Last year Asia Bibi, a Pakistani Catholic woman accused of blasphemy against Islam, arrived to make a new life in Canada with her family. After being convicted and sentenced to death, she had languished in jail for ten years. Her lawyers received death threats. But Asia Bibi is far from being the only Pakistani Christian […]
Population density and the proportion of society that is elderly quickly emerged as significant factors in the spread of COVID-19. Social distancing has been widely used as an effective way to avoid transmission, but is complex to implement in a very densely populated city without draconian government action. More than 55 percent of the world’s population is thought to […]
With the Covid-19 pandemic dominating headlines, many important issues have been forgotten or shelved. One of those is the plight of Uyghurs and other persecuted minorities in Xinjiang in northwestern China. I’d like to clarify the often-conflicting reports on Xinjiang and drill down into the demographic statistics to give an accurate picture of the balance […]
The two most powerful tools that we have in the fight against Covid -19 are lockdown and testing. Locking the country down is extremely costly in human and financial terms. Each month of lockdown costs the state billions of Euro in direct welfare supports and each week of lockdown sends more and more businesses into […]
Covid-19 is raising new moral issues for us to consider. What once were unlikely dilemmas in moral philosophy textbooks are now matters of urgent practical concern. Two matters seem to stand out: what we owe poorer countries in the context of a lethal viral pandemic where life-saving resources are scarce, and what we owe our […]
In my last post I looked at the end of the coronavirus and how the world will react in the light of China’s lies, threats and risky behaviour which has left so many people dead around the world and so much of the world’s economy in free-fall. Today I want to briefly discuss another impact […]
The World Health Organization is being criticised for being too close to China, one of his major funders. Director-General Tedros Adhanom has been loud in his praise of China’s management of the epidemic and has failed (in the eyes of his critics) to point out its shortcomings. In a blistering article in Foreign Policy, a […]
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The Gardaí are struggling to walk the fine line as a result of the emergency regulations enacted by the Government. On the one hand, they are reassuring the public that resorting to arrest and sanction to deter people from breaking the restrictions on movement would be a last recourse and the hope would be that […]
Given the spread of misinformation about Covid-19, Just Facts is providing a trove of rigorously documented facts about this disease and its impacts. These include some vital facts that have been absent or misreported in much of the media’s coverage of this issue. This research also includes a groundbreaking study to determine the lethality of Covid-19 based […]
Every now and then, and especially in distressed times such as these, it’s good to spotlight an engineer who has done the right thing, and keeps doing the right thing. Today I’m going to do that with Peter P. Tsai, who is credited with inventing the electrostatic non-woven filter used in the N95-type disposable masks […]
The governments Just Transition Strategy, with its clear priority on achieving the greatest levels of decarbonisation possible, is going to have a profound impact on Irish agriculture. We can take that as read. If implemented, it will also entirely reshape Ireland’s industrial landscape and, in particular the traditional industrial model that has revolved around Bord […]