Two climate activists were recently arrested at the Natural History Museum in London after spraying a dinosaur skeleton reproduction with orange cornstarch while demanding the UK government halt oil and gas projects.

Gastroenterologist Dr. Will Stableforth and physiotherapist Steve Fay sprayed the museum’s reproduction of the 26-foot-tall Patagotitan mayorum skeleton at approximately 1:50 pm on October 26, according to a press release from the organization Just Stop Oil. The two also unfurled a banner that said ‘For health’s sake- Just Stop Oil’ before sitting on the floor and waiting for police to arrive. Both Stableforth and Fay were arrested on suspicion of criminal damage.

The dinosaur replica is central to the exhibition “The Titanosaur: Life as the Biggest Dinosaur”, which was closed to the public the rest of the day, according to The Telegraph. The skeleton was made using fossils unearthed from South America in 2014 and is on loan to the museum from the Museo Paleontológico Egidio Feruglio (MEF), a science research and exhibition center in Trelew, Argentina.

“As an NHS medical consultant I’ve spent many years looking after patients with diseases which, at their root, are caused by fossil fuels. I have done everything legal I can to get our message across. Most of that has been ineffective; so it’s time to break the law. I cannot see another way at this time,” Stableforth said in a statement prior to the protest.

Stableforth and Fay called for health professionals and members of the public to march in London on October 30, but the press release from Just Stop Oil said the organization was calling for daily marches in the city until the government ends its approval of new oil and gas projects.

A 2,700-year-old Assyrian lamassu—a protective deity sculpture—was recently re-excavated in Iraq, astounding experts with its size and condition. 

The Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage (SBAH) announced yesterday that the figure, depicting a human head and a body akin to bull or lion with wings like a bird, had survived the two millennia with relatively limited damage. The alabaster sculpture weighs roughly 19 tons and measures around 12 and a half feet long.

The re-excavation was conducted by a joint Iraqi-French team led by Ahmed Fakak Al-Badrani. The French archaeologist Pascal Butterlin—the professor of Middle East archaeology at the University of Paris I Pantheon-Sorbonne—told France24: “I’ve never unearthed anything this big in my life before…Normally, it’s only in Egypt or Cambodia that you find pieces this big.”

According to the SBAH release, the lamassu was commissioned by Assyrian King Sargon II to guard the new capital of Khursbad after he gained power in 721 BCE. The death of Sargon II’s son, however, prompted the capital to move, leaving the lamassu behind.

It was first uncovered in 1992 during an Iraqi-led excavation. However, Iraq had recently been placed under a devastating economic embargo in retribution for Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. This consequently destabilized systems designed to protect cultural heritage from Iraq, fueling a spike in antiquities thefts.

Artist Ryder Ripps and Ripps’ business partner, Jeremy Cahen, have been ordered to pay Bored Ape Yacht Club creator Yuga Labs roughly $1.6 million, concluding the protracted court battle over copyright infringement. 

Per CoinTelegraph, John F. Walter, U.S. District Judge of Central California, ruled Wednesday that the pair must pay for “disgorgement and damages”, in addition to legal fees. Walter awarded Yuga Labs $1.38 million after concluding the company was entitled to a disgorgement—or a court-ordered repayment of illegally gotten gains—as well as $200,000 in statutory damages relating to cybersquatting violations. The order also covers attorney’s fees and costs from Ripps and Cahen after the judge deemed the trademark infringement to be an “exceptional case.” In the order, Walter reasoned that the “infringing and noninfringing elements of [the] work cannot be readily separated” and said the trademark infringement was an “exceptional case.”

“A trademark case is generally considered exceptional for purposes of awarding of attorneys’ fees when a party has taken positions that can be characterized as ‘malicious, fraudulent, deliberate or willful,’” the judge wrote in his ruling. 

