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
Secrets in science
Breakthroughs in machine learning could be used to design new deadly chemicals - how should we respond when scientific information is kept secret in the name of global security, ask ROX MIDDLETON, JOEL HELLEWELL and LIAM SHAW
The third structure of the protein called Pikachurin predicted by the program AlphaFold, July 1 2021
[AlphaFold] 
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
EARLY in Oppenheimer, the protagonist, who led the US atomic bomb development programme during WWII, attempts half-heartedly to poison one of his supervisors by injecting an apple with poisonous chemicals.
As a science student in an experimental lab, he has easy access to these chemicals. As the film explores, these poisonous materials are not the most deadly things that Oppenheimer works with in his life. The Manhattan Project that Oppenheimer and many thousands of others worked on in strict secrecy culminated in the first atomic weapons: two bombs that killed at least 130,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The rationale behind the secrecy was obvious. They were designing the deadliest bomb anyone had ever seen, and trying to do so before the Nazis. Since then, there have been no further uses of atomic bombs in war, although how to build an atomic weapon is no longer secret.
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
