Tag Archives: Creative Commons

02Sep/23

Winnie and Mandela biography: a masterful tale of South Africa’s troubled, iconic power couple

Gavin Evans, Birkbeck, University of London

A new book on South African liberation struggle icons Nelson and Winnie Mandela is a masterful biography of the pair. It’s a work of scholarship involving an immense body of primary and secondary research, written with flair and panache but in an easy and compelling style, making it accessible to anyone with an interest in politics, power and South Africa and looks set to become the definitive work on them.

Continue reading

01Sep/23

New Alzheimer’s drugs don’t deserve the hype – here’s why

Sebastian Walsh, University of Cambridge

A prominent childhood memory is of my grandparents living with and then dying from dementia. As is universal with dementia, there was a double blow: watching my grandparents lose their identity and seeing the suffering of those closest to them.

Continue reading

29Aug/23

International ransomware gangs are evolving their techniques. The next generation of hackers will target weaknesses in cryptocurrencies

Alpesh Bhudia, Royal Holloway University of London; Anna Cartwright, Oxford Brookes University; Darren Hurley-Smith, Royal Holloway University of London, and Edward Cartwright, De Montfort University

In May 2023, the Dallas City Government was hugely disrupted by a ransomware attack. Ransomware attacks are so-called because the hackers behind them encrypt vital data and demand a ransom in order to get the information decrypted.

Continue reading

26Aug/23

Yevgeny Prigozhin: Wagner Group boss joins long list of those who challenged Vladimir Putin and paid the price

Stefan Wolff, University of Birmingham

Two months after challenging Vladimir Putin’s leadership in an apparent but abortive “mutiny”, Yevgeny Prigozhin – the former owner of the mercenary private military company Wagner Group – has joined a long list of prominent Russians to die in mysterious circumstances.

Continue reading

25Aug/23

Slavery stole Africans’ ideas as well as their bodies: reparations should reflect this

Jenny Bulstrode, UCL and Sheray Warmington, UCL

In a speech to mark Unesco’s campaign for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition, UN secretary-general António Guterres told the United Nations general assembly earlier this year that the inequalities created by 400 years of the transatlantic chattel trade persist to this day. “We can draw a straight line from the centuries of colonial exploitation to the social and economic inequalities of today,” he said.

Continue reading

19Aug/23

How English women’s football could become a billion pound industry – and where the money comes from to make it happen

Christina Philippou, University of Portsmouth

A long-awaited official review of women’s football in England sets out ten recommendations designed to transform and develop the sport at every level. The review, which was chaired by former international player Karen Carney, covers everything from playing standards to diversity goals and equal access to sports for girls.

Continue reading

14Aug/23

Hip-hop at 50: how the sights, sounds and moves of the music spread across the world

Adam de Paor-Evans, University of Plymouth

On August 11 1973, DJ Kool Herc and his sister Cindy threw the now legendary Back To School jam in the recreation room of 1520 Sedgewick Avenue in The Bronx, New York.

Herc’s party represented a coming together of music and the start of something new. The Bronx crowd did not want the dancehall sounds Herc had begun to play. They wanted soul and the tough percussion of funk. So, Herc changed up the sound and used the main switch for the lights like a strobe-light to add atmosphere. Little did they know, that his event would be commonly accepted by the hip-hop fraternity worldwide as the starting point of what was to become one of the most important creative movements of the last century.

Continue reading

12Aug/23

Why do I fall asleep on the sofa but am wide awake when I get to bed?

Madeline Sprajcer, CQUniversity Australia and Sally Ferguson, CQUniversity Australia

After a long day, you flop onto the sofa and find yourself dozing off while watching TV. The room is nice and warm, the sofa is comfortable, and the background noise of the TV lulls you to sleep.

Then a loved one nudges you awake and reminds you to go sleep – in bed. But when you get there, you find to your frustration that you’re wide awake.

Why does sleep come so easily on the sofa but not always in bed?

Continue reading

03Aug/23

The most serious Trump indictment yet – a criminal law scholar explains the charges of using ‘dishonesty, fraud and deceit’ to cling to power

Gabriel J. Chin, University of California, Davis

The Justice Department announced its second federal indictment of former president Donald J. Trump on Aug. 1, 2023. The charges are groundbreaking and not just because a former president is facing multiple criminal charges.

Continue reading

31Jul/23

The end of Twitter – how Elon Musk’s rebrand to X could foster the platform’s dark side

Leslie Hallam, Lancaster University

Alas, poor Twitter; we knew it well. Or, at least, we thought we did. Despite never occupying more than 10% of social media’s online presence, western audiences are very aware of the platform. That’s not least because of the way that the mass media echoes and amplifies the controversies and outrage born on Twitter.

Continue reading