大象传媒

Do reporters know it when they are witnessing history? Kevin Connolly, now based in Cairo, analyses what a presidential election win for Sisi really means for Egypt - and remembers another poll he covered 25 years ago, in the last days of eastern-bloc Poland. It was a very hard news week in June 1989, with events in Tiananmen Square, the funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini and a terrible train disaster in the USSR - leaving Poland's first free, multi-party election for 50 years rather overshadowed on the bulletins. But some big news events can seem more momentous at the time than they prove to be years after the event - while others only grow in memory.

Meanwhile, Tara Isabella Burton steps into a booth in Tbilisi which is at the heart of a passionate campaign of activism aiming to roll back rights, rather than promote them. In Georgia, it turns out, very few people are glad to be gay - or glad to know of others who are. And this prejudice isn't a thing of the past. Young people too express virulently homophobic attitudes and a popular rap tune insists "A Man Should Never Be Called Wife".

(Photo: Polish leader Wojciech Jaruzelski (centre) at the first multi-party session of the Polish parliament in 50 years. Credit: Wojtek Druszcz/AFP/Getty Images/)