The city; urban transport, a slight fug to the sky so that nothing takes a sharp edge. The park late afternoon crowded with dogs, their adult companions, all sitting in chat circles or circling, chasing. Not the ambling streaking ballthrowing beach wiggling of my northern sand-walking homes. That was February... Continue reading

Post bombardment reflections on Gaza, Israel, and displacement. [This post was written November 2012 pending the cease-fire and augmented early January.] The mid-November outrages. 80 died in Gaza, 3 in Israel. Did you see the photograph of the Dalou children, dead? It would stop your heart, if nothing else has. In Israel the glossy lively Tel Aviv, thought to be somehow immune, was battered. A friend visited there in 2011, partied in the bars. It was just after the release of Gilad Shilat. Like many liberal Jews, her hosts were outraged by oppression of Palestine. In Gaza - the territory's... Continue reading

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara W. Tuchman (1978) 1987 by Ballantine Books. Watching the crushing, increasingly terrible trauma being inflicted this week on the people of Palestine, Syria and yes, Israel, I've been thinking about its genesis in time and colonialism. And about how a 20thC... Continue reading

The United Nations Audiovisual Library of International Law was first proposed by the Codification Division of the Office of Legal Affairs and approved by the General Assembly as an activity under the Programme of Assistance in the Teaching, Study, Dissemination and Wider Appreciation of International Law in 1997 (resolution 52/152). The Audiovisual Library was initially created to serve as a lending library of audio and video cassette tapes for educational and government institutions in developing countries. The Audiovisual Library, as originally conceived, encountered insurmountable practical difficulties. In response to the dramatic increase in requests for international law training beginning in... Continue reading

James Hathaway on the legality of offshore processing via www.abc.net.au Finalising my article about state's failures on asylum-seeking and refugee policy and I've just listened again to this interview. Geraldine Doogue interviewed James Hathaway in September this year on Labor's 'Pacific Solution Mark 2'. Intriguing and compassionate argument from Hathaway and a quite different take on people-smugglers. I think that take must be noted: extended, recall that the people-smuggler follows a long tradition of helping displaced persons escape persecution. Historically and in other contexts (WW2, Cold War Berlin for example) the role has been heroic. Sure the role is also... Continue reading

Bernie was stubborn, passionate and a working-class hero. He was elevated to iconic status, but only because he was willing to take on corporate greed until his last breath. He was bold, funny, exciting and wasn’t afraid of a challenge. The media just happened to find someone that was lost in life, and Bernie found his calling and relished that. He was a man diagnosed with a horrible condition and who just didn’t want to go quietly. He wanted to rattle the cage; wanted everyone to know he was suffering and that others were suffering. via blogs.abc.net.au Trade unions, social... Continue reading

Turkish-Italian archaeological team explores site in the city of Karkemish on Syria-Turkey border. This link via John Hopper's wonderful The Textile Blog. Reminds me of William Dalrymple's description -in From Holy Mountain - of Turkish destruction in that eastern border region, over years, of Armenian churches: exquisite heritage plundered or... Continue reading

I was amused by this Tor piece: most citizens of the Star Wars galaxy are probably totally illiterate. And then life imitated art: Amazon ate Audible, that is. A while back, Amazon acquired Audible (the audiobook store) and now they have added a whispersync for voice service which, I confess,... Continue reading

Yesterday marked the 10th anniversary of the first Bali bombing; 202 people dying terribly while travelling, enjoying their tribes, or working - simply earning a living in the Kuta nightclubs. People of nations, including the people of Bali. I often think of the father who eventually found his 16 yr... Continue reading

'After the Cold War Eric Hobsbawm remembers Tony Judt' in London Review of Books LRB, 26 April 2012. An interesting long essay mainly on Judt; it illustrates the depths of Hobsbawm's critical insight and his extraordinary capacity for compassionate, uncompromised, analysis. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n08/eric-hobsbawm/after-the-cold-war Clipping: "My relations with Tony Judt date back... Continue reading

Eric Hobsbawm, Marxist historian, died a week ago, on Monday 1 October in London. He was 95. Many, many words have been written since by a host of people, by no means all historians, who are made bereft by his passing. (This is The Guardian obituary from Martin Kettle and... Continue reading

