Lander, also the city’s comptroller, was ‘arrested for assaulting law enforcement’, says DHS
Brad Lander, New York City’s comptroller and a mayoral candidate, was arrested by masked federal agents while visiting an immigration court and accompanying a person out of a courtroom.
In a statement to the Guardian, assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin from the Department of Homeland Security said Lander “was arrested for assaulting law enforcement and impeding a federal officer”.
As Farhad* and his friends left Tehran, they had plenty of time to survey the destruction. Smoke billowed from rooftops and flames flickered behind them as they inched their way through miles-long traffic to escape Israel’s bombardment of Iran’s capital city.
Despite leaving early on Tuesday morning, it took Farhad six hours to reach his ancestral village, a journey that usually would take no more than two-and-a-half hours.
As Palestinians starve amid the rubble, western governments defend Israel, fund armed aid and dismantle the very rules they claim to uphold
Gaza’s cries have been drowned out by Israel’s strikes on Iran, and the diplomatic pressure on Benjamin Netanyahu over the suffering has ebbed. Yet as the industrialised world urges de-escalation in the Middle East, the devastation continues. On Tuesday morning, witnesses described Israeli forces firing towards a crowd waiting for trucks loaded with flour, leaving more than 50 dead. These are not stray bullets in wartime chaos, they are the outcome of a system that makes relief deadly.
As Médecins Sans Frontières declared this week, what is unfolding in Gaza is “the calculated evisceration of the very systems that sustain life”. That includes homes, markets, water networks and hospitals – with healthcare continually under attack. Last week, a UN commission found that more than 90% of the Gaza Strip’s schools and universities have been damaged or destroyed by Israeli forces using airstrikes, burning, shelling and controlled demolitions. What’s happening is not the collateral damage of military necessity, it is a programme of civic annihilation.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
The UK still has ways to press for the release of the British-Egyptian writer and bring an end to the hunger strike endangering his mother’s life
Last month, Sir Keir Starmer promised to do “everything I possibly can” to free Egypt’s highest profile political prisoner, Alaa Abd el-Fattah. A few months earlier, the foreign secretary had described the case of the British-Egyptian writer and campaigner as the “number one issue”. In opposition, David Lammy had joined a protest in Mr Abd el-Fattah’s support outside the Foreign Office and demanded serious diplomatic consequences for Cairo if no progress was made.
Progress has not been made and time is running out. Arbitrary detention has stolen almost a decade of Mr Abd el-Fattah’s life, while that of his remarkable mother, Laila Soueif, may be drawing to its close. As of Tuesday, the 69-year-old, who lives in London, had not eaten for 261 days, as she demands her son’s release. After taking 300-calorie liquid supplements for a short period, she returned to a full hunger strike almost a month ago and has been hospitalised since the end of May. In Egypt, Mr Abd el-Fattah has been on hunger strike for more than 100 days.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
Royal Ascot’s uncanny ability to deliver performances to suit the occasion was to the fore once again on Tuesday as Field Of Gold, the odds-on favourite, overwhelmed his rivals in the St James’s Palace Stakes with a sustained burst of speed a quarter of a mile out that put the result beyond doubt well before the furlong pole. If there is a better performance over a mile by a three-year-old later on in the season, it feels long odds-on that Field Of Gold will be the horse to produce it.
John & Thady Gosden’s grey colt was one of three Classic winners in the field, though his winning performance was further evidence that, had Ruling Court not been allowed first run in the 2,000 Guineas at Newmarket, the fast-finishing Field Of Gold would surely have taken that too. Ruling Court was only third here, nearly four lengths behind Henri Matisse, the French 2,000 Guineas winner, who was in turn three and a half adrift of Field Of Gold at the line.
A harrowing new book looks back at a dark period of US history as the Johns committee targeted Black and queer Americans, drawing parallels to what’s happening now
With his second book, Robert W Fieseler casts new light on a dark episode: the years in the 1950s and 60s when the Florida legislative investigation committee, commonly known as the Johns committee, persecuted Black and queer Americans in the name of anti-communist red scare politics.
“The state of Florida has a very poisonous political system,” Fieseler said, promoting a book published as Ron DeSantis sits in the governor’s mansion, whose virulently anti-LGBTQ+ policies had fueled, if briefly, his presidential ambitions.
