A new sanctions bill is meant to pressure President Vladimir Putin to end the war in Ukraine. But President Trump is taking another approach: offering enticements to Russia.
As the Alternative for Germany party seeks to control a state government for the first time, its push for “patriotic” art has drawn comparisons with Nazi policies.
Hard questions about AI in the classroom by Nathalia Alcantara
Mark Brilliant misses plagiarism.
The old kind, that is. Back when his students copied from Wikipedia, and when Turnitin, a text-matching software developed at Berkeley, could match plagiarized paragraphs to their original sources.
Brilliant has taught American history at Berkeley for more than two decades—before that, he taught high school—and for most of that time, catching a cheater was just a routine, though unpleasant, part of the job. What’s different now is not that students cheat. It’s what happens when he catches them.
UC faculty split over standardized test requirement by Margie Cullen
In the spring of 2023, UC Berkeley math professor Zvezdelina Stankova began to notice that about a third of her students were “in freefall.” They weren’t showing up to lectures or doing their homework, and, on tests, they scored far below the average. At first, she thought it was an anomaly, but her observations were reinforced by a 2025 UC San Diego report that found that 1 in 12 of the campus’s incoming students tested below middle school math standards.
The development comes after the UC Board of Regents dispensed with standardized testing as a requirement of admission in 2020. That decision has since caused a rupture between faculty who feel the tests are an important measure of college preparedness and those who feel they discriminate against underrepresented students.
IGI-affiliated researchers have spawned more than 30 startups. Here are just six of them. By James Pagett Tollen
Berkeley Professor Jennifer Doudna, who shared the Nobel Prize for developing the gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9, founded the Innovative Genomics Institute in 2015 to advance new applications of the revolutionary technology. Since then, IGI-affiliated researchers have spawned more than 30 startups. Here are just six of them.
Amber Bio
Basem Al-Shayeb, Ph.D. ’22, a graduate of the Banfield and Doudna Labs, cofounded Amber Bio in 2021 to address a limit of the gene-editing field: The current paradigm of genetic medicine relies on developing independent therapies for each separate mutation, the company says. Amber Bio’s RNA-writing platform will enable thousands of mutations to be edited simultaneously. Importantly, the company adds, these RNA-based edits will be reversible.
Editpep
The goal of Editpep, per the company’s website, is straightforward: “To bring life-changing genome-editing therapies to patients with devastating neurological diseases.” They will do so by safely delivering CRISPR straight into the brain. Ross Wilson, IGI’s director of therapeutic delivery and an assistant adjunct professor at Berkeley, cofounded the company in 2023.
Friedrich Merz is a man with few choices and little popular support as he faces the end of Germany’s postwar settlement and the collapse of all the checks and balances to maintain democratic norms after the second world war and reunification. While Alternative für Deutschland’s success in state elections in Saxony-Anhalt saw the party win 44% of the vote, they are three seats short of a governing majority and, so far, no other party has said they are prepared to work with them, which means that for the moment, at least, the threat of Germany’s first rightwing extremist state government since the Nazi period has not yet come to pass.
As Berlin correspondent Deborah Cole explains, Merz is seen as the wrong man to present and sell a political counterpoint to the AfD’s populist policies. Seen as lacking in empathy and political dexterity, his demeanour is in sharp contrast to Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD’s lead candidate in Saxony-Anhalt. But as Deborah’s Berlin colleague, Kate Connolly, reports, some of Siegmund’s prospective new MPs have questionable backgrounds, including criminal records, Stasi pasts and connections to far-right networks.
Spotlight | Stop, slow down and swerve the apocalypse Can the world heave a collective sigh of relief after fellow tech bosses heeded a proposal by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s to put the brakes on AI’s headlong rush to over take human intelligence? Nick Robins-Early weighs up our chances
Science | Can I borrow your coyote? Guardian US reporter Lois Beckett visits a one-of-a-kind California lending library where you can check out taxidermied animals and fossilised dinosaur bones.
Feature | Slime is not as simple as it seems Scientists are battling to determine whether supposedly simple organisms demonstrate a form of intelligence. If they do, what does it mean for our understanding of brain power, asks Samanth Subramanian
Opinion | Ethics make a return to UK foreign policy The evidence is Ed Miliband’s bold decision to label settler violence in the West Bank as “ethnic cleansing” and institute a boycott, argues Steve Bloomfield
Culture | Shear fun Catherine Shoard is rounded up for a trip down to Mossy Bottom farm to get a behind-the-scenes preview of the latest Shaun the Sheep film
Republicans are putting up a costly defense of districts that President Trump won easily in 2024. In places like Georgia, strategists wonder if it’s too late.
Prime Minister Mark Carney told European lawmakers that an alliance would help to secure sovereignty and independence for his country. The moves come amid a historic low for U.S. ties with Canada.
Never again? Think again. The far right’s resurgence in Germany should terrify all Europeans
The AfD is on the path to power. It doesn’t just want to take Germany in a different political direction – it wants to build a new country
Slavoj Žižek is the perfect philosopher for the Trump, AI, climate catastrophe era – but he probably hates you
Controversial, dizzyingly erudite and defiantly European, is the world finally catching up with the Slovenian thinker?
A new film about Elon Musk reveals him as so awful it’s almost tragic. Almost
Four hours is a long time to spend inside the mind of the world’s richest man – and that’s because his mind turns out to be a twisted, miserable nightmare
The right wing media hounded Jason Arday and ignored James Orr. It’s obvious why
When a real scandal comes along, some parts of the press just can’t bring themselves to acknowledge it
Intellicurious 