Leaked documents have revealed illegal operations and ethically questionable practices of the world’s biggest ride sharing company, writes Dr Binoy Kampmark.
Sri Lanka
Between May 1989 and January 1990, Gotabaya oversaw a rule of forced disappearances (the report accounts for 1,042 victims), torture, and killing. A number of Sri Lankan government commissions took note of over 700 forced disappearances.
Source: Get Gota: Holding a War Criminal Accountable – » The Australian Independent Media Network
With Russia and the U.S. currently on the warpath during the escalating conflict in Ukraine, the world is again at serious risk of nuclear disaster, writes Dr Helen Caldicott.
We know that Republicans want schoolchildren and other Americans to keep dying in mass shootings, because preserving easy access to AR-15s is much more important than preventing massacres. We know that Republicans want women who are experiencing ectopic pregnancies not to have access to appropriate care, because women’s deaths are the inevitable collateral damage that comes from banning all abortions. We know that Republicans hate vaccines now. But they never stop trying to find new ways to hurt people, because when they do, we howl in outrage, and there’s no sweeter sound to a Republican voter.
Republicans Are The Party Of Sickness And Death | Crooks and Liars
Without a single thought or platform of their own, the LNP under Peter Dutton’s leadership is grasping at Republican strategies in order to regain power. It’s not for Australia’s sake but simply for their own benefit. Like Dutton the strategy is entirely unoriginal or relevant..
My thought for the day
The ability of thinking human beings to blindly embrace what they are being told without referring to evaluation and the consideration of reason never ceases to amaze me. It is tantamount to the rejection of rational explanation. ( John Lord )
The Texas attorney general has signalled his willingness to take a law making homosexuality illegal through to the Supreme Court should he have the chance. A Republican candidate in South Carolina’s primaries recently called for LGBTQI Americans to be pursued for treason, and executed. He received a quarter of the vote.
The Texas Republican Party platform, launched this Pride Month, named LGBTQI lives “an abnormal lifestyle choice.” Approximately 340 bills targeting LGBTQI existence have been introduced across America this year. The leader of the Christian Fascist organisation Protect Texas Kids tweeted, “Let’s start rounding up people who participate in Pride events,” and other figures on the Right have begun imagining a world where it is legal to hunt LGBTQI people.
In Australia, the Right faces different challenges to impose minority rule. It sees its best chance to regain power and reinstate the steps it had been taking to break our democracy in culture wars. These “moral” panics are distractions meant to disguise the fact that the Right can’t win on a platform of tax cuts for the rich and deregulation.
The new campaign to attack schools for being “woke” as signalled by Dutton, Sky News and the IPA’s Class Action campaign signal their intent to replicate the American crippling of schools and silencing of teachers. The IPA, like the American equivalents, is largely funded by fossil fuel figures who naturally do not want students taught to understand climate science. The harnessing of traditionalists scared of change, combined with radical Religious Right Christian Nationalist bodies, offers the LNP a new base that might offer electoral success.
Source: Calling on the Straights – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Why is Australia so important to the likes of Lauren Southern? The Publicity support and nurture given to her, and grubs like her, by Sky News which is global of course. Coupled with the political sympathy afforded her by Australia’s worst Immigration and Homeland Minister Peter Dutton, who’s now lost for something to do she trying to remain relevant. Lies, lies, and more enables a depleting income for Southern which has now been cut off down under by the ALP. Try to get a visa now Lauren your lies are on record and the world has turned its back. Andrew Bolt for something to do might continue to pay you for interviews from Canada but I doubt it.
Lauren published a lengthy video called The Whole Truth on Tuesday. It commits more than two painful hours to unending navel-gazing about all the white nationalist shit she’s ever said or done. She says in the video that she was declared a political extremist in many countries and that this stifled her ability to apply for international visas.
So, she essentially had to make a performance of “quitting” in order to get a visa here — and this strategy was almost immediately successful.
So, I think that means I was right all along. (Tom Tanuki )
Source: I was right about why Lauren Southern ‘quit’ white nationalism
The middleclass Public service unites and strikes while the traditional construction worker unions and tradies watch on and the LNP writes them off as Marxists.
Teachers, nurses, midwives, and railworkers have now spent years on the frontlines of the ongoing pandemic. In return for putting their health on the line, the state government is rewarding them with ongoing poor conditions and stagnant wages.
