Professor of Global History at Oxford. Director, Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research. Silk Roads. Environment & Climate Change. Co-host of the Legacy podcast
🏏 This morning, The King welcomed the Afghan national women’s cricket team to Clarence House.
The team was set up during the Afghan Republic in 2010, but lost recognition as a national team following the Taliban’s return to power. In Afghanistan, women and girls are banned from playing sport, along with other restrictions on their education, work and public life.
His Majesty was able to hear the stories of many of the players who fled Afghanistan and have rebuilt their lives as refugees, playing club cricket informally, and campaigning for recognition.
France recorded a high of 44.6°C today.
That’s so far beyond anything seen in the historical record, a 4.2 sigma deviation from the norm that it gives a return period of 87 thousand years.
It’s really difficult to convey just how utterly extreme this is.
Guess what? I’m at risk of redundancy. My job - and those of my colleagues in my department and across our wider faculty of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences - is one of those currently targeted for cuts. I received a personal letter today. https://t.co/dLgmiSir0c
There is nothing unlikely about this alliance - it is based purely on Islamophobia, and it has led to the worst foreign policy mistake in the history of modern India.
Ghalibaf, Speaker of the Iranian Parliament:
In the middle of the discussions, I learned that Trump had made threatening remarks regarding our president, the negotiating team, and possible attacks on our territory.
I told Vance: “We are here engaged in talks, and according to the signed understanding, the first clause states that there should be no threats or coercion. Yet today your president has issued threats. Understand that we never negotiate under threats or pressure.”
We ended the negotiations, left the meeting, and did not return.
The American side sought another meeting through the mediators, but we refused. The Qatari and Pakistani mediators then came to us, and we told them that we would speak with them, but not with the American side directly.
The outcome of these discussions and the 80-minute negotiations was the statement later released by the Pakistani and Qatari side.
Time will tell, but I suspect in, say 30 years, Starmer will be most remembered for being the shadow Brexit secretary whose ludicrous position of stopping Brexit was terrible for Britain but fabulous for his career.
He was central in Britain getting the hardest possible Brexit.
This tweet from Bukele is fascinating, because the graph he posted shows that the murder rate in El Salvador plummeted sharply before he became president, and long before he started throwing tons of people in jail.