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UNIVERSAL has revealed further plans for yet another theme park which is due to open next year.

Set to open in Texas, America, Universal Kid’s Resort will be solely focused on children’s attractions.

The park will feature seven lands in total, all based on popular children’s shows and stories.

The lands will include Shrek’s Swamp, Puss in Boots Del Mar, Minions vs Minions: Bello Bay Club, Jurassic World Adventure Camp, TrollsFest, SpongeBob SquarePants Bikini Bottom and Isle of Curiosity.

Visitors will enter through the Isle of Curiosity where they will be able to meet Gabby from Gabby’s Dollhouse and enjoy a dance party together.

Then in Shrek’s world, which Universal describes as a “waterlogged paradise”, guests will be able to meet Shrek and Fiona, as well as grab a photo at the onion carriage.

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The land will have two interactive play areas as well – Shrek’s Swamp Rompin’ Stomp and Shrek’s Swamp Splash & Smash.

For kids who prefer Puss in Boots, they can meet the character themselves as well as Mama Luna and Perrito from Puss in Boots: The Last Wish.

The land will also have a series of carnival-themed games and concept arts suggest there will be a swing carousel.

One of the main attractions in the Minions land, where Yellow Minions battle Purple ones, will be a water ride that snakes around the world.

Onlookers can participate in the fun too, by using water pistols to spray those on the ride.

Aspiring paleontologists will get the opportunity to see a newly hatched baby dinosaur in the Jurassic World Adventure Camp as well as climb up Lookout Towers in a play area.

Concept art also reveals a rollercoaster and drop tower ride.

In the Trolls land, visitors can once again meet characters such as Poppy and Branch and experience two play areas – Poppy’s Playland and Trolls Critter Crawl.

In addition, some of the concept art shows that the land may also have a rollercoaster, hot air balloon-themed ride and a netted climbing area.

Heading ‘undersea’ to SpongeBob’s land, kids can head to Mussel Beach and also see SpongeBob’s iconic pineapple house.

Across the park, there will be multiple sensory gardens with different touch, sound and colour attractions as well.

For families looking to stay close-by, the theme park will have a colourfully-themed 300-room hotel.

Molly Murphy, president of Universal Creative said: “Universal Kids Resort embodies the spirit of igniting thrill that drives everything we create — designed to bring our youngest guests and families together through play, creativity, and beloved characters and stories.”

Brian Robinson, executive vice president and chief creative officer at Universal Creative said: “We envisioned this park through the unbridled creativity of kids where infinite imagination, curiosity and free-spirited play were core to our design philosophies.

“It produced a park that’s pure joy and an absolute celebration of what it is to be a kid.”

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In other family attraction news, a new theme park with world’s fastest and tallest rollercoaster to finally open this year.

Plus, the UK’s best value theme park has been named and tickets are buy one get one free this week.

United States President Donald Trump on Wednesday confirmed that he has authorised the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to carry out covert operations in Venezuela.

He added that his administration was also mulling land-based military operations inside Venezuela, as tensions between Washington and Caracas soar over multiple deadly US strikes on Venezuelan boats in the Caribbean Sea in recent weeks.

On Wednesday, Trump held a news conference with some of his top law enforcement officials, where he faced questions about an earlier news report in The New York Times about the CIA authorisation. One reporter asked directly, “Why did you authorise the CIA to go into Venezuela?”

“I authorised for two reasons, really,” Trump replied. “Number one, they have emptied their prisons into the United States of America.”

“The other thing,” he continued, was Venezuela’s role in drug-trafficking. He then appeared to imply that the US would take actions on foreign soil to prevent the flow of narcotics and other drugs.

“We have a lot of drugs coming in from Venezuela,” Trump said. “A lot of the Venezuelan drugs come in through the sea.  So you get to see that. But we’re going to stop them by land also.”

Trump’s remarks mark the latest escalation in his campaign against Venezuela, whose leader, Nicolas Maduro, has long been a target for the US president, stretching back to Trump’s first term in office.

Already, both leaders have bolstered their military forces along the Caribbean Sea in a show of potential force.

The Venezuelan government hit back at Trump’s latest comments and the authorised CIA operations, accusing the US of violating international law and the UN Charter.

“The purpose of US actions is to create legitimacy for an operation to change the regime in Venezuela, with the ultimate goal of taking control of all the country’s resources,” the Maduro government said in a statement.

Earlier, at the news conference, reporters sought to confront Trump over whether he was trying to enforce regime change in Caracas.

“Does the CIA have authority to take out Maduro?” one journalist asked at the White House on Wednesday.

“Oh, I don’t want to answer a question like that. That’s a ridiculous question for me to be given,” Trump said, demurring. “Not really a ridiculous question, but wouldn’t it be a ridiculous question for me to answer?”

He then offered an addendum: “But I think Venezuela’s feeling heat.”

Claiming wartime powers

Trump’s responses, at times meandering, touched on his oft-repeated claims about Venezuela.

Since taking office for a second term, Trump has sought to assume wartime powers – using laws like the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 – by alleging that Venezuela had masterminded an “invasion” of migrants and criminal groups onto US soil.

He has offered little proof for his assertions, though, and his statements have been undercut by the assessments of his own intelligence community.

In May, for example, a declassified US report revealed that intelligence officials had found no evidence directly linking Maduro to criminal groups like Tren de Aragua, as Trump has alleged.

Still, on Wednesday, Trump revisited the baseless claim that Venezuela under Maduro had sent prisoners and people with mental health conditions to destabilise the US.

“Many countries have done it, but not like Venezuela.  They were down and dirty,” Trump said.

The authorisation of CIA operations inside Venezuela is the latest indication that Trump has been signing secret proclamations to lay the groundwork for lethal action overseas, despite insisting in public that he seeks peace globally.

In August, for instance, anonymous sources told the US media that Trump had also signed an order allowing the US military to take action against drug-trafficking cartels and other Latin American criminal networks.

And in October, it emerged that Trump had sent a memo to the US Congress asserting that the country was in a “non-international armed conflict” with the cartels, whom he termed “unlawful combatants”.

Many such groups, including Tren de Aragua, have also been added to the US’s list of “foreign terrorist organisations”, though experts point out that the label alone does not provide a legal basis for military action.

Strikes in the Caribbean Sea

Nevertheless, the US under Trump has taken a series of escalatory military actions, including by conducting multiple missile strikes on small vessels off the Venezuelan coast.

At least five known air strikes have been conducted on boats since September 2, killing 27 people.

The most recent attack was announced on Tuesday in a social media post: A video Trump shared showed a boat floating in the water, before a missile set it alight. Six people were reportedly killed in that bombing.

Many legal experts and former military officials have said that the strikes appear to be a clear violation of international law. Drug traffickers have not traditionally met the definition of armed combatants in a war. And the US government has so far not presented any public evidence to back its claims that the boats were indeed carrying narcotics headed for America.

