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  How China bought a £190bn slice of Britain Private schools, power stations, Heathrow — and now even asylum hotels — are part of a portfolio earning billions of pounds a year for firms and individuals linked to Beijing Next image  › Chinese interests own more than £190 billion in British companies and property and Beijing is making millions a year from asylum hotels, a new analysis reveals. The Sunday Times China List discloses that organisations linked to the Communist Party own three hotels blockbooked for migrants, netting them at least £15 million in Home Office contracts. They are just some of the 442 UK assets owned by private individuals and firms from China and Hong Kong, as well as state-backed organisations, with a total value of £190 billion. Their value has risen from £134 billion in 2021 and £152 billion in 2023. Of the total, about £51.3 billion of assets are owned by organisations linked to the Chinese government, including the former site of the Royal Mint in ...
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  Why Trump Tore Down the East Wing The act of destruction is precisely the point: a kind of performance piece meant to display Trump’s arbitrary power over the Presidency, including its physical seat. October 25, 2025 The surprise and shock that so many people have registered at the photographs of Donald Trump’s destruction of the East Wing of the White House—soon to be replaced by his own ostentatious and overscaled ballroom—is itself, in a way, surprising and shocking. On the long list of Trumpian depredations, the rushed demolition might seem a relatively minor offense. After months marked by corruption, violence, and the open perversion of law, to gasp in outrage at the loss of a few tons of masonry and mortar might seem oddly misjudged. And yet it isn’t. We are creatures of symbols, and our architecture tells us who we are. John Ruskin, the greatest of architectural critics, observed that a nation writes its history in many books, but that the book of its buildings is the mos...
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  On My Last Leg - from The New Yorker magazine  One afternoon at the start of April, I am on my way home from an errand when my legs seize up; they are suddenly so stiff that walking feels impossible. Standing on the sidewalk, I call my husband. Luckily, he is working at home and comes to get me. Hanging on to him, I am able to shuffle the last two blocks. In the E.R. at NewYork-Presbyterian, a couple of hours later, while I wait to be seen by the neurologist on call, I watch a middle-aged mother fussing over her twentysomething daughter, who seems to be suffering from a similar affliction. The mother is clearly a person of means, and she badgers the nursing staff about when her daughter’s private room will be ready. Her sense of entitlement is irksome; nevertheless, I’m impressed by her devotion to her daughter. Her overbearing presence takes me back almost twenty-eight years, to a week I spent at this very hospital being treated for multiple sclerosis. My mother came to se...
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  «Irresponsabilité publique, l’un des maux de l’État français» Par  Guillaume Roquette , pour  Le Figaro Magazine Il y a 1 jour Écouter cet article 00:00/03:13 Guillaume Roquette, directeur de la rédaction du Figaro Magazine. Le Figaro Magazine Si l’on veut que les Français retrouvent confiance dans l’État, il est temps que ses dirigeants rendent des comptes. Après l’invraisemblable  vol des bijoux de la Couronne , la présidente du Louvre a présenté  sa démission . Mais le président de la République ne l’a pas acceptée. De son côté,  Rachida Dati , ministre de la Culture, a affirmé, contre toute évidence, que  « les dispositifs de sécurité du Musée du Louvre n’ont pas été défaillants ».  On n’ose imaginer  l’ampleur du butin  s’ils l’avaient été… À découvrir L’irresponsabilité collective  est l’un des maux de l’État français. Quand  Notre-Dame brûle , ce n’est la faute de personne. Quand les recettes fiscales so...
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  How NSF hopes to keep Antarctic scientists afloat without an icebreaker Ending  Palmer  lease is one of many belt-tightening moves amid budget uncertainty 24 Oct 2025 12:25 PM ET By Jeffrey Mervis Palmer Station is the base of operations for many U.S. scientists studying the changing Antarctic ecosystem.NATASJA VAN GESTEL/TEXAS TECH UNIVERSITY In 2022, the National Science Foundation (NSF) gave University of Alabama geoscientist Tom Tobin a grant to drill rock cores at a remote site off the Antarctic peninsula. NSF told Tobin, who works on mass extinctions, that he’d have to wait 4 years for a vessel to take him there. This summer, however,  NSF canceled the lease  on his long-awaited ride, the  RV Nathaniel B. Palmer , the only U.S. research icebreaker dedicated to working in the treacherous waters of the Southern Ocean. NSF has since rebooked him on another ship, but it’s one that normally operates in the Arctic and lacks the  Palmer ’s capacity to...
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  Skip to main content Search Account Explore content About  the journal Publish  with us nature     news     article NEWS 21 October 2025 US PhD admissions shrink as fears over Trump’s cuts take hold Some doctoral programmes are admitting no students at all amid uncertainty about federal science funding. By   Alexandra Witze Twitter   Facebook   Email You have full access to this article via your institution. Many academic departments at US universities are planning to cut the size of graduate-student cohorts. Credit: Sophie Park/Bloomberg/Getty Phoenix-Avery Sarían has been interested in astronomy ever since her mother bought her a telescope as a child. But the fourth-year university student faces a cosmic challenge in reaching the next stage of her academic career: enrolling in a  PhD programme . Preliminary survey data  show that dozens of US graduate programmes in astronomy and physics are planning to admit smaller PhD coh...
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