Opinion in 1995

The consequences of the acquittal by a Los Angeles jury last week of O. J. Simpson, the US football star, would have been less perplexing if the jury had spent more time reaching its conclusion.

The excellent Human Genome Diversity Project needs better planning and a pilot project.

On a gloomy reading of recent trends, the European Union may never be able to deliver the rising prosperity that is its chief justification. The best hope is a stroke of luck with innovation.

British universities, which award degrees by examining their students, are now to be examined themselves.

The World Medical Association is planning to fashion a statement on the ethical principles of genetic screening from a draft that is altogether over-cautious.

The London Stock Exchange, which thinks itself a citadel of capitalism, is behaving badly towards the Internet.

The World Bank is devising a measure of national wealth that will be confusing if taken seriously.

The danger that interracial comparisons will be inhibited by considerations of political correctness is less serious than that interracial studies will be wrongly used, yet much benefit could come from well-planned research.

The use of ingredients from the neem tree sharpens questions about patent laws.

It will be a Signal dishonour if Britain fails to save the house in which Darwin lived and wrote.

Of all the darnage that will be done by France's tests of nuclear weapons in the Pacific, the most serious is that it will complicate and perhaps undermine the negotiation of a comprehensive test-ban treaty.

The British government should not seek to make its second school-leaving examination even more exacting.

A thorough study of the death-rate among British haemophilia patients with or without HIV infection will, for most people, be sufficient proof that the infection leads to AIDS.

There will be no quick answer to the British government's call for better care for the psychiatrically ill.

The new Republican Congress is naturally antipathetic to the US Food and Drug Administration, but radical change will not be easily accomplished, which is just as well.

Newly private British water companies are in trouble with their first summer drought, and deserve to be.

The British government's new chief scientific adviser would have faced a formidable task even if it had not been complicated by the abrupt transfer of the Office of Science and Technology to the Department of Trade and Industry.

Many countries in the West are in confusion about Japan's role in the Second World War, but demands for apologies are generally misplaced; teaching contemporary history is a better course.

Clinton's war on teenage smoking is a just war, but will need imagination as well as toughness.

The British Association's visit to Newcastle next week could be good for both.