ABC TV’s Landline programme has declared that “Australia’s dairy industry is licking its lips at the prospect of increased demand from Indonesia.” The cow cockies’ cliched hopes are based on the applauded pledge by Indonesia’s incoming president and former general Prabowo Subianto to give 83 million school kids free feeds and milk. The salivators are Continue reading »
Reading
According to the Australian Government’s Future Gas Strategy, gas is “critical” to the nation’s economy. In view of this, many Australians might be surprised to learn that a large amount of the country’s gas reserves are essentially being given away for free. Australia has ten facilities that export gas as liquified natural gas (LNG). Six Continue reading »
‘My dad is gone… where will I go?’ Nine-year-old Omar Hamad just lived through the worst day of his life, when his father was burned alive in Israel’s attack on a tent camp in Rafah. Dozens of Palestinians in Gaza were killed that day, and dozens more lost loved ones. Watch Omar speak to Al Continue reading »
This is the opening move in a protectionist regime the U.S. president will extend significantly to prove his bona fides as a Sinophobe. I love the photograph The New York Times ran atop Jim Tankersley’s May 18 story analysing the inadvisable raft of tariffs on Chinese imports President Biden authorised four days earlier. There is the old coot signing Continue reading »
The former US President was convicted of 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment to adult actress Stormy Daniels
Sad! Julia Davis at the Daily Beast follows the Russian media. They’re even more distraught than the Republicans: Russian state-controlled media apparatus closely followed legal troubles of the former U.S. President Donald J. Trump, spicing up most of their coverage with pro-Trump clips from Fox News and Tucker Carlson. Russian propagandists were openly hoping for a hung jury and were visibly disappointed when Trump became a convicted felon on all 34 charges he was facing. On Friday morning, Dmitry Kulikov, host of Solovyov Live, the self-described “most patriotic channel” in Russia, said on-air, “They wronged our Donald Trump!” Malek Dudakov, a political scientist who specializes in America, said that the hope for a miracle—meaning a hung jury—was extinguished. He said, with Russia’s affectionate middle name usage, “The miracle did not happen. Our Donald Fredovych was found guilty on all 34 counts.” For that, Dudakov blamed the judge and the jury and baselessly claimed that all of them were prejudiced against Trump.
“It’s hard to see this wildly disproportionate response as anything other than an attempt to chill speech on this issue.”
The post Columbia Coincidentally Rewrites Disciplinary Rules Just in Time to Screw Over Student Protesters appeared first on The Intercept.
The worst has happened.
Donald Trump is now a convicted felon, found guilty by a jury of his peers in the city in which he was born and raised and lived for the first 70 years of his life. The front page of his former hometown newspaper looked like this today: Republicans have all rallied in support of the Dear Leader by whining and complaining about the judicial system being used against a political opponent, apparently trying to convince the American people that anyone running for office should be immune from prosecution for their crimes. (That’s pretty rich coming from the crowd that chanted “lock her up” for four solid years.) Needless to say, every one of the lawsuits filed against him and the crimes he is accused of were being very publicly investigated long before he decided to run for president again. In fact, there’s a good case to be made that that’s why he did it. As the LA Times Doyle McManus pointed out back in October of 2021: As long as he’s running (or even sort of running), Trump can denounce every inquest and subpoena as just another part of a political vendetta.
- - -
Our friends at The Believer are now publishing web exclusives. To celebrate, we’re sharing excerpts of their inaugural weekly column, in which Katie Heindl (author of the beloved Basketball Feelings) writes about the WNBA for both longtime fans and the casual observer. If you want to follow along and bypass the paywall, pick up a Believer digital-only subscription. For just $16 a year, you’ll also have full access to the magazine’s complete two-decade archive, including the most recent issue.
That was a moment, wasn’t it? Watching MSNBC’s Guilty/Not Guilty counter click its way up to 34 Trump guilty verdicts was a moment I won’t forget. I heard about the 9/11 attack in New York from a colleague who’d heard of it in a phone call from home. I thought it must have been an internet rumor. Then I couldn’t even connect to the internet to check. It wasn’t a rumor. Neither was yesterday’s verdict. So. What does it mean? Well, Donald John Trump is a felon 34 times over. His cult is pissed (Reuters): Supporters of former President Donald Trump, enraged by his conviction on 34 felony counts by a New York jury, flooded pro-Trump websites with calls for riots, revolution and violent retribution. After Trump became the first U.S. president to be convicted of a crime, his supporters responded with dozens of violent online posts, according to a Reuters review of comments on three Trump-aligned websites: the former president’s own Truth Social platform, Patriots.Win and the Gateway Pundit. Some called for attacks on jurors, the execution of the judge, Justice Juan Merchan, or outright civil war and armed insurrection.
The latest episode of the hit Media Storm podcast focuses on unpicking the narratives around South Africa's stance on two of the world's biggest geopolitical issues
Convicted like you’ve never seen before It’s a first America doesn’t need, and yet it does. The Washington Post reports yesterday’s news: Donald Trump was convicted Thursday on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in his New York state hush money case, becoming the first former U.S. president to be tried and found guilty of a crime. All of America watched in the aftermath of the Great Recession as its architects in the finance industry took home bonuses even as they took back the homes of families to whom they’d sold “No income, no asset” (NINA) loans, a.k.a. “liar loans.” The Department of the Treasury under Barack Obama “foamed the runway” for the banks to prevent hard landings in the crisis. But it left homeowners out in the cold. The Department of Justice looked the other way.
Young people, those with few qualifications, and voters in Scotland are least aware of new voter ID rules
The MP for Stoke-on-Trent North didn't comment on potential job cuts at the digger giant but called an “urgent” meeting with the Business Secretary over the closure of Johnson Tiles amid claims his "silence was bought"
As for the politics, I don’t know. My guess is it won’t make much difference. Even if he’s given prison time, he’ll appeal and I can’t see him having to run his campaign from prison.
In the larger American domestic context, I think this may presage an era of lawfare. One of the norms of American politics is that elites, unless they betray other elites, are immune to prosecution for a wide variety of crimes which would ruin an ordinary person. Democrats, of course, consider Trump, thru the Jan 7 riot/coup attempt, to have betrayed, but many Republicans don’t see it that way and the likely response will be to use their prosecutors in Red states to go after Trump, just as Democrats used prosecution in a blue state.
This will go until one side wins and other submits, or until both get sick of it and decide to go back to old norms or create new ones.
“I’M A POLITICAL PRISONER! … I DID NOTHING WRONG! … My end-of-month fundraising deadline is just DAYS AWAY!” — Donald Trump on his campaign website, which went down briefly, after he was convicted on thirty-four counts in hush-money trial
- - -
IT’S OFFICIAL: I’M A POLITICAL PRISONER.
A JURY OF YOUR PEERS (NOT MINE) FOUND ME GUILTY.
BUT I DID NOTHING WRONG.
In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: Trump Guilty, The Boys, Welcome to Derry, Smiling Friends, Yellowjackets, Doctor Who, Star Trek, and more!