But Trump has justified the strikes by saying they will save American lives lost to drug addiction.

He has maintained the people on board the targeted boats were “narco-terrorists” headed to the US.

On Wednesday, he again brushed aside a question about the lack of evidence. He also defended himself against concerns that the bombings amount to extrajudicial killings.

“When they’re loaded up with drugs, they’re fair game,” Trump told reporters, adding there was “fentanyl dust all over the boat after those bombs go off”.

He added, “We know we have much information about each boat that goes. Deep, strong information.”

Framing the bombing campaign in the Caribbean as a success, Trump then explained his administration might start to pivot its strategy.

“ We’ve almost totally stopped it by sea. Now, we’ll stop it by land,” he said of the alleged drug trafficking. He joked that even fishermen had decided to stay off the waters.

“ We are certainly looking at land now because we’ve got the sea very well under control.”

Bold claim, I know. But the Clown Motel is special. Owner Vijay Mehar has taken an old motel and filled it with clowns. Paintings, murals, dools, ceramic figures. Many of them frowning or shrieking.

What guests love, Mehar has learned, is fear, loathing, painted faces, circus vibes and hints of paranormal activity. To be afraid, basically.

“America’s Scariest Motel,” say the brochures by the register. “Let fear run down your spine.”

The 31 guest rooms teem with enough clown imagery to eclipse a Ringling Brothers reunion. The gift shop is vast and troubling. (Clown knife, anyone?)

And then there are the neighbors. The motel stands next to the Old Tonopah Cemetery, most of whose residents perished between 1900 and 1911, often in mining accidents.

Some guests sign up for ghost hunt tours or explore the cemetery after dark. Others settle in with a horror movie, perhaps one of the several made on site, along with countless Youtube videos.

When I visited in late 2024, Mehar said hundreds of people stop by the motel on busy days, mostly focusing on the gift shop and the crowded, dusty shelves of the lobby-adjacent clown museum.

“When we came here, there were 800 or 850 clowns,” Mehar said. “Right now, we have close to 6,000.”

Throughout the motel’s corridors, walls and no-frills guest rooms (rated at 3.5 stars by Yelp and Trip Advisor), the clowns continue against a color scheme of purple, yellow and red, augmented by polka dots of blue and green. Rates start at $99.

If you book Room 222, which highlights Clownvis (Elvis as a clown, basically), the motel warns that you may be awakened in the wee hours by a mysterious “malevolent entity.”

The hotel also advises all guests that, despite monthly pest-control visits, they may encounter “UFI’s (Unwanted Flying Insects),” because rooms open to the outdoors. (This part of Nevada is known for its many Mormon crickets.)

It was a sombre Thursday afternoon in Alesi, a community in Ikom Local Government Area (LGA) of Cross River State, in South South Nigeria. Inside the village head’s palace, men and women gathered in silence, their faces drawn with grief. Some stared blankly ahead; others fought back tears.

“We have lost another son. Our hearts are heavy, our eyes are bleeding. Our people are continuously being killed as a result of boundary disputes, and we are increasingly being forced to take up arms,” Nzan Osim, a community leader, addressed the mourners. 

A day earlier, Fidelis Akan, a cocoa farmer from Alesi, was beheaded on his farm, close to the boundary with Ochon, a neighbouring community in Obubra LGA. His elder brother, Lawrence Akan, said Fidelis had gone to the farm with his daughter that morning to harvest cocoa when they heard gunshots. 

“As they came out to see what was happening, a group of boys, allegedly from Ochon, caught them. When they found out that he was from Alesi, they beheaded him,” he narrated. Fidelis’ daughter escaped and raised the alarm. His body was later recovered and buried the same day, leaving behind a wife and six children. 

In the aftermath, angry residents allegedly set fire to a truck loaded with cocoa, believing it belonged to an Ochon farmer. 

A long battle over land

Since 2022, Alesi and Ochon have become flashpoints for deadly clashes, rooted in a long-running boundary dispute and the struggle for farmland to cultivate cocoa, one of Cross River’s most valuable crops. 

Yet, for decades, both communities coexisted peacefully, trading and even intermarrying across the boundary without violence. Many locals believe the recent tensions are being driven by increased competition for farmland and the growing economic value of cocoa.

The disputed land falls within the Ukpon River Forest Reserve, a protected area established by the state government in 1930 to preserve forest resources and biodiversity. Both communities continue to claim ownership of the area, with residents of Alesi accusing their Ochon counterparts of trespassing and attempting to seize land around Adibongha, the nearest clan to the boundary. 

The tension has often turned violent. In July, several houses were burnt and many families were displaced after an attack on Adibongha, according to Kelvin Eyam, a resident. 

“We have documents to prove our claim, but the Obubra people don’t want us at the boundary. They want to seize the entire land. The boundary is clearly marked at the centre of the river. There’s even a document that shows this, but attempts have been made to wipe it out,” said Nzan, a community leader from Alesi.

The traditional ruler of Obubra, Robert Mbinna, disagrees and insists it is Alesi that has been trespassing and illegally occupying their land. “There is a court order to that effect,” he said, adding that his own people have also lost lives in the crisis.

While both sides referred to documents supporting their claims, they did not present any to HumAngle for verification.

Beyond the legal arguments, residents say the human toll continues to rise. “A lot of people have been maimed, kidnapped and not seen till today. We dread to see one another and no longer enter the same vehicle with those from Obubra,” Nsan added. 

Aside from the lives lost, the protracted crisis between these communities is also impacting the livelihoods of residents. Farmers say vast farmlands have been abandoned for fear of attacks, while others have watched their cocoa trees destroyed in the clashes.

Daniel Eguma, a cocoa farmer from Ukanga in Ikom, is one of them. Just a day before Akan’s brutal murder, he escaped from Okokori, a community near the boundary where he would always pass the night after working on his farmland. 

“I slept at a primary school field and made arrangements with a driver who took me away at 3 a.m. after I heard of an impending attack. I left behind my six hectares of cocoa farmland and a motorcycle,” he told HumAngle. 

Daniel was already planning to harvest his cocoa in a week, but he cannot go back to his farm again. Usually, when criminals notice that farmers have abandoned their farms, they go in and steal. He said he could not even begin to estimate the value of what he has lost — but after years of labour and investment, it is substantial.

‘The Prevent Council’

As violence persisted despite repeated police deployments, civil society actors began searching for ways to prevent further bloodshed.

Nine months after at least eight people were killed and about 2000 displaced following a clash between the communities in March 2022,  the Foundation for Partnership Initiatives in the Niger Delta (PIND), a non-profit organisation, launched the Prevent Council initiative. The project aimed to strengthen community peacebuilding structures by engaging traditional rulers as positive influencers and conflict mediators in Akwa Ibom, Cross River, and Delta states.

