Today, new kinds of space travel are emerging. The year 2001 marked the beginning of space tourism, as a wealthy California businessman, Dennis Tito, became the first paying passenger for a space flight. He paid $20 million to be launched by Soyuz TM-32 via arrangements made between an American company called Space Adventures and a Russian company MirCorp, which oversaw the Mir space station. The ticket sale was to fund the maintenance of the Mir space station; however, a premature deorbit decision diverted Tito’s destination to the International Space Station…
Read MoreHUMANITARIAN GOVERNANCE CHALLENGES FOR HUMANITARIAN AID AND DISASTER MANAGEMENT
Our notion that humanitarian governance must be understood as the interplay of different actors tallies with theories on governance. However, writing about humanitarian governance tends to overly focus on the international humanitarian system, neglecting local and national actors’ involvement. Also, governance theories of the 1990s show that state power is layered and fragmented, and that attaining collective purposes is not solely the domain of the state. The shift from ‘government’ to ‘governance’, showed how “the state becomes a collection of inter-organizational networks made up of governmental and societal actors with…
Read MoreWORLD CONFLICTS: CHANGING NATURE OF WARFARE
A few decades ago, it was relatively easy to talk about the nature of warfare, as it was intimately linked to statecraft, so one identified an adversary state and prepared oneself accordingly. In fact, one could even quantify threats and capabilities to arrive at a predictable outcome. In the 21st century, this is no longer so. Shades of grey have crept in; threats are not easy to quantify and, sometimes, even to identify. There is a merging, a fusion of various types of warfare; international rules do not apply to…
Read MoreDISAPPEARING STATES, STATELESSNESS AND RELOCATION
Among the various environmental problems that cause the displacement of people from their habitats, none rivals the potential effects of sea level rise as a result of human-induced changes in the earth ́s climate. Lately, the climate change discourse has become aware of a possible consequence of climate change, the disappearance of the entire territory of a state. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) determines that the earth is warming up. The linear warming trend for the last 50 years is twice that compared to the same over 100…
Read MoreFAKE NEWS OR TRUE LIES?: REFLECTION ABOUT PROBLEMATIC CONTENT
Scholars in different scientific fields and practitioners are analyzing the rise of production and diffusion of fake news and problematic information that is rapidly contaminating the digital world. Fake news, defined as “news articles that are intentionally and verifiably false, and could mislead readers”, has just recently gained scholarly attention predominantly in the fields of journalism, psychology and political sciences. Less is done empirically in the marketing and consumer behaviour literature, with some recent and few exceptions. Fake news represents only one aspect of the ongoing crisis of problematic information,…
Read MoreTHE INEVITABLE SPACE MILITARISATION NOT WEAPONISATION
The satellites are increasingly being utilised as dual-use (can be used for both military and non-military purposes). A number of countries own between 10- 20 satellites, but at least 115 countries (approximately) in total own a satellite or a share the resources of one. There are about 529 plus operational dedicated military satellites worldwide, with the US operating approximately 239 satellites and China approximately 140 satellites followed by Russia approximately 105 satellites. These are the three countries with the most military satellites owned outright. Space is emerging as an important…
Read MoreROLE OF LAWS AND POLICIES FOR ADDRESSING THE UNIQUE HUMAN AND BIO-GEOGRAPHICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF MOUNTAIN AREAS
Law has an important, but by no means exclusive, role to play in promoting and securing the civil, political, economic, cultural and environmental rights of affected groups, and in ensuring that the benefits and burdens of development are equitably distributed. The absence of specific laws and policies for addressing the unique human and bio-geographical characteristics of mountain areas occurs in the context of the broader failure of nation states to develop appropriate domestic and international legal frameworks for human rights and community-based management of renewable natural resources. Indeed, the conservation,…
Read MoreTHE GLOBALISATION OF PUBLIC HEALTH AND GLOBAL HEALTH GOVERNANCE
It is widely recognized that contemporary globalization is having a profound impact on the health of populations everywhere. Although increasing global integration is not an entirely new phenomenon, contemporary globalization has had an unprecedented impact on global public health and is creating new challenges for international law and policy. Globalization can be broadly understood as a process characterized by changes in a range of social spheres including economic, political, technological, cultural and environmental. These processes of global change are re-structuring human societies, ushering in new patterns of health and disease…
