A man holds a sign calling for the release of Julian Assange as people march and rally on May 1, 2019 in Los Angeles, California.

Photo: David McNew/Getty Images

When Joe Biden becomes president of the United States on January 20, a historic opportunity awaits him to demonstrate Americas commitment to the First Amendment. He can, in a stroke, reverse four years of White House persecution of journalism by withdrawing the application to extradite Julian Assange from Britain to the U.S. This would be in line with the departures from Trump policies Biden is proposing on health care, environmental protection, and tax fairness. Assanges liberty represents the liberty of all journalists and publishers whose job is to expose government and corporate criminality without fear of prosecution. We need and deserve to be protected against government control of the press.

By removing the 1917 Espionage Act charges against Assange, Biden would be adhering to the precedent established by the administration in which he served for eight years as vice president. President Barack Obamas Department of Justice investigated Assange and WikiLeaks for three years until 2013 before deciding, in the words of University of Maryland journalism professor Mark Feldstein, to follow established precedent and not bring charges against Assange or any of the newspapers that published the documents. Equal application of the law would have required the DOJ to prosecute media outlets, including the New York Times, that had as large a hand in publicizing war crimes as did Assange himself. If prosecutors put all the editors, publishers, and scholars who disseminated WikiLeaks materials in the dock, there would not be a courtroom anywhere in America big enough to hold the trial. Obama decided against it, knowing it would represent an unprecedented assault on freedoms Americans hold dear.

President Barack Obamas January 2017 decision to commute the sentence of Chelsea Manning, the source for WikiLeakss revelation that American forces in Iraq were involved in murder and torture, is another indication that the Trump Justice Departments prosecution of Assange was an aberration and not an irreversible policy to threaten journalists and whistleblowers everywhere.

Although the Obama administration prosecuted more journalists under the Espionage Act than all its predecessors combined, it pulled its punches in cases that would not withstand scrutiny. The DOJ investigated and wiretapped Fox News journalist James Rosen for publishing information on North Korean nuclear policy in 2013 from State Department security adviser Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, but it avoided a contentious and high-profile trial by declining to prosecute him. Kim pleaded guilty and received a 13-year sentence.

Biden has signaled his intention to return the U.S. to international cooperation, revoking Trumps withdrawal from the World Health Organization, the Paris Agreement on climate change, and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action to control Irans nuclear program. Americas return to the community of law-abiding nations would be enhanced further by adhering to judgements from the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights calling for Assanges immediate release. Exonerating Assange would also underscore American dedication to Article 19 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, among whose drafters was American former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt: Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. (Italics mine.) Assange and WikiLeaks received and imparted information vital to the public interest, as hundreds of media outlets, legal experts, and human rights advocates have attested.

It will take courage for Biden to retract the allegation he made on Meet the Press in 2010: I would argue it [WikiLeaks] is closer to being a high-tech terrorist than the Pentagon Papers. Yet voters chose him over Donald Trump this month in the hope that he would show courage. Biden also said in 2010 that the WikiLeaks revelations had endangered the lives of intelligence sources. When WikiLeaks released the Iraq War logs and video of an American helicopter crew gunning down civilians, including two Reuters journalists, Defense Secretary Robert Gates conceded, Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for U.S. foreign policy? I think fairly modest. The source who provided the Pentagon Papers on Americas war in Vietnam to the New York Times and Washington Post, Daniel Ellsberg, recently stated that government officials have not been able to identify a single person at risk of death, incarceration or physical harm.

When the Nixon administration prosecuted Ellsberg for espionage in 1973, Judge William Byrne dismissed the case with prejudice against the government for infringing Ellsbergs right to confidential communication with his psychiatrist. The Trump administration has illegally obtained Assanges privileged discussions with his doctors and lawyers, tainting its case as much as Nixons against Ellsberg. Whether Trump-appointed justices will defend the law as scrupulously as Byrne need not be put to the test.

