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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 133]
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 >>
The Literacy of Flesh: Naked Reading in San Francisco
Thursday, 6 January 2011, 3:40 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Had there been books in the Garden of Eden, this might well have been envisaged. Bodies of various shapes and sizes, keeping company with the printed word. To get into this particular garden, however, requires payment. More >>
Farewell Arnie: The Governator Leaves Office
Tuesday, 4 January 2011, 11:12 am | Binoy Kampmark
If life is a theatre, Californian politics has provided one of its greatest stages. In cinematic terms, the state has seen the likes of Ronald Reagan and, most recently, Arnold Schwarzenegger. In 2003, Hollywood’s muscle bound creature, termed a condom ... More >>
Sex, Politics and Assange
Wednesday, 22 December 2010, 12:27 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Gore Vidal has reminded us regularly how sex is politics. The chance to throw sex into the political mix is hard to resist. It becomes a valuable weapon, destroying reputations and undermining credibility. By becoming a conduit for the release of ... More >>
The Stammer of History: George VI and The King’s Speech
Tuesday, 21 December 2010, 10:54 am | Binoy Kampmark
The speech is a vital part of the modern ruler’s job description. With the radio and the onset of wireless, the English Royal family found itself having to front up to a public face on a scale never before seen. Too bad, then, for the nervous, ... More >>
Blessed Sisters and Cross Dressing: Christmas in City Hall
Monday, 20 December 2010, 5:10 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The much admired rotunda is filled with anticipation. The audience gathered within San Francisco City Hall awaits the annual Tree of Hope Lighting ceremony. They are in for a treat of contradictions, a pastiche, a pantomime. Towering transvestites ... More >>
Brutality and Poultry: Killing Chickens in Krasnaya Polyana
Monday, 20 December 2010, 5:09 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The scene is harrowing. Bins filled with living gold fluff, the bodies of chicks readied for slaughter. There is, of course, nothing new about slaughtering huge numbers of poultry, a process that takes place everyday. The Krasnaya Polyana poultry farm ... More >>
