For Heaven’s Sake Sanitise! Coronavirus as a Way of Life
“Anything we say in advance of a pandemic happening is alarmist; anything we say afterwards is inadequate.” Michael Leavitt, US Health and Human Services Secretary, March 30, 2006 A crew…
Dr Binoy Kampmark
Coronavirus Offerings and Job Losses: University Reliance on China Bites
It was predicted, warned against and is happening. Universities fattened by the Chinese student market are now in a state of financial shock, cutting losses, trimming courses and doing what…
Golden Anniversaries for Flawed Treaties: The NPT turns Fifty
In an era where agreements have been abandoned as “bad”, to use that favourite word of US President Donald Trump, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons continues to…
Crimes in Afghanistan: Fatou Bensouda’s Investigative Mission
It seemed an unlikely prospect. The International Criminal Court has tended to find itself accused of chasing up the inhumane rogues of Africa rather than those from any other continent. …
Toilet Paper Blues: Coronavirus and Pandemic Pantries
Fears of imminent apocalypse tend to be midwives to absurdity. The stockpiling fever that has gripped various populaces in response to the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak has taken various forms. …
Strong Man Legacies: Burying Mubarak
Reviled strongmen of one era are often the celebrated ones of others. Citizens otherwise tormented find that replacements are poor, in some cases even crueller, than the original artefact. Such…
The Viral Blame Game: Xenophobia, Attribution and Coronavirus
Moralising the way diseases and viruses are transferred is a very human, and particularly nasty trait. “We don’t need this kind of riff-raff on our shores,” screamed The New York…
Julian Assange, the Glass Cage and Heaven in a Rage: Day Four of Extradition Hearings
Thursday, February 27, Woolwich Crown Court. The first round of extradition hearings regarding Julian Assange’s case concluded a day early, to recommence on May 18th. It ended on an insensible…
Julian Assange, Political Offences and Legal Restraints: Day Three of Extradition Hearings
Wednesday, February 26, Woolwich Crown Court. Today, the focus shifted to the protagonist himself and the nature of the US-UK Extradition Treaty of 2003, a contentious document that shines all…
Julian Assange Against the Imperium: Day Two of Extradition Hearings
The second day of extradition hearings against Julian Assange and by virtue of that, WikiLeaks, saw Mark Summers QC deliver a formidable serve for the defence at Woolwich Crown Court. …
Julian Assange and the Imperium’s Face: Day One of the Extradition Hearings
If we are to believe it, Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, the man behind showing the ugliness of power, is the one responsible for having abused it. It is a running…
Mixed Returns for the Huawei Bashing Tour
The US imperium is rattled, so much so it’s letting everyone else know about it. Move over the trade war with its bitchy insistence on redressing imbalances, surpluses and deficits;…
Viral Losses: Australian Universities, Coronavirus and Greed
There are few things more richly deserved than the punishment of a profligate ruler who finds himself fending off a hungry citizenry. But such matters lie in the realm of…
Pardoning Julian Assange: Donald Trump, WikiLeaks and the DNC
The central pillar to Democratic paranoia and vengefulness regarding the loss of Hillary Clinton in 2016 was the link between Russian hacking, the servers of the Democratic National Committee and…
“Leave Our Bloke Alone”: A Little Mission for Julian Assange
“I think that now it is time that the government I am a part of needs to be standing up and saying to both the UK and the US: ‘enough…
Corporate Occupations: The UN Business “Black List” and Israel’s Settlements
Mikhail Bakunin, in that charming anarchist tradition, regarded the state as an evil to be done away with. Such collective formations were criminal, oppressive, eviscerating to the individual. The corporation…
Intelligence Spats: Australia, Britain and Huawei
A note of fraternal tension has been registered between the United Kingdom and Australia. It began with Britain’s decision to permit China’s technology giant Huawei a role in the construction…
Fashion Fetishism, Surgical Masks and Coronavirus
Entering Singapore’s Changi Airport gives the visitor a glimpse of a mask fetish. Security guards wear it. As do the nurses and the various personnel who man cameras like anti-aircraft…
Failed Prosecutions: Donald Trump Survives the Senate
Never undertake a prosecution unless you have good grounds, and prospects, for a solid conviction. In the case against President Donald Trump, there was never a serious prospect that the…
Triumphal Divisions: Trump’s State of the Union Address
