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MEMBERS of the community can now have their say on the Dorrigo Escarpment Great Walk, with the environmental review of the project now available online. The $22 million project involves a proposed multi-day walk that will connect visitors to Gumbaynggirr Country and the wonders of Gondwana rainforests. Advertise with News of The Area today. It’s...

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BELLINGEN Shire’s 2025 Community Awards, recognising individuals and groups who have enhanced the local government area, were presented at a ceremony at Bellingen Memorial Hall on Thursday, 23 January. A Welcome to Country from Honey Cairns and a dance performance by The Budaabang Bari Dance Group began the evening. Advertise with News of The Area...

The post Bellingen Shire recognises its outstanding citizens appeared first on News Of The Area.

SUNDAY 6 April will see people of all ages plunge into the ocean to freestyle, breast-stroke or doggy paddle around the Jetty in the 2025 Coffs Harbour Ocean Swims. For nearly three decades, the swimming event has grown from a local gathering of swimmers to one of the region’s most anticipated events. Advertise with News...

The post Getting swim fit for the iconic Coffs Harbour Ocean Swims appeared first on News Of The Area.

PREPARATIONS for the Dorrigo Rotary Dahlia Ball began in December and are full steam ahead. Inspired by the success of the Dorrigo Rotary Mother’s Day Ball and Dahlia Day, the event will take place on Saturday 8 February at 6.30pm in the Dorrigo Community Hall. Advertise with News of The Area today. It’s worth it...

The post Dorrigo Rotary ready to roll with Dahlia Ball fundraiser appeared first on News Of The Area.

COFFS Harbour branch of the Australian Plants Society (APS) has organised a walk in honour of the late Frank Kennedy, a carer of the natural environment in and around Coffs Harbour. Mr Kennedy passed away in November 2024 at Mater Christi Aged Care, aged 80. Advertise with News of The Area today. It’s worth it...

The post Walk commemorates the environmental work of Frank Kennedy appeared first on News Of The Area.

1975. Smack in the middle of the Me Decade. President Gerald R. Ford was stumbling around the White House after taking the reins from Richard M. Nixon, who had made his Watergate-weary exit the previous year to slink back to his castle by the sea (not unlike mad King Lear). Former Nixon advisors John Mitchell, Haldeman, and John Ehrlichman were convicted and sentenced for their involvement in the Watergate coverup. The country was in a recession, and people were lining up for hours at the gas pumps due to an OPEC-imposed oil embargo. And yet…were we not entertained? The top 5 highest-grossing films of the year (domestically) were Jaws, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Shampoo, and Dog Day Afternoon. Saturday Night Live premiered in October (as NBC’s Saturday Night), hosted by a coked-out George Carlin. The top 5 TV shows were All in the Family, Laverne & Shirley, Maude, The Bionic Woman, and Rich Man, Poor Man. People were spending their hard-earned bucks on Pet Rocks (don’t ask). Those were heady days. Yeah, I know. “OK, Boomer”. I was all of 19 years old in 1975. That was the year I visited L.A.

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

“The cemeteries are full of indispensable people.” In one form or another, this observation has been made many times over the last century or more. What is true of people is true of nations. In the past 25 years or so it was often claimed (and , admittedly, often denied) that, in the modern world, […]

As Josh Marshall said in this earlier post, this is almost certainly illegal and there needs to be immediate legal action to stop it. We have no idea who these people are, whether they are competent or if they have nefarious goals. It’s literally just Musk’s boys taking over the very closely held US payment system. It could not be more dangerous. I wonder if Republicans are really a-ok with this. Do they all think Musk is a genius godhead who can be trusted? Or are they just cowards who are so afraid of losing their seats that they won’t question Dear Leader and his henchmen? Let’s just say I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for them to take a stand. Update — It gets worse: Update II — The New York Times now has the story: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave representatives of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency full access to the federal payment system late on Friday, according to three people familiar with the change, handing Elon Musk and the team he is leading a powerful tool to monitor and potentially limit government spending.