A terrible massacre yesterday at the Lonmin Marikana platinum plant (and acknowledging that this comes after a week of utter violence at the plant, machetes, including between workers; is not unprecedented in global historical terms; and that police have also died): but am shocked speechless by this event, as must be trade unionists everywhere, and certainly as is South Africa, hurting again. Is it worth noting that Lonmin is a ftse100 company, with all that this implies in a country lacking leadership right now? Take a look at the Twitter feed hastag Lonmin for the local disbelief, grief, and the... Continue reading

London is a town on a series of visible ‘ups’ right now – the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations, the Olympics imminent, the annual tennis festival Wimbledon; the town bubbles away in a soup of international visitors and media hype. But less visible ‘downs’ lurk. Last year’s riots are still puzzled over,... Continue reading

London is a town on a series of visible ‘ups’ right now – the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations, the Olympics imminent, the annual tennis festival Wimbledon; the town bubbles away in an intriguing soup of international visitors and media hype. But less visible ‘downs’ lurk. Last year’s riots are still puzzled over, as though they were a puzzle and not an inexorable, rippling, shocking outcome of deep social frustration and fragmentation. The rest of the country observes the partying, unsure how to approach the shenanigans – to share vicariously, or to resent. London geographer, scholar and activist Doreen Massey (World City,... Continue reading

Am now back in the UK which has Council/ Borough elections next week, and am about to travel to Paris, serendipitously in the countdown week to final round Presidential election ballot. Last week I was in Scotland at the European Social Science History Conference in Glasgow: Scotland certainly seemed to be gearing up to a Labour resurgence in the election: am now in London where the real contest is Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson. Johnson will doubtless win but it’s an intriguing match: was at a dinner party the other night where the debate was of Johnson cycling in his... Continue reading

How great is the internet. It used to be quite difficult to locate Cynthia Cockburn's work online even through university websites pre the days of blog. And now she has her own website/ blog at http://www.cynthiacockburn.org/ Cockburn is both scholar and activist, politically involved in Women in Black against War and in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. These days her research and writing is, as you might know, very much on women and/in peace movements, feminists as anti-militarists, but I first came across it in another genre - gender / labour process - 15 years back during... Continue reading

On January 26 1939, in the third year of the Spanish Civil War, General Francisco Franco y Bahamonde finally took Barcelona. In March he took Madrid and in April he and his nationalist, royalist, ruling class forces controlled Spain. Franco established a repressive, elitist, anti-worker regime which would last until his death in 1975. This photograph (2006) from my own collection is of the Telephone (Telegraph) Building on the perimeter of Plaza Cataluna in Barcelona, at the upper end of the Ramblas. In May 1937 it was held by anarchist/ republican forces in a battle eloquently described by George Orwell... Continue reading

Horrible. I was foolishly surprised to pick up this info last night from an Amnesty tweet. A few months back when the Iran government backed off on stoning Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani for 'adultery while married' we could have been excused for thinking that a measure of safety for Sakineh had been achieved. You might recall that she was originally imprisoned for complicity in the murder of her husband: AWID, Association for Women's Rights in Development, observes that the prison term linked to that conviction has possibly expired. Signing Amnesty petitions seems the most rapid action in support of last minute... Continue reading

It's New Year's Eve (or it was, until 20 minutes back) and Oz has watched the UK summer Edinburgh Tattoo on ABC TV, Again. Such a strange mix of spectacle, military skite, irony (the British National Anthem in Edinburgh Castle?) colonialism, and soldiers dressed to the nines looking too old and way too far being just back from Helmand Province. What head-space are they in and do these games help, or simply hide that space? All is played out against brass bands, skill, and bravado. Male bravado, mostly. Yet oddly there must be some civic pride involved as well -... Continue reading

Who'd want to be an Afghani asylum-seeker today? After all, consider the options - wait for months or years in detention in Indonesia, waiting against hope to be granted refugee status, eventually patience worn down, desperate for self or loved ones to escape, pay some crook $6000 for a space on a worn-out fishing boat heading for Australia. Drown, or see loved ones friends and travellers drown. What point then of escape to paradise Oz, refugee status. Or to have got into Britain, with a UK government which lets asylum-seekers in, then throws them out, deports. Almost more cruel? The... Continue reading