“... then under the direct control of the president. It became Bashir’s praetorian guard. In April 2019, Hemetti says, he refused an order from Bashir to open fire on protesters. Bashir had quoted an Islamic law which supposedly allows a ruler to kill up to half of his people in order to bring stability. Many in Sudan welcomed Hemetti’s stance. But they are ...”

“... antisemitism row at Documenta was about more than just one banner, however. It began in January, five months before the exhibition opened. The dispute was not about the institution’s own legacy – its co-founder Werner Haftmann was a Nazi war criminal – or the ongoing violence against Germany’s Jewish community. Instead, it started with a ...”

“... draconian measures against migrants ended up dominating the headlines. In the summer of 2019, with the Lega leading the polls, he overplayed his hand by leaving the coalition. He had intended to trigger an election; instead, President Sergio Mattarella brokered a coalition between the M5S and the centre-left, followed in 2021 by a coalition of ...”

“... election campaign: Isaac Levido, the Australian spin doctor credited with coining the party’s 2019 slogan, ‘Get Brexit Done’; the former Vote Leave director of communications, Paul Stephenson; and Ben Guerin, one half of Topham Guerin, the political consultancy firm that rebranded the Conservatives’ official Twitter account as a fact-checking ...”

“... On​ 22 January, shortly after midday, Narendra Modi entered the half-built Ram Temple in the city of Ayodhya. Watched by millions on television and online, he slowly crossed the five halls, cradling a small silver umbrella (a symbol of spiritual power), and consecrated the new temple. The ceremony, he said, marked ‘the beginning of a new era ...”

“... recently of a Chicago social worker called Anjanette Young, whose home was raided in February 2019. Several police officers, who had mistakenly targeted her apartment, held Young at gunpoint, naked, for thirty minutes. In the bodycam footage, which the office of the city mayor, Lori Lightfoot (a Black woman), tried to suppress, and was originally denied ...”

“... beach just across the state border in Oaxaca.Emmanuel Cheo Ngu left his home in Bamenda on 30 July 2019, with his wife, Antoinette, and their four children. They drove south for seven hours, to Douala airport. There they said goodbye and he boarded the first of several flights that would take him to Quito in Ecuador. Ngu was a teacher at a secondary school in ...”

“... like the desert, from north to south,’ the International Crisis Group warned in December 2019. It predicted a growing ‘risk of jihadist contagion’ that could spread to West Africa’s more fertile, prosperous coastal states, including Côte d’Ivoire and Nigeria, the regional powerhouses. In February, Emmanuel Macron said he had twice ...”

“... concern in the Vatican about the impending visit of Vance, who had converted to Catholicism in 2019. In an encounter with Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office on 28 February, Vance had shown himself to be aggressive and combative, a populist politician in search of a cause. How interesting it might be for him, then, were he looking for a second target, to ...”

“... Marten and Mark Gordon, the couple who went on the run from social services and the police in January 2023, in order to prevent their baby girl being taken into care. Marten was raised in wealth and privilege: a large landed estate, acquaintance with royalty, private schools, trust funds. She had fallen out with her family, mainly because of her ...”

“... letter opened with a claim that the Lancet had warned of the virus spreading in China in 2019 – it hadn’t); and, circumstantially, for the transparency of Trump’s real motivation (to shift the blame for his weak handling of the crisis less than six months before the presidential election). In a way, the episode was extraordinary, a notable ...”

“... work at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, Marie Laurencin: Sapphic Paris (until 21 January), is one of her biggest to date. Recent retrospectives in France, Switzerland and Japan, where the founder of a taxi company collected more than five hundred of her paintings and established a museum in her honour (it closed in ...”

“... told on 31 October 2018 that there was a high chance it would lose, but it did not concede until 8 January 2019, after senior counsel said the case had become ‘unstateable’. Waiting so long meant that the cost to the taxpayer rose to more than £600,000. By December 2018, it had become clear that there was information that had not yet been disclosed ...”

“... Little admits that ‘quite likely very few’ of the rioters who stormed the Capitol on 6 January 2021 ‘thought of Shakespeare or theatre’, but insists that ‘resonances of a white Shakespeare haunted the insurrection,’ not just because the Capitol is near the Folger Shakespeare Library, but because the building is an architectural homage to ...”

“... as well be. The Child Trust Fund was a New Labour manifesto promise from 2001, passed into law in January 2005, giving every child born after 1 September 2002 a lump sum of £250, to compound until their eighteenth birthday. (My son qualified by a matter of days. Are kids born just before the cut-off annoyed about it? Yes.) The idea was to address structural ...”