A WOMAN’S WORLD
Brittany Higgins says her “heart broke” for the Toowoomba woman who has alleged former Liberal staffer Bruce Lehrmann raped her, The Australian ($) reports. Higgins commended the fact the woman had come forward “despite seeing the horrific championing of this individual in the media all year”. Lehrmann is accused of allegedly stealthing — where someone removes or doesn’t wear a condom unbeknownst to the sexual partner — but he hasn’t been committed to stand trial yet and his lawyers have indicated he will defend the rape charges. It comes as the eSafety Commission received almost 175 complaints a week about online sextortion and revenge porn this year, the Herald Sun reports, which is up 117% from the year prior. It could be due to the rise in AI-driven deepfakes, the paper says, where people can create convincing fake imagery of others.
Meanwhile Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has cancelled a scheduled interview with The Courier-Mail after female reporter Madura McCormack was replaced by political editor Hayden Johnson. The paper said it wasn’t personal, just a “longstanding convention” that the state editor does those chats. It didn’t happen in a vacuum, though — in Australian media, men account for 70% of quoted sources and 66% of experts in all news stories, as Guardian Australia reported, while this country’s newsrooms are about 59% male. The Courier-Mail’s Chris Jones rather fantastically claimed Palaszczuk’s move was a “dangerous precedent of interest to all press gallery journalists”. Oh, please. It comes as Australian media fixture Wendy Harmer has lifted the lid on a career dealing with shitty male behaviour, as The Age reports.
WARRING WORDS
If we send “material assistance” to Israel, Australia could be complicit in war crimes. That’s according to barrister Greg Barns who cites a list in Michael West Media per Human Rights Watch: Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, which has killed 8,000 Palestinians according to the Gaza Health Ministry; use of white phosphorus; collective punishment via cutting water, food, electricity and fuel; and the displacement of Palestinians. It comes as human rights lawyers warned US President Joe Biden of complicity under international war, as The Intercept reports. It could go before the International Criminal Court, where everyone including a president or PM can be held accountable.
Meanwhile former PM Paul Keating will not sign a Zionist Federation of Australia statement that condemns Hamas, unlike signees Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, John Howard, Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull. Keating refuted reporting in the Herald Sun, saying former ZFA president Mark Leibler asked him to sign but he said no. Meanwhile leader of the lower house Tony Burke is in trouble for what he didn’t say. On RN Breakfast Burke declined to answer whether Israel was engaging in genocide or apartheid, saying it was for others to say. The Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council’s Colin Rubenstein claimed Burke had “crossed a line” with his “vile and ridiculous statements”. Why? Burke supposedly made an “offensive moral equivalence” between the “slaughter of Israeli civilians by Hamas” and the “accidental deaths of Palestinian civilians who are unfortunately being killed because Hamas made a deliberate decision to use them as human shields”, Rubenstein said.
I’LL TRADE YOU
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese talked about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s plight to US President Joe Biden, Albo told the ABC’s Insiders, adding “enough is enough”. But Biden “doesn’t interfere with the Department of Justice”, the PM qualified. Go harder, Assange’s brother Gabriel Shipton told Guardian Australia — if we can get Cheng Lei home from China, surely we can get the imprisoned whistleblower back too? Biden’s issue, Shipton says, would be that Donald Trump has been charged under the Espionage Act too, as Reuters explains, so how can he go near it? In addition to the president, Assange adviser Greg Barns said they’ve been lobbying attorney-general Merrick Garland and members of the US House/Senate.
To another diplomatic stalemate — Trade Minister Don Farrell has walked away from trade talks with the EU’s Valdis Dombrovskis because there was no “progress”, the SMH reports. I wanted a different deal to July’s, Farrell said, while also acknowledging the free trade negotiations could stall for several years now the EU is about to enter election season. So what’s the issue? European naming rules that apply to our homegrown feta and prosecco, and France/Ireland’s objection to more Aussie beef and sheep meat, mostly. The EU also wants us to ditch our luxury car tax so BMW, Volkswagen and Citroën can send more cars here. It comes as Albanese heads to China this Saturday to talk trade too, The New Daily reports, attending the China International Import Expo in Shanghai. About 35% of our exports go to China, and our diplomatic freeze during the Morrison years continues to thaw with a review of Australian wine tariffs announced.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE
“Mind the gap,” a rather jaunty British voice has said for 54 years, “between the train, and the platform.” The saying is as frayed as an old boot, but the inflection is a little different on the Northern Line than the cool dulcet tones of other routes. Regular commuters through the Embankment station also might’ve long noticed an elderly woman sitting on the platform, a smile playing on her face every time the recording played. But on November 1, 2013, the voice had changed. Margaret McCollum was devastated. She spoke to transport officials who dutifully informed her the digital system had been updated, and the old recording wasn’t compatible anymore. What’s it to you? they asked. Well, she responded, as the BBC reports, it’s the voice of my late husband.
