MELBOURNE — After Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, ships used to export grain from Ukraine’s Black Sea ports stopped travelling there because they were liable to be attacked by Russian forces, which suspected them of carrying military supplies.

PRINCETON — In August, Springer Nature, the publisher of 3,000 academic journals, including the Nature portfolio of the world’s most influential science journals, announced new ethics guidance for its editors, addressing the balance between academic freedom and the risk that publ

MELBOURNE — “Every day, thousands of innocent plants are killed by vegetarians. Help end the violence. Eat meat.” These words, written last month by an Edinburgh butcher on a blackboard outside his shop and shared on a vegan Facebook group, led to a heated online discussion.

MELBOURNE — I’m writing from Victoria, the Australian state that became, in 1970, the first jurisdiction in the world to make it compulsory to wear a seat belt in a car.

 MELBOURNE — “If the sound of beef sizzling on the grill brings tears to your eyes, you are a real beefatarian.” That’s the opening line of a TV ad produced by a European advertising campaign called Proud of European Beef. Just more advertising silliness?

MELBOURNE — “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress,” Mahatma Gandhi said, “can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” If we apply that test to the world as a whole, how much moral progress have we made over the past two millennia?That question is suggested by “

MELBOURNE — For the past three months, this metropolitan area of nearly 5 million people, the capital of the Australian state of Victoria, has been under one of the world’s tightest lockdowns.

MELBOURNE — Angelina Jolie, Madonna, Melania Trump and Kanye West have all, in recent years, made highly publicised visits to orphanages in low-income countries. Tourists who “travel with purpose” are following their lead.

MELBOURNE — On January 3, the United States assassinated Qassem Suleimani, a top Iranian military commander, while he was leaving Baghdad International Airport in a car with Abu Mahdi Al Muhandis, an Iraqi leader of Kata’ib Hizbollah, an Iran-backed militia.