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An innocent invitation to a conference could turn into a nightmare. Next month I shall be on my way to an Australian Studies conference in Beijing, but already I am nervous about my travel plans because of recent stories about the attitude of Australian spy agencies to information exchanges with China. Friends, if I fail Continue reading »

Prior to his most recent overseas trip to Jakarta, Manila, and New Delhi, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has been abroad a dozen times. Not bad for a government that’s been in office for just on eighteen months. The next few months will see him flying off again for half a dozen more summits, head to head meetings Continue reading »

It is time for government to get the suits back under control and manage the economy for the benefit of us all. When my brain was switching to idle on my recent break, I thought of two central questions. First, for whose benefit is the economy being run – a handful of company executives at Continue reading »

Without reform, Australia’s schooling system threatens to create a lost generation of young people. Teddy is a Kamilaroi university student who dreams of making a difference to educational outcomes of First Nation peoples. Growing up in regional New South Wales was fraught with challenges related to disadvantage for Teddy, but the amazing teachers who supported Continue reading »

By chance, US president Biden’s goodwill visit to Vietnam’s communist government in Hanoi came just 50 years after the notorious 1972 Christmas bombings. These bombings saw more than 200 American B-52s flying 730 sorties and dropping over 20,000 tons of bombs on North Vietnam over a period of 12 days in December 1972. The aim: Continue reading »

The American diplomatic starship, USS Exceptionalism, fell to earth at the G20 Leaders’ Summit in New Delhi. Thankfully for the world, India, that is Bharat, successfully landed its earthbound diplomacy. Only a few weeks ago, during the BRICS Leaders Summit, the Global South and its Eurasian partners had stood to applaud Prime Minister Modi because Continue reading »

The post Doctor Who Magazine 595 appeared first on Doctor Who Magazine.

Vladimir Putin could barely contain his excitement Tuesday while discussing Donald Trump, telling a forum in Vladivostok that the criminal cases against the former president are “good” for Russia and that the Kremlin took delight in Trump’s claim he’d swiftly force an end to Moscow’s war against Ukraine. “As for the persecution of Trump… for us, what is happening in these conditions, in my opinion, is good, because it shows the whole rottenness of the American political system, which cannot claim to teach others about democracy,” Putin said, echoing the former American president’s own oft-repeated claim that “what’s happening with Trump is a persecution of a political rival for political motives.” The man who is responsible for trying to kill his rival with poison and then locking him up in a prison camp for life says what? Trump’s response: Hmmm. I’d guess he didn’t really think that through. (But when does he ever think anything through?) But I’m sure Putin doesn’t care.

“U.S. Representative Lauren Boebert was escorted out of a Sunday night performance of the ‘Beetlejuice’ musical in downtown Denver, accused by venue officials of vaping, singing, recording and ‘causing a disturbance’ during the performance.” — The Denver Post

(The curtain rises on the Buell Theatre, Denver. We see the AUDIENCE on stage, settling in for a performance of the musical “Beetlejuice.”)

AUDIENCE
It’s a splendid night for a musical
An escape that’s non-pharmaceutical
You won’t see a frown
When the theater lights go down

We’re waiting in our seats politely
Looking forward to the show excitedly
Hey, look, there’s our rep in DC
And she’s shouting, “Hey, y’all, look at me!”

Eh, let her have her fun
The show hasn’t yet begun
Once the actors start their work
She’ll probably stop acting like a jerk

New evidence suggests electric stoves are better for people and the planet.

The post The Case Against Cooking with Gas appeared first on Nautilus.

McCarthy snaps to On August 28th, Donald Trump had had enough of his House Republicans dilly-dallying around. He took to his social media platform Truth Social and issued an order: The Republicans in Congress, though well meaning, keep talking about an Impeachment ‘Inquiry’ on Crooked Joe Biden.Look, the guy got bribed, he paid people off, and he wouldn’t give One Billion Dollars to Ukraine unless they ‘got rid of the Prosecutor.’ Biden is a Stone Cold Crook-You don’t need a long INQUIRY to prove it, it’s already proven. These lowlifes Impeached me TWICE (I WON!), and Indicted me FOUR TIMES – For NOTHING!Either IMPEACH the BUM, or fade into OBLIVION. THEY DID IT TO US! Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy heard him loud and clear. On Tuesday he announced that he was unilaterally ordering an impeachment inquiry into the president during his term as Vice President nearly a decade ago. No one was surprised that he went back on his stated principle that an impeachment inquiry can only be launched with a full vote of the House or the still binding determination by Trump’s Department of Justice which came to the same conclusion.

