A t the weekend the World Health Organization (WHO) declared an outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) a “public health emergency of international concern”. This designation is the highest alarm level the WHO has to notify its member states about a health crisis that is considered extraordinary, has multi-country risk and requires a coordinated international response. Usually, the director general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, would convene a meeting of international health experts to discuss whether an outbreak meets the legal criteria, but for the first time in the agency’s history, he went ahead and declared it after consulting the governments of the DRC and Uganda, and analysing the data presented.
So what is happening now and why are health experts so concerned? We recently learned that there are several hundred suspected cases and 131 suspected deaths from Ebola in the eastern part of the DRC and possibly neighbouring Uganda. Ebola is one of the world’s most deadly infectious diseases, with symptoms progressing from fever and vomiting to internal bleeding and organ failure.
Most of the 16 previous outbreaks of Ebola in the DRC have been caused by the Zaire variant. For Zaire, we have a highly effective vaccine, targeted therapeutics and rapid diagnostics. Unfortunately, this latest outbreak is of the Bundibugyo variant , which does not have any medical countermeasures. Part of the reason that Ebola has been spreading for weeks undetected in communities, and into hospitals, is because rapid diagnostics for Zaire failed to identify the Bundibugyo variant. Without specific drugs, the treatment for Bundibugyo is general medical support, with death rates estimated at between 30% and 40% of those infected.
Ebola spreads through the body fluids of infected people: think saliva, blood, sweat, vaginal fluids or semen. Those most at risk are healthcare workers and family members taking care of sick patients, as well as those involved with the burial and treatment of dead bodies. Stopping the spread requires ensuring those caring for Ebola patients have adequate personal protective equipment (PPE) to protect themselves, as well as tracing contacts and ensuring they isolate before further transmission can occur. Ebola outbreaks have been controlled in the past, so it’s less a knowledge gap and more one of enough staff, PPE, lab capacity and logistics.
A couple of other factors make the situation in the DRC difficult. The outbreak is in a conflict-affected, high-traffic mining region where communities have little trust in government or external aid agencies. This makes even routine healthcare such as vaccination campaigns difficult, given the political instability and violence. Public health officials are considering using a combination of the existing approved vaccines for the Zaire and Sudan variants. Doses are available, but there are concerns that, if it isn’t as effective as hoped in reducing severity or transmission, trust in future vaccination campaigns may be undermined. Also, the outbreak is in the province of Ituri, close to the border with Uganda , so there are concerns about community spread to urban Kampala (a major regional hub), which would make it much more difficult to stop. Uganda has closed certain land crossings, but given a 950km (590-mile) border and mobile populations it’s very difficult to stop cross-border spread.
In addition, foreign aid cuts mean we are less prepared than we were even several years ago. The 2014 west Africa Ebola outbreak relied on US leadership from USAID, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the US military. Since then, the USAID team dedicated to Ebola-like diseases was cut by Elon Musk (he says accidentally), then partly restored (the team going from about 30 members to just a few). The CDC funding given to the lab networks operating in low-income settings to quickly identify specific pathogens and outbreaks was also cut. With the US government withdrawing from the WHO, the budget for the WHO’s emergency-response programme has also been cut by 37% since 2024 . UK foreign aid funding has fallen to its lowest level in two decades .
The concern is less about this becoming a global pandemic, which is unlikely given how the Ebola virus spreads, and more about the devastation it can cause in the lives lost and to the already fragile healthcare systems in the DRC and neighbouring countries. During the west Africa Ebola outbreak ( which I worked on ), hundreds of healthcare workers died due to treating patients without having adequate PPE. Healthcare workers are a scarce and precious resource, and the knock-on effect was increased maternal and infant mortality due to lack of trained staff, and a rise in child mortality from disrupted standard vaccination campaigns.
Right now, the DRC and Uganda governments need the world’s attention, cooperation and support to get the necessary resources to stop this outbreak. If your neighbour’s house is on fire, you don’t wait and watch. You help to put it out before the fire spreads to yours. That’s the interconnected world we live in, and an important lesson for all politicians watching the crisis unfold.
Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, and the author of How Not to Die (Too Soon)
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here .
M anchesterism is “the end of neoliberalism”. That was the claim made by Andy Burnham in his campaign launch video this week – a film which made an audacious offer not just to his byelection constituents in Makerfield, but how he intended to change national politics and the economy.
But the 2026 doctrine of Manchesterism is very different to its 19th-century namesake, when it was a byword for free trade.
Now in the hands of the mayor of Greater Manchester, it means the national rollout of what he has achieved in the city – essential assets brought into greater public control such as the bus network, a closer partnership between the state and business to spread the proceeds of wealth, and a huge expansion of devolution.
However, the task of turning Manchesterism into a practical offer in government – potentially in a matter of weeks – is immense. It is a shoestring operation, with a considerable number of players vying for influence.
There is a determination among those backing Burnham to be bold and authentic, but it runs alongside a deep fear about spooking an already jittery bond market and causing the cost of borrowing to soar, as well as anything that might risk handing the seat to Reform UK.
Those constraints were evident in Burnham’s statement at the weekend that he will stick to Rachel Reeves’s fiscal rules – meaning any further expansion of public spending will have to be paid for with tax increases.
Investors had been fretting about an unfunded spending splurge in the event of a Burnham leadership, since he called for Labour to be less “in hock,” to the bond markets. The shadow chancellor, Mel Stride, has begun claiming the government is already paying a “Burnham penalty” in higher borrowing costs.
Burnham, according to his close adviser Neal Lawson, who founded the thinktank Compass, has developed his prognosis entirely through his work in Manchester, although the roots come from the much-praised civic leadership of Howard Bernstein, the chief executive of Manchester city council during the New Labour years.
“What is interesting about Andy is that he does not get his theory of change from books,” Lawson said. “He’s what Gramsci would call an organic intellectual, because it’s literally the practice of running Manchester.”
The intellectual work of Manchesterism that Burnham intends to make his framework for government has been taking place over many months – with different influences.
From the left is Common Wealth’s Mathew Lawrence and the economist Alex Williams, whose ideas will be fleshed out in an essay called The Productive State, although in practice the ideas are significantly more radical than what Burnham knows he can achieve in the short-term in government, and without his own electoral mandate.
It argues that privatisation is at the root of Britain’s problems, that essential services are run entirely for profit and that the welfare state has ballooned because ordinary people need state help just to afford the essentials.
Lawrence’s work argues that the state should not just regulate, but directly own and operate in essential sectors. It should provide services where profit is not the main incentive – seen in practice by Manchester’s Bee Network buses, where the city has control over the routes and the price.
But Burnham himself has never directly said he intends to nationalise those essential services such as energy and water, but rather that they should be brought into “public control” with more government involvement in the way they are run and paid for.
Those close to the mayor say the pragmatic version of Manchesterism shows a framework for a more productive relationship between the state and business – Burnham has been widely known as a business-friendly mayor. “You can be pro-business but want more of the proceeds of growth recycled back into our communities,” he has said.
The small team behind Burnham face an extraordinary challenge to win a tight byelection and potentially prepare for power – and are likely to face tough questions about how that framework can be applied in government via specific policy levers, and especially how to do so in such fiscally constrained circumstances.
Allies of Burnham say the first test of their theories on public ownership will be Thames Water, the stricken utility for which the government is trying to find a new buyer.
