The UK’s first free trade agreement negotiated from scratch with Australia was so rushed that environmental issues and protection for niche British products were overlooked, a report by peers says today.

The House of Lords International Agreements Committee says the agreement is important as it both paves the way for other agreements in future and for our entry into the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), a major Government objective. The deal is estimated to add only a 0.08% increase in GDP by 2035 and rising quotas will phase in tariff-free imports.

Extended space flight presents a myriad of challenges for astronauts, including changes to muscles and exposure to solar radiation, to say nothing of getting used to floating around in zero-gravity all the time. Digestive issues are probably not at the top of the list of commonly expected problems, though.

In space, nobody can hear you scream - but they can definitely smell your farts.

And now… Mr. Bean.

(It’s been a slow news cycle, folks. But just wait. I can make this into something.)

from ANDREW ANGLIN

Metro:

Last month, President Joe Biden nominated a longtime advocate of Social Security privatization and benefit cuts to a key board overseeing the Social Security system. The move comes as Republicans get ready to push cuts to Social Security and Medicare, if they end up winning control of Congress during the November’s midterms, as expected.

The development suggests that there could soon be a coordinated push in Washington to cut the Social Security program, which provides retirement, disability, and survivor benefits to 66 million Americans.

Australia’s media is back-snapped broken — but don’t expect the most concentrated media industry in the world to fix itself, writes founder and publisher Dave Donovan and managing editor Michelle Pini.

TOMORROW [GusNote: this was a day ago], it will be 12 years since Independent Australia published its first article.

To be more specific, on 23 June 2010, the very first article was put up on independentaustralia.net, our beloved IA.

The future world order, already in progress, will be formed by strong sovereign states. The ship has sailed. There’s no turning back.

Let’s cut to the chase and roll in the Putin Top Ten of the New Era, announced by the Russian President live at the St. Petersburg forum for both the Global North and South.

BY PEPE ESCOBAR

“David Ray Griffin has done it again. His new book should be read as a prequel to the seminal Bush and Cheney: How They Ruined America and the World. Supported by extensive research, Griffin thoroughly debunks the myth of an American Empire as a benign, exceptionalist, divinely ordained historical agent.

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.