Diaspora politics can often be testy. While the mother country maintains its own fashioned narrative, governed by domestic considerations, the diaspora may, or may not be in accord with the agreed upon story. While countries such as China and Iran are seen as the conventional bullies in this regard, spying and monitoring the activities of their citizens in various countries,[Read More…]
During the Cold War, assassinations most foul were entertained as necessary measures to advance the set cause. In Latin America, military regimes were keenly sponsored as reliably brutal antidotes to the Marxist tic, or at the very least the tic in waiting. Any government deemed by Washington to be remotely progressive would become ripe targets for violent overthrow. To this[Read More…]
The broad lament from commentators about global economic growth is that China is not pulling its weight. Not enough is being done to stir the sinews and warm the blood, at least when it comes to the GDP counters. And many such pundits hail from countries, most prominently the United States, which have done everything they can to clip the[Read More…]
The tear-squeeze remembering those who died in the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington has become an annual event. In the words of US President George W. Bush, it was an attack on “our very freedom”. The US had been targeted because it was “the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world.” Five decades ago,[Read More…]
The Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 has been justified by Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “special military operation” with a few barbed purposes, among them cleaning the country’s stables of Nazis. As with so many instances of history, it was not entirely untrue, though particularly convenient for Moscow. At the core of many a nationalist movement[Read More…]
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi really wanted to make an impression for his guests and dignitaries, and coarse realities would simply not do. The occasion of the G20 summit presented him with a chance to give the city an aggressive touch-up, touching up a good number of its residents along the way, not to mention the city’s animal life as[Read More…]
It all tallies. War, investments and returns. The dividends, solid, though the effort expended – at least by others – awful and bloody. While a certain narrative in US politics continues in the vein of traditional cant and hustling ceremony regarding the Ukraine War – “noble freedom fighters, we salute you!” twinned with “Russian aggressors will be defeated” – there[Read More…]
They really are a brutal lot. While the Queensland Labor Government croons on matters regarding rights, liberties and, it should be said, the plight of the First Nations Peoples, its policy, notably on youth detention, is a contradictory abomination. This situation finds itself repeated across the country, though the Sunshine State, as it is sometimes called, does it better than[Read More…]
An odder political bunch you could not find, at least when it comes to pursuing a single goal. Given that the goal is the release of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange makes it all the more striking. Six Australian parliamentarians of various stripes will be heading to Washington ahead of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s October visit to test the ground of[Read More…]
On August 1, protesters against the Burrup Hub expansion in Western Australia, a project of one of Australia’s most ruthless fossil fuel companies, took to the Perth home of its CEO, Meg O’Neill. The CEO of Woodside was not impressed. In fact, she seemed rather distressed. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a member of the business community, in professional athletics,[Read More…]
Australia experienced this in February 2021. Facebook had gotten nastily stroppy, wishing to dictate public policy to the Commonwealth government. To teach Canberra mandarins a lesson, it literally unfriended the entire country, scrubbing all news platforms of content and making any posted links through the platform inaccessible. It mattered not that the content involved the tawdry details of celebrity love[Read More…]
The Vietnam War tormented and tore the societies who saw fit to participate in it. It defined a generation culturally and politically in terms creative and fractious. And it showed up the rulers to be ignorant rather than bright; blundering fools rather than sages secure in their preaching. Five decades on, the political classes in the United States and Australia[Read More…]
We know what the regime is like. Starving a country, bombing its hospitals and strafing its schools has been minor fare for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The population of Yemen has found this out to their colossal cost. Add to this the killing of dissident journalists, the enthusiastic employment of capital punishment, and an assortment of other merry brutalities,[Read More…]
Times of crisis can be glorious for some. The Great Depression bred its share of wealthy profiteers. The First and Second World Wars fostered many a multimillionaire. Over the bodies of millions, the returns for armaments companies were unparalleled. And during the current “cost of living crisis,” as it is so often dubbed, there are companies beaming at their profit[Read More…]
What happens when the looters are looted? Perhaps that strange sense of satisfaction called justice, an offence cancelled by another. One therefore greets the realisation that the British Museum has been suffering a number of such cases with some smugness. What makes them even more striking is the inability of staff to have picked up on the matter in the[Read More…]
Australia’s funding priorities have been utterly muddled of late. At the Commonwealth level, there is cash to be found in every conceivable place to support every absurd military venture, as long as it targets those hideous authoritarians in Beijing. It seemed utterly absurd that, even as the Australian federal government announced its purchase of over 200 tomahawk cruise missiles –[Read More…]
Climate change litigation is falling into pressing fashion. In Australia, the 2021 case of Sharma, despite eventually failing before three judges in the Federal Court in 2022, suggested that ministers had been put on notice regarding a potential duty of care regarding the consequences of approving fossil fuel projects. The lower court decision had shaken the fossil fuel industry with[Read More…]
The atomic bomb created the conditions of contingent catastrophe, forever placing the world on the precipice of existential doom. But in doing so, it created a philosophy of acceptable cruelty, worthy extinction, legitimate extermination. The scenarios for such programs of existential realisation proved endless. Entire departments, schools of thought, and think tanks were dedicated to the absurdly criminal notion that[Read More…]
At every stage of its proceedings against Julian Assange, the US Imperium has shown little by way of tempering its vengeful impulses. The WikiLeaks publisher, in uncovering the sordid, operational details of a global military power, would always have to pay. Given the 18 charges he faces, 17 fashioned from that most repressive of instruments, the US Espionage Act of[Read More…]
“X” marks the spot. For the modern advertiser, this is problematic. It breathes pornographic escape, self-denial, elusive treasure, irresistible capture, compelling lasciviousness. And now Elon Musk has decided to impose himself upon a brand he loved as a plaything of juvenile ecstasy. Farewell the bird of Twitter; welcome the X of Musk. The company rebrand is certainly all Muskian in[Read More…]
Water. Data centres. The continuous, pressing need to cool the latter, which houses servers to store and process data, with the former, which is becoming ever more precious in the climate crisis. Hardly a good comingling of factors. Like planting cotton in drought-stricken areas, decisions to place data hubs in various locations across the globe are becoming increasingly contentious from[Read More…]
The AUSMIN 2023 talks held between the US Secretaries of State and Defense and their Australian counterparts, confirmed the increasing, unaccountable militarisation of the Australian north and its preparation for a future conflict with Beijing. Details were skimpy, the rhetoric aspirational. But the Australian performance from Defence Minister Richard Marles, and Foreign Minister Penny Wong, was crawling, lamentable, even outrageous. [Read More…]
If a date might be found when Australian sovereignty was extinguished by the emissaries of the US imperium, July 29, 2023 will be as good as any. Not that they aren’t other candidates, foremost among them being the announcement of the AUKUS agreement between Australia, UK and the US in September 2021. They all point to a surrender, a handing[Read More…]
It was there for all to see. Embarrassing, cloying, and bound make you cough up the remnants of your summit lunch, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin III stopped by one of the vassal states to make sure that the meal and military service was orderly, the troops well behaved, and the weapons working as[Read More…]
As the ancient Greeks reminded us, bone cold definitions as starting points are essential in any discussion. One current discussion, insignificant to posterity but amusing for advertisers and the presently bored, is the ludicrous reactions to a plastic doll rendered into celluloid form. And as a doll, it can be no other. Mattel’s Barbie has become, courtesy of Greta Gerwig,[Read More…]
She doesn’t love you, she doesn’t care for you, and she doesn’t know you. But does her team pretend to, confecting an image of faux empathy and interest, sorting out the wheat from the chaff. The predatory, fan sucking phenomenon of the Taylor Swift marketing machine is something to behold. Leaving aside the sort of music that will eventually be[Read More…]
Any security arrangement with too many variables and multiple contingencies, risks stuttering and keeling over. Critical delays might be suffered, attributable to a number of factors beyond the parties concerned. Disputes and disagreements may surface. Such an arrangement is AUKUS, where the number of cooks risk spoiling any meal they promise to cook. The main dish here comprises the nuclear-powered[Read More…]
While the United States, along with its allies, left Afghanistan in August 2021 in spectacularly humiliating circumstances, the departure was never entirely complete, nor bound to be permanent. Since then, Washington has led the charge in handicapping those who, with a fraction of the resources, defeated a superpower and prevailed in two decades of conflict. In a fit of wounded[Read More…]
Hosting sporting events has always been a government’s formula to distract their seducible subjects. It’s the secular version of smells and bells, the warbling of the church choir turned into flesh and performance. If such occasions are of sufficient scale, they might even be political promotions, body beautiful types paraded and performing before clapping and glorifying spectators. Sponsors also have[Read More…]
Again, he was at it, that charming show on two legs, playful and coy. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been burning the charismatic fuel of late, making the necessary emissions in visiting friendly countries. Each time, he seems to be getting away with more and more, currying (pun intended) favour with his hosts and landing the necessary deals. For[Read More…]
Nothing said from the nuclear industry can or should be taken for face value. Be it in terms of safety, or correcting defects or righting mistakes; be it in terms of construction integrity, there is something chilling about reassurances that have been shown, time and again, to be hollow. The 2011 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (FDNPP) disaster has forever[Read More…]
Since the end of the Cold War, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation has distinctly strayed from its original purpose. It has become, almost shamelessly, the vessel and handmaiden of US power, while its burgeoning expansion eastwards has done wonders to upend the applecart of stability. From that upending, the alliance started bungling. It engaged, without the authorisation of the UN[Read More…]
There is a certain desperation in the logic of those who argue that a depraved solution has merit because it’s only slightly less depraved than that of the opponent. Torture is bad but should still be used because your adversary feels free to resort to it. Only do so, however, via judicial warrant. Bombing hospitals is terrible, but when done,[Read More…]
Climate change negotiations and debates are characterised by some curious features. For one, there are interminable stretches of discussion that never seem to feature the agents of cause. Chatter about horrendous fires, toxic smoke, and environmental degradation often skirts around the culprit of anthropogenic change, so ably aided by fossil fuels. With the fossil fuel industries of so many countries[Read More…]
What are the English other than their excruciatingly worn class, kitted out with a code of manners revocable at an instant? A streak of traditional Englishness, as A. A. Gill wrote, stresses bullying. It made them great in the hope of making others small. A towering creature like Charles James Fox may well have added his worth to the abolition[Read More…]
Since 2022, Rwanda has been very much on the mind of British policy makers, a dark option of retreat from the irritating intrusions of international refugee law. The English Channel has become something of a polemical resource, with those seeking to cross it demonised as undermining Britannia’s sacred sovereignty. Giddy with the dusty advice of Australian advisors – the crude[Read More…]
Sports stars are making a heated rush for it, cresting on the money wave, and finding sanctuary in Mammon’s big breasted glory. And that wave is coming, oddly enough, from a desert country, alien to such matters till recent decades, when oil came with blessings and political power. After colonising international golf with a throat crushing ruthlessness, the Kingdom of[Read More…]
The last refugee, for now, has left the small, guano-producing state of Nauru. For a decade, the Pacific Island state served as one of Australia’s offshore prisons for refugees and asylum seekers, a cruel deterrent to those daring to exercise their right to seek asylum via the sea. Since July 2013, 3,127 people making the naval journey to Australia to[Read More…]
A lot of nonsense is being spouted by a bevy of spontaneous “Russian experts” in light of the Prigozhin spray, a mutiny (no one quite knows what to call it), stillborn in the Russian Federation. It all fell to the theatrical sponsor, promoter and rabble rouser Yevgeny Prigozhin, a convict who rose through the ranks of the deceased Soviet state[Read More…]
![A handout image provided by Greece's coast guard on Wednesday, June 14, 2023, shows scores of people covering practically every free stretch of deck on a battered fishing boat that later capsized and sank off southern Greece. A fishing boat carrying migrants trying to reach Europe capsized and sank off Greece on Wednesday, authorities said, leaving at least 79 dead and many more missing in one of the worst disasters of its kind this year. [AP Photo/Hellenic Coast Guard via AP]](https://cdn.countercurrents.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/refugee-boat-200x150.webp "Deaths at Sea: From the Titan to the Mediterranean 77")
Mortality at sea is becoming a theme of late. The nature of how that mortality has been represented, however, has varied. The death of a billionaire on a quest to see the sunken ruins of the Titanic is treated with saturating interest; the deaths of those making their way across the Mediterranean to seek sanctuary receives a relative footnote of[Read More…]
In 1972 Stanley K. Sheinbaum, chairman of the Pentagon Papers Fund, wrote with a hot pertinence that remains striking (at this time Julian Assange is facing grave prospects of being extradited to the United States) that both Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo had “struck a blow for us all when they gave the Pentagon Papers to the press and to[Read More…]
Dear future students wishing to come to Australia and study: don’t. The gurgling, decaying system is, on a regular basis, being exposed for what it is. If it is not students being exploited, its academics being manipulated to the point of ruinous ill-health. True, not all universities are equally rotten in the constellation of corporate manipulation, but each one is[Read More…]
The agent of chaos is at it again. Boris Johnson, frontman of the Brexit disaster show, prime minister responsible for breaking regulations, rules and laws, and overall self-serving gross figure of indulgence, has decided to throw in the towel. He is leaving the House of Commons. The time had come for him to walk to the cricketing Pavilion, accepting the[Read More…]
They think we are mugs – and it’s insulting. It’s all fine for politicians to be swimming, swerving and tossing about in the goo of paranoia that is surveillance, chatting to the ghost called foreign interference; but to expect the rest of the citizenry to be morons is rather poor form. But the formula has always been such: We terrify[Read More…]
Henry A. Murray has much to answer for. Between 1959 and 1961, the Harvard psychology academic, as the leader of a team of equally unprincipled academics, was responsible for conducting an CIA-funded experiment most unethical on twenty-two undergraduates. The individuals in question were pseudonymised. One particularly youthful figure, named “Lawful”, was the mathematically gifted Theodore John Kaczynski. A central theme[Read More…]
The victory of Novak Djokovic in the latest French Open had the usual mixed reception in Australia. While Australians pretend to like radicals, larrikins and the occasional deviant, the contrary is true. Tight buttoned, properly behaved and conformist to the point of invisibility, the boringly predictable are always preferred. You can rely on them. Even in Melbourne, a town where[Read More…]
Described as acrimonious, divisive and disruptive to golf, the LIV Golf Tournament, launched with the aid of former world number one Greg Norman and an enormous well of capital fronted by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), will now unite with the enemy. The announcement that the PGA Tour and LIV Golf would be merging would only have shocked the[Read More…]
Australian concepts of sovereignty have always been qualified. First came the British settlers and invaders in 1788. They are pregnant with the sovereignty of the British Crown, bringing convicts, the sadistic screws, and forced labour to a garrison of penal experiments and brutality. The native populations are treated as nothing more than spares, opportunistic chances, and fluff of the land,[Read More…]
It was an ugly case lasting five years with a host of ugly revelations. But what could be surprising about the murderous antics of a special arm of the military, in this case, the Australian Special Air Service Regiment, which was repeatedly deployed on missions in an open-ended war which eventually led to defeat and withdrawal? Ben Roberts-Smith was meant[Read More…]
