Новости за 07.06.2017

Jean-Jacques Hublin, MPI-EVA, Leipzig

According to the textbooks, all humans living today descended from a population that lived in east Africa around 200,000 years ago. This is based on reliable evidence, including genetic analyses of people from around the globe and fossil finds from Ethiopia of human-like skeletal remains from 195,000–165,000 years ago.

Jean-Jacques Hublin, MPI-EVA, Leipzig

According to the textbooks, all humans living today descended from a population that lived in east Africa around 200,000 years ago. This is based on reliable evidence, including genetic analyses of people from around the globe and fossil finds from Ethiopia of human-like skeletal remains from 195,000–165,000 years ago.

Miguel Discart, CC BY-SA

Donald Trump, president of the world’s second greatest emitter of CO₂, has unilaterally withdrawn the US from the Paris climate agreement. The international response has been largely in line with the simple statement from the EU’s climate action commissioner, Miguel Arias Canete, that this was “a sad day for the global community”.

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The notion of a “job for life” has ceased to exist for most workers in the UK. Companies are shifting the burden of earnings risk to the employee, increasing their use of zero-hours contracts. Depending on your political standpoint, this is either a logical response to the demands of fiercely competitive globalisation, or a way of exploiting workers at the more vulnerable end of the job market.

The world increasingly depends on the services provided by major corporations, which in turn depend heavily on their IT infrastructure. British Airways’ recent IT meltdown is just the latest in a string of serious technical failures experienced by big companies and government agencies, with such failures effecting hundreds of thousands or millions of people and accruing potentially huge costs.

Conservative campaigners are sure to tell you that the party can provide the “strong and stable” government that they have been promoting. But tensions are simmering under the surface – and no less so in Wales.

Gravity of a white dwarf star warps space and bends the light of a distant star behind it. NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI

If you are looking at a glass lens you will not see the lens itself, but rather notice objects behind it being displaced and distorted. Gravitation has a similar effect. Any massive body warps the space and time around it, according to Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. As a result, light rays should take an apparent turn around the object rather than travelling in a straight line. Читать дальше...

Happy birthday, RDM. Wikimedia

Scotland is rarely slow to recognise its literary heroes, from building monuments to Walter Scott to crafting a tourist industry around Robert Burns. However, one major writer remains unclaimed for the canon 130 years after his literary career began.

At the beginning of May, Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s first post-referendum foreign visit was to meet India’s prime minister Narendra Modi. Despite Erdoğan’s controversial pro-Pakistan statement just before the trip, the pair were pictured sharing friendly hugs as they vowed to tackle terrorism and extend economic relations.

Tent city. かがみ～/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

The business of government is typically carried out by representatives in parliament, at local town halls or in the cabinet office, but make no mistake: politics is done everywhere, by everyone. Around the world, social and protest movements empower people to push for change from outside of established institutions. In recent years, another form of protest has been added to the familiar repertoire of community activism, marches of protest and social media campaigns: the protest camp. Читать дальше...

We need to get the Muslim community itself to sign up to the Prevent programme. Only one out of eight referrals to Prevent come from within the Muslim community.

Prime minister Theresa May has announced her resolve to tear up human rights law if it prevents her, and her government, from tackling extremism and countering terrorism.

When Bernie Sanders took to the stage at this year’s Hay Festival, it was to a room of cheers and clapping. The US senator may not have been nominated as the Democrat candidate, but his international influence and support has certainly not disappeared in the year since his fight for the White House ended.

Justin Lynham/Flickr, CC BY-NC

The UK’s exit from the EU represents a tearing up of the informal contract that exists between multinationals and the UK government. Companies put their money into Britain based on cheap, tariff-free market access to 300m EU customers. Whatever happens in the UK general election this week, the question of how to retain and attract corporate investment will loom large for the prime minister.

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For students voting in the 2017 General Election, there is much to consider – with fees and the future of higher education featuring strongly in the campaigns and manifestos.

The year 2016 was characterised by a long list of celebrity deaths. Responses to such deaths follow a clear pattern: a shock announcement, followed by an inevitable outpouring of public grief on social media. But the way society treats the “celebrity death” was arguably predicted in the works of the late Gordon Burn – a writer who sought to dissect the ways in which the modern world of celebrity and the media intersect and operate.

It’s going to be a long night as the UK goes to the polls for its snap 2017 general election. So should you stay up all night or take a democracy nap? Here are the key moments to look out for and the seats which might indicate early on whether Theresa May has secured the thumping majority she originally envisaged.

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The emergence of bacterial strains that are immune to last-line antibiotics poses an increasing threat to global health. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that up to half a million people develop multidrug-resistant tuberculosis every year. And laboratory confirmed cases of particular resistant strains have increased 600-fold in the UK between 2003 and 2015.

Mary Webb’s classic novel Gone to Earth marks its 100th anniversary this year and remains extremely relevant. The novel has anti-fox hunting and anti-cruelty rhetoric at its core – so its centenary comes at a timely moment. Should the Conservative Party secure a majority after Theresa May’s snap election on June 8, the UK countryside could well be witnessing the return of hunting with hounds.

Once written off as an electoral force even by much of the left, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour has defied expectations to mount a late surge in the 2017 election polls. The New Statesman’s recent lament that the “stench of decay and failure coming from the Labour Party is now overwhelming” seems a distant memory.

Following the London Bridge and Manchester attacks, politicians and commentators have insisted that Britain should “keep calm and carry on”. This has lead some to declare that public mourning and statements of condolence are platitudes and inadequate.