The AUKUS FUKUS Fracas: Submarines, Really? — One Finite Planet
This is an amazing diplomatic saga, that just could have an impact on the world political balance. Background. The Main Event. Round 1: Recalled Ambassadors. Round 2: Biden to Macron, “I was under the impression you had been told”. Round 3: Macron, “I don’t think, I know [Scott Morrison Lied]” . Round 4: Morrison: Denials […]
The AUKUS FUKUS Fracas: Submarines, Really? — One Finite Planet
Morrison leaves Glasgow with Australia’s global reputation in a state of crisis — RenewEconomy
Scott Morrison had a chance to reset Australia’s position on global climate action, instead he leaves Glasgow with Australia’s reputation in crisis. The post Morrison leaves Glasgow with Australia’s global reputation in a state of crisis appeared first on RenewEconomy.
Morrison leaves Glasgow with Australia’s global reputation in a state of crisis — RenewEconomy
Australia finally wakes up to solar opportunity – “world’s cheapest clean electricity” — RenewEconomy
Australia unveils 30-30-30 plan, designed to help deliver ultra low cost solar to power new green industries and emission cuts. The post Australia finally wakes up to solar opportunity – “world’s cheapest clean electricity” appeared first on RenewEconomy.
Australia finally wakes up to solar opportunity – “world’s cheapest clean electricity” — RenewEconomy
More clean energy will insulate against rising coal, oil and gas prices — RenewEconomy
Economic recovery should be fuelled by renewables, not fossil fuels. The post More clean energy will insulate against rising coal, oil and gas prices appeared first on RenewEconomy.
More clean energy will insulate against rising coal, oil and gas prices — RenewEconomy
Entering the Absurdicene as the Anthropocene loses its relevance — Sustainability Bites
So, if you accept that humanity is now acting in an absurd way (ie, you accept the premise of the Absurdicene) then maybe we need to be honest about the prospects of a rational process towards sustainability. Maybe we need to focus on why this absurdity prevails, and what we need to do to short circuit it.
Entering the Absurdicene as the Anthropocene loses its relevance — Sustainability Bites
With “net zero 2050” and 1.5°C in same breath, Glasgow reeks of cognitive dissonance
Glasgow will not get close to pledges to halve emissions by 2030, and any reputable climate scientist will say that means warming will shoot past 2°C. The post With “net zero 2050” and 1.5°C in same breath, Glasgow reeks of cognitive dissonance appeared first on RenewEconomy.
With “net zero 2050” and 1.5°C in same breath, Glasgow reeks of cognitive dissonance — RenewEconomy So far most of the media coverage and advocacy at COP26 has been poor andseverely misinformed. One after another politicians, business leaders, journalists and NGO advocates talk about “net zero 2050” and the 1.5°C Paris goal in the same breath, and get away with it. This gross underestimation of the climate condition is utterly delusional, and very few seem to be calling it out.
“Net zero 2050” (NZ2050) is a con, as this blog has reported over and over again, as did this Breakthrough report. Central bankers have NZ2050 scenarios in which fossil fuels constitute 50% of primary energy use in 2050. When the Murdoch media endorses the NZ2050 climate goal, you know it is the problem and not the answer. 2050 is so far away it’s a reason for procrastination. Judging by the G20 outcome, even NZ2050 and a coal phase-out may not pass muster in Glasgow. China is on net zero by 2060 and India on net zero by 2070.Current climate models are not capturing all the risks, including the stalling of the Gulf Stream, polar ice melt and the uptick in extreme weather events.
Carbon dioxide and methane release from deep permafrost are not routinely included in climate models; Climate models do not account well for increased warming due to loss of Arctic sea-ice: “Losing the reflective power of Arctic sea ice will advance the 2ºC threshold by 25years”; and rhe IPCC 2021 report gives “a best estimate of equilibrium
climate sensitivity of 3°C” but including factors such as “slow”
feedbacks (carbon stores) and albedo changes (reflectivity), warming may be
as high as 5–6°C for a doubling of carbon dioxide for a range of climate
states between glacial conditions and ice-free Antarctica.
Renew Economy 3rd Nov 2021
Only Britain has the dubious plan to get to net zero by relying on multiple nuclear reactors
Even without our plentiful opportunities to exploit wind, solar, wave and tidal power many countries feel they do not need nuclear power to reach their goals.
