More governments seeking to keep millions of people offline amid conflicts, protests and political instability

Digital blackouts reached a record high in 2024 in Africa as more governments sought to keep millions of citizens off the internet than in any other period over the last decade.

A report released by the internet rights group Access Now and #KeepItOn, a coalition of hundreds of civil society organisations worldwide, found there were 21 shutdowns in 15 African countries, surpassing the existing record of 19 shutdowns in 2020 and 2021.

Since becoming president, Trump has upended the US approach to Ukraine and treated Moscow more as an ally

In just seven weeks since returning to the White House for a second term, Donald Trump has upended the US approach to the invasion of Ukraine and treated Russia increasingly not as an adversary, but an ally.

After tossing aside decades of alignment with Europe against Russian aggression, the US president suspended military assistance and intelligence to Kyiv and said on Friday he finds it “easier” to work with Russia than Ukraine.

National Gallery, London
From young Christ in a strop to Lazarus coming back from the dead, astonishingly relatable paintings by medieval Siena’s finest reach into the present in this dazzling show

The picture glows in the dark, small but incandescent. It shows three men by the shore. Two are in a boat, trawling the sea with a net, delicately visible beneath the surface. The other stands on a rock, inviting them to follow him in an atmosphere of glimmering gold air. Fish swim straight at you, head on through translucent green waters, as the boatmen turn in amazement at the speaking gestures of Christ. Everything is fluid, mobile, elemental.

Duccio painted this panel for the spectacular double-sided altarpiece installed with immense pageantry in Siena Cathedral in 1311. The scene is from Saint Luke. The front of the altar is still in the city, but these wooden back panels were hacked apart in the 18th century – some lost, possibly destroyed, others scattered across the globe. Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350 unites eight long-separated paintings from as far afield as Texas, New York and Madrid, along with many other radiant wonders. The show is as beautiful as it is transformational.

Photographer Meyerowitz, 87, and artist and writer Barrett, 78, invited two documentary-makers into their lives for a year. The result, Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other, is an intimate portrait that all couples should see

We might all have domestic arguments that demand to be preserved on film for their drama, but few of them would ever live up to the intensity, eloquence and glamour of the barneys between American photographer Joel Meyerowitz and his English wife, novelist and artist Maggie Barrett.

The best (or worst) of those clashes comes toward the end of the extraordinary, intimate documentary of Joel and Maggie’s marriage, aptly entitled Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other (their own private update on “till death us do part”). In that final set-to, Maggie conjures all the frustrations of the 30 years they have been together – years in which Joel has become ever more world-famous and celebrated as a photographer, and she has seen her novels rejected by publishers and her paintings go unsold – and lets them go in a formidable rush.

Some of the president’s Tory fans seem to find the grim reality of the president’s actions invigorating rather than terrifying

Short of emigration, what is the best option for Britain’s dazzled Trump followers now their hero confirms he is not Europe’s ally but Vladimir Putin’s? That’s assuming what we can’t in the case of Nigel Farage MP: that they do not share the US president’s well-documented weakness for a genocidal invader. Even his more respectable British acolytes have until recently finessed, quite successfully, their love of Trump with his long history of Putin-pleasing. No one more so than Boris Johnson, former prime minister, self-styled saviour of Ukraine and still Trump’s most dependable British idiot.

To Johnson’s way of thinking, detailed in numerous Daily Mail columns, it is Trump-doubters who are always the ridiculous, panicking, hysterical, whingeing headless chickens. When Trump looked likely to win the US election, Johnson likened the reaction of the “western liberal intelligentsia” to “the shriek of elderly beldames leaping on the piano stool after spying a mouse in their petticoats”. The virile Johnson was more than willing to forget that business at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.

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