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WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - US President Joe Biden will convey to Russian President Vladimir Putin during their upcoming meeting that the United States is not seeking to escalate the situation and seeks more stable and predictable relations with Russia, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Monday.

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Australian politics returned to white noise this week. It started happening after Parliament rose before Easter, but we are now in a zone where the public are mostly tuning out – unless there’s an attention snapping event.

The intensity of the first two months of political action – dominated by exposés of appalling behaviour, allegations of more and brain-dead responses from the Prime Minister and many of his colleagues – turned voters off.

After a year of rallying around the flag, willing governments to get things done and battle a health and economic emergency in intelligent unity, disappointment and frustration were back in vogue.

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In the early days of the Hawke Government, when Labor and a dynamic young treasurer, Paul Keating, kept confounding a hostile and suspicious business community with market-friendly policies, the cartoonist Patrick Cook would draw the then former treasurer John Howard as a battle scarred veteran.

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A senior defence official under former United States president Barack Obama says the Five Eyes spy network should be used as a diplomatic grouping to pressure China, in a direct contrast to New Zealand’s attempt to narrow its remit.

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Australia’s government has major issues with transparency and is actively trying to keep citizens uninformed and unaware, a senator leading the charge against the culture of secrecy has said.

On Saturday, independent senator Rex Patrick slammed Australia’s Freedom of Information (FOI) process, and threatened to take the freedom of information commissioner to court over “unreasonable” delays in the review process.

Senator Patrick, a strong advocate for open government, has written to Australian information commissioner Angelene Falk, demanding she makes decisions on his FOI requests – some of which have been with her office for two years.

variants

THE PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY is pouring resources into the growing political fight over generic coronavirus vaccines.

Newly filed disclosure forms from the first quarter of 2021 show that over 100 lobbyists have been mobilized to contact lawmakers and members of the Biden administration, urging them to oppose a proposed temporary waiver on intellectual property rights by the World Trade Organization that would allow generic vaccines to be produced globally.

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Australia’s billions in fossil fuel subsidies are under the spotlight in a new report as the US puts pressure on other countries to stop handing money to the sector.

Left-leaning think tank the Australia Institute has combed through recent federal and state budgets, finding there has been $10.3 billion in fossil fuel subsidies this financial year.

Most of it – $7.84 billion – is from a federal government fuel tax credit scheme, which provides a refund to industry for diesel.

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The one thing that the Covid-19 pandemic, now in its second year, has encouraged very few people to do, when most are despairing, has been to try to re-invent the wheel in the epoch of digitisation. 

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It turns out it’s surprisingly easy to tolerate the torture of your citizens if you’re a country with a long record of it. Dr Lissa Johnson weighs in on the Australian Government’s silence on Julian Assange.

BY Dr Lissa Johnson

As an Australian citizen, Julian Assange has set a number of firsts for Australia.

He was the first person to establish an encrypted dropbox media platform through which whistleblowers could anonymously share troves of information in the public interest, a practice which has now been adopted by news outlets worldwide.

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 On Wednesday, April 21, Australia terminated several agreements that had been concluded with China as part of the Belt and Road Initiative.

war drunks...

22 years since the launch of the NATO aggression on Serbia...