Questions remain over the UK’s nuclear power plans https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/nov/02/questions-remain-over-the-uks-nuclear-power-plans?fbclid=IwAR3TQj7xYv3jEY824jm9tVFuNln6CgT7xqS3
No other country taking part in Cop26 is relying on multiple new reactors to get to net zero by 2050 Paul Brown, Tue 2 Nov 2021 In 2007, Vincent de Rivaz, the then EDF chief executive, said Britain would be “cooking our Christmas turkeys” with electricity from Hinkley Point C nuclear station by 2017. Instead the first concrete was poured that year and the turkey is now scheduled for late 2026.
In the race against time to avert dangerous global heating, the UK government has decided to back an untried reactor from Rolls Royce. The first of these could be “plugged into the grid by 2031”, according to Nuclear Industry Association.
Internationally average planning time for reactor proposals is 10 years, plus another decade for building, and that is for already proven designs. The 16 planned Rolls Royce reactors are still on the drawing board. The arguments about where they could be sited are beginning. Apart from other possible objections the favoured UK coastal locations are vulnerable to sea level rise, erosion and storms.
Faced with the well-documented delays and drawbacks to nuclear programmes it is perhaps not surprising that there is no other country taking part in the Cop26 process in Glasgow relying on multiple new nuclear reactors to get to net zero carbon targets by 2050. Even without our plentiful opportunities to exploit wind, solar, wave and tidal power many countries feel they do not need nuclear power to reach their goals.
Glasgow Brief: Australia spruiks gas, earns another fossil award as US, EU make methane pledge — RenewEconomy
Day 2 of COP26 saw some leaders make significant pledges to cut methane emissions and halt deforestation. Australia promoted its gas industry to the world. The post Glasgow Brief: Australia spruiks gas, earns another fossil award as US, EU make methane pledge appeared first on RenewEconomy.
Glasgow Brief: Australia spruiks gas, earns another fossil award as US, EU make methane pledge — RenewEconomy
November 3 Energy News — geoharvey
Opinion: ¶ “My Island Home Is Threatened – We Have No Hill To Run To” • The Marshall Islands are only 2 meters above sea level and we are one of the most threatened countries in the world, due to the sea level rise caused by climate change. Unlike many other island nations, we have […]
November 3 Energy News — geoharvey
Australian media part of the cover-up of Pandora Papers
Meanwhile, the 2016 Panama Papers remain under lock and key, unavailable to the public, secreted by ICIJ. The data is getting stale now. It is six years old. It is wasted, an insult to the people who risked their lives to put it in the public domain.
Pandora Papers: is the world’s biggest leak the world’s biggest cover-up? https://www.michaelwest.com.au/pandora-papers-is-the-worlds-biggest-leak-the-worlds-biggest-cover-up/ , By Michael West|, October 8, 2021
Where are the US billionaires, the Wall Streeters, the Big Four tax firms Deloitte, EY, KPMG, PwC? Michael West explores the mystery of the Pandora Papers in this first of a two-part series.
In the wake of the stunning Pandora Papers data leak this week, the ABC enthused, “Even by the ICIJ’s standards, this is big. If the documents were printed out and stacked up they would be four times taller than Sydney’s Centrepoint Tower”.
Probably not. If we assume Pandora is like its predecessors Panama Papers and Paradise Papers – where less than 1% of the data was made public – that would represent a stack of documents 12.2 metres high, not 1220 metres, which would get you up to Yogurt World on Level 5 of the Centrepoint food court.
Another “biggest data leak in history”, another trove mega-leaks where billionaires, celebrities, Italian mobsters, Russian oligarchs and foreign heads of state have been outed for their links to tax havens.
But where are the US politicians? Where are the Wall Streeters? Where are the Big Four, the masterminds of global tax avoidance PwC, EY, KPMG and Deloitte?
Conspicuously absent, that’s where. Again.
Beating the B Team
Make no mistake this is fabulous, explosive stuff. The Pandora Papers, like Panama Papers and Paradise papers, are a spectacular data leak but, like the leaks before them, they have blown the lid on the world’s Tax Avoidance B Team.
And, like the others, the data has not actually been made public; not much of it anyway, maybe 1%. The rest is sitting with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) in Washington. It has been leaked to the ICIJ alone which in turn leaks bits of it, presumably a very small part of it, to its “global media partners”.
n Australia, these are Nine Entertainment’s AFR, Guardian and ABC who are themselves keeping most of it a secret. This from Guardian Australia:
“Australians who appear in the data include senior figures from the finance and property industries. The Guardian has chosen not to identify them.
