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Civilians protest in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, in December 2022. AFP via Getty Images Linda Bishai, George Washington University While Sudan’s generals have unleashed indiscriminate destruction and occupation on wide swaths of the capital, Khartoum, neighbourhood resistance committees and pro-democracy activists have stepped up to respond to the needs of citizens. They have risked their lives…

Evicted: about 750,000 Palestinians were killed or expelled from their land during the Nakba which began on May 15 1948. Anas-Mohammed/Shutterstock Marwan Darweish, Coventry University Until 1948, Lajjun was a small village about ten miles south of Nazareth in one of the most fertile valleys in Palestine. Since 1949, the area has been occupied by Jewish settlers who established Kibbutz Meggido…

Iraq War Crimes: Tony Blair Should Be In Prison NOT Julian Assange LINDSEY GERMAN US POLITICS, UK POLITICS 20 Years On: What kind of world rewards war criminals & imprisons those who tell the truth?

FGC/Shutterstock Jane Setter, University of Reading The way a person speaks is an intrinsic part of their identity. It’s tribal, marking a speaker as being from one social group or another. Accents are a sign of belonging as much as something that separates communities. Yet we can probably all think of examples of people who seem to have “lost” their regional or national accent and of others…

Marco Cappelletti/OMA/Islamic Arts Biennale Sumayya Vally, UCL The inaugural Islamic Arts Biennale is underway in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. (Biennales are large and prestigious international art exhibitions held every two years.) This important new event for the Muslim world features numerous African artists. And the biennale’s artistic director is Sumayya Vally, a South African architecture…

Constant distractions affect our ability to concentrate. (Shutterstock) Nehal El-Hadi, The Conversation and Daniel Merino, The Conversation Staying focused on a single task for a long period of time is a growing concern. We are confronted with and have to process incredible amounts of information daily, and our brains are often functioning in overdrive to manage the processing and…

Parveen Akhtar, Aston University and Timothy Peace, University of Glasgow Humza Yousaf’s appointment as first minister of Scotland is a historic moment for the UK. It means that, for the first time in history, the country has a Hindu prime minister in Westminster (Rishi Sunak) and a Muslim first minister in Scotland. In his victory speech, Yousaf said: We should all take pride in the fact that…

Florian Stadtler, University of Bristol Victory City is an epic chronicle of the rise and fall of Vijayanagar (the capital city of the historic southern Indian Vijayanagara empire), which acquires the name “Bisnaga” through ill-fated attempts at pronunciation by a Portuguese traveller. The story unfolds as a fictional retelling of Bisnaga’s history, premised on the archaeological discovery of the…

John Frederick Wilson, York St John University Grief is a universal emotion. It’s something we all feel, no matter where we come from or what we’ve been through. Grief comes for us all and as humans who form close relationships with other people, it’s hard to avoid. Studies of grieving brains – be it scans of the brain regions which process grief, or measures of the stress hormone cortisol that…

<figure> <img src=”https://images.theconversation.com/files/501245/original/file-20221215-23-zd431c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip&#8221; /> <figcaption> Sennacherib – his face deliberately damaged in antiquity – presides over captives from the Levantine city of Lachish. <span class=”attribution”><a class=”source”…

Kateryna Kon/Shutterstock Manal Mohammed, University of Westminster Since the COVID variant omicron emerged in late 2021, it has rapidly evolved into multiple subvariants. One subvariant, BF.7, has recently been identified as the main variant spreading in Beijing, and is contributing to a wider surge of COVID infections in China. But what is this new variant, and should we be worried? Although…

Studio Romantic/Shutterstock Alessandro Siani, University of Portsmouth It’s been nearly two years since Margaret Keenan became the first person in the world to receive an approved COVID vaccine at a clinic in Coventry on December 8, 2020. Since then, almost 13 billion doses of various COVID vaccines have been administered globally. And they are estimated to have prevented millions of…

The Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza. Ashy Cat Inc, CC BY-NC-SA Claire Gilmour, University of Bristol With the Arab spring of 2011, a downturn in tourism and the devastation of COVID, the odds have been stacked against the opening of Giza’s Grand Egyptian Museum, work on which began in 2005 and is due to complete 2023. Nevertheless, it will house over 100,000 artefacts and become the largest…

Mark Maslin, UCL; Priti Parikh, UCL; Richard Taylor, UCL, and Simon Chin-Yee, UCL Billed as “Africa’s COP”, the 27th UN climate change summit (otherwise known as COP27) in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, was expected to promote climate justice, as this is the continent most affected but least responsible for the climate crisis. Negotiations for a fund that would compensate developing countries for the…

Doha. All clean? Shutterstock/HasanZaidi Argyro Elisavet Manoli, Loughborough University Fifa’s choice of Qatar as host of the 2022 men’s football World Cup has been controversial since day one. Questions continue to be raised about the nation’s attitude to human rights, and its treatment of migrant workers. To some, the entire event exemplifies the concept of “sportswashing” – using sport as a…

Christoph Bluth, University of Bradford Since the invasion of Ukraine in February, the threat that weapons of mass destruction would be used has been a constant concern. Discussion of this threat has tended to focus on the possibility that Russia might resort to using its nuclear arsenal – something hinted at several times by the Russian president Vladimir Putin and his senior colleagues. On…

Shutterstock/Jorm S Ruth Itzhaki, University of Oxford This article is part of the Insights Uncharted Brain series. There are many competing theories about what causes Alzheimer’s disease. Here, Ruth Itzhaki reflects on a career dedicated to one of the more controversial lines of research. Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in…