The Slow Newscast

If animals share many qualities with humans - if they're self-aware, if they communicate, and grieve for their dead, as we know they do - do they deserve human-like rights? Next month, the case of Happy the elephant comes before the New York Supreme Court. Happy's lawyer (yes, she has one) will argue that her long incarceration in the Bronx Zoo has breached her right to bodily freedom. The case will get a respectful hearing; it's not inconceivable that Happy will win. But even if she loses, the court of public opinion is already changing its mind about the way we treat the animals around us.

The organisation change.org have a petition calling for Happy's release, currently signed by 1.3m people.

You can read the Bronx Zoo's statement about Happy here.

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If animals share many qualities with humans - if they're self-aware, if they communicate, and grieve for their dead, as we know they do - do they deserve human-like rights? Next month, the case of Happy the elephant comes before the New York Supreme Court. Happy's lawyer (yes, she has one) will argue that her long incarceration in the Bronx Zoo has breached her right to bodily freedom. The case will get a respectful hearing; it's not inconceivable that Happy will win. But even if she loses, the court of public opinion is already changing its mind about the way we treat the animals around us.

The organisation change.org have a petition calling for Happy's release, currently signed by 1.3m people.

You can read the Bronx Zoo's statement about Happy here.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The serial failures of the UK's test and trace system will never be a footnote in the coronavirus crisis. In fact, they're the headline. Matthew d'Ancona reports on how it got so bad.

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The fertility industry is booming, but there is a tightrope to walk between what is possible, ethical and harmful. Reporter Claudia Williams and host Basia Cummings investigate the rise and rise of IVF.

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Coronavirus can kill, or pass through a body unnoticed. Its effects in the short term are wildly unpredictable. But as we learn to live with this new virus we're discovering more of its grisly secrets. One of them is that the damage it does to the body in the long run might leave a dreadful legacy. This is the story - as much as we know it – of Long Covid.

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We went to the perennial swing state where Trump won narrowly in 2016. Four years later, is Florida ready to flip again? Will it be an election about Covid and competence, law and order or racial justice? Will it be a referendum on the character of Donald Trump or just further evidence of a hopelessly divide nation?

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Evin Prison is one of the most secretive places on earth; the heart of Iran's oppression of its own people. We've spent months getting inside its walls through the testimony of people who've been detained there over the past 40 years. Together, their accounts are not simply the story of the prison, they're the story of what Iran has become.

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Drill music styles itself as a tough and uncompromising representation of life in poor communities in cities like Chicago and London. Police forces have clamped down on it in the belief that it provokes violence, but the evidence for a causal link is thin. Not for the first time, an innovative, anti-establishment Black voice is being quietened.

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Something which is now almost unimaginable happened between 1974 and 1989. The world spotted a massive problem; the fix required action by consumers, businesses and governments; and they came together to pull it off. This is the story of the discovery of what man-made emissions were doing to the ozone layer and mankind's brilliant response.

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Michaela Coel's TV drama I May Destroy You has just finished playing on the BBC and HBO. Based partly on her own experience it's an unsettling, sometimes harrowing, examination of sexual assault, consent, friendship, and the experience of growing up Black and British. It may come to be seen as a watershed moment in British television, and it's not Coel's first. Basia Cummings talks to journalist and critic Yomi Adegoke about Michaela Coel's remarkable talent.

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