Showing 21 - 30 of 38
Thanks to the media, the US can get away with murder
News, Philip J Cunningham, Published on 15/10/2013
» The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Peter Higgs and Francois Englert this month for helping the world understand how a background field can cause phantom particles to acquire mass. The relatively irrational world of politics, riddled as it is with contradictions, offers its own version of the Higgs Field in terms of divergent national narratives.
US snooping scandal risks stunting internet's growth
News, Philip J Cunningham, Published on 14/09/2013
» The US is at a key crossroads, trying to regain the trust of its citizens and friendly nations around the world even while it continues to lie and dissimulate in defence of National Security Agency (NSA) overreach.
Miyazaki and Aso battle for Japan's hearts and minds
News, Philip J Cunningham, Published on 03/08/2013
» Unresolved issues of history continue to haunt and distort the present, all the more so when hidden from view. Historical controversies need a good airing from time to time, not so much to salvage the past as to save the future from repetition of past mistakes.
The year of living dangerously, Thai-style
News, Philip J Cunningham, Published on 13/07/2013
» Bangkok has just become the world's No.1 tourist destination, and it couldn't have come at a worse time - not because the capital and the country haven't earned the accolade, and not because it isn't a fun place to visit, but because Thai society is brimming with contradictions that could break into conflict at any time.
Snowden has no island, nor Quasimodo, to help him
News, Philip J Cunningham, Published on 08/07/2013
» 'Sanctuary! Sanctuary!" is the pathetic cry of the title character, played by Charles Laughton in the1939 film The Hunchback of Notre Dame, when he frees the heroine from the hangman's noose and whisks her into the safety of sanctuary inside the cathedral, just in the nick of time.
Surveillance scandal signals a creeping police state
News, Philip J Cunningham, Published on 12/06/2013
» Even before an unlikely freedom fighter named Edward Snowden revealed his hand in the firestorm of a story about massive US government surveillance, Diane Feinstein, Peter King and other congressional mouthpieces for the US security state did their best to turn attention away from the message and onto the messenger.
The sacrifices we make for the promise of wealth
News, Philip J Cunningham, Published on 05/06/2013
» There's a tragicomic story about the power of money to corrupt absolutely. A billionaire comes back home from exile to share the wealth and exact revenge. Purse strings are pulled even before the billionaire's triumphant return, to ensure the people suffer and languish until their once-scorned saviour returns.
Mystery shrouds the real Jit Phumisak story
News, Philip J Cunningham, Published on 14/05/2013
» Who was the real Jit Phumisak? The gifted linguist, willing to risk his college career arguing over a single archaic word? Co-translator of the Communist Manifesto? A radical historian who subversively upended centuries of received knowledge with a bold new history of Thailand? Poet? Composer? Loving son? Jungle fighter?
Publicity or propaganda, it's all just a matter of spin
News, Philip J Cunningham, Published on 02/05/2013
» When Beijing changed the name of the Department of Propaganda to the Publicity Department, journalists snickered at the transparency of the ploy, since the spin and the information control system remained the same.
An overzealous response to terror can also be terrifying
News, Philip J Cunningham, Published on 23/04/2013
» To follow the drama of the manhunt for the Boston Marathon bomber online through Twitter, Reddit, television, police scanners and news updates was to be inundated with an abundance of almost real-time information.