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Three big things have happened with the passage of the second half of the ‘Closing Loopholes’ Bill through Federal Parliament on Monday. One is world leading, one is not far from it, and one is playing catch up with the rest of the world. A fourth big thing happened a couple of months ago, with passage Continue reading »

You know there is a shocking decimation taking place when news footage shows only two colours – grey and red. Images of the persecution and murder of Gazans are utterly heartbreaking. Israel is asking the world to allow it to commit genocide. The US, and the West, are saying “Yes, go ahead”. If Israel were Continue reading »

It is almost impossible to devise a scenario in which the Labour Party does not win the UK election in 2024. The biggest remaining question may well be whether the victory is sufficiently large to almost guarantee a second term and possibly splinter the Conservative side of UK politics for a decade or more. There Continue reading »

Reading the latest Scanlon Foundation social cohesion report makes you aware that there are two quite distinct images of Australia. One – totally dark and doom laden – is depicted in the mass and social media and the other – clear-eyed about both serious problems and opportunities – is depicted in the 2023 Scanlon Foundation Continue reading »

Natural resources are owned by the people of Australia, but mining companies don’t like paying us for the resources they take out of the ground. And when they look like having to pay more, their response is swift and brutal. The way Lang Hancock told it, he discovered the vast iron ore deposits in the Continue reading »

The release of the latest PISA results provided another opportunity to bash schools and teachers. Amy Haywood and Jordana Hunter, from the Grattan Institute joined the chorus of denigrators. They, along with most academics, mainstream media and, of course politicians ‘validated’ our students’ performance in the International Student Assessment or PISA tests is in decline Continue reading »

An undutiful daughter’s atonement trip after four years. When my mum asked me to bring a king-size wool quilt on a flight back to China, I was hit with a strange familiar feeling – time for Lunar New Year again. It was a gift she wanted for one of my grandmothers (her aunt). In this Continue reading »

While bellicose rhetoric continues to be lobbed across the DMZ, North Korea appears focused on bolstering not just its weaponry, but its farms as well. The mood on the Korean Peninsula has been fraught since the very start of 2024. Does North Korea really intend to start a war? Are we facing the prospect of Continue reading »

The UK is officially in recession. A recession is defined as two successive quarters of negative growth, and the UK has now reported negative growth in both the third and fourth quarters of 2023. GDP fell by 0.3 percent from October to December 2023, after falling 0.1 percent in the previous quarter. No sector of […]

The mysterious case of a tiny new ‘think tank’ launching – and being immediately granted gullible coverage from right-wing papers

The Lever speaks with two organizers involved in unionizing one of Amazon’s biggest warehouses.

There is a poignant vulnerability to dereliction pipe organs face in a world saturated with synthetically produced musical sound.

I will be shocked if Maryland sends Hogan to the Senate. He was a popular governor but his time has passed. I’m not even sure he can get Republican votes since the rural areas are very MAGA and he’ll have to separate himself very strongly from Trump. It’s a blue state and I think Democratic voters understand the stakes this time. I hope …

Meet Susan and Joe. Their daily observations of the groundhogs in their yard are making science history.

The post The Groundhog Watchers appeared first on Nautilus.

Joe Biden is responsible for a genocide in Israel, because Israel couldn’t do it without American support. (And this isn’t his only mass murder. He engineered a famine in Afghanistan.)

Obama said that he and Joe were responsible for making the US the biggest oil and gas producer in the world. Biden has, in office as President, made that brag too, meaning he owns it.

He is also responsible for all the deaths in Ukraine since March of last year, when the US, thru the UK PM Boris Johnson, scuttled a peace deal. As a result, Ukraine will almost certainly wind up losing much more land and hundreds of thousands more dead. Most likely it will wind up a landlocked nation. The IMF and the EU will then loot it to the ground with neoliberal policies.

Never let the US use you as their proxy in a war. They always fuck you over.

The Devil didn’t go down to Georgia MSNBC just reported jury selection for Donald “91 Counts” Trump’s trial in Manhattan on hush money payments will begin March 25. Washington Post: Former president Donald Trump is in a Manhattan courtroom Thursday for a hearing in one of his criminal cases, while a hearing in a different case is held in Atlanta. In New York, a judge ordered jury selection to begin on March 25 in Trump’s trial related to 2016 hush money payments. The judge also denied a motion to dismiss the case. The Atlanta hearing centers on allegations that Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D) engaged in an improper relationship with a special prosecutor she named to lead the case. In Manhattan, Trump faces “34 counts of falsifying business records connected with alleged hush money payments made to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential campaign.” Trump is in the courtroom now. In the Georgia case, Trump and others were charged with conspiring to overturn the 2020 presidential election results there.

Over 200 Doctor Who scripts (including the 60th Anniversary episodes) and many other BBC show scripts are available in the BBC Writers Room.

Like many American boys of the baby-boomer generation, I played “war” with those old, olive-drab, plastic toy soldiers meant to evoke our great victory over the Nazis and “the Japs” during World War II. At age 10, I also kept a scrapbook of the 1973 Yom Kippur War between Israel and its various Arab enemies in the Middle East. It was, I suppose, an early sign that I would make both the military and the study of history into careers. I recall rooting for the Israelis, advertised then as crucial American allies, against Egypt, Syria, and other regional enemies at least ostensibly allied with the Soviet Union in that Cold War era. I bought the prevailing narrative of a David-versus-Goliath... Read more

Source: Bombing Muslims for Peace appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

Though her family sometimes received food stamps and occasionally had their utilities cut off, Marcie Alvis Walker’s parents led her to believe that they were an average middle-class Black family. They encouraged her to pursue her dreams and told her that if she worked hard enough, she’d achieve them. The small catch was that Walker’s dream was an elusive one for any cash-strapped and undereducated Black woman: being a New York Times–bestselling author. Now, as a published non-bestselling author, she wishes she’d had a backup plan.

When I first got divorced, I didn’t have a job, because I was doing my best to be a good and proper Christian woman whose husband was the head of the household while she looked after his every need and cared for his castle. Small hiccup—my first husband was having none of that: no church, no traditional job, no needs, no castle.

Another debunking years later One of the most infuriating aspects of the right-wing Contract On America is how obvious the cons are. No, that’s not it, either. It’s that we, the reality-based community, dumbly play along as if there’s some factual basis behind them. The collective We give “the miners, and sappers–of returning despotism” the benefit of the doubt. Like parents with a toddler still trying to grasp object permanence, we play along when the child acts as though the red ball we’ve palmed has ceased to exist. So, too, with the right’s allegations of election fraud that time and again prove to be the actual fraud. Why? Because it would be bad form to call out the infant-like credulity of diner-dwelling Real Americans™? Or impolite to brand them liars and cheats and unAmerican, even if justly deserved? The tactic: Lob a “voter fraud” smoke grenade into the news cycle and shout fire. The “news” compliantly plays along, front-paging the false story.