Binoy Kampmark - Latest News [Page 79]
Soft Brexits and Hard Realities: The Tory Revolt
Tuesday, 10 July 2018, 1:42 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Soft Brexits and Hard Realities: The Tory Revolt It was meant to be an away day at Chequers in total hermetic isolation, an effort on the part of UK Prime Minister Theresa May to sketch some common ground in a cabinet that has struggled to agree ... More >>
Rescues, Caves and Celebrity Salvation
Friday, 6 July 2018, 3:44 pm | Binoy Kampmark
It all risks becoming pornographic, looped and re-run with an obsessive eye for updates and detail about despair and hope. The twenty-four hour news cycle tends to encourage this sort of thing, ever desperate for snippets, obsessively chasing the update. ... More >>
The Lures of Kleptocracy: Malaysia’s Najib Condition
Wednesday, 4 July 2018, 3:30 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Words can be teasing in their meaning. In the realm of political and financial discussion, they can become absurdly changing. Take Malaysia’s political status. On the surface, all looks delightfully democratic in that multi-ethnic state. Once the eyewash is ... More >>
Send in the Troops! Deploying the ADF against Rioters
Tuesday, 3 July 2018, 1:09 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Such moves should trouble any constructive dissenter and civil libertarian: the vesting of powers in a military force to be used against domestic disturbances. While the United States has a troubled history with it, posse comitatus still remains something ... More >>
Democrats Against Assange: Influencing US-Ecuador Relations
Friday, 29 June 2018, 1:44 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Such a historical twist, but one that deserves its iniquitous slot in the history books. No secret has been made about US policy towards Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, which continues its trajectory to seek his apprehension and shutter the organisation. ... More >>
Viktor Orbán’s Soros Problem
Thursday, 28 June 2018, 1:59 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Where there are refugees and asylum seekers, there will be the assistants, the exploiters and the opportunists. The global anti-refugee sentiment has become an industrial complex, well-funded, sharpened and vicious. The richer the state, it follows, the ... More >>
Defeat in Sochi: Australia’s World Cup Campaign Ends
Wednesday, 27 June 2018, 1:21 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Defeat in Sochi: Australia’s World Cup Campaign Ends “Disappointing is the word. Empty is the other word.” Mile Jedenak , Jun 26, 2018. More >>
The Next Step: The Campaign for Julian Assange
Tuesday, 26 June 2018, 4:33 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The modern detainee in a political sense has to be understood in the abstract. Those who take to feats of hacking, publishing and articulating positions on the issue of institutional secrets have become something of a species, not as rare as they ... More >>
Evading Medical Care: Australia’s Refugee Arrangements
Sunday, 24 June 2018, 3:09 pm | Binoy Kampmark
It is a credit to the venality of Australia’s refugee policy that much time is spent on letting others do what that particular country ought to be doing. For a state so obsessed with the idea of a “rule-based order”, breaking those rules ... More >>
Infant Armour: Jacinda Ardern, Baby Madness and Myth
Friday, 22 June 2018, 3:15 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The Jacinda Ardern phenomenon, clumsily dubbed Jacindamania, shows no signs of abating. Journalists have long given up bothering about policy analysis regarding New Zealand’s prime minister, instead focusing on pregnancy and the newly arrived infant. More >>
The Catholic Church in Resistance
Thursday, 21 June 2018, 1:20 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The Catholic Church in Resistance: Priests, Child Abuse, and Breaking the Seal of the Confessional More >>
Leaving the UN Human Rights Council
Wednesday, 20 June 2018, 4:31 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The margin between what is a human right as an inalienable possession, and how it is seen in political terms is razor fine. In some cases, the distinctions are near impossible to make. To understand the crime of genocide is to also understand the ... More >>
Rocking the G7: Trump Stomps His Allies
Tuesday, 19 June 2018, 4:49 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Disruption, disturbance, eruption, the words crowning the presidency of Donald J. Trump, who has effectively demonstrated an idea made famous by Nazi doodler of law and political theorist Carl Schmitt: politics is defined, not by identifying with ... More >>
Embers and Death at the Victoria Park Hotel
Saturday, 16 June 2018, 12:16 pm | Binoy Kampmark
We came across a skeleton of a building bristling with warnings: Asbestos, Stay Out; Danger, Do Not Enter. The sense was that entering this site of history in Townsville, North Queensland, would kill you. And damn well it would have, sending you keeling ... More >>
Dark Precedents: Matteo Salvini, the MV Tampa and Refugees
Friday, 15 June 2018, 2:20 pm | Binoy Kampmark
In August 2001, Australia’s dour Prime Minister John Howard demonstrated to the world what his country’s elite soldiers could do. Desperate, close to starvation and having been rescued at sea from the Palapa I in the Indian Ocean, refugees and ... More >>
Pushing Huawei Out
Thursday, 14 June 2018, 2:24 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Be wary of the Chinese technological behemoth, goes the current cry from many circles in Australia’s parliament. Cybersecurity issues are at stake, and the eyes of Beijing are getting beadier by the day. More >>
Meeting on the Island of Death From Behind
Wednesday, 13 June 2018, 2:28 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Everything about this summit is in the showy warm-up run. “I am on my way to Singapore,” tweets US President Donald J. Trump, “where we have a chance to achieve a truly wonderful result for North Korea and the World.” Such descriptions from America’s ... More >>
Australian University Funding and Western Civilisation
Monday, 11 June 2018, 3:13 pm | Binoy Kampmark
There is a lot of tattle going on about why the Australian National University rebuffed, after a series of talks, the offer for the establishment of a specific bachelors degree that would feature Western Civilisation as its content. It would have been ... More >>
Elite Atrocities: Australia’s Special Forces in Afghanistan
Sunday, 10 June 2018, 1:22 pm | Binoy Kampmark
“Further into the Afghanistan mission, after multiple deployments, soldiers began to refer to members going ‘up the Congo’.” Chris Masters, The Sydney Morning Herald , Jun 9, 2018 More >>
The Food of Movement: Anthony Bourdain’s Universal Eater
Saturday, 9 June 2018, 5:21 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The Food of Movement: Anthony Bourdain’s Universal Eater Bruce Chatwin considered movement the indispensable feature of the human species. Sedentary natures killed through asphyxiation; a refusal to move suggested an acceptance of death. Walking ... More >>