Death in New Zealand: The Christchurch Shootings
Five weapons were said to have been used, all inscribed with symbols, numbers and insignia. The individual charged with the shootings at two Christchurch mosques that left 49 dead was…
Dr Binoy Kampmark
Lobbies and Belated Groundings: Boeing’s 737 Max 8
Lobbies, powerful interests and financial matters are usually the first things that come to mind when the aircraft industry is considered. Safety, while deemed of foremost importance, is a superficial…
Lies in the Branding: Justin Trudeau’s Implosion
“Trudeau came out and asked for strong women, and he got them.” Michelle Rempel, Conservative Party MP, The Atlantic, Mar 12, 2019 The gods have various roles, and most of…
Publicised Cruelty: Scott Morrison Visits Christmas Island
His visit struck a sour note. The Australian prime minister Scott Morrison was making an effort to show he cared: about those intangible things called borders, secure firm and shut…
Grand Jury Efforts: Jailing Chelsea Manning
“I will not comply with this, or any other grand jury.” So explained Chelsea Manning in justifying her refusal to answer questions and comply with a grand jury subpoena compelling…
A Fancy Hypocrisy: China, Australia and Coal Mania
Fear them for their technology; fear them for their ideology and their authoritarianism. But embrace interference and involvement in the economy if it involves coal. This is the fancy hypocrisy…
The Cardinal Can Do No Wrong: George Pell’s Defenders
The powerful have always had defenders. Power seeps into the system, corrupts, controls and, ultimately, assumes an authority that does wonders to destroy an appraisal of fairness. To be there…
Militarised Conservation: Paramilitary Rangers and the WWF
Think charity, think vulnerability and its endless well of opportunistic exploitation. Over the years, international charity organisations have been found with employees keen to take advantage of their station. That…
British Labour’s Fractious Jaunt: The Politics of the Independent Group
They could not hold on. A small – and in the scheme of things negligible group – split from the British Labour mothership last month in an effort to salvage…
Walkout in Hanoi: The Second Trump-Kim Summit
“Sometimes you have to walk and this was one of those times.” That was US President Donald Trump’s remark about something he has been doing a lot of lately: walking…
The Chagos Islands Case, WikiLeaks and Justice
Let this be a lesson to its detractors, doubters and stuff shirts of the secrecy establishment: the documents sourced from WikiLeaks can have tangible, having significant value for ideas and…
Shifting the Centre of Gravity: Julian Assange Receives His Passport
In March 2008, one Michael Horvath of the US Army Counterintelligence Center within the Cyber Intelligence Assessments Branch considered the risks posed by WikiLeaks in a 32 page document. Created…
The Showbiz of Conservation: PETA, Google and Steve Irwin
The world of conservation has thrown up various voices of tenacity. There was Aldo Leopold, a vital figure behind establishing the first wilderness area of the United States when he…
Turning Screws: China’s Australian Coal Ban
Overly reliant economies are dangerously fragile things. As it takes two parties, often more, to play the game, the absence of interest, or its withdrawal by one, can spell doom.…
The Candidate Rides Again: The Bernie Sanders Re-Run
He could not stay away, and few could blame him. Such political tendencies are nerves, conditions, diseases: eventually, we have to succumb to them. Bernie Sanders has announced his intention…
Size Matters: The Demise of the A380
The aircraft business has always been a dear affair. More than other forms of transport, it remains susceptible to oscillating costs (materials, fuel), ever at the mercy of the uncontrollable. …
Death by Video: Morrison Combats Refugees By Film
Caught in the backwater of the world’s existence, Australia struggles for relevance in various ways. It might show itself a leader in creating a sovereign fund (too late for that…
Sickness and Paranoia: The Morrison Government’s Refugee Problem
The passage of amendments to the Migration Act 1958 (Cth) by the Australian House of Representatives and the Senate this week was less a case of celebration than necessitous deliverance. …
Means of Control: Russia’s Attempt to Hive Off the Internet
Such measures were always going to come on the heels, and heavily so, of the utopians. Where there is Internet Utopia, Dystopia follows with dedicated cynicism. Where there are untrammelled…
Football, Refugee Rights and Hakeem al-Araibi
“Al-Araibi’s case has become a crucial test of world football’s commitment to human rights.” So observed the director of the Castan Centre for Human Rights at Monash University, Sarah Joseph,…
