Feature

Many Ukrainian civilians say they’re not getting enough assistance. Registration with the UN for cash aid – people are eligible for $74 a month for up to three months – has been slow. Several locals said they either register and don’t receive money, or they don’t know where or how...

Beneath the calmer facade of Ukraine major town and the capital Kyiv is a wake of death and destruction. Forty-six out of 69 towns and villages were impacted in the region, according to the government. In towns like Bucha and Irpin, civilians were slaughtered, their bodies left on the road;...

Four months into the Russian invasion, Ukraine is facing multiple humanitarian crises on several different fronts, with local and international aid responders girding for the long haul amid the expectation that needs are only going to grow and last longer. Concentrated, brutal fighting in the east is preventing aid groups...

Ambazonia fighters – separatist insurgency in anglophone Cameroon – many of whom had missed critical years of schooling, were encouraged to surrender and take advantage of skills programmes – from computer training to poultry farming and tailoring. The idea was that they would then graduate as young entrepreneurs, capable of...

People with similar body odours are more likely to ‘click’ and become instant friends, according to several experiments. When people meet others for the first time, they sometimes experience an “immediate strong click that makes us feel as if we have already been good friends for years,” says Inbal Ravreby...

Vida Maralani began her career studying whether education is, in fact, the ticket to socio-economic advancement and reducing inequalities, as she’d been taught. “I’ve evaluated some of the most expensive social policies our government has ever funded to prevent school dropouts,” says Maralani, interim director of the Centre for the...

Bananas may be beneficial for people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). They are potassium-rich and contain antioxidants and fibre. Other sources of these nutrients are berries and whole grains. COPD is a group of diseases, including emphysema and chronic bronchitis. These conditions cause a blockage to the airflow and...

Warming, wildfires and unpredictable weather threaten to disrupt the delicate processes that underlie treasured wines. Researchers and producers are innovating to keep ahead. Soon after the devastating Glass Fire sparked in California’s Napa Valley in September 2020, wine chemist Anita Oberholster’s inbox was brimming with hundreds of emails from panicked...

In June 2018, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali told Parliament that the post-1991 government used torture and killing to terrorise its people. Perpetrated in police detention centres, dungeons and prisons across the country, the state-sanctioned violence recounted by the prime minister amounts to crimes against humanity in international criminal...

Sexual networks among men who have sex with men (MSM) are not different in nature from those of other groups, Lilith Whittles, an infectious disease modeller at Imperial College London, stresses, but a core group of people are much more densely connected than people outside the MSM community. They change...