The expediated citizenship initiative was first announced in September. Seventy-four people have already been granted a French passport and another 693 are in the final stages. A total of 2,890 people have applied so far.

Normally a successful applicant must have been resident in France for five years with a stable income and demonstrated integration into French society. But the government has said frontline Covid workers must only live in France for two years to be eligible for citizenship in recognition of their "great services rendered".

The two white supremacists didn't know each other personally, and there is no evidence that they ever communicated directly. But they shared an ideology and frequented the same online forums and often unmoderated "imageboards," where a globe-spanning network of young men regularly air racism and misogyny and feed each other's anger and resentment about society.

The sheer frequency of these otherwise "unconnected" attacks mean they are often lost in the ocean of daily news: In the two months between the El Paso shooting and the Halle attack alone, there were two more attacks by young men in Dayton, Ohio, and Baerum, Norway, which together left 10 more people dead. And in Germany, the death toll in Halle has already been superseded by a more recent racist atrocity: this February another man attacked a cafe and a hookah bar in Hanau, western Germany, killing 10 people of immigrant background.

a new online project that allows users to trace on a "timemap" how one attack is being prepared while another is being carried out elsewhere in the world

Indonesia has passed a wide-ranging bill that will weaken environmental protections and workers’ rights in an attempt to boost investment, a move condemned as a “tragic miscalculation” that could lead to “uncontrolled deforestation”.Groups representing millions of workers said they would strike on Tuesday in response to protest against the bill, which will amend about 1,200 provisions in 79 existing laws after it was pushed through parliament with unprecedented speed

The bill has also been criticised by both environmental experts and some of the world’s biggest investors, who expressed concern over its impact on the country’s tropical forests.

The government argues that the bill will make the country more attractive to investors at a time when the economy is reeling from the impact of Covid-19. Millions of people have lost their jobs as a result of the virus, which has infected more than 300,000 people and claimed 11,253 lives.

Turkish authorities have seized possession of the country’s oldest and richest archaeobotanical and modern seed collections from the British Institute at Ankara, one of the most highly regarded foreign research institutes in Turkey, particularly in the field of archaeology. The move has sounded alarm bells among the foreign research community and is seen as part of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s wider xenophobia-tinged campaign to inject Islamic nationalism into all aspects of Turkish life.

“staff from the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, the General Directorate for Museums and Heritage from the Ministry of Culture and the Turkish Presidency took away 108 boxes of archaeobotanical specimens and 4 cupboards comprising the modern seed reference collections” to depots in a pair of government-run museums in Ankara. The institute’s request for extra time “to minimize the risk of damage or loss to the material was refused.”

Coming on the heels of the controversial conversions of the Hagia Sophia and Chora Museum into full service mosques this summer, the seizure has left the research community in a state of shock, sources familiar with the affair said.

Poverty, inadequate public health infrastructure, citizen mistrust, and violent conflict are among the underlying conditions that make countries more susceptible to the pandemic’s ravages

Things in Tanzania got markedly worse in April, when three members of the country’s parliament died from unknown causes within days of each other. Suspecting COVID-19, members of the main opposition party, Chadema, called for the suspension of parliament and COVID-19 testing for all parliamentary members, staff, and families. Chadema Chairman Freeman Mbowe accused the Magufuli government of a cover-up regarding the extent of coronavirus infections in Tanzania. Magufuli’s government was vague in its response, acknowledging the three deaths but leaving speculation about the cause of their deaths unanswered. Late that month, the Tanzanian government submitted its COVID-19 infection data to the World Health Organization, reporting 509 cases and 21 deaths. It has not updated the figures since. It is hard to trust these numbers; scores of observers have noted the difficulty many African countries have had effectively collecting data.

In the intervening months, Magufuli has officially suspended parliament. In May, he also dismissed the head of Tanzania’s national laboratory—which leads COVID-19 testing—and he has since declared that the coronavirus was “absolutely finished” throughout the nation. He’s gone on to insist that credible national elections will be held in October, although that seems unlikely.

