There have been penalties for those who looked the other way when Epstein was convicted of child sex offences and decided to maintain relationships with the financier — but not for the British ambassador to Washington, reveals SOLOMON HUGHES
The stars that tell us about ourselves
Tonight you can see the best shooting stars of the year, but what can they tell us about our place in the universe?
Often, the locations of falling meteorites are predicted by looking at the trajectories of a group of shooting stars
Labour’s new Treasury unit will ‘challenge unnecessary regulation’ by forcing nominally independent bodies like Ofwat to bend to business demands — exactly what Iain Anderson’s corporate clients wanted, writes SOLOMON HUGHES
DR DYLAN MURPHY looks at a Big Brother Watch report which exposes the government as an enabler of DWP secret spying on benefit claimants
The EU faces a critical choice: will it remain in the shadow of an increasingly unreliable US ally, or will it forge its own path in a multilateral world where co-operation with China is essential, asks MARC VANDEPITTE as leaders meet for the EU-China Summit
A lot of discussion about how the left should currently organise – including debate on whether the Green Party is a useful vehicle for advance – runs the risk of refusing to engage with or learn from the reasons the left was defeated previously, argues KEVIN OVENDEN
For Egypt trade trumps the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, but how long can the country’s ‘misleaders’ – and others in the region – continue their indifference against the popular will of their own people, asks ROGER McKENZIE
TONIGHT is one of the best nights of the year for shooting stars, as we go through the huge annual meteor shower called the Perseids.
Shooting stars are what we see as small objects travelling through space collide with the Earth’s atmosphere. The speed of their movement through the air causes so much friction that they burn up in a fireball. These meteors, some of which are no bigger than a grain of sand and travel 15 times faster than a high-powered rifle bullet, often burn up 60 miles up in the sky, well before they reach the Earth’s surface. However, some larger meteors fall all the way to Earth, leaving a meteorite — the space rock itself.
There are so many tiny fragments of rock from space colliding with Earth and its atmosphere that every year they increase the Earth’s mass by 20,000 tons, (although this is infinitesimal compared to the weight of the Earth which is twenty million billion times heavier than this). This perpetual rain of small objects from space isn’t so scary, but on rare occasions in Earth’s history, some rather larger objects have arrived: the “Chicxulub impactor” object often blamed for the extinction of many dinosaurs 66 million years ago is thought to have had a mass of at least one trillion tons.
More from this author
What’s behind the stubborn gender gap in Stem disciplines ask ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT in their column Science and Society
While politicians condemned fascist bombing of Spanish civilians in 1937, they ignored identical RAF tactics across the colonies. Today’s aerial warfare continues this pattern of applying different moral standards based on geography and race, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
The distinction between domestic and military drones is more theoretical than practical, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
Nature's self-reconstruction is both intriguing and beneficial and as such merits human protection, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
