The difficulty for the Australian Labor government in deciding how to respond to the Julian Assange case is that once a prosecution is characterised as a political prosecution then, by its nature, there can be no expectation of due process.

The U.S.-U.K. Extradition Treaty forbids extradition in the case of “political offences.” Former Australian High Commissioner to the U.K. George Brandis — who was commissioner for almost the entirety of Assange’s Belmarsh imprisonment since 2019 — doesn’t agree that Assange is a political prisoner.

By Kellie Tranter
Declassified Australia

Kyiv: The head of Amnesty International’s Ukraine chapter has resigned, saying the human rights organisation shot down her opposition to publishing a report that claimed Ukrainian forces had exposed civilians to Russian attacks by basing themselves in populated areas.

In a statement posted on Facebook, Oksana Pokalchuk accused her former employer of disregarding Ukraine’s wartime realities and the concerns of local staff members who had pushed for the report to be reworked.

The report, released on Thursday (Ukraine time), drew angry denunciations from top Ukrainian officials and criticism from Western diplomats, who accused the authors of making vague claims that appeared to equate the Ukrainian military’s defensive actions to the tactics of the invading Russians.

New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman released photos on Monday apparently showing former President Donald Trump’s handwritten notes flushed down two toilets, supposedly in violation of White House protocol. Trump himself ridiculed Haberman, and his office called her scoop “desperate.”

Published by Axios on Monday, the photos show two torn-up wads of notes, apparently in Trump’s handwriting, lodged in a pair of toilets, one in the White House and the other from an overseas trip.

Former deputy premier John Barilaro has been told to prepare for a grilling about his girlfriend's job at Investment NSW later this week, as the saga into his appointment to a lucrative trade position continues.

Democrats and the Washington press corps spent the last week insisting that the party was about to close a notorious tax loophole that allows many Wall Street billionaires to pay a lower tax rate than most Americans. 

In truth, the proposal would have left most of the loophole open, fulfilling Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) longstanding pledge to protect the private equity industry that bankrolls his campaigns. Now, the plan is gone.

IT'S GRAND TIME FOR THE WEST TO REALISE TWO THINGS:

CHINA ISN'T GOING TO GIVE UP ON ITS CLAIM ON FORMOSA (TAIWAN). HAVING A WORLD WAR ABOUT THIS ISSUE WOULD BE PATHETIC AND STUPID. 

RUSSIA ISN'T GOING TO ABANDON THE RUSSIANS IN UKRAINE. HAVING A WORLD WAR ABOUT THIS ISSUE WOULD BE PATHETIC AND STUPID. SENDING WEAPONS TO ZELENSKY IS ONLY PROLONGING THE AGONY OF THE REMNANT OF UKRAINE. UKRAINE HAS TO BE SPLIT INTO TWO REGIONS (INDEPENDENT COUNTRIES).

THEN WE CAN HAVE PEACE, AS LONG AS THE US EMPIRE DOES NOT CARRY ON LIKE AN IDIOT WHO WANTS TO OWN EVERYTHING....

--------------------

Late last week a Texas jury ordered Alex Jones to pay nearly $50 million in compensatory and punitive damages to the parents of a child killed in the Sandy Hook shootings, with two more trials still scheduled. These awards may be sharply reduced, but if they are not, the result will probably mean the destruction of Jones’ media empire.

When Russia started its special military operation in Ukraine, a perception, ostensibly created by the western mainstream media, began to develop that Beijing could begin a similar operation to take over Taiwan. Following this, Joe Biden said in a media statement during his visit to Japan that the US is willing to “get involved militarily to defend Taiwan.”

An old missionary student of China once remarked that Chinese history is “remote, monotonous, obscure, and-worst of all-there is too much of it.” China has the longest continuous history of any country in the world—3,500 years of written history. And even 3,500 years ago China’s civilization was old! This in itself is discouraging to the student, particularly if we think of history as a baffling catalogue of who begat somebody, who succeeded somebody, who slew somebody, with only an occasional concubine thrown in for human interest. But taken in another way, Chinese history can be made to throw sharp lights and revealing shadows on the story of all mankind—from its most primitive beginnings, some of which were in Asia, to its highest point of development in philosophy and religion, literature and art.

Australia must develop its own long-range missiles to meet rising challenges to regional security, opposition defence spokesman Andrew Hastie has said, as tensions across the Taiwan Strait continue unfolding.

Mr Hastie said on Sunday that Australia had to develop greater deterrents to challenges, such as from a rising China with “expansionist ambitions”.

“We need missiles that can reach out and touch an adversary,” Mr Hastie said.

BY James Robertson

“We need to partner (with America) to develop our own sovereign missiles, sovereign missiles Australian-owned, Australian-delivered, if required.”

Most of the fact-checking organizations Facebook has partnered with to monitor and regulate information about Ukraine are directly funded by the U.S. government, either through the U.S. Embassy or via the notorious National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

In light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, an information war as bitter as the ground fighting has erupted, and Meta (Facebook’s official name) announced it had partnered with nine organizations to help it sort fact from fiction for Ukrainian, Russian and other Eastern European users. These nine organizations are: StopFake, VoxCheck, Fact Check Georgia, Demagog, Myth Detector, Lead Stories, Patikrinta 15min, Re:Baltica and Delfi.

In America – as in Europe – there is fear and anger at system disintegration

The train wreck has been expected for so long that we have become comfortable living under its shadow. Life went on; markets were sanguine that the market lifestyle subsidy provided by the Central Banks would continue unabated. And not without good reason either: Any trader disappointment at Central Bank action, any dip in markets, brought forth a collective market hissy fit that usually strong-armed the Central Banks into immediate appeasement. We were hard pressed to imagine differently.

By ALASTAIR CROOKE 

I’m interested in stories that go uncovered and undercovered. Fewer stories are less obscured today than life in Russia under Western sanctions. I’m especially interested in stories that are so imbued with spin and propaganda that the news media has abandoned all pretense of objectivity. That’s certainly true about the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Leader of the opposition, Peter Dutton stated that the Coalition opposition would not vote for the 43% emissions reduction legislation put up by the Albanese government, despite agitation by the few remaining moderates in his party. As it turned out the opposition did vote against it. However, Tasmanian Bridget Archer crossed the floor to vote with the government to pass the legislation, not that she needed to do so.

BY Houses And Holes — David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal.