Author: Dr. Binoy Kampmark

It will come as little surprise that colossal Apple has been favouring its own music streaming service in snuffing and stuffing competitors. The company, it has been alleged, has prevented app developers from informing users of less expensive methods to purchase subscriptions outside the scope of Apple’s own services. Its cosmos was all.  Central to these claims is the ongoing battle between Apple and the Swedish music streaming service, Spotify, a largely amoral gladiatorial encounter of drain, pinch and seizure that saw the latter draw customers away from Apple’s iTunes. Territorial skirmishes have ensued over the years, with gains and…

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How delicious is political hypocrisy.  Abundant and rich, it manifests in the corridors of power with regularity.  Of late, there is much of it in the US Congress, evident over debates on whether the platform TikTok should be banned in the United States.  Much of this seems based on an assumption that foreign companies are not entitled to hoover up, commodify and use the personal data of users, mocking, if not obliterating privacy altogether.  US companies, however, are.  While it is true that aspects of Silicon Valley have drawn the ire of those on The Hill in spouts of select…

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It was praised to the heavens as a work of negotiated and practical genius when it was struck. The then Australian treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, had finally gotten those titans of Big Tech into line on how revenue would be shared with media outlets for using such platforms as supplied by Facebook and Google. Both companies initially baulked at the News Media Bargaining Code, which led to a very publicised spat between Facebook and the Morrison government.  For a week in February 2021, users of Facebook in Australia were barred from sharing news.  A number of government agencies, trade unions, media…

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The town hall meeting is the last throbbing reminder of the authentic demos. People gather; debates held. Views converge; others diverge. Speakers are invited to stir the invitees, provoke the grey cells. Till artificial intelligence banishes such gatherings, and the digital cosmos swallows us whole, cherish these events. And there was much to cherish about Night Falls in the Evening Lands: The Assange Epic, part of a global movement to publicise the importance of freeing WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, who remains in the forbidding confines of Belmarsh Prison in London. Held on March 9 in Melbourne’s Storey Hall, it was…

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The history of such experiments is not promising.  Why would those in the US like the game of rugby league, when an established code of superficial similarity already exists?Fundamental differences, for one thing, abound.  The US NFL Superbowl tries to keep blood and violence off the pitch.  Force, when exercised, is chivalric, the moves ceremonially packaged.  Such contests are astonishingly contained, hemmed in by a distinct netting of protocol and protections.  These US padded gladiators remain calm, composed and, when irate, kept within the confines of expected conduct. Rugby league extols speed, the violent tackle, the brutish push, the military…

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It can take much bruising, much ridicule, and much castigation to eventually reach the plateau of wisdom.  Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, who took office in November 2022, is one such character.  Like a hero anointed by the gods for grand deeds and fine achievements, he was duly attacked and maligned, accused of virtually every heinous crime in the criminal code.  Sodomy and corruption featured.  Two prison spells were endured. His whole fall from grace as deputy-prime minister was all the more revealing for being instigated by his politically insatiable mentor, Mahathir bin Mohammed, Southeast Asia’s wiliest, and most ruthless…

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Nuclear weapons are considered the strategic silverware of nation states.  Occasionally, they are given a cleaning and polishing.  From time to time, they go missing, fail to work, and suffer misplacement.Of late, the UK Royal Navy has not been doing so well in that department, given its seminal role in upholding the doctrine of nuclear deterrence.  In January, an unarmed Trident II D5 nuclear missile fell into the Atlantic Ocean after a bungled launch from a Royal Navy submarine. The missile’s journey was a distinctly shorter than its originally plotted 6,000 km journey that would have ended in a location…

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The starvation regime continues unabated as Israel continues its campaign in the Gaza Strip.One of the six provisional measures ordered by the International Court Justice entailed taking “immediate and effective measures” to protect the Palestinian populace in the Gaza Strip from risk of genocide by ensuring the supply of humanitarian assistance and basic services. In its case against Israel, South Africa argued, citing various grounds, that Israel’s purposeful denial of humanitarian aid to Palestinians could fall within the UN Genocide Convention as “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or…

