Författare: Gemma Ware Editor and Co-Host The Conversation Weekly Podcas

3D-printed guns are now appearing the world over, including in the hands of organised criminals in Europe and anti-junta rebels in Myanmar. Made using a 3D printer and a few metal parts that can be easily sourced online, these shadow guns are untraceable, and becoming a popular choice for extremists too.

 In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we talk to researcher Rajan Basra about this clandestine world, and about his hunt to uncover the real identity of the man who designed the world’s most popular 3D-printed gun, the FGC-9.

When the design for the FGC-9 emerged online in spring 2020, it caused a sensation. Earlier 3D-printed gun models required regulated components, weren’t very reliable, or couldn’t take popular ammunition. But the FGC-9, which stands for “fuck gun control”, and then its Mark II version, were more efficient and easier to make.

Rajan Basra, a research fellow on radicalisation at King’s College in London, has been tracking cases around the world involving 3D-printed guns. And he became fascinated by the FGC-9’s designer who went by the online moniker JStark1809 in homage to the American revolutionary general John Stark.

He almost adopted this persona of an American revolutionary that was standing up against tyrannical gun control laws and that’s why he developed the FGC-9.

JStark kept himself anonymous online, but he wasn’t afraid to speak publicly about the gun, or the movement he established called Deterrence Dispensed.

He just captivated me straight away. When he would appear on podcasts or in interviews, he would be wearing a balaclava with sunglasses on and he was very careful about not giving away exactly who he was or where he was.

Then, in the autumn of 2021, an investigation by the German magazine Der Spiegel reported that a man suspected of being JStark had been found dead in Hanover, a few days after his arrest, and subsequent release, by German police.

Despite this, Basra kept wondering who the real JStark actually was. And then one day he was listening to an old podcast interview JStark had done in which he mentioned a specific exchange he’d had on Twitter.

I thought to myself, I could probably find that.

That sent Basra down an internet rabbit hole through the depths of the anonymous messaging board 4Chan on a hunt for JStark’s real identity, and his motivations.

Listen to Rajan Basra explain on The Conversation Weekly podcast how he uncovered JStark’s real identity, or read an article by him from our Insights series.

A transcript of this episode will be available soon.

Newsclips in this episode from ABC News, BBC News, WION, CBS News and Reuters.

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Gemma Ware and Mend Mariwany, with assistance from Katie Flood. Sound design was by Eloise Stevens, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Stephen Khan is our global executive editor.

You can find us on Instagram at theconversationdotcom or via email. You can also subscribe to The Conversation’s free daily email here.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. Läs mer…

A controversial British government plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda has been central to the UK’s response to a recent sharp increase in the number of people making the dangerous journey across the English Channel in small boats. But if the Conservative party lose the general election in early July, the Rwanda plan is likely to be abandoned.

In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, two experts in UK immigration policy explain how the Rwanda plan became such a crucial part of the immigration debate in the UK. And how, whatever happens in the election, it’s already shifting the wider conversation in Europe about how to deal with migrants and asylum seekers.

In a BBC interview the morning after he announced a UK general election for July 4, the British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, put his Conservative party’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda front and centre of his re-election campaign. The policy has been held up by a series of legal challenges, but Sunak insisted that if he’s re-elected, flights to Rwanda would leave in July.

The Labour party, which is widely expected to win the election and form the next British government, says it will scrap the Rwanda plan and use the money to create a new Border Security Command of investigators focused on targeting the criminal gangs behind the small boat crossings in the English Channel. But Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, also hasn’t ruled out processing asylum seekers offshore if the law permits it.

For Nando Sigona and Michaela Benson, the Rwanda plan is part of a wider attempt by Britain to reposition itself after Brexit. Sigona is a professor of international migration and forced displacement at the University of Birmingham, and Benson is a professor of public sociology at Lancaster University. They’re leading a research project examining the long-term effects of Brexit on migration between the EU and UK.

Sigona says the rationale behind the Rwanda plan was that it would deter migrants from crossing irregularly into the UK if they knew they would be sent to the east African country for processing.

The point with this plan was that it was unfeasible from the beginning and to some extent it was meant to have a more symbolic effect. You could argue if you were cynical that the government never wanted to implement it, but they wanted it to have it in the news to have that deterrence effect.

Benson explains that the rise in small-boat crossings “are a Brexit-made policy failure” and that the change in the relationship between the UK and the EU, in particular the UK’s removal from the EU border regime, has been “significant in increasing the number of crossings”.

