Qilin and Synnovis, the two entities involved in the recent ransomware attack that has disabled laboratory services at London hospitals, are very different in many ways but nevertheless have a common purpose: using tech to extract money from healthcare organisations.
On 9 June, doctors across Israel received an email from Zion Hagay, the president of the Israeli Medical Association (IMA), saying that a red line had been crossed. The night before, Udi Baharav, a 71-year-old physician and volunteer wearing a high-visibility doctor’s vest, had been violently arrested during an anti-government demonstration in Tel Aviv. Video clips of the police using excessive force went viral on social media and were picked up by the press. Dr Baharav was detained for hours simply for fulfilling his duty as a doctor and providing medical care to a protester.
Under the UK’s grotesque electoral system, a national breakthrough by a small party is more or less impossible. But in the new constituency of Bristol Central, the Green Party leader Carla Denyer is running Labour’s Thangam Debbonaire very close in the polls. Accounts of the race in the national press often recreate stereotypes of Bristol being somehow alternative, ‘bohemian’, quirky, as if voting Green were a bourgeois eccentricity reserved for people who play lyres and wear purple shirts. But the Green wave in Bristol has been a long time coming, and has its roots in disaffection with the way the city has been run at a local level. It also tells us something instructive about Labour in power, which may prefigure what happens when Keir Starmer takes over as prime minister in July.
Kier Starmer and Rachel Reeves visiting Southampton docks, 17 June 2024. Photo © Stefan Rousseau / PA Images / Alamy
The intractable sense of exhaustion which attends British politics – not only in this election – is a signal of crisis in its institutions and ideologies.
‘The trick is to create a world,’ John Burnside’s poem ‘Koi’ begins, ‘from nothing.’ Published in the LRB in 2001, it was one of nearly a hundred poems by Burnside that appeared in the paper between 1996 and his death last month at the age of 69.
Labour’s manifesto at least looks like a real programme, though it is in places evasive, unclear or underpowered. Starmer promised ‘no surprises’ between its covers: it is a conservative document, cleared of any potential traps on the way to Downing Street. Its cover promises, simply, ‘change’, but raises the question: how much?
The number of Trump administration officials who could be called ‘very competent’ is small, but the former deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger is one of them. A private school boy from Massachusetts who learned to speak excellent Mandarin, Pottinger was once the Wall Street Journal’s correspondent in China (where he was punched in the face in a café by someone he described as a ‘government goon’).