Yulia Navalnaya’s call for protest votes and spoiled ballots in Russia’s presidential election was heeded by thousands. Outside the Russian Embassy in London yesterday, a queue stretched for almost a mile along Bayswater Road throughout the afternoon. It’s unlikely that many had given up their Sunday to contribute to Vladimir Putin’s 87 per cent share of the vote. 

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14 March 2024

Where’s my tail?

Liam Shaw

A female hoolock gibbon in Meghalaya

At some point in the past, humans and other apes lost their tails. Research recently published in Nature proposes a mechanism to explain how.

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12 March 2024

The Narcodictator in His Labyrinth

John Perry

The Honduran and US flags outside the courthouse in New York where JOH was on trial. Photo © Derek French / SOPA Images via ZUMA Press Wire

Prosecutors in New York this month claimed they had cracked ‘the largest drug trafficking conspiracy in the world’.

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8 March 2024

Liberté, if not yet égalité

Joan W. Scott

At a moment when the world seems very dark, with wars raging in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and with authoritarian leaders insisting that women’s natural role is to reproduce the family, the race and the nation, the passage of the French constitutional amendment protecting freedom of access to abortion brings a ray of hope. The long struggle to win recognition of the need for women to control their own bodies has resulted, if not in complete victory, at least in a major step forward.

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7 March 2024

At the Karachi Literature Festival

Selma Dabbagh

The support for Palestinians among ordinary people in Pakistan is genuine, palpable and widespread. Audience members asked what they could do with the outrage they feel when they watch images of slaughter and starvation. They described their sense of isolation and distress when watching these clips on social media on their phones. M.A. Jinnah Road (formerly Bandar Road), lined with crumbling colonial-era architecture and packed with lawyers’ offices, was festooned with Palestinian flags, especially near the mosques, strung up between the banners of the parties that had run in the recent elections. In Pakistan, two things get stolen, a man joked at the Sind Club: lighters and elections.

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4 March 2024

At the Tom Verlaine Book Sale

Alex Abramovich

Tom Verlaine in 1979. Photo © Janette Beckman / Redferns / Getty

A meme bounced around Brooklyn last summer: ‘What if we kissed at the Tom Verlaine book sale?’ Verlaine, who formed and fronted the band Television, died on 28 January 2023. Over the years he had acquired fifty thousand books.

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1 March 2024

At the Berlin Film Festival

Shane Danielsen

At the beginning of February there were reports that members of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party had for the first time been invited to attend the Berlin Film Festival’s opening night. The outcry was immediate. More than two hundred members of the European film industry signed an open letter protesting at the invitations, declaring them ‘incompatible with the festival’s commitment to being a place of “empathy, awareness and understanding”’.

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