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When Scotland held a referendum on independence from the United Kingdom in 2014, 55 percent of voters elected to remain. Now, in light of Brexit, the S.N.P. is calling for another referendum. Polls suggest the result would be much closer now. “Independence is coming,” Ian Blackford, the leader of the Scottish Nationalist Party in the British Parliament, said during a debate there in October. “We will take our place as a proud European nation.”

But Northern Ireland’s history often reads like a case study in how the most extreme elements in the society can wreak undue havoc.

he documents were revealed to have come from Brittany Kaiser, an ex-Cambridge Analytica employee turned whistleblower, and to be the same ones subpoeaned by Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election

The documents were retrieved from her email accounts and hard drives, and though she handed over some material to parliament in April 2018, she said there were thousands and thousands more pages which showed a “breadth and depth of the work” that went “way beyond what people think they know about ‘the Cambridge Analytica scandal’”.

“on our current trajectory these problems are likely to get worse, not better, and with crucial 2020 elections in America and elsewhere approaching, this is a very scary prospect. Something radical needs to be done about it, and fast.”

The unpublished documents contain material that suggests the firm was working for a political party in Ukraine in 2017 even while under investigation as part of Mueller’s inquiry and emails that Kaiser says describe how the firm helped develop a “sophisticated infrastructure of shell companies that were designed to funnel dark money into politics”.

more sophisticated actors will have been emboldened to interfere in our elections and sow social divisions

authorities in the west had failed to punish those practising social and other media manipulation

There are emails between these major Trump donors discussing ways of obscuring the source of their donations through a series of different financial vehicles. These documents expose the entire dark money machinery behind US politics.

“The documents reveal a much clearer idea of what actually happened in the 2016 US presidential election, which has a huge bearing on what will happen in 2020. It’s the same people involved who we know are building on these same techniques,”

“There’s evidence of really quite disturbing experiments on American voters, manipulating them with fear-based messaging, targeting the most vulnerable, that seems to be continuing. This is an entire global industry that’s out of controlbut what this does is lay out what was happening with this one company.

Bilateral relations remained fraught over the last few months of the year. Islamabad issued constant broadsides against New Delhi for its continued security lockdown in Kashmir. By year’s end, an internet blackout was still in effect. Then, in December, India’s parliament passed a controversial new citizenship law that affords fast-track paths to Indian citizenship for religious minorities—but not Muslims—fleeing persecution in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.

This means Afghanistan is unlikely to have a new government in place for at least another few months, and even longer if the final results are different from the initial ones and require a second vote. Due to winter weather in Afghanistan, a runoff likely wouldn’t occur until the spring. Without a new government in place, it beggars belief that Afghanistan could launch a process to establish an intra-Afghan dialogue, much less negotiate an end to the war.

The two nuclear-armed nations will enter 2020 just one big trigger event away from war. The trigger could be another mass-casualty attack on Indian security forces in Kashmir traced back to a Pakistan-based group, or—acting on the threats issued repeatedly by New Delhi in 2019—an Indian preemptive operation to seize territory in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. 

Researchers for Alexei Navalny, the opposition politician and anti-corruption researcher, noted that Mishustin’s wife had earned nearly 790m rubles (nearly £10m) in the past nine years, according to government declarations. Little is known about her business and there are no companies listed in her name, the investigative group said. “Mishustin has been a ‘servant of the people’ for 20 of the past 22 years,” Navalny wrote in the investigation. “So why is he so damn rich?”

Corruption scandals hounded Medvedev in recent years

“The school of life has been tough for this man, and he is capable of big missions,” said Vyacheslav Volodin, the hard-nosed chairman of Russia’s parliament, adding that Mishustin was a “self-made man”.

Khamenei called the downing of the plane a “bitter accident” that saddened Iran as much as it made its enemies happy. He said Iran’s enemies had seized on the crash to question the Islamic Republic, the Revolutionary Guards and the armed forc

After Suleimani was killed, Iran announced it would no longer be bound by the limitations in the nuclear agreement. European countries who have been trying to salvage the deal responded earlier this week by invoking a dispute mechanism that could result in even more sanctions.

Hundreds of thousands of people from around the country have taken to the streets in opposition to the law since its passage. Opponents say the measure is discriminatory and violates India’s secular ethos.

Monday, a member of Parliament from the ruling party said that any protester who damaged public property should be shot or jailed.

Several protests have devolved into showdowns with the police, who have responded with force. Since December, 24 people have died nationwide, nearly all of them in Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state.

