loud

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook and its family of apps, including Instagram and WhatsApp, went down at the same time on Monday, taking out a vital communications platform used by more than three billion people around the world and adding heat to a company already under intense scrutiny.

Facebook’s apps — which include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Oculus — began displaying error messages around 11:40 a.m. Eastern time, users reported. Within five minutes, Facebook had disappeared from the internet. Hours later, the sites were still not functioning, according to Downdetector, which monitors web traffic and site activity.

chinese chess...

The United States urged China to stop its "provocative" military activities near Taiwan, after the island scrambled jets to warn away close to 100 Chinese military aircraft entering its air defence zone over a three-day period.

briggs

Obtained from 14 offshore banking institutions and analyzed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), the ‘Pandora Papers’ reveal the financial chicanery of more than 100 billionaires, 35 current and former world leaders, and 300 public officials. The first round of information, handed to a select list of international outlets and studied by “600 journalists,” was published on Sunday.

sub

Australia's most popular fast-food restaurants need to be more transparent about their nutrition policies and should commit to reducing salt, sugar and saturated fat, according to a new report which ranks the retailers based on their public positions on tackling obesity.

The report, released today by Deakin University's Global Obesity Centre, examined the 11 largest fast-food restaurants – which cover about 67 per cent of the market – using publicly available information, then ranked them based on their policies relating to healthy eating.

It found the majority of the restaurants do not identify nutrition and health as being a focus area, with a sector-wide failure by "quick service restaurants" to disclose what they are doing to address obesity and nutrition.

grant

Emmanuel Macron was planning for a world beyond the US well before his anger erupted over the cancelled submarine deal.

The French President calls it strategic autonomy; it could just as easily be named "Europe first". Macron says Europeans must stop being naive and develop the power to defend themselves. 

And that may now extend to rethinking NATO, an alliance Macron has previously described as "brain dead". 

By Stan Grant

Would France leave NATO? Well, it has before — sort of. In 1966, President de Gaulle withdrew his country from NATO's command structure, albeit remaining an active member of the alliance. It didn't "rejoin" NATO until 2009. 

oink

The Democratic spending bills are economic packages that serve moral and cultural purposes. They should be measured by their cultural impact, not merely by some wonky analysis. In real, tangible ways, they would redistribute dignity back downward. They would support hundreds of thousands of jobs for home health care workers, child care workers, construction workers, metal workers, supply chain workers. They would ease the indignity millions of parents face having to raise their children in poverty.

…

Biden had it exactly right when he told a La Crosse, Wis., audience, “The jobs that are going to be created here — largely, it’s going to be those for blue-collar workers, the majority of whom will not have to have a college degree to have those jobs.”

fake journalism

Danielle Doyle, 37, was given two months of probation on Friday in the US District Court in Washington, rather than being sentenced to home confinement as prosecutors sought. She pleaded guilty in July to illegally demonstrating inside the Capitol, which she entered through a broken window. She spent a total of 24 minutes in the building and wasn’t accused of committing any acts of violence or property damage.

boris

Petrol supplies are not improving at independent forecourts, according to the the Petrol Retailers Association (PRA).

"There's been no easing off of the pressure from drivers wanting to refuel whenever they can, wherever they can, " said PRA chairman Brian Madderson. 

fool

Just 24 hours earlier, the Financial Review's annual power list had been trumpeting the fact that, for the first time in the 21-year history of the list, the Prime Minister was not perceived as the nation's most powerful person.

Instead, it was four premiers — Gladys Berejiklian, Daniel Andrews, Annastacia Palaszczuk and Mark McGowan — who were regarded as the ones running our lives.

But by lunchtime of publication day, Berejiklian — so often held up as the Gold Standard of pandemic management by Scott Morrison — was gone.

The woman touted as the one who had "saved Australia" in last year's power list could not save herself.

vlad

For the first time in more than a century, the Russians have a state that they can call their own, a state run by and for the Russian people – the hallowed “Russian National State” (RNS) that has been the holy grail of Russian nationalism in the post-Soviet era. At first glance, this seems like a questionable, if not extraordinary, assertion.

BY ANATOLY KARLIN

WA

While political tensions between Beijing and Canberra were largely left aside, WA Premier Mark McGowan used an event with the state's top Chinese diplomat to lament the eastern states' failure to acknowledge China's contribution to Australia's economic success.

citrus

Here I was, making a cartoon about the "citrus" coalition in Germany, that our Gladys resigned from being Premier of New South Wales. Here again, I also had made a cartoon (unpublished yet) about the number of cases, the number of deaths per day, plus the "well done New South Wales" in regard to approaching that magic 70 per cent vaccination...

On the same toon, Frydenberg is telling us that as soon as 70 per cent is reached he will cut the disaster relief fund to most people who have lost their jobs, can't find another job and live in despair... Happy days all around.

But Back to the Germans...

Speaking in a new post-election edition of DW's podcast "Merkel's Last Dance," the Free Democrats' (FDP) Bundestag deputy leader Alexander Graf Lambsdorff said the mood in his party was very positive.

hoodlums

Paul Keating put it succinctly yesterday in The Sydney Morning Herald that we are selling our country to another power. Or, as former ambassador John McCarthy put it, “we are moving from being a country with the self-respect of true independence”.

Step by step we have been ceding our sovereignty to the US. The recent AUKUS and AUSMIN meetings in Washington were further giant steps in our becoming a US colonial outpost.

order

Here comes Rod Dreher. He just saw the future. Being a dilettante martyr awaiting his due martyrdom that may come after his death, he was more than happier to be confirmed in his own predictions of social collapse — to invite you once more and live with god in a little corner of the universe, under a Benedictus rock. There, awaiting for the rightful resurrection, unless it’s the final seventh judgement (Armageddon/Revelations) during which the sinners are turned into a Hell-paste for eternal sufferance, we would gloat at the prospect of having been right all along, like a traditional clock is on time twice a day, when stuck at 12 o'clock… 

Here comes Rod:

rocketeers

Using our interplanetary probes, we learn a lot about ourselves. We discover a relatively universal truth:

We’re idiots. And some of us commute between the Shire and Kanbra — and act like prophets. 

We’re idiots to think that we can trash our present planet and move onto another one — and avoid “making the same mistake” again in our civilizatioforma. Making mistakes aren’t our only problems really. Thinking we can live somewhere else is the main delusion. Like kids who break their toys, we think that we can get another one if we have a tantrum strong enough. Newsflash: there is no planet B. Not even Mars.