The Trump court is a royal progress that moves between Palm Beach and the White House, for the most part in private planes. But the interests of the US government require that at least some of its members be willing to travel farther afield than Florida. Trump talks of putting the US economy behind a great tariff wall, but he also wants deals, which means he needs dealers. America’s official chief diplomat is the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, but so far his activities have been fairly limited. Instead, the role of principal US emissary is currently filled by the unlikely figure of the property developer Steve Witkoff.
Ain Anger as Dosifei and members of the Slovak Philharmonic Choir as Old Believers in Simon McBurney’s production of Mussorgsky’s ‘Khovanshchina’, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, at the Salzburg Easter Festival in April 2025. Photo © Inés Bacher
Mussorgsky’s alcoholism caught up with him before he could finish Khovanshchina. At the time of his death in 1881 he had completed a piano score but hadn’t begun the orchestration. He was also still working out the final act, where, after Golitsyn is exiled and Khovansky is killed, the Old Believers opt for martyrdom by self-immolation in protest against the tsar.
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.’