She met Oswald Laurence, a renowned theatre actor, in 1992 in Morocco, and the pair had been inseparable right up until his last breath in 2007. A “devastated” McCollum had taken to visiting the tube stop daily to hear her beloved’s voice again, sitting and waiting as the trains came and went into the darkness. Could she at least get a copy of the recording, McCollum had asked transport officials. When the London Underground heard of the grieving widow’s heartbreak, they were touched. Staff tracked down the recording, putting it onto a CD for her to keep. But it wasn’t enough. Transport director Nigel Holness told staff to find a way to restore Laurence’s recording onto the Northern Line. It still plays three times for each train, a salve for an elderly woman.
Hoping you feel the love around you today.
SAY WHAT?
We disagree on the basis of our political systems, on issues of human rights, on issues such as access to the South China Sea and the Taiwan Straits … we will continue to put those positions strongly, clearly and directly to China.
Anthony Albanese
The PM will be the first in seven years to visit Beijing this week, welcoming ministerial dialogue and thawing trade relations. But there are many things that set us apart from China’s government, Albanese added, and we’ll raise them.
CRIKEY RECAP
“The presence of large numbers of voters of Middle Eastern heritage in western Sydney electorates has been portrayed in some parts of the media as a political problem for Labor, preventing Labor figures like Burke and Energy Minister Chris Bowen from offering the level of support to Israel deemed necessary by journalists.
“In discussing what he’s hearing from his own constituents, however, Burke has turned that purported problem around and shifted the focus to why the media has been so selective in its coverage and levels of outrage.”
“How did this pattern of ruthless terror get so edited out of history? How did it come to seem that Zionism fought clean? Like Australian history, the true history is not taught — either inside or outside Israel. Many who hear of it simply pretend not to have.
“And there was no shortage of Arab violence against civilians at the time, detailed throughout the sources. That is not in dispute. But the forgetting of the crucial role of Zionist terrorism has given the use of atrocity a racist construction in the present.”
“May-June 2023: News Corp produces a series of pieces attacking Ten’s Lisa Wilkinson and poking holes in Higgins’ account of the alleged rape. They, and other outlets, are aided in this by the steady leak of private text and audio messages sent by Higgins and her partner David Sharaz. It is never established exactly where these leaks come from — Lehrmann’s defence denies any involvement.
“June-August 2023: Lehrmann gives his first public interview — split over two episodes — to Channel Seven’s Spotlight program, in which he reiterates his contention that the rape ‘simply didn’t happen’.”
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Palestinians break into Gaza UN aid warehouses as toll tops 8,000 (Al Jazeera)
Chrysler maker agrees pay deal to end strike (BBC)
Matthew Perry, ‘Friends’ star, dead at 54 (CNN)
Poilievre says Trudeau’s carbon tax pause is a ‘scam’ to win re-election (CBC)
Father of Liverpool’s Luis Díaz missing in Colombia amid kidnapping reports (The Guardian)
Maine shooting suspect found dead in cargo trailer, motive still a mystery (Reuters)
Russia executing soldiers not following orders, says US (Euronews)
THE COMMENTARIAT
How Apple’s AI voice cloning works for those at risk of speech loss — Tim Biggs (The Age): “The main new feature, Live Speech, is straightforward to use on iPhones, iPads, Macs and Apple watches. Once you turn the feature on, each device has a quick shortcut to access the keyboard, and once you type your message and hit “send” your words are spoken aloud. There’s also a button to access phrases you’ve set ahead of time, such as your favourite coffee order, and there are a few different options for voices.
“But those with newer devices also have the option of creating a custom voice that sounds like them, with machine learning. Apple calls this feature Personal Voice, and it’s a bit like those synthesised vocal deepfakes you might have heard on YouTube where a Barack Obama soundalike ranks Pokémon, except Apple’s take doesn’t require an enormous amount of training data, is easy to make, and has security and privacy features built in to keep it from being misused.”
Of course the Holocaust is relevant to Israel now — Karen Pollock (The Guardian): “Yet for some people, today the Jews are no longer victims. The fact that so many were victims is irrelevant. The fact that across the Jewish state people are mourning their loved ones is immaterial. The fact that Hamas murdered babies is irrelevant in this analysis, firmly grounded in the kind of discourse that talks only about “power”, because the Jews have a state and because Israel is more powerful than the Palestinians. By this dehumanising metric, therefore, the Israeli baby is more ‘powerful’ than the Hamas terrorist who murdered them, and unworthy of our attention.
“Let me be very clear here. Jews will inevitably connect the trauma of an attack that murdered more than a thousand innocent civilians with the trauma of Nazi massacres. It is macabre that Jews should be denied the right to voice those connections that are so deeply rooted in our trauma. And acknowledging that trauma does not have to come at the expense of acknowledging the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza we are witnessing on our TV screens, which is heartbreaking. All life is sacred and we must not forget that the Palestinian people are also victims of Hamas, used as human shields to pursue the hateful agenda of these murderous terrorists.”
HOLD THE FRONT PAGE
WHAT’S ON TODAY
Kulin Nation Country (also known as Melbourne)
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Jemena’s David Gillespie, Net Zero Australia Steering Committee’s Richard Bolt, Clean Energy Council’s Anna Freeman, and Australian Energy Producers’ Samantha McCulloch will speak at an industry panel about net zero, held at RACV.
Eora Nation Country (also known as Sydney)
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Writer Richard Glover will talk about his new book, Best Wishes, at Better Read Than Dead bookshop.
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