Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Laura Williams
Early in 2011 the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) published guidance intended to improve treatment for alcohol dependence and harmful use in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Yet under the coalition government, the stigmatisation of alcohol dependence has worsened and become increasingly explicit in England.
This week, we announced that South Sudan is the 2011 Place of the Year and quizzed you about how much you know. Now, we present a slideshow of photos provided courtesy of Lucian Perkins and the United States Holocaust Museum.
Yesterday, we announced that South Sudan is the 2011 Place of the Year. How much do you know about Sudan, South Sudan, and Darfur? Test your knowledge with this quiz by Andrew S. Natsios.
By Andrew S. Natsios
For more than two centuries, Sudan has attracted an unusual level of attention beyond its own borders. This international interest converged in the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century as four independent forces met.
First, there is the rebellion in Darfur, which has generated greater international concern than any other recent humanitarian crisis. This long-neglected western region has been intermittently at war since the 1980s and claimed the lives of 300,000 Darfuris in its most recent phase. The rebellion beginning in 2002 led to an ongoing humanitarian emergency, costing Western governments
By Gayle Sulik
Telecom giant AT&T is currently proposing a $39 billion buyout of T-Mobile. The purchase, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ), would have negative implications for the telecommunications market, so much so that the DOJ filed a civil antitrust lawsuit on August 31st to block the proposed acquisition, stating that it would “substantially lessen competition…resulting in higher prices, poorer quality services, fewer choices and fewer innovative products.” AT&T vowed to “vigorously contest” the matter. In addition to hiring 99 lobbyists and spending $11.7 million
In light of the growing momentum of Occupy Wall Street and the international riots this summer, we’ve decided to share the following excerpt from Sharp’s Dictionary of Power and Struggle: Language of Civil Resistance in Conflicts. These 198 methods of nonviolent action have all been used in historical instances of nonviolent struggle. Without doubt, a large number of additional methods have already been used but have not been classified
By Elvin Lim
When the dust settles on the history of the Obama presidency, a major theme historians will have to consider and explain, is the startling contrast in his record in domestic policy versus his successes in foreign policy, which now include the assassination of Bin Laden and the toppling of Qaddafi. To put the matter in another way: if 2012 were 2004, and Obama would be judged purely on his foreign policy alone, he wouldn’t have to be doing any bus tours in the battleground states now.
By John Reader
A blaze of media attention recently greeted the claim that a newly discovered hominid species, , marked the transition between an older ape-like ancestor, such as Australopithecus afarensis, and a more recent representative of the human line, Homo erectus. As well as extensive TV, radio and front-page coverage, the fossils found by Lee Berger and his team at a site near Pretoria in South Africa featured prominently in National Geographic, with an illustration of the three species striding manfully across the page. In the middle, Au. sediba was marked with twelve points of similarity: six linking it to Au. afarensis on the left and six to H. erectus on the right. Though Berger did not explicitly describe Au. sediba as a link between the two species, the inference was clear and not discouraged. The Missing Link was in the news again.
By Trevor Getz
Abina and the Important Men is an interpretation of the testimony of a young, enslaved woman who won her way to freedom in late nineteenth century West Africa and then prosecuted her former master for illegally enslaving her. October 21 marks the 155th anniversary of the date that she forced a British magistrate and a jury of eleven affluent and powerful men to hear the charges she was making against an influential male land-owner.
By David S. Meyer
The Occupy Wall Street movement, several weeks strong and gaining momentum, reminds us that tea partyers aren’t the only people unhappy with the state of the nation.
The two groups are angry about some of the same things, too, especially the government bailouts for big banks — a similarity that Vice President Biden observed in remarks. They’ve taken different tacks for expressing their anger. The Occupiers camp out in New York’s Financial District, while
By Bill Wiist
As in many other aspects of the global economy, corporations continue to exert inordinate influence over aspects of trade agreements that control life and death, and the rule of democracy particularly in low and middle-income countries. Corporations are able to disproportionately influence provisions of trade agreements to a far greater extent than public health, labor, other citizen representatives, and low-income countries. Corporations are allowed greater access to the trade agreement development process. For example, in the U.S. the memberships of the advisory committees to the
Paul Woodruff
As thousands continue their march on Wall Street for a fifth straight week, an ancient story has much to tell us about the demands of justice.
The occupation of Wall Street is about a colossal failure of justice. When justice fails, anger grows into rage. And rage can tear a community into shreds. When a few people reap huge rewards they do not deserve, while others get nothing but insults — even though they have worked hard and been loyal to their workplace –- justice has failed. Bankers carry away huge bonuses, while more and more of the workers who do the heavy lifting are laid off.
What percentage of long-term care nursing home admissions is precipitated by a hospitalization? How is this changing over time? How does the risk for long-term care placement vary by patient, disease, and health system characteristics?
The hypothesis is that most institutionalization is triggered by an acute event requiring hospitalization, which then interacts with underlying risk factors to result in long-term nursing home care. Differences in percentage of patients in a nursing home 6 months post-hospitalization, by age, gender, etc. were tested.
By Joseph McCartin
As the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement gathers momentum in New York and around the country, one of its most interesting features has been the growing number of union members at the protests. For understandable reasons, unions have traditionally avoided close involvement with demonstrations as spontaneous as OWS.
This Day in World History – Why does most every country in the world agree on how to determine what time it is? You can thank the International Prime Meridian Conference, which began on October 13, 1884, and lasted nearly ten days. The twenty-five countries that gathered in Washington , D.C., agreed to accept the line of longitude that passed through Britain’s Royal Observatory as the prime meridian—the line of 0° longitude (just as the Equator is 0° latitude). The nations also agreed that the time at Greenwich would be the standard time against which all other times would be compared—Greenwich Mean Time.
By Vassilis Monastiriotis
After fifteen years of fast growth and, by Greek standards, monumental achievements (from EMU accession in 2001 to winning the UEFA Championship in 2004), Greece has found itself at the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008/09 again at the epicentre of global attention. But this time the publicity is unintended and for all the wrong reasons.