Former US president Barack Obama will need to get a bigger mantelpiece now that he has picked up an Emmy to go with his two Grammys.

Obama was named winner on Saturday of the best narrator Emmy for his work on the Netflix documentary series Our Great National Parks.

The five-part show, which features national parks from around the globe, is produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company Higher Ground.

He was the biggest name in a category full of famous nominees for the award handed out at Saturday night’s Creative Arts Emmys, including Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, David Attenborough and Lupita Nyong’o.

Barack Obama is the second president to have an Emmy. Dwight D. Eisenhower was given a special Emmy Award in 1956.

The Greens are threatening to block the referendum on the ‘Voice’ which promises to give effect to the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

The Green’s spokesperson on Indigenous Affairs, Senator Lidia Thorpe has described the Voice as a ‘waste of money’ and a ‘wasted exercise’.

Instead the Greens want priority for a Truth and Justice Commission.

This could spell the end or the defeat of the referendum on the Voice.

Don’t the Greens ever learn?

BY JOHN MENADUE

We are taking exactly the same tactics in East Asia that led to the war in Ukraine. We’re organising alliances, building up weaponry, trash-talking China, having Speaker Pelosi fly to Taiwan, when the Chinese government said, “Please, lower the temperature, lower the tensions.” We say, “No, we do what we want,” and now send more arms. This is a recipe for yet another war. And to my mind, it’s terrifying.

A new database that Tufts is maintaining has just shown that there have been more than 100 military interventions by the United States since 1991. It’s really unbelievable.

More than six months into Russia-Ukraine war, peace seems increasingly out of reach. The United States, for its part, is continuing to send tens of billions of dollars to fund Ukrainian military spending—money that often circles back to the American weapons industry—without so much as a dissenting voice in Congress or U.S. corporate media, laments “Scheer Intelligence” host Robert Scheer. On American streets, there are few remnants of the anti-war movement that Scheer himself helped shape in the 1960s and 70s. 

The energy crisis, exacerbated in recent months by Washington’s anti-Russian sanctions policy, is perhaps the worst such crisis since 1973, when Arab countries imposed an oil embargo to protest Western support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War. It has affected all Western states by now. While the search for new energy sources and improvements to existing relatively environmentally friendly ways of generating electricity on an industrial scale continues, nuclear power plants remain something of a lifeline for many of the world’s leading states.

All of this has prompted countries to revisit the possibility of using nuclear energy to combat the energy crisis, to analyze the state of the nuclear fuel market and their own capabilities in this field.

BY Vladimir Danilov

It’s Back to the Future for U.S. Grand Strategy

By Angela Stent, author of Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and With the Rest and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

BACK TO THE FUTURE? GRAND STRATEGY???? THIS IS PROPAGANDA MALAISE AND CLICHE GALORE.....

Angela IS A FULL-ON PRODUCT OF THE US HEGEMONY. Her comments are in normal type, GUS'S COMMENTS ARE IN CAPS....

Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine ended the first phase of the post-Cold War era. 

The Warrior Games is a multi-sport event for wounded, injured or ill service personnel and veterans organized by the United States Department of Defense (DoD).

The Army hosted the games for the second time in 2022, August 19–28. 

In 1990, scientists from around the world published a report that spelled out that the climate was changing and that we — human beings — were the cause.

If we continued polluting, with business as usual …

"Emissions of greenhouse gases … will result in a likely increase in global mean temperature of about 1 degree Celsius above the present value by 2025, and 3C before the end of the next century. The rise will not be steady."

This is a story about a story that nobody else seems to think is a story.

When the story is about the Governor-General’s rather odd support of an $18 million charity, hot on the heels of the Governor-General’s rather odd silence at the time of Scott Morrison’s rather odd secret ministerial job collection, well, this old journalist finds it rather odd.

BY Michael Pascoe

What is with politicians and tanks and other armoured vehicles?

In 1988, Michael Dukakis doomed his already slim US presidential hopes by allowing himself to look ridiculous in a 68 tonne Abrams Main Battle Tank. Liz Truss, possibly the next Tory PM, was ridiculed for appearing in full military gig in Estonia. Kim Beazley (Bomber Beazley to colleagues) was often perched on military vehicles.

Scott Morrison, in between squeezing into Bathurst 500 cars, squeezed into a fighter jet and even Malcolm Turnbull was pictured in a Victorian-built armoured vehicle – albeit a tad uncomfortably – while dressed in an elegant suit rather than combat gear.

On Aug. 17 Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky ratified Law 5371, which removes rights for workers at small and medium-sized companies. It will be effective for as long as the country is under martial law — a qualification added at the last minute, under pressure from trade unions.

Under the new law, people who work for firms with up to 250 employees will now be covered by contracts they negotiate as individuals with their bosses, rather than the national labour code.

By ODR Team
openDemocracy

In practice, this means that around 70 percent of workers in Ukraine have been stripped of many labour protections.

The Ukraine war has generated great controversy, but of one point there can be no doubt, and Benjamin Abelow, a physician with a longstanding interest in public affairs, has properly emphasized this in his brief and excellent book. The policy of the United States toward the war, and more generally toward the Russian regime of Vladimir Putin, has been one of direct confrontation rather than peaceful accommodation.

“If you have an old kettle that takes ages to boil, it may cost you £20 to replace it, but if you get a new one, you’ll save £10 a year every year on your electricity bill,” outgoing UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared in his final policy speech to reporters in Suffolk on Thursday. 

Johnson explained that financial assistance for families facing record-high energy bills, which are expected to exceed £3,500 annually on average when the price cap is lifted in October, would be determined by his successor – either Foreign Secretary Liz Truss or former Chancellor Rishi Sunak. However, he reassured onlookers that it would be plentiful. “Of course, there will be more cash to come, whoever takes over from me, in the months ahead – substantial sums, that’s absolutely clear,” he said.

The Ukrainian conflict, presented as a Russian aggression, is only the implementation of the Security Council resolution 2202 of February 17, 2015. If France and Germany did not keep their commitments during the Minsk II Agreement, Russia prepared itself for seven years for the current confrontation. It had foreseen the Western sanctions well in advance and needed only two months to circumvent them. These sanctions disrupt US globalization, disrupt Western economies by breaking supply chains, causing dollars to flow back to Washington and causing general inflation, and creating energetics in the West. The United States and its allies are in the position of being the hosers hosed: they are digging their own grave. Meanwhile, the Russian Treasury’s revenues have increased by 32% in six months.

I have never considered myself a Marxist. I came to adult at the end of the one, 40-year-long period in the history of Western civilisation when there was a reduction in the chasm between the rich and ordinary people.

In consequence I believed that a tolerable society might be achieved by simple measures to ameliorate capitalism. I grew up with public ownership of utilities, natural monopolies and strategic industries, with free healthcare and medicines, free university tuition with good maintenance grants, schools under control of elected local councils, controlled fair rents including the private sector and significant public housing. We thought it would last forever.