MOSCOW

Gunmen slaughter concertgoers outside Moscow, and Putin blames the enemy he was already fighting

More than 140 people died when attackers opened fire at a concert hall. A branch of Islamic State claimed it and American intelligence had warned of it. The Kremlin pointed, without evidence, at Ukraine.

Gunmen stormed the Crocus City Hall, a concert venue on the edge of Moscow, on the evening of March 22, opening fire on a crowd waiting for a rock show and setting the building ablaze, killing more than 140 people in the deadliest terrorist attack in Russia in two decades. Islamic State's Afghan branch, ISIS-K, claimed responsibility and released body-camera footage; the United States said it had privately warned Russia of exactly such a threat weeks earlier, a warning Putin had publicly dismissed as Western provocation. Four suspects, Tajik nationals, were arrested and appeared in court visibly and severely tortured.

The attack was a double failure and a revealing response. It was a failure of security, at a moment when Russia's intelligence services are consumed by the war in Ukraine and the suppression of domestic dissent rather than the jihadist threat that actually struck. And Putin's reaction was to ignore the group that claimed it and the ally that had warned him, and instead to insinuate, without a shred of evidence, that Ukraine was behind it, folding the massacre into the war he had already chosen. A warning had come, precise and specific, from a source he preferred to distrust, and been dismissed for political convenience, and 140 people paid for the dismissal. This paper has a long file on warnings ignored. It rarely gets to add a national security service that was told, in as many words, and looked away.

TECHNOLOGY

Europe's AI law becomes real, and Washington moves against TikTok

The European Parliament gave final approval to the AI Act on March 13, turning the world's first comprehensive law governing artificial intelligence from an agreement into a statute that will phase into force over the next two years, banning some uses outright and forcing scrutiny on the rest. The same day, the US House of Representatives passed, by a lopsided margin, a bill that would force the Chinese-owned TikTok to be sold to a non-Chinese owner or be banned from American app stores, the most aggressive move yet against the app that 170 million Americans use, on the grounds that its ownership hands Beijing a lever over data and attention. The bill's fate in the Senate is less certain, and a legal fight over free speech is guaranteed, but the direction, in Brussels and Washington alike, is unmistakable: the era of governments treating these platforms as beyond their reach is over.

IN BRIEF

Putin's coronation; a bond crisis; a palace confession

Vladimir Putin claimed 87 percent of the vote in an election held March 15 to 17 with no real opponents and no real doubt, extending his rule to at least 2030 in a ritual of power rather than a contest of it. Donald Trump spent the fortnight scrambling to post a bond of nearly half a billion dollars in his New York civil fraud case, warning he might have to sell properties, before a court cut the figure to $175 million; separately, the company behind his Truth Social platform went public, handing him a paper fortune of billions. And the Princess of Wales ended weeks of feverish online speculation, fed by a clumsily edited family photograph, by announcing on March 22 that she was being treated for cancer, a private tragedy that a rumour mill had spent a month turning into a circus.

The Column

The largest act of democracy in human history is about to begin

India announced the dates this fortnight: nearly a billion eligible voters, seven phases, six weeks. I want to set aside, for once, the anxieties, and simply describe the scale of the thing, because there has never been anything like it.

By Meera Anand

This fortnight, amid the massacre in Moscow and the coronation dressed as an election beside it, my own country announced something that I think deserves a moment of plain wonder before the analysis takes over: the dates of its general election. Beginning April 19, across seven phases over six weeks, India will conduct the largest exercise of democracy in the history of the species. Nearly 970 million people are eligible to vote. Not 970 million citizens; 970 million voters, more than the entire population of Europe, more than the Americas combined. I have spent a year in this column being careful and often critical about the direction of Indian democracy, and I will be again. But this fortnight I want to describe the machine itself, because it is genuinely one of the astonishing organisational achievements on Earth and almost no one outside the country pauses to see it.

