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For Arab dissidents, the walls are closing in
In November 2022, Sherif Osman was having lunch with his fiancee, his sister and other family members at a glittering upscale restaurant in Dubai. A former military officer in Egypt and now a U.S. citizen, Osman had traveled to Dubai with his fiancee, Virta, so his family could meet her for the first time.
Without space to detain migrants, the UK tags them
The U.K. is presenting asylum seekers with an ultimatum: await deportation and asylum processing in Rwanda, face detention or wear a tracking device. Or leave voluntarily. As thousands of people continue to arrive in the U.K., the British authorities are scrambling for new ways to monitor and control them. Under the government’s new rules, Britain has a legal duty to detain and deport anyone who arrives on its shores via truck or boat regardless of whether they wish to seek asylum. Passed in July 2023, the Illegal Migration Act has already been described by the United Nations Human Rights Office as “exposing refugees to grave risks in breach of international law.”
Tech is still critical for Iran’s protest movement — and its regime
It has been just over a year since protests erupted across Iran, after the 22-year-old Mahsa Amini was arrested by the morality police for allegedly breaching the country’s hijab law and died in police custody a few days later. Iran has not seen uprisings of this magnitude since the...
While Greece burned, politicians blamed migrants
In late August, as wildfires still raged in Greece, a video went viral. A man had filmed himself walking to the back of a trailer attached to a Jeep. He threw open the trailer door to reveal a group of men huddled inside, all of them migrants from Pakistan and Syria. He was holding the 13 men captive, he said, because he had caught them planning to set fires on the outskirts of the northeastern city of Alexandroupoli, the capital of Greece’s Evros region, that shares a border with Turkey.
For migrants under 24/7 surveillance, the UK feels like ‘an outside prison’
In June 2022, the U.K. Home Office rolled out a new pilot policy — to track migrants and asylum seekers arriving in Britain with GPS-powered ankle tags. The government argues that ankle tags could be necessary to stop people from absconding or disappearing into the country. Only 1% of asylum seekers absconded in 2020. But that hasn’t stopped the Home Office from expanding the pilot. Sam, whose name we’ve changed to protect his safety, came to the U.K. as a refugee when he was a small child and has lived in Britain ever since. Now in his thirties, he was recently threatened with deportation and was made to wear a GPS ankle tag while his case was in progress. Here is Sam’s story, as told to Coda’s Isobel Cockerell.
How earthly notions of conquest — and Big Tech power moves — are playing out in the stars
The summer is over and the secret is out about Flannery Associates, the once-mysterious company that has bought thousands of acres of land east of the San Francisco Bay as part of a Silicon Valley billionaire-backed venture to build a “new California city.” The New York Times reported in late August that some of the industry’s biggest names — including Reid Hoffman, Marc Andreessen and Michael Moritz — plan to build a techno utopia in largely rural Solano County and have already spent around $800 million to make it happen. Investors and other sources familiar with the pitch said the new city was billed as a bustling metropolis that would bring thousands of jobs to the area, be “as walkable as Paris” or New York’s West Village and even help solve the Bay Area’s housing crisis.
Why Saudi money is so hard to refuse
I’d like to think, because of the work I do, that I’d be immune to the gravitational pull of money, but I’d probably be lying. On the rare occasions when I’ve met someone wealthy — and they’ve been multimillionaires, rather than centibillionaires, and thus nowhere close to the lower reaches of the Forbes list — I can’t help noticing that slight tug as my brain says: “Just think of what could be achievable if I could persuade this person to invest in one of my pet projects.”
Academic freedom is at stake in India in a row over research
The first day of the new semester began on August 28 at Ashoka University, an elite private institution near Delhi, with students returning to a campus that seemed almost eerily quiet. Ashoka, in the weeks before classes began, had been at the center of a loud political row that briefly dominated national headlines and sparked debates about academic freedom in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s India.
How space traffic in orbit could spell trouble on Earth
It was February 2009, and a disaster was about to occur 500 miles above Siberia: A dead Russian satellite, Cosmos-2251, was on a direct collision course with a communications satellite operated by Iridium, an American company. The orbits of the two wrapped around the globe, their paths forming a giant...
The Albanian town that TikTok emptied
“I once had an idea in the back of my mind to leave this place and go abroad,” Besmir Billa told me earlier this year as we sipped tea in the town of Kukes, not far from Albania’s Accursed Mountains. “Of course, like everybody else, I’ve thought about it.”
Oligarchs take cover, in the West and in Russia
It is good news for the Western coalition seeking to strangle the Russian economy, that a judge upheld the U.K. sanctions imposed on Eugene Shvidler. Shvidler, a billionaire who has held senior positions in oil company Sibneft and metals giant Evraz, was designated by the U.K. last year because of his close relationship to Roman Abramovich. Had Shvidler won, it could have unleashed a torrent of similar appeals, at a time when the anti-Kremlin coalition needs as much help as it can get.
Belarusian exiles are running out of hope
Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya was worried about food trucks. At a festival for Belarusians in exile in Poland this summer, Belarus’ most important dissident had to answer for a lack of Belarusian catering. “Why are there no Belarusian food trucks at this festival?” an attendee asked her, his voice tinged with...
The Kremlin revises a textbook to dictate future understanding of Russian history
Russian high schoolers are heading back to school this fall with a new history textbook, revised by the Kremlin, that tells a story about Nazis running amok in Ukraine and the necessity of invading the country. It’s the kind of direct political interference in education not seen in Russia since...
Senegal is stifling its democracy in the dark
On July 31, after jailing opposition leader Ousmane Sonko and dissolving the political party that he leads, Senegal’s government ordered a nationwide mobile internet shutdown. The communications ministry said the shutdown was meant to curb “hateful messages.”. The authorities had made a similar decision in June after a...
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