Table of contents for 20 March 2026 in Guardian Weekly

The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol 214 | Issue № 12 Guardian Weekly is an edited selection of some of the best journalism found in the Guardian’s digital editions in the UK, US and Australia, and the Guardian newspaper in the UK. The weekly magazine has an international focus and four editions: global, Europe, Australia and North America. The Guardian was founded in 1821, and Guardian Weekly in 1919. We exist to hold power to account in the name of the public interest, to uphold liberal and progressive values, to fight for the common good, and to build hope. Our values, as laid out by editor CP Scott in 1921, are honesty, integrity, courage, fairness, and a sense of duty to the reader and the community. The…

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More than 1,000 cargo ships, mainly oil and gas tankers, have been blocked from transiting the strait of Hormuz after Tehran closed the key maritime passage. US officials have suggested ways to get ships moving again, but amid Iranian strikes on tankers, and reports that Iran has started mining the narrow waterway, the proposed naval escorts have failed to materialise. What is the strait of Hormuz? The strait is the only maritime passage between the Gulf and the Gulf of Oman and the route for about a quarter of the world’s liquefied natural gas and seaborne trade from Gulf countries to reach the global market. Shipping in the chokepoint is confined to a pair of 3km-wide lanes, one for outbound traffic and one for incoming, separated by a 3km-wide meridian.…

His island home is shrouded in mist, but his union jack woolly hat makes Hideya Yagi easy to spot as he greets the approaching boat. The 80-year-old, a former president of a construction company, is pleased to see the passengers disembark, because he is one of only seven registered residents at their destination: the island of Kasasa. Kasasa is known as the “Hawaii” of Japan’s inland sea because of its warm climate and beautiful coastline. Yagi and his wife, Mihoko, eke out a quiet life alongside just one other couple and an elderly woman. The other two residents are almost always absent. “You can stand on the quayside and just reel the fish in,” he said, standing on the rudimentary quay and letting his mind wander towards the hobby that…

Fifty years after Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne founded the company in Jobs’ parents’ garage in Los Altos, California, Apple has become a behemoth, and billions of us use its products every day. From the first successful home computers with colour screens, to the iPod, to the smartphone that set the template for the modern mobile era, the company has repeatedly reset consumer expectations. As a result, the firm occupies a central position in the tech world, initiating trends and popularising products. Here are five of its most influential products from the past half-century – alongside some unusually big misses. THE HITS Apple II 1977 The Apple II put the small, scrappy upstart company on the map. It was Apple’s first mass market personal computer, designed by Wozniak…

I won the lottery. Out of around 8,000 artists, my name was randomly chosen to be one of the 2,000 who the Irish government would pay a basic income. This pilot scheme was a test of whether a policy of supporting artists would pay off in terms of creative work, wellbeing and, calculated down to the cent, the money that society would make back. For three years, we were paid €325 ($370) a week with no strings attached, other than filling out a survey. We could continue earning and applying for artist grants. I am a freelance writer who, like most artists, has always had to work outside my creative focus to afford to live, worrying I will never be able to afford a home or to start a family.…

Since their formation in 1979, Tuareg guitar band Tinariwen have been without a homeland. Moving between Mali, Libya and Algeria, the Grammy-winning group have used their desert blues music as a lament for a wandering refugee status that continues to this day. Co-founder Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni says the group are currently in Algeria, after band members had to flee their homes in Mali in October 2024. “The Malian military and the Russian mercenary group Wagner have been burning villages, slaughtering animals and raping women,” he says. “No one is talking about what is happening – no politicians or journalists – so we have to let the world know through our music.” While the Tuareg people are traditionally nomadic, living across the Saharan desert, the region’s increasingly complex politics have often…

It is always interesting to see how overnight snow reveals what goes on under the cover of night. Around the granny pines, I see the fore and hind prints of a red squirrel. Across the fields and along pinewood paths, there is evidence of hares and badgers, pine martens and deer, before they veered off, back into the heather and blaeberry understorey. I came across some less familiar animal tracks and was convinced they were those of a wildcat. After going to a talk by the Saving Wildcats project, I’m even more certain. The project was launched in 2015 after conservationists feared the wild population was facing extinction in Britain. Wildcats bred through Saving Wildcats are fitted with GPS collars to map their movements, and it’s fascinating to see their…

