With democratic values under attack from populists within and former allies without, there are no simple solutions

Three decades after political philosopher Francis Fukuyama declared the End of History and the “universalisation of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”, the democratic model is under attack in many parts of the world, not least here in Europe. Populists bent on weakening the rule of law, rolling back human rights protections, subjugating the judiciary and cowing independent journalism are amplified by anything-goes social media algorithms that promote anger and polarisation over rational discourse.

They have now received a mandate from the Trump administration , which effectively declared civilisational war on the EU and its values in its National Security Strategy .

Paul Taylor is a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre

The work of surgeon and artist Joseph Maclise is the focus of a show at the Thackray Museum of Medicine in Leeds

It is an image of an unnamed black man with his eyes closed and his innards exposed. Drawn with care and precision, the image may be the only anatomical drawing of a black body made during the Victorian age.

Now it is part of a new exhibition that focuses on the work of Joseph Maclise, a surgeon and artist whose work – including his 1851 atlas Surgical Anatomy – made the human anatomy accessible to the general public, and who was the brother of the celebrated artist Daniel Maclise.

With democratic values under attack from populists within and former allies without, there are no simple solutions

Three decades after political philosopher Francis Fukuyama declared the End of History and the “universalisation of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”, the democratic model is under attack in many parts of the world, not least here in Europe. Populists bent on weakening the rule of law, rolling back human rights protections, subjugating the judiciary and cowing independent journalism are amplified by anything-goes social media algorithms that promote anger and polarisation over rational discourse.

They have now received a mandate from the Trump administration , which effectively declared civilisational war on the EU and its values in its National Security Strategy .

Paul Taylor is a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre

The work of surgeon and artist Joseph Maclise is the focus of a show at the Thackray Museum of Medicine in Leeds

It is an image of an unnamed black man with his eyes closed and his innards exposed. Drawn with care and precision, the image may be the only anatomical drawing of a black body made during the Victorian age.

Now it is part of a new exhibition that focuses on the work of Joseph Maclise, a surgeon and artist whose work – including his 1851 atlas Surgical Anatomy – made the human anatomy accessible to the general public, and who was the brother of the celebrated artist Daniel Maclise.

With democratic values under attack from populists within and former allies without, there are no simple solutions

Three decades after political philosopher Francis Fukuyama declared the End of History and the “universalisation of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”, the democratic model is under attack in many parts of the world, not least here in Europe. Populists bent on weakening the rule of law, rolling back human rights protections, subjugating the judiciary and cowing independent journalism are amplified by anything-goes social media algorithms that promote anger and polarisation over rational discourse.

They have now received a mandate from the Trump administration , which effectively declared civilisational war on the EU and its values in its National Security Strategy .

Paul Taylor is a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre

The work of surgeon and artist Joseph Maclise is the focus of a show at the Thackray Museum of Medicine in Leeds

It is an image of an unnamed black man with his eyes closed and his innards exposed. Drawn with care and precision, the image may be the only anatomical drawing of a black body made during the Victorian age.

Now it is part of a new exhibition that focuses on the work of Joseph Maclise, a surgeon and artist whose work – including his 1851 atlas Surgical Anatomy – made the human anatomy accessible to the general public, and who was the brother of the celebrated artist Daniel Maclise.

When the new premier of the British Virgin Islands said he needed an armed security detail, his chief of police knew trouble was on its way

Augustus James Ulysses Jaspert, Gus for short, arrived in Tortola, the largest of the British Virgin Islands, on 21 August 2017, just two weeks away from catastrophe. Jaspert, who was in his late 30s, had recently been appointed governor by Queen Elizabeth II, on the recommendation of the Foreign Office in London. The BVI is an overseas territory of Britain, with only partial independence, and the governor effectively acts as a backstop to the locally elected legislature. For Jaspert, a career civil servant, it would be his first hands-on experience of governing – and his first time in the British Virgin Islands. Any trepidation was outweighed by the prospect of moving to the Caribbean. “If you’re sitting in an office in London and someone says, ‘Go to Tortola,’ you look it up on a screen and think, ‘OK, I can do that,’” Jaspert told me.

While Jaspert, his wife and two sons were settling into their new life, a tropical storm gathered over the Atlantic. At first, forecasters weren’t unduly alarmed, but in the first days of September, the storm transformed into something much worse. In the afternoon of 6 September, Hurricane Irma made landfall in Tortola, which is home to the majority of the BVI’s 30,000-strong population. Irma was one of the strongest hurricanes ever recorded in the Atlantic basin. It scalped buildings, blew out windows and removed entire floors from homes. Shipping containers smashed into the islanders’ fishing boats and the out-of-towners’ yachts.

Tapanuli orangutans survive only in Indonesia’s Sumatran rainforest where a mine expansion will cut through their home. Yet the mining company says the alternative will be worse

A small brown line snakes its way through the rainforest in northern Sumatra, carving 300 metres through dense patches of meranti trees, oak and mahua. Picked up by satellites, the access road – though modest now – will soon extend 2km to connect with the Tor Ulu Ala pit, an expansion site of Indonesia’s Martabe mine. The road will help to unlock valuable deposits of gold, worth billions of dollars in today’s booming market. But such wealth could come at a steep cost to wildlife and biodiversity: the extinction of the world’s rarest ape, the Tapanuli orangutan.

The network of access roads planned for this swath of tropical rainforest will cut through habitat critical to the survival of the orangutans, scientists say. The Tapanuli ( Pongo tapanuliensis ), unique to Indonesia, was only discovered by scientists to be a separate species in 2017 – distinct from the Sumatran and Bornean apes. Today, there are fewer than 800 Tapanulis left in an area that covers as little as 2.5% of their historical range. All are found in Sumatra’s fragile Batang Toru ecosystem, bordered on its south-west flank by the Martabe mine, which began operations in 2012.

When the new premier of the British Virgin Islands said he needed an armed security detail, his chief of police knew trouble was on its way

Augustus James Ulysses Jaspert, Gus for short, arrived in Tortola, the largest of the British Virgin Islands, on 21 August 2017, just two weeks away from catastrophe. Jaspert, who was in his late 30s, had recently been appointed governor by Queen Elizabeth II, on the recommendation of the Foreign Office in London. The BVI is an overseas territory of Britain, with only partial independence, and the governor effectively acts as a backstop to the locally elected legislature. For Jaspert, a career civil servant, it would be his first hands-on experience of governing – and his first time in the British Virgin Islands. Any trepidation was outweighed by the prospect of moving to the Caribbean. “If you’re sitting in an office in London and someone says, ‘Go to Tortola,’ you look it up on a screen and think, ‘OK, I can do that,’” Jaspert told me.

While Jaspert, his wife and two sons were settling into their new life, a tropical storm gathered over the Atlantic. At first, forecasters weren’t unduly alarmed, but in the first days of September, the storm transformed into something much worse. In the afternoon of 6 September, Hurricane Irma made landfall in Tortola, which is home to the majority of the BVI’s 30,000-strong population. Irma was one of the strongest hurricanes ever recorded in the Atlantic basin. It scalped buildings, blew out windows and removed entire floors from homes. Shipping containers smashed into the islanders’ fishing boats and the out-of-towners’ yachts.