PIND says it currently has 10,113 peace actors in its network, who have intervened in over 2000 conflicts since 2013.

In Cross River, at least 25 traditional rulers and community leaders in five LGAs, including Ikom and Obubra, were trained and made peace ambassadors. PIND’s Executive Director, Tunji Idowu, said that the initiative recognised the critical role that traditional rulers play in maintaining peace and security within their communities. 

“The central goal of the Prevent Council is to promote and sustain social cohesion and peaceful coexistence in society with no one left behind. It emphasises that sustainable peace must involve multilateral engagements with traditional institutions as critical positive influencers and conflict mediators in their respective states and communities,” Tunji explained.

Participants received training on early warning and response, conflict mapping, mediation, and Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR). 

Between 2023 and 2024, PIND peace ambassadors intervened when clashes erupted between Alesi and Ochon. Using their training manuals, they engaged both sides to de-escalate tensions.

“We went into the communities where we spoke with elders and youths about the need to embrace peace,” said Agbor Clement, a participant from Ikom LGA. 

However, since the return of the violence this year, both Agbor and Mbinna, a participant from Obubra LGA, admit that their effort have not tackled the root causes. Agbor noted that Ikom also shares boundaries with Boki and Etung local government areas; however, there have been no reported boundary disputes, as the borders are properly demarcated. 

Local government officials agree. According to Daniel Eyam, a Special Adviser on Political and Executive Matters to the Ikom LGA chairperson, although PIND’s activities are well-intentioned, the system itself prevents peace from taking root. 

“In communities, when there is a land dispute, you go to the elders because they are the custodians of facts that pertain to the disputed area, and when they speak the truth, matters are resolved. Sadly, many of them have refused to do that,” he said. 

Daniel stressed that beyond offering training, PIND should push relevant agencies to speak the truth and take action. 

Another challenge facing PIND’s Prevent Council is a lack of resources to enable peace ambassadors to respond immediately during conflict situations.

“We were supposed to meet with stakeholders after the latest crisis, but we are handicapped because our work usually ends after training,” said Victor Okim, a PIND ambassador in Obubra. “We cannot go into the communities to drill down on what we have learned because we don’t have the resources. There is no continuous monitoring and evaluation of Prevent Council activities.”

“If we have the support that we need, we can do more because we are part of them, and they trust us so much to listen when we speak,” he added. 

Nkongha Daniel, the PIND Coordinator for Ikom, said women are often the biggest losers in crises because they lose their husbands and children. She suggested the foundation invest more in training women on how to respond in times of crisis.

PIND did not respond to interview requests, so it remains unclear whether the organisation is aware of the renewed violence or has taken steps to address these challenges. However, in its Niger Delta Weekly Conflict Update for March 2022, it recommended stronger collaboration between stakeholders and the state government to tackle the root causes of land conflicts and redress historical grievances.

Government efforts fall short

On July 30, the Cross River State Government ordered the immediate suspension of all farming activities on the disputed land, saying it was part of its efforts to bring peace to the area until proper boundary demarcation was carried out.

Community leaders and stakeholders of the two warring communities met in Calabar, the state capital, with the Deputy Governor, Peter Odey, and other government officials, including Anthony Owan-Enoh, who is overseeing an eight-person Peace Committee that was inaugurated to identify the root causes of the conflict and recommend a sustainable resolution framework. 

During the meeting, community leaders were instructed to submit all relevant documents relating to the crisis on or before Aug. 1. HumAngle confirmed that the papers were submitted, and a follow-up review meeting was slated for Aug. 13 to assess compliance, monitor the committee’s progress, and tackle emerging issues.

However, several community leaders noted that no meaningful progress has been made. 

“They gave us two weeks to stay off our lands, saying they were coming to carry out boundary demarcation. But after the visit, nothing happened. We have not been told whether we can return to our farms,” said Kelvin Eyam, a community leader from Alesi, lamenting that the government appears indifferent as violence continues. 

Nzan claimed that on Sept. 4, the Secretary to the State Government asked both parties to provide surveyors for an urgent meeting with the state’s Surveyor General. However, when he called to find out the outcome of the meeting the next day, he was informed that it didn’t hold because the surveyor from Obubra could not come. 

“This is what has been happening, and the government continues to keep calm, give us excuses and watch lives get lost,” he lamented. 

Neji Abang, a member of the Peace Resolution Committee for the Ikom-Obubra communal conflict, said that the committee visited both communities shortly after its inauguration to conduct fact-finding. According to him, the state’s Surveyor-General was invited and subsequently deployed a technical team to the disputed boundary. 

“We had a meeting where they presented their findings, and the chairman of the committee had invited 10 representatives from each of the communities to the meeting,” he said. 

But the presentation was rejected by the Alesi delegation, who argued that the demarcation was different from the original boundary record in their possession. They claimed the survey relied on a previous court judgment that had awarded the disputed area to Ochon and therefore demanded a fresh exercise.

Neji also confirmed Nzan’s earlier account that Obubra failed to bring its own surveyor, despite a directive from the committee chairperson instructing both communities to provide independent surveyors to work alongside the state’s team at the disputed site on  Sept. 3.

When asked why the state government had not formally demarcated the boundary despite having records of all boundaries in the state, Abang said, “That is what we will eventually do if it addresses the crisis.” 

What’s the way out?

As government interventions stall, community members and peace ambassadors are proposing alternative paths toward a lasting solution.

Members of the PIND Prevent Council noted that it is also important to look into training community members on livelihoods and alternative means of survival because the conflicts are often rooted in economic struggle.

“Young people can be empowered through skills acquisition programs and grants so they can look away from cocoa, which is a major reason why there is a struggle for land,” Nkongha explained. “Many of the youth are jobless and turn to hard drugs, hence they become willing tools for conflict.”

She explained that Ikom and Obubra, for instance, are big producers of garri, plantain, palm oil, yams, and groundnuts. 

“We can establish industries that process these crops where young people can be employed to work and earn for themselves,” she noted.

For Agbor, another way out of the conflict will be for the government to take over the disputed area and set aside days when farmers on each side can go and harvest their crops, accompanied by security operatives. 

Emmanuel Ossai, a peace and conflict expert who has researched violence in the region, said that interventions, like that of PIND, need to consider widening existing partnerships by involving more strategically placed youth, traditional, religious, and women leaders across the communities in conflict management training regularly.  

“There might be several possible reasons for the violence that are not under PIND’s direct control, but expanding partnerships and training more local leaders in conflict management would be helpful,” he suggested. 

Emmanuel added that regular follow-ups are necessary after training to assess whether community leaders are applying the conflict management skills they acquired to achieve greater impact.

