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PRAISING the quality of the fish exhibits, judge Mark Robinson took his time admiring all entries in the Australian Koi Association (AKA) Mid North region chapter in its major show of the year in Coffs Harbour. A sanke koi owned and bred by Greg Collins from Arrawarra Headland was finally declared the Coffs Harbour Koi...

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DORRIGO branch of the United Hospital Auxiliaries (UHA) of NSW has reflected on a successful year of fundraising for hospital equipment and thanked the local community for its support. The volunteer group donated a Hi Lo adjustable bed and four electric recliner chairs worth $12,029 to Dorrigo Multi Purpose Service (MPS) in the past financial...

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LEONARD Ale is back working at Costa Berries in Corindi to build up his finances to send home to the Solomon Islands, where he supports a school. This is his second placement with the company. Advertise with News of The Area today. It’s worth it for your business. Message us. Phone us – (02) 4981...

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ChiLL, Choices in Later Life, presents its next seminar as part of Dying to Know Day at The Shoreline Retirement Village on Tuesday 8 August. The free program typically goes for two hours and ends with a panel discussion, followed by a smorgasbord of takeaway resources for participants. Advertise with News of The Area today....

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Overthrowing democracy is not like a health care debate or a highway bill A good piece by Mark Z Barabak in the LA Times: Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. That is an incontrovertible fact. And yet for many Republicans — including most of those seeking the party’s 2024 nomination — Trump’s irrefutable loss and direct responsibility for the Jan. 6 insurrection are a verity they dodge and duck. At least right now. Florida’s flailing governor, Ron DeSantis offers a prime example. The won’t-back-down-culture warrior, who gleefully stoops to swat at teachers and transgender people, meekly tucks his tail when it comes to Trump’s Big Lie and Jan. 6. DeSantis won’t say if he believes President Biden was duly elected and suggests it’s wrong to call the assault on the Capitol “a plan to somehow overthrow the government of the United States” — though how else would you define a violent attempt to overturn the result of a free and fair election? South Carolina Sen.

If Albanese is such a buddy of Biden’s, why is Assange still in jail? Especially after our titanic strategic favours. Julian Assange is in his fourth year in Britains Belmarsh Prison. If the current appeal fails, he will be shackled and driven off in a prison van and flown across the Atlantic on a CIA Continue reading »

The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age have published serious allegations about millions of dollars of Australian government funding for Offshore Processing Centres finding their way through contractors to bank accounts controlled by South Pacific politicians. This comes on top of a history of criticism by the Auditor-General on how providers were selected and contracts Continue reading »

One of the great claims for representative democracy and federations is that they provide a uniquely successful way of dynamically negotiating, rather than suppressing, social differences and tensions. So, when it appears to be failing to do that in one of the world’s oldest and most successful democracies it is worth asking “why has this Continue reading »

Imagine encountering an enemy and, as it starts to reveal its full array of tactics and capabilities, a feeling of ice-cold fear runs through your chest. In an instant, you realise that you are out-matched; you’ve been out-witted, and defeat is a real possibility. As has occurred so often in military history, the threat assessment Continue reading »

Australia’s climate and energy minister Chris Bowen says the extreme weather events of recent years, and the heatwaves sweeping the globe in this northern summer, show that the world has already failed to prevent a climate emergency. “To be frank, it’s too late to avoid the climate emergency,” Bowen said in a speech to the Continue reading »

Due to the entrenched English class system, research has shown that the strong familial persistence of social status across generations has not changed in the UK across 400 years of accumulated data. With growing inequality and the emergence of ultra-wealthy and privileged classes in Australia – are we following the same path? Over the past Continue reading »

“It’s like arriving at a bus station at five minutes to midnight, in the middle of a bustling city, dressed only in your undies”. That’s my friend’s rather odd male-centric take on reaching seventy years of age. But let’s go with it – for now. I’m not sure you arrive anywhere really, only in the Continue reading »

China is eschewing the former European Central Bank chief’s pledge to ‘do whatever it takes’ to stabilise via monetary easing. For weeks now, global markets have ricocheted between excitement over a Chinese stimulus boom and disappointment that Beijing was taking its sweet time to jolt a slowing economy. It’s now clear that Xi Jinping’s team Continue reading »

At the time of the 2022 survey, 60.5 percent of our staff identified as white and 35 percent identified as people of color.

