Rishi Sunak visiting the Titanic Quarter in Belfast, 24 May 2024. Photo © Stefan Rousseau / PA Images / Alamy
It is difficult to explain Sunak’s choice. He can hardly have missed that the polling average puts the Tories twenty points behind Labour. Recent economic good news is abstract compared to the enduringly high cost of virtually everything. The prime minister is not a man overburdened with charisma. The Conservatives’ chief electoral strategist has stressed the ‘enthusiasm gap’ for Labour. But it takes some elaborate self-deception to read that voters despise you more than they like the other guy and take it as good news. Sunak must know he is going to lose. Perhaps he just wants it all to be over.
Last Saturday, 25 May, was Resistance and Liberation Day in Lebanon. It commemorates the date when the south of the country was freed from Israeli occupation in 2000. The Israeli army had entered Lebanon in June 1982 in pursuit of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, reaching as far north as Beirut, and had retreated to the south by 1985, where it remained for fifteen years until it was forced out by Hizbullah fighters. There was no celebration this year. The strip of formerly occupied villages has been heavily bombed since October. Most of the residents have left.
The coincidence of the centenary of Kafka’s death, on 3 June, and the publication of the first complete, uncensored English translation of his diaries a month before, is less straightforward than it seems. There are more obvious texts through which to tell the story of his last days.
The ANC’s rising clout in the Global South recalls its glory days as a national liberation movement. Its abysmal domestic record, however, indicates a common post-colonial quandary: how to transition successfully from protest to power. Despite South Africans’ flair for exceptionalism, this is not the only place in the world where erstwhile liberators, once they’re tasked with ruling, become as loathed as the former oppressors. The question that will begin to be answered after tomorrow is what might come after national liberation.
‘Lots of clubs claim to be “safe spaces”,’ I was told by Anton Nazarko, the co-founder of Some People in Kharkiv, ‘but ours is probably the only one in the world that actually is.’ He was joking, but also not. The dancefloor is below ground level, with fireproof doors that have been there since the building was a refrigerator factory. This means that it could theoretically act as a shelter from the Russian missiles being fired at the city. The club, which also acts as a theatre, cinema and art gallery, was founded last summer, a year after the Russians were expelled from the Kharkiv region and the city was granted a brief respite from Russian attacks.
When a building under construction collapsed in George, South Africa, last week, dozens of workers were buried beneath the rubble. Delvin Safers, an electrician, was trapped next to a colleague who was ‘already deceased’. His girlfriend sent him photographs of their two-year-old son to keep his spirits up. Without the light from his phone, everything was dark. That was the hardest part of it, Safers said. ‘When you close your eyes, it is dark, then you open them, it is the same thing.’ He was freed after a couple of days, with the use of his legs. ‘That was the main thing,’ his father said, ‘when I saw my son walk.’ His life was saved thanks to the large teams of rescue workers with hard hats, sniffer dogs, cranes, bulldozers and trucks who came to his rescue.
In Gaza more than ten thousand people are trapped under the rubble, according to the United Nations.
According to one influential view, crimes against humanity can and must be prosecuted irrespective of national borders: at the Nuremberg trials, the American prosecutor, Robert Jackson, declared that ‘the real complaining party at your bar is civilisation’.