Many on the left of Labour want ministers to abandon attempts to negotiate a sale, and allow Thames to collapse into special administration, effectively putting the government in the driving seat.
Some advocate for public control of water companies rather than full nationalisation. This could involve setting up an independent company, perhaps with worker representation on the board, which would have some kind of accountability to government.
They cite Berlin as one example of this, where the local water company was brought back into municipal control in 2012. Berlin water company’s board is half elected by workers, and half appointed by the city council.
Some on the right of Labour fear Lawrence’s approach, set out in a long article in the New Statesman last week, is too theoretical and lacks a retail offer. The Labour Growth Group, which has discussed its recent publication An Honest Day with Burnham’s team, has called for more tangible, immediate action on the cost of living and harder messaging on extractive capitalism that rewards grifting.
The other key influence – although less likely to play a major part in the byelection – has been Lawson’s thinktank Compass; primarily its work on the need for constitutional reform, especially the electoral system. However, Burnham has indicated he does not expect this to be possible before the next election.
As well as Lawrence and Lawson, Makerfield’s outgoing MP, Josh Simons, is likely to be influential in the development of Burnham’s agenda – although his past at the Starmerite operation Labour Together and the fallout from the scandal over the investigation of journalists that led to him resigning from the government in February will mean an uneasy alliance with some of those on the left who have been longtime backers of Burnham.
Simons, and his wife, Leah, who is a Harvard-trained economist, grilled Burnham for two hours at their home in Makerfield on his economic agenda before Simons finally decided he would give up his seat to allow the mayor to run again for parliament.
But Simons said on Sunday he too was a believer in Burnham’s diagnosis about the selling off of national assets. “One of the things he’s really, really committed to is that the energy, water, social housing, those things that are the basics of our lives that we all depend on have gotten so expensive … we’ve privatised a lot of them and often the bills that we pay go to the shareholders of some private equity fund,” he said.
“It is for Andy to say whether he’s going to disaggregate neoliberalism but, you know, I don’t think he would entirely reject that … I basically agree that over the last 40 years the basic way that we’ve run our economy is shafting my constituents.”
A delicious way to enjoy butternut pumpkin. No need to remove the skin, and try not to overcrowd the tray; give everything space so it roasts rather than steaming. And don’t be shy with colour – those dark edges on the pumpkin are where all the flavour is. I serve this with sliced chilli on the side to keep it family friendly.
Roasted butternut pumpkin with chickpeas, tahini mandarin yoghurt, pomegranate and herbs
(Pictured above)
Serves 2–4
½ large butternut pumpkin , seeds removed, sliced into 1cm rounds 3 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil 1 tbsp honey 1 tsp ground cumin 1 tsp smoked paprika 1 x 400g tin chickpeas , drained 2 cloves garlic , roughly chopped
For the tahini mandarin yoghurt 200g natural yoghurt 2 tbsp tahini Zest of 1 mandarin (use a microplane) Juice of ½ mandarin (squeeze it with your hands, then sieve) A little grated garlic
To finish 3 tbsp pomegranate seeds Small handful mint , leaves picked Small handful coriander , leaves picked 3 tbsp chopped almonds and macadamias Good quality extra-virgin olive oil , to drizzle
Preheat the oven to 200C/180C fan.
Place the pumpkin slices on a tray. Drizzle with two tablespoons of the olive oil, as well as the honey, then sprinkle with the cumin and paprika, then season with salt and pepper. Toss to coat well, then spread out in a single layer. Roast for about 25 minutes to colour.
Sign up for a weekly email featuring our best reads
While the pumpkin is roasting, in a medium bowl, toss the chickpeas with the remaining one tablespoon of olive oil and a pinch of salt.
Remove the tray from the oven. Scatter the chickpeas and garlic over the pumpkin, then return to the oven for another 15 to 20 minutes until everything is golden and caramelised and the chickpeas have crisped up a bit.
Meanwhile, make the tahini yoghurt. In a bowl, combine the yoghurt, tahini, mandarin zest and juice, garlic and a pinch of salt. Taste and adjust with extra yoghurt, tahini, juice or salt – you want it creamy and slightly nutty, with a gentle citrus lift.
To serve, spread the yoghurt over a plate. Pile on the roasted butternut and chickpeas, then finish with pomegranate seeds, mint and coriander leaves, almond and macadamias, and a drizzle of olive oil.
Darren Robertson, co-founder of Three Blue Ducks, and Doug Innes-Will, Bundanon executive chef, are hosting a Twilight Feast as part of the Make Good festival on 30 May at Bundanon, NSW
T he banana skins were an ominous sign. As was the branch that had been broken off to get to the fruit. Had Edi Ramli walked into the forest, he might have seen scattered balls of bark that had been ripped off trees, chewed like gum, then spat out. It takes a powerful jaw to do that. Closer to Edi’s home, there was an intricate construction of bent and broken branches high in a tree. The nest.
It was October, the fruiting season. The pile of half-eaten bananas was less than a minute’s walk from where Edi and his family slept. He felt nervous. He got on with his day. He picked sweetcorn and sold it at the market. He bought a carton of chocolate milk and biscuits for his grandson. He and his wife, Siti Munawaroh, ran the farm with their three adult children. They prepped the land, sowed seeds, tended crops. Survival depended on what they could grow.
Now, at five in the afternoon, the light was beginning to fade. Suddenly, Edi heard a cry. A neighbour’s child who’d been bathing in the river came running back, frightened. He said he’d seen an orangutan. Edi ran towards the river, the farm’s guard dog at his heels. In a clearing barely 100 metres away, he saw the reddish bulk of the orangutan. It was an adult male; he could tell from the large cheek pads. The creature was huge, about 90kg, and a good deal stronger than he was. One swipe and he’d be knocked to the ground. The dog ran after the orangutan, barking ferociously. The orangutan disappeared into the undergrowth.
Edi, 55, and Siti, 51, live on a small farm on the southern, Indonesian part of the island of Borneo, called Kalimantan, in a remote spot on the west coast. They are originally from Java, the island that is home to more than 157 million people. A decade ago, Edi was working as a builder and Siti as a machinist in a garment factory. But they found Java stultifying, and disliked the crowds, the noise and the pollution. Then they discovered the government would pay to move them elsewhere.
In 2016, Edi and his family joined a scheme set up to relocate people from Indonesia’s overcrowded inner islands to the less populated outer islands. The scheme, known as transmigration, was a form of experimental population engineering on a grand scale. It was started in the 19th century by Dutch colonialists, and reached its peak in the 1980s: 2.5 million people were resettled between 1979 and 1984. Each family is given land, a house and a small amount of money (about 4m rupiah: £170).
Edi and his family loved their new home, a haven of light and space after the city. But unbeknown to him, he’d been encouraged to settle near one of the largest populations of wild orangutans in West Kalimantan. About 2,500 live in Gunung Palung, the national park almost on his doorstep. His farm is close to the park’s buffer zone, a strip of land supposed to cushion the protected forest from human development. But it’s not demarcated. There are no deep ditches or high walls. And, of course, orangutans don’t know boundaries. Besides, the land Edi was now cultivating had once been their territory. Orangutans can live for up to 45 years and have strong territorial instincts. They carry on visiting the areas they’ve always ranged in, even when those areas have been violently changed.
