Binoy Kampmark - Latest News [Page 36]
Shaq Dunks The Voice
Tuesday, 30 August 2022, 1:19 pm | Binoy Kampmark
August 27, Sydney. The scale was jaw dropping and amusing. There he was, the still fresh Labor Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, rendered pygmy-like by the enormity of one Shaquille O’Neal, popularly known as Shaq. No degree of expert photography ... More >>
Spears In Place Of Bridges: Australia, China And Fashioned Ignorance
Thursday, 25 August 2022, 12:20 pm | Binoy Kampmark
There is an overwhelming boisterous ignorance that characterises Australia’s foreign policy approach to China. When Beijing was boxed and derided as emerging, weak and well-behaved, everyone supposedly got on. Washington remained the region’s patriarch ... More >>
The Many Lives Of Ayman Al-Zawahiri
Tuesday, 23 August 2022, 1:41 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Ayman al-Zawahiri is dead – or so we are told. Al-Qaida’s chief and successor to the slain Osama bin Laden, he was deemed the chief ideologue and mastermind behind the audacious September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. On July 31, he was ... More >>
The Opaque Pacific: Fiji’s Maritime Essential Services Centre
Sunday, 21 August 2022, 6:50 pm | Binoy Kampmark
With China constantly being accused of insufferable secrecy and a lack of openness about security and defence arrangements among partners in the Pacific, the shoe, when on the other foot, sits just as well. In the case of Australia, it is particularly ... More >>
Liz Cheney: Goodbye And Good Riddance
Saturday, 20 August 2022, 6:30 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The fact that Daddy Dick was there, the dark eminence who soiled the Republic and inflated executive power with drugged glee, said it all. This was the occasion of his daughter’s electoral defeat at the hands of another Republican, Harriet Hageman. ... More >>
The Maybe Mob And The Rushdie Attack
Thursday, 18 August 2022, 12:28 pm | Binoy Kampmark
He has survived death threats and attempts on his life since February 1989. But Salman Rushdie’s luck just about ran out at the Chautauqua Institution, southwest of Buffalo in New York State. On August 12, at a venue historically celebrated for ... More >>
The Failings Of Westminster: Scott Morrison’s Shadow Government
Tuesday, 16 August 2022, 11:57 am | Binoy Kampmark
Why the sharp intake of breath, the tingling shock? In one of the world’s most secretive liberal democracies , the revelation that the previous Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison ran a shadow government overseen by personal quasi-despotic ... More >>
Stumbling Surveillance: The End Of The COVIDSafe App
Monday, 15 August 2022, 2:06 pm | Binoy Kampmark
It took a few years of tolerable incompetence, caused fears about security, and was meant to be the great surveillance salvation to reassure us all. Instead, Australia’s COVIDSafe App only identified two positive cases of infection during the SARS-CoV-2 ... More >>
Europe Dries Up
Sunday, 14 August 2022, 7:51 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Scenes and pictures have been circulating of broken earth, lacking moisture, cracked and yearning. But these are not from traditional drought-stricken parts of the planet, where the animal carcass assumes near totemic power amidst dry riverbeds or desert ... More >>
A Looting Matter: Cambodia’s Stolen Antiquities
Thursday, 11 August 2022, 12:47 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Cambodia has often featured in the Western imagination as a place of plunder and pilfering. Temples and artefacts of exquisite beauty have exercised the interest of adventurers and buccaneers who looted with almost kleptocratic tendency. In 1924, ... More >>
Punishing Whistleblowers At The United Nations
Tuesday, 9 August 2022, 1:12 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The United Nations prides itself on exposing, monitoring and noting the travails and vicissitudes to be found on this troubled planet. It also prides itself on being the premier international institution that protects, or at the very least keeps an ... More >>
Going Global With NATO
Monday, 8 August 2022, 12:58 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Regional alliances should, for the most part, remain regional. Areas of the globe can count on a number of such bodies and associations with varying degrees of heft: the Organization of American States; the Organisation of African Unity; and the Association ... More >>
Chegg, Cheating And Australian Universities
Sunday, 7 August 2022, 6:03 am | Binoy Kampmark
The note on Radio National’s Background Briefing on the morning of July 31 was sombre. A student, who did not divulge his real name (he is professionally pseudonymised as Ramesh), talks about services that aid him in his study. Aid is less accurate ... More >>
Nancy Pelosi, You Silly Biddy
Thursday, 4 August 2022, 2:03 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s visit to Sarajevo in 1914 was an instructive lesson on how the dumb do, at some point, ask for it. Bosnia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, was desired by the Kingdom of Serbia. With the Serbs also well represented ... More >>
The Fuss About Monkeypox
Thursday, 4 August 2022, 1:51 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The World Health Organization has been one of the easier bodies to abuse. For parochial types, populist moaners and critics of international institutions, the WHO bore the brunt of criticisms from Donald Trump to Jair Bolsonaro. Being a key institution ... More >>
Penal Assassination: The Gradual Effort To Kill Assange
Sunday, 31 July 2022, 5:48 pm | Binoy Kampmark
They really do want to kill him. Perhaps it is high time that his detractors and sceptics, proven wrong essentially from the outset, admit that the US imperium, along with its client states, is willing to see Julian Assange perish in prison. The locality ... More >>
Gilding The Cage Of Suburbia: Farewelling Neighbours
Saturday, 30 July 2022, 5:05 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The statistics of Australia’s longest running drama series about sickeningly idyllic suburbia will interest soap show boffins. It lasted 5,955 episodes over 37 seasons, starting in 1985. Its anaemically thin plotlines, subpar acting, and emphasis on ... More >>
Facial Recognition Technology Down Under
Friday, 29 July 2022, 2:37 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The language is far from reassuring. Despite being caught red handed using facial recognition technology unbeknownst to customers, a number of Australia’s large retail companies have given a meek assurance that they will “pause” their use. ... More >>
Chaff Candidates: The Race For The UK Tory Leadership
Wednesday, 27 July 2022, 3:25 pm | Binoy Kampmark
As UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson set the scene in spectacular fashion. All who sought to confine him to history, perished. He was the only one who seemed to survive, and reject, one diabolical scandal after the next – till now. No leader with such ... More >>
International Accountability: Myanmar, The ICJ And The Genocide Question
Tuesday, 26 July 2022, 7:01 am | Binoy Kampmark
The indomitable spirit of Raphael Lemkin, bibliophile, assiduous documenter of humanity’s dark deeds and inexecrable conduct, is bound to be an unsettled one. This brilliant, committed and peculiarly dedicated creature took years to come up with what would, ... More >>