The undertakings made by Australia regarding the AUKUS security pact promise to be monumental. Much of this is negative: increased militarisation on the home front; the co-opting of the university sector for war making industries and defence contractors; and the capitulation and total subordination of the Australian Defence Force to the Pentagon. There are also other, neglected dimensions at work[Read More…]
Meta, to put it rather inelegantly, has a data non-compliance problem. That problem began in the original conception of Facebook, a social network conceived by that most anti-social of types, Mark Zuckerberg. (Who claims that these troubled sorts lack irony?) On May 22, the European Union deemed it appropriate to slap a $1.3 billion fine on the company for transferring[Read More…]
“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.” Anthony Bourdain, A Cook’s Tour (2002) If a heavy resume of crimes is a guarantee of longevity, then surely Henry A. Kissinger (HAK, for short), must count as a good specimen. The list of butcheries attributed to his centurion, direct or[Read More…]
There is an interesting thread that links the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, the owner of the gargantuan conglomerate that bears his name, Gautam Adani, and Australia. There is cricket; there is mining; there is remorseless extraction; and then there is steaming propaganda. On arriving in Australia, Modi was greeted by people who had left India decades ago. The Indian[Read More…]
![Stella Assange address National Press Club in Canberra, Australia, May 22, 2023. [Photo: National Press Club]](https://cdn.countercurrents.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Stella-Assange-200x150.webp "Visits of Justice: Stella Assange’s Plea to Australia 103")
It certainly got the tongues wagging, the keyboards pressed, and the intellectually dead aroused – at least for a time. Given how many of those in the Australian press and media stable have been, for the most part, unconcerned, and in some cases celebratory, regarding the prosecution of Julian Assange, it was strikingly poignant to have his wife, Stella, present[Read More…]
Australia is a country addictively hostile to the elderly. Despite being a continent that speaks to immemorial origins, respect for those who age is uncommon. In The Lucky Country, that seminal, repeatedly misunderstood text, written in frustrated, sour prose, Donald Horne observes that Australia is not a place where one should grow old. And so, it follows: the rampant, habitual[Read More…]
Much needless fuss has been generated by President Joe Biden’s cancellation of his visit to Australia for the Quad meeting, a now regular gathering of leaders from the US, Japan, India and Australia. He had other things on his mind: dealing with fractious debt ceiling negotiations taking place back in the United States. Students of US history would, or should[Read More…]
Talk about the dangers of artificial intelligence, actual or imagined, has become feverish, much of it induced by the growing world of generative chat bots. When scrutinising the critics, attention should be paid to their motivations. What do they stand to gain from adopting a particular stance? In the case of Geoffrey Hinton, immodestly seen as the “Godfather of AI”,[Read More…]
Europe is joining a number of other regions on the planet in suffering a prolonged water crisis; and it is one that shows little sign of abating. To this can be added the near catastrophic conditions that exist in other parts of the globe, where ready and secure access to water supplies is more aspiration than reality. Since 2018, according[Read More…]
It looks like 2008 all over again. Economic and financial mismanagement feature in scorching, consuming brilliance. The culpable, bungling banksters, have returned with their customary, venal incompetence. In the customary script, they habitually seek the role of the public purse to socialise their losses. Along the way, they will avoid richly deserved prison sentences, lie low, and return to repeat[Read More…]
In Britain, pageantry has always been a palliative and plaster for the dark and dismal. Be it in times of crisis, the chance to put on an extravagant show, usually at vast expense, is not something to forego. Central to this entertainment complex is the Royal family, that archaic vestige of an era that refuses to pass into history. The[Read More…]
The former Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, has been somewhat of an absentee in the Federal seat of Cook. Since losing the May 2022 election, he has been aggressively chasing up contacts and deals on the consultancy circuit, bellyaching about the usual talking points: the gruesome China menace; defence matters; and, just to round it off for good measure, additional[Read More…]
Selected days for commemoration serve one fundamental purpose. Centrally, they acknowledge the forgotten or neglected, while proposing to do nothing about it. It’s the priest’s confession, the chance for absolution before the next round of soiling. These occasions are often money-making exercises for canny businesses: the days put aside to remember mothers and fathers, for instance. But there is no[Read More…]
President Joseph Biden has done what many from his own party dreaded but dare not say. Last month, via a painful video, the aged Democrat declared his candidacy for a second term in the White House, branding himself a defender of US democracy. For a politician lacking the mettle of competence, awareness, and, at certain points, basic clarity of the[Read More…]
Welcome the canons of pseudoscience. Open your arms to the dribbling, sponsored charlatans. According to a growing number of India’s top officialdom, teaching Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution to children in their ninth and 10th grades is simply not on. Last month, the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), a purportedly autonomous government organisation responsible for curricula content[Read More…]
US$2.24 trillion is a mighty amount. It’s also a sickening figure when considering the object of this exercise. The flickering tease of war, the promise of bloodshed and an increasingly large butcher’s bill, are inevitable suggestions from such a figure. The scenes are also clear: well-paid suits dazed by theories of the next war; policy wonks jabbering over mock war[Read More…]
However described, the shabby treatment of Julian Assange never ceases to startle. While he continues to suffer in Belmarsh prison awaiting the torments of an interminable legal process, more material is coming out showing the way he was spied upon while staying at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Of late, the Spanish daily El País has been keeping up its[Read More…]
It’s a very funny thing. In the US, the provision of services in such industries as security and intelligence is outsourced in a sprawling complex of contractors and subcontractors. In Australia, the entire military and security establishment is outsourced to Washington’s former mandarins, many of them earning a pile in consultancy fees. This, perhaps, is what Australia’s Defence Minister Richard[Read More…]
While the mass slaughtering of, and slaughter by, soldiers, is always a touchy subject of commemoration, a tension has existed between those who did the fighting, and those who ordered it. Comfortably secure in furnished rooms and battle props, planners would, as they still do, draw up the blueprints, concoct the strategy, and give the orders. In Australia, politicians should[Read More…]
The recently concluded LIV Tournament in Adelaide was a matter of bread, circuses and golf. It was something of a triumph for the chief sponsor: the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and, more notably, the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Critics, and criticism about the regime and the blood spattered House of Saud, were generally forgotten. This vulgar display of denial[Read More…]
Cometh the new platform, cometh new actions in law, the fragile litigant ever ready to dash off a writ to those with (preferably) deep pockets. And so, it transpires that artificial intelligence (AI) platforms, for all the genius behind their creation, are up for legal scrutiny and judicial redress. Certainly, some private citizens are getting rather ticked off about what[Read More…]
If anyone was expecting a new tilt, a shine of novelty, a flash of independence from Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s address to the National Press Club on April 17, they were bound to be disappointed. The anti-China hawks, talons polished, got their fill. The US State Department would not be disturbed. The Pentagon could rest easy. The toadyish musings[Read More…]
Emmanuel Macron’s recent visit to China did not quite go according to plan, though much depends on what was planned to begin with. In one sense, the French President was consistent, riding the hobbyhorse of Europe’s strategic autonomy, one hived off from the US imperium and free of Chinese influence. Europe’s third-way autonomy would be a mighty thing for the[Read More…]
For years, US intelligence officials could hold their allies, notably the British, in contempt for leaking like sinking vessels and harbouring such espionage luminaries as the Cambridge Five. The whirligig of time has returned the favour with the latest leak from the US Department of Defense. They pose a question pregnant with relevance: Do Washington’s allies have any reason to[Read More…]
Films featuring animals as screen filled protagonists, often in an imperfect, callous human world, have been made before. There was Robert Bresson’s 1966 Au Hasard Balthazar, which introduced audiences to a saintly donkey subject to the terrible things human beings are so often prone to inflict. In recent times, the documentary black-and-white film Gunda, directed by Viktor Kossakovsky (executive producer[Read More…]
Succeeding administrations have a chronic habit of blaming their predecessors. The Biden administration has been most particular on the issue, taking every chance to attack former President Donald Trump for the ills of his tenure. But the effort to almost exclusively lay blame at Trump’s door for the US fiasco in Afghanistan was a rich one indeed, given the failings[Read More…]
“Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.” I.F. Stone The US Congress and Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, have what can only be regarded as a testy relationship. Its various members have advocated and condoned his farcical prosecution, demanded his lifelong incarceration, even assassination, taking issue with his appetite for publishing unsavoury, classified[Read More…]
Collateral damage? Deserving and worthy of their punishment? The exclusion and banishment of Russian and Belarusian athletes has become the acceptable prejudice of many governments and a slew of sporting bodies. After the invasion of Ukraine in February last year, a number banded together to find ways to punish Russia, and those of its ally, Belarus. Pitifully, and weakly, athletes[Read More…]
The sham that is the Assange affair, a scandal of monumental proportions connived in by the AUKUS powers, shows no signs of abating. Prior to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese assuming office in Australia, he insisted that the matter dealing with the WikiLeaks publisher would be finally resolved. It had, he asserted, been going on for too long. Since then, it[Read More…]
Being the scapegoat of tribal lore cast out with the heavy weight of sins remains a popular political motif. Supposedly noble soldiers, by way of example, are punished for not adhering to the rules of war. In breaching the codes of killing and the protocols of acceptable murder, they are banished from a realm supposedly wrapped in law. In doing[Read More…]
Should they be taking them? Ukraine is desperate for any bit of warring materiel its armed forces can lay their hands on, but depleted uranium shells would surely not be a model example of use. And yet, the UK, in an act of killing with kindness, is happy to fork them out to aid the cause against the Russians, despite[Read More…]
It was a sight to behold and took the wind out of the bellicose sails of the AUKUS cheer squad. Here, at the National Press Club in the Australian capital, was a Labor luminary, former Prime Minister of Australia and statesman, keen to weigh in with characteristic sharpness and dripping venom. Paul Keating’s target: the militaristic lunacy that has characterised[Read More…]
What a coup. Nakedly amoral but utterly self-serving in its saccharine minted glory. India’s showman Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who otherwise appears to have clerkish, desk-bound qualities, had what he wanted: an accommodating, possibly clueless guest in the form of the Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese; a common interest in India’s national sport cricket, and a show illuminating him as[Read More…]
For some time, Washington has been losing its spunk in the Pacific. When it comes to the Pacific Islands, a number have not fallen – at least entirely – for the rhetoric that Beijing is there to take, consume, and dominate all. Nor have such countries been entirely blind to their own sharpened interests. This largely aqueous region, which promises[Read More…]
The scene of Israeli Ambassador, Sharon Bar-Li, along with other Israeli delegates, being escorted out of the opening ceremony of the African Union Summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on February 18, was historic. The very moment that was meant to crown twenty years of Israeli diplomacy on the African continent, in a few seconds, turned to represent Israel’s failure in[Read More…]
![The UK Carrier Strike Group 2021, led by HMS Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier, departing the UK [Credit: Royal Navy/Flickr]](https://cdn.countercurrents.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/AUKUS-200x150.jpg "From Balloons to AUKUS: The War Drive Against China 164")
When will this hate-filled nonsense stop? Surveillance balloons treated like evocations of Satan and his card-carrying followers; other innumerable unidentified phenomena that, nonetheless, remain attributable in origin, despite their designation; and then the issue of spying cranes. In the meantime, there has been much finger pointing on the culprit of COVID-19 and the global pandemic. Behold the China Threat, the[Read More…]
The arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for Russian President Vladimir Putin came at an opportune moment. It was, if nothing else, a feeble distraction over the misdeeds and crimes of other leaders current and former. Russia, not being an ICC member country, does not acknowledge that court’s jurisdiction. Nor, for that matter, does the United States, despite the[Read More…]
When Australia – vassal be thy name – assumed responsibilities for not only throwing money at both US and British shipbuilders, lending up territory and naval facilities for war like a gambling drunk, and essentially asking its officials to commit seppuku for the Imperium, another task was given. While the ditzy and dunderheaded wonders in Canberra would be acquiring submarines[Read More…]
He was standing before a lectern at Downing Street. The words on the support looked eerily similar to those used by the politicians of another country. According to UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, Stop the Boats was the way to go. It harked back to the same approach used by Australia’s Tony Abbott, who won the 2013 election on precisely[Read More…]
History is filled with failed planners and plans, threats thought of that did not eventuate, and threats unthought of that found their way into the books. The AUKUS agreement is an attempt to inflate a threat by developing a number of fictional capabilities in an effort to combat an inflated adversary. The checklist of imminent failure for this security pact[Read More…]
Before the financial collapse come the aggressive anti-regulation lobbyists. These are often of the same ilk: loathing anything resembling oversight, restriction, reporting and monitoring. They are incarnations of the frontier, symbolically toting guns and slaying the natives, seeking wealth beyond paper jottings, compliance and bureaucratic tedium. The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), for a period of time the preferred[Read More…]
Ever so rarely, the human species can reach accord and agreement on some topic seemingly contentious and divergent. Such occasions tend to be rarer than hen’s teeth, but the UN High Seas Treaty was one of them. It took over two decades of agonising, stuttering negotiations to draft an agreement and went someway to suggest that the “common heritage of[Read More…]
Diligently, obediently and with a degree of dangerous imbecility, a number of Australian media outlets are manufacturing a consensus for war with a country that has never been a natural, historical enemy, nor sought to be. But as Australia remains the satellite of a Sino-suspicious US imperium, its officials and their dutiful advocates in the press seem obligated to pave[Read More…]
The scene is unforgettable and unforgivable: an elected official, the deputy prime minister of Australia, cutting loose about a fish species introduced into the country by his ancestors, and demanding their annihilation. During the near-lunatic display by Barnaby Joyce, even his own colleagues betrayed embarrassment and alarm at the full-throated shrieks of “carp, carp”. With crazed eyes and crimson face,[Read More…]
Over the last week or so, Australian politicians and representatives of the university sector got busy pressing flesh in India, hoping to open avenues that have largely remained aspirational. It was timed to coincide with G20 talks in New Delhi, which has seen a flurry of contentious meetings traversing security, economics and education, all taking place in the shadow of[Read More…]
The increasingly shabby treatment of former US marine Daniel Edmund Duggan by Australian authorities in the service of their US masters has again shown that the Australian passport is not quite worth the material it’s printed on. In January this year, Sydney’s Downing Centre Local Court heard that Australian Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus accepted a request from the US before Christmas[Read More…]
They have become the outsourcing mandarins, consultancy companies which have served to degrade expertise in the public sector while diminishing the quality of services. Along the way, they have charged astronomical fees in giving repeatedly flawed advice. Consultants, packaged as all wise gurus, have become the great confidence tricksters. Embracing the inner voodoo of consultancy had the effect of discouraging[Read More…]
When news first emerged over explosions endured by the Nord Stream pipelines, known collectively as Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2, an army of guessers was mobilised. The accusation that Russia had done it seemed counterintuitive, given that the Russian state company Gazprom is a majority shareholder of Nord Stream 1 and sole owner of Nord Stream 2. But[Read More…]