The actor used to point vaguely to the sky and suggest the government was watching when asked for a photo. Nowadays, that could lead to some very awkward conversations
Sarah Jessica Parker, the Sex and the City star and Booker prize judge, has a nifty trick for getting out of taking selfies with her fans. “I did this for a really, really long time and it worked for ever,” Parker said in an interview with Howard Stern. “I used to say, ‘I can’t, because of the government,’ and I’d do this,” Parker said, pointing up to the sky. “It really confused people. This was through different administrations, so it wasn’t political.”
It is not entirely clear why Parker – who has said she refuses to take selfies and would rather “have a conversation” instead because “it’s much more meaningful” – stopped using this brilliant excuse. But one does have to wonder whether it is because the US has become a nation of conspiracy theorists. Rather than backing away from the weird “the government is watching” woman, perhaps fans started to excitedly engage her with theories about how Bill Gates has implanted us all with mind-controlling microchips. Or maybe she just got tired of the joke. I don’t know. But I’m sure someone out there (the government) does.
Fly-half is determined to enjoy his rugby again after injury-disrupted time in France but his international future remains up in the air
If either call were to come, does Owen Farrell want to go on tour with England or the British & Irish Lions this summer? It is both the question that most intrigues and the one that he steadfastly does not answer following his return to Saracens.
“There’s nothing for me to do other than concentrate on getting myself back here and getting myself in the best place I can and everything else is hypothetical,” is a typical example of his response. There were a number of others in the 20 minutes spent in his company, back at the StoneX Stadium after a torrid season with Racing 92, but all gave little insight into what his reaction might be if Steve Borthwick or his dad, Andy Farrell, wish to call him up for either England’s summer tour of Argentina and the US, or the Lions’ trip to Australia.
Israel international stuck after his wedding last week
Airspace closed to civilian flights due to conflict with Iran
Tottenham remain in regular contact with their winger Manor Solomon over his welfare after the winger was left stranded in Israel as the military conflict with Iran continues.
The 25-year-old Israel international got married to his long-term partner, Dana Voshina, last week but they have not been able to leave after Israeli airspace was closed to civilian flights.
In the two decades before he retired from concert-performances in 2008 at the age of 77, Alfred Brendel was arguably the best known classical pianist in the world. Yet regard for his playing was never by any means universal; what his many admirers found as searching, considered and profound in his interpretations, others heard as colourless and lacking in spontaneity. But Brendel’s lasting popularity is evidenced by his recorded legacy, which is certainly extensive enough for generations to come to make their own assessment of his stature. In a recording career that stretched well over half a century, he made more than 100 albums, which included three complete cycles of the Beethoven sonatas.
As his career burgeoned, Beethoven, and the other great composers of the Austro-German tradition - Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Brahms - were increasingly the focus of Brendel’s recital repertory, but a glance at a chronology of his recordings reveals how wide his musical interests really were. If it is Brendel’s discs of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert that will be treasured above all, there is much else to be discovered among the myriad recordings he left us. The recordings that follow, therefore, are very much a personal choice; another day, it might be entirely different.
In the UK, a new era of pay openness could be about to begin. It is undoubtedly a positive step, but water-cooler discussions could be about to get considerably more messy …
Name: Pay transparency.
Age: Merely a twinkle in government ministers’ eyes.
Program with the defense department is first under the startup’s initiative to put AI to work in governments
The US Department of Defense on Monday awarded OpenAI a $200m contract to put generative artificial intelligence (AI) to work for the US military.
The San Francisco-based company will “develop prototype frontier AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges in both warfighting and enterprise domains”, according to the defense department’s posting of awarded contracts.
Widely regarded as the ‘musicians’ musician’ Brendel was the first pianist to record all of Beethoven’s piano works during a much-garlanded career spanning 60 years
The celebrated pianist and author Alfred Brendel has died aged 94 at his home in London.
The musician was born on 5 January 1931 in Moravia (now part of the Czech Republic) and spent his childhood mainly in Croatia and Austria. “I was not a child prodigy or eastern European or Jewish as far as I know,” he told interviewers. “I’m not a good sight reader, I don’t have a phenomenal memory and I didn’t come from a musical family, an artistic family or an intellectual family. I had loving parents, but I had to find things out for myself.”
‘They come up with weird clauses … it’s just embarrassing’
Red Bull accused Russell of erratic driving in Montreal
The Mercedes team principal, Toto Wolff, has called Red Bull’s protest “petty” and “embarrassing” after George Russell beat the reigning world champion, Max Verstappen, at Sunday’s Canadian Grand Prix.
