The UK’s seemingly endless supply of fresh fruit and vegetables may be heading for a difficult test. A powerful El Niño climate pattern developing in the tropical Pacific is threatening to disrupt
by Our Correspondent in Colombo Sri Lanka is set to enter a new agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) when its current programme expires in March 2027, according to sources familiar
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In Karur, near the southern tip of India, the rise of artificial intelligence is visible not only in technology but in the hundreds of young people who fill the city’s streets during
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Several years ago, psychiatrist Suzanne Garfinkle-Crowell began noticing a striking change among teenage girls and young women arriving for their first psychiatric sessions. Instead of waiting anxiously to hear whether a professional
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Editorial Nanda Malini is gone, and Sri Lanka has lost something that cannot simply be replaced by another singer. She may well be the last great Sinhala-Buddhist singer of a particular generation,
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A Harvard-led team has developed a method for keeping human brain organoids alive and developing for years, opening new possibilities for studying brain development, neurological disease and potential treatments. A team led
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The company says it has temporarily paused some advanced reinforcement-learning training as it strengthens alignment, security and monitoring for increasingly capable AI systems. OpenAI has temporarily slowed the training of some of
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Meta faces its most consequential legal challenge as a former engineer alleges the company knew its platform design could harm young users and prioritised keeping them online The second day of the
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An analysis of communism delivered by a naked pop star while receiving a massage may sound like an unlikely scene from a music documentary. Yet it captures something essential about Wham!’s extraordinary
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Russia’s decision to summon the Japanese ambassador has brought a 150-year-old territorial dispute back into sharp focus, underscoring the strategic importance of the Kuril Islands and the increasingly difficult relationship between Moscow
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As Donald Trump continued his attacks on Iran earlier this month, a potentially transformative security agreement was quietly taking shape in Saudi Arabia. On 7 August, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey signed
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Recent hostage releases across the Sahel have produced striking moments of diplomacy. Last week, the Tuareg-led Front de libération de l’Azawad (FLA) released 82 Malian Armed Forces soldiers it had held captive.
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The officials at Frontex headquarters in Warsaw are accustomed to disturbing images. Their screens monitor one of the principal migration routes into Europe, the central Mediterranean, where drones and aircraft transmit images
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North Korea has rejected a claim by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that Pyongyang planned to send as many as 50,000 additional troops to Russia, with Kim Yo-jong describing the estimate as “groundless”
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France recorded more than 7,300 excess deaths during periods of high temperatures this year, as the country endured a record number of heatwave days and temperatures reached levels not previously observed across
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Bangladesh’s worsening energy crisis has given India an unexpected opportunity to repair strained relations with its neighbour, after Dhaka requested additional diesel supplies as power shortages forced shops, malls and markets to
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