“About 400 Australian names are contained in the papers, a cache of 11.9m files from companies hired by wealthy clients to create offshore structures and trusts in tax havens such as Panama, Dubai, Monaco, Switzerland, the Cayman Islands and Samoa.”
Meanwhile Julian Assange
Meanwhile Julian Assange continues to rot in London’s Belmarsh Prison, facing extradition to the US, abandoned by successive Australian governments amid reports of a CIA plot to assassinate him. His crime? Wikileaks made public US war crimes; a real leak, documents actually made public.
In contrast, the Washington-based ICIJ has consistently refused to release its data to the public, preferring instead to conduct a choreographed media circus. Its director, Australian journalist Gerard Ryle, declined to respond to questions for this story, doubly ironic given we used to work together on the newsroom floors at Fairfax and the ICIJ is a self-styled beacon of journalistic integrity dedicated to “expose the truth and hold the powerful accountable, while also adhering to the highest standards of fairness and accuracy”.
One question we put to Ryle was whether ICIJ had received a subpoena from US authorities for this incredible trove of corporate information, say the Department of Justice. If not, why not?
The questions are many, not only because of the sheer magnitude of this set of leaks but also because the effect of the Pandora Papers is to, deservedly, trash a suite of non-US tax havens such as the notorious British Virgin Islands and the upshot will be to drive global wealth towards secrecy jurisdictions in the US such as Rupert Murdoch’s preferred haven of Delaware.
So, what is going on here?
The way ICIJ works is they use a panel of 150 “media partners”, mostly large corporate media organisations around the world, to disseminate the information, or at least the bits of it they deem suitable.
In the case of Panama Papers, an anonymous source dubbed John Doe hacked Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca and leaked the data to German journalists who got it to ICIJ for dissemination to its band of media partners.
14 Mossack Fonsecas
This time around, there are 14 Mossack Fonsecas; that is, 14 “offshore service providers” have been hacked. This is hacking on an industrial, possibly sovereign, scale. It is possible these “offshore service providers”, from Hong Kong to the Caribbean, divulged the information voluntarily, but unlikely.
Who benefits? The US and the Big Four. Just as the Panama Papers helped to demolish Panama as a tax haven, compelling clients of Mossack Fonseca to flee to other secrecy jurisdictions to hide their money, the upshot of the Pandora Papers is that, right at this moment, the super rich who secrete their money in the British Virgin Islands, the Seychelles or Cyprus will be thinking long and hard about restructuring to hide their riches via Delaware or another onshore tax haven in the US.
They will also think long and hard about getting the Big Four global tax firms – PwC, Deloitte, EY and KPMG – to manage their affairs. The A Team.
This is of course a speculative conclusion but also, as one regulatory finance source confided to Michael West Media this week, just a matter of putting two and two together. The Washington-based ICIJ never seems to be harassed by US authorities, the Big Four are rarely named, US billionaires are rarely named, blue chip tax avoiders are rarely named, the identity of the vast bulk of wealthy Australians in the data are never named.
Foreign PEPs, mobsters and oligarchs
This is not to disparage the work of Gerard Ryle and his team. The latest mega-leak of almost 12 million documents from offshore finance firms has identified the usual high profile types: crooner Julio Iglesias, cricket star Sachin Tendulkar, pop music diva Shakira, supermodel Claudia Schiffer and “an Italian mobster known as “Lell the Fat One”.
Great headlines, and every one a worthy story, although many will have bona fide reasons for being in tax havens. Rich people avoid tax, full stop. We will discuss the mechanics of secrecy jurisdictions, how it all works and who actually benefits in the sequel to this story.
Besides the crooners, mobsters and Russian oligarchs however, the Pandora Papers have outed an array of ”politically exposed persons” (PEP); former politicians and present heads of state. From King Abdullah of Jordan, Azerbaijan’s ruling Aliyev family, the prime minister of the Czech republic, Andrej Babiš and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to former British prime minister Tony Blair and three current Latin American heads of state, those identified publicly in Pandora Papers have sent shockwaves around the world.
The Aussie connection
A slew of tax authorities have vowed to take action, including the Australian Tax Office which, on Wednesday, froze more than $80 million in assets and companies linked to Gold Coast property developer Jim Raptis.
