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Index on Censorship •

Attacked on all fronts in the West Bank - Index on Censorship

When Diala Ayesh was arrested last year, her first thought wasn’t for her own safety – it was whether anyone would inform her loved ones of her whereabouts.

“Even though there was nothing against me, as Palestinians we always expect to leave home and not return,” she told Index.

On 17 January 2024, Ayesh was travelling north from Hebron to Ramallah via public transport when the vehicle was stopped by Israeli forces at Wadi a-Nar – a military checkpoint...
Index on Censorship •

Left speechless: How trauma is leaving children in Gaza unable to communicate - Index on Censorship

This article first appeared in Volume 54, Issue 1 of our print edition of Index on Censorship, titled The forgotten patients: Lost voices in the global healthcare system, published on 11 April 2025. Read more about the issue here.
Most children say their first word between the ages of 12 and 18 months. But Fatehy, a Palestinian boy living in Jabalia City in Gaza, is four years old and is still barely talking.
When he does speak, he says the same words over and over again – “scared”, “bomb” and “...
Index on Censorship •

When trade wars become culture wars - Index on Censorship

The repercussions of Donald Trump’s tariffs continue to spiral with the escalating US-China trade war and the World Trade Organization warning of an impending sharp decline in global trade. But perhaps even more concerning is how the USA’s threats of taxation are increasingly being used to coax significant societal policy changes out of other governments.
Talks have intensified between the UK and US governments around tariffs, with US Vice President JD Vance reportedly putting pressure on UK Pri...
Index on Censorship •

The existential threat to international aid and consular assistance - Index on Censorship

It would have been difficult to miss the recent flurry of news regarding cuts to international aid organisations, and the repercussions these will have in areas such as climate change mitigation, tackling gender-based violence, and supporting independent journalism in countries with severe free speech violations.
Donald Trump’s cuts to USAID (the US Agency for International Development) will decimate such assistance, with more than 90% of the agency’s foreign aid contracts due to be eliminated....
Index on Censorship •

Trump, Zelenskyy and the war on truth - Index on Censorship

The news this week has been dominated by the growing feud between Donald Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, which has culminated in possibly irreparable relations between the presidents.
What started with a meeting between Trump and Vladimir Putin on the war in Ukraine (from which Zelenskyy was excluded) ended in a stream of disinformation coming from the leader of the world’s largest economy. Trump made several spurious claims chiming with those regularly churned out by Putin’s...
Index on Censorship •

Under the Taliban, Afghanistan's musicians have fallen silent

This article first appeared in Volume 53, Issue 4 of our print edition of Index on Censorship, titled Unsung Heroes: How musicians are raising their voices against oppression. Read more about the issue here. The issue was published on 12 December 2024.
When the Taliban seized power in Kabul in August 2021, they soon began searching people’s homes for items they deemed to be immoral. Waheedullah Saghar, the head of the music department at Kabul University, had to destroy all of his musical instru...
Index on Censorship •

It’s been quite the year for freedom of expression - Index on Censorship

Hello, readers. This will be our final newsletter before Index wraps up for the holiday season. It’s been quite the year for freedom of expression, and whilst it’s not easy to summarise in one email, we’ve had a go. We’ve seen severe violations by repressive governments – but we’ve also seen remarkable acts of defiance by political activists, journalists and protesters.

These acts of defiance leave room for hope. In Russia, the year started with the suspicious death of Alexei Navalny whilst in d...
Index on Censorship •

Will Syria's future leaders restore human rights for all? - Index on Censorship

Syrian rebels gather around an equestrian statue of Bassel al-Assad, brother of deposed leader Bashar, during the 2024 Battle of Aleppo. The statue was later torn down. Photo by VOAHello, readers. This week, the world watched in shock as Bashar al-Assad’s government was toppled by Syrian rebels, bringing the dictator’s 24-year-reign to a close and suddenly ending the country’s brutal 13-year civil war. He and his family have since fled, and allegedly claimed asylum in Russia.
One of the defining...
Index on Censorship •

The power of protest - Index on Censorship

Protests have the power to rally people, express objection to political decisions, and in the most successful cases, elicit change. They are a fundamental form of self expression, and a crucial mechanism of any democracy. This week, we saw South Koreans take to the streets to protest President Yoon Suk Yeol’s shock move to impose martial law, which temporarily placed the military in charge and suspended many civilian rights, including the right to protest.
The move was immediately declared illeg...
Index on Censorship •

The UK Government must defend its citizens around the world - Index on Censorship

Hello, readers. This week, the news in the UK has been dominated by the Budget, alongside anticipation of next week’s USA presidential election. Whilst a lot of media attention has been focused on the Chancellor’s number crunching, the Prime Minister also started the week with a proclamation of the importance of press freedom.
Writing for The Guardian on Monday, in an article coinciding with the News Media Association’s week-long Journalism Matters campaign, Keir Starmer vowed to protect journal...
Index on Censorship •

Film censorship risks emboldening those who threaten violence

For more than 20 years, Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s classic novel, A Clockwork Orange, was banned from cinemas in the UK.
Kubrick was known for his shocking and crass, but altogether original, forays into directing. His interpretation of Burgess’s novel was considered exceptionally scandalous for its depictions of sexual and physical violence. But it wasn’t public outrage that triggered its banning – the director himself pulled the film from circulation in 1973, over concer...
Index on Censorship •

