By Donald Rothwell, Professor of International Law, Australian National University
With peace talks breaking down, the US president has said the US will blockade the Strait of Hormuz, which will have a further dire impact on international fuel supply.
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By Suci Lestari Yuana, Lecturer at the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Universitas Gadjah Mada
AI-driven platforms pull informal labour into the global digital economy but push the risks and responsibilities back onto workers. Cases in Indonesia show that women pay the highest price.
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By Human Rights Watch
Click to expand Image Families gather under a tree at an informal site where displaced people, many from neighboring Jongeli state, have assembled without assistance or shelter at Yolakot informal camp near Mingkaman, Lakes state on February 14, 2026. © AFP via Getty Images (Nairobi) – South Sudan’s military and opposition forces are blocking humanitarian access and unjustifiably ordering civilians to evacuate populated areas, Human Rights Watch said today. Since late 2025, the military has issued multiple evacuation orders, at least three of them sweeping in nature and the opposition…
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By Human Rights Watch
Click to expand Image Flag of Bahrain in Sakhir, March 2, 2023. © 2023 Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via AP Photo (Beirut) – A 32-year-old man who was forcibly disappeared in Bahrain on March 19, 2026, died in custody more than a week later and his body bore signs of torture, Human Rights Watch and the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (BIRD) said today. After Sayed Mohamed Almosawi’s family lost contact with him for over a week, his parents received a call to come to the Bahrain Defense Hospital, a military hospital. When they arrived, they discovered that Mohamed Almosawi…
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By Kate Griffiths, Democracy Deputy Program Director, Grattan Institute
Aruna Sathanapally, Chief Executive, Grattan Institute
Matthew Bowes, Senior Associate, Economic Prosperity and Democracy, Grattan Institute
Around the world, democracy as a system of government is backsliding. After more than 50 years of liberal democracy in ascendancy, democratic progress plateaued around the turn of the century and is now going backwards.
In 2025, there were only 31 liberal democracies out of 179 countries assessed. And the United States – once the poster-child for…
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By Giuseppe Carabetta, Associate Professor of Workplace and Business Law, UTS Business School, University of Technology Sydney
If you live in these parts of Australia, you’ll get an extra public holiday for it this year. But millions of others aren’t so lucky.
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By Melanie O'Brien, Professor of International Law, The University of Western Australia
Humanitarian personnel put themselves in harm’s way to help others. An international law expert explains how we can keep them safe.
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By Craig Costello, Professor, School of Computer Science, Queensland University of Technology
Online data is generally pretty secure. Assuming everyone is careful with passwords and other protections, you can think of it as being locked in a vault so strong that even all the world’s supercomputers, working together for 10,000 years, could not crack it.
But last month, Google and others released results suggesting a new kind of computer – a quantum computer – might be able to open the vault with significantly less resources than previously thought.
The changes are coming on two fronts. On one, tech giants such as IBM and Google are racing to build ever-larger quantum…
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By Gregory Moore, Senior Research Associate, School of Agriculture, Food and Ecosystem Sciences, The University of Melbourne
While stopped in heavy Melbourne traffic recently, I noticed that what looked like a shadow under a row of spotted gums (Corymbia maculata) along a major road was actually a stain on the concrete kerb.
As a botanist, it caught my attention; biological stains always have an interesting story attached.
Stains like these – under many tree species, on your car after certain leaves have fallen on them, and on your timber deck after rain has washed leaves onto it –…
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By Judy Ingham, Newsletter Producer, The Conversation
Every day, we publish a selection of your emails in our newsletter. We’d love to hear from you, you can email us at yoursay@theconversation.edu.au.
Monday April 13
Electric dreams
“Reading the article about 6 things Australia should do to tackle the energy crisis made me wonder how big the task is to ‘turn over’ the passenger vehicle fleet as the main candidate…
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