Red Bull challenged Russell’s victory in Montreal for driving erratically and committing unsportsmanlike conduct behind the safety car, a claim rejected by the stewards. It was the second time they had launched a protest against the Mercedes driver this season after a claim he had failed to slow sufficiently under yellow flags in Miami.
Prime minister outlines plans to penalise countries that refuse to take back refused asylum seekers
The UK will look into penalising countries that refuse to take back people who are refused asylum by making visa applications for their nationals harder, Keir Starmer has said at the G7 summit in Canada.
Asked during a media Q&A about ways to reduce the number of people arriving irregularly, the prime minister said it would have a more “transactional” approach to granting visas for countries depending on their cooperation with returns.
The cherubic sixtysomething stars as a supercool old-school driver returning 30 years after a near-fatal crash to break all the rules of Formula One racing
With that amused-cowpoke face of his squashed into his safety helmet, making his sixtysomething cherubic chops bulge in towards his nose, Brad Pitt gets behind the wheel in this outrageously cheesy but fiercely and extravagantly shot Formula One melodrama. Along with a lot of enjoyable hokum about the old guy mentoring the rookie hothead (a plot it broadly shares with Pixar’s 2006 adventure Cars), F1 the Movie gives you the corporate sheen, real-life race footage with Brad as the star in an unreasonably priced car, the tech fetish of the cars themselves (almost making you forget how amazingly ugly they are) with brand names speckling every square inch of every surface, the simulation graphics writ large, and the bizarre occult spectacle of motor racing itself.
This is a movie which (like Barbie) has been licensed by the brand, with Lewis Hamilton credited as a producer; he gets a stately walk-on and plenty of big names are glimpsed. At one stage, Brad notices Max Verstappen out there on the track: “Damn, he’s good!” he mutters. Oh sure, yes, Max Verstappen is good, but is he a reckless, intuitive risk-taker and old-school motor race romantic who might get himself killed chasing some undefinable something out there on the burning, shimmering tarmac? We may never know.
Metabolic syndrome – popularized by two architects of Maha – is a real health issue, but messaging can take a turn toward scienceploitation
Metabolic syndrome is trending online. On TikTok, thousands of videos dissect the subject, also referred to as metabolic dysfunction or disorder. These often come with claims that healing mitochondria, often called the “powerhouses of cells”, is key to restoring metabolic health.
The concept was popularized by Calley and Casey Means’ bestselling book Good Energy. Some consider the Means siblings – Casey is Donald Trump’s surgeon general pick, and Calley is an entrepreneur and lobbyist – architects of Make America Healthy Again.
Spielbergian twists and an aggressive, deal-oriented alien are among the familiar beats of the Inside Out animator’s latest, about a lonely boy who finds friendship in space
There are some sweet retro-Spielbergian thrills in Pixar’s amiable new family animation, whose release was delayed a year due to the strikes; it also has some touches of Douglas Adams as well as John Lasseter’s Toy Stories. There are co-director credits for Pixar stalwarts Adrian Molina (who was the co-director and co-screenwriter of Coco) and feature first-timer Madeline Sharafian, and Pixar will be hoping for a handsome return here to match the success of its recent box office champ Inside Out 2.
Elio may well indeed do the business. It has charm, likability and that potent ingredient: childhood loneliness and vulnerability. Its opening act is set aboard a military base where an ambitious young officer has postponed or even abandoned her dream of being astronaut to look after her orphaned nephew. But once the film leaves planet Earth and its recognisably real, lump-in-the-throat emotional world and inhabits the goofy multi-voiced arena of space aliens, it loses, for me, a little (though not all) of its charge. There is occasionally something a little formulaic, a bit programmatic and … well … which two letters of the alphabet sum it up?
Keir Starmer said he rushed to pick up papers dropped by Donald Trump at the G7 summit in Canada mainly to avoid anyone else stepping forward to do so and being tackled by the US president’s security team.
Speaking to reporters in Kananaskis a day after Trump fumbled some of the documents about a UK-US trade deal, letting a sheaf of papers tumble to the ground, Starmer said he had little choice but to bend down and help out.
Convicted sex trafficker had been placed in solitary and given medication by prison staff, court filing alleges
Lawyers for R Kelly say in new court documents that the convicted sex trafficker and singer was recently rushed to hospital after medically overdosing in prison.
