One of the key messages emerging from the Wikileaks cables is the callousness of Western leaders towards human rights. It’s seen as an inconvenience. That’s why we treat them with appropriate contempt. One: The Howard government urged the United States to force the collapse of the North Korean regime by denying it aid, despite advice…
Showing all posts tagged Britain
News flash: FT questions privatisation
Hold the phone. Here’s a very astute piece in the Financial Times arguing against unquestioned privatisation of everything, including Heathrow Airport. Challenging the religion of privatising the entire country is a debate too rarely had: For the world’s rising states, international airports – and indeed their national airlines (Turkish Airlines beats BA hands down on…
David Hicks shows us what we became after 9/11
My following book review appeared in yesterday’s Sydney’s Sun Herald newspaper: AUTOBIOGRAPHY Guantanamo: My Journey David Hicks (William Heinemann, $49.95) Reviewed by Antony Loewenstein Almost 10 years after the Bush administration launched the ”˜”˜war on terror’’, the victims of the policy remain largely voiceless. The unknown number of civilians murdered by Western bombs have no…
Alliances in the name of fighting a bigger enemy
Julian Assange is currently living in Britain under the roof of one Vaughan Smith, a man who believes in a free press. More on him here: Veteran BBC correspondent Loyn, who has known Smith for almost 20 years and worked with him in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, said Assange and Smith met “relatively recently” when…
Shut down the web or face a Wikileaks inspired future
A wonderful piece by John Naughton in the Guardian from early December that perfectly captures this Wikileaks moment: What WikiLeaks is really exposing is the extent to which the western democratic system has been hollowed out. In the last decade its political elites have been shown to be incompetent (Ireland, the US and UK in…
Let’s not get seriously side-tracked with Assange personal life
So the Guardian has smeared Julian Assange with sexual allegations and the focus has inevitably shifted from what Wikileaks is doing to what Assange may have done: As fresh snow erases the traces of Friday’s scrum of camera crews from the elegant lawns of a Georgian mansion in East Anglia, inside Ellingham Hall Julian Assange…
An info-struggle that we must win
An open letter published in the UK Guardian this week: We are writing this statement in support of democracy. Since Sunday, 28 November, WikiLeaks and five major newspapers from around the world (the Guardian, the New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, El Pais) have been publishing redacted versions of leaked US diplomatic cables in…
And nothing will ever be the same again…
Very perceptive and largely fair editorial in yesterday’s UK Guardian on the legacy of Wikileaks and the reasons for its importance: The sight of Julian Assange giving a stream of television interviews from the grounds of an 18th-century country house on the Norfolk-Suffolk borders was, at the very least, a confusion of the cinematic genre…
My name is Murdoch and I’m so proud of my journalism
So this is how you become a massively successful media mogul; fund journalists and editors who break the law: Lawyers have secured explosive new evidence linking one of the News of the World‘s most senior editorial executives to the hacking of voicemail messages from the phones of Sienna Miller, Jude Law and their friends and…