12 March 2010 | DANIEL J WAKIN | The Australian Financial Review
Being 'on tour' is a decidedly unglamorous experience for this Russian orchestra.
12 March 2010 | Jason Burke | The Australian Financial Review
As if living in a Delhi slum wasn't bad enough, now the local government plans to use satellites to police illegal land use.
12 March 2010 | William Cullerne Bown | The Australian Financial Review
The lure of resources is drawing nations back to the moon, writes William Cullerne Bown
12 March 2010 | Peter Hallward | The Australian Financial Review
The fundamental reasons for Haiti's destitution originate as responses to Haitian strength, rather than as the result of Haitian weakness, corruption or incompetence.
12 March 2010 | Ron Charles | The Australian Financial Review
American Adam Haslett has produced a novel that illuminates the financial and moral calamity of the global financial crisis.
12 March 2010 | Lorin Stein | The Australian Financial Review
French writer Guy de Maupassant initially wrote novels about love and sex, with little introspection. Towards the end of his life he changed his style to examine the psychological qualities of romance.
12 March 2010 | Gabriel Sherman | The Australian Financial Review
On Saturday, January 9, Rupert Murdoch was on his Boeing 737 returning to New York from a business trip to Los Angeles when he learned that the New York Times had just posted a long profile of Fox News chief Roger Ailes on its website, one that he knew was going to cause a giant headache.
05 March 2010 | Clay Risen | The Australian Financial Review
Matt Kirschenbaum slips a five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disk into his Apple IIe's drive and flips the switch. The 26-year-old machine, which his family bought when he was a child, squeaks to life. A pixilated green dragon fills the screen, as a tinny synthesized voice, not unlike T-Pain's, drones "sea dragon, Sea Dragon, SEA DRAGON!"
05 March 2010 | The Australian Financial Review
Neoliberals wanted to limit government, but the upshot of their policies has been a huge expansion in the power of the state. Deregulating the financial system left banks free to speculate, and they did so with reckless enthusiasm.
05 March 2010 | Bill Donahue | The Australian Financial Review
'Dear Father," the announcer intoned over the darkened arena, "we ask that you put your mighty hands on this event, not only on the cowboys, but on the livestock as well."
05 March 2010 | Mehdi Hasan | The Australian Financial Review
In 2006, the investigative reporter Jeff Stein concluded a series of interviews with senior US counterterrorism officials by asking the same simple question: "Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shia?" He was startled by the responses.
05 March 2010 | Steven Roberts | The Australian Financial Review
Robert Elias seems to hate America and hate baseball. His disdain oozes from every page of this tirade called ``The Empire Strikes Out.'' In just one example of his ideological intolerance, he accuses the major leagues of ``adopting an often militaristic and jingoistic nationalism that sometimes makes baseball into merely an extension of the government or armed forces. This blind patriotism has linked baseball with policies that have put the game in a bad light.''
05 March 2010 | Luke Harding | The Australian Financial Review
It is one of Moscow's last green enclaves, a unique garden village built by the new Soviet Union for its revolutionary elite. In winter and summer, weary Muscovites flock here to escape the urban noise and to wander along peaceful avenues of birch trees and log-built cottages. You can even spot the odd woodpecker.
05 March 2010 | Amy Knight | The Australian Financial Review
How long will Vladimir Putin last? It is hard to imagine Russia without its steely-eyed, iron-fisted, and hugely popular prime minister, especially since he has hinted so broadly that he might run again for the Russian presidency when the term of his protégé, Dmitry Medvedev, expires in 2012.
05 March 2010 | Richard Heeks | The Australian Financial Review
It sounds like a digital alchemist's question. How do you turn virtual gold into the real item? Hundreds of thousands of "gold farmers" in developing countries have found a lucrative answer. They have become entrepreneurs who make their living by profiting from online games. By assuming fantasy roles in these games, they kill monsters, mine ore or engage in other activities that earn "virtual gold" that they then sell to other players, often in rich nations, for real-world currency. Although it flaunts the rules of the game, buyers and sellers of this make-believe currency use the gold to determine the fate of a character in these fantasy games.
05 March 2010 | The Australian Financial Review
On April 22, 2009, in London, the judges of the Orwell Prizes, given annually for the books and for journalism that have best achieved George Orwell's aim to "make political writing into an art" awarded a special prize to Tony Judt, whose Reappraisals?: Reflections on the Forgotten 20th Century? was shortlisted for the book prize. The following remarks were made at the ceremony:
05 March 2010 | PATRICIA COHEN | The Australian Financial Review
Patricia Cohen
05 March 2010 | Kim Barker | The Australian Financial Review
Anita Khalwat wears heavy makeup, fake eyelashes, and a green spangly head scarf, loose dress, and pants fit for an Afghan wedding. But she's no bride. She's a warrior in heels and metallic nail polish, preparing to appear on Afghan Model, a new TV show that aims to find the top fashion star in a war-torn nation where neither of the two main languages has a word for "model," and where threats by the TV-hating, women-loathing Taliban have turned an appearance before the cameras on a rickety, rainbow-lit white stage into a political statement.
05 March 2010 | Elisabeth Bumiller | The Australian Financial Review
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05 March 2010 | The Economist | The Australian Financial Review
The great hope of transplant surgeons is that they will, one day, be able to order replacement body parts on demand. At the moment, a patient may wait months, sometimes years, for an organ from a suitable donor. During that time his condition may worsen. He may even die. The ability to make organs as they are needed would not only relieve suffering but also save lives. And that possibility may be closer with the arrival of the first commercial 3D bio-printer for manufacturing human tissue and organs.
