Andrew L. Urban

So, you want a federal corruption watchdog?

20 April 2022 2:00 pm

What constitutes corruption for a watchdog? Merriam-Webster Definition of corruption 1a: dishonest or illegal behavior especially by powerful people (such as…

Ukraine was conned

17 April 2022 4:00 am

Volodymyr Zelenskyy was brought up in the grunt town of Kryvyi Rih, a Soviet-looking industrial city in the southeast of…

Dishonesty, the new transparency?

14 April 2022 12:00 pm

Labor Leader Anthony Albanese wouldn’t answer (three times, like Peter the Apostle’s denial of knowing Jesus) whether a Labor government…

Putin’s Playbook is playing Americans for suckers

22 March 2022 4:00 am

Perhaps the biggest mistake of the American intelligence world is to have imagined that Russians think like Americans. ‘They don’t,’…

Capitulation complete for Ukraine-Russia conflict

8 March 2022 9:00 am

It cannot be any clearer: 141 countries have condemned Russia for its invasion of Ukraine as illegitimate in a vote…

Kyiv falls: then what?

4 March 2022 2:00 pm

Taking control of Kyiv is one thing. Taking control of the entire country is quite another. But even if Putin…

Thugs ‘R’ Us

1 March 2022 1:00 pm

The meeting in Moscow was kept secret. The Soviet leadership had agreed to a low key exchange of views with…

Why would the West want to invade Russia?

11 February 2022 4:00 pm

A June 2016 Levada poll found that 68 per cent of Russians think NATO troops in the Baltic States and…

Australia desperately needs a Criminal Cases Review Commission

8 February 2022 12:00 pm

Talk about missing the point… All those clamouring for a federal corruption commission to be an election issue have so…

‘Whoopsi’ Goldberg’s learning curve

4 February 2022 12:00 pm

‘I stand corrected,’ said Whoopi Goldberg, the day after she was advised that the Holocaust was indeed a racist slaughter.…

Nerds, nannies and dictators

23 January 2022 12:00 pm

Young nerds in Silicon Valley are now the rule-makers of culture across the western world. Culture, identity, and the conflict…

A different take on the Jesus story

19 December 2021 12:00 pm

My favourite Christmas story … stop me if you’ve heard it. According to the late Sydney theologian Dr Barbara Thiering’s…

High courts and misdemeanours

11 December 2021 9:00 am

Sometimes the truth is chased out of our legal system

The Dan Andrews protests v polls conundrum 

26 November 2021 2:11 pm

Ever since the Newspoll results on Saturday, I’ve been wracking (and wrecking) my brain trying to find a logical answer…

Here are some real justice issues for the climate warriors

10 November 2021 11:31 am

What a tragic shame that so much energy, time, resources and opportunities to really improve the lives of millions is…

Will we all have to take the knee?

31 October 2021 2:00 pm

If test cricketers such as Quinton de Kok can be compelled to ‘take the knee’ by their employer in order…

Remembering the Hungarian Uprising, 65 years on

30 October 2021 11:20 am

The world gasped 65 years ago this week as Hungarian protesters were mowed down by the secret police, starting a revolution that…

Climate and Covid: the fact checks we had to have

27 October 2021 2:56 pm

There is no relationship between lockdowns and virus control (eg, 35 studies reported in December 2020, in American Institute for Economic…

Road to damnation 2050 

25 October 2021 2:03 pm

I know how Net Zero 2050 ends. I’ve read the book. In Chris Brook’s excellent if devastating Road to Damnation*,…

COP this, climate sumiteers

20 October 2021 11:23 am

Man does not live by bread alone, an early revolutionary once advised his followers.  As Glasgow’s COP26 closes in on a discombobulated world, the…

Is Facebook really on the ropes?

7 October 2021 1:35 pm

It may be counter-intuitive, but American investigative and Pulitzer winning journalist Glenn Greenwald makes a strong argument that paints Facebook…

Big Tech has placed its bet – on the Genghis Khan of our time

29 September 2021 6:49 pm

The nineteenth-century Russian writer Alexander Herzen’s greatest fear when thinking about the future has come true. He said “What I’m…

The new provocateurs of Covid

28 September 2021 11:15 am

The extraordinary 1988 John Hillcoat/Nick Cave film Ghosts … of the Civil Dead is set in a slightly futuristic high-tech…

Beware Stumbling Joe’s mumbling, Scotty

26 September 2021 4:11 pm

When they were talking the other day in Washington the other day, did Joe Biden tell Scott Morrison his recipe…

Aussie Life

4 September 2021 9:00 am

As a child in Budapest, I heard my grandfather tell the family around the Sunday lunch table to beware the…