What is new in New Caledonia? There was a referendum on Sunday 4 November in New Caledonia, a Pacific island territory that is under French sovereignty. The question was whether it should become an independent […]
On Friday 26th October, Ireland goes to the polls to vote in the presidential election and the blasphemy referendum. The country recently voted overwhelmingly to repeal the eighth amendment, legalising abortion. With attitudes modernising and […]
What happened last week in Australian federal politics? The Australian government lost its parliamentary majority in a by-election (a special election in only one constituency, to fill a seat whose MP has died or resigned) […]
Macedonia had a referendum on Sunday 30 September 2018 on whether to accept the agreement with Greece about the country’s name that was intended to end a long dispute between the two countries about who […]
When Donna Strickland was woken at 5am by a call from the Nobel Prize committee, her first thought was that she was being prank-called. A woman had not been awarded the coveted prize for physics […]
What are ‘midterm elections’? Americans go to the polls on Tuesday 6 November for the ‘midterm elections.’ ‘Midterm’ means that these are elections that take place in the middle of the President’s four-year term of […]
The inspiring and very true story written by a colleague of mine, Peter Apps, a columnist for Reuters. I first met him at a talk he gave on the Future of War at Chatham House and he was by far the […]
How do elections in Sweden work? Sweden holds parliamentary elections every four years. There is only one chamber in the Swedish parliament (the Rijksdag), so these results decide who forms the government – there are […]
‘I do not think the Russian general staff is so naive as to think this is a definite long term alliance. There will naturally be mutual wariness’. (Alexander Gabuev, chair of the Rusia in the […]
On Tuesday Economist Simon Wren-Lewis retweeted a post from the Stumbling and Mumbling blog, written by Chris Dillow, entitled ‘The BBC’s Bias Against Understanding’. The blog post tackles the broadcaster’s ‘preference for reporting splits and divisions […]