It is not farfetched to make the point that delivery systems capable of deploying nuclear weapons will lead to them carrying those very same weapons. Whatever the promises made by governments that such delivery systems will not carry such loads, stifling secrecy over such arrangements can only stir doubt. That is the problem facing the AUKUS alliance which makes Australia[Read More…]
Things are getting rather bizarre at the US Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). Its increasingly prominent commanding chief, one General Glen VanHerck, has abandoned any initial sense of frankness in discussing the destruction of an alleged Chinese surveillance balloon on February 4. Since that disproportionately violent event, more public relations than sense, three other objects[Read More…]
Inside the beating heart of many students and a large number of learners lies an inner cheat. To get passing grades, every effort will be made to do the least to achieve the most. Efforts to subvert the central class examination are the stuff of legend: discreetly written notes on hands, palms and other body parts; secreted pieces of paper;[Read More…]
There is nothing Gautam Adani will not do for money. In this sense, he is admirably dedicated to greed, so much so he has become its foremost caricature worthy of permanent enthronement. Mark this man’s name in the scriptures of eternity: There was nothing he did not do for the filthy lucre. For the unfamiliar reader, the $218 billion Adani[Read More…]
Hysteria over balloons is a strange thing. Hot air balloons made their appearance during the Napoleonic era, where they served as delivery weapons for bombs and undertook surveillance tasks. High altitude balloons were also used by, of all powers, the United States during the 1950s, for reasons of gathering intelligence, though these were shot down by the irritated Soviets. Somehow,[Read More…]
It seems to be a case of little provision for so much supposed effect. The debates, the squabbles, the to-and-fro about supplying Ukraine with tanks from Western arsenals has served to confirm one thing: this is an ever-broadening war between the West against Russia with Ukraine an experimental proxy convinced it will win through. Efforts to limit the deepening conflict[Read More…]
The transformation of Ukraine into untarnished, saintly victim, symbol of democracy and civil society savaged by brutish Russia, has been nothing less than remarkable. The endemic corruption of a state captured by oligarchic tendencies and its own breed of kleptocrats has somehow gone by the wayside, only interrupted by the occasional symbolic purge by the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Lo,[Read More…]
Through the course of his political life, the current US president has often been injudicious. He has stumbled, bungled and miscalculated. His electoral victory was fortuitous, aided by a number of factors, not least the conduct of his opponent and the murderous gift of a global pandemic. Along with his fellow Democrats, he has made the issue of Donald Trump[Read More…]
When the first Russian forces began entering Ukrainian territory in February 2022, the instant reaction from Europe, the UK, Canada and Australia, was one of open commitment to Ukraine’s refugees. The relentless human trains heading westwards were initially embraced by Poles, whose history with Ukraine is, at best, tense and sketchy. Across Europe, walls came down in dispensation for this[Read More…]
International relations remains the sum game of vast hypocrisies, a patchwork of compromises and the compromised. Every moral condemnation of a regime’s conduct is bound to be shown up as an exercise in double standards, often implicating the accusers. In the case of the military regime in Myanmar, double standards are not only modish but expected. A number of international[Read More…]
The policymaking apparatus behind the AUKUS security pact was shoddy from the start. It has raised questions about the extent US power will subordinate Australia further in future conflicts; it has brought into question Australia’s own sovereignty; and it has also raised the spectre of regional nuclear proliferation via the use of otherwise closely guarded propulsion technology. The other feature[Read More…]
Villains often have the best tunes. In some cases, they also have the best evidence. The tendency in the latter is to suppress or distort that evidence if it is contrary to their interests. Exxon, now ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil and gas company, has revealed, much like tobacco companies of the past, that excellent research that might prove costly[Read More…]
Another needless, fatuous endeavour; another irresponsible drain on the public purse; another expression that the military-industrial complex Down Under is thriving in all its insidious stupidity. But Australia’s purchase of HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System) batteries from the United States can be put down to loneliness – or the feeling of being left out. And history shows that loneliness[Read More…]
What to make of it? History is filled with the deeds of blood-thirsty princes bold in ambition and feeble of mind. Massacres make the man, though there is often little to merit the person behind it. The Duke of Sussex seemingly wishes to add his name to that list. In what can only be described as one of his “Nazi[Read More…]
Metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else. Aristotle, Poetics (1457b) It all seemed familiar. Anthropomorphised Mother Nature in vengeful mood; humans wondering if they might meet a frozen demise in trapped vehicles; the planners taking stock as to how best to cope with grim circumstances. The New York State governor Kathy Hochul was happy[Read More…]
There was the punk scene, Malcolm McLaren, their racy clothes shop at 430 King’s Road that started out as Let it Rock, the creation of a look, and the gathering of the earth rumbling Sex Pistols. In fact, the late Dame Vivienne Westwood was already a proven stirrer, suggesting that she, not Sex Pistols frontman John Lydon, a.k.a Johnny Rotten,[Read More…]
“This is quite shocking,” declared South Australia’s Attorney-General and Aboriginal Affairs Minister, Kyam Maher. “These caves are some of the earliest evidence of Aboriginal occupation of that part of the country.” That evidence was subtracted this month by acts of vandalism inflicted on artwork in Koonalda Cave on the Nullarbor Plain, claimed to be the world’s largest limestone karst landscape[Read More…]
Africa has been a continent exploited since the European scramble carved it out in lines of a draughtsman’s crude design. Its resources have been pilfered; its peoples enslaved for reasons of trade and profit; its political conditions manipulated to favour predatory companies. A similar pattern is detectable in the digital world. The slavers have replaced their human product with data[Read More…]
There was never anything going for it, except political mileage and the desire for crude retribution. The putting to death of another human being by the legal sanction of a state has always been another way of justifying murder, effectively assassination by judicial fiat. Such policies remain terrifying features of a number of penal systems, designed to terrorise more than[Read More…]
On November 30, the French baguette was formally added to the United Nations’ Intangible Cultural Heritage list. The bureaucrats had finally gotten hold of a glorified bread stick, adding it to their spreadsheet list of cultural items worthy of preservation. A delighted French President took the moment to gloat at the French Embassy in Washington. “In these few centimetres passed[Read More…]
The US military industrial complex has made news with another eye-wateringly expensive product, a near totemic tribute to waste in a time of crisis. The $700 million B-21 Raider stealth bomber was unveiled by Northrop Grumman Corp. and the United States Air Force on December 2 at Airforce Plant 42 in Palmdale, California. There was much slush and fudge about[Read More…]
The unflinching US effort to extradite and prosecute Julian Assange for 18 charges, 17 of which are chillingly based upon the Espionage Act of 1917, has not always stirred much interest in the publisher’s home country. Previous governments have been lukewarm at best, preferring to mention little in terms of what was being done to convince Washington to change course[Read More…]
When lost to climatic disaster and environmental turbulence, where does a whole nation go? History speaks about movements of people, whether induced by human agency or environment, finding sanctuary and refuge on other terrains, or perishing altogether. In the case of the Pacific Island state of Tuvalu, the response is seemingly digital or, as its officials prefer to call it,[Read More…]
It has been one noisy time for the paladins of big tech. Jobs have been shed by the thousands at Meta, Amazon and Twitter; FTX, the second largest cryptocurrency company, has collapsed. Then came the conviction of Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the healthcare company Theranos, for fraud. Pursuing the steps of the college drop-out turned billionaire, Holmes claimed that her[Read More…]
Poor, silly, protuberant Mike Pompeo. The stocky, irritated former CIA director and former Secretary of State is rather upset that those who worked under him dared wag their tongues about Julian Assange. The wagging so happened to relate to contemplated plans of abduction and assassination, something the US executive formally disallows though permits via various devious mechanisms. It’s not every[Read More…]
Wars tend to bury facts. What comes out of them is often a furiously untidy mix of accounts that, when considered later, constitute wisps of fantasy and presumption. Rarely accepted in the heat of battle is the concept of mistake: that a weapon was wrongly discharged or errantly hit an unintended target; a deployment that went awry; or that the[Read More…]
It all speaks to scale: the attorney generals of 40 states within the US clubbing together to charge Google for misleading users. On this occasion, the conduct focused on making users assume they had turned off the location tracking function on their accounts even as the company continued harvesting data about them. The $391.5 billion settlement was spearheaded by Oregon[Read More…]
Peter Malinauskas, the South Australian Premier, has been the latest convert to the LIV Golf circuit, showing little to no awareness about where the lion’s share of funding is coming from. When confronted with that, he paddles away the prospect of being compromised. With LIV Golf Adelaide, scheduled for April 21-23 next year, he has made an undeniable statement on[Read More…]
To get to where they are, imperial powers will deceive, dissimulate and distort. The US imperium, that most awesome of devilish powers, has tentacled itself across the globe, often unbeknownst to its own citizens. In a report released by the New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center of Justice titled Secret War: How the US Uses Partnerships and Proxy[Read More…]
It’s a grotesque, ceremonial observance, marked by a degree of unpardonable acceptance. The First World War, which killed millions, extirpated classes in Europe, and destroyed monarchies, established a mawkish ritual that serves to continue, rather than prevent war. The more one grieves for the slaughtered and the brain frozen folly, the more one hopes for the next round of bloodletting,[Read More…]
Soon, the US government may be making waves regarding another extradition request for a figure connected with that oft exaggerated notion of national security. While the high profile and insidious effort to extradite Julian Assange from the United Kingdom continues, the case of former US pilot, Marine Corps major and flight instructor Daniel Edmund Duggan has crossed the radar of[Read More…]
They are falling like ninepins, and the Tories have now given the weary people of Britain yet another prime minister. And what a catch: stupendously wealthy, youthful – the youngest in two centuries – and a lawbreaker. As Chancellor of the Exchequer in the government of Boris Johnson, he was fined for breaches during the partygate scandal, despite telling the[Read More…]
While the levels of schadenfreude will be going through the roof given the unfolding farce in British politics, the resignation of Liz Truss as UK Prime Minister was troubling in one vital respect. True, her juvenile salad understanding of economics, which involved spending billions on tax cuts and energy subsidies, was lamentable. To cope with the beast of aggressive inflation,[Read More…]
How do you bury responsibility for a decision inspired by a pilfered idea? Blame someone else, especially if that person came up with the idea to begin with. This tried method of distraction was used with invidious gusto by US President John F. Kennedy, who recast his role in reaching an agreement with the Soviet Union during the Cuban missile[Read More…]
For a time, the confused and muddled approach from Australian football (soccer to some) did much of a side-step regarding the human rights imbroglio and Qatar’s hosting of the FIFA World Cup. There was ample cash and participation in one of the world’s biggest tournaments on the line. There was FIFA’s reluctance that footballing sides show any political streak; such[Read More…]
Bogeyman politics tends to be flatly unimaginative. The image of the nuclear-mad Russian President, counting his diminishing options, has caught the imagination of press and propaganda outlets across the West. Will Mad Vlad go the distance and deploy a nuclear weapon in Ukraine? Certainly, his rhetoric suggests the possibility. Vladimir Putin has promised to “make use of all weapon systems[Read More…]
Ethics and Eric Schmidt are rare bedfellows. The former Google/Alphabet CEO/Chairman exudes a sense of predatory self-interest, always making the point that what he wants aligns with what is supposedly good for the United States. He has splashed money on numerous projects, including such artificial intelligence outfits as Rebellion Defense, all the time maintaining uncomfortably close ties to the government[Read More…]
It was telling. Of the mainstream Australian press gallery, only David Crowe of the Sydney Morning Herald turned up to listen to Jennifer Robinson, lawyer extraordinaire who has spent years representing Julian Assange. Since 2019, that representation has taken an even more urgent note: to prevent the WikiLeaks founder from being extradited to the United States, where he faces 18[Read More…]
“When are you going to govern? The only thing you have governed for the past year is your own survival.” Jess Phillips, Labour MP, October 20, 2022 British politics has revealed hidden depths, each one being sought as each prime minister succumbs. The announcement by Liz Truss that she would be resigning came after a mere 45 days in office. [Read More…]
Sports stars are often adored like dumb show animals, suitably pretty, happily disposed to the cause they are paid for. For the FIFA Men’s World Cup being held in Qatar next month, football can count on the face of former English star David Beckham as its prized animal. This month, the principle-free player signed a 10-year contract worth £150 million[Read More…]
“The Tory Party is like a knight dying in his armour.” Peter Hitchens, Mail on Sunday, Oct 16, 2022 Liz Truss is proving to be the architect of her own spectacular demise. She laid the mines in a fit of drunken ecstasy and decided to skip across them with an almost childish arrogance that has stunned her own party members. [Read More…]
Demographic angst is a terrifying thing, especially to leaders concerned about poor returns from horizontal folk dancing. Viktor Orbán of Hungary is particularly apprehensive that precious Hungarian blood is not being propagated, facing dilution, if not disappearance, from hordes of swarthy immigrants from the Middle East and Africa. In Italy, the country’s imminent first female prime minister is much of[Read More…]
On the latest slimed path Julian Assange has been made to trod, a few things have presented themselves. The rusty sword of Damocles may be suspended above him (he, we are informed, has contracted COVID-19), but there are those, in the meantime, willing to defend him with decent conviction against his dispatch to the United States, where he is certain[Read More…]
It is a stinker in terms of policy, and unconvincing in effect, but the wholesale, indiscriminate retention of telecommunications data continues to excite legislators and law enforcement. In the European Union, countries continue to debate and pursue such measures, despite legal challenges. The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), passed in 2016, limits the ways personal data is collected in[Read More…]
Never underestimate the power of failure. As the Liz Truss Disaster Show demonstrates, the next pitfall is probably just around the corner. The UK Prime Minister has shown, along with her distinctly oblivious Chancellor of the Exchequer, how to balls up the economy in the shortest timeframe imaginable. Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s “mini-Budget” delivered on September 30, designed to evade the[Read More…]
It all caused a flutter amongst the ignorant and expectant on September 21. China, it was said, was in the grip of an intriguing internal crisis. Air traffic had dramatically altered, with some 9,583 flights cancelled. There were talking heads aflame with interest on the latest social media morsel, minute and yet profound. The issue of flight cancellations was then[Read More…]
Things are not getting better for Optus, a subsidiary of the Singapore-owned Singtel and Australia’s second largest telecommunications company. Responsible for one of Australia’s largest data breaches, the beleaguered company is facing burning accusations and questions on various fronts. It is also proving to be rather less than forthcoming about details as to what has been compromised in the leak.[Read More…]
If ever there was a blatant statement of realpolitik masquerading as friendliness, the latest US-Pacific Island declaration must count as one of them. The Biden administration has been busy of late, wooing Pacific Island states in an effort to discourage increasingly sharp tilt towards China. It has been spurred on, in no small way, by Beijing’s failure in May to[Read More…]
Imagine the tobacco producer who invests in smoke limitation programs, or the arms manufacturer who attends a conference proposing to ban weapons and seek a better future. Gautam Adani, one of India’s most ruthlessly adept billionaires, has added his name to the growing list of corporate transvestism, using ecological credentials as his camouflage for fossil fuel predation. The central feature[Read More…]
Be careful who you praise and the degree of zeal you do it with. The slain Shinzo Abe, shot dead in Nara on July 8, towered over Japanese politics. In doing so, he cast a lengthy shadow. In death, this shadow continues to grow ever more darkly. The reaction from certain figures outside Japan left an impression of distorted admiration. [Read More…]
Australia has a mixed relationship with the United Nations Human Rights Committee. Irritation, dismissal and even the occasional openly hostile comment, have registered. But in 1994, the Toonen decision filtered through the Australian legal process, leading the federal government to remove archaically noxious provisions in the Tasmanian criminal code criminalising sodomy. The UNHRC has since found Australia’s compliance with the[Read More…]
