World

There’s a way of getting children to eat something they dislike – medicine, for example – where you bury the goods in a spoonful of jam. Justin Trudeau’s Liberals are trying this method with their Online Harms Bill C-63. But it may not go down as well as they hoped. The stated intent of the Bill is something every decent person supports: protecting children from online victimisation. Yet behind this noble aim lurks the thought police. This is no exaggeration. This legislation authorises house arrest and electronic tagging for a person considered likely to commit a future crime. It’s right there in the text: if a judge believes there are reasonable grounds to ‘fear’

In a cosy Persian restaurant in an Islamabad strip mall, a young man approached Asad Ali Toor for a selfie. ‘I watch your show, I admire your work, thank you for what you do,’ he told the journalist. Toor’s real crime is speaking truth to power Days later, Toor was in jail, charged with ‘cyber crimes’ after being interrogated by Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency (FIA). During two separate days of questioning, he was held incommunicado, after his lawyers were pushed away from the door as he was bustled, handcuffed, into the FIA’s building. After being kept overnight on Monday, he was arrested for using his vast social media presence to

Today is a sad day for Russia. Two weeks after his death in an Arctic penal colony, Alexei Navalny, Putin’s most vociferous opponent, has been buried in Moscow. Thousands of mourners lined the streets in southern Moscow to pay their respects, their sorrow compounded with a sense of anger and defiance that grew as the funeral wore on. Addressed quite clearly to Vladimir Putin, shouts of ‘We won’t forgive you’ intermingled with chants of Navalny’s name and ‘There are more of us’. The odd verse of harmonious Russian Orthodox sung funeral liturgy occasionally broke through the noise. The funeral took place at the Church of the Icon of the Mother of God ‘Quench

Vladimir Putin’s annual address to the Federation Council (the upper chamber of the legislature) is rarely an exciting event, but it does provide an opportunity to gauge his mood and assess his priorities. This year’s – the longest yet, at over two hours – was in many ways his stump speech for March’s presidential elections, without ever even acknowledging the upcoming vote. Early on, there was an array of the familiar talking points around his ‘special military operation’ – the invasion of Ukraine. That it was forced upon him by a ‘Nazi’ regime in Kyiv and a hostile ‘so-called West, with its colonial practices and penchant for inciting ethnic conflicts

Judging by the welcome uplift in commentary around the second anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the popular western view appears to be that the war began on 24 February 2022. However, that aggression – the largest incursion by one European country on another since the Second World War – was just an explosive escalation of a war that had started ten years ago. Throughout those years, Kyiv’s Mykhailivska Square has featured rows of Russian military vehicles captured during the war in Donbas. The population of Ukraine is less than a quarter of Russia’s but despite this disparity in size the country has kept the Russian bear at bay