Malaria’s not the only surprise comeback of 2023. Gold heists are still a thing: Police in Canada are investigating one of the largest gold heists in the country’s history, after more than C$20m ($15m; £12m) of the precious metal and other valuable goods were stolen from Toronto’s airport [this past April]. […] In a brazen pilferage, a “high-value container” disappeared while it was being transported to a cargo holding facility near Canada’s busiest airport. Authorities say the thieves gained access to the public side of a warehouse near Toronto Pearson International Airport that was unmanned by airport security. The theft, which is still under investigation, was an isolated and “very rare” incident, police say. While a heist of that magnitude is indeed rare, a look at Canadian history shows it’s not the first. The Toronto Pearson International Airport has often been used as a hub for gold mined in the province of Ontario, and in September 1952 it was the scene of a mysterious heist. Back then, Pearson was known by another name: Malton Airport.
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Is it the Tale or Tail End? Coming to the end of my European journey I have waved goodbye to R&H and will follow them back to the outback in a few days. I am not sure what to make of my time away from Broken Hill and how …
This NY Times piece analyzes Trump’s long-standing habit of obstructing justice. The man who claims that everyone else is cheating has always been a cheater and a cover-up artist. He is completely unethical and immoral. By now you know the new charges in the superseding indictment. He tried to have the surveillance tapes destroyed and he worked to make sure his henchmen wouldn’t say anything. They did and now they are under federal indictment. Trump has always done this: “Demanding that evidence be destroyed is the most basic form of obstruction and is easy for a jury to understand,” said Mr. Goldstein, who is now a white-collar defense lawyer at the firm Cooley. “It is more straightforwardly criminal than the obstructive acts we detailed in the Mueller report,” he said. “And if proven, it makes it easier to show that Trump had criminal intent for the rest of the conduct described in the indictment.” The accusation about Mr.
This is interesting… Dance, Ron, dance. Megyn isn’t quick enough to throw back in his face the long-standing GOP view of small government and the private sector being completely independent from the state. His diversion from that ideology is very Trumpian: the only rule that corporations need to follow is that they must show total fealty to … him. There’s a word for that and it starts with F and ends with ism.
Trump discusses the surveillance tapes He’s at a loss on this one. His excuse is lamer than usual: “These were my tapes that we gave to them,” Trump told conservative radio host John Fredericks. “These were security tapes. We handed them over to them. … I’m not even sure what they’re saying.” That’s a non-sequitur. Yes, they were his tapes. It’s what he ordered his henchman to do with them that was criminal. The Department of Justice alleged that Trump and Nauta had asked De Oliveira to delete the footage from Mar-a-Lago, so the video would not get into the hands of a grand jury. The new court documents claimed De Oliveira and Nauta were captured on surveillance video moving boxes that may have contained documents with classified markings before DOJ and FBI officials visited the property to collect subpoenaed items. It also alleged that in June 2022, on the same day that the DOJ emailed Trump’s attorney another subpoena for surveillance video, De Oliveira had a private conversation with an employee in an audio closet during which he asked how long a server containing the video kept its footage.
In 2017, Pearls and Irritations had a half a million views. By the end of 2022 we had more than 5.3 million views and we have already surpassed 3.3 million views heading into the second half of 2023. We receive more than 400,000 monthly views, and frequently many more. Our voice and reach is expanding. Continue reading »
The Queensland government is vigorously promoting coal’s social licence. Heat waves are clearly linked to global warming. The war in Ukraine is destroying the environment as well as people. ‘Coal royalties help pay for the Cairns hospital expansion’ ‘Everyone benefits from coal royalties [and] this ensures Queenslanders are compensated fairly from the earnings mining companies Continue reading »
Australia must carefully monitor US domestic developments as a barometer of longer term risks to the reliability of our “great and powerful friend”, and to avoid being drawn into a US war against China. But the biggest lesson from the political polarisation in the US is that it is better to have lower overall economic Continue reading »
“One of the most extraordinary moments in politics in the last five years has been watching Anthony Albanese, notionally from the left of Labour, adopt, without any internal democracy within the Labor Party, without any public investigation of it, adopt wholeheartedly Scott Morrison’s AUKUS plans… It’s perhaps one of the most extraordinary betrayals of the Continue reading »
The appointment of Chris Barrett to head the Productivity Commission puts its Trade and Assistance Review under the spotlight. While it has become commonplace in recent years to ignore the PC’s regular evisceration of anything that smacks of market intervention, it has this year chosen to target the very policy platform on which the Albanese Continue reading »
Criticism of Kathryn Campbell’s appointment a year ago to a $900,000 a year job to assist with implementation of the AUKUS agreement is mostly based on hindsight following the adverse comments about her performance in DHS and DSS by the Robodebt Royal Commission. To be fair to those who made that decision, it is important Continue reading »
Despite the adoption in early May this year of a new development plan by the last Timorese government, incoming Prime Minister Xanana Gusmão has declared that his government will implement the Strategic Development Plan adopted when he was Prime Minister in 2011. His calls for unity ring very hollow when he ignores the serious work Continue reading »
A new US warship has been ushered into service in Sydney. The ship is called the USS Canberra to honour the military union of the United States and Australia, and, if that’s still too subtle for you, it has a literal star-spangled kangaroo affixed to its side. That’s right: the first US warship ever commissioned Continue reading »
In the next hour of the Doctor Who 60th Anniversary multimedia event, Doom's Day sees the deadly assassin meeting up with K-9.
