Over the past twenty months, the US has launched airstrikes in Somalia using MQ-9 Reaper drones and sometimes manned aircraft at an average rate of more than twice a week. Donald Trump may have described it as ‘not even a country’ but objectively Somalia has been one of the US military’s higher priorities since his return to the White House. Even while engaged in large military operations in Venezuela and Iran, the US found the resources to conduct waves of airstrikes in Somalia.
Flood damage along the Trishuli river near Betrawati, 31 August 2026 (Imago / Ambir Tolang)
Not long after 8.30 a.m. on 26 August, a mass of rock and ice, more than six hundred metres wide, broke off the face of Langtang Lirung, a mountain in the Nepal Himalayas near the border with Tibet. It crashed into the Lhende river, more than a kilometre below, setting off a rapid chain of events that scientists around the world are still piecing together. For tens of thousands of people living along the Bhotekoshi and Trishuli river systems, it arrived as an unimaginable wall of mud, water and debris, rushing at the speed of an express train, mowing down everything in its way.
One of the main differences between today’s far right and the fascism of the mid-20th century is the absence of a uniformed paramilitary street wing. The anti-migrant protests in Dover and Portsmouth at the weekend mark an attempt to create one – or at least to project the image of one.
Bomb damage in Balham High Road, 15 October 1940
The story of the Blitz cannot be fully understood as a national story. It was part of a global war. While the Luftwaffe attacked industrial and civilian locations from the skies, the Kriegsmarine’s U-boats attacked from beneath the seas to starve Britain of supplies.
By July, our tent had become almost impossible to live in. As soon as the sun rose, the fabric trapped the heat, turning the small space into an oven. We decided to get a new tent. I wanted to make it by hand, hoping it would be larger and better at keeping out the heat, but my father thought we should buy a ready-made one. My mother didn’t care either way. Whenever we started arguing, she’d say: ‘Just get any tent. I don’t care what it looks like. Just get us some relief from the heat. It’s all just fabric anyway.’
Last month, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez published a series of Instagram posts documenting the process of freezing her eggs. In the last video, on the economics and politics of women’s healthcare in the United States, she asked why fertility preservation is so prohibitively expensive, costing thousands of dollars and not covered by insurance.
Dolly Parton performing in the 1970s (MediaPunch / Alamy)
It’s an understatement to say that Dolly Parton, who died on Tuesday, was many things to many people. She was multifaceted in a way that few are: she was a popular, well-respected, beloved iconoclast, a true original, and she also radiated the self-referential camp of a celebrity impersonator. She operated both as a person and as an idea.