Federal Court Justice Mordecai Bromberg has been in the environmental news again, this time throwing a large judicial spanner in the works of Santos and its drilling efforts in the Timor Sea. On this occasion, the Federal Court found that the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority should never have approved the Barossa Gas Project off the Tiwi[Read More…]
The right to protest, fragile and meekly protected by the judiciary in Britain’s common law tradition, did not really hold much force till European law confirmed it. In the UK, condemning other countries for suppressing rights to protest is standard fare. So it was with some discomforting surprise – at least to a number of talking heads – that people[Read More…]
When it was revealed that former Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison had not only shown contempt for his own government in secretly appointing himself, via the Governor-General’s approval, to five portfolios, the depths of deception seemed to be boundless. His tenure had already been marked by a spectacular, habitual tendency to conceal matters. What else would come out? The latest[Read More…]
In Vienna, China’s permanent mission to the United Nations has been rather exercised of late. Members of the mission have been particularly irate with the International Atomic Energy Agency and its Director General, Rafael Grossi, who addressed the IAEA’s Board of Governors on September 12. Grossi was building on a confidential report by the IAEA which had been circulated the[Read More…]
Once the fixated adoration with the late Queen Elizabeth II starts cooling, the accountants of public welfare and decency will be stunned to realise the costs and wealth associated with the royal institution. Her successor, Charles III, is continuing in that vein, a jarring note of wealth and pomp even as prices rise and the hefty bills for citizens (should[Read More…]
Here we go again, playing God and toying with Promethean fire. Having done a comprehensively brutal job of killing off the thylacine, known in popular parlance as the Tasmanian Tiger, along with a growing number of other species, there is interest in reviving and ultimately returning them to the wild. And, as with any deity, the choice resides in the[Read More…]
Turn on the television. Move to the screen. Switch on the device – if you ever left it off. Queen Elizabeth II may have passed, but she is everywhere in very lively fashion, a spectral manifestation that has utterly controlled large chunks of a transfixed global media system. It helps that she has captured the media mecca that is the[Read More…]
10 Downing Street is set to be bathed in social media guff with the victory of Liz Truss. Confirmed as Boris Johnson’s successor, the new British Prime Minister won by a slimmer margin over rival contender Rishi Sunak than anticipated. Nonetheless, 81,326 votes to 60,399 was sufficient to guarantee her a secure margin – for the moment. (The turnout had[Read More…]
Julian Assange’s legal team has taken its next step along their Via Dolorosa, filing an appeal against the decision to extradite their client to the United States to face 18 charges, 17 based on the odious US Espionage Act of 1917. Since his violent eviction from the Ecuadorian embassy in April 2019, much to the delight of the national security[Read More…]
It must have been music to Elon Musk’s ears. Twitter, a platform he has had a patchy relationship with, has been the recipient of various blows inflicted by Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, the company’s former head of security. This was no mean feat, given the company’s reputation as being essentially indestructible. But Mudge was left with every reason to seethe; his[Read More…]
There is an overwhelming boisterous ignorance that characterises Australia’s foreign policy approach to China. When Beijing was boxed and derided as emerging, weak and well-behaved, everyone supposedly got on. Washington remained the region’s patriarch and Australia its policing deputy. Everyone could get on plundering resources and making some ruddy cash along the way. Then, assumptions started being challenged: the cheeky[Read More…]
Ayman al-Zawahiri is dead – or so we are told. Al-Qaida’s chief and successor to the slain Osama bin Laden, he was deemed the chief ideologue and mastermind behind the audacious September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. On July 31, he was supposedly killed in a drone strike in Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, while standing on his balcony. Terrorism[Read More…]
He has survived death threats and attempts on his life since February 1989. But Salman Rushdie’s luck just about ran out at the Chautauqua Institution, southwest of Buffalo in New York State. On August 12, at a venue historically celebrated for bringing education to all, the writer was stabbed incessantly by a fanatic who felt little sense of guilt or[Read More…]
Scenes and pictures have been circulating of broken earth, lacking moisture, cracked and yearning. But these are not from traditional drought-stricken parts of the planet, where the animal carcass assumes near totemic power amidst dry riverbeds or desert expanses. Neither Australia nor Africa feature on these occasions – at least in a prominent way. Europe, continent of historical arable sustainability,[Read More…]
Cambodia has often featured in the Western imagination as a place of plunder and pilfering. Temples and artefacts of exquisite beauty have exercised the interest of adventurers and buccaneers who looted with almost kleptocratic tendency. In 1924, the French novelist and future statesman André Malraux, proved himself one of Europe’s greatest adventurers in making off with a ton of sacred[Read More…]
The United Nations prides itself on exposing, monitoring and noting the travails and vicissitudes to be found on this troubled planet. It also prides itself on being the premier international institution that protects, or at the very least keeps an eye out for, the principles of the Charter that underpin its existence. But as with all bodies with mighty aspirations[Read More…]
Regional alliances should, for the most part, remain regional. Areas of the globe can count on a number of such bodies and associations with varying degrees of heft: the Organization of American States; the Organisation of African Unity; and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Only one has decided to move beyond its natural, subscribed limits, citing security and a[Read More…]
The World Health Organization has been one of the easier bodies to abuse. For parochial types, populist moaners and critics of international institutions, the WHO bore the brunt of criticisms from Donald Trump to Jair Bolsonaro. Being a key institution in identifying public health risks, it took time assessing the threat posed by SARS-CoV-2 and its disease, COVID-19. Little time[Read More…]
Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s visit to Sarajevo in 1914 was an instructive lesson on how the dumb do, at some point, ask for it. Bosnia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, was desired by the Kingdom of Serbia. With the Serbs also well represented in Bosnia, a visit by the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne was always to be tricky, if[Read More…]
They really do want to kill him. Perhaps it is high time that his detractors and sceptics, proven wrong essentially from the outset, admit that the US imperium, along with its client states, is willing to see Julian Assange perish in prison. The locality and venue, for the purposes of this exercise, are not relevant. Like the Inquisition, the Catholic[Read More…]
The language is far from reassuring. Despite being caught red handed using facial recognition technology unbeknownst to customers, a number of Australia’s large retail companies have given a meek assurance that they will “pause” their use. The naughty will only show contrition in the most qualified of ways. It all began with an investigation by CHOICE which found that the[Read More…]
As UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson set the scene in spectacular fashion. All who sought to confine him to history, perished. He was the only one who seemed to survive, and reject, one diabolical scandal after the next – till now. No leader with such a destructive sense of presence could do anything but impair those who followed him. But[Read More…]
The indomitable spirit of Raphael Lemkin, bibliophile, assiduous documenter of humanity’s dark deeds and inexecrable conduct, is bound to be an unsettled one. This brilliant, committed and peculiarly dedicated creature took years to come up with what would, in time, become a word so horrifying as to transfix judges of international law. The amalgam word of genocide stalks the conscience[Read More…]
Thinktanks across Australia, tanked with cash from US sources and keen to think in furious agreement, are all showing how delighted they are with the AUKUS security pact and what potential it has for local, if subordinated industry. The United States Studies Centre, a loudspeaker for Washington’s opinions based at the University of Sydney, has added its bit to the[Read More…]
The fall and ignominious retreat of Sri Lanka’s Gotabaya Rajapaksa has enlivened one distinct possibility. Having formally resigned as Sri Lankan President, a point made via email from Singapore, those wishing to see him account for war crimes may get their wish. There have been various efforts in train regarding a man who ruthlessly concluded his country’s civil war in[Read More…]
The lobbying of Uber should, along with those of other corporate giants, only surprise those prone to pollyannaish escapism. Its hungry, desperate behaviour takes place in plain sight, and denials merely serve to emphasise the point. It resembles, in some crudely distant way, the operating rationale of the notorious British sex pest Jimmy Savile, who preyed upon his victims with[Read More…]
It was, all and all, an odd spectacle. The Ladies’ Singles victor for Wimbledon 2022 had all the credentials that would have otherwise guaranteed her barring. Being Russian-born, news outlets in Britain walked gingerly around The All England Club’s decision to ban Russian players yet permit Elena Rybakina to play. Sky News noted that, “Moscow-born Elena Rybakina, who represents Kazakhstan,[Read More…]
Like the political equivalent of a cockroach, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson survived and endured one strike after another. His credibility was shot, his mendacity second to none. He lost the confidence of a party that delighted in his buffoonish performances and appeal. Fearing electoral punishment, senior ministers and aides have left his side. Labour opposition leader, Sir Keir Starmer,[Read More…]
When faced with the option of acquiring nuclear technology, states have rarely refused. Since the splitting of the atom and the deployment of atomic weapons in war, the acquisition of a nuclear capacity has been a dream. Those who did acquire it, in turn, tried to restrict others from joining what has become, over the years, an exclusive club guarded[Read More…]
The US Supreme Court has been frantically busy of late, striking down law and legislation with an almost crazed, ideological enthusiasm. Gun laws have been invalidated; Roe v Wade and constitutional abortion rights, confined to history. And now, the Environmental Protection Agency has been clipped of its powers in a 6-3 decision. The June 30 decision of West Virginia v[Read More…]
Instances of sympathy are rarely excuses to throw out the rule book. In the case of the European Union, throwing out the rule book about admission has tended to be a feature of enlargement. Credentials of candidate states have been, when needed, boosted or cooked for the occasion. Others, whatever the progress, have been ignored. For a collective that really[Read More…]
American exceptionalism can be a dreary thing, and no more so than each time a US president promotes the country’s imperial credentials and continued prowess. But in matters of literacy, shared wealth, and health care, the US has been outpaced by other states less inclined towards remorseless social Darwinism. The overruling of Roe v Wade by the US Supreme Court[Read More…]
It looks all too eerily similar as a method: the expulsion of individuals from their home, the demolition of said home and the punishing of entire families. All excused by a harsh reading of local regulations. But this method, used by Israeli authorities for years against vulnerable Palestinians, has become a weapon of choice for the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata[Read More…]
Hollywood, like the US press, has not been spared the influential hand of government. Under the mask of various projects, the defence establishment has sought to influence the narrative of Freedom Land’s pursuits, buying a stake in the way exploits are marketed or, when needed, buried. The extent of such collaboration, manipulation and interference can be gathered in National Security[Read More…]
A sordid enterprise, nasty, crude and needless. But the World Cup 2022 will be, should anyone bother watching it, stained by one of the highest casualty rates amongst workers in its history, marked by corruption and stained by a pharisee quality. The sportswashers, cleaning agent at the ready, will be out in force, and the hypocrites dressed to the nines.[Read More…]
The only shock about the UK Home Secretary’s decision regarding Julian Assange was that it did not come sooner. In April, Chief Magistrate Senior District Judge Paul Goldspring expressed the view that he was “duty-bound” to send the case to Priti Patel to decide on whether to extradite the WikiLeaks founder to the United States to face 18 charges, 17[Read More…]
“Keep Ithaka always in your mind. Arriving there is where you’re destined for.” C. P. Cavafy, trans. Edmund Keeley John Shipton, despite his size, glides with insect-like grace across surfaces. He moves with a hovering sense, a holy man with message and meaning. As Julian Assange’s father, he has found himself a bearer of messages and meaning, attempting to convince[Read More…]
The United States remains a country of tenacious faith. The nature of that faith stretches from the digital pulpits of Silicon Valley, where cool technology occupies the seat of majesty, to the hot Bible Belt of spiritual endurance and suffering, where the good Lord holds sway in stern disapproval. In between, market fundamentalists take time to worship the invisible hand[Read More…]
June 10 bore witness to a valiant effort on the part of refugee groups and a trade union to stop what promises to be the first journey of many as part of the UK-Rwanda plan. Their attempt to seek an injunction failed to convince the High Court. Next Tuesday, the first flight from the UK to Rwanda filled with asylum[Read More…]
On June 3, Judge Santiago Pedraz of Spain’s national court, the Audienca Nacional, issued a summons for former CIA director and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to testify in an ongoing investigation into the conduct of private security firm UC Global and its founder, David Morales. The security firm is said to have been hired by US intelligence operatives[Read More…]
For a country experiencing its worst economic crisis since gaining independence in 1948, the picture of a touring team pampered and fussed over might cause consternation. But the Australian cricket tour to Sri Lanka has only been met by praise from the country’s cricket officials, where logic is inverted, and the gaze of responsibility averted. Not even a shortage of[Read More…]
The platinum jubilee will bore and cause some to yawn. It might certainly agitate the republican spleen in the fourteen countries where Queen Elizabeth II remains a constitutional head of state. But the question remains: How does the institution this figure represents endure, if it should at all? A rash of countries have expressed an interest in severing ties with[Read More…]
After having a few lunches with Australia’s then opposition leader, Anthony Albanese, John Shipton felt reason to be confident. Albanese had promised Assange’s father that he would do whatever he could, should he win office, to bring the matter to a close. In December 2019, before a gathering at the Chifley Research Centre, Albanese also referred to Assange. “You don’t[Read More…]
Complacency has been the hallmark of NATO expansion. Over time, it has even become a form of derision, notably directed against Russia. As with many historical matters, records ignored can be records revisited, the second time around sometimes nastier than the first. With the Ukraine conflict raging, a few of Russia’s neighbours have reconsidered their position of military non-alignment and[Read More…]
When it comes to the tawdry, hideous business of politicising the right to asylum, and the refugees who arise from it, no country does it better than Australia. A country proud of being a pioneer in women’s rights, the secret ballot, good pay conditions and tatty hardware (the Hills Hoist remains a famous suburban monstrosity) has also been responsible for[Read More…]
Death, remarked Gore Vidal about Truman Capote’s passing, was a good career move. The novelist Saki also considered the good qualities of shuffling off the mortal coil. “Waldo,” he writes in “The Feast of Nemesis”, “is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.” But what of those instances when death is foiled, the Grim Reaper cheated?[Read More…]
Societies generate their own economies of tolerable cruelties and injustices. Poverty, for instance, will be allowed, as long a sufficient number of individuals are profiting. To an extent, crime and violence can be allowed to thrive. In the United States, the economy of tolerable massacres, executed by military grade weapons, is considerable and seemingly resilient. Its participants all partake in[Read More…]
Never underestimate the potency, and deceptive malice, of the British political mind. In responding to the threat posed by Imperial Germany during the First World War, the British propaganda campaign made much of the atrocity tale, the nun raping German and the baby bayoneting Hun. The effectiveness of the campaign was so impressive it sowed doubt amongst a generation about[Read More…]
It has dominated news cycles, debates and policies since 2020, but COVID-19 continues to exercise the interest of number crunchers and talliers. While the ghoulish daily press announcements about infections and deaths across many a country have diminished and, in some cases, disappeared altogether, publications abound about how many were taken in the pandemic. The World Health Organization, ever that[Read More…]
Weapons, lacking sentience and moral orientation, are there to be used by all. Once out, these creations can never be rebottled. Effective spyware, that most malicious of surveillance tools, is one such creation, available to entities and governments of all stripes. The targets are standard: dissidents, journalists, legislators, activists, even the odd jurist. Pegasus spyware, the fiendishly effective creation of[Read More…]
