The move by the Johnson government to pass a bill that undercuts its own agreement about the terms of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU has caused fury in Britain and abroad. Despite the protestations of some of Johnson’s own MPs, former prime ministers and others, the first stage of the bill passed in the House of Commons on Monday night. Will this move, which even the government admits would break international law, permanently damage Britain’s global reputation? Toby Helm reports on a wild week in Westminster, where the latest Brexit drama crashed into the ongoing crisis that is the UK government’s handling of coronavirus.
A summer of fire continued last week with destruction in the Moria refugee camp on Lesbos, Greece. Fires broke out when protests by residents against Covid-19 restrictions turned violent. More than 12,000 people were left without shelter and sanitation. Those residents are now begging to be allowed to leave or to be deported. Katie Fallon and Peter Beaumont report.
Meanwhile, huge areas of the globe continued to be devastated by wildfires, both in the Amazon and the west coast of the United States. On page 30, Oregon resident and Guardian reporter Jason Wilson follows the families evacuated from the fires’ paths in his state and Rebecca Solnit laments the blood orange sky in her home city of San Francisco.
Elsewhere, we report from Canada as Justin Trudeau attempts to turn around his stumbling fortunes; from India where a Bollywood star’s death has created a media and political frenzy and from Japan where Yoshihide Suga has replaced Shinzo Abe as prime minister.
In features, Tim Harford looks at how our emotions can overpower the most indisputable facts; Paul Vallely wonders if the philanthropic endeavours of the ultra-rich are really a net benefit. In arts, Miranda Sawyer interviews the mighty Margaret Atwood and Steve Rose asks if the era of American pop cultural hegemony is really over.
Alongside Richard Wolffe and Sonia Sodha in this week’s comment section, we also feature a new Guardian opinion writer. On page 47, GPT-3 – a robot (specifically, a cutting-edge language model that uses machine learning to produce human-like text) – explains why they are, thankfully, not out to destroy the human race.