If extradited, Assange risks a 175-year sentence in the Alcatraz of the Rockies, otherwise known as the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colorado. Its harsh regime would see him in permanent solitary confinement in a concrete box cell with a window four inches wide, with six bed checks a day and one hour of exercise in an outdoor cage. His fellow inmates would be Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, Boston Marathon bomberDzhokhar Tsarnaev, FBI-agent-turned-Russian-spy Robert Hanssen, Oklahoma City co-bomber Terry Nichols, and Mexican drug baron Joaqun El Chapo Guzmn Loera.

Trump may contend that journalists and publishers are no different from terrorists, serial killers, and narcotics traffickers. Biden is free to take another view. Does he want to begin his term of office carrying the burden of that Trump legacy? Assange stands in the tradition of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward during Watergate, Ellsberg with the Pentagon Papers, Seymour Hersh over the My Lai massacre, Sydney Schanberg on Americas massive bombardment of Cambodia, plus hundreds of others who, vilified at the time, have been vindicated by the judgment of history.

Does Biden want to begin his term of office carrying the burden of that Trump legacy?

Those who insist Assange must pay for his actions can be satisfied that he has already suffered severe punishment. He has spent the past 10 years under confinement: first under house arrest, then as a political refugee in Ecuadors embassy in London, and for the past year and a half in Belmarsh, a high-security prison outside of London, under conditions that U.N. Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer called psychological torture. Assanges health has deteriorated to the point that 117 physicians wrote to British medical journal The Lancet lastFebruary that he is suffering psychological torture and medical neglect. Expert medical witnesses who have examined Assange at Belmarsh testified at his extradition hearing in September that, if extradition proceeds, his suicide is inevitable.

The American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders, and other defenders of free expression have repeatedly called for Assanges immediate release. Ellsberg issued a warning to journalists and publishers about Assange: If he is extradited to the U.S. and convicted, he will not be the last.

Bidens choice on January 20 is between the opposite courses taken by his two immediate predecessors, Obama and Trump. His conscience should tell him which to follow.

Correction: December 2, 2020

A previous version of this article referred to President Barack Obamas 2017 commutation of Chelsea Mannings sentence as a pardon, and stated that Julian Assange risks a 170-year sentence if extradited to the U.S. and convicted. In fact, he risks a 175-year sentence.

Read more:

Biden's Choice on Julian Assange and the First Amendment - The Intercept

There is this idea about language that they used to torture us students with in the West.

All meaning, the air-wank explanation went, is a case of absence. We only know what a word signifies by knowing that it does not signify something else.

Cat is only cat, they would say while I calculated how many schooners the change in my pocket would buy at the Union bar, because it is not bat. So, you see, said Mrs Derrida, what were really saying is nothing at all.

When I had asked for a beer, which was only a beer because it was not a deer or a bear or an onion, I would sometimes bother to think about this stuff. Frankly, I did not, and do not, believe that meaning is something produced by friction between the clouds.

Meaning rises first from the ground beneath our feet; only those who can afford to live in high places believe that it does not. But I did think that this language theory could help me search for certain things that just seemed missing a case that I made to my tutor when my essay on semiotics went, mysteriously, undelivered.

I failed this course, I think. But every so often, the bits I had remembered from 20th century nonsense came back. There were times where you could only declare what a thing was by describing it in the terms of what it wasnt. When the phrase un-Australian made it into popular use, I remembered those seminars a lot.

It was, I think, around the time of the late 1990s that un-Australian was first non-mockingly said. This was a time when mean conditions hit here, and the feet beneath the ground of many Australians forced them up to produce foul words in angry clouds. Un-Australian has always been, to my ears at least, a joke of solidarity; blokes would say it to other blokes on my dads building site to gently chide them for working at too efficient a pace. To be un-Australian meant to please the boss.

Then, suddenly, it meant obedience to an unspoken ideal.

Australia, never clearly defined as a thing, became known within its borders for what it was not. You can say this of any place, I guess. It is only sketched in the terms of the things that surround it. But, this is so particularly true of our nation-state, which is a place founded so very recently on such a fragile, thieving lie.

