Guardian Weekly cover 2 July 2021 Photograph: Guardian Design
The closure of Hong Kong’s Apple Daily last week shows how the pro-democracy movement and press freedom are being crushed in the city under pressure from Beijing. We follow the final weeks of the flagship publication, including a first-person account from one of the last journalists to leave the building after colleagues were arrested and equipment seized. Analysis from China commentator Louisa Lim looks at how the remaining windows of defiance against the mainland’s determination to stamp out media criticism are being resolutely shut via legal and financial pressure.
The Delta variant of Covid-19 is behind a worrying resurgence in infections across the world. We investigate why, in the face of its increased transmissibility, pushing ahead with vaccination is imperative while even the inoculated may have to keep wearing their masks for a while longer yet. And in Indonesia, meeting grave diggers at a Jakarta cemetery reveals the enduring and heartbreaking reality of coping with a rising Covid death toll.
Could studying works of fiction from around the world have predicted a disaster comparable to the coronavirus pandemic or explain China’s unshakeable belief that it could defy international norms with little pushback from the west? Philip Oltermann, our Berlin bureau chief, reports on how a group of German literary scholars working with state intelligence thought they could gain a Cassandra-like insight into the geo-political future using textual analysis. It’s a spy story that replaces fast action with fast reading.
Our interview with Leslie Caron, who as a young young French dancer who was paired with Gene Kelly in An American in Paris and Fred Astaire in Daddy Long Legs then went on to star in Gigi, reveals why she turned her back on Hollywood and now, at 90, is happiest in her London garden.
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