Khaled Sulaiman, environmental Journalist

Richard Sambrook Professor of Journalism and Director of Centre for Journalism Studies at Cardiff University Are the traditional journalistic disciplines of objectivity and impartiality relevant or wanted in a digital news environment? Many practitioners and commentators argue that they are not – that editorial approaches suited to the middle of the last century, with a scarcity of bandwidth and in an age of media concentration, are now redundant in the digital age of plenty.

Kenneth Collack With the loss of large parts of Mosul, the second-largest Iraqi city, to Sunni extremist fighters on Tuesday, it is time to recognize that Iraq is once again in a state of civil war. A low-level civil war at present, perhaps, but the situation is only going to worsen unless something dramatic and unexpected pulls Iraq out of its descent. This is a tragedy for Iraq and a serious threat for the United States. Americans seem to think that the vast increase in domestic oil production from shale deposits has immunized the U.S. economy from Middle East instability. Not by a long shot. The International Energy Agency has warned as clearly as it can that projected low prices of oil in the future depend more on increased Iraqi oil production than on North American shale. And every postwar American recession has been preceded by an increase in oil prices, often the result of Middle East instability.