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Pearls and Irritations

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No, Minister. It’s you who should be in court

Even good minds can get criminal justice wrong, but usually for only so long. Several years ago, a veteran magistrate was speaking over lunch with...

latest 9

Pearls and Irritations

Andrew Fraser

77% of top Climate Scientists think 2.5°C of warming is coming – and they’re horrified

“I expect a semi-dystopian future with substantial pain and suffering for the people of the Global South,” one expert said. Nearly 80% of...

latest 8

Pearls and Irritations

Olivia Rosane

Faced with an Israeli Pariah, Wong decides on Palestinian statehood

Foreign Minister Penny Wong conveys Australia’s decision on Friday 10 May to the UN General Assembly on whether Palestine should be admitted as a...

latest 9

Pearls and Irritations

Alison Broinowski

Australia must vote yes to Palestine at UN

The Jewish Council of Australia is horrified by what we are witnessing Israel do in Rafah. Israel’s ongoing violence in Gaza and the West Bank is...

latest 8

Pearls and Irritations

Jewish Council Of Australia

Peace starts with Palestine’s UN membership

On May 10, all member states should vote to admit the State of Palestine as the 194th member of the United Nations. On May 10, the United Nations’...

latest 10

Pearls and Irritations

Jeffrey D. Sachs

The West believes antisemitism is a more egregious problem than genocide

The loss of Western authority as a result of Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza has merely sped up changes already underway for a generation. It was...

latest 10

Pearls and Irritations

Henry Reynolds

Students are the nation’s conscience

The courageous stance of students across the country in defiance of genocide is accompanied by a near total blackout of their voices. Their words...

latest 9

Pearls and Irritations

Chris Hedges

For centuries, art has raised its voice in terrible times

In times of atrocity, art and reporting are crucial to evidence, to remember and assert moral witness. To paraphrase Palestinian poet Mahmoud...

latest 7

Pearls and Irritations

Jo Holder

Australia’s stunted mainstream defence and security imagination

With Australian defence writers now arguing for society to be reimagined as an ‘input to defence capability’, we are witnessing further incursions...

latest 10

Pearls and Irritations

Michael Mckinley

Labor deploys ‘security’ to protect bad policy from proper scrutiny

Politicians are increasingly using the word to justify bad policy initiatives and fend off criticism of their decisions. I doubt if you’re...

yesterday 10

Pearls and Irritations

Ross Gittins

Developer oriented development only worsens the housing crisis

A lobby group representing the $600 billion property industry is determining state housing policy in NSW. On the 29th April, when the NSW...

yesterday 10

Pearls and Irritations

Marie Healy

Meta versus Australia

The ABC now faces an awful dilemma. If, as now seems certain, it loses the media bargaining code revenue it has been receiving from Facebook, now...

yesterday 10

Pearls and Irritations

Quentin Dempster

NZ Foreign Minister’s anti-China defamation of Carr threatens trans-Tasman friendship

Former Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr sues New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters for defamation over AUKUS comments. The defamation...

yesterday 10

Pearls and Irritations

Max Hayton

China dropped a flare near an Aussie copter in its EEZ. What’s wrong with that?

Patriotism, they say, is the last refuge of a scoundrel. Judged that way, there seem to be a large number of scoundrels around within the Australia...

yesterday 10

Pearls and Irritations

Sam Varghese

Israel is morphing into a pariah state. Time to cut the cord

Washington’s attempts to attack and impair the workings of the ICC on Israel’s behalf merely serve to further isolate a declining America. It...

yesterday 10

Pearls and Irritations

Binoy Kampmark

The Nakba never ended, the coloniser lied

The blood is on your hands Biden. We can see it all, and fuck no, I’m not voting for you in the fall. It’s too late, we’ve seen the truth, we...

yesterday 10

Pearls and Irritations

Macklemore

Israel is carrying out a horrific ground invasion of Rafah

Israel has begun a ground assault on Rafah, where 1.5 million Palestinians have sought refuge from the brutal war on Gaza. International observers...

yesterday 10

Pearls and Irritations

Seraj Assi

Palestine is the ‘red pill’ for America’s Gen Z

Like the previous Vietnam generation of baby boomers, US university students are waking up to the atrocities their government commits or helps its...

yesterday 10

Pearls and Irritations

Alex Lo

The 1984 anti-Sikh genocide

It’s almost 40 years since Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her own Sikh bodyguards. A year earlier she’d ordered the Indian army to storm...

yesterday 10

Pearls and Irritations

Christopher Raja

Being young is getting worse, but we are not sure why, or what it means

Ill health, perhaps especially mental ill health, is generally seen as a personal issue, requiring diagnosis and treatment. But at the population...

previous day 2

Pearls and Irritations

Richard Eckersley

If China became a democracy, would it still be rejected by the West?

