Gideon Lichfield

From outside the US, the Senate intelligence committee’s 528-page report on CIA torture techniques—merely the abridged, non-secret version of the 6,700-page original—seems like America at its best. Harshly critical of an agency that did evil things to produce dubious intelligence while lying to its overlords, it seems to embody the country’s best traditions of transparency and honest self-examination.

After president Vladimir Putin called the internet a “CIA project,” this was probably just a matter of time: Google confirmed late Thursday (Dec. 11) that it’s getting its engineers out of Russia. According to tech site The Information, which first reported the news (paywall), its 50 mostly Moscow-based engineers will have the option to leave the company or relocate to other countries. Google will, however, keep marketing and sales teams in Russia, and it’s not shutting down its services; on the contrary, company sources have told both Western and Russian media that it plans to up its investment in Russia next year.

The little town of Ferguson, Missouri, became a global story again this week, after a grand jury declined to indict police officer Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown.

Last June I snapped the above photo on Fifth Avenue during New York City’s LGBT pride parade. I was surrounded by Russian-speakers, many of them newly arrived from somewhere in the former Soviet Union. Most, if they had been to a pride parade at all, had been to a tiny, illegal gathering where the police arrested them while onlookers hurled insults. Here in America, there were thousands of police protecting them, and hundreds of thousands of onlookers cheering themselves hoarse.

In a 13-tweet “tweetstorm” this afternoon, Travis Kalanick, head of the car service Uber, appeared to issue an apology. It was anything but.

Thank you for your email. But I’d like you to remove me from your mailing list. Permanently.

On Sept. 26, 43 students went missing in Iguala, a town in the southwestern Mexican state of Guerrero. An investigation concluded that local police had kidnapped them and handed them over to a local criminal gang, who killed them. Only last week did the authorities announce they had found what they think are the students’ charred remains.

A curious dichotomy confronts the casual web surfer who visits Reuters.tv. If your browser window is more than 1,200 pixels wide—smaller than most laptop screens these days—you’ll see the above picture of a rather retro-looking alarm clock stacked atop some books, with the time at a bracing 6:30 (a.m., one presumes). Any narrower, and the picture flips abruptly to a dust-blown desert landscape with the unmistakable figure of Burning Man in the background.

From abroad, this week’s US mid-term election looks like a disaster for the Democrats. To Americans watching closely, it signals something more subtle. Yes, the Republicans now have both houses of Congress, historic majorities in state legislatures, and the most governors they’ve had in 20 years.

More than 60,000 runners are due to crowd the streets of New York City this Sunday for the world’s largest 26.2-mile race, but it’s a near certainty that not one will break Dennis Kimetto’s world record marathon time of 2:02:57, set five weeks ago in Berlin.

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Mail.ru, Russia’s most popular email provider, this morning announced that it has paid $1.47 billion for the 48% that it did not already own of VKontakte, Russia’s most popular social network. Mail.ru already owns Odnoklassniki, the second-most popular network. It’s as if Gmail (if it were an independent company) were to buy Facebook.

Here are two pictures that, on the face of it, look pretty similar.

The conflict in Syria has scattered refugees literally to the four winds. Some 2.8 million Syrians have fled to Lebanon (to the west), Iraq (east), Jordan (south), and Turkey (north) to escape the fighting, on top of 6.5 million people who have left their homes but stayed within Syria. Many of the refugees, and the wounded, are children.

This post has been corrected.

Influential Russian bloggers have long been subject to Vladimir Putin’s distaste for online dissent. Popular writer and activist Alexei Navalny—one of the intellectual leaders of the 2011 protests that challenged Putin’s legitimacy—had his blog blocked earlier this year. But a law that came into force today applies even to writers of moderate influence. Any blog with more than 3,000 daily unique visitors will have to register with Roskomnadzor, Russia’s official media regulator, as a media organization and be held to the same standards.

Today ratings agency S&P declared Argentina to be in default for the second time in 13 years, after the deadline passed for it to reach a deal with a group of its creditors. But the default may only be temporary.

Microsoft’s Bing search engine—and its virtual personification, Cortana, the sultry digital assistant on Microsoft Windows phones—has so far had a spotless record of predicting World Cup matches. And the nail-biting semi-final of Argentina vs the Netherlands, which has just been decided on penalty kicks after 120 minutes of goal-less play, has continued Bing’s winning streak.

After Tim Cook was inadvertently outed yesterday on a CNBC business-news talk show, (though hardly for the first time), some are calling on the Apple CEO—who has never admitted to being gay, but never denied it either—to come out himself.

When a bunch of extremists seem about to take control of one of the Middle East’s largest countries, you’d think we’d have better things to do then argue about what they’re called. But the world’s media seem stubbornly divided about what name to give the jihadist movement currently overwhelming Iraq.

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In the four years since he launched Jamalon, an online bookseller for the Middle East, Ala Alsallal has been noticing something. “Any book sold in the Middle East normally becomes boosted when a government bans it—it becomes a best-seller,” he says.

The US polling company Pew Research Center has just released a survey of Russian and Ukrainian attitudes to what’s going on in eastern Ukraine, and one fact caught our eye: 55% of Russian adults think it’s a “great misfortune” that the Soviet Union no longer exists: