Suing Saudi Arabia: Overturning Sovereign Immunity In US Courts
It was momentous on one fundamental level. Here was the President of the United States, Barack Obama, holding the torch for a wretched ally the politicians on the Hill and…
Dr Binoy Kampmark
Pictures Left Incomplete: MH17 And The Joint Investigation Team
The investigation into the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over two years ago always had the flavour of pre-emption, caked with assumptions of premature adjudication. Neither side, be it…
The Debates Of Loathing: Trump And Clinton At Hofstra
It really doesn’t matter that these two creatures loathed and feared in varying degrees should even be conducting a debate. What, after all, is there to dispute? Both Hillary Clinton…
Re-electing Jeremy Corbyn: The Triumph Of Momentum
He has proven to be one of the most stubborn of creatures in a political sense. Unlike the dinosaur of political thinking he has been accused of being, British Labour’s…
Punishing The Punished: Chelsea Manning’s Fate
“Essentially she is now being tortured as punishment for an act of desperation.” Nancy Hollander, lawyer for Chelsea Manning, Sep 24, 2016 It was not sufficient for US military authorities…
Controlling Bodies: Italy’s Fertility Campaign
Demography is destiny, and the destiny of aging Europeans is long run death. How the demographic strategists have dealt with this varies, but the tendency in various countries is either…
Bartering On Refugees: The Costa Rica Solution
“We will also participate in a US-led program to re-settle Central American refugees currently in a resettlement centre in Costa Rica.” Malcolm Turnbull, Australian PM, Sep 21, 2016 It used to…
The Washington Post And Edward Snowden
The tensions between those engaged in the dangerous and compromising pursuit of whistleblowing, and those who use the fruit of such efforts has been all too coarsely revealed in the…
Nuclear Theatre: The North Korean Show
It is a performance where few are laughing. The DPRK has demonstrated again why it remains by far the most theatrically foolish yet prescient of powers. Held hostage by the…
The WADA Hack: Transparency And The Uneven Playing Field
The disclosure of confidential material has its own sometimes fraught ethics. When it comes to medical information, assumptions abound that confidentiality comes first. Not, however, in international sports, a notorious…
Turnbull As Fantasist: Selling Australia’s Security And Refugee Agenda
Island mentalities do not travel well. When their sellers hawk the agenda before world forums, these start looking ludicrous. Coming close to this ludicrous display is Australian prime minister, Malcolm…
David Cameron, Libya And Disaster: The Findings Of The Foreign Affairs Select Committee
The UK Foreign Affairs Committee was a long time coming with this judgment, but when it came, it provided a firm reminder about how far the 2011 intervention against the…
Banning Burkinis: The Politics Of Beachwear
So the tendency continues; woman wears an outfit either provocative in its skimpiness or provocative in its conservativeness. Authorities beset by ideology intervene. The idea of control is never far…
Hillary Clinton’s Extreme End Game
The loathsome two are moving into full view, mustering weapons and taking aim at each other in a US election campaign that continues to be filled with colourful missives. But…
Unwanted Images: The Nauru Incident Reports
When the first reports came through about the unfolding Holocaust during the Second World War, audiences were incredulous. Surely no industrialised society could quite go so far? Killings, yes; butcheries,…
Labouring Hours: Sweden’s Six-Hour Working Day
Sweden has been in the news of late for attempting to take the Marxist spirit to heart, with employers seeking to maximise the value of labour from the shorter work…
Claims Of Exoneration: The Case Of Slobodan Milošević
Every age needs its cult of demonology. It creates a social target of unified indignation and moral outrage. Finally, we can find a figure, prey upon it, and feel good…
Closing Manus Island’s Detention Centre: The Search For Alternative Cruelties
It all goes back to April, when the Papua New Guinea Supreme Court found the Manus Island detention facility, ostensibly directed and run by the Australian government, in breach of…
The Hypocrisies Of Commemoration: Dispute At Long Tan
One of the stranger sights in international relations is that of a defeated State seeking to commemorate its fallen in a country whose affairs it sought to disrupt. Australia is…
Fingers On The Button: “First Use” And US Nuclear Weapons
Do you wait till the prospect of obliteration is upon you? Or initiate, blithely, a nuclear holocaust upon your enemy as a matter of what is termed “first use” by…