Source: New South Wales Public Sector Workers Are Striking Against the Cost-of-Living Crisis
Britain’s Met Office weather forecaster has declared a national emergency, with temperatures early next week predicted to approach – and possibly exceed – record highs.“Exceptional, perhaps record-breaking, temperatures are likely on Monday, then again on Tuesday,” the Met Office said on their website.
National emergency in Britain as the mercury soars to near-record levels | The New Daily
( Middle East Monitor ) – When the Palestinian Authority leader jumped on the US bandwagon spouting status quo rhetoric, he should have remembered President Joe Biden’s dedication to Zionism and colonial Israel. Upon arriving in Israel yesterday for a two day visit during which he will also go to the occupied West Bank, Biden said, ‘I realised that I had the great honour to be part of the great history of this country. I’ll say it again, you need not be a Jew to be a Zionist.’ That ‘great history’, remember, is built upon a distorted narrative and the
Source: In Biden World, Palestinians are not an Occupied Nation-in-Waiting but a mere Charity Case
Despite Republican opposition, Democrats passed a bill to affirm the right to cross state lines for abortion care in response to attempts by anti-choice lawmakers to ban such travel.
Source: 99% of House GOP Just Showed They Support Forcing Children to Birth ‘Their Rapist’s Child’: Pascrell
Falls in Australia due to accidents and/or lack of balance in the aged are also the greatest cause of death and quality of life deterioration in the elderly and are not attended to well enough by our public health system. We once helped the elderly crossroads, giving them a seat and generally offering assistance. However not anymore.
US health officials consider falls to be the leading cause of injury-related death for people who are 65 years of age or older. About 64 out of 100,000 elderly people die as a result of accidental falls, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
there is a grotesque orange cloud hovering over the GOP in the person of Donald J. Trump who is planning to announce his candidacy any time now and remind everyone in the country that the Republican Party has been remade in his image and still dances to his tune. When asked what he thought about Trump entering the 2024 race, Joe Biden said he welcomes it. No doubt. Biden may be unpopular but in head-to-head polls, he still beats Trump.
He’s running: The specter of Donald Trump looms over the GOP | Salon.com
And that’s surely the point of Matt and Tim and Peter. They make the rest of them look so much more reasonable. I remember when we laughed at the “Joh for PM” campaign in the late 1980s. I was at Billy Bragg’s concert where he made jokes about it, but then left us with a warning that the problem was that after Joh someone would come along and – by comparison – they’d seem alright.
And thanks to Matt and Tim and Peter, then the moderates like Hollie Hughes and Dan Tehan and Angus Taylor and Alan Tudge and Alex Hawke…
Oh, I see…
Yeah, the days of looking good compared to the previous front bench may be over for the federal Coalition.
But at least, down here in Victoria, Tim Smith is making a concerted effort to make his leader look good by comparison with his praise of Rugby League over AFL.
If that doesn’t get him expelled from the Victorian Liberal Party then they might as well disband now.
Soda for the Quinella of the worst Health, Immigration, Homeland, Defence and Opposition Leaders this Nation has ever seen. Morrison might have beaten him out of that record because of Immigration.
THE ADMINISTRATIVE law system for assessing asylum seekers in this country is straight out of the 17th Century. It is so complex and arcane that it prompted a Federal Court judge, Nye Perram, to say recently that of the 70,000 or so legal practitioners in Australia, he would be surprised if more than 200 had any idea how it worked.
Naturally, it has long since been abandoned by every other common law country in the world.
Source: Peter Dutton’s legacy is a refugee processing nightmare
The judges described mandatory minimum sentences as wrong in principle, particularly given it wasn’t open to courts to consider sentencing options outside of jail.
They required judges to be instruments of injustice, imprisoning people when not warranted, and inflicting more severe punishment than a proper application of a sentencing principle could justify.
“This blunt, oppressive sentencing regime is contrary to the public interest and incompatible with modern sentencing jurisprudence,” they said in a judgment published on Thursday.
Victorian appeal judges have derided the state’s mandatory sentencing laws, saying they force them to be “instruments of injustice”.
Source: Victorian sentencing laws force ‘injustice’ say judges
Push Polling by the IPA
POLL: MAJORITY OF AUSTRALIANS DEMAND NEW COAL-FIRED POWER STATIONS proclaimed the media release from the Institute of Public Affairs on Thursday. Yes, it was scary enough to rate capital letters.