Over the last few years, I have wondered about what drives the relentless Western animosity towards China. It seems a very logical question to ask...

previous day 20

Pearls and Irritations

Chandran Nair

Australia and the F-35 supply chain: in lockstep with Lockheed

Australia is one of six western countries that are complicit in the ‘genocidal erasure’ of the Palestinian people by continuing to supply Israel...

previous day 10

Pearls and Irritations

Michelle Fahy

Grotesque claims: Students revolt against Western media misinformation

Heralded as the largest this century, the pro-Palestinian student demonstrations in the US and globally are putting into stark relief the systemic...

previous day 10

Pearls and Irritations

Jeremy Webb

The end of US primacy: facing Australia’s existential security question

“Nothing Australia does – with or without AUKUS – will make any difference to the collective capacity to either deter or defeat China in the...

previous day 20

Pearls and Irritations

Mike Gilligan

Netanyahu as Lord of the Flies: He has wounded, sickened or starved all 600K Palestinian Children in Rafah

Catherine Russell, the head of UNICEF, said this week that of the 600,000 children in Rafah, southern Gaza, all of them are either injured, or...

previous day 10

Pearls and Irritations

Juan Cole

ASPI caught spreading misinformation about open-source software

It’s not often that you find someone writing about open source software and not bothering to make mention of the licences being used. But...

previous day 10

Pearls and Irritations

Sam Varghese

Australia: the land of lost revenue

Australia once thought of itself as a country of opportunity and innovation – economically and socially. Like most countries self-beliefs, the...

previous day 10

Pearls and Irritations

Noel Turnbull

The ‘Future Made in Australia’ plan for solar panels relies on a crucial ingredient: Help from China

Twenty-three years ago, a Chinese-Australian solar scientist moved from Sydney to Wuxi to build China’s solar panel manufacturing industry from...

tuesday 10

Pearls and Irritations

James Purtill

Thai police graft highlights bigger issues

There is no bigger news on the current Thai political scene than corruption among the top echelons of the police force. At issue is the tussle...

tuesday 4

Pearls and Irritations

Thitinan Pongsudhirak

On his 34th birthday, refugee offers the gift of life

May 6 2024, marks an important birthday for Asif Ali Bangash, who turns 34 years old. But instead of celebrating with gifts, he has decided to be...

tuesday 5

Pearls and Irritations

Jane Salmon

The food industry can’t be trusted to make the rules

In 1964, the first US Surgeon-General’s report on smoking and health was published. The tobacco industry could veto the proposed members of the...

tuesday 10

Pearls and Irritations

Peter Breadon

Washington’s new man in Manila eases the burden on Canberra

In an essay entitled “Australia’s Choice” published in Australian Foreign Affairs in 2022, the leading Singaporean commentator on...

tuesday 10

Pearls and Irritations

Richard Cullen

Three Indians held in Canada over murder of Sikh activist Nijjar

The stars do not exactly seem to be aligning for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi as he bids for a third term in office with the Royal Canadian...

tuesday 10

Pearls and Irritations

Sam Varghese

Wall Street’s corporate landlords lack accountability in Australia

Inches upon inches of press releases have heralded how Build to Rent (BTR) is coming to Australia to provide affordable and stable rentals....

tuesday 10

Pearls and Irritations

Karl Fitzgerald

Combating Islamophobia and addressing oral health inequities

Promoting culturally sensitive oral health care for elderly Muslim migrants is vital to address disparities in oral health among cultural and...

tuesday 10

Pearls and Irritations

Hurjehan Kadernani

The hospital at the bottom of the DV cliff

A sense of crisis now pervades discussion of what to do about violence against women, made obvious by recent marches demanding action, statistics...

tuesday 4

Pearls and Irritations

Jack Waterford

Australian politicians lock more people up, for longer

Criminal justice is an area of public policy where the disconnect between evidence based solutions and political responses is depressingly wide....

tuesday 10

Pearls and Irritations

Greg Barns

Dutton rising: the power of constant attack 

There are some things in our ‘shrinking nation’ that are not shrinking. There are the obvious ones that have dominated the news – petrol prices,...

tuesday 20

Pearls and Irritations

Graeme Turner

Why has there been no credible media narrative justifying AUKUS?

Many members of the Albanese Government, including Anthony Albanese himself, recall the problem that presented itself when Julia Gillard took the...

tuesday 4

Pearls and Irritations

Paul Begley

“Malicious government”: One Israeli citizen’s journey after 7 October

What follows is the end of a journey by one citizen of Israel – a retired high-ranking IDF officer – who has had his view of the world vastly...

tuesday 20

Pearls and Irritations

Richard Llewellyn

Israel’s war on journalism

Last Sunday, Israel closed Al Jazeera’s office in occupied East Jerusalem, confiscating broadcast equipment and taking the channel off air....

tuesday 10

Pearls and Irritations

Jeremy Rose

The State Department report on human rights

Blinken knew exactly what he was doing, he could have delayed the release but he chose, instead to release the State Department’s “2023 Country...

06.05.2024 10

Pearls and Irritations

Jerry Grey

Is environmental disaster inevitable? A reflection on economics and society

Is capitalism capable of long term meaningful reform? This is perhaps the most import of issues to address, given that environmental disaster is...

06.05.2024 10

Pearls and Irritations

Peter Allitt

How Israel relies on up to 1,000 Australians and other foreign fighters to carry out its war crimes

Thousands of people from countries around the world have joined the war against Palestinians. The US recently threatened to impose sanctions on...

06.05.2024 20

Pearls and Irritations

Ali Bakir

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