A Lowy Institute survey issued in April this year showed that the balance of Chinese-American influence in Southeast Asia had shifted in China’s favour over the last few years. Specifically, in overall diplomatic, defence, economic and cultural influence, the balance was 52 to 48 in China’s favour in 2018 but its lead increased to 54 Continue reading »
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Earlier this year, I wrote on the potential risks of the new Pacific Engagement Visa (PEV) that will provide a lottery-based pathway to permanent residence for nationals of Pacific Islands and Timor Leste. With the visa starting on 1 July 2023, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), which has policy responsibility for the Continue reading »
Senator Linda Reynolds is suggesting that she might seek to take her complaints of ill-treatment during the controversy of the Bruce Lehrman rape allegation to the new National Anti-Corruption Commission. That would include, we gather, allegations that Senator Katy Gallagher was briefed by the alleged victim and her boyfriend before the allegations had been made Continue reading »
The story behind Jenny Hocking’s epic battle against the Australian Government and HM Queen Elizabeth to access the Palace Letters is being told through a new documentary film. Based on the best-selling book “The Palace Letters” by Jenny Hocking, Scribe 2020. The Search for the Palace Letters follows historian Professor Jenny Hocking as she fights Continue reading »
Doing the rounds on YouTube is the case of a black American Tyshon Booker arrested when he was 16 for being present (with a gun) at a murder which he did not commit (the murderer confessed). He was given a 51 year minimum sentence. This case is, of course, is only the disgraceful tip of Continue reading »
Son, I’m going to need you to put the Xbox controller down. Now, you’re not in trouble, but we need to have a serious talk about your responsibilities in this household. You’re not a little kid anymore, and it’s time you stepped up and pulled your weight review-bombing the latest Marvel Cinematic Universe releases around here.
Growing up comes with privileges, son, but you also have to earn them.
Specifically, you need to be doing way more in visiting review aggregator sites over and over, using as many sock puppet accounts as you can, and giving negative score after negative score to Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and pretty much anything Kevin Feige greenlights to suck up to the woke lib masses.
What would your little sister think if she knew you were barely even spamming Brie Larson’s Instagram account to call her a “feminazi”?
She looks up to you, son.
On this week’s bonus episode of Lever Time Premium, The Lever’s reporters do a deep-dive on the climate crisis.
I think we knew that a federal indictment of former president Donald Trump would elicit a collective primal scream from the right wing fever swamp and they have not disappointed. And in true Trump era fashion, the response from most elected Republicans has been a collective whine about “unfairness” and the “weaponization” of the “deep state.” Some have even gone so far as to at least hint around that it’s a nice little country we have here, be a shame if anything happened to it. I would expect nothing less. This is how they roll. There are a few dissenters from that party line. Utah Sen. Mitt Romney put out a statement saying that Trump “brought this on himself” and it’s “consistent with his other actions offensive to the national interest” which is true. Former Gov. Chris Christie said “these facts are devastating” which is also true. But these and a handful of others are outliers among GOP elected officials. One very significant former GOP official has come out swinging, however: There are a number of defenses out there.
Trump gave his first interview to Roger Stone for his new radio show DONALD TRUMP (GUEST): I tell you what, they must hate – these Democrats, these crazy lunatic Democrats like deranged Jack Smith. He’s a deranged person, in my opinion. His wife hates me more than he does. You got to see what the wife – the wife hates Trump more than she hates Trump more than any human being who’s ever lived. And it’s a shame. It’s a shame that we can have this because we did a great job with borders, with taxes, with – with everything. I mean, we did a great job with everything that people can hate so much, but I believe they hate our country. ROGER STONE (HOST): Mr. President, many of your supporters intend to go to the Miami courthouse on Tuesday to demonstrate their support for you and to protest what they see as unfair and politically motivated charges. I urge all of your supporters … that if they decide to go, it is essential that they keep it peaceful, civil, and legal. … Do you have a message for those who may be planning to go to just to demonstrate their support for you? TRUMP: I do. We need strength in our country now.
