As with so many stories, the outbreak of violence this week in Belfast can be told through the lens of a single street. Lendrick Street is in the east of the Northern Irish city. A straight line of barely 200 meters. Modest two-story brick houses, aligned in that Georgian style where only the door and windows mark the different homes that occupy the continuous walls on both sides of the road.

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Chinese espionage in the European Union and neighboring countries reveals its full scope when certain pieces are connected. The May 20 arrest in Germany of a German couple of Chinese origin who were taking military-technology information from universities is a particularly notable case. But it is only one of many. The episode exposes a strategy of large-scale, coordinated infiltration when placed alongside other arrests in EU member states and neighboring countries. In total, around 30 agents and collaborators have been uncovered in Europe and its vicinity in just the past two years; some were arrested, several expelled, and others are awaiting trial. China typically denies all espionage allegations and describes them as slander.

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It was extreme even for a figure like Nigel Farage. Hours after the police footage of officers handcuffing Henry Nowak on the fatal night of December 3 in Southampton became public and spread like wildfire on social media, the Reform UK leader called on citizens to respond with “pure, cold rage.” The young Nowak had been fatally stabbed by a man of Sikh faith and Asian descent, who later falsely accused him of a racist attack. “I can’t breathe,” the victim shouted up to nine times, to the officers’ disbelief as they moved against him. His cry of agony echoed the words George Floyd uttered on the streets of Minneapolis, which sparked the Black Lives Matter movement.

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In May 2021, while the world was still trying to recover from the Covid pandemic, British artist David Hockney presented his exhibition The Arrival of Spring. Normandy, 2020, dozens of hours of meticulous work he devoted to capturing — on his iPad using the Brushes app — the essence of the changing seasons while the world was confined by tragedy. True to form, he did not give up on either innovation or joy.

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Political and religious leaders in Northern Ireland saw early Wednesday morning — with the embers of a long night of violence in Belfast and other parts of the region still smoldering — that their calls for calm had fallen on deaf ears. Cars, buses, phone booths, and trash cans set ablaze. Homes where immigrants — or simply people from ethnic minorities — were believed to live, completely engulfed in flames after violent groups targeted them as places that needed to be “liberated.”

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