A new youth protest movement in India that started as online satire is now staging an ongoing sit-in in New Delhi calling for the resignation of India’s education minister.

The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) was launched in late May by Abhijeet Dipke, a graduate of Boston University, in response to alleged comments by India's chief justice, Surya Kant, comparing unemployed young Indians to cockroaches. Dipke launched a parody political party, calling on all cockroaches to unite, which led to street protests in cities including Delhi, Pune, Jaipur and Bengaluru.

The CJP latched onto mounting anger in India at a series of issues affecting exams, including the secondary school leaving exam, which has affected thousands of people and been linked to suicides. But the movement has also tapped into the anger of a generation of graduates who’ve done everything right but still can’t find work that matches their aspirations.

In this episode economist Rosa Abraham at Azim Premji University, explains how India’s jobs crisis is fuelling this new youth protest movement.

This episode was written and produced by Gemma Ware and Mend Mariwany. Mixing by Michelle Macklem and theme music by Neeta Sarl. Read the full credits for this episode and sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.

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When Australia banned under 16-year-olds from using social media in December 2025, it became a test case for a policy now being pursued by governments around the world. This week, the UK announced a similar social media ban from 2027.

So how’s it going in Australia? Have the teenagers emerged from a phone-lit glow to reengage in the real world? And what kind of difference is it having on their mental health?

In this episode, we speak to Susan Sawyer, a professor of adolescent mental health at the University of Melbourne, who is running a number of ongoing studies examining the way young people and their parents are reacting to Australia’s ban.

This episode was written and produced by Gemma Ware, Katie Flood and Mend Mariwany. Mixing by Michelle Macklem and theme music by Neeta Sarl. Read the full credits for this episode and sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.

If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, an independent, not-for-profit news organisation.

When Roberto Baggio missed a penalty in the 1994 Fifa World Cup final at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, more than 94,000 people were there to watch Italian heartbreak and Brazilian ecstasy.

To this day, no other World Cup has been as well attended as the 1994 tournament. Tickets were cheap and abundant, and despite the relatively low profile of the game in the US compared to sports like baseball or basketball, people went along to see what it was all about.

Now, three decades later, as the 2026 World Cup returns to North America with games across Mexico, Canada and the US, soccer has grown a much larger and more dedicated fan base in America.

In this episode, we speak to John Sloop, a professor of communication studies at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and historian of soccer and its fans in the United States, about what’s changed for the men’s game in the US and whether the popularity has staying power.

This episode was written and produced by Gemma Ware, Katie Flood and Mend Mariwany. Mixing by Michelle Macklem and theme music by Neeta Sarl. Read the full credits for this episode and sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.

If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, an independent, not-for-profit news organisation.

• Is soccer taking over America … or are Americans taking over football?
• How apartheid, European racism and Pelé helped cultivate a culture of diversity in US soccer that endures into Messi-era MLS
• Soaring ticket prices could help FIFA pull in $15B this World Cup cycle — where does the money come from, where does it go?

As health workers in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) continue to battle an ongoing Ebola outbreak, scientists around the world are racing to develop a vaccine against the strain of the virus that’s causing it.

Two approved vaccines exist for Ebola, but they target the Zaire strain of the virus, not the Bundibugyo strain causing the 2026 outbreak, which has so far killed 61 people with 359 confirmed cases in the DRC and neighbouring Uganda.

In this episode, we speak to two scientists at the Oxford Vaccine Group at the University of Oxford, Teresa Lambe and Rebecca Makinson, who are developing a vaccine candidate for Bundibugyo virus. On June 1, they were among three research groups to receive fast-track funding from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, alongside Moderna and IAVI.

This episode was written and produced by Gemma Ware, Katie Flood and Mend Mariwany. Mixing by Eleanor Brezzi and theme music by Neeta Sarl. Read the full credits for this episode and sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.

If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, an independent, not-for-profit news organisation.

Buried underground in caverns dug out of salt on the Gulf coast of the US are millions of barrels worth of crude oil. This is the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, built up in the late 1970s.

Globally, at the end of 2025, global strategic oil stockpiles were estimated at 2.5 billion barrels, with China holding the most.

