Coda Story

A complaint has been filed by the anti-surveillance advocacy group Privacy International against the U.K. Home Office, which is rolling out GPS tracking devices for migrants entering the country through irregular routes. Privacy International says the practice is excessive, unlawful and threatens the fundamental rights to privacy to which everyone in the United Kingdom is entitled.

As a young Russian freelance journalist who has gone into exile, I have recently become alarmed by an insidious form of Kremlin-backed disinformation. Among my friends still in Russia — skeptical, reasonable people who have plenty of doubts about an unjust war of attrition being fought in their name in Ukraine — several have forwarded posts from “War on Fakes,” a “fact checking” site that claims to be restoring balance to a western media narrative that seeks to demonize Russia and Russians.

Coda Story is hiring an Assistant Editor to join our dynamic, growing newsroom of reporters, editors, multimedia producers, and videographers. Our journalists working across multiple countries have been recognized for their work on surveillance, disinformation, human rights, historical memory, among other interconnected topics, and have won prestigious awards, from investigative reporting to podcasting to topical essays.

That’s how Togolese reporter Ferdinand Ayité, director of the West African nation’s L’Alternative newspaper, described himself last year after learning that his phone may have been infected with spyware. The revelations came from the now infamous Pegasus Project. The multi-newsroom investigation exposed the stunning global reach...

China’s official state press agency Xinhua published an article early last week celebrating that over 80% of Cambodia’s rural population now has access to clean water and sanitation. This is due, apparently, in large part to China-aided development projects. The pro-Cambodian government Khmer Times published a similar article.

“No culture cannot cancel culture,” says the once revered Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica, twice winner of the Palme d’Or. He also has French citizenship. Beard scraggly, hair and clothing artfully rumpled, Kusturica looks at the camera nonplussed: “And how can you separate Tolstoy or Turgenev from the history of Europe? This is impossible.”

“First it was Uber and Careem, now it’s Bolt, tomorrow it will be something else,” says the stoic Walid. After he’s done with his day job, he puts in several more hours ferrying people to and from the nightclubs and bars of east Beirut, popular with tourists and the Lebanese diaspora in town for the summer.

From using GPS tracking of waste disposal to new digital payment systems to advanced CCTV technology in crime-heavy areas, Myanmar’s “smart cities” developments were an exercise in technocratic city management, in making cities safer, cleaner, more efficient and more livable. Following a coup in February 2021, which...

Just two hours before the long-delayed Chinese historical drama “A Love Never Lost” was set to premiere on July 18, it was pulled and replaced with a rerun of a 2020 “poverty alleviation drama.”. The showrunners blamed technical issues, but Weibo users weren’t convinced, as China Digital...

Over the last few months, many people have taken to TikTok to express solidarity with those seeking support for abortions in what might at first sight appear to be unusual ways. “If we go down then we go down together,” a line from the song “Paris” by the Chainsmokers plays...

Spreading false and alarming news and fomenting dissent against the army are the outlandish charges under which a Japanese journalist has been held in Myanmar. He was detained while covering an anti-junta protest in Yangon last weekend. He is one of over 140 journalists, including at least five foreign journalists, who have been arrested since February, 2021, when the military, known as Tatmadaw, seized power.

The first death threat arrived last November, on the very day Lisa-Maria Kellermayr was set to take over her own medical practice. As she and her staff readied themselves to welcome their first patients in Seewalchen am Attersee, an idyllic lakeside town of 5,700, she received an email that outlined in painstaking detail how its author would come to Kellermayr’s office and slaughter her and her entire staff.

For pretty much as long as kleptocracy has been a thing, kleptocrats have bought property in London and hidden their ownership behind shell companies. This has allowed them to keep their wealth secret from the citizens of their home countries, and from UK law enforcement agencies. It is therefore a Bad Thing but is, apparently, no more.

On a blazing afternoon in July, the white heat made worse by the humidity, so that each step through the thick air required the summoning up of near-superhuman will, Pooja Devi, 33, walked for over a mile, much of it uphill. She climbed to a spot about 500 feet off the ground.

On July 21, an email was sent to the Chinese Embassy in London saying: “This is Drew Pavlou, you have until 12pm to stop the Uyghur genocide or I blow up the embassy with a bomb. Regards, Drew.”. Drew Pavlou, who at the time was protesting outside the embassy,...

This summer, we’ve been inundated with news of devastating heatwave after heatwave, unprecedented droughts, and raging wildfires. We’ve also been inundated with news and opinion on how European climate policies have left the continent in a position where it is over-reliant on Russian oil and gas to meet its energy needs.

Earlier this summer, in June, children from an occupied region of Luhansk were taken to a summer camp in Russia. The camp was made up of both Russian and Ukrainian children. The goal, authorities say, was to distract children from the grim reality of war. During the 10-day camp, activities...

Many of you will know the work of Gabriel Zucman, at the University of California, Berkeley, in which he tries to pierce the layers of secrecy around offshore finance and see who really owns what. I was really excited to see an update to the ongoing project Missing Profits of Nations, which he and two Danish economists have been working on for a few years.

Most years, when the Channel Islanders of Alderney come together on May 22 to memorialize the victims of the Nazi occupation, it rains. A chilly wind whips up from the sea as a congregation gathers to pay tribute to the thousands of people who toiled and died in forced labor camps on this tiny island.

For Lithuanians, their country’s medieval history has been a source of pride, pageantry and identity. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania was a cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic, multilingual state that sprawled across swathes of the Baltics and eastern Europe, including modern-day Lithuania, Belarus, and parts of Poland, Latvia, Ukraine, Moldova, and Russia.