Our reporters on the US west coast have spent the week chronicling both the protests in Los Angeles, the impact of Ice raids on ordinary people and the decision by the Trump administration to send in the national guard. In this powerful exposé, Maanvi Singh revealed the terrible conditions in which families detained by Ice, including those with young children, were being held. Andrew Gumbel wrote a powerful dispatch from among the protesters in LA, and also spoke to groups representing military families concerned at the position they had been put in; Lois Beckett explored why it was no surprise that Los Angeles, for decades the centre of the civil rights and immigrants’ rights movements, rose up. Rachel Leingang and Lauren Gambino reported that the sight of US troops on the streets was a show of military force years in the making, while Dani Anguiano explained how exactly Trump was able to do it.
In India, 265 people died when Air India flight 171 crashed into a hostel minutes after take off from an airport in Ahmedabad in north western India on Thursday. Paul Scruton on graphics, and Mathilde Poncet and Sarah Bertram from video, produced this visual guide to what we know so far. Incredibly, one passenger survived, a British man Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, who was sitting in seat 11A. Hannah Ellis-Petersen in Delhi and Jason Burke covered how the crash unfolded while recovery efforts continued and the black box was located.
In the UK, chancellor Rachel Reeves unveiled a far-reaching spending review. Her plans included billions of infrastructure investment alongside cuts to everyday spending. Jessica Elgot looked at the winners and losers; Pippa Crerar wrote that Reeves’s approach risked failing to see results before the next election; and Robyn Vinter spoke to unimpressed former Labour voters in Morley, near Leeds. There was in-depth reaction from our panel of experts as well as analysis from the Politics Weekly UK podcast team. Richard Partington and Kiran Stacey asked if Reeves’s plans signalled a return to austerity.
Malak A Tantesh in Gaza and Emma Graham-Harrison produced a heartbreaking report on the death of Reem Zeidan, who was killed by Israeli fire while trying to get food from one of the food distribution hubs in Gaza that have become death traps for starving families desperate for supplies. Emma also covered Israeli forces taking control of an aid boat crewed by activists, including Greta Thunberg, who were trying to make a symbolic delivery of aid to Gaza. Lorenzo Tondo took a close look at the leader of an Israeli armed gang numerous aid agencies have accused of looting aid. On Instagram, Scarlet Pestell and Albert Villa Alsina visualised how the aid distribution system has seemingly been designed to fail.
Daniel Boffey in Ukraine profiled Vasyl Malyuk, the head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), who is credited with masterminding a series of daring strikes on Russia, including operation Spiderweb, last week’s audacious drone attack. He also reported on the mood in Kyiv as Russia launched its biggest air raids of the war, bringing fear to those living near factories and industrial estates. A Ukrainian man who joined the military to fight off Vladimir Putin’s invasion told Peter Beaumont about his more than two years as a Russian prisoner of war, which involved a mix of death threats, torture and kafkaesque legal absurdities.
Violence erupted in the town of Ballymena in Northern Ireland this week, with hundreds of people – many masked and hooded – targeting foreign-owned homes and businesses, following an alleged sexual assault on a teenage girl by two 14-year-old boys. Ireland correspondent Rory Carroll wrote a striking piece talking to foreign residents living in fear for their lives.
Annie Kelly continued her work with Zahra Joya and other female reporters from Afghan women’s news organisation Rukhshana Media, investigating how fathers, brothers and husbands have succumbed to Taliban pressure to ensure the women in their families observe the country’s repressive laws in the home, effectively becoming unpaid foot soldiers imposing the regime.
The height of the front of new cars in the UK and Europe is rising relentlessly, a fascinating report has found, bringing a “clear and growing threat to public safety, especially for children”. Analysis found that drivers in the tallest cars could not see children as old as nine when they were standing directly in front of the vehicle. Not unrelated, children in England are growing up “sedentary, scrolling and alone” because of a dramatic decline in play in their lives, according to a panel of experts who spent a year investigating play and childhood. Harriet Grant visited a school in Oxford where one headteacher has managed to bring play back to the classroom: “The impact has been profound.”
Following the launch of our chart-topping Missing in the Amazon investigative series, Science Weekly had its own mini-series looking at the vital work Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira were undertaking with Indigenous groups to help protect the Amazon from miners, poachers, loggers and others who continue to do great harm to the rainforest.
Tumaini Carayol saw a fortnight of French Open tennis save its best for last, with Coco Gauff fighting back in three sets to beat Aryana Sabalenka in the women’s singles final – a victory she hoped gave encouragement to “people who look like me in America”; and then the longest men’s final in the tournament’s history, won by Carlos Alcaraz in five sets over Jannik Sinner as they underlined how theirs is the most exciting new rivalry at the top of the men’s game. “You want more of this? How about another decade?” wrote Jonathan Liew.
Music lost two bona fide but troubled geniuses this week. Rock and pop critic Alexis Petridis paid fitting tribute to Sly Stone who he – just about – interviewed twice, and Brian Wilson, creator, he wrote, of “pop music as perfect as pop music is ever likely to get: music you can bathe in.”
I enjoyed Gaby Hinsliff’s illuminating piece about the backlash against wokeness and how progressives can start winning again; Andrew Lawrence on how figures in the manosphere have seized on the trial of Sean “Diddy” Combs for racketeering and sex trafficking offences; Alice Bolin on why America continues to fall for the myth of “boy geniuses” and Great Men; and Lucy Knight’s hilarious piece on Rukmini Iyer’s Roasting Tin cookbooks and why all lesbians own one. Also don’t miss Shaad D’Souza’s fun interview with Sarah Jessica Parker – when I was watching Sex and the City the first time around in the late 1990s, I never imagined that gen Z would love it, or indeed a Guardian article might describe it as “a quarter-century old ur-text of heteropessimism”.
One more thing …I’m fascinated by the way some people interested in “wellness” have moved towards the rightwing fringes since the pandemic, and enjoyed Hari Kunzru’s piece on the subject in the New York Review of Books: “New agers and conspiracy theorists share three common beliefs: nothing happens by accident, nothing is as it seems and everything is connected.”
