The United Nations’ nuclear watchdog has said the Natanz nuclear enrichment facility in Iran has suffered “some recent damage” as US-Israeli attacks on the country continue. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) confirmed the damage was confined to entrance buildings to the underground fuel enrichment plant.
Also on the programme: a weight loss drug is now off patent in India meaning prices are expected to drop sharply; and the Australian teens grappling with the country's social media ban.
(Photo: Satellite imagery taken in January 2026 showing a new roof over a previously destroyed building at Natanz nuclear site, Iran. Credit: Planet Labs PBC/via Reuters)
Interview with Professor Kristian Andersen; Update on Conspiracy Teacher; News Items: Cannabis Review, AI Agents Breaks Out Of Testing Area, Life On Exomoons, Man Producing Carbon Fiber, Bigfoot Hoax Revealed; Who's That Noisy; Science or Fiction
As the war in Iran enters its fourth week, Iranian civilians remain in the crossfire and the Pentagon is sending at least two Marine units to the region. In the American West, states reported their hottest and driest winter on record.
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Why are investors turning away from gold? And why weren’t Micron Technology’s blowout earnings good enough? Plus, why is Super Micro’s co-founder in hot water with U.S. prosecutors? Host Hannah Erin Lang discusses the biggest stock moves of the week and the news that drove them.
Why are investors turning away from gold? And why weren’t Micron Technology’s blowout earnings good enough? Plus, why is Super Micro’s co-founder in hot water with U.S. prosecutors? Host Hannah Erin Lang discusses the biggest stock moves of the week and the news that drove them. Sign up for the WSJ's free Markets A.M. newsletter.
This special issue of Genocide Studies International examines the erasure and revitalization of Indigenous cultures and languages a crucial area of analysis within genocide and human rights studies. The collection explores how Indigenous languages function as both targets and tools of survival. It emphasizes that language revitalization is not simply about preservation but is part of a larger movement for self-determination, sovereignty and resistance. It features articles by authors of a variety of disciplinary and cultural backgrounds to survey the terrain of language erasure and revitalization as it understood in 2025.
The New Kingdom of Granada: The Making and Unmaking of Spain's Atlantic Empire (Duke UP, 2025) tells the history of the making and unmaking of empire in the diverse and decentralized Indigenous landscapes of the Northern Andes. Santiago Muñoz-Arbeláez examines the intricate and disputed processes that reshaped the peoples and landscapes of present-day Colombia into a kingdom within the global Spanish monarchy. Drawing on correspondence, visitation reports, judicial records, maps, textiles, and accounting and legal documents created by Europeans and Indigenous peoples, Muñoz-Arbeláez outlines the painstaking century-long effort between 1530 and 1630 to consolidate the kingdom. A diverse group of people that included Indigenous interpreters, scribes, and intellectuals spearheaded these projects, which eventually expanded colonial control outward from its base in the highland Andean plateaus down to the lowland river valleys. Meanwhile, autonomous Indigenous political projects constantly threatened imperial rule, as rebels often encircled the kingdom and seized the corridors that linked it to Spain. By foregrounding the kingdom’s difficult establishment and tenuous hold on power, Muñoz-Arbeláez challenges traditional understandings of imperial politics and the myriad ways Indigenous peoples participated in, disputed, and negotiated the establishment of colonial rule.
This Supreme Court term has seen threats against the Justices – from the President, a slew of game-changing shadow docket opinions, justices sparring in public, and some of the most consequential cases of our lifetimes. If you’re feeling a little disoriented by it all, join Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern on this week’s show for a clearer understanding of what’s going on at One, First Street. They discuss the big immigration case the court took up just this week that will be crammed into the last week of arguments, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s courage at a public event, and what it means when a justice steps out of the four corners of her opinions to voice urgent concerns about the shadow docket in public, and why, when it comes to threats to judges, the Chief Justice is meekly asking Trump knock it off, while taking no responsibility for his court’s role in it all.
This week’s Executive Dysfunction newsletter from Slate’s jurisprudence team is a must-read: slate.com/dysfunction
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Paul Ehrlich’s bestselling book The Population Bomb opens with an apocalyptic paragraph.
“The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” it states. “In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”
Professor Ehrlich, who died last week, made a simple argument. The global population was outrunning our capacity to produce enough food to feed everyone. Famine, disease and nuclear Armageddon would follow if the population was not controlled.
The book made him a celebrity, and he regularly spoke in public, warning of the imminent threat to humanity.
Sometimes his warnings were quite vague in terms of the timescale, but other times not - he was reported as saying in 1968 that if current trends continued, by the year 2000, the UK would be a “small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people".
"If I were a gambler," he was quoted as saying, "I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000".
But the UK did not collapse, the global death rate did not increase, and we have more food per person now than when he wrote the book.
So, what went wrong with Paul Ehrlich's predictions of a population apocalypse?
If you’ve seen a number or claim that you think More or Less should look at, email moreorless@bbc.co.uk
CONTRIBUTORS
Vincent Geloso, Assistant Professor of economics at George Mason University
Darrell Bricker, global CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs and co-author of Empty Planet, the Shock of Global Population Decline
Peter Alexander, Professor of Global Food Systems at the University of Edinburgh
CREDITS:
Presenter: Charlotte McDonald
Series producer: Tom Colls
Production co-ordinator: Brenda Brown
Sound mix: Dave O’Neil
Editor: Richard Vadon
