Grilled tomato toasts with yoghurty spread and a smoky sesame-harissa salsa, then a tender chicken with chipotle sauce
Jocoque is somewhere between yoghurt, soured cream and labneh, and traditionally made on Mexican ranches from milk that’s left to ferment in clay pots. Here, I’ve used strained greek yoghurt instead, to add depth to these simple tomato toasts and for a creamy balance to the smoky salsa backdrop. It makes a simple and delicious starter for an alfresco dinner. To follow, a simple, spatchcocked chicken slathered in a smoky, brick-red chipotle paste that is mouthwateringly good.
The tiny, astonishingly wealthy country has become a major player on the world stage, trying to solve some of the most intractable conflicts. What’s driving this project?
On the morning of Friday 13 June, a few hours after Israel launched a volley of missiles towards Tehran, one of Donald Trump’s first calls was to the emir of Qatar. Trump hoped that Sheikh Tamim could persuade the president of Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian, to engage in a negotiated solution. Pezeshkian refused. Iran would be willing to talk, but would not negotiate under fire.
Over the next few days, during what has since come to be known as the “12 -day war”, the Qataris spoke regularly to President Trump and the Iranian leadership. “We were busy,” a senior Qatari diplomat told me, with some understatement. The risks to the region were high, but to Qatar they were “existential”, he said. Qatar is a tiny country. Most of its immense wealth comes from the undersea gasfield that it shares with nearby Iran, and the two nations enjoy good relations. At the same time, Qatar is a close ally of Iran’s greatest enemy, the US, and hosts the largest US military base in the region. If the US became involved in the war, Qatar would become a target.
Patricia da Silva Armani shared a south London flat with the Brazilian electrician who was mistaken for a terrorist in the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings
Patricia da Silva Armani was living with her cousin Jean Charles de Menezes in a flat in south London two decades ago when he was shot seven times in the head by firearms officers at Stockwell station. Her younger cousin was a chatterbox and a dreamer, she says, “always with plans”.
The pair had grown up together as part of a large and close family. Two years after De Menezes had moved to London for a life that Brazil was unable to offer, “Paty”, as he affectionately called her, had been encouraged to follow him to his two-bedroom flat on Scotia Road, along with their younger cousin Vivian Figueiredo, then 20.
Readers lose out when English-speaking gatekeepers decide what books are sold and whose stories get told
I attended an American writers’ conference in Texas, just before the world plunged into Covid-19 lockdowns. Between panels and networking, I spent my time wandering around the book fair, leafing through titles and peppering publishers with questions.
“How many translated works are in your catalogues? How do you discover authors from outside the US? And how do you evaluate the quality of writing in languages you don’t speak?”
Ana Schnabl is a Slovenian novelist, editor and critic
Two years after the Nova Kakhovka dam was destroyed in Ukraine, nature has returned in abundance to the drained land in a ‘big natural experiment’ – but it could be lost as quickly as it appeared
At the southern tip of Europe’s largest river island, the ground falls away into a vast and unexpected vista. From a high, rocky ledge on Khortytsia Island, the view opens on to a sea of swaying young willows and mirrored lagoons. Some of the trees are already many metres tall, but this is a young forest. Just a few years ago, all of it was under water.
“This is Velykyi Luh – the Great Meadow,” says Valeriy Babko, a retired history teacher and army veteran, standing on the former reservoir shoreline at Malokaterynivka village. For him, this extraordinary new-old environment represents more than nature alone.
Water flows over the collapsed Kakhovka dam on 7 June 2023. Photograph: AP
Twenty-five-year-old Bijan Ghaisar was unarmed when he was shot in his car by two officers. Charges against the men were dismissed – but seven years on his mother Kelly is still fighting for her boy
Kelly Ghaisar never thought to teach her son, Bijan, to fear the police. She didn’t see the need. After arriving in the US as a young girl fleeing the Iranian revolution in 1979, she had led a charmed life in her adopted country, building a prosperous and happy family with her husband and raising her two children – Bijan and his older sister, Nageen – to believe in the American dream.
“We had just lived our life in this bubble, this very lovely bubble,” she says. “Even though we’re both from Iran, we never felt we had to teach our kids that they were different. They were American and we taught them to believe that they were equal and free, the values we thought this country stood for. I never thought that Bijan, a young man of colour, would need to know what to do if he encountered the police. We taught him they were there to protect him, not that he would ever have to protect himself from them.”
Eduardo Bolsonaro condemns Alexandre de Moraes’s order, while judge directs Jair Bolsonaro’s lawyers to explain why he breached social media restrictions
A Brazilian supreme court justice has ordered the freezing of the accounts and assets of former president Jair Bolsonaro’s third son, Eduardo Bolsonaro, the latter said on social media.
Eduardo, a Brazilian congressman who has been in Washington to drum up support for his father, said on X on Monday the decision was “another arbitrary” decision by Justice Alexandre de Moraes.
