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A New Zealand mother was detained in Australia for many years and taken away from her family under discretionary ministerial powers, as Fabian Robertson reports.  read now...

"Some of Fiji's best journalists left the industry as a result and the media still carry the mental scars today from that very disturbing period."

Following the same tag it hit NPR with this week, Elon Musk's Twitter is designating the BBC as "government funded" even though it's not.

In my 2010 review of Sheng Ding’s Little Big Soldier, I wrote: I will confess that I have not gone out of my way to follow action star Jackie Chan’s career. According to the Internet Movie Database, he has made 99 films; after a quick perusal of that impressive list, I’d guesstimate that I have seen approximately, let’s see, somewhere in the neighborhood of, oh, around…four. So when I say that Little Big Soldier is the best Jackie Chan flick I’ve ever seen, you can take that with a grain of salt. There is one camp of Chan’s devotees who would tell you that you can’t truly appreciate his prowess as an entertainer until you’ve seen one of his Hong Kong productions; I think I understand what they are talking about now. Of course, you could easily apply this caveat to any number of accomplished actors from Europe or Asia who, due to their broken English, give the impression of impaired performances when they star in Hollywood films.

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

The current boom in international students may end abruptly and in tears, writes Dr Abul Rizvi.  read now...

He has excellent judgment… Former President Donald J. Trump recently told aides to hire Laura Loomer, a far-right and anti-Muslim activist with a history of expressing bigoted views, for a campaign role, according to four people familiar with the plans. Mr. Trump met with Ms. Loomer recently and directed advisers to give her a role in support of his candidacy, two of the people familiar with the move said. On Tuesday, after Mr. Trump’s arraignment in Manhattan, Ms. Loomer attended the former president’s speech at Mar-a-Lago, his resort and residence in Palm Beach, Fla. Some of Mr. Trump’s aides were said to have concerns that such a hire would cause a backlash, given her history of inflammatory statements and her embrace of the Republican Party’s fringes. That proved to be correct: The New York Times’s report on the potential hire ignited a firestorm among some of Mr. Trump’s most vocal conservative supporters, and by late Friday, a high-ranking campaign official said Ms. Loomer was no longer going to be hired. Reached by phone on Friday morning, Ms.

These people … House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) has teased to television audiences over the past month that four different people have appeared before committee investigators to provide information regarding his inquiry into whether President Biden and members of his family were involved in an influence-peddling scheme. On Fox News in March, Comer said he had even met with some of the “four individuals” personally, and in an interview with Breitbart News this week, he characterized the four individuals as “whistleblowers.” But Comer’s media tour has confounded his Democratic counterparts on the committee. After inquiring with Comer’s staff about the reported new witnesses, they were assured that Comer’s statements “in fact referred only to two individuals” and “no new witness information … had actually been provided,” according to a letter sent by the committee’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (Md.), to Comer on Thursday and obtained by The Washington Post.

Can you believe it? The January 6th “choir” made a bunch of money and a grifter has stolen it. Or, at least that’s what they say…

Bruce Haigh, who died on April 7, was a diplomat, an adventurer, an artist and writer, a humanist, a romantic and a man with a deep love of his country, who mourned its fading ideals and values. Ominously, Bruce was born in Sydney on 6 August, 1945, the day the Americans dropped the atom bomb Continue reading »

An Easter reflection on romantic weddings, love, and our global context. Towards a ‘Calming of souls’ and a ‘lightness of being’. Preparing for an upcoming Easter- time wedding, I asked the couple, spontaneously, what they love about each other. It was an innocent question. It is a joy to be invited into wedding celebrations and Continue reading »

China leads the world in building both coal and renewable infrastructure. Ten leading drivers of climate action are ineffective at keeping warming below 2oC. More and more species exposed to extinction as temperatures rise. The many faces of China The USA might spend as much on its military as the next ten countries put together Continue reading »

Australia has only a few months of fuel reserves and we are on the edge of a technological revolution in transport. So in a strategic sense anything we could do to secure our fuel reserves or find alternatives to petroleum based fuels would make us more secure. Australia has all the raw materials to manufacture Continue reading »

