Another fault line has opened in the mining wars. In Serbia, resistance is gathering steamagainst various deals made between Belgrade and companies that risk environmental degradation and lingering spoliation. In this regard, the globe’s second largest metals and mining corporation, features prominently. Rio Tinto, bruised in reputation but determined in business, finds itself in a hunting mood in the Balkans, hoping to establish a lithium mine and processing plant in the valley of Jadar. As the infamous destroyer of the Juukan Gorge Caves outlines in a statement, the Jadar site is intended to “produce battery-grade lithium carbonate, a critical mineral…
Author: Dr. Binoy Kampmark
Another fault line has opened in the mining wars. In Serbia, resistance is gathering steam against various deals made between Belgrade and companies that risk environmental degradation and lingering spoliation. In this regard, the globe’s second-largest metals and mining corporation, features prominently. Rio Tinto, bruised in reputation but determined in business, finds itself in a hunting mood in the Balkans, hoping to establish a lithium mine and processing plant in the valley of Jadar. As the infamous destroyer of the Juukan Gorge Caves outlines in a statement, the Jadar site is intended to “produce battery-grade lithium carbonate, a critical mineral…
Get the Marines ready. Store the supplies. Marshal the allies. The United States is getting ready for war (the preferable term in Washington is policing) in the Indo-Pacific region, and is hoping to do so with a range of expanded bases across client states, or what it prefers to call friends. On November 29, the Pentagon announced that US President Joe Biden had accepted the recommendations made by Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III in the Global Posture Review commissioned in February. The news might have been delivered by Austin himself, but this solemn duty fell to Mara Karlin,…
Among the motivations behind establishing a university is a desire to leave old ones. Old in tooth, depraved, decayed, the assumption is that a new institution will return to original purposeson the pretext that these are truly radical. This, on the face of it, is the purpose of The University of Austin (UATX) – at least as originally advertised. “We’re done waiting for America’s universities to fix themselves,” came the words of a promotional video for the incipient body. “So we’re starting a new one.” This is the sentiment of PanoKanelos, who left his position as president of St. John’s…
A small riot. Unrest. Risk of collapse. All given a ballooning effect and inflated for policymakers across the ocean. Before much time elapses, Australian security forces are skirting off to restore order in their vast watery neighbourhood. It is a reminder that such relations in the Pacific region are a mixture of intervention, forcible charitable guidance and, at times, plain scolding. In the Solomon Islands, Australian interventionism was originally cloaked in shining dress, justified as humanitarian and utterly noble. By the time some 2,000 troops, police officers and support personnel, mostly Australian, were deployed in 2003, the country had already mounted…
It has been written about more times than any care to remember. Pliny the Elder, that old cheek, told us that Africa always tended to bring forth something new: Semper aliquid novi Africam adferre. The suggestion was directed to hybrid animals, but in the weird pandemic wonderland that is COVID-19, all continents now find themselves bringing forth their types, making their contributions. It just so happens that it’s southern Africa’s turn. On November 26, the Technical Advisory Group on SARS-CoV-2 Evolution (TAG-VE) was convened to assess the threat posed by B.1.1.529. Named Omicron, its emergence was reported by South Africa…
Australian foreign policy towards Taiwan, as things stand, is a distant fantasy in floating mist. There is little to connect them, but Australia’s political classes have a habit of fabricating relations with those it cares little for, nor understands, all in the name of forced obedience. For decades, a puppy loyal Australia has committed forces without condition or qualification, refusing to understand the circumstances of their deployment, or the people who they will either kill or die for. The result is an astonishing global deployment of personnel with admirable ignorance to theatres most of its citizens would fail to name.…
Never leave matters of maturity to the Peter Panners of Silicon Valley. At their most benign, they are easily dismissed as potty and keyboard mad. At their worst, their fantasies assume the noxious, demonic forms that reduce all users of their technology to units of information and flashes of data. Such boys (they are mostly boys), felt somehow left out by the currents of reality, their own world excruciatingly boring and filled with pangs of childhood disturbance and regret. So they sought vengeance upon us all: imposing a global regime of fairly useless cyber architecture that saps intelligence in the…
When Kingsley Amis encountered the works of D. H. Lawrence, he was left unimpressed by yet another great denouncer and missionary the English send “themselves to tell them they are crass, gross, lost, dead, mad and addicted to unnatural vice.” With little charity, Amis suggested leaving the didactic novelist on “on his pinnacle, inspiring, unapproachable and unread.” Leaving aside matters of inspiration, much the same can be said of Hillary Clinton, failed US presidential candidate, tenured alarmist grump, ever worried about inroads being made into establishment power by rogue elements keen to snatch the crown of power. One of them,…
Fresh from attending COP26 in Glasgow, Prime Minister Scott Morrison was keen to impress the Australian public that he was willing to make good his word about the role technology would play in combating climate change. An important component of his limited strategy lies in the realm of electric cars, the very thing he warned Australians against in 2019. His then opposite number, Labor’s Bill Shorten, was accused by the prime minister during the election campaign of wishing to end the Australian weekend. “I’ll tell…