In this year of the presidential elections, President Donald J. Trump shows little sign of cowering. It had been some time in coming, but here was a businessman talking to…
Teflon Lies and Mowing Lawns: The Afghanistan Papers
Afghanistan is a famous desert for empires, a burial ground which has consumed those in power who thought that extra fortification and trading most might benefit them. It remains a…
Brexit Day
London: Parliament Square is the site, muddied by rain, trodden by hundreds who have made it their celebratory space. The Leave Means Leave official website had been busy for weeks,…
Paranoid Groundings and Technocratic States: Hillary Clinton versus Mark Zuckerberg
It is another one of those contests and disagreements where the contestants should all loose, or at the very least, be subjected to a torturous stalemate. Hillary Clinton remains the…
Split Hearings: The Assange Extradition Case Drags On
It is being increasingly larded with heavy twists and turns, a form of state oppression in slow motion, but the Julian Assange extradition case now looks like it may well…
Janus-Faced on Climate Change: Microsoft’s Carbon Vision
“This is a bold bet – a moonshot – for Microsoft.” So claimed Brad Smith, Microsoft President, in a Thursday announcement painting a picture of a company that intends to…
Short of Time: Julian Assange at the Westminster Magistrates Court
London: Another slot of judicial history, another notch to be added to the woeful record of legal proceedings being undertaken against Julian Assange. The ailing WikiLeaks founder was coping as…
Vague Imminence: US policy, Pre-emptive Force and Qasem Soleimani
International relations is typified by its vagueness of definition and its shallowness of justification. Be it protecting citizens of a state in another, launching a pre-emptive strike to prevent what…
Incendiary Extinctions: Australian Fires and the Species Effect
Cocooned as it is from the world of science scepticism, the handling of the bush fire catastrophe unfolding in Australia is going to one of the more notable (non)achievements of…
Disruptive Assassinations: Killing Qassem Soleimani
On the surface, it made not one iota of sense. The murder of a foreign military leader on his way from Baghdad airport, his diplomatic status assured by the local…
Australia Burns: Fireworks, Bush Fires and Denial
As 2020 approached, the sense that the barbarians were not only at the gates but had breached the walls of indifference had come to the fore. But these were not…
Indian Adventures: Policing, Facial Recognition and Targeting Privacy
The chances for those seeking a world of solitude are rapidly run out. A good case can be made that this has already happened. Aldous Huxley’s Savage, made famous in…
Hypersonic Putin and Gonzo Weaponry
Weapons of dazzling murderousness have always thrilled military industrial establishments. They make money; they add to the accounts; and they tickle the pride of States who manufacture them. From time…
Scapegoats for Jamal Khashoggi
The hit squad that went about its deadly business with varying degrees of competence in Istanbul last year is set to be thinned. Five members of the group tasked with…
Sanctions, Security and the Nord Stream 2 Pipeline
The Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, construction of which is intended to transport 55 billion cubic metres of Russian gas to Germany per year under the Baltic Sea, is a…
Burning Continents, Secret Travels and Scott Morrison
The bush fire situation in Australia is now deemed catastrophic. And it started early, with a relentless ferocity that has seen thousands of volunteers stretched across the states and a…
Medical Opinion, Torture and Julian Assange
On November 27 this year, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, delivered an address to the German Bundestag outlining his approach to understanding the mental health of WikiLeaks founder…
The Politics of Trump’s Impeachment
Several features stand out in the impeachment quest against President Donald J. Trump. There is constitutional discourse as mythology and fetish. There is outrage that the executive office could have…
Boris Johnson’s Britain
Britain is looking drenched at the moment; colours blue and yellow seem to be streaking through the country. The Scottish Nationalists have re-asserted control lost to the Conservatives in 2016. …
Climate Change Accounting: The Failure of COP25
Prior to the UN Convention on Climate Change talks held in Madrid, the sense that tradition would assert itself was hard to buck. Weariness and frustration came in the wake…
Paranoias of Interference: Russia, Reddit and the British Election
No election takes place in a vacuum, and for all the assertions of fact-checkers, monitors and gatekeepers of order, some agency, be it corporate, national or international, is involved. To…
A Troubled Family: NATO turns 70
