Aung San Suu Kyi’s U.S visit: A Personal View

I first became aware of the brutal nature of the regime in Burma and the story of Aung San Suu Kyi during the mid 1990s. Suu Kyi had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 and five years later the award-winning journalist and filmmaker John Pilger released the film Inside Burma: Land of Fear [...]

The Thesis of Dominant Culture: Eurocommunism, Weltanshauung and Zeitgeist (VIDEO)

INTRODUCTION The discourse on non -western cultural expression, its ontology and its fundaments are consistently hijacked by proponents of what I call Eurocommunists; leftist forces in and outside Western academia in fact challenged proponents of capitalism and Western culture nothing more, nothing less. The silence of non-western scholarship in this discourse became cloaked by writers [...]

BIF News Briefing, August 2012

CONTENTS 1. TIPNIS consultation extended after community resistance 2. Freedom of expression concerns as government takes legal action against newspapers 3. Protests over illegal coca plantations and ‘ecological’ military deployment 4. Tensions mount over Colquiri mine 5. MAS plans to eradicate extreme poverty by 2025 Bicentenary 6. Sacha Llorenti named as ambassador to the UN [...]

Abusing children “part and parcel” of Israeli ideology, says rights defender

Rifat Kassis is the director of Defence for Children International-Palestine Section. In 2010, I interviewed Kassis about about his organization’s work and the special situation of Palestinian children growing up under occupation. I interviewed him again this week on the Israeli soldiers’ confessions about the mistreatment of Palestinian children, published in a new booklet from the Israeli veterans’ organization Breaking [...]

Funerals, Bamboo trains and flooded tuk tuks

I’m preparing for the drive back to Siem Reap today, which will take about three hours. I am very much hoping the heavy downpours will hold off until after I arrive back. Travelling anywhere in Cambodia is difficult enough but it becomes much worse when trying to drive through endless floods. It is incredibly hot with the [...]

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