Protesters outside the Bishop Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis on Saturday, 7 February 2026 (AP/Ryan Murphy/Alamy)
ICE have gone from wearing tactical army gear to Midwestern civilian garb; I have even seen photos of agents in keffiyehs. They have changed their cars and their licence plates: from out-of-state to in-state, to blotted plates or none at all. We have adapted too. South Minneapolis is alive with community defence practices. There are patrols and rapid response networks, people stationed at schools and bus stops, parents taking shifts watching daycare centres, protests and general strikes, grief ceremonies and rides.
Starmer’s apology to Jeffrey Epstein’s victims is part of a reputational clean-up that may keep him in office, for now. If apologies can be outsourced, they are also fungible. As ministers and MPs gathered round to support him, Starmer’s direct apology had become a key part of the defence, a token of the prime minister’s worth. The suffering of the victims, as Starmer put it last Thursday, ‘must never become part of a political game’. It may not be a game, but it’s certainly politics.
Bad Bunny performs during the Super Bowl half-time show, 8 February 2026 (AP/Mark J. Terrill)
Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl half-time show was a magic trick that revealed what those who refer to other people as ‘illegal aliens’ would prefer to keep hidden or otherwise misrepresented: the contributions made by people of colour to America’s national story.
When I was at nursery school in Beijing in the 1970s, there was a teacher who seemed to find tireless pleasure in tormenting the children. Living in today’s America reminds me of that nursery school. The reigning tyranny; the people who, like my mother, say this can’t be true, life can’t be that terrible; if bad things happen, you are the problem; do not provoke; keep up the hope; things will be better – by the midterms, in four years, some day.
Much of our politics now consists of performance rather than governance. The calculations are short-term by design: win the week, dominate the clip, neutralise the headline. The long-term consequences – the erosion of empathy, the normalisation of cruelty, a growing sense that nobody in charge believes what they say – are outsourced to society to endure.
My friend Mahmoud called to check on me at the beginning of January. We hadn’t been in touch for a while. I told him, as always, that I missed our days at university. Then, joking, I asked if he was free to invite me over sometime. Mahmoud was making a fire, with his mother sitting beside him. ‘Do you remember the days of hunger, Hassan?’ she asked.
In 2023, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution to ask the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to clarify, first, the obligations of states under international law to ensure protection of the climate system from anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases and, second, the legal consequences for states whose actions have caused significant harm to the environment. The resolution was tabled by Vanuatu, a nation made up of an archipelago of dozens of volcanic islands, which is consistently ranked as the country with the highest disaster risk. The campaign had been started by a class of law students at the University of the South Pacific and gained the endorsement of the Pacific Islands Forum in 2022.