London: French President Emmanuel Macron agreed to start rebuilding a relationship with Australia based on “trust and respect” in his first phone call with new Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Thursday evening.

Macron, who wrote privately to congratulate Albanese following his election victory on Saturday evening, reminded his new counterpart of the “deep breach of trust” which had occurred in an ugly chapter in Franco-Australian relations last year following the cancellation of a $90 billion submarine contract.

In a conversation that lasted more than 20 minutes, the pair agreed the two nations needed to repair the bond to jointly overcome global challenges, including the climate “emergency” and strategic challenges in the Indo-Pacific.

E T Gundlach's (satirical) book "Fact and Fetishes of Advertising" (1931) was poopooed by the advertising community, despite Gundlach having invented many of the TRICKS of advertising. The point of advertising is to sell more products, not for its boffins to be creative Picassos or being writers of literature. SIMPLE points have to be made — and SIMPLICITY CAN BE FAR MORE DIFFICULT than literature...

In some ways, Gundlach was a visionary and a master of understanding ways to manipulate individual's mind. The paragraphs above give an inkling about his insight, not only of advertising but of the greater TRADE. Trade and the price of fish do more to international relations than wars and political machinations. Above all, honesty in trade and advertising (and in politics) has been the key to progress...

Recent general elections in The Philippines appear to signal the island nation’s continued but gradual move out from under US subordination and its rise with the rest of Asia as China emerges as both a regional and global superpower.

With Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. set to become the next president along with his running mate, Sara Duterte, daughter of the outgoing President Rodrigo Duterte, the Western media appears convinced that it signals the continued building of relations between The Philippines and China and the gradual diminishing of American influence over both The Philippines and the rest of the region.

by Brian Berletic

I am pleased to be here for this meeting and thank you for organising it. In my introduction, I would like to raise two issues that seem to me fundamental for understanding the current events in Ukraine. The first aspect concerns the nature of this war. In the second part of my reflections, I will try to explain why, in my opinion, peace in Europe is currently impossible, or at least unlikely, and quite distant.

BY: Guy Mettan

30 April 2022. 

The nature of this war

julius

Voting is a humongous subject. It is at the core of the health of democracy. We refer thus to the father of MODERN ADVERTISING: E T Gundlach. The excerpt above from his (somewhat satirical) book "Facts and Fetishes in Advertising (published 1931)....

Promoting political belief is often crass because of ... read above.

Ukrainian presidential advisor Alexey Arestovich resorted to obscene language to criticize those in the West urging Kiev to cede part of the country's territory to Russia for the sake of peace.

“Go f**k yourselves with such proposals, you dumb f**ks, to trade Ukrainian territory a little bit! Are you f**king crazy? Our children are dying, soldiers are stopping shells with their own bodies, and they are telling us how to sacrifice our territories. This will never happen,” Arestovich said in an interview on Wednesday.

The proposition that Australians were disengaged from politics has become something of an orthodoxy in recent years. Polls showing high rates of undecided voters before the election seemed to confirm this analysis.

But come election night 2022, it became clear — horribly so, for the MPs who were personally escorted to the exit by their electorates — that the Australian voting public is engaged, alert, and has its BS detector dialled up to 11.

The voting patterns around the country were intricate, and runic analysts in the major parties will likely be going over them for years.

Peter Dutton has issued a rallying cry to a devastated Liberal Party, promising to bring together moderate and conservative wings fractured by the election loss and vowing to take the fight to Labor on the economy.

Dutton formally confirmed on Wednesday he will stand for the leadership of the Liberals as he warned “things are going to be tough under Labor – higher interest rates, cost of living, inflation and electricity prices”.

“Labor talked a big game on the economy. They now have to deliver and we will hold them to account,” he said in a statement.

More than 4 million Australian school students were at risk of unprecedented tracking and surveillance during remote learning as corporations exploited their access to children.

Key points:

• 
  Human Rights Watch analysed 164 educational apps and websites used in 49 countries
• 
  It found 89 per cent of EdTech products used globally could put children's privacy at risk
• 
  Several products used in Australia were found sharing children's data with advertisers

The findings come from the most comprehensive global study into the murky world of student data during COVID-19 lockdowns, and the privacy risks for both students and their families as education shifted from schools to homes.

The German government has rejected criticism by Polish President Andrzej Duda, who accused Berlin of failing to substitute tanks Warsaw had delivered to Ukraine. It might take Germany a long time to produce the heavy equipment Poland seeks to receive from Berlin, government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit told journalists on Wednesday.

On Tuesday, Duda told the German news outlet Die Welt that Berlin had failed to replenish the Polish stocks in a timely fashion after Warsaw “weakened” its own military potential by sending “a large number” of tanks to Ukraine. Most Polish tanks are German-made ones and Warsaw expected Berlin to step in, the Polish leader added.

The war in Ukraine is a trompe l’oeil. Behind the appearances of the unity of NATO and its consolidation by new members, several big players run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. In reality, all those who are not blinded by their own propaganda know that their side is going to lose and is already planning other enemies on other battlefields. Washington is making the best of a bad situation and using Russian pressure to close ranks.

RISING TENSIONS (19)

A new war is being prepared for after the defeat in the face of Russia

by Thierry Meyssan

China and Australia's prickly diplomatic relationship has dominated foreign policy in recent years, with provocative rhetoric and public spats showing no signs of easing. 

Relations went into rapid decline after Beijing and Canberra clashed over several issues, resulting in a diplomatic stalemate and damaging tit-for-tat trade war.

Unless Moscow is defeated in Ukraine quickly, the collective West won’t be able to address climate change in time to save civilization, billionaire financier George Soros told the World Economic Forum in Davos on Tuesday. He also called Russia and China the greatest threats to his concept of open society.

Russia sending troops into Ukraine “may have been the beginning of the Third World War and our civilization may not survive it,” Soros told the WEF, and even when the fighting there stops, “the situation will never revert to what it was before.”

The idea that war can be a source of national unity and national regeneration is one of the most dangerous in modern history. In 1914, it seduced a generation of European liberal intellectuals, many younger ones of whom paid for their illusions with their lives. In the interwar years, it formed the very core of Fascist and Nazi ideology.

One of the things that makes this idea so seductive is that it occasionally proves true. In Britain during World War II, the national unity government of Conservatives, Labor, and Liberals gave birth to the national consensus behind the British welfare state, which has lasted to this day. 

BY Anatol Lieven

Without even bothering to mask its Russophobic positions in the conflict in Ukraine and experiencing a failure in its actions there, Washington is strenuously seeking to unleash a “second front” against Russia in any zone sensitive to Moscow. The United States is actively trying to destabilize the situation in the Central Asian region, to worsen relations between Russia and the European Union, to create a conflict with Japan and in the South China Sea as a whole.

by Vladimir Danilov