Louts pressing false claims, faux principled types seeking to score successes against clearly useless targets. Jules Hurst, in trying to discharge the duties of the comptroller, had some news for…
Intellectual giants are in painfully short supply in the Trump administration, but if there was anyone who might lay claim to cerebral weight of any sort, Elbridge Colby might be…
Not much good comes from war. Qualifying exceptions, however, can be found. The United Nations, tarnished, libelled and mocked for being simultaneously ineffectual and intrusive, was the mediating entity for…
They have kept their strategy of cultural and institutional vandalism generously broad in recent campaigns against their adversaries. It therefore came as something of a surprise that much febrile fuss…
The Earth is in a fine mess, but human beings sealed in laboratories full of energy and vigour, attached to screens, and running tests about conditions in space, have another…
Depending on which historical sources you care to consult, the Pope has been a figure of obloquy, ridicule and abomination. This mediator between the terrestrial and the divine was always…
Reading messages from President Donald J. Trump is an exercise in taunting masochism. It is one inflicted on commentators and the press corps the world over, and they are not…
Be wary of a company – any company – who exerts moral muscle as they create software and digital platforms that are injurious and simultaneously lauded for curing that injury. …
He’s out of ideas, a mind running on empty. Increasingly, he is also short of reason, zapped by geopolitical addling and meddling. Now that US President Donald J. Trump has…
Last month, the United Nations General Assembly was unimpeachably correct in condemning the hideous practice of slavery in a resolution endorsed by 123 votes. Those voting either against the resolution…
Global crisis and human suffering can sometimes be susceptible to the cheap loop of sloganeering and mawkish publicity, often associated with a phrase, usually annexed to the image of a…
It was celebrated with ghoulish delight. On March 30, the Israeli Knesset passed the Penal Bill (Amendment – Death Penalty for Terrorists), an instrument expanding the use of the death…
With the Iran War groaning along, the Trump administration is getting increasingly indignant. Plumes of childish anger can be seen coming out of the White House and Pentagon. Having joined…
On March 20, 2026, US District Senior Judge Paul Friedman found for The New York Times in a ruling deeming the Pentagon’s media access policy in breach of the US…
Truth may well be the first casualty of war, but death, injury and environmental degradation are bound to be keeping up in the hit lists. Attacks on gas fields, oil…
When will Israel realise that invading Lebanon with paralytic compulsion can never be the solution to its security ills? Having destroyed Gaza with existential, illegal fury, the Israeli Defense Forces…
The bellicose may find wars attractive and cleansing, but those responsible for such dry matters as inventory, material and how prepared the armed forces of a country are will stalk…
It’s almost not worth considering, but precisely because it comes from the White House, the mad manoeuvrings and silly airings of the US President must be taken seriously. But only…
Joe Kent, the now former US Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, always seemed a bit off, especially to liberals. As a combat veteran of MAGA pedigree, he found favour…
With each dragged out day, President Donald Trump begins resembling a mad emperor who has not only taken leave of his senses but leave of everything else. Having hitched his…
When it comes to asylum seekers, the Australian political machine has prided itself on using cruelty and a purposely obtuse understanding of international law. Bolted sovereignty has been elevated over…
The closure of virtually all commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz occasioned by the Iran War is not merely a matter of oil and gas, the usual prized duo…
The big drain on military resources has begun. A war apparently already won (and not), against an adversary supposedly without means to fight back, its air force and navy destroyed,…
“The geopolitical genie is out of the bottle: by capitalizing on geography to disrupt global trade, countries can strengthen their strategic position at relatively low cost.” Alex Mills, The Atlantic…
In his January speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney gave the impression of a banker turned soothsayer, a Daniel coming to judgment. Here…
Wars can distract, and for leaders in political purgatory, they can be particularly useful. It remains to be seen whether the UK’s increasing involvement in the illegal war being waged…
To expand a stockpile of both the useless and the mindlessly murderous in a military sense would seem to be a wasteful exercise best contemplated in the psychiatric ward. But…
Former British Conservative politician and current pundit Rory Stewart thought it might have been a case of artificial intelligence. Many would have agreed. The US First Lady, Melania Trump, had…
Villainous lunacy is abundant these days as the bombing of Iran by Israel and the United States continues. The rationale for this illegal pre-emptive war that not only lacks legitimacy…
Many in the United States would scarcely identify the difference between Iran and Iraq, both countries based on ancient civilisations so chronologically distant as to be fiction. If not Marvel,…
This time, the appropriately designated shoe had found itself on the other foot. While the Trump administration has been gorily killing personnel on alleged “narco-boats” and vessels supposedly heading to…
