwave, put the spinach in a colander in the sink and pour over the water from a hot kettle, until the leaves are wilted.) Leave the spinach to cool for a few minutes, then use a clean tea towel or kitchen paper to squeeze out the excess water and chop roughly.

Mix the parsley, ricotta, feta, olives, artichokes and lemon juice in a bowl, stir through the chopped spinach and taste – add salt and more lemon juice if needed. (I find the feta and olives provide enough salt, so tend not to add any.)

Unroll the puff pastry sheets and place one on the lined tray. Spread the spinach and ricotta mixture all over the sheet, leaving a 2cm border all around the edge, then gently lay the second pastry sheet on the top and pinch the edges together. Brush the top of the pastry with the beaten egg, then use a sharp knife to cut a small steam hole in the middle. Cut a swirling pattern from the middle to the outside edge, as pictured.

Bake for 25-30 minutes, until the pastry is evenly golden brown and cooked through, and serve hot, perhaps with a green salad.

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Tanya Bush’s recipes for carrot cake with cream cheese mousse, and Neapolitan pavlova | Food | The Guardian

Fri, 15 May 2026 23:28:47 +0000

Carrot cake is heaven at any time of year, but especially around Easter. Thanks to a generous glug of olive oil and heaps of finely shredded carrots, this single-layer version stays moist for days. A supple crumb, deep carrot flavour, a halo of cinnamon: it’s as close to divinity as I’ll ever get. For something more unexpected, meanwhile, I love this Neapolitan-inspired pavlova: a crisp, strawberry meringue piled with bittersweet fudge sauce, tangy vanilla cream cheese whip and bright strawberry compote. It’s impressive yet simple, and a raucous pleasure to devour communally with spoons.

Carrot cake with cream cheese mousse (pictured top)

Prep 10 min
Cook 1 hr
Makes 1 x 23cm cake, to serve 10

For the carrot cake
Oil, for greasing
190g peeled and coarsely chopped carrots
120g plain flour
½ tsp baking powder
½ tsp bicarbonate of soda (baking soda)
½ tsp sea salt
Scant ½ tsp ground cinnamon, plus extra for dusting
¼ tsp ground cardamom
¼ tsp ground nutmeg
200g granulated sugar
100g extra-virgin olive oil
100g eggs (about 2 large ones), at room temperature
1 tsp vanilla extract

Heat the oven to 180C (160C fan)/350F/gas 4, and oil or spritz a 23cm round cake tin with oil or cooking spray, then line it with greaseproof paper.

Put the chopped carrots in a food processor and pulse until finely shredded.

In a small bowl, whisk the flour, baking powder, bicarb, salt, cinnamon, cardamom and nutmeg. In a large bowl, whisk the granulated sugar, oil, eggs and vanilla until combined. Add the shredded carrots and whisk for about two minutes more, until airy and light.

Whisk in the flour mixture a third at a time until just incorporated, then pour the batter into the lined tin. Bake for 25-35 minutes, until golden brown and the centre springs back when touched. Leave the cake to cool in its tin for 15 minutes, then invert on to a plate and carefully peel off the paper. Invert the cake again on to a rack and leave to cool. The cake can then be wrapped in clingfilm and stored at room temperature for up to five days, or in the freezer for up to three months.

In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment, beat the cream on medium speed for four to five minutes, until it forms stiff peaks. Transfer the whipped cream to a small bowl and chill until ready to use.

In the same bowl of the stand mixer, this time fitted with the paddle attachment, mix the cream cheese, vanilla and salt on medium speed for about a minute, until smooth. Add the icing sugar and mix until smooth.

Using a rubber spatula, gently fold a little of the whipped cream into the cream cheese mixture until incorporated, then fold in the remaining whipped cream.

Transfer the cake to a serving plate, dollop the cream cheese mousse on top and smooth with an offset spatula. Dust with cinnamon and serve immediately.

Neapolitan pavlova

Photograph: Matthew Hague/The Guardian. Food and prop styling: Lucy Turnbull. Food styling assistant: Georgia Rudd.

Prep 10 min
Cook 4 hr 15 min
Cool 2 hr+
Serves 8-10

Heat the oven to 110C (90C fan)/225F/gas ¼, and line a baking sheet with greaseproof paper.

In a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment, beat the egg whites on medium speed for about eight minutes, until they form soft peaks. With the motor running, gradually stream in the granulated sugar, then turn up the speed to medium-high and whisk for 10-15 miuntes, until the mix forms stiff, glossy peaks.

Add the cornstarch, Nesquik powder, vinegar and salt, mix until incorporated, then dollop the meringue in a 25cm disc on to the lined baking sheet. Use a bench scraper to smooth the sides, then scoop out a cup of the meringue from the centre to create a generous divot; use the meringue in the cup to reinforce the sides.

Bake for three and a half to four hours, until the meringue is very crisp, then turn off the oven and leave the meringue inside with the door closed for two to three hours, until cool. Store in an airtight container for up to five days.

To make the sauce, in a small pan on a medium heat mix the cream, brown sugar and salt, and bring to a simmer. Take off the heat, add the dark chocolate and cocoa, and whisk smooth. Return to a low heat and cook, whisking constantly, for a minute. Stir in the vanilla, then remove and leave to cool. Store the sauce in an airtight container in the fridge for up to a week. Warm it gently until smooth before using.

To make the cream cheese whip, in a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat the cream cheese, icing sugar and vanilla on medium-high speed until smooth. Add the cream and salt, switch out the paddle attachment for the whisk, then beat on medium for about four minutes, until the mix forms medium peaks.

Spoon half the fudge sauce into the indent in the meringue, then smooth it out. Dollop the cream cheese whip on top, then cover with strawberry compote and decorate with fresh strawberries, if using. Drizzle with the remaining fudge sauce, cut into slices and serve immediately.

These recipes are edited extracts from Will This Make You Happy: Stories & Recipes from a Year of Baking, by Tanya Bush, published by Chronicle Books at £21.99. To order a copy for £19.79, go to guardianbookshop.com

Psyllium husk is being touted as ‘nature’s Ozempic’ – here’s what experts say | Well actually | The Guardian

Fri, 15 May 2026 22:55:57 +0000

As Ozempic and similar GLP-1s have transformed the world of weight loss, health companies and influencers have been scrambling to find “nature’s Ozempic” – cheaper, non-prescription products they claim can help with weight loss. The latest buzzy supplement? Psyllium husk.

“Psyllium husk has become popular thanks to a wave of social media influencers and wellness personalities touting its ability to suppress appetite, regulate digestion and even mimic the effects of more costly medications,” says Lena Beal, spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. But comparing it to Ozempic is “oversimplified and misleading”, she warns.

On TikTok, more than 12,500 videos boast the psyllium husk tag. But this substance is not new; it has long been popular in India and across south Asia.

Is psyllium husk a miracle weight-loss substance? No. But there are benefits, experts say.

What is psyllium husk?

The outer covering of any seed is called a husk. Psyllium husk comes from the seed of Plantago ovata plants, a type of shrub that grows in sandy deserts and steppes.

In the US, “it is best known as the active ingredient in over-the-counter laxatives like Metamucil”, says Beal.

Psyllium husk can be consumed in pill or powder form. It can also be consumed whole, when is resembles tiny wood shavings. When combined with water, it creates a gloopy, gel-like substance.

What are the benefits of psyllium husk?

That gloopiness may not sound appealing, but it’s part of what makes the product useful.

Psyllium husk is a good source of soluble fiber, explains Katherine Zeratsky, a registered dietitian at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Soluble fiber – unlike insoluble fiber, which remains unchanged during digestion – attracts water during digestion and turns into a gel.

This gel can soften stools and add bulk to them, which helps in the management of constipation and diarrhea, says Julia Zumpano, a registered dietitian with the Cleveland Clinic Center for Human Nutrition.

What is okra water and is it good for your health?

Additionally, Zumpano says, this gel can bind with the bile in your gut, which is composed of cholesterol, and remove it with the body’s waste, thus reducing the amount of cholesterol in your body.

Beal points to a 2018 meta-analysis in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition which found 10-15g of psyllium husk a day significantly reduced LDL (or “bad” cholesterol) and total cholesterol in “healthy individuals and those with high cholesterol”.

By slowing the rate of glucose in the bloodstream, it can also help in blood sugar management, says Zumpano.

Psyllium husk can also increase one’s overall consumption of fiber, a significant benefit given that only 5% of people in the US and 9% of adults in the UK eat the recommended amount of 25-30g of fiber a day. Psyllium husk provides about 7g of fiber per tablespoon.

Eating fiber in any form has many benefits, says Zumpano, including “slowing down digestion and increasing satiety, which are both benefits of weight-loss drugs”. (She is careful to add that fiber does not accomplish either of these outcomes to the extent GLP-1s can.)

When increasing your fiber intake, start slowly and adjust as necessary, says Zeratsky. She suggests starting with a powder form, which gives you control of the amount.

What are the risks of psyllium husk?

Experts emphasize that it’s extremely important to consume psyllium husk with enough water: roughly 500ml of water per 20g of fiber.

Because psyllium husk expands quickly with liquid, without an adequate amount of water, it can become a choking hazard and potentially lead to gastrointestinal obstruction, says Beal.

This also means it may not be ideal for everyone. “People with swallowing difficulties, bowel strictures or severe gastrointestinal conditions like Crohn’s disease should consult a healthcare provider before using psyllium,” says Beal.

Fiber and psyllium can also potentially interact with certain medications, warns Zeratsky, so consult a doctor or pharmacist before taking it.

Also, thinking of it as “nature’s Ozempic” comes with its own risks, experts say.

Overconsumption can lead to digestive discomfort, she warns, adding that people may overly rely on a single ingredient instead of a “holistic lifestyle change”.

If psyllium husk isn’t your thing, there are plenty of other foods that offer similar benefits, says Zeratsky.

“Fruits, vegetables, beans and other legumes, and whole grains, particularly oats, barley and quinoa, all contain soluble fiber” and a variety of other beneficial nutrients, she says.

I’m watching myself on YouTube saying things I would never say. This is the deepfake menace we must confront | Yanis Varoufakis | The Guardian

Fri, 15 May 2026 20:48:34 +0000

It was my blue shirt, a present from my sister-in-law, that gave it all away. It made me think of Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin, the lowly bureaucrat in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novella The Double, a disconcerting study of the fragmented self within a vast, impersonal feudal system.

It all started with a message from an esteemed colleague congratulating me on a video talk on some geopolitical theme. When I clicked on the attached YouTube link to recall what I had said, I began to worry that my memory is not what it used to be. When did I record said video? A couple of minutes in, I knew there was something wrong. Not because I found fault in what I was saying, but because I realised that the video showed me sitting at my Athens office desk wearing that blue shirt, which had never left my island home. It was, as it turned out, a video featuring some deepfake AI doppelganger of me.

Since then, hundreds of such videos, bearing my face and synthesising my voice, have proliferated across YouTube and social media. Even this weekend, there has been another crop, depicting a deepfaked me saying fictitious things about the coup in Venezuela. They lecture, they say things I might have said, sometimes intermingled with things I would never say. They rage, they pontificate. Some are crude, others unsettlingly persuasive. Supporters send them to me, asking: “Yanis, did you really say that?” Opponents circulate them as proof of my idiocy. Far worse, some argue that my doppelgangers are more articulate and cogent than me. And so I find myself in the bizarre position of being a spectator to my own digital puppetry, a phantom in a technofeudal machine I have long argued is not merely broken, but engineered to disempower.

My initial reaction was to write to Google, Meta and the rest to demand that they take down these videos. Several forms were filled in anger before, a week or more later, some of these channels and videos were taken down, only to reappear instantly under different guises. Within days I had given up: whatever I did, however many hours I spent every day trying my luck at having big tech take down my AI doppelgangers, many more would grow back, Hydra-like.

‘Hundreds of videos, bearing my face and synthesising my voice, have proliferated across YouTube and social media.’ Another AI-generated image from a deepfake video of ‘Yanis Varoufakis’. Illustration: YouTube

Soon, rage gave way to contemplation. Was I not, after all, the one who argued that big tech did not merely digitise capitalism but in fact spearheaded a great transformation, turning markets into cloud fiefs and profit into cloud rents? Are my AI doppelgangers not the perfect confirmation that, in this technofeudal reality, the liberal individual is dead and buried?

Acquiescing to the partial loss of self-ownership, I sought solace in the rationalisation of these deepfakes as the ultimate act of feudal enclosure, proof that under technofeudalism we own nothing – not our labour’s data output, not our social graphs and now not even our audiovisual identity. Our new lords see us as tenants on their cloud lands, androids whose likeness they can appropriate at will to sow confusion, to muddy discourse, to drown genuine dissent in a cacophony of synthetic noise created for this purpose.

But then a sunnier thought hit me, one that harks back to ancient Athens. What if my AI doppelgangers were harbingers of isegoria (ἰσηγορία), a principle as bright, promising and absent as genuine democracy itself? When I asked several versions of AI chatbots to define it, they all dutifully misrepresented its meaning, defining isegoria as equality of speech, or the right to be heard, or the freedom to address the assembly. But that’s not what the Athenians meant with the word. In fact, to them isegoria meant the exact opposite of today’s “free speech”, which they would dismiss as the abstract right to shout into the void. To the Athenians, it meant the right to have your views judged seriously, on their merits, independently of who you are or indeed how well you phrase them.

Might AI deepfakes salvage isegoria from the clutches of our technofeudal dystopia? When we realise that it is impossible to verify who is speaking in a YouTube video, might we be forced to judge the merits of what is being said, rather than who is saying it? In the process of debasing authenticity, could big tech have inadvertently given isegoria a chance? These questions offered a glimmer of hope.

It was the hope that the spectre of democracy may still be hovering over our heads if only we can find the motivation to look up, to engage in the slow, difficult, democratic labour that the algorithmic feed was designed to obliterate: critical evaluation of views and arguments thrown at us. Alas, this hope, though tangible, is insufficient as long as our technofeudal lords retain two colossal, asymmetrical advantages.

How Amazon turned our capitalist era of free markets into the age of technofeudalism | Yanis Varoufakis

First, they own the agora itself – the servers, the feeds, the algorithmic means of communication. They can anoint their own speech as authentic with digital seals while drowning ours in a quagmire of doubt and noise. The result? Not isegoria, but a digital divine right where truth is the patented property of power.

Second, and more cunningly, they need no deepfakes to rule. Their ideology is embedded in the machine: the power to extract surplus value from proletarians connected to the cloud through various digital devices, the logic of extracting cloud rents from vassal capitalists on their platforms, the tyranny of shareholder value, their imminent success at privatising money.

So our task is not to beg these lords for verification. Our task is political. We must socialise cloud capital, the all-powerful new force transforming society and destroying everything that makes humanism imaginable.

Until then, let our digital doppelgangers speak. Perhaps they will so saturate the spectacle that we finally stop listening for our voice and start judging the arguments on their own terms. This is perhaps the most paradoxical shard of hope in a hall of mirrors. But in this carnival, we grasp at every fragment we can.

Yanis Varoufakis is an economist, politician and author. His latest book is Raise Your Soul! A Personal History of Resistance

Nearly one in four Americans believe political violence justified to ‘save’ US | US politics | The Guardian

Fri, 15 May 2026 00:17:39 +0000

Nearly one in four Americans believe that political violence may be justified to “save” the country, a national opinion poll has found.

The 14th annual American Values Survey, carried out by the non-profit Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) in partnership with the Brookings Institution thinktank, offers a snapshot of America’s deepening polarisation and willingness to contemplate taking up arms.

Even as Joe Biden has sought to lower the temperature, support for political violence has increased over the past two years, the survey shows. Today about 23% of Americans agree that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country” – up from 15% in 2021.

The PRRI has asked this question in eight separate surveys since March 2021 but this is the first time that support for political violence has risen above 20% in the general population.

One in three Republicans believe that “true American patriots” may have to resort to violence to save the country, compared with 22% of independents and 13% of Democrats – all representing increases since 2021. Almost one in three white evangelical Protestants believe that patriots may have to resort to political violence to save the country, markedly higher than any other religious group.

Support for political violence jumps to even higher levels among Americans who believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump (46%); Americans who hold a favourable view of Trump (41%); Americans who believe in the so-called “replacement theory” (41%); Americans who affirm the core tenet of white Christian nationalism, that God intended America to be a new promised land for European Christians (39%).

“The political temperature in America is rising, and this year’s American Values Survey results reflect that reality,” said PRRI’s president and founder, Robert P Jones. “Our last presidential election was the first in our history without a peaceful transfer of power. With flashes of political violence continuing among us, and the 2024 election on the horizon, we should be deeply concerned about the growing number of Americans who express openness to political violence.”

Trump, facing 91 criminal charges in four jurisdictions, has used ever more violent rhetoric in recent months, prompting warnings that such discourse is becoming normalised. The former president falsely claimed the former joint chiefs of staff chairman Gen Mark Milley committed “treason” and suggested he be executed, called for police to shoot shoplifters on sight and claimed that migrants illegally crossing the southern border are “poisoning the blood of our country”.

Trump, who denies without evidence that he lost the 2020 election, is the current frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. The PRRI study found three in four Americans say the future of democracy is at risk in next year’s election. Democrats (84%) are most likely to hold this view but 77% of Republicans and 73% of independents also agree.

PRRI has also been tracking the QAnon conspiracy movement since 2021. Across party lines there has been a significant increase in QAnon believers (from 14% to 23%) and a decrease in QAnon rejecters (from 40% to 29%). Republicans remain twice as likely as Democrats to be QAnon believers (29% v 14%) and are three times less likely to be QAnon rejecters (14% v 43%).

The survey was conducted among a representative sample of 2,525 adults living in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Interviews were conducted online between 25 and 30 August.

Sex changes are not effective, say researchers | Health | The Guardian

Thu, 14 May 2026 23:25:03 +0000

There is no conclusive evidence that sex change operations improve the lives of transsexuals, with many people remaining severely distressed and even suicidal after the operation, according to a medical review conducted exclusively for Guardian Weekend tomorrow.

The review of more than 100 international medical studies of post-operative transsexuals by the University of Birmingham's aggressive research intelligence facility (Arif) found no robust scientific evidence that gender reassignment surgery is clinically effective.

The Guardian asked Arif to conduct the review after speaking to several people who regret changing gender or believe that the medical care they received failed to prepare them for their new lives. They explain why they are unhappy with their sex change and how they cope with the consequences in the Weekend magazine tomorrow (July 31).

