Commentary

Controversy has dogged the event ever since sport’s governing body, FIFA, handed Qatar hosting duties back in 2010. In spite of the controversy, the World Cup will be the most-watched sporting event of the year. Here are quick guide of the good and bad.

Twitter’s dual role in fostering real-time communication and acting as an arbitrator of authoritative information is of crucial interest to academics, journalists and government agencies. If Twitter were to collapse, there’s no clear replacement in sight.

To return the French language to its rightful place as the voice of human rights, the Québec government must promote it as a tool of a human rights-based civic education, not a mandatory language. Welcoming immigrants would subsequently not be an obstacle to the French language or francophone culture — it would be a benefit.

Arrests have actually been going down each year since 2010 as more states legalize medical or recreational use of the drug. In 2019, for example, more than 500,000 marijuana possession arrests were reported, so the 2020 arrest numbers represent a single-year decline of 36%.

Of NASA’s 135 Space Shuttle missions, only about 40% launched on time. While Artemis 1 is continuing the long tradition of delayed NASA launches, there are good reasons for the high level of caution that underlies these delays.

The failure of the expected GOP “red wave” might mark a passing of the high watermark for the political fortunes of Donald Trump. Or, to put it another way, America may have passed peak Trump after he took a big share of the blame for the failure of the Republican Party to capitalise on the highest inflation figures in 40 years, America’s rising murder rate, and what Republicans’ perceive as Joe Biden’s underperformance as president.

Like Twitter, Mastodon allows users to post, follow people and organizations, and like and repost others’ posts. But while Mastodon supports many of the same social networking features as Twitter, it is not a single platform. Instead, it’s a federation of independently operated, interconnected servers.

First it was the “Great Resignation.” Then it was “nobody wants to work anymore.” Now it’s “quiet quitting.” Yet it seems like no one wants to talk about what I see as the root cause of America’s economic malaise. The inability to dictate and meaningfully control one’s own working life is the problem.

Numbers Republican candidates and politicians keep referring to as representing an “invasion” of migrants represent encounters, not the number of individuals who have come across the border. It’s a misleading and inaccurate way of describing the number of people coming into the U.S.

Drug overdose deaths from opioids continue to rise in the U.S. as a result of both the misuse of prescription opioids and the illicit drug market. But an interesting trend has developed: Opioid emergency room visits drop by nearly 8% and opioid prescriptions are modestly lower in states where marijuana is legalized.

A warning about the threat of political violence heading into the 2022 midterm elections was issued to state and local law enforcement officials by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Oct. 28.

The U.S. military learned a valuable lesson about race during the Vietnam War: Diversity does not happen without affirmative action. The conservative majority of the United States Supreme Court is about to unlearn that lesson.

The Supreme Court’s historically low public standing has prompted a national conversation about the court’s legitimacy. It’s even drawn rare public comment from three sitting Supreme Court justices. What’s referred to by experts as the problem of “judicial legitimacy” may seem abstract, but the court’s faltering public support is about more than popularity.

Is student debt cancellation unfair? It isn’t as simple as yes or no answer. It seems to violate the moral principle of following through on one’s promises. Fairness and respect, however, also demand that society address the magnitude of student debt today, and especially the burden it imposes on low-income, first-generation and Black borrowers.

Humans can best protect sea turtle hatchlings as they make their way from the beach to the sea if they know precisely when the baby turtles will appear. But predicting emergence has been difficult. By placing a simple sensor disguised as a turtle egg in the nest, it indicates when the baby turtles would emerge from the sand and swarm toward the water.

The current volume of state election litigation also has the potential to derail the safeguards that state courts can provide. When every aspect of an election becomes a lawsuit, negative effects may follow – including destabilizing elections, overwhelming already strained courts and imposing significant costs on states.

There have been shootings at U.S. schools almost every year since 1966, but in 2021 there were a record 250 shooting incidents – including any occurrence of a firearm being discharged, be it related to suicides, accidental shootings, gang-related violence or incidents at after-hours school events.

Sunak was born in the southern English port city of Southampton in 1980. His father, Yashvir, was a family doctor and his mother, Usha, a pharmacist. They were born and brought up in present-day Kenya and Tanzania, respectively, before moving to the UK. Sunak’s grandparents on both sides were from India and had migrated to East Africa.

Halloween is a time to embrace all that is disgusting, from bloody slasher films to haunted houses full of fake guts and gore. But the attraction to stuff that grosses us out goes beyond this annual holiday.

Pit bulls are not inherently dangerous. Like other dogs, they can become dangerous in certain situations, and at the hands of certain owners. But there is no defensible rationale, other than canine profiling, for condemning not only all pit bulls, but any dog with a single pit bull gene, as some laws do.

A pilot study of several hundred athletes (of all genders) at both large and small schools has revealed troubling examples of abusive coaching behavior. Data and research strongly suggest that abusive behavior is widespread and baked into the very essence of organized sports.

Government agencies and private security companies in the U.S. have found a cost-effective way to engage in warrantless surveillance of individuals, groups and places: a pay-for-access web tool called Fog Reveal.

The United States leads the world in its use of solitary confinement, locking away in isolation more of its population than any other country. The authors interviewed 100 people confined or employed in solitary confinement units to better understand what it is like from both sides of the bars. The interviews form the basis of “Way Down in the Hole,” a book published on Oct. 14, 2022.

In 1962 environmental scientist Rachel Carson published “Silent Spring,” a bestselling book that asserted that overuse of pesticides was harming the environment and threatening human health. Carson did not call for banning DDT, the most widely used pesticide at that time, but she argued for using it and similar products much more selectively and paying attention to their effects on nontargeted species.

Trump led Canadians to be more receptive to progressive policy orientations — if only as a means of distinguishing themselves from Trump’s America: he motivated Canadians to work towards a more inclusive and egalitarian society, while attempts by conservative politicians to brand themselves as the Canadian Trump led to failure.

Since nine states already have bans on affirmative action, it’s easy to know what will happen if affirmative action is outlawed. Studies of college enrollment in those states show that enrollment of Black, Hispanic and Native American undergraduate students will decline in the long term.

With the opening of the U.S. Supreme Court’s new session on Oct. 3, 2022, Clarence Thomas is arguably the most powerful justice on the nation’s highest court. He’s the longest-serving sitting justice and on track to have the lengthiest court tenure ever.