James ‘Fergie’ Chambers, a US citizen, was detained by Spanish police on Ibiza earlier this month. He was visiting the Balearic island with his family with a possible view to moving there from their current home in Ireland. He’s now in prison in Madrid, as the Spanish government begins to comply with a US extradition request. The US Justice Department has accused Chambers of funding Hamas, proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the US since 1997. If the Spanish authorities agree to his extradition, it will have a chilling effect on organising for Palestine and other socialist causes.
Occasionally when the phone rang at the London Review offices in the late 1990s it would be the operator asking if we’d accept a reverse charge call from Bill Johnson in Johannesburg. The first couple of times I checked with a colleague if it was OK to take it. After that I’d just say yes, put it on hold and call across the office to Mary-Kay Wilmers: ‘Big Bill’s on the phone.’ I never thought to ask where R.W. Johnson got his nickname; it certainly suited his voice. Yesterday the paper got an email from his son to say that Johnson had died at home in Cape Town. He was 82.
Before the final yesterday I was puzzled as to why Jennifer Hudson was singing the US national anthem: did they think we might have forgotten where the match was being held? As if in a fever dream I saw Robbie Williams, Tom Cruise, Donald Trump’s favourite ring announcer Michael Buffer (‘let’s get ready to rumble’) and, like something from the TK Maxx Gold Label range, a Louis Vuitton trophy box. No one scored in the first half. The half-time show – don’t forget this is America – looked like a long advert for Coca Cola, culminating in children singing with Coldplay and a gigantic carpet displaying the word ‘love’. Meanwhile the US war on Iran intensified.
Bailiffs evicting people from Ardee House in Dublin on 7 July (Jack Caffrey / The Liberties SOS)
The masked men had hidden the identification on their olive green private security uniforms. They wore sunglasses, body cameras and a variety of baseball hats; one said ‘Bailiff Services Ireland’, another ‘Police’. The actual Irish police force had arrived at around 9 a.m. to arrest two of the people inside, Eoghan Lynch and Seán Doyle. Now, thirty minutes later, this mysterious squad had come to evict the other six of us. The police vacated the building and left them to finish the job.
Michel Nkuka Mboladinga, also known as Lumumba Vea, at DR Congo’s match against Colombia, 23 June 2026 (Carl Recine / Getty Images)
English identity is a funny business: we can be one thing to ourselves and something else to others, and that changes depending on mood and context. During this World Cup – and particularly when DR Congo played England – I’ve realised that I am still unsure who I am to myself, and other people.
My friend Jawad Ali, a Palestinian American lawyer, was at his daughter’s graduation last month when he got a call from his sister in the West Bank. ‘She was crying, almost hysterical,’ he said, as she told him that settlers were ‘trying to burn us alive in our home’.
The hollowness of the RN revolution became clear this week, when Marine Le Pen announced she would be standing again to become France’s head of state, despite a criminal conviction for embezzlement being upheld. In 2013, she had asked: ‘When will we implement a lifetime ban on holding office for anyone convicted of offences committed thanks to their mandate or while in office?’