With public university students (including those I teach at the Universidad Nacional in Medellín) and young people in the lead, Colombia’s vibrant, diverse and terrorised social movements have all come out at once, which does not imply programmatic unity. The geographic scope of the mobilisation has been as impressive as its sectoral breadth, and the demands are widely divergent.
Last weekend, Premier League sides, media organisations, and sporting and political figures adhered to a social media boycott held to recognise the failure of sites such as Twitter and Facebook to tackle racism in football. From Friday to Monday, only a handful of organisations didn’t go along with the idea. One journalist was clearly sticking to the boycott until the news broke about Manchester United fans protesting against the Glazer family’s ownership of their club, causing their game against Liverpool to be postponed, at which point the journalist returned to Twitter to cover it, highlighting the inanity of the whole performance.
Ed Harriman, who has died at the age of 77, wrote half a dozen pieces for the London Review between 2004 and 2007, reporting on the waste and corruption that followed the US-led invasion of Iraq. An award-winning documentary film-maker as well as a print journalist, who had worked for Granada TV’s World in Action during the 1980s and Channel 4’s Dispatches since 1991, he went to the Middle East in 2003 to make Secrets of the Iraq War for ITV. His previous films included investigations of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, of the mismanagement of nuclear waste by both the US and Russia, the handover of Hong Kong, and new houses in Britain built on contaminated land.
The TRIPS Agreement came into effect in 1995 as part of a broad new suite of trade agreements resulting from the Uruguay Round of multilateral negotiations that led to the creation of the WTO. The agreements were treated as a ‘single undertaking’. States had to sign up to all of them if they wanted to join the new organisation. On its own, the TRIPS Agreement was a strikingly bad deal for most states, especially in relation to the expanded patent regime it established.
Bill and Melinda Gates have asked for privacy after their divorce announcement, but a storm of attention seems more likely. Interest in their marital arrangements isn’t merely prurient. They are public figures and their personal lives have political ramifications. The urgent question in global health circles is what will happen to their powerhouse foundation in the wake of their split. Large amounts of funding hang in the balance.
A man in New Delhi rolls an oxygen cylinder after waiting more than eight hours for it to be refilled. Photograph © Ishan Tankha
A tanker carrying medical oxygen from the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand to central Madhya Pradhesh was halted after it crossed the border into Uttar Pradesh on 25 April. India registered more than 350,000 new Covid-19 cases that day. The vehicle was on a tight deadline; patients on ventilators were urgently awaiting its arrival. The driver alleges that police commandeered the tanker at Varanasi and took it further off course into the state, to Jhansi. When the oxygen did not arrive at Sagar as scheduled, state chief ministers got involved. The UP government reluctantly parted with the tanker, but has since denied the incident ever took place. As India is overwhelmed by a second wave of the virus, the country has run out of oxygen.
Part of the trouble is the idea that trees are just wood, wood is carbon, and carbon is fungible. Most of the wood pellets burned in the UK are imported from Canada and the United States, where mature forests which underwrite vast, complex ecosystems are being felled to meet the growing European demand for ‘renewable’ energy. The official line is that pellets are made from offcuts from the timber industry, but scientists and environmentalists report that trees are being felled to go straight to biomass.