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Protests against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza are going ahead in London this weekend, despite apparent attempts by Suella Braverman to pressure police into preventing them. The Met pushed back, insisting that it is not their role to stop demonstrations that fall within the law, even if some find them offensive. The law is actually quite clear on all this. A home secretary simply can’t dictate to police how to respond to legal protest, and there are very good reasons
why.
Braverman’s suggestion that the marches are “of the kind we are more used to seeing in Northern Ireland” was both confusing and inflammatory. In seeking to unpack everything that was regrettable about this parallel being made by a senior minister in the British government, I sought the counsel of Peter John McLoughlin at Queen’s University Belfast. Peter always helps me understand these issues more clearly but also inevitably raises points that have never even occurred to me. He’s done precisely that in his response — highlighting both what Braverman got wrong and how she could have used Northern Ireland’s history as a far more positive example in this debate.
Meanwhile, Labour is also struggling to calibrate a response to the situation in the Middle East in its own way. Keir Starmer is facing a sizable backlash within his ranks for refusing to support a ceasefire. This history of how the Israel/Palestine question maps onto shifting party factionalism helps explain his predicament.
While it’s great that electric vehicles are on trend, their popularity has brought new models onto the market, including some very large ones. This is a problem because big cars need big batteries and therefore significantly more rare earth materials. Even a standard battery for a smaller EV can contain 170kg of minerals including nickel and lithium. A battery for an electric SUV can require as much as 75% more of these materials.
It’s possible to have a biological age that is significantly out of sync with your numerical age. People who live healthy lives are often biologically much younger than their years and vice versa. New findings based on the experiences of 325,000 middle-aged British people across nearly a decade show it’s your biological age that often counts more as a marker of your likelihood to develop certain conditions. Biologically older people are more vulnerable to stroke and
dementia. The good news, however, is that while you can’t do anything about the year you were born, with diet and exercise you can control how old you are on the inside.
Also this week, scientists conclude that wild and domestic cats lived alongside each other for 2,000 years before it occurred to either of them to get it on, Barbra Streisand uses the title of her new autobiography to remind us that she is not and never has been a “diva”, and doctors hope for a major breakthrough in the quest to cure HIV.
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