Omar Waraich

Live updates: Iran war likely to last 4 to 5 weeks, Trump says As the war in the Middle East spirals further, U.S. President Donald Trump said on Monday that the U.S. has “the capability to go far longer” than its projected four-to-five-week time frame for its military operations against Iran.

The Israeli military says soldiers are operating in southern Lebanon as part of a broader effort to increase security for residents in northern Israel near their shared border as it battles Hezbollah militants.

Horrific news from Iraq where feminist activist and human rights defender Yanar Mohammed, co-founder and director of the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), has been assassinated by gunmen outside of her home just days after returning from Canada.

Arrived in #SouthSudan and travelled directly to Malakal.

Met communities living through years of displacement, as well as families forced to return due to the war in Sudan.

They want peace – but people also need support now to rebuild their lives with dignity.

Gaby Wood · At the Movies: ‘The Secret Agent’ Like Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here, which had a similarly successful run last year, The Secret Agent is set during...

‘A large part of what’s great about 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘦𝘤𝘳𝘦𝘵 𝘈𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘵 is Wagner Moura, who inhabits his role with the naturalism of a documentary subject and the charisma of a star. He plays two roles, the second of which I won’t reveal.’

Gaby Wood at the movies.

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Both Democrats and Republicans helped create the infrastructure for ideological surveillance at the US border—but the Trump administration is deploying it in the service of a radically partisan and censorial agenda. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

What’s Labour actually good at? In a government of few policy successes, one policy area stands out

Even his enemies are likely to admit Ed Miliband is Labour’s best cabinet minister, writes Michael Jacobs. Not even Morgan McSweeney could stare him down...

Why I should never have used ChatGPT as an OCD therapist I fear for people relying on AI for mental health advice

It was unwise to seek mental health advice from a platform that isn’t regulated to provide it—and is incentivised to keep users online, writes @sarahelizacollins.bsky.social.

Escape From the Abyss: Surviving the Atrocities in El Fasher

“I carried him on my back. It took seven days.” A camp in eastern Chad is now home to more than 100,000 refugees of Sudan’s civil war, and is a key destination for those fleeing El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur State. Resources are strained as the number of newly displaced people increases.

Michael Sheen spent his own money to write off $1.3 million of neighbors’ debts | CNN Actor Michael Sheen has bought $1.3 million of his neighbors’ debts and written them off using $129,000 of his own money.

The actor Michael Sheen used all his money to start a fake debt collecting business, buy 900 people in Wales's debt, and excused it. If Musk bought ALL $194 billion in medical debt in the U.S. and excused it in the same way, he'd still be the world's riches man by hundreds of billions of dollars.

The CBS reporter who led the story calls pulling it a "political" decision.
"The decision was made after Bari Weiss, the new editor in chief of CBS News, requested numerous changes to the segment."
www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/b...

boy, a grim echo of Budapest's memorial to pogrom victims here.

The victims at Brown University?

Ella, a white Christian student, and Mukhammad, a Muslim student who originally came from Uzbekistan.

We're all in this together. Be wary of the hatemongers who are demonizing an entire faith for the sins of the few and love guns more than our kids.

Ahmed al Ahmed, the man who tackled one of the Bondi killers, became an Australian citizen 3 years ago.

His deed was "his way of conveying his gratitude for staying in Australia, for being granted citizenship."

He took 5 bullets, and fears he'll lose his left arm.

www.smh.com.au/national/nsw...

apart from the sheer inconceivable horror of the El Fasher massacre and its attendant horrors itself, the thing I'm feeling depressed about is that it probably won't matter.

these were people already on the utmost margins of the global system, who the world has already decided it doesn't care about

Why I should never have used ChatGPT as an OCD therapist I fear for people relying on AI for mental health advice

I fear for people relying on AI for mental health advice, writes @sarahelizacollins.bsky.social.

Meanwhile. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/13/c...

Screenshot of a tweet by Congressman Randy Fine says "Rep. Fine on How to Deal with Mainstream Muslims: “I don’t know how you make peace with those who seek your destruction, I think you destroy them first.” And then 3 flame emojis. It is dated December 11, 2025.

Here is Congressman Randy Fine explicitly calling for the genocide of Muslims.

