As the fifth anniversary of the disappearance of forty-three students from rural Mexico passes, questions remain about the culpability of the Mexican government in the crime and its subsequent cover-up. Now, with a new President and a special government commission, there’s hope the truth might be revealed.

The question does not ask about the specific circumstances of the Bali 9 case, nor does it offer any explanation for the positive response. There are no follow up questions about alternatives, such as imprisonment. Without such context, it cannot and should not be used as evidence that Australians support the death penalty for Chan and Sukumaran. Polling has a profound power over politicians, regardless of what they say. The fuss over the parliamentary Liberal Party leadership is an obvious example of how polling can spur politicians to action (or inaction as the case may be).

In July this year a 44-year-old Bristol man named Bijan Ebrahimi was beaten, set alight and killed. Last week two 24-year-old male neighbours pleaded guilty over their roles in his death. Following this a more complete picture of the circumstances surrounding Mr Ebrahimi’s murder has begun to emerge.

During a brief stint working as a lawyer for indigent death row prisoners in Louisiana, I attended a public forum where one of the speakers was a former long-time warden of a Mississippi prison. While speaking, he expressed a reflection that neatly condensed the key conundrum of criminal justice in Western society.

The Unforgiving Rope: Murder and Hanging on Australia’s Western Frontier Simon Adams UWAP Have you got one of those relatives, the kind who insists that the answer to all the world’s problems is to bring back hanging? You know who I mean. They usually live in a fantasy land called the Good Old Days. Yes? […]

When I read The Ecstasy Of Owen Muir at the age of 14 what stood out was the opulence, vanity and hypocrisy of the Catholic Church. How, I wondered, had it become so much bigger than its boots? And how had Catholicism become such a schmick business, such a powerful entity, such a gross version (in my mind at least) of the doctrine of Christ?

The proof is in the painting. It has been ‘revealed’ that this year’s winner of the Wynne Prize for Australian landscape painting is a fraud, a fake, a phoney, a copycat, and worst of all, unoriginal. Yep, it’s true. Proposal for a Landscaped Cosmos by Sam Leach is almost an exact replica of a work […]