News bytes

– Romania decides to withdraw its troops from Iraq. – How Iranian Jews are learning to live with Ahmadinejad. – Dahr Jamail on the real power in Iraq. – A campaign to boycott Israel’s Gay Pride festival. – Just how much are Palestinian lives really worth? Murdoch’s Australian shows its true, bigoted colours.

Good friends disagree

Relations with our neighbour remain as challenging as ever: A recent poll has found that more than two-thirds (67 per cent) of NSW men between ages 40 to 49 felt that Australia did not stand up enough to Indonesia in its dealings. And overall, the poll found that 58 per cent of Australians believe our…

Quote of the week

“Running the story about the money-tracing program is a version of giving Anne Frank’s address to the Nazis.” Richard Valeriani, Huffington Post

Importance noted

Rupert Murdoch’s Australian newspaper understands news. Hence today’s page-one lead. A serious story about individuals who thrive on selling advertisements between diet shows. Perhaps it would have been better to discuss Condoleezza Rice’s belief that the US has “moral authority.”

Demanding sovereignty

The Daily Star, June 27: It is understandable that US officials would react with outrage to the idea of forgiving insurgents with American blood on their hands. As Senator Carl Levin said, “the idea that they should even consider talking about amnesty for people who have killed people who liberated their country is unconscionable.” But…

The end is nigh

As Israel commits war crimes in Gaza (more here and here), a former adviser to the Israeli prime minister argues that the US Zionist lobby offers little more than fighting a perceived “enemy”: Writing during the Rabin era in an article entitled “Foreign Affairs: Mischief Makers,” Tom Friedman argued, “It is as if these organizations…

More empire, please

My latest New Matilda column discusses the growing, Western admiration for empire: Despite the odious history of the British and US Empires in the last centuries, it has become increasingly acceptable to express respect for these long-forgotten days (in the case of Britain) or their continuation (in the case of the US). After all, there…

The real story

When the New York Times and a host of other newspapers recently published stories about the US Treasury Department’s program to covertly monitor worldwide money transfers of “terrorists”, it was a necessary and important story. It is not the job of journalists or media companies to support any administration or governmental authority. It is certainly…

Bullseye!

The Columbia Journalism Review Daily reports: In November, 2001, at the outset of its military campaign to oust the Taliban and hunt down Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, a U.S. missile levelled the Kabul bureau of the Al Jazeera television network. In his new book, The One Percent Doctrine, Ron Suskind alleges that Al Jazeera was…

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