Australia is swimming – literally – in crises at the moment. Parts of the eastern coast are under water at the moment with once-in-a-hundred years flooding. The Covid-19 pandemic has been contained with masking and lockdowns, but everyone is still jittery. A Royal Commission exposed an elder abuse crisis in nursing homes. There’s a hidden […]
Three weeks after the Governor of the US State of Texas announced an end to all Coronavirus lockdown restrictions, including the mandatory use of facemasks, and two weeks after those measures took effect, cases of Covid are still falling in the Lone Star state. In the first week of March, when the announcement was […]
Another step in “an explosion of new techniques and ideas for studying early development” of human embryos came last week from Israel. Researchers there have successfully grown mouse embryos for 12 days, which is about half the animal’s natural gestation period. The rough equivalent for a human would be a first-trimestre baby. They published an article […]
Since February 1st a South East Asian country that rarely makes the news here in Ireland has been gradually and tragically turning into a bloodbath. For Myanmar (or Burma) this is in some ways a new eruption of a wound that has afflicted the country for decades, you could say generations. In other ways, it […]
Canada’s House of Commons has passed a revised bill which expands access to euthanasia, eventually including people suffering solely from mental illnesses. The bill is intended to amend the current law so that it will comply with a 2019 Quebec Superior Court ruling which struck down a provision that allows assisted dying only for intolerably suffering individuals […]
An Australian surrogacy lobby has called for commercial surrogacy to be legalised in Australia. It is currently banned in all of the country’s states. However, in 2019-20 275 babies born overseas to surrogate mothers were granted Australian citizenship, the highest number on record. Thailand and India, formerly popular destinations, no longer allow foreigners to employ surrogate mothers, […]
Two weeks ago, the state of Texas lifted its mandate for the public to wear facemasks. At the time, President Biden said it was a grossly irresponsible move and “neandarthal thinking“. Obviously, the numbers in Texas are worth watching in the weeks and months to come, and we will do that, here at Gript, in […]
Last week, a Polish member of the European Parliament, Dominik Tarczynski of the governing Law and Justice (PiS) Party, delivered a rousing speech. In it, he excoriated the EU for its ongoing attempts to bully Poland into accepting left liberal decrees that have nothing whatsoever to do with the concept of a voluntary union based […]
A scandalous event is set to shake South Africa in the near future: A former president of this country could soon be in prison. The country’s deputy chief justice, Justice Raymond Zondo, has called on the Constitutional Court to find former president Jacob Zuma in contempt of court and requested the “Apex Court” to sentence […]
A newly published global overview report in the Journal of Human Reproduction has found that the number of twins being born in the last 30 years has increased in all regions of the world. This, in the main, is down to increased access to IVF, fertility treatments and the postponement of having children until later […]
Since the inclusion of China into the World Trade Organization (WTO) by the Clinton Administration, some politicians in the United States have continued to labour under a dubious illusion: that after the advancement of China’s economy, its politics will gradually democratize. This illusion has finally been shattered by recent events. Evidence that has gradually emerged […]
On March 8, the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy published a comprehensive report whose title speaks for itself: The Uyghur Genocide: An Examination of China’s Breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The report arrives at the same conclusion as the former Trump administration and states that China’s treatment of the Uyghurs meets all of […]