The Latest Breaking News from The Conversation Weekly

Germany is holding an election on February 23 and the contest is attracting an unusual amount of attention. That’s because the far-right Alternative for Germany (AFD) is polling in second place on 20% of the national vote.

Quantum computers have the potential to solve big scientific problems that are beyond the reach of today’s most powerful supercomputers, such as discovering new antibiotics or developing new materials.

 Zimbabwe is on the cusp of abolishing the death penalty after its Death Penalty Abolition Bill was approved by the Senate on December 12. The bill is now sitting on the desk of Zimbabwe’s president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, a known opponent of the death penalty, waiting for his assent. Once it…

Surveys suggest that in many western democracies, political trust is at rock bottom. Scandals, corruption, faltering economies, conspiracy theories and swirling disinformation are all playing their part. But is it really such a bad thing for people living in a democracy to distrust their government?

It was a story that pulled at the heartstrings. In 2018, an orca called Tahlequah was seen dragging the corpse of her newborn baby calf for 17 days, over 1,000 miles along the coast of North America. Eventually, Talequah let the baby go (happily, she’s had another baby since), but…

Amazon workers in 20 countries are expected to strike or protest on Black Friday, pushing the company to respect their rights and commit to more action on the climate. The protests are coordinated by the Make Amazon Pay campaign, run by a global umbrella body of trade unions and workers’…

On November 24 1974, renowned American paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson spotted “a piece of elbow with humanlike anatomy” poking out of a rocky hillside in northern Ethiopia. It was the first fossil of a partial skeleton belonging to “Lucy”, an ancient female hominin who took the story of human evolution back…

For generations, cod fishing was a way of life in Newfoundland and Labrador, the easternmost province in Canada. But in 1992, after cod stocks in the north Atlantic plummeted, the federal government imposed a moratorium on cod fishing. It was to last for 32 years until it was lifted in…

What happens when a gangster leaves their life on the street? How do they transition to something new? In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we find out through the life stories of two people who joined gangs as young men and came out the other side.