The word Ebola is conjuring up fear around the world; breakdowns in Western infection control procedures have led to cases in Spain and the US, and have given the non-African world a taste – or a foretaste…
The latest batch of data on political party membership in Great Britain do not make happy reading for the faithful. Membership of the major parties is at a historic low, with less than 1% of the electorate…
A fundamental lack of trust is at the heart of Australian politicians’ extremely poor reputation. It is the main reason why people’s opinions about their elected representatives have mutated from healthy…
Corruption is an urgent global problem, one that costs the developing world dearly and badly slows its development down. But until recently, figuring out just how big the problem is, and what to do about…
GlakoSmithKline (GSK) is currenlty feeling the heat from the allegations of foreign corruption that have erupted in China, Poland, Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon and the company is scrambling to restore…
Chinese premier Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption purge has really started to hit its stride – and by announcing an investigation into Zhou Yongkang, one of the most influential figures in the Chinese Communist…
Nigeria and Algeria both fell out of the World Cup at the last 16 stage, competing heroically against France and Germany and showing amazing discipline and shape for 70 of the 90 minutes. Then tiredness…
The G20 countries’ whistleblower protection laws fail to meet best international standards, according to the first independent evaluation of both public and private sector whistleblowing laws. This is…
Qatar did not win the right to host football’s World Cup in 2022 legitimately. That was impossible. Awarding the World Cup to Qatar was clearly not about passion for the game, nor about offering communities…
It is not known whether Sepp Blatter, the president of FIFA, has ever digested any of Karl Marx’s work. If he has, then he will no doubt be well aware that history has a tendency to repeat itself first…
Ostensibly, the May 22 coup was just the latest instalment in Thailand’s decade-long political conflict. On one side are the forces loyal to tycoon-turned-politician Thaksin Shinawatra: some business elites…
Reports in the Sunday Times that improper secretive payments of millions of pounds were allegedly made to officials supporting Qatar’s bid for the 2022 World Cup have led to calls for the Gulf state to…
“A public servant who accepts bribes is akin to a traitor,” Judge David Rozen read as he sentenced Ehud Olmert, Israel’s ex-prime minister, to six years in prison for corruption. But in real democracies…
“Monitory democracy” refers to the extra-parliamentary, para-legal, post-bureaucratic institutions of scrutiny that emerged as recently as the 1970s in Australia. Their evolution has swept us along in…
The old joke was that visitors to Queensland should turn their clock back one hour and their calendar back 30 years. There are indications state premier Campbell Newman wants to take Queensland back to…
The corruption scandals facing New South Wales politics are about as complex as they come. The sheer number of investigations, seemingly involving a conveyer belt of familiar faces, have made the question…
Political scandals, the perennial product of the grinding gears of greed and governance, proliferate in the age of digital media, the 24-hours news cycle and anti-corruption bodies with wide powers. Constant…
In 2004, students in the north Indian city of Meerut, Uttar Pradesh, started a club called Generation Nowhere. They met to discuss the hopelessness of their position as educated young men from provincial…
We read a lot these days about corruption, self-interest and personal tragedies. The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the first time explicitly considers climate change…
Today, the New South Wales Independent Commission into Corruption (ICAC) claimed its biggest political scalp in two decades. Liberal state premier Barry O’Farrell resigned after what he has described as…