“... are forced to travel to England – as many still do from Northern Ireland where, despite the 2019 decriminalisation, provision of services has been repeatedly blocked by the health minister, Robin Swann. As in the US, there are long-standing efforts to erode the legal protections that exist for abortion in Britain. The Tory MPs Nadine Dorries, Jeremy ...”

“... Amin Maalouf, Le Naufrage des civilisations (‘The Shipwreck of Civilisations’), published in 2019. Maalouf is a Lebanese-Christian novelist who, for the last two decades, has been warning of the threat posed by ‘identitarian’ political movements. Le Naufrage is both an elegy for the Levant in which he grew up, and a reflection on the violent ...”

“... them in some recent work, such as Alec Ryrie’s Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt (2019). The religious misgivings of the devout were apologetic, shameful and secretive, ingredients of a ‘covert history’ that contrasts starkly with the swaggering self-confidence and certainty of well-known freethinkers such as Christopher Marlowe. These men ...”

“... has made clear that under a Tory government ‘fiscal consolidation’ will be maintained until 2019 at least. Where further savings and cuts – roughly £55 billion over the next parliament, ‘cuts on a colossal scale’ according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies – are to be found hasn’t been made clear, still less where the money will come from ...”

“... company to pursue projects with clear societal benefits and set up an AI ethics unit. He left in 2019 after allegations of bullying. His latest venture, Inflection AI, a $4 billion company backed by Microsoft and Nvidia, aims to produce AI that is empathetic as well as useful. Its main consumer offering is Pi, a chatbot that engages you in conversation ...”

“... when the right began to lose its mind. Sandwiched between the two, for four years beginning in January 1989, was the hapless regime of George H.W. Bush, the dying gasp of the postwar consensus as to how politics should be conducted. Amid such events as the recession of 1990-91, the LA riots, Ross Perot’s presidential run, the rise of the ‘shock ...”

“... the self-justifying and the self-lacerating. When it comes to the miscarriage she suffered in January 2011, she is unflinching. Though Murrell was thrilled about the pregnancy, she was less sure how she felt, and so when she lost the baby at eleven weeks, she wondered if she was being punished for not wanting it ‘badly enough’. This confession, along ...”

“... and more like a constraint on it. Was a Hamas-run Gaza an asset to Israel, as Netanyahu said in 2019?There were signs that Hamas realised it had been backed into a corner. When Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s junta in Egypt attacked the tunnel smuggling system from Sinai in the winter of 2013-14, Hamas decided to resurrect efforts at reconciliation with Fatah. But ...”

“... sterilised. He cited budgetary concerns and the likelihood of more frequent hurricanes.In November 2019, in a statement published in the journal BioScience, more than 11,000 scientists working in fields other than climate science declared a climate emergency: ‘The climate crisis has arrived and is accelerating faster than most scientists expected … It is ...”

“... managed the currency for a decade, and made it a thoroughgoing product of the French state. In January 1946, an analysis by the weekly magazine Marchés coloniaux concluded that colonial economies needed the new currency precisely because they were colonial economies. Not only were they dependent on foreign investment, external aid and export ...”

“... On​ 24 January, US Central Command, which oversees military operations across the Middle East and West Asia, issued a press release reporting that the USS Gravely, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, had shot down two missiles fired by Yemeni Houthis at a US-owned container ship, the MV Maersk Detroit, in the Gulf of Aden ...”

“... listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2018, was among them. On the brink of bankruptcy in late 2019, with shares down to $1.4, Nio’s stock shot up in the second half of 2020, briefly surpassing $60 in January 2021. By that point, the company was worth more than $90 billion, making it the fourth most valuable car firm ...”

“... version trailed in dire precursors like the storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters on 6 January 2021. It’s from among such riled-up conspiracists and militiamen, according to Walter, that the next American civil war will come, as home-grown bands of right-wing terrorists and xenophobic guerrillas infest the democratic liberal order of the United ...”

“... week of December the executive caved in on fuel tax. Philippe announced that the rise, due in January, would be put on hold for six months. The news was greeted with contempt by the gilets jaunes and the following day word came down from the president’s office that the fuel tax hike was no longer part of the ...”

“... by brazen corruption, set in long before Covid, not to mention the Ukraine war. Since October 2019 the country has experienced a major rise in poverty rates and a 90 per cent drop in the value of the lira. Not long after the Russian invasion Banque du Liban was failing to deliver payments for imported wheat. Supplies of bread started to run down. By ...”