Michael Kirby

8 results

Gannet with fish: Anyone who has watched the birds plunging vertically from the sky to seize mackerel deep beneath the surface must marvel at their anatomy. Illustration: Michael Viney
Gannet population continues to thrive despite human threat to its numbers

Someone has pocketed my lovely gannet’s skull – well, probably not, but it seems to have disappeared from the years-old jumble of tideline ossuary on (...)

“It’s unfortunate that human rights are being sidelined in a rush to rapprochement and solving security problems.” Photograph: Ahn Young-joon/AP Photo/File
North Korean rights abuses likely to be ignored at summit

Lee Cheol cannot remember how many times he was forced to gather with his fellow soldiers at an airfield outside Pyongyang in North Korea and watch as(...)

Colin Crehan and Diarmuid Nash from Clare, winners of the GAA Handball Championship Men’s Senior Doubles Final. Photograph: Tommy Grealy/actionshots.ie
Clare duo topple 11-time champions with razor-sharp moves

There is a new name on the All-Ireland 40x20 Senior Doubles trophy after Clare’s Diarmaid Nash and Colin Crehan sensationally toppled 11-time champion(...)

Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, votes with other members of the United Nations Security Council to impose new sanctions on North Korea, on Friday, in New York City. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
UN Security Council imposes new sanctions on North Korea
  • US
  • December 22, 2017, 19:33

The UN Security Council on Friday unanimously imposed new sanctions on North Korea following its latest intercontinental ballistic missile test, a mov(...)

Steve Johnson takes a ferry to the site of his brother Scott’s death in 1988, in Sydney, last month. Australian authorities are reviewing the deaths of 88 men between 1976 and 2000 to determine whether they should be classified as anti-gay hate crimes. Photograph: Matthew Abbott/The New York Times
Australia revisits a chapter when gangs killed gay men for sport

On a December day in 1988, a teenager on a spearfishing expedition found a body at the bottom of one of the wild, honey-coloured sandstone cliffs tha(...)

Jane Urquhart: ‘The Rás seemed to me to be a mythic thing when it began in the mid-1950s. God. The weather. And the potholes.’ Photograph: Stephen McCarthy
A Canadian novel about Kerry’s ‘mythic’ Rás Tailteann in the 1950s

Jane Urquhart is indisputably a Canadian novelist. She was born in Ontario. She shares an editor with Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje. She has(...)

North Korea’s crimes against humanity

The number of political prisoners in North Korea’s concentration camps, known as kwanliso , (...)

Michael Kirby, chairman of the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in North Korea, presents his report on the human rights violations in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, during a press conference at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, yesterday. Photograph: Salvatore Di Nolfi/EPA
UN reports appalling human rights abuses in North Korea

North Korea’s leadership is committing systematic and appalling human rights abuses against its own citizens on a scale unparalleled in the mod(...)