Chris Hyde, the director of Arif, said: "There is a huge uncertainty over whether changing someone's sex is a good or a bad thing. While no doubt great care is taken to ensure that appropriate patients undergo gender reassignment, there's still a large number of people who have the surgery but remain traumatised - often to the point of committing suicide."

Arif, which advises the NHS in the West Midlands about the evidence base of healthcare treatments, found that most of the medical research on gender reassignment was poorly designed, which skewed the results to suggest that sex change operations are beneficial.

Its review warns that the results of many gender reassignment studies are unsound because researchers lost track of more than half of the participants. For example, in a five-year study of 727 post-operative transsexuals published last year, 495 people dropped out for unknown reasons. Dr Hyde said the high drop out rate could reflect high levels of dissatisfaction or even suicide among post-operative transsexuals. He called for the causes of their deaths to be tracked to provide more evidence.

Dr Hyde said: "The bottom line is that although it's clear that some people do well with gender reassignment surgery, the available research does little to reassure about how many patients do badly and, if so, how badly."

There are around 5,000 post-operative transsexuals in the UK, according to the transgender pressure group Press for Change (PFC). It is estimated that up to 400 sex changes will be performed this year on the NHS and privately. Each operation costs the NHS around £3,000, while private patients pay upwards of £8,000 for surgery.

Christine Burns, of PFC, said the campaign group's research suggested that the vast majority of transsexual people enjoyed much happier lives following surgery.

Ms Burns added that the greatest flaws in medical literature about gender reassignment were in those studies unsympathetic to transsexual people. For example, one study was based on a survey of seven transsexual prostitutes interviewed in one gay bar in Chicago.

She said: "The fact that research is badly constructed isn't a poor reflection on transpeople, but on the people we should be able to trust for our care. If they "lose" half the patients they ought to be able to track the question is why? As we've repeatedly pointed out ourselves there is really no difficulty in getting transpeople to come forward and cooperate in research that is properly constructed and conceived with people's true well-being in mind."

Research from the US and Holland suggests that up to a fifth of patients regret changing sex. A 1998 review by the Research and Development Directorate of the NHS Executive found attempted suicide rates of up to 18% noted in some medical studies of gender reassignment.

Andrew McCulloch, chief executive of the Mental Health Foundation, has written to the mental health minister, Rosie Winterton, requesting a "thorough assessment" of the long-term effects of sex change operations. He wants the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, which decides what treatments should be available on the NHS, to draw up guidelines on gender reassignment.

Transgender psychiatrists, who assess whether patients should change sex, agree that more scientific research is needed. But Kevan Wylie, chairman of the Royal College of Psychiatrists' working party on gender identity disorders, said that all of his patients' lives have drastically improved following gender reassignment surgery.

Dr Wylie added that it was difficult to conduct research on the outcome of gender reassignment, or to compare its effects with alternative treatments, because transsexualism was such a "rare experience". Urological surgeon James Bellringer, who has performed more than 200 sex changes over the past four years, claimed that trying to carry out research that involves studying a control group of transsexual patients who were denied hormones and surgery would be unethical.

Mr Bellringer, who works at the main NHS gender identity clinic at Charing Cross hospital in west London, said: "I don't think that any research that denied transsexual patients treatment would get past an ethics committee. There's no other treatment that works. You either have an operation or suffer a miserable life. A fifth of those who don't get treatment commit suicide."

Formula One’s Australian Grand Prix hit by travel chaos amid Middle East crisis | Formula One | The Guardian

Thu, 14 May 2026 20:23:28 +0000

As many as one thousand members of the Formula One circus have been forced into last-minute travel changes to get to Melbourne’s opening round in the wake of the escalating crisis in the Middle East, and some are set to miss the start of the season entirely.

However, a larger logistical headache has been narrowly avoided, after the cars and supporting equipment were already shipped from last month’s testing in Bahrain – one of the countries drawn into the conflict – prior to this week’s widespread aviation disruptions.

The ultimate breakdown: everything you need to know about F1’s new regulations for 2026

Travis Auld, chief executive of the Australian Grand Prix Corporation, told Channel Nine on Monday the vehicles were already sitting on the main straight at Albert Park in containers, ready to be put into the garages ahead of the Formula One race weekend, which begins with practice on Friday.

He added, however, that many staff have had to make new travel arrangements to avoid international airport hubs in places such as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates which have been hit by Iranian missiles.

“You’re talking about teams, drivers, Formula One personnel, I’m guessing there’d be close to a thousand people that would have already booked their flights and would be landing somewhere between today, tomorrow, Wednesday – they had to all be changed.

“But a lot of people around the world are doing the same thing and so you’re competing obviously with that increase in demand, but they’ve been able to sort it out.”

As a globetrotting sport with close ties to locations and capital in the Middle East, Formula One has been heavily affected by the the events of recent days.

Round four remains scheduled in Bahrain in early April and round five in Saudi Arabia a week later, but Formula One officials said they were monitoring the situation.

Tyre manufacturer Pirelli cancelled wet weather testing in Bahrain due to the conflict but staff were still stranded in Manama, one of the sites targeting by a drone attack.

Some members of the McLaren and Mercedes teams were reportedly also still in Bahrain, including Mercedes new third driver Frederik Vesti who posted two days ago from the track.

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Auld said fans can expect to see all of Formula One’s familiar faces in Melbourne, even if he suggested not everyone will make it.

“The drivers will be here, the engineers will be here, the team principals will be here, they’re the ones that have been prioritised [for travel] and so you won’t see any sort of surprise drivers under a helmet,” he said.

“Some of the other ones [staff] are coming out now, probably you could continue the race without them, but luckily we’ve been able to get everyone that needs to be here, here.”

The president of Formula 1’s governing body, the FIA, meanwhile, has said it will prioritise “safety and wellbeing” as it decides what to do about upcoming races in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia in the middle of April.

The FIA statement also mentioned the World Endurance Championship, a leading sportscar series that opens its season in Qatar at the end of this month.

“We are in close contact with our member clubs, championship promoters, teams and colleagues on the ground as we monitor developments carefully and responsibly,” the FIA president, Mohammed Ben Sulayem, posted on Instagram on Monday.

“Safety and wellbeing will guide our decisions as we assess the forthcoming events scheduled there for the FIA World Endurance Championship and the FIA Formula One World Championship. Our organization is built on unity and shared purpose. That unity matters now more than ever.”

Ben Sulayem, who is from Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, said “we are deeply saddened by the loss of life and stand with the families and communities impacted,” adding that the FIA hopes for “calm, safety and a swift return to stability.”

Evgeny Lebedev: Don't call me an oligarch | Evgeny Lebedev | The Guardian

Thu, 14 May 2026 17:20:46 +0000

After giving evidence to the Leveson inquiry last week, Britain's youngest newspaper proprietor Evgeny Lebedev tweeted the following: "Forgot to tell #Leveson that it's unreasonable to expect individuals to spend £millions on newspapers and not have access to politicians." It was a funny and refreshingly honest message after all the recent humbug and hypocrisy from media magnates about not wanting to influence the political class.

But perhaps we should no longer be surprised by such interventions. Since taking over the London Evening Standard and the Independent (both for a quid) Lebedev has cut an increasingly eccentric and impressive figure. The son of the billionaire businessman and former KGB agent Alexander, he was the most unlikely newspaper boss. He was known for appearances in the gossip columns, an unfeasibly black beard (yes, it's real), dapper dress sense, dating the actor Joely Richardson and almost dating the pop star Geri Halliwell.

It was originally thought that his father had bought him the Standard in 2009 as a plaything; a bauble to keep him busy in Britain while Alexander got on with the serious business of running the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, condemning Putin's swerve from democracy, and making more billions at home in Russia. When Lebedev junior announced his revamped Standard would be a freebie, readers and staff feared the worst. But over the past three years, a paper that had become bleak and intolerant has recovered much of its old verve. Meanwhile, just keeping the Independent going is a triumph. To be fair, he has done more than that – launching the cheap and cheerful paper the i, and boosting its web presence.

We meet in his Mayfair office, which is every bit as striking as Lebedev – elegant leather chairs, a table with every upmarket mag you could wish for, orchids and two Bacons on the wall for good measure. There's a restraint to his showiness – the suggestion that he could put so much more on display, but chooses not to. As for Lebedev, he is dressed formally – with waistcoat and tie, all matching greys and blacks. He could be a 19th-century Russian prince, and yet he could turn into John Travolta circa Saturday Night Fever any second.

The outer office, staffed by young, beautiful people speaking a number of languages, leads to Lebedev's, which is even bigger. It's stuffed with iconoclastic modern art. Lebedev, who studied history of art, gives me a guided tour. He speaks gently in an accent that still has a hint of Russia – he moved to London at eight. "That's Fuck Face," he says, referring to a Chapman brothers sculpture of a child with a penis for a nose. We move on to a mock-up of an Evening Standard banner by Gilbert & George. He says the Bacons are just lithographs, only worth about £30,000 each.

We sit down next to an orchid. It's cold and unusually fresh (even the air seems expensive). An assistant brings in coffee – it tastes unusually good.

Did Lebedev, 32 next week, always want to run newspapers? "No, I wanted to be a cosmonaut, like all good Soviet children." He says his experience of newspapers was largely confined to work experience with his father. "It was quite – what's the right word? – unknown. Two days after the paper was acquired, Jonathan Rothermere [the previous owner] suggested I should take out all the senior executives." In the Russian sense? He grins. "No, not in the Russian sense. For lunch. I've learned so much in the last three years, and I've got more and more interested in the business model, and trying to survive at a time when everybody's hailing the death of print journalism. When we bought the Independent, its parent company had set a date for closure, May 2010. And the Standard was on its knees, losing £30m. Now it's going to break even this year." It's apparent how much he loves his newspapers (the Standard because he adores London, the Independent because it's a thinking paper) and values a strong, free press.

Lebedev stresses he's not in papers for money – that he couldn't be. So what does he want out of his papers? Well, he says, he hopes to change the image of the moneyed Russian. "The perception is of Russians as dodgy, shady businessmen or ruthless, bare-chested politicians, and we're not all like that."

Then there is what he calls his project. Lebedev is as hands-on, as interfering, as any of the legendary media magnates. Not in an overtly political sense (he and the Standard went with his friend Boris Johnson for London mayor, while the Independent said Boris would be disastrous), but in a broader, benign way. His hope, which is as Panglossian as it is commendable, is to improve world leadership; to look at countries and systems that fail and examine why. So yes, he makes no bones about using his influence – the world of celebrity can be useful (Bono and Elton John have guest-edited the Independent) and his name will provide access to many of the world's leaders. Over the past year, he has visited Gaza, Somalia and Ethiopia, interviewed presidents and mayors, victims of violence and perpetrators, and written a series of nuanced articles. It seems he is rapidly becoming his own favourite foreign correspondent.

Why does he think he should author these? "I think it's almost a crime to have the ability to see these places and understand them, and give a balanced account of what's going on, and not do it." But most proprietors would leave it to editors to send their best reporters. "If you send somebody else, it's not really your project. In the past, I've delegated too much to other people. I've had a restaurant and been involved in a fashion label, and I've got somebody else to come up with the concept or design, and just been an investor. I realised I'm more interested in doing it myself."

I can't help thinking newspapers have given him a belated sense of purpose. It can't be easy growing up in the shadow of such a successful father – Lebedev senior is not only an intellectual and possessor of a $3.5bn (£2.2bn) fortune, but also showed himself to be a decent pugilist when he rose from his seat in a TV interview to punch a fellow guest.

Lebedev calls his father a man of "great courage". He seems more gentle than his father. Would he wallop a guy? "Depends how far I'm pushed." When did he last hit anybody? "Not for a long time." Actually, he says, he and his father are similar. "We are both quite shy and gentle until we get pushed too far ... then the gentleness disappears. But that doesn't happen often."

Does he have any qualms about how his father made his fortune in the 1990s? "No, because there's never been a question of his acquiring his cash like the top oligarchs have, which is basically by splitting the country's natural resources. There's a well-documented history of how he made his money, first by being a financial adviser, then acquiring this tiny bank and growing it."

Lebedev's grandparents were academics. His family lived in Moscow and were "comfortable". He is both critical and defensive of today's Russia. When he talks about it, he sounds like a member of an old ruling class. "Simple Russians, people who live in the provinces, like a strong figure such as Putin."

What was it like when his family became absurdly rich? "Unlike the other oligarchs, there wasn't suddenly a big change in terms of yacht, villa, private jet. I don't want to seem immodest in saying that. My dad continued living in the same apartment, my grandfather's apartment, with my mother's parents in Moscow until my parents separated."

Everything about Lebedev is so immaculate, perfumed with privilege – the beard looks as if each hair has been individually trimmed. Look, I say, this is a pretty lavish lifestyle, isn't it? "Yeah, but not by traditional oligarchs' lifestyle." So Roman Abramovich would say this is rubbish? He smiles. "Yeah, he'd say, 'Why don't you fucking own the whole building? Why are you sitting in a building with other people? Why have you got a lithograph rather than a fucking real Bacon?' Hehehehe."

Who is his favourite oligarch? "I don't really keep friendly relationships with them." Your least? "All of them, really."

Does he hate being called one? "Yeah, because you paint every one with the same brush stroke." He says the material want experienced in the Soviet Union led to excess, and defines a typical oligarch. "They are driven by cash and nothing else. It's a combination of having access to money and not having a lot of education or aesthetic understanding. Taste, you know. You suddenly just want everything, and most importantly, you want to show everybody you have it."

I ask if he is a billionaire in his own right. "Well, yes we, what's the word, we share, so you could call me a billionaire." Does he ever wish he had less money? He looks astonished. "I've never thought about that. If money in some way spoiled me or made me vulgar ... or, if I'd gone the route of a lot of wealthy young teenagers, and spent all my time lying on beaches with supermodels, snorting coke and wasting my life … "

And has he ever done that? "I've ... done what teenagers do … " He's had his coke years? "I did what all teenagers do. I wouldn't say coke years, no." Months? "Minutes … I could have been wasting my life away, and it is for that reason you said, when people are daunted by what their parents are."

Does it become hard to trust people when you are so rich? "You just have to use your judgment and carry on life. You can't start suspecting people, otherwise you'd just go mad. I think I've got pretty good judgment of character." Has he ever thought, why do all these women fancy the billionaire Evgeny Lebedev? "They don't!" Anyway, he says, he enjoys his own company, isn't going out with anybody, and is a bit boring.

He never thought of himself as a playboy; he insists it was a cliche. Perhaps it was his choice of girlfriends? Well, he says, the Halliwell thing was rubbish, and Richardson would not be the choice of most playboys. "Joely is an extraordinary human being. I don't think the word playboy and her could be used in the same sentence. She's an extremely exquisite, sophisticated person."

There is no fleet of flash cars, he says. What does he drive? "A Jag." And not a single yacht? "Nope, not even a rubber dingy." What's the flashest thing he's bought? He struggles. "I'm thinking of buying a duck-billed platypus who could just walk around the office." Really? "Yeah. Oh, and I've got a wolf." Here? "No, I've got a flat in Italy, and I have a wolf there. His name is Boris. He likes to nibble on people's backsides. And consumes a lot of kilos of meat a day." He says perhaps that's the main difference between him and your everyday oligarch. "Russian oligarchs like to go to St Tropez, I like to go to Umbria. It's just rural Italian peace. There's nothing there, just farmers and wolves."

David's story | Peter Aitchison | The Guardian

Thu, 14 May 2026 12:44:33 +0000

It was an easy decision. Flicking past the pages of the chapter on handicapped children in the Good Parent guide to childbirth. Gillian's pre-natal scan had been fine. No problems foreseen; nothing could go wrong. We had done all the right things, been to all the classes. Had the PC parent T-shirt.

Labour started uncomfortably for both of us. Gillian's waters broke early in the morning. Five weeks premature. I had to cancel a golf match as we raced from a holiday on the Isle of Arran to the Queen Mother's Maternity hospital in Glasgow. It was a lengthy delivery, but we had been told to expect that. And to expect a purple newborn to appear. But maybe not quite as purple as that.

I didn't have a cigar ready, but who doesn't expect to have a perfect baby? But then things started to go wrong. Gillian was rushed off to theatre and my tiny son was bundled out at high speed to intensive care. What was going on? For two hours, I sat alone in a labour ward, convinced they were both dead. When Gillian was brought back, having had some placenta removed, a nervous doctor appeared. Our son had problems. He was having difficulty breathing. Things were not quite right. He had a cleft lip and palate and there were complications.

Gillian squeezed my hand and together we were taken to David's cot. I could not speak. Beneath the forest of wires and monitors was a helpless soul struggling for life. He had no right side to his face. No right ear, a tiny jaw, eyes that seemed to bulge and a gnawing hole where his nose should be. It was only later that we were told David had an extreme form of Goldenhar syndrome, an umbrella term for a condition that affects only a handful of births every year.

Gillian, who has always been the strong partner in the rock that is our marriage, looked lovingly on and hugged me. We would come to know the intensive care unit better than our home. David would be there for seven months. Within a matter of hours an emergency tracheotomy was performed. A tube was inserted into his throat to allow him both to breath and to be incubated during the many operations that the medical staff, now furiously boning up on the condition, had already told us to expect.

In my ignorance, I signed the consent form without even asking what a tracheotomy was. When David was wheeled back, I was curious as to the tube sticking out of his neck. It had saved his life. How could I object? But this incident concentrated my resolve on always asking questions, always getting as much detail from the doctors as possible. To their credit, they never denied me information. Even if the news was bleak - as it often was.

David had hydrocephalus and would require a cranial shunt to be inserted below the skin on his head. He could not swallow and eventually had a gastrostomy tube inserted into his stomach so that he could be syringe-fed a diet of thick, calorie-rich milk. His heart had a hole in it and the organ was on the wrong side. He was profoundly deaf.

Every day seemed to bring another problem, another medical term, more things to come to terms with. One day, the doctors took us aside. They told us David had survived two heart attacks. Had we considered having him baptised? They did not think they would intervene if our tiny infant son had another seizure.

We had never really cried much. We had resisted the temptation to beat our breasts and ask the obvious question - "why us?" - but that night we wept.

In a way, though, it was a defining moment. We were allowed to take David home for a few short hours, accompanied by all the paraphernalia of medical equipment, oxygen bottles and syringes, and had a wonderful family christening for our son, David Peter Macrae Aitchison. He was our son. And we loved him.