Unity and Exceptionalism: Trump’s State of Union Flurries
“Trump is hated by everyone,” comes one unnamed former official in an account to Vanity Fair, one supposedly sourced after the President’s State of the Union Address. Another claimed that…
Meeting in Moscow: The Taliban Meets the Afghan Opposition
It had the semblance of a play lacking key actors. They were deemed the difficult ones, and a decision was made to go through with the performance. The Taliban were…
Sharp Manias: Knife Crime in London
London: A bleak London assailed by daily news about Brexit negotiation, prospects of food shortages and higher prices in the event of a no-deal with the European Union, provides the perfect…
“Instagram Helped Kill My Daughter”: Censorship Tendencies in Social Media
It is all a rather sorry tale. Molly Russell, another teenager gorged on social media content, sharing and darkly revelling, took her own life in 2017 supposedly after viewing what…
Everybody Else’s Business: Coup Fever in Venezuela
This could have been seen as audacious. Instead, it had the smell of a not so well concealed sponsorship, the backing of a meaty foreign hand. Venezuelan opposition leader and…
Shutting Down in Trumpland
It is a political idiosyncrasy that most political systems avoid: the state, as if suffering a stroke, operating at only partial capacity, incapable of paying certain employees and incapable of…
Eyeing the White House: The Democratic Field
Not so much hunting season as declaratory season in US politics. The US presidential candidates from the Democratic side are making promises spiced with forced excitement in anticipation of the…
Spy Theories and the White House: Donald Trump as Russian Agent
The level of absurdity in US politics has now reached such vertigo inducing levels as to render all manner of things permissible. Contact with the unwashed implies collaboration; discussion with…
Trump, Bolton and the Syrian Confusion
It’s a messy, though typical picture. US President Donald Trump wants to pull out forces in Syria. When announced in December, jaws drooped and sharp intakes of breath were registered…
Dances of Disinformation: The Partisan Politics of the Integrity Initiative
Is there such a plane of blissful, balanced information, deliberated and debated upon? No. Governments mangle; corporations distort. Interest groups tinker. Wars must be sold; deception must be perpetrated. Inconsistencies…
Gabon and Coup Mania
It starts with a presumption, makes its way through a discussion, and becomes a set, moulded stereotype: Africa is the continent of tin pot dictatorships, unstable leaderships, and coups. Latin…
Biting into Apple: The Giant’s Revenues Fall
The worm has gotten into Apple, and is feasting with some consistency. Revenue has fallen. Chief executive Tim Cook is cranky. The celebrated front of Apple’s wealth – the iPhone…
Brexit Armageddon
London, New Year’s Eve 2018. It is a very English middle-class trait: the world will end if the price of a certain life style goes up. Certain services will be…
Suspending Choice: The Patrick Melrose Series
Ashes, even when washed way, can haunt the living. A cracked Patrick Melrose has come to retrieve the cremated remains of this late father. He is addicted, indulgent, outrageous. He…
The Hand that Won’t Sign the Paper: Adani’s Stalling Project
It should be a sign for this Indian giant, a company that has done much to illustrate the ethical and moral bankruptcy in Australia’s political classes. Despite support stretching from…
Cooking Books and Limiting Responsibility: The Goldman Sachs Playbook
Managing a bank will always be a more lucrative criminal enterprise than raiding one but this Brechtian styled analysis only goes so far. A closer look at the extraordinary nature…
The Misuses of History: The Christmas 1914 Truce
All memorialised events, when passing into mythology, must be seen critically. In some cases, there should be more than a hint of suspicion. The Christmas Truce of 1914 remains one…
Orbán’s Latest Dance
Viktor Orbán of Hungary is not to be hectored to. Arching with fury at the EU’s September motion to sanction Hungary for bad behaviour under the Article 7 process, he…
Leaving Syria: President Trump’s Withdrawal
“The President announced an apparently impulsive decision that shook the world, showed little sign of nuanced consideration, confounded top advisers and by the end of the day left Washington in…
Agreed Rules, COP24 and Climate Change Protest
“If children can get headlines all over the world just by not going to school, then imagine what we can all do together if we really wanted to.” Greta Thunberg…
Tumblr and the Cult of the Safe
