News
It's been a weekend of non-stop excitement in Australian politics as the Council of Australian Governments met over the weekend to
try and finagle a deal on health reform. And finagle they did! While health has long been a contentious point in Federal/State politics, Gillard - in what is becoming her trademark - boldly secured a deal for reform by stripping all ambition and vision away and pitching in an offer for the lowest common denominator. As is usually the case in Australian politics, the result is a combination of abstract figures ($18.4 billion!) mixed with hazy generalisations (more beds!), but would appear to go some way toward unifying the previously complex and scattershot individual funding models for each state. However, it falls long short of Kevin Rudd's one time promise to entirely nationalise the entire health system. But we try not to talk about Kevin too much these days.
After a horror week, Tony Abbott continues to prove that his patent combination of unstinting anger and loose ineptitude is a hit with the voters,
after the Coalition jumped to an 8 point lead in the most recent polls. Which should really be joyous news for ineffectual malcontents everywhere: there's hope for you yet! (NB: only applies if competing with opposition of grinding, uninspiring mediocrity)
Egypt is free!... Ish. After
the bitterest of disappointments on Friday, Mubarak only managed to last another 24 hours before being summarily dispatched to his seaside home town to think about what he's done. And didn't the people just love it? The answer: yes.
I'm not sure what it must feel like to have your absence so riotously celebrated by so many millions of people, but I imagine that the billions and billions of dollars that now constitute his retirement fund must be some small consolation. While already pretty rich, it seems that rather than actually trying to defuse the situation, Mubarak may have spent the 18 days of the uprising quietly
funneling his/the Egyptian people's immense wealth into untraceable overseas accounts. So, that's nice. With his removal, the much vaunted military have stepped into the void, which is one of those things that makes you a bit itchy and uneasy as an outside observer, but is still broadly welcomed by the rest of Egypt.
The new leaders issued another of their Communiqués overnight, this one dissolving the current Parliament and setting a more specific timeline for the holding of elections and the implementation of constitutional reform. There is still, as with all these things, much to be done, and much that can go wrong, but for now it remains a remarkable moment of unequivocal good in a world that sees far too few of them.
Meanwhile, the Egyptian people remained on the street across the weekend, this time so as
to clean up the accumulated mess of the last 18 days of protesting. That's right, as one, they returned to the site of their protest and cleaned up after themselves. If only Australia Day could inspire that degree of care amongst our populace.
Algeria and Yemen both saw protest marches on Saturday,
both of which were crushed with reasonable brutality. Not that these movements seem entirely in vain: in Yemen, opposition groups have arranged to meet with the government to discuss a range of concessions pitched up last week, chief amongst them the announcement that the current President will not run at the 2013 election, while in Algeria there has been some mention of ending the emergency law which has been operating for the last 19 years. However, such law has not yet been revoked, and it was used on Saturday to arrest hundreds of protesters.
Features
An article in the Globe and Mail about Egypt and being
reminded what the concept of revolution - of its hopes and fears and opportunities and disasters - stands for. A stirring account of humanity's sometimes misguided passion for overthrow and reconstruction.
The fascinating story of a woman's search for the killer of her father, and the shady world of the mafia, casinos and Native American reservations it led her to.
Oddities/Curiosities
With another despotic leader being quietly removed to the outside world, presumably to spend his days on a beach somewhere drinking cocktails out of gold-plated coconuts, Crikey has compiled
a handy list of recently removed dictators, their current locations and the amount of ill-gotten money they're frittering away on gold-plated coconuts.
If you're anything like me, you both love the internet and presume that it is, these days, as capable of being killed as is space itself. However, researchers in Minnesota have discovered that
you could conceivably take the entire Internet down with as few as 250 000 remotely networked computers. Which, to the average consumer, does seem like a lot of computers, but when you consider that
the world just passed the 4.3 billion internet connections mark last week, securing that many doesn't seem entirely unreasonable. I'd say this has a 50-50 chance of being done by terrorists/rogue states or a coalition of old folk who just really, really want things to go back to how they were.
Video
A beautiful and emotive sequence of images and interviews from the aftermath of Mubarak's resignation.
The raw emotion and sense of pride recaptured is quite moving.