Slowly, David began to improve, but we never heard him cry. The tracheotomy silenced him. What pain he must have endured as doctors and nurses daily taped the two loose sides of his face together in preparation for surgery. What agonies he would have experienced as his baby teeth scythed through his misshapen gums. And then the surgery itself. It is not easy to describe the look on your child's face as he comes round from hours of surgery on his head. A head that has ballooned and is coated in blood.

David's homecoming was the proudest and happiest moment of my life. But the months and years ahead were never easy. His tracheotomy required suction every 10 or 15 minutes and, though we were fortunate to get some nursing assistance, Gillian and I still had to sit up most nights. Looking back, it is difficult to understand how we existed on so little sleep.

Five times a day, we laboriously tube-fed our son who could not swallow, wiping up the sick which he retched at almost every feed as his poor stomach struggled to cope. And we battled to communicate with him. What a breakthrough when, at the age of three, he "signed" bath. We had no idea if he knew what he had done, but just in case he did, we dipped him in the tub. He probably thought we were mad. But our little boy began to battle and show fighting quality and Scottish spirit. He signed more and more, and we began to involve him in family outings, along with his younger siblings, Jennifer and Jack.

Early on, a well-meaning doctor at the hospital had told us to go home one day, "get some wine and get together". When we realised Gillian was pregnant some weeks later and told the doctor, he was astonished - "I didn't mean that!" Jennifer was born 11 months after David, and proved to be the best tonic for him. A healthy sister also provided us with another focus, not to mention a lot more work and responsibility. Jack, another happy mistake, is his brother's best mate and cheerful enemy. They play and fight together - and sign together, too.

From the very necessary concentration on the present, Gillian and I increasingly began to think of David's future. Against the medical advice of some, we removed his tracheotomy tube. His, and our, quality of life leapt upwards. No more nights sitting by his bed and no more pram-loads of suction tubes and catheters to carry around with us.

In spite of all the problems, and the fact that, even now, he requires to be tube-fed, David was admitted to the roll of St Vincent's school for the deaf in Glasgow. He has excelled there, thanks in large measure to the wonderful care and persistence of some remarkable staff.

Like any other young lad, David is obsessed with computer games and his PlayStation. Like most other boys of his age, he can beat his dad hands-down. To do this, David, who cannot hear the instructions, has to memorise sequences and programmes. His intelligence seems to be matched only by his sense of fun and mischief.

So, yes, David has Goldenhar syndrome. People do stare at his uneven jaw, his solitary ear, and the feeding tube that juts out from his tummy. But people stare at anyone who does not conform to the so-called norm. Those with birthmarks, with Downs or with withered limbs. People often ask us how we cope. How we cope? How has David coped?

When he was born, someone said it was as though Gillian and I had been preparing for a holiday in Italy. We had learned the lingo, bought the phrasebooks and booked the tours. Then we were unexpectedly stranded in Holland, with no idea how we had got there and no notion of how to deal with the situation. But everyone can learn a new language and appreciate the richness of experiences that were never anticipated. This is our postcard from Holland.

· The Goldenhar Syndrome Hemificial Microsomia Family Contact Group, 9 Hartley Court Gardens, Cranbrook, Kent TN17 3QY, tel 01580-714042

A pufferfish: ‘probably nature’s greatest artist’ | Helen Sullivan | The Guardian

Thu, 14 May 2026 05:31:42 +0000

Pufferfish are cute, and most pufferfish are toxic. Like people, they spend their weeks moving between states of puffed up and deflated. Or, really, three states: normal, puffed up and then the hangover after the puffing up. Ironically, the pufferfish toxin, called tetrodotoxin, is deadly because it stops a person’s diaphragm from moving – in other words, it stops you from being able to puff yourself up. And you could see that as a lesson for wanting to eat them in the first place.

You’re wondering what is inside a blown-up pufferfish, how they inflate. Firstly: it is not air, or else they would pop up and out of the water like a balloon in a swimming pool. Also, air is hard to come by down there. They turn themselves into absurd-looking spherical objects by sucking water – something called, grossly, “buccal pumping” – into their extremely elastic stomachs. They don’t have ribs, which helps. This gives predators a fright – but perhaps more to the point, large spheres are hard to swallow.

After they do this, they feel very tired, and take five hours to get back to normal. Which seems like around the time it might take a person to feel normal again after freaking out. You could say that it is ego that makes them puff up: do you have any idea what they are capable of?

If there is one person you want to hear say the word “pufferfish” repeatedly, it is David Attenborough, who describes the pufferfish as “probably nature’s greatest artist”. If you have ever met an artist, you will know that the word “probably” will haunt that fish for the rest of its days. Like an animal expanded so widely that its little face shrinks into its body and its peripheral vision – despite independently moving eyes – is restricted, the artist, deflated, will fail to remember the word “greatest”, and remember only that there is some doubt.

As Attenborough speaks – godlike, invisible – the pufferfish wriggles the part where a fish’s butt would be if a fish had one; not the tail, but upwards, like where a mermaid’s rear would be. He wriggles this way and that, making patterns in the way a person might in a Japanese dry garden (known in the western world in the 1990s as a “Zen garden”).

A kookaburra: ‘They think they are waking the world’

And what he produces is mind-blowingly symmetrical. The fish is about 10cm long. What he makes is 2 metres wide. It takes him more than a week to make. His creation looks very much like a flower, with a centre like a sunflower’s, and a radiating, petal-like pattern. It is symmetrical, which is hard to do if you are eye-height with your creation.

If the female approves, she will descend to the ocean floor and mate with the male. Most female pufferfish store their toxin in their ovaries, which is where I store my most toxic chemicals, too. Their names are progesterone, oestrogen; they make me puff up with determination, sensitivity, mania, irritability and also water retention.

Dolphins have been seen playing with pufferfish before, according to one theory, entering a trance-like state because of the mild narcotic effects of the poison in the pufferfish’s skin. They appeared, to one writer, to be “mesmerised by their own reflections at the water’s surface”. After thinking about pufferfish for a few hours, I see my reflection, too. And it is hard to swallow.

Helen Sullivan is a Guardian journalist. She is writing a book for Scribner Australia
Do you have an animal, insect or other subject you’d like to see profiled by this columnist? Email helen.sullivan@theguardian.com

UK supermarkets push for Amazon soy safeguards after traders abandon ban | Amazon rainforest | The Guardian

Thu, 14 May 2026 04:37:21 +0000

Leading British and European retailers are trying to salvage the core elements of the Amazon soy moratorium after the world’s most successful forest protection agreement was wrecked by Brazilian lawmakers and abandoned by international traders.

In an open letter, high street brands including Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Asda say the breakdown this month of the 20-year-old agreement will damage consumer confidence unless new arrangements are put in place to ensure grain production is not linked to deforestation.

The letter is addressed to the major traders of soy – Cargill of the US, Bunge and Louis Dreyfuss of Brazil and the Chinese state-owned firm Cofco. They are members of the Brazilian soy producers’ association Abiove, which recently removed its name from the official website of the soy moratorium.

Without their participation, conservation groups warn of a free-for-all race to clear land in the Amazon biome despite scientific warnings that destruction of the world’s biggest tropical rainforest is approaching a point of no return. Supporters of the moratorium say its loss could open up an area the size of Portugal unless alternative measures are put in place.

The letter states: “We are deeply disappointed to see that Abiove, and your company, has now voluntarily withdrawn from the moratorium. Stepping back risks weakening existing deterrents to deforestation, undermines future efforts to develop collaborative protection agreements, and threatens efforts to secure the sustainability of your investments in Brazilian soy production in the face of accelerated climate change.”

Soy is one of the most widely grown crops in Brazil and posed a huge deforestation threat to the Amazon rainforest until stakeholders voluntarily agreed in 2006 to impose a moratorium and no longer source it from the region.

The retailers behind the letter, which also include Lidl, Aldi, Morrisons, Marks & Spencer and the Co-op, say they will continue to apply the key principle of the soy moratorium – not to source the grain for Amazon land cleared after 2008 – and urge the traders and producers to clarify whether they still adhere to previous commitments on the climate and environment and are able to make assurances about the reporting, monitoring and verification of their supply chains.

Under this voluntary agreement, any detection of soya beans planted on areas deforested after 2008 would result in the farm being blocked from supply chains, regardless of whether the land clearance was legal in Brazil. In the two decades since, this has prevented an estimated 17,000 sq km (6,564 sq miles) of deforestation.

In the past two years, the moratorium has come under fierce attack from Brazil’s powerful agribusiness lobby, particularly in the soy-producing heartland of Mato Grosso where state legislators revoked tax incentives for companies engaged in the agreement. Brazil has threatened to penalise grain traders for involvement in the moratorium on the grounds that it involves the sharing among competitors of commercially sensitive information, which poses monopoly risks.

This appears to be a fig leaf as Mato Grosso’s subsidies were modest, and the administrative council said traders could have continued to apply the 2008 cutoff date independently. However, these firms backed out of a globally significant moratorium, in line with a broader US-led trend of major corporations welching on commitments to environmental and social governance.

Europe consumes 10% of the world’s soya bean production. In the letter, the retailers say they need a substitute for the moratorium to avoid supply chain uncertainty and a backlash from consumers. Will Schreiber, a director at the Retail Soy Group, said: “There needs to be some sort of agreement. We need credible action to avoid fragmentation. If there are just guidelines, some soy producers will make money from destruction.”

Cargill, Bunge, ADM and Cofco have their own sustainable supply chain policies against deforestation, but without the moratorium there is a risk they will pursue different paths using separate criteria. An investigation by Reporter Brazil found that Cargill had already weakened its no-deforestation commitment by moving the cutoff date in some documentation to 2020.

Conservation groups including WWF and Greenpeace have said land speculators are already moving into the Amazon in the expectation that the 2008 cutoff date will be moved, which will reward them for destruction.

From Boudicca to modern Britain: the dream of island utopias, ruled by women | History books | The Guardian

Wed, 13 May 2026 15:35:54 +0000

Throughout history, the idea of islands where women rule has been part mythological wish fulfilment, part male fantasy – and part cultural-geographical reality. In 2017 I moved to Orkney, an archipelago still dominated, as all of Britain once was, by its monumental neolithic architecture. Early one spring morning I visited the chambered cairn of Maeshowe, which is older than Stonehenge and much more complex in construction. Originally a circle of standing stones, around 2800BC it was encased in huge slabs of rock, making a domed chamber aligned to the setting winter solstice sun. Five thousand years later, on any clear evening a few weeks either side of solstice, as the sun goes down behind the hill of a nearby island, it hits the top of a standing stone, and is channelled into Maeshowe in a burst of golden light. It is a sacred moment in Britain’s year: when nature and culture collide, exploding out of winter’s darkness in a dramatic symbol of warmth and hope.

We were there to experiment with neolithic acoustics. Kristin Linklater, an Orcadian voice coach, crawled down Maeshowe’s entrance passage first, followed by me and my baby daughter, an archaeologist or two, musicians and students. Inside the central chamber, we stood up and began to sing. Kristin and I had already discussed our fascination with Maeshowe’s shape, which, with its green turf covering, looks like a giant grassy breast or pregnant womb. Together, we had enjoyed deploring the fact that the female symbolism of this monument receives little if any mention in academic literature, let alone tourist guidebooks. Yet it is just as likely that structures such as Maeshowe were designed to honour the female body as a safehouse of human potency in the world, as they were to serve a male elite priesthood.

I spent the rest of the summer at walking distance from Maeshowe, as writer-in-residence at the Ness of Brodgar archaeological site. I was given a trowel and set to work digging through layers of history. One of the things I found, here at the centre of Orkney’s sacred landscape, was an incredibly rare incense burner. For five thousand years it had lain undisturbed in the earth. Perhaps the last person to touch it, before I did that bright June morning, was a priestess, burning hemp or poppy.

Boudicca’s statue in London. Photograph: Neil Lang/Alamy

My forthcoming history of the islands of Britain, The Britannias, demonstrates how the patriarchal mainstream has marginalised the ancient tradition of female rule in Britain. But I also wanted to unleash these islands of women into the 21st century in a novel. My novel, Cwen, is set in a fictional archipelago off the east coast of Britain, where I imagine a female coup.

This November, Britain will host Cop26, the UN climate conference, whose outcome will affect all our futures. When the government announced an all-male presidency team last September, there was outrage. SheChangesClimate.org was founded to campaign for gender balance in the leadership team. It might have seemed perfectly natural, to Boris Johnson and Alok Sharma, for the decisions on the British side to be made by men – after all, that is more or less how it has been for the past 3,000 years. Had Boris attended more closely to his classical education, however, he might have seen the potential for a very different story.

There was once a time when the islands of Britain were viewed by the outside world as a stronghold of female leadership. In 7BC, the Greek geographer Strabo wrote of a British island organised around the worship of the mother-goddess. Julius Caesar observed that, among other barbaric practices, British women were polyandrous. In his AD43 Description of the World, Pomponius Mela wrote of a British island inhabited by nine priestesses, “who stir up the seas and winds by their magic” – British women in charge of their climate.

From around the time of the Roman conquest of Britain, mythology and hearsay give way to historical documentation. In AD98, Tacitus marks Britain as a place of female rule when he writes in his Annals that “Britons make no distinction of sex in their royal successions” – an observation about Boudicca, Cartimandua and others that is borne out by the archaeology of Britain’s iron age and its sacred island goddess sites. Tacitus returned to this theme 20 years later, when chronicling the Roman assault on the Druid island stronghold of Anglesey. He observed that, during battle, women were ranged across the defending frontline:

On the beach stood … a serried mass … with women flitting between the
ranks. In the style of Furies, in robes of deathly black and with dishevelled
hair, they brandished their torches.

In the second century AD, Dionysius Periegetes wrote of islands near Britain where women perform “sacred rites”. In the sixth century, Procopius described a northern island, Thule (Orkney? Shetland?), where men and women “do everything in common”.

One afternoon in the British Library, I ordered up a book called Celtic Miscellany, a collection of early British texts translated in 1951 by the Harvard and Cambridge professor of Celtic languages, Kenneth Jackson. There on page 173, in a piece of trans-historical magic, was the idea I had been groping towards, preserved in an anonymous seventh-century Irish poem, The Voyage of Bran:

There is an island far away, around which sea-horses glisten … a lovely land through the ages of the world … begin a voyage across the clear sea, to find if you may reach the Land of Women.

I was electrified. Like a centrifuge, the patriarchal culture of mainland Britain had pushed these stories to the geographical margins – and yet they lived on, a force too potent to ignore.

Once I knew what I was looking for, I found these islands everywhere. I found them in other early medieval Irish poems; hinted at in the ancient Welsh tales called the Mabinogion. They survived the Norman invasion, to be picked up by Geoffrey of Monmouth who, in the Life of Merlin – written in Latin, in about 1140 – describes “the island of apples which men call ‘the Fortunate Isle’ … nine sisters rule by a pleasing set of laws.” When new epics of Britain’s origin as a nation came to be written, in Anglo-Norman, the main story is male: Britain, spawned by Brutus. But there is an earlier, female-born story, too, for Albion, founded by Albina:

Then Albina said:
‘This land to which we have come,
We do not know its name,
Nor if it ever had a lord.
Therefore, since I am the leader,
We will name it after me.
Albina is my name –
From which it will be called Albion,
And hence this country
Will remember us always.’

– On the Great Giants, c1250–1333

Albina is a Greek or Syrian princess, who, in an echo of Aeschylus’s The Suppliant Women, flees with her sisters from their forced marriages. They sail across the world to an uninhabited island, where they learn to hunt; make love to demons; birth a race of giants. There are overtones of Circe or Calypso, but the undertow is atavistic: an extraordinary vision of an alternative destiny for Britain. Moreover, the ancient name of this country, Albion, quoted by Pliny, is itself an echo of an earlier form, Albina, the ancient British goddess of art and death. As with the Voyage of Bran, the epic gives voice to female rebellion.

These ideas did not go away. In his 15th-century retelling of the story of King Arthur’s male-dominated court, Thomas Malory describes a parallel female-ruled island world. The “ladies of the lake” come and go from Arthur’s court as they please. They belong to a dimly remembered realm, where women were physicians and seers. As Merlin admits, the women of the island lake palace are the source of Arthur’s prowess, through their gift of his magical sword, Excalibur. At the end of Le Morte d’Arthur, the mortally wounded king is taken away on a ship to Avalon for healing by the Lady of the Lake, Morgan le Fay and two further queens.

Later writers are harsher about the islands of women. For Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare and others, islands ruled by women – Acrasia’s in The Faerie Queene, Sycorax’s in The Tempest – are too threatening and provocative to survive contact with men. Just as when the conquistadores sailed to the New World spurred on by visions of female-run islands dripping with gold, so too, these seductive islands and their women must be dominated, and, if necessary, destroyed.

Björk’s album Utopia.

A more positive iteration of Britain’s islands of women occurs with the Restoration, when almost all British writers, of whatever political persuasion, appear to be yearning for the ideal political paradise, so recently fought for and lost. Following Thomas More, islands – often faraway ones – become sites of potential metamorphosis. Among the most radical of these is the island in Margaret Cavendish’s feminist utopia, The Convent of Pleasure (1668), upon which Lady Happy sits, as she declares herself the source of the sun’s power – as if she is Maeshowe:

I feed the Sun, which gives them light,
And makes them shine in darkest night,
Moist vapour from my brest I give,
Which he sucks forth, and makes him live,
Or else his Fire would soon go out,
Grow dark, or burn the World throughout.

Fourteen years later, the apogee of this stubborn counter-current was published in Dublin, in the form of a faux-travelogue which purports to be an eyewitness account of an expatriate female colony descended from ancient Britons – “the Island so long sought for in the Western Ocean”.

Perhaps because of the rise of empire, and the acquisition of real islands as places to loot and exploit in far-off waters, from then on male-dominated dystopias tend to loom large: Treasure Island, Lord of the Flies, JG Ballard’s Concrete Island. But outside the English language, islands of women do survive. In the islands of Scotland, particularly, where pagan preliterate culture somehow outlived the onslaught of priests and kings, the ancient language of Gaelic encodes in its invocations and prayers, as well as in the names of hills and streams, a deeply buried reverence for women. On the tiny island of Handa, near Ullapool, there was even a “queen” until the mid 19th century; as the Reverend Tulloch noted, in his official report about this remote community:

they have established nothing less than Royalty amongst them, in the person of the eldest widow on the island, who is designed Queen; and her prerogative is recognized not only by the islanders, but by visitors from the mainland.