This is abhorrent. We are disgusted by Congressman Fine's persistent and rampant anti-Muslim racism and call on all American Jewish leaders to speak out.

How ‘The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám’ inspired Victorian Hedonists The Rubáiyát brought to mind sensuous embraces in jasmine-filled gardens on balmy Arabian nights, accompanied by cups of cool, intoxicating wine

How ‘The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám’ inspired Victorian Hedonists

You Don’t Need a Burry to Know Which Way the Bubble Blows Nvidia’s earnings land like a macro event. They’re just one thing to watch.

With or without 'Big Short' predictions, the concern that AI hardware might soon become obsolete has been growing for a while

Chatbots and deepfakes are eroding our shared reality With Trump et al using AI slop for political gain, fact-checking and civic journalism are more vital than ever

After Martin Luther King’s family protested, OpenAI now restricts users’ ability to make fake videos of MLK. It’s just one way AI must be prevented from warping our sense of reality, writes @ethanz.bsky.social.

The A.I.-Profits Drought and the Lessons of History Like the steam engine, electricity, and computers, generative artificial intelligence could take longer than expected to transform the economy.

A recent M.I.T. study found that 95% of companies that had invested in A.I. tools were seeing zero return.

‘Insider and Outsider’ | Josephine Quinn How did Saint Augustine’s African origins and his life among Christians there shape his theology?

St. Augustine (yes, that one), the African. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

The exodus out of Tigray Young people are leaving en masse – and don’t know if they’ll ever come back.

“Tigray is broken. Its leaders divided, some aligning with Addis Ababa, others with Eritrea. Another war looms, one that could pit Tigrayans against each other. I fought once to defend my people; I will not fight again in a war that will destroy what remains.” continent.substack.com/p/the-exodus...

Julian Barnes · Ouvriers de luxe Gustave Flaubert’s first three novels, Madame Bovary, Salammbô and L’Éducation sentimentale, were all published by...

‘Writers, for better or worse, need publishers (and vice versa), and their relationships, involving taste, friendship and money, can be as long-lasting, as complicated and as asymmetrical as any marriage.’

Online early: Julian Barnes on Flaubert and his publisher.

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Opinion | Why the Gaza ceasefire won’t lead to lasting peace “A new Middle East” will require sacrifices that Israelis and Palestinians show no sign of making.

While the war has been raging in Gaza, the right-wing Netanyahu government has been doing everything short of formal annexation to extend Israeli control over the West Bank—and it might well have done the formal annexation if Trump had not blocked it. wapo.st/3W5yhAx

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor · I do not have to be you: Audre Lorde’s Legacy Lorde never had to persuade her comrades about a strategy, tactic or new idea, lose an argument in order to maintain a...

‘Like James Baldwin, she thought social revolution required a reckoning of all relationships, including the individual’s relationship to herself.’

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (@keeanga.bsky.social) on Audre Lorde: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘I deserve to heal’: freed British-Egyptian activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah on his prison ordeal and next steps The campaigner, who spent more than a decade in an Egyptian ‘vortex of incarceration’, wants to join his son in the UK while he reflects on the fight for freedom

"Asked what freedom felt like, [Alaa] said: “It is overwhelming. It is also comfortable and natural, and I am immediately fitting in with them, including witnessing three family fights in two days. The usual stuff."

Don't miss this Guardian interview: www.theguardian.com/world/2025/o...

John Milton's Areopagitica, one of the most important and influential tracts on free speech ever written, is basically 100 pages of "belittling conservative ideas." Glad Milton got that one published before Marc Rowan came along.

A labour government wants to make amendments to our laws to bring in conditions, and possible outright ban on protests in the UK because the Palestine movement got too big for them to continue to ignore.

A Labour government. Not Tory, not reform, but Labour.

Yun Sheng · Short Cuts: China’s Gen Z A passive-aggressive ‘lying flat’ attitude is easily dismissed as laziness, but Gen Z-ers have developed a...

‘Chinese Gen Z-ers don’t want their parents or colleagues to know what they say, watch or read in the virtual world. Plus, cyber violence is rife: who wants to be doxxed over a silly comment?’

Yun Sheng: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...