The peaceful sit-in at Shaheen Bagh began after police stormed a nearby university campus and assaulted unarmed student protesters. The first night, the demonstration consisted of four women and six men. In the following days, the men went to work, but the number of women coming out of their homes kept growing. Now the protest is led by women while the men watch from the sidelines.

“In all my 35 years of working with Muslim women, I had never witnessed a scene such as this,” activist Syeda Hameed, chair of the Muslim Women’s Forum, wrote after a visit. “What I was witnessing was the new generation of Muslim women who speak boldly without an iota of fear.”

India’s powerful home minister, Amit Shah, has said the citizenship law will be followed by a nationwide push to verify all citizens, an exercise that many believe targets Muslims.

As the protest has endured, there have also been points of friction. There are arguments over who should be allowed on stage, whether to accept donations of supplies and how to keep away local politicians. Some chief volunteers recently tried to call off the protest to avoid its becoming a tool for political parties, but the women did not leave. Rumors about impending action by police to clear the road has not deterred them, either.

It is a position that China has not been shy to weaponize.

“It is not about individual companies, but rather security standards,” the chancellor said in November. “It is about the certification we will carry out. That should be our guiding benchmark.”

rebellion is brewing in Germany’s foreign policy and intelligence community — scared of American threats to limit intelligence sharing — and even among some of the chancellor’s own lawmakers, who want to submit a proposal to Parliament with tougher security criteria that would, in effect, keep Huawei out.

“Car companies gather loads of personal data from the drivers of their cars, and they face an enormous risk of an angry public outraged to find their data used by the Chinese Communist Party,” said Mr. Grenell, the United States ambassador.

German automakers like Volkswagen, Daimler and BMW have continued to record sales gains in China and to take share from rivals like Ford, even as the overall market has slumped.

Today Volkswagen earns almost half its sales revenue in China and has 14 percent of the Chinese car market.

“If we were to pull out” of China, Herbert Diess, the chief executive of Volkswagen, told the Wolfsburger Nachrichten newspaper in December, “a day later 10,000 of our 20,000 development engineers in Germany would be out of work.”

Putin also has options to be speaker of the Duma (parliament) or leader of its main party, United Russia, thereby exercising power behind the scenes in the manner of Jaroslaw Kaczyński, leader of Poland’s Law and Justice party.

The accompanying, enforced resignation of the entire government, including the prime minister, Dmitri Medvedev, is Putin’s attempt to reset his administration before Duma elections next year. Analysts say he feared Medvedev’s unpopularity – he has been accused of corruption – was beginning to rub off on him.

Although these changes are dressed up as desirable constitutional reforms, they clearly serve one common purpose: establishing Putinism in perpetuity. By showing he has no intention of retiring, Putin hopes to nip a possible succession battle in the bud.

Putin’s supposedly transformative national spending projects worth an eye-watering $390bn have largely failed to materialise. His promises of economic modernisation and raised living standards must be set against a consecutive five-year fall in real wages and cuts to state pensions.

The continuing drag on Russia’s development caused by western sanctions, imposed after the illegal annexation of Crimea, symbolises the broader, negative aspects of perpetual Putinism.

Putin is in cahoots with Turkey’s leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and his campaign against pro-western Kurds in north-east Syria. More recently, he has inserted Russian mercenaries into the war in Libya, backing rebels against the UN-recognised government in Tripoli.

And speaking of poison, who doubts that Putin and his henchmen were behind the unpunished attempt to assassinate Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury and last year’s murder of a Chechen separatist in Berlin?

The prospect of Putin prolonging and strengthening his nihilistic reign is a terrible one. Putin’s is the face of the enemy. Henceforth he must be recognised as such.

More people than ever before are reading and supporting our journalism, in more than 180 countries around the world. And this is only possible because we made a different choice: to keep our reporting open for all, regardless of where they live or what they can afford to pay.

None of this would have been attainable without our readers’ generosity – your financial support has meant we can keep investigating, disentangling and interrogating. It has protected our independence, which has never been so critical. We are so grateful.

President Xi Jinping ended term limits on China's leaders in 2018. You don't even have to mention Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia or any other authoritarian government to see how, all over the world, leaders left and right wing just hold on to power

Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan took power as prime minister in 2003 — was elected president in 2014, then established an "executive presidency" in 2017. He has suppressed a free press and arrested political opponents and academics.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants the Israeli parliament to give him immunity from prosecution on bribery and fraud before Israel's next elections in March.

This week, there may have been a message in all the American messiness.

Elections count.

