A burrowing dinosaur
Sep 26th 2020THIS DINOSAUR, a newly described species called Changmiania liaoningensis, was extracted from 123m-year-old rocks in Liaoning province, China. It has a snout shaped like a shovel and a short, robust neck and forearms, and was almost certainly a burrowing animal, like a modern rabbit—though, at 1.2 metres in length, it was somewhat larger.…
Why funnel-web spiders are so dangerous to people
Sep 26th 2020FUNNEL-WEB spiders have a fearsome reputation. People bitten by these Australian arachnids suffer extreme pain, breathing problems, confusion, convulsions and dangerously high blood pressure. Left untreated, the venom can kill within hours. For years, researchers assumed this lethal effect was an evolutionary accident. The venom, they presumed, evolved to help the spiders kill…
A veteran Malaysian politician tries to topple the government
AFTER THREE stints in prison and more than two decades of waiting, Anwar Ibrahim has had enough. Long the leader of a multiracial opposition party, Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR), he declared on September 23rd that a “strong, formidable, convincing majority” of lawmakers wanted him to form a government. “The claim must be proven through the…
Even as countries peck at each other, their birdwatchers co-operate
Sep 26th 2020FOR THOSE awed by nature on a planetary scale, this is a special time of year. During the autumn bird migration, 50m-odd individuals from 155 species of waders and other waterbirds barrel down the great avian thoroughfare known as the East Asian-Australasian Flyway.It stretches from breeding grounds in Alaska and the extreme north-east…
Ghana is planning to sell most of its future gold royalties
Sep 26th 2020WHEN PORTUGUESE mariners first dropped anchor in the mouth of the river Pra in what is now Ghana, they heard of goldfields so rich that for the following five centuries the entire region became known as the Gold Coast. The promise of wealth sparked a rush to grab land, build forts, trade slaves…
Social-media platforms are destroying evidence of war crimes
Sep 26th 2020“PUT YOUR hands up! Put your hands up!” shouts a gunman at his hooded captive, who already has two hands in the air and shuffles about, seemingly unsure what more to do. The gunman then shoots his victim to the ground before firing more bullets into the body and saying: “You have been…
What Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s passing means for Americans
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was one of the most prominent women in America’s modern history. She was a former associate justice of the United States Supreme court. Ginsburg was a woman of immense power and influence, being in her position over two decades. She has worked with a long list of US Presidents and is widely…
Can China’s economic miracle continue?
Sep 26th 2020FORECASTS CAN haunt their authors, especially when they appear in headlines or book titles. Most pundits play it safe, giving “a number or a date, but not both”, as an old sage once advised. Thomas Orlik of Bloomberg is more courageous. His latest book, “China: The Bubble That Never Pops”, provides an unusually…
Has the Vatican cleaned up its finances?
Sep 26th 2020VATICAN CITYSMALL EUROPEAN enclaves have given financial regulators big headaches in the past. Two of them, San Marino and the Vatican, will be visited by inspectors from Moneyval, the organisation set up to fight money-laundering and terrorist funding in Europe, in the final days of September. They will arrive at a delicate moment.…
Natural disasters quicken an already precipitous global loss of species
Sep 19th 2020TROPICAL WETLANDS should be soggy and green, not lands of flaming vegetation. Yet the world’s largest tropical wetland, Brazil’s Pantanal, has been burning for weeks, in the largest blazes to take hold in the region since records there began in 1998. The consequences for one of the planet’s most diverse ecosystems are haunting.…