Westpac director Steve Harker was also identified as a client of one of the offshore service providers Singapore’s Asiaciti. As the identities of most of the Australians remain a secret, Harker is probably feeling unfairly targeted. What of the other 400 Australians?
No doubt the draconian defamation laws in this country, laws which protect the wealthy, played a part in the decision of local media to keep the names secret. Yet this also goes to the fundamental issue with ICIJ’s arbitrary arrangements and its media partners cherry-picking the data.
If ICIJ were truly fair dinkum about transparency and public interest, it would make the data from all its leaks public so that boffins from around the world, anybody for that matter, could hop in and dig around.
Who is calling the shots? One man apparently, Gerard Ryle. In the wake of the Panama Papers, when we asked Ryle on a number of occasions for an ICIJ log-in to analyse the data, we were denied.
“My path, my call,” said Ryle. We already have our media partners, he said.
Meanwhile, the 2016 Panama Papers remain under lock and key, unavailable to the public, secreted by ICIJ. The data is getting stale now. It is six years old. It is wasted, an insult to the people who risked their lives to put it in the public domain.
In Part II: who guards the guards? The second story in our investigation of the ICIJ and its Offshore Leaks examines what is really going on with international tax avoidance.
Michael West
Michael West established michaelwest.com.au to focus on journalism of high public interest, particularly the rising power of corporations over democracy. Formerly a journalist and editor at Fairfax newspapers and a columnist at News Corp, West was appointed Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Sydney’s School of Social and Political Sciences. You can follow Michael on Twitter @MichaelWestBiz.
Chris Hedges: The Assange case is the most important battle for press freedom in our time
Chris Hedges: The Assange case is the most important battle for press freedom in our time, Rt.com29 Oct, 2021
If the WikiLeaks founder is extradited and found guilty of publishing classified material, it will set a legal precedent that will effectively end national security reporting.
For the past two days, I have been watching the extradition hearing for Julian Assange via video link from London. The United States is appealing a lower court ruling that denied the US request to extradite Assange not, unfortunately, because in the eyes of the court he is innocent of a crime, but because, as Judge Vanessa Baraitser in January concluded, Assange’s precarious psychological state would deteriorate given the “harsh conditions” of the inhumane US prison system, “causing him to commit suicide.” The United States has charged Assange with 17 counts under the Espionage Act and one count of trying to hack into a government computer, charges that could see him imprisoned for 175 years.
Assange, with long white hair, appeared on screen the first day from the video conference room in HM Prison Belmarsh. He was wearing a white shirt with an untied tie around his neck. He looked gaunt and tired. He did not appear in court, the judges explained, because he was receiving a “high dose of medication.” On the second day he was apparently not present in the prison’s video conference room.
Assange is being extradited because his organization WikiLeaks released the Iraq War Logs in October 2010, which documented numerous US war crimes – including video images of the gunning down of two Reuters journalists and 10 other unarmed civilians in the ‘Collateral Murder’ video, the routine torture of Iraqi prisoners, the covering up of thousands of civilian deaths and the killing of nearly 700 civilians that had approached too closely to US checkpoints. He is also being targeted by US authorities for other leaks, especially those that exposed the hacking tools used by the CIA known as Vault 7, which enables the spy agency to compromise cars, smart TVs, web browsers, and the operating systems of most smart phones, as well as operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux.
If Assange is extradited and found guilty of publishing classified material, it will set a legal precedent that will effectively end national security reporting, allowing the government to use the Espionage Act to charge any reporter who possesses classified documents, and any whistleblower who leaks classified information.
If the appeal by the United States is accepted, Assange will be retried in London. The ruling on the appeal is not expected until at least January.
Assange’s September 2020 trial painfully exposed how vulnerable he has become after 12 years of detention, including seven in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. He has in the past attempted suicide by slashing his wrists. He suffers from hallucinations and depression, takes antidepressant medication and the antipsychotic quetiapine. After he was observed pacing his cell until he collapsed, punching himself in the face, and banging his head against the wall, he was transferred for several months to the medical wing of the Belmarsh prison. Prison authorities found “half of a razor blade” hidden under his socks. He has repeatedly called the suicide hotline run by the Samaritans because he thought about killing himself “hundreds of times a day.”
