“China has a continuous civilisation for 5,000 years” Sun Yeli, CPC central committee member said when launching the World Conference on China Studies in Shanghai. The challenge is to promote understanding of this continuity and the way it shapes current policy. Civilisation is more than culture. It’s the way China approaches the world and that Continue reading »
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The emptiness of modern Labor is now on full display: maligning refugees, promoting fossil fuels, tinkering around the edge of social crisis, pandering to the wealthy, condoning mass murder, adopting policies of Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison. Labor’s reaction to the High Court’s decision to outlaw outlaw outlaw indefinite detention of immigrant offenders was to panic. Continue reading »
Now what on earth will those staunch monarchists and climate denialists – John Howard and Tony Abbott – say about their new king, Charles III, and his very strongly held environmental views? Charles may or may not be terribly bright (well smarter than his brother anyway) and rather pompous but that tends to go with Continue reading »
Spiritual and cultural Christians – indeed such people of all faiths – need to consider allying together with those who identify as belonging to “no religion.” It is the fundamentalist authoritarians who would divide and constrain us all that need exposing as the small minority they truly are. We must make them as powerless as Continue reading »
You might be forgiven for thinking that the images from Ireland the other week of a burning bus and of riot police came from Belfast. After all, arson is a form of public protest we tend to associate with Northern Ireland (Northern Ireland deja vu: They’re burning buses again). Yet the rioting we saw this Continue reading »
The third preview of the ABC acquired documentary; ‘Saving Bondi Pavilion’ was screened in the NSW Parliament theatrette on the 28th of November. It detailed the successful fight to prevent the privatisation/commercialisation of one of our treasured national icons. Following the screening the audience was shocked to learn that the ABC had mothballed the documentary. Continue reading »
“This is what Christmas looks like in Palestine.” A church in the occupied West Bank has changed this year’s nativity scene, not with shepherds but laying baby Jesus in the rubble, to show solidarity with the people of Gaza. Continue reading »
I en debattartikel i Aftonbladet idag lyfter Tidöpartierna baksidorna med att tillåta mobiltelefoner i skolan. Efter att ha varit ute och besökt en rad skolor under några veckors tid kan yours truly inte låta bli att fundera över saker man skulle vilja ändra och förbättra. Och en och annan undran kan man ju också kosta […]
Your once and possibly future president , ladies and gentlemen: No, you are not dreaming. That’s who half the country wants to lead it. Oh my: Beck asked Kelly if she thought Trump has cognitively “faded from where he was in 2020.” Kelly’s response: “Yeah, I do … There’s no question Trump has lost a step. Multiple steps. He is confusing Joe Biden for Obama. I know he’s now saying he intentionally did that. Go back and look at the clips. It wasn’t intentional.” “Look, any of us can have a slip of the tongue, but it’s happening to him repeatedly. The reference of how somebody is going to get us into World War Two, confusing countries, confusing cities where he is in, and it’s happening more and more. With all due respect to Trump, this is what happens when you are 77 years old … Are we really going to pretend that Trump is just as vibrant as he was in 2016?”
Worth repeating “America is more than a country. America is an idea,” former Speaker Kevin McCarthy told an Oxford Union audience in late October. That idea is freedom [timestamp 7:35]. At the New York Times DealBook event last month, McCarthy repeated something else he’d said at Oxford about Americans who are the true caretakers of that idea (Washington Post): “I became leader when we took the minority, and this was a turning point for me,” McCarthy said, describing having attended the 2019 State of the Union address. “I’d just become leader and I’m excited and President Trump’s there. And I look over at the Democrats and they stand up. They look like America,” he told Sorkin. “We stand up. We look like the most restrictive country club in America.” Called it: Robert Calhoon once wrote about colonists who supported the Crown during the American Revolution. “Historians’ best estimates,” he wrote, “put the proportion of adult white male loyalists somewhere between 15 and 20 percent,” a figure not far removed from the Republican base.
Mark Gatiss talks about his adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's supernatural story Lot No. 249 as this year's Ghost Story for Christmas.
The BBC is releasing the mostly lost Doctor Who serial "The Celestial Toymaker" on Blu-Ray & DVD. But based on how it looks, should they?
Stop hand-wringing People feel what they feel. Don’t tell them otherwise, suggests Dave Johnson (now blogging from across the Pond). “Biden & Dems need to be saying, ‘We understand how hard it has been and we’ve been working on it. It is starting to turn around,’” Johnson reminds readers of Seeing the Forest. That was Bill Clinton’s message to the DNC convention that renominated Barack Obama in 2012. The economy was a wreck when Obama took over, but he’s turning it around, Clinton told the assembly: Now, look. Here’s the challenge he faces and the challenge all of you who support him face. I get it. I know it. I’ve been there. A lot of Americans are still angry and frustrated about this economy. If you look at the numbers, you know employment is growing, banks are beginning to lend again. And in a lot of places, housing prices are even beginning to pick up. But too many people do not feel it yet. That was two months before the 2012 election. You know how that worked out.
Plus, organizers take on non-union automakers, an automatic voter registration program expands to the prison system, and a “Lithium Valley” bonanza bodes well for a clean-energy future.
In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: Doctor Who, Silk, DCU/Maxwell Lord, Stranger Things 5, Rick and Morty, The Boys, Pretty Little Liars & more!
“You are seeing in front of your eyes that your family is suffering and might be killed, but you can’t do anything about it.”
The post For Palestinians Who Just Left Gaza, Witnessing the War From Afar Evokes Helplessness and Grief appeared first on The Intercept.
Chicago police officer Raymond Piwnicki has 99 civilian complaints on his record, many of them involving racist invective and violence.
The post Why Does the Chicago Police Department Tolerate Abusive Racists in Its Ranks? appeared first on The Intercept.
The event was organised by the International Foundation for Therapeutic and Counselling Choice – a London-based company that says it is a 'home for the once-gay'
Think ‘Quadrangle’ and an image might come to mind of the University of Sydney and the Quadrangle which forms its nucleus: grand sandstone buildings, gargoyles, perfect lawns and the (replacement) talismanic jacaranda tree. Unless you frequently travel through Cammeraygal country, along Eastern Valley Way. In which case you might also think of the shopping […]
Along with new images from "The Giggle," Doctor Who Showrunner Russell T. Davies shared a "warning" video that had us asking questions...
No lad who has liberty for the first time, and twenty guineas in his pocket, is very sad, and Barry rode towards Dublin thinking not so much of the kind mother left alone, and of the home behind him, but of tomorrow, and all the wonders it would bring. -from Barry Lyndon Oh man, oh God…we’ve lost another one: Ryan O’Neal, the boyish leading man who kicked off an extraordinary 1970s run in Hollywood with his Oscar-nominated turn as the Harvard preppie Oliver in the legendary romantic tearjerker Love Story, has died. He was 82. O’Neal died Friday, his son Patrick O’Neal, a sportscaster with Bally Sports West in Los Angeles, reported on Instagram. He had been diagnosed with chronic leukemia in 2001 and with prostate cancer in 2012. “As a human being, my father was as generous as they come,” Patrick wrote. “And the funniest person in any room. And the most handsome clearly, but also the most charming. Lethal combo. He loved to make people laugh. It’s pretty much his goal. Didn’t matter the situation, if there was a joke to be found, he nailed it. He really wanted us laughing. And we did all laugh. Every time. We had fun.