This week, as the Guardian Weekly was being delivered to readers, Britons voted in the first UK election to take place in December since 1910. At the time of writing the result is (perhaps blissfully) unknown, but we will be back next week with in-depth analysis of Thursday evening’s outcome. In the meantime, our news, politics, comment and data teams will cover every moment of the vote in depth. Catch every minute here.
Our cover this week is Gary Younge’s essay on the end of a decade which started with the Arab spring and Occupy movements and ended up – via Ferguson, #MeToo and Greece – on the streets of Hong Kong, Santiago, La Paz, Beirut and Shiraz. It was the decade of protest, Younge writes – and a guttural reaction to the financial crash and years of political and social oppression. In some cases, the results were striking victories, but in too many the return blows of the establishment paused revolution in its tracks. Will the school climate strikers and Extinction Rebellion be able to break through the status quo in the 2020s?
The images of White Island, or Whakaari, erupting in New Zealand’s Bay of Plenty on Monday were as striking as they were terrifying. As a police investigation into the deaths on the island opens, Charlotte Graham-McLay tells the story of those who made it off the island just in the nick of time.
The news of the rape and murder of a Hyderabad woman last week repulsed the world. The extrajudicial killing of her alleged attackers has done nothing to quell the anger felt by women in India. The country’s rape crisis, reports south-east Asia correspondent Hannah Ellis-Petersen, has become a sexual violence pandemic – with 133,000 cases pending in Indian courts. Ellis-Petersen hears the harrowing story of a family whose six-year-old daughter was killed after being raped, allegedly by a neighbour. She also talks to the women standing up to sexual violence, including one whose despair is such that she’s taken to hunger striking.
Michael Billington wrote his first review for the Guardian in 1971. Since then he’s spent 10,000 nights at the theatre, writing beautifully about the stage. As he prepares to step down, the critic looks back at his career in the stalls, to show how the story of British theatre in the last five decades tells the story of Britain as a whole. Michael’s words have been a consistent feature in the Guardian Weekly for the past 48 years, too, and we wish him the best of luck in retirement. Perhaps he’ll have time to catch a show or two …