The idea of islands as places where women can be free has too long and complex a history in popular culture to disappear from view. In 1991, Julie Dash became the first African-American female director to have a feature film on general release. Daughters of the Dust takes place in the sea islands of Georgia, where her ancestors settled after being transported from Africa. Isolation gave them a measure of freedom, not just from Christian enslavement, but also from patriarchy; something impossible to imagine elsewhere in the deep south of the 19th and 20th centuries.

International climate lawyer Farhana Yamin. Photograph: Peter Marshall/Alamy

“Utopia isn’t elsewhere, it is here”, Björk sang in 2017, just as I was discovering Maeshowe anew. Her album, Utopia, describes a female island paradise; to me, it is a vision that reaches back through the history of Iceland and Britain, to Viking times and earlier. It reminds me of the Old Norse epic the Völuspá: a creation story narrated by women, which makes the sun into a female goddess and has women as law-makers. The Völuspá, in turn, drew on those ancient Celtic legends which told of paradisal western isles where women ruled.

My novel, Cwen, draws on all these rich and inspiring stories to tell an alternative story of Britain and its women. The word “cwen” is Old English for queen. According to the etymologist Carl Darling Buck, English is the only Indo-European language in which words for queen are not derived from those for king. By Chaucer’s time, the word had taken on a more bawdy meaning.

In the 5,000 years since Maeshowe was built, we have entered a sixth mass species extinction event, and pollution and waste plague our soils and oceans. It is surely time to try something new – or old. Let us put female weather prophets in charge of Britain’s climate: Emma Howard Boyd, head of the Environment Agency, for example. Or Caroline Lucas, the Green party’s sole MP; or Farhana Yamin, an environmental lawyer. That Johnson and Sharma fitted out the Cop team with a group of their male mates was not a foregone conclusion, culturally speaking. Had Cop26 been hosted by Britain in the first century AD, rather than the 21st, Boudicca would have been leading the negotiations. Now, once again, it is time to inject some of Britain’s ancient female power into our modern social fabric.

TikTok CEO grilled for over five hours on China, drugs and teen mental health | TikTok | The Guardian

Wed, 13 May 2026 14:34:38 +0000

The chief executive of TikTok, Shou Zi Chew, was forced to defend his company’s relationship with China, as well as the protections for its youngest users, at a testy congressional hearing on Thursday that came amid a bipartisan push to ban the app entirely in the US over national security concerns.

The hearing marked the first ever appearance before US lawmakers by a TikTok chief executive, and a rare public outing for the 4o-year-old Chew, who has remained largely out of the limelight as the social network’s popularity soars. TikTok now boasts tens of millions of US users, but lawmakers have long held concerns over China’s control over the app, which Chew repeatedly tried to assuage throughout the hearing. “Let me state this unequivocally: ByteDance is not an agent of China or any other country,” Chew said in Thursday’s testimony.

Questioning got off to a forceful start with members of the committee hammering Chew on his connection to executives at TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, who lawmakers say have ties to the Chinese Communist party. The committee members asked how frequently Chew was in contact with them, and questioned whether the company’s proposed solutions to US data security concerns would offer sufficient protection against Chinese laws that require companies to make user data accessible to the government.

TikTok’s CEO eluded the spotlight. Now, a looming ban means he can’t avoid it

Chew’s claims of independence from the Chinese government were undermined by a Wall Street Journal story published just hours before the hearing that said China would strongly oppose any forced sale of the company. Responding for the first time to Joe Biden’s threat of a national ban unless ByteDance sells its shares, the Chinese commerce ministry said such a move would involve exporting technology from China and thus would have to be approved by the Chinese government.

Lawmakers also questioned Chew, a former Goldman Sachs banker who has helmed the company since March 2021, over the platform’s impact on mental health, particularly of its young users. The Republican congressman Gus Bilirakis shared the story of Chase Nasca, a 16-year-old boy who killed himself a year ago by stepping in front of a train. Nasca’s parents, who have sued ByteDance, claiming Chase was “targeted” with unsolicited self-harm content, appeared at the hearing and grew emotional as Bilirakis told their son’s story.

“I want to thank his parents for being here today, and allowing us to show this,” Bilirakis said. “Mr Chew, your company destroyed their lives.”

Driving home concerns about young users, congresswoman Nanette Barragán asked Chew about reports that he does not let his own children use the app.

“At what age do you think it would be appropriate for a young person to get on TikTok?” she said.

Chew confirmed his own children were not on TikTok but said that was because in Singapore, where they live, there is not a version of the platform for users under the age of 13.

Chew, who has kept a relatively low-profile during his two years as CEO, spent much of the five-hour hearing stressing TikTok’s distance from the Chinese government, kicking off his testimony with an emphasis on his own Singaporean heritage. Chew talked about Project Texas – an effort to move all US data to domestic servers – and said the company was deleting all US user data that is backed up to servers outside of the country by the end of the year.

Some legislators expressed skepticism that Project Texas was too large an undertaking and would not tackle concerns about US data privacy soon enough. “I am concerned that what you’re proposing with Project Texas just doesn’t have the technical capability of providing us the assurances that we need,” the California Republican Jay Obernolte, a software engineer, said.

At one point, Tony Cárdenas, a Democrat from California, asked Chew outright if TikTok is a Chinese company. Chew responded that TikTok is global in nature, not available in mainland China, and headquartered in Singapore and Los Angeles.

Neal Dunn, a Republican from Florida, asked with similar bluntness whether ByteDance has “spied on American citizens” – a question that came amid reports the company had accessed journalists’ information in an attempt to identify which employees leaked information. Chew responded that “spying is not the right way to describe it”.

Shou Zi Chew, TikTok’s CEO, leaves the hearing. Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

The hearing comes three years after TikTok was formally targeted by the Trump administration with an executive order prohibiting US companies from doing business with ByteDance. Biden revoked that order in June 2021, under the stipulation that the US committee on foreign investment conduct a review of the company. When that review stalled, Biden demanded TikTok sell its Chinese-owned shares or face a ban in the US.

This bipartisan nature of the backlash was remarked upon several times during the hearing, with Cárdenas pointing out that Chew “has been one of the few people to unite this committee”.

Chew’s testimony, some lawmakers said, was reminiscent of Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance in an April 2018 hearing to answer for his own platform’s data-privacy issues – answers many lawmakers were unsatisfied with. Cárdenas said: “We are frustrated with TikTok … and yes, you keep mentioning that there are industry issues that not only TikTok faces but others. You remind me a lot of [Mark] Zuckerberg ... when he came here, I said he reminds me of Fred Astaire: a good dancer with words. And you are doing the same today. A lot of your answers are a bit nebulous, they’re not yes or no.”

TikTok’s CEO eluded the spotlight. Now, a looming ban means he can’t avoid it

Chew warned users in a video posted to TikTok earlier in the week that the company was at a “pivotal moment”.

“Some politicians have started talking about banning TikTok,” he said, adding that the app now has more than 150 million active monthly US users. “That’s almost half the US coming to TikTok.”

TikTok has battled legislative headwinds since its meteoric rise began in 2018. Today, a majority of teens in the US say they use TikTok – with 67% of people ages 13 to 17 saying they have used the app and 16% of that age group saying they use it “almost constantly”, according to the Pew Research Center.

This has raised a number of concerns about the app’s impact on young users’ safety, with self-harm and eating disorder-related content spreading on the platform. TikTok is also facing lawsuits over deadly “challenges” that have gone viral on the app. TikTok has introduced features in response to such criticisms, including automatic time limits for users under 18.

Some tech critics have said that while TikTok’s data collection does raise concerns, its practices are not much different from those of other big tech firms.

“Holding TikTok and China accountable are steps in the right direction, but doing so without holding other platforms accountable is simply not enough,” said the Tech Oversight Project, a technology policy advocacy organization, in a statement.

“Lawmakers and regulators should use this week’s hearing as an opportunity to re-engage with civil society organizations, NGOs, academics and activists to squash all of big tech’s harmful practices.”

DNA test confirms Warren Harding fathered daughter outside his marriage | US politics | The Guardian

Wed, 13 May 2026 13:08:11 +0000

Warren G Harding, the president who ushered the US into a decade of speakeasies and big band jazz, fathered a daughter with a mistress, new genealogy tests confirm.

Nan Britton first claimed that Harding had fathered her daughter, Elizabeth, in 1927, a few years after the 57-year-old president died of a heart attack and left nothing for his only child. Her book, The President’s Daughter, provoked outrage and denunciations of Britton, who was accused of inventing a scandal to profit off a tainted administration.

The book was a bestseller but earned Britton the scorn of Harding relations and Americans who disbelieved the young woman without correspondence or proof.

But descendants of the Harding family – the president himself was childless in marriage – chose to solve the mystery at last this year, approaching Britton’s grandson, James Blaesing, to participate in a DNA test performed by the genealogical website Ancestry.com.

The tests found that a grandnephew and grandniece of Harding are second cousins of Blaesing, confirming that an extramarital affair had resulted in a child. The results were first reported by the New York Times.

Nan Britton and her daughter Elizabeth Ann Britton. Photograph: AP

“We’d heard about it all our lives and we’d heard it wasn’t true,” Abigail Harding told the Guardian of her cousin, Peter Harding, and the story of their granduncle’s affair. But after reading Britton’s book and other love letters by Harding, she said they became more convinced that Blaesing was their second cousin.

“We just thought we have the tools now, let’s find out the truth – is he or isn’t he?” she said. “We both felt that he was.”

After the results were confirmed, Harding said she got a call from Blaesing, who simply began: “Hi, cousin.”

The results “show 99.9% certainty”, Stephen Baloglu, an Ancestry DNA executive said. “After having tested multiple members of the Harding family, all having connections back to James, the family connection is definitive.”

Baloglu added that the company was glad to help solve the family mystery “and in this case rewriting history”.

Harding, a 72-year-old retired teacher in Ohio, said that a branch of the family remains skeptical about whether the tests are valid, and that various stories had circulated denying the president’s paternity of Blaesing’s mother.

“The one I heard was that president Harding’s father said he had mumps when he was little, and that had made him sterile,” she said. “Others just said Nan was crazy, was a gold-digger.”

In her book, Britton described how as a 17-year-old she had felt infatuated with Harding, even though he was decades her senior. She included salacious details of the affair, claiming that they conceived her daughter in Harding’s Senate office and kept the affair alive after he won the presidency in 1920.

Britton claimed that she had Harding frequently “repaired” in the White House, in “a small closet in the ante-room, evidently a place for hats and coats, but entirely empty most of the times we used it”.

She was not Harding’s only mistress. Before Britton, Harding kept up an intermittent affair with a woman named Carrie Phillips, whom the Republican National Committee is suspected to have paid thousands of dollars for her silence. Letters unsealed last year by the Library of Congress reveal that Harding did not try hard to disguise the relationship; the letters include poems, paeans to Phillips’ breasts, and anthropomorphized genitalia with the nickname “Jerry”.

The flowery, effusive language in those letters further convinced the Harding cousins that Britton’s account was true. “It sounds like a middle-school kid having his first crush,” Harding said of the president’s distinctive style. “It was really over the top.”

The DNA test should put historians finally at ease about questions on Harding’s personal life, ending the division wrought by The President’s Daughter in the 87 years since its publication.

Biographer John W Dean, who expressed skepticism in his 2001 account of the president’s life, tweeted “At last!” on learning of the new DNA test. James Robenalt, author of thebook about Harding’s administration and aims, has for years accepted Britton’s story, and urged Americans to finally move past the president’s personal indiscretions.

“It helps put this stuff all behind us I think,” Robenalt said. “You can put it down in a box and say it’s no longer a mystery and scandal that people have to wonder about. I think that it will help people to put that aside just like they do with John Kennedy and Bill Clinton and Franklin Roosevelt.”

“We’ve had a lot of presidents who’ve had personal issues in their sex lives, but there’s been a real sea change. People are more willing to say personal lives are personal. Today might be the turning point for his legacy.”

Dean, Robenalt and others have tried in the last 20 years to rehabilitate Harding’s reputation, which was for decades tarnished by corruption scandals of his advisers and his brief time in office. They note that Harding tried to address racial tensions as African Americans moved from the south to major cities; that he maneuvered through the volatile politics of anarchists, socialists and hawks in post-war America; and that he helped institute one of the first international arms treaty.

Blaesing, now confirmed as Harding’s grandson, did not immediately respond to calls for comment, but said on Thursday that the tests vindicated his grandmother. “She loved him until the day she died,” he told the New York Times. “He was everything.”

“I wanted to prove who she was and prove everyone wrong.”

Harding said that she and her cousin, who lives in California, plan to meet Blaesing next year somewhere near their second cousin’s Oregon home.

Serena Williams lets fly with volley at 'crip walk' critics at US Open | US Open tennis | The Guardian

Wed, 13 May 2026 11:18:50 +0000

The buses of New York perversely carry images of last year's losing finalists, Rafael Nadal and Serena Williams, to promote the 2012 US Open, which starts on Monday.

Nadal, injured, is not here but Williams, bouncing with fitness, brio and pedigree that mocks her No4 seeding, most definitely is.

We were reminded of her considerable presence when she responded acidly to questions on Saturday about her supposedly controversial "crip walk" to celebrate her Olympic triumph over Maria Sharapova at Wimbledon three weeks ago.

At the time, Fox Sports fumed with all the cliches it could muster: "She was in the city of kings and queens. People were sipping champagne and eating strawberries and cream … and there was Serena crip-walking all over the most lily-white place in the world."

To hear tennis fulminate with mannered righteousness about the gang culture of Los Angeles is to listen to cant turned up to knob 11. Whatever reservations or knowledge tennis writers may have about the history of a movement that began in ghetto solidarity in the 70s and has descended with sad predictability into a culture of crime and death on the streets of Compton, that is where Williams spent much of her youth. That is where she lost her older sister, Yetunde, in a drive-by shooting in 2003 because her boyfriend was a gang member.

"All people know that the crip walk is not just a dance," came the questioner's first serve at the final round of press conferences here. Fault. "I was wondering, do you have any regrets doing it in front of everyone?" came the second – and Williams unrolled a withering volley.

"First of all," she bridled, "it was just a dance. I didn't know that's what it was called. Second, why are you asking me that? If anything, you should be trying to ask me questions to lift me up not bring such things … I'm done with that question."

Mess with Serena and keep your hands up. What was less convincing was her assertion that: "I haven't even seen the draw."

She will know by now, no doubt, that she is due to play her 22-year-old fellow American Coco Vandeweghe on Tuesday, and thereafter hurtles towards more testing engagements against, probably, Maria Kirilenko, seeded 14th, and the former world No1 Caroline Wozniacki on the way to a semi-final against the No2 seed Agnieszka Radwanska, whom she beat to win her fifth Wimbledon title seven weeks ago.

Yet, for all her achievements, for all that she has beaten life-threatening illness and shows no sign of going away, the media glare has fallen more kindly here on Kim Clijsters, who was greeted with predictable and deserved gush on the occasion of her farewell grand-slam tournament.

Just about every other player was asked to say how wonderful was the ever-smiling Belgian mother who was runner-up here when world No1 in 2003 and won the second of her three US Open titles as a wild card when she came out of retirement three years ago.

"Obviously this place is magical for me," Clijsters said. "I have had so many beautiful memories. I have always enjoyed being around the other players and having a good relationship with them. There are a lot of girls I have stayed in touch with over the years, even when I retired in the past and had Jada and got married."

She said of Serena: "It's great to see that she's doing so well physically after all the problems that she's had." And she meant it. Good stories do not come more Hollywood perfect.

Among active players, no one has won more than her 31 titles on hard courts – and Williams has 30, with eight of them in slams (to Clijsters's four).

Clijsters's final bow may come a little earlier than her fans want but probably no earlier than realists expect. Williams, though, cares little about pleasing a gallery that has only occasionally given her the sort of unconditional love afforded her rival. Her New York nadir arrived three years ago when she was booed off court on her way out of the tournament after berating an official over a foot-fault in her semi-final against Clijsters.

But history is there for the making again. Only seven players aged 30 or over have won a slam title in the open era – Margaret Court (three), Martina Navratilova (three), Chris Evert (two), Billie Jean King (two), Ann Jones, Virginia Wade and Williams, who did it at Wimbledon this year.

It is Serena's time. Still.

‘Dark, like our future’: Iranians describe scenes of catastrophe after Tehran’s oil depots bombed | US-Israel war on Iran | The Guardian

Tue, 12 May 2026 20:24:12 +0000

Thick black smoke was still rising in the sky, soot covered the streets and cars, balconies filled with black gunk, and the toxic air had filled the lungs as Tehran woke up after a night of airstrikes on the city’s oil depots on Sunday.

In messages and voice notes sent to the Guardian, people described the situation in their homes and on the streets, some calling it “apocalyptic”. With the sun blotted out, disoriented people in Iran’s capital had to turn on their lights to see through the gloom.

Four oil depots and a petroleum logistics site in and around Tehran were hit. Local authorities said six people were killed and 20 wounded at one of the sites.

Videos shared by citizen journalists showed massive flames over the Tehran sky overnight and smoke still billowing over the oil storage facilities. As rain poured down on the city of 10 million people on Sunday morning, authorities warned of toxic acid rain and many residents woke up with pain in their throat and eyes burning.

A fire after an airstrike on an oil storage facility in Tehran. Photograph: Arileza Sotakbar/AP

Speaking to the Guardian via voice notes, Negin – not her real name – an activist and former political prisoner based in the central-east side of the city, said the situation was “apocalyptic”.

She said: “The situation is so frightening it’s hard to describe. Smoke has covered the entire city. I have severe shortness of breath and burning in my eyes and throat, and many others feel the same. But people still have to go outside because they have no choice. Many places reopened today, but closed again because it’s impossible to stay outdoors.”

Iran’s environmental agency advised people in Tehran to stay indoors. The country’s Red Crescent said the toxic chemicals could lead to acid rain and hurt the skin and lungs, advising people to avoid turning on air conditioners or going outside immediately after rainfall. It also encouraged people to protect exposed food. Tehran’s governor recommended wearing masks outside. Dr Shahram Kordasti, a UK-based Iranian haemato-oncologist, warned the toxic gases and fine particulate matter could irritate the eyes and airways, worsen asthma, pulmonary conditions and heart disease, and increase the risk of some cancers.

Strikes near the Azadi tower close to Tehran’s Mehrabad International airport on Saturday night. Photograph: Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images

Negin, who went out to buy a mask and an inhaler, said: “Even masks are becoming difficult to find. This is a huge mistake. I ask those who have the ability, especially foreign media, to reflect on this situation. What are people supposed to do under these conditions? This is truly a crime against humanity.”

