‘Can’t you ping elsewhere?’ The question, daubed on the twelve-foot green fences encircling much of Brockwell Park in South London, has long been on the minds of local residents. For months, the park has been the subject of a battle over urban public space and culture. Austerity is driving it. Facing a large budget deficit, Lambeth Council is expected to cut local services by £99 million over the next two years. To boost its income, the council has been renting out Brockwell Park to Summer Events Ltd (which operates under the brand name Brockwell Live) since 2018. Between 23 May and 8 June this year, the park hosted five festivals – Wide Awake, Field Day, Cross The Tracks, City Splash and Mighty Hoopla, followed by the non-commercial Lambeth Country Show. As well as the direct revenue, the events boost trade for local pubs and music venues.
Israel’s codename for its attack on Iran, launched last Friday, was Operation Rising Lion, a pointed reference to the pre-1979 Iranian national flag, a lion before a rising sun. Israel and the US seem to hope that they can shatter the Iranian state and induce civil unrest. This is an attempt at regime change, or regime destruction, poorly disguised as an anti-nuclear operation.
Alejandro Éder, the mayor of Cali, asked last week when Colombia had gone back to 1989. On Saturday, 7 June, in Bogotá, a fourteen-year-old had shot Miguel Uribe Turbay, a senator and potential candidate for the presidency, in the head and chest. (It was apparently a contract hit: the boy had been offered $5000.) There were candlelit vigils throughout the country. Uribe Turbay, whose mother was kidnapped and murdered by Pablo Escobar in 1991, is in stable condition after surgery.
The late Brian Wilson recording ‘Pet Sounds’ in Los Angeles, California in 1966 (Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images).
Junction 15 of the M25 may not be the first place that comes to mind when you think of escapism, but for me as a child in the late 1980s, joining the M4 was crossing a watershed. We visited my grandparents in Wales every summer, and not only did leaving the London Orbital mean we were properly on our way, it was also the point at which I was allowed to ask for music to be played. I always asked for The Best of the Beach Boys. (No one objected: my father had loved the Beach Boys since the 1960s, even before his older brother moved to the US.) Their songs weren’t just the soundtrack to a car journey to Wales, but a gateway to an America of the mind.
Nathan Fielder loves an elaborate plan. In the TV show that made his name, Nathan for You, the Canadian satirist played an exaggerated version of himself – affectless, sexless, awkward yet oddly confident – who offered terrible advice to real-life business owners. He meets a restaurateur, for instance, who is struggling to get permission to sell his chili con carne inside a nearby hockey stadium. Fielder ‘helps’ him by inventing a heat-resistant body suit that he fills with the chili, smuggling it into a game and dispensing it through hidden tubes; in a subplot, he tricks a doctor into thinking that he has a pacemaker to get a medical exemption that allows him through the stadium’s metal detectors.
Protesters in front of police in downtown Los Angeles, 9 June 2025. (AP/Eric Thayer/Alamy)
The protests that broke out last weekend in Los Angeles are at once an autonomous phenomenon and a continuation of the George Floyd rebellion of 2020 and the student-led campaign against the war on Gaza. They have been met with no longer shocking displays of state violence, including the arrival of the National Guard and seven hundred marines. Protesters have been gassed, shot in the head with ‘less lethal’ munitions, beaten, trampled with horses, hit by cars and taken into custody.
Marie Nejar died last month at the age of 95. As far as the Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland (ISD) is aware, she was the last Black survivor of Nazi Germany. She was born in Mülheim an der Ruhr in 1930. Her mother, Cécile Nejar, was a musician who performed on Hamburg’s Reeperbahn. Her father, Albert Yessow, was a Ghanaian seafarer working aboard the Victoria.