Sunday Night Safran
''Sunday Night Safran'' was a weekly radio programme on Australian youth radio station, Triple J, about "religion, politics and all things ethnic." It was hosted by John Safran and Catholic priest, Bob Maguire. It ran from 2005 to 2015. During the program's run, Safran and Fr Maguire were able to get interviews from people such as religious scholar Reza Aslan, Julian Assange's mother Christine, The Exorcist star Linda Blair, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Katherine Boo, philosopher and School of Life founder Alain de Botton, writer, retired prison doctor and psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple, longest-serving Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, West Memphis Three Damien Echols, detained Al Jazeera journalist Peter Greste, antitheist Christopher Hitchens, Dame Edna creator Barry Humphries, conspiracy theorist David Icke, television evangelist and exorcist Bob Larson, Serbian political activist Srđa Popović, former white supremacist skinhead Frank Meeink, pro-e ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Australia
Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a sovereign ''Sovereign'' is a title which can be applied to the highest leader in various categories. The word is borrowed from Old French , which is ultimately derived from the Latin , meaning 'above'. The roles of a sovereign vary from monarch, ruler or ... country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands. With an area of , Australia is the largest country by area in Oceania and the world's sixth-largest country. Australia is the oldest, flattest, and driest inhabited continent, with the least fertile soils. It is a megadiverse country, and its size gives it a wide variety of landscapes and climates, with deserts in the centre, tropical Forests of Australia, rainforests in the north-east, and List of mountains in Australia, mountain ranges in the south-east. The ancestors of Aboriginal Australians began arriving from south east Asia approx ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Alexander Downer
Alexander John Gosse Downer (born 9 September 1951) is an Australian former politician and diplomat who was leader of the Liberal Party from 1994 to 1995, Minister for Foreign Affairs from 1996 to 2007, and High Commissioner to the United Kingdom from 2014 to 2018. Downer was born in Adelaide, the son of Sir Alick Downer and the grandson of Sir John Downer. After periods working for the Bank of New South Wales and with the diplomatic service, he was appointed executive director of the Australian Chamber of Commerce in 1983. He also served as an advisor to Liberal leaders Malcolm Fraser and Andrew Peacock. Downer was elected to parliament at the 1984 federal election, winning the Division of Mayo in South Australia. He was added to the opposition frontbench in 1987. After the Coalition lost the 1993 election, John Hewson's position as leader of the Liberal Party came into question. Downer successfully challenged him for the leadership in May 1994, thus becoming L ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Jon Ronson
Jon Ronson (born 10 May 1967) is a British-American journalist, author, and filmmaker whose works include '' Them: Adventures with Extremists'' (2001), '' The Men Who Stare at Goats'' (2004), and ''The Psychopath Test'' (2011). He has been described as a gonzo journalist, becoming a '' faux-naïf'' character in his stories. He produces informal but sceptical investigations of controversial fringe politics and science. He has published nine books and his work has appeared in publications such as ''The Guardian'', '' City Life'' and ''Time Out''. He has made several BBC Television documentary films and two documentary series for Channel 4. Early life Ronson was born in Cardiff on 10 May 1967. He attended Cardiff High School and later worked for CBC Radio in Cardiff before moving to London to study for a media degree at the Polytechnic of Central London.Nathan BevanWho is Jon Ronson? WalesOnline.co.uk, retrieved 13 June 2011. Career Writing Ronson's first book, ''Clubb ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Joshua Oppenheimer
Joshua Lincoln Oppenheimer (born September 23, 1974) is an American-British film director based in Copenhagen, Denmark. He is known for his Oscar-nominated films ''The Act of Killing'' (2012) and ''The Look of Silence'' (2014), Oppenheimer was a 2014 recipient of the MacArthur fellowship and a 1997 Marshall Scholar. Life and career Oppenheimer was born to a Jewish family, in Austin, Texas, and grew up in and around Washington, D.C., and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Oppenheimer received a Bachelor of Arts (BA) ''summa cum laude'' in film-making from Harvard University and a PhD from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London, while studying on a Marshall Scholarship. He is Professor of Film at the University of Westminster. His first film ''The Entire History of the Louisiana Purchase'' (1997) won a Gold Hugo from the Chicago International Film Festival (1998). From 2004 to 2012, he produced a series of films in Indonesia. His debut feature fi ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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The Act Of Killing
''The Act of Killing'' ( id, Jagal, meaning "Butcher") is a 2012 documentary film about individuals who participated in the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–1966. The film is directed by Joshua Oppenheimer and co-directed by Christine Cynn and an anonymous Indonesian. It is a Danish-British-Norwegian co-production, presented by Final Cut for Real in Denmark and produced by Signe Byrge Sørensen. The executive producers were Werner Herzog, Errol Morris, Joram ten Brink, and Andre Singer. It is a Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM) project of the University of Westminster. ''The Act of Killing'' won the 2013 European Film Award for Best Documentary, the Asia Pacific Screen Award, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 86th Academy Awards. It also won best documentary at the 67th BAFTA awards. In accepting the award, Oppenheimer said that the United States and the United Kingdom have "collective responsibili ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Philip Nitschke