Speaking about the effects on people of the US-Israeli strikes continuing around her she said, “This is no longer just a human rights violation. It is truly anti-human behaviour. If someone has a problem with the Islamic Republic government, that is one thing – but not with us, the people. You cannot attack water systems or refineries. Most of Tehran’s water comes from dams. If those become polluted, what happens then? The government has basically left people on their own.”

She said: “Prices are skyrocketing. I bought an inhaler for 850,000 tomans [£4.50]. Where are people supposed to get this money? Many people in Tehran are daily workers who haven’t had work for a long time. Food is becoming extremely expensive, and many things are becoming scarce.”

For Negin, who decided to stay in the city, there was a feeling of helplessness. “The pressure inside the country is becoming enormous. There are shortages of basic goods. There was no gasoline anywhere. Today in many places they are giving people only five litres of fuel. The situation is extremely painful.”

Firefighters at the Shahran oil depot in Tehran after it was struck. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

In other messages relayed via relatives abroad, two Tehranis said everyone was advised to stay indoors and given instructions on domestic media on how to deal with the toxic air and keep safe.

Mehdi – speaking under an alias – is a 42-year-old restaurant owner who lives in the west of the city. He said the fear of inhaling the toxic gas and touching anything is similar to how it felt during Covid. “We are so scared to even clean the windows and balconies. There’s soot everywhere and we don’t even want to touch it with gloves. My eyes are burning and I look outside and see people without masks are going on with their daily lives. I am not so brave. There’s this smell in the air I can’t explain.”

Mehdi said he also planned to leave the city and that it would be hazardous to serve people food in his restaurant until he knew the water was safe. “Trust me, we are on our own. This regime doesn’t care about us so why would I make a plea to a foreign power to care for us? And tell those saying we asked for this. No! We didn’t ask for the death of our people who were getting killed by the regime anyway. And if you haven’t cared when they gunned us down, zip your mouth now. We [Tehranis] are here to help each other even if this government doesn’t.”

A destroyed fuel tanker at the Shahran depot. Photograph: Majid Asgaripour/Reuters

As Israel targeted the oil storage facilities on Saturday evening, Mehnaz, 39, who did not want her real name published, tried to flee the south of the capital, she said in messages. Believing the strikes would get worse early the next morning, she and her husband packed up essentials and got in the car. After driving just a few minutes, she saw bright flames in the sky towards the Shahr-e Rey oil depot.

Thinking it was just another explosion, she drove ahead, not realising the oil depot had been hit. The internet shutdown imposed by the regime meant she had no information on what was hit and where. “I thought leaving now was safe because they will hit early [on Sunday] morning, but I had to come back,” she said.

At about midnight on Saturday, she wrote: “Tehran is burning. And smoke has filled the streets. It’s impossible to drive out of the city right now and even with the windows closed, heavy smoke is making its way inside … [I am] clueless whether to stay in or brave the flames and drive out while it’s still on fire. I don’t even have a mask.”

Cars in Tehran pass a war memorial statue and a billboard depicting the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

But on Sunday, Mehnaz decided staying put in the city was no longer feasible. She fled at about 11.30am and drove towards her parents’ home outside the province.

“There was a long queue for gas and they were rationing and putting a limit on how much we [could] fill in,” she said. “The Rey depot, you won’t believe, was still on fire and it’s insane because in the night it looked like day and in the day, it was so dark, it looked like a new moon night. So, so dark, just like our futures.”

She said: “While I was leaving I noticed there wasn’t a single bird in the sky and you know what they say? When the birds abandon you, you are truly on your own. We have so many cats in the city. If these attacks continue, whoever rules here next, they will rule over a democracy of cats. But then even cats have only nine lives.”

Additional reporting by Angelique Chrisafis, Associated Press and AFP

Mona Chalabi’s datablog: Iraq war leukemia rates worse than after Hiroshima bombing | US military | The Guardian

Tue, 12 May 2026 20:24:12 +0000

Leukemia rates climbed 660% after the Hiroshima bombing and 2,200% after the assault on Falluja. Illustration: Mona Chalabi/Guardian Design

This article is more than 3 years old

Mona Chalabi’s datablog: Iraq war leukemia rates worse than after Hiroshima bombing

This article is more than 3 years old

Bombing of Falluja preceded 2,200% increase in leukemia rates, as well as 1,260% increase in childhood cancer

The US assault on Iraq that began 20 years ago has left a toxic legacy worse than that of the Hiroshima bombing, according to a study that looked at cancer rates and infant mortality.

After the bombing in Japan, the rates of leukemia among those living closest to the detonation increased by a devastating 660%, about 12 to 13 years after the bomb (which is when radiation levels peaked). In Falluja, leukemia rates increased by 2,200% in a much shorter space of time, averaged just five to 10 years after the bombings. Anecdotally, doctors in Iraq began reporting a big increase in cancer rates as well as congenital anomalies (commonly referred to as “birth defects”) after the US began bombing the country. The research, led by Dr Christopher Busby while he was at the University of Ulster, showed that the doctors’ observations were backed up by data.

In addition to the huge increase in leukemia, Busby and his colleagues found a 1,260% increase in rates of childhood cancer in Falluja after the US bombing as well as a 740% increase in brain tumors. They also found evidence that Iraqis had been exposed to radiation, as infant mortality rates were 820% higher than in neighboring Kuwait.

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States in 1945 was one of the worst atrocities in human history. When Dr Busby compared the numbers to those in Falluja, he found that “the cancer levels are astonishing”, adding: “The peak effect in those at Hiroshima who were most irradiated was less than the effect in all of Falluja.”

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Is new kids’ show Chip Chilla a ‘blatant Bluey knock-off’ for conservatives? | Children's TV | The Guardian

Tue, 12 May 2026 19:11:55 +0000

Janine, I just saw a teaser for a new show that looks like Bluey but … for conservatives? What’s going on?

You’re not imagining things, Steph. The Daily Wire, the US conservative media brand founded by political commentator Ben Shapiro and film-maker Jeremy Boreing, has branched out into kids’ entertainment with a new subscription streaming app called Bentkey. Their aim is to get ’em while they’re young, claw back some ground from “the left” and counter Disney’s stranglehold. “We have to challenge the left every single place that it lives,” Boreing declared last year, when the Daily Wire announced it was investing US$100m into creating a children’s platform.

My kids may have outgrown the cartoon Bluey, but I haven’t | Emma Brockes

One of Bentkey’s four original series is Chip Chilla: an animated show about a family of chinchillas who are homeschooled by their parents, voiced by embattled former-Broadway actor Laura Osnes, and actor and culture war warrior Rob Schneider. The pastel colour palette bears a resemblance to a certain beloved Australian animated preschool series, and the three kids and parents in the series engage in elaborate role play. You’ll notice the music in the teaser also rings distinct Bluey bells.

An episode of Chip Chilla, in which the children are taught a patriotic lesson about the moon landing. Photograph: Bentkey

People are calling this a ‘blatant Bluey knockoff’. Are the characters dogs, like in Bluey?

Well, chinchillas are actually furry rodents native to South America. But there’s nothing vaguely Latino about the American-accented characters in Chip Chilla, who – in the six episodes I watched – inhabit a very wholesome, heteronormative, patriotic slice of US suburbia.

Have I died and woken up in the 1950s? Why is this happening now?

The cult of Bluey: how a kids’ cartoon became a bible for modern parenting

Funny you should ask. Bentkey intentionally launched on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Walt Disney Company, a firm Boreing reckons “pushes all the worst excesses of the woke left”. Bentkey was apparently created in response to Disney’s public opposition to Florida’s Parental Rights in Education measure, also known as the “don’t say gay” law.

According to Boreing: “Kids go to school for 40 hours a week and then they engage in pop culture for 40 more hours every week. That means for 80 hours of a child’s week, you are turning them over to the left. A good parent might spend 15 minutes a day in meaningful conversation with their kids … A great parent might take their kid to church for one hour, or two hours, or three hours a week. The other 80, they’re watching Disney … they’re online … they’re in public schools.”

In a video statement on Monday marking Bentkey’s launch, Boreing said: “Bentkey isn’t about teaching kids politics, it’s about childhood and wonder and adventure. It’s about values and all of the things on which politics are built later.”

You’ve actually watched a few episodes of Chip Chilla. Is it as yikes as it sounds? How does it compare?

As one commentator on X noted: “The first Daily Wire cartoon show looks like it will finally answer the question ‘What if Bluey sucked?’”

Bluey has been praised for being as moving and meaningful for parents as for kids – and, importantly, for being funny. From the six episodes I’ve watched, I can say the worst sin Chip Chilla commits is to be a bit dull, at least for this adult. If its mission is, as suspected, to take Bluey’s winning formula and put a conservative wash on it, it’s subtle.

Bluey has been praised for being as moving and meaningful for parents as for kids. Photograph: ABC iView

Take gender roles, for instance. While Chilli, the mother in Bluey, is engaged outside the home with work, the father, Bandit, is an active and relatively equal caregiver to the two kids. The parents in Chip Chilla, meanwhile, embody more traditional roles: the mother, Chinny (voiced by Osnes), does a lot of the feeding, nurturing and affection-giving, while the distinctly alpha father Chum Chum (Schneider) leads the charge (while Chinny assists) in teaching topics such as Frankenstein, the Three Musketeers and America’s heroic role in the moon landing. Like Bandit in Bluey, Chum Chum is a highly engaged and creative father, but his style does sometimes verge on the mansplain-y; you certainly couldn’t imagine him shopping for psyllium husks or being hungover.

Chip Chilla opens with the oldest child, a girl named Charla, cooking breakfast. “You’re becoming quite the chef,” coos her proud mother. “Gonna put me out of a job!” (Chum Chum spends most of this scene at the table, hiding behind his newspaper.) In the fourth episode of Chip Chilla, in which the kids and parents try swapping roles for the day, the children come to the conclusion that being a parent is hard. “But Mom says she wouldn’t trade it for the world,” the middle child, Chip, says.

Have the team behind Bluey said anything?

A spokeswoman for the ABC said Ludo Studios, the Brisbane-based production company behind Bluey, would “respectfully decline” to comment for now.

Venezuelans deported by US detail fresh claims of torture and abuse at El Salvador mega-prison | El Salvador | The Guardian

Tue, 12 May 2026 07:58:05 +0000

A group of 18 Venezuelan men whom the US expelled a notorious Salvadorian mega-prison are demanding that Salvadorian authorities be held internationally accountable for violation of human rights – detailing new allegations of torture, sexual assault and medical neglect.

A new petition, filed on Thursday before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, alleges that El Salvador violated the human rights of these men, who were expelled to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot) last year without charge.

Human rights groups filed the petition on behalf of the 18 men, who were among 288 Venezuelans and Salvadorians that the US transferred to Cecot in March 2025. The detainees detail a “pattern of abuse, including beatings, humiliation, and sexual assault” while they were incarcerated.

‘We became famous, but at what cost?’: after the horrors of Cecot, the search for a normal life

“One year later, these men are still waiting for justice,” said Bella Mosselmans, co-counsel on the petition and Director of the Global Strategic Litigation Council (GSLC). “We are demanding accountability for them, for their families and to ensure it never happens again.”

In new testimony, the men, who were released from Cecot and returned to Venezuela in July last year, also recount the lasting mental and physical toll of their incarceration. One man testified that he still has scars from the shackles that the detainees were forced to wear for extended periods of time, writing that they “are a constant reminder of the horror I lived”.

The former detainee said he is also triggered by loud noises, including the clanking of keys – “because the officials used to bang their keys on the cells to torture us and keep us awake at all hours. The sound of keys puts me into a panic state.”

The human rights organizations and advocates who filed the petition have requested that the individuals’ names remain anonymous, given that some of them fled persecution and danger in Venezuela, and remain vulnerable now that they have returned to their home countries.

Another of the men said that officials beat him from the moment he disembarked from the flight to El Salvador. “When I got off the plane, I fell, and two riot police from El Salvador picked me up with blows to the ribs,” he said. “They lifted me up by the handcuffs. This was an unimaginable pain.”

A prisoner receives medical care, during a media tour of the Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot) in Tecoluca, El Salvador, on 30 January 2026. Photograph: José Cabezas/Reuters

He was beaten dozens of times during his four months of incarceration. “After each beating I was in severe pain for about seven days, to the point where I couldn’t move or walk properly,” he said. But in neighboring cells, he said, detainees were beaten more than 100 out of the 125 days that they were incarcerated. “We could hear them screaming in pain.

“Several times,” he added, “The guards told us that human rights did not exist in Cecot.”

The petition echoes abuses that several of the men released from Cecot have recounted to the Guardian and other media outlets, noting that detainees were held in windowless cells with no air conditioning and were made to sleep under the glare of bright lights that remained on 24/7. The detainees staged a hunger strike – which they said they kept up until one of their fellow detainees was beaten and dragged out of his cell “half dead’. Other detainees also staged a “blood strike”, cutting their wrists, “but neither the guards nor the doctors cared”, one of the men said in his testimony.

The men also testified that they were deprived of basic necessities including food, water and sleep. Sometimes there was only one tank of water for bathing and drinking provided for a cell with 10 people, the men said – and sometimes there were worms and mosquitoes in the tank. One individual said he had stomach issues and diarrhoea three out of the four months he spent in Cecot. “I don’t know if it was because of the water or the food. I always had diarrhea. The food hurt my stomach so much that I still have a stomach aches,” he said.

The men were detained in windowless rooms, without air conditioning, and were made to sleep on metal bunks. Bright lights remained on at all hours. “This was torture,” one of the former detainees wrote. “At first, we did not know if it was day or night. I felt like a chicken raised in a cage with constant light.”

Many of the other Venezuelan migrants who were expelled from the US to El Salvador note that they have no criminal records. The US spuriously accused them of being members of the Tren de Aragua gang, the men have alleged, based on scant evidence including innocuous tattoos.

After four months at Cecot, 252 Venezuelan men were released and returned to their home countries – where many were forced to confront the same danger and persecution they had fled.

In an interview with the Guardian last winter, Andry Hernández Romero – a gay makeup artist who had fled persecution in Venezuela due to his sexuality and his political views – said that after he returned to his home country, it was difficult to navigate daily life back in Venezuela. It had been difficult to find work, he said, because some employers believed the US government’s claims that he was a gang member.

The whereabouts of 36 Salvadorians the US sent to Cecot remain “unconfirmed”, the petition states, and their families remain unable to contact them.

The petition was filed to the IACHR, a regional body within the Organization for American States tasked with protecting and promoting human rights across the region. It asks the commission to declare that the agreement between the United States and the Republic of El Salvador for the transfer of deportees to Cecot violates El Salvador’s obligations under the American convention on human rights. It also asks the commission to require El Salvador to make reparations to the former detainees, make a public apology and provide resources for psychiatric and psychological rehabilitation.

It includes testimony not only by men incarcerated at Cecot, but also from medical workers who corroborated their accounts, from former US officials who attest that the Trump administration knowingly sent deportees to a country with a record of human rights abuses and from former UN special rapporteurs on the human rights of migrants.

Police officers stand guard outside Cecot. Photograph: José Cabezas/Reuters

Most American states, including El Salvador under prior administrations, have complied with orders of the inter-American human rights system. But it is unclear how the current administration in El Salvador, under the autocratic leadership of President Nayib Bukele, will respond to this international pressure. Since 2022, El Salvador has operated under a “state of exception”, an emergency security policy that Bukele implemented as part of his government’s campaign against organized crime. Under the policy, authorities have also incarcerated about 1.4% of the Salvadorian population without due process.

“We still feel that there’s fundamental importance in trying to hold the regime to account and in supporting the victims of Cecot and their families and their fight for justice,” Mosselmans said.

Human rights groups within the US have also filed claims and lawsuits on behalf of the deportees sent to Cecot. Last year, the ACLU and Democracy forward filed suit arguing that the Trump administration unlawfully invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act – which grants the president the wartime authority to expel nations of foreign countries engaged in a “declared war” against the US – to remove Venezuelan migrants. Declaring that Tren de Aragua was at “war” with the US, Trump invoked the act to swiftly expel Venezuelan men – many of them asylum seekers with no criminal records – to Cecot.

Earlier this month, the legal aid group ImmDef filed claims against the Department of Homeland Security on behalf of six deportees including Hernández. And on Tuesday Neiyerver Adrián León Rengel, 28, filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking at least $1.3m in compensation, alleging false imprisonment and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

“The men who disappeared to Cecot are beloved fathers, sons, husbands and neighbors,” said Julie Bourdoiseau, an attorney at the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies. “US and Salvadorian authorities colluded to rip them from their homes and communities without warning, and without any semblance of due process … One year later, these families have received no redress for the unimaginable pain our governments inflicted upon them. That is unacceptable.”

The petition to the IACHR is part of a broader series of cases challenging US deporting migrants to third countries – not only El Salvador but also Costa Rica, Panama and Eswatini.

Venezuela court freezes Juan Guaidó's bank accounts and imposes travel ban | Juan Guaidó | The Guardian

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:04:52 +0000

Venezuela’s supreme court has imposed a travel ban and financial restrictions on self-declared interim president Juan Guaidó, including freezing his bank accounts.

On Tuesday, the political crisis deepened as the country’s attorney general ordered an investigation into the opposition leader, who last week declared himself interim president in a rare challenge to the incumbent, Nicolás Maduro.

Tarek Saab, a Maduro loyalist, announced that Juan Guaidó – who has received the backing of the US and other regional powers including Brazil and Colombia – would be investigated over his supposed role in “serious crimes that threaten the constitutional order”.

Juan Guaidó: Venezuela has chance to leave chaos behind

Hours earlier the US tightened the screws on Maduro by announcing sweeping sanctions against the country’s state-owned oil company PDVSA in what experts said was an attempt to economically asphyxiate his regime.

A series of anti-Maduro demonstrations are due to take place on Wednesday in Caracas, the capital, and across the country.

Speaking to Russian news agency RIA on Wednesday morning, Maduro said he was ready for talks with the opposition, with the participation of international mediators.

“I am ready to sit at the negotiation table with the opposition for us to talk for the benefit of Venezuela, for the sake of peace and its future,” he said. Maduro said the US sanctions were one of US national security adviser John Bolton’s “craziest” ideas and that he would emerge the victor in the standoff.

