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On the road with the Newfoundland diaspora

In a journalist’s career there are many stories to tell. Sometimes you are a local journalist telling a local story to a local audience. Other times you are a foreigner in a foreign land trying to tell a foreign story to the folks back home. In either case it’s usually someone else’s story you are telling, not your own. I’ve never been much interested in “local” stories or covering my own home town. It’s just too close to home, especially in a small city like St. John’s, Newfoundland, where you are pretty well guaranteed to know or have some connection

Overdrawn: Earth Overshoot Day

Imagine that your income isn’t quite covering your expenses. Every month you run out of cash just before you get paid. But now, imagine that you find you’re running out of money sooner with each passing month, trying to cover the gap by running up your credit card. At first it’s just a few days, then a week, then more. Pretty soon, you would know you had a problem. That’s almost exactly the situation we’re in as a species, and yet we’re only very dimly aware of our problem. And not just any problem, but one which, left unattended, will with

Obstacles temper hopes for new global role for Iran

By allowing the election to Iran’s presidency of moderate Hassan Rouhani, the country’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has tacitly admitted his own past blunders and shown a desire for better relations with Washington and Europe.  But although the prospects of dialogue with Tehran look better than they have for many years, there are still formidable obstacles around Iran’s nuclear ambitions and resolution of its role in the basic schisms in the Middle East, writes international affairs analyst Jonathan Manthorpe in his new column today. It is available with a $1 day pass for the entire site, or by subscription.  

Egypt is in for a prolonged struggle

 Egypt’s torment in the undertow of the Arab Spring is a textbook example of failure, writes international affairs analyst Jonathan Manthorpe in his new column.  Manthorpe’s piece is available with a $1 day pass for the entire site, or by subscription.  

Not finished with Earth

Well, damn. Seems we’ll be stuck on this spinning rock in space a while longer: humanity’s best shot at escape died a heavenly death this week. NASA announced it can’t fix the broken Kepler Spacecraft, tasked with solving an earth-shaking question, “Are Earths in the habitable zone of stars like our sun common or rare?”  Escape has been our thing for a while now. The Kepler mission (“A Search for Habitable Planets”) was just the latest. There was Icarus, of course. There are multiple religious or superstitious versions of an afterlife. There was the euphoria over the Age of Flight, illustrated in this

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