I first met the Israeli lawyer Tamar Pelleg-Sryck in Megiddo Military Prison, where I was sent after receiving an administrative detention order in December 1995. It was soon after the Oslo agreements, when the newly installed Palestinian Authority was starting to take control of the larger Palestinian cities. As part of setting the ground for the new realities, Israel was placing those opposed to Oslo in detention without charge, branding them ‘enemies of peace’. As the numbers of administrative detainees surged, Tamar took on some of their cases, including mine.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.