“Australia’s Great Energy Crisis is a direct result of the elite’s policy of net zero emissions by 2050. The political class’s obsession with unreliable renewables continues to push reliable and affordable baseload power generation off the grid and makes us more vulnerable,” proclaimed Daniel Wild, deputy executive director of the Institute.
Back to the Future 70 years later knowledge we weren’t allowed to investigate
In a rare bipartisan display, Reps. Dan Crenshaw and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez secured defense spending amendments that would support psychedelic-assisted PTSD treatment for veterans.
Two Sydneysiders made their fortune on the back of short-term loans to cash-strapped customers. JobKeeper helped. Callum Foote reports on executive pay and public subsidies.
Source: Executive bonus bonanza: Afterpay CEOs’ quarter billion pay juiced by Jobkeeper – Michael West
Corporations are underwriting the thuggery of Trump and his allies – all because they want to pay as little tax as possible
Murdoch Media sets the lowest global standard for media in the English-speaking world
With its recent commentaries on a terrible rape case in Ohio, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board has demonstrated yet again that it exists simply to put a seemingly respectable face on the most disgusting vitriol from right-wing political circles.
and
The central question right-wing propagandists won’t answer about a 10-year-old rape survivor
A couple of nights ago, Ohio’s Attorney General thought that it was his duty to cast doubt on the story by going on Fox News with Jesse Watters, calling it likely “a fabrication.” “This young girl, if she exists and if this horrible thing actually happened to her, it breaks my heart to think about it, she did not have to leave Ohio to find treatment,” Yost said. Also, another lie, as Ohio’s so-called “Heartbeat Law” makes no exceptions for rape or incest. That was unfortunate as it turned out, as less than 24 hours later a Columbus man was charged with impregnating the 10-year-old Ohio girl.
Ohio AG Lies To Fox About 10-Year-Old Rape Victim | Crooks and Liars
and
So where now for the Right?
We are witnessing a monumental disconnect among those who define themselves as of the Right.
A stark example is the discombobulation of members of the Conservative Party of the UK, who abandoned former Prime Minister Boris Johnson in droves, suggesting the British Right has lost all faith in its philosophy.
The same is true of the Liberal Party of Australia, which, to a casual observer, appears devoid of political relevance.
Source: How Right disunity emboldens the Left – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Unless the US and the world’s biggest corporations get on board and assist China and India the gesture is a token even if admirable. The biggest corporations are the biggest polluters and have ignored governments for years.
Prepare for a great acceleration in renewable energy build, despite the policy fracas between Labor and the Greens. To achieve its 82% target, Labor has to build renewables around five times faster than the past two decades, and build storage at about 10 times the rate of the past five years. Energy economist Bruce Mountain offers a blueprint.
Source: Hitting the green accelerator: Labor’s renewables target ambitious but achievable – Michael West
Even if you are lucky enough to live in a wealthy country, one of the biggest influences on your health and life expectancy will be your socioeconomic status.
Distinctly political, the Medical Board of Australia has turned its back on science, and turned to strong-arm tactics to silence any opposition to their political interests it seems. Surely, their aggression would be better directed at Murdoch Media, and others, rather than trying to bring to task a member who makes reasonable sense.
If we have learnt nothing else in the last two years, it is that public health is inextricably a political process. It is utterly outrageous that the Medical Board of Australia seems intent on trying to silence one side of this debate to protect the powerful.
Source: Medical whistleblower calling out COVID incompetence risks deregistration
Once head of the the NDIS which still operates uner Reynolds Rules and spends a record amount of time and money cutting people off from the scheme finds that she shouldn’t be judged for her transgresions in the same manner. In Morrison’s government you simply blame someone else.
Coalition senator blames ‘administrative oversight’ for delayed disclosure of shares including in Electro Optic Systems, which had previously been awarded millions in government contracts
Linda Reynolds more than six months late in declaring series of share trades on register | Australian politics | The Guardian
reporting now confirms that the story was true all along. Around noon on Wednesday, Columbus Dispatch reporter Bethany Bruner published an article confirming that Gershon Fuentes, an undocumented man living in the Columbus area, had been charged with the rape of the 10-year-old girl. The crime is a first-degree felony in Ohio. Bruner noted on Twitter that she was the only reporter in the courtroom covering the story.