The post The Intercept’s 2022 Annual Staff Demographic Survey appeared first on The Intercept.

He sounds a little uhm — over-stimulated to me. Meanwhile, one of the most right wing members of congress doesn’t care for this idea that slavery was actually beneficial for the enslaved: And …. DeSantis, of course, goes after Donalds: Education Commissioner Manny Diaz, Jr. affirmed to superintendents Wednesday afternoon that the standards will be approved in their current form. Responding to Donalds, Diaz slammed the congressman as “supposedly conservative” and part of the federal government trying to “dictate Florida’s education standards.” “This new curriculum is based on truth,” he said. “We will not back down from teaching our nation’s true history at the behest of a woke @WhiteHouse, nor at the behest of a supposedly conservative congressman.” Jeremy Redfern, the press secretary for Gov. Ron DeSantis, also called Donalds a “supposed conservative.” “Supposed conservatives in the federal government are pushing the same false narrative that originated from the @WhiteHouse,” Redfern said.

We realize there are a lot of educational toys out there, particularly those that teach STEM skills (science, technology, engineering, and math). In today’s crowded marketplace, it can be tough to know what will keep your children entertained and on track to become the next engineer, chemist, coder, or tech CEO.

But what if they want to grow up to be a writer, artist, lawyer, therapist, or—dear god—a teacher? Not on our watch. Our new line of toys will keep your little Musks from falling into the hands of Big History and Social Work.

As I write this, CNN is reporting that Trump’s lawyers are meeting with the Special Counsel today as the Grand Jury has convened in DC. Buckle up. Meanwhile, here’s Trump caterwauling last night. It would appear he knew …. something: Lol! “We’ll have fun on the stand with all of these people that say the Presidential Election wasn’t Rigged and Stollen. THE TRIAL OF THE CENTURY!!!” he declared, spelling “stolen” as he often does, as “stollen,” which is actually a popular German Christmastime dessert.

“To serve Man,” indeed “The Beat with Ari Melber” on Wednesday featured a segment in which astrophysicist Adam Frank offered skeptical commentary on the congressional UFO/UAP hearings. In her wrap-up, MSNBC’s Katie Phang quipped that she got her information on aliens from a “documentary” called Independence Day. I like a good movie about aliens as much as the next person, but they are movies. The Twitter/Xitter/whatever comments on the hearings were withering. Most ran along the lines of, “So aliens travel here possibly from hundreds of light years away only to crash? Repeatedly?” Perhaps what we need more than a congressional hearing on UFOs/UAPs is one on the credulity pandemic.

Readers have thought that Waugh’s books divided on much more rudimentary lines: the good ones, which are funny, and the bad ones, which are pious. There is the string of brilliant, brittle social comedies in the 1930s, and then there is whatever started happening with the publication in 1945 of Brideshead Revisited.

With her insistence on renegotiating power dynamics between the sexes, claiming her right to sexual pleasure, and earning her own money, Alysoun can sound not unlike a second-wave feminist. Yet she doesn’t fit neatly into any ideology. The first word she speaks in the Canterbury Tales is ‘experience’, and it is her specific experience of marriage that gives her authority.

Han Kang’s story is propelled by antinomies. Here is a dead language, Greek, and there is the ‘unbearably alive’ Korean. Here is a philosopher, there a poet; one unrequited love, another love one cannot requite; a deaf woman who reads lips and a mute woman who writes with her fingertips. It feels geometrical: closer to Euclid’s Elements than to Plato’s Republic.

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For Richter, the seeming inevitability of capitalism only made it a better subject. He has never been an artist who asks questions of the world around him; he paints not from life but from photographs, when the subject is settled and the angle already determined. In some ways, however, he shares Mark Fisher’s pessimism.