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The silly will make print and leave bursts of digital traces; the idiots will make history, if only in small print.  One such figure is the shortest serving UK Prime Minister in living memory, the woeful, joke-packed figure of Liz Truss who lasted a mere 50 disastrous days in office.  She was even bettered by a satirical, dressed-up lettuce, filmed in anticipation of her brief, calamitous end. With such a blotted record, the vacuous, inane Truss felt that her experiences were worthy of recounting to the Conservative Political Action Conference, held at National Harbor, Maryland between February 22 and 24.The…

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The end of the Second World War was a calamitous catalyst, laying the bricks and mortar for institutions that were always going to look weary, almost comically so, after some decades.  The United Nations was meant to be the umbrella international organisation, covering an eclectic array of bodies that seem, to this day, unfathomably complex.  Its goals have been mocked, largely for their dew-eyed optimism: international peace, prosperity, levels of stable development.  The balance sheet is, however, more complex. In this organisational mix stands the haughty, sometimes interested, sometimes violentclub known as the UN Security Council.  On paper – well,…

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If only we could say that Peter Dutton, Australia’s federal opposition leader and curator of bigoted leanings, was unusual in assuming that granting humanitarian visas to Palestinians might be problematic. But both he, and his skew-eyed spokesman on home affairs, James Patterson, have concluded that votes are in the offing. Refugees may be accepted from the Ukrainian-Russian War, as long as they are Ukrainian, but anything so much as a whiff of a Palestinian fleeing the Israel-Hamas conflict is bound to be concerning. Ukrainians are noble victims; the latter might be terrorist sympathisers or Hamas militants. This view started being…

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On February 21, the Royal Courts of Justice hosted a second day of carnivalesque mockery regarding the appeal by lawyers representing an ill Julian Assange, whose publishing efforts are being impugned by the United States as having compromised the identities of informants while damaging national security.  Extradition awaits, only being postponed by rearguard actions such as what has just been concluded at the High Court. How, then, to justify the 18 charges being levelled against the WikiLeaks founder under the US Espionage Act of 1917, an instrument not just vile but antiquated in its effort to stomp on political discussion…

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On February 20, it was clear that things were not going to be made easy for Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who infuriated the US imperium, the national security establishment, and a stable of journalists upset that he had cut their ill-tended lawns.  He was too ill to attend what may well be the final appeal against his extradition from the United Kingdom to the United States.  Were he to be sent to the US, he faces a possible sentence amounting to 175 years arising from 18 venally cobbled charges, 17 spliced from that archaic horror, the Espionage Act of…

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Gaza. Palestinians.  Israel.  Genocide.  Taylor Swift?  This odd cobbling of words is the extent celebrities make a mockery of serious conversation, even in such middle-brow outletsas Australia’s Radio National.  Admittedly, it was breakfast, and the presenter a seasoned impressionist of journalism, but surely listeners did not have to know that Swift’s private jet had just arrived in Melbourne, making it an occasion of national significance? Ground had already been tilled, and seeds scattered, by desperate academics keen to draw gold dust from the Swift worship machine at Melbourne’s Swiftposium 2024.  Seriousness was not the order of the day and papers…

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The imaginative faculties of standard Australian politiciansretreat to some strange, deathly placeon certain issues.  In that wasteland, theyare often unrecoverable.  Like juveniles demanding instant reward, these representatives find complexity hideous, troubling, discomforting.  Focus on the prospect of immediate electoral gain, the crude punch, the bruising, the hurt. That, in sum, is Canberra’s policy towards refugees. With this month’s appearance of 39 asylum seekerson some of the most remote shorelines on the planet in Western Australia, the customary wells of hysteria were again being tapped for political gain.“Here we go again,” lamented the Tasmanian Greens Senator Nick McKim.  “A boat arrives…

