'Credible' just means it isn’t incredible, and that is a good enough standard for the advocates, touts and urgers pushing their particular barrows into the headlines. That self-interest and ideology inspire some to deceive and suppress is no surprise. That journalists refuse to question such agendas and their purported 'facts' is reprehensible

Read More

No one with even a shred of decency defends the shooting of unarmed prisoners, as alleged in the Brereton Report. And no one can observe the way Defence has confronted the report's aftermath without the deepest misgivings about the nous and competence of those who seem unable to say the word 'alleged'

Read More

If the SASR engaged in 'blooding', as has been alleged, that was one crime for which no excuse can be accepted. But there is another hardly less repugnant violation: if subordinates were bullied into taking innocent lives, the obligation not only to lead troops but to protect them was heinously betrayed by their superiors

Read More

Australian soldiers in Afghanistan face enemies all around, from declared Taliban warriors to treacherous faux comrades who have gunned them down without mercy or warning. The allegations in the Brereton Report are shocking -- but so is the rush to judgment

Read More

Unlike International Women's Day, the November 19 date set aside to mark those issues specifically relevant to the male of the species shares discordant billing with another UN-endorsed day of celebration, World Toilet Day. No, it's not a feminist joke, but it would still be nice to see plumbing fixtures exalted on some other day

Read More

To maintain white men are more favoured than any other racial/gender group is to ignore that they are much less likely to receive the protection of the law, more inclined to take their own lives and, generally, much less socially successful than almost any other ethnic-social group

Read More

What Greg Clarke, formerly head of the English Football Association, had to say about women in soccer, Indians in IT departments and gays in locker rooms can't be faulted on facts or tolerant sentiment, yet purity of heart couldn't save him being issued with a red card and banished from the game. Speak softly, friends, or pay the price

Read More

Variously compared in his lifetime to Charlemagne, Joan of Arc, Richelieu, Henri IV, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Chateaubriand and Clémenceau, he begged to differ, saying Tintin was a more apt doppelganger. Fifty years after his death, the man whose abrasive hauteur annoyed Churchill, aggravated Roosevelt and every president thereafter remains 'the greatest Frenchman'

Read More

In many Republican strongholds a curious thing happened on election day: while his party received the votes it expected, Donald Trump's tallies were way down. According to a bipartisan team of computer scientists and data analysts, there is only one explanation: the fix was in

Read More

The electoral standoff that sees Donald Trump in court and Joe Biden jumping the gun to proclaim himself 'president-elect' is an invitation to soar into the stratosphere of speculation. Could this affair, like another contest 144 years ago, end up being decided on Capitol Hill? If so, Trump wins

Read More