Be aware of the titty. Or pudenda. Or anything else suggesting a copulative angle familiar to most adults with a decent constituency of desire. The world of Tumblr, home of…
May Days in Britain
It is hard to envisage sympathy for a person who made a name as a home secretary (prisons, detentions, security and such) taking the mast and banner of her country…
Having it All Ways: Scott Morrison’s Jerusalem “Compromise”
The pieces were already put in place during the Wentworth federal by-election, a hopeless, needless gambit that reduced the Coalition government’s majority whilst giving the outgoing Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull…
The Kosovo Blunder: Moves Towards a Standing Army
There never is a time not to worry in the Balkans. The next conflict always seems to be peering around the corner with a malicious enthusiasm, eager to spring at…
The Case that Dare Not Speak Its Name: The Conviction of Cardinal Pell
“Freedom of the press in the world will cease to exist if a judge in one country is allowed to bar publication of information anywhere in the world.” Martin…
William Blum: Anti-Imperial Advocate Passes Away
In the incessant self-praise of the US imperial project, kept safe in a state of permanently enforced amnesia, occasional writings prod and puncture. Mark Twain expressed an ashamed horror at…
Seventy Years of Aspiration: Rights Charters and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
It was a gathering of activists masquerading as deep thinkers. Ostensibly, it was to celebrate seven decades of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, one devised in the aftermath of…
Exhuming Franco: Spain’s Immemorial Divisions
“Of course there’s one Spain. If there was another, we’d all be in that one.” Joke on Franco’s Spain, in London Review of Books, 37, July, 2015 Beware the corpse…
The Security Derangement Complex: Technology Companies and Australia’s Anti-Encryption Law
Australia is being seen as a test case. How does a liberal democracy affirm the destruction of private, encrypted communications? In 2015, China demonstrated what could be done to technology…
In Contempt of Parliament: The Legal Advice of Brexit
It is attrition, suffocation and contortion. While Theresa May’s Brexit program, weak, compromising and cobbled as it is, endures that bit longer, her opponents from within and without government have…
George H.W. Bush: Cold War Ends and New World Orders
The death of certain political figures, notably those of a vast imperium, is bound to provoke less criticism or critical insight than soul searching pursuits. With the US in the…
Journey into Obsolescence: The Adani Carmichael Project
The Carmichael mine being pursued in the Galilee Basin in Central Queensland is a dinosaur before its creation. On paper, it is hefty – to be some five times the…
Mutual Decline: The Failings of Student Evaluations
That time of the year. Student evaluations are being gathered by the data crunchers. Participation rates are being noted. Attitudes and responses are mapped. The vulnerable, insecure instructor, fearing an…
Eyes Without The Prize: Stripping Aung San Suu Kyi’s Awards
It is impossible to see peace prize or freedom awards as anything other than fragments of an industry. In time, ideals become marketable and matters of commodity. Those who go…
Steve Bannon at Oxford
Steve Bannon. The Oxford Union. A university that has been the breeding, sculpting and minting ground for British prime ministers for centuries and the Establishment. Here, Bannon, strategist of the…
Coming Up Against Yellow Vests: Emmanuel Macron’s Fuel Problem
Governments and ruling regimes tend to face revolution in the face of harsh hikes in prices. Margaret Thatcher’s rule in Britain was rocked by the poll tax. In France, the…
Bringing God and Finding Death: A Christian Missionary on North Sentinel Island
Curiosity for the undiscovered last tribe, that tantalising moment when eyes are cast upon the previously unseen, remains the anthropological Holy Grail. But to do so would lead to the…
Forgetting Jamal Khashoggi: Donald Trump, Saudi Arabia and Brute Realism
“I never thought I’d see the day a White House would moonlight as a public relations firm for the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.” Senator Bob Corker (R-Tennessee), Twitter, Nov…
The Jerusalem Tangle: ScoMo’s Recognition Policy Stumbles
Jerusalem, deemed a holy city, and seen as trade item, bargaining chip and bartering tool over the centuries. Sought by the major faiths, despoiled at stages by various empires, revived…
The Disgruntled Former Prime Minister
The disgruntled former prime minister is a rather large, and growing club, on the Australian scene. The country has become known for its killing seasons, those occasions when spear wielding…
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