They were in with a shot. The English team, deliriously floating on chants of Football’s Coming Home, had made it to their first major tournament final since 1966. The UEFA European Football Championship would be decided at Wembley against an Italian side unblemished by defeat since September 2018. But the English, coached by the much admired Gareth Southgate, succumbed in that most cruel of deciders: the penalty shootout. In English footballing history, the penalty shootout has been responsible for a string of famous defeats. In 1990, the national side lost to the West German juggernaut in the semi-final of the…
Author: Dr. Binoy Kampmark
“Dear customers, if you are standing there reading this sign you are part of the problem. STAY THE FUCK HOME! Best, Sydney.” Note on store front, Sydney, Twitter, July 10, 2021 It is proving to be an unfolding nightmare. For a government that had been beaming with pride at their COVID contract tracing for months, insisting that people could live, consume and move about with freedom as health professionals wrapped themselves round the virus, the tune has changed. The Delta variant of the disease has proved viciously wily in Sydney, New South Wales. Admissions to intensive care units are growing. …
Sex on the screen and on the page has often incurred the wrath of Australian censors. Over the years, the opaquely functioning Office of Film and Literature Classification has been guarding Australians like the children of Eden, fearful that their sensibilities might be corrupted. But Australian politicians and various advocacy groups have broadened their interest over the years to focus on the Internet and how best to regulate both posted content and access to it. Pornography features highly in this effort. In April former opposition leader and shadow minister for government services Bill Shorten remarked to the National Press Club…
It took over half a year, but the US government’s case against Julian Assange continues its draining grind. Even the Biden administration, which claims to tolerate a free press and truthful dialogue with the fourth estate, has decided to exhaust its legal options in seeking the publisher’s scalp. On July 7, the UK High Court of Justice agreed to hear the appeal from the US government on narrow grounds, though no date has been set for those proceedings. The Crown Prosecution Service, representing the US government, is challenging District Court Judge Vanessa Baraitser’s ruling that Assange not be extradited for…
With a lamentable, even disgraceful vaccination rate, confusion over how best to deal with the AstraZeneca supply, vague promises about the arrival of other COVID-19 vaccines, and a degree of complacency, half of Australia found itself in lockdown conditions earlier this month. A good deal of this was occasioned by an outbreak in Australia’s largest city in June, which saw the state of New South Wales become the last bastion to yield to the lockdown formula. For the duration of the pandemic, the state government saw the blunt approach as unnecessarily harsh to residents, preferring to rely on fabled common…
The tyrannical, brutal cynicism of keeping Julian Assange in Belmarsh prison remains one of the more inglorious marks of the British legal system and, it should be said, its sponsors and colluders. Having won his case against extradition to the US, if only in deeply qualified terms, the UK keeps the WikiLeaks publisher banged up as the appeals process stutters. The case against Assange could have been thrown out under any number of grounds. Unfortunately, the judgment halting his extradition to the US on 17 charges based on the Espionage Act and one charge of computer intrusion was framed in…
From the Bagram Airbase they left, leaving behind a piece of the New York World Trade Centre that collapsed with such graphic horror on September 11, 2001. As with previous occupiers and occupants, the powers that had made this venue a residence of war operations were cutting their losses and running. Over the years, the base, originally built by the Soviets in the 1950s and known to US personnel as Bagram Airfield, became a loud statement of occupation, able to hold up to 10,000 troops and sprawling across 30 square miles. It was also replete with cholesterol hardening fast food…
From his secure fortress of contented spite, Dominic Cummings, exiled from the power he once wielded at Number 10 as one of the chosen, must have felt a sense of satisfaction. Biliously, the former top aide to UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson had scorned the now former UK Health Secretary in a performance before MPs lasting hours. Matt Hancock, Cummings explained last month, could have been sacked for any number of things he did in responding to the pandemic. With history moving from its tragic gear into a farcical one, Hancock has resigned. It had all the makings of a…
He began on RN Breakfast by claiming that he, and his company, would be open and transparent about mining operations. But Lucas Dow, chief executive of Adani’s Australian operations, soon revealed in his June 25 interview that his understanding of transparency was rather far from the dictionary version. When asked how the Carmichael Coal Mine was getting its water, he claimed that these were from “legally regulated sources” and in commercial confidence. Businesses work like that, he stated forcefully, preferring to praise the company for it – and here, he meant no irony – its sound ecological credentials in solar…
While Australian politicians languish in a world blotched by climate change scepticism and fossil fuel love-ins, global oil and gas companies have been shaken. Three titans of oil fame – Shell, ExxonMobil and Chevron – faced a range of decisions in May that promise to dramatically shape their future operations. The point is not negligible, given that this triarchy produced, between 1988 and 2015, 5% of total global scope 1 and 3 emissions. Royal Dutch Shell was the first giant humbled by a Dutch court ruling that it was required to reduce total emissions by net 45% of 2019 levels…