No one knows what a right-wing politician means when they say un-Australian in the present, least of all the politician saying it. It is not even a negation, but blanker than that. It reduces the meaning of Australian-ness down to whatever might, or might not, live inside the unconscious borders of the speaker at that particular time. This is so postmodern, I thought, the first time I heard one of the crazies say it, and I could almost smell the stale Union beer.

I had heard Julian Assange, a man who holds an Australian passport, called un-Australian by these crazies. They have conveniently revised their opinion in recent times you know, now that WikiLeaks is perceived, wrongly and by nearly everyone, as a servant of nostalgic right-wing order.

Now, some of the crazies, so persistent in describing their nation by its lack, think of him and of WikiLeaks as very Australian or Strayan, to be phonetically faithful, for the un-Australian reader. It was in 2016 that one of our most despicable politicians made the case for this Australians return.

While local crazies have embraced the thing they once excluded, the reverse is true for our nations liberals. Such people are, of course, too finely educated to ever take the refuge of patriotism. The new liberal, like the movement of trade she admires, is global.

Assange and WikiLeaks were seen as global at the time of their major public debut. Assange was a mysterious international good guy conceived in the liberal political unconscious as halfway between, I dont know, a figure in a le Carr novel and one of those twits from Silicon Valley. A real disruptor, our Julian. But caring, you know. Like a younger, much poorer, more promiscuous Bill Gates.

To be honest, I wasnt paying much attention to WikiLeaks at the time. I figured that others were doing that for me when, in 2010, a guy that helped me reverse a robot checkout mistake at the Elsternwick Coles joked, WikiLeaks has hacked your chicken thighs.

WikiLeaks seemed to be doing good work in what I now knew was a terrible era, but they didnt need my help. Besides, I always felt uneasy with the postmodern local liberals who were always mystifying the mans global posture. Global, as far as I was concerned, had come to conceal a dysphoria made otherwise plain in a cruel utterance like un-Australian.

The years passed and the robots got smarter. The liberals, though, got dumber when their own systems started to fail. The crazies sniffed a glitch or a feature as they say in Silicon Valley and they began to wrest control.

What this meant in the Australian perception of Assange was interesting, even if it was frustrating. The liberals, who had once offered him their most uncritical support, no longer thought of their countryman as global, a great ambassador, as they had it, for their international trade ideals.

They began to find a way to signify him that would not misrepresent their own noble goals. They certainly couldnt call him un-Australian, even if they no longer thought of him as a younger, global Gates. They couldnt say he was Australian either, because that speech act might ease his passage home.

They came up with a good compromise: They began to call him Russian.

I am just the right age to find this very funny. I am just the right age to find this un-fking-believable. When I was at school, in that po-mo dust kicked up by the fall of the Berlin Wall, we joked, much in the way the guys on my dads building site had, that you should Just go and live in Russia. This was a reference to the newly ended Soviet experiment, which we, being affectionately post-communist postmodernists, thought hilarious. If someone didnt hand their essay in on time, they were charged with the defunct idea of being Russian.

Look, I know we thought it was funny. You probably had to be there. Remember, this was the time of maximum Foucault, and our gags were all about diffuse power and, ergo, very bad.

So, I, being around the same age as Assange, have the sense of Russia as something that once was a true threat to liberal order, and now as a place with a GDP roughly equivalent to that of Italy.

Sensitive reader, this doesnt mean I disrespect the place in recent times, I find myself drawn in unnatural affection to the idea of it. It just means that I see it, as many realist foreign policy thinkers see it, as a nation that we dont really have to worry about; well, not until it starts having cosy conversations with Iran and China.

This dead menace. This grey state. This failed rejoinder to all of our Western declarations is the thing to which they now compare Assange. Look, I dont know the guy and I know no WikiLeaks business beyond the use of the share button, I have never given it a moment of my labour.

Maybe these liberals have intuited something that will turn out to be true, however much I doubt this, and we will find that the slightly Slavic-looking man has a Cold War microfilm lodged between his arse cheeks.

I dont know, I dont care. The only thing I do care to know from WikiLeaks is how to use its search button better. Man, those Podesta emails. It will take me another six months to read them all, and another few years to make journalistic sense of the truths, both cynical and naive, the language of the powerful has come to conceal.