The South Australian premier has said the state’s algal bloom catastrophe, which has caused mass deaths among hundreds of marine species, should be described as a natural disaster despite the Albanese government declining to do so a day earlier.
Speaking to the ABC’s News Breakfast program, Peter Malinauskas warned “politicians can do themselves a disservice when they get caught up in technicalities”.
A fire that broke out on a Virgin Australia flight from Sydney to Hobart is believed to have been caused by a power bank in a passenger’s carry-on luggage, prompting the airline to consider changes to its battery policy.
The Virgin flight VA1528 was making its descent into Hobart on Monday when the fire started in an overhead locker, a spokesperson for the airline said.
The Piano Man singer, who announced in May he’d been diagnosed with the neurological condition normal pressure hydrocephalus, has spoken about its effects
Billy Joel has opened up about his health, after cancelling his scheduled concerts mid-tour in May. At the time, the 76-year-old singer announced that he’d been diagnosed with normal pressure hydrocephalus (NPH).
Speaking to Bill Maher on his Club Random podcast this week, Joel said he felt “good”.
Trump’s border tsar vows to ‘flood the zone’ with Ice officers, 700 marines redeployed and president’s megabill estimated to pile $3.4tn on to national debt. Key US politics stories from Monday 21 July
The Trump administration is targeting US sanctuary cities in the next phase of its deportation drive, after an off-duty law enforcement officer was allegedly shot in New York City by an undocumented person with a criminal record.
Tom Homan, Donald Trump’s hardline border tsar, vowed to “flood the zone” with Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (Ice) agents, saying: “Every sanctuary city is unsafe. Sanctuary cities are sanctuaries for criminals and President Trump’s not going to tolerate it.”
Transparency International condemns ‘massive’ pressure on NABU while G7 ambassadors express ‘serious concerns’. What we know on day 1,245
Ukrainian security services arrested officials from the country’s main anti-corruption agency, the NABU, on Monday and conducted dozens of searches in a crackdown that the agency said went too far and had effectively shut down its entire mission. The SBU said it had arrested one of the officials as a suspected Russian spy and others for alleged ties to a banned party. But NABU, which has embarrassed senior government officials with corruption allegations, said the “vast majority” of cases involved unrelated allegations such as years-old traffic accidents.
Anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International said the searches conducted without court orders showed that authorities were exerting “massive pressure” on Ukraine’s corruption fighters. Ambassadors of G7 nations in Kyiv issued a statement saying they had “serious concerns and intend to discuss these developments with government leaders”. Anti-corruption campaigners have been alarmed since Vitaliy Shabunin, a top anti-corruption activist, was charged earlier this month with fraud and evading military service. Volodymy Zelenskyy’s office denies that prosecutions in Ukraine are politically motivated.
Russia and Ukraine will hold new peace talks on Wednesday in Istanbul, said Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president. It is a follow-up to two earlier rounds that made little progress on ending their war. Zelenskyy has offered to hold direct talks with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin.
Russia has broadcast footage from inside a plant assembling the deadly attack drones it fires at civilian targets in Ukraine on a daily basis. The video was published on Sunday by Zvezda, a TV channel owned by the Russian defence ministry, showing workers with their faces blurred assembling jet-black triangle-shaped attack drones. “This is the world’s largest factory producing unmanned combat aerial vehicles, and the most secretive one,” said plant director Timur Shagivaleev, who has been sanctioned by the US. The plant is near the town of Yelabuga in the central Russian region of Tatarstan. Russia’s Geran drones are based on Iranian Shahed drones.
The French foreign minister, Jean-Noel Barrot, arrived in Kyiv on Monday for a surprise visit while rescuers were still sifting through the rubble from a massive drone and missile barrage against the Ukrainian capital. Six districts of Kyiv came under attack on Monday, sparking fires at a supermarket, multiple residential buildings and a nursery, authorities said. The entrance to a metro station where civilians were sheltering from the barrage was damaged. “This inhumane, cynical and cruel violence has no military purpose,” Barrot said.
Barrot visited the Chornobyl power plant, the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident. In February, Ukraine accused Russia of using an explosive drone to damage the confinement arch protecting the structure – prompting France to pledge €10m to help fix it. Barrot said Russia “targets energy infrastructure in defiance of international law, security and nuclear safety”.
Staff quarters attacked three times and four people detained, three temporarily, as IDF tanks enter Deir al-Balah
The World Health Organization (WHO) has said the Israeli military attacked its staff residence and main warehouse in Deir al-Balah on Monday, compromising its operations in Gaza.
The WHO said its staff residence was attacked three times, with airstrikes causing a fire and extensive damage, and endangering staff and their families, including children.
Homan vows to escalate Ice operations after off-duty officer allegedly shot by undocumented person in New York City
The Trump administration is targeting sanctuary cities in the next phase of its deportation drive after labelling them “sanctuaries for criminals” following the shooting of an off-duty law enforcement officer in New York City, allegedly by an undocumented person with a criminal record.