Earlier, Guaidó appeared to take the threat of imprisonment in his stride. He said: “We are here, we will keep acting and working to confront the humanitarian crisis.”

Bolton denounced the “threats” from Saab – who he described as the “illegitimate former Venezuelan attorney general”.

“There will be serious consequences for those who attempt to subvert democracy and harm Guaido,” Bolton tweeted.

José Miguel Vivanco, the Americas director of Human Rights Watch, said the move had been expected: “The only question, given the domestic and international support for Guaidó, is if the Maduro dictatorship is able to really flex its muscles and sideline Guaidó like it has with previous opposition leaders.”

Maduro’s government has long sidelined or arrested figureheads of movements that threaten his power, such as Guaidó’s mentor Leopoldo López, currently under house arrest after organising protests in 2014. Others leaders have gone into self-imposed exile.

Protests that began on Monday last week were met with brutal repression, with the UN human rights office reporting that security forces in Venezuela had detained nearly 700 people last Tuesday, the highest tally in a single day in Venezuela in over two decades.

Between Monday and Saturday last week, more than 40 people were killed, and 850 people were detained overall, including 77 children.

On Tuesday morning, residents of Petare, a sprawling, downtrodden neighbourhood in Caracas, were still reeling from the crackdown launched after tens of thousands took to the capital’s streets on 23 January. Later that night, police and national guardsmen swarmed the streets of Petare, summarily executing suspected agitators, witnesses told the Guardian.

“It was horrible, I was terrified by all the gunfire, so much gunfire,” said one resident who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal. “The police arrived and entered people’s home, and people say they killed people in their own homes who had no criminal records.”

Another resident, who also asked not to be named, expressed solidarity with Guaidó in the face of possible legal troubles. “He has done what no other political has done in about 10 days,” the resident said. “I believe in him and I ask that he helps us change Venezuela.”

However, there was also support for the move against the opposition leader.

Venezuela at the crossroads: the who, what and why of the crisis

“I agree with it because I think that Guaidó is a usurper. He has to respect President Maduro and I think he has to sit down and talk to him and reach an agreement to solve the country’s problems,” said Douglas Flores, 58, a cobbler from the José Félix Ribas neighbourhood in Caracas.

“I think was wrong to proclaim himself president and although I do not judge him, I think he should apologize to President Maduro. He was re-elected and that must be respected. We must respect what the constitution says.”

Guaidó has said he was aware of the consequences of standing up to Maduro, but said he was not fearful.

“I am more afraid of continuing to live in this situation of uncertainty and chaos,” he told the Guardian in an interview last Saturday. “I always think of my daughter when people ask me this, and I have to say my biggest fear is seeing her grow up thinking that this situation is normal. It is not normal and we need to leave the chaos behind.”

Where’s her Pulitzer already? Joanna Newsom’s 20 best songs – ranked! | Music | The Guardian

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:04:48 +0000

20. Divers (2015)

“And in an infinite regress / Tell me, why is the pain of birth / Lighter borne than the pain of death?” Joanna Newsom sings on the elegant, kaleidoscopic title track to 2015’s time-obsessed Divers, its nesting cascades of strings and piano echoing the album’s premise, that life contains death, which contains life, and on and on to ∞ …

19. Sapokanikan (2015)

Joanna Newsom: Sapokanikan – video

The jaunty piano and sweetly rambling verses of Sapokanikan belie the profound depth of history hidden within Divers’ lead single, which contemplates the passing of time in the palimpsest of landscapes and paintings rich with secrets. The song peaks in a sort of ecstatic existential panic: “Look and despair,” Newsom sings once it settles.

18. Peach, Plum, Pear (2004)

Since 2006’s Ys, Newsom’s albums have been so conceptually staggering that her simpler debut can seem juvenile by proxy. But it’s still obvious why anyone who heard 2004’s The Milk-Eyed Mender fell in love. Here, as her rattling harpsichord drives an urgent, anxious account of attraction and rejection, the sweetness of her voice and accompanying spurts of a children’s choir make the hurt sting even more.

17. You Will Not Take My Heart Alive (2015)

Newsom’s narrator manically fights to defy mortality: “Beyond recall, you severed all strings / To everyone, and everything,” she sings amid shards of harp and distorted organ. The beauty of this song lies in the devastating way she repeats the title, crushed as if by the force of protecting her heart.

16. Easy (2010)

From the monumental triple album Have One on Me, there is slyness in the beauty of Easy, which drains the colour from its beatific scenes of domestic bliss, in bed and fairytale glades, to reveal the strain and indignity of loving someone who resists it. It shifts from gentle piano and strings to something more courtly – maybe the forced ritual of love – as Newsom gradually makes her pained indignation plain.

15. Only Skin (2006)

The futility of care also drives Only Skin, the 17-minute showstopper of Ys (clock the last letter of Only and the first of Skin), which billows with hope and desperation. Frankly, you could rank the top 20 moments in this song alone: Van Dyke Parks’ grave, pristine string arrangements as Newsom exclaims “being a woman!” at 7:38 pip it for me.

14. Sawdust & Diamonds (2006)

Newsom in 2008. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

Ys’s (comparatively) simplest moment strips back Parks’ arrangements and puts its other collaborator, engineer Steve Albini, in the spotlight, making a virtue of his aptitude for capturing performance: just Newsom, her harp and a heart-stoppingly determined vocal performance that dives into fathomless loss and pain. Her repeated shrieks of “o, desire!” rip the fabric of the universe.

13. Does Not Suffice (2010)

On the coda to Easy, Newsom packs her silky, cashmere things “and everything that could remind you / Of how easy I was not”, and pictures her cold former lover enjoying his empty palace. With just Newsom and her fingers slipping around the piano, the tone is bittersweet but stunned (and echoes the refrain from In California). It appears to end on a valedictory “la la la” – until the final minute cracks into telling, stormy dissonance.

12. Good Intentions Paving Co (2010)

Parks didn’t return for Have One on Me, but the rollicking Good Intentions evokes the playful, questing Americana of his debut album, 1967’s Song Cycle. The beauty of Newsom’s lyrics, meanwhile, lies in the contrast between the struggle to make a relationship work and the simplicity of her own desire: “I only want for you to pull over and hold me / Till I can’t remember my own name” is an all-timer.

11. In California (2010)

Almost every song on Have One on Me is a mini suite unto itself, moving through patches of conversational delivery, ridiculously beautiful melodies and baroque arrangements. Often the best parts are when Newsom’s equanimity boils over and the arrangements become frenzied, fraught: the “cuckoo, cuckoo-koo” cries here are piercingly lonely.

10. Cosmia (2006)

At the Barbican, London, in 2007. Photograph: Mick Hutson/Redferns

The incomprehensibility of loss – not being able to prevent it, nor survive it – radiates through Ys’s closing track, a dedication to a friend who died while Newsom was touring her debut. Her harp and Parks’ arrangements swell and search, climaxing in her wrenching attempt to reconcile pain with the soul’s release: “And I miss your precious heart,” she howls, over and over.

9. On a Good Day (2010)

The shortest song in Newsom’s catalogue may be her most brutal. Widely interpreted as being about a lost pregnancy, as well as the end of a relationship, it features just her and her harp casting holy light on the most terrible of disappointments.

8. Time, as a Symptom (2015)

At the Vanity Fair Oscar party, 2018. Photograph: Taylor Hill/FilmMagic

As much as loss beats through Newsom’s catalogue, so does her absolute belief in beauty, love, the point of it all. “Stand brave, life-liver / Bleeding out your days / In the river of time,” she instructs in the rapturous ending to Divers (though the album’s final word, “trans-”, links to its first, “sending”, escaping linearity and conclusions in a perfect, unending loop).

7. Leaving the City (2015)

Newsom may have one of the most finely detailed catalogues in popular music, although her work never feels airless. The incantatory attack of the chorus to Leaving the City is maybe the closest she has sounded to reckless abandon, breaking free from the calculated materialism and glory her lyrics indict.

6. Anecdotes (2015)

Newsom joins an army of birds (“hotdogging loon!”) in a war against the tyranny of time, craving a “temporal infidelity” and immortality that doesn’t depend on surrendering our “borrowed bones” come life’s end. She’s a stalwart, stirring commander in the first half, before it skews prismatic and awesome, as if high on the possibilities of life beyond earthly constraint.

5. Emily (2006)

Newsom in 2010. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian

One of the most symphonically beautiful songs in Newsom’s catalogue is a tribute to her astrophysicist sister and her metaphysical and corporeal guidance. In a catalogue that should already have received the Pulitzer prize, describing shallow water as “a mud-cloud, mica-spangled, like the sky’d been breathing on a mirror” is especially wondrous.

4. Jackrabbits (2010)

From Big Black’s noise to Joanna Newsom’s hush: 10 of Steve Albini’s greatest recordings

Newsom sings in a crushed murmur on Jackrabbits, as if not wanting to own up to her proposal that, in the wake of grievous loss, she and her estranged lover might give things another go. Hearing this poetic writer sing something as tangibly mundane and despondent as “I was tired of being drunk” hits extra hard.

3. Monkey & Bear (2006)

A fable about exploitation and the toll of performance, this is the best storytelling in Newsom’s catalogue, with a depth of reference to nature, the cosmos and the gods unmatched by anyone. The menace that comes into her voice as the monkey realises the bear is set to escape is startling, piqued by leaping woodwinds.

2. Baby Birch (2010)

The simple lilt of harp at the outset of Baby Birch echoes the childlike beauty of Newsom’s debut single, Sprout and the Bean, which only adds to the agony of another song that clearly concerns pregnancy loss. Six minutes in, the weather darkens and the pace quickens, creating an utterly gut-punching sense of futile panic.

1. Go Long (2010)

Touching on the story of Bluebeard and the chamber of murdered past brides that he reveals to his next victim – “gilded with the gold teeth of the women who loved you” – the exquisite Go Long excoriates the male pride, violence and stubbornness that condemns such figures to loneliness at the expense of those who try to love them. It’s one of Newsom’s finest-spun performances, her harp a reverberant synaptic tingle, her grave delivery flaring with contempt and pity. Of all her admonitions, about war and regal hauteur, the sorriness in her voice as she observes “you are badly hurt, you’re a silly goose” may be the most cutting of all.

What we lose when we surrender care to algorithms | US healthcare | The Guardian

Sun, 10 May 2026 23:43:58 +0000

The computer interrupted while Pamela was still speaking. I had accompanied her – my dear friend – to a recent doctor’s appointment. She is in her 70s, lives alone while navigating multiple chronic health issues, and has been getting short of breath climbing the front stairs to her apartment. In the exam room, she spoke slowly and self-consciously, the way people often do when they are trying to describe their bodies and anxieties to strangers. Midway through her description of how she had been feeling, the doctor clicked his mouse and a block of text began to bloom across the computer monitor.

Rejecting generative AI in healthcare won’t protect patients – it will harm them

The clinic had adopted an artificial-intelligence scribe, and it was transcribing and summarizing the conversation in real time. It was also highlighting keywords, suggesting diagnostic possibilities and providing billing codes. The doctor, apparently satisfied that his computer had captured an adequate description of Pamela’s chief complaint and symptoms, turned away from us and began reviewing the text on the screen as Pamela kept speaking.

When the appointment was over, as a physician myself and anthropologist interested in the evolving culture of medicine, I asked if I could glance at the AI-generated note. The summary was surprisingly fluid and accurate. But it did not capture the catch in Pamela’s voice when she mentioned the stairs, the flicker of fear when she implied that she now avoided them and avoided going out, the unspoken connection to Pamela’s traumatic relation to her own mother’s death that the doctor never elicited.

Scenes like this are becoming increasingly common. Physicians, for generations, have resisted new technologies that threatened their authority or unsettled established practice. But artificial intelligence is breaking that tradition by sweeping into clinical practice faster than almost any tool before it. Two-thirds of American physicians – a 78% jump from the year prior – and 86% of health systems used artificial intelligence as part of their practice in 2024. “AI will be as common in healthcare as the stethoscope,” predicts Dr Robert Pearl, the former CEO of Permanente Medical Group, one of the largest physician groups in the country. As my colleague Craig Spencer has observed: “Soon, not using AI to help determine diagnoses or treatments could be seen as malpractice.”

Policymakers and aligned business interests promise AI will solve physician burnout, lower healthcare costs and expand access. Entrepreneurs tout it as the great equalizer, bringing high-quality care to people excluded from existing systems. Hospital and physician leaders such as Dr Eric Topol have hailed AI as the means by which humanity will finally be restored to clinical practice; according to this widely embraced argument, it will liberate doctors from documentation drudgery and allow them to finally turn away from their computer screens and look patients in the eye. Meanwhile, patients are already making use of AI chatbots as supplements to – or substitutes for – doctors in what many see as a democratization of medical knowledge.

The problem is that when it is installed in a health sector that prizes efficiency, surveillance and profit extraction, AI becomes not a tool for care and community but simply another instrument for commodifying human life.

It is true that large language models can churn through mountains of medical literature, generate tidy summaries, and even outperform human physicians on diagnostic reasoning tasks in some studies. Last month, a new artificial intelligence system from OpenEvidence became the first AI to score 100% on the United States Medical Licensing Exam. Research suggests AI can read radiologic images with accuracy rivaling human specialists, detect skin cancers from smartphone photos, and flag early signs of sepsis in hospitalized patients faster than clinical teams. During the Covid-19 pandemic, AI models were deployed to predict surges and allocate scarce resources, fueling hopes that similar systems could optimize everything from ICU beds to medication supply chains.

What makes AI so compelling is not simply faith in technology but the way it suggests we can improve medicine by leapfrogging the difficult work of structural change to confront disease-causing inequality, corporate interests and oligarchic power.

The rise of end times fascism | Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor

The US is the most medicalized country on Earth. Incentivized by profit, it spends roughly twice as much per capita on healthcare as other high-income nations, while simultaneously excluding millions from it and suffering – across all income levels – from far higher rates of preventable disease, disability and death. At the same time, public health scholars have long argued that medicine alone cannot fix what ails us at a population level. Instead, much more attention and public investment must be directed towards non-medical social care that is essential for preventing disease, lowering preventable healthcare needs and costs, and enabling medical interventions to be effective.

For many, tackling the perversity of American healthcare feels out of reach as the US lurches ever further into authoritarianism. In this context, AI is offered as a balm not because it addresses root causes of abysmal US public health, but because it allows policymakers and corporations to gloss over them.

This faith in AI also reflects a misunderstanding of care itself, a misunderstanding decades in the making in the service of an idea now treated as an unquestionable good: evidence-based medicine (EBM). Emerging in the 1990s with the unassailable goal of improving care, EBM challenged practices based on habit and tradition by insisting decisions be grounded in rigorous research, ideally randomized controlled trials. First championed at McMaster University by physicians David Sackett and Gordon Guyatt, EBM quickly hardened into orthodoxy, embedded in curricula, accreditation standards and performance metrics that reshaped clinical judgment into compliance with statistical averages and confidence intervals. The gains were real: effective therapies spread faster, outdated ones were abandoned, and an ethic of scientific accountability took hold.

But as the model transformed medicine, it narrowed the scope of clinical encounters. The messy, relational and interpretive dimensions of care – the ways physicians listen, intuit and elicit what patients may not initially say – were increasingly seen as secondary to standardized protocols. Doctors came to treat not singular people but data points. Under pressure for efficiency, EBM ossified into an ideology: “best practices” became whatever could be measured, tabulated and reimbursed. The complexity of patients’ lives was crowded out by metrics, checkboxes and algorithms. What began as a corrective to medicine’s biases paved the way for a new myopia: the conviction that medicine can and should be reduced to numbers.

The loss of the unsaid

The uses of AI do not just affect how we listen but also how we think and speak about ourselves, particularly as patients. Not long ago, a young woman came to see me, in my capacity as a psychiatrist, for chronic fatigue and associated experiences of sadness, anxiety and loss. She had experienced many rounds of dismissal by other doctors to whom she had appealed for help. Along the way, she developed strategies to try to avoid the experiences of humiliation she associated with doctors’ offices. One of those strategies: using ChatGPT to refine her narrative of herself. In the week leading up to her appointment with me, she had already told her story at least 10 times to the ChatGPT app she had installed on her phone. She had described her headaches, her racing heart in the early morning, the exhaustion that did not ease with rest. Each time, the bot responded in calm, fluent medical language, naming diagnostic possibilities and suggesting next steps. She refined her answers with each attempt, learning which words elicited which responses, as if she were studying for an exam.

When she spoke to me, she used the same phrasing ChatGPT had given back to her: precise, clinical, flattened language largely stripped of affect or reference to her personal history, relationships and desires. Her deep fears were now encased in borrowed phrases, translated into a format she thought I would recognize as legitimate medical concerns, take seriously and address.

It is true that her efforts made bureaucratic documentation easy. But much else was lost in the process. Her own uncertainty, distrust of her own self-perception and body, and her life history and idiosyncratic way of making sense of her suffering had been sanded away, leaving a smooth, ready-made medical discourse ready for transcription and transmission to pharmacists and insurance companies. In the hands of a clinician practicing EBM predicated on symptom scales, a reflexive prescription for antidepressants or stimulants – or a battery of tests for endocrine or autoimmune diseases – might have seemed the natural response.

But those interventions, while perhaps later appropriate, would have skated over the deeper social and personal roots of her exhaustion. My patient’s AI-distorted narrative of herself thus not only obscured her experience but it also risked directing her care down a path of algorithmic pseudo-fixes that carry considerable risk of unintended harm.

This encounter has been replicated in various forms with several other patients I have met over the last year as AI tools have rapidly infiltrated everyday life. One man in his late 60s, retired after a lucrative business career, divorced, estranged from his two adult sons and enmeshed in an abusive relationship came to me struggling with profound loneliness, regret and severe alcohol dependence, punctuated by panic attacks so severe he feared he might die alone of a heart attack in his downtown high-rise condo. Before seeing me, he had spent weeks using ChatGPT as a therapist to great effect, he told me. He spent hours every day writing to it about his symptoms and past, and taking comfort in its consistently complimentary replies that assured him he had been wronged by others in his life.

ChatGPT had become not only his counselor but his main source of companionship. By the time we met, he fluently named his attachment style and the personality disorders ChatGPT had assigned to his family members, and repeated treatment suggestions – none of which addressed his daily consumption of a fifth of vodka. When I asked how he was feeling, he hesitated, then looked down at his phone in his hand as if to check whether his words matched what the psychological profile ChatGPT had laid out for him. The machine had substituted for both his voice and the human connection he craved.

