from Crikey …..

Spooks harm the national interest in their great Anglophone game

I am trying to understand the utter inhumanity of this Abbott government towards asylum seekers.  First, let’s look at just some of what they are doing.

Gus asks. As we generously give some old custom gun boats to Sri Lanka one has to ask, do we supply the ammos as well? Do we supply the fuel to run the boats? Do we supply the maintenance expertise or are these going to become pitted aluminium saucepans or rust buckets?... Fair questions I thought. 

As usual our little turd-in-chief is super generous in giving what is not his to give, as he made us foot the bill for his furious pedalling at charitable events... Nothing new.

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British intelligence agency GCHQ has been targeting mobile phone company networks. Telecoms security expert Philippe Langlois explains what they can find this way, and how users can protect themselves from such snooping.

Australian journalist and BAFTA-award winning documentary filmmaker John Pilger has a strong investigative record spanning a 40-year career. In his latest film, Utopia, he turns his incisive hand to a topic integral to the Australian story, yet ostensibly glossed over by many of its own inhabitants – that of Indigenous Australia.

At Hogwarts, there are charms, spells and then there are unforgivable curses. There are gradations in the dark arts in the House of Reprehensibles, too.

On Monday this week Maurice Newman, the head of Tony Abbott’s business advisory council, gave a speech examining Australia’s fall in competitiveness over the past five years.

WikiLeaks has exposed details of secret trade negotiations that could leave Australians paying more for drugs and medicines, movies, computer games and software, and be placed under surveillance as part of a US-led crackdown on internet piracy.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott's support for Cardinal George Pell over child sex abuse is inappropriate and factually wrong, victims say.

This new controversy came as the Speaker of the Victorian Parliament, Ken Smith, accused the former Melbourne vicar-general, Gerald Cudmore, of committing perjury in evidence he gave to a parliamentary inquiry in 1993. Mr Smith said highly placed Catholics stifled his inquiry's report.

from Crikey ….. 

'The stuff of nightmares': when who you are becomes a crime