Morrison’s self-appointment to six portfolios says a lot about his contempt for the quality and integrity of decision making under his government. The response by PM&C officers, who were in the know, also raises questions about how adequately they exercised their responsibility for good government.

The report by former High Court Judge, Virginia Bell, into Morrison’s self-appointment to administer six departments was released last Friday and was immediately headline news.

By Michael Keating

A key feature of these appointments was that they were made in secret, not disclosed to the parliament or the public, and in most cases even the responsible minister was not informed.

In history books as well as in politics every story is shaped by where one chooses to begin the tale. The current fighting in Ukraine, which many observers believe to already be what might be considered the opening phase of World War 3, is just such a development. Did the seeds of conflict arise subsequent to Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s consent to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 after having received a commitment from the United States and its allies not to advance the West’s military alliance NATO into Eastern Europe? That was a pledge that was quickly ignored by President Bill Clinton, who intervened militarily in the former Yugoslavia before adding new NATO members from amidst the ruins of the Warsaw Pact.

Revealed: US Military Bought Mass Monitoring Tool That Includes Internet Browsing, Email Data

The “Augury” platform includes highly sensitive network data that Team Cymru, a private company, is selling to the military. “It’s everything. There’s nothing else to capture except the smell of electricity,” one cybersecurity expert said.

By Joseph Cox

Should the Dutch Court decision on the downing of Malaysian airliner MH 17 set a precedent for the trial of weapons suppliers? 

On November 17, the District Court of The Hague found Igor Girkin, Sergey Dubinskiy and Leonid Kharchenko, guilty of contributing to the downing of Malaysian Airways flight MH17 and the murder of all 298 individuals on board. 

By Paul Malone

The three were found to have helped arrange the deployment and transport into Ukraine of the Russian BUK missile system that was used to shoot down the plane, though they were not the ones who physically pulled the trigger.

A sentence of life imprisonment was imposed on the three men.  

A different election, but a familiar result.

Despite grand predictions of a Labor retreat, the government has maintained a strong majority in the Victorian parliament.

Questions of integrity and the premier's popularity dominated the hostile campaign period, but Labor stuck to its policy guns — it went directly to voters and worried less about the media.

There was a swing against the government – 3.5 per cent (two-party preferred) across the state – but the heaviest backlash was in Melbourne's northern and western outer suburbs, where Labor suffered a 6.7 per cent swing.

Oft described as Labor's heartland, the party must now address why voters in these suburbs have turned away.

Jens Stoltenberg IS A DANGEROUS MAN. HE IS AN IDIOT WITH A MINUSCULE BRAIN IN CHARGE OF A VICIOUSLY BIG APPARATUS OF WAR. Jens Stoltenberg SHOULD GO (BE FLUSHED). NATO IS A FASCIST ORGANISATION. Jens Stoltenberg IS A FASCIST WHO BELIEVES IN HIS RIGHT TO BE STUPID AND DANGEROUSLY AGGRESSIVE.

UNFORTUNATELY, IT IS DIFFICULT TO MAKE PEOPLE SUCH AS HIM SEE THE DISASTERS THAT THEIR STUPID POSITION ON ISSUES ARE ENGENDERING — UNLESS HE DOES IT PURPOSEFULLY TO LAUNCH WW3 AND BE BUSILY IN CHARGE OF THE BIGGEST DISASTER OF THEM ALL.

Europeans are about to face numerous hardships due to the Ukraine conflict, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told Germany’s Welt an Sonntag newspaper on Sunday.

Bye-bye, Kiev, hello Cote d’Azur: As Westerners send aid, here’s how Ukraine’s corrupt elites are profiting from the conflict

Officials and oligarchs have diverted much of the financial support sent to Kiev

There isn’t a Russian over the age of forty-five – 40 million people — who doesn’t know by heart Vladimir Lenin’s report on the work of the Council of People’s Commissars of December 22, 1920. 

In the 30 years since the world began negotiating the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, no one has identified exactly where all that pollution is coming from. That will begin to change next week when Climate TRACE (Tracking Real-Time Atmospheric Carbon Emissions)—a nonprofit coalition of artificial intelligence (AI) specialists, data scientists, researchers, and nongovernmental organizations—releases the first facility-level inventory of the largest known individual sources of the 162 million tons of GHG pollution emitted into the troposphere every day.

And you thought the big digital entertainment in the months ahead is Donald Trump’s return to Twitter.

Hah. What is coming to a split-screen near you in 2023 is much more dramatic. It is a direct result of Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appointment of a Special Counsel, Jack Smith, to take forward two critical investigations that may well seek to bring Trump to justice, and to show to the American people that no one, not even a former president, is above the law.

By Bruce Wolpe

What we will also see is the result of the Republicans winning control of the House of Representatives, and their insistence that Joe Biden be impeached for corruption.

Policing of protest has long been fraught in New South Wales. Over years a slow creep has chipped away at the right to peaceful public assembly. We reached an ugly and repressive high watermark this year. Legal changes and growing police repression against climate protestors has been widely documented (for example, here and here). Readers of this journal are likely aware of this alarming trend. In this article, we convey stories of activists targeted by the new laws and Strike Force Guard. These are anonymised accounts written in consultation with affected persons.

The global economic outlook is deteriorating due to inflation-fighting efforts by central banks, the war between Russia and Ukraine, and China’s prioritization of political control over economic growth. A global recession is likely, with at least slower economic growth virtually certain.

People who have followed my work for years often say that I’m an optimist, and usually I am. Right now, though, the weight of evidence points to a slowing world economy.

Bill Conerly

The European Parliament, which on Wednesday adopted a non-binding resolution branding Russia a “state sponsor of terrorism”, should be designated a “sponsor of idiocy,” Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said.

The EU’s legislative body passed the decision on Wednesday in a landslide vote in Strasbourg. The document was supported by 494 MEPs, with 58 votes against and 44 abstentions. The resolution merged drafts penned by three different factions of the European Parliament.

The labeling is the EU’s latest condemnation of Russia’s military offensive in Ukraine. Some individual states, including Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and the Czech Republic, previously passed similar resolutions on a national level.

According to The Wall Street Journal, White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has been involved with a secretive “back channel” line of communication with top Russian officials as part of an effort by the U.S. and Russia to prevent the war in Ukraine from escalating into a nuclear conflict.

Among the officials named as representing the Russian conduit for this “back channel” are Yuri Ushakov, a senior foreign policy adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Nikolai Patrushev, the head of Russia’s security council.

BY Scott Ritter

The US Treasury announced on Tuesday that it would disburse $4.5 million to Ukraine in the coming weeks, according to a press release.

“Today, the United States continued to uphold its unwavering commitment to Ukraine with the mobilization of an additional $4.5 billion in grants for direct budget support,” US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in the release.

“These funds will begin disbursing in the coming weeks and help the Government of Ukraine defend against Russia’s illegal war by bolstering economic stability and supporting core government services, including wages for hospital workers, government employees, and teachers as well as social assistance for the elderly and vulnerable.”