Latest

Remembering the Famous Five

By Brian Brennan Today is Persons Day in Canada. I was reminded of this, not by a story in the Canadian media – which by now has become blasé about this annual commemoration of women’s rights – but by an opinion column in Wednesday’s New York Times, which headlined it “A Tree Grows in Canada.” The tree metaphor referred to a comment made by a British judge on 18 October 1929 when he ruled that, for the purpose of Canadian Senate appointments, women counted as “qualified persons” in Canada’s made-in-Britain constitution. The British North America Act, declared Lord John Sankey,

Miner’s deaths the tip of South African police issues

Since 34 striking miners were shot and killed in Marikana in August last year, South African police have been in the spotlight. Facts and Opinions welcomes aboard Ruth Hopkins, a senior journalist with the Wits Justice Project in Johannesburg, South Africa, to explain. An excerpt of her dispatch in the Justice section:  Steven Mothao was walking back home from a piece job on August 10, 2010, through Fordsburg in Joburg. Out of nowhere, three police officers appeared and pushed him against a wall. While onlookers gawked, the police officers slammed Mothao into a police van. He was detained in a

Manthorpe on North Korea’s crystal meth problem

International Affairs columnist Jonathan Manthorpe writes today: The hermit kingdom of North Korea is in the grip of an epidemic of addiction to the highly addictive and damaging drug methamphetamine, that the authoritarian regime of Kim Jong-un appears powerless to control. A new report by two South Korean academics, who interviewed recent defectors from the North, says that in some parts of the country half the population is addicted to what is often called crystal meth or ice. The Kim regime does not appear to have the will or the capacity to effectively confront the epidemic, which has spread over the border into neighbouring

America no longer exceptional

By Deborah Jones As the United States shutdown nears its bitter end, the global flood of American-induced hysteria is subsiding – but beneath the tainted waters a new current is gathering force, one directed away from American shores. Call it Plan B. The warring parties in the United States Senate announced a deal at mid-day Wednesday to raise America’s legislated debt ceiling, end the government shutdown and avert a default on Thursday. Senators thanked each other with emotional displays of civility. Congress showed signs of coming to heel. Even as America’s default seems to have been averted, the political brinksmanship and the shutdown

‘Truth’ and Iraq’s ‘excess’ body count

By Deborah Jones A commentary that accompanies a new report on Iraq’s war dead is more poignant than the statistics cited. The study links nearly half a million “unexpected” deaths in Iraq to the American-led invasion, between 2003 and 2011. Most of the deaths — which would not be expected had the war not happened – “can be attributed to direct violence, but about a third are attributable to indirect causes (such as from failures of health, sanitation, transportation, communication, and other systems),” said Mortality in Iraq, a report published in PLOS Medicine, a peer-review online science journal. Though sanitized by academic language and dry statistics,

1 … 119 120 121 122 123 … 130