The US Supreme Court Chief Justice was furious. For the first time in history, the raw judicial process of one of the most powerful, and opaque arms of government, had been exposed via media – at least in preliminary form. It resembled, in no negligible way, the publication by WikiLeaks of various drafts of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the forerunner to[Read More…]
The hysteria in Canberra and Washington over the Sino-Solomon Islands security pact has shown, again, how irrelevant the individual affairs of Pacific Island states are in the chess game of geopolitics. The one thing conspicuously missing has been the issue of climate change, near and dear to those whose lands are gradually being inundated by rising sea levels. In a[Read More…]
Secular religions are hard to battle in terms of their misplaced assumptions. In some ways, they are even harder to fight than those based on mythical gods and superstitious foundations, many drawn from desert religions and sandy practice. ANZAC, the name of the Australian New Zealand Army Corps, hardly sounds promising as the basis of a religion. But since the[Read More…]
Visits to Honiara, part plea, part threat. Delegations equipped with a note of harassment. That was the initial Australian effort to convince the Solomon Islands that the decision to make a security pact with Beijing was simply not appropriate in the lotus land of Washington’s Pacific empire. Despite an election campaign warming up, Senator Zed Seselja found time to tell[Read More…]
In terms of labyrinthine callousness and indifference to justice, the treatment of lawyer Bernard Collaery by the Australian government must be slotted alongside that of another noted Australian currently being held in the maximum-security facility of Belmarsh, London. While Collaery has not suffered the same deprivations of liberty as publisher extraordinaire Julian Assange, both share the target status accorded them[Read More…]
It was a dastardly formality. On April 20, at a hearing at Westminster Magistrates Court, Julian Assange, beamed in via video link from Belmarsh Prison, his carceral home for three years, is to be extradited to the United States to face 18 charges, 17 based on the US Espionage Act of 1917. The final arbiter will be the UK Secretary[Read More…]
This month, the government of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson joined an ignominious collective in announcing a refugee deal with Rwanda, seedily entitled the UK-Rwanda Migration Partnership. The fact that such terms are used – a partnership or deal connotes contract and transaction – suggests how inhumane policies towards those seeking sanctuary and a better life have become. In no[Read More…]
In 1900, Representative George Henry White of North Carolina, the sole Black law maker in Congress at the time, dared to introduce legislation (HR 6963) that would make lynching a hate crime. To back his case, he submitted an anti-lynching petition from New Jersey residents protesting the lynching of Black Americans for alleged offences, from the most fleetingly minor, to[Read More…]
If further clues were needed as to why AUKUS, the security pact comprising the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, was created, the latest announcement on weapons would have given the game away. Australia, just as it became real estate to park British nuclear weapons experiments, is now looking promising as a site for hypersonic missile testing, development, and[Read More…]
It does not pay to be too moralistic in politics. Self-elevation can lead to tripping up. Sermonising even as your stable needs cleaning can enfeeble the argument. But Bidenism, this gaffe-prone ideology currently doing the rounds in a barely breathing administration, has identified the simplest of binaries to work with. In his State of the Union address, US President Joe[Read More…]
For more terrestrially grounded people, writing about cricket can be seen as an exercise in distant planetary speculation. The Nobel laureate Harold Pinter did not think so, calling this old English game “the greatest thing that God ever created on earth.” Others might disagree with mild disgust, finding it archaic, jargon heavy and slow. In the early 1990s, one figure[Read More…]
Obscenities occupy the annals of State behaviour, revolting reminders about what governments can do. One of Australia’s most pronounced and undeniable obscenities is its continuing effort to gut and empty international refugee law of its relevant foundations. Instead of being treated as a scandal, populists and governments the world over have expressed admiration, even envy: If they can get away[Read More…]
When involved in war, those who feel like benefactors are bound to congratulate the gun toting initiators. If you so happen to be on the losing end, sentiments are rather different. Complicity and cause in murder come to mind. The late US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright will always be tied with the appallingly named humanitarian war in Kosovo in[Read More…]
The cultural vandals and iconoclasts have been busy of late, removing Russians from the stables at short notice and demanding what might be called a necessary affirmation of disloyalty. It’s all good to talk about world peace and the resolution of disputes, but that will hardly do for the flag bearing choirs who have discovered their object of evil. Do[Read More…]
In a good number of Western states, the ruling classes, former and current, have lost their heads. Bugbear and boogieman Vladimir Putin’s efforts in Ukraine have lent themselves to some rather extreme suggestions, ranging from assassination to potential war crimes trials. This is not to say that the Russian leader has nothing to account for. As ever, it all depends[Read More…]
Great reformers are not normally found in theocratic monarchies. Despite assertions to the contrary, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia remains archaic in the way it deals with its opponents. In its penal system, executions remain standard fare. With liberal democratic countries fixated with the Ukraine conflict and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, it was prudent for Saudi authorities to capitalise. On March[Read More…]
Wars disturb and delude. The Ukraine conflict is no exception. Misinformation is cantering through press accounts and media dispatches with feverish spread. Fear that a nuclear option might be deployed makes teeth chatter. And the Russian President Vladimir Putin is being treated as a Botox Hitler-incarnate, a figure worthy of assassination. The idea of forcing Putin into the grave certainly[Read More…]
Julian Assange, even as he is being judicially and procedurally tormented, has braved every legal hoop in his effort to avoid extradition to the United States. Kept and caged in Belmarsh throughout this farce of judicial history, he risks being extradited to face 18 charges, 17 based on the US Espionage Act of 1917. District Court Judge Vanessa Baraitser initially[Read More…]
Seedy, compromised and creepy, the surveillance machine of Facebook, now operating under the broader fold of its parent company Meta Platforms, is currently giving out the very signals that it was condemned for doing before: encourage discussions on hating a group and certain figures, while spreading the bad word to everyone else to do so. The Russian Federation, President Vladimir[Read More…]
Working with Russian academics and institutions. The attack upon Ukraine by Russia. These are two features playing out heavily in university discussions. As typifies such chitchat, nuance features rather less than cant and sanctimony. As writer and lecturer Paolo Nori of Milano-Bicocca University stated after discovering that his course on Fyodor Dostoevsky would be cancelled in response to the war,[Read More…]
Never trust anything that comes out of a politician’s mouth in an election year. Pledges are made to be broken; promises are made to seduce, not convince. When the subject matter involves fictional submarines, even greater care should be taken. The prolonged, costly nightmare of Australia’s submarine policy took another turn on March 6. The Defence Minister Peter Dutton could[Read More…]
“These people are not people we are used to… these people are Europeans.” – Kiril Petkov, Bulgarian Prime Minister, Associated Press, March 1, 2022 In the history of accepting refugees, countries have shown more than an erratic streak. Universal human characteristics have often been overlooked in favour of the particular: race, cultural habits, religion. Even immigration nations, such as the[Read More…]
The guilty can be devious in concealing their crimes, and their role in them. The greater the crime, the more devious the strategy of deception. The breaking of international law, and the breaching of convention, is a field replete with such figures. Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has presented a particularly odious grouping, a good number of them neoconservatives, a[Read More…]
In a country expert in killing off mammal species at a rate exceeding that of others (to be fair, there are so many more to destroy, with more to come), Australians now face the prospect that the koala, one of its most singularly recognisable animals, has its days numbered. Divergent attitudes to such animal species, notably indigenous ones, has been[Read More…]
A frozen continent. Another potential frontier for conflict and competition. Antarctica is a part of the world were realpolitician meets scientist; the desire for finding exploitable resources meets environmental expectations and fears. Countries have vied for their little slice of ice, sometimes citing reasons of scientific collaboration, and often national self-interest. Much of this culminated in the establishment of the[Read More…]
US President Theodore Roosevelt never had much time for peace, seeing its returns as distinctly less than those of war. Despite his love of military conflict and its touted benefits, he was rewarded with the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in brokering peace in the Russo-Japanese War. But for old Teddy peaceniks were sissies, degenerates, and probably sexually dubious.[Read More…]
Nation states are habitually doomed to defeat their best interests. Conditions of mad instability are fostered. Arms sales take place, regimes get propped up or abandoned, and the people under them endure and suffer, awaiting the next criminal regime change. Nothing is more counter-intuitive than the effort to isolate, cripple and strangulate the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. For all the[Read More…]
Incompetent politicians and diplomats are on the level with ill-prepared generals fighting current wars with dated methods. They err, they stumble, and they may well be responsible for the next idiotic slander, misfire or misunderstanding. UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss is synonymous with Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s idea of groping diplomacy. Graceless, all confusion, and much ignorance besides, she has[Read More…]
There are some things that strain credulity. There are the dubious accounts of virgin births. There are the resolute flat earth theorists and denialists of the moon landing. To this can be added the environmental stance of Australia’s Scott Morrison and his ministers, one resolutely opposed to the empirical world. We are now at the phoney stage of an electoral[Read More…]
It all seems worn, part of an aspic approach to foreign policy. But US President Joe Biden is keen to ensure that old, and lingering mistakes, retain their flavour. Towards Cuba, it is now 60 years since President John F. Kennedy’s Presidential Proclamation 3447 imposed an embargo on all trade with the island state. The proclamation was packed with Cold[Read More…]
It has become common fare to read ghoulish stories of child abuse in institutions supposedly created to care for the vulnerable. Orphanages, homes, religious orders have tended to feature, along with their assortments of innumerable sadists and pederasts. But in December, another institution caused ripples for its alleged role in abusing children. A Danish Radio documentary series, The Search for[Read More…]
On the face of it, there seems to be little in the way of connection between the treatment of Novak Djokovic by Australian authorities and the cooling of the Serbian government towards Rio Tinto. The Anglo-Australian mining giant was confident that it would, at least eventually, win out in gaining the permissions to commence work on its US$2.4 billion lithium-borates[Read More…]
With December’s High Court decision to overturn the lower court ruling against the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States, lawyers of the WikiLeaks founder immediately got busy. The next avenue of appeal, strewn less with gold than obstacles, would be to the Supreme Court. The central question remained: Should the publisher be extradited to face 18 charges, 17[Read More…]
History’s annals are filled with war profiteers and hustlers for the opportunistic return. They come in the form of hoarders, arms manufacturers and wily business folk making a steal on slaughter and mayhem. But the other conflict – that of battling a pandemic – has also shown that profits exist for those willing to exploit the crisis. With the global[Read More…]
Australia’s treatment of Novak Djokovic, the tennis world number one, has been revelatory. Unintentionally, this has exposed the seedier, arbitrary and inconsistent nature of Australia’s border policies. The approval by the Australian Federal Court of the Immigration Minister Alex Hawke’s decision to re-cancel the prominent Serb’s visa left the country a heaving precedent that will be invoked, in future, with[Read More…]
Anniversaries for detention centres, concentration camps and torture facilities are not the relishable calendar events in the canon of human worth. But not remembering them, when they were used, and how they continue being used, would be unpardonable amnesia. On January 11, 2002, the first prisoners of the absurdly named “War on Terror”, declared with such confused understanding by US[Read More…]
Julian Assange has now been in the maximum-security facilities of Belmarsh prison for over 1,000 days. On the occasion of his 1,000th day of imprisonment, campaigners, supporters and kindred spirits gathered to show their support, indignation and solidarity at this political detention most foul. Alison Mason of the Julian Assange Defence Committee reiterated those observations long made about the imprisonment[Read More…]
January 10, 2022 will be remembered as one of the odder days in the annals of sport. For one, it had little to do with physical exertion. Tennis proved secondary to the claims of one Novak Djokovic, currently the world’s number one ranked player. Instead of finding himself training on court in preparation for the Australian Open, he found himself[Read More…]
Rarely can the treatment of a grand sporting figure by officialdom have caused such consternation. Novak Djokovic, the tennis World Number One, has always had a tendency to get under skin and constitution, creating a large following of admirers and detractors. But his current treatment by Australian authorities, and his subsequent detention as an unlawful arrival despite being granted a[Read More…]
Awards and honours bestowed by States or private committees, republican or monarchical, are bound to be corrupted by considerations of hypocrisy, racketeering and general, chummy disposition. From the Nobel Peace Prize to the range of eccentric and esoteric orders bestowed each year in Britain by Her Majesty, diddling and manipulating is never far behind. You are bestowed such things as[Read More…]
The US presidential doctrine is an odd creature. Usually summoned up by security wonks and satellite personnel who revolve around the President, these eventually assume the name of the person holding office. They are given the force of a Papal bull and treated by the priest pundits as binding, coherent and sound. Much of this is often simple mythmaking for[Read More…]
With Julian Assange now fighting the next stage of efforts to extradite him to the United States to face 18 charges, 17 of which are based on the brutal, archaic Espionage Act, some Australian politicians have found their voice. It might be said that a few have even found their conscience. Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce was sufficiently exercised[Read More…]
It’s not the sort of thing you encounter regularly. A member of a government cabinet, responsible for arguably one of the country’s most important portfolios, found both wanting and culpable for their actions after leaving their post. But this is what former Danish immigration minister Inger Støjberg found when she was convicted for illegally separating asylum seeking couples arriving in[Read More…]
British justice is advertised by its proponents as upright, historically different to the savages upon which it sought to civilise, and apparently fair. Such outrages as the unjust convictions of the Guilford Four and Maguire Seven, both having served time in prison for terrorist offences they did not commit, are treated as blemishes. In recent memory, fewer blemishes can be[Read More…]
Making moral statements in the blood and gristle of international relations can often come across as feeble. In doing so, the maker serves the worst of all worlds: to reveal a false sense of assurance that something was done while serving no actual purpose other than to provoke. Anger, and impotence, follow. The Biden administration is proving to be particularly[Read More…]
Forget any notions of juicy carrots; the stick approach of savage punishment is in vogue with the Greek government in pushing vaccination rates. It is far from the only one. Across a number of countries in Europe, governments wishing to drive up levels of COVID-19 vaccination have decided to abandon suasion and the generous supply of medical information in favour[Read More…]
Stick to the script: owe that duty of care to your population, so the legal experts in government tell you. Self-interest pays, if in small amounts. These rigid, formulaic assumptions have done wonders to harm and deter any spirit of cooperation regarding dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. History’s record of humanity’s response to plagues, pandemics and disease is one of[Read More…]
The history of humanitarian or policing missions is a history of taking sides, disruptive partiality and the forfeiture of the very object powers claim when intervening in another country. Things become particularly absurd when the individual or government pleading for such help to an outside force is struggling to survive yet making grand statements about democracy and the like. Take[Read More…]
Another fault line has opened in the mining wars. In Serbia, resistance is gathering steam against various deals made between Belgrade and companies that risk environmental degradation and lingering spoliation. In this regard, the globe’s second largest metals and mining corporation, features prominently. Rio Tinto, bruised in reputation but determined in business, finds itself in a hunting mood in the[Read More…]
Get the Marines ready. Store the supplies. Marshal the allies. The United States is getting ready for war (the preferable term in Washington is policing) in the Indo-Pacific region, and is hoping to do so with a range of expanded bases across client states, or what it prefers to call friends. On November 29, the Pentagon announced that US President[Read More…]
