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Keywords: America

There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Small stories of redemption in Laos

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 29 August 2013

    A psychologically scarred war veteran struts about dressed as James Brown. An annual 'rocket' festival sees men celebrate explosives, in a country riddled with unspent American bombs. And a ten-year-old boy, who is accused by his grandmother of being a bad luck charm, sets out to prove that he is not to blame for the tragedies his family has endured.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Parochial Australia needs to grow up

    • Fatima Measham
    • 16 August 2013
    15 Comments

    Hot-button topics such as economic management and asylum seekers are best seen from a wide lens, yet we seem determined to keep the rest of the world out of the frame. It is a sea-girt mentality that our politicians don't care to take apart because it is too hard to convince the average voter that there are in fact other people on the planet. Such denialism will inevitably leave us ill-prepared for significant challenges.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Foreign policy beyond asylum seeker silliness

    • Evan Ellis
    • 16 August 2013
    1 Comment

    We might get lucky. Malcolm Turnbull might be right, and the mass of egos, grievances and interests that make up US-Sino relations might 'evolve into a new order, without either side having to make concessions to the other'. But the risks are growing. In this context the framing of asylum seekers as a threat to our sovereignty seems plain silly. War between China and the US would be a disaster to our national interests.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Flawed humanity of a police shooting martyr

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 01 August 2013
    3 Comments

    On 1 January 2009, police in Oakland, California shot dead an unarmed African-American man, 22-year-old Oscar Grant. The event sparked riots, and renewed tensions around race and debates about police procedure. Underlying this politicised context is the story of a young father and former drug dealer who was trying, with mixed success, to turn his life around.

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  • MEDIA

    'Fundamentalist' Americans miss the point of Boston bomber cover

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 22 July 2013
    19 Comments

    Glory is the preserve of the patriotic American. Never was this belief more obvious than when Rolling Stone dared to publish on its cover a photograph of the alleged Boston bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The ensuing public outrage has invoked the stiflingly patriotic adage adopted by George W. Bush shortly after the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers: you're either with us or against us.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Moved and confused by church in a tent

    • Brian Doyle
    • 09 July 2013
    6 Comments

    Religions are mesmerised and ruined by power but always pregnant with the possibility of humility. They are so easy to ignore. You'd be wise to sneer, with every reason imaginable for the curl of your knowing lip. Yet here I am, on Sunday morning, in the wedding reception tent, agog; not so much at the earnest idiot of a minister, but at everyone, sweetly, else.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    High Court hedges bets on free speech

    • Patrick McCabe
    • 26 April 2013
    5 Comments

    In 2011 the US Supreme Court found it was not unlawful for members of Westboro Baptist Church to stage inflammatory protests at the funerals of US soldiers, whom the church believes are killed by God to demonstrate disapproval at tolerance of gay people. You might say 'only America', but recently something similar nearly happened here. 

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  • RELIGION

    Pope Francis' unfinished business with the poor

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 21 March 2013
    24 Comments

    The relationship between the Catholic Church and the poor was explored most seriously in Latin America. I caught its dimensions most vividly in a dawn trip on a clapped out US school bus to a small regional town in El Salvador.

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  • RELIGION

    A funny thing happened on the way to the Vatican

    • Richard Leonard
    • 18 March 2013
    8 Comments

    Francis stood there alone for the cruellest time. This is why members of royal families never appear on balconies alone: you can only wave so often. The Latin Americans went nuts. This guy is now the most famous Argentine ever, jumping Che, Evita and Maradona. Like 'Francis', they specialise in one-name handles too, but with friends like that ... 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Sex and power in the case of Cardinal Keith O'Brien

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 07 March 2013
    2 Comments

    Catherine Deveney was right to point out that power, not homosexuality, was at issue in the case of Cardinal O'Brien, who resigned amid accusations of sexual misconduct. A new film by American director Steven Soderbergh also reflects on relationships based in power, and the ethical obligation of the party with the greater power not to act against the interests of the other. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Losing Chavez the indispensable

    • Antonio Castillo
    • 06 March 2013
    16 Comments

    With Hugo Chavez's death Latin America has arguably lost the most influential political leader of the last two decades. Chavez was one of those men that Bertolt Brecht called the 'indispensible ones'. He has been the champion of the socially and economically marginalised since he came to power in 1999.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Evil is relative in the hunt for bin Laden

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 31 January 2013
    5 Comments

    The tagline 'history's greatest manhunt for the world's most dangerous man' is ironic. By the time of bin Laden's execution his dangerousness was arguably largely emblematic. Zero Dark Thirty portrays the manhunt as a quest for revenge, and leaves open to question whether America was enhanced or diminished by exacting its vengeance.

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