News Feature

It was the dead of night as 12 men approached a Chinese mining compound near the city of Likasi. Just after 2:30am, they cut a hole in the wire fence and slipped through, carrying AK-47s and metal pipes. Once inside, they moved swiftly through the camp to the security office,...

Extracting the valuable materials from an electric vehicle (EV) battery is difficult and expensive. The recycling process typically involves shredding batteries, then breaking them down further with heat or chemicals at dedicated facilities. That part is relatively simple. The harder part is getting dead batteries to those facilities from wherever...

The number of asylum seekers and migrants crossing the treacherous Atlantic maritime route to the Spanish Canary Islands is on track to be the highest annually since 2006. But improvements to the reception system have for the most part averted the sense of crisis and the rise in xenophobia and...

Whenever there is fire outbreak in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, late response, lack of equipment and personnel have become all too familiar a narrative that leaves burns in the memories of victims and guts through the hearts of those who have to watch helplessly as their loved ones being recovered...

This summer, Dirk Spiers, a tall, rumpled Dutchman-turned-Oklahoman, got a heads-up from General Motors about more problems with the Chevrolet Bolt. Over the previous year, the car model that had once been celebrated as GM’s grand victory over Tesla – the United States’ first truly mass-market electric vehicle – had...

Claiming to have found “more than 1,000 fields and deposits, including major hydrocarbon and solid mineral deposits and fields” in other world regions, the state-owned exploration company published the announcement in English on its website as the Covid-19 pandemic swamped world headlines in February 2020. Despite an Antarctic mining ban...

In September, nine philanthropic organisations, most of them in the United States, pledged a total of $5 billion over a decade towards projects that will help to preserve the richness of Earth’s species. This month, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced the allocation of 1.5 billion yuan ($235 million) to the...

In more than 40 reports published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, researchers analysed what happened to the women, adjusting for potential confounding factors such as age. The overall finding was that, on average, abortion didn’t harm women’s mental or physical health, but being denied an abortion resulted in some negative financial...

In recent years, the uses for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, have multiplied across Africa. Drones have been used to fertilise crops, monitor wildlife and deliver medicine to hard-to-reach places. Drone technology has grown rapidly worldwide and is projected to be a $43 billion global industry by...