Since the 1970s, hundreds of hectares of forest in Borneo have been cleared to grow rice and pineapples and, more recently, oil palms. The large spiky palms with their red, bulbous, oil-rich fruit have become the main cash crop in this once densely forested area.
Since the transmigration scheme opened up this area to new settlers in 2016, the orangutans’ forest habitat has been disappearing, and the settlers have found their crops and gardens invaded by unwelcome visitors.
Most of us see orangutans as adorable, with their tufts of red hair and solemn eyes. They are known as devoted mothers. Their hands are very like ours. The renowned primatologist Biruté Galdikas once remarked: “Orangutans have souls, absolutely.” But they are also big, smart and strong, and locals can find them scary, says Karmele Llano Sánchez from Yiari, a charity based in West Kalimantan that works across Indonesia to protect orangutans and their habitat. The charity had been receiving a stream of messages about orangutans taking bites out of precious fruit, and scaring children. There was no reason for alarm, Yiari told callers. Orangutans are generally peaceful, and only become dangerous if threatened or cornered. Orangutans had not directly attacked humans, according to Yiari (though there had been occasions where orangutans had charged at people); but humans had attacked orangutans.
As the population of southern and western Kalimantan has increased, and farms and new settlements have expanded, conservationists have been sending out rescue parties to catch orangutans that have come into conflict with humans. The apes are tranquillised and moved to a more remote area, where they are released back into the wild. This approach has become common, but according to a recent study , which triggered fierce debate, moving orangutans does more harm than good. In their new environment, they may struggle to find food, and get attacked by orangutans who view them as intruders. Many are moved more than 30 miles away, but some captured animals make their way back to their original home, the authors claim, even when their home territory has been violently altered. The solution, said Julie Sherman, the director of conservation non-profit Wildlife Impact and a lead author of the paper, is not to remove animals to alien territory, but for humans and orangutans to live alongside each other.
Yiari has rescued 270 orangutans at risk in the past 12 years, and defends the practice. “A large number are babies from mothers that have been killed,” said Llano Sánchez. “I’m not saying that 100% of the orangutans we’ve rescued and released have survived, but if we hadn’t rescued them, they would be 100% dead, for sure.”
“When you’ve got farmers shooting at orangutans, or the forest on fire, what should we do?” asked Gail Campbell-Smith, a primatologist who works at Yiari. “Should we leave the animal to die? What should we do in that moment in time? Moving them is the last resort when we’ve done everything else that we can.”
W hen Llano Sánchez first visited Kalimantan as a vet in 2005, the drive to convert land into oil palm plantations was well under way. She encountered the roaring of chainsaws and vehicles, crashing trees and people yelling. The bulk of palm oil expansion was between 2001 and 2012, when powerful corporations descended, and things really started to speed up. At the peak in West Kalimantan in 2012, an area of ancient forest slighty less than the size of Greater London was cleared in one year .
“It was crazy,” she said. “So many orangutans were being displaced and wiped out.” A lean and slight woman in her late 40s, Llano Sánchez speaks forcefully, as if she’s running out of time to get her message across. She showed me a video shot in the district of Ketapang, West Kalimantan, in 2013. Orangutans were clambering around among felled branches, charred tree stumps and upended root balls in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
The place where the video was shot is now mile after mile of evenly spaced trees, each topped with a dense crown of fronds. Palms are planted nine metres apart and the fruit is harvested by hand, with a machete, chisel or long-handled sickle, which is used to prise the fruit bunches from the body of the tree. The oil extracted from the flesh and kernel is highly versatile, turning up in about half of all supermarket products globally, from pizza dough to lipsticks.
Indonesia is now the biggest palm oil producer in the world, responsible for 59% of global output, worth about £26bn a year.
Besides the major commercial plantations, villagers in very out-of-the-way places are clearing pieces of land to create their own palm oil smallholdings. Oil palms have changed fortunes. Villagers have been able to fix up their houses, buy a motorbike, set up a hair salon.
It is in many ways a remarkable crop. On a per-hectare basis it produces between six and 10 times more oil than equivalents such as soya bean. But palm oil has been calamitous to wildlife, and not just to orangutans. The plantations are hostile environments for monkeys and birds – they are quiet, oddly dead places – but for snakes and rats they are a paradise. Rats eat the palm oil kernels and the snakes feast off the rats.
Despite pressure from environmental campaigners, it is not easy to prevent illegal deforestation. The palm oil industry is enormous, supply chains are complex and include independent farmers who have as little as two-hectare plots. These smallholders mostly sell their fruit to companies for processing. The number of smallholders clearing ground to plant palms is growing fast, and they are largely unmonitored. Smallholders are not just converting tiny patches of existing cropland, according to a study of their environmental impact. People are avoiding the regulations that restrict companies and finding pristine forests to slash open.
O n a hot, soupy morning on 26 October, I travelled with the photographer Fergus Thomas to remote West Kalimantan, 850 miles from the skyscrapers and grid-locked streets of Jakarta, about 1,000 miles from the beach resorts of Bali. The port town of Ketapang, one of the largest in the region, has no public transport and only three traffic lights for a population of 93,000 people who mainly get around on motorbikes.
Edi lives in a village two hours north of Ketapang. To reach his farm from the road, we rode a motorbike for 10 minutes down a dirt track, through pools of muddy water and over an unsteady wooden bridge. A lean man with smiling eyes, hardy and resourceful, Edi was dressed in wellington boots, battered shorts and T-shirt with the face of Joko Widodo, the former president of Indonesia, who stepped down in 2024; the T-shirt was a freebie from the transmigration scheme.
About 150 families were moved here from Java. More than 100 of these families have since moved back. “It’s a very different life to the big city,” said Edi. “You have everything in Java but nothing here.” It was the rainy season and the ground was a quagmire. I slithered around in the mud. Water still gushed from the corrugated tin roof of the family shelter. But Edi remained cheerful. “We knew the conditions before we moved here,” he said. “We adapt to the weather.”
Edi and his family live in a makeshift wooden shelter with a raised wooden platform like a raft. It is basic, but the family prefer it to the house in the nearby “transmigration village”. They have all they need: sleeping bags; solar panels to charge their mobile phones and the water pump; a one-gallon plastic water container and a gas camping stove. Their home is surrounded by orderly, cultivated fields, with a boundary of banana palms.
There are restrictions on the people who arrive from the city. Recipients are not allowed to sell the land, but plenty do. “They get the land for free, sell it and then walk away,” said Llano Sánchez. We used a drone to get a bird’s eye view of the area. It’s a hodgepodge of forest fragments and small domestic plots with rambutans and jackfruit – crops for the family to eat and to sell in the market. The brown of the transmigration village can be seen close to the verdant forest. There is a sand mine that supplies high quality silica for glass, construction and other industrial applications. And then, in a mixed mosaic with other crops, the distinctive green fronds of oil palms sprouting upwards, like a pattern on a carpet.
Oil palms lined both sides of every road we drove down. They sprouted on riverbanks and scrub land. You might think it was a weed haphazardly self-planting, but it’s been planted with care. Edi had 200 or so seedlings still in pots lined up in a row next to the deep furrows of his tomato plants. He’d grown them from seed at a cost of 20,000 rupiahs. When they are three years old, the palms will start to bear fruit. Edi will expect two harvests a month (driven by 2kg of fertiliser every three months). Families can earn about £100 a hectare (about 140 to 160 plants) with each harvest.