Yuga Labs filed its complaint in June 2022, after Ripps began selling RR/BAYC NFTs that were identical to Yuga Labs’ Bored Ape Yacht Club collection. However, Ripps claimed that the RR/BAYC NFTs were a form of appropriation art meant to undermine BAYC, which he has said he believed to be threaded with alt-right, Neo Nazi dog whistles and imagery.

Yuga Labs, which has denied that their project contains references to esoteric right-wing ideology, sued Ripps for trademark infringement and cybersquatting, with their main contention being that Ripps was confusing potential customers with his knockoff project.

Maine Rep. Jared Golden, a Democrat who last year voted against a federal assault weapons ban, apologized on Thursday for his previous opposition and pledged to reverse course following the mass shootings in Lewiston that killed 18 people and left 13 injured. 

“The time has now come for me to take responsibility for this failure, which is why I now call on the United States Congress to ban assault rifles, like the one used by this sick perpetrator of this mass killing in my hometown,” Golden said at a press conference. “For the good of my community, I will work with any colleague to get this done in the time that I have left in Congress.” 

Golden—who was elected to office in 2018, won reelection last year and is up for re-election in 2024—was one of five Democrats who voted against a federal assault weapons ban last July. The bill eventually passed the House but has yet to come up for a vote in the Senate. In his apology on Thursday, Golden said he had opposed the ban out of a desire to protect his family and “because of a false confidence that our community was above this.” 

“To the people of Lewiston, my constituents throughout the second district, to the families who lost loved ones, and to those who have been harmed, I ask for forgiveness and support as I seek to put an end to these terrible shootings,”  Golden said. 

Contrition is rare among gun-supporting lawmakers, who have often stopped short of taking meaningful legislative action after mass shootings and become known instead to offer “thoughts and prayers”—or alternative theories about what actually makes such events so lethal. My colleague Mark Follman noted one example following the horrific mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas last year, in which the shooter used an AR-15:  

George Santos has pleaded not guilty for the second time this year. Santos’ plea on Friday morning at the Eastern District of New York’s Long Island courthouse comes after prosecutors unveiled a superseding indictment earlier this month that charges the freshman Republican congressman with helping to orchestrate a fake donor scheme first exposed by Mother Jones in February, fabricating a $500,000 loan to his campaign, and making unauthorized transactions with donors’ credit cards.

Santos is now facing 23 counts of criminal charges.

Santos did not make a statement or take questions from reporters as he exited the courthouse. On his way out, he was heckled by a small group of protesters.

Federal prosecutors had requested that District Court Judge Joanna Seybert, a Bill Clinton appointee, hold Santos’ trial in May or June of next year. Seybert said that was not possible given the cases already on her docket, and set September 9 as the trial date. The trial is expected to last two to three weeks.

It is unclear whether Santos will be a member of Congress in September. Fellow New York Republicans are moving forward with a motion to expel Santos from the House as part of an effort to distance themselves from him as they run for reelection in swing districts.

Santos did not make a statement or take questions from reporters as he exited the courthouse. On his way out, he was heckled by a small group of protesters. One held a sign that read “Devolder, Defrauds, Devoters,” a reference to Santos’ second last name.

Right-wing journalist Pietrangelo Buttafuoco has been nominated to replace Roberto Cicutto as president of the prestigious Venice Biennale, according to multiple English and Italian news outlets.

Buttafuoco is a close friend of Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni and a supporter of her far-right Brothers of Italy party. He began his career as a writer for several right wing Italian newspapers and magazines and was once the leader of the Fronte della Gioventù, the youth wing of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement party that preceded Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, according to The Art Newspaper.

Despite Buttafuoco’s lack of managerial experience, supporters view his nomination as triumph for Italy’s cultural right and fatal blow to the Italian liberal/left which, according to Raffaele Speranzon, an Italian senator and member of the Brothers of Italy, “thought of the Biennale Foundation as a fiefdom where it could place friends and acolytes.” Speranzon has said that Buttafuoco’s nomination “represents the kind of sea change the Meloni government wants to extend to every cultural and social institution in the nation: figures will be chosen for their depth, competence and experience alone.”

