Beware privileged people who have learned to speak with confidence yet appear blind to the benefits of social class. Beware powerful people who claim that democratic governments, in the US, UK, Australia, administer justice always according to some time-honoured principle about rules of law.

Beware a society in which men socialised by privileged education and employment remain socially distant from ordinary citizens with few resources. Beware assumptions derived from life in protected institutions, law, academia, or government, which foster hostility towards someone they do not understand, or who, heaven forbid, disputes the fairness of society’s customs and rules.

By Stuart Rees

Thousands of leaked files have revealed how far ride-share company Uber went in lobbying world political leaders to help boost its growth.

Dubbed The Uber Files, the leak shows how Uber received extensive help from politicians such as French President Emmanuel Macron and former EU commissioner Neelie Kroes to relax labour and taxi laws, and to avoid justice.

The documents include more than 124,000 records, 83,000 emails and 1000 other files involving conversations, spanning 2013 to 2017 and nearly 30 countries.

“I am here today at the committee’s request,” West said. “I have never spoken publicly about this matter for the sake of my family and their privacy I have been trying to move on from what has been a very disappointing episode in my life.”

West said she started as deputy secretary, trade and international, within Investment NSW in October 2020 and applied for the senior trade and investment commissioner role for the Americas at the encouragement of Brown.

She was advised that she was the successful candidate in August last year but Brown later told her that she had been advised by the government that the positions would be “political appointments, and not public sector appointments” and the recruitment process was halted.

Brown said she was also told that her existing job would be terminated.

Everyone loves a redemption arc. The British media is no exception. It makes a habit of rescuing people from the pits of history: the liars, the cheaters, the war criminals. If these figures have something to offer the establishment — a condemnation of the Left; a bolster to the Right — the press that represents its interests will sponge away their crimes and bring them, renewed, back to their seat at the table.

Ukraine has a million-strong army poised to retake South, ministry says

President Zelensky gave the order to retake the areas, Ukraine’s defense minister told The Times

As ordered by the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, a million-strong fighting force has been amassed in the country to recapture its southern areas, which have previously been taken by Russian forces, defense minister Alexey Reznikov has told The Times. 

“We understand that, politically, it’s very necessary for our country. The president has given the order to the supreme military chief to draw up plans,” he said in an interview published on Sunday. 

China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi has told Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong that the Albanese government must form a "correct understanding" of China as a partner, not a threat, according to a Chinese government summary of their first meeting in Bali.

What explains America’s hyper-ideological response to the Ukraine crisis? Less than a year before Vladimir Putin launched his invasion, Washington had wrapped up two decades of lousy regime-change wars, waged in the name of planting “freedom” in that region’s inhospitable soil. There was, or seemed to be, broad agreement that liberal moralism in foreign policy stood discredited: It had destabilized whole swaths of the Middle East and North Africa and bogged down America and its allies in the region’s bloody and intricate enmities—and to what end?

Yet now, a few months later, the United States and its NATO allies are once again on an escalatory path, handing billions of dollars’ worth of sophisticated weaponry to Kyiv, deploying covert operatives to assist the Ukrainians, and mounting massive (if so far useless) economic sanctions against Russia.

It is customary in our political circles to link cultural modernism (and its negative social consequences) to Jewish influence. While there are strong grounds for this stance, things are sometimes more complicated than this narrative would suggest. Take, for instance, the group of painters who made up the French Impressionist movement of the late nineteenth century.

Considered to be the first avant-garde movement of the Modernist period, Impressionism served as a springboard for many artistic movements of the twentieth century, including Symbolism, Fauvism, and Cubism. Yet among the leaders of the Impressionist movement were artists, like Cezanne, Renoir and Degas, who were notable for their antipathy to Jews.

“It doesn’t change our relationship with the United Kingdom,” said Deputy PM Richard Marles of Boris Johnson’s inevitable and belated political demise.

He’s wrong.

Of course Johnson’s ousting will change our relationship, just as Australia changing prime ministers either subtly or unsubtly change our relationships with other nations.

Cue the change in relationship with Donald Trump as we moved from Malcolm Turnbull to Scott Morrison, a kindred spirit. Or with France from Scott Morrison to Anthony Albanese – no explanation required.

BY Michael Pascoe

Is Albo auditioning for membership of NATO? His Labor government may be more competent than the Coalition on foreign affairs but little has changed on government secrecy, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese even stepping up weapons traffic to Ukraine while keeping mum on coal.

“Today we are announcing an additional $100 million in military-technical assistance. In total, we have already provided $390 million,” Albanese said this week on his tour to meet President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyi. “We are also additionally providing 14 armoured personnel carriers and 20 “Bushmaster” – armoured vehicles. Thus, the total number of “Bushmasters” was 60″.

Last week, Reuters reported that over five million barrels-worth of crude from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve released by the Biden administration to help ease gas prices in the United States had instead been shipped to refineries in Europe, India and China.

Some 950,000 of the oil released from the SPR to cope with spiraling gasoline prices may have wound up in depots controlled by Sinopec, the Chinese state-owned energy giant which Hunter Biden co-founded capital market firm BHR Partners has a $1.7 billion stake in, the Washington Free Beacon has reported, citing Department of Energy (DoE) data and information previously disclosed by Chinese and US business regulators.

This March, when the Biden administration presented a staggering $813 billion proposal for “national defense,” it was hard to imagine a budget that could go significantly higher or be more generous to the denizens of the military-industrial complex. After all, that request represented far more than peak spending in the Korean or Vietnam War years, and well over $100 billion more than at the height of the Cold War. 

THE BRILLIANT THOMAS PIKETTY ENTERS THE MURKY WATERS OF PRESENT WORLD POLITICS. HE IS EITHER NAIVE OR MISINFORMED, OR DELIBERATELY CHOSE TO IGNORE REALITY TO PROMOTE IDEALISTIC BULLSHIT. GUS EXPLAINS IN CAPS. HERE COMES PIKETTY:

…

Will Europe succeed in redefining its place in the global geopolitical order? With the invasion of Ukraine by Russia and the rise of tensions with China, circumstances oblige Europe to do so, but it is full of hesitations.

EUROPE WILL NOT SUCCEED UNLESS IT RECOGNISES RUSSIA’S CLAIMS OF SELF-DEFENCE, OF THE SELF-DETERMINATION OF THE DONBASS REGION AND RUSSIAN SECURITY. WHAT GEOPOLITICAL ORDER?

Red Cross official Basheer Omar told RT on Saturday that the humanitarian situation in Yemen is one of “unimaginable horror,” with two thirds of the population deprived of basic healthcare. Omar called on the international community not to leave the Yemeni people “alone facing their fate.”

With the armed conflict in Yemen in its eighth year, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) released a report this week stating that around 66% of Yemen’s 30.5 million people lack access to basic healthcare, and those in need of medical attention often risk death to visit the 51% of healthcare facilities still operating in the country.