1 ENERGY IEA to consider release of more emergency oil stocks The world’s energy watchdog will consider releasing further emergency crude stocks to cool rising oil prices after warning that it will take time for markets to recover from the ongoing crisis in the strait of Hormuz. Fatih Birol, the head of the International Energy Agency (IEA), said its members continued to hold large reserves of emergency oil stocks even after the biggest release of government crude in the history of the market, meaning more emergency oil reserves could still be released “as and if needed”. It came as the price of Brent crude traded at just above $100 a barrel on Tuesday. About 100m barrels of emergency oil stockpiles will be made available to buyers in Asia in the…

An eerie quiet hangs over Ras Al Khaimah’s industrial port. Usually a thriving maritime hub of the United Arab Emirates, ships now stand docked and silent. Not far out along the hazy horizon, a backlog of hundreds of tankers have lined up in recent days, halted along a waterway flooded with danger. Any vessel heading past Ras Al Khaimah out to the Arabian Sea must traverse the strait of Hormuz. Just over 37km from Ras Al Khaimah, two oil tankers heading for the strait were attacked by Iranian missiles last week, one catching fire. Last Saturday, Fujairah, the UAE’s main oil port on its east coast, was targeted by a drone attack. It is one of the consequences facing Gulf states as they are pulled deeper into a war that…

There is strong evidence that the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) committed a war crime by depriving the villagers of north Darfur of the means to produce food, legal experts argue in a new analysis published last week calling for the Humanitarian Research Lab’s (HRL) revelations to be used in international courts. The destruction of the villages, farming equipment and infrastructure all provide strong evidence of a “starvation strategy” against a population already struggling with food insecurity because of the war, said Tom Dannenbaum, a professor at Stanford Law School and an expert on the use of starvation in war. “People were at the brink of starvation and objects indispensable to their survival were being destroyed,” said Dannenbaum, who co-authored the analysis alongside Yale Law School professor Oona Hathaway. He said…

Just south of Santiago, the tiny rural town of Paine is a quiet grid of painted adobe facades, shaded squares and shuttered shop fronts as the summer holidays draw to a close. But the white-knuckle fear of crime that propelled its most famous son, José Antonio Kast, to a resounding victory in December’s presidential election is as present in sleepy Paine as it is the length of Chile. “We have so much crime here – robberies, guns, drugs,” said María Elena Balcázar at a table in her roadside cafe opposite the church where the Kast family would attend mass. Kast, 60, took his oath of office in a ceremony at the National Congress in the coastal city of Valparaíso last Wednesday, elected president at the third attempt with his campaign…

It was day three of the British family’s holiday in Brazil and, as the sun rose over Rio’s undulating mountains, they set off for the city’s most talked about tourist haunt. “It’s our first time in Brazil. We’re really looking forward to it,” said Paul Boswell, a 58-year-old builder from Basildon, Essex, before clambering on to the motorbike that would carry him there. “You’ve got to do it, haven’t you?” said his partner, Fiona Kelly, 55, admitting she was unsure what she would do when they reached Rio’s latest must-see attraction. Boswell, Kelly and their teenage son Jack could have picked any of Rio’s world-famous landmarks at which to spend their Saturday: Sugarloaf mountain, Copacabana beach or the Christ the Redeemer statue, which thousands of tourists visit each day. Instead,…

FEMINISM IS FAR FROM DEAD, BUT PEOPLE LOVE TO WRITE ITS OBITUARY. I’ve lived through dozens of them over the decades, and there’s been a fresh flurry over the past few years. These death announcements are mostly based on two dubious assumptions. One is that we’re at the end of the story, the point at which a verdict can be rendered and a moral extracted. In this version, 60 years on from the great 1960s surge of feminism, the process should be over, and if feminism has not won, surely it has lost. In reality, it’s naively defeatist to assume millennia of patriarchy entrenched in law, culture, social arrangements and economics could be or should have been fully disassembled in one lifetime. The other assumption is that one event can…

