Narges Mohammadi, who was jailed in November 2021 and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2023, was punched in the chest by an Evin guard during a protest in August 2024. She was released on medical leave a few months later, though forbidden from leaving Iran or seeing her twin children. She was detained again last week at a memorial for Khosrow Alikordi, a human rights lawyer, who was found dead in his office. ‘The only machine that’s working for the regime is repression,’ she told me a few weeks ago.
I enrolled at the Islamic University of Gaza in 2022. As I started my second year, I hoped I would do well enough to get a scholarship to spend the second semester as an exchange student at a university abroad. A few weeks later war broke out. Everything in Gaza came to a halt; education was suspended at all institutions. We began to live from one day to the next, never knowing what the next day would bring. With the borders closed, the only way to leave Gaza was by paying a fixer $5000 or more per person, an impossible amount for my family. Our home was destroyed. We moved into a tent in a camp where I knew no one.
Police violence against demonstrators isn’t new. What is distinct in the Palestine case, however, is the consistent and cumulative use of almost weekly violence for more than two years, in service of a cause central to the German state. The Berlin government has repeatedly shown its willingness to break the law to suppress Palestine activism.
The picket line outside the British Library, 8 December 2025 (Anna Aslanyan)
On Monday morning, more than a hundred people formed a picket line outside one of the entrances to the British Library’s St Pancras building. ‘We’ve got a library with no books, no readers, no digital content, no front-facing staff and absolutely no clue!’
In its open aggression and territoriality, Trump’s second National Security Strategy is less duplicitous about US actions around the world than past official documents. But there is plenty of dissembling. Trump’s government, which has bombed Iran, conducted drone assassinations in northern Syria, bombed Yemen and waged a global trade war is said to have a ‘predisposition to non-interventionism’.
A man walks past the Christmas billboard in Kingston upon Thames, 19 November 2025 (Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty)
Above Côte Brasserie in Kingston upon Thames, overlooking its Riverside Walk, there was for a week in mid-November a very long billboard depicting crowds in sackcloth and red hats trimmed in white, wading across water towards us. Yuletide synapses fired first: here was a Victorian Christmas card rerun of a Renaissance nativity painting, snow-covered fields in the distance, past-times rural types massed up front. Happy shopping! Except: that was a really big crowd. And a lot of stables. Look closer, and the smiles were smudged and strange, more feral than festive.
England doesn’t know how to say: ‘No Kings.’ Instead, it says: ‘Not this one, but perhaps his brother or his son.’ All Windsor crises, from the Abdication through Diana to this Andrew disaster, have been about personal morality – ironically revealing how much faith remains in the monarch as an ethical role model. But it isn’t the monarchs who are the British problem. It’s monarchism: the archaic top-down power structure of the Anglo-British state. In 1689, absolutism was stripped from the crown and transferred to Parliament, which today means the cabinet. The principle of parliamentary sovereignty is monarchism thinly disguised: government by supreme authority, with certain liberties allowed to trickle downwards.