The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, met in February with Raúl Castro’s grandson at a Caribbean Community (CARICOM) meeting on the island of St Kitts. Venezuelan oil deliveries to Cuba had already stopped, following the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro by the US. Shortly afterwards, Donald Trump ordered a blockade of any oil deliveries to the island regardless of their origin, though he has since allowed a Russian tanker to deliver a shipment – the first since January.
On 20 April 2018, bidders gathered at Christie’s showrooms in Rockefeller Plaza for the auction house’s annual ‘exceptional sale’. The cover of the catalogue showed the top half of an almost life-sized marble statue of Hercules holding a cornucopia, his beard neatly curling and his lion-skin cape pulled up over his head.
The attack on the small town of Nabi Chit in the eastern Bekaa Valley on 6 March shows the value placed on human lives by the regime in Israel and its backers in the United States. According to the Israeli government, the invasion was a rescue operation to retrieve the remains of an Israeli airman who disappeared forty years ago. Residents of Nabi Chit and the Lebanese army chief told the BBC that Israeli special forces entered the town ‘disguised in Lebanese military fatigues and used ambulances with signs of Hizbullah’s Islamic Health Organisation’. They headed to the corner of the graveyard, dug it up but found nothing there. The town fought back, causing the Israeli soldiers to withdraw. To cover their retreat, Israel carried out more than forty airstrikes in five hours, killing 41 people.
The inaugural Shield of the Americas Summit was held at one of Donald Trump’s golf resorts in Florida on 7 March. The US president told the dozen allied heads of state gathered at Trump National Doral Miami that he didn’t have time to learn ‘your damn language’. He scolded them for the reach of organised crime in their countries, as if US drug policies had nothing to do with it. Trump said he’d be happy to use missiles to target traffickers should his partners request it, and that Cuba was ‘at the end of the line’. Pete Hegseth announced that he only spoke ‘American’.
My ties to Habermas were multi-layered. He was an inspiration and a role model; a mentor and an antagonist; a figure who showed me early on how to practise ‘critique with an emancipatory intent’ but from whom I eventually had to distance myself.
Some friends of mine support the war and some are vehemently against it. Some of those who wanted the Americans and the Israelis to bomb Iran have changed their minds since the war started. Iranians in the diaspora want war but those of us living it first-hand are frightened.
The first vaccines a two-month-old child gets in England offer protection against three species of virus and five bacteria. Since 2015, they have included Neisseria meningitidis group B, the bacterium involved in the recent meningitis outbreak in Kent in which two people have died. The first vaccine against bacteria was created by Louis Pasteur in 1879. It was a live attenuated vaccine for chicken cholera, meaning it involved weakened forms of the bacteria that didn’t cause serious disease. While that approach is still often used for viruses, modern vaccine development for bacteria has largely moved away from live attenuated forms. Ensuring that a bacterium is reliably weakened is a difficult problem because bacteria are complicated: SARS-CoV-2 has only eleven genes; N. meningitidis has about two thousand.