Apheda, Union Aid Abroad in Australia, has launched a major campaign against the new global outbreak of asbestos-related disease and deaths - in Asia. As I've covered in earlier posts on this blog (see 'Devils Dust') we all too sadly... Continue reading

Dreadfully sad news in Australia's anti-fracking community this week - Queensland farmer George Bender, longterm frontline fighter against the CSG multinationals, has taken his life. Testimony to the terrible impact of the fight, against fracking, on people in the front... Continue reading

"It’s extraordinary that the Australian Government couldn’t assure the UN expert that people he spoke to wouldn’t be exposed to prosecution under the Border Force Act” http://hrlc.org.au/un-official-visit-to-australia-cancelled-due-to-risk-of-reprisals-on-asylum-seeker-issues/ Continue reading

http://ideas.ted.com/since-the-ted-talk-the-guardians-paul…/ Just for interest. I've followed Paul Lewis on Twitter for several years - It's how I first learned about the death of Jimmy Mubenga in October 2010. Lewis sought comment from followers, having heard that a person being deported had died. His investigation insisted that this death not be... Continue reading

I'm reading Barbara Tuchman's 1962 classic 'The Guns of August' (the micro-study of August 1914). Not because it's now 2014 and a century since World War One began but because she was a brilliant writer and a model historian. I've read and re-read 'A Distant Mirror'; that cultural study which... Continue reading

An interim post while I finish reading Paul Preston's 'We saw Spain die' (what an extraordinary title). Preston offers yet another passionate perspective on the war, and one which, because of its narrative style drawing on the experiences of journalists who covered the war from inside Spain, will attract not... Continue reading

Hosted by friendly owners of the Meadows Cafe, at 235 Kentish Town Road, London NW5 2JT (it's next door to the Santander Bank), I have mounted a display of prints of some of my recent black and white landscape photographs. (Nothing to do with work - this is sheer fun!)... Continue reading

Yesterday I at last ended reading CJ Sansom's Winter in Madrid. It was a hard read. I'd expected a wartime detecting narrative - yes, set in the awfulness of Franco's Spain - but less cutting to the bone, less informed on Civil War dynamics than this. Even, perhaps, less perceptive... Continue reading

In Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August (1962): "In the month of August 1914 there was something looming, inescapable, universal that involved us all. Something in that awful gulf between perfect plans and fallible men that makes one tremble with a sense of 'There but for the Grace of God... Continue reading

Seaumus Milne in today's UK Guardian (28.8.13) quite rightly attacks the coming together of nations who formed Bush's coalition of the willing, this time ramping up their collusion to intervene in Syria. (Here's his article: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/27/attack-syria-chemical-weapon-escalate-backlash ). Milne reminds how we have all been here before, even down to the line on chemical weapons, the use of which is still denied by the regime (and inarguably a massive crime against civilians has taken place, with perpetrators). There's substance to this 'being here before' - even, we see the UN being sidelined as with the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The difference... Continue reading

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

"For a country a third of the size of NSW but with a population of 150 million, the impact of disasters is nearly unimaginable. ... Bangladesh is surrounded by water, but much of it is unfit for consumption. Why is... 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