It has been written about more times than any care to remember. Pliny the Elder, that old cheek, told us that Africa always tended to bring forth something new: Semper aliquid novi Africam adferre. The suggestion was directed to hybrid animals, but in the weird pandemic wonderland that is COVID-19, all continents now find themselves bringing forth their types, making[Read More…]
A small riot. Unrest. Risk of collapse. All given a ballooning effect and inflated for policy makers across the ocean. Before much time elapses, Australian security forces are skirting off to restore order in their vast watery neighbourhood. It is a reminder that such relations in the Pacific region are a mixture of intervention, forcible charitable guidance and, at times,[Read More…]
When Kingsley Amis encountered the works of D. H. Lawrence, he was left unimpressed by yet another great denouncer and missionary the English send “themselves to tell them they are crass, gross, lost, dead, mad and addicted to unnatural vice.” With little charity, Amis suggested leaving the didactic novelist on “on his pinnacle, inspiring, unapproachable and unread.” Leaving aside matters[Read More…]
The role of the parliamentarian, historically, is one of service. The desire to hold two jobs, or more, suggests that such service is severely qualified. In the quotient of democracy and representation, the MP who is ready to tend to the affairs of others is unlikely to focus on the voter. I represent you, but I also represent my client[Read More…]
Refugee crises are often manufactured by governments. They can be done at the source: war, famine, rapacious institutions. They can also be manufactured by the refusal of governments to accept those seeking asylum, sanctuary and refuge. The latter is very much in evidence in Europe: governments of the European Union are staring down desperate humans keen to travel into the[Read More…]
Words can provide sharp traps, fettering language and caging definitions. They can also speak to freedom of action and permissiveness. At COP26, that permissiveness was all the more present in the haggling ahead of what would become the Glasgow Climate Pact. COP26, or the UN Climate Change Conference UK 2021, had a mission of “Uniting the world to tackle climate[Read More…]
Rarely is the pragmatist admired. Be it in policy or politics, such a figure induces suspicion, a concern that principles will have to be subordinated to broader goals. True dreamers and visionaries, for all their glaring faults, can take the accolades; the pragmatists can be given lower pegging. These differences have proven stark with the late FW de Klerk, South[Read More…]
Former Australian prime ministers tend to be less conspicuous in public life than their counterparts in other countries. Occasionally, they make an appearance at political functions and events to remind us that they are still alive, their estate still breathing, their lawyers still working. For the most part, the pronouncements are less than profound, let alone relevant. But there are[Read More…]
In a modest effort to disrupt the global spyware market, the United States announced last week that four entities had been added to its blacklist. On November 3, the US Department of Commerce revealed that it would be adding Israel-based companies NSO Group and Candiru to its entity list “based on evidence that these entities developed and supplied spyware to[Read More…]
During his eventful time in office, US President Donald Trump took much delight in reflecting about the lethal toys of his country’s military, actual or hypothetical. These included a hypersonic capability which, his military advisors had warned, was being mastered by adversaries. Such devices, comprising hypersonic cruise missiles and hypersonic boost-glide vehicles, have been touted as opening a new arms[Read More…]
The second day of appellate proceedings by the United States against Julian Assange saw the defence make their case against the overturning of District Court Judge Vanessa Baraitser’s January ruling. Any extradition to the US, she concluded, would be so oppressive to the publisher as to render it unjust under UK extradition law. Before the UK High Court, both Edward[Read More…]
It’s time to ready yourself for ghoulishly bad behaviour. Shred your bill of rights or whatever charter of liberties you have handy. Flatulent, dangerous and fatuous, the US prosecution of Julian Assange took to the UK High Court on October 27, opening its effort to overturn the January ruling by District Judge Vanessa Baraitser. In a judgment poor on press[Read More…]
Is the imperium showing suspicions about its intended quarry? It is hard to believe it, but the US House Intelligence Committee is on a mission of discovery. Its subject: a Yahoo News report disclosing much material that was already in the public domain on the plot to kidnap or, failing that, poison Julian Assange. Given that such ideas were aired[Read More…]
On January 7, 2015, the staff of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo found themselves facing a form of cancel culture before it became fashionable in the Twaddle sphere. It was of the most severe, lethal sort. Twelve people were butchered and the fanatic’s credo asserted. The assailants Chérif and Saïd Kouachi had been offended by the magazine’s cartoon depictions[Read More…]
Overpaid breakfast hosts on an Australian network sniggered, wondered and pondered. Why is that top throbbed Blue Origin capsule heading to space shaped that way? Is Jeff Bezos’s effort nothing more than a phallic spurt into the heavens? The implications are flowing: Can he hold it? Will he come in the appropriate atmospheric strata? Giggles aside, the scandalous venture that[Read More…]
As a city, Melbourne previously prided itself with the air of a prim and proper heiress, one without peer in Australia: a gastronomic wonder, a sporting goddess, and a place of orderly public transport. The Economist Intelligence Unit glowed with praise, designating the city the world’s “most liveable” for seven years running. There were few law and order issues; nothing[Read More…]
History is strewn with the broken branches of twisted irony. An individual who found himself entangled in it was the late Colin Powell, who, as a military man, gave a doctrine his name only to forgo it as a diplomat. The Powell Doctrine was one of certitude and caution: do not engage in conflict except in conditions whereby you could[Read More…]
No one can stop him. He can barely stop himself. The former Australian prime minister, Tony Abbott, seems to be everywhere, fighting the poor cause. At the very least, he is everywhere with the press cameras, the niggling concerns, the irritations that make it into the twenty-four-hour news cycle before sinking with toxic charm. He is the perfect ingredient in[Read More…]
It was not for everybody, but the shock advertising tactics of the Australian comedian Dan Ilic made an appropriate point. Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison, a famed coal hugger, has vacillated about whether to even go to the climate conference in Glasgow. Having himself turned the country’s prime ministerial office into an extended advertising agency, Ilic was speaking his language.[Read More…]
The recent acquisition of the Newcastle United football club by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, along with financier Amanda Staveley and the billionaire Reuben brothers, was a source of much excitement for some former players. Old boy Alan Shearer did little to conceal it. “We can dare to hope again,” he rejoiced. In The Guardian, Barney Ronay was less enthusiastic,[Read More…]
The only surprise was that it did not come sooner. Big Tech whistleblowers are not exactly running out of the offices of Silicon Valley, so it was with some excitement that Facebook could produce a person willing enough to show us the laundry, with the dirt still caking the content. And the laundry in question proved to be bountiful, with[Read More…]
The merits are hard to stomach for partisans long jaundiced by presumption and dislike, but the cheer at the deplatforming of Donald Trump by a range of social media platforms said as much about the nature of any sentiment about democracy as it did about those claiming to defend it. For one, it shut off a valve of fantastic, instant[Read More…]
Pushing people back across borders; turning asylum seekers away from shores. When such tactics were openly adopted and used with impunity by Australia’s navy and border force, it caused outrage and concern in the maritime community and pricked the interest of border protectionists the world over. Disgust and outrage have, in time, been replaced by admiration at the sheer chutzpah[Read More…]
If there was any reason to halt a farcical train of legal proceedings, then the case against Julian Assange would have to be the standard bearing example. Since last year, the efforts by the US government to pursue his extradition to the vicious purgatory of American justice has seen more than a fair share of obscene revelations. While prosecutors for[Read More…]
With that orange haired brute of a president supposedly ushered out of the White House with moralising delight, the Biden administration was all keen to turn over a new leaf. There would be more diplomacy, and still more diplomacy. There would be a more humanitarian approach to refugees and asylum seekers – forget, he claimed, the Border Wall. Kindness would[Read More…]
It seems utterly beyond debate but acknowledging legal rights to clean hair has assumed the makings of a slow march over the years. The 1956 Clean Air Act in Britain arose from the lethal effects of London’s 1952 killer smog, which is said to have taken some 12,000 lives. The Act granted powers to establish smoke-free zones and subsidise householders[Read More…]
In a particular deli store in South Melbourne, a tongue-and-cheek message is attached to the cash register. “Bitcoin accepted there,” it proclaims brightly. Naturally, it is nothing of the sort, a teasing ruse for the punters and those casting an eye in the direction of the store. Cold hard cash remains king, albeit one with a tarnished crown; pandemic times[Read More…]
Anniversaries can provide occasions for reflection and deep consideration. Past errors and misjudgements can be considered soberly; historical distance provides perspective. Mature reflections may be permitted. But they can also serve the opposite purpose: to cake, cloak and mask the record. The gooey name GWOT, otherwise known as the Global War on Terrorism, is some two decades old, and it[Read More…]
It was all marvellous for Paul Wolfowitz to get on Australian television (why bother?) to brusquely discuss those attacks on US soil in September 2001 and criticism of the invasion of Iraq by US-led forces. After two decades, the former US deputy secretary of defense has not mellowed. With each show, interview and podium performance Wolfowitz gives, there is a[Read More…]
Larrikin is a word often, and inaccurately used, in Australian political lingo. Australia’s longest serving Labor Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, was known as one such figure. He was praised as the great communicator and healer between the forces of labour and capital, enjoyed imbibing, his sports and varied female company. He could also be vain and ruthless. In June, a[Read More…]
In May, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken made a visit to Greenland. In a rather unedifying way, he was called ‘Tony’ by his hosts, a disarming point that was bound to open the floodgates of insincerity. For all the convivial stuffing, there was a certain sting to the occasion: the previous Trump administration had revisited a fantasy long nurtured[Read More…]
No more profoundly disturbing statement was needed. In the dying days of the official US departure from Kabul, a US drone etched its butcher’s legacy with a strike supposedly intended for the blood-lusty terrorist group ISIS-K, an abbreviation of Islamic State in Khorasan Province. Its members had taken responsibility for blasts outside Harmid Karzai International Airport that had cost the[Read More…]
When the tears dry, it is worth considering why there is so much upset about the fall of Kabul (or reconquest) by the Taliban and the messy withdrawal of US-led forces. A large shield is employed: women, rights of the subject, education. Remove the shield, and we are left with a simple equation of power gone wrong in the name[Read More…]
Since 2004, Amazon has been building a foothold on the African continent. In Cape Town, it already employs thousands in a global call centre and a range of data hubs. Its South African career portal is a busy place, with the vast majority of advertised jobs located in Cape Town. In April, as part of its aggrandising drive into the[Read More…]
Do not for a minute think that this is a kind, heart-felt thing in the aftermath of Kabul’s fall. True, a number of Afghans will find their way to Germany, to Canada, to the UK, US and a much smaller number to Australia. But this will be part of the curtain act that, in time, will pass into memory and[Read More…]
Civilisation has tended to be seen like a gift by those claiming to grant it. It is done, in the sense Rudyard Kipling intended it, with solemn duty. It is a task discharged as a burden borne heavily. In its modern form, notably in the hands of the US, it comes with fast food, roads, schools and blue chip stocks. [Read More…]
It unfolded as a story of fleeing. The Afghan president Ashraf Ghani, taking flight to Tajikistan, giving little clue of his intentions to colleagues. The fleeing of the infamous Abdul Rashid Dostum, a warlord assured to fight another day. The fleeing of tens of thousands of residents out of the city of Kabul, long seen as beyond the reach of[Read More…]
The historical vectors are moving with conviction and purpose; the weak and lacking in conviction are in retreat and the gun is doing the talking. The government of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, the security services and the Afghan National Army, seem to be either huddled in despair, capitulating or fleeing before the inexorable advance of the Taliban. They have the[Read More…]
The desperate attempt by the US imperium to nab Julian Assange was elevated to another level on August 11 in a preliminary hearing before the UK High Court. The central component to this gruesome affair was the continuing libel of the expert witness upon which District Justice Vanessa Baraitser placed so much emphasis in her January 4 decision not to[Read More…]
This week, Twitter was keen to share the news about its new arrangement with The Associated Press and Reuters “to expand our efforts to identify and elevate credible information” on its platform. The company reiterates its commitment that people using its service are able to “easily find reliable information” hoping to “expand the scale and increase the speed of our[Read More…]
The Public Inquiry into the murder of the resourceful journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia handed down its findings on July 29. Firm aim was taken at the Maltese State, which had “to shoulder responsibility for the assassination because it created an atmosphere of impunity, generated from the highest levels in the heart of the administration of the Office of the Prime[Read More…]
The company has been looking forward to this for some time. For an outfit found wanting in dealing with inhabitants of a land whose culture it eviscerated in a matter of hours in May last year, Rio Tinto could think grandly about another future. The Anglo-Australian mining giant could add its name to a sounder, more environmentally sensitive programme, join[Read More…]
In May 2019, the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, that famous bastion of anti-whistleblowing fervour, unsealed an indictment charging former intelligence analyst Daniel Everett Hale with five counts of providing classified information to a reporter. The first four focused on obtaining national defense information, retaining and transmitting that information, causing the communication of that same information[Read More…]
It is a country other powers simply cannot leave alone. Even after abandoning its Kabul post in ignominy, tail tucked between their legs, Australia is now wondering if it should return – in some form. The Department of Trade and Foreign Affairs has been sending out a few signals, none of them definitive. “We will not comment on intelligence matters,”[Read More…]
“The gap between rhetoric and reality is a persistent one when looking at the sustainability of commitments of Olympic Games hosts”. Martin Müller, European Urban and Regional Studies, 2015 The organisers of the Olympics have always been into appearances and grand theatre. And the International Olympic Committee has always been keen in keeping them up, from the barely credible notion[Read More…]
They keep insisting they don’t do it. But companies such as the Israeli NSO Group are global vendors for regimes, whatever stripe or colour, for surveillance tools to spy on those they deem of interest. The 2013 revelations by Edward Snowden that exposed the warrantless world of mass surveillance by entities such as the US National Security Agency and Britain’s[Read More…]
He can scant resist a slogan, but UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s insistence on describing Britain’s exit from lockdown as Freedom Day came with its usual kitschy quality. All would be splendid as COVID-19 restrictions were lifted in the “move to step 4.” Social contact rules would be scrapped, along with mask mandates in various public spaces. Nightclubs could reopen;[Read More…]
They were in with a shot. The English team, deliriously floating on chants of Football’s Coming Home, had made it to their first major tournament final since 1966. The UEFA European Football Championship would be decided at Wembley against an Italian side unblemished by defeat since September 2018. But the English, coached by the much admired Gareth Southgate, succumbed in[Read More…]
Australia, like other island states, has had spells of isolationist fancy and hermit dispositions. Protected by geography, distant and vast, the country’s first bit of legislation in 1901 was the Immigration Restriction Act. This nasty little statute came to be colloquially known as the White Australia Policy. Doors would remain open to Europeans and preferably those of Western stock. Fortress[Read More…]
It took over half a year, but the US government’s case against Julian Assange continues its draining grind. Even the Biden administration, which claims to tolerate a free press and truthful dialogue with the fourth estate, has decided to exhaust its legal options in seeking the publisher’s scalp. On July 7, the UK High Court of Justice agreed to hear[Read More…]
The tyrannical, brutal cynicism of keeping Julian Assange in Belmarsh prison remains one of the more inglorious marks of the British legal system and, it should be said, its sponsors and colluders. Having won his case against extradition to the US, if only in deeply qualified terms, the UK keeps the WikiLeaks publisher banged up as the appeals process stutters.[Read More…]
