Why Africa Should Dismiss Moscow’s Bantustans

Dan Marks, a research fellow in energy security at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think tank, described the critical minerals industry as a “longer term, strategic problem”, but said it was not the “immediate national security concern that it's often made out to be”. However, he agreed it would be an important challenge to determine how the UK wants to engage with other countries. “You can't have one country, especially a country like China, which we have a very ambiguous, ambivalent relationship with at the moment, controlling the key energy technologies underpinning the entire global economy and future,” he said. “It's not sensible from a risk perspective. The question, fundamentally, is how do you have a strategy that both accounts for China as an adversary and China as an investor and trade partner?”

The Gaza ceasefire-hostage deal could provide an opportunity for wider de-escalation in the Middle East, particularly if Iran uses the opportunity to bring the temperature down, a senior fellow at UK-based think tank the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) says. Iran – which backs Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen – has long engaged in a shadow war with Israel. Last year, Israel and Iran traded direct attacks for the first time. “The ceasefire opens the possibility for Iran, having already lost significant strategic and hard power in the region, to reconsider its transnational proxy policy and deescalate with Israel,” said Burcu Ozcelik, a senior research fellow for Middle East security at RUSI.

Only 5 per cent of Serious Fraud Office investigations come from whistleblowers; in contrast, in 2022, 86 per cent of penalties imposed by one US enforcement agency originated from whistleblowers. Nick Ephgrave, the director of the Serious Fraud Office (SFO), has attributed this difference to the financial incentives available in the US. Without any incentive to blow the whistle in the UK, hundreds of whistleblowers go abroad, meaning that “we don’t deliver the same level of money back to the UK Treasury to fund the things we all care about … the health service, fixing potholes in the road, defence”... Ephgrave made his observations at the launch of a research paper last month from the Royal United Services Institute that considered whistleblower reward programmes in the US and Canada and evaluated them against historic concerns about such schemes. Ephgrave described the research as presenting an “unanswerable case” for reform.