Potemkin polls: Russia’s elections

Consecration at Ayodhya, the country’s most contested holy site, is another tick box in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist agenda. Is India’s foundational secularism at risk? The pandemi...

5 Aug 202020min

Since the Arab spring the country has vastly expanded its military and diplomatic efforts—filling an evident power vacuum and harking back to the days of the Ottoman Empire. Tanzania’s economy was rec...

4 Aug 202019min

The territory’s elections have been postponed, its activists barred from running—police are even targeting them abroad. What next for the democracy movement? We ask whether the global protests about r...

3 Aug 202023min

Enormous growth over 22 years has brought challenges, both from within and from outside; we examine the tech behemoth’s prospects. Wealth has always exploded wherever humans interacted more—and so hav...

31 Juli 202022min

The crisis has disproportionately squeezed migrants and has given many leaders an excuse to tighten borders. Will the restrictions outlast the pandemic? Balkan countries were notorious for organised c...

30 Juli 202022min

Five years ago a $4.5bn hole in a development fund scrambled Malaysia’s politics. Now the inquiry has claimed its first scalp: that of Najib Razak, a former prime minister. We examine the grand shift ...

29 Juli 202023min

Camouflaged personnel with no insignia, protesters bundled into unmarked vans: the President Donald Trump's plan to put federal officers into American cities is a worrying political ploy. Our annual B...

28 Juli 202021min

Scientists are looking to South-East Asia to find how the virus got its start in humans. Knowing that could head off future pandemics. It is often hard to blame climate change unequivocally for weathe...

27 Juli 202020min