Philip Haig Nitschke (; born 8 August 1947) is an Australian humanist, author, former physician, and founder and director of the pro-euthanasia group Exit International. He campaigned successfully to have a legal euthanasia law passed in Australia's Northern Territory and assisted four people in ending their lives before the law was overturned by the Government of Australia. Nitschke was the first doctor in the world to administer a legal, voluntary, lethal injection, after which the patient activated the syringe using a computer. Nitschke states that he and his group are regularly subject to harassment by authorities. In 2015, Nitschke burned his medical practising certificate in response to what he saw as onerous conditions that violated his right to free speech, imposed on him by the Medical Board of Australia. Nitschke has been referred to in the media as "Dr Death" or "the Elon Musk of assisted suicide". Early life and career Nitschke was born in 1947 in Ardrossan, South ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Frank Meeink
Frank Meeink (born Francis Steven Bertoline; May 7, 1975) is a former white supremacist skinhead gang member in the United States. After a three-year stint in prison, he left the racist skinhead movement and now lectures against it. Early life Born in South Philadelphia, Meeink lived a violent and unpleasant childhood with a lack of a structured family.Powell, Caleb. The Nervous Breakdown. 15 January 2011. In his early life, he had no relationship with his biological father and had an abusive stepfather. Meeink's mother abused drugs and alcohol. As a teenager, Meeink was constantly bullied and taunted at school because his peers considered him to be an outcast. At age thirteen, Meeink was out with his cousin when he discovered the Neo-Nazi movement. Life in prison At 17, Meeink was arrested after he had nearly killed a man and had kidnapped another.Powell, Caleb. American History X-treme. 16 March 2010. 27 January 2013 Meeink used a gun in the kidnapping, which led to him being trie ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Srđa Popović (activist)
Srđa Popović ( sr-Cyrl, Срђа Поповић, born 1 February 1973) is a Serbian political activist. He was a leader of the student movement Otpor! that helped topple Serbian president Slobodan Milošević. After briefly pursuing a political career in Serbia, he established the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS) in 2003 and published '' Blueprint for Revolution'' in 2015. CANVAS has worked with pro-democracy activists from more than 50 countries, promoting the use of non-violent resistance in achieving political and social goals. In October 2017, he was elected Rector of the University of St Andrews, succeeding Catherine Stihler. Early life Popović was born in Belgrade, where both of his parents worked in television. His mother, TV anchor Vesna Nestorović (1944–2017) narrowly avoided being killed during the NATO bombing of state television in Belgrade in 1999. He played bass guitar in a goth rock band called BAAL, which was fronted by Andrej ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Bob Larson
Bob Larson (born May 28, 1944) is an American radio and television evangelist, and a pastor of Spiritual Freedom Church in Phoenix, Arizona. Larson has authored numerous books critical of rock music and Satanism. Life and career Larson was born in Westwood, Los Angeles, California, the son of Viola (née Baum) and Earl Larson. He was raised in McCook, Nebraska. Larson plays guitar; he has claimed his early experiences as a musician led to his concerns about occult and destructive influences in rock music. He would later incorporate his guitar playing into some of his sermons. In the 1960s, the focus of Larson's preaching centered mainly on the leftist political ideology, sexually suggestive lyrics, Eastern religious mysticism, and anti-social behavior of many of the era's rock musicians. Debates with Satanists During the late 1980s and into the 1990s, Larson repeatedly debated, interviewed, and confronted Satanists, during the period known as the Satanic panic. On two ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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David Icke
David Vaughan Icke (; born 29 April 1952) is an English conspiracy theorist and a former footballer and sports broadcaster. He has written over 20 books, self-published since the mid-1990s, and spoken in more than 25 countries. In 1990, Icke visited a psychic who told him he was on Earth for a purpose and would receive messages from the spirit world. This led him to claim in 1991 to be a "Son of the Godhead" and that the world would soon be devastated by tidal waves and earthquakes. He repeated this on the BBC show '' Wogan''. His appearance led to public ridicule. Books Icke wrote over the next 11 years developed his world view of a New Age conspiracy. Reaction to his endorsement of an antisemitic forgery, ''The Protocols of the Elders of Zion'', in ''The Robots' Rebellion'' (1994) and in ''And the Truth Shall Set You Free'' (1995) led his then publisher to decline further books, which he has self-published since then. Icke contends that the universe consists of "vibrationa ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Barry Humphries
John Barry Humphries (born 17 February 1934) is an Australian comedian, actor, author and satirist. He is best known for writing and playing his on-stage and television alter egos Dame Edna Everage and Sir Les Patterson. He is also a film producer and script writer, a star of London's West End musical theatre, a writer, and a landscape painter. For his delivery of dadaist and absurdist humour to millions, biographer Anne Pender described Humphries in 2010 as not only "the most significant theatrical figure of our time … utthe most significant comedian to emerge since Charlie Chaplin". Humphries' characters have brought him international renown, and he also appeared in numerous stage productions, films, and television shows. Originally conceived as a dowdy Moonee Ponds housewife who caricatured Australian suburban complacency and insularity, Dame Edna Everage has evolved over four decades to become a satire of stardom – a gaudily dressed, acid-tongued, egomaniacal, inte ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011) was a British-American author and journalist who wrote or edited over 30 books (including five essay collections) on culture, politics, and literature. Born and educated in England, Hitchens worked as a journalist with the ''New Statesman'' magazine in London in the 1970s after leaving Oxford. In the early 1980s he emigrated to the United States and wrote for ''The Nation'' and '' Vanity Fair''. Hitchens political views evolved greatly throughout his life. Originally describing himself as a democratic socialist, he was a member of various socialist organisations in his early life, including the International Socialists. Hitchens eventually no longer regarded himself as socialist, but continued to admire aspects of Marxism. He was critical of aspects of American foreign policy, including its involvement in Vietnam, Chile, and East Timor. However, he also supported the United States in the Kosovo War. After Hitchens ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |