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In the May 2023 Budget, Treasury caused a ‘big Australia’ furore by increasing its net migration forecast for 2022-23 from the 235,000 it published in the October 2022 Budget to 400,000. Net migration is the number of people, irrespective of citizenship or visa status, who arrive in Australia after being outside the country for more Continue reading »

Joe Biden isn’t coming to Australia. The good news is he hasn’t had a senior moment and forgotten all about an appointment with another interchangeable ‘fella down under’. The bad news is that the United States’ increasingly poisonous domestic politics and crises take priority over everything else, including the long-term security of the Indo-Pacific. To Continue reading »

Ever since the six-day war of 1967, when Israel occupied the whole of Jerusalem, a triumphant march of conquest, called ‘Jerusalem Day March’ takes over the Holy City. How would you feel if this was your home, your neighbourhood and you and your family were faced with hoards of religious fanatics, waving the Israeli flag, Continue reading »

Look at this nonsense: Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley says the results of voting in all 50 states should be announced on Election Night. Haley spoke to a crowd in Ankeny tonight and was asked if she feels elections are fair. “I don’t mind absentee voting and I don’t mind early voting, but you have to prove you are who you say you are and when those ballots come in, they need to verify signatures and count them as they come in,” Haley said. “There’s no reason any state can’t produce the results on Election Night. There’s no reason whatsoever.” Haley suggested “a lot of states” are doing things right and she urged the crowd to “keep the faith” about election integrity. “The good thing from COVID is we had a lot of election integrity laws that passed in multiple states,” Haley said.

We at HBO recognize that our audience’s values have evolved. Similar to the recent edits of Agatha Christie and Roald Dahl, we will be revising our older shows with dated attitudes and values that do not reflect the current state of the world. This network has a responsibility to protect our viewers from the narrow-minded opinions of the past, which is why our first sensitivity reading will be of a generation-defining classic from a bygone era, Entourage.

Entourage was very much a product of its time, and 2011 was an entirely different chapter in this nation’s history. We have since undergone vast shifts in our views on women, race, and Ed Hardy. We don’t want modern audiences to have to confront this potentially offensive content or wonder how this show, an unironic love letter to douchebags, was ever considered worthy of being broadcast on HBO.

Following up on Tom’s post below: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a horrifying bill Wednesday that will let the state take transgender minors away from their families if they are receiving gender-affirming care. The new law will allow the state to take custody of a child if they have been “subjected to or [are] threatened with being subjected to” gender-affirming care, which includes puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy. Florida courts could modify custody agreements from a different state if the minor is likely to receive gender-affirming care in that second state. The text refers to gender-affirming care as “sex-reassignment prescriptions or procedures” and qualifies this care as a form of “physical harm.” Medical facilities would have to give the state Department of Health a signed attestation that they neither provide gender-affirming care to any patients under the age of 18 nor refer people to providers that do. Their medical license renewal is contingent upon sending in this attestation.

Ryan Grim interviews Ismael Cortés, a member of Spain’s parliament, who was expelled from Turkey as he worked as an election observer.

The post Turkish Elections: Erdogan’s Government Arrested and Expelled International Election Observers appeared first on The Intercept.

As legislation is introduced to end Section 21 evictions, Lauren Crosby Medlicott talks to tenants who live in constant fear of homelessness Back in 2019, the government promised to ban Section 21 no-fault evictions, a move that would guarantee a landlord would no longer be able to evict a tenant from their tenancy without a […]

The Grayzone has obtained video recordings of well-connected figures within Moldova’s political and business community openly testifying to rank corruption within the country’s government and economy, while outlining schemes to enrich Western investors for an appropriate fee. The invasion of Ukraine placed the tiny country of Moldova on the immediate periphery of a conflict with global significance. Bordering Ukraine, counting hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russians as citizens, and home to the breakaway region of Transnistria, Moldova’s doggedly pro-Western government […]

The post Leaked recordings expose shocking state corruption in ‘US governed’ Moldova appeared first on The Grayzone.

Of brown shirts and Charles Bronsons Charlie Sykes writes at The Bulwark, “A few months ago, in a particularly dark mood, I wrote a column suggesting that cruelty was no longer the point in MAGA World…. Trump has already pivoted to brutality, and there is nothing subtle about it.” “As it turns out, I may have understated the case,” Sykes quips: They are not alone, you are not surprised to know. Stephen Crowder of “Louder with Crowder” weighed in on the killing of homeless Jordan Neely on a New York Subway, declaring, “The second that you are engaging in an activity where someone else is forced to make a decision to save their life or a life of their loved one, completely, by the way, not of their own volition, you’ve put them in that scenario, you forfeit your right to live.” In essence: When in doubt, take them out. Trump, Nikki Haley, and Ron DeSantis have all rushed to celebrate Daniel Perry, the man charged with killing Jordan Neely. But DeSantis raised the ante, by calling him a “Good Samaritan,” and raising money for his defense.

History was expunged from the national school curriculum more than a decade ago because, it was claimed, there was no interest in it. Evidently, the political establishment continues to fear that knowledge of their history might further empower young people, who are more interested in good governance than in the ethnic politics of elderly men reluctant to concede power.

‘paradoxical contrivances for intercrossing’ – Darwin  Archilochus ColubrisFrom the red-light districtsof pomegranatescomes ruby-throated Archilochuswith his...

María Gainza’s idea is that absorption is only one kind of attention: becoming distracted in the course of looking at something might be a sign of meaningful engagement. It’s when María’s mind wanders in front of a painting – or back to a painting – that we learn something interesting about her character.

The revolution was significantly different in each country it visited. The fearsome events unfolding in Vienna can’t be understood without taking into account the simultaneous eruptions in Hungary. The explosion in Berlin was touched off by news of the February Revolution in Paris, but took a quite different course.

Lucian Freud’s etched portraits look at first like mangled bits of realism but are in fact stealthy works of cubism: many selves, many facets, many moments in one. They display two kinds of time: the time it took to make the work, and the person the portrait anticipates as a result of that long observation. 

The British and American right differ in the weight they place on ideological purity. With a limited cast of characters – and an even smaller pool of funders – British conservatives can ill afford to divide their world into neoliberals and traditionalists. At NatCon London, the tirades about woke universities and pronouns often obscured political differences, but they can’t conceal them completely. 

The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 11 (Friday 19 May 2023)

The tone of commentary both internationally and within opposition circles in Turkey was badly affected by wishful thinking. The selection of a candidate who was clearly not a match for Erdoğan will come under examination, but the more serious problem was the absence of a good choice.

Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 11 (Friday 19 May 2023)

Mária Bartuszová made around five hundred sculptures, her productivity aided by her preferred material, plaster. The great majority of her works are plaster casts – and not just any sort. Plaster has been used for millennia, but very few pieces have the purity and refinement of surface Bartuszová achieved.

A general rule about rules is that one rule breeds another rule developed to catch an exception to the first rule, and so (potentially) ad infinitum, until there are so many darn rules that nobody can be bothered to grasp or obey most of them.

 ‘Michael’ (Bradley) and ‘Field’ (Cooper) were distraught to be revealed as two people and, more specifically, as two women: ‘the report of lady-authorship,’ Bradley wrote, ‘will dwarf & enfeeble our work at every turn . . . And we have many things to say the world will not tolerate from a woman’s lips.’ But what did they want to say?