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He was sweet and well meaning, but he was old. He was hazy. His memory was poor. Doddering, confused, the self-proclaimed leader of the Free World seemed ready to check into a retirement village. That, at least, is the thick insinuation of the Special Counsel’s report on President Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents when vice president during the Obama administration. The findings of the Special Counsel Robert Hur were not punitive. But they were laceratingly wounding. It seemed to resemble more of a nurse’s assessment of whether you need an upgrade in aged-care treatment, a bolstering of services for…

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To attribute weighty moral codes to athletes has always been a silly pastime of the judging classes and flesh admiring voyeurs. But sporting bodies, in a manner similar to the clergy, demand something called the level playing field. Fairness and fair play imply that sports people will follow various principles and rules in competition. They will, for instance, do nothing to unravel and disturb this understanding of détente between the supremely talented. We are all gifted on Olympus; may the best athlete behave in accordance with accepted practices. No need for superior sporting machinery, superior equipment, enhanced biceps, steroid-boosted bodies.…

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There are few surprises regarding the final episode of Nemesis, the three-part account on how the Australian Liberal Party, in partnership with the dozy Nationals,psychotically and convulsively disembowelledthemselvesfrom the time Tony Abbott won office in 2013.Over the muddy gore and violence concluding the tenures of Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull, one plotter rose, knife bloodied and brimming with confidence: Scott Morrison.  As always, he claims to have done so without a trace.  That, dear readers, is the way of all advertising men. Theinconspicuous rise of Morrison heralded a bankrupt political culture, one of smeary gloss, smug grabs on complex issues, the…

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Legal challenges regarding the Israel-Gaza War are starting to bulk lawyers’ briefs and courtroom proceedings.  South Africa got matters underway with its December application before the International Court of Justiceaccusing Israel of genocide in its campaign against the Palestinians.While determining whether genocide has taken place, the ICJ issued an interim order warning Israel to prevent genocidal acts, preserve evidence relevant to the prosecution of any such acts, and ease the crushing restrictions on humanitarian aid. In the United States, a valiant effort was made in the US District Court for the Northern District of California to restrain the Biden administration…

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Animals have, at times, been given the same dismissively nasty treatment humans love giving themselves.  Be it detention, torture, trial, and execution, the unwitting creatures can be found in the oddest situations, anthropomorphised with all the characteristics of will, thought and intention.By way of ghastly example, the Norman city of Falaise hosted the execution of a pig in 1386 for having “indulged in the evil propensity of eating infants on the streets”, and sentenced to maiming in the heat and forelegs prior to hanging. A field where such a matter has, and continues to crop up, is espionage.  Espionage, that…

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Times were supposedly better in 2022.  That is, if you were a lawmaker in the Australian state of Victoria, a busy Israeli arms manufacturer, or cash counting corporate middleman keen to make a stash along the way between the two.  That view is premised on the notion that what happened on October 7,2023 in Israel was stunningly remarkable, a historical blot dripped and dribbled from nothingness, leaving the Jewish state vengeful and yearning to avenge 1200 deaths and the taking of 240 hostages.  All things prior were dandy and uncontroversial. Last month, word got out that the Victorian government had…

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Holding the foreign policy of a country accountable in court, notably when it comes to matters criminal, can be insuperably challenging.  Judges traditionally shun making decisions on policy, even though they unofficially do so all the time.  The Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York-based civil liberties group, was not to be discouraged, most notably regarding the Biden administration’s unflagging support for Israel and its war in Gaza. In a filing in the US District Court for the Northern District of California last November, the CCR, representing a number of Palestinian human rights organisations including Palestinians in Gaza and the…