Center-left politician Rachele Scarpa has said Speranzon’s comments “bring forth a chilling vision of how the right conceives the cultural institutions” in Italy. “What is most alarming is that he calls into question the work of an institution, such as La Biennale, whose sole aim must be to take care of its exhibitions and certainly not to make the [Brothers of Italy] happy.”

Italy’s minister of culture Gennaro Sangiuliano confirmed Buttafuoco’s nomination, which now has to be assessed by the cultural commissions in Italy’s Senate and House of Deputies before it becomes official. Their decision is to be made public on November 14, according to Artnet News. 

Contemporary art fairs have been proliferating across Asia lately, as they did a decade or so ago in the United States and Europe. Frieze Seoul arrived in 2022, Art SG in Singapore in January, and Tokyo Gendai in July. Art Basel Hong Kong is still the dominant player in the Asian art market, but it is gaining competitors fast. Remember complaints about “fairtigue” prior to the pandemic? That seems like long ago. The argument put forward by fair organizers has been that these economic hubs, with their own distinct art scenes, merit fairs of their own. No arguing with that. But strolling the aisles (or just perusing Instagram), there is a creeping sense of monotony to it all: Well-capitalized dealers carting their wares from one white-walled trade-show booth to the next.

But at least one art fair has set out to do things differently. Behold Art Collaboration Kyoto, a young public-private entity that asks each selected Japanese gallery to partner with one or two galleries from abroad on a single display. That intriguing conceit has “a synergistic effect on the quality of the booth,” Yukako Yamashita, ACK’s program director, argued in an interview with ARTnews ahead of the event, which opens this weekend. (Typically, the Japanese gallerist invites the foreign colleague, but the fair also sometimes assists.)

“It’s just such a nice way of doing something with colleagues from the other side of the world, sharing resources,” Paris-based dealer Robbie Fitzpatrick said. His eponymous gallery will be in a booth with Anomaly (of Tokyo) and ROH (of Jakarta); each is bringing work by three of their artists, including Hannah Weinberger, Kei Imazu, and Dusadee Huntrakul, respectively.

ACK debuted in 2021, when Japan’s borders were still closed amid the pandemic; they reopened fully last October, weeks before its second edition. And so the latest outing, which runs October 28 to 30 at Sachio Otani’s 1960s sci-fi Kyoto International Conference Center, has the feel of being a major event, with exhibitors coming from around the globe.

New York’s 47 Canal, for one, has linked up with Tokyo’s Misako & Rosen to show some of the beguiling impressionist landscapes that Trevor Shimizu, who is represented by both galleries, has been making in recent years. This will be dealer Jeffrey Rosen’s third time doing ACK, having collaborated with São Paulo’s Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel in 2021 and London’s Herald Street in 2022. “It was fun, and because it was fun, it generated business,” Rosen said of that second fair, adding that he “met Japanese collectors that we did not otherwise know.”

Last week, Israeli performance artist Tamy Ben-Tor posted a video to Instagram and YouTube titled “Dear Hamas…” In the video, Ben-Tor dons a mask and a wig of black hair, and embodies a character that might best be described as a caricature of an elite liberal academic. 

“I’d like to utter support for your freedom fight,” says Ben-Tor in the video. “I’m still on the fence about the massacre of the babies. On the one hand, they were colonizing babies, they were Zionist babies…” 

In the video, which has since been taken down on Instagram, Ben-Tor suggests that the alleged killing of babies and raping of women during the October 7 attack in Israel—when Hamas killed more than 1,400 Israelis and took over 200 hostages—was justified and is supported by the women’s rights movements. 

“I will be waiting for you at the university campus when you invade and finally win your exhilarating battle of freedom,” she says.

