Max Jeffery

Thursday evening. All quiet in Ballymena so far, after three nights of wrath. On the kerb of Waring Street – just off Larne Street, which rioters tore through on Tuesday and left burning and beaten – sit James and Casper, both 16. James is wearing a balaclava with a Rottweiler’s face printed on the front. Casper wears a hoodie. Opposite the boys, a woman is handing out signs for people to put in their windows which read ‘LOCALS LIVE HERE’, and down the road, on the corner of Henry Street and Railway Street, a man is pointing his phone at a row of parked police jeeps, and will expectantly livestream this scene to thousands of people on TikTok over the coming hours, as violence is predicted, feared and hoped for, but does not come to pass. The rioting began on Monday 9 June.

The Cambridge bike bandit emerged. I watched the rough, smiling face of the old man who came slowly from his bungalow and urged me to join him around the back; he didn’t look like a thief. We entered his grassless yard filled with bikes, tyres and tools. ‘This Raleigh, £80,’ he said, withdrawing a creaky frame from the pile. ‘I just changed the tyre. You see? Not heavy. Made in England. Nottingham. You can try a little bit. Try it for ten minutes. I don’t mind.’ A source had told me about the bandit, a man who openly shifted stolen bikes from a suburban Cambridge home, so bad and unpoliced has bike theft become in the city. I had got the outlaw’s phone number and arranged to meet him under the guise of making a purchase.

Better rebels than Kneecap would’ve begun their headline set at Wide Awake festival in south London on Friday night with a show of defiance against the British state, a swipe at the occupier in its fortress capital. Perhaps they would’ve unfurled a great big yellow Hezbollah banner. As it was, Kneecap flashed the message ‘FREE PALESTINE’ on a screen, showed a montage of criticism the band had received from Sharon Osbourne, some Fox News pundits and the shadow home secretary Chris Philp, and walked on stage to ‘It’s been ages,’ one of their less popular songs. The moment demanded more.

Signal is the fashionable place to discuss shady business – and that is probably what tempted National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, a military man with a previous in at the Pentagon, into using the app to discuss American air strikes against the Yemeni Houthis with top Trump administration officials. It was Waltz who added the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to the “Houthis PC small group” on March 13, two days before the strikes. To people like Waltz, Signal is the obvious place to plot such an operation. But Signal is also the app you use when you want the world to know that you have something to hide.

Dan Pena has a picture of Adolf Hitler on his wall, but not any old picture. You know, not a simple portrait with Bavarian hills in the background, or a snap of the Führer doting on Helga Goebbels, Joseph’s daughter. No, Pena has a Hitler collage – Nazis marching through Nuremberg, a swastika blotting out the sky, hellfire on the horizon and, the final layer, a red and murderous photograph of the man himself superimposed on to the right-hand side. ‘Allegedly I used to hit my students in the 1990s.