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LIPMAN, the NSW-based construction company with a long and proud history of working in the Mid North Coast, has won three awards at the 2023 Master Builders Association (MBA) Northern Region Building Awards. “We are thrilled to have been considered for three awards this year,” Darren Ferguson, Region Manager, North Coast (Lipman) told News Of...

The post Coffs Harbour projects by Lipman win 2023 Northern Regions Building Awards appeared first on News Of The Area.

FUNDS raised at the LifeWalk 2023 sponsored walk on Saturday 3 June have put the SleepBus for Coffs Harbour project’s goal of raising $100,000 within sight. The SleepBus project was founded by advocate for the homeless Doris Rake (Cowan) and is enthusiastically supported by LifeHouse Care, who run LIfeWalk. Advertise with News of The Area...

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THE Legacy Centenary Torch Relay 2023, the flagship event for the organisation’s anniversary marking 100 years of service to those who have sacrificed, arrives in Coffs Harbour on Friday 30 June and Coffs Coast Legacy has been planning a suitably celebratory occasion. Beginning in Pozieres, France in the lead up to ANZAC Day in 2023,...

The post The Legacy Centenary Torch Relay 2023 is coming to Coffs Harbour appeared first on News Of The Area.

TWO Coffs Coast students received scholarships at the ‘2023 Proudly Public!’ Awards night at Sydney Town Hall on Monday, May 29. They were among over 700 public school students and educators from across Australia to receive scholarships administered by the Public Education Foundation (PEF) in 2023. Advertise with News of The Area today. It’s worth...

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LOGGING in native forest in Orara East State Forest was halted by protesters on Wednesday morning, June 6. A 55-year-old ‘forest defender’ suspended herself 30 metres high in a tree-sit from ropes strung across the only entrance to the forest, blocking all trucks, vehicles and workers from logging the forest. Advertise with News of The...

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The reviews for HBM are coming in and, so far, have been enormously positive ...

New York City’s Tribeca Film Festival is running through June 18th. The festival (co-founded by Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal, and Craig Hatkoff in 2001) features a variety of media platforms, including film, TV, music, audio storytelling, games, and XR. I’m doing virtual coverage; as much as I’d love to be skipping down the streets of my birth city (well…technically Queens), physical mobility issues have made travel too uncomfortable. At any rate, I’ll be sharing reviews over the next couple weeks. The good news is that you can virtually attend as well-the festival is offering select titles via the “Tribeca at Home” online portal. Check out the website for more info. Against All Enemies (U.S.) *** – In a post examining reaction from the Right when news broke this week that ex-president Trump was being indicted by federal prosecutors for alleged mishandling of classified documents, Digby included this disturbing tidbit: Take this seriously. “Perimeter probe”: Higgins thinks indictment precedes bigger attack. “rPOTUS”: “real POTUS,” Trump.

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

I was going to Fisk (an old blogging term) this WSJ editorial but I see that James Joyner did it already so I don’t have to. Seriously, it’s completely daft and a low point for the WSJ editorial page and that’s saying something. Never, ever let them forget this the next time they start hippie bashing over national security. The hypocrisy has never been so overwhelming. Here’s Joyner: That the WSJ editorial page tends toward reflexive fealty to Republican causes is no secret. But the Editorial Board should be ashamed of its latest effort. Already, this is ominous. They’re not only insinuating that violence is likely to occur but blaming the decision to indict a person for serious crimes, not the environment created by the individual under indictment. The Justice Department is not Joe Biden’s; it’s ours. We have not, in modern history, had a former President run for re-election after having been defeated.

Garth Brooks is selling Bud Light at his bar and says that the boycotters are assholes. The right is now calling for a boycott against Garth Brooks. Of course. (Read the comments to this…) Look who’s making moral judgments about Garth Brooks: I know, I know. Garth does a great version of a Billy Joel song called “Shameless” and I think it’s called for right now:

I realized, while watching the semi-final at Roland Garros between Djokovic and Alcaraz, that I have lived a uniquely blessed and cursed life. My life has coincided with the best years of humanity, and I have played a unique but ultimately losing role in the two great crises of our age: the collapse of the … Continue reading "My Blessed and Cursed Life"

Secrets are a kind of currency. They can be hoarded, but if kept for too long they lose their value. Like all currencies, they must, sooner or later, be used in a transaction—sold to the highest bidder or bartered as a favor for which another favor will be returned. To see the full scale of […]

The post The Ultimate Deal appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Apparently, some people think that one of the unnamed recipients of classified information in the Trump indictment was Kid Rock. It’s because of this interview from 2022 on Tucker Carlson’s show. But the event happened in 2017 so it was when Trump was president and has nothing to do with this indictment. He does show just how cavalier he always was with government secrets. In the 2022 interview, Rock said the embattled former business mogul asked him for assistance when writing a tweet about ISIS and probed the rocker on how he would handle North Korea – showing him maps in the Oval Office. A 52-year-old Rock – whose real name is Bob Ritchie – is not the mystery person mentioned in the indictment, though the stories he told to Carlson do call into question Trump’s handling of top secret material. Rock recalled one session with Trump when the now ex-president ‘ended the caliphate,’ a reference to the Islamic State terror group that took over parts of Iraq.  ‘He wanted to put out a tweet.

