Between 1 May and 31 August, more than twenty thousand laboratory-confirmed cases of cyclosporiasis were reported to the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, with more than a thousand hospitalisations and two confirmed deaths. Symptoms include dehydration, exhaustion, cramping and persistent – or, as some news reports more or less gleefully put it, ‘explosive’ – diarrhoea. The true number of cases is almost certainly higher, since some infected people will have recovered without seeking medical care or being tested.
Users of the British Library received an email on 21 October with the subject line ‘Transforming your Library’. In order to adapt to a changing world, we were told, the BL would be ‘repurposing’ its Science and Social Sciences Reading Rooms as a ‘flexible … technology-enabled workspace’ for hire. When I told a colleague about the plans, he responded to my outrage by saying he was only surprised that something like this hadn’t been done before. I have since learned that, in a sense, it already has.
The government’s justification for its reform of the courts has shifted from clearing the backlog to modernisation and rationalisation: those well-worn euphemisms for cost-cutting. Legal aid for cases in the magistrates’ court is far less generous than in the Crown Court, which will result in many more unrepresented defendants, taking more time and risking unjust convictions.
How did Lula defeat Bolsonaro so handily, by a far greater margin than in 2022, after losing in the first round? How did the hoped-for virada take place? Turnout made a difference: close to three million more people voted in the second round. In Bahia alone – where, as the saying goes, ‘fascism doesn’t take root’ (‘na Bahia fascista não se cria’) – Lula gained almost a million votes.
On Wednesday, 21 October, four days after France’s biggest student protest in a generation, Inès stood in the rain outside Art Basel Paris’s VIP preview at the Grand Palais. As part of a programme the fair runs with the École du Louvre, she and other students had volunteered to explain the artworks on display outside to anyone who stopped by, while collectors with the right passes were allowed through the anti-ram barriers to shop for art inside.
‘Things are normal,’ Sofya texted me on Sunday. ‘People really can’t wait to vote. It’s a good atmosphere.’ Marija, a journalist at the independent magazine Vreme, said that turnout was high. ‘But there are many incidents. Tensions are rising.’ There were rumours that the deputy chairman of the electoral committee in Despotovac, a small town in central Serbia, had eaten two ballot papers.
On 19 October, the World Food Programme announced that it would be reducing its monthly food assistance in Gaza, providing support to 1.1 million people rather than 1.6 million. On 22 October, the head of the Bakery Owners Association warned that the remaining bakeries in occupied Gaza would cease operations within 48 hours because of the lack of flour in the territory and Israeli entry restrictions. ‘Things are really, really difficult,’ the Palestinian diplomat Marwan Yaghi said to me, ‘especially with the Israeli action coming on the way.’