Guardian Weekly

The Guardian Weekly magazine is a round-up of the world news, opinion and long reads that have shaped the week. Inside, the past seven days' most memorable stories are reframed with striking photography and insightful companion pieces, all handpicked from The Guardian and The Observer.

Your dinner party’s on Friday. Wait, today’s Friday.

Editor’s Notes

Global report • Headlines from the last seven days

United Kingdom

Reader’s eyewitness

SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENT

The great divide • The rise of the hard-right AfD in recent state elections has caused panic in Germany, but is it premature? James Hawes argues that deep historical and cultural divisions between east and west will serve to protect the country from the spread of populism

Hard choices • Merz is likely to be the next chancellor – but can he defuse the AfD?

Spotlight • Police under pressure in wake of inquiry into Grenfell fire

‘Justice delayed’ • Why trust in public inquiries to bring closure is fading

Inside the Russian town where Kyiv is now in charge

Stormy waters • New flashpoint emerges in South China Sea dispute

Eyewitness France

‘I am all the world’ The brutal rule of a West Bank settler • Palestinians tell of blacklisted Yakov’s reign across the Jabal Salman valley – and he is just one of many violent bosses

IDF holds self-investigation after shooting of US activist

Glacial deep secrets Could sediment banks slow rising sea levels?

‘It’s a human disaster’ Towns on frontline of tragic Channel deaths • Security around Calais has led to dinghies launching farther along the coast – and taking bigger risks at sea

The final card? • With Barnier as PM, Macron has put his fate in Le Pen’s hands

Dalai Lama’s mountain town feels the strain of tourist boom

A bug’s life • The woman whose 1705 book altered entomology

The write stuff How human scribes are fuelling AI • 20,000 people work full-time to ‘train’ models like ChatGPT. Here, a data annotator spills the beans on his job

Too close to call Harris leads the polls – but it’s still on a knife-edge • Analysis of 2024 polling and previous elections involving Donald Trump suggests race could go either way

Starlink’s conquest of the Amazon leaves Brazil in a dilemma

The day my brother fell to Earth • In 2001, a young man’s body was found in a London car park. Police thought he had tried to enter the UK by hiding in a plane’s landing gear. Reporter Esther Addley traced his tragic story. Two decades later, the man’s brother emailed, asking to meet her

Can you click it? • Never mind the action on the pitch; every weekend, 10 million fans are plugged into a whole different ballgame – the Fantasy Premier League. Tom Lamont meets the world’s best armchair football managers to find out the mystic secrets of their success

Nesrine Malik • Realistic about its past, proud of its present: a new Britain takes shape

Marina Hyde • After the Oasis ticket debacle, Ticketmaster deserves to be rinsed

Aslak Nore • What the princess and the shaman tell us about hereditary privilege

The Guardian View • Liberal democracies have failed women and girls oppressed by the Taliban

Opinion Letters

Scare tactics • James McAvoy discusses class, criticism, comfort and his terrifying role in a big-screen psychological horror

All work and no play • Hard Graft, a powerful new London exhibition, focuses on workers’ exploitation, from the ruined hands of a washerwoman to mothers forced to sell their bodies

Culture Reviews

Going underground • A darkly humorous encounter between an American spy-cop and the members of an eco-commune she is hired to...