The Guardian Politics Weekly: Is a no-deal Brexit back on the cards?

Heather Stewart is joined by Jonathan Freedland, Owen Jones and Rachel Wolf to discuss the latest Tory leadership pledges, the new intake of European MEPs and same-sex marriage in Northern Ireland.

As Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt do their utmost to drive the country off a no-deal cliff edge, business leaders, fellow politicians and the rest of the world look on aghast.

While the Thelma and Louise of British politics wrestle over the steering wheel, we ask: are we really going to leave the EU without a deal?

Joining Heather Stewart are the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland and Owen Jones, and Rachel Wolf from the consultancy Public First.

Also this week: it was a lively start to the opening of the European parliament, with protests, back-turning and rude T-shirts. We talk to one of the new crop of MEPs, Caroline Voaden of the Liberal Democrats, and to the Guardian’s Brussels bureau chief, Daniel Boffey.

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99 Percent Invisible: Life and Death in Singapore

Singapore is tiny, and today the entire nation is really just one city. It takes less than 45 minutes to drive across the island, with traffic. But in the 1950s there were mainly villages known as kampongs, a local Malay word. Kampong communities were strong and close-knit, but the living conditions weren’t easy. Multiple families might share one toilet or one kitchen. Many of the kampongs relied on gas for lighting and cooking. And most houses were made of super flammable palm leaves or wood with roofs made of sheet metal. [...]

When planning for a growing population, most urban planners expand their cities outward, but in land-limited Singapore, that’s not an option. Today, Singapore’s tallest public housing buildings are 50 stories high –the tallest in the world. Today, Singapore is the third richest nation in the world, and 80% of Singaporeans still live in these tall, cement HDB flats and there are about 10,000 public housing buildings on the island. It’s not the glitzy, futuristic Singapore skyline you see in movies like Crazy Rich Asians. Much of the island is full of tall cement buildings with housing block numbers, painted boldly down the sides, which help Singaporeans locate themselves in the monotonous sea of nearly identical buildings. And new flats are going up all the time. [...]

In Singapore, where land is scarce, it’s not unlikely for apartment buildings to be built on top of land that was graveyards not too long ago. But building on top of a graveyard has its complications, and in one cemetery called Peck San Theng, the new housing development disrupted more than just the dead — it disrupted a way of life. “When I was a kid […] wandering around the hillsides, you know walking through the grass, we [said] prayers. We [made] offerings,” says Kwan, someone who grew up near Peck San Theng cemetery. His father would bring him to the cemetery to pray at the graves of their family and friends. Kwan’s family was Chinese, and they believed that if the dead were well-taken care of, it not only meant peace for the departed, but it could also bring direct benefits to the descendants.

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Human Progress: How Anti-Humanism Is Gaining Ground

Whether it’s Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s questioning the morality of childbearing, a birth-strike movement that encourages people to forego parenthood despite the “grief that [they say they] feel as a result,” or political commentator Bill Maher claiming, “I can’t think of a better gift to our planet than pumping out fewer humans to destroy it,” a misanthropic philosophy known as “anti-natalism” is going increasingly mainstream. [...]

Recent examples of writings that are warming to the idea of human extinction include the New Yorker’s “The Case for Not Being Born,” NBC News’ “Science proves kids are bad for Earth. Morality suggests we stop having them,” and the New York Times’ “Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?” which muses that, “It may well be, then, that the extinction of humanity would make the world better off.” Last month, the progressive magazine FastCompany released a disturbing video entitled, “Why Having Kids Is the Worst Thing You Can Do for the Planet.” [...]

These extinction advocates, however, have misunderstood the evidence about population growth’s true impact on the planet. The late University of Maryland economist Julian Simon rejected the idea of overpopulation as a problem in his 1981 book The Ultimate Resource. He believed that, on the contrary, more people in the world means more people to solve problems. “There is no physical or economic reason,” he wrote, “why human resourcefulness and enterprise cannot forever continue to respond to impending shortages and existing problems with new expedients that, after an adjustment period, leave us better off than before the problem arose.”

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Reuters: Wahhabism confronted: Sri Lanka curbs Saudi influence after bombings

Sri Lanka has since arrested a Wahhabi scholar and is poised to take over a Saudi-funded school. The government also says it will monitor previously unchecked money flows from donors including prominent Saudi families to mosques on the Indian Ocean island. [...]

Saudi Arabia rejects the idea that Wahhabism is problematic and defends its record by pointing to the detention of thousands of suspected militants. Riyadh in June sent back five Sri Lankans allegedly linked to the Easter attacks. [...]

The monks, who are influential on the island where 70 percent of the population are Buddhists, and some members of parliament say Hizbullah’s links to Riyadh contributed to the spread of militancy in his native Kattankudy, a Muslim-majority town.

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Associated Press: At Tehran symphony, music lovers seek escape from reality

This week, the Tehran Symphony Orchestra, including female musicians in burgundy headscarves on cello, horn and harp, played works by 19th-century Russian composers for an enraptured crowd in the capital’s main concert venue, Vahdat Hall. [...]

Classical music may not have mass appeal, but Rohani said in a backstage interview that there’s potential for growth, citing a large turnout during a stadium concert last year in Abadan, a provincial city in southwestern Iran.[...]

The Tehran Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1933, continued its work after 1979, he said. Live performances were initially rare, but have increased in number since the 1990s. [...]

This includes a ban on female singers performing for mixed audiences, considered “haram,” or religiously forbidden. In February, female guitarist Negin Parsa sang a solo during a concert by pop singer Hamid Askari. The authorities cut her microphone, and Askari’s permission to perform was briefly suspended. [...]

“There is a lot of interest in Western culture among the young urban middle class population,” said Mina, portraying it as pushback against the lifestyle and artistic expression promoted by the authorities.

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The Guardian: Dubai: Princess Haya's flight to UK threatens diplomatic crisis

Princess Haya Bint al-Hussein’s flight to Britain is threatening to provoke a diplomatic crisis as her husband, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai and a key UK ally in the Gulf, faces mounting criticism over his family’s treatment of women. [...]

The most notorious disappearance involved the 33-year-old Princess Latifa, Sheikh Mohammed’s daughter, who allegedly escaped Dubai before being seized off the coast of India by commandos last year and forcibly returned home. Emirati authorities dismissed the claims at the time as fiction.

In 2000, another of the sheikh’s daughters, Princess Shamsa, fled from her father’s estate near Chobham, Surrey. She was last seen in August that year on the streets of Cambridge from where she was reportedly abducted by the sheikh’s staff. Cambridgeshire police investigated the incident. [...]

She is believed to be under the protection of a private security firm though there are suggestions that, because of her fears of being kidnapped, a formal request has been made for police protection. Scotland Yard said it did not comment on security details.

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