AnewZ Morning Brief - 17 October, 2025
Start your day informed with AnewZ Morning Brief: here are the top news stories for October 17th, covering the latest developments you need to know....
A much-delayed nuclear fusion project involving more than 30 countries is ready to assemble the world's most powerful magnet - a key part of efforts to generate clean energy by smashing atoms together at super-high temperatures.
The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project, based in southern France and backed by the United States, China, Japan, Russia and the European Union, needs the magnetic system to create an "invisible cage" to confine super-hot plasma particles that combine and fuse to release energy.
ITER said late on Wednesday that the final component of the system - the central solenoid - had been completed and tested by the United States, and assembly was now underway.
"It is like the bottle in a bottle of wine: of course the wine is maybe more important than the bottle, but you need the bottle in order to put the wine inside," said Pietro Barabaschi, ITER's director general.
The magnet was originally scheduled for completion in 2021, but has been beset by delays.
"To be behind schedule by four years after 10 years of effort shows just how troubled this project is," said Charles Seife, a professor at New York University who writes about nuclear fusion.
Barabaschi said the "crisis" was now over and construction was proceeding at the fastest pace in ITER's history. The start-up phase of the project will begin in 2033, when it is scheduled to start generating plasma.
He said ITER proved that countries could still cooperate despite geopolitical tensions.
"They have a very, very strong cohesion of objectives and for the time being I see no sign of a withdrawal from anyone."
Fusion investment has been growing, with dozens of initiatives currently underway. Several private start-ups have said they can build commercial fusion reactors within a decade.
Barabaschi said he was sceptical but supportive of the dozens of ventures in development across the world.
"We already know that we can get fusion," he said. "The question is, are we going to get fusion in such a way that it would be cost-effective?
"I am quite sceptical that we will be able to achieve this within, say, one or even two decades. Frankly speaking, it will take more time."
Video from the USGS (United States Geological Survey) showed on Friday (19 September) the Kilauea volcano in Hawaii erupting and spewing lava.
At least 69 people have died and almost 150 injured following a powerful 6.9-magnitude earthquake off the coast of Cebu City in the central Visayas region of the Philippines, officials said, making it one of the country’s deadliest disasters this year.
Authorities in California have identified the dismembered body discovered in a Tesla registered to singer D4vd as 15-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez, who had been missing from Lake Elsinore since April 2024.
A tsunami threat was issued in Chile after a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck the Drake Passage on Friday. The epicenter was located 135 miles south of Puerto Williams on the north coast of Navarino Island.
The war in Ukraine has reached a strategic impasse, and it seems that the conflict will not be solved by military means. This creates a path toward one of two alternatives: either a “frozen” phase that can last indefinitely or a quest for a durable political regulation.
A team of Argentine paleontologists has uncovered one of the oldest known dinosaurs, a nearly complete skeleton of a long-necked herbivore that roamed Earth 230 million years ago in what is now La Rioja province.
An earthquake of magnitude 6.7 struck Papua province in Indonesia on Thursday, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) said.
Five days after historic floods that have killed at least 66 people and damaged 100,000 homes, Mexico is still struggling to provide aid to the worst-affected communities and locate 75 missing individuals, amid growing criticism of the government’s response to the crisis.
Indonesia's Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki erupted on Wednesday, shooting volcanic ash 10 km (6.2 miles) into the sky, the country's volcanology agency said, forcing authorities to raise the alert system to its highest level.
Britain must urgently prepare for global warming of at least 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2050, its climate advisers said on Wednesday (15 October), warning the country is ill-prepared for extreme weather that is already occurring.
You can download the AnewZ application from Play Store and the App Store.
What is your opinion on this topic?
Leave the first comment