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.
‘Soften up hard lad’ by Corbin Shaw
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.