I am not suffering from what some of President Donald Trump’s more fervent supporters — both in the US and in Australia — like to call “Trump derangement syndrome”. That is, I’m not disputing that he won the presidential election held last November “fair and square”, as did the Republican Party in both the House Continue reading »
politics
In Australia at the federal level of government, we have some of the shortest election cycles in the world: often barely three years. This mitigates against even medium-term planning. A new government takes a year to learn the ropes of office, another year to govern before preparing for re-election in the third. And even if Continue reading »
The Council of the Australian Association of University Professors has welcomed the announcement of a Federal Parliamentary inquiry into the quality of governance at Australian higher education providers. The governance of Australian universities faces significant challenges, with systemic issues and breakdowns in university governance affecting their functioning at all levels. University management currently operates with no Continue reading »
The “China Initiative” was the name of a controversial program run by the US Department of Justice, which was introduced in late 2018 during the first Trump administration. It operated under a typically broad mandate to counter alleged China-related national security threats to the United States. Might messages in Chinese fortune cookies represent, as the Continue reading »
Well, they did it! The Reserve Bank of Australia Board decided, at its meeting conducted over the past two days, to cut its official cash rate by 25 basis points to 4.10%, after having held it at 4.35% since November 2023, and having raised it by 425 basis points over the preceding 18 months. Today’s Continue reading »
Senate Democrats have the power to block federal contracts to Tesla and SpaceX. It’s the path to pushing Musk out of politics.
The post This Is the Way to Stop Elon Musk appeared first on The Intercept.
In the 2020 disaster movie Greenland, the hero John Garrity (played by Gerard Butler), his wife (Morena Baccarin), and their young son are in a truck driving north from the United States into Canada. We hear on the radio an announcement from NASA: A nine-mile-wide fragment larger than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs will […]
The post From Comedy to Brutality appeared first on The New York Review of Books.
"The public deserves to know if there are any debt obligations, resource access clauses, or strategic commitments involved."
Before the 18th century Enlightenment, church and state in Europe were one. In Indonesia, fears that Islam will infiltrate civic affairs go back to the founding of the Republic. Instead, the threats are not from the mosques, but the military. The nation with more Muslims than any other state is constitutionally secular, but it’s heading Continue reading »
February 7 saw the first AUKUS meeting held between officials of the Trump administration and their Australian servitors since the changing of the guard in the White House. In attendance was the US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth and his unbearably compliant Australian counterpart Richard Marles. From all general appearances, the sense was that a change Continue reading »