The role of the parliamentarian, historically, is one of service. The desire to hold two jobs, or more, suggests that such service is severely qualified. In the quotient of democracy and representation, the MP who is ready to tend to the affairs of others is unlikely to focus on the voter. I represent you, but I also represent my client who so happens to be parking his cash in offshore tax-havens. I represent you, but I am moonlighting as an advisor for an armaments company. This condition has become rather acute in the British political scene. While a backbencher earns…
Words can provide sharp traps, fettering language and caging definitions. They can also speak to freedom of action and permissiveness. At COP26, that permissiveness was all the more present in the haggling ahead of what would become the Glasgow Climate Pact. COP26, or the UN Climate Change Conference UK 2021, had a mission of “Uniting the world to tackle climate change.” The tackling, however, fell rather short, though countries, in the main, were trying to sell the final understanding as a grand compromise of mature tidiness. COP26 president Alok Sharma called the outcome “a fragile win”, the outcome of “hard…
Refugee crises are often manufactured by governments. They can be done at the source: war, famine, rapacious institutions. They can also be manufactured by the refusal of governments to accept those seeking asylum, sanctuary and refuge. The latter is very much in evidence in Europe: governments of the European Union are staring down desperate humans keen to travel into the EU; Belarus, engaging in its own form of mega-trafficking, has become a conduit for the movement of asylum seekers and migrants fleeing from Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan. Despite being granted Belarussian visas at considerable cost, many being initially housed…
Rarely is the pragmatist admired. Be it in policy or politics, such a figure induces suspicion, a concern that principles will have to be subordinated to broader goals. True dreamers and visionaries, for all their glaring faults, can take the accolades; the pragmatists can be given lower pegging. These differences have proven stark with the late FW de Klerk, South Africa’s last apartheid president. “De Klerk,” suggested Mac Maharaj, formerly official spokesperson for President Jacob Zuma, “was a man of the moment and [Nelson] Mandela was a man of history.” The late Colin Eglin went one better in his observation…
Former Australian prime ministers tend to be less conspicuous in public life than their counterparts in other countries. Occasionally, they make an appearance at political functions and events to remind us that they are still alive, their estate still breathing, their lawyers still working. For the most part, the pronouncements are less than profound, let alone relevant. But there are a few radiant surprises. Malcolm Fraser was one, considered dour when prime minister through the latter part of the 1970s and early 1980s, yet utterly provocative on becoming an elder statesman. It was he, a Cold War warrior so keen…
In a modest effort to disrupt the global spyware market, the United States announced last week that four entities had been added to its blacklist. On November 3, the US Department of Commerce revealed that it would be addingIsrael-based companies NSO Group and Candiruto its entity list “based on evidence that these entities developed and supplied spyware to foreign governments that used these tools to maliciously target government officials, journalists, businesspeople, activists, academics, and embassy workers.” Russian company Positive Technologies and the Singapore-based Computer Security Initiative Consultancy also made the list “based on a determination that they traffic in cyber…
During his eventful time in office, US President Donald Trump took much delight in reflecting about the lethal toys of his country’s military, actual or hypothetical. These included a hypersonic capability which, his military advisors had warned, was being mastered by adversaries. Such devices, comprising hypersonic cruise missiles and hypersonic boost- glide vehicles have been touted as opening a new arms race, given their ability not merely to travel at five times the speed of sound – as a general rule – but also show deft manoeuvrability to evade defences. Undeterred by any rival capability, Trump claimed in May 2020…
In the twenty-four-hour news cycle, scraps of information become flecks of distracting gold. Information sifters go through coverage with anorak enthusiasm. Instead of good copy and measured consideration, journalists are encouraged to become manufacturers of news in the hope that what they produce lasts for posterity. For eighteen days, four-year-old Cleo Smith could not be found. She had gone missing from the Quobba Blowholes Shacks campsite north of Carnarvon in Western Australia, “last seen,” according to a notice, “at 1.30 am on 16th October 2021”. The Western Australian government had promised a $1 million reward for information on her disappearance.…
It looked like something of an ambush, but a coterie of Australian journalists had their man where they wanted him. Between sessions at the G20 Summit in Rome, and French President Emmanuel Macron found himself blunter than usual. The sundering of the relationship between Australia and France over the new trilateral security relationship between Canberra, Washington and London, and, more importantly, the rescinding of the submarine contract with Australia, was playing on his mind. Did he think, came the question, whether he had been lied to by the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, about the intended scrapping of the Franco-Australian…
The second day of appellate proceedings by the United States against Julian Assange saw the defence make their case against the overturning of District Court Judge Vanessa Baraitser’s January ruling. Any extradition to the US, she concluded, would be so oppressive to the publisher as to render it unjust under UK extradition law. Before the UK High Court, both Edward Fitzgerald QC and Mark Summers QC sought to preserve the status quo. The morning session was focused on defending the action of the defence witness Michael Kopelman, whose initial psychiatric assessment of Assange’s wellbeing omitted reference to Stella Moris and…
