The Guardian launched its new Europe website last week with an exclusive investigation into the dangerous levels of air pollution being measured across the continent. The research found that 98% of Europeans live in areas with highly damaging fine particulate pollution that exceed World Health Organization guidelines, and for almost two-thirds the pollution levels are more than double the safe recommended levels.
The hazy blur of this week’s Guardian Weekly cover draws a visual link to the tiny airborne particles mostly produced by burning fossil fuels, some of which can pass through the lungs and into the bloodstream and affect almost every organ. Experts say PM2.5 pollution causes about 400,000 deaths a year across Europe.
Environment correspondent Matthew Taylor and data projects editor Pamela Duncan crunch the numbers, while air pollution scentist Gary Fuller looks at the causes – and potential solutions. Then our new Europe environment correspondent Ajit Niranjan reports from smog-choked Belgrade, one of the worst-affected cities on the continent.
Thousands of ethnic Armenians were fleeing the breakaway territory of Nagorno-Karabakh this week after the Azerbaijani military reclaimed full control of it in a lightning offensive. Andrew Roth reports from Goris, a resort town near the border with Armenia that is now at the centre of an exodus that could swell to up to 120,000 people.
The photojournalist Stefanie Glinski is one of the few reporters to have made it into Derna, the Libyan town recently devastated by flooding. Her photo essay in this week’s edition is a moving insight into how people there are coping with an unimaginable tragedy.
What makes Elon Musk tick? It’s a riddle that many have tried and failed to solve. Until now perhaps, after David Runciman spent a summer on Twitter following the same accounts as Musk, to try to build up a mind map of the world’s richest man.
In Culture, Claire Armitstead speaks to the actor Gabriel Byrne about portraying the legendary Irish dramatist Samuel Beckett in his latest film. And, as the performance artist Marina Abramović becomes the f irst woman to have a solo show in the main galleries of London’s Royal Academy, Hannah Jane Parkinson asks why it has taken so long.