This is the code I want to crack. This is the secret, before me in plain sight. When I decipher the soft language shared between the Citigroup c-suite and the White House, between Goldman Sachs and a presidential nominee, Ill let you know. I might even let Mrs Derrida know. But for the minute, I am searching in the absences.

I wish I could do this in some sort of peace. Every so often, I publish an article based on my hours in the inbox of John Podesta, preparing for the time Ill write that one big thing. I offer a look at a particular turn of phrase, a particularly polite way a company director has recommended cabinet appointments with clear connections to Wall Street by claiming that these are diverse. It is difficult to read through the mystification, and I really wish Id paid more attention in school. But I really wish my liberal peers would shut the f up with their nonsense that Julian Assange is Russian and that I, therefore, am his useful Russian idiot. Too stupid, too Slavic, to know shes being fooled.

I do not always know, Ill own, when I am being fooled. It takes time for mystification to fall away. I know that I have written, way back when, in mild support not so much of President Obamas policies, but for the sheer idea of what he promised. It would be a lie to tell you that I wont get fooled again. But, it is a lie to tell those of us, looking for absence in the search bar, that what we are doing is foolish.

To keep looking through the last documents of an era is not, I sense, especially foolish. Its possibly even a little bit wise. I do not expect this reading to reveal that One Weird Trick that will explain power, end liberalism or restore the Soviet experiment to a more viable stage. What WikiLeaks gives us is not an easy hack. What WikiLeaks gives us is something like the hazy feeling I had back in the 1990s. That language and its clouded meaning was important, sure, but that its interaction with the ground was the real story.

Because I did go to school at a time when people said ridiculous postmodern things, I can never believe that there is a story that is entirely real. There is no post-truth. There is no fake news. These rely on an imaginary precondition of pure truth and fact and news; a liberal nostalgia as noxious as that held by the hard right and its invented golden age.

This is not the post-fact age more than any other. There are still facts, but many new ways to conceal them. How did they disguise that fact with the language? What language can we use to describe the fact of this new disguise?

What WikiLeaks gives us is the chance to find those means of concealment. What WikiLeaks gives us is the same frustrating answer history always has: Look for the truth and dare yourself to describe it.

If the truth turns out to be that Assange is Russian, that hes utterly un-Australian or as Australian as snake bite and savoury pies, I dont care. Its an easy truth to tell, an easy one to refute, and, either way, tells us little, if nothing, about the nature of power.

Mrs Derrida would probably be quite pleased to see me suffer at WikiLeaks.org, challenging me at every turn with its interplay of truth and meaning. Me, defying her, reading between the lines for the interweaving of the cloud of ideas with the ground. Her reminding me that what I am looking for are things that are not there, as much as I am looking for things that are present. Me, asking the 1990s, that orgy of liberalism, to please get out of my head.

We only know what WikiLeaks means by knowing what it is not, she tells me. I agree. What it is not is in any way knowable. What it is not is a Russian nested doll set with a single truth at its centre. What it will not be defined by, at any point, are its enemies or its friends.

And it is not un-Australian, in the old sense of that absurd and wonderful compliment. WikiLeaks will rarely please the boss.

Helen Razer is a broadcaster and writer whose work also appears in The Saturday Paper, The Age, SBS online, and The Big Issue.

This is an edited extract fromA Secret Australia: Revealed by the WikiLeaks exposs,edited by Felicity Ruby and Peter Cronau, available December 1 fromMonash University Publishing.

Continued here:

Revealed by the Wikileaks expose: The fragile, thieving 'un-Australian' lie - The New Daily

Justice Brereton has just handed down his report into war crimes allegedly committed in Afghanistan by Australias SAS soldiers. Crimes that may not have seen the light of day without the work of journalists.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison says the report is disturbing and distressing; that the war crime allegations must be dealt with by the justice system; that any prosecutions must adhere to the presumption of innocence.

Morrison fails to recognise the role of journalists in revealing the killings, and instead warns against trial by media. And the journalist who first revealed evidence of war crimes in Afghanistan, Julian Assange, should, according to Morrison, be left to face the music. Assange is fighting what is seen as a largely political US extradition request that could see him jailed for 175 years yet Australia has done little to help.