It’s time to ready yourself for ghoulishly bad behaviour. Shred your bill of rights or whatever charter of liberties you have handy. Flatulent, dangerous and fatuous, the US prosecution of Julian Assange took to the UK High Court on October 27, opening its effort to overturn the January ruling by District Judge Vanessa Baraitser. In a judgment poor on press liberties and publishing but the sound on the issue of mental health and wellbeing, Baraitser held that Assange’s extradition to the US to face espionage and computer intrusion charges would exacerbate his suicide risk and be oppressive. Despite her finding,…
Is the imperium showing suspicions about its intended quarry? It is hard to believe it, but the US House Intelligence Committee is on a mission of discovery. It’s subject: a Yahoo News report disclosing much material that was already in the public domain on the plot to kidnap or, failing that, poison Julian Assange. Given that such ideas were aired by officials within the Central Intelligence Agency, this struck home. On the Yahoo News “Skulduggery” podcast, Committee chairman and Democratic Representative Adam Schiff said, “We are seeking information about it now.” Making sure to put himself in the clear of…
On January 7, 2015, the staff of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo found themselves facing a form of cancel culture before it became fashionable in the Twaddle sphere. It was of the most severe, lethal sort. Twelve people were butchered and the fanatic’s credo asserted. The assailantsChérif and Saïd Kouachi had been offended by the magazine’s cartoon depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. To add insult to grave injury, figures of various shades of political colour not exactly disposed to free expression were suddenly claiming they stood with the slain, declaring themselves in solidarity to be “Je suis Charlie”. Despite…
History is strewn with the broken branches of twisted irony. An individual who found himself entangled in it was the late Colin Powell, who, as a military man, gave a doctrine his name only to forgo it as a diplomat. The Powell Doctrine was one of certitude and caution: do not engage in conflict except in conditions whereby you could bring overwhelming and decisive force to bear. Political goals had to be clear; hostilities would be brief. There would be no more quagmires, no more Vietnam Wars for the US imperium. The model for this was his first engagement…
As a city, Melbourne previously prided itself with the air of a prim and proper heiress, one without peer in Australia: a gastronomic wonder, a sporting goddess, and a place of orderly public transport. The Economist Intelligence Unit glowed with praise, designating the city the world’s “most liveable” for seven years running. There were few law and order issues; nothing to speak of in terms of war, famine, crisis and the sorts of things that disturb the money minded business traveller. Even after Vienna got on its high horse and knocked Melbourne off its pedestal, Melbournians were undisturbed.The city still…
No one can stop him. He can barely stop himself. The former Australian prime minister, Tony Abbott, seems to be everywhere, fighting the poor cause. At the very least, he is everywhere with the press cameras, the niggling concerns, the irritations that make it into the twenty-four-hour news cycle before sinking with toxic charm. He is the perfect ingredient in a stew of conflict, the agitator, the irritant. The range of issues that have seen his intervention have taken him to conservative, often reactionary fora, the world over. He has given a gloss of legitimacy to the Great Replacement theory,…
It was not for everybody, but the shock advertising tactics of the Australian comedian Dan Ilic made an appropriate point. Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison, a famed coal hugger, has vacillated about whether to even go to the climate conference in Glasgow. Having himself turned the country’s prime ministerial office into an extended advertising agency, Ilic was speaking his language. The language was promoted through sponsored imagery in Times Square, New York, with advertising space purchased by a crowdfunding campaign of considerable success. Billboards featured the prime minister as a “Coal-o-phile Dundee”, mercilessly mocked Australia’s climate policies and responses to…
It was such a noble public health dream, even if rather hazy to begin with. Run down SARS- CoV-2. Suppress it. Crush it. Or just “flatten the curve”, which could have meant versions of all the above. This created a climate of numerical sensitivity: a few case infections here, a few cases there, would warrant immediate, sharp lockdowns, stay-at-home orders, the closure of all non-vital service outlets. Then came mutations and variants. Delta became the word mentioned like a terrorist saboteur, placing bombs under the edifice of the health system. The pro-market factions within governments receptive to using lockdown formulas…
Morning listening on October 13. Australia’s Radio National. Members of the Morrison government are doing their interview rounds with the host, Fran Kelly. We enter a time warp, speeding away into another dimension where planet Earth, and Australia, look different. The first interview, with Nationals Senator Bridget McKenzie, is filled with the sort of rejigged reality that is less mind expansion than contraction. It is easy to forget that she is a member of the government. She tells listeners that her constituents and the electorate she represented were not interested in climate change or its effects. A bold, quixotic reading.…
The returns have not been impressive. For an app essentially anointed as a saviour for tracing purposes in the worst pandemic in a century, COVIDSafe is a lesson in exaggerated prowess and diminished performance. It was billed as necessitous and supremely useful. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison was fashionably vulgar in linking the use of the app with an important goal: getting watering holes opened. “If that isn’t an incentive for Australians to download COVIDSafe, I don’t know what is,” Morrison claimed in May last year. The prime minister even equated the use of the app to protect yourself before…
