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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.
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Apr 2, 2024 | 
mercatornet.com | Louis March |Sonia McGarrity |Ida Gazzola
The Lancet is the world’s oldest and most referenced peer-reviewed medical journal. Rivalling the New England Journal of Medicine in global influence, it was founded in England in 1823. The Lancet has rock-solid credibility, despite the rare occasion when a paper is retracted (notably, a 2020 Big Pharma-friendly screed against hydroxychloroquine).
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Apr 2, 2024 | 
mercatornet.com | Karl Stephan |Sonia McGarrity |Ida Gazzola
Some accidents are simple: two cars collide on a freeway, a tree falls on a jogger, lightning hits a golfer. Others require a chain of events, each of which is unlikely, and so are much rarer than the simple kind. The sequence of occurrences, each one fairly harmless by itself, which led to the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore Harbor on last Tuesday, March 26, included things that by themselves would cause few if any major problems.
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Apr 2, 2024 | 
mercatornet.com | Michael Cook |Mathew Otieno |Sonia McGarrity
In the United States, Australia, and Europe there can be no cause more idealistic, more popular, and more progressive than the abolition of female genital mutilation (FGM). Many countries have banned it; NGOs educate people about it. The United Nations has proclaimed February 6 as International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation. According to the World Health Organization, FGM has been declining over the past 30 years.
