Meta, to put it rather inelegantly, has a data non-compliance problem. That problem began in the original conception of Facebook, a social network...
It’s impossible to know whether the new British Prime Minister is genuinely serious about constructive policy or not. She is certainly interested...
Thinktanks across Australia, tanked with cash from US sources and keen to think in furious agreement, are all showing how delighted they are with...
When faced with the option of acquiring nuclear technology, states have rarely refused. Since the splitting of the atom and the deployment of atomic...
It has dominated news cycles, debates and policies since 2020, but COVID-19 continues to exercise the interest of number crunchers and talliers....
Julian Assange has now been in the maximum-security facilities of Belmarsh prison for over 1,000 days. On the occasion of his 1,000th day of...
History’s record of humanity’s response to plagues, pandemics and disease is one of isolation, marginalisation, and exclusion. The infected...
Be it the scandals disclosed by the Facebook papers, the scrutiny over the use of algorithms by the company, the inability to combat galloping...
Poland’s Law and Justice Party has happily stirred xenophobic hysteria. Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and President Adrzej Duda are part of an...
Refugees and asylum seekers provide rich pickings for demagogues and political opportunists. The Australian approach politicians their plight by...
Politics is not merely the art of the possible but the pursuit of concerted hypocrisy. When it comes to that matter of funding good causes –...
It is proving to be an unfolding nightmare. For a government that had been beaming with pride at their Covid-19 contract tracing for months,...
Over the years, the Bagram Airbase, originally built by the Soviets in the 1950s and known to US personnel as Bagram Airfield, became a loud...
The Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response was never likely to hand down a rosy report with gobbets of praise. Organised by the...
With President Donald Trump all but conceding to the transition team that will take over after January next year, interest now shifts to...
The Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force Afghanistan Inquiry was always going to make for a gruesome read – and that was only the...
When US President Harry S. Truman made the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, followed by another on Nagasaki a few...
The political absurd has become all modish. With US President Donald Trump turning the White House into his own circus of personalised woe and...
Land seizures, annexations, and conquest. These are words axiomatic to the state of Israel. In the main, the state has maintained an uncomfortable...
Donald Trump claims to be the law-and-order president of the United States. There does not seem much sign of this as the stitching of the Republic...
Mobs are unruly, headless things. The message is the action. The platform is often violence. But what is happening across the United States cannot...
Never discount the importance of venality in international relations. While pandemics should provide the glue for a unified front in response – we...
Across the globe, events are being cancelled, rallies are being limited, gatherings are being treated with suspicion. It is an authoritarian’s wet...
Moralising the way diseases and viruses are transferred is a very human, and particularly nasty trait. “We don’t need this kind of riff-raff on...
The second day of extradition hearings against Julian Assange and by virtue of that, WikiLeaks, saw Mark Summers QC deliver a formidable serve for...
Entering Singapore’s Changi Airport gives the visitor a glimpse of a mask fetish. Security guards wear it. As do the nurses and the various...
Afghanistan is a famous desert for empires, a burial ground which has consumed those in power who thought that extra fortification and trading most...
On the surface, it made not one iota of sense. The murder of a foreign military leader on his way from Baghdad airport, his diplomatic status...
As the continent scorched, the annual, exorbitant display of Sydney’s fireworks that mark the opening of the new year seemed a touch vulgar. This...
Several features stand out in the impeachment quest against President Donald J Trump. There is constitutional discourse as mythology and fetish....
Prior to the UN Convention on Climate Change talks held in Madrid, the sense that tradition would assert itself was hard to buck.Weariness and...
Leaders currently in office rarely make an appearance before either the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court....
There is an inherent bestiality in the politics of the Americas that signals coup, assassination and disruption. No state is ever allowed to go...
The Canadian elections have returned Trudeau to Ottawa, but with a reduced vote. The sheen has come off, and the coat seems somewhat...
The Decent Protester, appropriately capitalised and revered is, from the outset, one who does not protest. It is an important point: to protest in...
Much ink has been spilt in textbooks describing situations where autocratic states can behave badly. They abuse rights; they ignore international...
China has rattled Western observers for centuries, and the idea that it might be approaching a level of formidable heft is troubling to those who,...
It had a good deal of desperate scolding. Sweden’s Greta Thunberg assumed the role of punishing advocate, a Joan of Arc of fury.The main culprit...
They all do it: corporations, regimes, authorities. They all have the same reasons: efficiency, serviceability, profitability, all under the...
The protester of school age sported a placard featuring a distorted caricature of Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison: “Scomo was liking it...
The Brexit no deal prospect is engendering an element of lunacy fast seeping into every pore of the British political establishment. As with all...
Rarely do ambassadors resign after an intense self-assessment of worth. Diplomatic immunity does not merely extend to protecting the official from...
Traditional diplomacy is being given a makeover – at least where it is not being abolished altogether and being replaced by a replica of The...
The Balkans has often been prone to seizures of mysticism, glum prediction and predation. But one character felt at home as he addressed his...
The Home Secretary of the United Kingdom did his thing, which was little in the way of disagreement. The superpower has issued a request; the...
It is a giddy intoxicant, and making all who partake fall over in puddling nonsense. The Mueller Report is not turning out to be the cleansing agent...
Australian politics since the 1990s has been marked by a dedicated loathing of the “vision thing”. For those keen to see policies lasting beyond...
It had to come. A massacre, broadcast in real time and then shared with viral automatism; the inevitable shock, and the counter from the...
The modern UN Refugee Convention is now so flea-bitten it’s been put out to the garbage tip of history. At least the enthusiastic fleas think so,...
