When SailGP was formed, Tom Slingsby was the obvious choice as driver and CEO of the Australian team given his decorated individual career and success in team competitions, including the 2013 America’s Cup. He has since proven his worth in SailGP, skippering the Aussies to Championship glory in both Season 1 and Season 2.

Youth
Although his father was a sailor and he had been around boats during his earliest years, Slingsby admits he wasn’t a strong junior sailor and instead focused his energy on tennis, which saw him evolve into a budding prospect. However, when the Olympics came to Sydney in 2000, he became “obsessed” with the sport when he saw the scenes taking place on the harbour and decided then and there to begin dedicating his training towards a career on the water. 

President Joe Biden demanded Wednesday that gas stations start lowering their prices, in his latest attempt to address record-high prices this summer.

“To the companies running gas stations and setting those prices at the pump, this is a time of war, global peril, Ukraine,” he said.

The president spoke about the record high gas prices occurring during his administration during a speech on his imitation White House set across the street.

“These are not normal times. Bring down the price you are charging at the pump to reflect the cost you are paying for the product,” Biden said. “Do it now. Do it today.”

Biden griped that the price of oil had fallen slightly, but the price of gas had not.

“Some haven’t reduced prices at all,” he complained.

As Australians pay the price for decades of poor energy planning, the two single greatest beneficiaries of high electricity prices are Hong Kong billionaires Michael Kadoorie and Li Ka-Shing. Callum Foote reports on two of the big winners from Australia’s electricity crisis.

It’s another big week in the energy crisis. It’s clear who are the losers: Australians. We have been let down by a decade of policy paralysis on the transition to clean energy. The winners are becoming clear too. Not only have energy companies been “gaming” the market operator AEMO by withholding supply to force the operator to pay them more but they also stand to win enormous compensation payments because AEMO has shut down the market.

A law banning the importation of goods produced by the forced labor of Uyghur ethnic minorities in a region of China took effect on Tuesday. 

President Biden signed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act into law in December to prohibit goods that the Chinese government has forced Uyghurs, a mostly Muslim minority group, to produce in the autonomous region of Xinjiang. 

In the decade after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the history of Russian and Soviet labor and Social Democracy, once a subject of prodigious academic research, fell into a memory hole, as historians turned toward other topics. An engaged scholar and activist, Eric Blanc has not only revived exploration of a neglected subject but delved deeply into the history of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks and widened his lens to include the too often overlooked revolutionary Marxists of the borderlands of the tsarist empire.

BY RONALD GRIGOR SUNY

Alfred McCoy, Playing with Fire in Ukraine

POSTED ON JUNE 21, 2022

Since the creation of the US Federal Reserve over a century ago, every major financial market collapse has been deliberately triggered for political motives by the central bank. The situation is no different today, as clearly the US Fed is acting with its interest rate weapon to crash what is the greatest speculative financial bubble in human history, a bubble it created.

Global crash events always begin on the periphery, such as with the 1931 Austrian Creditanstalt or the Lehman Bros. failure in September 2008. The June 15 decision by the Fed to impose the largest single rate hike in almost 30 years as financial markets are already in a meltdown, now guarantees a global depression and worse.

America’s Father’s Day was first celebrated on June 19, 1910, in Washington State. That was only a few years before Ann Jones’s father went to war.  His was the Great War which turned out — with its trenches of frozen mud, rats and lice, poison gas, and machine-gun death — to be not so great.  It was supposed to be the War to End all Wars, but all it did was bequeath to humanity a more terrible war that would be even more worldly.

BRUSSELS (Sputnik) - The proposal voiced by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to lower domestic thermostats in Europe by 2 degrees Celsius to replace gas supplies from Russia's Nord Stream 1 is "incredibly naive," energy experts said on Tuesday.

On Monday, the EC head said that Europeans can replace gas supplies coming via Russia's Nord Stream 1 pipeline by lowering the heating or air conditioner temperatures by 2 degrees, adding that the EU has comprehensive emergency plans in place, including energy savings.

Two years ago, at my local Australian Labor Party branch, I moved a motion urging the ALP to support dropping extradition proceedings against Julian Assange. Maroubra ALP is not inner city. It might be regarded as a bastion of the right. The motion was carried, near unanimously. After the debate, one member came up and said: “I think Assange is probably a narcissistic bastard but he’s ours.”

That is, he’s an Australian.

By BOB CARR

The Spectator (Australia) published an article in 2014 about PUTIN WANTING TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD.... with a cartoon of Putin that was a pisstake from the movie, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.... Gus Leoniksy, cartoonist since 1951, has modified this illustration to represent "reality"... The Spectator article was (is) rubbish of course. Russia, China and many other countries are sick of being told what to do by the USA. THE US ARE THE ONES WHO WANT TO OWN AND CONTROL THE WORLD and this has been known since 1917/1919.... (see the HEARTLAND)

If Stepan Bandera was an agent of the Gestapo and left only the memory (positive for some) of the massacres and tortures he organized, Dmytro Dontsov was -and still is- the reference thinker of Ukranian nationalists. It is he who invented Ukrainian racialism and imagined the fanaticism of Ukrainian nationalists as a weapon.

RISING TENSIONS (23)

The ideology of the banderists

by Thierry Meyssan

If in previous articles I have presented the history of the Banderist movement from the interwar period to the present day, I would like to talk here about their ideology.

LONDON, June 21 (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of workers walked out on the first day of Britain's biggest rail strike in 30 years on Tuesday, with millions of passengers facing days of chaos as both the unions and government vowed to stick to their guns in a row over pay.

My graduating class at Davison High School had voted that I should give the graduation address at our commencement ceremony, which took place 50 years ago this weekend. The senior class had also voted me “Class Comic.” That should’ve been all the warning the school administration needed — that the senior class wanted the class clown to give the official graduation speech. They should’ve known this would not end well. 

In the weeks leading up to the end of the school year, those of us with the “good grades” were inducted into the National Honor Society, which meant we would receive flashy golden cords so we could parade around on graduation night and show everybody how really smart we were (when in fact, all it meant was that we were good test takers).

The EU must not revert to using coal and neglect its climate change goals in order to replace Russian gas, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has said.

“We have to make sure that we use this crisis to move forward and not to have a backsliding on the dirty fossil fuels,” von der Leyen told the Financial Times on Monday.

“It’s a fine line and it’s not determined whether we are going to take the right turn.”

Von der Leyen said EU nations need to continue “massive investment in renewables.” 

She added that Brussels has “emergency steps in place” to respond to the threat of decreasing supplies from Russia, such as energy conservation and prioritizing which industries receive gas.