Monthly Archives: February 2012
The Anti Rupert Murdoch
ENGLAND can be confusing, and John Bird isn’t helping. Bird is the Anti-Rupert, a social entrepreneur who in 1991 founded – with Gordon Roddick, who also founded The Body Shop with his late wife, Anita – The Big Issue, that ubiquitous “street newspaper” distributed by homeless people from Brisbane to … read more >>
An Environmental Problem For Brisbane Roar
THEY DO things differently at the Football Federation of Australia, the peak administrator of soccer in Australia.
UK: The Bomb-Chucking Blogger
A DISCUSSION with Paul Staines develops not so much as conventional-journalist-interviews-gadfly-blogger-of-British-politics, as form dictates it should. Rather it mutates into an hour of grilling each other, as perhaps was destined to occur upon meeting the bomb-thrower better known as Guido Fawkes, named after the anarchist who plotted to blow up … read more >>
Top banker breaches FSA rules in £2 million share trade
A Standard Chartered plc director has breached Financial Services Authority regulations over millions of pounds of his personal share dealings in the bank’s stock. A joint investigation by Euromoney and The Global Mail into the share dealings of Stanchart’s Hong Kong-based group executive director and CEO for Asia, Jaspal Singh … read more >>
The Last Grande Dame of Australian Art
DAZZLING in a sarong of a shade best classified as unspeakably orange, Mitty Lee Brown emerges regally from a nap through Sri Lanka’s tropical torpor to receive an unexpected well-wisher. She’s a little startled at the intrusion because these days, at 89, Mitty doesn’t get too many guests … read more >>
Room for Everyone at The Hague
MEET Kuniko Ozaki – 55, Japanese and, since 2009, international resident of The Hague. Ozaki-san is one of the current 19 judges of the International Criminal Court, which sits in The Hague with claims as the world’s most distinguished forum to transact criminal justice. With her untaxed, near €300,000-a-year … read more >>
Europe’s Leaders-In-Waiting Face The Mess Ahead
HINDSIGHT. It’s a wise and beautiful thing. And there’s a lot of it about Europe at the minute. In Britain, the Murdoch kids believe, with hindsight, that Rupert shouldn’t have handed Rebekah Brooks the reins at News International. Much of the rest of the country reckons, in hindsight, that Rupert … read more >>
Amsterdam: I’ve Been To Bali, Too
AMSTERDAM. Been here a year. Was concerned I’d find it boring after years absorbed by manic Asia, the last years in Indonesia, which used to be Dutch. But, neo-colonially, we’re now ensconced in the Netherlands, in an agreeably restored 18th century canal-house that once traded silks, pelts and spices shipped … read more >>
LONDON: Starbucks, Star Pupils and Protest
THE Starbucks on St Paul’s Church Yard is one of the chain’s biggest and busiest outlets in London. And no wonder, servicing disciples of two deities, The City and The Church, and myriad tourists too, at £3.50 per winter-warming, triple-shot venti latte. Worshippers of Mammon swing by here in their … read more >>