Category: Explainers
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The leap second is on its way out, changing the definition of civil time for the first time since the 1970s. What it was for, why computers hated it, and the long-run problem that abolishing it defers rather than solves.
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Twenty-five years on, al-Qaeda has no single centre. Its capacity for transnational attacks has fallen and its local power has grown — affiliates now hold territory and tax populations in the Sahel, Somalia and Yemen. That is the anniversary story nobody tells.
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American courts decide which unwritten rights the Constitution protects by asking whether they are “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition”. That test decided the clean water case — and the level of generality at which a right is described often decides it first.
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Russian drones keep crossing into Moldovan and Romanian airspace, and the record shows detection and notification rather than interception. Three reasons: interceptors cost more than the drone, a downed drone still falls on someone, and a small state without an alliance absorbs the consequences alone.
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Settlement exports are a fraction of one per cent of Israel’s trade, so what does banning them achieve? The answer is less about commerce than about legal determinations, corporate risk and what twelve countries acting together makes possible for the thirteenth.
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More than 100,000 people have been killed in Myanmar’s civil war, the deadliest in Asia and the most fragmented in the world. It gets a fraction of the coverage of smaller conflicts, and the reasons say more about how international news works than about Myanmar.
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Days instead of months, short briefs, no oral argument, and often no stated reasoning. The Supreme Court’s emergency docket formally decides only what happens while a case proceeds — but for elections and deportations, the interim period is frequently the whole period.
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Countries rarely cut ties outright. They summon, recall, suspend, hollow out, downgrade, expel — and only then sever. What each step on the ladder actually means, and why closing an embassy hurts the country that closes it more than most coverage admits.
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Akbar Bugti was killed in a Pakistani military operation on 26 August 2006. Two decades on, the insurgency that followed is one of the least covered armed conflicts in the world — partly because of what it is, and substantially because of how hard it is to report from there.
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Both the US and Iran are attacking oil tankers, and both call the other’s attacks war crimes. What the law of naval warfare actually says about when a merchant ship stops being a protected civilian object — and where each side’s legal argument is weakest.