Sigh: A top-secret document revealing how MI6 and MI5 officers were allowed to extract information from prisoners being illegally tortured overseas has been seen by the Guardian. The interrogation policy – details of which are believed to be too sensitive to be publicly released at the government inquiry into the UK’s role in torture and…
Showing all posts in June 2019
Serco making money from the noble act of volunteering
A privatised future that gives us all a chill, writes Zoe Williams in the Guardian: It is pointless at this stage to pretend to be surprised that charities are facing …£100m worth of cuts to their local authority funding, although it is ironic that the sector most flattered by “big society” rhetoric should be the…
Israeli paper sorry it publicly stated its dislike for racial diversity
Just after the massacre in Norway, the pro-settler Jerusalem Post wrote an editorial that appeared to blame multiculturalism for the crimes of Anders Behring Breivik. What the world needs is ethnically pure nations (like Israel?). The paper has now issued an “apology”. The message? We’re so sorry that readers would think we hate Muslims: A…
The long arm of Saudi attitude (and Robert Fisk now knows)
Mmm: Saudi Arabia’s interior minister yesterday accepted undisclosed damages from a British newspaper for a false story claiming that he had ordered police chiefs in the kingdom “to shoot and kill unarmed demonstrators without mercy”. The Independent newspaper and its Middle East correspondent, Robert Fisk, offered “sincere apologies” at the high court in London to…
The Blogging Revolution updated post the Arab revolutions
In 2008 my second book, The Blogging Revolution, was released. It told the story of the internet in repressive regimes. Now, post the Arab uprisings, I’ve updated the title and it’s been released globally this week as an e-book via Melbourne University Press:
The hundreds of thousands marching in Israel are forgetting the bloody stain of their nation
Dimi Reider, an Israeli journalist and photographer and Aziz Abu Sarah, a Palestinian columnist with the newspaper Al Quds, write in the New York Times about the profound myopia of the current massive protests in Israel: There are profound and institutionalized economic disparities between Arabs and Jews in Israel. But when it comes to housing…
What scared Zionists need to hear daily; everybody hates us, always
Just what the Australian Jewish community needs. A leading Jewish American, Zionist lobbyist – David Harris is the Executive Director of the the American Jewish Committee – comes here and talks about how weak Jews are and how the world hates Jews/Israel/democracy. Make people scared. Keep them ignorant. Don’t explain why growing numbers of people…
How many companies are shafting America in its WOT?
Far too many and who really cares? A United Arab Emirates-based logistics contractor billed Defense Department authorities in Iraq for parts at prices marked up as high as 5,000 percent and 12,000 percent, according to a quarterly report released Saturday by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. A review of a $119 million reconstruction…