James Lewis, the lawyer for the United States, attempted to discredit the detailed and disturbing medical and psychological reports on Assange presented to the court in September 2020, painting him instead as a liar and malingerer. He excoriated the decision of Judge Baraitser to bar extradition, questioned her competence, and breezily dismissed the mountains of evidence that high-security prisoners in the United States, like Assange, subjected to Special Administrative Measures (SAMs), and held in virtual isolation in supermax prisons, suffer psychological distress. He charged Dr. Michael Kopelman, emeritus professor of neuropsychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London, who examined Assange and testified for the defense, with deception for “concealing” that Assange fathered two children with his fiancée, Stella Moris while in refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. He said that, should the Australian government request Assange, he could serve his prison time in Australia, his home country, after his appeals had been exhausted, but stopped short of promising that Assange would not be held in isolation or subject to SAMs…………………
There is no legal basis to hold Assange in prison. There is no legal basis to try him, an Australian citizen, under the US Espionage Act. The CIA spied on Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy through a Spanish company, UC Global, contracted to provide embassy security. This spying included recording the privileged conversations between Assange and his lawyers as they discussed his defense. This fact alone invalidated the trial. Assange is being held in a high security prison so the state can, as Nils Melzer, the UN special rapporteur on torture, has testified, continue the degrading abuse and torture it hopes will lead to his psychological if not physical disintegration. The architects of imperialism, the masters of war, the corporate-controlled legislative, judicial and executive branches of government and their obsequious courtiers in the media, are guilty of egregious crimes. Say this simple truth and you are banished, as many of us have been, to the margins of the media landscape. Prove this truth, as Assange, Chelsea Manning, Jeremy Hammond, and Edward Snowden have by allowing us to peer into the inner workings of power, and you are hunted down and persecuted.
Assange’s “crime” is that he exposed the more than 15,000 unreported deaths of Iraqi civilians. He exposed the torture and abuse of some 800 men and boys, aged between 14 and 89, at Guantánamo. He exposed that Hillary Clinton in 2009 ordered US diplomats to spy on UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and other UN representatives from China, France, Russia, and the UK, spying that included obtaining DNA, iris scans, fingerprints, and personal passwords, part of the long pattern of illegal surveillance that included eavesdropping on UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in the weeks before the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. He exposed that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the CIA orchestrated the June 2009 military coup in Honduras that overthrew the democratically-elected president, Manuel Zelaya, replacing him with a murderous and corrupt military regime. He exposed that George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and General David Petraeus prosecuted a war in Iraq that, under post-Nuremberg laws, is defined as a criminal war of aggression, a war crime, which authorized hundreds of targeted assassinations, including those of US citizens in Yemen. He exposed that the United States secretly launched missile, bomb, and drone attacks on Yemen, killing scores of civilians. He exposed that Goldman Sachs paid Hillary Clinton $657,000 to give talks, a sum so large it can only be considered a bribe, and that she privately assured corporate leaders she would do their bidding while promising the public financial regulation and reform. He exposed the internal campaign to discredit and destroy British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn by members of his own party. He exposed how the hacking tools used by the CIA and the National Security Agency permit the wholesale government surveillance of our televisions, computers, smartphones, and anti-virus software, allowing the government to record and store our conversations, images, and private text messages, even from encrypted apps.
He exposed the truth. He exposed it over and over and over until there was no question of the endemic illegality, corruption, and mendacity that defines the global ruling elite. And for these truths alone he is guilty. https://www.rt.com/op-ed/538822-assange-battle-for-press-freedom/#comment-5589120643
Australia’s credibility at a low point, with Scott Morrison’s lying and appalling performance at COP26
Bonne chance? Australia might need it on AUKUS nuclear submarines deal https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/7492847/bonne-chance-australia-might-need-it/ 2 Oct 21,
The AUKUS nuclear submarines deal had better pay off, because the costs for Australia are beginning to appear far greater than first suggested.
In case Prime Minister Scott Morrison really thought some time, and some space, would quell Emmanuel Macron’s anger at the announcement – which abruptly ended a $90 billion submarines contract with France’s Naval Group – the French president disabused him of that idea on Sunday.
Mr Macron knew very well what he was doing when he spoke to Australian journalists about the AUKUS deal, and Mr Morrison’s actions. There was an air of calm calculation about his words. If his intent was to express the depth of his disappointment, the damage the nuclear submarines deal had done to the Australia-France relationship, and to raise questions about Mr Morrison’s handling of the AUKUS move, then he was bang on target.
He didn’t overplay his anger, and even couched his disapproval of Mr Morrison’s actions with a respectful recognition of Australia and France’s friendship and shared history.
