News & articles

It will be nine years on January 7 since a shooting at French weekly satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo killed 12 and injured 11 of its employees. The attack led to an immediate and unprecedented outpouring of solidarity around the world. Much of this support was organised online, using the hashtag #JeSuisCharlie (I am Charlie).

What do we learn about ourselves when we write creatively about an artwork? I asked myself this question during my creative writing PhD, where my focus was on writing a collection of poems in response to modern and contemporary art.

Russian television audiences didn’t have much choice but to watch Vladimir Putin’s annual press conference on December 14 – it was broadcast on all terrestrial TV networks. After a year’s hiatus in 2022, when the success of the Ukrainian autumn counteroffensive meant there was little good news to talk about, Putin returned to the airwaves for a four-hour press conference and phone-in Q&A session in which he answered pre-approved questions and boosted his candidacy for next year’s elections.

Getting to net zero emissions by mid-century is conventionally understood as humanity’s best hope for keeping Earth’s surface temperature (already 1.2°C above its pre-industrial level) from increasing well beyond 1.5°C – potentially reaching a point at which it could cause widespread societal breakdown.

The two small moons of Mars, Phobos (about 22km in diameter) and Deimos (about 13km in diameter), have been puzzling scientists for decades, with their origin remaining a matter of debate.