"It's a pain you can't describe," Raylene Nixon says quietly.

"It's something that you feel deeper than a broken heart - it's pain in your soul."

In 2021, she sat in a sterile room and watched Australian police footage of her son's death in real time, as he gasped for air and pleaded for help.

"Choke him out," one officer can be heard yelling in the body camera video, before another places Steven Nixon-McKellar in a chokehold. 

Moments later, the 27-year-old Aboriginal man lost consciousness. Paramedics failed to resuscitate him, as his throat was obstructed by vomit.

On our own behalf: Why journalism is not a conspiracy theory and Multipolar is not a “right-wing” magazine

The RKI protocols that Multipolar sued for have triggered a broad political debate about coming to terms with the Corona period. Some media are now trying to attack our credibility. Multipolar is “right-wing” or “conspiracy-theoretical,” according to SPIEGEL and the Süddeutsche Zeitung. A reply.

PAUL SCHREYER, April 4, 2024, 18 comments, PDF

The Long Lineage of Russophobia

Why is it possible for Western politicians and journalists to repeatedly make extremely derogatory statements about Russia without an immediate public outcry? Rhetorically, any taboo may apparently be broken. This negative treatment, hardly imaginable in relation to other countries, goes well beyond factually justified criticism of the Russian leadership, and is equally observable in times of war as in times of peace. Those responsible resort to stereotypes and insinuations about Russia that have been recurrent over the centuries and have become deeply ingrained in the Western subconscious.

Hey, what if the next time Joe Biden visits the House of Representatives, Marjorie Taylor Greene is wearing a pin that says: “Donald Trump Lucks Out.” Because he so often seems to, doesn’t he?

NATO nations can only forestall an inevitable loss to Russian forces in Ukraine by deploying their troops to the former Soviet republic, a former adviser to the US military has claimed.

“The arithmetic of this is inescapable: NATO countries will soon have to send soldiers to Ukraine, or else accept catastrophic defeat,” military strategist Edward Luttwak wrote in an oped published on Thursday by the British online media outlet UnHerd. “The British and French, along with the Nordic countries, are already quietly preparing to send troops – both small elite units and logistics and support personnel – who can remain far from the front.”

Pampered hernia patient Netanyahu is ultimately responsible for the destruction of more of the planet’s hospitals than anyone since the bombing of Hamburg during the Second World War.

Normally, one would feel at least some, if not in fact quite a lot, of sympathy, for a gentleman of a certain age who has to go to hospital to have a hernia operation.

A rumbling hernia can be very annoying, sometimes to the point of public irascibility and irrationality in the victim who feels that hot poker protruding where it should not be.

Twenty-five years ago, NATO was bombing Serbia as the first performance in its new role. The collapse of the Soviet Union had deprived the military alliance of its initial official role of defending its member states from a theoretical communist threat. Under no threat and devoid of UN Security Council approval, NATO assumed the self-ordained role of virtuous defender of allegedly oppressed minorities by bombing what was left of largely dismantled Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999 on behalf of Albanian rebels in the Serbian province of Kosovo.

A pledge by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken that Ukraine will become a member of NATO looks like a scene from a movie about a nuclear apocalypse, entrepreneur Elon Musk believes.

The top US diplomat reiterated the “rock solid” determination of his country and other members to eventually include Ukraine in the military bloc at a NATO summit in Brussels this week. Speaking alongside Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba, he said the purpose of the event was to “help build a bridge to membership.”

At last year’s Conservative party conference, prime minister Rishi Sunak declared the UK government planned to increase, year by year, the legal age of smoking to achieve a “smoke-free generation”.

The announcement gave the impression the prime minister was taking on Big Tobacco. 

However, the UK has consistently failed to rein in the activities of Britain’s biggest tobacco company, British American Tobacco (BAT), which predominantly operates overseas.

BAT is a blue-chip company, one of the few genuinely transnational British businesses. Operating in some 180 countries, BAT says it is “one of the world’s most international businesses”. 

BRUSSELS — European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen's top team is piling the pressure on her to explain the selection of an EU business envoy from the German political group of which she's a member.

MEP Markus Pieper's recent appointment as the bloc's "Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises Envoy" has sparked unrest among von der Leyen's most senior colleagues in the European Commission, who are now demanding answers about how Pieper — a German Christian Democrat — was appointed. 

I congratulate Samantha Mostyn on her appointment as Governor-General. Such an appointment is a great honour.

Ms Mostyn has given much service to public life as she has to both community and business life. This service marked her out as a distinguished communitarian with a complex range of interests. And with those interests, experience.

Accordingly, that experience and those interests additionally qualify her beyond her innate ability, values and sense of the world for such an exalted position.

I am certain Samantha Mostyn will bring much credit to the office of Governor-General.

PJ Keating
3 April 2024

https://johnmenadue.com/appointment-of-samantha-mostyn-as-governor-general/

Membership of NATO is no guarantee of democracy

It was early September in 1971. My mother had taken me in a taxi to a boutique hotel in a leafy northern Athenian suburb to visit my favourite uncle, her beloved brother. Before we got out the car, she put her arm around me and whispered words of courage in my ear. You see, Hotel Pefkakia had been commandeered by the ESA, the Greek military regime’s version of the Gestapo, which had turned it into a holding cell for VIP dissidents. What I saw inside, including my uncle’s tortured face, ensured that, from the age of 10, I understood what it meant to live in a brutish dictatorship.

WE IN THE WEST SEE DEMOCRACY AS A BATTLE BETWEEN TWO SIDES. IT SHOULD NOT BE THIS WAY. IT ALWAYS ENDS UP IN THE DITCH OF COMPROMISES WHEN ONE SIDE HAS THE UPPER HAND BY A FACTOR OF ONE MORE VOTE THAN THE OTHER. BUT MORE OFTEN THAN NOT, DEMOCRACY ENDS UP FASCIST.

FOR EXAMPLE:

Ukrainians target Australian politician over Moscow trip
A neo-Nazi-linked activist wants the town councilor fired for observing Russia’s presidential election

The Australian Federation of Ukrainian Organisations has demanded that a small-town councilor be fired for traveling to Russia to observe the country’s recent presidential election and congratulating Vladimir Putin on his “transparent and comprehensive”victory. 

MORE TO COME.

NATO marks 75 years

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was created on April 4, 1949, as the Cold War began. Sweden became the defense alliance's 32nd member on March 7, 2024, and Ukraine hopes to join amid the ongoing war with Russia.

NATO perpetuates an imaginary Russian threat because having an external adversary is vital for the military bloc’s survival, a top diplomat has told RT.

In an exclusive interview, Russian deputy foreign minister and former permanent representative to NATO, Aleksandr Grushko, commented on the billions of dollars allocated by the US and EU to help Ukraine in its fight against Russia.