Source: Conservatives tried — and failed — to cast doubt on tale of Ohio child rape victim | Salon.com
Murdoch media isn’t just a fake News Corporation by what it reports but also by what it omits. It collects ratings from fake, and no news alike which they onsell to moneyed interests. That’s private and political interests alike to misguide the public while calling it information.
Can advertisers sell a product as crudely and in that way? Is there any public obligation in America to sell truth or is that only in a courtroom with its bible? It appears there’s none as even the courts, and the very highest in the land, can be bought.
Of great interest will be the outcome of Murdoch vs Dominion voting machines for the current future of American News and the current ongoing sale of press propaganda.
Fox, by shielding its viewers from the information the committee details, is continuing its complicity in Trump’s effort to subvert the election and the resulting mob attack on the U.S. Capitol.
For years Trump threatened anyone ready to speak out against him with money or the courts. He was the most practised Don in the country with 4000 court cases to prove it. However, the Jan 6th Committee hasn’t been bought or a court it’s simply there to gather the facts for the American legal system to decide whether charges should be brought. However, Trump while President made every effort to swing that system his way. The question remains just how much and solid must the evidence be against Trump be for an indictment to be made?
Donald Trump famously joked that he was so popular with his fans that he could literally get away with murder.
“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, he bragged while campaigning in Iowa back in 2016.
Never mind the voters. Here we are, 18 months after his presidency, staring at clear evidence that Trump led a criminal conspiracy to interfere with the 2020 election and the constitutional duties of Congress. He intentionally incited a violent mob that he knew was armed to mount an attempted coup on Capitol Hill.
We need a criminal investigation into Donald Trump | Richard Wolffe | The Guardian
We need a criminal investigation into Donald Trump | Richard Wolffe | The Guardian
At the end of Tuesday’s hearing of the House January 6 committee, Rep. Liz Cheney revealed yet one more bombshell from a congressional investigation that has been full of them.
Murdoch media stands out as central to the reporting of the denial that this event even occurred and is given the freedom to do so without verification or testing of the facts. Might is right the loudest voice doesn’t always win but is never smothered.
The Washington Post, the conservative Daily Caller and other media outlets published stories saying that the case was unverified. The Wall Street Journal Editorial page suggested the story was a “fanciful tale.” The National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty referred to the case as “a fictive abortion and a fictive rape.” Republican Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost went on Fox News Monday to raise further doubts.
It’s incredibly disturbing that the default position of so many sick and twisted people — including Ohio’s most prominent Republican elected officials — is to very vocally and very publicly question whether the rape and impregnation of a 10-year-old child ever happened.
This case was never implausible. In 2020, the most recent year for which statistics are available, 52 girls aged 14 and younger had abortions in Ohio, according to the state department of health. A review of just the city of Columbus’ police log since March 15 uncovered 59 reports of sexual assaults of girls 15 and younger that, based on the information available, could have resulted in pregnancy.
There was never going to be a situation in which there were no deaths. Nobody expects that. However, when so little has been done by the Federal Government to mitigate COVID-19 deaths, it is extremely alarming that the Morrison strategy is to desensitise people to suffering and death, rather than make an all-out effort to introduce every protection against those outcomes.
When your government starts selling you death as the option, it’s probably time to get concerned.
FLASHBACK 2021: The Liberal Government doesn’t care if you die
Just as COVID is surging, test accuracy has plunged. Now what?
Just as COVID is surging, test accuracy has plunged. Now what?
Fast-mutating variants of the Omicron COVID-19 strain have made rapid tests for the virus much less accurate and liable to provide an inaccurate diagnosis in four out of 10 cases.
Doctors say the development is a major health dilemma.
The federal government has announced that funding would be cut for subsidies to drop the price of rapid antigen tests (RATs).
The decision has drawn criticism from pharmacists and the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners.
But the vice president of the Australian Medical Association, Chris Moy, says taking steps to offset the tests’ falling accuracy and prevent them from being overused was far more important than ensuring they could be easily accessed.
At the same time RAT tests are being reported to be inaccurate in 4 out of 10 cases and the subsidy on the tests is being dropped nevertheless passengers are being allowed to leave. Are we witnessing the repeat of the Ruby Princess time-bomb?
After departing Eden on the New South Wales south coast with more than 2,300 people onboard, the Coral Princess berthed at Circular Quay just before dawn on Wednesday, where it will remain for a day before returning to its home port of Brisbane.
