It is just over ten years since the school autonomy program called Local Schools, Local Decisions commenced in NSW. It has been a lost decade. It was supposed to increased student results but high inequity in education continues with more bureaucracy, less central support for schools and bigger workloads for principals and teachers. The stated Continue reading »
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Pearls and Irritations has played a fundamental role in providing an internationally recognised and widely read platform where serious arguments can now challenge the shallow, rancorous Hong Kong denigration agenda advanced by the MWM. John Menadue reads exceptionally widely and with great understanding. By early 2021, he was inviting a range of writers from Hong Continue reading »
Our automated monitoring service has picked up a conversation about a superpower taking control of an island in Asia-Pacific… Continue reading »
So US-sanctioned, Hong Kong Chief Executive, John Lee, will not be allowed into the US to attend the forthcoming APEC annual conference. This is US unilateralism gone mad. We have seen it before, of course, with the US unilaterally refusing admission to national leaders it dislikes who wish to attend UN sessions. But there is Continue reading »
Gemma Arrowsmith , Mary Malone, Majid Mehdizadeh-Valoujerdy & Billy Brayshaw are going to be a part of the future of the BBC's Doctor Who.
After initially suggesting the cable published by The Intercept was inauthentic, Pakistani officials now claim it doesn’t reveal a conspiracy.
The post Pakistan Confirms Secret Diplomatic Cable Showing U.S. Pressure to Remove Imran Khan appeared first on The Intercept.
Western media has dismissed evidence of neo-Nazi influence in Ukraine by citing President Zelensky’s Jewish heritage. But new footage published by Zelensky shows the leader openly collaborating with a fascist ideologue who once pledged to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade…against Semite-led Untermenschen.” Ukrainian President Vlodymyr Zelensky has uploaded a video to his Telegram channel showing him holding court with one of the most notorious neo-Nazis in modern Ukrainian history: Azov Battalion founder Andriy Biletsky. […]
The post Zelensky holds court with Ukraine’s most notorious neo-Nazi first appeared on The Grayzone.
The post Zelensky holds court with Ukraine’s most notorious neo-Nazi appeared first on The Grayzone.
One of the most compelling images that came out of the Jan. 6 House committee hearings was of former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows slumped on his couch on the afternoon in question, disconsolately scrolling through his phone while Donald Trump’s angry mob stormed the Capitol. As the New York Times reported: [White House aide Cassidy] Hutchinson said around 2 p.m. or 2:05 p.m. that day, she went to Meadows’ office because she saw rioters were getting closer to breaching the Capitol. Meadows was on his couch, scrolling through his phone, as he had been that morning. “I said, ‘Hey, are you watching the TV, chief? … The rioters are getting really close. Have you talked to the president?’ He said, ‘No, he wants to be alone right now,'” she recalled.”I remember Pat saying to [Meadows], something to the effect of, ‘The rioters have gotten to the Capitol, Mark, we need to go down and see the president now.’ And Mark looked up at him and said, ‘He doesn’t want to do anything, Pat,'” Hutchinson said.
Overstating the power of algorithmic systems only serves to benefit the tech companies behind them.
The post AI Isn’t Banning Books in Iowa Schools. Republicans Are. appeared first on The Intercept.
The Band – A device your physical therapist wants you to use to increase joint flexibility.
Pink Floyd – A nickname for your rosacea.
Deep Purple – The color of your spider veins.
Blur – Your twenties and thirties.
The Smiths – What you call the three couples you socialize with whose names you can’t remember.
The Who – How you respond when someone uses their correct name.
Red Hot Chili Peppers – One of several spicy foods your gastroenterologist recommends you avoid.
Chuck Berry – One of the many cuts of meat your cardiologist says you should eat less; a fruit your endocrinologist says you should eat more.
Tool – Something you can’t find.
Alice Cooper – What you named your daughter; what she named her son.
Led Zeppelin – One of the many kinds of aircraft you refuse to fly in.
Van Halen – How you get a cab because you can’t remember your Uber login.
