Despite a strong public opinion against the execution of Nguyen Tuong Van by the Singaporean government, the Howard government and the opposition have washed their hands clean. Their hands are now clean so they can pursue further the business interests of Australian companies, with their Singaporean counterpart, ready to shake hands to close some deals.
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Monthly Archives: November 2005
Harassing the little guy
A Waverley Council ranger tells a street musician to move on because the management of Eastgate Shopping Centre (Spring Street, Bondi Junction) does not like people busking in a public area. They called the ranger when they realised that the could not evict a street musician from land that is not theirs. The management representative claimed that shop owners complained of noise, as a lame excuse to victimise a musician serenading the public. In cases like these, usually there is no complaint, just concocted stories emanating from the centre management.
Death penalty applied to the wrong people?
There must be something wrong with a system that sentences people to death over heroin or other illicit drugs. Especially when the sentence is applied blindly, disregarding any extenuating circumstances. In the case of Nguyen Tuong Van, he agreed to move the drugs from Vietnam to Australia in order to pay the debts of a brother who owed money to the wrong people. In two weeks time, he will be paying with his own life.
Without in anyway diminishing the horrible effects of drug addiction on the addicts and society, it may seem to be some kind of an imbalance to some people that crimes such as murder and extortion do not automatically attract the death penalty in Singapore. Neither does corruption (the higher the rank in governemnt the lower the penalty?).
While Nguyen’s life is seemingly facing an untimely end, the Australian government seems ready to turn a blind eye to the fate of one of its citizens at the hands of a corrupt and totalitarian government which seeks to implement an antiquated and barbaric system of law (not far from the Islamic sharia law?). Maybe the Australian government has been too careful not to upset their Singaporean counterparts to promote the push for a merger between Qantas and Singapore Airlines?
Fragments
An exhibition of photographs by Jackson Ellis, a photographer who has lived and worked in Dublin, Sydney and Seoul. The exhibition is opening today at the alpha gallery in Namdaemun, Seoul. Wish I could go there.
Back To Normal
After nearly two weeks of chaos on the agit8.org server, things are finally back to normal. Two weeks ago, due to network disruptions, the agit8.org server had to be physically relocated to another connection, which is a little more stable and less prone to disputes. Having left the server alone for the best part of two years, I could not remember exactly how things were configured or where things were on the filesystem. This had me stumped for a while as Apache just refused to serve the other virtual hosts in its configuration.
It did not help that the server, at the new premises, had to be put behind a router and firewall, which meant more configurations had to be changed. Previously, the server was sitting as the network gateway. I took this opportunity to also reconfigure and update a few things on the server, such as openSSL, etc to the latest versions.
Thank you all for your patience, everything is now back to normal (and running).
Apologies
Of late, there have been problems with the server and a fix is on the way soon. It began with a severed connection to the internet which precipitated the relocation of the server to another connection which promises easier administration. So far everything is working as they should, except for the site hosting side of things. This situation is far from satisfactory and will be rectified as soon as possible.
We apologise for any inconvenience caused.