He’s old, boring, uninspiring, and offends no-one: surely he’ll fail miserably as President? But he has a stronger chance than any Democrat President since LBJ of getting very strong domestic reforms done.
Joe Biden announces his VP pick.
Trump has announced he will ban Tik-Tok from the United States. It’s Chinese-owned so there. Or maybe he will force it to be sold to Americans.Don’t think security is the issue; kids used it to stuff up his Tulsa rally. And it is good for mockery, as clips about Trump and Pompeo show. Don’t think that will stop if Americans own it.
With the growing assertions by the Chinese government across the eastern Pacific including in Hong Kong and our own repudiation of an extradition treaty, there are now calls to expand the Five Eyes intelligence network to include Japan.
A justified operation, no organised cover-up, but serious failures in senior defence personnel’s denial and misrepresentation, and serious failures by the intelligence agencies in handing over a suspect to torture. The Inquiry called for a review of Defence administration, an Inspector-General of Defence, a Defence Force order on dealing with allegations of civilian casualties, and an “effective detention policy.”
Australia’s Foreign Minister Marise Payne and Defence Minister Linda Reynolds traveled to the US this week to meet face-to-face with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Minister Mark Esper. In what was clearly meant as a follow-up to recent speeches on China by the Americans, Payne firmly declined to join Pompeo in in his call for regime change in China.
Jami-Lee Ross is threatening today to attempt to table details of National’s 2017 donations in Parliament.
According to our Prime Minister, today’s announcement that New Zealand is suspending extradition arrangements with Hong Kong is because of our principles. But it is not immediately clear what these principles are, other than falling into line with our Five Eyes spying partners. Some history is important.
A few weeks ago we were at 14 million cumulative confirmed cases of Covid-19 worldwide. A million more cases in just 4 days. Now a few weeks later, we are at 16 million confirmed cases worldwide. The lobbyists and business groups affected by our blocked borders need to get real. We won’t be opening our borders until we get a widely used vaccine later next year (at the earliest). It is too expensive to do so.
What is the strangest recent proposal for development in New Zealand?
It has been obvious about COVID-19 that it is very well adapted to humans. It has evolved a good entry system to the humans, often has mild symptoms, long pre-symptomatic infectious period, and doesn’t kill many of its hosts. What has been less obvious is where it came from. It looks more like South East Asia rather than China.
With a new Immigration Minister this week, could we please get some reality to bringing our people home?
With the government clearly watching the unravelling of Australia’s Covid-19 response and putting in place $14 billion in preparation for a second infection wave, we are clearly now in a history-in-making territory of the highest instability outside a world war.
New Zealand’s tourism economy has essentially collapsed, and it is part of a global tourism industry collapse that is so big that it may be permanently smaller. But does it have to be?
An occasional series
Jian Yang, he with impeccable Chinese Communist Party links and of formidable fundraising ability, has announced that he is is retiring from politics.
Love Music, Hate Racism? Here’s the film for you!
Richard Northey and Nicky Hager will discuss their experiences with the SIS over the past thirty-five years, what they reveal about the agency’s values and culture, and what we might want to see in the forthcoming review of the intelligence and security agencies post the Christchurch mosque massacre. St Andrews Church, The Terrace, Wellington, Friday 3 July 5:30pm. All welcome, register here.
Todd Muller had a bad day yesterday with adverse confidential National polling leaked to the media and with Grant Robertson and Winston Peters showing in the house that Muller’s denial that he had proposed opening up the border with China was simply not correct.
Nazis Punked; Fucked Off!
A really successful and very modern revolution has already started in just the last few weeks. It’s not the revolution we expected.
National and elements of the media have gone full on attack on the Government’s and Ashley Bloomfield’s Covid 19 performance. Which is unusual given that there is still no examples of community transmission and all recent infections have been picked up through the quarantine system.
Donald Trump has planned to hold a political rally on the day used to celebrate the abolition of slavery at a place where one of the worst examples of white brutality on black people using advertising material containing nazi symbols. All in the middle of a global pandemic.
Despite downbeat economic predictions and an imminent global recession, the New Zealand recovery offers opportunities for entrepreneurial success that exceed anything we’ve seen for decades.
A medical treatment of drug used since the 1960s in medicine has proven to be effective in reducing the worst effects of human body over-reactive immune responses to covid-19 infections. This will be a boon for the countries with under developed hospital systems that are at the forefront of the current rising wave of infections. And it isn’t quack ‘science’.
A quick look at rising second wave in the US as covid-19 digs deeper into the less populated states and counties. Because of its deliberate lack of governmental cohesion, the US is a rack of petri dishes testing different strategies. When that comes to disease control and covid-19, that strategy is a bit of a disaster.
…is the US sharemarket roaring away – up 44% – while economic recovery prospects are grim?” ANZ’s Sharon Zollner’s answer on Tuesday was the Fed printing money, but worried markets were turning a blind eye to the bad news. The bad news hit today as the sharemarket nose-dived. Wolf Richter’s answer was more to Kim’s point: “Fed bails out the wealthy while America convulses in pain.”
National has backed away from its policy of creating Strike Force Raptor Police Unit, a unit based on an Australian force dedicated to terrorising possible gang members.
The Black Lives Matter movement is causing many countries to reflect on their history and practices. And the decision of the police to discontinue the Armed Response Teams Trial and the Childrens Commissioner’s scathing report on Oranga Tamariki’s practices in the uplifting of young children, mostly Maori, from their mothers are examples of the change that is happening.
We have a model of policing by consent and that means we need the vast majority of people to see as legitimate the style in which we’re policing and it’s been clear to me that there has not been acceptance of this as an appropriate style of policing in New Zealand. – Police Commissioner Andrew Coster
Skripal’s relatives don’t believe it, Jacinda Ardern doesn’t believe it, Paul Buchanan doesn’t believe it, and I never believed it. But a story planted in the UK Sunday Times that the Skripals are here lets our media rerun the assassination attempt that failed, even though the most deadliest poison in the world was involved. Stuff website has a British Minister from Theresa May’s time rerunning the old lies,as does the NZ Herald. Fits in nicely with the SIS anti-Russian history.
The toppling of a statute of former slave trader Edward Coulson has led to conjecture that the statute may have tripped and fallen rather than forcibly removed and deposited in Bristol Harbour.
The civil war may have ended slavery, the civil rights movement may have changed the legal framework ending segregation in the Southern States, but the idea that white people’s lives matter more has survived into the 21st century.
Nothing changes
This week Donald Trump has hid in a bunker, used tear gas to move protestors away from a church so that he could have a photo opportunity with a bible, and has started to build his much vaunted wall. Although it is around the White House and not on the Mexican border.
The politics of Covid 19 present difficulties for the opposition. They cannot fault execution of the plan so far and have been reduced to complaining that the restrictions are not being loosened quickly enough.
