All Else

South Africans are wearily attuned to governments’ Orwellian misuse of language. So perhaps they should not be unduly surprised that the government of the US has imported 49 Afrikaners and labelled them as “refugees”. The claim is that they are escaping from the persecution of Afrikaners – and white people more broadly – in South Africa today. But there is no evidence whatsoever that Afrikaners or white people more generally are subject to genocide.

After 18 months of punishing airstrikes, raids and an increasingly restrictive siege in Gaza, the United Nations on May 20, 2025, issued one of its most urgent warnings yet about the ongoing humanitarian crisis: an estimated 14,000 babies were at risk of death without an immediate influx of substantial aid, especially food. Aid delivery continues to be inconsistent and well below what was necessary for the population, culminating in a dire warning by U.N. experts in early May that “the annihilation of the Palestinian population in Gaza” was possible without an immediate end to the violence.

A writing professor sees artificial intelligence as more of an opportunity for students, rather than a threat. That sets her apart from some of her colleagues, who fear that AI is accelerating a glut of superficial content, impeding critical thinking and hindering creative expression. They worry that students are simply using it out of sheer laziness or, worse, to cheat. Perhaps that’s why so many students are afraid to admit that they use ChatGPT.

U.S. consumers often pay more for gluten-free products, yet these items typically provide less protein and more sugar and calories compared with gluten-containing alternatives. That is the key finding of a new study, published in the journal Plant Foods for Human Nutrition.

The top 10 cities in 2025 were London, New York, Paris, Tokyo, Berlin, Washington DC, Copenhagen, Oslo, Singapore and San Francisco. The top three all do particularly well in human capital, which includes features like educational and cultural institutions. They also score highly on international profile, which looks at indicators of global interest, such as the number of airport passengers and hotels.

The United States has long led the world in cancer research. It has spent more on cancer research than any other country, including more than US$7.2 billion annually through the National Cancer Institute alone. But that legacy is under threat. Funding delays, political shifts and instability across sectors have created an environment where basic research into the fundamentals of cancer biology is struggling to keep traction and the drug development pipeline is showing signs of stress.

Hydrogen will play a significant role in achieving net zero carbon emissions by replacing natural gas in industrial and domestic heating. But it remains difficult to see how hydrogen can compete with electric vehicles, as the bulk of the car, bus and light-truck market looks set to adopt battery electric technology, which are a cheaper solution than fuel cells.

For more than 150 years, almost all people who were born within U.S. territory automatically received citizenship – regardless of their parents’ immigration status. President Donald Trump’s January 2025 executive order on birthright citizenship – stating that children born in the U.S. to parents who are not in the country legally, or who are not permanent residents, cannot receive citizenship – threatens to upend this precedent. The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments on the case on May 15.