The 58-year-old reportedly collapsed on Friday at the federal correctional institute in Butner, North Carolina, which specializes in housing sex offenders, and was transported to Duke University hospital.
The rightwing media ecosystem spins up narratives to serve their agendas after tragic events, regardless of accuracy
Tina Smith, a Minnesota senator, confronted Mike Lee, a Utah senator, on Monday to tell him directly that his social media posts fueled ongoing misinformation about a shooting that killed her friend.
Lee’s posts, which advanced conspiracies that a Minnesota assassin was a “Marxist” and blamed the state’s governor for Melissa Hortman’s death, were among many threads of false or speculative claims swirling online after the killings.
A college physician allegedly abused at least 177 male students during his tenure, a story revived in a harrowing new film that highlights how he got away with it
Ohio State sets the standard in intercollegiate sports. The university’s athletics department, a statewide source of pride that includes 36 varsity sports teams (from pistol shooting to college football’s reigning national champion), rivals some Fortune 500 companies for scale. In 2024 Ohio State spent $292.8m on its sports programs, more than every school in the well-heeled Big Ten conference and every college in the country besides the University of Texas, while hoovering in more than $1.2bn in revenue over the past seven years. The Ohio State brand – flaunted through scarlet red block-O logos and buckeye tree iconography – is so synonymous with flush times inside and outside the lines that even now few really associate the university with one of most shocking and widespread sex abuse scandals in US history.
Eva Orner – the Australian documentary director behind Netflix’s Bikram and the Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side – got an up-close view years ago on her first flight from Los Angeles to Columbus, home of the Buckeyes and the Ohio State campus. “We stopped somewhere,” she recalls. “There wasn’t a direct flight, and it was a game day weekend. When I got on to the connecting flight, everyone was in Buckeyes paraphernalia. I walked around the city, and everything was Buckeyes. I went to the game and watched the tailgating. It’s like a fever or a cult. It’s an incredible thing and a positive thing – but then when a story like this comes out, it can be very challenging.”
The US has stepped up its military presence in the Middle East since the weekend but has left certain details vague to preserve operational ambiguity for Donald Trump as he considers whether the US will intervene in the Israel-Iran war.
Critically, there has been no new information about the deployment of B-2 bombers that would be used to attack Iran’s deep-lying nuclear enrichment site at Fordow with 13.6-tonne (30,000lb) bunker-buster bombs, designed to penetrate 60 metres of rock.
From the Ohio pussy who triggered a wild conspiracy theory to the Brexit ‘Leave’ votes piling up, the great American photographer has turned her lens on election excesses. But what are those fake eyelashes doing in there?
In 2016, almost by accident, the US artist Taryn Simon ended up making a video work about the most important moment in recent British political history. While scouting for a location for another work, she visited Alexandra Palace in London just as a rehearsal for the Brexit ballot-counting was taking place. “I immediately asked if I could come back and film the actual count,” says Simon, whose request was approved, making her the only person in the world permitted to record a Brexit count.
She’s speaking with me from Paris, where the video has just gone on show. Presented on two screens, it is at first unremarkable: one view shows a wide frame of the historic Great Hall of the palace, with count staff seated at tables covered with black tablecloths and scattered with paper. A second screen offers a closeup view of two count staff in their official burgundy T-shirts, sorting papers into “Leave” and “Remain”. The tension mounts as each stack grows, but no climax is reached.
Mykola Lykhovydov is living his sporting dream with Ukraine’s Real Pharma, helped by a haka-like warm-up, local water and naps
Mykola Lykhovydov half-boils a kettle and, pausing slightly for dramatic effect, decants its contents into the waiting glasses. The water comes from an artesian well close to this small, rickety dressing room that doubles as a clubhouse. They say it flows from 80 metres underground and should be consumed just like this, served a little above body temperature and sipped gently so the body’s cells can properly hydrate. Nobody at FK Real Pharma would drink anything else before training and Lykhovydov swears by an extra benefit. “A doctor from Dynamo Kyiv told me this is the best water in Ukraine,” he announces. “It is the secret of eternal youth.”
Whether marvel or myth, the regimen is serving Lykhovydov well. He turned 59 in January and is, as far as anybody knows, the oldest active professional footballer in the world. At almost a year older than the Japanese great Kazuyoshi Miura he lays convincing claim to the record and has no intention of stopping here. He can still do a job in the Ukrainian third tier. “I was thinking I’d make it to 50,” he says. “But now I’m almost 60 I won’t put limits on myself.”