Figures show that the level of public housing has hardly increased in more than 20 years, even though the Australian population has increased markedly (by about 30%). State Governments in Australia provide subsidised public housing for elderly, disabled, unemployed and other people on low incomes. The rent for this public housing is based on the Continue reading »

John Kerin’s contribution to the success of the Hawke-Keating government has been grievously understated and uncelebrated. Given the economic, environmental, managerial and social change it successfully engineered, having someone who could neutralise the farm lobby was a boon to the ALP’s parliamentary machine. It contributed significantly to the material reforms of the Hawke/Keating era. As Continue reading »

Successive Israeli governments have pretended to engage in a ‘peace process’, but in reality they have continued to consolidate and expand the occupation. While our unelected representatives pontificate they, the Israelis consolidate. From Oslo to Sharm el-Sheik, Palestinians have been on a long arduous and thorny road to nowhere. This mad journey was started back Continue reading »

More than five centuries after it was formulated in a series of papal decrees, the Vatican issued a formal announcement on March 30 repudiating the Euro-supremacist “Doctrine of Discovery.” In essence, the “doctrine” said that all lands not occupied by “Christians” passed into the hands of the European conquerors as soon as they were “discovered,” Continue reading »

Jessica Valenti channels the feelings of millions of women when they heard the news that that throwback cretin in Texas banned the abortion pill last night: Tonight, a judge ruled that a drug that’s safely ended pregnancies for over twenty years should no longer be available—not just in anti-abortion states, but everywhere. We knew the ruling was coming, just as we did when Roe was overturned. As was the case then, foreknowledge doesn’t make the moment any easier.  There’s no real way to prepare for the feeling of despair that rises in your body as you’re reminded, once again, that you’re no longer a full citizen in your own country.  I want to be useful, and smart. I could write about how this decision lays bare the lie of ‘states’ rights’, or how a singular activist judge being able to wave away decades of science and progress is a sign of our decaying democracy. I could write out the ways that the FDA could respond, or what the Biden administration should say and do. But others will do a better job of all that.

Wait. What??? When Republican megadonor Harlan Crow isn’t lavishing Justice Clarence Thomas with free trips on his private plane and yacht (in possible violation of Supreme Court ethics rules), he lives a quiet life in Dallas among his historical collections. These collections include Hitler artifacts—two of his paintings of European cityscapes, a signed copy of Mein Kampf, and assorted Nazi memorabilia—plus a garden full of statues of the 20th century’s worst despots. Crow, the billionaire heir to a real estate fortune, has said that he’s filled his property with these mementoes because he hates communism and fascism. Nonetheless, his collections caused an uproar back in 2015 when Marco Rubio attended a fundraiser at Crow’s house on the eve of Yom Kippur. Rubio’s critics thought the timing was inappropriate given, you know, the Hitler stuff.  “I still can’t get over the collection of Nazi memorabilia,” says one person who attended an event at Crow’s home a few years ago and asked to remain anonymous.

Notice a trend? Not that Real MAGAs™ vote their pocketbooks, but if they did Simon Rosenberg would provide, you know, facts: “With Democrats Things Get Better.” (BTW: Elon’s platform continues to decay. Twitter changes have disabled Thread Reader’s functioning. Who knows for how long?) Remind your MAGA relatives.

Mandrake, have you ever hear of Central Bank Digital Currency? That CRT-killin’ Mouse-foe, Florida Gov. Wokety-woke DeWoke, decided he was not fringy enough to appeal to the QAnon-fueled, pedophile-fightin’, MAGA primary voter. He’s rooted out another Deep State enemy with which to scare the bejeezus out of them. It got lost in the Trump indictment fallout this week until the other day. Catherine Rampell noticed it, though: In a speech this past weekend in Pennsylvania, DeSantis suggested that the real reason to fear the Fed is that central bankers are “colluding” with other (unnamed, presumably evil) communist-style elites to block your ability to buy gasoline and guns. “They want the Fed to control a digital dollar,” he said. “Guess what’ll happen? They’re going to try to impose an ESG agenda through that. You go and use too much gas, they’re going to stop it. They’re not going to honor the transaction because you’ve already bought more than what they think. You wanna go buy a rifle, they’re going to say no, you have too many, too many of those, you can’t do it.