The tin cup is empty, and the ass has gone under. Joe Biden’s political career is over, and he had to do it by autocoup. His two most trusted aides came to him at Rehoboth Beach and told him from a distance – because he has Covid – that he no longer had a path to victory. The money had dried up, he was trailing in all the usual swing states, and even in states the Democrats usually win without spending much money, like Virginia and New Mexico. The next day he posted his resignation letter to X (formerly Twitter) and followed it up with an endorsement of his vice president. Oh, yeah, c’mon, man, keep her around. So came to an end a month of blather about the way Biden had become King Lear. The final reckoning was less like Julius Caesar than like sending the president to the self-checkout till at Tesco to pay for his own hemlock.
The streets around the Seine have gone silent: restaurants are almost empty; there are only a few people walking along the footpaths; bike traffic is practically non-existent; the odd car and motorcycle goes through, still stopping at red lights, even though the way’s clear. This is the ‘grey zone’, a restricted area set up by the Paris préfecture to secure the river before the Olympic Games opening ceremony today.
In the early days of the war, I came across a photo of an orphanage in Gaza City, mainly for children with disabilities. Searching for more information online, I found a GoFundMe page from a few years ago: a British man was running a marathon in support of the Mubarat al-Rahma orphanage, which seemed to be the same place. I sent a message via GoFundMe and heard back a couple of weeks later – the man and his wife have been supporting the orphanage for years, and still are. They introduced me to Hazem al-Naizi, who manages it, looking after twenty children. Hazem and his wife also have five children of their own.
Sitting in a road is annoying; being late to a job interview is inconvenient; missing a funeral is upsetting. But the mass displacement of people, the failure of crops, the loss of entire species: these are rationalised as ‘externalities’, or ignored, or imagined as a distant prospect that will somehow be averted with capitalist ingenuity. The imprisonment of those who are trying to shake us out of this denial is discombobulating.
My sleep is broken by a terrifying thud. I leap out of bed to the sound of another one. The sirens wail. I fling open the door to my room and bolt out, calling for my father. He is hurrying from his study to the shelter. I yank open the door and we scramble inside. We strain to listen. A third rocket hits. It’s a sickening sound, difficult to describe. The sound of impact between a rocket and the earth. A boom that sometimes feels like it’s down the road. The people in Gaza, I think, have no warning and nowhere to hide.
We wouldn’t want ‘people to think we were “afraid” of its existence’, Carlos Eduardo Machado, of the Portuguese secret police, wrote in a report on the literary journal Mensagem in the 1960s.
The days leading up to the final were worrisome. If we lost, would everyone lose the plot? If we won, would everyone lose the plot? The BBC shared footage of a bus en route to Bellingham being mobbed in celebration of Jude Bellingham. Keir Starmer hinted at a bank holiday if England won. The Coldstream Guards played ‘Three Lions’ at Buckingham Palace. The king encouraged the players ‘to secure victory before the need for any last minute wonder-goals or another penalties drama’.
By shifting the focus of public debate away from the housing crisis and towards immigration – or by presenting the housing crisis as the consequence of immigration, which amounts to the same thing – Ireland’s far right has performed a valuable service for the government parties.
Bolivia is known for having experienced frequent coups throughout most of its history, and some have been brief and/or bizarre, but last month’s may have set a new record. On Wednesday, 26 June, General Juan José Zúñiga, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Bolivian Army, drove up to Plaza Murillo in La Paz with six tanks. He smashed his way into the Palacio Quemado (the former seat of government) through a metal door, made phone calls to the political opposition and the military, and demanded the release of Jeanine Áñez and Luis Fernando Camacho, both currently imprisoned for plotting the coup of 2019.
Corbin Shaw’s work draws on the history of flag-waving and textiles in football. Now based in East London, he was born and grew up in a South Yorkshire ex-mining town. He began making flags after the death by suicide of his father’s longtime friend and companion on the terraces. The first one was a parody of a Sheffield United banner that instead of ‘we hate Wednesday’ said ‘we should talk about our feelings.’ He’s made versions of the St George’s Cross with slogans like ‘I’m never going to be one of the lads,’ ‘God save the queers’ and ‘Soften up hard lad.’ Shaw collaborated with Women’s Aid during the 2022 World Cup to highlight the rise of domestic abuse during football tournaments.
Relief, renewed anxiety, several surprises. These are the mixed feelings of a country that voted down the Rassemblement National on Sunday. As the blog’s unreliable narrator on France, I’ve presented readers with poll predictions in earlier posts that turned out to be wide of the mark. That Marine Le Pen’s party would come in third, as it has, behind the Nouveau Front Populaire and Macron’s Ensemble alliance, was a long shot. Turnout in both rounds of voting was about 66 per cent, the highest since President Chirac dissolved the National Assembly in 1997. High turnouts were said by some pollsters to favour the RN, but it wasn’t the case.
One of the pieces in the recent retrospective of Barbara Kruger’s work at the Serpentine Gallery is an image of a woman’s divided face, with the slogan ‘your body is a battleground’ taped across it in red. Since October, women’s bodies have been blasted across the killing fields of Gaza and trapped under its rubble.
Sudan’s humanitarian crisis is, by numbers, the biggest in the world. Sudan’s population is 48 million, of whom more than 25 million are facing ‘high levels of acute food insecurity’.
Recognising the role of moral luck encourages empathy and humility, but it also threatens the notions of culpability that help us to make sense of evil. Luke Holland died in 2020, a few months before the release of Final Account. Watching it again I could not find my way to thinking: ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’ I was, and remain, quite sure that I wouldn’t have been a Nazi.
Across both campaigns, I found the swell of anger at the Tories undercut with disenchantment with Labour: ‘two sides of the same rusty coin’, Mohamad called them. ‘They are not reliable’, a 22-year-old teacher in Ilford said. ‘They are not true to their word.’
Growing numbers of Democrats have called for Biden to step aside, but for the moment this does not seem likely. Meanwhile, it is worth pausing to ask how it came about that Biden is able to hold the party hostage, especially in the face of what it repeatedly defines as a quasi-fascist threat.
For years, in round after round of elections, the far right have been treated by French public broadcasters as dangerous animals, caged by skilful moderators and prodded through the bars by political opponents. But it may no longer matter. Le Pen’s party now has a wealthy patron who has let it loose in his vast private media domain, where it roams at leisure as his favourite charismatic species.
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