We risk entering a perverse loop: machines are supplying the language with which patients relay their suffering, and doctors are using machines to record and respond to that suffering. This cultivates what psychologists call “cognitive miserliness”, or a tendency to default to the most readily available answer rather than engage in critical inquiry or self-reflection. By outsourcing thought, and ultimately the most intimate definitions of ourselves to AI, doctors and patients risk becoming yet further alienated from one another.

In this trajectory we can see the evolution of what Michel Foucault described in The Birth of the Clinic as the “medical gaze” – the separation and isolation of the diseased body from the lived experience of the person and their social environment. Where the 19th-century gaze fragmented the patient into lesions and signs visible to the clinician, and the late 20th-century evidence-based gaze translated patients into odds ratios and treatment protocols, the 21st-century algorithmic gaze dissolves both patient and doctor alike into never-ending streams of automated data. AI views both suffering and care as computational problems.

The arguments in support of this transformation of the clinic are familiar. Human physicians misdiagnose, while algorithms can catch subtle patterns invisible to the eye. Humans forget the latest science; algorithms can absorb every new article the instant it is published. Physicians burn out, but algorithms never tire. Such claims are true in a narrow sense. But the leap from these advantages to a wholesale embrace of AI as medicine’s future depends on dangerously simplistic assumptions.

The first is that AI is more objective than human physicians. In reality, AI is no less biased; it is merely biased differently, and in ways harder to detect. Models rely on existing datasets, which reflect decades of systemic inequities: from racial biases baked into kidney and lung-function tests to the underrepresentation of women and minorities in clinical trials. Pulse oximeters, for example, systematically underestimate hypoxemia in people with darker skin tones; during the Covid pandemic, these errors fed into triage algorithms, delaying care for Black patients. Race-based corrections for kidney function long influenced transplant eligibility across the country. Once such biases are embedded in protocols, they persist for years.

These problems are compounded by the assumption that more data automatically translates to better care. But no amount of data will repair underfunded clinics, reverse physician shortages or protect patients from predatory insurers.

‘Headed for technofascism’: the rightwing roots of Silicon Valley

AI threatens to deepen these problems, obscuring discriminatory and profit-driven policies behind a sheen of computational neutrality. Emerging AI tools are ultimately controlled by the billionaires and corporations who own them, set their incentives, and determine their uses. And as has become increasingly apparent in Trump’s second term, many of these AI scions – Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and others – are open eugenicists guided by prejudice against gender and racial minorities and disabled people. What is emerging is a form of technofascism, as this administration helps a small cadre of allied tech magnates consolidate control over the nation’s data – and with it, the power to surveil and discipline entire populations.

AI tools are perfectly suited to their project of authoritarian surveillance, which the Trump administration is actively advancing through its “AI action plan”. By stripping away regulatory guardrails and granting tech firms free rein so long as they align with the administration’s ideology, the plan hands unprecedented power to corporations already steeped in eugenicist thinking. Beneath the rhetoric of innovation lies a simple, sobering fact: AI can only function by vacuuming up enormous troves of human data – data about our bodies, pain, behaviors, moods, anxieties, phobias, diets, substance use, sleep patterns, relationships, work routines, sexual practices, traumatic experiences, childhood memories, disabilities and life expectancy. This means that each step toward AI-driven medicine is also a step toward deeper, more opaque forms of data capture, surveillance and social control.

Already, health insurance companies have used AI-driven “predictive analytics” to flag patients as too costly, quietly downgrading their care or denying coverage outright. UnitedHealth rejected rehabilitation claims for elderly patients deemed unlikely to recover quickly enough, while Cigna used automated review systems to deny thousands of claims in seconds, with no physician ever even reading them.

Another key assumption behind AI optimism is that it will free physicians to devote more time and attention to patients. Over the last several decades, countless technological advances in medicine – from electronic health records to billing automation – have been sold as a way to lighten the clinician’s load. Indeed, controlled trials in which AI scribes wrote patient notes for doctors resulted in time savings and improved satisfaction with their workdays – but only in controlled experiments in which time savings are not accompanied by increased productivity expectations.

The real world of the US healthcare system doesn’t generally work that way. Each technological advancement that could free up physician time has instead tightened the productivity ratchet: these “efficiency gains” have simply been used to squeeze more visits, more billing, and more profit out of every hour. In other words, whatever time and energy technology saves, the system immediately recaptures them to maximize profit. With private equity gobbling up healthcare facilities at an alarming rate, there is little reason to think the medical industry’s uses of AI will be different.

The result of all this efficiency is not more presence in caregiving, but less. Already, patients’ most common complaint is that their doctors do not listen to them. They describe being treated as bundles of symptoms and lab values rather than as whole people. Good clinicians know what matters most in interactions with patients are the hesitations, silences and nervous laughs – the things left unsaid. These cannot be reduced to data points. They require presence, patience and attunement to the affective states, social relationships, family dynamics and fears of each patient. This is obviously true in the case of mental healthcare, but it is no less true in internal medicine, oncology or surgery, where patients are appealing for care in what are often the most vulnerable moments of their lives – moments in which a physician responds not just as a technician but as a person.

AI, by contrast, is built to erase silence and isolate the patient as a calculable organism. It cannot recognize that a patient’s first version of their story is often not their real one – not the one that is troubling them most. Moreover, studies of doctors’ reliance on AI underline that it frequently causes rapid clinical deskilling: when algorithms propose diagnoses or management plans, physicians’ reasoning skills atrophy, leaving them more dependent on machines and less capable of independent judgment. Rather than correcting human fallibility, AI seems more likely to amplify it by training clinicians out of their capacity to listen and think critically, collaboratively and creatively.

Reclaiming care

If the danger of AI medicine is forgetting what genuine care entails, then we must collectively recall the foundation of caregiving that has been obscured under US health capitalism. Care is not about diagnoses or prescriptions. It relies on something more fundamental: the provision of support to the other alongside the cultivation of an inner experience of concern toward others.

This kind of care is inseparable from politics and the possibility of community. As philosophers from Socrates to Søren Kierkegaard and feminist theorists like Carol Gilligan and Joan Tronto have long argued, care is not only a clinical task but an ethical and political practice. It is, in the deepest sense, a practice of disalienation – of recovering our sense of ourselves as singular beings in community with one another in which individual difference is valued rather than erased.

That is why care has transformative power beyond health. To be truly listened to – to be recognized not as a case but as a person – can change not just how one experiences illness, but how one experiences oneself and the world. It can foster the capacity to care for others across differences, to resist hatred and violence, to build the fragile social ties upon which democracy depends.

By contrast, when medicine is reduced to data and transactions, it not only fails patients and demoralizes doctors. It also degrades democracy itself. A system that alienates people in their moments of deepest vulnerability – bankrupting them, gaslighting them, leaving them unheard – breeds despair and rage. It creates the conditions in which authoritarians gain traction.

In this light, the rush to automate care is not politically neutral. To hollow out medicine’s capacity for presence and recognition is to hollow out one of the last civic institutions through which people might feel themselves to matter to another human being – to suffocate the very basis of society itself.

Perhaps the most dangerous assumption behind the rise of AI in medicine is that its current trajectory and private ownership structure is inevitable. When we refuse this narrative of inevitability, we can finally recognize that the real alternative to our present is political, not technological. It requires investing in the caregiving workforce, strengthening publicly owned systems for both medical and social care, expanding the welfare state to combat growing inequality, and creating conditions for clinicians to care for patients as people, not data.

Maga’s era of ‘soft eugenics’: let the weak get sick, help the clever breed

Technology, including AI, need not be inherently dehumanizing or alienating. In a national health system oriented toward genuine care, AI in medicine could help track medication safety, identify the most vulnerable individuals for intensive social and financial support, prioritize remedying inequities, or support overburdened clinicians and support staff without monetizing their every move. But such uses depend on a political economy premised on care, not extraction and the endless commodification of human life – one that values human diversity, collective flourishing and supporting each individual’s unique life potential over data capture, standardization and profit.

If AI in service of corporate imperatives becomes medicine’s guiding force, these dimensions will not merely be neglected. They will be actively erased, recoded as inefficiencies, written out of what counts as care.

To resist AI optimism is often cast as anti-progress or naive luddism. But progress worth pursuing requires refusing the illusion that faster, cheaper and more standardized is the same as better. True care is not a transaction to be optimized; it is a practice and a relationship to be protected – the fragile work of listening, presence and trust. If we surrender care to algorithms, we will lose not only the art of medicine but also the human connection and solidarity we need to reclaim our lives from those who would reduce them to data and profit.

Eric Reinhart is a political anthropologist, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst
Spot illustrations by Georgette Smith

I knew my writing students were using AI. Their confessions led to a powerful teaching moment | AI (artificial intelligence) | The Guardian

Sun, 10 May 2026 23:43:30 +0000

I have been teaching fiction writing at MIT since 2017. Many of my students last wrote fiction in middle school, and very few have experienced a proper workshop, so at the start of every semester I offer these directions for writer and reader alike:

Read the story at least twice. Mark what works and what doesn’t – underline great sentences, flag clunky syntax, gaps in logic and unrealistic dialogue. Ask yourself: does the story work? Why or why not? What could improve it? Answer in a signed letter to the author, attached to their story. Give your honest opinions. Remember that an effective peer review demands close reading of the text accompanied by a boldness of spirit.

As the directions foreshadow, most of the time we’re discussing why we didn’t like the story being workshopped, because writing a good story is immensely difficult even under the best conditions, especially for Stem-centric undergrads who thrive within a structure of quantitative problems and solutions – systems where there’s a right answer and a clean method for arriving at it.

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Fiction writing isn’t quantitative. Good writing feels good to read; bad writing feels bad. An effective workshop is a paradox: students must provide textual evidence to support the qualitative as if it were the quantitative. This is a terrifying prospect for the habitually superb student, to sit in stony silence while their classmates and professor slash at their work. The act of confronting that terror is, itself, an education for the writer, because writing is both vehicle and vessel for thinking – abstract made concrete, feelings translated into words. This is what many writers talk about when they refer to good prose as not just poetic expression, but communication. Thus, when we criticize a writer’s work, not only are we criticizing their aesthetic choices, we’re also criticizing – and here’s where it can get personal – the writer’s feelings and their ability to communicate them.

It’s a lot for the ego to absorb. Prior to a few years ago, the only way a fiction writer could protect their ego was to either pay someone else to write for them, or resort to plagiarism. AI changed all that.

‘Dead perfection’

AI’s prose is perfectly mediocre, producing the sort of inert gloss that reads like a Frankensteinian amalgam of MFA-workshopped writing, an unintentional parody of the style it mimics. The resultant stories and essays are simulacra of thought, generated via pattern recognition learned from millions of human-penned words, rooted in no particular experience by no particular person. AI writing reminds me of Tennyson’s description of the beautiful Maud in the titular poem:

Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null
Dead perfection; no more

Insightful readers feel that emptiness even if they can’t articulate it. They sense that the body moves without a brain. By contrast, student-written fiction is gloriously flawed, a struggle on the page between what the author is trying to say and what’s actually being said. The prose stumbles in a way reminiscent of a foal learning how to walk: even in their trembling legs I see hints of future grace. Such clumsiness is necessary; its absence would be proof of the foal never having learned to walk.

Death and taxes; technophobia is the third certainty. In 1565, nearly a century after Gutenberg invented the printing press, the Swiss scientist Conrad Gessner was already worrying about the “confusing and harmful abundance of books”. An 1889 article in Nature claimed the telephone is the most dangerous of all inventions “because it enters into every dwelling. Its interminable network of wires is a perpetual menace to life and property.” Now we’ve added AI to the list of worries: a 2025 MIT Media Lab preliminary study found that participants who used ChatGPT to write essays showed lower neural connectivity than those who wrote without assistance.

Other studies warn of similar dangers, from not-yet-peer-reviewed reports with self-explanatory titles such as “AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance” and “Generative Artificial Intelligence Reliance and Executive Function Attenuation: Behavioral Evidence of Cognitive Offload in High-Use Adults”. Dire stuff, if proven true. But whatever the peer-reviewed findings may be, the central warning is hard to ignore and doesn’t require a study for validation: by letting students routinely and thoughtlessly use AI, we’re weakening their minds. That warning shaped how I addressed AI in my syllabus. Specifically, how I planned to discourage its use:

Playing the AI-detection game drags me into a surveillance mindset that undermines the workshop environment. If you use AI, it reveals your orientation toward writing. Do you want to make art, or just turn in text? Do you want to actually learn how to write, or just pretend to do so?

I was certain my questions would shame them into compliance even without an explicit prohibition. So at the start of last semester, when I read two of my student’s stories for the first workshop and knew within their opening paragraphs that both stories were written by AI, I was hurt. I was also worried, because I realized that for the first time as a writing professor, I had to deal with students producing words without work, which wasn’t quite plagiarism and wasn’t quite paying for someone else to do the job, but it felt like a kind of naive chicanery; a perversion of the contract between writer and reader.

As the first workshop started that night, I turned to the ostensible authors and told them I knew that AI wrote their stories. I didn’t need AI-detection software to know; I just knew. The prose was too polished for a young writer, the arcs too tidy, every character prepackaged, every metaphor a pastiche without context. I told the class the workshop couldn’t proceed because I won’t give feedback to an author who doesn’t exist, but I assured the would-be authors that they weren’t in trouble. MIT’s policies regarding AI usage were in flux, and my syllabus offered an opening. Besides, had AI been available during my undergrad years, would I have resisted its help? Of course not. The pedagogical borderlands have always been filled with students questing for shortcuts. The technology changes but the quest remains.

For a few moments, all was quiet except the classroom’s ticking radiators. Then, a teary-eyed confession: one of the ostensible authors said she only used AI because she was scared of looking stupid, of being criticized for bad writing. She said she loved writing stories and hated having used AI. But she couldn’t stop herself, recounting a sequence similar to an addict’s descent: at first she fed her story into AI for a grammar check, it suggested line edits and she accepted, then it asked if she wanted structural edits, then it offered to rewrite the entire piece.

The other would-be author admitted he had never written a short story before and he had an idea but didn’t know where to start. I asked him why he didn’t reach out to me for help. He shrugged.

One of the other students raised her hand, saying she didn’t understand why it was bad for AI to write stories as long as the stories are based on their ideas. More students spoke: one wanted to know how using AI was any different from using a human editor. Another wanted me to answer why, at a university that launched one of the world’s first AI research programs in 1959, were we even having this debate? Isn’t AI meant to make everyone’s life easier? Less stressful? Isn’t the point of AI to free humans from the tedium of rote tasks?

The conversation that followed their confessions was one of the most productive teaching moments of my eight years at MIT. Writing, I told them, isn’t supposed to be easy, and of course it can be tedious but that doesn’t make it rote. Writing isn’t just the production of sentences – it’s the training of endurance by way of sustained attention. It’s a way of learning what one thinks by attempting to say it. An LLM can reproduce the appearance of that activity, but it can’t replace it, because the value lies not only in the object produced but in the transformation that occurs during its making.

Bringing back friction

In George Orwell’s 1946 essay Confessions of a Book Reviewer, Orwell describes himself surrounded by unread books, “constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feelings whatever”. High-volume, on-deadline reviewing, he argues, does not merely deform the work of reading – it deforms the self. The mindless manufacture of responses erodes judgment, and standards collapse.

Orwell is describing what happens when language is produced under conditions that disconnect it from thought: the reviewer performs the shape of a response without having actually responded. What Orwell couldn’t have anticipated is that this condition would eventually be outsourced upstream. When a workshop fills with AI-generated fiction, every writer and reader becomes the reviewer Orwell describes.

Orwell ends his essay by arguing that criticism would be healthier if it were slower, more selective, and less industrial. The same argument now applies to writing fiction. AI speeds the writing process, but isn’t at all selective, and – in an ironic cycle – turns the act of creation into the kind of rote task it’s meant to automate.

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Going forward, my policy is now plainly stated: I don’t want students using AI to write their work. I want their words. I want access to their thinking, their voice, their struggles to find what they want to say and the best way to say it. I want to see what happens when someone tries to move through language without an intermediary finishing the thought.

This is a pedagogical position, not a moral or technical one. The workshop only works if there’s a writer in the room, someone whose thinking is visible on the page, and who can speak directly to that thinking. Using AI to write not only nullifies the entire peer review concept – we’re here to workshop each other, not to workshop AI slop – it also guarantees a weakening of the muscles needed to wrestle with writing.

The danger isn’t that AI will replace writers or render the workshop obsolete. It’s that students are becoming accustomed to bypassing the friction that once revealed their process.

Since that night, our workshops have changed in ways I didn’t anticipate. We talk more openly about frustration, about the moments when a draft resists its own author. I still teach craft – form, structure, revision – but find myself returning to the tension between thought and language, the stories where abstraction refuses to take shape. We discuss why their thinking matters, that their struggle to translate thoughts into word isn’t evidence of failure, but a sign of growth. Even when, and especially when, words fail. What my students and I now guard isn’t a boundary against machines so much as a sanctuary for authorship, a place where everything on the page and not yet on the page belongs to an actual person.

Micah Nathan is a novelist, essayist and MIT lecturer in fiction and nonfiction writing whose books include Gods of Aberdeen and Losing Graceland. His fiction and essays have appeared in Vanity Fair, the Paris Review, Little White Lies, Kinfolk and elsewhere
Spot illustrations by Cristina Spanò

Fidel Castro obituary | Fidel Castro | The Guardian

Sun, 10 May 2026 23:00:04 +0000

Fidel Castro, who has died at the age of 90, was one of the more extraordinary political figures of the 20th century. After leading a successful revolution on a Caribbean island in 1959, he became a player on the global stage, dealing on equal terms with successive leaders of the two nuclear superpowers during the cold war. A charismatic figure from the developing world, his influence was felt far beyond the shores of Cuba. Known as Fidel to friends and enemies alike, his life story is inevitably that of his people and their revolution. Even in old age, he still exercised a magnetic attraction wherever he went, his audience as fascinated by the dinosaur from history as they had once been by the revolutionary firebrand of earlier times.

