An eerie communications blackout accompanied Hurricane Dorian’s excruciatingly slow, 48-hour passage across the Bahamas early last week. Satellite images of the category 5 storm – as seen in last week’s Eyewitness spread – merely hinted at the carnage taking place beneath. With the storm’s passing late last week the devastation was laid bare: hundreds of people missing and an estimated 70,000 left homeless. As aid began to trickle into the worst-hit areas, David Smith reports from the island of Abaco, where fear and sorrow have been turning to anger at the slow response from authorities.
Brexit Britain’s parliamentary crisis appeared to be calming down this week, if only temporarily. On Monday MPs rejected Boris Johnson’s second attempt to force a snap general election and the prime minister subsequently carried out his threat to prorogue parliament, which will not now sit again until mid-October. After a chaotic week of defeats, sackings and resignations, the Observer’s Toby Helm ponders how long Johnson can survive – or if the mayhem is part of a bigger Brexit battle strategy devised by his controversial chief adviser Dominic Cummings.
Some liars are easy to spot (insert joke about your least-admired politician here). But when it comes to weeding out the professionals, inconsistent polygraph lie detectors have long been the best available technology. Now, rapid advances in artificial intelligence and brain-scanning are coming closer to accurately identifying people’s lies than ever before. But, asks Amit Katwala, once it’s all out in the open, how much will we really want to know?
Elsewhere, Nesrine Malik writes on the myth of the free speech crisis, Charlotte Higgins gets exclusive access to the cast and crew of the new series of royal TV blockbuster The Crown, and there’s a review of The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s long-awaited follow-up to The Handmaid’s Tale.
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