The Conversation Weekly

In November, six Democratic lawmakers recorded a video directed at members of the US military and intelligence agencies. In it, they issued a blunt reminder:

"The laws are clear: you can refuse illegal orders. […] You must refuse illegal orders."

The lawmakers were issuing the warning against the backdrop of US airstrikes on boats off the coast of Latin America the Trump administration claims are suspected drug runners. Many Democrat...

The list of people Donald Trump has punished or threatened to punish since returning to office is long. It includes the likes of James Comey, Letitia James, John Bolton, as well as members of the opposition, such as Adam Schiff, Mark Kelly and Kamala Harris.

In fact, he has gone so far as to call Democrats “the enemy from within”, saying they are more dangerous than US adversaries like Russia and China.

According to Lucan Way, a prof...

In democratic systems, the courts are a vital check on a leader’s power. They have the ability to overturn laws and, in Donald Trump’s case, the executive orders he has relied on to achieve his goals.

Since taking office, Trump has targeted the judiciary with a vengeance. He has attacked what he has called “radical left judges” and is accused of ignoring or evading court orders.

The Supreme Court has already handed the Trump administ...

Donald Trump has sounded the alarm, over and over again, that the United States is facing an “invasion” by dangerous gang members. He blames immigrants for the country’s economic problems and claims protesters are destroying US cities.

Trump is not the first would-be autocrat to manufacture a crisis to seize extraordinary powers.

As Natasha Lindstaedt, an expert in authoritarian regimes at the University of Essex, says in episode 3 o...

Every autocrat needs a clan of loyalists, strategists, masterminds – these are the figures behind the scenes pulling the strings.

They’re unelected and unaccountable, yet they wield a huge amount of power.

This is the role Stephen Miller has played for Donald Trump – he is the architect in chief for the second Trump administration. He has so much power, in fact, he’s reportedly referred to as the "prime minister."

So who is Stephen Mi...

We used to have a pretty clear idea of what an autocrat was. History is full of examples: Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, along with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping today. The list goes on.

So, where does Donald Trump fit in?

In this six-part podcast series, The Making of an Autocrat, we are asking six experts on authoritarianism and US politics to explain how exactly an autocrat is made – and whether Trump is on his way to be...

In the latest escalation of tensions between the US and Venezuela, the US President Donald Trump ordered a "complete blockade" of sanctioned oil tankers going into and out of Venezuela. His Venezuelan counterpart, Nicolás Maduro, called the move "warmongering threats", and accused the US of trying to steal its resources.

In this episode we speak to Pablo Uchoa, a PhD candidate researching Venezuela's military, on how Venezuela has l...

Oecusse, a rugged, remote district of Timor-Leste in south-east Asia, is usually a pretty sleepy place. But in August, Oecusse was rocked by a large police raid on a suspected scam centre, later linked by a UN report to organised crime networks running scamming operations across south-east Asia.

And then in early September, a Facebook post by one of Timor-Leste’s highest political officials made some e...

Donald Trump’s fixation on South Africa’s white Afrikaner minority has become a central plank of US refugee policy, with their applications now given priority under a new refugee system.

This preoccupation by some Americans with white Afrikaners has a long history dating back to the publication of a large sociological study focusing on poor white Afrikaners in the 1930s.

In this episode, we speak to Carolyn Holmes...

Twice a year, 40 scientists gather together for five days to decide what strains of influenza to vaccinate against for the next flu season. It takes around six months to prepare the vaccine – which usually includes protection against three different strains of flu.

Europe and the US are heading into a flu season that some are warning could be particularly severe this winter. While even as summer approaches in Australia, the country...

As Pakistanis and Indians struggle with hazardous air quality, in Beijing – a city once notorious for its smog – the air quality is currently rated as good.

Ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the Chinese government was so concerned about pollution that it introduced temporary restrictions on cars, shut down factories and work on some construction sites. It would take a few more years before the Chinese government imp...

Since the 1960s, scientists have been developing and honing models to understand how the earth’s climate is changing. One such pioneer of early climate modelling is Syukuro Manabe, who won the Nobel prize in physics in 2021 for his work laying the foundation for our current understanding of how carbon dioxide affects global temperatures. A seminal paper he co-published in 1967 was voted the most influential climate scienc...

At dawn on October 28, residents of Rio de Janeiro woke to the sound of gunfire. Battles continued throughout the day in the favelas of Alemão and Penha, as police mounted a huge operation targeting the Commando Vermelho, or the Red Command, one of Brazil’s largest organised criminal gangs.

In the days that followed, as graphic images showed lines of bodies on the streets, it emerged that at least 115 civilians and four police offic...

In the 16th century, witches and demons weren’t just for Halloween. People were terrified and preoccupied with them – even kings.

In 1590, James VI of Scotland – who was later also crowned James I of England – travelled by sea to Denmark to wed a Danish princess, Anne. On the return journey, the fleet was hit by a terrible storm and one of the ships was lost.

James, a pious Protestant who would go on to sponsor the translation of the...

One American company called Strategy owns more than 3% of all bitcoin in existence. In August 2020, its executive chairman, Michael Saylor, pioneered a new business model where publicly listed companies buy cryptocurrency assets to hold on their balance sheet.

More than 100 other public companies have since followed Saylor’s lead and become bitcoin treasury companies, together holding more than $114 billion of bitcoin. The...

As one of the birthplaces of the industrial revolution, the River Mersey in northern England is no stranger to pollution flowing into its waters. Now it's got a new problem: monitoring shows the amount of forever chemicals, also known as PFAS, entering the Mersey catchment area is among some of the highest in the world.

In this episode we speak to water scientist Patrick Byrne at Liverpool John Moores University ...

Back in the 1980s, when Shimon Sakaguchi was a young researcher in immunology, he found it difficult to get his research funded. Now, his pioneering work which explains how our immune system knows when and what to attack, has won him a Nobel prize.

Sakaguchi, along with American researchers Mary Brunkow and Fred Ramsdell, were jointly awarded the 2025 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for the work on regulatory T-cells...

As Donald Trump gives oxygen to unproven theories about what might be behind a recent rise in autism cases, experts repeatedly point to the changing nature of how autism is diagnosed and viewed.

A key moment in the history of autism diagnosis was the publication in 1994 of a new version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It's a reference book of psychiatric conditions and how to diagnose the...