“It was the last thing I needed, especially after climbing over all of those boxes to get to my table,” an irritated patron said.
I had to throw out my script about this submarine simulator
Joe Biden kept Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure” sanctions — discouraging even legal, humanitarian trade.
The post Children Are Dying Because Companies Are Too Scared to Sell Medicine to Iran appeared first on The Intercept.
Alan Macleod uncovers how a shadowy pressure group linked to Israel is attempting to silence artists advocating for Palestinian liberation on Spotify.
The post Shadowy, Israel-Linked Group Attempts to Censor Pro-Palestine Spotify Artists appeared first on MintPress News.
When it comes to campaigning, Democrats are conservatives Self-identified independent voters are not, not really, argues Alex Shephard at The New Republic. They are leaners, 49 percent of Americans per a recent Gallup poll. They lean toward one of the major parties or the other. They just eschew the branding. It’s not a new argument, but it’s fashionable. “By far the dominant U.S. party isn’t Democrats or Republicans,” wrote Mike Allen of Axios. “It’s: ‘I’ll shop around, thank you.’” Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz told TNR, “There’s a reluctance to openly identify oneself as a partisan and to say, come right out and say, ‘I think of myself as a Republican or a Democrat.’” Shephard explains: Self-described independents and leaners do have one thing in common. “Even among people who identify with a political party … the trend is in their disdain for the other party,” said Matt Grossmann, director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research, or IPPSR, and professor of political science at Michigan State University.
That’s what a friend wrote to me when he sent me the story attached to that picture.
“plans for high-value-target killings by Prince’s mercenaries” Someone on Twitter in mid-May claimed that Erik Prince of Blackwater infamy had been indicted for arms trafficking in (of all places) Austria. I never saw any other mention of it until this morning. So, for those suffering a little Trump fatigue, apparently “the Elon Musk of the privatization of war” was indicted “with four other individuals in Austria on April 20 for exporting war materials without a license back in 2014 and 2015,” writes Ann Marlowe at The Bulwark: The indictment accuses Prince of using an aircraft-customizing company in which he then held a controlling interest, the Wiener Neustadt-based Airborne Technologies, to retrofit two American cropdusters that were then to be shipped illegally overseas. The charges overlap 2021 United Nations allegations that Prince had in 2019 violated the U.N. arms embargo on Libya in an aborted operation called Project Opus, financed by the United Arab Emirates to the tune of $80 million in support of Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, head of one of the two perpetually contesting governments in Libya.
Renters in the capital are encountering controversial practices as the housing crisis worsens, writes our Chief Reporter
The costs awarded in the Cadwalladr libel case suggest journalists reporting in the public interest are vulnerable to legal harassment
When we discovered our local public school wasn’t kidding about their state-mandated vaccination requirements, we saw no other choice but to pull our boys out, sell off our assets, and hit the road in a one-bedroom RV with plenty of room for our seven children.
Where others might have seen a life isolated from the rest of the world, existing on the fringes of society, we saw the chance to give our children an exciting, nurturing, and conveniently extremely monetizable upbringing. So we funneled $100k into an RV, a fancy vlogging camera, and twelve iPads to do the parenting part for us. Only the best for our darlings Figaro, Willoughby, Kayden-Jaymes, Jayden, Limestone, and twins Scooter and Spruce.
Our van has a bedroom with a queen-sized bed that’s only for Mom and Dad. But our kids have plenty of room in their bunk beds that double as storage and triple as their desks when they do “math.” Once, Willoughby told us that he likes to pretend he’s a vampire at night because it feels like sleeping in a coffin. We laughed nervously and hoped BetterHelp wouldn’t pull their sponsorship since we were already live on Instagram.
Leading barrister and dozens of organisations raise serious concerns about the “chilling effect” of the Government’s latest attempt to restrict the right to protest
The very limited authority of the UK press industry’s tame watchdog is under assault from its members, vividly exposing the contradictions in its make-up, writes Brian Cathcart