On 8 January I sent a video of the protests in Iran to a friend in England. Then the internet went dark. Reza Pahlavi – the son of the late shah, now living in the US – had called for people to come out into the streets at 8 p.m., in response to the catastrophic economic situation and the strikes that had begun in the bazaars a week earlier.
I live on the top floor of a block of flats in western Tehran. I turned off the lights and watched the city below. It was slowly changing shape. Shops were closing. People were running through the streets. My phone rang. It was a friend. ‘We’re going to Qeytarieh Square,’ he said. ‘Come with us.’
In the wreckage of the neoliberal order they once championed, there are a number of paths available to Europe’s social democrats. Keir Starmer’s Labour has chosen one: a hawkish fiscal policy combined with rearmament, moderate improvements in employment rights and a shift to the extreme right on migration. Labour has consolidated the UK’s harsh border regime while modestly raising the minimum wage, continuing austerity in many areas and insisting on the private ownership of water. Whether you call this ‘national renewal’, as Starmer does, or Blairism without the progressivism or the money, support for it now sits at around 20 per cent in the polls.
An ice stupa for water storage in a Ladakh village (Andrew Gasson/Alamy)
On 10 September 2025, the environmental activist and community leader Sonam Wangchuk began a 35-day hunger strike, along with fourteen other people, in protest at the collapse of talks between Ladakh and Delhi. On 24 September, as the hunger strikers’ conditions were worsening, demonstrators took to the streets. A group entered a BJP building in Leh and set it on fire. The central government cut off mobile data, imposed a curfew and banned public gatherings. Four protesters were killed with live rounds. Wangchuk, who had appealed for calm, was arrested on 26 September and taken 1300 kilometres from Leh to Jodhpur.
The Syrian government’s effort to take full control of the north-east clearly has the approval of the United States. After meeting with al-Sharaa and the Syrian Democratic Forces commander, Mazloum Abdi, the US special envoy to Syria (and ambassador to Turkey), Tom Barrack, said the SDF had outlived its usefulness. Its future, he said, ‘lies in the post-Assad transition under the new government led by President Ahmed al-Sharaa’.
The World Economic Forum in Davos is ending with talk of a rupture in world affairs, a collapse of international law, a descent into chaos and the rise of a new global order in which bullies rule like kings. This must all sound extremely odd to the Indigenous people of Canada, America, Australia or Greenland, for whom that old order meant only catastrophe.
The destruction of Palestinian lives is now a base line in a holding pattern. The ferocious white heat of the past two years of unrelenting attacks has receded from view, but the genocide continues. There is far less coverage on social media, where my accounts are instead filled with requests for aid.
Chimpanzees, New Caledonian crows – and now cows. The list of animals that use tools grew a little longer this week, with a paper in Current Biology reporting that an Austrian cow called Veronika uses a broom to scratch herself. Appealing to tool use as a defining feature of humanity has always been a shaky argument, though a curiously persistent one.