The lights go down, and for a moment I forget I’m watching a screen. It fills with a rooftop in Tel Aviv at night, black and grey. The camera pans down. Through windows, we see people watching screens of their own – couples holding each other close, following the news, eating food. They appear absorbed in their own worlds, and why wouldn’t they be?
That’s the thing I can’t get past as a Palestinian journalist from Gaza, watching this apparent tranquillity: this must be it – this must be what safety actually looks like. Just an evening uninterrupted, with no military aircraft flying overhead or drones buzzing incessantly. Meanwhile, men and women on the rooftop above them calmly talk about how they decided how many Palestinian civilians would die on any given night.
These are the soldiers, mostly intelligence officers, who helped Israel carry out its destruction of Gaza. Their testimonies form the basis of NAZA, a documentary whose title comes from an Israeli military acronym used to indicate how many civilians are likely to die in an airstrike on the territory.
What surprised me in the film wasn’t the massive scale of the killing, or even the coldness of it, but the proficiency of the soldiers who coolly described destroying people’s lives as if they were discussing a routine errand. One described the work simply as a “mission”, while another compared it to a “video game”.
One soldier described knowing exactly what some of the people were doing in the moments before he killed them. He recalled hearing a man talking to his wife in bed. A baby crying. The sound of the TV. Despite taking all that humanity in, he quickly gave permission to drop the bomb.
The soldier explained how he would then go out with friends in the evening, and come back the next morning to do it all over again. For these Israeli soldiers, killing Palestinians was simply a task that could be paused and repeated.
There was no hesitation in their voices, no sense that they were describing something that should be difficult to say aloud. They spoke with the ease of people who had learned how to do this, how to talk about it and how to carry on afterward – as one of them put it, with “zero” consideration for the lives they annihilated.

They played for Antiguoko Kirol Elkartea in 1990s

There is the US — candidate one — running a near 6 per cent of GDP deficit for no good reason except that taxes are un-American, with no plan and seemingly no desire ever to do anything about it.
Then there is Japan — candidate two — which has a massive public debt, an ageing population and has made the odd decision to carry on with deficit spending even after fixing its problem with deflation. Japan is asset rich, however, both its government and its people.
Finally there is Europe — candidate three — where big debtors include countries such as France, Italy and the UK. In Europe there is at least rhetorical attention to the control of debt and deficits, but many nations have made lavish spending promises, which their economies are increasingly ill-equipped to support, and there is almost no political will to confront voters with that harsh reality.
As bond yields tick upwards, with 30-year yields exceeding 4 per cent in Japan and 5 per cent in the US and UK, the fiscal pressure on every indebted economy is mounting.

Evolutionary anthropology combines natural sciences and social sciences to understand the evolution of humans, both past and present, and their relationship with non-human primates (hominids and non-hominid primates). It integrates multiple disciplines, including archaeology, behavioral ecology, psychology, primatology, and genetics, to explore how humans have evolved biologically and culturally.

Biological anthropology explores human evolution, biological diversity and primate behavior. Research in this area examines how humans emerged as a species, how we vary today and how biology interacts with environment and culture. From fossil evidence to living populations, biological anthropology connects deep history to present-day questions about health and adaptation.

Polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, is a DNA-copying method used in Biological Anthropology when you need to amplify one specific segment of DNA from a very small sample. Instead of trying to work with all the DNA in a cell or bone fragment at once, PCR targets one region and makes enough copies for analysis.
The process depends on repeated temperature changes. First, the DNA is heated so the two strands separate, which is called denaturation. Then short primers bind, or anneal, to sequences on either side of the target region. After that, DNA polymerase extends from the primers and builds new complementary strands.
That cycle happens again and again, usually 20 to 40 times. Each round doubles the amount of target DNA, so the amount grows very fast. A tiny starting sample can become millions of copies, which is why PCR is so useful when the DNA is scarce, damaged, or mixed with lots of other biological material.
In Biological Anthropology, this matters because researchers often work with old bones, teeth, hair, or environmental samples that do not contain much intact DNA. Ancient DNA is often fragmented, so PCR is one way to focus on a small region that can still be copied. The method does not create the original DNA sample out of nowhere, it only multiplies the part already present.