Showing 1 - 10 of 12
Bill Nighy, master of misdirection
Sunday Spotlight, Published on 29/01/2023
» British actor Bill Nighy was trying to describe how he prepared for his character in the new drama Living. He plays Mr Williams, a buttoned-up, almost catatonically reticent bureaucrat in post-World War II London who, upon learning that he is dying, decides finally to live.
Iranian fighters feel the squeeze
Sunday Spotlight, Published on 11/12/2022
» Sitting under an oak tree on a mountainside in the Kurdish region of Iraq, Mohammad Kurd said he recently fled neighbouring Iran after two friends were killed by security forces and the powerful Revolutionary Guard started going door to door to arrest anti-government protesters.
Ancient Greeks outsourced battles
Sunday Spotlight, Published on 20/11/2022
» Wherever there is an out-of-the-way war, there will be mercenaries -- hired fighters whose only common bond may be a hunger for adventure. Some join foreign armies or rebel forces because they believe in the cause; others sign on because the price is right.
Asia's century, China's year
Asia focus, Published on 30/12/2019
» Way back when 1999 was winding down, pundits were telling us that the Asian Century was about to dawn. That prediction has not yet been fully realised, but few would disagree that 2019 belonged to China. Over the past 12 months, the top headlines have been about the bruising trade war with America, defiant protests in Hong Kong against Beijing's tightening grip, and the rise of a surveillance state that is herding hundreds of thousands into "re-education" camps on its western fringes. Below, the Asia Focus team looks back on a busy and sometimes troubling 2019.
Paper-thin alibi for kids' day gun play
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 13/01/2018
» The irony must have been lost on him and on everyone around him. This Children's Day -- the day of machine guns, tanks and rocket launchers -- Thai kids will also get to take pictures with our cardboard prime minister, 10 standees in fact, in various poses and costumes deployed around Government House as special attractions.
Come on Baby, Light My Fire
B Magazine, Published on 30/07/2017
» After 24 years in Bangkok there's no hoodwinking Jerry Hopkins, pioneering Rolling Stone reporter and author of No One Here Gets Out Alive, the cult biography of The Doors' self-styled shaman-poet Jim Morrison.
Women seen as effective suicide bombers
News, Tobin Harshaw, Published on 12/04/2016
» On a list of history's most notorious assassins, alongside John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald and Gavrilo Princip, the name Thenmozhi Rajaratnam would probably draw mostly blank stares. But in her way, the Tamil Tiger terrorist -- who blew up herself, the Indian leader Rajiv Gandhi and 13 others in May 1991 -- has perhaps had the largest lasting influence.
Washington pulling back from the world
News, Peter Apps, Published on 04/04/2016
» For many in the US, the attacks on Brussels must have felt like more of the same. Once again, militants struck, the systems designed to stop them failed and all the blood and treasure of 15 years of "war on terror" appear more wasted than ever.
Jeb carries the war sins of his brother
News, Published on 18/05/2015
» It isn't about what we know now. It's about what we knew then. It is simply not true, as Republican presidential aspirant Scott Walker said on Friday, that "any president would have likely taken the same action Bush did with the information he had".
Half a spy thriller
Life, Published on 20/10/2014
» Wars, the death of soldiers and civilians, are fought for a variety of reasons: some making more sense than others. Self defence is the most legitimate. All combatants, attempting to take the moral high ground, make that claim. Even that they are fighting God's battles.