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The Russians are coming! So says the Australian mainstream media. To be honest, I don’t know what the Murdoch press is saying as my equilibrium depends on my not reading it. The other major media chain, Nine Entertainment, is in full neo-Cold War mode. Nine Entertainment, as its name implies, has been best known for […]
AFL CEO Gillon McLachlan (Image: AAP/James Ross) We’ve had so many royal commissions of late — two into Crown Resorts, aged care, bushfires, veteran suicide, banking, mental health, family violence, pink batts, trade union governance, Lawyer X, etc — that it’s not such a great leap to call for a decent independent examination of one of Australia’s leading sporting institutions, the AFL. That was the conclusion I reached after reading Michael Warner’s stunning new book, The Boys’ Club, which was launched by Hawthorn president and former Victorian premier Jeff Kennett last week. ...
Yale University Press | $26.95 | 337 pages In July 1989, just back from reporting for the ABC on the aftermath of the massacre in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, I was sent from my post in Singapore to cover the meeting of the foreign ministers of the ASEAN countries. The annual confab rotates through the Southeast Asian members, and this year was Brunei’s turn. The numbered paragraphs of the communiqué of that twenty-second ministerial meeting ranged over refugees, drugs, southern Africa, Afghanistan, Asia-Pacific cooperation, disarmament, the search for a settlement in Kampuchea… on and ...
by Tom Lewis The Decision to Drop the Bomb This book, aimed at the 75 th anniversary of the Atomic Bombings and the end of World War II in the Pacific, is really out of its time and place. Author Tom Lewis ( The Empire Strikes South) wants to reframe the bombings, picturing them in a positive light. His whole message is really in the title – the bombs “saved” millions of people. There was a time for this argument, in the middle 1990s when the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in the United States sought to put on display the Enola Gay B-29 aircraft that had dropped the A-Bomb on Hiro...