With two words, he also highlighted what is becoming increasingly clear about the AUKUS nuclear submarines arrangement: As an exercise in Australian defence procurement, it appears chimeric.
“Good luck,” he said, noting that far from a signed contract, Australia right now has to wait 18 months for a review before the next steps in its new quest for submarines. Bonne chance, Australia.
This is where the nation sits less than a couple of months after the AUKUS deal, in a region with heightening geopolitical tensions and unresolved questions about Australia’s ability to defend itself. Australia is falling out with its friends (France), while its closest ally gives a different version of events in the lead-up to the AUKUS announcement (it was “clumsy”, Joe Biden says).
In hindsight, the AUKUS announcement seems true to form for Mr Morrison. It was high in marketing, fanfare and gloss, but lacking in substance, ham-fisted in execution and questionable in the respect it afforded to those who deserved it.
Add Australia’s reputation as obstructing progress in international climate talks, its pathetically bare minimum net zero by 2050 position, and its refusal to support international agreements phasing out coal, and the nation cuts an increasingly lonely figure on the world stage.
Mr Morrison’s trip overseas for both G20 and COP26 is, at this stage, disastrous. Australia’s credibility seems to be ebbing, not just because of AUKUS but on climate action, too. Middle powers cannot afford to put their reputations at risk like this.
USA and UK’s transparent persecution of Australian Julian Assange
The goal is to set a legal precedent which allows journalists who expose the crimes of the powerful to be persecuted not covertly as is normally done in ‘free democracies,’ but right out in the open. To tell journalists “We’ll just throw you in prison if you cross us.
What makes this precedent uniquely dangerous is that it is not just threatening to imprison American journalists who expose US crimes, but any journalist anywhere in the world.
Caitlin Johnstone: The Assange persecution lays out Western savagery at its most transparent https://www.rt.com/op-ed/538713-us-appeal-of-the-julian-assange/28 Oct, 2021 By Caitlin Johnstone, an independent journalist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her website is here and you can follow her on Twitter @caitozThe first day of the US appeal in the Julian Assange extradition case saw grown adults arguing in court that the US government could guarantee that it wouldn’t treat the WikiLeaks founder as cruelly as it treats other prisoners.
I wish I was kidding.
In their write-up on Wednesday’s proceedings, The Dissenter’s Kevin Gosztola and Mohamed Elmaazi report that the prosecution argued that “the High Court should accept the appeal on the basis that the U.S. government offered ‘assurances’ that Assange won’t be subjected to Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) or incarcerated in ADX Florence, a super-maximum prison in Colorado.”
What this means is that in order to overturn the January extradition ruling which judge Vanessa Baraitser denied on the basis that the notoriously draconian US prison system is too cruel to guarantee Assange’s health and safety, the prosecution has established as one of their grounds for appeal the claim that they can offer “assurances” that they would not inflict some of their most brutal measures upon him. These would include the aforementioned Special Administrative Measures, wherein prisoners are so isolated that they effectively disappear off the face of the earth, or sending him to ADX Florence, where all prisoners are kept in solitary confinement 23 hours a day.
What’s ridiculous about these “assurances,” apart from the obvious, is that within its own legal argument the US government reserves the right to reverse those assurances at any time and impose SAMs or maximum security imprisonment upon Assange if it deems them necessary. As Amnesty International explains:
They say: we guarantee that he won’t be held in a maximum security facility and he will not be subjected to Special Administrative Measures and he will get healthcare. But if he does something that we don’t like, we reserve the right to not guarantee him, we reserve the right to put him in a maximum security facility, we reserve the right to offer him Special Administrative Measures. Those are not assurances at all. It is not that difficult to look at those assurances and say: these are inherently unreliable, it promises to do something and then reserves the right to break the promise.
So the prosecution’s legal argument here is essentially “We promise we won’t treat Assange as cruelly as we treat our other prisoners, unless we decide we really want to.”
This is not just a reflection on the weakness of the extradition appeal, it’s a reflection on the savagery of all the so-called free democracies that have involved themselves in this case.
This same prosecution argued that Assange should not be denied US extradition from the UK on humanitarian grounds as in the case of activist Lauri Love, because Love suffered from both physical and psychological ailments while Assange’s ailments are only psychological. They stood before the court and made this argument even as Assange was visibly pained and unwell in his video appearance from Belmarsh Prison, which he was only able to attend intermittently due to his frail condition.
