‘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.’
Demonstrators confront the police at Place de la République, 17 October 2026 (Tuul and Bruno Morandi)
Amid the tear-gas fumes and flying stun grenades it was easy to miss the ceremony taking place on the Pont Saint-Michel on Saturday, 17 October. A group of French-Algerians threw flowers into the Seine to mark the 65th anniversary of the worst police massacre in Europe since the Second World War.
My mother rang to say that my father had called a water truck owner and offered to pay him to fill our jerry cans, but the man said his truck had broken down and the spare parts weren’t available. We had barely enough water to last the day. My mother asked me to find out if a water truck would be coming to a nearby camp so that I could fill our jerry cans there.
My boss at the bookshop has said he would sell AI novels if there were clear demand and clear labelling. We almost certainly already sell books that have made some use of LLMs in their production. Novels and short stories which are suspected to have been written by AI are being nominated for prestigious literary prizes. When I ask my customers if they would read a novel written by AI they either vehemently reject the idea or shrug.
David Butt Philip as Licinius and Sonya Yoncheva as Julia in ‘La Vestale’ by Gaspare Spontini at the Berlin Staatsoper (Stephan Rabold)
At the first interval in the Berlin Staatsoper’s new production of La Vestale, the man to my right turned to me and said: ‘Mein Gott, ist das dumm!’ A few minutes later I heard someone say to their companion in the foyer: ‘Just close your eyes and enjoy the music.’
Jordan Bardella was supposed to be a different kind of far-right French politician: young, technically savvy, a long way from the poisonous demagoguery and street fighting of the old Front National. Mediapart, the investigative news site, last month published some of Bardella’s Facebook Messenger correspondence from when he was an aspiring FN apparatchik in 2013. Leaked by former party colleagues, it included such conspiratorial claims as ‘the Jew must dominate other peoples, crush them and rob them’ and ‘all the banks are owned by Jews.’ Since he denied writing the Facebook messages, rival politicians have joined other public figures in openly referring to Bardella as a liar as well as an antisemite.