This story was produced under the HumAngle Foundation’s Advancing Peace and Security through Journalism project, supported by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

Last week, a ceasefire was announced after two years of genocide in Gaza. The bombs have stopped falling, but the devastation remains. The majority of homes, schools, hospitals, universities, factories, and commercial buildings have been reduced to rubble. From above, Gaza looks like a grey desert of rubble, its vibrant urban spaces reduced to ghost towns, its lush agricultural land and greenery wiped out.

The occupier’s aim was not only to render the Palestinians of Gaza homeless but also unable to provide for themselves. Uprooting the dispossessed and impoverished, those who have lost their connection to the land, is of course much easier.

This was the goal when Israeli tanks and bulldozers entered my family’s plot of land in the eastern part of Maghazi refugee camp and uprooted 55 olive trees, 10 palms and five fig trees.

This plot of land was offered to my refugee grandfather, Ali Alsaloul, by its original owner as a place to shelter in during the Nakba of 1948. Ali, his wife, Ghalia, and their children had just fled their village, al-Maghar, as Zionist forces advanced on it. Al-Maghar, like Gaza today, was reduced to rubble; the Zionists who perpetrated the crime completed the erasure by establishing a national park on its ruins – “Mrar Hills National Park”.

Ali was a farmer and so were his ancestors; his livelihood had always come from the land. So when he settled in the new location, he was quick to plant it with olive trees, palms, figs and prickly pears. He built his house there and raised my father, uncles and aunts. My grandfather eventually bought the land from its generous owner, by paying in installments over many years. Thus, my family came into the possession of 2,000 square metres (half an acre) of land.

Although my father and his siblings married and moved out of their family home, this plot of land remained a favourite place to go, especially for me.

It was just two kilometres away from our house in Maghazi refugee camp. I enjoyed doing the 30-minute walk, part of which went through a complete “jungle”: a stretch of green populated with clover, sycamore, jujube and olive trees, colourful birds, foxes, leashed and unleashed dogs and many beehives.

Every autumn, in October, when the olive picking season began, my cousins, friends and I would gather to collect the olives. It was an occasion that brought us closer together. We would get the olives pressed and get 500 litres (130 gallons) of olive oil from the harvest. The figs and dates were made into jams to have for breakfast or for suhoor during Ramadan.

The rest of the year, I would often meet my friends Ibrahim and Mohammed between the olive trees. We would light a small fire and make a kettle of tea to enjoy under the moonlight, while we talked.

When the war started in 2023, our land became a dangerous place to go. The farms and olive groves around it were often bombed. Our plot was also hit twice at the beginning of the war. As a result, we could not harvest the olives in 2023 and then again in 2024.

When the famine took hold of Gaza in the summer, we started sneaking into the plot to get some fruit and some firewood for cooking, since a kilo of that cost $2. We knew that Israeli tanks might storm in at any moment, but we took the risk anyway.

Seven families – we, friends and neighbours – benefited from the fruit and wood of that land.

One day in late August, a friend of mine called me with a terrible rumour he had heard: the Israeli tanks and bulldozers had advanced into the eastern part of Maghazi and levelled it all, uprooting trees and burying them. I gasped; our lifeline was gone.

Days later, the rumour was confirmed. The Israeli army had uprooted more than 600 trees in the area, mostly olive trees. Those who had fled from the area shared what they had seen. What was once a lush green stretch of land had been bulldozed into a yellow, lifeless desert.

Earlier in August, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) reported that 98.5 percent of Gaza’s agricultural land had been damaged or made inaccessible. I guess the destruction of our plot shrank that 1.5 percent remaining land even further.

As Israel was completing the erasure of Palestinian agricultural land, it started allowing commercial but not aid trucks into Gaza. The markets were flooded with products with packaging covered in Hebrew.

Israel was starving us, destroying our ability to grow our own food, and then making us buy their products at exorbitant prices.

Ninety percent of people in Gaza are unemployed and can’t afford to buy an Israeli egg for $5 or a kilo of dates for $13. It was yet another genocidal strategy that forced the two million starving Palestinians in Gaza to choose between two horrible options: dying from hunger or paying to support the Israeli economy.

Now, aid is finally supposed to start coming into Gaza under the ceasefire agreement. This may be a relief to many starving Palestinians, but it is not a solution. Israel has rendered us fully dependent on aid, and it is the sole power that determines if, when and how much of it enters Gaza. Per the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, 100 percent of Palestinians in Gaza experience some level of food insecurity.

Much of Gaza’s agricultural land remains out of reach, as Israel has withdrawn from just a part of the Gaza Strip. My family will have to wait for the implementation of the third phase of the ceasefire deal – if Israel agrees to implement it at all – to see the Israeli army withdraw to the buffer zone and regain access our land.

We have now lost our land twice. Once in 1948 and now again in 2025. Israel wants to repeat history and dispossess us again. It must not be allowed to convert more Palestinian land into buffer zones and national parks.

Getting back our land, rehabilitating and planting it is crucial not just for our survival, but also for maintaining our connection to the land. We must resist uprooting.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

WIMBLEDON legends are thrilled to see Thomas Tuchel go full Crazy Gang in England’s bid for World Cup glory.

The England boss is taking a leaf out of the Dons playbook by telling his Three Lions to use long throws and big goal-kicks to secure their first major trophy since 1966.

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Wimbledon were renowned for their direct and physical style of play both during the 1980s and 1990s.

As well as climbing from non-league to the top tier, they also pulled off one of football’s biggest shocks to beat Liverpool in the 1988 FA Cup final at Wembley.

Former Dons manager Dave Bassett told Sun Sport: “I think Tuchel’s on the right lines.

“The purists have been living in fantasy land. Even Manchester City use the long ball more. Our old ways are catching on.

“If you can get the ball forward — not aimlessly — and get players running in behind, it unsettles defences.

“People panic more with long throws than they ever do with corners — they become frightened to death.

“Going sideways and backwards doesn’t get you goals.

“We didn’t hang around. The ­players knew it was one-touch and going into the box. But we did not get the credit because people called it anti-football.”

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Bassett backs Tuchel’s decision to leave Jude Bellingham out of his latest squad — raising the ­possibility the Real Madrid superstar may not even feature in the USA, Canada and Mexico next summer.

The 81-year-old added: “Tuchel needs to decide what formation he wants and which players best suit his system and share his vision.

“Bellingham is a very good player but if he’s not conducive to the team spirit, then tough luck on Bellingham. One person cannot hold the team to ransom.

“When you go away, Tuchel can’t have moody, selfish people who are not sold on his ideas.

“If players are suspect he won’t take them — even if they may be great players.”

Bobby Gould took the reins after Bassett fell out with Dons owner Sam Hammam — and led them to their most famous win.

