The Bread and Roses Women’s Health Centre in Gainesville, central Florida, is on a tree-lined street in a sedate neighbourhood, with well-kept lawns and LGBTQ flags outside several houses. When I went past a few months ago, there was an older white man with a beard outside, holding a four-foot sign with a picture of a foetus that said: ‘Preborn Human’. Another white man across the street had a smaller and more subtle sign: ‘We Will Help You.’ At the entrance to the clinic, Priya, a young woman of South Asian descent, was waiting to let patients know they had arrived at the right place and ensure they entered the building safely. ‘I think being a volunteer escort is the best way to support abortion access in Florida,’ she told me.
A building destroyed by an Israeli airstrike in Choueifat, south-east of Beirut, on Saturday, 28 September 2024. Photograph © AP Photo / Hussein Malla / Alamy
On Friday, 27 September, we felt the whole of Beirut shake. A huge plume of smoke was visible across the city. Israeli jets had dropped more than eighty bombs, flattening six apartment buildings in Haret Hreik without warning. Their target was one man. The rest of the still uncounted dead – many hundreds incinerated – were collateral damage.
When Israel bombarded Beirut on 27 September, killing hundreds of people, the BBC headline was ‘Beirut rocked by multiple blasts’. ITV News had ‘strikes hit Beirut’ and Sky ‘Beirut hit in multiple blasts’. None went for al-Jazeera’s straightforward and accurate statement: ‘Israel attacks Lebanon’ (which remains its main tag for the crisis). Yesterday evening, by contrast, the BBC headline was: ‘Iran launches barrage of missiles at Israel.’
Incapacitants. Photo © Yoshitaka Shirakura
The Tokyo-based duo Incapacitants deploy feedback, vocals and ‘various electronics’ to generate noise for the sake of noise.
Labour members have long used the party conference to push for a more humanitarian approach to immigration and asylum. In Liverpool this week, however, at the redeveloped docks from which more than five million Europeans travelled to America at the end of the 19th century, the only progressive motion on immigration was arbitrarily ruled out of order. On Tuesday afternoon, delegates were instead invited to debate a motion that would have committed the party to ‘establish a new Border Security Command’, ‘negotiate additional returns arrangements to speed up returns’, ‘increase the number of safe countries to which failed asylum seekers can swiftly be returned’ and ‘deliver new counter-terror powers to tackle organised immigration crime’. It pledged to ‘act upstream’ to stop ‘the humanitarian crises’ that fuelled immigration.
Peter Green died last week at the age of 99. His many books include a Life of Alexander of Macedon, a history of the Hellenistic age, an account of the Sicilian expedition and translations of Homer, Apollonius Rhodius, Catullus, Ovid and Juvenal. Born in England in 1924, he spent the second half of his life in the US, where he taught at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Iowa.
Slave Play, which ended its West End run at the Noël Coward Theatre last week, is a play by Jeremy O. Harris about three Black people who are sexually disengaged in their interracial relationships because of anhedonia from racial trauma. Desperate to feel something, they sign up for ‘Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy’ to enact ‘slave play’ sexual fantasies with their partners.