Author: Vidya Saras

At the 1972 Miss World contest, Cynthia Shange was one of two contestants from South Africa – one black and one white.

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.A collection of stolen rare books worth millions of dollars, including letters by John Keats and work by Oscar Wilde and James Joyce, is being returned to its owners’ heirs decades after being taken from a New York home. Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg will hand the 17 works, including a bound collection of Keats’ love letters to his fiancée Fanny Brawne, to the family of John Hay Whitney and Betsey Whitney on Monday. The books, which were stolen from a home…

Successfully flying around the Moon and returning to Earth in a historic 10-day journey? Easy-peasy for NASA’s Artemis 2 astronauts. Now the really hard part that everybody on Earth can relate to begins: sorting out their phone’s camera roll. Mission specialist Christina Koch and Commander Reid Wiseman had already stunned the public with their epic Earth photos taken from the Orion spacecraft’s main hatch. While they shared a gallery of shots taken with a Nikon DSLR and GoPro action camera, it was their “selfies,” shot with the iPhone 17 Pro Max’s front-facing camera, that captured everyone’s imagination. How do you…

Trusted Editorial content, reviewed by leading industry experts and seasoned editors. Ad Disclosure KelpDAO’s $290 million rsETH exploit has moved into a new phase, with LayerZero and Aave now publicly outlining how the incident unfolded, why the damage appears contained, and what it could mean for crypto cross-chain security standards going forward. The central claim from LayerZero is that the exploit was not a failure of the protocol itself, but the result of KelpDAO’s decision to run rsETH with a single-DVN configuration. That matters because the latest statements shift the market narrative away from generalized contagion risk across LayerZero-integrated assets…

Development of Ethereum has been progressing increasingly quickly this past month. The release of PoC5 (“proof of concept five”) last month the day before the sale marked an important event for the project, as for the first time we had two clients, one written in C++ and one in Go, perfectly interoperating with each other and processing the same blockchain. Two weeks later, the Python client was also added to the list, and now a Java version is also almost done. Currently, we are in the process of using an initial quantity of funds that we have already withdrawn from…

BNB, Binance’s native token, is currently trading in the $620–$630 range and has remained stuck below the key resistance level of $700 after several failed tests since mid-March. Although the price has recovered by approximately 6.4% over the past 7 days, the upward momentum is still not strong enough to push this asset out of its current accumulation zone.Signals from capital flows, price structure, and the derivatives market indicate that BNB remains in a state of equilibrium between buying and selling pressure, as the market still lacks a catalyst strong enough to break through this resistance zone.Price Structure Signals ResistanceTechnically,…

Planning a big night out at Madison Square Garden? Have fun—but don’t say we didn’t warn you.A WIRED investigation this week revealed new details about the private surveillance state instituted by MSG owner Jim Dolan and his head of security, John Eversole. According to court records and WIRED sources, visitors to the Garden and some other Dolan-owned venues have been subjected to face recognition, social media monitoring, in-person surveillance, and more.The US government’s warrantless wiretap powers hit a roadblock this week. Despite a push from President Donald Trump for a long-term reauthorization of the so-called Section 702 spy program, 20…

The Weekend Read / April 18, 2026 How music became the cathartic refuge for my political frustration. Ad Policy A broken piano in the music room of the abandoned Southwestern High School.(Johannes Schmitt-Tegge / Getty Images) Idon’t drink anymore, but a vestigial hangover clouds my recollection of the major events of recent history. On the morning of the Unite the Right rally, I lumbered down the staircase of a Catskills Airbnb rented for a bachelor party to learn that only hours before, a gang of white nationalists stormed the University of Virginia campus wielding Tiki torches and chanting, “Jews will…

Artificial intelligence is already proving it can accelerate drug development and improve our understanding of disease. But to turn AI into novel treatments we need to get the latest, most powerful models into the hands of scientists.The problem is that most scientists aren’t machine-learning experts. Now the company OpenProtein.AI is helping scientists stay on the cutting edge of AI with a no-code platform that gives them access to powerful foundation models and a suite of tools for designing proteins, predicting protein structure and function, and training models.The company, founded by Tristan Bepler PhD ’20 and former MIT associate professor Tim…

Enterprise implications Those same assurance questions translate directly to enterprise procurement. The OMB move signals that federal cyber defense is pivoting toward frontier models that can find vulnerabilities faster than human teams can patch them, and the rift between the Pentagon and the White House carries a lesson for private-sector buyers, Shah said. “The rift between the two government entities is a lesson on how important it is to control the deployment of potent AI capabilities which could be misused,” he said, calling for a multi-layered control framework spanning discovery, classification, security, assurance, and action. The asymmetry extends beyond US…