His first masterstroke after taking over the Crazy Gang was hiring ex-England coach Don Howe.

And Gould, 79, said: “England’s loss was Wimbledon’s gain with Don.

“We just added a bit more quality rather than ripping it up and starting again. It worked wonders.

“Don was Arsenal through and through and steeped in tradition — but even he got into the mind games.

“In the Wembley dressing room he told every player and staff member to put their watch back ten minutes.

“When the referee came to tell us to get into the tunnel, Don said, ‘no, not yet your watch must be wrong’. So off the ref went, we kept Kenny Dalglish & Co waiting — and that was our first ­victory of the day.”

Tuchel’s England exploits remind Gould of the Dons’ good old days.

He added: “England have scored a couple of goals under Tuchel right out of the Wimbledon playbook.

“But it showed our much-maligned tactics still work because the opposition don’t know what’s hit them when you get forward quickly and slaughter them with crosses or long throws.

“Mentally and physically you’ve got to be in it together and that gets the opposition thinking, ‘what have we got to do to stop them?’”

Wembley goal hero Lawrie Sanchez went on to use his Wimbledon experience as Northern Ireland manager.

And he masterminded a shock 1-0 victory over Sven-Goran Eriksson’s England at Windsor Park 20 years ago.

Sanchez, 65, said: “The thing the Crazy Gang had is we were greater than the sum of our parts.

“Whether you could get away with half the gamesmanship we got up to with 24 cameras focused on games is a different matter.

“But on the football side, the set-plays, strength of the characters, strong team ethic and belief in what we were doing would still stand us in good stead.

“We were stats-based well before stats came into play and our set-plays were the logical development from that stat-based stuff. We did set-plays in training ­boringly for hours on Thursdays and Fridays — but it paid off.

“Whether you can get that in an England team in a short space of time is a different matter.

“But they’ve been doing the same thing for the last 59 years and not won anything.”

Full-back Nigel Winterburn helped Wimbledon to a couple of promotions under Bassett but left for Arsenal a year before the cup glory.

He said: “No one liked us because of the way we played but we were often cast-offs with a determination to prove people wrong.

“Boy-oh-boy we intimidated a lot of teams.”

But the likes of John ­Fashanu and Vinny Jones met their match when they faced the British Army.

Winterburn, 61, said: “Dave Bassett liked to bond everyone in pre-season.

“We’d get a typed itinerary saying which five-star hotel awaited.

“But we would end up in the most basic places — usually with the army.

“Once we had to camp out overnight, attack a mock fort and rescue a so-called prisoner.

“It ended up in chaos with Fash and Vinny fighting soldiers.

“There were weird and wonderful times. It forged a togetherness that made sure we were always there to help team-mates.”

“Grounded,” the newly opened exhibition of relatively recent acquisitions of contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, starts out setting a very high bar. It’s a compelling launch, even if the spotty show that unfolds in the next several rooms falls apart.

Grounded, it isn’t.

“Land Deeds,” a 1970 work by Iranian American artist Siah Armajani (1939-2020), is the opener, and it’s terrific. The piece is composed of 50 documents recording real estate purchases that the artist made in all 50 U.S. states, spending less than $100 on each. Sometimes, I’d guess, much less: Armajani only bought a single square-inch of land in each place, so the properties were cheap. Maybe that would cost a hundred bucks in Beverly Hills or Honolulu, but a square-inch of Abilene, Kan., or Whitefish, Mont., would be lucky to get a buck.

In true Conceptual art form, the notarized documents confirming the transactions are lined up on the wall in alphabetical order, from Alabama and Alaska to Wisconsin and Wyoming, in two rows of 25. Visually dry, they nonetheless quickly pull you in. These are warranty deeds, a legal document used to guarantee that a property being sold is unencumbered and the transfer of ownership from seller to buyer is legit. In good Dada and Pop art-style, the work’s title turns out to be a pun: A deed is not just a real estate certificate but an endeavor that one has undertaken.

Siah Armajani’s 1970 “Land Deeds” records his purchase of one square-inch of all 50 U.S. states.

(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times)

Other artistic resonances unfold. Land art was then at the cutting edge of avant-garde activity.

By 1970, sculptors Christo and Jeanne-Claude had just wrapped a million square-feet of coastal Australia in tarpaulin lashed with rope. Robert Smithson had bulldozed dirt and rocks to build a spiral jetty coiling out into Utah’s Great Salt Lake. Michael Heizer had dug a huge trench across Mormon Mesa near Overton, Nev., making a sculptural object out of empty space. Armajani’s unusual earthwork joined in: Embracing a legal, bureaucratic form, he pointed to land as a decidedly social structure.

The document display is droll but serious. It may be a layered example of up-to-the-minute Conceptual art, deeply absorbing and surprisingly suggestive, but the deeds are also lithographs, a perfectly traditional medium. They’re signed by administrative officials — one Julian Allison, warranty trustee, and notary public Brenda J. Hord — rather than being autographed by the artist. An art experience is a social transaction.

Armajani, an immigrant working as an artist in New York but not yet a U.S. citizen, was profoundly committed to democratic principles. (His citizenship would come in the wake of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, which installed a disastrous theocracy from which the Middle East still suffers.) With “Land Deeds,” he put his finger on a critical real estate context: From the get-go, full participation in American democracy had been limited to white male landowners. The explanation was that they had a vested interest in the community.

The deeper reasons, however, were profoundly anti-democratic — the noxious intransigence of patriarchy and white supremacy in Western culture, which drastically narrowed the eligible land-owning class. Women and people of color, except in limited instances, need not apply. (And suffice to say that warranty deeds for land transfers from Indigenous people were in rather short supply.) Gallingly, this autocratic check on egalitarian participation was also spiked with an element of informed equanimity: An educated populace is essential to democracy’s successful functioning, but in the 1770s, that mostly meant white male landed gentry, since they were likely to have had formal schooling.

At LACMA, Armajani’s marvelously revealing “Land Deeds” sets the stage for “Grounded.” The show was organized by LACMA curators Rita Gonzalez and Dhyandra Lawson, and deputy director Nancy Thomas. Entry wall text — there is no catalog — says it “explores how human experience is embedded in the land, presenting the work of artists who endow it with meaning.”

But, collectively, the 39 assembled contemporary paintings, sculptures, photographs, textiles and videos by 35 artists based in the Americas and areas of the Pacific underperform. Sometimes that’s because the individual work is bland, while elsewhere its pertinence to the shambling theme is stretched to the breaking point.

Familiar photographs of figures in the landscape by Ana Mendieta, left, and Laura Aguilar, center, offer background for the theme explored in “Grounded.”