Read more:
Is the Rwanda plan acting as a deterrent? Here’s what the evidence says about this approach

When the Rwanda plan was first floated, in 2022, it was largely derided by European leaders and member states in the European Union. But now some EU leaders have suggested they are open to the idea of sending asylum-seekers to third countries for processing. In May, the Austrian chancellor, Karl Nehammer, said the UK was a “pioneer” in migration policy, citing the Rwanda plan. Benson says:

What we’re seeing across western Europe and some other liberal democracies is really that mainstreaming of anti-migrant sentiment. And so those things that a few years ago would have been completely off the cards and derided have now become almost common sense. And I think that’s a tendency that we need to look closely at and which should be alarming.

Listen to Nando Sigona and Michaela Benson explain the wider context of the migration plan and the effect of Brexit on the UK’s migration policy on The Conversation Weekly podcast. The episode also features an introduction from Avery Anapol from the politics team at The Conversation in the UK.

A transcript of this episode is available on Apple Podcasts.

Newsclips in this episode from BBC Radio 4, France 24 English, BBC News, CGTN Africa, CityNews, euronews, Sky News, ITV News and DW News.

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Mend Mariwany, with assistance from Katie Flood. Gemma Ware was the executive producer. Sound design was by Eloise Stevens, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Stephen Khan is our global executive editor and Soraya Nandy helps with our transcripts.

You can find us on Instagram at theconversationdotcom or via email. You can also subscribe to The Conversation’s free daily email here.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. Läs mer…

It’s one of the biggest puzzles in cosmology. Why two different methods used to calculate the rate at which the universe is expanding don’t produce the same result. Known as the Hubble tension, the enigma suggests that there could be something wrong with the standard model of cosmology used to explain the forces in the universe.

Now, recent observations using the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) are shaking up the debate on how close the mystery is to being resolved.

In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, two professors of astronomy explain why the Hubble tension matters so much for our understanding of the universe.

In February, the Nobel prize-winning physicist Adam Reiss, published a new paper. It said that new observations of far-away stars using the JWST matched those obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope.

These stars, called Cepheids, are commonly used in one method of calculating the rate at which the universe is expanding. Known as the local distance ladder, or cosmic distance ladder, this method has been around since observations first made by Edwin Hubble himself in 1929. And it generally produces a rate of expansion of around 73km per second per mega parsec.

But a second method, using predictions of the cosmic microwave background radiation left over by the Big Bang, has constantly arrived at a different number for the rate of expansion of the universe: 67km per second per mega parsec.

Reiss said that when the new data confirmed the earlier observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, the gap between the numbers remains unresolved. “What remains is the real and exciting possibility that we have misunderstood the universe,” he said.

A few months later, however, more data from the JWST, presented by Wendy Freedman, a physicist at the University of Chicago, using observations from a different set of stars, arrived at 69km per second per mega parsec, a number closer to the cosmic microwave background figure of 67. Freedman is excited that the numbers seem to be converging.

Listen to The Conversation’s podcast series Great Mysteries of Physics for more about the greatest mysteries facing physicists today – and the radical proposals for solving them. Hosted by Miriam Frankel it features interviews with some of the worlds leading scientists including Sean Carroll, Sabine Hossenfelder and Jim Al-Khalili.

Vicent Martínez and Bernard Jones are fascinated by the Hubble tension. Jones is an emeritus professor of astronomy at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Martínez, his former student, is now a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of València in Spain.

“The fundamental basis of science, what distinguishes science from science fiction, is our ability to verify the information we are getting,” explains Jones.

That’s why Martinez says the mystery of the Hubble tension is still driving people to:

Research and imagine experiments and organise huge projects with the complicated observation of the cosmos in order to understand what’s going on. At the end, this will affect your idea of the whole universe and probably you will need to change some fundamental ingredient of your cosmological model.

Martinez and Jones have just written a book, along with their co-author Virginia Trimble, about moments in history when scientists realised they’d got something very wrong, and had to readjust their way of thinking. Martínez thinks this could happen again with the Hubble tension:

It could happen that, for example, a new theory of gravity could solve the problem of dark energy or dark matter. We have to be open to those ideas.

Listen to Bernard Jones and Vicent Martínez talk more about the Hubble tension, and how it fits in the wider history of science, on The Conversation Weekly podcast. The episode also features an introduction from Lorena Sánchez, science editor at The Conversation in Spain.

A transcript of this episode will be available shortly.

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Katie Flood, with assistance from Mend Mariwany. Gemma Ware was the executive producer. Sound design was by Eloise Stevens, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Stephen Khan is our global executive editor and Soraya Nandy helps with our transcripts.

You can find us on Instagram at theconversationdotcom or via email. You can also subscribe to The Conversation’s free daily email here.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. Läs mer…