Russell Brand has been sentenced to ten years in prison for raping one woman and sexually assaulting three others. For his defence, Brand claimed that the encounters were all consensual even though he couldn’t remember them. ‘Consent is fundamental, essential, necessary,’ he told the court. Obvious as this should be, Brand’s past boasts imply that he saw consent not as a bare minimum, but as an obstacle to be overcome.
The office of the Moroccan Association for Aid to Migrants in Vulnerable Situations is arranged over two floors in a modest building in Oujda. The walls of one room are covered in pictures, including photographs of young men who have gone missing. There are also campaign posters calling for the abolition of the European Union’s border agency, Frontex.
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.
Knowledge produced through public institutions such as the British Library is being enclosed by AI companies and publishing oligopolies that flog it back to us in summary form. The BL is being transformed into desk space for hire by people unlikely to be reading at all.
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.