The Bubble.

True to the troupe’s uniqueness as ‘Durham University’s only Improvised Comedy Society’, Shellshock!’s preview for their upcoming show, due to be performed in the Durham and Edinburgh Fringe Festivals, surpassed all expectations of a distinctive and extraordinary portrayal of teamwork, adaptability, playfulness, and amusement.

Everyone believes in the right to protest until they are late for work, stuck in traffic, or trying to get to class. In theory, protest is one of the clearest signs of a healthy democracy. In practice, it is often treated as a public nuisance: too loud, too disruptive, too inconvenient, or simply too annoying to tolerate. This is the central contradiction in how Britain talks about protest.

Amid oil price turmoil due to the USA-Israel war on Iran, the UAE announced that, after being part of OPEC since 1971, it was to exit on the 1st of May 2026. OPEC stands for the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries. They are essentially a group of major oil-producing nations that coordinate how much oil they release onto the market. In simple terms, it behaves like a cartel: members agree to limit production so that prices stay high and profits remain stable.

Marie-Laure Parsy Szikola shares her harrowing experiences in Kathmandu during Nepal’s recent earthquake. A white Christmas with a Saharan twist… It must be another guest-post from Marie-Laure Parsy.

When we start – A Throwback? Every decade in film was hyperfixated on a genre, and it lived to milk the profit of it till there was nothing left of it. There was the rom-com streak of the 90s and the overload of musicals in the1950s and 60s. If you wanted to feast your eyes on the staples of the genre, you only had to flick back through the catelogue and find the decade.

The New Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics regards the Lyric as a poetic form which is ‘mechanically representational of a musical architecture’. In its rather restrictive, historical sense, states the encyclopaedia, ‘a lyric was simply a poem written to be sung’. In the context of contemporary music listening, songwriting is not necessarily associated with poetry writing.

There is something that feels cathartic about the ice-cream, the blankets and the rom-com. Suddenly, you’re disappointed in Benedict Bridgerton or screaming for Belly Conklin to make up her mind. Something about the culture of watching romances or rom-coms has stood the test of time. It’s the comfort or the smallest rekindling of hope that you’d get something remotely similiar to a confession in the rain.

The joint US-Israeli operation ‘Epic Fury’ has killed Iran’s Supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and has seen hundreds of bombs dropped—and more which continue to do so—in the Middle East. US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have justified their bombardment by claiming that Iran’s unwillingness to agree to a new nuclear programme poses an existential threat.

In Iran, as of the 10th of March 2026, approximately 1,630 people have been killed as a direct result of the Israeli-American strikes that began on the 28th of February 2026. Global oil markets reacted immediately to the escalation. The price of crude oil increased from about $67 per barrel before the strikes on 28 February to nearly $97 by 2 March 2026.

A popular Catholic expression, ‘He who sings, prays twice’ implies to many a devout worshipper that music plays a fundamental role in guiding and structuring worship. This seems to be fairly true across many religions, from hymns in Catholicism, to Dharmic bhajans and even shamanic ritual music.