Unfortunately for Mexicans, Mexico has moved to the top of the US foreign policy agenda. After Trump kidnapped the Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, he threatened Mexico with ground operations against ‘cartels’ that the DOJ designated terrorist organisations.
Before the war, Muhammad had been the most energetic of us. He wasn’t tall, but he never saw that as an obstacle. He was always the first to arrive at the volleyball court and the last to leave. He jumped with exaggerated enthusiasm, laughed loudly and insisted he would one day be a professional volleyball player, no matter what. Now, as he stood there, leaning on his crutches, I didn’t know where to look. At the place where his leg used to be? At his face? Should I pretend nothing had changed?
Max Richter’s Sleep, made up of 204 continuous movements, plays for nearly eight and a half hours. This is not as long as Erik Satie’s Vexations, Wagner’s Ring cycle, or John Cage’s Organ 2/As Slow As Possible, which started playing at St Burchardi church in Halberstadt in 2001 and is due to finish in the year 2640, but Sleep is still one of the longest pieces of classical music to have been continuously recorded and performed. Its premiere at the Wellcome Collection in 2015 was broadcast live and uninterrupted on Radio 3; it has since been performed at Sydney Opera House, Los Angeles Grand Park and the Great Wall of China.
Two marches will assemble in central London tomorrow. One is championing the rights of Palestinians and commemorating 78 years of displacement and occupation; the other, organised by the far-right activist Tommy Robinson, is calling on supporters to ‘unite the West’ against Islam and immigration. Yet only the former has been widely described in the British media as a ‘hate march’. According to the Nexis database, there were only 29 stories referring to ‘hate marches’ between 1 January 1994 and 7 October 2023. Since then, 3152 stories have used the term, most of them focused on pro-Palestine protests. In other words, despite regular demonstrations of racism, hate, discrimination and bigotry on the world’s streets, more than 99 per cent of stories that mention ‘hate marches’ have been published since 7 October 2023 and have focused on anti-racist protesters.
A hantavirus outbreak is extremely unexpected. Part of the confusion in press coverage has arisen from the messiness of viral classification. Although virologists do their best to categorise viruses into the traditional hierarchies of taxonomy – species, genus, family – the results are rarely satisfactory. Hantaviruses are a fairly diverse group of related viruses containing at least twenty species, only some of which can infect humans, and causing quite different diseases when they do. The natural hosts for all those viruses are thought to be rodents. After the passengers on the Hondius were informed in early May that the authorities suspected hantavirus, at least one hoped that it meant the ship was rat-infested; the alternative was that the outbreak was of the Andes virus, the only hantavirus species believed to be capable of human-to-human transmission.
The Beersheba boarding school for boys in 1935, twelve years before Salman Abu Sitta was a student there.
My life’s journey, through many countries as a foreigner, should end where it started, at Ma’in Abu Sitta. David Ben-Gurion, who led the forces that destroyed my village and sent me into exile, is buried in my hometown. And I wish to be buried in my birthplace.
Three friends represent the three poles of Benjamin’s intellectual trajectory: Gershom Scholem embodied the messianic legacy of Judaism, Bertolt Brecht the radical potential of the avant-gardes, and Theodor Adorno the attempt to turn Marxism into a theory of culture and what Benjamin called the ‘structure of experience’. All three sought to keep the critical-revolutionary tradition alive in the face of fascism.