Stalled out

Knocking Out Pain in Livestock: Can Technology Succeed Where Morality has Stalled?

Though the vegetarian movement sparked by Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation has achieved some success, there is more animal suffering caused today due to factory farming than there was when the book was originally written. In this paper, I argue that there may be a technological solution to the problem of animal suffering in intensive factory farming operations. In particular, I suggest tha...

Human cloning action stalled

‘Human dignity is inviolable. To respect and protect is the duty of all state authority.’ Thus begins the first article of the German constitution, the ‘Grundgesetz’. Many of the political debates of the last decades, from abortion to euthanasia, have been concerned with the interpretation of the concept of human dignity (‘Die Würde des Menschen’ – in a more literal translation: The dignity of ...

Has Thailand's fertility decline stalled?

Thailand is 1 of the third world countries in which a very substantial fertility decline has occurred during the last 2 decades. However, there has been some recent concern, based on fertility rates derived from 3 national contraceptive prevalence surveys conducted in 1978/1979, 1981, and 1984, that the fertility decline may have lost momentum at a level well above replacement fertility. New ...

The International Context of Morocco’s Stalled Democratisation

The Stalled Recovery of the Iraqi Marshes

The Iraqi (Mesopotamian) Marshes, an extensive wetlands system in Iraq, has been heavily impacted by both human and climate forces over the past decades. In the period leading up to the Second Gulf War in 2002, the marshlands were shrinking due to both a policy of draining and water diversion in Iraq and construction of dams upstream on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Following the war through...