While Australian politicians languish in a world blotched by climate change scepticism and fossil fuel love-ins, global oil and gas companies have been shaken. Three titans of oil fame – Shell, ExxonMobil and Chevron – faced a range of decisions in May that promise to dramatically shape their future operations. The point is not negligible, given that this triarchy produced, between 1988 and 2015, 5% of total global scope 1 and 3 emissions. Royal Dutch Shell was the first giant humbled by a Dutch court ruling that it was required to reduce total emissions by net 45% of 2019 levels…
To float over such an aqueous body is to find a majestic creature unparalleled in beauty and expanse, stretching at 2,300km. There are other stunning formations on the planet, but the Great Barrier Reef has such dimension, form and cocksure brilliance as to make others shrink, not so much because of beauty as due to sheer scale and ecological variety. But the Reef’s health record has been patchy. Each year brings a series of negative assessments about the patient. Its ticker is having palpitations; its central mineral supports in the form of coral life is being bleached. Water quality is…
My, were they delighted. Politicians across several international jurisdictions beamed with pride that police and security forces had gotten one up on criminals spanning the globe. It all involved a sting by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, led in conjunction with a number of law enforcement agencies in 16 countries, resulting in more than 800 arrests. The European Union police agency Europol described it as the “biggest ever law enforcement operation against encrypted communication”. The haul was certainly more than the usual: over 32 tonnes of an assortment of drugs including cocaine, cannabis, amphetamines and methamphetamines; 250 firearms, 55 luxury…
In the messy, underhanded world of global health responses to COVID-19 it was only appropriate that lawyers should find themselves enriched on respective sides of a dispute about vaccine supply. The pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca has been getting a good deal of bad press, with its COVID vaccines seen to be a riskier proposition, notably to younger adults, than those of its rivals. But the matter of rare blood clotting was less a bother to one of the company’s main customers – the European Union – than its failure to be timely and forthcoming with the number of contracted doses. In…
After tormenting the man for years, it became clear that the Australian authorities were willing to, for want of a better word, compromise. The more accurate word would be compromising. Instead of banishing former spy turned bean spiller Witness K to a cell and throwing away the key, there was preference for a softer, more hypocritical mode of punishment. He would be spared jail time, showing that the national security state can, when it wishes to sit in judgment, show some mercy. For those familiar with the case, there was nothing merciful in the finding. A punishment had been levelled…
Those of you drawing sustenance and stimulation from the traditional acronym UFO best brace yourselves. The less exciting and dull term accepted by the defence clerks – unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) – is renewing its march into the extra-terrestrial hinterland. On June 25, the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force will release a declassified report to Congress that will do little to shift ground or alter debate on the nature of such phenomena. For those exercised about green creatures, ancient aliens and that roguish charlatan Erich von Däniken, nothing would have changed. For sceptics, it will be a case of tired yawn…
Summits often feature grand statements and needless fripperies. In Cornwall, the leaders of the G7 countries were trying to position and promote their relevance as the vanguard of democratic good sense and values. They, the message went, remained relevant, valuable and essential to the order of the earth, despite challenges posed by the autocrats. Never let contradiction get in the way of such a united front. Babbling about liberal democratic values matters little when it comes to crusty realpolitik. The UK and the US continue to supply armaments to their favourite theocracy, Saudi Arabia, even as they take issue with…
Sincere Tony is again on the stump, promoting his vision of how best to return to a lovely, unruffled world of capitalist endeavour, circuit lecturing and summit meetings that no longer need to be held online. And when Blair has visions, they are bound to be highly selective and keen in terms of his own bank account, not to mention his PR services. In February this year, he told BBC Radio 4’s Week in Westminster that a digital health certificate or passport of some sort covering vaccination and testing status was bound to happen. It was a matter of “national…
This has been a fantasy of Danish governments for some time. There have been gazes of admiration towards countries like Australia, where processing refugees and asylum-seekers is a task offloaded, with cash incentives, to third countries (Papua New Guinea and Nauru come to mind). Danish politicians, notably a good number among the Social Democrats, have dreamed about doing the same to countries in Africa, returning to that customary pattern of making poorer states undertake onerous burdens best undertaken by more affluent states. The government of Mette Frederiksen has now secured amendments to the Danish Aliens Act that authorises the transfer…
A pandemic crisis. A state of emergency. Overwhelming public opinion bristling with alarm. Notwithstanding these factors, Tokyo is still on track to host the Olympics that was cancelled last year in response to the global pandemic. The first sports team – Australia’s softball crew – has touched down. Is all this folly, bravery or self-interest? On a daily basis, the tally of reasons against holding the games grows. Currently, the Japanese capital and nine other regions in the country labour under a declared state of emergency, one that will extend, at the very least, to June 20. Overseas fans have…
