February 2025

As the two coffins were driven through the crowd, a deep, sorrowful voice came from the loudspeakers. The sound of a violin rose as the voice of the man receded. I texted people in Beirut to confirm that the music was playing at the funeral, not being added by the television broadcasters.

On 8 January I received an email from my boss at the health department where I work on social epidemiology. It was a message relayed from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). ‘Data is the oxygen of public health,’ it said, ‘essential for improving health and saving lives.’ On 31 January, most, if not all, public health data were purged from the CDC’s website. Within hours of the erasure, health departments were stalled. If data were the oxygen of public health, then all the oxygen had just been sucked out of the room.

There is a troubling disconnect between the deterrent rationale and the mechanism that will be used to deny citizenship: the home secretary’s discretionary power to refuse someone on grounds of ‘bad character’. Perhaps the idea is that an asylum seeker has shown evidence of bad character by breaking the UK’s immigration laws, whatever the Refugee Convention may say. But this looks both implausible in itself and perversely at odds with other parts of the government’s rhetoric.

In a wiser and more competent – to say nothing of a better – world, the initial approach to Putin would have been followed by a consultation between the US, Ukraine and other European countries on their counter-proposals, and the pressure they could put on Putin if he refused to budge. Perhaps this will still happen. For the time being, Ukraine and the rest of Europe will be consulted in the way the residents of a village are consulted before it gets demolished to make way for a new airport.

The proposal to remove Native Americans from lands east of the Mississippi came after decades of war and illegal settlement. Settlers pushed farther west, often violating existing treaties with Native nations. In our traditional lands in what is now the US south-east, the Cotton Revolution drove demand for Native territory. As with Trump’s fantasies of turning Gaza into ‘the Riviera of the Middle East’, crass economic greed drove Native dispossession. As in the West Bank, settlers sometimes acted in co-ordination with state officials, while at other times they operated outside US law, putting pressure on the state to follow them and provide security. Talk of ‘empty land’ and ‘handfuls of wandering Indians’ was used to justify the expulsion of my people.  

Last month, the Upper Tribunal for Immigration and Asylum granted six displaced Palestinians entry into the UK to stay with a British family member. After their home in Gaza was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike, the family, anonymised by the court for their own protection, took refuge at the al-Mawasi ‘humanitarian zone’. From there, in January 2024, they applied for entry to the UK. The Home Office rejected their application and the First-Tier Immigration Tribunal dismissed their appeal. On further appeal, the Upper Tribunal reversed the decision, with the two immigration judges holding that the family, who faced ‘a high risk of death or injury’ if they remained in Gaza, were entitled to come to the UK under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects the right to family life. According to the prime minister, this judgment was ‘wrong’.

For the last six months I’ve been working for Solidarités International, a French NGO. It’s one of the many organisations that have been hit by Donald Trump’s executive order freezing humanitarian aid for ninety days. In 2023 the US government provided $72 billion of international aid, around 40 per cent of the global total. From the comparatively shabby three-storey building in Paris where I work (L’Oréal’s headquarters are next door), SI employs more than three thousand staff to provide water and sanitation in at least 25 countries. Its annual turnover is almost $200 million but it relies on state-funded, project-by-project allocations, rarely for periods of more than two years, nearly half of which are disbursed by Washington.

On 9 February, two branches of the Muna family’s bookshops in East Jerusalem were ransacked by Israeli police. They entered in civilian clothes, used Google Translate to decipher the titles of the English language books and confiscated box loads, picking out in particular any with a Palestinian flag on the cover. CCTV images show black bin bags being filled with books to be used as evidence against the Munas. The police arrested both Mahmoud (in front of his eleven-year-old daughter, Leila) and his nephew Ahmad, and took them to the notorious Moscobiyya interrogation centre in West Jerusalem.

‘Being pretty is a major disaster for women,’ Diana Melly once told a friend, and beauty certainly had a hand in her destiny that she spent a lifetime resisting.

When Iman shows his wife, Najmeh, his new gun, it comes with the news that he’s been promoted to the post of investigating prosecutor in Iran’s judiciary. He needs the gun for security, he says. Yet he’s also proud of the power his masters have given him. Or have they really taken it away? The moment comes early in Mohammad Rasoulof’s new film, The Seed of the Sacred Fig.

Donald Trump recently deported a planeload of 88 Brazilians, who arrived with cuts and bruises after being handcuffed, beaten and denied food and water during the flight from Louisiana. The plane had trouble with its engines and air-conditioning, and was forced to make unscheduled stops in Panama and Manaus, where the deportees were transferred to a Brazilian air force plane for the last leg to Belo Horizonte.

Last month, my sister, her husband and their three children returned to their damaged flat in northern Gaza after enduring almost thirteen months of forced displacement. My sister said that her four-year-old son struggles to walk on tiles and nearly fell while using the unfamiliar stairs. Since May 2024 they had been living in a tent, which provided little protection against intense heat, cold or heavy rains. One day they were flooded. At other times they faced severe food shortages. None of this stopped them setting up a school at the camp.

We ask a lot of some very small fish. Single species are relied on to save entire ecosystems.