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’.
The World Economic Forum in Davos is ending with talk of a rupture in world affairs, a collapse of international law, a descent into chaos and the rise of a new global order in which bullies rule like kings. This must all sound extremely odd to the Indigenous people of Canada, America, Australia or Greenland, for whom that old order meant only catastrophe.
The destruction of Palestinian lives is now a base line in a holding pattern. The ferocious white heat of the past two years of unrelenting attacks has receded from view, but the genocide continues. There is far less coverage on social media, where my accounts are instead filled with requests for aid.
Chimpanzees, New Caledonian crows – and now cows. The list of animals that use tools grew a little longer this week, with a paper in Current Biology reporting that an Austrian cow called Veronika uses a broom to scratch herself. Appealing to tool use as a defining feature of humanity has always been a shaky argument, though a curiously persistent one.
‘Safety is a trigger word for me,’ Aliyah says on the first day of the women’s circle in the documentary Holloway.
Cognac sales have been in decline since 2022, particularly in its two biggest markets, the United States and China. The reasons include tariffs, inflation and tequila. A recent publicity stunt to promote a collaboration between Hennessy and LeBron James fell very flat. If celebrity no longer sells, perhaps the cognac industry could fall back on an old marketing ploy: claiming it’s medicine. In 1918, the Daily Mirror ran the headline ‘Brandy for Influenza’: ‘Arrangements have been made to provide immediately extra supplies of spirits for medicinal purposes during the influenza epidemic.’ During Prohibition, one of the only legal ways to buy alcohol was on prescription.