Ben-Tor is known for performing a range of “despicable stock characters,” as New York Times critic Ken Johnson wrote in a 2012 review, including Jews and other identities. In Johnson’s words, “It emerges that the real targets of Ms. Ben-Tor’s satire are not particular deluded people but academic institutions that embrace and support ludicrous ideas in the name of open inquiry.” Ben-Tor’s work has been generally well received by critics, and her art is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Perez Art Museum Miami, and the Israel Museum, among others. 

I wrote this lecture in August 2023 and delivered it at Columbia University at the end of September. Nine days later, on October 7, the military wing of Hamas, the organization in power in the Gaza Strip, launched a surprise attack by air, sea, and land on the Israeli military stations along the partition fence, a nearby rave, and several kibbutzim. Around 1,400 Israelis were killed and more than 200 were taken hostage.

Since then, the Israeli war machine has roared into action. As of this writing, more than 7,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed so far, almost 3,000 of them children (the average age of inhabitants of the Gaza Strip is eighteen). More than 1,600 are trapped under the rubble. Entire families have been wiped out. The bombing has not stopped. On October 13, Israel ordered the inhabitants of the north part of the Gaza Strip—nearly 1.1 million people—to evacuate. The photographs of those who did leave chillingly recalled the photographs of the refugees of 1948, when Zionist militias drove more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. This event is known in Arabic as the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” and is considered by many to be ongoing. The Israelis proceeded to bomb this safe route, killing many of those who were attempting to flee to safety. Israelis continue to bomb the north and are now also bombing the south. The Israeli professor of Holocaust and genocide studies Raz Segal has called these events “a textbook case of genocide.”

Clearly, the numbers I cite in this lecture have rapidly become out of date: according to Al Jazeera, the number of Palestinian political prisoners has doubled since September, to ten thousand. I drew my initial statistics from reports by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza. Raji Sourani, the director of the center and Gaza’s leading human rights lawyer, is said to be alive, but his house was bombed earlier this week. It is difficult to get clear information, as Israel has cut off all electricity in Gaza as well as access to water, food, and fuel. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights has not published an updated report in over two weeks. The figure I cite of $158 billion given by the United States to Israel, largely in military aid, also requires updating: the Biden administration has just pledged to send Israel an additional $14.3 billion in military support.

Two questions come to me as I think about this lecture now: the first is about turning points, which is how I begin. I claim below that we can only identify turning points in retrospect. I do think we can at present agree with relative certainty, given the speed and violence with which the cogs are rotating, that we are in one now; what we do not know is in which direction they are turning.

A federal judge on Thursday ruled that voting maps created by Georgia Republicans violated the Voting Rights Act by racially discriminating against Black voters. In his 516-page ruling, US District Court Judge Steve Jones ordered lawmakers to redraw the state’s congressional and legislative districts, as well as create an additional Black-majority congressional district by December 8. The new maps could have major implications for the 2024 elections. 

Since September, voting rights advocates have been engrossed in a legal battle with legislators, arguing that the 2021 passage of new voting maps diluted the power of Black voters. As my colleague Ari Berman wrote when the new maps were drawn:

The congressional lines adopted by Georgia Republicans entrench white power by diluting the votes of fast-growing communities of color—a defining feature of GOP gerrymandering across the South this year. Georgia gained 1 million new residents over the last decade—all from communities of color—and is now a majority-minority state, but the congressional map increases representation for white Republicans and decreases representation for voters of color in spite of these demographic changes.

Now, along with redrawing current maps, Jones ordered lawmakers to create a new Black-majority congressional district, two more state Senate districts, and five additional state House districts, CNN reports. Republican Gov. Brian Kemp responded to Thursday’s order by scheduling a special session for November 29. But he did not rule out the possibility of appealing the court’s decision, according to the Associated Press. The Supreme Court’s ruling in the Georgia case is the most recent in a wave of decisions upholding the Voting Rights Act, including in Alabama and Florida, where judges ordered states to redraw maps found to be racially gerrymandered.