Saudi Gazette/ Opinion/ Editorial

Opinion

1 - 10 from 301 . In "Opinion / Editorial"

April 26, 2018

Ireland weeps as Apple starts to pay it $13 billion

Small countries with constrained economies long ago discovered interesting ways of making a living. There was, for instance, the issue of ever more attractive postage stamps, some issued in sufficiently small numbers as to make them highly collectable by philatelists around the world. Small nations have also set themselves up as registries for international shipping and more famously as offshore financial centers.Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, Andorra and San Marino are small ...

April 25, 2018

The rising Erdogan-Trump confrontation

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a powerful, even at times capricious, leader on a par with the US and Russian presidents, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. All three are risk-takers, which means when they come up against each other, the outcome is very far from predictable.For better or worse, Erdogan has transformed Turkey into a self-confident and assertive power at the key land and maritime crossroads between Asia and ...

April 24, 2018

Karadic’s pathetic protest

The former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadic is appealing his conviction and 40 year sentence for genocide and war crimes. He is claiming that his trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague was political. His conviction in March 2016 was therefore wrong.The ICTY was wound up last year following the conviction of Karadic’s military henchman Ratko Mladic, who was also jailed for 40 ...

April 23, 2018

A new opportunity in Libya?

US President George W. Bush and his neocon advisers knew what would become of Iraq once the US invaded that country and toppled Saddam Hussein. His successor Barack Obama was not under the influence of neocons and came to power on an anti-war platform. But what Obama, a Nobel Peace laureate, did to Libya is no different from what Bush did to Iraq.If destroying Saddam’s non-existing weapons of mass destruction ...

April 22, 2018

Nowhere to breathe

You see it, smell it, taste and feel it. It is called pollution and more than 95 percent of the world’s population is currently breathing unhealthy air.According to the annual State of Global Air Report, air pollution is the fourth highest cause of death among all health risks globally. Only high blood pressure, diet and smoking are more dangerous. The report says exposure to air pollution leads to strokes, heart ...

April 21, 2018

Nightmare in the sky

If people sometimes wonder how they might die, they rarely imagine that they could be sucked out of an airplane, as that scenario seems like something from a horror movie.But what happens on the silver screen made it into real life after an engine of a Southwest Airlines plane in Philadelphia broke up in flight over 32,000 feet in the air. The debris shattered a window and the rapid decompression ...

April 20, 2018

The Trump-Kim nuclear talks

It is shameful that many in the US liberal establishment are genuinely hoping that President Donald Trump will fall flat on his face when he actually has face-to-face talks with the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. They would rejoice at the humiliation of their president, even though if Trump can pull off this audacious piece of summitry and persuade Kim to ditch his nuclear arsenal, the United States and the ...

Theresa May

April 19, 2018

Theresa May’s blunder

The law of unintended consequences has hit home with a vengeance in the UK. The political victim is Prime Minister Theresa May but the real victims are up to half a million people living in Great Britain who came to the country before 1971 from the British Commonwealth, the independent states that emerged from much of the old British Empire.These people fell foul of a get-tough policy on immigration May ...

April 18, 2018

Beware World Cup ticket touts

For football fans who travel to Russia for the World Cup starting this June, heartache may not just come because their teams have lost; they may not have managed to get in to see the match because their tickets are invalid.FIFA, the sport’s world governing body, is currently issuing tickets and insists it is the only authorized seller. Considerable measures have been taken to stop fraud. Each ticket has a ...

April 17, 2018

Cutting emissions at sea

FOR most people, unless they live near a port, seeing an ocean-going vessel is a rarity. Around 90 percent of world trade is carried by merchant vessels which spend the greater part of their time operating far out to sea. But when a ship is close to shore, it is not unusual to watch a plume of black smoke rising from its funnel.The burning of heavy fuel oil by ships’ ...