As the fall quarter of my final year at the University of Georgia got underway in 1973, I was on the staff of The Red & Black, the student daily newspaper. I was the co-news editor that fall, but still … Continue reading
This week the House held a hearing on UFOs Not content with chasing phantom “Biden Crime Family” investigations, the Republicans decided to take a spin in a spaceship: David Grusch, the former US intelligence officer who claims that the US government is harboring “intact and partially intact” and “non-human” pilots, appeared in Washington, under oath, to repeat the same. The US government conducted a “multi-decade” program which collected, and attempted to reverse-engineer, crashed UFOs, Grusch told the oversight committee. He added that unnamed federal agencies had even recovered “biologics” from these craft, which he described as “non-human”. Moreover, Grusch, who led analysis of unexplained anomalous phenomena (UAP) within a US Department of Defense agency until 2023, said he had encountered “people who have been harmed or injured” in the course of the government’s efforts to keep this alien program secret. Grusch told the committee that after going public with his allegations he had feared for his life.
He reluctantly endorses mail-in votes but says “you’re never going to get an honest vote… it’s disgraceful.” As usual, he will accept the results if it goes his way.
A Southern man don’t need them around, anyhow Ala-by God-bama! “In an echo of mid-century southern defiance of school desegregation, the Yellowhammer State’s Republican-controlled legislature defied the conservative-dominated Court’s directive to redraw its congressional map with an additional Black-majority district,” Adam Serwer explains in The Atlantic: Openly defying a Supreme Court order is rare—almost as rare as conservative justices recognizing that the Fifteenth Amendment outlaws racial discrimination in voting. Under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, states are sometimes required to draw districts with majority-minority populations. This requirement exists because after Reconstruction, one of the methods southern states used to disenfranchise their Black populations was racially gerrymandering congressional districts so that Black voters could not affect the outcome of congressional elections. Earlier this year, Alabama asked the Supreme Court to further weaken the Voting Rights Act so as to preserve its racial gerrymander.
Also, the IRS proves its worth and hungry kids get lunch.
The morphing anti-woke war Another of the downsides to the steady withering of “X” is the former bird platform’s function as a town square where professional and amateur media critics could find an audience, complains Dan Froomkin of Press Watch. “Political reporters at our leading news organizations routinely put a thumb on the scale in favor of the far right – both by failing to call out its racist and increasingly homophobic nature, and by adopting right-wing frames in reporting current events,” Froomkin writes. He offers a short list of recent stories in which major media outlets tiptoe around the increasingly overt racist and homophobic impulses behind conservative actions and rhetoric. “The right-wing’s anti-woke war against trans people has now — as was entirely predictable — morphed into a war on any expression of gender or sexuality that isn’t Biblically-approved procreative sex between a man and a woman,” Froomkin posted to the X site on Friday. Slippery, meet Slope: The Washington Post story about the homophobic attack on libraries that I mentioned above is just one example.
As the Doctor Who 60th Anniversary Specials loom closer, we celebrate the work of Catherine Tate & her run as Donna Noble, MVP companion.
We have continually noted the tendency of Sraffians to subordinate the study of the substantive nature of economic phenomena to the requirements of logical rigor, and for Sraffians rigor equals GET (General Equilibrium Theory), the simultaneous determination of endogenous economic variables. The marriage of Sraffian economics and GET is not a promising avenue for studying […]