From the Bagram Airbase they left, leaving behind a piece of the New York World Trade Centre that collapsed with such graphic horror on September 11, 2001. As with previous occupiers and occupants, the powers that had made this venue a residence of war operations were cutting their losses and running. Over the years, the base, originally built by the[Read More…]
“On the morning of September 11, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld ran to the fire at the Pentagon to assist the wounded and ensure the safety of survivors,” expressed a mournful George W. Bush in a statement. “For the next five years, he was in steady service as a wartime secretary of defense – a duty he carried out with strength, skill,[Read More…]
He began on RN Breakfast by claiming that he, and his company, would be open and transparent about mining operations. But Lucas Dow, chief executive of Adani’s Australian operations, soon revealed in his June 25 interview that his understanding of transparency was rather far from the dictionary version. When asked how the Carmichael Coal Mine was getting its water, he[Read More…]
While Australian politicians languish in a world blotched by climate change scepticism and fossil fuel love-ins, global oil and gas companies have been shaken. Three titans of oil fame – Shell, ExxonMobil and Chevron – faced a range of decisions in May that promise to dramatically shape their future operations. The point is not negligible, given that this triarchy produced,[Read More…]
To float over such an aqueous body is to find a majestic creature unparalleled in beauty and expanse, stretching at 2,300km. There are other stunning formations on the planet, but the Great Barrier Reef has such dimension, form and cocksure brilliance as to make others shrink, not so much because of beauty as due to sheer scale and ecological variety.[Read More…]
In the messy, underhanded world of global health responses to COVID-19 it was only appropriate that lawyers should find themselves enriched on respective sides of a dispute about vaccine supply. The pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca has been getting a good deal of bad press, with its COVID vaccines seen to be a riskier proposition, notably to younger adults, than those of[Read More…]
Australian officials and paper mad types are running out of ideas as to how to be cruel towards refugees. We need to give them some credit: for years they have tried to do what most autocratic and murderous regimes do in a heartbeat: ignore international law, treat it with disdain and use those feeble excuses in the service of sovereignty.[Read More…]
Summits often feature grand statements and needless fripperies. In Cornwall, the leaders of the G7 countries were trying to position and promote their relevance as the vanguard of democratic good sense and values. They, the message went, remained relevant, valuable and essential to the order of the earth, despite challenges posed by the autocrats. Never let contradiction get in the[Read More…]
Sincere Tony is again on the stump, promoting his vision of how best to return to a lovely, unruffled world of capitalist endeavour, circuit lecturing and summit meetings that no longer need to be held online. And when Blair has visions, they are bound to be highly selective and keen in terms of his own bank account, not to mention[Read More…]
Those of you drawing sustenance and stimulation from the traditional acronym UFO best brace yourselves. The less exciting and dull term accepted by the defence clerks – unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) – is renewing its march into the extra-terrestrial hinterland. On June 25, the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force will release a declassified report to Congress that will do little to[Read More…]
This has been a fantasy of Danish governments for some time. There have been gazes of admiration towards countries like Australia, where processing refugees and asylum-seekers is a task offloaded, with cash incentives, to third countries (Papua New Guinea and Nauru come to mind). Danish politicians, notably a good number among the Social Democrats, have dreamed about doing the same[Read More…]
Not a day goes by these days without a casual remark about animal extermination in Australia. Mice have moved to the front of the queue in terms of animal species Australians would most like to liquidate. The language used has various registers: sombre and regretful; grave and scientific; panicked and bloody. This is all ordinary fare and is characterised by[Read More…]
A pandemic crisis. A state of emergency. Overwhelming public opinion bristling with alarm. Notwithstanding these factors, Tokyo is still on track to host the Olympics that was cancelled last year in response to the global pandemic. The first sports team – Australia’s softball crew – has touched down. Is all this folly, bravery or self-interest? On a daily basis, the[Read More…]
The Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response was never likely to hand down a rosy report with gobbets of praise. Organised by the World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus last May, the panel’s gloomy assessment was grim: the COVID-19 pandemic could have been avoided. Almost nothing in the main report could be seen as remarkable in these jaded[Read More…]
A clean, technology driven dystopia. A representation of our techno future. These were the introductory descriptions to a piece by science fiction author William Gibson on Singapore for Wired in 1993. “Imagine an Asian version of Zurich operating as an offshore capsule at the foot of Malaysia; an affluent microcosm whose citizens inhabit something that feels like well, Disneyland. Disneyland[Read More…]
With the babble about Cold War paranoia becoming a routine matter in Canberra, the treacherous ground for war with China is being bedded down and readied. The Yellow Peril image never truly dissipated from Australia’s politics. It was crucial in framing the first act of the newly born Commonwealth in 1901: the Immigration Restriction Act. Even as China was being[Read More…]
It should be making officials in the White House tremble. Critical infrastructure supplying 45% of the East Coast’s diesel, gasoline and jet fuel, left at the mercy of a ransomware operation executed on May 6. In the process, 100 GB of data of Colonial Pipeline was seized and encrypted on computers and servers. The next day, those behind the operation[Read More…]
Being sufficiently able at your job is a good thing. But beware the trappings of zeal. When it comes to the business of retaining an inventory for humanity’s annihilation, the zealous should be kept away. But there Admiral Charles Richard was in April this year, with his siren calls, urging the US Senate to consider a simple proposition. “Sustainment of[Read More…]
It has been a relationship of characterised by bitterness and misunderstanding. It began with a poorly negotiated agreement – poor, that is, from the European Union perspective – between Brussels and AstraZeneca for the supply of COVID-19 vaccine doses. Less rigorous in terms of penalties and consequences than the UK-AstraZeneca deal, the EU version was very much the poor cousin,[Read More…]
Criticism of Israel’s policies towards Palestinians has always induced a defensive rage from its defenders and advocates. A Threshold Crossed, a report by Human Rights Watch, lit several fires of rage and disapproval. Israel, according to the authors, is responsible for apartheid policies. The word, and the application of its meaning, is immemorially nasty. This deeply though through policy of[Read More…]
As India is being devastated by COVID-19 cases that have now passed a daily rate of 400,000, affluent and callous Australia has taken the decision to suspend all flights coming into the country till mid-month. The decision was reached by the Morrison government with the blessing of the State Premiers and the Labor opposition. Not happy with banning flights from[Read More…]
Attributing names to the brutal acts humans are capable of inflicting upon each other is never without problems. There are gradations of terror, hierarchies of atrocity and cruelty. In these, the pedants reign. Disputes splutter and rage over whether a “massacre” can best be described as a crime against humanity or a counter-measure waged with heavy sorrow against a threatening[Read More…]
The very word is chilling, but has become normalised political currency in Denmark. Since 2010, the Danish government has resorted to generating “ghetto lists” marking out areas as socially problematic for the state. In 2018, the country’s parliament passed “ghetto” laws to further regulate the lives of individuals inhabiting various city areas focusing on their racial and ethnic origins. The[Read More…]
Suffocating the grassroots. Mocking the working class origins of the game. World football, and primarily European club football, has long done away with loyalties in favour of cash and contract. The professionalization of the game has seen a difficult relationship between fan, spectator and sporting management, none better exemplified than the price of tickets, the role of branding and sponsorship.[Read More…]
There was a time when it seemed Papua New Guinea had managed to dodge a bullet. Instances of SARS-CoV-2 were minimal, along with its disease, COVID-19. Through 2020, the country of eight million people recorded a mere 900 cases. The World Health Organization praised the PNG government in a September 2020 news release in “taking the threat of the pandemic[Read More…]
It had to be symbolic, and was represented as such. Forces of the United States will be leaving Afghanistan on September 11 after two decades of violent occupation, though for a good deal of this stretch, US forces were, at best, failed democracy builders, at worst, violent tenants. In his April 14 speech, President Joe Biden made the point that[Read More…]
Over the weekend, Iran marked National Nuclear Technology Day. The stars of the show were going to be new advanced centrifuges at the Natanz uranium enrichment plant. Unfortunately, the stars did not shine and President Hassan Rouhani and his officials were left with a reminder of the previous time the centrifuges at Natanz crashed. In 2010, a joint US-Israeli operation[Read More…]
“I am not going to be talking about numbers today,” Australia’s Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly told Australia’s Radio National on April 12. This echoed suggestions from the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, who had adopted the position that Australia best forget meeting any clear vaccination targets. Having left battling the pandemic to State governments, the Federal government has found[Read More…]
Even in times of pandemic crises, some things never change. While Australia gurgles and bumbles slowly with its COVID-19 vaccine rollout, there are other priorities at stake. Threat inflators are receiving much interest in defence, and the media is feeding on it with a drunken enthusiasm. We live in a dangerous environment, and think-tankers, parliamentarians and commentators are starting to[Read More…]
Nothing makes better sense to the political classes than small time demagoguery when matters turn sour. True, the United Kingdom might well be speeding ahead with vaccination numbers, and getting ever big-headed about it, but there is still good reason to distract the voters. Coronavirus continues to vex; the economy continues to suffer. In February, the Office of Statistics revealed[Read More…]
Corporate morality can be a flexible thing. Some companies see tantalising dollar signs afloat in the spilt blood of civilians and dissidents. Military governments, however trigger crazed, offer ideal opportunities; potentially, corners can be cut, regulations relaxed. The Adani Group has shown itself to be particularly unscrupulous in this regard. In many ways, it is fitting. The group’s record in[Read More…]
Last week, Australians found themselves delighting in another fit of cancel culture, this time in the art world. Tasmania’s Dark Mofo art festival prides itself on being gritty but the mood was very much about removing any grit to begin with. Interest centred on the project of Spanish artist Santiago Sierra, who had proposed soaking a Union Jack Flag “in[Read More…]
Campaigners for the abolition of nuclear weapons had every reason to clink glasses with the coming into force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in January. Nuclear weapon states and their allies still persisted in calling the document unhelpful and unrealistic; the self-appointed realists have preferred the go-slow approach of disarmament, a form of moderated insanity. In[Read More…]
The Biden administration continues to engage in that favourite activity White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki can only describe as “circling back”. And much circling is taking place in the context of Afghanistan. The cupboard of calamities is well stocked, with the US facing an emboldened Taliban keen to hold Washington to its word in withdrawing the last troops by[Read More…]
Sensible, ideal, wonderful – if you happen to be in the European Union. This is the air of confidence surrounding the March 17 proposal for a digital COVID immunity passport, or what is officially being called the Digital Green Certificate. The Digital Green Certificate is actually a bundle of three: vaccination certificates stating the brand of vaccine used, data and[Read More…]
Forget the global university rankings of any list. The global university promotion exercise is filled with snake oil and perfumed refuse, an effort to corrupt the unknowing and steal from the gullible. The aim here is to convince parents, potential students and academics that their institutions of white collar crime are appealing enough to warrant enrolment and employment at. Writing[Read More…]
The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue has had its fits and starts, but nothing encourages such chats than threats, actual or perceived. In 2017, Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono felt that it was time that a strategic dialogue between Japan, the United States, Australia and India should be revived. The Quad, as it was termed, was on the way to becoming a[Read More…]
By now, anybody speaking about vaccine equality and equity of access must surely be coming across as slightly deranged. In the field of COVID-19, traditional proprietorial instincts remain. Add to this the disparity in terms of manufacture, bureaucracy and the nasty flavour of politics, and we would all be entitled to long draughts of cynicism. The COVAX (COVID-19 Vaccines Global[Read More…]
The European Union has been keeping up appearances in encouraging the equitable distribution of vaccines to combat SARS-CoV-2 and its disease, COVID-19. Numerous statements speak to the need to back the COVAX scheme, to ensure equity and that no one state misses out. And EU member states could be assured of a smooth vaccine rollout, led by the EU apparatus,[Read More…]
The papers are full of suggestions on what US President Joe Biden should do about his country’s seemingly perennial involvement in Afghanistan. None are particularly useful, in that they ignore the central premise that a nation state long mauled, molested and savaged should finally be left alone. Nonsense, say the media and political cognoscenti. The Guardian claims that he is[Read More…]
Every power worth its portion of salt in the Levant these days seems to be doing it. On February 25, President Joe Biden ordered airstrikes against Syria. The premise for the attacks was implausible. “These strikes were authorized in response to recent attacks against American and Coalition personnel in Iraq,” claimed Pentagon spokesman John Kirby, “and to ongoing threats to[Read More…]
It was a brutal way to go, and it had the paw prints of the highest authorities. On October 2, 2018, Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi Arabian insider turned outsider, was murdered by a squad of 15 men from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He was dismembered and quite literally cancelled in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. This state sanctioned killing[Read More…]
The ghost of Edward Teller must have been doing the rounds between members of the National Commission on Artificial Intelligence. The father of the hydrogen bomb was never one too bothered by the ethical niggles that came with inventing murderous technology. It was not, for instance, “the scientist’s job to determine whether a hydrogen bomb should be constructed, whether it[Read More…]
The Australian Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, was unconvincing in his efforts to summon up courage. The Australian government had been left reeling in the wake of Facebook’s decision to scrap and block Australians from sharing and posting news items on hosted pages. The company’s target of opprobrium: the News Media Bargaining Code. The Code’s ostensible purpose is to address the inequalities[Read More…]
Creepy and ruthless Facebook has again impressed with its steely indifference to civic responsibility, as if a company established by a sociopath could ever be a model of human improvement. On February 18, Mark Zuckerberg’s antisocial company took aim at Australia by blocking those in that country from sharing local and international content. As the company notice to those trying[Read More…]
Few could have been slack-jawed at the first significant foreign policy speech of US President Joe Biden. It can easily be filed under the “America is back” label. Back as well, as if the previous administration had been incapable of it, was a promise for that practice unflatteringly called jaw-jaw. “Diplomacy,” the President states from the outset, “is back at[Read More…]
In the first month of 2020, Forbes was all excitement about fresh opportunities for plunder and conquest. Titled “2020: The Year We Will Conquer Mars”, the contribution by astrophysicist Paul M. Sutter was less interested in the physics than the conquest. A potentially very crowded scene was described. Various countries would send their cluttering devices to “orbit, rove, sample, dig,[Read More…]
It began as a shudder through the scientific and public health establishments. A new variant of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 had been found, mutating in South African climes, potentially outwitting human responses to it. Vaccines such as Oxford-AstraZeneca’s would have to be brushed up. Rollouts would have to be reconsidered. The South African variant has been given a few designations:[Read More…]
With changes of presidential administrations, radical departures in policy are always exaggerated. Continuity remains, for the most part, a standard feature. It is precisely that continuity being challenged by groups fearful of the continuing prosecution of Julian Assange. The effort by the US Justice Department to extradite Assange from the UK on eighteen charges based on the Espionage Act and[Read More…]
It’s looking a touch quixotic, but the News Media Bargaining Code has become Australia’s weapon of choice in attempting to redistribute proceeds from big tech into the coffers of a withering fourth estate. It has now reached a point of sufficient concern for Google as to become threatening, winding its way to a Senate Committee Inquiry before going to Parliament[Read More…]
