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Binoy Kampmark
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.
Binoy Kampmark - Latest News [Page 131]
Impossible Project: Sidney Nolan and Australian Drought
Monday, 7 March 2011, 1:02 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The grotesque is always hard to capture, be it in terms of natural disaster or human-made catastrophe. When it comes to the Australian drought, it is nigh impossible. Human and animal figures elude proper examination. The carcasses of dead life stock seem ... More >>
Libyan Connection: Drama at the London School of Economics
Monday, 7 March 2011, 12:52 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Sir Howard Davies, former director of the London School of Economics, is in the soup. He has been rather less than diligent on the issue of receiving tainted funds, accused over his carelessness in accepting a £1.5 million donation from the Gaddafi International ... More >>
Riddle’s Judgment: Assange and Swedish Extradition
Tuesday, 1 March 2011, 10:33 am | Binoy Kampmark
Judge Howard Riddle, district judge of Belmarsh Magistrates’ Court in South London, was not impressed, least of all by the antics of cyber information fiend Julian Assange. In his judgment on Thursday, the judge found in favour of Marianne Ny of the Swedish ... More >>
Complicity and Denial: The Problem with Unit 731
Thursday, 24 February 2011, 11:56 am | Binoy Kampmark
Medical experiments are conducted on human subjects all the time. History’s record on this is a dark one. Japan’s less than glorious contribution to experimenting on human subjects is Unit 731, a lethal outfit kitted out to experiment on captured ... More >>
Unrest in Wisconsin: Battle Against Collective Bargaining
Thursday, 24 February 2011, 11:44 am | Binoy Kampmark
It seems to be the season of protest. Not merely are people in their tens of thousands marching in the Middle East and Africa, where blood is being spilt, but trouble is brewing in freedom land. Wisconsin’s Republican Governor Scott Walker’s bill ... More >>
Complicity and Denial: The Problem with Unit 731
Thursday, 24 February 2011, 11:30 am | Binoy Kampmark
Medical experiments are conducted on human subjects all the time. History’s record on this is a dark one. Japan’s less than glorious contribution to experimenting on human subjects is Unit 731, a lethal outfit kitted out to experiment on captured ... More >>
The Last Days of Gaddafi? Collapse in Libya
Thursday, 24 February 2011, 11:25 am | Binoy Kampmark
The regimes are panicking in pools of blood. The earth, it would seem, is moving beneath the feat of those who have stayed in power for decades in the states of Africa and the Middle East. The Libyan authorities have been trigger happy, butchering hundreds. ... More >>
Queues and Border Patrol: Queuing at Melbourne Airport
Friday, 18 February 2011, 2:14 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Perhaps no obsession is a healthy one, and on arriving in Melbourne airport, we find one in steady operation. While the English are able to queue with a single person, the Australian version is somewhat different. Queues are regarded with a forbidding ... More >>
Carnival of Brutality: Lara Logan and the Egyptian Protests
Thursday, 17 February 2011, 2:30 pm | Binoy Kampmark
A journalist’s vocation is a dangerous one. Revolutions have a habit of providing good copy and lethal results. The risk of injury is never far away. The fate of CBS foreign correspondent Lara Logan in Egypt provides a gruesome reminder of the craft’s ... More >>
Carnival of Brutality: Lara Logan & the Egyptian Protests
Thursday, 17 February 2011, 1:09 pm | Binoy Kampmark
A journalist’s vocation is a dangerous one. Revolutions have a habit of providing good copy and lethal results. The risk of injury is never far away. The fate of CBS foreign correspondent Lara Logan in Egypt provides a gruesome reminder of the craft’s ... More >>
Infernal Queues and Border Patrol
Wednesday, 16 February 2011, 11:55 am | Binoy Kampmark
Perhaps no obsession is a healthy one, and on arriving in Melbourne airport, we find one in steady operation. While the English are able to queue with a single person, the Australian version is somewhat different. Queues are regarded with a forbidding ... More >>
Remembering the Military Industrial Complex
Thursday, 10 February 2011, 10:25 am | Binoy Kampmark
When he went to play golf, a note of ease could be detected in the American populace. Ike, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower was referred to, could be counted on winning the Cold War on the golf course. His reactionary Secretary of State John Foster Dulles ... More >>
Violating the Law: The FBI in Operation
Tuesday, 8 February 2011, 10:19 am | Binoy Kampmark
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has fallen into that nasty habit, perfected during the Bush years, of violating privacy laws and regulations with impunity. By its own admission to that toothless tiger, the Intelligence Oversight Board, the agency reported ... More >>
Reagan at 100: Embalmed and Ready for Action
Monday, 7 February 2011, 10:08 am | Binoy Kampmark
It has been a hundred years since America’s 40th President Ronald Reagan, the ‘triumph of the embalmer’s art’, as Gore Vidal noted, was born. So, on examining the art close at hand, what can we make of this political creation on its centennial? More >>
Design in San Francisco: Taking Tickets on the Gravy Train
Saturday, 5 February 2011, 3:33 pm | Binoy Kampmark
All roads on the Villa Rosa of San Francisco eventually lead either to penury and a rehabilitation center, or the world of money. (The difference is not always easy to ascertain.) The latter is, as is so often the case, an illusion. Like lords with ... More >>
South Sudan: Independence and Prospect
Thursday, 3 February 2011, 1:38 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Rarely has there been such a majority in a ballot. But there it was, a stunning figure of 99.57 percent, registered in a referendum on whether South Sudan would secede and attain its independence from Khartoum. This has been some time in the making, ... More >>
Attacking the Beeb: Proposed Cuts to the BBC World Service
Monday, 31 January 2011, 4:53 pm | Binoy Kampmark
‘We must be free or die, who speak the tongue that Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold which Milton held.’ Or so thought the lofty William Wordsworth in It Is Not To Be Thought Of in 1802. The darlings of the British Foreign and Commonwealth ... More >>
The revolution shall be Tweeted: The Egyptian Protests
Friday, 28 January 2011, 10:49 am | Binoy Kampmark
The prophets of social media are getting excited. Not only can such forms of media as Twitter and Facebook often prove to be banal time wasters, they can also generate revolutionary excitement. Communities connected by messages instantaneously gather ... More >>
Gloom and Doom: Consequences of the Biblical Flood
Friday, 14 January 2011, 1:36 pm | Binoy Kampmark
A deluge termed ‘biblical’ by Queensland’s State Treasurer Andrew Fraser has engulfed parts of various countries across the globe. Australia’s third largest city, Brisbane, faces floods on a scale not seen since 1974. The state of Queensland ... More >>
The Tucson Killings: The Battle over Mind
Tuesday, 11 January 2011, 10:38 am | Binoy Kampmark
The allegations are clear enough. It took a Glock 19 handgun and a determined assailant to kill six people and wound thirteen others over the weekend in Tucson, Arizona. Among the dead is US District Judge John M. Roll. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords ... More >>