An underappreciated element of how the “special relationship” between Britain and US emerged in the aftermath of the second world war is that early on, both parties saw themselves as the senior partner. The US’s military and economic dominance of the postwar world gave it an obvious claim to seniority, but there was also a strain within English conservatism that saw itself as “Greeks in this American empire”, in the words of former Tory prime minister Harold Macmillan. In other words, even if the Americans were to be the new Romans, extending their dominion over every corner of the globe, without the intellectual, cultural and political guidance of their wise old mother country, they would quickly fall into ruin. The post-imperial UK positioned itself as tutor to its young progeny…

When cooking for one, dividing by the number of portions doesn’t always work. Do you have any tips? Melanie, by email First, you need to consider your cookware: “It’s worth investing in smaller pans,” says Alexina Anatole, who is behind the Small Wins Substack. A tiny amount of liquid in a large pan, say, will get too much exposure to heat, so it’s likely you’ll under- or overcook its contents. As Shelina Permalloo, author of What to Cook When Everyone’s Hungry, says: “The absorption method for rice is a nightmare if you’re using the wrong-sized pan.” As a general rule, Anatole scales to the lowest common denominator – “It’s hard to split an egg after all” – though it’s often worth skipping the maths altogether. “Sometimes it’s about making one…

* All solutions published next week Across 5 That island repeatedly disturbed this island (6) 6 Person distributing shares is fraudster if doubly so (6) 9 Shade in US area, with same again for state (8) 10 More than once, clumsily handle fruit (6) 11 Bear what is ridicule if repeated (4) 12 Replacement notices changed as one result of twice dividing (10) 13 Cheat producing score in old notation (6-5) 18 Initially beat a retreat, then once more in German town (5-5) 21 Good argument for double, for example (4) 22 Reveal 13 (6) 23 With it in audition, one most like to make others double up (8) 24 Continent reflected about multinational group in hot spots (6) 25 Doppelgänger translated from writer in German (6) Down 1 Train –…

FOREIGN POLICY Starmer distances UK from Iran war despite US pressure Keir Starmer has insisted the UK will not be drawn into the wider war in the Middle East as European leaders ruled out sending warships to the strait of Hormuz. In his clearest signal yet of the UK’s divergence from Donald Trump’s attack on Iran, the prime minister said he would stand firm in the face of US pressure despite the decision being “difficult, there’s no hiding that”. As concerns mounted at home over US demands for the British military to help keep shipping lanes open, he said: “While taking the necessary action to defend ourselves and our allies, we will not be drawn into the wider war.” Despite threats from the US president that Nato faces “a very…

ABOUT 30KM OFF THE COAST OF IRAN lies the source of the petrostate’s economic lifeblood and a target of US military aggression: a 20 sq km coral island through which nine in every 10 barrels of Iranian crude passes each day. The US president’s decision to launch a weekend attack on Kharg Island, the home of Iran’s processing hub and the heart of its economy, is an unsurprising counterstrike to the Iranian regime’s ongoing chokehold on the oil market’s trade artery. But uncertainty over future oil production by one of the world’s largest producers is also likely to cause further market volatility after weeks of historic price increases. Donald Trump ordered the US military attack on Iran’s most strategic economic asset last Saturday, exactly two weeks after the US-Israeli strikes…

On the main street of Metula last Thursday morning there was one thing everyone agreed on: the night had been “difficult”. The sirens fell silent only a few hours earlier when military authorities were sure there would be no further attacks on northern Israel by Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based militant Islamist movement, and its sponsor, Iran. Yet any calm was fragile and partial. Warplanes flew low over the small town, the northernmost community in Israel. The loud percussive bang of interceptions of missiles came frequently. In the background was the thud and crack of what residents drinking coffee in the Bela cafe said was Israeli artillery firing not far away. Miry Menashe, the co-owner of Bela, said she had kept the cafe open because “the people of Metula don’t run away…

Scrunched between luxury apartment buildings and a lush gated community, the neighbourhood of Santa Lucía Reacomodo in Mexico City is a working-class pocket of real estate. María del Socorro Corona, 79, arrived here decades ago, back when it was just a cactus-covered hillside. The two-bedroom house she built with her now-deceased husband is crammed with bags of clothes and knick-knacks she sells at a weekly market. “I have to make money, or I won’t eat,” she said. While most people built their homes here in the 80s and 90s, the area really started to change about 20 years ago, Corona said, when the government constructed a bridge connecting Mexico City to the high-end business district of Santa Fe nearby. Foreigners came wanting to buy up their land, but none of…