(Museum Associates / LACMA)

The land theme is so loose and shaggy that, without the contemporary time frame, the show could start with prehistoric cave paintings, toss in a Chinese Song Dynasty scroll whose pictures follow a journey down the Yangzi River, add a Central African Kongo spirit sculpture filled with grave dirt and, for good measure, suitably hang a Jackson Pollock drip painting solely because it was made by spreading raw canvas flat on the ground.

Superficial bedlam, in other words.

Some work does stand out. Across from the Armajani is Patrick Martinez’s “Fallen Empire,” which takes a sly commercial real estate approach. The poignant mixed-media painting doubles as a large shop façade of crumbling, graffitied ceramic tiles with signage attached on a tarp. The name “Azteca” evokes a long-gone historical realm, here attached to a shop now falling into ruin. Martinez scatters ceramic roses across the painting, a mordant honorific to past glory and current hopes.

In the next room, Connie Samaras’ serendipitous landscape photograph unshackles whatever might be meant by being grounded. Shot from her L.A. home in the hills, what at first appears to be a strange cloud in the night sky over the twinkling city below turns out to be the vapor trail of a Minuteman missile deployed one night in 1998. A tangle of light above a black silhouette of a palm tree emits a sulfurous glow, its nauseous beauty balanced on the tip of potential annihilation.

Also among the more engaging works are two well-known photographic excursions into the landscape. Laura Aguilar’s “Grounded #111,” from a large series that likely gave the show its name, poses her corpulent nude body before a majestic boulder in the Joshua Tree desert, as if a secular saint enclosed within a sacred mandorla.

Six adjacent photographs in Ana Mendieta’s “Volcano Series no. 2” record a performance type of Land art in which a female form seems to erupt from within the Earth, spewing a volatile shower of flaming embers and smoke. Forget placid if repressive fantasies of Adam’s rib. The volcanic explosion provides a theatrically dramatic precedent for Aguilar’s contemplative composition.

Other impressive works include Mexico City-based Abraham Cruzvillegas’ exceptional sculpture, “Autoconcancion V” — the title’s made-up word translates to “auto with song” — which upends conventional L.A. car culture. An old automobile’s beat-up rear bench seat becomes the launching pad for a wooden box holding a small fan palm, held aloft on buoyant metal rods and exuding a witty mix of aplomb and high spirits.

A 70-foot video projection by Lisa Reihana reimagines a famous scenic French wallpaper.

(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times)

New Zealand artist Lisa Reihana, who is of Māori British ancestry, transformed a famous early 19^th century French scenic wallpaper designed by Jean-Gabriel Charvet into an equally extravagant, 70-foot-wide projection of video animation. The showily exoticized wallpaper, sold throughout Europe and in North America by celebrated manufacturer Joseph Dufour, was the culmination of Western public fascination with British Royal Navy Capt. James Cook’s three voyages to the Pacific. In a big, darkened room, Reihana redecorates.

Amid dreamy island landscapes, “in Pursuit of Venus [infected]” beautifully mixes interactive scenes of playful harmony and brute conflict between red-uniformed colonizers and colonized Polynesians. She maintains a nuanced sense of humanity’s transgressions and innocence, without demonizing or idealizing either side. Emblematic is a wickedly funny episode where a British plein-air painter at his easel bats away pesky tropical insects, invisible to a viewer’s naked eye, as he attempts to render a still life of a dead fish.

What either the Reihana video or the Cruzvillegas sculpture has to do with how human experience is embedded in the land — “grounded” — I cannot say, except in the most superficial ways. The land is certainly not a major focus of either one. The Cruzvillegas sculpture celebrates varieties of youthful play, while the Reihana animation ruminates on dimensions of cultural collision. The exhibition’s purported theme unhappily narrows perspectives on the assembled works of art, rather than opening wide their myriad readings.

Lisa Reihana, “in Pursuit of Venus [infected],” 2015, projected video animation.

(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times)

Essentially, “Grounded” is an old-fashioned “Recent Acquisitions” show, with most works entering LACMA’s collection in the last half-dozen years or so. (The big exception is Mendieta’s “Volcano” series, easily the show’s most famous work, purchased a quarter-century ago; it’s apparently included here as a benchmark.) Six pieces are shared with the UCLA Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art as part of the new MAC3 (Mohn Art Collective) program, and the Aguilar is shared with the Vincent Price Art Museum at East L.A. College.

The exhibition is on view in LACMA’s Broad Contemporary Art Museum for eight months, until late June 2026. The unusually lengthy run will put recent art on par with LACMA’s historical departments, when the new Geffen Galleries building opens in April. Those rooms are also expected to thematize the museum’s diverse permanent collection of art’s global history.

But “Grounded” would have been better left without its imposed topic, which inadvertently casts much work as ugly stepsisters unsuccessfully trying to jam their feet into Cinderella’s glass slipper. Skepticism over the coming Geffen theme idea mounts.

Getty Images

Evtec

‘Toothless support’

Rebekah and Jamie Vardy have signed a huge TV deal with ITV which will give viewers an insight into their personal and professional lives as they start a new life in Italy

Rebekah Vardy may be able to put the humiliation of Wagatha Chrisitie firmly behind her after landing a lucrative TV deal to film a reality show with her husband and family. According to reports, Rebekah, 43, will document the couple’s personal and professional life as they film their transition to Italy.

Jamie has now signed for football team US Cremonese. As yet an official title has not been confirmed but The Sun has reported a working title of The Vardys. The family have already relocated to Lombardy with their five children.

And a source told the publication: “There is huge interest in Becky and her life as a Wag, a mother and a TV personality, not to mention the relationship between her and Jamie.”

They added: “She’ll be seen opening up her home and heart as she provides unprecedented access at a crucial point in their history. It’s a real coup for her to have this with a channel as huge as ITV.”

ITV declined to make an official comment. Rebekah was caught in a legal dispute with Coleen Rooney after she was accused of selling information to the media about Coleen’s private life.

News of Rebekah and Jamie’s TV deal with ITV comes after it was confirmed by Disney+ that Wayne Rooney and Coleen have signed a ten-part series focusing on their family life.

Viewers will get to see how Coleen deals with her business life while Wayne, who has retired as a professional footballer, now takes on the school run. Keen to give viewers a real insight into their life, fans will witness the highs and the lows.

Sean Doyle, Executive Director of Unscripted at Disney+, said: “We’ve seen great success over the past couple of years with our Disney+ Original unscripted series such as Finding Michael, Coleen Rooney: The Real Wagatha Story, Brawn: The Impossible Formula 1 Story and more recently, Flintoff.”

He added: “Our distinctive offering of combining the most talked-about household names and their incredible life experiences has hit the right note with our audiences who are looking for authentic and captivating real-life stories.”

Sean went on to say: “As our slate evolves, we want to continue working with world-class producers and homegrown talent in the reality space, with a focus on female-skewed factual.”