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The release of the Vault 7 files in the spring of 2017 in a series of 26 disclosures, detailing the hacking tools of the US Central Intelligence Agency, was one of the more impressive achievements of the WikiLeaks publishing organisation.  As WikiLeaks statedat the time, the hacking component of the agency’s operations had become so sizeable it began to dwarf the operations of the National Security Agency.  “The CIA had created, in effect, its ‘own NSA’ with even less accountability and without publicly answering the question as to whether such a massive budgetary spend on duplicating the capabilities of a…

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It was a struggle to see how a child’s welfare was relevant in the latest, shrill debates about technology taking place on The Hill. The Senate Judiciary Committee and the leaders of social media companies were on show to thrash out matters on technology and their threats on January 31 in a hearing titled “Big Tech and the Online Child Exploitation Crisis.” The companies present: X Corp, represented by Linda Yaccarino; TikTok Inc, fronted by Shou Chew; Snap Inc, by Evan Spiegel; Meta and Mark Zuckerberg; and Jason Citron of Discord Inc. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) got the ghoulish proceedings…

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The BBC’s characteristically mild-mannerednote said it all: What is Tower 22?  More to the point, what are US forces doing in Jordan?(To be more precise, a dusty scratching on the Syria-Jordan border.)  These questions were posed in the aftermath of yet another drone attack against a US outpost in the Middle East, its location of dubious strategic relevance to Washington, yet seen as indispensable to its global footprint.  On this occasion, the attack proved successful, killing three troops and wounding dozens. The Times of Israeloffered a workmanlike description of the site’s role: “Tower 22 is located close enough to US…

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Palace coups have become a seasonal tradition in Australian politics.  Between 2007 and 2018, Australia had six prime ministers, four of whom were overthrown by their own parties, the first five never being allowed to complete their first term in office.In contrast, between 1983 and 2007, the country could count on the dry, solid stability of three leaders.  The change of heart led to the irresistible description of Australia being “the coup capital of the democratic world”. In the Westminster system of government, where the executive is drawn from the representative chamber, prime ministers are at the mercy of party…

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During the evening of January 25, Kenneth Eugene Smith, having failed to convince the US Supreme Court to delay his execution,became yet another victim of judicial, state-sanctioned murder.  A previous, failed effort, using lethal injection, had been made in 2022.  On this occasion, it was the state of Alabama which sought to bloody (or gas, in this instance) its copybook at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore.  The method of execution: nitrogen hypoxia. Smith was convicted in 1989 for murdering Elizabeth Sennett, the wife of a preacher’s wife, in a murder-for-hire killing.  His life, taken in turn, succumbed…

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On January 26, legal experts, policy wonks, activists and the plain curious waited for the order of the International Court of Justice, sitting in The Hague. The topic was that gravest of crimes, considered most reprehensible in the canon of international law: genocide. The main participants: the accused party, the State of Israel, and the accuser, the Republic of South Africa. Filed on December 29 last year, the South African case focused on its obligations arising under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and those of Israel. Pretoria, in its case, wished that the…

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The lessons of the South African nuclear weapons program are deep, profound and largely ignored by non-proliferation dogmatists.  They show that a regime, even one subject to sanctions and exiled to the diplomatic cold room, can still show aptitude and resourcefulness in creating such murderous weapons.  The white regime of Apartheid South Africa was marginalised, the globe’s notorious pariah, yet managed to chug along, developing a formidable arsenal with external aid and local resourcefulness.  Where there is a pathological will, there will be a way. The South African example also shows that members of the nuclear club are an easily…

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So much for that.  Much had been promised by Florida Governor Ron De Santis to derail Donald Trump’s bid to return to the White House.  But the attempt to wrest the Republican Party from the orange ogre’s meaty, waving hands was never convincing.In the end, DeSantis was more stumbler than balancer, a woeful mismatch before the forces he never staved off. While he made his name fluorescent bright in Florida’s politics, launching attacks on Disney, skirmishing with public health officials regarding pandemic measures, and railing against minorities (LGBTQ youth figured highly), he seemed awkward away from the swamp.  On the…

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