The next day, I had coffee with a group of women in a nearby village who patrol the forest checking for wildfires, which are a big problem in this area. It is much cheaper for farmers and developers to clear land by burning down trees than to hire a digger. Set up by Yiari four years ago, the Power of Mama is a surveillance team of 118 women from eight local villages who take turns to patrol the forest on motorbikes; some are being trained as firefighters.
Protected forests are supposed to keep the area as wild and shielded from human activity as possible. But this hasn’t been the case. The strip of trees in the buffer zone surrounding the perimeter of Gunung Palung has been whittled down over the past few decades from a width of 10km to 2km. In 2003, illegal loggers began cutting down trees within the actual research site where orangutans are monitored.
Orangutans forced out of their home territory quickly get into trouble. Early one morning last summer, a baby orangutan was spotted clinging to the tall slender trunk of a jabon tree, half a mile or so from Edi’s farm. An hour later, the mother was found, hidden in tall grasses nearby. She had a wound 5cm deep on her back. The weapon, likely a spear of some sort, had penetrated her kidney. It took a week for her to die. The baby was taken to a centre for rehabilitation and eventually released into the forest, alone.
A s climate breakdown and human populations have brought chaos to the natural world, translocation has become a core conservation tool. It can be used to restore almost-extinct wildlife (kakapo in New Zealand); return a species to where it used to be (beavers in Great Britain); or move it to somewhere it’s never been before (western swamp tortoises in Australia).
In conservation circles, translocation is controversial, particularly if the reason the wildlife is being moved is because it’s come to be seen as a “problem” to people: that is, it has wrecked harvests, eaten livestock or scared children. “It’s a very human response to move things out of our way that we don’t want there, but it’s about our interests and desires, as opposed to the orangutans’,” says Julie Sherman, who is based in Portland, Oregon. “Globally, [translocation] is not generally an effective way to resolve conflicts with wild terrestrial animals.”
In 2015, Sherman and her colleague Serge Wich, a professor of primate biology at Liverpool John Moores, became interested in the fact that translocation was being promoted to protect orangutans in Indonesia. In the course of their research, they found that between 2005 and 2022, at least 988 orangutans were captured for translocation in Indonesia. The mechanics of translocation, which usually means uprooting an orangutan from familiar territory and framing it as a “rescue”, is what most worries Sherman and Wich. NGOs increasingly rely on Instagram and TikTok to fundraise and engage with the public, and the drama of a “rescue” is great for engagement. “What is really disturbing is seeing videos of animals fleeing towards a forest and people continue to pursue it for whatever reason,” said Sherman. “It’s very hard on the animal.”
As a species, orangutans seem particularly ill-suited to being moved. Wild orangutans have a mental map of the forest built up over many years. They know which trees are fruiting and when. Translocation is an alarming intervention in their social fabric. Sherman speaks about orangutans in somewhat human terms: an older male orangutan is a “grandfather”; they have “friends”, “neighbours”. “You are pulling that animal away from its family and friends and putting it in a group of strangers,” she said. When relocated, they’re at risk of being attacked by hostile animals on whose territory they arrive with no warning, said Wich, who was also on the call. “These are highly intelligent animals, so it must be very traumatic for them.”
No one really knows what happens to wild orangutans after they’ve been moved. Tracking devices to know how they get on are expensive and invasive. Fitting a global positioning system tracker, say, requires surgery, plus a two-week recovery period. “There just isn’t the human capacity to follow all these animals, the funding or the time,” said Sherman. She asked: should we be moving animals we aren’t equipped to monitor?
Wich and Sherman believe that, rather than moving them to unfamiliar areas, more effort is required to achieve peaceful coexistence. “It’s really key that we work with local communities and companies to find a solution,” said Wich. Sherman mentioned financial compensation and insurance as possible solutions. Wich and Sherman developed a programme of pilot workshops where villagers talk with local NGOs and decide how they might live alongside orangutans without killing or removing them.
O n a hot day in 2009, Llano Sánchez stopped at a house in Pontianak, the largest city in West Kalimantan. A large male orangutan was chained to a low, wooden platform in the back yard, exposed to the sun and rain and the raw sewage and wastewater that ran underneath him. Jojo, as he was called, had been kept as a pet for 10 years. “It was so painful to see,” Llano Sánchez said.
Llano Sanchez grew up in Spain where she trained as a vet. In 2003, aged 25, she came to Indonesia to volunteer in a rescue centre in Java. In 2005, she met her husband, Argitoe Ranting, who was not just an expert in orangutans, but also had a profound knowledge of the forest. He is from the Dayak tribe, the original forest dwellers of Kalimantan. A year later, they set up a rescue centre for macaques and slow lorises in Java. She was working in Central Kalimantan when she was asked to check on Jojo. At that time, keeping a pet orangutan was a status symbol, even though it was (and is) illegal.
Jojo was malnourished, with rickets and pneumonia. “The chain had gone into his flesh and it had got quite infected,” she said. She cleaned the wound and put the chain back on Jojo’s other ankle. “I had to leave him there as there was nowhere else to take him.” The following year, Llano Sánchez and her husband launched a second rescue centre, this time for orangutans in West Kalimantan. “The first orangutan we rescued was Jojo.”
Today, the centre occupies a peaceful enclave of about 200 hectares (500 acres), a 30-minute drive north of Ketapang. It includes a veterinary clinic, rehabilitation centre and forest school to teach survival skills to orphaned orangutans. Llano Sánchez’s charity, Yiari, employs nearly 300 people across three sites: Java, West Kalimantan and Sumatra, as well as casual staff, patrol teams and experts in the field. Its partner, International Animal Rescue, is based in the UK. Yiari currently has 60 orangutans in this sanctuary, including Jojo.
Yiari has translocated 72 wild orangutans since 2009. Each ape is given a name and entered on a database, and fitted with a microchip, implanted between its shoulder blades. From this data Yiari discovered that, in fact, only 3% of those 72 orangutans had previously been moved. But there may be more, cautions Gail Campbell-Smith. They only come across the ones that have become a problem.
Campbell-Smith has been working at Yiari for 15 years. She was the first to study orangutans in a “human-dominated landscape” in Sumatra, and made detailed observations of how orangutan behaviour changed around humans. Rather than rising and retiring with the sun, for instance, the orangutans would lie in their nests until late afternoon, “waiting for humans to leave”. Their diet had adapted to include oil palm shoots. “An odd one, as that is not a tree that orangutans usually like,” she said. They also spent more time on the ground. Orangutans are normally arboreal. They don’t swing by their arms from tree to tree at speed like monkeys, but “tree-sway”. They use branches like a pole vaulter, letting their weight bow the branch to propel them in tremendous arcs through the air. “They move from tree A to tree B using their bodies to swing,” Campbell-Smith explained. But they couldn’t go to tree B, because it had been cut down. So, they had to go to tree C and to get to tree C they were forced on to the ground.” They are slow and lumbering on all fours, and when they’re out of their protected areas, they are vulnerable to humans who want to kill them.
Llano Sánchez doesn’t disagree with Wich and Sherman that capturing and moving orangutans is invasive and frightening for the animals, but in the moment, they see no alternative. “We are dealing with emergencies,” she said. “We are on the frontline.”
