News
The High Court has flexed its muscles ever so slightly and has
delayed the deporting of any asylum seekers from Australia to Malaysia until a full hearing on the matter can be convened, due for August 22. Meanwhile, the asylum seekers at the heart of the furore have been on a hunger strike of late, which the Government was first trying to spin as Ramadan related fasting, although the absence of merry feasting at the end of the day perhaps should have disabused them of that notion.
In the cheeriest news conference Adelaide has ever seen,
Mike Rann graciously announced that he will be leaving the Premier-ship of his own free will on October 20. The current Education Minister, Jay Weatherill, will take over. Yes sir, Mr Rann. You got SCHOOLED.
Tonight is Census night. Have your forms at the ready. Let's get counted all up in this shiznit.
Anonymous got involved and hacked the Syrian Ministry of Defence's website yesterday, covering it in images of civilians killed and injured by the regime and attaching links to Syrian activist and human rights organisations.
It was quite a good hack really, although for various reasons Syria's MoD has seen fit to take it down. They're no fun. Most recently
they have been firing on mourners at a funeral, killing dozens, and have essentially lad waste to Deir al-Zor, the country's most populous eastern city. They also cut power to the restive hub of Hama, apparently killing eight babies after their incubators lost power. Syria are also now in the unenviable position of having Saudi "Women aren't allowed to drive" Arabia criticising its human rights record and removing its ambassadors. You know you're doing something right when... Turkey's Foreign Minister is due to a pay a call to Assad this week to tell him to, like, stop slaughtering innocent civilians and shit, but Assad's gonna be like NBD, why you hatin' LOL.
Yemen's President Saleh has finally been released from hospital in Saudi Arabia, raising the worrying spectre that he might actually try and return to the country he has ruled for 33 years. Which would definitely accelerate the situation in Yemen from "generally anarchic" to "colossal clusterfuck sandwich".
Things have started getting a bit "looty" in London, as
race related riots enter their third night, spreading from Tottenham to Hackney, Peckham and Croydon and
forcing the police to temporarily retreat. For the second time in a month, David Cameron has had to cut short an international trip to deal with a widescale catastrophe at home. A happy month in his stint as Prime Minister.
The Guardian is running a live blog of the chaos as it unfolds and you can get other bits and pieces with the #LondonRiots hashtag. Meanwhile,
this man shows off his recently looted wares, while this woman quite affectingly castigates the youth for all this meaningless destruction.
As expected, the US markets opened to a dramatic sell off in the wake of Standard & Poor's dramatic decision to downgrade the US investment status from risk free to pretty much risk free except there's the vague chance that in a century or so the US might not be able to fully service its debts. Which was enough to cause a 6% drop, the biggest one day loss since 2008. The weird thing about this run through the wringer is that it's a lot more panic than practice, in that while certain economies might be struggling a little, there's been nothing to suggest such a widespread sell off would be necessary except for the prognostication of the ratings agency themselves. Merchants of panic, indeed.
Features
It doesn't seem particularly fashionable to express sympathy for asylum seekers these days, but
this brief Julian Burnside piece is a quite stirring reminder that some small part of our national humanity may be at stake here.
The New Yorker's finance man about town, James Surowiecki, with
an explanation/condemnation of the investment ratings agencies, written in the wake of their abysmal failure to spot the GFC. To be read with
Bernard Keane's take on the debt downgrade: politics does matter and blind opposition a la the Tea Party/Tony Abbott is capable of hurting a nation.
Oddities/Curiosities
A floating island is missing somewhere over Europe. Most likely the Czech Republic. Owner is eager for return. Seriously.
All the Pulitzer Prize winning news photos from 1942-2011. Amazing, albeit occasionally quite tragic images. But not all of them. Here's 1974.
Video
As London grapples with a second day of quite unseemly rioting and looting, some footage from BBC News of the chaos, soundtracked with what sounds like quite a nice lady describing what she'd seen and mounting a defence of living in Tottenham. Her worst thing about the riots: insurance premiums are going to go up. Bless.