“For my newspaper, I have worked as media partner of WikiLeaks since 2009,” tweeted journalist Stefania Maurizi who attended the hearing via video link. “I have seen Julian Assange in all sorts of situations, but I have never ever seen him so unwell and so dangerously thin.”
So they’re just openly brutalizing a journalist for exposing US war crimes, while arguing that they can be trusted to treat him humanely and give him a fair trial if granted extradition. This after it has already been confirmed that the CIA plotted to kidnap and assassinate him during the Trump administration, after we learned that the prosecution relied on false testimony from a convicted child molester and diagnosed sociopath, after it was revealed that the CIA spied on Assange and his lawyers in the Ecuadorian embassy, and after intelligence asset Jeffrey Epstein famously died under highly suspicious circumstances in a US prison cell.
The worst atrocities in history have all been legal. All the worst examples of genocide, slavery, tyranny and bloodshed have been allowed or actively facilitated by the state. The persecution of Assange is geared toward entering the imprisonment of journalists into this category.
The goal is to set a legal precedent which allows journalists who expose the crimes of the powerful to be persecuted not covertly as is normally done in ‘free democracies,’ but right out in the open. To tell journalists “We’ll just throw you in prison if you cross us.”
What makes this precedent uniquely dangerous is that it is not just threatening to imprison American journalists who expose US crimes, but any journalist anywhere in the world. This is an Australian journalist in the process of being extradited from the UK for publishing facts about US war crimes in the nations it has invaded. The aim is to set up a system where anyone in the US-aligned world can be funneled into its prison system for publishing inconvenient facts.
This is the savagery of the Western world at its most transparent. It’s not the greatest evil the US-centralized empire has perpetrated; that distinction would certainly be reserved for its acts of mass military slaughter that it has been inflicting upon our species with impunity for generations. But it’s the most brazen. The most overt. It’s the most powerful part of the most depraved power structure on earth looking us all right in the eyes and telling us exactly what it is.
And if we can really look at this beast and what it is doing right now, really see it with eyes wide open, it reveals far more about those who rule over us than anything any journalist has ever exposed.
How Australia’s coal country past is scuppering its renewable energy future — RenewEconomy
Australia needs to massively scale up renewables to reach net zero, but they are handicapped by a system designed for fossil fuels. The post How Australia’s coal country past is scuppering its renewable energy future appeared first on RenewEconomy.
How Australia’s coal country past is scuppering its renewable energy future — RenewEconomy
Tony Abbott wants Australia to buy second-hand ”retired” nuclear-powered submarines, for training purposes.
Abbott calls for Australia to use retiring nuclear-powered submarines as training boats, SMH, By Anthony Galloway November 1, 2021 Australia should consider buying retiring nuclear-powered submarines from either America or Britain for training purposes and as insurance in the event of a conflict in the region in coming years, former prime minister Tony Abbott has said.
Speaking from Washington, where he is travelling in a private capacity, Mr Abbott said that he had been canvassing the idea in the US of Australia acquiring some older-model nuclear submarines “within months, rather than decades”……………
“One of the issues which I’ve been informally discussing here in Washington and elsewhere in the United States is: Might it be possible for Australia to acquire a retiring LA-class boat or two, to put it under an Australian flag, to run it if you like as an operational training boat, but it would be an addition to the order of battle in the Western Pacific should that be necessary?……………… https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/abbott-calls-for-australia-to-use-retiring-nuclear-powered-submarines-as-training-boats-20211101-p594yk.html
1 This month.
PETITION – To: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and the Australian Labor Government
Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes – A good documentary on Chernobyl on SBS available On Demand for the next 3 weeks– https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-program/chernobyl-the-lost-tapes/235274195556
19 May – Webinar- Webinar: No Nuclear Weapons in Australia
Start: 2026-05-19 18:00:00 UTC Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney (GMT+10:00)
End: 2026-05-19 19:30:00 UTC Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney (GMT+10:00)
20 May – Webinar – The dangerous world of AUKUS, US, military occupation and suppression of dissent
National Webinar, 20th May, 2026, 6.30pm AEST. Confronting laws restricting/suppressing protest speech and action
Speakers: Former Sen. Rex Patrick, Lawyer Nick Hanna ,Arthur Rorris ,Jorgen Doyle, Sen David Shoebbridge,
Facilitator Kelley Tranter.
of the week – Australians for War Powers Reform (AWPR)
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity
Antinuclear 