Staff in Cahoots with Looters
Police and customs officers today raided four major museums across the country in the culmination of an operation that has been tracking down antiquities looted from palaces and temples in Thailand. Read more
Intelligent Design
The first step of her clever campaign was to make a video diary in which she explained her intention and her strategy. And so, after she had begun to garrotte her mother with a power cord, and after her mother had abandoned her initial remonstrance - ‘This is not funny’ - to try to attract her husband’s attention and assistance, she would have been satisfied that her plan was unfolding flawlessly. Read more
Winter Soldiers - The Will to Resist
- Nick Terrell
The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan
by Dahr Jamail.
Haymarket Books, 2009.
Soldiers who refuse to fight have a type of moral authority which, oddly enough, a pacifist who refuses to fight will somehow always lack. Experience is a compelling authority. A pacifist is always struggling against implications of cowardice and self-interest, but soldiers who’ve seen action, who’ve taken lives and risked their own, are in a much better position to face down such insinuations. As Chris Hedges puts it in his foreword to Jamail’s book, “These returning veterans know the essence of war, which is death, and have been maimed by the trauma of industrial warfare.” Read more
Kirsten Reed on ‘The Ice Age’
- Nick Terrell
The Ice Age – by Kirsten Reed.
Text Publishing. 209 pages. $Au 27.95
The Ice Age begins in the vast interior of the USA. At a roadside petrol station a seventeen year-old girl makes her way among the pumps while ‘I Was Made For Loving You’ provides subliminal cues to the refuelling transients. Kirsten Reed’s novel is a first-person narrative – it is the seventeen, and then eighteen, year-old’s account of her dreamy, automotive peregrinations under the courtly supervision of the remote and considerably older Gunther. Read more