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The Latest Breaking News from Václav Havel

Inside Venezuela's El Helicoide Prison: How Dissident Jesús Armas Endured Torture and Outlasted Maduro

For helping prove that Maduro lost the 2024 election, Jesús Armas spent more than a year in Venezuela’s most-feared prison. He’s lucky it wasn’t more.

Reason

An Athens listing has created the world’s second largest gaming company. Finally, Europe has a No. 2 global player

Whatever the level of geopolitical volatility, millions of people like to buy a chance to win big at astonishingly long odds.

Fortune

Václav Havel’s 1978 essay The Power of the Powerless is eerily relevant today

When Czech political dissident, playwright and poet Václav Havel wrote The Power of the Powerless in October 1978, he was not offering a manifesto in any conventional political sense. Nor was he outlining a program for opposition or regime change.

The Conversation

From analysis to the latest developments in health,
read the most diverse news in one place.

The West's Already-Messy Divorce

Mark Carney's speech, and Donald Trump's blunderbussing, foreshadow future ruptures.

Reason

Brian Cox on Tom Stoppard’s sensational Rock’n’Roll: ‘I looked through the curtain and saw Mick Jagger and Václav Havel’

The actor, who starred as a Marxist academic in the acclaimed 2006 play at the Royal Court, remembers an astonishing writer of ideas and elegance

The Guardian - UK

Sir Tom Stoppard obituary

One of Britain’s most outstanding playwrights famed for the ‘hypnotised brilliance’ of his prose and dialogue

The Guardian - UK

Cardinal Dominik Duka, former Prague archbishop, dies at 82

Cardinal Dominik Duka, a former Archbishop of Prague, has died at 82

The Independent UK

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Czech author and anti-communist dissident Ivan Klíma dies at 94

Ivan Klima, a Czech author and anti-communist dissident whose work and life were shaped by Europe’s 20th-century totalitarian regimes, has died

The Independent UK

Athol Fugard, South African political dissident playwright, dies aged 92

A giant of political drama, Fugard captured the injustices of apartheid in works such as Sizwe Banzi Is Dead and The Island

The Guardian - UK

Iranian Oscar nominee Mohammad Rasoulof: ‘After my arrest, I told myself: don’t hold back’

His new film, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, is up for an Academy award – but the film-maker had to direct it from his sofa. Even under sentence of arrest and flogging, he won’t be silenced, he says

The Guardian - UK

František Janouch, a Czech nuclear physicist who supported dissidents from Sweden, dies at age 92

Czech nuclear physicist František Janouch has died at age 92

The Independent UK

‘Is my play still relevant? I don’t care!’ Tom Stoppard on his Gaza quandary and reviving Rock ’n’ Roll

As his Velvet Revolution drama returns, the great writer talks about his mounting Israel-Gaza uncertainties, the epiphanies he has in every hot shower – and our one-star ‘corker’ review of The Crown

The Guardian - UK

Salman Rushdie receives award in rare appearance at New York event

Author, who was stabbed at a literary event last year, gets lifetime disturbing the peace award and standing ovation

The Guardian - US

‘Time-lapse’ film-maker Helena Třeštíková: ‘Every life is interesting enough to produce a story’

As a season of the Czech director’s remarkable 7 Up-style documentaries comes to a streaming channel, she talks about filming under communism, funding projects that take decades to complete and forging relationships with unruly protagonists

The Guardian - UK

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Reason

Milan Kundera's Eternal Feud With Václav Havel

In clashing bitterly over how an individual should best confront government evil, the two most famous Czech anti-communists unwittingly demonstrated how totalitarianism mangles human lives.

The Guardian - UK

Milan Kundera obituary

Influential Czech-born author of the bestselling novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The Conversation

Hong Kong: crackdown on vigils to commemorate 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre show Beijing's fear of the power of memory

For the past 34 years, the height of “politically sensitive periods” for the Chinese government invariably falls around the same day: June 4, the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing. And, as use of the internet has become increasingly ubiquitous in China, online surveillance and censorship go into…

The Guardian - UK

Simon Schama’s History of Now review – this highly personal show is simplistic and outdated

The academic’s look at truth, democracy and art has its heart very much in the right place. But too often it’s fighting old battles rather than grasping the modern reality of untruths

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The Guardian - UK

A Message from Ukraine by Volodymyr Zelensky review – a winner in the war of words

The Ukraine president’s storytelling skills and sense of moral purpose elevate his war speeches in this compelling collection

The Guardian - UK

How Putin’s invasion returned Nato to the centre stage

The long read: For the first time in years, its role has become a topic of furious debate. But what do we talk about when we talk about Nato?

The Conversation

Understanding Ukraine’s symbolic fight to return to Europe, as the EU marks 18 years since its 'big bang’ enlargement

With the weight of Russian military might bearing down on it, Ukraine applied to join the European Union (EU) on February 28. While the Russian invasion provided the immediate pretext, membership had been on the Ukrainian political agenda since the Orange Revolution of 2004–2005.

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