With the Strait of Hormuz now closed for more than two months, global oil supplies are being squeezed. In March, as part of a co-ordinated move by members of the International Energy Agency to release 400 million barrels of oil to prevent price spikes, the US began releasing 172 million barrels from its strategic reserves.

In this episode, we speak to Scott Montgomery, a former petroleum geologist who lectures in international studies at the University of Washington, about why these oil stockpiles were built up in the first place, and how they work.

This episode was written and produced by Gemma Ware and Katie Flood with production assistance from Katie Flood. Mixing by Eleanor Brezzi and theme music by Neeta Sarl. Read the full credits for this episode and sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.

If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, an independent, not-for-profit news organisation.

• Why Middle East gas field attacks could send energy prices soaring
• Why the Persian Gulf has more oil and gas than anywhere else on Earth
• War in the Middle East made the case for renewables – what’s happening in each country tells a harder story
• The government’s plans to bolster Australia’s fuel stores are sensible – but 5 years too late
• Over 400 million barrels will be added to the oil market soon – what are strategic reserves and what can they do?

The month Javier Milei took over as president of Argentina in December 2023, monthly inflation was 25.5%. The annual rate for that year was 211%. Now, it’s plummeted to 32% – still very high, but more stable.

Milei, a right-wing populist famous for wielding a chainsaw on stage to make a point about fiscal conservatism, made cutting inflation a central part of his campaign.

And yet economists like Can Cinar from City St George's, University of London, warn that Milei’s battle against inflation is more of a mirage, than a miracle. In this episode, Cinar explains how Milei’s government managed to cut inflation by deliberately suppressing people’s wages, and the stark impact these policies are having on Argentinians.

This episode was written and produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware with production assistance from Katie Flood. Mixing by Eleanor Brezzi and theme music by Neeta Sarl. Read the full credits for this episode and sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.

If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, an independent, not-for-profit news organisation.

• Kemi Badenoch says she wants to be Britain’s Javier Milei – but is the Argentinian president a model to follow?
• What’s inflation – and how exactly do we measure it?
• Javier Milei’s victory in Argentina’s midterm elections is also a win for Trump
• Currency controls and debt in Argentina: the stakes are high if Milei’s latest economic gamble doesn’t pay off
• Javier Milei’s inflation ‘miracle’ in Argentina is a warning to the world, not a blueprint

As the revelations from the Epstein files continue to reverberate around the globe, those conspiracy theorists who were among the first to call for the release of information about Jeffrey Epstein's legal cases are feeling vindicated.

Before his death, Epstein already featured in many fringe online forums, including those centred on the Qanon conspiracy narrative that the world is run by an elite cabal of child sex traffickers. Now, many in these communities are saying "We told you so."

In this episode, Art Jipson, a sociologist at the University of Dayton in Ohio, who researches social movements and extremism, explains what happened when a real-life criminal case collided with an online community built on conspiracy theories.

This episode was produced by Katie Flood, with assistance from Mend Mariwany. The executive producer was Gemma Ware. Mixing by Eleanor Brezzi and theme music by Neeta Sarl. Read the full credits for this episode and sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.

If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, an independent, not-for-profit news organisation.

As Xi Jinping prepares to host Donald Trump for a delayed summit in Beijing on May 14-15, a lot has changed since the US president's last visit to China in November 2017. Trump's first trade war with China began in earnest the following year, ushering in a new era of trade tensions between the world's two largest economies.

While Trump's second trade war raged in 2025, China reported a record trade surplus of US$1.2 trillion. Yes, direct trade with the US fell sharply, but China shifted its focus elsewhere, doubling down on an existing "great reallocation".

In this episode, we speak to economist Jiao Wang at the University of Sussex, about how decisions China took over the past two decades meant it was able to protect itself from the worst of Trump's tariff wars.

This episode was produced by Mend Mariwany and the executive producer was Gemma Ware. Mixing by Eleanor Brezzi and theme music by Neeta Sarl. Read the full credits for this episode and sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.

If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, an independent, not-for-profit news organisation.

• Supreme Court’s tariff decision still leaves a ‘mess’ for companies trying to grab refunds
• With a shrinking population, China needs new drivers of growth. Consumer spending has yet to fill the gap
• Amid rising tensions, ‘friendshoring’ might keep global trade alive
• Have US tariffs failed to bite? China’s trade surplus hits a record US$1.2 trillion