Weekend rallies highlighted the anger and fear of thousands of women and men about the ongoing violence against Australian women. It is a crisis, and it is occurring day and night in homes and suburbs across the country where police are struggling to keep up with reporting of male violence and too many offenders avoid Continue reading »
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Israel’s crimes against humanity, war crimes and its acts of genocide against the Palestinian people are, without a doubt, the most horrific acts committed by a ‘democracy’ since the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War. Yet despite this fact the Australian government refuses to warn or investigate whether any Australian citizens or companies are Continue reading »
Thanks to Anthony Albanese’s prolonged refusal to change the Morrison government’s damaging policies that he has endorsed, Labor is struggling to stay around 30% in the opinion polls for the next election. One upshot is the latest OECD figures show low and middle income workers in Australia had the highest increase in personal income taxes Continue reading »
The ‘National Defence Strategy’ is not a strategy. It is an ideology. An ideology that firmly ties Australia’s future to that of the United States. A horrifying thought. Australia apparently faces the ‘most complex and challenging strategic environment since the Second World War’. From the perspective of the underpinnings of Australian defence policy for many Continue reading »
It is sometimes said that America bombs while China builds. What’s the evidence, and where are the statistics? Let’s examine the origin and nature of the broad global footprints of America and China which are evident across the world today. The US grew to become a world-striding superpower over 100 years ago. Three hundred years Continue reading »
In a failing quest to maintain its ‘primacy’, the US has cast China, Russia and Iran as global villains. The US intelligence community recently released its annual threat assessment, which focuses on worldwide threats to the country’s national security. The document reflects the collective analyses and insights of the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, Continue reading »
The UK’s Thames Water – infamous for pumping raw sewage into waterways – parent company has now defaulted on its debt. Why should the failure of a UK water company be of interest to Australia and Australians? First, because it illustrates the failure of many privatisations to improve service and performance. Second, because it is Continue reading »
I remember watching a timid singer walk on stage and when he opened his mouth to introduce himself, out came a French accent. The audience mewed and cooed in awe. The next contestant tenuously stepped onto the stage and started to speak. Her accent was Chinese. The audience’s reaction was completely different. Racism manifests in Continue reading »
Here’s one: Thanks to a provision in the Secure 2.0 Act, legislation aimed at improving retirement benefits nationwide, in 2024 employers will be able to start counting student loan payments as qualifying contributions toward retirement matching programs. That means if your employer offers to match your 401(k) contributions, you could get that matched money without ever depositing funds in your retirement account. Instead, your monthly student loan payments would count as your “contribution.” The benefit could be especially significant for recent graduates, who often have moderate incomes ($58,000 to start, on average) and high levels of debt (an average of $33,000 for federal borrowers aged 25 to 35). Does anyone know about this? I hope so. The Biden administration has created an unprecedented number of programs to help average people, increase manufacturing and jobs and generally expand the economy from the bottom up. And yet, most people are either unaware of it or frankly, don’t care. And yet all the polling says they do care about it and think Donald Trump is the guy who will give them the things that Biden has already done.
I was having a quiet evening at home when, suddenly, I received a text. It was my friend Laura, asking if I was free Friday. But I already had plans to get dinner with a different friend—a woman Laura had never met, named Erica.
I yearned to invite Laura along but knew, sadly, that I couldn’t. The laws of friendship dictate that getting dinner with two friends who don’t know each other is impossible, as they come from different, parallel universes.
To bring Erica and Laura to the same dimension—eating dinner with me at an Italian restaurant in the East Village, on the same night, at 7 p.m.—could be disastrous, shattering the friendship multiverse and generating awkwardness at unprecedented levels, with pauses in conversation so long, so vacuous, they’d fill with dark matter, sucking us into a void.
