The Latest Breaking News from Katie Flood

The Trump administration’s cuts to funding for American universities and research have left many scientists reeling and very worried. At the National Institutes of Health, which has an annual budget of US$47 billion to support medical research both in the U.S. and around the world, nearly 800 grants have been…

The Birkin bag made by French luxury retailer Hermès has become a status symbol for some of the global elite. Notoriously difficult to obtain, a select few obsess over how to get their hands on one.

Five years since COVID emerged, not only has the pandemic affected the way we live and work, it’s also influencing the way researchers are thinking about the past.

When the first cases of COVID began to spread around the world in early 2020, people in Iquitos, a remote city in the Peruvian Amazon, weren’t unduly worried. They assumed their isolation would protect them. It didn’t. Peru, and Iquitos, were hit fast and hard.

One hundred years ago, a paper was published in the journal Nature that would radically shift our understandings of the origins of humanity. It described a fossil, found in a lime mine in Taung in South Africa, which became known as the Taung child skull.

Every day that he was locked up in a scam compound in Southeast Asia, George thought about how to get out. “We looked for means of escaping, but it was hard,” he told The Conversation.

A few weeks after Ben Yeo travelled to Cambodia for what he thought was a job in a casino, he found himself locked up in a padded room. “It’s a combination between a prison and a madhouse,” he remembers. He was being punished for refusing to conduct online scams.

Scam Factories is a podcast series from The Conversation Weekly taking you inside Southeast Asia’s brutal fraud compounds. It accompanies a series of articles on The Conversation.

Scam Factories is a special multimedia and podcast series by The Conversation that explores the inner workings of Southeast Asia’s brutal scam compounds.

 When Donald Trump imposed sweeping tariffs during his first term as US president, it sparked a trade war with China. As the Trump administration ratchets up its threat to tax imports from its allies and economic rivals alike, the world is bracing for another wave of costly economic disruption.

When Elon Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, many users looked for alternatives, fuelling a wave of online migration from the social media platform. Musk says he’s using Twitter, now named X, to champion free speech and that “cancel culture has been cancelled”. But his closeness to Donald Trump and his…