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In its first issue of 2010, the scientific journal Nature looked forward to a dazzling decade of progress. By 2020, experimental devices connected to the internet would deduce our search queries by directly monitoring our brain signals. Crops would exist that doubled their biomass in three hours. Humanity would be well on the way to ending its dependency on fossil fuels. A few weeks later, a letter in the same journal cast a shadow over this bright future. It warned that all these advances could be derailed by mounting political instability, which was due to peak in the US and western Europe around 2020. Human societies go through predictable periods of growth, the letter explained, during which the population increases and prosperity rises. Then come equally predictable periods of decline. These “secular cycles” last two or three centuries and culminate in widespread unrest – from worker uprisings to revolution. In recent decades, the letter went on, a number of … [Read more...] about History as a giant data set: how analysing the past could help save the future

Disney’s glossy live-action update of Lady and the Tramp, like the majority of the studio’s other IRL remakes, exists purely because it has to rather than because it should do, a product born not from a creative brainwave but from a commercial inevitability. The hugely profitable, and mostly tiresome, trend of dusting off handcrafted classics and rehauling them for a new audience has sped up this year with Aladdin, The Lion King, Dumbo and a Maleficent sequel all released theatrically, the underwhelming box office of the latter two hinting at growing audience fatigue. The decision to premiere Lady and the Tramp digitally, morphing it into a TV movie, launching Disney’s splashy new content platform Disney+, is therefore a wise one and taken as such, it’s adequate if wholly unnecessary entertainment, ending up somewhere between a lady and a tramp. The story, still simple and still effective, tells of romance across class borders between two dogs: Lady (voiced by … [Read more...] about Lady and the Tramp review – Disney’s lovestruck dogs come to half-life

Israel killed a senior Palestinian Islamic Jihad commander in a strike in Gaza overnight on Monday, a rare targeted assassination that immediately prompted rounds of retaliatory rocket fire. Baha Abu al-Ata, 42, was killed with his wife in their home by an airstrike, the Iran-backed group said in a statement. Two others were wounded. An Israeli army statement accused Abu al-Ata of coordinating repeated rocket launches, as well as sniper fire into Israel over the past year and said he was preparing further attacks. It referred to him as a “ticking bomb”. “Abu al-Ata was promoting preparations to commit immediate terror attacks in various ways towards Israeli civilians and [Israel Defense Forces] troops during the recent few days,” the statement said. His killing, it added, was a “direct act to remove an imminent threat”. Targeted assassinations against enemy factions, once a mainstay of Israeli policy, were largely abandoned in recent years as they … [Read more...] about Israel kills Islamic Jihad commander in Gaza, sparking reprisal rocket attacks

There is a line in the television series Chernobyl that comes as no surprise to those of us who reported on the 1986 nuclear disaster in what was the Soviet Union – but that still has the power to shock: “The official position of the state is that global nuclear catastrophe is not possible in the Soviet Union.” It was not possible, so in the days and months after the world’s worst such accident, on 26 April, the Kremlin kept up its pretence. It dissembled, deceived and lied. I began investigating Chernobyl in the late 1980s after Ukrainian friends insisted authorities in the USSR were covering up the extent of the human tragedy of those – many of them children – contaminated by radiation when the nuclear plant’s Reactor 4 exploded, blasting a cloud of poisonous fallout across the USSR and a large swathe of Europe. When photographer John Downing and I first visited, the Soviet Union, then on its last political legs, was still in denial about … [Read more...] about The truth about Chernobyl? I saw it with my own eyes…

Russian state TV is set to air its own drama about the deadly 1986 Chernobyl disaster – but unlike the HBO series, which has transfixed viewers around the world, this version will claim that a CIA spy was present for the worst nuclear accident in history. Chernobyl, which will air on Russia’s NTV channel, appears to fulfil a demand from tabloid columnists and state TV news for a more patriotic retelling of the story. Craig Mazin, the creator of the HBO series, famously obsessed over minor details such as shoelaces and telephones, and adopted first-hand accounts of survivors to authentically recreate the Soviet Union of the 1980s. NTV’s Chernobyl, filmed in Belarus, takes far more liberties. A description of the show says that the plot revolves around a CIA agent dispatched to Pripyat to gather intelligence on the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and the Russian counterintelligence agent sent to track him down. If it sounds like fiction, that’s because it is. But … [Read more...] about Russian TV to air its own patriotic retelling of Chernobyl story