Open Rights Group welcomes the opportunity to respond to the Information Commissioner’s Office consultation on the “consent or pay” model, which is or could be relied upon for processing personal data on the basis of consent. ‘Consent or Pay’ and Data Protection Interferences with our right to privacy and data protection are admissible only and […]
Those gold sneakers are the extent of Trump’s grassroots outreach. Donald Trump says he wants to hold a major campaign event at New York’s Madison Square Garden featuring Black hip-hop artists and athletes. Aides speak of Trump making appearances in Chicago, Detroit and Atlanta with leaders of color and realigning American politics by flipping Democratic constituencies. But five months before the first general election votes are cast, the former president’s campaign has little apparent organization to show for its ambitious plans. His campaign removed its point person for coalitions and has not announced a replacement. The Republican Party’s minority outreach offices across the country have been shuttered and replaced by businesses that include a check-cashing store, an ice cream shop and a sex-toy store. Campaign officials acknowledge they are weeks away from rolling out any targeted programs. Basically, Trump’s saying “you’re on your own” to his Black MAGA endorsers.
Earlier today, Doctor Who star Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson stopped by ABC's Good Morning America - and they brought a clip with them.
A tale of two Americas.
The post Cable News Viewers Have a Skewed Attitude Toward Gaza War, Survey Finds appeared first on The Intercept.
Ofsted is considering closing AP Care Homes Ltd - run by TV star Ampika Pickston and funded by her West Ham owner fiancé David Sullivan - while a separate investigation has been launched into its social media promotion
ORG’s Submission to the House of Commons Public Bill Committee 1. Executive Summary · Open Rights Group, the UK’s largest grassroots digital rights organisation, is submitting evidence about its human rights concerns relating to the IPA Bill. · The requirement that operators must notify the Secretary of State before making security changes to their […]
Trump on Trump 2.0 Not-so-veiled threats and rumors of political retribution are par for the course Donald Trump cheats on. In interviews with Time magazine, the dictator-in-waiting lets everyone know just how far he will go if he wins a second presidential term. Time: Every election is billed as a national turning point. This time that rings true. To supporters, the prospect of Trump 2.0, unconstrained and backed by a disciplined movement of true believers, offers revolutionary promise. To much of the rest of the nation and the world, it represents an alarming risk. A second Trump term could bring “the end of our democracy,” says presidential historian Douglas Brinkley, “and the birth of a new kind of authoritarian presidential order.” Trump 2.0 will be the unitary executive theory on steroids. Nowhere would that power be more momentous than at the Department of Justice. Since the nation’s earliest days, Presidents have generally kept a respectful distance from Senate-confirmed law-enforcement officials to avoid exploiting for personal ends their enormous ability to curtail Americans’ freedoms.
He’s a funny little chap: a sharp dresser with a sleek grey jacket, a white waistcoat, red shorts, and a small grey crest for a hat. With his shiny black eyes and stubby black beak, he’s quite the looker. Like the chihuahua of the bird world, the tufted titmouse has no idea he’s tiny. He swaggers right up to the feeder, shouldering bigger birds out of the way. A few weeks ago, I wouldn’t have known a tufted titmouse from a downy woodpecker. (We have those, too, along with red-bellied woodpeckers, who really should have been named for their bright orange mohawks). This spring I decided to get to know my feathered neighbors with whom I’m sharing an island off... Read more
Source: Celebrating Links Across Species appeared first on TomDispatch.com.
“We do not want to be a democracy”* Republicans want to roll back the 20th century a quarter of the way into the 21st. They’ve made no bones about it for decades. In his heyday during the George W. Bush administration prior to the September 11 attacks, Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform busily strong-armed Republicans into signing his anti-tax pledge. He dreamed of returning America to “the McKinley era, absent the protectionism.” He wanted, famously, to shrink government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” Norquist was a radical for his day. But not so radical that he imagined chucking the Constitution itself along with the last 100 years. Among today’s MAGA Republicans, he’s a RINO. Nancy MacLean, author of “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America,” suggests the remnant of the southern planter class, economic royalists and academic libertarians, undertook affecting a restoration of elite dominance beginning in the late 1940s. Their goal: to save capitalism from democracy.