Read MoreSAFETY STANDARDS AND CERTIFICATION FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN ROBOTICS
There is currently much discussion on how to ensure Artificial Intelligence(AI) applications do not lead to undesirable outcomes, particularly bias in algorithms that power recommendations such as who is a suitable job candidate. In most of these instances it is important to be able to establish what data the algorithm was trained on to ensure the data is representative as well as how the algorithm reaches its conclusions. Much of the proposed regulation around Artificial Intelligence(AI) – such as the European Commission’s ‘Proposal for a Regulation on a European approach…
Read MoreTHE CHALLENGE OF NATIONAL ECONOMIC POLICY AND MULTILATERAL RESPONSES IN AN ERA OF GLOBALIZATION
Each country, based on its individual endowments and circumstances, will have to design and implement national policies in a range of areas that ensure the country takes advantage of the opportunities that globalization provides and at the same time deals with the risks that it introduces. In terms of the national economy, there are three distinct advantages: (a) The demand for a country’s product is no longer constrained by its own markets; (b) A country’s investment is no longer constrained by what it can save itself; (c) A country’s producers…
Read MoreTHE ROLE OF DOMESTIC SHELL COMPANIES AND OFF SHORE FINANCIAL CENTRES IN FINANCIAL CRIMES
The term “shell company” generally refers to limited liability companies and other business entities with no significant assets or ongoing business activities. Shell companies – formed for both legitimate and illicit purposes – typically have no physical presence other than a mailing address, employ no one, and produce little to no independent economic value. Shell companies are often formed by individuals and businesses to conduct legitimate transactions, such as domestic and cross-border currency and asset transfers, or to facilitate corporate mergers and reorganizations. Shell companies can be publicly traded or…
Read MoreJUDGE: INTERNATIONAL PRINCIPALS AND ACCOUNTABILITY
The judicial system in a country is central to the protection of human rights and freedoms. Courts play a major role in ensuring that victims or potential victims of human rights violations obtain effective remedies and protection, that perpetrators of human rights violations are brought to justice and that anyone suspected of a criminal offence receives a fair trial according to international standards. The judicial system is an essential check and balance on the other branches of government, ensuring that laws of the legislative and the acts of the executive…
Read MoreHUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT IN THE ERA OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND CHALLENGES OF HUMAN RESOURCES
Before starting to examine the impact of Artificial Intelligence(AI) and robots to organization and person working inside, it will be necessary to review briefly an artificial intelligence, more exactly what it is. Unfortunately there is no shared definition on AI and everybody has his own definition. This problem is understandable in that it is a research area where everything is rapidly developing and constantly evolving with an accelerating speed. However, it is also true that this lack of shared definition makes it difficult to study the impact of AI on people…
Read MoreWHAT MEDIA DOES TO PEOPLE: MEDIA EFFECTS APPROACH
Among the first approaches scholars used to conceptualize the role of media in human development was the media effects model. Within this model, the content of media is believed to affect the emotions, thoughts, behaviours and attitudes of the user. Proponents of this model view media as external to the user, with its effects flowing unidirectionally-from the outside in. Although not explicitly stated, the media effects approach views users as passive recipients of media influence, with the inference being that media uniformly impacts adolescents, rather than considering individual differences in…
Read MoreWORLD HEALTH ORGANISATION 75TH ANNIVERSARY: CRITICAL ANALYSIS ON GLOBAL HEALTH LAW
The political, legal, economic and social contours of the current international landscape present major challenges for global health governance. If ameliorating the most common causes of disease, disability and premature death require global solutions, then the future is demoralizing. The states that bear the disproportionate burden of disease have the least capacity to do anything about it. And the states that have the wherewithal are deeply resistant to expending the political capital and economic resources necessary to truly make a difference to improve health outside their borders. When rich countries…
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