International tribunals tend to be praised, in principle, by those they avoid investigating. Once interest shifts to those parties, such bodies become the subject of accusations: bias, politicisation, crude arbitrariness. The United States, whose legal and political personnel have expended vast resources on the machinery of international courts and jurisprudence, remains cold to the International Criminal Court. The sceptics have[Read More…]
The coronavirus student, a species brought forth in the world of education by a pandemic that has killed over 400,000 people in the United States and 100,000 in the United Kingdom, is a troubled creature. When universities and schools across the globe were given varying and often contradictory messages on the safety of continuing in class teaching and participation, the[Read More…]
It’s the sort of stuff that should have been sorted years ago in Australia: a murderous, frontier society ill disposed to the indigenous populace; the creation of a convict colony that was itself an act of invasion rather than settlement; the theft of land and its rapacious plunder. Even some of the rough colonists were not oblivious to such a[Read More…]
Not exactly Thermopylae. Not even close. The hundred thousand who have now been taken by COVID-19 in Britain were not determined warriors holding up the forces of a mighty empire to save their land. They were the innocent victims of infection, mismanagement and miscalculation. Central to the policy which led to such losses was a practised bumbling which has become[Read More…]
It was never meant to be like this. After the Indian cricketing team met misery and disaster in the first test match at Adelaide, registering a paltry 36 in its second innings, little hope was had for the touring side. Australia threatened rout and massacre. The Border-Gavaskar trophy seemed within the home side’s grasp. And the home side had every[Read More…]
It is the sort of breezy, skimpy and careless reasoning that is laying the ground for the Biden Republic. A person, kicked off a social media babbling platform and having the means to incinerate the human race multiple times over, seen as corollaries of each other. There should be an obvious difference, but Silicon Valley has managed to make public[Read More…]
The feeling from Rory Medcalf of the Australian National University was one of breathless wonder. “The US government,” he wrote in The Strategist, “has just classified one of its most secretive national security documents – its 2018 strategic framework for the Indo-Pacific, which was formally classified SECRET and not for release to foreign nationals.” Washington’s errand boys and girls in[Read More…]
Australia’s Foreign Minister, Marise Payne, said little in the statement from her department, which was a good thing, as it might have been dangerously useful. The finding of a UK court on whether Julian Assange would be extradited to the United States was made “on the grounds of his mental health and consequent suicide risk.” She does not care to[Read More…]
This was Twitter Safety’s January 8 post, full of noble concern: “After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them – specifically how they are being received and interpreted off Twitter – we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence.” Is it ever wise for a social[Read More…]
How strange it must have seemed for US lawmakers to be suddenly facing what was described as a “mob”, not so much storming as striding into the Capitol with angry purpose. A terrified security force proved understaffed and overwhelmed. Members of Congress hid. Five people lost their lives. With the US imperium responsible for fostering numerous revolutions and coups across[Read More…]
History, while not always a telling guide, can be useful. But in moments of flushed confidence, it is not consulted and Cleo is forgotten. A crisp new dawn can negate a glance to the past. Having received the unexpected news that Julian Assange’s extradition to the United States for charges of breaching the Espionage Act of 1917 and computer intrusion[Read More…]
Perfumed and tailored for a certain brand of folksy, identity politics, Pete Buttigieg hoped to blast his way to the White House having run a community of 102,000 constituents in South Bend, Indiana. Mayor Pete was hoping for the best, though his effort did not so much stall as fall over early on before the somnambulist who eventually won both[Read More…]
The barrister-brewed humour of Edward Fitzgerald QC, one of the solid and stout figures defending a certain Julian Assange of WikiLeaks at the Old Bailey in London, was understandable. Time had worn and wearied the parties, none more so than his client. Fitzgerald had asked for water, but then mused that its absence could hardly have been as bad as[Read More…]
It was a New Year gimmick that would have warmed advertising executives across the country. For the first time since it was proclaimed as Australia’s national anthem on April 19, 1984, Advance Australia Fair has been tinkered with. The jarring words from the second line, “For we are young and free” have been amended to “For we are one and[Read More…]
The odds are stacked against Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks publisher who faces the grimmest of prospects come January 4. On that day, the unsympathetic judicial head of District Judge Vanessa Baraitser will reveal her decision on the Old Bailey proceedings that took place between September and October this year. Despite Assange’s team being able to marshal an impressive, even astonishing[Read More…]
The number of figures extolling the merits of Britain’s Westminster system and how it supposedly embodies a glorious model of democracy are too numerous to mention. This is despite exploits by the government of Boris Johnson, marked by the appointment of unelected advisers with enviable, unaccountable powers and a record of assault on Parliament’s scrutineering functions. “As the government blunders[Read More…]
Governments that issue press releases about the abuse of human rights tend to avoid close gazes at the mirror. Doing so would be telling. In the case of Australia, its record on dealing with refugees is both abysmal and cruel. It tends to be easier to point the finger at national security laws in Hong Kong and concentration camps in[Read More…]
Warring over fish in the twenty-first century might seem an unlikely proposition. But the deployment of four Royal Navy ships to deter European fishing vessels from encroaching on British waters in the event of a no-deal Brexit has tongues wagging. The prospects of a trade pact between the EU and UK by the end of this month are becoming cold[Read More…]
Before the January 4 ruling of District Judge Vanessa Baraitser in the extradition case of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks publisher will continue to endure the ordeal of cold prison facilities while being menaced by a COVID-19 outbreak. From November 18, Assange, along with inmates in House Block 1 at Belmarsh prison in south-east London, were placed in lockdown conditions. The[Read More…]
Leafing – or in this case scrolling through – the commemorative issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists after 75 years of publication is a tingling exercise of existence. The subject matter pushes you to the edge. You threaten to fall off. Death is promised; extinction contemplated. Nuclear holocaust. Your sanity is called into question. The Bulletin’s own Doomsday[Read More…]
Security think tanks are the leeches of industry. Attached to their appropriate field, they compile analysis that is supposedly masterful, insightful and even useful. Reports can recommend courses of action, from a troop surge in a failing war, to an increase of defence spending in bolstering cyber capabilities. Bunkered in these institutes, the think tanker achieves eminence by detecting what[Read More…]
These are things that might have been done earlier. During the last, flickering days of the Trump administration, activity is being witnessed across countries which have a US troop presence. Numbers are being reduced. Security wonks are getting the jitters. Is the imperium shrinking? Will President elect Joe Biden wake up and reverse the trend? With the Beltway foreign policy[Read More…]
If one were to get into the head of Australian government MP Andrew Hastie, a security tangle of woe would no doubt await. Having been a captain with the Special Air Services and having also served in Afghanistan, he has been none too thrilled by the publicity soldiers he served with have received. The report by New South Wales Court[Read More…]
Much complaint can be had of the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force Afghanistan Inquiry Report. It exempts political actors of responsibility for alleged atrocities and war crimes. It suggests that those in the highest echelons of the Australian Defence Forces are ignorant in incompetent innocence. It spares the desk warriors and flays the field operatives. Heavily redacted, this document[Read More…]
Australia’s ambassadorial offices and political leaders have a consistent record of ignoring their citizens in tight situations. David Hicks, Mamdouh Habib and Julian Assange are but a few names that come to mind in this inglorious record of indifference. In such cases, Australian public figures and officials have tacitly approved the use of abduction, torture and neglect, usually outsourced and[Read More…]
With President Donald Trump all but conceding to the transition team that will take over after January next year, interest now shifts to President-elect Joe Biden’s choices for cabinet. On the national security front, the imperial-military lobby will have reasons to be satisfied. If Trump promised to rein in, if not put the brakes on the US imperium, Biden promises[Read More…]
A few nostalgic types still believe that the Union Jack continues to flutter to sighs and reverence over outposts of the world, from the tropics to the desert. They would be right, if only to a point. Britain, it turns out, has a rather expansive global reach when it comes to bases, military installations and testing sites. While not having[Read More…]
The Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force Afghanistan Inquiry was always going to make for a gruesome read – and that was only the redacted version. The findings of the four-year investigation, led by New South Wales Court of Appeal Justice and Army Reserve Major-General Paul Brereton, point to “credible evidence” that 39 Afghan non-combatants and prisoners were allegedly killed[Read More…]
“Making billions from arms exports which fuel the conflict while providing a small fraction of that in aid to Yemen is both immoral and incoherent.” So thundered Oxfam’s Yemen Country Director, Muhsin Siddiquey after consulting figures from the Stockholm Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) showing that members of the G20 have exported over $17 billion worth of arms to Saudi Arabia[Read More…]
As chief conductor of the saint factory, Pope John Paul II was always going to be, in time, canonised. Almost 500 saints were created under his watch. The previous 600 years had seen 300. But declaring him a saint in 2014, a mere nine years after his death, was speedy by the standards of the Vatican. Critics, and those more[Read More…]
Masks can prove liberating. The hidden face affords security. Obnoxious authority breathes better, hiding in comfort. Behind the material, confidence finds a home. While tens of millions of jobs have been lost to the novel coronavirus globally, security services, surveillance officers and pen pushers are thriving, policing admissions to facilities, churning through health and safety declarations, and generally making a[Read More…]
One dogma that is likely to persist in US foreign policy during a Biden presidency will be the sanctions regime adopted towards Iran. Every messianic state craves clearly scripted enemies, and the demonology about the Islamic Republic is not going to go begging. Elliot Abrahams, the current US special representative for Iran, told Associated Press on November 12 that, “Even[Read More…]
A sense of redundancy might encourage calm. The job is done, however well or poorly. The legacy charted. But in the case of President Donald Trump, there is still much to be done. Leaving aside his priority of fortifying himself in the White House against any bailiff onslaught by president-elect Joe Biden, he is busy making decisions. One of them[Read More…]
Australia has given the world two influential and disruptive exports in the field of media. One, currently in London’s Belmarsh Prison, is facing the prospect of extradition to the United States for charges that could see him serve a 175 year sentence in a brutal, soul destroying supermax. The other, so the argument goes, should also be facing the prospect[Read More…]
“The worst case scenario is a new pandemic, starting all over again out of Denmark,” came the words of a grave Kåre Mølbak, director of the Danish health authorities, the State Serum Institute. According to the Institute, COVID-19 infections were registered on 216 mink farms on November 6. Not only had such infections been registered; new variants, five different clusters[Read More…]
It was now the turn of other states to vent about, and at, the United States. The 2020 US presidential elections were coming down to a razor sharp wire. The Democrats were starting to feel confident in the swing states. Republicans and the Trump camp were mustering aggressive arguments on potential electoral fraud, lawyering up the heavies. The picture is[Read More…]
The great bard remarks in Henry VI: Part II that all the lawyers ought to be killed. In entertaining this homicidal formula, William Shakespeare had yet to encounter that barnacle breed known as the pollster. There is much to suggest that those practising this dark and futile art ought to be done away with, with their special ability to suggest[Read More…]
“Djab Wurrung women are in an abusive relationship with Victoria’s government.” Sissy Eileen Austin, The Guardian, Sep 14, 2019 It was a penultimate day in the Australian state of Victoria. The state government had announced that some of harshest coronavirus lockdown restrictions in the developed world would be easing. Melbourne’s restaurants, bars and cafes could resume inviting customers through their[Read More…]
Whatever stance taken by followers of the British Labour Party on the subject of antisemitism within its ranks, the suspension of Jeremy Corbyn must be seen as an exercise of muscle on the part of Sir Keir Starmer. Since coming to the leadership, Starmer’s popularity has risen, catching up to that of Prime Minister Boris Johnson. But Corbyn and the[Read More…]
Even that title strikes an odd note. It should not. The Fourth Estate, historically reputed as the chamber of journalists and publishers keeping an eye on elected officials, received a blast of oxygen with the arrival of WikiLeaks. This was daring, rich stuff: scientific journalism in the trenches, news gathering par excellence. But what Julian Assange and WikiLeaks did was[Read More…]
“Ambition is the subtlest Beast of the Intellectual and Moral Field,” wrote John Adams to his son, John Quincy Adams, in January, 1794. “It is wonderfully adroit in concealing itself from its owner.” Father Adams was thinking of Thomas Jefferson in penning these words, that sly devil of a man who sought to gain power while falsely claiming to eschew[Read More…]
Is international relations a field for cautious minds, marked by permanent setbacks, or terrain where the bold are encouraged to seize the day? In terms of dealing with the existential and even unimaginable horror that is nuclear war, the bold have certainly stolen a march. The signature of Honduras was the 50th required for the entry into force of the[Read More…]
In 2016, Australian Major General Jeff Sengelman approached the then chief of the Australian army Lieutenant General Angus Campbell with a nagging worry. The concern lay in allegations that Australian special forces had committed various war crimes in Afghanistan. Sengelman was then special forces commander; Campbell was chief of the army. Sociologist Samantha Crompvoets was duly commissioned to write a[Read More…]
Iran, Russia and electoral interference. It is all part of the delicious mess that any observer of US politics has come to expect. Were the US body politic capable of being examined on the clinician’s couch, historical fears, psychic disturbances, and a range of unsettling syndromes would be identified. The issue of electoral interference would certainly be at the fore;[Read More…]
It was all a fitting reminder of Bertolt Brecht’s remark that bank robbery lies in the province of amateurs. The real professionals of plunder establish banks. Last month, the labours of Buzzfeed and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists revealed just that. Centre stage: international banking misbehaviour. And my, was there much to go on. The journalists had been combing[Read More…]
It was highly probable. Given the howls of concern that social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook nurse and nurture a bias (every choice on content entails one), a gift was made to critics to show just that. Last Wednesday, Twitter prevented users from posting links to a New York Post story. The story, claimed Twitter, was “potentially unsafe,”[Read More…]
It was praised by Michael Clarke, former Director-General of the Royal United Services Institute, as “clear and entire laudable” – at least up to a point. The UK Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill would “give [British] troops serving overseas much-needed extra protection against fraudulent or frivolous claims against them of criminal behaviour.” It was also part of a[Read More…]
In July 2017, two journalists working for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Dan Oakes and Sam Clark, wrote of a stash of incriminating documents, running into hundreds of pages. They were “secret defence force documents leaked to the ABC”. These documents gave “an unprecedented insight into the clandestine operations in Australia’s elite special forces in Afghanistan, including incidents of troops killing[Read More…]
The tide has been turning against UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Oafishly, he has managed to convert that tide into a deluge of dissatisfaction assisted by the gravitational pull of singular incompetence. Much of this is due to such errors of communication as committed last month, when he got into a tangle over new coronavirus restrictions in England’s northeast. In[Read More…]
In March, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeal upheld an original jury finding that Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven did not infringe copyright in Spirit’s 1968 song Taurus. Michael Skidmore, who had filed the suit in 2014 as trustee of the estate of the late Spirit guitarist Randy Wolfe, was hoping that the US Supreme Court would take time[Read More…]
On September 2, US sanctions – the sort normally reserved for fully fledged terrorists and decorated drug traffickers – were imposed on the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Fatou Bensouda and her colleague Phakiso Mochochoko, head of Jurisdiction, Complementarity and Cooperation. For Balkees Jarrah, senior counsel for Human Rights Watch, it was a “stunning perversion of US sanctions,[Read More…]