Passengers will have to record a negative result on a rapid antigen test before disembarking but the crew will have to remain.
Source: Covid-hit Coral Princess cruise ship docks in Sydney | Health | The Guardian
COVID-19 cruise ship to dock in Sydney – Michael West
A cruise ship due to dock in Sydney will arrive carrying scores of people who have tested positive for COVID-19.
Passengers will have to record a negative result on a rapid antigen test before disembarking, while crew will have to remain on board.
COVID-19 cruise ship to dock in Sydney – Michael West
The outbreak aboard the Coral Princess has mostly infected crew, with 114 of them in isolation on Tuesday.
In terms of the gig economy, there are few more ruthless buccaneers than this San Franciscan ride-share company that has persistently specialised in cutting corners and remaking them. Those taken aback by the latest leaked files about Uber’s conduct would do well to remember the initial stages of the company’s growth, and the protests against it. Globally, the taxi fraternity raged against the encroachment of this new, seemingly amorphous bully. Some authorities heeded their wishes, seeing an alternative option in transportation.
Barely Legal: The Global Uber Enterprise – » The Australian Independent Media Network
The lack of interest in the death of a former African leader wasn’t just business as usual in the story of a continent, but a reflection on what we find important in our media diet, writes Mark Sawyer.
It’s been quite a few days. The former leader of the world’s third biggest democracy was gunned down. Much-loved actors James Caan and Tony Sirico, who embodied gangsterdom in The Godfather and The Sopranos, were whacked for real, so to speak (I mean no disrespect!). Boris Johnson both quit and hung on for dear life as prime minister of the UK.
The Australian media every now and then does some hand-wringing about its whiteness. ‘’We’re going to devote more attention to the wider world, not just London and Washington,’’ is the pledge.
Well, Sri Lanka teeters on the verge of collapse, having run out of oil and money. The Marcos family is back running the Philippines, but the novelty seems to have already worn off. There’s an election in Papua New Guinea. That will draw a little attention, and then we’ll put that fragile democracy on the backburner.
Australians talk about our future in this part of the world but a story about Boris, or say Meghan and Harry, will smoke the latest doings in countries with 90% of the world’s population.
The world won’t listen: African dream died long before a despot – Michael West
The refunds indicate the Illinois House member has a strained relationship with pro-Israel groups that supported his reelection.
Source: Rep. Sean Casten Returns $50,000 in Pro-Israel Donations
Dr Victoria Fielding analyses the “just asking questions” defence used by mainstream media journalists to avoid scrutiny and critique when their bias or poor journalism practice is exposed.
‘Just asking questions’ mantra — a poor excuse for media bias
Those of us who support Labor’s approach to doing politics need to publicly acknowledge this, to hold it up as the only decent way, the only way that benefits all of us.
Our partisan political system perpetuates this. Those who support it, the ‘right side’, the ‘liberal’ side, regard this as the ‘norm’, the way our political system ought to function. After all they insist, it is the entrepreneurs who have created the enterprises that power our economy, who give work to those who haven’t the capacity to create work themselves. They are right in their assertion, but does that authenticate their position of superiority. Should those who offer work be valued more than those who undertake it?
There seems to be no logically plausible answer to this, but we all know that this is so.
The union movement has long insisted that workers ought to be valued, that our economy could not function without them – an obvious conclusion. Yet too often they are denigrated, seen as simply pawns in the global chess game played by the powerful. To demonstrate their value, their importance to the economy, they sometimes withdraw their labour, whereupon they are demonised for their ‘perversity’.
The Liberal Party will not promote an economic system that gives workers their just dues. They are focussed on employers, eager to give them the advantage, eager to ensure that they have the workers they need to prosper. They will not change. Their DNA will not allow that.
So is there an answer?
Source: Another way of doing politics – » The Australian Independent Media Network
ON IT GOES, the Liberal Party attempting to recast Australia into its own image.
And if there was to be such an image, it would be an alabaster statue of a tall and impossibly noble-looking Captain Cook, in a huge tricorn hat, sword gallantly outstretched, with a knee-high leather boot grinding into Australia’s virgin soil a dusky native’s head.
Yes, the Liberal Party is trying to change the history books again.
Enter MP Stuart Robert, stage right. Stage Far-Right, to be precise.
Stuart Robert’s alabaster history wars
Stuart Robert’s alabaster history wars
olddogthoughts 
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