Military activities generate uncounted but large amounts of greenhouse gas. Ocean temperatures hit all-time peak in April. Victoria to end logging of native forests. And, do your personal CO2 emissions influence your life expectancy? Military greenhouse gas emissions Under pressure from the USA, the Kyoto Protocol, negotiated in 1997, excluded military activities from nations’ mandatory Continue reading »

A multipolar world is being forged by the Global South. Tectonic shifts are taking place between the “collective West” led by the United States and the “Global South” with China in this camp. Hong Kong’s predicament is that it lies on a fault line of the geopolitical plates. Political transitions are never easy for the Continue reading »

Is it not a great irony that the Chinese are now more supportive of the post-war Bretton Woods system than the Americans? There is a hole in public discourse and strategic analysis regarding the so-called “China Threat”. Concerned that his critics in the West are blithely unaware of the correlation of China’s values with the Continue reading »

Labor’s ability to seamlessly follow in the Coalition’s strategic footsteps is showing welcome signs of weakening as opponents of AUKUS and the submarine deal find their voice. By any measure, Anthony Albanese and his government have been a disappointment. True, Albanese has an authentic, anachronistic and atypical backstory, but that hasn’t stopped him from displaying Continue reading »

The latest Audit Office report documenting mismanagement by the Morrison government of a grants program – in this case the Community Health and Hospitals Program – has generated outrage. At a time when the health system is under great pressure, over a billion dollars in grants were allocated on the basis of a dodgy process. Continue reading »

It was a day of triumph and a day of shame for The Age newspaper, the once-great Melbourne daily. On Friday June 2, 2023, with justifiable pride, the newspaper trumpeted its victory over the defamation suit brought by Ben Roberts Smith, VC. On the same day, the newspaper announced that it would “trial a reduction” Continue reading »

“This nation, after three thousand years of grandeur and decay… exhibits today all the physical and mental vitality that we find in its most creative periods… Very probably such wealth will be produced in China by 2030 as even America has never known and once again, as so often in the past, China will lead Continue reading »

Gareth Evans, the former foreign minister of Australia received the fifth annual Jeju 4.3 Peace Prize presented by the Jeju 4.3 Peace Foundation. To achieve true reconciliation regarding the Jeju April 3 Incident, the US government must take responsibility for its historical wrongdoing in the same way as the Korean government, argues Gareth Evans, the Continue reading »

A lot of people have pooh-pooh’d the idea that Elon Musk’s degradation of twitter is of any real world importance and I’ve always thought that was ridiculous. No, it doesn’t really matter that a bunch of right wingers are hurling insults at everyone — what else is new? But this does matter: A viral hoax that briefly sent the stock market down last month apparently first gained traction on Twitter through a conspiracy-mongering, pro-Russian account. The picture that grabbed attention on the morning of May 22, captioned “Large Explosion Near the Pentagon,” was generated by artificial intelligence without much sophistication, experts said. But it is probably a harbinger of things to come, especially as generative AI gets better at producing images to meet the demandsof anyone’s imagination. Research by The Washington Post, misinformation tracking firm Alethea and othersfound that the earliest confirmed Twitter posting of the image came from an account called @CBKNEWS121.

Trump and the MAGA wingnuts are hystericl screeching about Hillary Clinton’s emails again so it’s worth reminding everyone what it actually was about and comparing it to Trump’s bizarre classified documents case: The obvious comparison that Republicans have, and will, make to Trump’s predicament is Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013. The email server became a public controversy during her 2016 presidential campaign against Trump, with his rally crowds chanting “Lock her up,” a sentiment Trump said he was “starting to agree with” in July 2016. Trump ally Alex Jones sold “Hillary for prison” T-shirts. The initial investigation into Clinton’s private email server revealed classified information had been shared in upwards of 2,000 email chains stored on the server. In making the server a campaign issue, Trump promised to enforce the law. “In my administration, I’m going to enforce all laws concerning the protection of classified information,” Trump said in August 2016.