Sorry to disappoint, but today will feature news not of the Wuflu variety. Instead, I wanted to bring you another update in Japan’s steady population decline. Perhaps it is no surprise, but for the ninth year running the Japanese population has declined. According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, at the beginning of October last year […]
The Covid-19 crisis highlights how the interests of individual patients and those of public health officials can sometimes be at odds. In other words, the general advice that government officials give from a public health perspective – looking at the proverbial bigger picture, the statistical aggregate – might not actually be the best advice for […]
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has been accused of sexual assault by a former staffer named Tara Reade. Such a serious allegation against a presidential candidate would normally be a loud, leading, global story. Instead, America’s biggest mainstream news outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN have remained eerily quiet about the Tara Reade accusations. […]
Right from the get-go, I have to admit that Planet of the Humans, a documentary about the environmental movement produced by Michael Moore, is unfair, very unfair. And unkind, too, very unkind, to Al Gore. Alas. But as the Sierra Club might have said, you can’t produce clean, green biomass energy without levelling forests. Planet of […]
Easy to miss the distinction here, but it’s there, all right. He’s not praying “for the people of Europe”, or even, “to grant wisdom to European leaders”, or anything like that. He’s praying for “the unity of the European Union”. On the feast of St. Catherine of Siena, Doctor of the Church and Patroness of […]
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.