The Russians were beguiled by him (Nikita Khrushchev and Anastas Mikoyan in particular), European intellectuals took him to their hearts (notably Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir), African revolutionaries welcomed his assistance and advice, and the leaders of Latin American peasant movements were inspired by his revolution. In the 21st century, he acquired fresh relevance as the mentor of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia, the leaders of two unusual revolutions that threatened the hegemony of the US. Only the US itself, which viewed Castro as public enemy No 1 (until they found an “axis of evil” further afield), and the Chinese in the Mao era, who found his political behaviour essentially irresponsible, refused to fall for his charm. It took until Barack Obama’s presidency for US restrictions to be eased – but by then intestinal illness had compelled Castro’s resignation as president in favour of his brother Raúl, who saw in the historic normalising of relations between the two countries. Nonetheless, Fidel maintained his antagonism until the end, declaring in a letter on his 90th birthday this year that “we don’t need the empire to give us anything”.

Castro’s rule thus spanned nearly five decades, and during the cold war hardly a year went by without his mark being made on international politics. On several occasions the world held its breath as events in and around Cuba threatened to spill beyond the Caribbean. In 1961 an invasion at the Bay of Pigs by Cuban exiles, encouraged and financed by the US government, sought to bring down Castro’s revolution. It was swiftly defeated. In 1962 Khrushchev’s government installed nuclear missiles in Cuba in an attempt to provide the infant revolution with “protection” of the only kind the US seemed prepared to respect. And in November 1975 a massive and wholly unexpected airlift of Cuban troops to Africa turned the tide of a South African invasion of newly independent Angola, inevitably heating up cold war quarrels.

The young anti-Batista guerrilla leader Fidel Castro. Photograph: Andrew St. George/AP

Castro was a hero in the mould of Garibaldi, a national leader whose ideals and rhetoric were to change the history of countries far from his own. Latin America, ruled for the most part in the 1950s by oligarchies inherited from the colonial era, of landowners, soldiers and Catholic priests, was suddenly brought into the global limelight, its governments challenged by the revolutionary gauntlet thrown down by the island republic. Whether in favour or against, an entire Latin American generation was influenced by Castro.

Cuba under Fidel was a country where indigenous nationalism was at least as significant as imported socialism, and where the legend of José Martí, the patriot poet and organiser of the 19th-century struggle against Spain, was always more influential than the philosophy of Karl Marx. Castro’s skill, and one key to his political longevity, lay in keeping the twin themes of socialism and nationalism endlessly in play. He gave the Cuban people back their history, the name of their island stamped firmly on the story of the 20th century. This was no mean achievement, though by the early 1990s, when the collapse of the Soviet Union brought the Cuban economy down with a bump, the old rhetoric had begun to wear thin.

Fidel was the son of Lina Ruz, a Cuban woman from Pinar del Río, and Angel Castro, an immigrant from Spanish Galicia who became a successful landowner in central Cuba. Educated by the Jesuits, and subsequently as a lawyer at Havana University, he was clearly marked for politics from early youth. A brilliant student orator and a successful athlete, he was the outstanding figure of his generation of students.

The return to power by coup d’etat in 1952 of the old dictator, Fulgencio Batista, seemed to rule out the traditional road to political power for the young lawyer, and an impatient Castro embraced the cause of insurrection, common in those years in the unstable countries that bordered the Caribbean. On 26 July 1953, he led a group of revolutionaries who sought to overthrow the dictator by seizing the second largest military base in the country, the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba.

The attack was a dismal failure, and many of the erstwhile rebels were captured and killed. Castro himself survived, to make a notable speech from the dock – “history will absolve me” – outlining his political programme. It became the classic text of the 26th of July Movement that he was later to organise, using the failed Moncada attack as a rallying cry to unite the anti-Batista opposition into a single political force.

Granted an amnesty two years later, Castro was exiled to Mexico. With his brother Raúl, he prepared a group of armed fighters to assist the civilian resistance movement. Soon he had met and enrolled in his band an Argentinian doctor, Che Guevara, whose name was to be irrevocably linked to the revolution. Castro’s tiny force sailed from Mexico to Cuba in December 1956 in the Granma, a small and leaky motor vessel. Landing in the east of the island after a rough crossing, the rebel band was attacked and almost annihilated by Batista’s forces. A few members of Castro’s troop survived to struggle up the impenetrable mountains of the Sierra Maestra. There they tended their wounds, regained their strength, made contact with the local peasants, and established links with the opposition in the city of Santiago.

Fidel Castro (L) with Ernesto Che Guevara. Photograph: Roberto Salas/AFP/Getty Images

Throughout 1957 and 1958, Castro’s guerrilla band grew in strength and daring. They had no blueprint. Their first aim had been to survive. Only later did revolutionary theorists develop the notion that the very existence of an armed struggle in rural areas might help to define the course of civilian politics, putting the dictatorship on to the defensive, and forcing squabbling opposition groups to unite behind the guerrilla banner. Yet that is what took place in Cuba. Civilian parties and opposition movements were forced to accept orders from the guerrillas in the hills, and even the conservative and unadventurous Communist party of Cuba eventually came to bow the knee to Castro in the summer of 1958. By December that year, Guevara had captured the central city of Santa Clara, and on New Year’s Eve, Batista fled the country. In January 1959, Castro, aged 30, arrived in triumph in Havana. The Cuban revolution had begun.

His early programme was one of radical reform, comparable to that espoused by populist governments in Latin America over the previous 30 years. The expropriation of large estates, the nationalisation of foreign enterprises and the establishment of schools and clinics throughout the island were the initial demands of his movement.

Like most Latin American leftwingers at that time, Castro was influenced by Marxism – whatever that might mean in the Latin American context, about which Marx himself had little to say. In practice it meant a warm feeling for the (far away) Russian revolution, and a strong dislike of (nearby) Yankee “imperialism”. Radicals were familiar with the historical tendency of the US to interfere in Latin America in general and Cuba in particular – economically all the time and militarily at all too frequent intervals. This leftist inclination did not usually involve much enthusiasm for the local Communist party which, in Cuba as elsewhere in Latin America (except in Chile), had always been small and lacking influence. Castro himself was not a communist, though his brother had strong sympathies, as did Guevara.

‘He led a humble life’: Fidel Castro’s biographer on the legacy of a revolutionary Guardian

Castro’s anti-American rhetoric and nationalisation of US companies soon aroused American anger. The bungled Bay of Pigs invasion, in the early months of John F Kennedy’s presidency, postponed any possible improvement in relations. US dislike of Castro was reinforced by the presence of an immense diaspora of the Cuban middle class, based chiefly in Miami, who had left in a hurry and expected at any moment to return in triumph. It was not to be.

The missile crisis of October 1962 sealed the hostility. Khrushchev’s move into Cuba – introducing nuclear weapons (other than US ones) into an area of the world where the Monroe doctrine was held to prevail – was widely regarded as destabilising, although the Soviet Union itself had US nuclear missiles on its borders, notably in Turkey. Khrushchev was forced to withdraw his missiles after days of global tension, although not before he had received a tacit promise from the Americans that there would be no further attempts to invade Cuba.

Castro’s performance during the crisis was less than heroic. The fate of his revolution was decided elsewhere. The compromise on the missiles reached between Washington and Moscow enabled his regime to survive, but the ignominious manner of its happening was to fuel Castro’s fierce sense of independence. His only success in the affair was his absolute refusal to permit US inspection of the evacuated missile sites.

Fidel Castro with Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow in 1963. Photograph: AP

Whether Castro was pushed into the Soviet camp by US mishandling in the early years, or whether that was where he planned to be all along, is a matter of historical debate. There is evidence on both sides, and Castro allowed different interpretations to flourish. Guevara and Raúl Castro were certainly persuaded of the need to make an alliance with the Cuban communists, the only party that had troubled to enrol the country’s black people, and they had great hopes of economic (and later military) support from the Soviet Union. Yet for the first 10 years of Castro’s regime – until 1968 when he supported the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Leonid Brezhnev – he fought hard to maintain Cuba’s separate identity as a developing country struggling to take its own particular road to socialism. Even when he had taken the Soviet shilling, he tried ceaselessly to build bridges elsewhere – in Latin America (to Peru, Panama and Chile); in Africa (to Algeria, Angola and Ethiopia); and in Asia (to Vietnam – Vietnam Heróico as the Cubans liked to call it – and North Korea).

Although Kennedy had given a tacit promise to Khrushchev that invasion would never be repeated, the Americans continued to permit CIA-sponsored attacks on the island and refused to lift their economic blockade, pressurising the countries of Latin America to join in. Castro was effectively deprived of all contact with the US mainland, and later with most of Latin America. At first it was just fresh vegetables that Cubans could no longer obtain from Miami. Soon they were forced to abandon hope of receiving machinery and technology from the capitalist world. The oil blockade was particularly damaging. While the Soviet Union came to the rescue when oil could no longer be obtained from Venezuela or the Gulf of Mexico, the long journey from the Black Sea was hardly ideal. Their ships could carry no returning trade.

For a Caribbean island, rooted historically and geographically in the sea between the US and Venezuela, it was a cruel blow to lose the taproot of its commerce. Cuba had had previous experience of a monopolistic trade relationship, with Spain, its far-off madre patria, but the Soviet Union was even further away, and had little in common with Cuba except political rhetoric. The close Soviet link was to have a serious disadvantage in that it gave Cuba little opportunity to experiment economically. Guevara had hoped in the early days that the island might escape from the tyranny of sugar production and diversify its economy, but Castro perceived this to be an empty dream. Sugar was the only significant product Cuba could exchange for Soviet oil.

Perhaps Castro should never have made the effort to go it alone. Some thought the price was too high. The US was, and is, immensely powerful – and very close. The Dominican Republic of Juan Bosch was unable to escape US pressure in 1965, nor could Salvador Allende’s Chile in 1973. The baleful experience of Nicaragua, 30 years after the Cuban revolution, showed that the passage of time had not made the task of securing sovereignty any easier for a small Latin American state. Yet Castro’s largely successful attempt to escape from the geographic fatalism that had affected Latin America for so long should not go uncelebrated.

Isolated from Latin America in the 1960s by the US blockade, Castro made efforts to assist revolutionaries who sought to turn the Andes into a new Sierra Maestra. The impact was considerable, yet brought Cuba little political reward. No revolutionary group was able to repeat the example of Cuba in the early years, and even when Guevara himself joined the fray in Bolivia in 1966, his expedition was to end in disaster a year later.

After 10 years in power, safely basking in Soviet approval, Castro’s policy towards Latin America became more circumspect. When Allende, a friendly socialist, won the presidential elections in Chile in 1970, Castro counselled caution. The victorious Sandinistas of Nicaragua received the same message in 1979. Castro knew from experience that building socialism in one small, developing country was not an easy option. Guevara had once called for the creation of “one, two, three, many Vietnams”, but who was going to fund and sustain them? The large Soviet economic support for Cuba was never going to be matched in Chile or Nicaragua.

Fidel Castro greets three African presidents - Sekou Tour,Agostinho Neto and Luis Cabral. Photograph: BBC

Castro’s Cuba was an early member of the Non-Aligned Movement, the first attempt to mobilise the emerging developing countries for a political purpose. Soon, leaders of African revolutionary movements were honoured guests in Havana – notably Ben Bella and Houari Boumédiènne from Algeria, and Agostinho Neto from Angola, in full rebellion against the Portuguese. Guevara, by touring Africa in the early 1960s and then going to fight with guerrillas organised in the eastern Congo by Laurent Kabila, later president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, also helped to bring Africa into focus in Havana.

There was a further dimension. For Castro, Cuba was not just a Caribbean country with Hispanic connections. He was the first white Cuban leader to recognise the country’s large black, former slave population and, after initial hesitation, to make efforts to bring them into the mainstream of national life. Sergeant Batista, his predecessor, banned from Havana’s top clubs because of his mixed race, had secured considerable support from black people in the Cuban army, and Castro took up their cause. His championing of them came at the same time as the civil rights movement was growing in the US, and this may have contributed to the nervousness of the US government over his regime. On an early visit to the UN in New York, Castro stayed at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem, a symbolic but significant gesture.

Recovering Cuba’s black roots, both in the African slave trade and in the independence struggle of the 19th century, was a natural prelude to taking an interest in an Africa still in the throes of decolonisation. Cuban troops played a historic role in 1975 in rescuing Neto’s embryonic MPLA government in Angola from the South African army. Castro displayed a personal interest in the Angolan expedition, as he did two years later in Ethiopia, when Cuban soldiers were sent to assist the regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam. The Cubans helped the Ethiopians to push back the Somalis from the Ogaden. Castro’s boldness in flinging men and resources into foreign wars when Cuba itself was under permanent threat of attack was typical of his style.

The policies of glasnost and perestroika espoused by Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s brought a dramatic unravelling of the Cuban revolution. Castro was always an opportunist communist rather than a true believer such as Erich Honecker, the East German leader, yet the two men shared a distrust of Gorbachev’s reforms. The stability and survival of their states depended on Russian support, although Cuba, the fruit of a popular revolution, had greater staying power than East Germany. Unlike some in the Cuban political elite who appeared willing to embrace changes in the Soviet system, Castro recognised that they would lead to disaster. For Cuba, the writing was on the wall even before the collapse of the Soviet Union after the failed coup against Gorbachev in August 1991. Castro knew that the US had made clear to the Russians, in 1990, that future economic assistance to the Soviet Union would depend on an end to Soviet aid to Cuba.

Castro declared a state of emergency, of the kind that would have been imposed had there been a military invasion. His political genius was for improvisation and compromise, coupled with a verbal felicity that proved capable of persuading people that he was doing one thing when actually doing another. He now projected Cuba as the world’s first truly “green” society, with industry powered by windmills, and the people riding bicycles. It was guerrilla war all over again, with Castro invoking the spirit of the Sierra Maestra.

Then, before any significant change could be made to the Cuban system, the Soviet Union imploded, and with it went the extensive economic network that it had maintained. A form of perestroika had now to be forced on the Cubans whether they wanted it or not, for Castro’s ally had simply melted away. Boris Yeltsin, the new Russian leader, was no friend. He had even visited Jorge Mas Canosa, the principal organiser of the Cuban exiles in Miami, and he soon removed Russian soldiers from the island and abandoned most of the preferential economic agreements that had kept the Cuban economy afloat for so long. Hopes in the US that Cuba would go the way of the countries of eastern Europe were encouraged by legislation in Congress that sought to tighten the economic embargo.

Castro with Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. Photograph: REX/Shutterstock

Almost miraculously, Castro survived this period, throwing open the country to foreign tourists and permitting a dual economy in which the US dollar reigned supreme. In January 1998, his efforts to secure fresh international recognition were crowned by a visit from Pope John Paul II, seen by some as the author of the overthrow of communism in eastern Europe. Castro’s communism had always been tempered by respect for the Catholic church, and he had long taken an interest in liberation theology and in the convergence on the ground in Latin America – notably in the period of military dictatorships in the 1970s – between Catholic priests and leftwing human rights activists. Yet the pope was an outspoken opponent of that trend in his church, and his visit thus seemed all the more unusual and surprising. If John Paul had hoped that his visit would help to undermine Castro’s regime, he was to be disappointed.

Early in this century, Castro’s star was once again in the ascendant, with a marked improvement in the economic situation and the presence in Latin America of a powerful and wealthy new acolyte. Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, first elected in December 1998, was soon to identify himself as Castro’s favourite son. Enjoying huge oil royalties, Chávez was able to finance mutual aid that brought thousands of Cuban doctors to work in the shanty towns of Venezuela, and hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil to the thirsty refineries of Cuba. The impact on the economy was immediate.

Castro was a legend long before his death. The early years of revolutionary government, with dashing young men in guerrilla fatigues sporting the then unfashionable beards grown in the revolutionary war, were romantic, chaotic and exhausting. Castro worked at all hours of day and night (mostly night), made long and didactic speeches, and was rarely out of his 4x4, ceaselessly travelling from one end of the country to another.

Over the years, he calmed down, became more measured, spoke as often but not for so long. His government became less of a one-man band, and power was sufficiently decentralised to allow him to travel abroad for months at a time. The Americans could never forgive him, but he became a welcome visitor all over the developing world, and notably, in the 1980s and 1990s, in Latin America. Although too long-winded for European tastes, the best of his full-scale speeches were models of wit and clarity, well-prepared and delivered with the panache of a trained orator.

A handful of women found space in Castro’s life, but he always claimed he was married to the revolution. He had married a fellow student, Mirta Díaz-Balart, in 1948, and they had a son, Fidelito, but she divorced him a few years later and went to live in the US. An early lover was Naty Revuelta, with whom he had a daughter, Alina, and he was always close to Célia Sánchez, the compañera he met in the mountains in 1956. She died in 1980. In that year, he took a new wife, Dalia Soto del Valle, a teacher from the town of Trinidad, who was rarely seen in public. They had five boys – Angel, Antonio, Alejandro, Alexis and Alex – named allegedly after his various noms de guerre in the Sierra Maestra. Outside these relationships he had a son, Jorge Angel, and a daughter, Francisca.

Castro’s revolution was a remarkably peaceful process, apart from a number of Batista’s henchmen shot in the first weeks. Some revolutionary enthusiasts of the first generation could not stomach the government’s leftward drift, and swaths of the professional middle class left for Miami, but the revolution did not “eat its children”. Much of the inner group around Castro survived into old age.

Castro falls badly after a speech in Santa Clara in 2004. Photograph: AP

Tensions arose occasionally with the old communists and the island’s intellectuals (who suffered as much from blockade-induced isolation as from outright censorship), and in 1989 a couple of senior generals were executed for drug-running. Critics liked to argue that “General” Castro was no different in essence from any other Latin America dictator, yet such criticism was hard to sustain. He more closely resembled the Spanish colonial governor-generals, many of whom were benign autocrats, than the sanguinary military leaders of the 20th century. Even when his regime was under attack, he retained immense popular support. His huge personal charm and charisma, and his political genius, kept him on top throughout: the only force that could defeat him was the infirmity of old age.

The first premonition of his mortality came in October 2004, when he stumbled badly after a speech made in Santa Clara. He fractured an arm and broke a knee, and was for a while confined to a wheelchair. Yet he kept up a heavy schedule of television appearances, announcing in March 2005 an end to the “special period” of austerity that had begun at the time of the Soviet collapse. In July 2006, he suffered a more serious setback, and formally handed over power on a temporary basis to his brother Raúl after emergency intestinal surgery. He never fully recovered and was rarely seen in public again. In February 2008, he announced his resignation as president of the Council of State. The tasks of government, he said, “required mobility and the total commitment that I am no longer in a physical condition to offer”. Raúl Castro, five years younger and Fidel’s alter ego since the attack on the Moncada barracks in 1953, became the new president of Cuba.

Castro is survived by his children, his brother, Raúl, and sister, Juanita.