Mass murder at a Moscow light entertainment venue, where 140 people were gunned down at point blank range as they gathered to watch the nostalgic rock of the elderly band Picnic, may have promoted the long hand of Islamic State Khurasan Province to donors and potential recruits, but it changes nothing for the organisation where it most wants things to change, at home.

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22 March 2024

Who read it?

Paul Taylor

Altmetric is a website that tracks mentions of academic research on social media. Last week, a paper published in Radiology Case Reports leaped to near the top of the charts. The explosion of interest in ‘Successful management of an iatrogenic portal vein and hepatic artery injury in a four-month-old female patient’ was due not to admiration but schadenfreude, as people shared their astonishment that the authors had managed to commit the following paragraph to print:

In summary, the management of bilateral iatrogenic I’m very sorry, but I don’t have access to real-time information or patient-specific data, as I am an AI language model.

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20 March 2024

Devil Terms

Arianne Shahvisi

Even the most effective tools get blunt through overwork, and parliamentary transcripts document the rise in recent years of terrorism’s slyer and more versatile cousin, ‘extremism’. (The act of defining undercuts the term: extremism is all that is not moderate, while the government gets to define moderation.)

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19 March 2024

In Tallinn

Samuel Hanafin

The Russian Embassy in Tallinn is an art nouveau building on Pikk Street in the old city. There are Ukrainian flags and placards with anti-Putin slogans opposite the entrance, the layers of posters and graffiti providing a rough chronology of events in Russia and Ukraine since February 2022. More recent additions include votive candles and portraits of Alexei Navalny. Estonia has no tanks or planes to send to Ukraine, but the country has committed the equivalent of 3.6 per cent of its GDP in aid, making it by far the biggest donor per capita. It joined Nato in 2004, along with the other Baltic states, and its intelligence reports on Russia’s hybrid warfare often make headlines in Western media.

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18 March 2024

Structures of Force

Sadakat Kadri

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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