While the Middle East was on high alert this week in the wake of Iran’s retaliatory attack on Israel (see below), our cover story looks ahead to India and the commencement of the world’s biggest election.
As the vast process – in which 969 million people are eligible to vote over the course of six weeks – gets under way on Friday, Hannah Ellis-Petersen and Aakash Hassan visit the state of Uttarakhand, a mountainous region that has become a testing ground for the BJP’s Hindu nationalist policies and offers a glimpse of what may lie in store for India, should prime minister Narendra Modi win a third successive term, as most polls predict.
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Five essential reads in this week’s edition
1
The big story | Crisis in the Middle East
Peter Beaumont and Emma Graham-Harrison consider why Israel’s attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus earlier this month changed the terms of engagement between the two old enemies
2
Spotlight | Chibok, 10 years on
Caroline Kimeu and Ope Adetayo ask what happened to the 276 Nigerian schoolgirls who were kidnapped by Boko Haram Islamists a decade ago
3
Feature | The rebuilding of Germany’s Ahr valley
In a region devastated by flash flooding in 2022, Sirin Kale finds communities slowly regrouping, in the knowledge that the same thing could one day happen again
4
Opinion | Why has the world looked away from Sudan?
Columnist Nesrine Malik, who was born in Sudan, laments the largely forgotten tragedy of the country’s year-long civil war
5
Culture | Strat’s entertainment
As the Fender Stratocaster turns 70, Andy Welch explores the extraordinary life of the electric guitar that made the giants of music weep
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What else we’ve been reading
Author Rose Cartwright wrote eloquently and powerfully about her experiences and “the fallacy at the heart of mental healthcare”, explaining why it’s wrong to view mental ill-health as a disease like any other. Clare Horton, assistant editor
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Other highlights from the Guardian website
• Audio | How Swiss women won a landmark climate case for Europe
• Video | The Digital Divide: could you live without the internet?
• Gallery | Brutal Welsh architecture – in pictures
• Interactive | Hillsborough, 25 years on: the 97 people whose lives were cut short
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