A country that will not fight for its citizens when facing a hugely questionable prosecution erodes its own sovereign rights.

Through Assange and Wikileaks we have learnt much about the relationship between the US and Australia and its security agreement, the ANZUS treaty. But it is the Australian governments treatment of Assange that reveals more than a library of leaked documents could ever do about how power is exercised in this relationship.

The lies were obvious from the beginning. In 2010, when Assange, working with the Guardian newspaper in the UK, began publishing reports from the Cablegate cache of leaked documents, the Iraq War Logs, and the Afghan War Diary. The US government immediately complained that the revelations put lives at risk.

But that was all part of a ploy:

A congressional official said the administration felt compelled to say publicly that the revelations had seriously damaged American interests to bolster legal efforts to shut down the WikiLeaks website and bring charges against the leakers.

In truth, internal US government reviews had determined that the leaks had caused only limited damage to US interests abroad.

Yet, in lock-step with the US administration, the then Australian prime minister Julia Gillard echoed the White Houses public statements by declaring that Assange had broken the law.

I absolutely condemn the placement of this information on the WikiLeaks website. It is a grossly irresponsible thing to do and an illegal thing to do.

In fact it was nothing of the sort. A Federal Police investigation found that Assange had broken no laws. Yet Gillard did not retract her allegation. The Government went further, giving several organisations, including the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), greater powers and widened the area of activities deemed illegal to include strategic and diplomatic relations.

The then attorney-general, Senator Robert McClelland, weighed in saying that Australian authorities would do all they could to help the US investigation into WikiLeaks. Without revealing what advice he was basing his decision on, McClelland even threatened to revoke Assanges Australian passport.

The only government voice providing any support was foreign minister Kevin Rudd, who had taken Gillard and McClelland to task when they had attacked Assanges activities. Rudd declared the need to recognise the principle that Assange was innocent before proven guilty. He also told the attorney-general he did not have the power to revoke Assanges passport.

It is possible Gillard thought being pro-American would play well with the public. It didnt. Assanges biggest support base is in Australia, where opinion polls said that 60% of the people agreed with the work he had done. More surprising was the support he received from news outlets.

In an unprecedented move, representatives from all the major outlets bar The Australiansigned a letter criticising Gillard:

To aggressively attempt to shut WikiLeaks down, to threaten to prosecute those who publish official leaks, and to pressure companies to cease doing commercial business with WikiLeaks, is a serious threat to democracy, which relies on a free and fearless press.

When GetUp! launched a campaign, thousands filled the streets in Sydney and Melbourne. Assange told the crowd by video: It is interesting how some politicians single out my staff and myself for attack while saying nothing about the slaughter of thousands by the US military or other dictatorships. It is cowardly to bully a small media organisation, but that is what is happening.

Clearly the government thought it was a price worth paying for what it believed was its special relationship with Washington. In the final days of a wet Australian spring in 2011, then US president Barack Obama landed in Canberra to address the Australian Parliament.

It was the 60th anniversary of the founding document of the ANZUS treaty. Obamas presence produced what were described as scenes of nauseating adoration from politicians of both the major parties. When he addressed parliament, Obama spoke eloquently of the rule of law, transparent institutions and equal administration of justice.

However, it was becoming increasingly obvious that when it came to Assange the US and Australian governments were playing by other rules. Assange was receiving only minimum consular support from the Australian High Commission in London.

His political support came almost exclusively from the Greens. Scott Ludlam told the Senate that Assange was recognised as a journalist by the High Court in the UK. WikiLeaks was a publisher, and Assange had broken no law, just as the people who put his material on the front page of The Age and the New York Times have broken no law.

In the US public calls were made for Assanges execution as an enemy combatant. Joe Biden called him a high-tech terrorist. In any other case involving an Australian citizen, its hard to believe there wouldnt have been an outcry from Australias leaders. Drug runners had received more sympathetic treatment. There was little defence of Assange and he was fast becoming a man without a country.