We now know that Trump’s order to the military to “turn on the valve” and give southern California all the water it could ever need resulted in the Army Corps of Engineers releasing a bunch of water into a flood plain without notice almost causing a catastrophe. Oh, and the water would not have flowed to Southern California in any case. The whole thing is insane but apparently we have the military carrying out insane orders that they must know make no sense which is extremely troubling. And now we have Musk lying like Trump to his millions of followers about this ridiculous stunt. The LA Times article is a bullshit snowjob by the way. But even with that the truth can gleaned if you read the whole thing. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has dramatically increased the amount of water flowing from two dams in Tulare County, sending massive flows down river channels toward farmlands in the San Joaquin Valley. Federal records show that water releases from Terminus Dam at Lake Kaweah and Schafer Dam at Lake Success jumped early Friday morning. The sudden increase occurred four days after President Trump said on social media that the U.S.

AUSTRALIAN regional centres, including Coffs Harbour, are benefiting from stronger business investment growth than capital cities, according to new business lending data from Westpac. Advertise with News of The Area today. It’s worth it for your business. Message us. Phone us – (02) 4981 8882. Email us – media@newsofthearea.com.au Westpac lending to businesses in regional...

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At the 2025 Jerusalem (Al Quds) Peace Prize ceremony in the Melbourne Town Hall on Friday evening February 21, this year’s award will go to Wendy Turner, trade unionist, ageless social justice activist and long term advocate for the human rights of all Palestinians. From a record list of ninety two nominations, Wendy Turner more Continue reading »

There’s an abundance of interesting theatre out there in the non-Anglo worlds that could inspire, amuse and surprise Australian audiences. Yet, we seldom get to see those plays. For this article, let’s define Anglo as continental Europe, UK, US, Australia and Russia (eg, Chekhov). When I started reviewing theatre in 1975, mostly plays on our Continue reading »

By grappling with the history of the story of the adulteress, we are reminded to approach Scripture critically, aware of how it has been shaped and reshaped to suit power. In doing so, we ensure that its calls for justice, equity, and mercy are not silenced but remain central to our understanding of faith and Continue reading »

The new liberal consensus, born of a shared “exhaustion,” is that it is time to “tune out,” or “take a break,” or simply close one’s eyes and ears. I simply cannot figure American liberals and “progressives”—’pwogwessives,’” as the late Alexander Cockburn used to call them. They do nothing when faced with calamitous events and call Continue reading »

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Turning the White House into a chop shop Anand Giridharadas’s The Ink this morning announces: Musk’s hostile takeover It’s hard to know just how destructive this will be in the long run, but for now, this is arguably the most troubling development in a day of extremely troubling developments. Elon Musk appears to be trying to do to the federal government what he did at Twitter/X: massively disrupt its functioning and drive out experienced employees not on board with his transformations and his personality cult. [Tusk] Musk bought his way into the White House complex and now means to, as they say, “have his way” with the federal government. If you haven’t heard, Musk locked Office of Personnel and Management (OPM) civil servants “out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees” (Reuters): The two officials, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said some senior career employees at OPM have had their access revoked to some of the department’s data systems.

With the Democratic Party reeling from its losses, the DNC is voting on a new chair. Will it choose to reform its top-down model?

The post The Democratic National Committee Is Undemocratic. That’s by Design. appeared first on The Intercept.

Whole Foods workers are made whole, corporate criminals face the music, private equity loses its painkillers, and an empire of pain gets a taste of its own medicine.

Faced with a low budget, Doctor Who has made some surprising and creative decisions over the years. Will the show be returning to those days?

The day I watched Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, there was a rare red weather alert where I live in central Scotland. The night before, I had gone to the supermarket and found an end-of-days scene that gave me flashbacks to March 2020. Lone shoppers lined the aisles in preparation for a Government-mandated 24-hour indoors, with […]

Labour’s housing strategy makes a dysfunctional system bigger. We need systemic change. By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 26th January 2025 Build baby, build. That’s about the intellectual limit of the government’s housing strategy. Millions are under-housed, so let’s “bulldoze” the planning system and build more homes. But it’s not nearly so simple. As […]