Journalists have a "right to life" - Index on Censorship

Hello, readers. This is Sarah Dawood here, editor of Index on Censorship. Every week, we bring the most pertinent global free speech stories to your inbox.
I must confess that today’s newsletter is very bleak, so I won’t be offended if you click away in search of a more optimistic end to your week. We’re reflecting on how journalists are increasingly being silenced globally, not only with the threat of legal retribution or imprisonment, but with death – often with little or no repercussions for...
Index on Censorship •

All the news that's fake to print - Index on Censorship

Hello, readers. This is Sarah Dawood here, the new editor of Index on Censorship. Every week, we bring the most pertinent global free speech stories to your inbox.
This week, headlines have been dominated by the ongoing devastation of the war in the Middle East, where the death toll is now more than 42,000 in Gaza, and more than 2,100 in Lebanon. Monday also marked a painful milestone for Israelis and Jewish people everywhere, as the first anniversary of Hamas’s attacks, which killed 1,200 peopl...
Index on Censorship •

Telling fact from fiction: how war reporting is being suppressed

If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? This well-known philosophical question most likely stems from the work of 18th century philosopher George Berkeley, who questioned the possibility of “unperceived existence”. In other words – did something really happen if no one is around to witness or perceive it?

This might seem a lofty and pretentious way to start this week’s Index newsletter. But the first-hand observance and subsequent documentation of even...
New Statesman •

The NHS’s digital problem: how old infrastructure is slowing down healthcare services

Three months ago, a doctor at my GP surgery referred me for a blood test, but the form is still gathering dust on my bedside table. Since June, my local hospital has not been able to conduct any routine blood tests following a major Russian cyberattack on their pathology service provider Synnovis, bringing many diagnostic services to a standstill. 


This huge ransomware attack will have a significant impact on the patient backlog, given seven London hospitals rely on Synnovis. Hospitals have b...
New Statesman •

The NHS’s digital problem: how old infrastructure is slowing down healthcare services

Three months ago, a doctor at my GP surgery referred me for a blood test, but the form is still gathering dust on my bedside table. Since June, my local hospital has not been able to conduct any routine blood tests following a major Russian cyberattack on their pathology service provider Synnovis, bringing many diagnostic services to a standstill. 


This huge ransomware attack will have a significant impact on the patient backlog, given seven London hospitals rely on Synnovis. Hospitals have b...
New Statesman •

Craig Ritchie: “Dementia is a crisis of our own making”

As political parties push on with their election campaigns, grand promises are being made about tackling sky-high NHS waiting lists. If elected, Keir Starmer has promised to deliver 40,000 extra appointments, scans and operations a week to get non-urgent waits down to the 18-week target, while Rishi Sunak has pledged to boost the number of GP appointments and increase the scope of pharmacists to treat more common conditions. There are currently 7.5 million cases of people waiting for elective (n
New Statesman •

The government is running before it can walk on NHS digital transformation

In his Budget last week, the Chancellor vowed to transform the NHS digitally. Jeremy Hunt pledged £3.4bn towards boosting the health service’s productivity, particularly through “harnessing new technology” such as artificial intelligence (AI) to reduce admin and speed up diagnoses.

This feels like déjà vu – the government has promised this grand transformation before, yet the NHS remains woefully behind on its digital proficiency. Ten years ago, when Hunt was health secretary, he promised to ma
New Statesman •

Could ultra-processed food be the new smoking?

In the 1930s and 1940s, tobacco companies battled it out via advertising to be known as the “healthiest” cigarette brands. Adverts featured illustrations of smiling doctors clutching their favourite packets, with notorious campaigns reassuring the public that “More doctors smoke Camels”. Some of these ads even appeared in medical journals.

Now we know the catastrophic health implications of smoking, restrictions on tobacco products have increased dramatically over recent decades. It’s illegal t
New Statesman •

Esther Ghey: “The internet unleashed horrific things”

When Esther Ghey walked through the door of a huge co-working space on the seventh floor of Television Centre, the former home of the BBC in White City, London, she smiled with a hint of tiredness. Ghey has faced an overwhelming amount of media attention in the year since the death of her daughter, Brianna.

As she sat down on the sofa across from me, coffee in hand, I noticed the tattoos that travel up her arm – a homage to her child. “I have some bad days,” Ghey, who is 37 and dressed in a sma
New Statesman •

Seema Malhotra: The Tories are short-changing young people

The shadow skills minister Seema Malhotra first stood for the Labour Party in 1983, when she was 11 years old. As a candidate in her primary school council elections, inspired by her grandmother and four siblings, she pledged better pensions and more public facilities for children. She didn’t win, but she did come second.

At the age of 15, Malhotra gave her second major polemic. Asked by her English teacher to write about something that “wound [her] up”, she chose Margaret Thatcher. Not much la
New Statesman •

Is Labour's Child Health Action Plan fit for purpose?

This month, Labour released a Child Health Action Plan, which lays out how it would improve young people’s health and well-being if the party wins the next general election. The plan has seven proposals centred around cutting NHS waiting lists, improving mental health support, widening access to NHS dentistry, tackling smoking and vaping, banning junk food advertising aimed at children, introducing free healthy breakfast clubs in every primary school, and protecting children from infectious dise
New Statesman •

Parkrun founder: “It’s everybody’s right to be active and healthy”

It’s January, it’s cold outside, and yet this weekend around 200,000 people across the country will brave the freeze and head to their local park for a group 5-kilometre run.

Better known as Parkrun, the initiative started in 2004 as a small running club for a group of friends in Bushy Park, west London, who would jog and then go for coffee. Now it has spread around the world, taking place every weekend in 2,500 locations globally, including 1,236 in the UK.

Today, Parkrun may be a “public hea
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