Summit anniversaries are not usually this abysmally interesting. While those paying visits to Watford, England on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation are supposedly…
Going to the ICJ: Myanmar, Genocide and Aung San Suu Kyi’s Gamble
Leaders currently in office rarely make an appearance before either the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court. International law remains affixed to the notion that heads-of-state are,…
Julian Assange in Videoconference: The Spanish Case Takes a Turn
Judge José de la Mata of Spain’s High Court, the Audiencia Nacional, had been facing a good deal of stonewalling on the part of his British colleagues. He is overseeing…
Popes Against Nuclear Weapons
The Vatican comes with its ills, contradictions and blatant hypocrisies in the field of moral theology and human existence, but on the issue of atomic and nuclear weapons, the position…
Dropped Investigations: Julian Assange, Sex and Sweden
Sex, the late Gore Vidal astutely observed, is politics, and not merely from the vantage point of those who wish to police it. In the case of whistleblowers, claims of…
Letting the Side Down: Prince Andrew, the Royal Family and Jeffrey Epstein
The choking cloud of Jeffrey Epstein’s paedophilic legacy has been floating over the Atlantic for some time. It does its best (or worst) in matters of US and British celebrity,…
Business as Usual: Evo Morales and the Coup Condition
There is an inherent bestiality in the politics of the Americas that signals coup, assassination and disruption. No state is ever allowed to go through what is weakly called a…
Incinerating Logic: Bush Fires and Climate Change
Despite the Internet, connectivity, and linking technologies, distance has not shrunk the Australian sense of self, an often provincial appraisal of the world seen in slow motion and stills. Whether…
Walls in the Head: Ostalgia and the Berlin Wall Three Decades Later
Walls have always served a dual purpose: they keep people in, and others out. The mentality of the wall is one of imprisonment and exclusion. Three decades after the fall…
Charter for Conservatism: The ALP Campaign Review
Reports on electoral strategies are often written in order to be avoided. They are scripted for the express purpose of gathering dust on shelves, or decaying in digital files rarely…
Corporate Mammon: Amazon and the Seattle Council Elections
An enduring US political tradition was in evidence in Seattle recently. Amazon had decided that the city council elections would be too important to leave alone. Seattle was their city…
Curfew Panda
It seems a tall, ambitious and very authoritarian order: imposing bans on persons under the age of 18 from playing online games between 22:00 and 08:00; rationing gaming on weekdays…
Scott Morrison’s Authoritarian Streak: Crushing Anti-Mining Protest in Australia
The Prime Minister of Australia is fuming. Having made his mark on Australian politics by being the mining sector’s most avid defender, Scott Morrison was disturbed by the week’s events…
Tethering Pegasus: WhatsApp takes NSO Group to Court
A lawsuit filed in a US federal court in San Francisco on Tuesday threw up a few interesting, and disturbing considerations. In it, the Facebook-owned platform WhatsApp advanced an allegation…
Boris Johnson Against Parliament
A pretty odd thing, this. The prime minister of Britain, supposedly of the conservative creed, making an almost violent dash against both parliament and the courts of law. While his…
Unlevelled Fields: Brexit, Workers’ Rights and the Environment
The smorgasbord of Brexit terms has been further plated up with the latest acronym: the WAB or Withdrawal Agreement Bill. It comes in at 115 pages, with an added bonus…
Libra and Calibra: Mark Zuckerberg appears before Congress
It was never going to be pretty. The Facebook CEO knew in appearing before the House Financial Services Committee to answer questions on the company’s proposed cryptocurrency that a few…
Case Mismanagement in London: Julian Assange, Political Offences and Surveillance
While Australian journalists bonded and broke break in condemning national security legislation that some of them had previously supported, one figure was barely mentioned. Julian Assange was making his first…
Brand Trudeau Wins a Second Term
Few politicians come across more as products of hashtag committee management than Justin Trudeau. His image has been doctored, massaged and spruced, and even then, the Instagram-Twitter committee did not…
Celebrity Protesters and Extinction Rebellion
Benedict Cumberbatch. Olivia Colman. Fine actors. They believe in Extinction Rebellion, or perhaps, rebelling against the prospect of extinction. The environment thing, humanity as a damnably scandalous, ecologically damaging species.…
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