Showing 1 - 10 of 51
When journalism still exists -- but no longer matters
News, Carla Norrlöf, Published on 14/02/2026
» 'Democracy Dies in Darkness" became the motto of the Washington Post in 2017, four years after Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and one of the world's richest men, purchased the newspaper. Today, however, Mr Bezos, who has throttled the Post's opinion page and now slashed the newspaper's staff, seems determined to demonstrate that a free press, an essential component of democracy, can be killed off in broad daylight.
Humanity's alignment problem
News, Antara Haldar, Published on 06/01/2026
» It's lunchtime on top of the world again. Time's annual "Person of the Year" issue released two weeks ago has revived the iconic Depression-era photograph of steelworkers casually lunching on a beam suspended over Manhattan. With the city rising beneath them, the image portrays risk as normalised, even glamourised.
Musk's Starship: If it sounds too good to be true...
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 06/12/2025
» Elon Musk promised to build a spaceship that would put people and cargo into Earth orbit at one-hundredth of the current cost per kilo and even enable human beings to create a colony on Mars. A great many people were seduced by the idea, including me.
Can a country build its own social media?
News, Sebastian Vogelsang, Published on 26/07/2025
» When I built my first website back in 1998, the internet felt expansive. You could publish something in Berlin, and someone in Boston or Belgrade might stumble on it within seconds. But today, as a small number of tech monopolies hoover up attention and strangle innovation, that spirit of connection has been lost.
S112 fit for purpose
News, Postbag, Published on 13/07/2025
» Re: "MPs take up amnesty proposals", (BP, July 10).
Reform needs more than just a chainsaw
News, Diane Coyle, Published on 10/03/2025
» Billionaire and Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) czar Elon Musk and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer could not be more different. But they share a stated common goal: cutting red tape and reducing the burden of government on businesses.
Musk’s lost boys and Trump’s mean girls
News, Maureen Dowd, Published on 12/02/2025
» Tom Stoppard wrote in The Real Thing, his enticing play about infidelity: “To marry one actress is unfortunate. To marry two is simply asking for it.”
Spring clean for scammers
News, Editorial, Published on 07/02/2025
» After months of kicking the can down the road, the Thai government finally cut off electricity, internet signal and oil supplies to five border towns in Myanmar where scam gangs are based.
Hold Facebook accountable for scams, hoaxes
News, Dave Kendall, Published on 20/01/2025
» Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's decision to fire his fact-checking team has opened the floodgates to a deluge of scams, hate speech, propaganda and lies. I first discovered how the platform used by 3.2 billion people was being misused when I started sub-editing at the Post in 2017. Every news story about the plight of the Rohingya was followed -- in seconds -- by dozens of crude memes and copy-and-paste hate speech in comments demonising the stateless people as usurpers, animals and even cannibals. The campaign was later linked to propaganda farms run by Myanmar's Tatmadaw military.
Are high-skill immigrants a problem?
News, Daron Acemoglu, Published on 13/01/2025
» Fissures within US president-elect Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" (Maga) coalition have appeared sooner than expected. By the end of December, the tech-billionaire wing was in open warfare with Maga's nativist wing over America's H-1B visa programme, which enables US businesses to employ some 600,000 skilled foreigners per year on a temporary basis.