P alm oil has made a lot of local people far richer than they ever imagined. As a boy growing up in the village of Simpang Tiga in Ketapang province, Iskandar would run from his home to the nearby forest and fill his pockets with wild rambutans and mangoes. “Just like the monkeys!” he said.
Five decades on, the place where he grew up is a boom town. It consists of a roadside strip lined with a Catholic church and many small businesses: coffee stalls, restaurants offering grilled fish, chunks of giant jackfruit in a coconut sauce, fried tempeh, mounds of rice. The town is now surrounded by 100 sq miles of oil palm plantations owned by two companies: Bumitama Agri Ltd (BGA) and Sinar Mas, one of the largest conglomerates in Indonesia.
Iskandar’s home is set back from the main road. We sat drinking coffee on his tiled patio next to a tank of ornamental catfish as trucks barrelled past. Iskandar, 55, is glossy-looking with good teeth. The house where he lives with his wife and eight-year-old daughter has three bedrooms, and ornate furniture. He owns a Toyota Rush, two dump trucks and a pickup. “I grew up poor and wanted something better for myself,” he said. He has his own oil palm plantation, which makes him about £9,600 a year (about five-and-a-half times the average salary). He’s also done a deal with BGA, where he acts as middleman and quality controller for smallholders selling their crop to the company.
Every day about 20 to 30 dump trucks from across the region pull up outside his house, loaded with spiky oil palm heads. Iskandar checks the paperwork to ensure the oil palm heads are not stolen (palm oil theft is a growing problem) and after the consignment has been dropped off at BGA, he pays the drivers.
For Iskandar, orangutans are a familiar problem. Last May, a male orangutan appeared in his neighbour’s garden. This particular animal had been spotted on several occasions crossing the main road, slow and awkward on all fours, near the coffee shop and the church. After complaints, he was captured and moved to Gunung Tarak protected forest, a four-hour drive away. “He couldn’t stay here,” says Iskandar, “His life was in danger.”
Other smallholders in the area had been troubled by orangutans, and demanded they be removed, or else they would kill them. Naha, 54, who lives in the village of Kuala Satong, across the river from Edi’s house, wanted to take us to the scene of a recent attack on his crops. Small and muscular, he marched ahead, machete in hand. It was late morning and the sun was hot. Thwack! He chopped down some sugar cane for us to chew on.
An experienced farmer, he has only recently started to make money. For years, he’d grown rice and only ever produced enough to feed his family of six. The land is too swampy and salty for rice, it turns out. But then, five years ago, Naha switched to oil palms. He now earns 2m to 3m rupiah for each harvest, “and you can have two harvests a month. Twenty-four a year!” he said. He’s extended his home, sends his grandchildren to school. “I feel wealthy!”
After an hour of walking, we arrived at a hut on the riverbank, a place where he likes to rest and smoke cigarettes. His plantation of oil palms was nearby. One field was full of mature plants, the other had seedlings interspersed with bits of scrub and tangled vegetation. This was a new field he was cultivating. The shoots had been torn and flattened; more than 50 had been eaten, a third of his crop. “Who will compensate me?” he asked.
Farmers feel a certain resentment towards orangutans, says Paul Thung, director of conservation at Planet Indonesia, an NGO based in West Kalimantan. Orangutans can wreck their crops, but farmers are not allowed to shoot them as they would a macaque, which is recognised as a pest by the government.
“I’m angry,” Iskandar said. As was his sister. “If there is no replacement for the seedlings,” she warned in a voicemail to Yiari, “something unwarranted might occur.” She continued: “We do not own a large plantation, and we do not own any other land. So, please, we ask for your immediate help.”
O n my last day in Borneo, I went out on a rescue mission. It started with a call from the Orangutan Protection Unit, a rapid response unit that patrols places where orangutans are known to be a problem – 20 villages at the last count. They wanted to show us an orangutan they were worried about.
It was still hot and humid at 5pm. We heard a rustle of leaves in the high branches and walked towards the sound. Twenty or so feet up, we glimpsed a baby orangutan clambering on its mother’s back. The mother glanced down at us. She reached out and pulled branches in around her, like a cloak, and attempted to hide. Leaves and twigs dropped on to the forest floor.
The orangutan and her infant were in a tiny strip of 100 or so rubber trees in Tempurukan village, a 40-minute drive from Ketapang. There were houses with picket fences and bougainvillaea in terracotta pots. She was close to a main road, with a petrol station and an outdoor cafe.
This mother was known to Yiari as October. She had been spotted nine times in the previous four months, once by the owner of a jackfruit plantation. “Move it!” the owner had told Yiari. There was a risk that the animal would come to harm. “People put poison in fruit quite frequently,” Argitoe told me. He had relayed his concerns to the West Kalimantan Natural Resources Conservation Agency, which oversees the capture and movement of animals. It had visited the site and agreed: the orangutans needed to be moved.
On the day of our trip to the rescue site, Argitoe was holding a tranquilliser gun. “It’s very difficult to rescue a mother and child,” he said. There was a risk the baby would get hit by the dart aimed at its mother.
We were joined by trackers, field staff, an official from the conservation agency – his senior position reflected in superior footwear – plus motorbikes and two pickup trucks, each with a cage. A cameraman was filming Argitoe for his YouTube channel, where his words would be dubbed into American English. The group of 25 or so was predominantly male, apart from Fina Fadiah, the vet, and Maratul Halimnafiah, known as Fia, a student trainee.
Up in the trees, October was scared. She showed her fear by emitting “kiss-squeaks” – a sharp sound made by pursing her lips to form a trumpet. In her stress, she peed. Argitoe followed as she moved from branch to branch trying to escape. Trackers cut a path through the undergrowth. Argitoe stopped and looked up. The infant was spread-eagled on its mother’s back. He had to wait for it to clamber on to her chest to lessen the risk of hitting it. Every time October shifted, Argitoe followed with his gun. And every time Arigitoe moved, he was followed by a dozen others. “Quick, quick, quick, come quickly!” he shouted. We heard a sudden cry – “Arrrrgh arggggh!” – someone had swung a machete into a bees’ nest.
Finally, a dart hit October. She started to fall, but the effect of the sedative was delayed and, with one hand, she tried to hold on to a tangle of vines. A net was held out, about a metre above the ground. October fell into it. But her baby was gone.
The orangutan was carried to the clearing, where she was monitored and a blood sample taken. She was about 20 years old and weighed 35kg. She was still lactating. Fina found her microchip, and declared that this wasn’t October. This was Mama Ris. She had been moved before. She may have returned to this spot because land was being cleared in her new location.
Half an hour or so later, Fina was checking on the baby orangutan, now unconscious. Argitoe had used a blow pipe – an air rifle is too powerful for something so small. She was about three years old, and weighed 2.5kg. Her stained teeth showed she was eating bark. There wasn’t much fruit and she was hungry.
Mama Ris was in a cage lined with foliage. She had been given drugs to keep her calm. Meanwhile, Fia tried to wake the baby by tickling her nostrils with a blade of grass. Mother and baby were reunited while still drugged and groggy. They were driven in the same cage to a restored peatland forest, 30 minutes away. Porters carried the cage deep into the forest. At times the swampy water was knee deep. When the team found a good spot to release them, mother and baby clambered out and climbed up a tree. The day had been an ordeal for them. Even watching it unfold had been pretty upsetting.