Another addition to the reality TV sector of the streaming platform is Jamie Laing and his wife Sophie, who were on Made In Chelsea.

Due to the success of their podcast the couple have become popular with the nation.

READ MORE: Little-known benefits of bamboo bedding as shoppers ditch cotton for this unusual material

Like this story? For more of the latest showbiz news and gossip, follow Mirror Celebs on TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Threads.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration said Monday that it will open 13 million acres of federal lands for coal mining and provide $625 million to recommission or modernize coal-fired power plants as President Trump continues his efforts to reverse the yearlong decline in the U.S. coal industry.

Actions by the Energy and Interior departments and the Environmental Protection Agency follow executive orders Trump issued in April to revive coal, a reliable but polluting energy source that’s long been shrinking amid environmental regulations and competition from cheaper natural gas.

Environmental groups denounced the announcement, which comes as the Trump administration has clamped down on renewable energy, including freezing permits for offshore wind projects, ending clean energy tax credits and blocking wind and solar projects on federal lands.

Under Trump’s orders, the Energy Department has required fossil-fueled power plants in Michigan and Pennsylvania to keep operating past their retirement dates to meet rising U.S. power demand amid growth in data centers, artificial intelligence and electric cars. The latest announcement would allow those efforts to expand as a precaution against possible electricity shortfalls.

Trump also has directed federal agencies to identify coal resources on federal lands, lift barriers to coal mining and prioritize coal leasing on U.S. lands. A sweeping tax bill approved by Republicans and signed by Trump reduces royalty rates for coal mining from 12.5% to 7%, a significant decrease that officials said will help ensure U.S. coal producers can compete in global markets.

‘Mine baby, mine’

The new law also mandates increased availability for coal mining on federal lands and streamlines federal reviews of coal leases.

“Everybody likes to say, ‘drill baby, drill.’ I know that President Trump has another initiative for us, which is ‘mine baby, mine,’” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said at a news conference Monday at Interior headquarters. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin and Energy Undersecretary Wells Griffith also spoke at the event. All three agencies signed orders boosting coal.

“By reducing the royalty rate for coal, increasing coal acres available for leasing and unlocking critical minerals from mine waste, we are strengthening our economy, protecting national security and ensuring that communities from Montana to Alabama benefit from good-paying jobs,” Burgum said.

Zeldin called coal a reliable energy source that has supported American communities and economic growth for generations.

“Americans are suffering because the past administration attempted to apply heavy-handed regulations to coal and other forms of energy it deemed unfavorable,” he said.

Trump has clamped down on renewable energy

Environmental groups said Trump was wasting federal tax dollars by handing them to owners of the oldest, most expensive and dirtiest source of electricity.

“Subsidizing coal means propping up dirty, uncompetitive plants from last century — and saddling families with their high costs and pollution,” said Ted Kelly, clean energy director for the Environmental Defense Fund. “We need modern, affordable clean energy solutions to power a modern economy, but the Trump administration wants to drag us back to a 1950s electric grid.’’

Solar, wind and battery storage are the cheapest and fastest ways to bring new power to the grid, Kelly and other advocates said. “It makes no sense to cut off your best, most affordable options while doubling down on the most expensive ones,” Kelly said.

The EPA said Monday that it will open a 60-day public comment period on potential changes to a regional haze rule that has helped reduce pollution-fueled haze hanging over national parks, wilderness areas and tribal reservations. Zeldin announced in March that the haze rule would be among dozens of landmark environmental regulations that he plans to roll back or eliminate, including a 2009 finding that climate change harms human health and the environment.

Coal production has dropped steeply

Burgum, who also chairs Trump’s National Energy Dominance Council, said the actions announced Monday, along with the tax law and previous presidential and secretarial orders, will ensure “abundant, affordable energy while reducing reliance on foreign sources of coal and minerals.’’

The Republican president has long promised to boost what he calls “beautiful” coal to fire power plants and for other uses, but the industry has been in decline for decades.

Coal once provided more than half of U.S. electricity production, but its share dropped to about 15% in 2024, down from about 45% as recently as 2010. Natural gas provides about 43% of U.S. electricity, with the remainder from nuclear energy and renewables such as wind, solar and hydropower.

Energy experts say any bump for coal under Trump is likely to be temporary because natural gas is cheaper, and there’s a durable market for wind and solar power no matter who holds the White House.

Daly writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Todd Richmond in Madison, Wis., contributed to this report.

Staff at Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) will be out of work for at least another week as the business secretary prepares to meet suppliers of the car maker who are at risk of closure.

JLR has confirmed that production in its factories – including its UK facilities in Solihull, Halewood and Wolverhampton – will remain suspended until at least October 1.

It previously said production would resume on September 24.

The company’s production lines ground to a halt in late August following a major cyber attack, and fears are growing that the company’s suppliers could go bust without support.

Business Secretary Peter Kyle will visit JLR for the first time since the attack to meet with the company and firms in the supply chain for the beleaguered carmaker.

“Our focus remains on supporting our customers, suppliers, colleagues, and our retailers who remain open,” the statement said.

“We fully recognise this is a difficult time for all connected with JLR and we thank everyone for their continued support and patience.”

Industry minister Chris McDonald said he was visiting JLR alongside the business secretary to “host companies in the supply chain, to listen to workers and hear how we can support them and help get production back online.”

He said in a statement: “We have two priorities, helping Jaguar Land Rover get back up and running as soon as possible and the long-term health of the supply chain.

“We are acutely aware of the difficulties the stoppage is causing for those suppliers and their staff, many of whom are already taking a financial hit through no fault of their own – and we will do everything we can to reassure them that the government is on their side.”

Suppliers are anxious to be heard, according to Johnathan Dudley, the head of manufacturing for accounting and consulting firm Crowe UK. The firm is based in the West Midlands, which is where the Solihull and Wolverhampton plants are.

“Obviously, they’re being very, very cautious because they don’t want to create panic, and equally, they don’t want to be seen to be criticising people further up the chain,” he said.

“It’s not a blame game, but it is a cry for help, because there are businesses now seeing people not paying [staff].”

The halt in production had hit profits by about £120m already, and £1.7bn in lost revenue, according to David Bailey, Professor of Business Economics at the University of Birmingham.

JLR is currently taking the lead on support for its own supply chain, rather than any state intervention.

PLANE passengers need to be aware of this one boarding pass code which could land you the worst seat on the entire plane.

Although these tickets are small, they hold a wealth of information about flight details – some of which could impact where you are sat.

2

At the bottom of a typical boarding pass there is often a SEQ number, according to Simple Flying.

This is also known as the “sequence number”.

It refers to the passenger boarding order for the flight.

For example, if your ticket reads SEQ08, it would mean you are the eighth person to check in.

With this information, you may be able to determine what seat you have been allocated.

