Category: Featured

Corporations, universities, governments, and international organisations have all built virtual offices on islands in Second Life. They use these spaces to have meetings, where digital representations of their employees, officials, academics and students can converse when they cannot meet physically. Second Life also offers these organisations opportunities to offer and deliver services, publish information and marketing material and even sell goods.…

The Indian parliament is full of socialists, communists, nationalists and most of all, opportunists who would jump on any issue that could be portrayed as anti-poor or anti-farmer. So onlookers might think it easy for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to play safe and let the WTO talks falter.…

And so member governments have to obey. If a dispute settlement body panel rules that a government is breaking a WTO rule, then they must change a policy or even a law, if it is at fault. And this would apply even if that law itself was based on rules laid down by a regional international grouping such as the European Union (EU) or the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).…

And just to underline the importance of European law: it is the highest authority in Europe. No supreme court within the 27 member countries of the EU can challenge it. National laws must comply with EU regulations and directives. If they do not, then anyone – a consumer, a company, or a government – can ask the European Court of Justice (ECJ) to make a ruling saying a national law must be changed, or that an action was in breach of EU law.…

Multilateralism has been hailed as the natural evolution from the bipolar world order that marked the period after World War II – with influence split between the camps of US and the Soviet Union – and the unipolar order based on the power and influence of the US since the end of the Cold War.…

Outside Ireland, the recent passing of at 85 of Dr. P.J. Hillery – “Paddy” to his friends -was little noticed yet his achievements as a statesman were huge.

The son of a country doctor, he became a general practitioner himself but slipped, unobtrusively at first, into Irish politics.…

And with Lebanese political leaders looking to outside powers to consolidate their domestic position, whether you are pro- or anti- Western depends on the politics of the day.
But that, like any brief summary of Lebanon, is a simplification, as although the Hizbullah led opposition is ostensibly anti-Western, strongly backed by Iran and ardently anti-Zionist, fellow opposition party the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) is predominantly Christian and pro-Western.…

Nowadays this is a little unfair. Members of the European Parliament – MEPs – have made important differences to the lives of EU citizens, particularly in the fields of the environment, consumer protection, energy and trade in recent years. Much of the Parliament’s committee work is of a peerless quality.…