Quick link – 60th anniversary of the Slansky Trial: Stalinism, anti-semitism and “anti-Zionism”.
Here is a very interesting article about the emergence of anti-semitism (parading as anti-Zionism) as a key element of Soviet and Eastern European Stalinism after WWII.
Disease eradication: polio and guinea worm
The world continues to inch towards the eradication of two more diseases. The number of Guinea worm cases continues to decline. According to the latest WHO bulletin, in January through September 2011, there were 1,008 cases of dracunculasis reported, compared [...]
Situation in PNG
Papua New Guinea’s political instability seems to be coming to a head – but figuring out the context is challenging to say the least.
More foreign policy: US Marines and tripwires
There’s been lots of discussion of what the de-facto basing of up to 2,500 US Marines at a training area in the Northern Territory means. There’s been blather about Guam, Okinawa and Chinese missile strike capability, for instance. Perhaps the [...]
Foreign policy week: Uranium sales to India
It seems like this is foreign policy week – or, perhaps we’ll call it “fall into line with the USA” week.
Remember CCS?
There was a time, a few years ago, where you couldn’t trip over without a major party politician singing the praises of carbon capture and storage. You may remember the fanfare with which the Global CCS Institute was launched by [...]
An effective malaria vaccine!
This is amazing – a (partially) effective vaccine for malaria. The full scholarly article on the Phase 3 clinical trial is here. In short, the vaccine reduced the incidence of malaria amongst vaccinated children by about half. It’s not a [...]
Australia in the Asian century
Last Wednesday in a speech to the AsiaLink and Asia Society Lunch in Melbourne Julia Gillard (transcript here) announced that the government has commissioned a White Paper on Australia in the Asian Century. Former Secretary of the Treasury, Dr Ken [...]
The Anniversary
Malcolm Farnsworth has summed up how the MSM have fully lived up to expectations in its treatment of the anniversary of the change of prime ministership: As endless talk of The Anniversary has shown, political commentary in this country consists [...]
Starving masses not actually starving?
A provocative piece from Foreign Policy magazine by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo claims that “global hunger” is fundamentally mischaracterized: Are there really more than a billion people going to bed hungry each night? … What we’ve found is that [...]
Rinderpest eradicated
I’d never heard of rinderpest, and I come from cattle country. And, absent human malevolence, the world will never hear of rinderpest again. Absent any cases for a decade, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization will, on June 28th, adopt [...]
Recent Comments