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My second piece for Euronews, this time on how EU law is helping to protect forests threatened by the combination of eroding democratic freedoms and the money that can be earned from logging.
At the beginning of the year, Poland started cutting a swathe through one of Europe’s most ancient forests, Białowieża, to block refugees with a 190-kilmometre wall along its border with Belarus.
“It’s five, almost six meters high. It goes down with concrete that is underground. And it has razor wire on the top,” said Augustyn Mikos from the environmental organisation Workshop For all Beings, one that has frequently come into conflict with the Polish government’s forestry policies.
Read the full article here.
As part of Euronew’s series This will impact your life I wrote about the EU and its preparations for cyber warfare, a more present threat since the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.
When the systems of three oil and transport companies in Europe and Africa were brought down on February 2, 2022, Europe was preparing for a coming war in Ukraine and the impact of tensions on the Russian border were beginning to be felt in global energy markets.
The cyberattack sparked a wave of anxiety that a war in Ukraine would quickly expand online, with critical infrastructure at risk. Less than a week after the attack on SEA-Invest, and just eleven days before Russian troops crossed the border into Ukraine, the European Central Bank warned banks in Europe to brace themselves for a wave of Moscow-sponsored cyberattacks.
Read the full article here.
For my first piece in the Metro, I wrote about long-covid and how it’s impacted people around fitness – particularly people who had been at the high-end of fitness before.
Read the full article here.
This was one of the pieces that has come out of my project with the Museum of Homelessness.
Like many migrants, Adam came to the UK to support his family – his wife, son and parents – who stayed behind in Poland. He had been working as a chef for three years when his world ended. His family, all of them, died in a car crash. Nine years on, Adam still lives with the trauma and depression from those tragic events – but that was just the start.Â
Read the full article here.
When the patient Sanisha Wynter sought help for her mental health, she struggled to access services, treatment, and support—and above all to be heard by the professionals she saw and the services she attended. Her story is disturbing yet familiar. One clinician told her she was a “strong Black woman,” drawing on a racialised stereotype that downplays the emotional and physical pain that Black women experience.
Read the full article here.
An investigation with Natalie Bloomer and Luke Butterly, this follows up on the work we’ve done on the hostile environment.
UK MPs have been using an official tips line to report people for immigration enforcement in greater numbers than ever before.
More than 150 tip-offs were made to a Home Office immigration hotline by MPs since the start of the COVID pandemic, a freedom of information request by VICE World News showed.
Book reviews are not usually part of my regular writing, but I could not resist the opportunity to write an essay on the works of Abdulrazak Gurnah pegged to the release of his new novel Afterlives.
Gurnah’s latest novel starts with new beginnings. A man begins a new job that will transform his life. Elsewhere, a young man drawn into military service on behalf of a colonial power returns home. The theme of dislocation and abandonment is one Gurnah returns to throughout his novels. Afterlives opens just before the First World War in German East Africa, what is now known as Tanzania. The novel follows characters through episodes of momentous upheavals and conflict: the defeat of German Imperialism, colonisation by the British, and Independence. The focus is on the impact of these events and of colonialism on individuals, how people can move on, come together and build a life and a family of choice.
This is an issue I’ve been looking into for a while, so expect to see some more on this!
Drill artist Digga D is embroiled in an unrelenting legal battle to make music. His Kafkaesque world was the subject of a BBC documentary last November, Defending Digga D, where the 20-year-old performer is shown having check-ins with the police every three hours, subject to recall to prison without a stated reason, has to get his lyrics approved by the police, and even required to move away from his home in London and into a hostel in Norwich. It is one of the most high-profile examples of how the lives and careers of drill artists are disrupted by policing, usually because of perceived or sometimes actual proximity to gangs.
Read the full article here.
I wrote up this more personal piece for the wonderful Vittles newsletter on making mandazi, an East African fried food, in the challenging circumstances of lockdown.
Every immigrant culture has a genre of food that can be tentatively called aunty food: the type of food item that is almost exclusively only supplied to order by an aunty (an aunty is not necessarily a relative, just someone in the community). Mandazi is one of the East African diaspora’s aunty foods.
Samir Jeraj - Freelance Journalist 