By Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Assistant Professor, Harvard University
Zimbabwean writer NoViolet Bulawayo has been honoured as Africa’s best short story writer after winning the Best of Caine Award. The special recognition marks 25 years of the annual Caine Prize for African Writing.
An esteemed panel of judges unanimously selected Bulawayo as…
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By Roger Southall, Professor of Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand
Love her or loathe her, it is hard to deny that Helen Zille is one of the most remarkable politicians South Africa’s democracy has yet seen. Remarkable because she has served in so many high-profile public roles – as mayor of Cape Town, premier of the Western Cape province, leader of the opposition, and leader of the Democratic Alliance before later becoming the party’s federal chair, and wielding power behind the scenes.
She has never steered clear of controversy, and indeed, revels in it in a way which discomforts…
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By Moyosoluwa Dele-Dada, Assistant Lecturer, Covenant University
Poverty in Nigeria has reached critical levels, recent data shows. About 31% of Nigerians lived in poverty prior to the COVID-19 epidemic. Since then, an additional 42 million have become poor, increasing the poverty rate to about 46% in 2024.
Over 133…
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By David Rios Insua, Member of the ICMAT, AXA-ICMAT Chair in Adversarial Risk Analysis and Member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences, Instituto de Ciencias Matemáticas (ICMAT-CSIC)
Artificial intelligence has started to appear almost everywhere in our lives. We enjoy its benefits, such as the speedier discovery of new drugs, or the more personalised medicine that results from its amalgamation of data and expert judgement, often without realizing it. Generative AI, which enables the fast creation of content and automates summarization and translation via tools such as ChatGPT, DeepSeek and Claude, is its most popular form, but AI is much more: its techniques, mainly from machine learning, statistics and logic, help generate decisions and predictions while being guided by goals…
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By Human Rights Watch
Click to expand Image Rohingya refugees walk through rice fields after crossing the border from Myanmar into Palang Khali, Bangladesh, October 19, 2017. © 2017 Jorge Silva/Reuters (New York) – United Nations member states meeting on September 30, 2025, on the plight of Rohingya Muslims should commit to urgent action to protect them from persecution and violence, Human Rights Watch said today. Rohingya in Myanmar, Bangladesh, and across Asia continue to face grave threats to their safety, freedom, and lives.The UN General Assembly is convening a High-Level Conference on the…
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By Alexander Howard, Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English and Writing, University of Sydney
The winners of this year’s awards include celebrated novelist Michelle de Kretser, journalist Rick Morton on Robodebt and poet David Brooks.
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By Åsa Petersén, Professor of Neuroscience, Lund University
A company called uniQure has announced promising results from a trial of a new gene therapy for Huntington’s disease. The news has spread quickly through families affected by this condition, who have been desperately waiting for a treatment that can stop or slow down this devastating illness.
Huntington’s disease is a fatal brain disorder that runs in families, caused by a faulty gene that produces a protein called huntingtin. The disease typically begins to cause symptoms in people between 30…
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By Emily Hammer, PhD Candidate in Theological Ethics, University of St Andrews
Most debates about the depiction of consent in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga, which turns 20 this month, focus on the age gap between Bella Swan and Edward Cullen. For the uninitiated, Edward is an undead vampire who has been frozen at age 17 for 87 years, and falls in love with 17-year-old human schoolgirl Bella.
However, I want to discuss another question – whether Bella can consent to becoming a vampire (a transformation she begs Edward for throughout the series, and is finally granted in the final novel)…
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By Belinda Zakrzewska, Assistant Professor of Marketing, University of Birmingham
Peruvians are rightly passionate about food. Their pride in Peruvian cuisine has been fuelled in the past two decades or so by a wave of international culinary awards that has forged sense of belonging and visibility on the world stage. Yet, behind this “gastronationalism” lies a more complex story about inequality and exclusion.
The rise to international prominence of Peruvian cuisine, often referred to as the “gastronomic boom”, started to gather pace in the late 20th…
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By Kimberley Hardcastle, Assistant Professor in Business & Marketing, Northumbria University, Newcastle
Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude are now used by students and teachers at every level of education.
According to a report by Anthropic, the company behind Claude, 39% of student interactions with the AI tool involve creating and improving educational content, such as practice questions, essay drafts and study summaries. A further 34% interactions seek technical explanations or solutions for academic assignments – actively producing student…
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