It was good of Mike Huckabee, US ambassador to Israel, to come clean with the witchery and superstition that marks the Bible. When a text advocating genocide, ethnic cleansing and…
With much in the way of pomp and false premises, the social media ban in Australia for those under 16-years-old was celebrated as a healthy incentive to encourage children to…
It’s not a rare thing to see the founder of Facebook ducking and weaving before the irate comments of Congress as he explains, for yet another time, why his network…
With a sex trafficking, flesh peddling empire of favours, logistics and the good time to be had by the powerful, the gigantic scale of Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal network continues to…
For those with a sense of humour, consulting alleged facts compiled by an agency specialising in subterfuge, subversion, deception and plain mendacity must surely have been a delightful exercise. That…
The eulogies are starting to wear thin. The lamented passing of the rules and law-based order only makes sense to those who believed that such rules and laws existed in…
There were never the sharpest negotiators in the room, resembling a facsimile of Bertie Wooster in desperate need of the good advice of his manservant Jeeves. The Australian defence establishment…
How awful could it get? The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) expired on February 5, terminating an era of arms control and imposed limits on lunatically contrived nuclear…
Nominal realities bedevil politics. They usually find form in polling statistics, airings in the land of pundits and those self-appointed wise people who think they have a measure of the…
Jeffrey Epstein certainly got around. He moved virally, galloping through the cells of the establishment. What was more, he was permitted to. Dead and buried, the financier, convicted paedophile, sex…
Things are getting rather ropey on the invitation of Israeli President Isaac Herzog to visit Australia on February 8. It came amidst the anguish following the Bondi Beach attacks of…
It was another bead in the string of jurisprudence and case law in climate litigation. Previous sparkling examples include Urgenda Foundation (2019), KlimaSeniorinnen (2024) and the significant Advisory Opinion of…
How did he generate so much paperwork, traffic and comment? New York financier, mountebank, all purposes conman and dedicated rake that he was, Jeffrey Epstein continues to nag living figures…
When remote islands start to interest chatterboxes in think tanks and bureaucrats in foreign ministries, we can only assume that some matters will be exaggerated over others. With the Chagos…
Australia’s former Prime Minister and faithful Pentecostal Scott Morrison never passes up the chance to express an opinion if it will net him a reward. As one of various politicians…
US President Donald Trump might leave an impression of violent novelty, at least for the leader of a nominal liberal democracy, soiling international relations with the gangster’s touch. This sense…
It’s official. This tormented, heated, traumatised planet is now home to over 3,000 billionaires. (That number was reached last year.) In October 2025, Elon Musk became the first man to…
When does the rot start in a politician? For some, it commences the moment election to office is confirmed. Others need to become cabinet ministers before being wholly blighted. UK…
“It seems that every day we’re reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry – that the rules-based order is fading, that the strong can do what…
Donald Trump’s Board of Peace overseeing the reconstruction of Gaza was always going to raise a host of niggling questions. From the outset, the US President made it clear he…
Like all new frontiers touted as necessary and worthwhile, the cashless society is advertised as a supremely convenient way to facilitate financial transactions while avoiding such silly inconveniences as carrying…
What matters peace if it permits killing, maiming and destroying the infrastructure of a society supposedly once at war? This is the situation facing Gaza as the occupying Israeli forces…
The Trump administration’s mania about Greenland, a self-governing territory of Denmark, is something to behold. Its untutored thuggery, its brash assertiveness, and the increasingly strident threats to either use force,…
Boards of directors are a funny bunch. Often lacking expertise, claiming knowledge they do not have and insight that never illuminates, its members can make the cockup the stuff of…
It usually takes archival digging, the golden gaffe, an ill-considered remark and occasional spells of candour by those in power, to admit that the United States has, in common with…
Royal commissions are often held to confirm the obvious and squeak for modest change. They offer no binding remedies, have no compellable powers against the government of the day, and…
Once done, it remains, by nature and fact, irreversible. The precedent of indicting and abducting a serving head of state and his spouse, dropping them into the jurisdiction of another…
The Trump administration is increasingly resembling a government previously abominated by the current US president as entangling, bumbling, and prone to fantasies. President George W. Bush was well versed in…
While the secret signals and surveillance facility at Pine Gap in Northern Australia, officially named the Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap (JDFPG) is billed as a joint affair between Australia…
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