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Objects of Despair: Inspired by Roland Barthes, Meghan O’Gieblyn’s monthly column examines contemporary artifacts and the mythologies we have built around them.

Fake Meat | Mirrors | Mars | Drones | The 10,000-Year Clock

Concrete: The Most Destructive Material on Earth (more on The Guardian’s “Concrete Week”)

The Unfortunate Fate of Childhood Dolls by Rainer Maria Rilke

AirPods Are a Tragedy

Thinging the Real: On Bill Brown’s “Other Things”

Sum Effects: “Personal or real, tangible or intangible, durable, hard, soft, consumable, or perishable: my grandmother owned none of it. Goldyne Alter died with no possessions.”

A janitor rescued migrants’ possessions from a border facility’s trash. Now they’re art.

Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, ed. by Sherry Turkle

Friendly Floatees

Great Pacific garbage patch

Plastic: an autobiography by Allison Cobb

Fewer Better Things by Glenn Adamson

The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin

Queer Phenomenology by Sara Ahmed (full disclosure this was an assigned reading and a lot of the heavier philosophical stuff started to go over my head but if that’s your thing it is interesting!)

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A hospital strike in Sudan’s East Darfur state has killed at least 70 people and injured more than 140, as the United Nations warned of escalating violence and a surge in drone attacks across the country.

Speaking at a U.N. press briefing in Geneva on Tuesday, a World Health Organization official said Al Daein Teaching Hospital, the main referral facility in the regional capital, was hit on March 20.

Initial reports put the death toll at 64, but it later rose to 70, including seven women and 13 children, according to Hala Khudari, the WHO’s acting deputy representative in Sudan. A total of 146 people were injured, including patients and relatives. One doctor and two nurses were killed, while eight other health workers were wounded.

The hospital, which serves more than 2 million people in Al Daein and surrounding areas, sustained heavy damage, particularly to its outpatient and emergency departments.

...

The WHO has verified 213 attacks on health care in Sudan since April 2023, resulting in more than 2,000 deaths and nearly 800 injuries. In 2025, Sudan accounted for 82% of reported deaths from such attacks globally, according to the agency’s monitoring system.

Separately, the U.N. human rights office warned of a sharp increase in drone strikes, which it said have killed more than 500 civilians between Jan. 1 and March 15, most of them in the Kordofan region.

Marta Hurtado, a spokesperson for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, said drone attacks have continued in recent days. On March 21, a strike on a convoy of commercial vehicles in Al Daein reportedly killed 23 people.

Speaking to the Mail & Guardian from Washington DC, Ssentamu, also known by his stage name Bobi Wine, said: “I had to save my life to be able to speak to the world and later, I will return to my country for the regime to do whatever they want to me in the full glare of the world. My fight is in Uganda.”

Bobi Wine, under the National Unity Platform, was one of seven opposition candidates that challenged Museveni for the presidency on 15 January. Museveni won a seventh term with 71.65% of the vote, while Bobi Wine came second with 24.72% in a disputed election.

Bobi Wine said it was not an election but “a military operation” that resulted in his house arrest, while his wife and family members were tortured.

Major general Muhoozi Kainerugaba – Uganda’s military commander and son of the president – has used social media to issue direct, inflammatory threats against Bobi Wine, including threats to “behead” him or “castrate” his associates.

About his escape, he said he was assisted by some in the military and police who also felt oppressed under the Museveni establishment.

“There are many oppressed men and women in uniform and these are the people who helped me to escape,” he said. “That’s why, to me, the issue is about the Ugandan people versus their oppressor.”

Now in the US, Bobi Wine is calling on international pressure for sanctions against the Ugandan strongman.

The People's Revolutionary Army (ERP)

Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERP)

Two French nuns Léonie Duquet and Alice Domon, arrested by the Argentine military regime, forced to pose with the banner of the Montoneros guerrilla group, shortly before being killed, Argentina, 1977