Even an imperfect democracy can give dissident voices the chance to be heard and keep open chances for change.

Huge crowds were present to witness the rare sermon, with President Hassan Rouhani in the front row alongside parliament speaker Ali Larijani. The last time Khamenei presided over Friday prayers was in 2012 to mark the 33rd anniversary of the Islamic Revolution.

They come at a pivotal time for Iran, after vigils to mourn those who died in the Ukraine International Airlines crash quickly turned into mass anti-government demonstrations, with calls for Khamenei to step down and for those responsible for downing the plane to be prosecuted.

Iran's military initially denied shooting down the plane before admitting to it several days later, saying the plane was "accidentally hit by human error." Khamenei expressed his condolences to the families of the victims, but said foreign press had tried to deceive Iranians over the crash.

the tradition served “as a kind of safety valve that contained class resentments within clearly defined limits,” and thus, ultimately reinforced the hierarchy.

Christmas misrule was largely tolerated. After all, the birth of Jesus had been tacked onto pagan traditions that had existed for centuries.

So a period of gorging and resting was almost written into the stars, and most pagan European cultures had a holiday for this. In fact, Romans had been celebrating Saturnalia — a similar celebration of social inversion and orgiastic gluttony — for much longer before that.

December meant three things in early Europe: The work of harvesting the year’s crops was done, the beer and wine they’d been brewing was ready to drink, and it was cold enough to slaughter animals without the meat going immediately bad. December was often the only time of year when people got to eat fresh meat.

Puritans were fully aware of the non-Christian roots of Christmas, and unlike the Anglican church, they were having none of it

During Puritan rule of England in the mid-1600s, they attempted to make it illegal, scheduling Parliament to meet on Dec. 25 and ordering a day of fasting and repentance. They were met with riots and insurrection.

The Puritan ban on Christmas lasted much longer in New England, on paper from 1659 to 1681. But even after English authorities overturned the ban, it was still culturally taboo for well over a century afterward.

Noah Barkin, a China expert in Berlin with the Rhodium Group, called the investment agreement in particular “a geopolitical coup for China.”

The Europeans finalized the investment agreement, for example, a day after the European Union publicly criticized the harsh prison sentence handed down to a Chinese lawyer who reported on the initial coronavirus outbreak in the city of Wuhan.

“The values we all cherish in our Sunday sermons must be adhered to if we are not to fall victim to a new systemic rival,” said Reinhard Bütikofer, a German member of the European Parliament who has spoken out against the European investment agreement with China.

China’s overtures will not end the anger over its repressive policies, including its documented use of forced labor.

He said China could serve as a model and as a partner in cooperation, and suggested that Europe could play a moderating role between China and the United States.

Over the long term, it remains to be seen how significantly China’s pacts and pledges will improve its international image, which plummeted this past year because of its obfuscation over the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan.

A survey by the Pew Research Center in October found that in 14 economically advanced countries, unfavorable attitudes toward China had reached their highest levels in more than a decade. A median of 78 percent of those surveyed said they had little or no confidence that Mr. Xi would do the right thing in world affairs. (One upside for Mr. Xi: 89 percent felt the same way about Mr. Trump.)

Mr. Xi’s pledges to accelerate China’s reduction of carbon emissions, which he began making in September, have won international plaudits, even if the government has yet to detail how it will wean itself from coal and other heavily polluting industries.

Mr. Trump showed disdain for America’s traditional allies in Europe and Asia, but Mr. Biden has pledged to galvanize a coalition to confront the economic, diplomatic and military challenges that China poses.

Mr. Biden’s incoming national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, took to Twitter to hint strongly that Europe should first wait for consultations with the new administration — to no avail.

They said the agreement failed to do enough to address China’s abuses of human rights, including labor rights.

The TraceTogether smartphone app and token are used by 78% of the people in Singapore, a country of 5.7 million. Balakrishnan called it "perhaps the most successful contact-tracing program in the world."

He said contact-tracing data have been used once so far, in a murder case, according to The Straits Times.

Eugene Tan, a law professor at Singapore Management University and a former nominated member of Parliament, told The Straits Times that the government's backtracking on privacy assurances undermines trust and credibility. "This damage could undermine its future efforts, given its reiteration that Singapore has only managed to keep COVID-19 under control due to the people's trust in the government's measures," he told the paper.

Under the national lockdown, the government will extend a subsidy program that pays 80 percent of the wages of those people — a concession that the mayors said illustrated that the government does not treat the north the same as the south.

