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“... Norfolk, where around forty Iranian and Iraqi asylum seekers have been held since last April). In January, 120 of the men held at Napier tested positive for Covid, and all the residents were immediately locked in the barracks. The private contractor Clearsprings (which in January 2019 won Home Office asylum housing ...”

“... or it would have been included in I Object: Ian Hislop’s Search for Dissent (until 20 January 2019) as Hislop’s personal contribution. In May 1989 Sonia Sutcliffe, wife of the Yorkshire Ripper, was awarded record-breaking libel damages of £600,000 against Private Eye. Standing outside the Royal Courts of Justice after the ...”

“... found that prising information out of central government has become increasingly difficult. In 2019, Whitehall departments rejected more FOIs than ever before, citing excessive cost (£600 is the maximum) or one or other of the 24 exemptions available under the act, which range from national security to commercial confidentiality. Rejections are frequently ...”

“... On​ 23 January – the anniversary of a revolt that toppled the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez in 1958 – the head of Venezuela’s National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, declared himself interim president. But the crisis has been long in the making. Most of the Venezuelan opposition boycotted the presidential election held last May, in which Nicolás Maduro was standing for a second term, and refused to recognise his victory or the legitimacy of his new term in office ...”

“... and interaction between Asia and Europe. The show, which opened at the Block Museum in Chicago in January 2019, has travelled to the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto and is now at the National Museum of African Art in Washington DC (currently closed, but available online). It spans the period between the eighth and sixteenth centuries, focusing on specific ...”

“... the courts and even the Home Office saw them as victims of grooming and trafficking. As late as January 2019, the Home Office claimed to ‘consider minors, assessed to have been radicalised, as vulnerable victims’. A month later, the Times ran a story on Begum, who was by this time nineteen, pregnant and living in a Syrian refugee camp. (The fate ...”

“... old order. The international reception was glowing: media reports spoke of ‘Abiymania’ and in 2019 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Within three months he had signed a tripartite agreement with Eritrea and Somalia, an agreement that would help him prosecute the coming war.Abiy’s government disingenuously claimed that the war began when Tigrayan ...”

“... 1 January 2019, Yorkshire. The New Inn, the village pub, always lays on a quarter of an hour of fireworks at midnight, which we can see if not actually from our bed then certainly from the bedroom window. Brushing my teeth this morning, I catch a glimpse of my New Year self and am depressed to see how depleted I’m looking, though not quite as much as Raymond Briggs, who’s pretty much my age, and a good documentary on whom we watched earlier yesterday evening ...”

“... the portrait isn’t among the Swynnerton paintings now on show at Manchester Art Gallery (until 6 January 2019), the first exhibition of the artist’s work since 1923, when the gallery celebrated her election to the Royal Academy. She was the first woman to be elected to the RA (Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser were founding members and appointed not ...”

“... Alexei Navalny’s​ arrival in Russia on 17 January was both a homecoming and a high-stakes opening gambit. His decision to return, made after several months convalescing in Germany from near fatal poisoning with a nerve agent in Siberia last August, was a provocation confronting Vladimir Putin with a choice: he could either arrest his most prominent opponent, drawing greater attention to Navalny’s anti-corruption campaign, or allow him to operate freely on Russian soil ...”

“... existence as a species. Achatinella apexfulva, the Hawaiian tree snail, gave up the ghost on 1 January 2019. Maybe the loss of a few Fisher Price toys from the marketplace isn’t so bad. But humans can long for things they never wanted very badly in the first place. I yearn every other day for Mint Cracknel, a chocolate bar from the 1970s that was ...”

“... by the government.’ The taxation system was a machine designed to create inequality. In October 2019, the government tried to introduce yet another regressive levy, on v0ice over internet calls, a so-called ‘WhatsApp tax’. The streets erupted in fury: the thawra had begun. Since 1997 the Lebanese lira had been pegged at 1507 to the dollar, which ...”

“... have been sentenced to jail in absentia.Some fled, or tried to. Nabil Karoui, the runner-up in the 2019 presidential election, escaped through mountain passes but was arrested in Algeria. That the president himself was responsible for the coup, rather than its object, isn’t historically unusual. The autogolpe has many precedents, but what was remarkable this ...”

“... In December​ 2019, the US space force was established as the sixth branch of the US armed forces. Though founded by the Trump administration, the space force was not a Trump invention. Its precursor, air force space command, was set up in 1982. In 2001, a commission chaired by Donald Rumsfeld concluded that it was being neglected, and recommended setting up a separate ‘military department for space’, something that has remained a goal of American generals ever since ...”

“... In​ June 2019, legislation committing the UK to net zero carbon emissions by 2050 was added to the Climate Change Act. This move, made by Theresa May shortly before she resigned as prime minister, was strongly supported by the Conservative Environment Network, whose members now include half the MPs on the Tory back benches ...”