In any human community larger than about 120 to 150 – Dunbar’s number – it becomes increasingly difficult to govern on the basis of sheer personality alone. And so instead of face-to-face encounters of dominance and appeasement you have rules and commands: things that bind you – oral or in writing – because of the legitimate nature of the rule or command. In modern societies these rules and commands are divided between the normative and the positive, and the usual word for the latter is ‘law’.

in a modern society a government is creature of law, and so without law it is ultimately nothing

If the government complies with the law then it is more credible for the government to insist on the governed to comply with the law as well.

According to a new report by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (which usually monitors violence in war-torn countries), 20 violent groups—left and right—have taken part in more than 100 protests related to the George Floyd killing. In June, there were 17 counterdemonstrations led by right-wing militant groups, one of which sparked violence. In July, there were 160 counterdemonstrations, with violence in 18.

A decade ago, Kilcullen counted about 380 right-wing groups and 50 left-wing ones, many of them armed. In the early 1990s, the faceoff between the FBI and the Branch Davidians, outside Waco, Texas, left 80 people dead—and inspired Timothy McVeigh and his gang of extremists to blow up a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, left-wing groups such as the Weather Underground set off bombs all over the country; police waged deadly shootouts with the Black Panthers in Oakland, California, and Chicago; and marchers for and against the Vietnam War—mainly students and hard-hat workers—clashed in violent street battles.

the prevalence of cable TV networks and social media, which amplify and spread the shock waves. Incidents that in the past might have stayed local now quickly go viral, nationwide or worldwide, inspiring others to join in.

America already has an ISIS, a Taliban, an SS waiting to be born. A group of young men willing to do violence at the drop of a hat, because they’ve been brainwashed into hating. The demagogue has blamed hated minorities and advocates of democracy and peace for those young men’s stunted life chances, and they believe him. That’s exactly what an ISIS is, what a Taliban is, what an SS is. The only thing left to do by an authoritarian is to formalize it.

when radicalized young men are killing people they have been taught to hate by demagogues right in the open, on the streets — a society has reached the beginnings of sectarian violence, the kind familiar in the Islamic world, and is at the end of democracy’s road.

Crucial institutions have already been captured by the extremist factions who stand against democracy. Do all those cops think of themselves as fascists? Of course they don’t. So what? Mullahs don’t think of themselves as hate preachers, either. What else do you call someone who gives a violent young man with a gun a free pass to kill people, though? Someone who tries to shield him after the murder? A good and decent person?The police in America might not all think they are fascists. Certainly, not all of them are. But what is certain is that some significant number of them are captured. They are sympathetic to the forces which are now attacking democracy. They prioritize those forces over democracy, freedom, peace, justice.

it’s clear that few leaders have the power to impose an unwanted technology on its population without risking disgruntled voters or – at best – low uptake, which can render these tools irrelevant. That’s why what’s known as “data cultures” has become so important.

Japan’s acceptance of the new Apple-Google contact-tracing app marks a significant departure from a tradition of being fiercely protective of its citizens’ privacy – a national trait left over from a betrayal during the country’s experience of the second world war.In Brazil, a country where the data debate still feels new, a lawyer grapples with a fast-moving, data-hungry governor to force a slower, more conscientious approach while the wider public looks on, largely uninterested. And in South Africa, the idea of a data culture is only relevant to half the country’s population because of intense digital inequality, leaving governments with a cool attitude towards developers trying to promote their products.

just 53% of the South African population is connected – pointing to an issue of digital inequality. The lack of smartphones and digital literacy, both of which are related with poverty, are the main barriers to bringing people online. Smartphones remain unaffordable for many people. RIA found 36% of people claimed the cost of smart devices are the main reason they were not online, 15% said the Internet was too expensive, and 47% mentioned the cost of data as one of the reasons they limit their use.