Gillards role has often been reported through the prism of Australias grovelling support of America, fearful of confronting its powerful ally.

But she also had a personal issue with Assange, and a score to settle: the release of the Cablegate documents, which later so embarrassed her and unmasked the ALP plotters who had planned the coup against then prime minister Rudd.

One leaked US cable reported:

Don Farrell, the right-wing union powerbroker from South Australia, told us Gillard is campaigning for the leadership and at this point is the front-runner to succeed Rudd.

The US Embassy in Canberra also reported that the PMs brother Greg [Rudd] told us that Rudd wants to ensure that there are viable alternatives to Gillard within the Labor Party to forestall a challenge. The cable added that protected source Senator Mark Arbib (another Labor powerbroker) once told us a similar story.

Even though the cables were published well after Gillard made her attack on Assange, the US had provided well in advance full knowledge of the contents, because the US very early on had determined which cables Chelsea Manning had leaked.

Yet it was more than Gillard and McClellands behaviour that highlighted the federal governments hostile attitude towards Assange and WikiLeaks.

The government repeatedly delayed responding to Freedom of Information (FoI) requests, and the then foreign minister Bob Carr skirted the question when asked whether Assange was a journalist, undercutting his primary defence.

Carr also referred to the amorality of WikiLeaks revelations but did not elaborate. It was a strange comment from a foreign minister whose job it is to represent Australian citizens in trouble overseas, although he has since spoken out against Assanges extradition to the US.

Australia now a surveillance state with journalists as Persons of Interest under ASIO Act

The limited information released under the FoI Act revealed that instead of seeking assurances that Assange would be treated fairly if he were ever extradited to the US, the Australian Embassy in Washington was more focused on the possible political fallout in Canberra. The embassy was in fact seeking advance warning, a heads up, of when any action against Assange or WikiLeaks may take place.

For Assange, the final evidence that he had been abandoned came when Nicola Roxon, McClellands replacement as attorney general, wrote to Assanges lawyers just before he sought asylum in Londons Ecuadorean Embassy, saying:

Australia would not expect to be a party to any extradition discussions that may take place between the United States and the United Kingdom or the United States and Sweden, as extradition is a matter of bilateral law enforcement co-operation.

In other words, the Australian government had abrogated its responsibility to defend one of its citizens.

What is more difficult to understand is the indifference to Assanges plight often shown by other journalists, including from The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Guardian and the ABC, who are just as vulnerable to extradition to the US for what they have published from the WikiLeaks documents. Many remain silent or give only half-hearted support.

Others have argued a line straight out of the US State Department that Assange is not a journalist at all, thus stripping him of his best defence and putting other journalists at risk.

It would be comforting to think they are simply misguided, but the military intelligence establishment has always found willing recruits in the media, and now is almost certainly no different.

This edited extract is reproduced from A Secret Australia: Revealed by the WikiLeaks Exposs, edited by Felicity Ruby and Peter Cronau, Monash University Publishing, December 2020.

Read more from the original source:

Sovereignty eroded: Wiki cables show both Labor and Coalition culpable in Assange persecution - Michael West News

JULIAN Assanges father, John Shipton, will visit Nimbin, Byron Bay and Mullumbimby this month, to discuss his sons situation.

He said coming to the Northern Rivers was like coming home to visit extended family.

The Australian man said each time he visits the area he connects with long-term friends and former schoolmates from his time at boarding school in Bathurst, plus other local acquaintances.

He confirmed Mr Assange went to school in different places in Northern NSW with his mother Christine Ann Hawkins, a visual artist, who still lives in the area.

Mr Shipton recently returned from his sons extradition hearing at the Old Bailey in London.

The Australian activist and builder has called for the Australian government to support his son and bring him to Australia.

Mr Shipton said he was trying to put pressure on the Australian Government to help his son.

It is a task we take on, fighting to bring our speaker of truth home to family and friends. We appeal for your help to Bring Julian Home, he said.

Julian Assange, is an Australian editor, publisher, and activist who founded WikiLeaks in 2006.

WikiLeaks came to international attention in 2010 when it published a series of leaks provided by U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning.

