Opinion
Despite being described in some circles as such, the latest vote in the United Nations General Assembly on Palestine’s status is hardly extraordinary. For one, it does not vest the Palestinian territories with statehood but burnishes its credentials to join the club. It pushes thos...
Rarely has the International Court of Justice been so constantly exercised by one topic during a short span of time. On January 26, the World Court, considering a filing made the previous December by South Africa, accepted Pretoria’s argument that the Convention on the Prevention and Pun...
It was a struggle to see how a child’s welfare was relevant in the latest, shrill debates about technology taking place on The Hill. The Senate Judiciary Committee and the leaders of social media companies were on show to thrash out matters on technology and their threats on January 31 i...
Australia experienced this in February 2021. Facebook had gotten nastily stroppy, wishing to dictate public policy to the Commonwealth government. To teach Canberra mandarins a lesson, it literally unfriended the entire country, scrubbing all news platforms of content and making any posted links thr...
As the ancient Greeks reminded us, bone cold definitions as starting points are essential in any discussion. One current discussion, insignificant to posterity but amusing for advertisers and the presently bored, is the ludicrous reactions to a plastic doll rendered into celluloid form. And as a dol...
Europe is joining a number of other regions on the planet in suffering a prolonged water crisis; and it is one that shows little sign of abating. To this can be added the near catastrophic conditions that exist in other parts of the globe, where ready and secure access to water supplies is mor...
Inside the beating heart of many students and a large number of learners lies an inner cheat. To get passing grades, every effort will be made to do the least to achieve the most. Efforts to subvert the central class examination are the stuff of legend: discreetly written notes on hands, palms...
The right to protest, fragile and meekly protected by the judiciary in Britain’s common law tradition, did not really hold much force till European law confirmed it. In the UK, condemning other countries for suppressing rights to protest is standard fare. So it was with some discom...
The indomitable spirit of Raphael Lemkin, bibliophile, assiduous documenter of humanity’s dark deeds and inexecrable conduct, is bound to be an unsettled one. This brilliant, committed and peculiarly dedicated creature took years to come up with what would, in time, become a word so horr...
A sordid enterprise, nasty, crude and needless. But the World Cup 2022 will be, should anyone bother watching it, stained by one of the highest casualty rates amongst workers in its history, marked by corruption and stained by a pharisee quality. The sportswashers, cleaning agent at the ready,...
For a country experiencing its worst economic crisis since gaining independence in 1948, the picture of a touring team pampered and fussed over might cause consternation. But the Australian cricket tour to Sri Lanka has only been met by praise from the country’s cricket officials, where ...
It was meant to be time to reflect. The eager arms of a new pandemic were enfolding a society with asphyxiating, lethal effect. Public health authorities advocated various measures: social distancing, limited contact between family and friends, limited mobility. No grand booze-ups. ...
With a lamentable, even disgraceful vaccination rate, confusion over how best to deal with the AstraZeneca supply, vague promises about the arrival of other COVID-19 vaccines, and a degree of complacency, half of Australia found itself in lockdown conditions earlier this month.A good deal of this wa...
When Nobel Laureates open their mouths in despair and anger, their observations tend to be worth noting. Immunologist Professor Peter Doherty was willingly doing so last week, and found himself indignant at the merciless cuts to courses and subjects in Australian universities. He was par...
The hallmark of any institution is the ability to withstand ironic dysfunction. he parliamentary chamber of the European Union, between 1999 and 2020, hosted that most anti-EU of proponents, the bilious Nigel Farage. Hatred for European institutions did not stop the little Englander from...
It was a fittingly poor conclusion to a tournament that risked being cancelled, run to ground, or even rendered stillborn. The tennis world number one, Novak Djokovic, had captured his eighteenth grand slam against would be usurper Daniil Medvedev, whose winning streak of twenty matches was conclusi...
The decision to go ahead with the Australian Open, the first of the grand slams of the tennis calendar, was always going to be fraught with problems. Players journeying from designated “hot spots” of novel coronavirus outbreaks; large entourages of individuals taking up places on c...
Masks can prove liberating. The hidden face affords security. Obnoxious authority breathes better, hiding in comfort. Behind the material, confidence finds a home. While tens of millions of jobs have been lost to the novel coronavirus globally, security services, surveillance officers and pen p...
In March, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeal upheld an original jury finding that Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven did not infringe copyright in Spirit’s 1968 song Taurus. Michael Skidmore, who had filed the suit in 2014 as trustee of the estate of the late Spirit guitarist Randy Wolfe,...
Another slot of judicial history, another notch to be added to the woeful record of legal proceedings being undertaken against Julian Assange. The ailing WikiLeaks founder was coping as well as he could, showing the resourcefulness of the desperate at his Monday hearing. At the Westminster Magistrat...
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