Australian politicians, including Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott, are currently wandering around Western Sydney looking for friends and spewing bile against anybody who isn’t “Australian”, whatever the hell that means. Pandering to the racist instinct is the worst kind of politics. I’ve never linked to a story on Channel 7’s Today…
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BBC happy to promote deluded British narrative of spreading democracy
Typically savvy writing by Medialens: This ideological function was clear in the BBC Newsnight ‘special’ edition on February 26, 2013, titled… ‘Iraq: 10 Years On’. One of the guests on the platform in front of an invited audience was the grandly titled ‘World Affairs Editor’, John Simpson. The veteran journalist has an air of avuncular gravitas,…
What resistance in Bougainville, PNG means
The resource curse has hit Papua New Guinea more than many other countries in the world. Massive mineral and energy wealth is largely squandered by a corrupt government and Western multinationals. It’s an issue I’ve investigated in my forthcoming book and documentary about disaster capitalism. There’s a great website by Dr Kristian Lasslett that details…
10 years on, Iraq is broken
Patrick Cockburn, one of the finest mainstream journalists around, writes for the UK Independent… from Iraq about the state of the nation we invaded and occupied in 2003: Iraq is disintegrating as a… country under the pressure of a mounting political, social and economic crisis, say Iraqi leaders. They add that 10 years after the US…
Sins of the Vatican
There’s a remarkable documentary by US Oscar-winning film-maker Alex Gibney called Mea Maxima Culpa: In the House of God. It’s about the role of the Catholic Church in America and globally in hiding sexual abuse for decades. Nobody is spared, and rightly so. Testimony is given by deaf men who were assaulted as boys. Their…
Why Bradley Manning is one of the great heroes of our time
By his admission this week of passing documents to Wikileaks for the simple reason that he believed the world had a right to know that Washington was lying about a litany of wars around the world, his stance is incredibly brave. The fact that Manning’s actions are so unique (and the corporate press was offered…
Message from Stéphane Hessel (1917-2013)
He died this week, a giant of the 20th and 21st century who co-wrote the… Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
Britain finds novel way to strip citizens of rights before America drones them
Disturbing evidence in the Independent that reveals yet another way Western states find ways to capitulate to unaccountable American demands in the “war on terror”: The Government has secretly ramped up a controversial programme that strips people of their British citizenship on national security grounds – with two of the men subsequently killed by American…
Welcome to your future; a drone university near you
The joys: Touting unprecedented education “for the benefit of mankind,” Unmanned Vehicle University, America’s only school offering postgraduate engineering degrees in unmanned systems – ie: drones – is thriving. Since opening in Arizona in July with five students taking its largely online courses for an annual fee of $64,000, it now has 300 graduate drone…
Hands up who deserves a drone medal?
The Pentagon will be giving awards to drone pilots for killing all these awful terrorists. Or civilians. Cartoonist Matt Bors: