The new Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation aims to ‘revive’ liberal arts and the humanities. Yet the ‘civilisation’ model of history is now viewed as deeply flawed.
Map of the world’s CO₂ emissions for 2016. China, the United States, tne European Union, and India are the largest emitters.
World Carbon Atlas
South Africa’s Reserve Bank is facing a growing challenge of illicit financial flows and money laundering from gangs and errant businesses hell-bent on tricking regulators.
A Zimbabwean man harvests maize from a field outside Harare.
Reuters/Philimon Bulawayo
The Food and Agriculture organisation estimates that 30 to 40% of total food production is lost before it reaches the market. The losses in Africa are greater and sustainable strategies are needed.
Tonnes of plastic end up in the ocean each year, but a switch away from petroleum-based products to bio-derived and degradable composites could lessen marine pollution.
Alma Gottlieb, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Opening the minds of worried new parents to other ways of raising children may assuage fears that if they fail to ‘do the right thing,’ their children will be doomed.
A Reconciliation Pole is raised at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, B.C., in April 2017. The 17-metre red cedar pole tells the story of the time before, during and after the Indian residential school system. Thousands of copper nails representing thousands of Indigenous children who died in Canada’s residential schools were hammered into the pole by survivors, affected families, school children and others.
(THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck)
Calls to “indigenize” universities must start with listening - to Indigenous scholars and nations. And real reparation will be painful for settlers, for it will be unsettling.
Cannabis plant strains in jars in MediJean’s Health Canada-licensed tissue culture development lab are kept for research as manager Abdul Ahad works in the Richmond, B.C., facility, in this 2014 file photo.
(THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck)
The legal cannabis industry will have to develop scientific research and evidence based growth methods and technology if it is to succeed against the secretive illicit industry.
A patient suffering from dengue fever lies in a hospital bed in Peshawar, Pakistan, in October. Cases of dengue fever – a painful mosquito-borne spread disease – have doubled every decade since 1990. Environmental health experts are pointing the finger at climate change.
(AP Photo/Muhammad Sajjad)
What if we treated climate change as a health problem rather than an environmental one? There are lessons to be learned from the successful public health campaigns against smoking.
Collective prayer on October 20 in Mogadishu in tribute to the 276 dead and 300 wounded, victims of the October 14 terrorist attack. Terrorism has become a global weapon.
Mohamed Abdiwahab/AFP
Contemporary terrorism is rooted in a form of political violence dating from the French Revolution. It is rooted in social facts and is now evolving on a global scale.
The view from Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, where Australian immigrants were detained. They renamed it “Devil’s Island”.
Anne Rees
In 1921 the US imposed strict immigration quotas on Australians and detained the excess arrivals in terrible conditions. Contrast this with today’s treatment of asylum seekers on Manus Island and Nauru.
A view from the Apollo 11 spacecraft, showing the Earth rising above the moon’s horizon (July 1969).
NASA
While the fashion industry may want to address worker exploitation in their supply chains, it would open them up to tremendous legal liability. This needs to change.
Mugabe tried to impose his wife on his party as his chosen successor.
Philimon Bulawayo/Reuters
Are we witnessing the end of an era in which dictators stayed in power for decades? If so this must be good not only for Angola and Zimbabwe but for southern Africa as a whole.
In the wake of Hurricane Maria, mainland schools like this one in Florida are seeing an influx of Puerto Rican students.
AP Photo/John Raoux
A demographer at Penn State surveyed Puerto Ricans on the mainland to see if they had plans to return to the island.
Cory Watson of the Edmonton Eskimos reacts to losing to the Calgary Stampeders in the CFL West Final on Sunday. The word Eskimo signals negative and archaic stereotypes and is considered by most Inuit to be a racial slur.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh
The use of the word Eskimos for a Canadian football team needs to end. It signals negative stereotypes and is considered by most Inuit to be a racial slur.
Pious drinking.
Walter Dendy Sadler via Wikimedia Commons
For those wondering whether it is sinful to drink, even moderately, a scholar goes into the history of alcohol and its distillation to show how early monks and priests contributed to it.
It’s not all bad news at Bonn – with low carbon precincts, living infrastructure and urban networks, cities are leading the charge against climate change.
Professor in Practice on Environmental Innovation, School of Social and Environmental Sustainability, University of Glasgow, UK, National University of Singapore