Patrick E. Shea, University of Glasgow The US vice-president, J.D. Vance, recently told Fox News that “the very best security guarantee” to prevent Russia from invading Ukraine again was “to give Americans economic upside in the future of Ukraine”. The implication is that the much-debated minerals deal, in which an investment fund managed
Spyros A. Sofos, Simon Fraser University On March 1, the start of the holy month of Ramadan — observed by most of Turkey’s Sunni population — the imprisoned leader of the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party, Abdullah Öcalan, made a historic call for the party to disarm and end its 40-year-long armed struggle against
George Wittemyer, Colorado State University Surveying elephants is hard, risky work. Dedicated biologists have been doing this challenging task across Africa for decades. Systematic surveying started in the late 1960s but has been sporadic, as access to remote areas takes logistical planning, funding and well-trained teams. Surveys can easily be derailed by civil
An international team of researchers is developing a model of Mars’s evolution that could unlock some of its long-held secrets, including whether it once harboured life. François Forget, a space scientist from the Pierre Simon Laplace Institute in France, is the man looking for those answers. He is not a time traveller, but
Thomas Gift, UCL Elon Musk is wielding a chainsaw against US government departments, potentially culling tens of thousands of jobs, as part of a huge plan to shrink the government and slash federal spending. This large-scale purge of public servants, coordinated through Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), may end up creating one