In February 2020, in the middle of the first wave of coronavirus infections in China, Hong Kong’s emeritus bishop Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun visited the United States and spoke with members of Congress. Cardinal Zen, a vocal supporter of Hong Kong’s democratic movement and a passionate defender of the underground Catholic church, painted a […]
At midnight tonight New Zealand’s strict lockdown of 33 days will be slightly eased. As you can imagine, I cannot wait. We will be able to get a few takeout coffees, the children will be able to see their grandparents again and, most importantly, some people can head back to work and some businesses can […]
Last week, two Californian doctors, Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi, held a press conference in Bakerfield, California, to release data which, they claimed, shows that the present lockdown measures in the United States and most of the rest of the world, including Ireland, are an unnecessary over-reaction. In their statement, which has been widely criticised […]
Last year human relations think tank Reventure (A Future that Works) published a report on how the loneliness “epidemic” is impacting workplaces in Australia. Now, in the middle of another epidemic that is shaking economies and the world of work, feeling isolated in a huge, open plan office seems the least of a worker’s worries. MercatorNet asked Reventure’s managing director, Dr Lindsay McMillian, […]
Human Rights Watch is one of the most prominent and influential human rights advocacy groups in the world. It is particularly influential in the United States where it is headquartered. It describes itself as “roughly 450 people of 70-plus nationalities who are country experts, lawyers, journalists, and others who work to protect the most at […]
The dawn of mandatory vaccinations does seem to be upon us, but before that happens, perhaps we should take pause and ask: are we really willing to give up so much freedom from state-intrusion over a disease that appears to be as misunderstood as it is over-hyped?
Dr Chen Shih-Chung writes on the needs for international health organisations to recognize Taiwan in order to protect global health security.
In a welcome move, the Government has announced that this summer it will set out details of its plans to ban under-18s from undergoing sex-changes, with equalities minister Liz Truss saying that the development was about ensuring that under-18s were ‘“protected from decisions that they could make, that are irreversible in the future”’; she insisted: […]
A controversial sex education programme that taught children as young as six about touching their “private parts” has been withdrawn by a council in Britain following a backlash from parents. The Telegraph reports that the “All About Me” syllabus, which was rolled out at over 200 primary schools across Warwickshire, proposed that children should learn […]
The phrase ‘missing Mass’ used to refer to non-attendance at Sunday Mass and was a serious omission for any Catholic. If it was habitual it could lead to a call from the local priest. Today that would be represented as clerical policing rather than an act of pastoral outreach. In fact, in a homogeneous religious […]
The race is on to produce a COVID-19 vaccine: teams are working hard and fast across the world. We all long to see a vaccine in record time – but must, of course, have an eye to ethics too. Debates on vaccine ethics tend to focus on risks, whether to participants in clinical trials, or […]
Social media giant, Facebook, is under fire again for using biased ‘fact-checkers’ to label reporting as ‘fake news’. The New York Post, one of the most long-established newspapers in the U.S., hit back at Facebook this week saying that the platform’s “‘fact-checkers’ are the real fake news after censoring Post story”. As the newspaper explained: […]