The anthropologist Margaret Mead was just over five feet tall and had to stand on a suitcase to be seen above the lectern when she delivered her 1967 keynote address to the President’s Committee on Employment of the Handicapped (now the Office of Disability Employment Policy) in Washington DC. Mead began her lecture by referring to archaeologists’ observations of a healed fracture in an ancient human skeleton, noting that this is the point in hominid evolution at which ‘we know we are approaching what we regard as true humanity.’ It takes time and respite for bones to heal; a body that lived beyond a break is evidence of people taking on extra burdens to feed and tend those who were ill or disabled. In a Green Paper published earlier this week, the Labour Party unveiled its plans to cut five billion pounds from the budget for health and disability benefits.
A house in Deir al-Balah destroyed by an Israeli bombardment. Photo © AP / Abdel Kareem Hana
I woke up yesterday morning to a message from a friend in Karachi. It just said: ‘They’ve started again.’ I did not wonder who ‘they’ were. He could only have been referring to Israel. And I knew what they must have started again: mass killing in Gaza. The fact that he had sent me a message meant the bombing had to be much heavier than it had been for the weeks since the 20 January ceasefire. I sent a message to my friend Marwa in Gaza to see if she was OK. ‘Hamdulillah we are fine.’ Only then did I check the news.
On 1 November 2024, a concrete canopy collapsed at the renovated railway station in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second city, killing fifteen people and severely injuring two more. Three weeks later, as students and academics at Belgrade’s Faculty of Dramatic Arts held a silent vigil for the victims, they were attacked by a group of masked men. Last week I spoke with Vanja Šević, a 22-year-old graduate student at the university. ‘The response has been way bigger than we thought,’ she told me. ‘It is a fight for justice. The message is that we can’t tolerate this any more.’
In the spring of 1942 Dr Lennox Johnston, a Merseyside GP, took the train to London, intending to pluck Winston Churchill’s cigar from his lips and stamp it out. The anti-smoking campaigner, frustrated by his failure to convince the medical establishment to take his cause seriously, felt that a strong public protest was needed. Arriving in the capital he first paid a visit to Sylvia Pankhurst for advice about being arrested, finding her ‘both intrigued and approving of his project’.
It would be a mistake to see the attempt to deport Mahmoud Khalil for his political views in relation to Palestine as an authoritarian aberration on the part of the Trump administration. In reality, it marks the latest episode in a long-running saga of state repression of political speech in support of Palestinian rights on both sides of the Atlantic.
Nigeria already struggles with inadequate healthcare funding. This year’s budget allocates only 5.18 per cent of the total (2.48 trillion naira) to health – which is up from 1.23 trillion naira last year but still far below the 15 per cent target set by the Abuja Declaration in 2001. Without USAID, an already fragile system is weakened. This crisis forces a cruel reckoning: what happens when a nation accustomed to foreign aid is left to fend for itself? The abrupt withdrawal has revived debates among development economists. Critics argue that foreign aid fosters dependency and corruption, enriching elites while leaving ordinary citizens in poverty.
‘Man in the Snow’ (2012) from ‘The Principles of Uncertainty’ by Maira Kalman
Schneewittchen, a film by Stanley Schtinter based on a text by Robert Walser, opens with a shot of a man in black lying in a field of snow, supine, one arm thrown out. The scene emulates photographs taken on Christmas Day 1956, when Walser left the asylum where he had spent 23 years to go for a walk, never to return. The images have inspired many reconstructions. The one in Schneewittchen has the director playing the writer. Not everyone who came to the film’s UK premiere at the BFI last month realised that Schtinter was in it.