In November 2010, Sweden issued an international arrest warrant for Assange over allegations of sexual assault. Assange said the allegations were a pretext for him to be extradited from Sweden to the United States and took refuge in the Embassy of Ecuador in London in June 2012.

On April 11, 2019, Assanges asylum was withdrawn and he was arrested. He was found guilty of breaching the Bail Act and sentenced to 50 weeks in prison.

Assange is currently incarcerated in HM Prison Belmarsh.

On May 2, 2019, hearings began into the US governments request to extradite him. A decision on extradition is expected on January 4, 2021.

Mr Shipton will speak at the Nimbin Town Hall, 45 Cullen St, Nimbin, on December 8, from 7pm.

He will then appear at the Mullumbimby Civic Hall, 55 Dalley St, Mullumbimby, on December 11 from 7pm, and finally at Marvell Hall, 37 Marvell St, Byron Bay, on December 13 from 7pm.

Mr Shipton said entry to the events was free.

If too many people come along, well speak outside, he said.

View original post here:

Julian Assange's father to speak at 3 Northern Rivers towns - Tweed Daily News

Good morning, early birds. Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying last night knocked back calls for China to apologise over a controversial tweet, and South Australia lifted a series of COVID-19 measures overnight. It's the news you need to know, with Chris Woods.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying last night knocked back calls to apologise over a graphic, photoshopped image shared by spokesperson and deputy director general for the ministrys information department, Zhao Lijian, in response to the Brereton report.

While Scott Morrison called for an apology over the repugnant, falsified image of an Australian soldier holding a knife to the throat of an Afghan child, the ABC reports that Hua instead called for Australia to apologise to the people of Afghanistan.

Three pieces of context to note as this story presumably continues today:

PS: Morrison also acknowledged that there are undoubtedly tensions between the two countries in a likely reference to China slapping Treasury Wine Estates with a 169% tariff; as Crikey explained yesterday, that measure follows similar, recent examples of Australia deploying anti-dumping laws against China i.e. BlueScopes benefiting from tariffs on steel imports in Australia and the US.

According to 9News, South Australia lifted a series of COVID-19 measures overnight, including reopening the Victorian border, allowing stand-up drinking in pubs, and removal of patron caps on businesses.

The measures come after the state recorded no new cases yesterday, although authorities continue to urge anyone on SAHealths contact tracing list to be tested.

As the ABC explains, the news also comes after SAs chief public health officer Nicola Spurrier apologised to a 30-year-old infected man falsely accused of breaching quarantine; while still potentially contagious at the times he visited local shops, the man was only listed as a close contact of a COVID-19 patient, and had no obligation to remain in quarantine after initially testing negative.

PS: In other COVID-19 news, The Guardian reports that Moderna has announced that final trial results of its vaccine showed 94% efficacy and no severe diseases among participants, meaning the company will now follow Pfizer/BioNTech in seeking emergency approval from international regulators.

According to The Australian ($), the Morrison government is finalising industrial relations reforms that would see employers pay a single, higher rate to retail, hospitality and restaurant workers, and that the Fair Work Commission would be required to approve enterprise agreements within 21 days.

Employer and union sources speaking to the paper after months of roundtable discussions also say the government is proposing to create life of project agreements, where the same wage and conditions apply for the construction lifeline of new major projects worth more than $500 million or projects of lesser value deemed to be of national and/or employment significance.

President-elect Joe Bidens transition team has released a list of seven women for key communications positions, including his long-time communications director Kate Bedingfield taking on the same mantle at the White House.

While the team was keen to emphasise that, for the first time in history, these communications roles will be filled entirely by women, rumoured picks for cabinet positions confirm Bidens commitment to centrist Democrats with conservative histories.

Notably, NPR reports that Biden recently tapped the president of Clinton-aligned think tank the Center for American Progress president, Neera Tanden, as the head of the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Tanden, as The Daily Poster explains, is a long time aide to Hillary Clinton who pushed CAPs 2010 proposal to reduce social security benefits in 2012 as Biden advocated for the deficit measures under the Obama administration. Emails leaked between Tanden and Faiz Shakir, a journalist at CAPs media outlet arm, also revealed she advocated for asking Libyans to use oil revenues to pay the US back for bombings in the country.