At a February board meeting for Memphis-Shelby county schools in Tennessee, a parent of five children who currently or formerly attended Ida B Wells Academy, an alternative education school, asked board members a question. “This is a high-performing school. This is not a school in crisis,” she said. “So I respectfully ask, why are we considering closing a school that is working?” Indeed, while only 23% of students at the K-8 school tested at or above grade level in English language arts and 27% tested at or above grade level in maths – which was below state averages – that was still better than the district’s Chickasaw middle school, where only 7% of students tested at or above grade level in English and less than 5% did so in maths,…

A war spiralling in the Middle East. A death toll now in the thousands across Iran and Lebanon. Energy prices soaring. The Gulf seized up with Iranian strikes. It’s one of those eras that feels bewildering, incomprehensible, out of control. But there is, at the heart of it, a simple logic : everything that is unfolding is a result of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians. As the conflagration spreads, the connection to Palestine becomes obscured. But it is clear how much of the stability of the Middle East was secured at the expense of the Palestinians. Look at the region before 7 October 2023. US policy on the Middle East focused on “integration’’: containment of Iran, signing up more Arab countries to normalise relations with Israel and the creation, therefore,…

Oscar night climaxed with a metaphorical whiff of gunpowder and a defiant rebel yell as One Battle After Another broke late to claim the best picture and director awards at the Dolby theatre in downtown Los Angeles. If it is true that Americans get the presidents they deserve, it follows that they should get the appropriate Academy Award winner as well. Paul Thomas Anderson’s rambunctious counter-culture thriller is the perfect film for an imperfect America, brilliantly reading the tea-leaves of Donald Trump’s second term with its tale of leftist activists in a proto-fascist California. One Battle After Another was the most political of the best picture nominees and that might have made the difference. But it was arguably the most ambitious, rousing and lip-smackingly satisfying too. In honouring One Battle…

As I write this, Iranians around the world are holding their breath for the end of the murderous Islamic Republic. More than three years after the Woman, Life, Freedom movement began, amid renewed demonstrations, brutal state crackdowns and now US bombing raids, Shahrnush Parsipur’s banned novella Women Without Men arrives in the UK, where last month it was longlisted for the 2026 International Booker prize. At 80 years old, Parsipur is one of Iran’s most celebrated living writers, and one of our boldest feminists. In the 1980s, her stories were the talk of Iran’s literary circles and she was imprisoned for nearly five years without ever being formally charged. Three years after her release, in 1989, she published a novel, Touba and the Meaning of Night, and Women Without Men.…

Fabiano Caruana, the world No 3, US champion and 5-2 favourite to win the world title Candidates in Cyprus from 29 March, planned to warm up with two events at his home town St Louis, but events did not follow the script. Caruana was second to the former Russian Mikhail Antipov in the Saint Louis Masters, though he was unbeaten with 7/9, so this was still a good result. But then, in the American Cup, a double elimination format knockout, he lost to Wesley So and Levon Aronian. Both defeats followed a pattern where Caruana was gradually ground down in middle games and endgames without queens. So won in 68 moves, while Aronian took only 40. Hikaru Nakamura, the world No 2 and popular streamer, and Javokhir Sindarov, the Uzbek…

Across 1 Arctic Circle native (4) 3 Careless (8) 8 Tool with prongs (4) 9 Considerably (2,6) 11 Setter of meter in vehicle (4,6) 14 French lady? (6) 15 Dose up (anag.) (6) 17 One born during a period following WW2 (4,6) 20 Measurer of small quantities of food and liquids (8) 21 Bart (anag.) – jackanapes (4) 22 Date (2,6) 23 Race (anag.) – maple (4) Down 1 Extant span? (8) 2 Lightener of hair (8) 4 Soaked pulse (6) 5 Punch and Judy performance? (6,4) 6 Helper (4) 7 Dry seed covering (4) 10 Thyroid cartilage projection (5,5) 12 Yellow flavouring (8) 13 Author of same book (2-6) 16 Familiar saying – example (6) 18 Male (4) 19 Girl (4) Solution No 17,417…