US imperialism in action: An audit-based appraisal of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq

This paper drawing from audit reports reflects upon the post-Iraq war administration the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). It argues that the CPA’s compliance with basic levels of decent public administration were akin to Guantanamo’s compliance with basic levels of natural justice. The audit reports demonstrate that the CPA was a chaotic administration which spent billions without proper controls or procedures and left precious Iraqi oil revenues open to fraudulent acts. The CPA failed to comply with its obligations under UN resolutions. It identifies the geopolitical/economic implications of the US government which was partly motivated by economic concerns but it was also motivated by political concerns—the imposition of US hegemony. It then turns to the broader economic imperatives of the falling rate of profit and the imposition of neoliberalism (market fundamentalism).

Venus infers

These poems mark the fault lines of myth, dream and memory, of a doubled identity emerging from the clash of war, desire and the cacophony of the city. 1974/Dead Sister , a narrative poem with a cast that includes Lewis Carroll’s Alice, Freud’s Dora, the Lady of Shalott, Ophelia, Esther, female cowboys and other deposed goddesses is ‘an autobiography’ of an imaginary dead twin. Alev Adil delineates the traces of a sense of displacement, but while the poems mark those frenetic uncertainties and erasures they celebrate the plenitude of new stories, epistemologies and possibilities born out of falling into fracture (the fracture of memory, gender, identity, culture) more than they mourn any loss. Venus Infers is haunted by the deities of ancient Greek myths and their contemporary manifestations. Eurydice is hiding out in Hackney, sometimes glimpsed on the Jubilee Line; Ariadne remembers her ancient palace as she prowls the endless corridors of a London hotel; Penelope still waits for peace in the ruins of Marash/Varosha. Cyprus often features in these poems, both as a landscape for myth and as a site for contemporary, and contested, memories. [From the Author]

Horsham Properties Group Ltd v Clark: possession - mortgagee's right or discretionary remedy?

Comments on the Chancery Division decision in Horsham Properties Group Ltd v Clark on whether a mortgagee's exercise of its contractual right, on the mortgagor falling into arrears, to appoint receivers such that the property could be sold and possession obtained without triggering the court's discretionary powers pursuant to the Administration of Justice Act 1970 s.36 infringed the mortgagor's rights under the European Convention on Human Rights 1950 Protocol 1 art.1. Considers the implications of proposed reforms recasting the mortgagee's right to possession as a discretionary remedy. [From Legal Journals Index]