News
Does Australia have a Government yet? Funnily enough, no. Ten days and counting. It's a wonder we're not all rioting in the streets and trying to feast on the brains of our neighbours. More ceaseless back and forth yesterday, with first one side and then the other claiming a fragile lead in the
two party preferred vote, an argument which, while important in principle, starts to appear less so when you're talking about differences of 2000 votes i.e. 0.0143% of the population. Still, anything in this battle for moral supremacy in their
negotiations with the independents. Gillard was also out and about yesterday, declaring at the National Press Club (by this stage they must have started wearing down the carpet there) that her Government would "renovate" both Labor and Parliament in response to the demands of the independent MPs. She was a little sketchy on what exactly this might involve, but at least the thought was there. Aside from that, Abbott was mostly quiet, Tasmanian MP Andrew Wilkie
rejected Labor and now looks like he might
not back anyone at all, and Bob Katter didn't say or do anything weird or entertaining. More's the pity.
For further reading, here's Germaine Greer laying about her in
typically indignant fashion, and Joe Hildebrand has analysed the Constitution and come up with the
50 ways in which a party can form Government.
The protests at the Darwin detention centre kicked up a notch, with 90 detainees - mostly Indonesians being held without charge on suspicion of people smuggling - scaling a fence and... sitting peacefully outside. Not for them grand dreams of escape, just a bid for procedural fairness. Given that some of these "people smugglers" have now been waiting for nine months without a hint of being charged and that most of them are simply impoverished Indonesian fisherman who didn't actually realise that what they were doing had such an extravagant prison sentence attached, you can perhaps understand their frustration.
Herman Rockefeller died in really nasty fashion:
So, there you are. You have millions of dollars. You have security. You have all the material goods you've ever wanted. But still, despite it all, you feel empty. So, at a loss, you decide to turn to swinging with decidedly unattractive suburbanites in order to try and fill that gaping void. Excellent choice. And thus went the grisly end of Melbourne millionaire Herman Rockefeller, who, after advertising for crazy, multi-person sex in a suitable magazine, was punched by a 58 year old for not bringing his wife (the guy doing the punching did compare himself to Muhammad Ali, so there was fair warning), fell to the ground and died, at which point he was dismembered and his remains set on fire. Just to really drive the point home. Not all that newsworthy in the grand scheme of things, but nonetheless, a good look for practitioners of casual sex everywhere.
Tasmania's lower House approves same-sex marriages... so long as they occurred somewhere else. Still a generous gesture by the oft-forgotten state and hopefully one that begins the ever so slow process of prompting real change throughout the nation.
It's about time.
The US is leaving Iraq! Kinda. Still, it's heartening that it only took seven years for those protests to stop the war. For obvious reasons, the US has been aching to get out for a while, and fortunately Iraq, unlike its
predecessor (and now successor) Afghanistan, has some semblance of civil society, functioning police/military and territorial integrity. This withdrawal isn't absolute: some 50 000 soldiers are to remain in Iraq for the foreseeable future - around half the number of the 100 000 estimated civilian casualties to have occurred since the invasion - to help out with training and suchlike. But even so there is a certain degree of apprehension that the semi-dormant insurgency may well see this drawing down as a bang-up opportunity to rekindle the ol' ethnic hatred and bomb the shit out of things. It should make for an interesting 12 months.
Mexico arrests a drug lord named Le Barbie (due to his pale complexion. Natch)
. And good on them. I mean, really, who cares if Mexico's drug war has claimed the lives of some 28 000 people over the last three years. It's moments like this that make it all worthwhile. Even better, the US have a $2 million bounty on Le Barbie's head. Which is probably about as much as Le Barbie spent on yachts in a given day. Lucrative stuff that drug-selling.
Features
Prison Without Walls: an intriguing piece in the Atlantic on the many failings of the United States' blind focus on incarceration as the answer to crime and current attempts to try and move offenders out in to the community. This is an increasingly pertinent concern for the nation; at last count they had 2.3 million of their 300 million citizens locked up.
Fatal Distraction: the winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing and perhaps the single most gruelling and sad thing you'll read all year. An account of the people who accidentally kill their children by leaving them in cars. Worth reading, but pick the right moment and bring tissues.
Oddities/Curiosities
Testicle cooking in Serbia: There's actually not a lot I can add to this, but suffice to say, if you enjoy well-cooked animal testicles, you'll love Serbia.
Russia 100 years ago, in colour: The always excellent Big Picture delivers once again, this time with a series of early 20th century Russian photographs that have been infused with (Techni)colour to provide a stunning portrait of a nation before the events of a brutal and tumultuous century.
Video
Over the weekend the assorted nutbars that constitute the
terrifyingly pertinent Tea Party movement in America descended upon Washington in their hundreds of thousands to look foolish. Or at least that's the sense I got from this video. They seem nice.