When Casablanca went into production in the spring of 1942, most of Morocco was a French protectorate, administered by the Vichy regime. The film was a hasty project, with excellent anti-Nazi credentials, shot on the cheap – largely at Warner Brothers’ studios in Hollywood. It was released in the US in November, when the young sultan Mohammed V, who had circumvented Pétain’s plans for Jewish deportations from Morocco, welcomed the Allied invasion, which did for Vichy’s forces within a matter of days. In Burbank, Jack Warner had kept his costs down by carting members of the cast to different lots: parts of Casablanca were shot on the sets for Now, Voyager, released in the same year. It was a shrewd – and relatively climate-friendly – way to make a political point.
The Jerusalem municipality has worked to ethnically cleanse the city of its Palestinian population since the illegal occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967. Discriminatory taxes and planning laws, house demolitions, closure of Palestinian schools, hospitals and cultural centres, revocation of residency rights, harassment of businesses and restrictions on the right to entry are some of the ‘legalised’ ways in which Palestinians have been pressured to leave the city.
On 10 August, three days after the inauguration of President Abelardo de la Espriella, Colombia experienced a magnitude 7.4 earthquake, the country’s worst since 1979. With the epicentre in San José del Palmar, the western cities of Cali, Pereira and Manizales were directly affected, along with the entire Chocó department, where the lack of a census, the collapse of communications and the absence of transport infrastructure have stymied relief efforts.
Faridoon Tofan wanted to see Rome. The 46-year-old Afghan national had been living in Germany since 2022 without leaving the country. His asylum claim had been rejected but he had been granted a temporary residence permit. When he was offered a new job cleaning at a family restaurant outside Potsdam, he decided to take a short holiday.
The suggestion that people from ethnic minority backgrounds are regularly promoted beyond their qualifications or are being given some form of advantage is contradicted by the evidence. DEI may have narrowed some gaps, but it has not reversed the fortunes of white Britons as its critics suggest. And it has not had the scale of positive impact that its supporters had hoped for.
In May 2025, ten people affiliated with Eksmo, Russia’s publishing behemoth, were detained in Moscow. Three of them, Pavel Ivanov, Dmitry Protopopov and Artyom Vakhlyaev, were charged with ‘organising activities of an extremist organisation’. Their crime was distributing LGBT-themed books (such as Pioneer Summer, a bestselling novel in which two teenagers exchange a few tentative kisses). Placed under house arrest, the accused faced up to twelve years in prison. Their hearings concluded this month; all three were given suspended four-year prison sentences.
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.