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In 2011, I, like most Egyptians at the time, had little hope that Hosni Mubarak’s regime would ever end. His 30 years in power had been set apart by systematic human rights violations. His pathological concern with his own security had given rise to a vast autocratic and bureaucratic state, with little civil or political freedom.

On August 4, 2020, nearly 2,750 tonnes of improperly stored ammonium nitrate exploded in the seaport in Beirut, killing more than 200 people, injuring more than 6,000, and displacing thousands from their homes.

Politicians know that they have a problem when they have to deny it. On Monday, Vladimir Putin insisted that an extravagant palace on the Black Sea coast did not belong to him, following a video exposé released by the opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, and so far watched by around 90 million people. Footage of him swimming in a giant pool was fake.

Joe Biden’s presidential bid has often invited comparisons to President Warren G Harding, whose 1920 campaign slogan promised a “return to normalcy” after a chaotic preceding decade.

On January 6, as the two chambers of Congress convened to count Electoral College votes and officially certify Joe Biden as the president-elect of the United States, a violent mob stormed the US Capitol in support of President Donald Trump and his false allegation that the presidential contest was “stolen” through voter fraud.

If there was any doubt at all, let’s end it today. Words have meaning. When a president tells his followers that the fate of the nation is at stake in a presidential election, millions will believe him.

It is one of the curiosities of this inside-out age that Donald Trump is loved by conspiracists, even though he is a leader – at last! – who embodies of all their worst fears. He really does hate them, he really is plotting against them, and he really is lying to them, in multiple and increasingly wicked and baroque ways.

Brexit was never fundamentally an economic project. It was always more about what it said on the ballot paper in 2016. Brexit was about ceasing to be a member of the European Union. Leavers understood that. Remainers, in contrast, still struggle with it.

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Air pollution in British cities must urgently be reduced. The public, and particularly people who have asthma – or other conditions that place them at increased risk from breathing particulate matter or gases including nitrogen dioxide – must be much better informed about the threat to their health.