Spanish investigators are examining whether visa appointment and document-processing companies helped a network prioritise applicants who paid bribes. Indian company BLS International has been drawn into a Spanish National Court investigation with links to alleged visa fraud network at Spain’s consulate in Algiers.The probe, led by Judge María Tardón, was expanded to examine the role…

She struck gold literally. An hour and a half into her first excavation, an American archaeology student found an artefact extremely valuable for Britain’s history. Dating back to the ninth century, the small, ornate artefact is believed to have had a ceremonial purpose.Yara Souza, a Florida-native and an undergraduate at Newcastle University in northern England,…

Cortical Labs founder and CEO Hon Weng Chong at the Cortical Cloud biological data centre at NUS (Image: The Straits Times).. Singapore has unveiled a world-first biological data centre prototype that brings living human neurons into a server-rack environment, marking an unusual new step in the race to build more efficient and adaptive computing systems….

Romanian firefighters work to prevent a wildfire from reigniting as they tackle smoldering ground following a fire in the Deliblato Sands nature reserve in Serbia. (Photo: Reuters) Wildfires are stretching firefighting capacity across Europe, forcing countries to move aircraft, helicopters and crews across borders as several blazes burn at the same time. Serbia is using…

On small islands scattered across the Pacific, changes in wildlife can be surprisingly easy to notice. A few more birds along the shoreline, coconut crabs appearing where they had become scarce, or native animals moving through places they once avoided can all point to a shift in the balance of an ecosystem. In Tuvalu, that…