Additionally, Axios reports that Biden is strongly considering Rahm Emanuel to run the Department of Transportation, despite allegations that the former mayors work to suppress body camera footage of a Chicago cop murdering a Black teenager constituted a cover-up.

Australia has welcomed migrants from China for more than 200 years and Australians of Chinese background have added immensely to our nation.

Alan Tudge

In a day filled with dubious claims and horrific images, at least we have the acting immigration minister publicly forgetting and/or just flat-out forgetting the White Australia policy.

Australias trade agreement with China its not a free trade agreement (FTA), despite Coalition claims to the contrary was borne of Tony Abbotts desperation to appear to have an economic policy.

Having been elected on the basis of all the things hed stop boats, climate action, deficits he turned to free trade agreements with a number of regional countries as a facade of a positive economic policy.

The hypocrite of the year award is heating up with a tight race between billionaires Bruce Gordon and Andrew Twiggy Forrest, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian, and the entire Chinese and Russian governments.

Lets take a look at the nominees.

Australias popular media particularly television has been a willing follower of the Liberal governments long campaign to Americanise Australian attitudes to the military. Theres been a deliberate PR strategy to turn the Australian military in part into a secular saint of Australian values and in part a tool to provide an apolitical shield for the governments most political acts.

A Defence chopper sparked Canberras Namadgi bushfire, but its crew didnt tell authorities the location for 45 minutes

Rent still too costly for Aussies on Newstart, despite JobSeeker payments

Bushfires toll on platypuses prompts protection alarm call

Morrison governments updated Covidsafe app unlikely to improve results, experts say

LNP brass facing a grassroots revolt after Queensland election flop ($)

Victorias hotel quarantine system to resume under a new agency run by Corrections Commissioner Emma Cassar

Disgraceful Gobbo condemned but may be out of reach of justice

Australian coal exports face perfect storm as China restrictions hit

Three-quarters of Australians back target of net zero by 2030, Guardian Essential poll shows

AACTA awards 2020: Cate Blanchetts Stateless and Shannon Murphys Babyteeth win big

Honour your climate commitments, Australia, signed your Pacific neighbours Anote Tong (The Sydney Morning Herald): On December 12, 2020, leaders from across the world will gather virtually for the annual United Nations Climate Ambition Summit. While the coronavirus pandemic has meant much has changed in the last few months, Pacific demands for action on climate change have not. Indeed, climate change remains the single most pressing security threat to our Blue Pacific region.

Cold War lessons for countering Chinese threat ($) Paul Dibb (The Australian): It has become fashionable to claim the Cold War was nowhere near as dangerous as the situation we face with China. It is true that todays China poses a much more multifaceted economic and domestic political challenge to Australia than the Soviet Union did. However, it is not true that we are in a second cold war with a military threat from China comparable to that of the Soviet Union.

Mark Lathams bill seeks to ensure trans and queer children remain in the closet Liz Duck-Chong (The Guardian): The research on this is clear gender diverse young people exist, and their genders are not able to be suppressed, converted or reprogrammed. They struggle when their identities and lives are disparaged or not taken seriously, and flourish when they are affirmed and respected. However, the true danger of a bill like this is not in its dismissal of the science, but how it positions its concept of core values and parental primacy as neutral, instead of what they really are: ideological.

Canberra

Australian of the Year 2020 James Muecke will present Silent no more at the National Press Club.

Jennifer Robinson, a barrister, and a member of the legal team acting for Julian Assange and WikiLeaks since 2010, and Peter Cronau an investigative journalist, Four Corners producer, and co-editor of new book A Secret Australia,will discuss the anthology and WikiLeaks impact in Australia Institute webinar Webinar: A Secret Australia Revealed By Wikileaks Exposs.

Melbourne

Budget estimates will begin for the 2020/21 Victorian budget, while the Parliament of Victorias Public Accounts and Estimates Committee will hold its third round of hearings for the COVID-19 inquiry.

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