Since Palestine Action was proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the UK government last month, more than seven hundred people have been arrested on suspicion of supporting the group. On Sunday, hundreds of demonstrators gathered in front of Belfast City Hall to ‘Defend the Right to Protest’. At a previous protest in Belfast, on 9 August, 74-year-old Máire Mhic an Fhailí was arrested for wearing a Palestine Action T-shirt. She’d given the police her name and address in Irish and been told she had to give them in English (she didn’t). An attendee who’d given his details in English received a caution. The 2022 Language Act gives Irish theoretical parity with English in Northern Ireland; the Police Service of Northern Ireland is supposedly non-sectarian, unlike the Royal Ulster Constabulary it replaced in 2001. But Palestine solidarity is strong in Belfast in part because Catholics and Irish-speakers are still marginalised.
From the sieges within the siege, Palestinian journalists are smeared as terrorists and assassinated by airstrike. Even when their reports reach Western media, Palestinian journalists are systematically denied the right to be credible and authoritative about the fact of the genocide they face. Palestinians must be verified.
Since the disputed elections of October 2024, protesters have gathered daily in front of the Georgian parliament building on Rustaveli Avenue in central Tbilisi. These days they wear creative face coverings: costume masks, broad-brimmed hats, lace bandeaux, disposable Covid masks and sunglasses. Joining the protests now carries a steep price. Facial recognition technology has led to fines for ‘blocking the street’ of up to five thousand laris, about £1350. Hundreds of people have been arrested and are awaiting trial for ‘organising, leading or participating in collective violence’ or, sometimes, ‘assaulting a police officer’. They could spend the next couple of years in prison.
In the West Papuan regency of Merauke, close to the border with Papua New Guinea, Indonesia is rapidly clearing land in the world’s largest ever deforestation project: three million hectares for sugarcane and rice production. Within three years, Indonesia plans to convert an expanse of forest roughly the size of Belgium into profitable monoculture. The ambition and destructiveness of the development distinguish it from previous mining or agribusiness initiatives in West Papua, which has been under Indonesian occupation since the 1960s.
Trump insists that the whole Epstein affair is a ‘hoax’ and that his own followers are ‘stupid’ and ‘weaklings’. Their reaction has been intense and swift, since Trump now sounds like the elitists who disparage them – elitists like Hillary Clinton, who called them ‘a basket of deplorables’. Trump scoffs at their complaints, noting that his supporters have nowhere else to go.
The main component of cigarette filters is a plastic, cellulose acetate, and trillions of butts are discarded into the environment every year, making them the most common single item of plastic pollution. Each filter contains more than twelve thousand strands of cellulose acetate, which break down into microfibres and particles. Toxic chemicals from discarded cigarette butts, including nicotine, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and heavy metals leach out, polluting rivers and seas and harming vertebrates, invertebrates, micro-organisms and plants. There is no possible mitigation strategy for plastic waste from tobacco products. Clean up programmes, a form of greenwashing for the tobacco industry, collect only a trivial proportion of the trillions of discarded butts. The material is too toxic to be reused or recycled. In any case, cigarette filters are a fraudulent product, providing no protection to people who smoke, while giving the false impression that they are doing something to reduce the risk.
Why is the London Review of Books putting out records? We liked the idea of marking the paper’s 45th anniversary with a series of 45 rpm vinyl singles, and drawing on our rich archive of poems made sense (LPs of readings by Dylan Thomas or Stevie Smith used to sell by the bucketload). But which poems? There are thousands of contenders. A seven-inch record has space for about eleven minutes of spoken word, which is more than you get with music: the bass requires deeper and therefore wider grooves. Happily, this equates to a long-ish poem – the kind that takes up a whole page or even a double-page spread in the LRB – being read in full.