Saramago Cafe Bar at the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow (Kay Roxby / Alamy)
The entire contents of the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow were auctioned off by a commercial asset sales company on 30 July. In the days leading up to the sale, it was promoted in the Herald as an exciting opportunity to ‘purchase a major piece’ of Glasgow’s ‘creative heritage’. But the heritage of a civic arts centre belongs to the community it serves.
Trump’s most shocking move to influence the Honduran electorate was to pardon the former president Juan Orlando Hernández, serving a 45-year prison sentence for trafficking cocaine to the US. JOH is the patriarch of the National Party, and his release helped lift its candidate, Nasry Asfura, from third in the polls, sealing the fate of the progressive Libre party which had ruled for four years. It was unclear if JOH would return to Honduras, where he still faces criminal charges. But on 26 July he landed at Palmerola Airport in a private jet, welcomed by the new president of the National Congress, Tomás Zambrano, and hundreds of supporters.
Unlike peace agreements – which require negotiation, compromise and (ostensibly) long-term commitment – ceasefires are by definition temporary, partial and immediate. But they also construe violence narrowly and reinforce imbalances of power. They are as much a way to govern a population as a road to peace.
It has been a bad few weeks for Fifa and its president, Gianni Infantino, and therefore a good few weeks for football. More and worse has happened since the World Cup than even Fifa’s most fatalistic observers would have thought possible.
Firefighters attend a wildfire between Saumos and Le Porge, Gironde, France, 23 July 2026 (MAXPPP / Guillaume Bonnaud / Alamy)
In the last week of July a guest in our house, an hour’s drive from Bordeaux, was called away to a fire emergency in the Gironde, where things were rapidly getting out of control. A firefighter attached to the French military, he had just lost two colleagues in the civilian service in a fire near the airport: their fire engine was trapped in a stand of blazing pine trees. Within days, it looked as if the western suburbs of Bordeaux were under threat, but by early August the situation in the Gironde was relatively stable, even if the destruction was immense and the prospect of further fires still looms.
It has never been easy to get asylum in the US, but during the last two years it has become almost impossible. The Trump administration has closed the border to asylum seekers, denied detainees access to a judge, cut off food benefits, added application fees and just last week announced a rule that will shunt affirmative asylum cases (those opened outside of deportation proceedings) to the immigration courts, where the process is quick, adversarial and even more likely to result in deportation.
Bev Craig, leader of Manchester City Council before she was comfortably elected last week to replace Andy Burnham as mayor, has promised to build fifty thousand affordable homes over the next thirteen years. This would be a doubling of the rate at which they were built between 2016 and 2023, an impressive feat in the abstract, but not enough to address the scale of the problem, especially if few are offered for social rent.