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May 15, 2024 | 
mercatornet.com | Mathew Otieno |Gabriel A. Andrade |Michael Cook |James Parker
The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) recently made a minor splash in the international news when, towards the end of last month, it sent Apple a letter bearing a series of questions regarding the company’s possible usage of conflict minerals from the country’s benighted east.
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Apr 25, 2024 | 
mercatornet.com | Mathew Otieno |Gabriel A. Andrade |Michael Cook |James Parker
It’s been a year since war broke out in Sudan. Sadly, it doesn’t look like it will end any time soon. It has festered largely outside the world’s eye, overshadowed by the more famous conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine. Until the European Union, to its credit, stepped up last week, the international community spectacularly failed to answer calls for humanitarian assistance.
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Apr 15, 2024 | 
mercatornet.com | Mathew Otieno |James Parker |Michael Cook |Faith Kuzma
Earlier this month, Mokgweetsi Masisi, the president of Botswana, offered to send Germany 20,000 of his country’s elephants. He was reacting to the German government’s plan to restrict the importation, by German hunters, of hunting trophies from Africa. “This is not a joke,” the president reportedly said of his offer. Mr Masisi may not have been joking, but his gambit definitely did have a humorous angle.
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Apr 9, 2024 | 
mercatornet.com | Antonio Graceffo |Mathew Otieno |Sonia McGarrity
The human rights situation in Venezuela has been dire for many years, with little indication of improvement. Since 2014, there have been 15,800 politically motivated arrests, and over 270 political prisoners continue to languish in Venezuelan jails. The misguided economic policies implemented by successive socialist governments have led to 19 million people facing malnutrition and a severe lack of healthcare.
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Apr 9, 2024 | 
mercatornet.com | Louis March |Mathew Otieno |Sonia McGarrity
Demographic replacement is nothing new. Ask the Carthaginians. How about American Indians? Could Australian Aboriginals and Rohingya Muslims weigh in as well? Prussians? Palestinians? There are myriad examples. This sordid business ever bedevils us. CyprusCyprus is swamped. With the EU’s highest per capita rate of asylum seekers, half of the school children in Europe’s only divided capital, Nicosia, are of migrant background.
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Apr 9, 2024 | 
mercatornet.com | Michael Cook |Mathew Otieno |Sonia McGarrity
The news is bad. Israel is pounding Gaza, with tens of thousands of deaths. Ukraine is barely holding its own against Russia. China might invade Taiwan. The Antarctic ice sheet might break up. Transgender ideology is spreading everywhere. Birth rates are dropping. And on and on. "Humankind cannot bear very much reality," wrote T.S. Eliot. Perhaps that is why TikTok, Instagram and other social media are turning the minds of Gen Z to glop. Sorry. Once you’re started, it’s hard to stop.
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Apr 5, 2024 | 
mercatornet.com | Faith Kuzma |Mathew Otieno |Sonia McGarrity
WPATH, or the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, is respected as the peak body for transgender medicine. Its “standards of care” (SOC) were once regarded as a benchmark for ethical and effective treatment for minors and adults. The eighth edition (SOC8) , which was released in 2022, has been translated into ten languages. Its prestige, however, has been tarnished by the leak of hundreds of posts from an internal messaging forum.
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Apr 4, 2024 | 
mercatornet.com | David Jones |Mathew Otieno |Sonia McGarrity
In 1997, Oregon became the first jurisdiction to legalise physician-assisted suicide for people with a terminal illness. Since then, numbers have increased year-on-year, and this shows no sign of slowing. Last week, Oregon produced its 26th report. This shows that 2023 saw a 20 percent increase in assisted suicide compared to 2022, which itself had been a record-breaking year. Last year, at least 367 people died by assisted suicide, an average of one a day.
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Apr 4, 2024 | 
mercatornet.com | Kurt Mahlburg |Mathew Otieno |Sonia McGarrity
This year’s was a particularly memorable April Fools’ Day. First, Scotland’s new Hate Crime and Public Order Act came into force, making it illegal to “stir up hatred” against people based on their age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or other protected characteristics. It’s a fool’s errand to try to police hatred — a subjective and internalised feeling if ever there was one — not to mention the even more ambiguous “crime” of stirring up hatred.
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Apr 2, 2024 | 
mercatornet.com | Mathew Otieno |Sonia McGarrity
Female genital cutting is a barbarous practice that should have been consigned to the ash-heap of history long before this world experienced the pleasure of beholding my angelic baby face. Unfortunately, however, for the first time after a steady decline over two decades, it is now on the rise worldwide. Sadly, the biggest contributors to this increase are a few African countries where the custom has never been sufficiently stigmatised. And the main factor behind it is rapid population growth.
