Showing all posts in June 2019

Every Easter, refugee activists converge on Baxter Detention Centre in South Australia to protest the Howard government’s asylum seeker policy. Some violence has been reported, but this is a distraction from the main game. This photograph graphically displays the reality. Full information about the reasons, actions and motives of the activists is well worth reading.…

Ever thought your drink of Coke tastes a little sour? Perhaps it’s because charges of serious human rights abuses by the company are gaining in strength. The Nation reports. And who said soft drinks can’t kill you? Killer Coke responds. Patrick Cockburn is the Iraq correspondent for the UK Independent, also home to Robert Fisk.…

In the current debate surrounding Terry Schiavo and issues of assisted suicide, shameless political point-scoring and faux moral outrage, Not Dead Yet is a perspective rarely heard. What are they about? “Since 1983, many people with disabilities have opposed the assisted suicide and euthanasia movement. Though often described as compassionate, legalized medical killing is really…

Michael Manning is an American deep-sea diver turned documentary filmmaker. He recently went to the Iraqi town of Fallujah. Why? “For the past two years, Manning has been making a documentary, American Voices, crisscrossing the United States and asking hundreds of Americans if they could explain why, exactly, the U.S. is at war with Iraq”,…

Be inspired. Rabbi Arik Ascherman: “…this is a country fighting for its soul, that Zionism is fighting for its soul, that Judaism is fighting for its soul. Nothing, even after the terrible things I’ve seen, causes me to call the enterprise into question.” “But as a Jew, as a rabbi, as an Israeli, as a…

Harvard Law Professor and defender of torture, Alan Dershovitz, claimed in 2003 that Israel “outlawed torture“: “They were the only country in the world ever directly to confront the issue, and it led to a supreme court decision…outlawing torture, and yet Israel has been criticized all over the world for confronting the issue directly.” So…

Interesting recent gabfest at the Brookings Institution about blogging, its relationship with the traditional media and what the future may hold. Put aside the generally conservative voices here (we are, after all, at the Brookings Institution) and discover a fairly thorough investigation about the fear that currently rests in the so-called “old media” towards the…

The support of Ariel Sharon in Israel, from both the left and right, is a disturbing delusion, argues Sefi Rachelevsky in today’s Haaretz: “…the contrary political path that perpetuates the idea that “only the Likud can do it” is ironically what will allow the Likud to reunite after the disengagement from Gaza, and to gather…

Sir William Deane is a former Governor General of Australia and remains a voice of compassion in the community. He gave the following speech at the University of Western Australia on Monday night. Our country is being challenged by a conservative orthodoxy, Deane argued, and the very fabric that makes us diverse and tolerant is…

Will an Australian television station have the moral fortitude to launch the Frank and Fitzy show on an unsuspecting public? It’s Seinfeld meets Sopranos.