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Keywords: Ira

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    The normalisation of destruction in SA nuclear plan

    • Michele Madigan
    • 23 September 2016
    13 Comments

    On Saturday 3 September, in Port Augusta, Yankunyjatjara Elder Edie Nyimpula King was keeping up the struggle, singing again the Seven Sisters inma, strong in its demands for a clean country and protection for the future generations. Its cry: Irati Wanti ... leave the poison! Have nothing to do with it! No radioactive waste dump in our country! But why is such responsibility for country and the health of its people forever so hard? Why is the destruction of country forever allowed to be normalised?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Heroes and humanity in Hudson River plane miracle

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 15 September 2016
    1 Comment

    On 15 January 2009, US Airways pilot Chesley 'Sully' Sullenberger successfully executed an emergency water landing on the Hudson River in New York, after both engines on the passenger jet he was flying were disabled following a collision with a flock of geese shortly after takeoff. Miraculously, and thanks largely to the veteran pilot's razor instincts and resourcefulness, all 155 passengers and crew on board escaped the ordeal all but unscathed. In Sully the incident itself is portrayed in near forensic detail (aviophobics might best stay away). But it is the human touches that really make it soar.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Antiheroes of the Bush-Cheney arms boom

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 25 August 2016

    War Dogs is the latest in a string of films from the past few years that are custom made for our cynical times; deeply ironic black comedies and dramas featuring antiheroes who profit to the point of excess off the misery of others. Where those films dealt with the finance industry and gained relevance from the backdrop of the Global Financial Crisis, this one shifts focus to the grimier world of arms dealing, in the context of Bush era conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Truth beyond written records of the Wave Hill walk off

    • Moira Rayner
    • 23 August 2016
    9 Comments

    I had been in WA for exactly a year when the local newspaper reported that a white guy had led about 200 people off Wave Rock station. Coming out of the comfortable myth that my home country of New Zealand was not racist, I was amazed to learn that Australia's Indigenous people were obliged to work without industrial protections. In 1966 it was the British Vesteys Group that had been exploiting Aboriginal people: today it is the State in the guise of 'community development', aka work for the dole.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Dying with dignity in Madrid

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 19 August 2016
    6 Comments

    The film's quiet humour leaves open many spaces for reflection on getting older, and on mortality. Tomas is uncomfortable with the subject of death, but Julian is determined to confront it with honesty and dignity. His activities during those four short days reveal he possesses a well formed conception of his own humanity and mortality that is not short of admirable. We are as sympathetic to Paula raging against her cousin's resignation, as we are to Tomas' growing acceptance.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Humanity meets bureaucracy on asylum seeker Fast Track

    • Shira Sebban
    • 15 August 2016
    14 Comments

    Sobs rack his body. Under the Fast Track Assessment process being used to clear the backlog of protection claims, the nondescript official sitting opposite him, or one of his colleagues, will most likely be the one to decide his fate. 'Should you be found not to engage Australia's protection obligations, the government may share your biographical details with the authorities of your country of origin,' the official intones. 'If you give them information about me I will be killed,' comes the chilling reply.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Recent reflections on Iraq War ignore key ethical questions

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 10 August 2016
    2 Comments

    The recent Chilcot report on British participation in the Iraq War elicited embarrassing responses by British and Australian leaders and apologists of the time. Specious justifications were accompanied by a failure to take responsibility. The defects of the invasion and the moral irresponsibility of those who collaborated in it did not flow solely from its procedural inadequacies. The crudity now attributed to Donald Trump and his obiter dicta on war flourished before him among Washington insiders.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Forget conspiracies and own your complicity

    • Ellena Savage
    • 08 August 2016
    4 Comments

    The talking heads say the same things I once heard on Illuminati documentaries. In place of Pharrell Williams making suspicious hand gestures though, the blame for the unpleasant outcomes of a healthy free market is bestowed on the western world's maligned: refugees, Indigenous people, queer people, the working poor. These talking heads, who feel desperate and inferior because they have never contributed anything to anyone other than themselves, are eschewing their complicity in harm.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    War-room of a child's mind

    • Belinda Rule
    • 21 June 2016
    4 Comments

    I saw a younger girl, blonde hair in pink clips, spiral glitter sneaker laces - baubles of a treasured child that no-one ever bought for me. A girl in a parlour painting, and I the hairy spider hulking in the corner. In the war-room of the mind, I pierced my map with pins. How simple to trick her to some dirty culvert, hold her down, mar her white arms ... Civilisation was a hair draped on the head of a pin, each one of us poised, rigid, clutching our own pin still - I could see I would cramp with the effort all my life.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Setting subeditors' slights to rights

    • Brian Matthews
    • 25 May 2016
    6 Comments

    Under election campaign pressure, some names have been misprinted. Mr Malcolm Ternble of Naracoorte wishes to point out that he has not made any public statements on negative gearing and is unsure what negative gearing means. The error was made by a Gen Y subeditor and should have read 'Prime Minister Malcolm Ternbull'. The Foreign Minister was cited as Ms Julia Bishop. The correct nomenclature is Ms Julia Bronwyn. Ms Bronwyn was inaccurately described as a part-time helicopter pilot.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Miracle of the Andalusia schoolhouse wasp

    • Dan Graham
    • 20 May 2016
    12 Comments

    I attempted to continue with the class but it was impossible for the children to ignore the wasp. I elected to evacuate. We had our lesson on the playground. One of the kids went home and told their mother about the wasp and that instead of class, we'd had an extra long lunch. The mother failed to appreciate the dilemma I'd faced, called my boss and asked her how I could be trusted with 20 children when I couldn't even handle a single wasp. Next week, same class, the wasp returned.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Changed by faith in a miraculous child

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 06 May 2016

    Despite its epic scope it is also deeply intimate and, dare I say, spiritual. Roy regards his son with a mixture of stern, protective love, and helpless wonder. They are joined in their quest by Roy's childhood friend Lucas, a state trooper converted to Alton's cause after literally seeing the light in his eyes. Also by Alton's mother, Sarah, who of all the cohort has the most direct experience of the 'sense of awe' that ultimately unfolds from the 'mystery' of Alton's story.

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