Conservatives have a litany of other objections — that the lockdown is a death knell for the economy, an infringement of civil liberties and proof that the government lacks a coherent strategy for getting past the pandemic.

The chaotic nature of the announcement added to the misgivings. Mr. Johnson convened an emergency cabinet meeting on Saturday after internal deliberations leaked late Friday. T

“The U.S.A. is a first-world country but it is acting like a third-world country,” said U Aung Thu Nyein, a political analyst in Myanmar.

Adding to the sense of bewilderment, Mr. Trump has refused to embrace an indispensable principle of democracy, dodging questions about whether he will commit to a peaceful transition of power after the November election should he lose.

“It reminds me of Belarus, when a person cannot admit defeat and looks for any means to prove that he couldn’t lose,” said Kiryl Kalbasnikau, a 29-year-old opposition activist and actor. “This would be a warning sign for any democracy.”

“We used to look to the U.S. for democratic governance inspiration,” said Eduardo Bohórquez, the director of Transparency International Mexico. “Sadly, this is not the case anymore.”

“The world sees the dismantling of social cohesion within American society and the mess in managing Covid,” said Yenny Wahid, an Indonesian politician and activist. “There is a vacuum of leadership that needs to be filled, but America is not fulfilling that leadership role.

Ms. Wahid, whose father was president of Indonesia after the country emerged from decades of strongman rule, said she worried that Mr. Trump’s dismissive attitude toward democratic principles could legitimize authoritarians.

“Trump inspired many dictators, many leaders who are interested in dictatorship, to copy his style, and he emboldened them,” she said.

“They now know what it’s like in other countries: violating norms, international trade and its own institutions,” said Eunice Rendon, an expert on migration and security and the director of Migrant Agenda, a nonprofit organization in Mexico. “The most powerful country in the world all of a sudden looks vulnerable.”

In Cambodia, which reports being largely spared by the virus so far, there is a measure of schadenfreude toward the United States. Prime Minister Hun Sen has survived as Asia’s longest serving leader by cracking down on dissent and cozying up to China.

“He has many nuclear weapons,” Sok Eysan, a spokesman for Mr. Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party, said of Mr. Trump. “But he is careless with a disease that can’t be seen.”

the obstacles to prosecuting such cases more aggressively point to another problem making the German authorities increasingly anxious: Infiltration of the very institutions, like the police, that are supposed to be doing the investigating.

In July the police chief of the western state of Hesse resigned after police computers had been repeatedly accessed for confidential information that was then used by neo-Nazis in death threats. It was in Hesse that a well-known neo-Nazi assassinated a regional politician last summer in a case that woke many Germans to the threat of far-right terrorism.

The region where they live is nestled between the former Iron Curtain and the Polish border. Members had grown up in the former East Germany.

There were two criteria for joining, Mr. Moll recalled: “The right skills and the right attitude.”Mr. Gross and another police officer in the group were members of what was then an emerging far-right party, the Alternative for Germany, now the third largest force in the national Parliament. At least two others in the group had visited the Thule Seminar, an organization whose leaders had a portrait of Hitler on their wall and preach white supremacy.

Over time, Nordkreuz members recalled, their group morphed into a close-knit brotherhood with a shared ambition that would come to dominate their lives: preparing for Day X.

The group identified a “safe house,” where members would decamp with their families on Day X: a former Communist vacation village deep in the woods.

“This movement has its fingertips in lots of places,” he said. “All this talk of Day X can seem like pure fantasy. But if you look closer, you can see how quickly it turns into serious planning — and plotting.”

“Under Communism, everything was scarce,’’ Mr. Moll explained. ‘‘You had to get creative getting things through certain channels. You could not rely on things being in the supermarket. You could say we’re used to prepping.’’

“The scenario was that something bad would happen,” Mr. Gross told me. “We asked ourselves, what did we want to prepare for? And we decided that if we were going to do this, we would go all the way.”

But at least one member of the group portrays a more ominous story.“People were to be gathered and murdered,” Horst Schelski told investigators in 2017, according to transcripts of his statement shared with The New York Times.

Jan Henrik H. was described by other members as particularly fervent and hateful. On his birthdays, he held a shooting contest on a field behind his house in Rostock, a nearby city on Germany’s northern coast, Nordkreuz members recalled.The winner got a trophy named for Mehmet Turgut, a Turkish street vendor killed in Rostock in 2004 by the National Socialist Underground, a far-right terrorist group.

