Posts by stephen walker
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
even 25 years ago I had a pretty low opinion of Whitcoulls.
it is ironic, because in countries where Amazon is available with either no shipping charge or a very small cost, the bookshops are going to all sorts of lengths to get people through the door, browsing and reading, drinking coffee, seeing books up close and intimate. lectures and other events are also seeing a revival. bookshops are in trouble worldwide, but it seems some shops in NZ are happy to serve up whatever they can be bothered with.
-
Emperor Hirohito's ultimate authority
anyone who has read a reasonable cross-section of Japanese history 1850-1945, and especially 1915-1945, will understand that the Showa emperor never had "ultimate authority" even though everything was done in his name. a lot of machinations and manipulations went on in the army, navy and their respective ministries, and a lot of their jockeying took the form of co-opting relatives of the emperor for their own organisational benefit (as they perceived it). the imperial line was revered and feared. it was above criticism. so it was usefully employed by those wishing to engineer a clash with the US/UK. even if the Showa emperor had wanted to stop this impending clash, his actual ability to change the course set by the army and navy was very limited.
-
-
it's not that the US of A is intrinsically bad
big, big call Che.
-
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/afghanistan/article7087637.ece
US special forces soldiers dug bullets out of their victims’ bodies in the bloody aftermath of a botched night raid, then washed the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what happened, Afghan investigators have told The Times.
Two pregnant women, a teenage girl, a police officer and his brother were shot on February 12 when US and Afghan special forces stormed their home in Khataba village, outside Gardez in eastern Afghanistan. The precise composition of the force has never been made public.
The claims were made as Nato admitted responsibility for all the deaths for the first time last night. It had initially claimed that the women had been dead for several hours when the assault force discovered their bodies.
“Despite earlier reports we have determined that the women were accidentally killed as a result of the joint force firing at the men,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Todd Breasseale, a Nato spokesman. The coalition continued to deny that there had been a cover-up and said that its legal investigation, which is ongoing, had found no evidence of inappropriate conduct.
EDITORIAL:U.S. must stop spying on WikiLeaks
Fri Mar 26 08:44:46 UTC 2010Over the last few years, WikiLeaks has been the subject of hostile acts by security organizations. In the developing world, these range from the appalling assassination of two related human rights lawyers in Nairobi last March (an armed attack on my compound there in 2007 is still unattributed) to an unsuccessful mass attack by Chinese computers on our servers in Stockholm, after we published photos of murders in Tibet. In the West this has ranged from the overt, the head of Germany's foreign intelligence service, the BND, threatening to prosecute us unless we removed a report on CIA activity in Kosovo, to the covert, to an ambush by a "James Bond" character in a Luxembourg car park, an event that ended with a mere "we think it would be in your interest to...".
<snip>
But the increase in surveillance activities this last month, in a time when we are barely publishing due to fundraising, are excessive. Some of the new interest is related to a film exposing a U.S. massacre we will release at the U.S. National Press Club on April 5.
The spying includes attempted covert following, photographng, filming and the overt detention & questioning of a WikiLeaks' volunteer in Iceland on Monday night.
I, and others were in Iceland to advise Icelandic parliamentarians on the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, a new package of laws designed to protect investigative journalists and internet services from spying and censorship. As such, the spying has an extra poignancy.
-
thousands of farmers owed millions of dollars
hundreds of thousands of property-investors-but-not-for tax-purposes owed half a million dollars or more
(if it has a pointy top, four corners on the bottom and is built on sand, it probably is a pyramid)
-
This time, the problems were either overseas or in the retail finance company business.
the reason why nz is not (yet) in a similar position to Ireland or Iceland (or UK-land) is largely explained by "our" Aussie-owned banks' ability (so far) to continue surfing atop the Aussie property tsunami. quite risky behaviour, actually. sort of like those dodgy banks in Europe's "weirder" little corners...
-
Yep, it is online right there on the website.
was it worth a good chunk of the AU$40 annual subscription price?
-
tiso-sama,
c'mon, don't take it so personally ;-)
there was obviously not room for the both of us.
my subconscious warnings from the future must have seen all but deepest parnell turning into a giant slag heap. so there ya go, not your fault after all. pls remind me to change homeopathists. -
Is there some sort of alumni office, or do you just have to live in a place with a fairly small community from the country you're from?
the embassy monthly drinks were open to anyone (of any nationality) who could be bothered getting themselves up the hill from Shibuya. it's a decent walk. either you were fit enough to walk or rich enough to get a taxi. new zealanders who only had limited opportunity for contact with other nz-ers and news from the old country tended to go along once a month on a friday evening. you could always carry on your piss-up/chat-up somewhere else in the city...(after they kicked everyone out at about 9:30pm)
remember, until 1995 or so, with no internet/email, most people craved a bit of nyuzild contact once in a while...