It is 2022, the bicentenary of the birth of the Augustinian friar Gregor Mendel, the founder of genetics, and this is being celebrated in all kinds of ways. In 1955, as a biology student, I travelled with a group of young people to Brno (then part of Czechoslovakia), where he had done his experiments with […]
Two guises of racism, disdain as well as envy
Amsterdam (Special to Informed Comment) – Discussions still focus on who can and who cannot be called racist, while the question of what racism actually is, is posed much less and is often fobbed off with vague descriptions in the direction of ‘believing population groups to be inferior’. Looking down on people is of course […]
Cluster bombs once against Vietnamese people and still in use today
( Joop) – On 4 March 1971 our train pulled in to Paris’s Gare du Nord station. My then husband Ab van Kammen and I were going to spend a few days in the city. We had left our three daughters with various friends, packed our suitcases and caught the train. It would not just […]
An Atomic Bomb no bigger than a Pencil
By Anne-Ruth Wertheim[1] – It was 24 August 1945. I was ten years old, living with my mother, brother and sister in a Japanese internment camp on the Dutch East Indian island of Java. That evening we and all the other internees had been summoned to the large covered area by the main gate. The […]
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