The Guardian - 07.09.2019

Section:GDN 1N PaGe:58 Edition Date:190907 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 6/9/2019 11:30 cYanmaGentaYellowbl

• The Guardian Saturday 7 September 2019

58

Booker prize

Atwood shortlisted for

book yet to be published

Art

Golden toilet plumbed in

at Blenheim Palace

Hong Kong

Lam withdraws extradition

bill as protests continue

Education

School heads criticise new

tests for fi ve-year-olds

Gun violence

Seven murdered in latest

mass shooting in Texas

Dorian

Strongest hurricane to hit

land devastates Bahamas

The strongest-ever Atlantic

hurricane to make landfall

hit the Bahamas between

Sunday and Tuesday as

Hurricane Dorian – a category-5

hurricane with wind gusts of

up to 220mph – pulverised

the archipelago. By the time

the slow-moving storm had

passed, at least 30 people were

dead, 13,000 homes had been

destroyed and thousands of

survivors were without shelter,

stranded by fl ooding and

suff ering shortages of food,

water and medicine.

In a country accustomed

to harrowing encounters

with fi erce storms, Dorian

registered as a disaster on a

diff erent scale, with lakes of

seawater instead of streets,

blasted debris where homes

once stood, boats thrown

inland, denuded trees and only

the occasional lone structure

still standing. In many areas,

life on the islands appeared to

have simply been erased.

The Bahamian prime minister,

Hubert Minnis, said: “We are in

the midst of a historic tragedy.”

 Aliana Alexis

stands in what is

left of her home

on Great Abaco

Island, Bahamas

PHOTOGRAPH:

AL DIAZ/AP

The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s

much-anticipated sequel to her

feminist dystopia The Handmaid’s

Tale, has landed her a place on the

Booker prize shortlist – despite the

fact that barely anyone has read it yet.

With little publicly known beyond

that it is set more than 15 years after

Atwood’s hero Off red attempted to

Maurizio Cattelan became front-

page news when his sculpture

America, above, was installed at the

Guggenheim museum in New York

in 2016. A fully functioning toilet

made of 18-carat gold, America has

now been plumbed into Blenheim

Palace, Oxfordshire, where Winston

Churchill was born. Visitors will be

able to use it provided they obey a

three-minute time limit.

Hong Kong’s leader, Carrie Lam,

(above) formally withdrew an

extradition bill that has sparked

month of protests and political crisis.

In a fi ve-minute television

address on Wednesday, Lam said:

“The government will formally

withdraw the bill in order to fully

allay public concerns.”

Earlier in the week protesters

blocked the road leading to the

city’s airport and the operator of

the express train to the airport

suspended services.

The bill would have allowed the

extradition of suspects to mainland

China’s opaque legal system. The

protests it sparked have revived the

broader democracy movement that

has challenged Beijing’s authority.

A day after Lam suspended the

bill in June, an estimated two million

people took to the streets to call for

its full withdrawal.

Since then, the city has been

rocked by protests every weekend as

relations between protesters, many

of them students, other residents

and the police have grown fraught.

The protesters’ demands have

expanded to include an independent

inquiry, an amnesty to those

arrested and democratic reforms.

Headteachers and campaigners

have urged the government to halt

plans to introduce a start-of-school

assessment for four- and fi ve-year-

olds, arguing it is a waste of money

and will not benefi t schools or

children.

About half of all primary schools

in England will begin to trial the

20-minute test from this week as

the new school year gets under way,

before a planned introduction across

the country next year. Campaigners

are concerned that schools are not

obliged to inform parents that their

children will undergo the test.

The government says the

assessment will be stress-free and

provide data about a child’s language

skills and ability to count at the start

of their school career.

As the death toll from Texas’s

most recent mass shooting rose to

seven and details emerged of how a

17-month-old child was shot in the

face, nine new laws were coming

into force in the state – all of them

loosening gun controls.

The laws, all backed by Texas’s

Republican governor, Greg Abbott,

allow more armed marshals to patrol

schools, permit citizens without

a licence to carry handguns in the

middle of disaster zones, and allow

licensed weapons to be stored inside

cars in school car parks.

Texas has been the scene of

four of the 10 most deadly mass

shootings in modern US history,

including the Walmart massacre in

El Paso last month in which a white

supremacist murdered 22 people. ▲ This is Atwood’s sixth nomination

The week

that was

escape a theocratic future US, the

plot of The Testaments remains

under lock and key for most readers

until its global release date on

Tuesday, with midnight launches

and parties around the world.

The chair of judges , Peter

Florence, could not say more than

that it was a “savage and beautiful

novel, and it speaks to us today, all

around the world, with particular

conviction and power”.

Booksellers complained when

Amazon accidentally shipped out

hundreds of copies early to readers

in the US. Publishers Weekly

reported that several booksellers

had complained to the publisher,

Penguin Random House, about

Amazon’s mistake and demanded

the retailer be sanctioned for

violating the embargo.

This is the sixth Booker

nomination for the Canadian author,

who won the prize in 2000 for The

Blind Assassin.

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