Yiari does all the research it can about the best place to release an orangutan. But things don’t always go to plan. A couple of weeks after the relocation of an orangutan who had been electrocuted by a pylon, he was spotted lying by the side of a road, having been electrocuted again. He recovered and was rereleased in April 2023, deeper in the forest, this time. He hasn’t been seen since.
Llano Sánchez has spent 20 years trying to help orangutans whose home is being destroyed by palm oil companies. She doesn’t believe translocation is ultimately the answer. “We will run out of forest to move the orangutans to,” she said.
A big challenge is to come up with alternative schemes that can put as much money in people’s pockets as oil palms, without further harming orangutans. Compensation against damage, say, can backfire as it’s hard to prove orangutans are to blame. Macaques are just as destructive.
“There are so many very smart ideas,” says Thung. For instance, farmers could grow coffee instead of palm oil, a crop that orangutans dislike. But it takes a great deal of money and effort to make changes. “Working with communities in a meaningful, in-depth, collaborative way takes a lot of investment, a lot of time.”
But for now, all is not lost. “There are still many orangutans out there,” Llano Sánchez said. “The main thing is to protect what we have left. Because giving up hope isn’t going to help anyone.”
Support for this article was provided by a grant from the Pulitzer Center
Discover a selection of the Guardian’s finest longform writing, in one beautifully illustrated magazine . In this issue, you’ll find stories about how private equity is plundering the world and what it’s like growing up in a family of Nazis. Plus: why do we think the perfect buggy will make us better parents? Order your copy here , delivery charges may apply
Listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here .
Pub chain Greene King has agreed to sell its Old Speckled Hen ale brands to the Spanish owner of Estrella lager, making it the latest in a series of British beers to be snapped up by overseas buyers.
Barcelona-based brewer Damm has agreed to buy all the Old Speckled Hen lines, including its non-alcoholic and golden ale versions.
Greene King said it would continue to brew the ale at its Westgate site in Bury St Edmunds during the sale “handover period”, but that the process would later move to Damm’s brewery in Bedford, which it opened last year.
Nick Mackenzie, the chief executive of the 227-year-old pub chain, said the company was “delighted to have secured a partner in Estrella Damm who will continue to brew the ales in the UK”.
The companies did not disclose the value of the sale, but said after the deal is complete, Old Speckled Hen beers will still be available in Greene King pubs, as well as major supermarkets in the UK and in the off-trade.
Greene King said it planned to focus on selling its beers in its own pubs and UK on trade, moving away from the off trade.
Old Speckled Hen was bought by Greene King from the Oxfordshire-based Morland Brewery in 1999. Morland had first brewed it in 1979 to mark the MG Car Company’s 50th anniversary of its move from Oxford to Abingdon.
The business had asked Morland to brew a commemorative beer for the occasion, naming it “Old Speckled Hen” after their MG Featherlight Saloon, which they referred to as the “owld speckl’d un” because of its mottled appearance.
Its sale to Damm makes it the latest in a line of British beer brands to be bought by a foreign drinks group.
In 2015, Camden Town Brewery agreed to a takeover by AB InBev , the Belgian company behind Budweiser, Stella Artois and Beck’s, in a deal worth about £85m.
That year, SAB Miller, the drinks group which brewed Peroni and Miller, also agreed to buy London’s Meantime Brewing Company. AB InBev later bought SAB Miller.
In 2019, the British pub chain Fuller, Smith & Turner accepted a £250m offer for its entire drinks business from the Japanese beer group Asahi, including its flagship London Pride ale.
This year, the US drinks company Molson Coors said it would shut down the Cornish brewery that makes Doom Bar ale . The company, which bought Sharp’s Brewery in Rock 15 years ago, said it was “no longer financially sustainable” and would close the site by the end of this year.
Molson Coors is also behind the Madrí Excepcional beer, which it markets as “the soul of Madrid”, although the beer is brewed in Tadcaster, Yorkshire.
The boss of Estrella Damm, which is headquartered in Barcelona and is family controlled, told the Sunday Times that Madrí had “no heritage whatsoever”.
Demetrio Carceller Arce, the billionaire who inherited the business from his father, told the paper last year: “One hundred percent respect for the idea of coming up with Madrid, without a D at the end, which is fantastic. [But] Madrí is a brand that is created. There is no heritage whatsoever. We have a superior product.”
There are several popular Spanish beers sold in the UK that are brewed within the country, including San Miguel, which is made by AB InBev in Northampton, as well as Cruzcampo, which is brewed by Heineken in Manchester.
Luke White, the managing director of Damm UK, said: “Old Speckled Hen is an iconic British ale brand with a rich heritage and loyal following … The brand not only complements the current portfolio range by adding another category to our offering but it also reconnects the Damm Eagle Brewery to its historic British beer and ale production roots.”
Taking antidepressants during pregnancy does not increase the risk of children going on to develop autism or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), according to an analysis of more than half a million pregnancies.
The study , conducted by researchers at the University of Hong Kong and published in the Lancet Psychiatry, analysed data from 37 existing studies that included 600,000 pregnant women who had taken antidepressants, and 25 million women who had no antidepressant use during their pregnancies.
Before controlling for key factors such as pre-existing mental health conditions, the analysis found that antidepressant use by the mother during pregnancy was associated with a 35% increased risk of ADHD and a 69% increased risk of autism.
However, when controlling for confounding factors such as pre-existing mental health conditions, this risk became non-significant. This means the meta-analysis found no significant link between antidepressant use during pregnancy and a greater risk of autism and ADHD in children, after controlling for the mother’s mental health or other influencing factors such as genetics.
Dr Wing-Chung Chang, a professor at the University of Hong Kong and lead author of the study, said: “We know many parents-to-be worry about the potential impact of taking medication during pregnancy; our study provides reassuring evidence that commonly used antidepressants do not increase the risk of neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism and ADHD in children.
“While all medications carry risks, so too does stopping antidepressants during pregnancy due to an increased risk of relapse. Therefore, for women with moderate-severe depression, doctors and patients must carefully weigh the potential risks and benefits of continuing antidepressant treatment during pregnancy against the potential harms of untreated depression.
“Although our study found a small increase in the risk of autism and ADHD in the children of women who had used antidepressants during pregnancy, it also found that this risk disappeared when we accounted for other factors. The increased risk was also seen in the children of fathers who took antidepressants and of mothers with antidepressant use before, but not during, pregnancy.
“Together, this suggests that it is not the antidepressants themselves causing an increased risk in autism and ADHD but it is more likely to be due to other factors, including genetic predisposition to conditions such as ADHD, autism, and mental health conditions.”
The study also found no difference in risk between high and low doses of antidepressants. Limitations of the study included the lack of data on socioeconomic status, lifestyle risk factors and low birthrate. Furthermore, women who are prescribed antidepressants tend to have more severe depression than those who are not, so some bias may remain even after controlling for factors such as mental health status.
James Walker, a professor emeritus of obstetrics and gynaecology at the University of Leeds, said the research had helped to “cut through the noise” regarding recent concerns regarding whether medications taken by mothers during pregnancy could affect their babies.