  ​As political attacks on trans life have increased across the English-speaking world, sport has been a highly effective route through which the anti-trans right…

“While I was at the funeral for my brother…there were only four people, because of social distancing. I will never forget that," song-writer and actor Will Young tells Byline Times.

China has emerged as a greater threat than Russia, despite Ukraine. In the New Cold War, China is richer, more populous, and the dominant power pitted against the West

Evidence-free since … pretty much forever We’ve seen this show before. Rudy Giuliani had his law license suspended for bringing meritless lawsuits, unsupported by evidence, alleging massive voter fraud in the 2020 election. He had it, oh yes, massive amounts of evidence he hyped endlessly before cameras but never produced to be independently scrutinized. House Republicans are playing that game again with their budding Biden impeachment inquiry. “What actual evidence do you have as opposed to allegations to show to the American public that would merit an actual impeachment inquiry of Joe Biden?” the off-camera reporter asked Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) Perry did not take it well. Mediaite: Notably, during a CPAC event in March Perry made clear his penchant for political revenge. Perry, whose cell phone was seized by the FBI during its investigation into Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, fantasized aloud at CPAC about “leftists” and “Marxists” “quaking in fear” and “losing weight because they’re not eating” because they are so afraid the government may jail them.

Set to hit next week, here's a preview of Big Finish Production's Sooz Kempner-starring audio drama Doctor Who: Doom's Day - Dying Hours.

Bloody Tradies! For those looking for an excuse to use “gobsmacked.” An X-post video clip from Tuesday: Gurner Group founder Tim Gurner tells the Financial Review Property Summit workers have become “arrogant” since COVID and “We’ve got to kill that attitude.” Financial Review: The current unemployment rate needs to rise by 40 per cent to 50 per cent to boost the Australian economy’s productivity, Tim Gurner has said. “In my view, we need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around,” he said. Gurner told the Summit that the cultural shift towards a more pro-employee climate had led to tradies pulling back on productivity. “When there’s been a systematic change where employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them as opposed to the other way around it’s a dynamic that has to change. We’ve got to kill that attitude.” Gurner has received some blowback over his remarks about “tradies.” “Just a reminder corporate profits and CEO pay are at historic highs,” wrote Greens MP Stephen Bates.

There’s a raw and sinewy energy to Elisa Gonzalez’s line. Her debut collection, Grand Tour, clarified and found its final form in the years after her brother was shot to death. So it is a first book and also a shattered elegy, an announcement and an aftermath, by turns impassioned and dispassionate as it registers grief in many forms. It begins with “Notes Toward an Elegy,”

The Cypriot sun is impatient, a woman undressed
who can’t spare the time to dress, so light
like a vitrine holds even a storm.
One day in the Old City, a pineapple rain.
And I’m on my way home from the pharmacy, carrying my little bag of cures.
Refuge at the café in the nameless square.
Nihal brings espresso poured over ice, turns off the music.
We listen to rain fall through the light until the end.

That’s the end of the stanza and the rain but the beginning of the poem and the book. It’s as if the poet’s point of departure is the place where two Yeatsian gyres meet just as they go their separate ways:

We, the computer scientists and engineers of this nation, are pleased to announce that we have invented actual, real-life portals. However, we are saddened to announce that they are fucking horrible.

We’ve built hundreds of variations of these things, and we promise none are cool. Rent-payment portals, student portals, health insurance portals—just name the portal, and it will suck.

In sci-fi, you might go into a portal and pop out millions of light-years away. We swear we tried to replicate that. But as of now, if you enter one of our portals from the comfort of your own home, at best, you might come out thousands of miles away from your closest accepted primary care physician.

We’ve completely reimagined what a portal can be. Unfortunately, our collective imagination was limited to picturing what dozens of pages of tedious dental information might look like rendered on Microsoft Excel in 1988.

We’re not sure what we’re doing wrong. Our portals successfully transport you to another time, but only to a year sometime between when computers were made of tubes and the last time somebody typed out “www.”

Human rights groups sued government agencies for information about Afghans stuck at processing sites while their applications to come to the U.S. are pending.

The post The Biden Administration Is Keeping Thousands of Afghans in Limbo Abroad appeared first on The Intercept.

When the NHS was founded, it was a central part of the UK’s post-war social contract. Now, it is struggling to perform, and there are increasing calls for so-called ‘reform,’ which is often a euphemism for privatisation and the introduction of insurance-based funding.  They are calling for a fundamental change to the business model of […]