"At the weekend the Israeli high court rejected a petition from residents, endorsing on security grounds the policy of bulldozing homes without warning and without giving them a chance to appeal or remove their belongings" (quote from the Sydney Morning Hereld, May19) The Israelis have instigated a policy of occupying Rafah with tanks, helicopters and bulldozers in retaliation for the death of 13 Israeli soldiers. There has been talk of systematically demolishing houses, and already thousa...

I hate to think it, but the fate of our world rests in the hands of men and women who along with fate, hold in their hands guns and weapons. If not holding them directly, than ordering those hands, telling them when and who to strike down. Fundamentalists on the other side of the world are hard to reach at best, impossible at worst. I have no written or conversational Arabic, and the Muslims that I do know are not complicit in the appalling trade in blood we see paraded before us day in an...

There she was, beaten. Knuckleduster beaten. Face all mashed up, hard to determine what she looked like before the assault, hard to measure what type of person before the act determined what we all think of her. I think she might have looked hard before the incident, but she looked harder after it. Someone said she looked like a “junkie”, as if that description made the whole thing acceptable, normal… with precedent, because such things are, of course, important. We would hate to see violenc...

NSW teachers are planning a strike and march to parliment house on thursday to protest our governments refusal to honor pay rises. A 5.5% increase had already been given last december, but a further rise has been postponed after the government claimed that it could not "afford" this further rise. Parents are know claiming that the teachers are holding their children to ransom, that they cannot afford the costs and inconvenience of placing their children in day care centers. Now paren...

For some directors the Palm d’Or revolves in tight little circles inside their heads, like bodily vital functions and sex. For some it’s about as important as a plausible plotline and the respect of critics. I’m not sure what camp Michael Moore falls into but he won it anyway with a film lacking US distribution and a plausible plotline. If we were to turn the current international events into a screenplay, people would laugh it off as a film that couldn’t even sell seats in cinemas, let...