My friend Mahmoud called to check on me at the beginning of January. We hadn’t been in touch for a while. I told him, as always, that I missed our days at university. Then, joking, I asked if he was free to invite me over sometime. Mahmoud was making a fire, with his mother sitting beside him. ‘Do you remember the days of hunger, Hassan?’ she asked.
In 2023, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution to ask the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to clarify, first, the obligations of states under international law to ensure protection of the climate system from anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases and, second, the legal consequences for states whose actions have caused significant harm to the environment. The resolution was tabled by Vanuatu, a nation made up of an archipelago of dozens of volcanic islands, which is consistently ranked as the country with the highest disaster risk. The campaign had been started by a class of law students at the University of the South Pacific and gained the endorsement of the Pacific Islands Forum in 2022.
Minneapolis residents film ICE agents detaining someone, 27 January 2026. (Dave Decker/ZUMA/Alamy)
‘The effectiveness of terror depends almost entirely on the degree of social atomisation, the disappearance of ... organised opposition,’ Hannah Arendt wrote. The resistance in the Twin Cities has not pushed ICE and CBP away yet, but it has turned a supposed projection of state power into a floundering tool of homicidal violence.
I live on the top floor of a block of flats in western Tehran. I turned off the lights and watched the city below. It was slowly changing shape. Shops were closing. People were running through the streets. My phone rang. It was a friend. ‘We’re going to Qeytarieh Square,’ he said. ‘Come with us.’
In the wreckage of the neoliberal order they once championed, there are a number of paths available to Europe’s social democrats. Keir Starmer’s Labour has chosen one: a hawkish fiscal policy combined with rearmament, moderate improvements in employment rights and a shift to the extreme right on migration. Labour has consolidated the UK’s harsh border regime while modestly raising the minimum wage, continuing austerity in many areas and insisting on the private ownership of water. Whether you call this ‘national renewal’, as Starmer does, or Blairism without the progressivism or the money, support for it now sits at around 20 per cent in the polls.
An ice stupa for water storage in a Ladakh village (Andrew Gasson/Alamy)
On 10 September 2025, the environmental activist and community leader Sonam Wangchuk began a 35-day hunger strike, along with fourteen other people, in protest at the collapse of talks between Ladakh and Delhi. On 24 September, as the hunger strikers’ conditions were worsening, demonstrators took to the streets. A group entered a BJP building in Leh and set it on fire. The central government cut off mobile data, imposed a curfew and banned public gatherings. Four protesters were killed with live rounds. Wangchuk, who had appealed for calm, was arrested on 26 September and taken 1300 kilometres from Leh to Jodhpur.
The Syrian government’s effort to take full control of the north-east clearly has the approval of the United States. After meeting with al-Sharaa and the Syrian Democratic Forces commander, Mazloum Abdi, the US special envoy to Syria (and ambassador to Turkey), Tom Barrack, said the SDF had outlived its usefulness. Its future, he said, ‘lies in the post-Assad transition under the new government led by President Ahmed al-Sharaa’.