I’m proud to have signed the following statement, just released publicly, that asks the Chinese regime to release famed artist Ai Weiwei: This is an open letter from members of the Australian creative community to the Chinese Ambassador in Australia about the disappearance of artist and activist Ai Weiwei To Chen Yuming, Chinese Ambassador to… Australia,…
Showing all posts tagged China
Killing fields of Sri Lanka
Here is the devastating Channel 4 in Britain documentary on the brutal civil war in Sri Lanka. Assisted by China, Israel, India and the US, Colombo murdered over 40,000 Tamil civilians. We will not forget. And we will demand accountability:
Understanding cyber warfare from the other side
The US is unsurprisingly worried about cyber attacks from hackers, Russia, China or even a friendly nation. The future of warfare may well be fought in a different space altogether. But this report proves how unprepared America is for the inevitable attempts to understand its inner workings. The problem lies in how hackers are viewed.…
Global dissidents may not want US openly backing them
Promoting web freedom is a noble idea, especially since so many autocratic regimes and Western multinationals are working together to stop citizens accessing the glories of information on the internet. But this idea is full of potential problems (via the New York Times), not least because Washington has a shocking record of supporting dictatorships at…
The Net Delusion is alive and well
My following book review appeared in Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herald: THE NET DELUSION Evgeny Morozov Allen Lane, 408pp, $29.95 As people in the Middle East have been protesting in the streets against Western-backed dictators and using social media to connect and circumvent state repression, it would be easy to dismiss The Net Delusion as almost…
Fox News as a propaganda unit
Fascinating Rolling Stone feature: At the Fox News holiday party the year the network overtook archrival CNN in the cable ratings, tipsy employees were herded down to the basement of a Midtown bar in New York. As they gathered around a television mounted high on the wall, an image flashed to life, glowing bright in…
Chinese prisoners forced to earn web game credits
A surreal environment in a country where human rights campaigning is an issue largely seen as a Western plot to undermine Beijing: As a prisoner at the Jixi labour camp, Liu Dali would slog through tough days breaking rocks and digging trenches in the open cast coalmines of north-east China. By night, he would slay…
Sri Lanka cannot escape scrutiny over war crimes
An important editorial in the Financial Times: Last year, Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary-general, commissioned a report into human rights violations in the closing months of the decades-long Sri Lankan civil war that ended in 2009. The report points to credible evidence of mass shelling of civilians and summary executions. It also concludes that…
What Wikileaks Gitmo files says about our Western “values”
My following article appears in today’s ABC The Drum: The Wikileaks-released Guantanamo Bay files provide an invaluable insight into the mindset of the US and its allies since September 11. An infrastructure of torture was implemented, a practice still defended by the US government today, to allegedly protect the homeland from future attack. The result…