Tom Homan, Donald Trump’s hardline border czar, vowed to “flood the zone” with Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (Ice) agents in an all-out bid to overcome the lack of cooperation he said the government faced from Democrat-run municipalities in its quest to arrest and detain undocumented people.
Federal judge rejects justice department recommendation that Brett Hankison be give no prison time
A federal judge on Monday sentenced an ex-Kentucky police officer to nearly three years in prison for using excessive force during the 2020 deadly raid on Breonna Taylor’s home, declining a justice department recommendation that he be given no prison time.
Brett Hankison, who fired 10 shots during the raid but didn’t hit anyone, was the only officer on the scene charged in the Black woman’s death. He is the first person sentenced to prison in the case that rocked the city of Louisville and spawned weeks of street protests over police brutality five years ago.
We’re collectively trying to decide through digital telepathy what makes it OK to ruin someone’s life. That is an impossible task
By now we’ve all seen the video: a couple locked in an intimate embrace at a Coldplay concert. Within milliseconds, the woman turns her face and the man ducks. The crowd gasps. Chris Martin quips: “Either they’re having an affair or they’re very shy.”
Within 24 hours, the internet had done what it does best: turned sleuth. The names of the pair were quickly revealed. LinkedIns found. Both were senior executives at a New York data firm, he, the CEO; she, the head of HR. Both married. With children.
Miski Omar is a writer and director based in Sydney
Adviser to former PM said Bush’s pursuit of regime change in Baghdad could also cause ‘regime change in London’
The stark terms in which the US was warned that invading Iraq without a second UN security council resolution could cost Tony Blair his premiership have been revealed in newly released documents.
Blair’s foreign policy adviser, David Manning, warned Condoleezza Rice, the then US national security adviser: “The US must not promote regime change in Baghdad at the price of regime change in London.”
State and city officials had called presence of marines provocative during protests against Ice raids in the city
The Pentagon’s chief spokesperson, Sean Parnell, confirmed to the Guardian on Monday that the entire deployment of 700 active-duty US marines is being withdrawn from Los Angeles more than a month after Donald Trump deployed them to the city against objections of local leaders.
The redeployment of the marines comes a week after 2,000 national guard troops were withdrawn from the city. The troops were sent to the city last month by the federal government after violence broke out on the fringes of protests against immigration enforcement sweeps in LA.
Ice hockey player Gary Kelly died at Ibiza Rocks Hotel as did fellow Scot Evan Thomson, who fell to his death on 7 July
An Ibiza hotel and music venue has cancelled a number of music events after the deaths of two British men on its premises in the space of two weeks.
Gary Kelly, 19, who was a professional ice hockey player for the Dundee Stars, died at the Ibiza Rocks hotel on Monday. His club paid tribute to the “hugely talented and charismatic individual” who “had a great future ahead of him”.
About 200,000 pages of surveillance records released despite objection from slain civil rights leader’s family
The Trump administration has released records of the FBI’s surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr, despite opposition from the slain Nobel laureate’s family and the civil rights group that he led until his 1968 assassination.
The release involves an estimated 200,000 pages of records that had been under a court-imposed seal since 1977, when the FBI first gathered the records and turned them over to the National Archives and Records Administration.
In three-hour Channel 5 talk, ex-president’s son says ‘fuck him’ of actor over op-ed calling on Joe Biden to step down
Hunter Biden has given a profanity-laced, three-hour interview to the US outlet Channel 5 that is remarkable for its no-holds attack on actor George Clooney, denial that he was the source of cocaine found in the White House and thoughts on why his father bombed in his debate with Donald Trump before dropping out of his presidential re-election run.
“Fuck him!” the younger Biden said of Clooney, whose remarkable New York Times opinion piece last July called on the Democratic party for which the actor is a financial donor to find a new presidential nominee.
Federal Reserve video says project is ‘modernization’ of two buildings that have not had major renovations since 1930s
The US Federal Reserve is pushing back against claims from the White House that it is undergoing extravagant renovations with a video tour showing the central bank’s ongoing construction.
The video, posted on the Fed’s website, includes captions explaining that the project is a “complete overhaul and modernization” of two buildings that have not had major renovations since the 1930s.
The president launched a broadside at Washington’s NFL team as well as the Cleveland Guardians. But the teams and their fans have largely moved on
Haven’t the fans of the Washington Commanders and Cleveland Guardians suffered enough?
For decades, each team had to endure the twin indignities of on-field futility and off-field scorn. Until last year, when they enjoyed a resurgence under rookie quarterback Jayden Daniels, the Washington NFL team had won exactly only one playoff game in the 21st century. Cleveland’s baseball team have been competitive this century, but they once went 41 years between playoff appearances (from 1954 to 1995) and came out on the losing end in the “whose drought will end?” World Series of 2016, in which the Chicago Cubs won the championship for the first time in 108 years at the expense of Cleveland, whose epoch without a World Series win now stands at 77 years.
Connexion
