Under the surface of Iraqi reconstruction an old fact still trundles on – the work is being done by American companies, at American wages, while Iraqis are desperate to do the jobs, and will eventually be required to run the system.
The legal trick to make this possible is simple – as the Washington Post [...]

Bush’s attack on gay marriage is swinging across the internet like a pterodactyl with leprosy, swooping and staggering and crashing into unlikely habitats far up in the mountains. Australia for instance.
Kick and Scream has had fun with this, while Geoff Honnor has maintained his usual poise, and Tim Lambert found something really nasty.
Come back [...]

Walter Potter’s Case of Curiosities leaves me with one irritating question – why didn’t the old taxidermist have himself stuffed and mounted to go with such tableaux as The Guinea Pigs’ Cricket Match, or The Kitten’s Tea and Croquet Party? Potter was the da Vinci of artfully arranged stiffs, a Rodin of wire, fur and [...]

Richard Horton is a visiting professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He is also the editor of Lancet. His thoughtful discussion in the New York Review of Books looks at the convergence of science and commerce, mostly in the US. It is driven often by medicine and biotechnology.
The [...]

Bruised by awards? Hoping like hell that Harvie Krumpet will get an Oscar? (Go Adam Elliot. Go Melanie Coombs).
Here’s an award that is sweet enough to work….. the Emmas. Keep it a secret but I’m dobbing in Back Pages..
I found this through Common Man, which also carries these poignant details about Israeli Conscientious Objectors, along [...]

Julian Burnside delivered the keynote address at the Australian International Documentary Conference.
The speech, a cool but impassioned summary of our position on refugees, climaxed with the proposition that “Mr Howard Mr Ruddock and Senator Vanstone at least, are guilty of a sustained, repeated crime against humanity, contrary to Australia’s own law, judged by Australia’s [...]

To update… The Pentagon’s paper on climate change – turned by the Observer into “Pentagon says you are dying RIGHT NOW!” – has been explored further. As the
Oakland Tribune puts it: “”We were playing a little bit with where science ends and speculation begins,” Randall said.
Yet most of the report’s recommendations are a study [...]

You don’t believe that I was alive in the seventeenth century do you?
Petronella de la Court commissioned a doll’s house somewhen in that time, as a “miniature art collection … to provide an exact reflection of reality on a miniature scale, which also contained an exhortation to run an `exemplary’ household.”
Here is proof that [...]

“The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control recently declared that American publishers cannot edit works authored in nations under trade embargoes, which include, Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Libya and Cuba. Although publishing the articles is legal, editing is a, quote, service, and the Treasury Department says it’s illegal to perform services for embargoed nations. [...]

On a single day, Friday the 13th of January 1939, a great fire burnt across Southern Australia from the Otways to Mt Kosciusko. By the end 71 people were dead, and over a million hectares of forest burnt so fiercely the trees were laid in rows by the wind.
Almost all our founding myths are about [...]