Until last Friday, around twenty homeless people had set up camp in Melbourne’s City Square, creating shelter where it elsewhere eluded them, as a public petition for more secure, affordable housing in Australia’s second most populous city. The presence of the camp was also a visceral risposte to claims, which appeared in the mainstream media last week, that homeless people had been behaving unpalatably, including asking passers-by for money in an aggressive fashion.

More than ten people have been killed after Israeli forces attacked a flotilla bringing aid supplies to the besieged people of Gaza. Details are still sketchy – some sources claim twenty people are dead – but it seems that IDF commandoes stormed the vessels and then opened fire with live ammunition. The flotilla was part […]

Much of the outrage around the 2007 helicopter attack in Iraq recorded in video revealed by Wikileaks has centred on whether or not the Apache crew committed a war crime. That’s, however, the wrong frame to understand what took place. What’s most significant about the killings is not the extent that they differ from standard […]

That’s from al Jazeera; here’s the Guardian‘s account: The US military’s takeover of emergency operations in Haiti has triggered a diplomatic row with countries and aid agencies furious at having flights redirected. Brazil and France lodged an official ­protest with Washington after US military aircraft were given priority at Port-au-Prince’s congested airport, forcing many non-US […]

The American evangelist Pat Robertson’s claim that the Haitian earthquake resulted from a pact with the Devil have been widely reported. Interestingly, the ‘Satanic Haitians’ theory seems to be historical survival of the hysteria that the great Haitian slave rebellions instilled in white racists. Scott Mclemee explains (quoting CLR James’ mighty book The Black Jacobins) the […]

I’ve got a piece up on the new ABC blog The Drum. It begins like this: Tony Blair’s latest admission on Iraq raises, yet again, the need for a genuine inquiry here in Australia about that misbegotten war. Even before Britain’s Chilcot inquiry has concluded, it has spurred a fresh round of revelations. Britain, we […]