“The practical message is straightforward” Walker said. “Women with moderate or severe depression should not stop their antidepressants in pregnancy out of fear of causing autism or ADHD. Depression that goes untreated in pregnancy carries real risks of its own, for the mother, the pregnancy and for the developing baby, including a higher chance of premature birth, postnatal depression and difficulties bonding with the baby. For milder depression, talking therapies and other non-medication approaches are usually tried first, in line with current guidelines. As always, decisions in pregnancy are personal and should be made with a clinician who knows the woman’s history.”
C ould your post-gym spa habit affect your ability to have a baby? It’s a belief that gets repeated regularly online. But Prof Colin Duncan, a fertility expert at the University of Edinburgh, says things aren’t as clearcut as people make out. Cisgender men produce sperm in the testicles. It’s from here that these male reproductive cells are released to inseminate the eggs women produce.
Duncan says that repeated exposure to higher temperatures, such as those found in saunas, do inevitably have some effect on how much sperm is made by them. “Testicles are located outside the body because they work better when they’re cooler. If you’re incubating them in a sauna then they don’t work quite as well.”
Most of the time this is nothing to worry about, says Duncan. “The testicles are designed to produce way more sperm than is actually required for fertility. If you go for the odd sauna, it’s going to make absolutely no difference.” What about if you’re a daily visitor? “If you’re having extreme saunas for a long time every day, it will reduce your sperm count.”
Most people will still have plenty of sperm, he says, so this decreased sperm count shouldn’t have a noticeable effect on fertility. He points to the Finns, who he says use saunas much more than British people do. “They don’t seem to have a bigger problem with infertility.”
The men this does matter to are those with borderline low sperm counts anyway. Perhaps those who have already seen their GP after experiencing fertility issues. Duncan says that the “crucial” advice he gives men who come to his clinic is: “If you’re doing anything in excess – whatever it is – it’s probably worth moderating that.”
L abour’s failures have made a rightwing authoritarian government not just a nightmare, but a plausible next chapter. Having enraged its natural voters – many of whom have flocked to the Greens – Labour MPs have clambered on to a lifeboat named Andy Burnham .
Do the rest of us blindly hop on board? Burnham is, indisputably, Labour’s best bet. He is the party’s most popular politician, and surely the figure best placed to win back voters lost to both the Greens and Reform. He has an easy northern charm, and some genuine progressive achievements to his name, secured with the limited powers he has as Greater Manchester’s mayor . But he has also benefited from not being at the centre of the great national political controversies of our age.
To be blunt: if he wants support from the left, which he will need to win power at a general election, he will have to earn it. Six years ago, Keir Starmer stood on a leadership platform that included public ownership, hiking taxes on the well-to-do, scrapping tuition fees and putting “human rights at the heart of foreign policy”. It was a deceitful ruse to con the Labour membership into installing a faction dedicated to crushing the left. A failure to scrutinise Burnham after that experience would smack of fatal naivety.
The first test must concern his own political journey. Burnham is a former Blairite special adviser who voted for the Iraq war . Under Ed Miliband, he shifted towards the soft left as shadow health secretary. After Labour’s rout in 2015, he launched his leadership bid in an accountancy firm linked to tax avoidance , attacked the mansion tax as “spiteful” and abstained on Tory benefit cuts . In doing so, he handed the Labour crown to Jeremy Corbyn.
Having once incinerated his leadership hopes with contempt for the left, has he learned his lesson? Those who know him insist his political journey since then is authentic. Now he says Britain “has been on the wrong path for 40 years” – a renunciation of the Thatcherite consensus that implicitly folds both New Labour and Starmerism into the same failure. He is loudly championing “public control”, specifically naming energy, housing, water and transport .
But what does that mean? In one interview, he began by saying he would “put more things back under public …” before correcting himself: “Stronger public control.” The definition matters. Starmer argued that he had committed to “common ownership of rail, mail, energy and water” in his 10 pledges, and that did not mean nationalisation. Burnham cannot pull the same trick. Public control must mean democratic public ownership of our utilities.
Burnham’s flagship success is bringing Greater Manchester’s buses under public control. His integrated Bee Network has meant lower fares, more passengers and improved punctuality. But most buses remain privately owned. If he is merely proposing, say, tighter regulation of water companies, that is nowhere near good enough.
Of particular concern is his record on housing. More than half of the grants from the Greater Manchester Housing Investment Loans Fund have gone to a single property developer, Renaker. Its developments have included barely any affordable housing, and mostly consist of luxury flats the average Mancunian cannot afford. Overall, just 503 affordable units have been built. Does this foreshadow a similar relationship with big business nationally?
After he was re-elected as mayor in 2024, he promised to build at least 10,000 council homes in Greater Manchester. Yet, in the first year, only 10 were built . That needs an explanation, and a clear answer as to how he will produce better outcomes in a higher office.
Back in the 2015 leadership election, he condemned “unjustified spitefulness” towards Israel, claiming it stood for gay rights, trade union rights and civil liberties. This was a truly appalling erasure of Israel’s occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and then-siege of Gaza. Since then, he supported a ceasefire in Gaza in October 2023 – long before the national Labour leadership. In June 2025, he backed the recognition of Palestine and declared that Israel was “destroying viable life for Palestinians in Gaza”.
He needs to be clear where he now stands. Does he believe Israel has committed war crimes and genocide, with the legal implications that follow from that? Will he impose sweeping sanctions and end all arms sales? Significant numbers of previously Labour voters have abandoned the party on this issue.
Then there’s electoral reform. He’s previously committed to proportional representation – but he needs to be clear about what system. He now suggests it should be enacted after a general election. This may prove more sensible than yet another referendum, introduced by a majority of MPs being elected who support it. But he needs to be clear that is what he intends.
There is naivety, too. When, last year, he said government had to “ get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond markets ”, he merely caused confusion that added to the market pressures he now faces. He has also now had to renounce his previous commitment to rejoining the EU – a recipe for years of culture war gridlock – because he is standing in Makerfield, a strongly leave seat . That only deepens concerns about the firmness of his ideological commitments.
Labour is losing far more support to the Greens than Reform, and so it is unfortunate he is standing in a constituency where his main competitor is Nigel Farage’s party . That the current Makerfield MP, Josh Simons, has become a key cheerleader is concerning, too. Simons was a close associate of former Starmer chief-of-staff Morgan McSweeney, succeeding him as head of Labour Together – whose key purpose was to crush the left. If he has major involvement in Burnham’s campaign, a big red light is flashing.
Burnham may have become a sincerely committed progressive politician. If he delivers electoral reform, the left will be much better positioned to realise his potential – and stave off the Farageist threat. But the left is a force that must be listened to, rather than swindled all over again.
Here is where the story ends. Congratulations, Arsenal, champions of England after 22 years . Farewell then, Pep Guardiola, 10 years of dominance ending in anticlimax. Two domestic cups counts as a disappointment in Pep terms. There will be no treble celebration at Manchester’s Co-op Arena leaving party on Monday. Eli Junior Kroupi wrote his name in north London legend for ever, as the title race reached its conclusion on the south coast. Erling Haaland’s late equaliser was nowhere near enough.
Andoni Iraola has been able to keep his future movements secret and he received a post-match send-off from a club grateful for three seasons of progressive, exciting football, capped off by qualifying for Europe for the first time. A point was enough to claim that. His team’s determination to complete the job was too much for opponents who cracked under the pressure of their situation, perhaps distracted by overnight news of the huge change coming their way.