Some airlines reportedly assign seats in the order of how travellers have checked in.

This means that people who were last to show up may be given a less desirable seat, reports say.

The SEQ code could also cause issues if the passenger is one of the last people to check in and the flight is full. 

In Groups

Other codes on boarding passes include the group number, with airlines like Air Canada and Finnair using these.

This code is designed to help make boarding easier.

It usually reads as something like “Group 1” or “Group 2”, which staff then call out at the gate.

These groups are often assigned based on things like families, passengers with disabilities and seating class. 

Enhanced Screening

Another common code on a boarding pass is “SSSS”.

This stands for Secondary Security Screening Selection – and works as an thorough security check.

It was created by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) in the US.

Passengers who notice it on their boarding ticket should expect an “enhanced” screening.

This can take longer than normal security checks.

And it can sometimes cause delays for travellers who don’t anticipate this factor.

Overbooking

Some airlines can also overbook planes.

When everyone turns up without anyone pulling out of the flight, those who check in last are at risk of being transferred to a different flight. 

Another code that appears on boarding passes is the booking reference or reservation number.

The Passenger Name Record (PNR) is a six-digit alphanumeric code that appears on each and every boarding pass. 

This randomly-generated sequence labels you as a unique passenger.

It can help distinguish you in case you share an exact first and last name with another person on your plane. 

Every passenger’s PNR is essentially a detailed travel itinerary which includes a trove of data.

This includes things like flight details to meal preferences and even frequent flyer status.

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In our fiercely tribal and divisive culture, when consensus is illusory and we can’t seem to agree on even the most fundamental facts, the notion of shared history as a societal precept has left the building. But if we are indeed living in a post-truth era, Ian McEwan is here to tell us that things will only get worse.

In his bracing new time bender of a novel, the great British novelist posits that the past is irretrievably past, particularly in matters of the human heart, and any attempt by historians or biographers to wrench it into the present is folly — or in the case of this novel’s protagonist Thomas Metcalfe, intellectual vanity.

Metcalfe is an associate humanities professor and a researcher living in England in the 22nd century (2119, to be exact) who has taken it upon himself to unlock the mystery of a poem called “A Corona for Vivien,” written in 2014 by a deceased literary eminence named Francis Blundy, a poet whose genius, we learn, once rivaled that of Seamus Heaney. The poem was composed for his wife Vivien’s birthday dinner in October 2014, an evening that has taken on mythic proportions in certain academic circles in the intervening years. It even has a name: The Second Immortal Dinner, in which Blundy for the first time read his corona, a poem composed as a sequence of sonnets, that had been lost long ago.

In Metcalfe’s hothouse literary universe, Blundy’s poem is important because it is a revenant. In the intervening years, interpretive speculation about it has run rampant. Some have called it a warning about climate change. Others say Blundy was paid a six-figure sum by an energy company to suppress the poem. Only fragments of it exist, certain fugitive lines that appear in correspondence between Vivien, Blundy and Blundy’s editor, Harold T. Kitchener. Metcalfe has taken it upon himself to find the long-lost document, allegedly written by Blundy on a vellum scroll and buried by Vivien somewhere on Blundy’s property.

Metcalfe’s task is greatly complicated by the fact that he lives in a future world where much of the planet has been either immolated or else submerged underwater by a nuclear cataclysm that McEwan calls “The Inundation.” There has also been a mass migration — “The Derangement” — in which millions, deprived of resources and land, have been driven from England into Africa. Entire cities have been lost, “the land beneath them compressed and lowered, so they did not drain, but persisted like glacial lakes.” Whatever repositories of learning that weren’t destroyed now exist on higher ground in the mountains, where the “knowledge base and collective memory were largely preserved.”

The built environment has eroded, but fortunately for Metcalfe, the digital world of the past is intact. Biographers from 2000 onward, McEwan writes, are “heirs to more than a century of what the Blundy era airily called ‘the cloud’ ever expanding like a giant summer cumulus, though, of course, it simply consisted of data-storage machines.” Here in the cloud are the many hundreds of emails and texts from Blundy, his wife and their circle, allowing Metcalfe the satisfaction of knowing he can piece together the events of the epochal dinner party down to granular details: cutlery used, foods prepared, toasts proffered.

Ian McEwan’s elegantly structured and provocative novel is a strong argument for how little raw data, or even the most sublime art, can tell us about humans and their contrary natures.

(Annalena McAfee)

What Metcalfe knows of the Blundys’ life together can be gleaned from the 12 extant volumes of Vivien’s journals. From the journals Metcalfe has surmised that Vivien, herself a brilliant literary scholar and teacher, had willfully lived out her marriage under Blundy’s shadow, the dutiful handmaiden to a literary eminence. “She enjoyed producing a well-turned meal,” Metcalfe posits. “She was once a don, a candidate for a professorship. Abandoning it was a liberation. She always felt herself to be in control. But it had surprised her how … she had emptied herself of ambition, salary, status and achievement.”

Despite the pile-up of particulars, Metcalfe knows he must find the lost poem, that it is the keystone without which the story crumbles into insignificance. If he fails in this task Metcalfe, already feeling like an “intruder on the intentions and achievements” of Blundy, loses his mojo: his mission aborted, his career stalled.

But just when it seems as if Metcalfe, after a long and arduous journey across land and water, has discovered something significant, McEwan drops the curtain on that story, and rewinds the narrative 107 years, back to Vivien Blundy and her story. At first, the basic contours conform to Metcalfe’s version of events: Vivien did forsake her academic ambitions for Blundy, who did write a poem for her that he read aloud on her birthday, and so on.

But Metcalfe, as it turns out, has the details right and the motives all wrong, never more so than when McEwan reveals the fact of a murder, conceived in such a way that no snooping academic could ever unearth it. Emails are composed yet remain unsent. Digital correspondence is deleted into the ether, sneaky evasions that are beyond the biographer’s grasp. Metcalfe’s thesis is driven by a romanticized notion of Blundy’s life, but as McEwan slowly and carefully reveals, his poem, ostensibly a “repository of dreams,” more closely resembles a passive-aggressive act. As for Vivien, the narrative she has proffered in her journals is far from the whole story. She is resentful of Blundy, thwarted in her career, simmering with resentment. Despite his scholarly assiduity, Metcalfe is moving down an errant path that will never square the facts with lived experience.

Of course, facts are important, but they don’t necessarily reveal anything; it is the biographer’s folly to ascribe deeper meaning to them, to extrapolate truth from a disparate series of events. Metcalfe’s pursuit of revelation in a single lost poem is magical thinking, a relentless grasping for a chimera. McEwan’s elegantly structured and provocative novel is a strong argument for how little raw data, or even the most sublime art, can tell us about humans and their contrary natures.

Weingarten is the author of “Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water, and the Real Chinatown.”