Olly Mann and The Week delve behind the headlines and debate what really matters from the past seven days.
In this week’s episode, we discuss:
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Parks
Paris is planning to turn most of the Champs-Elysees into parks and pavements, dramatically reducing the space given over to cars. The city’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo, has said that Covid and the 2024 Olympics have persuaded her to reshape its most celebrated street. Will other cities follow suit - and should they - now that demand for city-centre office space is plummeting.
Empathetic robots
Columbia University says it has created a robot capable of showing the first “glimmer of empathy”, by envisaging how another robot will behave. The significance is that unlike other examples of artificial empathy, the machine in this experiment was not programmed with any rules or assumptions about what its fellow robot would do. All it could do was observe, spot patterns and then deduce and predict how the other robot would act in the future.
EU vaccines
Anger over the EU’s slow vaccine rollout has been punctuated after Germany was found to have negotiated a deal for 30 million doses outside of the bloc’s joint scheme. Revelations in German magazine Der Spiegel then revealed that the EU scheme itself favours larger member states, leaving smaller countries with a lesser share. So what does that all mean for the continental rollout - and is it an example of Brexit Britain gaining an edge on its neighbours?
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The WW2 ‘massacre’ dividing Senegal and FranceUnder the Radar A new investigation found the 1944 Thiaroye attack on ‘unarmed’ African soldiers was ‘premeditated’, and far deadlier than previously recorded
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Political cartoons for October 22Cartoons Wednesday's editorial cartoons include Donald Trump's construction at the White House, tariffs, and a new investment option
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What is Donald Trump planning in Latin America?Today’s Big Question US ramps up feud with Colombia over drug trade, while deploying military in the Caribbean to attack ships and increase tensions with Venezuela
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First crocodile virgin birth recordedfeature And other stories from the stranger side of life
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Growing number of people ‘actually aliens’feature And other stories from the stranger side of life
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The Week Unwrapped: Antisocial Saudis, hormone therapy and retro techpodcast Why is Saudi Arabia investing in – and banning – social networks? Will new research make life easier for trans women? And is the future of technology dumb?
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The Week Unwrapped: AI in court, Germans in Taiwan and ghostwriterspodcast Could artificial intelligence replace lawyers? What does Taiwan want from Germany? And are ghostwriters becoming less ghostly?
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US approves world’s first vaccine for honeybeesSpeed Read Development hailed as ‘exciting step forward’ in effort to halt decline in bee numbers