If the Pataudi Trophy had to be renamed then the rivalry between India and England’s two most-capped Test cricketers was worthy of the switch
Spring 2006 and India are batting against England at the Wankhede in Mumbai. The series is all square, one Test each with one to play. England, batting first, have made an even 400, thanks in large part to a century by Andrew Strauss and 88 from his Middlesex teammate Owais Shah, who is making his debut.
It is just past tea on the second day and India’s openers are already gone, bounced out by Matthew Hoggard. Sachin Tendulkar is at No 4 and England’s captain, Andrew Flintoff, has just thrown the ball to his first-change bowler, Jimmy Anderson.
Police say the man tested negative for alcohol but did not divulge whether or not he had been using a satnav
An 80-year-old man drove a car down the Spanish Steps in Rome early on Tuesday before getting stuck part way, municipal police said in a statement.
The man tested negative for alcohol, police said. They did not identify the driver or say if the car, a Mercedes-Benz, was his. Nor did they say whether or not he had been using a satnav.
Top players to vie for increased prize of £740,000
Couple Stefanos Tsitsipas and Paula Badosa will team up
There will be a sprinkling of stardust at the US Open mixed doubles with Carlos Alcaraz partnering the British women’s No 1, Emma Raducanu, in an event many top players have decided to give a try for the first time. Jannik Sinner will be with the world No 9, Emma Navarro, while the British men’s No 1, Jack Draper, will partner the Olympic women’s singles champion, Zheng Qinwen. Novak Djokovic has agreed to play with his Serbian compatriot Olga Danilovic.
The rush of big names comes after the US Open moved the mixed doubles to the qualifying week, with matches being played on Arthur Ashe and Louis Armstrong courts on 19 August and 20 August.
If he does nothing, the US president may alienate Israel’s fervent American allies. If he intervenes, he’ll undermine his own foreign policy
During his three presidential campaigns, Donald Trump ran as an opponent of serial military interventions and wars of “regime change” à la Iraq and Libya, which neoconservatives and liberal internationalists alike had embraced after the end of the cold war. He correctly sensed that many Americans had tired of “forever wars”.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s attack on Iran is a watershed moment for Trump. It will force him to reveal whether he truly represents a clean break with the foreign policy establishment, often referred to as “the blob”, or is in fact a continuation of it. It all depends on whether he decides to join Israel’s attacks on Iran.
Rajan Menon is a professor emeritus of international relations at the City College of New York and a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies
In an interview with Fox News on Sunday, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, pontificated on a theme he has become increasingly attached to in recent years: that Israel under his leadership would not simply attempt to dismantle Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programmes through military attack, but in the process usher in regime change in Tehran.
The government in Tehran, he said, was “very weak”, adding that given the opportunity, “80% of the people would throw these theological thugs out”.
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday afternoon, the country’s environment minister, Sara Aagesen, ruled out a cyber-attack as the cause of the outage on 28 April, saying it had been down to a “multifactorial” system failure caused by the network’s inability to control grid voltage.
Former president has denied wrongdoing as federal police accuse him of overseeing a spy network targeting rivals
Federal police have formally accused Brazil’s former far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, of presiding over an illegal spying network which allegedly snooped on political rivals, journalists and environmentalists during his administration.
Bolsonaro is already facing the prospect of jail time over his alleged role in masterminding a military coup plot designed to help him keep power after losing the 2022 election to the leftwing veteran Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. There is broad consensus among analysts that Bolsonaro’s conviction is a foregone conclusion and the 70-year-old populist is expected to face arrest in the coming months once a supreme court trial concludes.
It was a turning point in the push for African independence – and it took place in Chorlton-on-Medlock Town Hall. We meet the writer of a play about the fifth Pan-African Congress
On the facade of the building that once housed Chorlton-on-Medlock Town Hall in Manchester sits a plaque commemorating a turning point in the push for African independence. The fifth Pan-African Congress in October 1945 was attended by future global leaders as well as activists and scholars from across Africa and its diaspora. But despite the event’s international importance, it has been largely overlooked by mainstream British history.Now a biting new play is set to remedy this.
“I think a lot of Mancunians don’t know it happened,” says playwright Ntombizodwa Nyoni, who lectures in the same building, now part of Manchester Metropolitan University. “But it’s like: you’re part of such a phenomenal moment in history.” Eighty years later, her dramatisation of the event, Liberation, is about to receive its world premiere at Manchester international festival.
