The Biden administration has notified Congress that it will remove Cuba from its list of state sponsors of terrorism in a deal the country’s communist government said would involve the “gradual” release of 553 political prisoners. The deal, which administration officials said was negotiated through the Catholic church, was announced on Tuesday, just five days…
A staccato blast of electromagnetic energy has been tracked to an old, dead galaxy for the first time. The discovery supports the idea that there are more ways to produce such flares, called fast radio bursts, than originally thought. Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are millisecond-long eruptions of intense radio waves. Astronomers have observed thousands…
An online row last week underlines something we all know but which many prefer to ignore. There is something not right about surrogacy. The furore started with an Instagram post by Lily Collins: a picture of her new daughter, Tove, in a little basket, under which the Emily in Paris actor expressed “endless gratitude for…
People living in Goma on the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s eastern border with Rwanda have spoken of their fear and acute hunger after the M23 rebel group swept into the city earlier this week. “We are very afraid. This situation feels hopeless,” said Judith Saima, a 28-year-old merchant in Goma, where heavy fighting that…
Recent governments have carried out “wilful acts of bastardry” and created intergenerational inequality and environmental destruction that will leave younger voters worse off, the former Treasury secretary Ken Henry has said, urging tweaks to Australia’s tax system to bridge the growing divide. Henry, who worked under both the Howard and Rudd governments, used a speech…
Deadly disease-causing organisms from pathogen families that include bird flu, plague and Ebola pose a threat to health in the UK and should be prioritised for research, government experts have said. The first tool of its kind from the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) lists 24 types of viruses and bacteria where a lack of…