SwayBlog

AfghanistanObituaryAbdul HaqVeteran Afghan leader seeking post-Taliban consensus ruleThe veteran Afghan resistance commander Abdul Haq, who has been executed by the Taliban aged 43, was regarded as one of the few homegrown political figures who could have restored unity to his benighted and wartorn country. His sudden demise not only dashed hopes of an internal revolt against the Taliban regime in Kabul, but also snuffed out hopes of a political revival by the feted anti-Soviet warlord of the 1980s.

Book of the dayScience and nature booksReviewIn beautiful prose, the Pulitzer-winning US novelist offers a powerful indictment of human complicity in environmental destruction Hunter S Thompson once said that to get at the truth, especially about something terrible, you had to “get subjective”. He was talking about his sworn enemy Richard Nixon, but it applies just the same to the appalling damage we’re doing to our planet. Newspaper articles, charity reports and activist speeches abound – all earnest and arguably objective, but they somehow fail to capture the true meaning of what’s being lost in the natural world.

Human rights'Justice dies when the law is co-opted for political purposes.' Gareth Peirce, one of our key human rights lawyers, talks to Stuart Jeffries'I don't have any memories of my childhood now," says Gerry Conlon, as he rolls a cigarette in the sun-dappled garden of a cafe in Camden Town, north London. "But everything that happened from Saturday 30 November 1974 is absolutely vivid." That was the day the 20-year-old was arrested in Belfast for his supposed part in the Guildford pub bombings, in which five people died and 65 were injured.

Copa del ReyGriezmann sparkles as Atlético Madrid enjoy Copa del Rey revenge against RealAtlético Madrid 4-2 Real Madrid after extra-timeGriezmann pounces with sensational goal against city rivalsThere is a phrase in Spain: second parts were never any good. Sequels, they say, invariably fail to live up to the original, but this time it did. Like The Godfather Part II, the second episode of the Madrid Trilogy, that run of three derbies in three weeks and three different competitions, was even better than the first, however implausible that had appeared.

Local TVLocal outlets may lack audience size, but they can can provide a veneer of legitimacy to fringe groups, experts say Last November, the WEAR-TV news station in northern Florida aired a segment on Dr Benjamin Marble, a local doctor who created a free telehealth website offering consultations for Covid-19. Marble, the reporter said, had made it so “patients don’t have to pay a cent” for coronavirus treatment and believed his site could replace Obamacare.

The ObserverPop and rockReview(Island) The Irish singer-songwriter draws on some classic literary sources for his entrancing but overlong third album Irish singer-songwriter Andrew Hozier-Byrne’s third album is a lot. A teetering stack of soul and rock teeming with furrow-browed, denim-jacketed, glass-cased emotion. It should come with a reading list – its 16 songs are patterned by way of Dante’s Inferno and he has said that epic poetry such as Metamorphoses inspired him.

The G2 interviewMoviesInterview‘I’ll never drink like that again’: Kathleen Turner on booze, health and falling in love with Michael DouglasAnn LeeBody Heat made her a star in the 80s. Then, after a string of hit movies, illness forced her to take a step back. The actor talks about her fights with directors, her rage at white male privilege and her return to the screen as a foul-mouthed political lobbyist Kathleen Turner is pondering her acting career, a smile playing on her lips.

The science behind sustainability solutionsGuardian sustainable businessIn 2011, an ecologist released an alarming study showing that tiny clothing fibers could be the biggest source of plastic in our oceans. The bigger problem? No one wanted to hear it Ecologist Mark Browne knew he’d found something big when, after months of tediously examining sediment along shorelines around the world, he noticed something no one had predicted: fibers. Everywhere. They were tiny and synthetic and he was finding them in the greatest concentration near sewage outflows.

FilmObituaryMauro BologniniDirector turning literature into visual masterpiecesOnce described as "the most Proustian of Italian film directors", Mauro Bolognini, who has died aged 78, was admired, above all, for his elegant adaptations of literary works, made mostly in the 1960s and 1970s. He was sometimes maliciously called "the poor man's Visconti", and the director of The Leopard was heard to say, somewhat bitchily, when asked if his projected film of Proust's Recherche would start from Du cté de Chez Swan, "