In much of the coverage of the Ed Sheeran-Macklemore debacle, the reality of the incident is turned on its head, as people ask whether Sheeran has been unfairly cancelled for failing to take a sufficiently strong stand against Israel. You could be forgiven for thinking that Sheeran had been dropped from his tour for not being pro-Palestinian enough. But of course he wasn’t. It is Macklemore, not Sheeran, who has been barred from performing. Yet somehow the story is about Sheeran’s freedom to be apolitical.
The frenzy in Israel surrounding the documentary NAZA is fundamentally undemocratic. That is what happens after years of extreme right-wing populism, amplified by social media and new technology – in the context of decades of conflict, occupation, apartheid and impunity. This is denial and bullying as political culture.
Johnny Marr with his Gibson ES-355 at Hammersmith Palais, London, 15 June 1984 (DPA)
The Smiths kicked off the Scottish leg of their Meat is Murder tour at the Magnum Leisure Centre in Irvine New Town on 22 September 1985, and I was at that gig, watching from the middle of the crowd as all the tough boys from school tried to climb the stage. It was a signal moment. There on his own side was Johnny Marr. He had an amazing stance, folded around his fabulous guitar and swaying his head from side to side.
The opening ceremony of the World Nomad Games in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, 31 August 2026 (ZUMA Press / Alamy)
Kok-boru is a horseback sport related to polo, played with a headless goat carcass rather than a ball and mallets. The equestrian scrums are violent and players are routinely thrown off their horses. It was the highlight of the World Nomad Games in Kyrgyzstan earlier this month. The ‘Olympics of Central Asia’ also include horseback archery, falconry, mancala and poetry improvisation.
Planning regulations were modified last year, with AI data centres redefined as ‘nationally significant infrastructure projects’. Any attempt by a local council to reject or pause such a project can be overruled. AI data centres are to be built on the site of the old Truman Brewery in Brick Lane, in the teeth of fierce community and council opposition, and at Abbots Langley in Hertfordshire, despite the district council’s rejection of the plan.
A desperate flurry of possible solutions, from the stopgap to the structural, has whirled across the German political establishment and media in the week since the AfD won a record 44 per cent of the vote in the small eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, leaving them only three seats short of a majority. Existing efforts to deflect or contain the tide of support for the far right, primarily through a ‘firewall’ agreement between established parties to refuse to go into coalition with the it, have run out of road. Exclusion has both radicalised and strengthened it. The AfD’s winning campaign in Saxony-Anhalt put the issue of ‘remigration’, adopted directly from the fascist Identitarian movement, front and centre. It now stands to enter government not as a junior coalition partner but as a senior one.
In July 2021 my Uncle Bilal was dying of lymphoma. In the days before his death, our family gathered at his hospital bed to ‘keep him comfortable’. Comfort was a sponge dipped in icy water for his dry mouth – I think they’re called ‘oral care swabs’ – and loved ones in the room. A week or so earlier, so many of us wouldn’t have been allowed in; only people who were ‘actively dying’ could have more than three visitors at a time.