Month: March 2019

Nineteenth-century engraving. Wikimedia Commons / FS Church. Public domain.Today’s drug policies are finally under debate. Above all, they are in crisis. Their stated objective was to establish a policy to control numerous hazardous substances, to prevent the addictive behaviours that these substances arouse in those who consume them. These substances were considered so dangerous that…

While at a protest at Los Angeles International Airport against President Trump’s Muslim ban, I watched as a white woman approached two Muslim women in headscarves. She carried with her Shepard Fairey’s now-inescapable American hijab poster—which depicts a Muslim woman wearing an American flag print headscarf—and plastered on her face was the kind of expectant…

A few months after bubonic plague had allegedly arrived in San Francisco and thus finally reached the Americas for the very first time, the popular local newspaper San Francisco Call arrived at its own diagnosis. What had plagued the city, the bay area and the minds of the people therein was not plague, but a…

Have you noticed how great America is again? We’ll forgive you if you weren’t taking detailed notes. After all, we were warned we were going to be doing so much winning in 2017 that we’d get tired of winning. Thankfully, the White House is on the case. In their daily email briefing, they made sure…

The National Assembly building in Luanda, Angola. David Stanley/Flickr. Some rights reserved. 99% of Angolans, those who are neither related nor have befriended the ruling party Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) elites, are facing yet another backlash. And there have been more than a few in the last 36 years. Now the threat…

On Wednesday evening, Senator Jeff Sessions was confirmed as the newest Attorney General of the United States. The vote comes after a stunning series of events for President Donald Trump’s cabinet picks, including the historic vote for Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, whose confirmation was made official after Vice President Mike Pence cast a tie-breaking vote. Sessions’ confirmation…

Police in Paris. Demotix/ Cesar Dezfuli. All rights reserved. Rosemary Bechler(RB):  Francesco, you have analysed in some detail the relatively recent French plan to ‘combat radicalization’, following a path previously trodden in the UK and the Netherlands. Could you explain how, in your view, this approach to counter-terrorism influenced the nature of the French response…

For decades, customers have complained that McDonald’s straws were pretty much useless when used to drink milkshakes. The flimsy, thin straw would buckle under the power of your own suction. With most milkshakes, the problem solves itself as the shake melted and became thinner. But McDonald’s gum-based processed shakes didn’t really melt. They just sort…

Just over two years have passed since Russia annexed Crimea in March 2014. Since then, the peninsula has remained in international limbo and has become something of an information vacuum for outside observers. Yet before the Ukrainian crisis began in late 2013, there was a lack of information and deep understanding not just of Crimea,…

Tyson Jost of the Colorado Avalanche took a cross-ice pass from his teammate and slid a shot past the Minnesota Wild’​s goalie to score his first ever NHL goal in just his fourth game. As you can see from the video above, it was all a little too much for his grandpa Jim to process….