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Reading Turkish news is anything but boring. For example, in your morning scan of the Turkish news networks, you may be bombarded with videos depicting a “baby who did a military salute the moment he was born.” The video of the baby — whose umbilical cord was still intact — saluting made the headlines of several pro-government news networks five weeks after the launch of Operation Peace Spring. The report concluded with the oft-repeated dictum: “Another Turk is born a soldier!”

he militarization of Turkish society is forging ahead at full speed. Since the July 2016 coup attempt, Turks have been bombarded with images of the military. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his ministers periodically pose and salute in military uniforms

It has become the norm for politicians in the lower ranks of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) to give speeches in military uniforms, even though they are civilians

Mahmoud al-Sisi, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s son and a senior official in the powerful General Intelligence Service (GIS), is being reassigned to a long-term position at Egypt’s diplomatic delegation in Moscow

perception within the president’s inner circle that Mahmoud al-Sisi has failed to properly handle a number of his responsibilities and that his increasingly visible influence in the upper decision-making levels of government is having a negative impact on his father’s image

suggestion that the president’s son be sidelined also came from senior government figures in the United Arab Emirates, a close and influential ally of Egypt, who view Mahmoud al-Sisi’s role as having become damaging to the president

When asked about changes that have taken place since the end of the communist era, people across the former Eastern Bloc express support for the shift from one-party rule and a state-controlled economy to a multiparty system and a market economy. However, Russians in particular are less supportive of these changes.

People in many of the countries surveyed are less supportive of the changes to the political and economic systems now than they were in 1991. However, since 2009, there has been a notable uptick in positive sentiment toward these changes in about half of the countries surveyed. Russia, a notable exception, is the only country where support has decreased since 2009.

More than six-in-ten Russians agree with the statement “It is a great misfortune that the Soviet Union no longer exists.” This represents an increase of 13 percentage points since 2011. Only three-in-ten disagree with the statement.

Johnson’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, has long had the civil service in his sights. If his reform agenda is about competence, capacity and accountability that could be good news. If it means civil servants are cowed into not challenging ministers on the implications of their plans, it will be bad. The risk is that we end up with Americanisation – with a politically appointed top layer deterring good professionals from staying. Worse still would be the Trumpification of the civil service – with key posts unfilled or filled by people who are wholly unqualified.

The roots of all this turmoil lie in the casual approach to constitutional matters that allowed David Cameron to legislate for a referendum as a stratagem to solve a problem within his own party. His memoir suggests that he toyed with the possibility of setting a minimum threshold leave would have to reach in order to win – if he had gone ahead with this, remain would have carried the day. Unlike other countries that use referendums more often and more wisely, the UK has an ad hoc approach to them that has meant since 2016 we have been grappling with how to reconcile representative with direct democracy, an issue finally resolved – though obviously not to everyone’s satisfaction – by the 2019 election

Brexit and the election have brought into focus the fragility of the final pillar on which our reputation for stable government rests, the union itself. They have given the SNP a pretext to reopen the independence question, apparently settled in 2014, and have tilted opinion in Northern Ireland, making the prospect of a border poll more likely. Both nations voted to remain in 2016, but the UK system – unlike in formal federations – did not assign that any constitutional significance

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.

Britain is a primary enabler of the autocrats she is so worried about; we are butler to the world’s worst people. Our shell companies hide their money, our private schools educate their children, our lawyers defend their reputations, our financial markets fund their companies, and our banks launder their money. It’s absurd to talk about the threat that dictators pose to our democracy without acknowledging how without our assistance they wouldn’t be a threat at all. It’s like condemning a war without mentioning you supplied the weapons, or criticising a party that took place in your own house.

She boasted of Britain’s place in Nato, of its development aid, of its “cyber-security partnerships”, yet all of the problems that these interventions are supposed to solve are worsened by the unregulated financial system centred on the City. The Russian kleptocrats whom Nato is opposing keep most of their wealth offshore, with houses in London their favourite assets and City lawyers their tireless defenders. The aid payments that go to help the crises in Nigeria, South Sudan or Libya are just sticking plasters over wounds worsened by entrenched corruption, again enabled through the UK. Hackers who defraud people of billions of pounds a year launder their money through our poorly regulated economy.

“Corrupt actors hide their money in the United States all the time. We can no longer provide them a shadow under which to operate,” wrote the treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, and the USAID administrator Samantha Power in an article announcing the strategy. “Combating corruption abroad, therefore, begins at home, and our first step must be to expose the owners of shell companies and other illicit funds.”In contrast to that, Truss failed to satisfactorily answer a question from the audience on the British role in laundering money after her speech at Chatham House, choosing instead to talk about how we shouldn’t talk about the empire. If she’d only hung around until after lunch, however, she would have realised quite how colossal her omission was, since on Wednesday Chatham House also hosted the launch of a major report by a group of academics that forensically dissected Britain’s role in enabling corruption, and came to conclusions that were all the more alarming for the sober language they were described in.

The European Commission in Brussels will this year propose rules that would require the nutritional qualities of all foods to be displayed on the front of their packaging. The idea is to tip off shoppers about what makes them fat. But the measure, backed by nutritionists, is being attacked by its opponents as nothing less than an assault on the European way of life.

Nearly all grub sold in Europe has had to divulge its nutritional qualities (or lack thereof) since 2016. But the nagging only goes so far. The information is found on the back of the pack, written in a font size usually reserved for the finer points of insurance contracts.

Nutri-Score is unkind to many staples of Italian cuisine. A meal of prosciutto, gorgonzola and tiramisu turns out to be entirely at the wrong end of the spectrum. Even olive oil, the elixir at the heart of the country’s famed Mediterranean diet, gets only an amber light from the grading system. For Italians, ever alert to the possibility that condescending northerners are holding them to an unreasonable standard, this is provocation enough. How can their food be bad when Italy has among the lowest adult obesity rates in the rich world?