Stories from Abroad

The study of information and communications technology (ICT) adoption signals that diffusion processes within highly unequal societies produce stratification in the access to digital technologies

One of the most sweeping surveillance states in the world, China has all but closed its borders since the start of the pandemic, accelerating a political turn inward as nationalism is on the rise and foreign ties are treated with suspicion.

On the eve of this week’s rail strikes, it was reported that industry bosses are planning to phase out paper train tickets and shut almost 1,000 station ticket offices in England. The government says nothing has been decided. But the transport secretary, Grant Shapps, has made no secret of his desire to see savings delivered in this way; some stations, Mr Shapps likes to point out, sell only a handful of tickets each week and the vast majority of transactions have moved online.

In the days after Vladimir Putin ordered Russian troops into Ukraine, Elon Musk made the decision to support Kyiv. Fewer than 48 hours later, Musk’s commercial rocket and satellite business SpaceX dispatched a shipment of Starlink satellite kits to fortify the country’s internet network against Putin’s forces. Musk was commended by the west but his aid was viewed differently by China, a critical growth market for his business empire, where Tesla makes a quarter of its revenues.

The UK has nearly 5 million houses with more than three choices of ultrafast fibre-optic broadband, while 10 million homes do not have a single option, according to analysis that points to the inequality in internet infrastructure across Britain. While some parts of the country are benefiting from high internet speeds, others have been left behind, according to research conducted by data group Point Topic with the Financial Times. The government has pledged to bridge the digital divide and level up the economy by extending fast broadband to all homes.

Since the end of May 2022, the 280,000 people living in Kherson, Ukraine and its surrounding areas have faced constant online disruptions as internet service providers are forced to reroute their connections throu

Britain’s ability to roll out superfast broadband across the country is being slowed by the “tortuous” process of recruiting workers from the EU following Brexit, the head of BT’s networking business has warned. Clive Selley, chief executive of BT’s Openreach, the division leading the rollout of fibre optic networks to homes, said countries such as Portugal and Spain have plenty of people with the necessary skills to accelerate the delivery of superfast broadband. “They want the work, we want the skills and the Home Office have a process that is tortuous,” Selley said in an interview.

The United States, European Union and other NATO countries have donated billions of dollars in military equipment to Ukraine since the war began in late February. But Elon Musk’s Starlink—based on a cluster of table-sized satellites flying as low as 130 miles above Ukraine and beaming down high-speed internet access—has become an unexpected lifeline to the country: both on the battlefield and in the war for public opinion. Ukrainian drones have relied on Starlink to drop bombs on Russian forward positions.

An order by Indian regulators requiring Internet companies to store their users’ real names and track their usage history has alarmed digital privacy advocates and virtual private network providers, which have begun to pull out of the country in protest. ExpressVPN, a leading virtual private network firm based in the British Virgin Islands, said that it would shut down its servers in India.