Category: Greed

Turkey (Conversation) – The last regional elections were held on March 30, 2014, and resulted in the victory of the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP), which won 43% of the votes. While this year’s elections once again marked a victory for the AKP, with the AKP-MHP (Nationalist Movement Party) alliance taking 51.6% of the vote, it also shook the foundations of the AKP’s enduring rule. A significant breakthrough made by the opposition alliance, CHP (Republican People’s Party) and the Good Party (İP), which took control of big cities like…

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United States (Conversation) – A man sits in a doctor’s office after months of his wife’s increasingly desperate pleas for him to seek professional help for his constant coughing. In the end, she was the one who booked his appointment and even drove him there. Another man is meeting with his manager, anticipating derision and mockery when he mentions he needs to reduce his workload to accommodate the birth of his first child. A third man has a violent encounter outside a pub, fuelled by binge drinking and machismo. He…

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United Kingdom (Conversation) – Demand for food is increasing rapidly – the global population is expected to reach 11.2 billion by 2100. To keep up with the additional mouths to feed, intensive farming practices have maximised production, but often at the expense of the environment and human health. Livestock is reared to maximise economic returns, which often means animals are kept in close confinement with each other, increasing the risk of disease. As a result, antibiotics are often used to treat animals destined for human consumption, but relying on them…

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Africa (Conversation) – How do we know whether women are achieving equitable levels of political representation? For many years, scholars have focused on women’s representation in legislatures. But in many African states power is in fact concentrated in the executive branch. In most African countries heads of state and cabinet ministers enjoy significant discretion over resource distribution and policy agendas. This means that it’s important to pay close attention to who holds executive posts when trying to work out the role of women in a particular country. Ethiopia and Rwanda…

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United States (Conversation) – Many were horrified by the viral video of New York City police officers ripping Jazmine Headley’s one-year-old from her arms as she cried out, “They’re hurting my son!” On Dec. 7, 2018, Headley was waiting in a Brooklyn, N.Y., social services office when guards asked her to leave because she was sitting on the floor of the overcrowded office. She refused to leave. She was waiting to speak with someone about assistance for childcare for her son, which had just been revoked. Headley needed the childcare…

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Mexico (GV) – Nearly a year and a half after it erupted in the United States, the #MeToo movement shows no signs of fading worldwide. Since March 23 and 24, a surge of sexual assault allegations in the universe of the film, the arts, academia, and the media is overflowing Mexican Twitter, with more and more women joining in and recounting their experiences. The surge was kicked off by a tweet by Ana G. González in which she accused a well-known journalist of physically assaulting “a long list of women,” one of them being…

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World Wide (Conversation) – When it comes to dealing with online hate speech, we’ve ended up in the worst of all possible worlds. On the one hand, you have social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter that seem extremely reluctant to ban white supremacists and actual neo-Nazis, but enthusiastically enforce their own capricious terms of service to keep adults safe from such harmful things as the female nipple. That is, until something horrific happens, such as the Christchurch massacre, when they decide — after the fact — that some content…

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Australia (Conversation) – Around 80% of secondary school students who had classes about diverse religions claim to have positive views of Muslims. This compares to around 70% who had not attended such classes. Our national study of Australian Generation Z teens (those born around the mid-1990s to mid-2000s) showed teens who had been exposed to education about diverse religions and worldviews were more tolerant of religious minorities, including Muslims and Hindus, than those who hadn’t. General religious education is distinct from religious instruction, which is taught by teachers or volunteers…

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World Wide (Conversation) – Want to get into politics? It helps if you come from the right family. Our new study, published in the journal Historical Social Research in December 2018, shows that, on average, one in 10 world leaders comes from households with political ties. We examined the backgrounds of 1,029 political executives – that is, presidents and prime ministers – in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and Latin America from 2000 to 2017. We found that 119, or 12 percent, of all world leaders belonged to a…

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World WIde (Yes) – The first time I read the phrase “year of the woman” was in relation to the 1992 election. That year the most women ever—four—had been elected to serve in the U.S. Senate. Today, there are 25. And after millions of women across the world marched in protest of Donald Trump’s presidency, the explosion of the #MeToo movement, and last year’s record-breaking election of women to Congress—particularly women of color—the label endures. Truth is, every year is the “year of the woman.” Women have always been significant actors…

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