This is an audio transcript of the Rachman Review podcast episode: ‘Can diplomacy avert a US-Iran war?’
Andrew England
Hello, and welcome to the Rachman Review. I’m Andrew England, the Middle East editor at the Financial Times, standing in…

This is an audio transcript of the Rachman Review podcast episode: ‘Can diplomacy avert a US-Iran war?’
Andrew England
Hello, and welcome to the Rachman Review. I’m Andrew England, the Middle East editor at the Financial Times, standing in…

Visiting a museum could soon be a truly multisensory experience—smells included. Thanks to recent advances in the field of biomolecular archeology, scientists can now detect traces of molecular fingerprints on ancient artifacts. From these tiny…

The priest is late arriving at the Cabane Mont Fort mountain refuge. A wedding in nearby Val de Bagnes has overrun, leaving dignitaries and 50 mountain guides from Verbier hanging around on the cabin’s terrace in the late-afternoon chill….

When her mum called her, stress would ring through Marie’s body like an alarm going off. So “I stopped answering the phone,” she says. She forms the words purposefully, as if reading from a script. This was one of the “boundaries” she…


Silver bars are stacked in the safe deposit boxes room of the Pro Aurum gold house in Munich, Germany, Jan. 10, 2025.
Angelika Warmuth | Reuters
Silver prices slid as much as 16% on Thursday, snapping a two-day rebound, as the white metal continues to reel from excessive volatility.
Spot silver prices are were last down 13% at $76.97 per ounce, while futures in New York were over 8% lower at $77.28 per ounce.
Silver had been on a record-breaking spree before crashing almost 30% last Friday. In 2025, it gained about 146%, data from LSEG showed.
Analysts point to speculative flows, leveraged positioning and options-driven trading, rather than physical demand, as key drivers of the recent price swings.
“As prices fell, dealer hedging flipped from buying into strength to selling into weakness, investor stop-outs were triggered, and losses cascaded through the system,” Goldman Sachs said in a note on Wednesday.
Silver prices in the past one year
Silver’s correction has been larger than gold’s due to tighter liquidity conditions in the London market, which magnified price swings.
Goldman added that the timing of the volatility suggested Western flows, rather than Chinese speculation, are behind much of the build-up and unwind, noting that most of the more violent moves occurred while Chinese futures markets were closed.
The volatility in silver prices has drawn growing comparisons to meme stocks such as GameStop, the video-game retailer that became a global phenomenon in 2021 after retail traders on Reddit piled in en masse, sending its shares soaring far beyond what traditional valuation models could justify.
Rhona O’Connell, head of market Intelligence at StoneX, warned that prices had detached from sustainable levels.
“Silver was massively over-valued and in a self-fulfilling frenzy; it is however notoriously fickle and its history is littered with examples of price crashes,” she said. “At present it is behaving like Icarus and to extend the analogy there is a strong risk of other buyers getting burned.”
Spot gold and futures declined a little over 1% to $4,887.03 and $4,887.40 per ounce, respectively.
LOS ANGELES, Feb. 4 (Xinhua) — Data from NASA’s Juno mission show that Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system, is slightly smaller and more “squashed” than previously believed, the U.S. space agency said on Wednesday.
By analyzing…

AEW Dynamite was LIVE from Las Vegas, Nevada, on TBS and HBO Max! And the pursuit of the AEW World Championship was once again in the spotlight just 10 days from AEW Grand Slam Australia!
In the main event, Brody King pinned the AEW World…