The Latest Breaking News from Katie Flood

Across parts of academia, concerns are mounting that the Israel-Gaza war is having a chilling effect on academic freedom. In the second of two episodes of The Conversation Weekly exploring how the war is affecting life at universities, we speak to an Israeli legal scholar, now based in the UK,…

Tensions have been running high at many universities around the world since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 and the subsequent Israeli assault on Gaza. In the US, protests and solidarity events have been met with varied responses from university administrations. Some institutions are now facing federal investigation…

Kenya is marking 60 years since its independence from British colonial rule on December 12, 1963. Each year, the country celebrates the occasion with a national holiday, Jamhuri Day. And for much of the past 60 years, patriotic choral music has been a regular feature of those celebrations.

As world leaders and their climate negotiators gathered at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai in early December, on the other side of the world, Brazil was experiencing an unprecedented drought in the Amazon. Scientists fear it could release of billions of additional tons of carbon into the atmosphere.

In the weeks since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 and the Israeli bombardment and ground assault on Gaza, both sides have traded accusations of genocide. Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis and took more than 200 hostage, while Israel’s subsequent aerial and ground attacks on Gaza have killed more…

Amid the flurry of billboards promoting cut price deals in the run up to Black Friday, some activists have slipped in the odd spoof advert. By subverting public advertising space, they’re risking legal action to try and make serious points about the excesses of consumer culture and the perilous state…

The rise of drug-resistant infections is one of the biggest global threats to health, food security and development. Antibiotic-resistant superbugs were estimated to kill 1.27 million people in 2019, and the UN projects that drug-resistant diseases could cause 10 million deaths a year by 2050.

The 6.8 magnitude earthquake that struck Morocco’s Atlas mountains on September 8 killed more than 2,000 people and left thousands more homeless. Parts of the old medina in the nearby city of Marrakech, a Unesco world heritage site, were left badly damaged.

In recent years, Californians have had to deal with some deadly and destructive wildfires. But in fact, this part of the western United States has been shaped by fire for millennia.

Imagine a particle so small that it’s the same relative size to a football as that ball is to the planet Earth. That’s the size of a quantum dot – a type of nanocrystal that changes colour depending on its size, and was once thought impossible to actually produce.

For generations, Neanderthals have been a source of fascination for scientists. This species of ancient hominim inhabited the world for around 500,000 years until they suddenly disappeared around 40,000 years ago. Today, the cause of their extinction remains a mystery.