One has to be repeatedly reminded that the theatre of international relations knows no friends and only national interests, whatever those might be. Intelligence services, being an expression of those interests, do not necessarily discriminate in targeting their quarry. The revelations of Edward Snowden in 2013 about warrantless and unwarranted surveillance by the US National Security Agency was revealing on this point, though it merely confirmed centuries of understanding in politics: In our friends and foes, we mistrust. Having spilled such valuable beans, Snowden readied us for what should have been regarded as banal, even farcical. As Steven Aftergood of…
His comments would not have fallen on deaf ears. While metropolitan London would have been aghast at his pedigree and remarks, a Brexit-audience in the rustbelts and areas of deprivation, would have felt a twang of appreciation. For them, migration has not been a boon and glory. For Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, it has been an opportunity to make valuable enemies and court new friends. The meeting between UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Orbán on May 28 did more than raise eyebrows and prompt head scratching. The statement released by No 10 was anodyne enough, filling space and not much…
The former chief strategist for Prime Minister Boris Johnson was in a stroppy mood before the UK parliamentary Health and Science committee. For seven hours, Cummings unleashed salvo after salvo against his former boss and the government coronavirus response. Boiling down some points of the Cummings show: there was a failure on the part of the Johnson government to respond to the pandemic. Johnson was unfit for office. The Health Secretary Matt Hancock should have been sacked for any number of decisions. Lockdown measures were imposed too late to prevent the surge of infections. There was simply no overall master…
The Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response was never likely to hand down a rosy report with gobbets of praise. Organised by the World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus last May, the panel’s gloomy assessment was grim: the COVID-19 pandemic could have been avoided. Almost nothing in the main report could be seen as remarkable in these jaded times. It reads like a sharp vision of looking backwards, a history of folly and stumbles. The protagonist, SARS-CoV-2, proved wily, moving more rapidly than surveillance could detect it, ducking the monitors and seducing the examiners. The rest of the actors…
One could not accuse US Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming of having a sense of irony. For some time, she has felt her party to be the hostage of a ghoulish monster who refuses to be slayed. And she fears her party has fallen out of love for the rule of law. In being ousted from the third spot in the leadership of the Republican Conference in the House, Cheney has found a new morality. In her floor speech, she called Donald Trump’s canard of a stolen election a “threat America has never seen before.” Opposing Trump’s interpretation of the result…
The interview was infamous, made his name and was bound to enrage. It also received a viewing audience of 23 million people who heard a saucy tale of adultery, plots in the palace, and stories of physical and mental illness. But the tarring and feathering of Martin Bashir for his 1995 Panorama programme featuring Princess Diana was always more than the scruples of a journalist and his interviewing methods. Princess Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer, eternally committed to excoriating press coverage of his sister, brought pressure to bear on the BBC last year in allegations that Bashir had used forged bank…
It starts off as an exercise of anticipation. First comes the softening drinks and teasing morsels which find their mark. The audience at this promotions gig is well heeled, of an age where they have money to burn, but nowhere to burn it. They have not travelled on a luxurious prison of bliss for eighteen months. The world has been ravaged by a pandemic, and they yearn to be ravished by the flavour, surrounds and excitement that is Viking Cruises. Cruise liners are not for all but advertise themselves as the unrivalled option of travel for the satisfied life. But…
A clean, technology driven dystopia. A representation of our techno future. These were the introductory descriptions to a piece by science fiction author William Gibson on Singapore for Wired in 1993. “Imagine an Asian version of Zurich operating as an offshore capsule at the foot of Malaysia; an affluent microcosm whose citizens inhabit something that feels like well, Disneyland. Disneyland with the death penalty.” Micromanaged, controlled, sterile, the city state was always going to be seen as a model for combating the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Digital check-ins were rapidly introduced to facilitate contract tracing, along with temperature scans. Plans such…
With the babble about Cold War paranoia becoming a routine matter in Canberra, the treacherous ground for war with China is being bedded down and readied. The Yellow Peril image never truly dissipated from Australia’s politics. It was crucial in framing the first act of the newly born Commonwealth in 1901: the Immigration Restriction Act. Even as China was being ravaged and savaged by foreign powers and implosion, there was a fear that somewhere along the line, a reckoning would come. Charles Henry Pearson, a professor of history at King’s College London, penned his National Life and Character: a Forecast…
It should be making officials in the White House tremble. Critical infrastructure supplying 45% of the East Coast’s diesel, gasoline and jet fuel, left at the mercy of a ransomware operation executed on May 6. In the process, 100 GB of data of Colonial Pipeline was seized and encrypted on computers and servers. The next day, those behind the operation demanded a ransom, or the material would be leaked. The consequences are telling. The operator, taken offline to enable an investigation to be conducted by US cybersecurity firm Mandiant; fuel left stranded at refineries in Texas; a spike in fuel…