Donald Trump And The ISIS Factor
Ever straddling that fine line between the absurd and the puncturing revelation, Donald J. Trump’s “ISIS” remarks about the Obama administration and the Democrat presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, were vintage. …
The Flagging Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement: The US Election And Free Trade Politics
Being savaged by Donald J. Trump on one side of the electoral aisle, and modestly beaten by the Democratic presumptive candidate, Hillary Clinton, the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement is lying somewhere…
Bungling The Australian Census
Each country needs its exceptionalist message, its sui generis theme. We do something here no one else does, and such like. In Australia, there are many things deemed exceptional. Compulsory…
Refugee Trauma On Nauru: The Leaked Incident Reports
“Do I have to kill myself to go to Australia?” Asylum seeker, Nauru, March 2, 2015 Human sensibility has been given another sound beating with the leak of 2,116 incident…
Detained For Terror: Proposed Indefinite Detention Laws In Australia
The Turnbull government has come down rather heavily in its response to a spate of attacks in France and Germany, deciding that it is time that something be done in…
The Olympic Gold Obsession: An Australian Condition
Obsessions of any sort, notably of a consuming nature, are never healthy matters. The drive to win gold, laced with a desperation often reflected in steroid consumption and psychological battering,…
Fires Of Illusion: Guarding The Olympic Flame In Rio
“The investment is not for us, it’s for the foreigners.” Felipe Paiva, Rio favela resident, CBC, Aug 3, 2016 The hideous mess that is the Olympic spectacle is about to…
Meaningless Words: Terrorism, Mental Health And The London Knife Attack
“And this is what disturbs me: the fact that people today, despite living with more safety and wealth and access to information than anyone in human history, feel as though…
The Washington Vaccination Ploy: Puerto Rico And The Zika Quandary
Should you fear receiving the needle from a stranger? Yes. Should you fear receiving it from a person you know all too well as a historical abuser? Even more so. …
Rubbishing Pauline Hanson: The Campaign Continues
A virus of populism, as it has come to be called, has rattled established classes across the countries of Europe, the United States, and, to a lesser extent, Australia. The…
Olympic Chaos: The Rio Games In World Of Global Sporting Corruption
Wounds have opened; recriminations are all around. The Rio Olympic Games, even before the first act, has already shown how it will be one of the more interesting ones for…
Humanising Hillary Clinton: The Democratic National Convention
“He [Bill Clinton] wanted people to know the real Hillary.” John Podesta, Jul 28, 2016 Moving beyond idea, beyond type, beyond cardboard cuts, was always going to be a central…
Kevin Rudd’s Failed UN Secretary General Bid
Few sights are sadder in international diplomacy than seeing an aging figure desperate for honours. In a desperate effort to net them, he scurries around, cultivating, prodding, wishing to be…
Cults Of Security And Terror: Fear Ahead Of The Rio Olympic Games
The Olympics remains a black hole of needless expenditure, sucking services into it with impending and merciless doom. Unused stadia, tracks left to moulder, services supposedly linked to urban renewal…
The Scourge Of Youth Detention: The Northern Territory, Torture, And Australia’s Detention Disease
“What we’re changing is a culture in an organisation within the youth detention system and I think we’ve come a long way in that time.” Adam Giles, NT Chief Minister,…
Undermining Bernie Sanders: The DNC Campaign, WikiLeaks And Russia
Two aspects of Hillary Clinton’s response to the Bernie Sanders campaign have been notable in 2016. One has involved her attempts to “adjust” to his views to make tactical gains.…
The Futility Of Collective Punishment: Russia, Doping And WADA
The idea of excluding a country wholesale brings with it dangers that decision makers may well not see. It eliminates specific, untainted talents who also deserve to be protected in…
Laura Ingraham And Trumpism
Never doubt the ballistic factor of Laura Ingraham. Ingraham is never into facts, which tend to be the unwanted gate crashers of her party. What matters in that particular world…
Apologist In Chief: Boris Johnson As Foreign Secretary
“There is a rich thesaurus of things I have said that have, one way or the other, I don’t know, that has been misconstrued.” Boris Johnson, Jul 19, 2016 It might…
Australia’s Malcolm Turnbull: The Failure Of Success
The term “mandate” has been sluicing through the Australian electoral system in its predictable wash-up. In that particular country, it never matters whether one wins by one vote or a…
