Indulgent, vain and profligate, the all-female venture into space on the self-piloted New Shepard (NS-31) operated by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin was space capitalism and celebrity shallowness on full show, masquerading as profound, moving and useful. The crew consisted of bioastronautics research scientist and civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen, CBS […]
Author: Binoy KAMPMARK
Junk Science And Bad Policing: The Homicide Prediction Project
The law enforcement breed can be a pretty dark lot. To be paid to think suspiciously leaves its mark, fostering an incentive to identify crimes and misdemeanours with instinctive compulsion. Historically, this saw the emergence of quackery and bogus attempts to identify criminal tendencies. Craniometry and skull size was, for […]
Killing Paramedics: Israel’s War On Palestinian Health
It was a massacre. Fifteen emergency workers, butchered in cold blood by personnel from the Israeli Defense Forces in southern Gaza on March 23. It all came to light from a video that the IDF did not intend anyone to see, filmed by Red Crescent paramedic Rifaat Radwan in the […]
Withdrawal Symptoms: Hungary, Europe And The International Criminal Court
Europe seems to be suffering paroxysms of withdrawal, notably when it comes to international conventions. Many states on the continent seem to have decided that international law is a burden onerous and in need of lightening. Poland, Finland and the three Baltic states, for instance, have concluded that using landmines, […]
Addressing Hate Speech And Incitement: Holding Meta Accountable In Africa
It was yet another unwelcome development for Mark Zuckerberg’s technology titan Meta, the parent company of Facebook. The High Court of Kenya has found that the US-based entity can be sued over its alleged role in disseminating content that incited violence in neighbouring Ethiopia. While the case can be heard […]
Closed For Business: The Oddities Of Trump’s Tariffs
Liberation Day, as April 2 was described by US President Donald Trump, had all the elements of reality television perversion. It also had a dreamy, aspirational hope: that factories would spring up from rust belt soil in a few months across the United States; that industries would, unmoored from the […]
Netanyahu’s War On Israeli Institutions
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is waging a war on many fronts. He has ended the tense ceasefire with Hamas in Gaza in spectacularly bloody fashion and resumed bombing of Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon. Missiles fired at Israel from the Houthi rebels in Yemen also risk seeing a further […]
Trump’s Star Wars Revival: The Golden Dome Antimissile Fantasy
Bad ideas do not necessarily die; they retire to museums of failure and folly, awaiting to be revived by the next proponent who should know better. The Iron Dome shield vision of US President Donald Trump, intended to intercept and destroy incoming missiles and other malicious aerial objects, seems much […]
Careless People, Meta And Restricting The Digital Town Square
There is much talk in this age of heaving tech behemoths about the digital town square, where views can be aired with confidence, impunity and, at stages, disconcerting stupidity. Tech moguls such as Elon Musk are the loudest proponents of the view, claiming that “it is important to the future […]
Back To Tried Failures: The New Offensive On Gaza
If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your only option. This is proving very much to be the case with the resumption of savagely lethal strikes on Gaza by the Israeli Air Force on March 19. In a matter of hours, over 400 Palestinians were slaughtered. The resumption […]
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