Dictators
This country will have Christmas in October. People are not happy
With a nationwide blackout, a broken economy and a widely contested election result there are only so many things a leader can do to win popular support.
- by Julie Turkewitz
Latest
Explainer
World politics
‘Grave provocation’: What does North Korea’s Kim Jong-un want?
K-pop is blasting into North Korea once more as bizarre tactics ratchet up tensions on the peninsula. We explore what’s behind this “tit-for-tat” in an Explainer updated from earlier this year.
- by Angus Holland and Jackson Graham
Opinion
For subscribers
Losing sleep over Trump? It’s time to wake up to the real tyrants
Donald Trump is dangerous because he takes too much of our attention. So much so, people become blind to much larger threats.
- by Parnell Palme McGuinness
‘They beat you constantly’: Chilean political prisoners reclaim torture sites
Fifty years after a coup ushered in a brutal military rule that imprisoned, disappeared, tortured or killed some 40,000 people, five former prisoners return to the scene of the crimes.
- by Ivan Alvarado and Natalia A. Ramos Miranda
Analysis
Russia-Ukraine war
If Putin is about to fall, why do 82 per cent of Russians support him?
Russia is sinking deeper into the quagmire of Putinism, and there are few signs that the population is resisting the path the president is leading them down.
- by Lisa Haseldine
From one dictator dad to another: Monica’s lost childhood in North Korea
Monica Macias was just seven when her African despot father left her with another feared leader, Kim Il-sung.
- by Julia Llewellyn Smith
Orphans, songs about spilling blood: Russia takes celebration of war to another level
“They’re trying to militarise the whole society,” said Grigory Yudin, a political philosophy professor at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences.
- by Valerie Hopkins
Cambodia’s Hun Sen orders closure of independent news outlet
The Voice of Democracy has had its licence taken after leader says the media organisation attacked him and his son.
- by Clare Baldwin
1984, Orwell’s novel of repression tops Russian bestseller lists
Readers in Putin’s Russia are rediscovering George Orwell’s dystopian world where totalitarian rulers oppress their citizens to maintain support for their wars.
- by Kevin Liffey
Assassinations become weapon of choice for guerrilla groups in Myanmar
The movement to restore democracy has evolved into deadly warfare between a ruthless, well-supplied military and a broad but poorly armed resistance movement.
- by Richard C. Paddock
Russian ally in Kazakhstan vows democratic reforms after uprising
The country descended into chaos in January, amid a failed coup. Now Kassym-Jomart Tokayev is promising to shed his personal power.
- by Rob Harris