Fariba Vancor, former boss of Think Pink waste management company, convicted of 19 serious environmental crimes
A Swedish entrepreneur who once called herself the “queen of trash” has been sentenced to six years in prison for illegally dumping hundreds of thousands of tonnes of toxic waste in the country’s biggest environmental crime case.
Fariba Vancor, previously known as Bella Nilsson and the former chief executive of waste management company Think Pink, was convicted on Tuesday of 19 counts of serious environmental crimes. Her ex-husband Thomas Nilsson was found guilty of 12 counts of serious environmental crimes and sentences to three years and six months in prison.
Wilson bought Parks a Volvo when he’d barely met him – and together they brought sublime poetry to pop. He remembers the making of Smile, Surf’s Up and more
It was the Beatles’ publicist Derek Taylor – who I met backstage at their first concert at the Hollywood Bowl – who first declared “Brian Wilson is a genius” as part of a [1966] publicity campaign. I knew that word would come back to haunt Brian and it did: from then on he was competing in a world of heightened expectations, but he did that very bravely all his life. He was basically forever competing against a previous version of himself, but as the great American beat poet Lewis MacAdams said: “If it’s not impossible, I’m not interested.” As for lyrics, you can’t beat “I’m a cork on the ocean” [in Til I Die] for a redux of thought from a Beach Boy. I will call that genius and I think the word does apply to Brian.
He had so many gifts. One of them was mutual empowerment. He brought out the best in everyone around him. In the studio, under great tensile strength, the things he could do with a piano, bass, and maybe a couple of guitars were like him entering a dark room and breathing light and life into it. He was a celebratory spirit with a dark coda on his life: the burden of some psychosis. I don’t believe that was caused by drugs. I think it was in his genes, but he had the ability to dig deep. He had a disciplined spiritual force and had sat on church pews and had learned musical lingos, had loved and absorbed everything from barbershop quartets to calypso to composers to Gershwin, was growing up when they coined the expression “Americana” and configured all this into a new kind of pop.
Information stolen from US company included details of 150,000 British residents including family trees
The genetic testing company 23andMe has been fined more than £2.3m for failing to protect the personal information of more than 150,000 UK residents after a large-scale cyberattack in 2023.
Family trees, health reports, names and postcodes were among the sensitive data hacked from the California-based company. It only confirmed the breach months after the infiltration started and once an employee saw the stolen data advertised for sale on the social media platform Reddit, according to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office – which levied the fine.
Juror 6 reportedly claimed during jury selection that he lived in the Bronx but told court staff he lived in New Jersey
The judge presiding over the high-profile federal sex-trafficking and racketeering trial of Sean “Diddy” Combs dismissed a juror on Monday over conflicting statements about his residency.
The juror, identified as Juror 6, reportedly claimed during jury selection that he lived in the Bronx, but last week, prosecutors said that he told a court staff member that he had been living in New Jersey, making him ineligible for a Manhattan federal jury.
Discussing the dilemma facing western diplomats in confronting Iran’s nuclear programme, Henry Kissinger wrote in 2006: “Diplomacy never operates in a vacuum. It persuades not by the eloquence of its practitioners but by assembling a balance of incentives and risks.”
Rarely has the balance of incentives and risks been placed so starkly in front of Iran’s leaders as now.
The popularity of ‘healing’ through psychedelics is fueling exploitation of Indigenous peoples and threatening biodiversity in Ecuador
In the world of the Ecuadorian Amazon, humans, plants and animals are relatives, and ancient stories reflect real ecological relationships and Indigenous knowledge rooted in profound connections to the land. But one of those connections – ceremonial medicine known as hayakwaska – is now marketed as a mystical shortcut to healing and enlightenment. Behind the scenes of these “healing retreats” lies a deeper story of cultural erasure, linguistic distortion and ongoing colonisation masked as wellness.
The global popularity of “ayahuasca” has given rise to a new form of spiritual tourism that romanticises and distorts Indigenous cultures. This growing industry fuels the exoticisation of Indigenous peoples, turning our languages, practices and identities into consumable fantasies for outsiders. Sacred rituals are stripped of context, spiritual roles are commercialised, and even the names of the plants are misused, reducing complex cultural systems into simplified, marketable experiences.
Connexion
