Alexei Navalny’s family have been refused access to his body for a third day. Officials reportedly told the dissident’s mother and lawyers that the investigation into his death in an Arctic penal colony on Friday – which they attributed to “sudden death syndrome”, a vague term for cardiac failure – was being extended. The government has issued schools in England with new guidance to help them ban mobile phones. Headteachers can order pupils to leave phones at home or in on-site lockers, with new powers to search rucksacks and boosted legal protection against parental lawsuits. Oppenheimer dominated last night’s Baftas, picking up seven awards including best film, best director (Christopher Nolan) and best actor (Cillian Murphy). Jonathan Glazer’s German-language movie The Zone of Interest managed to pick up best British film as well as best film not in the English language.

Navalny loved Russia. Did it love him?

The only shocking thing about the death of Alexei Navalny is “how unshocking it is”, says Daniel Hannan in The Sunday Telegraph. People who stand in the way of the “gangster-murderer” Vladimir Putin have long had “the habit of dying”, and no sane person is in any doubt that Russia today is merely a “crime syndicate with a country attached”. What’s extraordinary is that there are still those in the West – particularly among Donald Trump’s cheerleaders – who portray the Russian leader as “some kind of anti-woke tough guy” who loves his country and fights for its interests. Total nonsense, of course. If anyone loved Russia it was Navalny, who “sacrificed everything for it” by returning even after its corrupt government had tried to assassinate him.

What’s not obvious is whether his country loved him back. Because here’s a hard thing that needs saying: Putin “is not forcing his brutality on a resentful population”. His approval rating – in the most credible polling available, at least – hovers around 85%, and many Russians support him “not despite his cruelty but because of it”. In 2002, when Chechen separatists seized a theatre in Moscow and took the audience hostage, Putin’s response was to “pump in a chemical agent and then go in shooting”. The separatists were killed, as were 130 innocent theatregoers. The response of the Russian population? “To cheer wildly for a leader not afraid to get things done.” Since then, Putin has tightened his grip: pro-Western types have emigrated; many who remain have normalised repression and violence. Navalny’s dream of a democratic Russia can only be realised with Putin gone. But even that would be no guarantee.

After the Cold War ended, Sweden’s military reserve force, or Home Guard, became the domain of “largely middle-aged citizens”, who often didn’t take their duties terribly seriously, says Politico. But things have changed since Russia invaded Ukraine. In 2022, nearly 30,000 Swedes applied to join, “up 619% from an average year”. The Home Guard now has so many applications it’s having to turn people away.

The BBC’s hit reality TV show The Traitors is set in Ardross Castle, one of Scotland’s most spectacular properties, says The Daily Telegraph. But the contestants don’t get to stay in these “extravagant digs”. When the actor Alan Cumming hosted the American version, which was also filmed at Ardross, he said the participants were driven 45 minutes away to an airport hotel in Inverness.

The archetypal performative politician

When London mayor Sadiq Khan announced the new names for the London Overground lines, I let out a “weary groan”, says Janice Turner in The Times. “Had someone ingested a diversity, equity and inclusion manual and burped them up?” They seem to tick every right-on checkbox – the Suffragette line, the Windrush line – while the Lioness line is simply based on something people are “really into” right now. “A few years back we’d be boarding the Deliciously Ella or Fleabag line.” This £6.2m rebranding nonsense is “peak Sadiq” – and I voted for him. “Twice.” But I won’t do so again for his “inevitable” re-election in May. He’s the archetypal performative politician. “Sizzle over sausage, say over do.”

Voters are treated like “distractible children”, as if a shiny anti-hate crime poster will make us forget that violence on the Tube has shot up, with 10,836 reported crimes in April to September last year compared with 6,924 in 2022. “Or that knife crime is rising at its fastest rate in five years, with 40 incidents reported a day.” Khan has nothing to show for his eight years in office beyond expanding Ulez, which was originally Boris Johnson’s creation. He’s like another performative politician, Nicola Sturgeon: under her tenure, Scottish education standards cratered and drug deaths soared, while she busied herself with “authoritarian anti-hate laws” and a “baby box” scheme for new parents copied from Finland. At least Keir Starmer’s “soporific” style seems more focused on granular solutions to real problems. “Let’s pray this continues into government.”

A Chinese renewable energy firm has built the world’s biggest onshore wind turbine blades, says New Scientist. At 131 metres long, each one would “dwarf Big Ben or the Statue of Liberty”, while a turbine with three blades attached will have a diameter of more than 260 metres. The bigger the blades, the fewer of them you need to generate the same amount of power.

It’s the Time Pyramid, an artwork that started in the early 1990s and won’t be finished until the year 3183. Residents of the German town of Wemding are assembling it block by block, says The New York Times, after local artist Manfred Laber proposed the idea back in 1993. When he died in 2018, he left his fellow citizens to “decide how it evolves”. They are constructing the colossus at a rate of one six-by-four-foot block every decade.