果冻传媒

This is just a friendly reminder to all incoming students to check out the Welcome to 果冻传媒 pages, where you can enrol online, sign up for your student ID card, get your 果冻传媒 email and login details, etc. Remember, you must enrol so that you're ready to start your course at the beginning of term--1 October!

Undergraduates also have an induction on the 1st October.

A Pinpoint Politics article by Helen Jane Martin

Cases of deaths caused by US drone strikes are rarely far from front pages, with high-profile insurgents regularly falling victim to their new mechanised enemy. Yet, despite this publicity, reliable statistics are unavailable on the number of strikes, the number of deaths, and, importantly, the locations of strikes. This is not only down to the CIA’s secrecy concerning the operation, but also because in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), where most of the attacks are taking place, the environment for outsiders and foreigners is nothing short of hostile. The most comprehensive effort to scale the impact of the new drone war has been carried out by the based on the strikes. However, the organisation admits that this effort is still not the full story, stating that it only gives best approximations of locations and its details of drone attacks are reliant on media organizations for their information.

A Pinpoint Politics article by Brendan Pastor

"Well, we’re going to start in a couple weeks with our budget adjustment bill. The first step is we’re going to deal with collective bargaining for all public employee unions, because you use divide and conquer. So for us, the base we’ve got for that is the fact that we’ve got – budgetarily we can’t afford not to. If we have collective bargaining agreements in place, there’s no way not only the state but local governments can balance things out.” ()

The above quote by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was in response to a question posed by billionaire and Republican Party donor Diane Hendricks, who asked if Walker could make Wisconsin a “completely red [Republican] state, and work on these unions’, transforming his state into “a right-to-work” state. Accepting Walker’s poorly phrased and politically slanted answer, Hendricks would go on to contribute over $510,000 to the Walker re-election campaign, his single biggest individual donor.

A Pinpoint Politics article by Christopher Ogunmodede

In the wake of former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s failed six-point Syria peace plan and the Assad’s regime not-so-subtle admission that it possesses chemical weapons, the stakes of a Western-led military intervention have increased significantly in less than a week. A report by the Royal United Services Institute noting the possibility of chemical weapons being used or stolen, not to mention the increased capability of the opposition forces as well as the geopolitical implications of the conflict spreading to and gripping other nations, concludes that a military intervention may take place to prevent the conflict from spilling beyond Syrian borders. As the ongoing crisis continues to manifest itself in the international realm, many pro-intervention voices in academia, the media, think-tanks and policymaking circles have decided that a military intervention will be the pill that cures all that currently ails the conflict-ridden country. John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the United Nations under George W. Bush, has been making the rounds of Fox News and other right-wing press outlets decrying the administration’s response to the conflict.

Dr James Brassett and Dr Nick Vaughan-Williams have recently published a Special Issue of Alternatives, entitled: 'Governing Traumatic Events'. The volume draws together leading critical scholars on the politics of traumatic events, covering subjects like 9-11, Mumbai, and the Norway Massacre, as well as the ideologies of 'response' and 'resilience' that predominate. This publication is part of an ongoing research project on 'Resilience and the Politics of Security' that seeks to interrogate contemporary practices of civil contingency planning in the UK and abroad.