One of the key elements of the Georgia false statement criminal statute is 'knowing' misrepresentations are false
It doesn’t work for the GOP It’s pretty clear that Trump’s obsession with 2020 has hurt the party over the past two and a half years. Candidates for other offices want nothing more than to move on from that unpopular and unpleasant topic. Trump’s legal problems make that impossible and now he’s making it even worse: Hours after being indicted for his attempts to overturn the election results in Georgia, Donald Trump signaled that he is going to re-litigate the matter once more. This time, it will be part of his campaign to win the presidency, not retain it. Trump announced on his social media site that he would be holding a “major news conference” on Monday where he’d present a detailed and “irrefutable report” on voter fraud from three years ago. The post had all the whiffs of a Four Seasons Total Landscaping moment. And it quickly transported the Republican Party right back to a conversation it studiously has tried to avoid for nearly three years.
This deception seems to be becoming part of a deliberate strategy by Conservative Party HQ.
There is a familiar feeling here: existential dread, impending doom, a light dose of despair.
Kit Klarenburg delves into the brutality meted out during the tenure of former President Jair Bolsonar by Brazil's infamous Rural Indigenous Guard—an undercover, lethal elite police force clandestinely established by the CIA.
The post Bolsonaro’s Butchery: CIA Fingerprints Are All Over Brazil’s Indigenous Genocide appeared first on MintPress News.
If it’s about news coverage, Biden’s buried Donald Trump’s multiple indictments and ongoing court cases have one upside for Republicans: keeping President Joe Biden off the front pages. I’m skimming the news for Biden and not finding much. The inferno on Maui offers Biden a chance at some column inches and camera time, but not until next week: President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden will travel to Maui on Monday in the aftermath of the Hawaii wildfires, White House press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre announced on Wednesday. On Aug. 21, they will meet with first responders, survivors and government officials, she said. “In Maui, the President and First Lady will be welcomed by state and local leaders to see firsthand the impacts of the wildfires and the devastating loss of life and land that has occurred on the island, as well as discuss the next steps in the recovery effort,” Jean-Pierre said. Biden today celebrates the one-year anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act. But most of the coverage seems to be at The Guardian. NPR places Biden coverage far down the list of this morning’s stories.
On 24 May 2023, Open Rights Group (ORG) held an online roundtable to discuss proposals for the Online Safety Bill that ORG argues will amount to prior restraint. The Bill proposes that content deemed illegal under the legislation should be prevented from appearing on the platform, thus controlling expression and a form of censorship. Participants […]
Here's a listen to Big Finish's Colin Baker-starring 60th anniversary audio adventure, Doctor Who – Once and Future: Two's Company.
Jeffrey Yang’s latest book is Line and Light, a title that rhymes in a way with the title of his second collection, Vanishing-Line. Line and Light, his fourth full-length work, is sprawling, vast, like a city of poetry. It’s composed of five sections, all of them serial in form or spirit. The first and most ambitious, “Langkasuka,” spans sixty-three sections and a third of the book. It grows out of visits the poet took a decade ago to Kuala Lumpur, and takes its name from an ancient, creative utopia of a kingdom—one that disappeared, possibly because of self-induced catastrophe. No one knows. But the possibilities haunt the poem, and the poem’s poetics are all about haunting: about history and the pulse of the living individual, about the relationship between memory and the present, memory and the enduring song. Yang begins his poem with this couplet which, I think, beautifully stands in for the poetics he’s worked out of his entire career:
I open my eyes to forget
I close my eyes to remember
Smith paints a portrait. Willis, a landscape. Special counsel Jack Smith and Fulton County DA Fani Willis issued complementary indictments in the Republican conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. Dahlia Lithwick summarizes: There’s one other notable contrast between the two stories that will be unspooled regarding the very similar events that took place after Donald Trump learned he’d lost the election and decided he would win it through organized crime. Smith chose to tell the story of an abstraction, crimes against democracy and the peaceful transfer of power. Willis is telling a concrete and detailed story of crimes against voters and election workers; Black voters in particular, female Black election workers in specific. In effect, Trump is on trial in D.C. for trying to break democracy and, in Fulton County, Georgia, for trying to set aside Black votes. The two stories are deeply connected, but they are also two very distinct acts of violence against elections. Smith reminds us what the country nearly lost, and Willis recalls what Black voters have almost never won.
The Pentagon claims “no correlation” between U.S. training and coups, but research suggests the opposite could be true.
The post Niger Junta Appoints U.S.-Trained Military Officers to Key Jobs appeared first on The Intercept.