As they drank coffee at the truck stop, Jan Henrik H. turned the conversation to “the people in the file,” who he said were “harmful” to the state and needed to be “done away with,” Mr. Schelski later told the police.Jan Henrik H. wanted advice on how best to transport their captives once they had been rounded up. He asked Mr. Schelski, a major in the state reservist unit, how they could get them past any checkpoints that might be created in a time of unrest. Would uniforms help? Army trucks?

“They showed me a handmade sketch of my home,” Mr. Böhringer said. “‘Do you recognize this?’ they had asked.”“It was the exact same sketch that those officers had made in my home,” he said.“I had to swallow pretty hard,” he recalled. “The very people who said they wanted to protect me then passed this on to people who wanted to harm me.”“They didn’t just want to survive Day X, they wanted to kill their enemies,” he said. “It was concrete, what they were planning.”

Chancellor Angela Merkel belongs “in the dock,” he said. The multicultural cities in western Germany are “the caliphate.” The best way to escape creeping migration was to move to the East German countryside, “where people are still called Schmidt, Schneider and Müller.”A copy of Compact, a prominent far-right magazine, with President Trump’s face on the cover, lay on a shelf. A selection of the president’s speeches had been translated into German in the issue. “I like Trump,” Mr. Gross said.

As far back as 2009, some fellow police officers had voiced concerns about Mr. Gross’s far-right views, noting that he had brought books about the Nazis to work. But no one intervened, and he was even groomed for promotion.“There is no danger from the far right,” he insisted. “I don’t know a single neo-Nazi.”Soldiers and police officers are “frustrated,” he told me the third time we met, ticking off complaints about migrants, crime and the mainstream media. He likens the coverage of coronavirus to the censored state broadcaster during Communism. Instead, he says, he has a YouTube subscription to RT, the Russian state-controlled channel and other alternative media.In that parallel universe of disinformation, he learns that the government is secretly flying in refugees after midnight. That coronavirus is a ploy to deprive citizens of their rights. That Ms. Merkel works for what he calls the “deep state.”“The deep state is global,” Mr. Gross said. “It’s big capital, the big banks, Bill Gates.”

He still expects Day X, sooner or later. Riots linked to an economic meltdown. Or a blackout, because the German government is shuttering coal plants.Nordkreuz members never told me, nor the authorities, the location of the disused vacation village that was their safe house for Day X.The safe house is still active, said Mr. Gross, who at the height of Nordkreuz’s planning had boasted to a fellow member that his network contained 2,000 like-minded people in Germany and beyond.“The network is still there,” he said.

They carried hundreds of handmade signs and called out the names of Floyd and others in the UK like Mark Duggan who had died at the hands of police or were victims of racial injustice such as the murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence.

Frankie Clarence, 28, one of the organisers of the protest, said: “I feel we are now in a period where voices don’t need to be voiceless anymore.” He was one of many who highlighted the case of Belly the black transport worker who died of coronavirus after being spat at at a train station

The demonstrator added: “The British Transport Police said any assault to staff would be prosecuted, fined, and arrested. After hearing the news of Belly Mujinga we found injustice and no action had been taken on her behalf. These guys are contradicting their words and there’s thus injustice not just in the US, but the UK. It’s literally everywhere in the world.”

Between 1890 and 1910, for example, the population of major Russian cities such as St. Petersburg and Moscow nearly doubled, resulting in overcrowding and destitute living conditions for a new class of Russian industrial workers.

The massacre sparked the Russian revolution of 1905, during which angry workers responded with a series of crippling strikes throughout the country.

Russia entered into World War I in August 1914 in support of the Serbs and their French and British allies. Their involvement in the war would soon prove disastrous for the Russian Empire.

Czar Nicholas left the Russian capital of Petrograd (St. Petersburg) in 1915 to take command of the Russian Army front. (The Russians had renamed the imperial city in 1914, because the name “St. Petersburg” had sounded too German.)

Russian nobles eager to end Rasputin’s influence murdered him on December 30, 1916. By then, most Russians had lost faith in the failed leadership of the czar. Government corruption was rampant, the Russian economy remained backward and Nicholas repeatedly dissolved the Duma, the toothless Russian parliament established after the 1905 revolution, when it opposed his will.

The leaders of the provisional government, including young Russian lawyer Alexander Kerensky, established a liberal program of rights such as freedom of speech, equality before the law, and the right of unions to organize and strike. They opposed violent social revolution.

The Russian Revolution paved the way for the rise of communism as an influential political belief system around the world. It set the stage for the rise of the Soviet Union as a world power that would go head-to-head with the United States during the Cold War.