Colombia produced a record 2600 tons of cocaine in 2023 and at least a third of it passed through Ecuador – probably more. The Calabrian ’Ndrangheta long monopolised shipments to Europe via West Africa, but called on Albanian gangs to help move the increased volume through Guayaquil; the Albanians doubled the size of the loads and took over wholesaling in Rotterdam, Antwerp, Hamburg and Spanish port cities. Since 2021 there has been a sharp spike in the numbers of Albanian ‘businessmen’ operating in Ecuador along with an increase of banana shipments to Albania. In Guayaquil, homicide grew by a factor of ten in less than a decade.
Jack (Dylan Llewellyn) and Danny (Jon Pointing) in Jack Rooke’s ‘Big Boys’.
The Queen Mary University of London branch of the University and College Union, of which I am co-chair, hosts a webpage, UK HE shrinking, that lists redundancy and closure programmes at UK universities. The list, now 93 institutions long, is the only public attempt so far to track what is happening to higher education institutions in the UK. It is an index of a sector in freefall.
A Wound with Teeth, the first half of the choreographer Holly Blakey’s recent double bill at the Southbank Centre, reminded me of some of Paula Rego’s busiest paintings. It seems to come from the same dreamscape: deconstructed fairy tale costumes, densely arrayed symbolism, a certain shagginess of expression, animal heads, predatory gender relations (going both ways), triumphant victims, grotesque sexuality, maximalism, a powerful sense of mischief, an elaborate, multi-perspectival choreography of confrontations, subplots and cursed couplings.
If the British government is to be believed, only one civilian has been killed by its armed forces during its air war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. As part of the US-led Operation Inherent Resolve, Britain has dropped more than 4300 bombs on Iraq and Syria since 2014, many of them in densely populated urban centres, and claims to have killed more than four thousand IS fighters. The US admits that the coalition has killed at least 1437 civilians, though the likely toll is far higher. Airwars, a British civilian casualty research organisation, puts the number between eight and thirteen thousand.
Dina Khaled Zaurub, a 22-year-old artist killed by an Israeli airstrike on 12 April. Photo © Dina Khaled / Facebook
I asked Raji Sourani of the Palestine Centre for Human Rights if it was true that Gazans can hear the difference between a British drone and other drones. ‘Hear the difference?’ he replied. ‘You can read the writing on them.’
Towards the end of February, Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan accused the Senate president, Godswill Akpabio, the third most powerful man in Nigeria, of sexual harassment. According to Akpoti-Uduaghan, in December 2023, on a visit to the Senate president’s house, Akpabio held her hand while giving her a tour, her husband walking behind them. In one of the mansion’s many sitting rooms, she says, he asked her if she liked his house and told her: ‘I’m going to create time for us to come spend quality moments here. You will enjoy it.’ In a second incident, Akpoti-Uduaghan says that Akpabio told her a motion she put forward would appear before the Senate if she ‘took care of him’.
Mario Vargas Llosa has died at the age of 89. In a recent issue of the London Review, Tony Wood wrote about the Peruvian novelist’s trip to Moscow in 1968, when his disenchantment with socialism began (or so he later claimed).