Is this the future of investigative reporting? How far would a US government (or London?) go to stop information they believed was sensitive? Great piece by Amy Davidson in the New Yorker: On Saturday night, Michael Grunwald, aTime… correspondent, deleted a tweet that he said was “dumb”; a spokesperson for the magazine noted in an e-mailed…
Sydney Morning Herald/Melbourne Age positively reviews For God’s Sake
The following review by Stephanie Dowrick appears in today’s Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age: FOR GOD’S SAKE By Jane Caro, Antony Loewenstein, Simon Smart and Rachel Woodlock Macmillan, $32.99 At its best, thinking – and therefore writing and reading – can be transformative. It can allow our vision of life to become more nuanced…
Welcome to the remote Curtin detention centre
The following extract from my book Profits of Doom appears in The Melbourne Review: In this extract from his recently-released… Profits of Doom, Antony Loewenstein visits the remote and jealously guarded Curtin Immigration Detention Centre.… It’s a 30-minute drive through the desert from Derby to the Curtin Air Base. A number of signs warn us to…
War in Syria exposes gross Western hypocrisy
My following piece appears in the Guardian today: Syrian president Bashar al-Assad wasn’t supposed to survive. Since the uprising began in 2011, it’s been long presumed in western political and media circles that he would be deposed or killed and that a new, more US-friendly autocrat would be installed. This hasn’t happened. We know Russia…
How to fight mass privatisation one industry at a time
My following article appears in The Hoopla today: The rate of incarceration of Indigenous Australians is… higher per capita… than it was for … blacks living in apartheid South Africa. The Australian Institute of Criminology released figures this year that confirm the problem. One in four are behind bars and the over-representation of Indigenous people in West Australian…
What Edward Snowden revelations say about indy journalism
An insightful feature in the New York Times magazine by Peter Maass on the role played by film-maker Laura Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald when discovering Edward Snowden and reporting his invaluable NSA revelations: Poitras and Greenwald… are an especially dramatic example of what outsider reporting looks like in 2013. They do not work in a…
Al Jazeera English gets “access” to Serco-run Christmas Island camp
When I visited Christmas Island in late 2011 (researching my book Profits of Doom), the Australian Immigration Department and Serco heavily restricted access (though I finally obtained entry on my last day). This was supposedly for asylum seeker “privacy” but in reality is a policy aimed to not humanise the faces and lives of refugees.…
Small but positive signs that US war on drugs at home viewed as failure
One of the most devastating effects of the war on drugs has been on people of colour in the US, especially African-Americans. I’ve long believed that a serious society would consider decriminalising if not legalising drugs, a point I argued in a recent Guardian column. Now, some positive news from the US (via the New…
What is vulture capitalism doing to our world?
My follow article appears today in The Conversation: The story in last weekend’s Sydney’s… Daily Telegraph… was stark: “[Prime Minister] Kevin Rudd will warn people smugglers he stands ready to create an island from hell in Papua New Guinea housing 10,000 asylum seekers.” The message, an “exclusive” by News Corp Australia journalist Samantha Maiden, was to inform…
Centre for Public Christianity discusses For God’s Sake
The new book… For God’s Sake… is a discussion between an Atheist, a Jew, a Christian and a Muslim about the big questions of life. CPX invited Jane Caro, Antony Loewenstein and Simon Smart to discuss their reasons for writing the book and to debate some of the questions that are raised in it.