Inside this week's long reads

Support the Guardian Support us   Fund independent journalism Swag and sway: money laundering at the Post Office and the skyscraper made of timber In this week’s newsletter: how the latest Post Office scandal has gone unreported in the wake of Horizon, and the wooden tower: a revolution in climate-friendly building Composite: Anaïs Mims/Guardian Design/Getty Images The other Post Office scandal: how organised crime launders money on the high street | Oliver Bullough Hundreds of millions of pounds of dirty money are being deposited at post offices every year. So why are the police reluctant to investigate the scale of the problem? Mjøstårnet, the world’s tallest wooden skyscraper. Photograph: Voll Arkitekter/Ricardo Foto The flat-pack skyscraper: how wood can shape the cities of the future | James Crawford Our buildings are monuments to extraction and extreme emissions. But what if we turned from destructive concrete to timber? Inside this week’s long read This week we published an investigation by Oliver Bullough into money laundering through Post Office branches. We asked Oliver about the scale of the problem, and how hard it was to report on. You’ve written about international money laundering a great deal. Did you expect laundering through the UK’s cornershop post offices to be a comparatively small-scale affair? In international terms, this is a relatively small-scale affair, in that it’s “just” a few hundred million pounds, compared with the hundreds of billions of dirty money that flow through the City of London every year. But if you think about the criminal cash moving through branches of the Post Office in terms of the number of victims and its impact on communities, it’s incredibly important. Police officers have been warning me about this for years, and are extremely frustrated by the government’s failure to act on the clear evidence of what’s going on. How difficult was it to broach this criminal activity at post offices after the public outcry over the Horizon scandal? It was very difficult to get anyone to go on the record about this, because of their concerns about being seen to victimise post office operators, who have already been through a horrible ordeal. I could understand their concerns, but it was a bit frustrating. It’s never nice not being able to quote anyone by name, so I spoke to far more people than I perhaps needed to, very few of whom ended up being quoted in the article, just to make sure I wasn’t being spun a line. In the past, you’ve been asked to give evidence at special committees on money laundering. Has Britain got any better at dealing with the dirty money flowing through our systems? The short answer is no. A slightly longer answer is that perhaps we’ve got better at acknowledging our role, and are starting to try to think about maybe doing something to improve things. Some of the more egregious holes – such as Companies House, which I’ve written about for the Guardian before – have begun to be plugged, but it’s never the government’s priority for long. You can see this with Russian oligarchs: they all got sanctioned, but none have been prosecuted. Should we be suspicious of anyone dealing in cash? Lots of people use cash for entirely legitimate reasons: cash makes it easier to budget if you’re on a low income; lots of people don’t trust banks, and prefer to keep their money where they can see it; some businesses still take in a lot of payments in cash. But these are comparatively small groups and there really aren’t many legitimate reasons for using a lot of cash. If someone is repeatedly paying in bundles of banknotes, into one account after another, as happens at branches of the Post Office, that’s a big red flag, and everyone should be a lot more suspicious of it. This week’s audio long reads ‘The war leaked into every lesson’: learning Ukrainian in a country under siege Apocalypse no: how almost everything we thought we knew about the Maya is wrong ‘Any other child would have died’: the miraculous survival of Nada Itrab Listen to the Audio Long Read on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or in the Guardian app From the archive Elvira Moral, aged two, with her siblings Ramón and Richard. All three were abandoned at a train station in Barcelona in 1984. Photograph: Jordi Matas/The Guardian Three abandoned children, two missing parents and a 40-year mystery | 2023 Elvira and her brothers, Ricard and Ramón, were left at a train station in Barcelona aged two, four and five. As an adult, when Elvira decided to look for her parents, she discovered a family history wilder than anything she had imagined. Three years after Giles Tremlett investigated this astonishing case, it is now a four-part documentary series. Photograph: Darko Vojinović/AP 14 years a fugitive: the hunt for Ratko Mladić, the Butcher of Bosnia | 2016 Bosnian ​Serb general ‌Ratko Mladić, who ​was serving ​a life sentence ⁠for ​genocide in ​the 1992-95 war ​in ​Bosnia, has died ‌in prison. He was accused of killing thousands of civilians at Srebrenica and Sarajevo – the worst atrocities in Europe since the Nazi era. Julian Borger tells the inside story of how he evaded capture for so long, and how he was finally caught. What else we’ve been reading Becca Rothfeld is one of the best literary critics working today, and her review – dismantling, really – of the new Rachel Cusk novel is well worth reading. David Wolf, editor What happened to all the hype around lab-grown meat? For those of us still following the quest for a meat substitute that doesn’t involve desertified industrial feedlots, the early promise has not died. After all, Mr Beast couldn’t tell the difference between lab grown chicken and the real thing. Erin Summers takes to the road in search of meatballs. Clare Longrigg, deputy editor Caravan recently published an interesting profile of Bimal Patel, Narendra Modi’s architect-in-chief; he’s the man behind the highly controversial redevelopment of the centre of Indian political power. Yohann Koshy, deputy editor   It’s all here, it’s all free Every day the Guardian publishes hundreds of powerful pieces of journalism, from news stories, features, live blogs, explainers and analysis to podcasts, video, cartoon, puzzles and recipes. However, we can only produce all this great work thanks to our readers. Only a small percentage of readers pay for our work, but because they choose to do so it means we can keep everything on our website open to everyone around the world. If you value our work, any amount you can pay to support us will go a long way and help to sustain all the work we do. Please consider supporting us with any amount, from just $1. 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