Beyond the serial collection of silverware, Guardiola’s bequest to City is rich. A considerable rebuild has taken place since, in November 2024, a 2-1 defeat at the Vitality Stadium signalled the end of an empire for his treble winners of 2023, the scoreline flattering City. The next manager in, presumed to be Enzo Maresca, will inherit the new breed, players brought in since then such as Abdukodir Khusanov, Nico O’Reilly, Gianluigi Donnarumma and Antoine Semenyo. “Pep stay” read one placard among away fans who begged their manager for “one more year”. In pre-match, Guardiola continued the club policy of avoiding the elephant in the room by saying Monday’s breaking news would have “absolutely zero” effect on his team.
For Bournemouth, with Ryan Christie suspended after his red card at Fulham, Tyler Adams returned to central midfield, where he faced Mateo Kovacic. One last wildcard from the Catalan grandmaster of perplexing selection decisions? The Croatian veteran had played only 40 minutes of Premier League football all season. FA Cup final hero Semenyo lined up against the club he graced until January and who continue to flourish in his absence. Alongside Kovacic, two of Guardiola’s favourite generals, Bernardo Silva, another set to wave goodbye to Manchester, and Rodri, who has been linked with a return to Spain.
Bournemouth, with their own ends to tie up, began by swarming over their opponents, pressing high up while leaving a high line. Jérémy Doku had the first shot as City eventually advanced. On the sidelines, Guardiola, in grey slacks and polished brogues, was far less active than Iraola, his face solemn during bitty early stages where neither team could find any momentum. The expected pattern of City possession with Bournemouth looking to speedy transitions soon came to pass.
City, though, were below their best. Semenyo had the ball in the net in the 13th minute, only to be ruled offside. Soon after that, Evanilson’s blushes were spared when he produced a howling miss of an open net only for a flag to protect his modesty. When Marc Guéhi, another cog in City’s reboot, wrestled down Evanilson, he was fortunate the referee, Anthony Taylor, ruled the shoving match in his favour.
Haaland, after continuing his Wembley duck, was struggling for touch, forced to drop deeper than is customary, though he did have a shot blocked by a sliding Adam Smith. When Kroupi scored his brilliant strike, laid on by Adrien Truffert’s overlap, Haaland grabbed the ball in frustration, barking instructions at Silva.
Guardiola wore a similarly mournful expression as the second half resumed. Deep in conversation with Pepijn Lijnders, his assistant, he rubbed his cranium in trademark fashion. Within seconds of the whistle, he was bellowing commands. It almost had the desired effect, O’Reilly carving towards a Haaland pass and forcing a fine save from Djordje Petrovic.
The better chances were still falling Bournemouth’s way, Evanilson drawing a Donnarumma save after another rapid counter. Soon enough, Guardiola was rolling the dice with the introduction of Rayan Cherki, Phil Foden and Savinho, youthful legs introduced as Silva and Kovacic departed, Semenyo also coming off to applause from home fans.
Bournemouth sought to take advantage of Guardiola’s turning of the dial. Kroupi might have scored his second, after Evanilson’s flick. Rayan hit the post after chaos at a corner, and had a low shot saved. City rocked on their heels. When Donnarumma took his time over a goal-kick, he was barracked by a manager demanding his team hurry up.
City fought desperately for their way back, determined to show why they were once serial champions, but the ball would not fall their way. As pressure was piled on, Bournemouth did their best to preserve an unbeaten record that stretched longer than any club in Europe’s top five leagues.
On the touchline, Guardiola went through the public agonies that have been a full part of his persona, the supremacy that has dominated English football for the last decade. The old magic was not to be found, Haaland’s thumped goal came too late. A dynasty had reached journey’s end.
I still remember the first time I came across that poster of Valie Export wearing crotchless trousers, her legs spread apart, a gun in her hand. It was a fearless image that took my breath away and is etched in my brain for ever.
Over the years, her work served as an inspiration to my music. Her Tapp-und-Tast kino (Tap and Touch Cinema) performance, where she strapped a miniature theatre to her bare chest and invited passersby to reach through a tiny curtain, felt as important as Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece . It was up to the spectators how they interacted with her, which could make for painful watching but always felt telling. I’m saddened that she is gone.
Peaches is a Canadian musician and producer
‘The female body is not a polite object’
Florentina Holzinger
I wrote a paper on Valie Export back in high school when I was 14. I have always taken legacy seriously; much of my own work evolves around what has been, and what those histories mean for us today.
It is 1969 when Genital Panic happens. Valie walks into an experimental cinema in Munich wearing crotchless jeans. She moves slowly, row by row, forcing her exposed genitalia to eye-level with the seated audience.
Fast forward to today. We find ourselves in an entirely new landscape: We are drowning in algorithmic thirst traps, free internet porn etc, not to mention the rotting political backlash trying to legislate bodies back into the dark ages. So yes: the core political necessity to subvert how we handle nudity and real bodies endures. In fact, it has become more urgent and complicated than ever.
Thank you, Valie, for paving the way and for articulating this reality with such crystal clarity: the female body is not a polite object. It can be a registered trademark – a weapon to be exported directly against the structures we choose to battle. Rest in peace.
Florentina Holzinger is an Austrian choreographer and theatre director
‘Passionate, brave and certainly generous’
Joan Jonas
Valie Export was a very important artist. In remembering her, certain words come to mind such as bold, radical, innovative, passionate, brave and certainly generous. Her body was central, in confronting architecture by men, for instance, and in general as vehicle for her many interactions. Several works are unforgettable, such as 1968’s Grope and Touch, 1969’s Genital Panic, and 1976’s Encirclement.
Her own words [about Homo Meter II (1976) ] explain her position: “When I went out on the street with the loaf of bread tied around me and offered it as a gift people were disturbed, perturbed and curious. They did not dare to cut off a piece with a knife. The loaf of bread was also meant as an extension of the body, a provocation … as an artist I was alone in many ways and especially the confrontation with the public in the public space was something very isolating.”
Joan Jonas is an American artist
‘She made a virtue of civil disobedience’
Candice Breitz
Valie demonstrated to so many of us – with her fierce attitude and badass flair – that it was not necessary to live by the rules of those we could not respect. As a feminist provocateur, she made a virtue of civil disobedience, consistently claiming space that had for far too long been dominated by men. In an intervention staged in 1968, she quite literally put patriarchy on a leash, dragging the legendary curator Peter Weibel through the streets of Vienna on all fours. Her legacy will live on not only in her work, but also through her empowerment of those of us who continue in her footsteps.
Candice Breitz is a South African artist
‘She understood the tools of mainstream media’
Shoair Mavlian
Photography played a central role in Valie Export’s practice. In her iconic Body Configurations series she placed her body in urban public spaces, contorting to the architectural structures of the built environment. She understood the power of engaging with the tools of mainstream media and became one of the first female artists to critically examine representations of women in mass media using photography and film. During her exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery in 2024 she commented on her use of photography in relation to feminist practice from the 1960s onwards, saying: “We used the aperture of the film camera in the way to see things with our own eyes, with our own thoughts.” Her radical use of photography as a tool to document, record and question influenced generations of female artists to follow.
Shoair Mavlian is director of The Photographers’ Gallery, London
