Wednesday 13 May 2026 The dream of the driverless motor car is as old as the motor car itself – the removal of human frailty from the act of driving, the promise of a machine that neither drinks, nor tires, nor grows distracted. In a world in which road traffic collisions kill more than a million people annually, overwhelmingly through human error, the appeal of automation is self-evident. Yet the question of whether driverless cars are safe is not one that admits of a simple

Wednesday 13 May 2026 The concept of desert, that individuals ought to receive what they deserve, lies at the heart of both moral philosophy and the administration of justice. It is a notion that appears intuitive, even self-evident, and yet upon closer inspection it dissolves into a set of profound difficulties. In the aftermath of war, when societies seek to assign responsibility for atrocity and suffering, the appeal to desert becomes particularly acute. Nowhere is this mo

Wednesday 13 May 2026 Throughout modern history there has been a persistent argument about the relationship between ideas and machines. Do human beings first formulate moral, political and social doctrines, and then build technologies that express those doctrines? Or does the process run in the opposite direction — with technological innovation reshaping the possibilities of society, and with political philosophies emerging afterwards as rationalisations of material change? T

Wednesday 13 May 2026 The question of Ukraine’s phytosanitary standards is, at first glance, a technical matter of plant health regulation. Yet in the context of her long journey towards integration with the European Union, it is nothing less than a strategic hinge upon which the future of her agricultural economy turns. For a country whose black soil has for centuries made her one of Europe’s great breadbaskets, the alignment of sanitary and phytosanitary systems with Europe

Tuesday 12 May 2026 The story of Russian lawyer and propagandist Ilya Remeslo is remarkable not merely because of the speed of his apparent political conversion, but because of what it may reveal about the condition of the Russian state itself. For years Remeslo was known as one of the Kremlin’s most loyal legal attack dogs. He participated in campaigns against opposition activists, including the late Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, and cultivated a reputation as an aggress