Éric Sadin gets up and paces around the living room of his Paris apartment when an argument excites him. His own voice urges him to do so. He has developed a critical body of thought, brimming with striking headlines and elegant analyses of the future, riding the philosophical and social thinking of the last century to arrive at a scathing conclusion across some 10 books: we have become idiots, and we are on our way to becoming even bigger idiots.

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Garry Kasparov, 63, is the only one still alive of three very prominent opponents of Vladimir Putin who were threatened in 2012; the other two were Boris Nemtsov, murdered near the Kremlin in 2015, and Alexei Navalny, who survived a poisoning attack in 2020 and who died suddenly in a Siberian prison in 2024. The U.S. Department of Justice has now revealed a plan by agents linked to Russian intelligence to kill the chess player and activist—who is highly critical of Putin on a daily basis—last summer in New York, where he lives. The former world champion, who holds a Croatian passport, ties his fate to that of Ukraine.

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Nature has perfected the art of creating living cells over billions of years. A team of researchers is now learning from that process and looking for ways to speed it up. For Massimo Vassalli, chair of bioengineering at the University of Glasgow, the goal is to understand not only how living tissues form, but how they can be recreated in the laboratory.

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Brett Christophers, 55, has spent years studying the strategies of large corporations. He began by examining big investment banks such as JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs. But he soon noticed those names being pushed aside on the agendas of politicians and influencers by investment firms like BlackRock and Blackstone. It was not sudden: for decades they had quietly gained ground, and now control almost every aspect of a citizen’s daily life — the home they live in, the water they wash with, the road or railway they use to get to work, or the hospital they visit for an emergency. That is what Christophers, an economic geographer at the Institute for Housing and Urban Research at Uppsala University (Sweden), has been documenting in multiple studies and, more recently, in books such as Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World and Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It?.

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It’s Saturday night in Rio de Janeiro’s financial district and there are nothing but closed offices and dark streets, but around a corner, a three-story house lit in the colors of the rainbow appears. In front, a boisterous crowd is spread between tables, and there is even a sofa set out on the street. This is the atmosphere of Queerioca, a cultural center that has become the epicenter of Rio’s LGTBIQ+ community. There’s a DJ, laughter and caipirinhas, but also T-shirts bearing the face of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and some tension in the air. Brazil is holding general elections with the first round scheduled for Sunday, and the far right is knocking at the door.

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We like to believe we are rational. That we make decisions based on data, that we analyze reality objectively and that our opinions stem from clear thinking. But the human mind works differently: it is full of shortcuts, biases, distortions and prejudices whose purpose is to simplify complexity and make the vertigo of uncertainty manageable.

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Vente Venezuela, the party founded by María Corina Machado, is preparing again for the imminent return of its leader despite delays, skepticism, and uncertainty. Decisions within the organization are being made on the assumption of her return. Machado was unable to enter the country from Panama last week (the reasons are still unclear), but her definitive arrival in Venezuela, says Henry Alviarez, the party’s secretary of organization, “is a matter of days.”

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The Strait of Hormuz is far from what it was before Donald Trump blew everything out of the water: a maritime route that, although located in a hotspot region, allowed the free and safe passage of huge volumes of oil and gas from the Middle East. However, something has been moving in recent days, with many more tanker transits than over the previous several months. Some analysts even place crude shipments through the area around the levels seen before last spring and near those recorded during the short-lived ceasefire in June.

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President Donald Trump told reporters this week he would embark on a 32-day campaign tour to try to save Republican races ahead of the midterm elections. Texas, along with other traditionally Republican states such as Iowa, is on his must-stop list. But the state attorney general and the party’s Senate candidate, Ken Paxton, does not appear convinced the visit will help.

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It was the first face-to-face between the two men vying to govern California, the most populous state in the United States, with more than 39 million residents, just over a month before the midterm elections. Republican Steve Hilton and Democrat Xavier Becerra arrived at the CNN-organized debate with a twofold mission: lay out their proposals to lead what is considered the fourth-largest economy in the world and, at the same time, attack their opponent and explain to voters why they should not trust the other with their vote on November 3. Neither missed the chance to present their ideas on the state’s difficult economic situation, fears around artificial intelligence, and the ICE raids that threaten undocumented immigrants.

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It was 8.22 a.m. on Wednesday when, aboard Flydubai flight FZ1073 between Dubai and Tel Aviv, the aircraft suddenly lost altitude, began jerking violently and a woman in the front started screaming. “They’re killing him, they’re killing him!” Many of the 174 passengers wondered what had provoked that hysterical outburst, since it initially seemed to be nothing more than severe turbulence.

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Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has halted the one remaining execution for 2026 after a woman named Christa Pike on Wednesday survived two injections of pentobarbital, a situation described as unprecedented.

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The foiled hijacking of a flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv carrying 174 passengers — 166 of them Israelis — on Wednesday has revived the specter of earlier hijackings (mostly attempted) of aircraft bound for Israel, especially during the 1960s and 1970s.

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The Dictionary of the Spanish Language explains that a geoglyph is a “large figure on slopes or in wide plains, carved directly into the ground or made with stones, especially by prehistoric peoples.” Of all those located worldwide, the most famous are the Nazca lines (Peru), which have been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. They are visible only from surrounding mountains or from the air, which gives them an aura of mystery. Now, a group of researchers from Argentina and Spain will study a structure that could be a geoglyph discovered last year at about 3,000 meters above sea level in the Tigre mountain range (Argentina) and which was found by mountaineer Carlos Gobbi while consulting Google Earth. A joint expedition will attempt to examine it in situ in December.

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This is the driest year on record in Tegucigalpa. Eighty percent of Honduran territory is on red alert, and the capital has had a potable water rationing system every 12 days for a month. The lack of rain is making maize and bean crops in Guatemala — the main food source in a country with the region’s highest rate of chronic child malnutrition — even more vulnerable. The Panama Canal has begun restricting vessel traffic because of water stress in the basin, and the parched Amazon rivers are isolating dozens of riverside communities in Brazil and hampering fishermen’s work.

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Three years ago, a category-five hurricane devastated the Mexican resort of Acapulco. Amid images of a shattered city, the impossible emerged: the story of sailors who survived Otis on their boats. Marlon Valdez and Jonathan Chico’s feat was to withstand the winds that destroyed buildings, uprooted trees and dislodged entire hillsides, killing at least 52 people and leaving 31 missing, most of them sailors like them.

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Charles Spencer, 9th Earl Spencer, has decided to record his memories and, in some way, also preserve the public memory of his sister, Lady Diana. At 62, he has just published Swan Song: Diana, My Sister (2026), less than a year before the 30th anniversary of her tragic death in Paris.

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The state of Tennessee has ordered a stay on the execution of a woman who was sentenced to death for the murder of a fellow student when she was 18. If it had been carried out as planned on Wednesday, Christa Pike, now 50, would have been be the first woman put to death in the mid-southeastern state in more than two centuries.

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The U.S. Treasury bond market is scorching hot and this should worry you because of the consequences for your bottom line. Your mortgage rate, car loan, credit card interest or business loan rates could rise driven by the state of government debt securities.

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