-
1 month ago | 
thetimes.com | Tom Ball |Muktadir Rashid
-
Nov 29, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Tom Ball
For more than a year, Junaid Yousef has felt a lurking sense of disquiet while walking the streets of Dublin, the city he was born and raised in. “You feel like there’s an extra pair of eyes on you,” he said. “Dublin has an edge to it these days.”With its stained-glass windows and Gothic archways, Dublin Mosque is an architectural emblem of the ease with which Muslims have integrated into Irish society, the building having been converted 40 years ago from a Presbyterian church.
-
Nov 17, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Tom Ball
Iraqi militia groups could drag the country into regional conflict with Israel after a rise in the number of drone attacks launched from the nation’s territory. In October Shia forces, backed by Iran and loosely operating under the banner of the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, staged 90 drone assaults, which compares with 31 in September and six in August. So far this month 65 drones have been launched, according to data compiled by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank.
-
Nov 15, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Alistair Dawber |Tom Ball
Robert F Kennedy Jr has been nominated as Donald Trump’s health and human services secretary, putting the prominent anti-vaccine campaigner at the head of the sprawling department. Known as RFK Jr, the scion of the famous Democratic family abandoned his independent White House campaign in August to back Trump, earning the public disapproval of most of the Kennedy clan.
-
Oct 23, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Tom Ball
A woman in St Petersburg recently received some unwelcome news when a letter arrived telling her that her husband, an artillery officer in the Russian army, had contracted HIV. In a fit of rage at his suspected infidelity, she went straight to her spouse’s superiors, who then suspended him pending an investigation. In fact, the only ailment he had was a case of hypertension. Earlier that month, the artillery officer had been dispatched to the frontlines of Luhansk, eastern Ukraine.
-
Jun 5, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Tom Ball
Russia is being provided with a “backdoor for its spies” to Europe’s latest scientific technologies by CERN, the nuclear research body, Ukraine’s delegation to the group has claimed. In December, members of CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, voted to eject Russian and Belarusian members in response to the war in Ukraine.
-
Jun 4, 2024 | 
thetimes.co.uk | Tom Ball
Duolingo has removed references to gay people on the Russian version of its language learning app after threats from the state censor. Roskomnadzor, the Russian media watchdog, launched an investigation into the US company this year after complaints from conservative activists. Phrases used during training exercises including “Ben and Peter love each other” and “Clara met her wife, Maria, at a lesbian bar” were said to contravene Russia’s “LGBT propaganda” law.
-
Apr 18, 2024 | 
thepress.co.nz | Marc Bennetts |Tom Ball
Demonstrators protest against the reintroduction of the Foreign Agent Bill at the First Republic Square (Rose Revolution Square) in Tbilisi. The Georgian parliament has revived a draft law after shelving an earlier version in response to mass protests in March 2023.
-
Mar 29, 2024 | 
thetimes.co.uk | Tom Ball
When Stepan Bandrivsky fled Soledar in eastern Ukraine in February 2022, he probably never thought that the next time he’d step foot in his hometown would be as a character in a video game. Though his corporeal self may be 600 miles away in Khmelnytskyi, in the west of the country, Bandrivsky returned home in disembodied form this month as a character in Minesalt, a spin-off of the hugely popular game Minecraft that has been developed by the Ukrainian government.
-
Mar 4, 2024 | 
thetimes.co.uk | Tom Ball
Russian forces are operating a black market of prisoners of war, Ukrainian authorities have told The Times. Petro Yatsenko, spokesman for Ukraine’s co-ordination headquarters for the treatment of PoWs, said that Chechen paramilitary groups were actively buying up captured Ukrainians from other Russian military factions. “There have been cases where they bought our wounded from the Russian army, took them to [the Chechen capital of] Grozny, and then exchanged them for their own,” he said.
