Eye

• Recent reports of a series of drone strikes on Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) have demonstrated the serious safety and security concerns at Europe’s largest nuclear power station.
• It has not been confirmed who is responsible for the strikes.
• Both Russia, which occupied ZNPP in March 2022, and Ukraine have pointed the finger at each other.

Drones strike targets

• Attacks have included a drone strike on the oxygen and nitrogen production facility, two on the training centre and a drone shot down above a turbine hall.
• It is clearly part of the power plant, yet is isolated and likely contains little to no nuclear material, meaning the risk of resulting nuclear accident is relatively low.

• The IAEA has repeatedly stated that there can be no benefit to any party from a nuclear disaster at the plant.
• Ukrainian personnel still working at ZNPP have claimed that Russia has turned the plant into a military base.
• The IAEA continues to call for restraint and for all military activity to be halted in the vicinity of the plant.

A risky restart

• This means the cooling water in the reactor is below 100°C and at atmospheric pressure.
• This is safer than the previous state of “hot shutdown”, but a restart would be far worse than either of these.
• Putting ZNPP, a plant still on the front line of an armed conflict, into operation would therefore be highly risky.
• Chernobyl Remembrance Day commemorates the world’s worst nuclear disaster, which occurred in 1986 in what is today Ukraine.

Ross Peel is affiliated with the Centre for Science & Security Studies at King's College London.

• A man named Hadi Matar has been charged with second-degree attempted murder.
• He is an American-born resident of New Jersey in his early twenties, whose parents emigrated from Lebanon.
• Review: Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder – Salman Rushdie (Jonathan Cape) Knife is very good at recalling Rushdie’s grim memories of the attack.

• “Let me offer this piece of advice to you, gentle reader,” he says: “if you can avoid having your eyelid sewn shut … avoid it.
• Here, for a number of reasons, Rushdie is not on such secure ground.
• Read more:
  How Salman Rushdie has been a scapegoat for complex historical differences

  Rushdie, who studied history at Cambridge University, described himself in Joseph Anton as “a historian by training”.

• Indeed, a speech he gave at PEN America in 2022 is reprinted in the book verbatim.
• For these intellectuals, principles of secular reason and personal liberty should always supersede blind conformity to social or religious authority.

Old-fashioned liberal principles

• In Knife, though, Rushdie the protagonist confronts a world where such liberal principles now appear old-fashioned.
• He claims “the groupthink of radical Islam” has been shaped by “the groupthink-manufacturing giants, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter”.
• But for many non-religious younger people, any notion of free choice also appears illusory, the anachronistic residue of an earlier age.
• Millennials and Generation Z are concerned primarily with issues of environmental catastrophe and social justice, and they tend to regard liberal individualism as both ineffective and self-indulgent.
• A new book traces how we got here, but lets neoliberal ideologues off the hook

Suffused in the culture of Islam

• The Satanic Verses itself is suffused in the culture of Islam as much as James Joyce’s Ulysses is suffused in the culture of Catholicism.
• In their hypothetical conversation, the author of Knife tries to convince his assailant of the value of such ambivalence.
• He protests how his notorious novel revolves around “an East London Indian family running a café-restaurant, portrayed with real love”.

Attachment to past traditions

• Rushdie discusses in Knife how, besides the Hindu legends of his youth, he has also been “more influenced by the Christian world than I realized”.
• He cites the music of Handel and the art of Michelangelo as particular influences.
• Yet this again highlights Rushdie’s attachments to traditions firmly rooted in the past.
• Part of James’s greatness lay in the way he was able to accommodate these radical shifts within his writing.

‘A curiously one-eyed book’

• Particularly striking are the immediacy with which he recalls the shocking assault, the black humour with which he relates medical procedures and the sense of “exhilaration” at finally returning home with his wife to Manhattan.
• Yet there are also many loose ends, and the book’s conclusion, that the assailant has in the end become “simply irrelevant” to him, is implausible.
• He insists he does not want to write “frightened” or “revenge” books.

• This was despite several brave comeback attempts by Milburn that likewise cited Pataudi as an example.
• Knife, by contrast, is a curiously one-eyed book, in a metaphorical, as well as a literal sense.

Paul Giles does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Orphan designation: Tranilast Prevention of scarring post glaucoma filtration surgery, 27/07/2010 Positive

• But if you’re one of the distrustful majority, that may not be such a bad thing.
• In a 2021 survey, just 24.5% of respondents across OECD, countries said they trust political parties.
• National polls repeatedly show similar results, particularly in the wake of scandals involving politicians misbehaving.
• Self-evidently, trustworthy leaders are preferable – but that doesn’t mean trusting them unconditionally once they’re in power.

Trust isn’t a ‘thing’

• But there’s no optimal survey result, and no one should expect complete trust.
• People talk metaphorically of “building” trust, but trust isn’t a “thing” that’s literally broken and rebuilt.
• Political trust is about an underlying “deal” that keeps a society together and functioning.
• People disagree about whom to trust, and judgment will partly depend on which politicians promote the policies people prefer.

Government is a work in progress

• But leadership and government are themselves problems about which people have debated for millennia, with still no universally agreed solution in sight.
• It’s worth noting, for example, that in China, most people tell pollsters that they trust their government.
• There may be disagreements about how best to govern, but all states practice, by necessity, some form of government.

• As there’s no handy administrative formula for political trust, such personal and political self-examination has to persist.
• Telling surveyors that you don’t trust politicians is a gentle and valid form of political resistance.

Grant Duncan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.