News Feature

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...

Shaky cell phone videos captured the scene of a lone terrorist engaged in a shootout with police on the streets of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in late August. Walking in the afternoon sun, the man held an assault rifle in his hands with a second rifle hanging around his neck....

Companies are updating vaccines and testing them on people to prepare for whatever comes next in the pandemic. Pfizer’s chief executive, Albert Bourla, made a bold promise in June. Standing next to US President Joe Biden at a press conference in St Ives, UK, just before the G7 summit meeting,...

Scientists temporarily attached a pig’s kidney to a human body and watched it begin to work, a small step in the decades-long quest to one day use animal organs for life-saving transplants. Pigs have been the most recent research focus to address the organ shortage, but among the hurdles: A...

With elections a week away, attacks on ward councillors are bad for democracy and reflect the country’s organised crime problem. A growing extortion ‘mafia’ is sweeping across South Africa, crippling construction and small businesses with threats and bribes, and more recently killing political ward councillors if demands aren’t met. These...