Banning And Banishing: The Nonsense About Muslims
He was the kingpin of the whole affair by suggesting it. In December 2015, the US Republican presumptive nominee for President, Donald Trump, came up with that daft suggestion which…
Failing States Of Emergency: The Nice Attacks
Security states, heavily policed and run by surveillance gurus and juju men of the intelligence community, have more failings than meritorious attributes. If liberty is to succeed, then holes, sometimes…
Military Coups, Turkey And flimsy Democracy
“A minority within the armed forces has unfortunately been unable to stomach Turkey’s unity.”- President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Jul 15, 2016 Any aspect of instability in the state of Turkey is…
Boris Johnson And Anti-Diplomacy
British politics has seen it before: a good deal of political bloodletting in a dramatic Cabinet reshuffle. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan did so on July 13, 1962 in what became…
Bernie Sanders: The End Of A Campaign
The slimmest of hopes, which got extremely threadbare in the last month, was nursed that Bernie Sanders might have taken his support base and made it into a third movement. …
Shootings In Dallas: Violence, Police Authority And Black Lives Matter
While the police have been dishing it out extensively for years to the black community, often with murderous effect, retaliation was bound to come. A movement scolded for being narky…
The Mother Fetish: British Politics And The Tory Leadership Contest
What role the womb? Politically, it is exploited by the conservative creed as the indispensable mechanism for reproduction. To not add offspring to the ledger of life is not doing…
Satrap Guilt: Australia, Iraq And The Chilcot Inquiry
The release of the Chilcot Iraq Inquiry, examining the feeble reasons for launching a war against a sovereign state in 2003, did not merely land former British Prime Minister Tony…
The Eel Of History: Hillary Clinton, Emailgate And The FBI
Clinton was spared, even if the FBI recommendation remains just that. It was a textbook outcome pointing to the failures of consistent approaches all too familiar to that of her…
Hung Parliaments And Democracy In Australian Context
Hung parliaments are deemed the bane of the Westminster System. It makes politicians sweat, policy makers work, and the broader system of representative government unusually representative. The latter part is…
Corbyn, British Labour And Anti-Semitism
In another attempt to kick the leader of the British Labour down and out, a campaign has been hatched with a now commonplace virulence. A report into anti-Semitism within Labour…
Who Is Special Now? The Mythology Behind The US-British Relationship
To any historian buff, it should be a known fact that Britain’s “special relationship” with Washington has been a tough one, subjected to periods of bruising and disagreement. States caught…
The US Problem With Immigration: Railroaded By The Supreme Court
Immigration, blood source of the United States, its motor of development, has been rocked by judicial pronouncements of late. The Obama administration had put much stock in reforming the general…
Texas, Abortion And The US Supreme Court
The abortion right in the United States, given full force in Roe v Wade, has never been a plain sailing affair.[1] The language of rights is ever a prickly matter,…
Iceland’s Football Story: The Glory Of Public Football
“These guys now with us in the [Iceland] national team were brought up on artificial pitches. Many would have had youth coaching in an indoor dome. They could go out…
The Woes Of Brexit: Revolt Against Corbyn
Jeremy Corbyn, the grand hope of the Labour Party in Britain, is being politically assassinated. The process has been a gradual one, coming in the form of poison administered over…
Headaches Of Empire: Brexit’s Effect On The United States
There remains a conspicuous fear in the US Republic that civilization must be a centralising endeavour. Smaller states only matter if they are wedged into a series of agreements and…
Rubbishing Brexit: Post-Referendum Malevolence In Action
Twenty-four hour news networks are both terrible and worthy sites to gauge herd-like assumptions. A gaze at CNN over the coverage of the Brexit over the course of Friday suggested…
Brexit It Is! David Cameron Resigns
The Vote Leave chief executive Matthew Elliot was wishing to get voters out for the cause, circulating a message that, “There is a very real chance that voters in London…
The Inhumanity Of Brexit
While the Brexit debate has become a matter of colliding blocs of speculators and crystal ball gazers, a glaring aspect has come to the fore. Virtually nothing has been said…
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