Consider the logistics, because the logistics are the marvel. The law in India says no voter should have to travel more than two kilometres to a polling station. To honour that, the Election Commission sends teams, with electronic voting machines, over mountains, across rivers, into forests and deserts, to reach every last cluster of citizens, however remote. There is a polling station, every election, set up for a single voter, a temple priest in a forest in Gujarat, because the rule is the rule and the rule says he gets to vote without a journey. Voting machines travel by boat, by elephant, by foot, carried by officials walking for days. Nearly a million polling stations. Fifteen million election workers and security personnel. The whole thing conducted in phases precisely so that the security forces can move across a subcontinent to protect each region as it votes. It is a feat of coordination that would defeat most governments and most armies, run every few years, more or less on time, at a scale that makes every other election on the planet look like a rehearsal.

I dwell on the machine, and not the politics, deliberately, because the machine is the part that gives me hope in a year when the politics mostly has not. Whatever you think of who is likely to win, and whatever this column has said and will say again about the pressures on India's institutions, the fact that a country of a billion and a half people, with the poverty and diversity and sheer difficulty that India contains, chooses its government by counting the freely-cast votes of nearly a billion people, and that the losers, mostly, accept the count, is not a small thing. It is, measured by the number of human beings who participate in it, the single largest peaceful transfer of legitimacy that our species knows how to perform. Most of the world cannot do it at all. India does it at a scale no one else would even attempt.

So before the six weeks of results and recriminations begin, before this column returns, as it will, to the harder questions about what Indian democracy is becoming, let me just say the plain thing. Nearly a billion people are about to walk to a booth, many of them poor, many of them unable to read the names, and press a button to choose who governs them, protected by a rule that will carry a machine up a mountain for a single one of them. It is imperfect, contested, and under strain, like every democracy, more than some. It is also, this fortnight, about to be the most people who have ever peacefully decided anything together, and that is worth one paragraph of undiluted awe before we get back to the argument.

The Ledger

The EU AI Act is now law, the first of its kind; the US moves on TikTok. The regulatory year this paper tracked from Italy's ChatGPT ban is delivering statutes. Implementation, over the next two years, is the next test.

Data centers & power

Quiet on the surface. The build-out continues; the power reckoning waits, as ever, for the next set of numbers.

Rates

The Fed held steady and still projects cuts later in 2024; markets have made peace with mid-year. Inflation's last mile is proving stickier than the descent from the peak.

Real estate

US 30-year mortgage 6.87 percent (March 21). Frozen and patient. The spring buying season opens with rates still near the highs.

India tech

The election machine described above runs on technology, electronic voting machines, biometric rolls, logistics systems, much of it built domestically. It is a quiet demonstration of exactly the state-scale software capability the country's services industry sells to the world.

What we called wrong

Nothing to retract. The Moscow attack adds a grim entry to this paper's oldest file: a specific warning, delivered by the Americans to the Russians, dismissed for political reasons, and vindicated in blood weeks later.

The Back Page

The photograph nobody could trust

Before the Princess of Wales told the world she had cancer, the world spent a strange month convinced it had caught the palace in a lie. A Mother's Day photograph of Kate and her children, released to quiet speculation about her absence, turned out to have been clumsily edited, a misaligned sleeve, a blurred hand, and the picture agencies took the extraordinary step of withdrawing it as manipulated. The internet, primed by a year of learning that any image might be fake, went into a frenzy: she was gravely ill, she was gone, there was a cover-up, the whole thing was AI. The conspiracy theories curdled for weeks. And then, on March 22, the truth arrived and silenced all of it at once: a young mother of three, being treated for cancer, who had edited a family snapshot herself, badly, as any harried parent might, and whose only crime was wanting a month of privacy while she told her children before she told the world. There is a lesson in the whole sorry episode about the age we have entered, when a real family's real grief could hide in plain sight behind a doctored sleeve because we have all learned to assume the image is a lie. We spent a month interrogating a photograph. Behind it was just a frightened person, being human, hoping for a little time. Sometimes the thing behind the suspicious image is not a conspiracy. It is a life.