WELL PRIMED

Nivanh Chanthara

It could have been done in secret. But that was not the point.
Instead it was done with maximum impact.
Blocked off streets. Clogged airports. 
A government which had ignored all advice to make the nation's airports safer and wasted millions on prolonged inquiries was now deliberately inconveniencing millions of travellers.
Just to make themselves feel safer. Hold fast their own grip on power, now that the time was ripe. 
A madness gripped the planet. 
The old gods were at war.
The security agencies were at war. 
The politicians were beyond contempt. 
The Tables of Knowledge grew ever closer unto themselves.
The social divides drew greater.
It was a single step from fantasy to reality.
The populace had been well primed.
The warriors died for what they believed, sacrificing not just themselves but their wives and children. Allah Akbar. 
Australian bureaucrats worked their fat cat prescribed seven hours and 11 minutes; tormenting the less fortunate, those without government jobs.
The politicians were just the pimples on a puss ridden corpse; democracy a show trial, the heavily manipulated populace stricken with normality bias. They could not understand what they did not know.
The situation couldn't possibly be as bad as he sometimes thought.
"You have no idea. No idea how bad it is. How great the swindle. How horrific the compromise we are all being asked to make."
Step by terrible step.
Dripping stalagmites, of a substance not found on earth, reached down from the sky.
Transcendental, transformational, trans-dimensional, these were creatures breaking into a twilight space, a well-prepared field.
The covens which had spread through the suburbs watched his every move.
The Boschnian hummingbirds, having done their job, retreated; a hovering sound, frightening. 
The compromise is too great, one of the Watchers on the Watch decried in faux camp outrage; for in the end they did not care, they were paid. Forced to put down the ribald language for a time, they could find other things to do. Other ways to torment their targets. 
They knew too much. 
They would have their brains sucked out alive. 
Their own filthy traps had trapped themselves.
He had told them all along, surveillance was not just an abuse, but a two-way mirror wired with genuine evil. They could not emerge unscathed. 
The birds, mythical in their haunted character,  retreated just in time to spare the feeble consciousnesses on duty.
The AIs had no idea what to do but report, and cross-reference. Continue their silent observation.
They found enough to know that nothing normal was gong on here; the animal duties, the furry, funny, human creatures which they husbanded, which had been so seriously locked in their own diversions, mass entertainment, that they were gone for good. 
Dreams of the past gone for good.  
But it was all too late. Nothing would save the subjugated population, the country, or, more precisely, nothing could save the original emphasis of the country, freedom, self-reliance, hard work, compassionate care for one's own family. A participant democracy, where everyone had a say, where everyone was encouraged to be bold, to speak out.
The drift towards a totalitarian state was almost complete.
Almost no one would live to tell the tale. No one that knew the true story. 
The crowd crawled straight into the jaws of that crazed dog, the future.

THE BIGGER STORY:

Australian airportts

THE tip-off Australian police received over a conspiracy to bring down a passenger plane came from foreign intelligence sources on the verge of issuing a public travel warning, according to media reports.

It’s understood intelligence agencies in the UK and US tipped off Australian forces under the Five Eyes arrangement — which also includes New Zealand and Canada — about the plot that may have been carried out within days.

The ABC’s 7:30 reports Australian police had hoped to gather more evidence before taking people into custody however the UK government said it would issue a public security threat if the raids did not happen immediately.

A UK Home Office spokesman said: “We do not comment on intelligence matters.”

It’s been reported communications intercepted from Syria were the source of the intelligence.

One of the men in custody has been named as Bulldog’s supporter Khaled Khayat. He has not been charged but remains in police custody with three other men who are assisting inquiries.

Mosul, Iraq

Raqqa – Sick and injured civilians within and outside Raqqa city are facing major difficulties obtaining urgent lifesaving medical care due to the ongoing battle to control the northeastern Syrian city, says international medical organisation Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).

MSF calls on all warring parties and their allies to ensure the protection of civilians and allow access to medical care and medical evacuation for the war-wounded. MSF also reiterates the importance of facilitating access to northeast Syria for international demining organisations to carry out their activities so that residents can return to their homes safely and aid organisations can provide urgently needed humanitarian assistance.

“Patients tell us large numbers of sick and wounded people are trapped inside Raqqa city with little or no access to medical care and scant chance of escaping the city,” says Vanessa Cramond, MSF medical coordinator for Turkey and north Syria.

CONFLICT ZONE

Central / Western desert Papunya

The street riots of the future were already breaking through into the present, a land of consequence.
Broken.
He could feel them even as he half-listened to football blather at the local Table of Knowledge, a strange curving stream, dark figures shouting in torment, fury. 
The days, at last, were growing longer, and, despite the intensity of tormenting imagery, a pallid light settled and then faded across the nesting suburb.
Not far off, the once magic lake. 
"This government mismanages absolutely everything, and it has badly mismanaged immigration," Old Alex said after the subject of the Sydney terror arrests, and their Muslim nature, was broached.
"I agree with you on that," Phil said, who seemed determined some days not to agree with him on anything, for whatever reason; and at other times was one of the only people to show kindness or understanding. 
Everything ran behind curtains. 
"You'll have me to deal with," he had heard in the ether one day, as Phil had risen to his defence. He did not deny it. Nothing was ever fully recounted. 
These people were entrenched in place. While he, as Ray Bradbury once put it, was clinging to the world by a single finger. Barely encased in flesh.
From the outside, there was nothing to see, a patrol officer moving on the crowd. "Nothing to see here, nothing to see."
External and internal landscapes.
"We're all friends here."
Nobody ever told the full truth. Perhaps it was best that way, although there was little to conceal except perhaps embarrassment, and in any case the years were fleeing towards a Vanishing Point, when these fleshly frames and false or inflamed, circuitous, self-confirming  gossip would mean nothing.
Old Alex, stranded in one place long enough to sort through some boxes, found an interview with a broken lover Ian Farr, whose blood from a suicide attempt, rising from under the blanket of a group orgy, still scarred; far far less than it had scarred Ian, who in later years had gone to the doctor with a stomach ache one day and been dead within the week. 
He had been an accomplished pianist who had destroyed his own ability to play. Old Alex, incensed by the emotional blackmail of the suicide attempt, had refused to visit him in hospital.
How hard would it have been, to show kindness?
It had been, once again, the wrong thing to do; and now, old men and their regrets, was a breach of decency which still cluttered conscience, detritus washed up on a distant shore, nothing.
Already most of those who had known Ian had passed on, and Old Alex couldn't even think who to share the interview with.
In the broader realm, the dreams of a Big Australian, first invoked up by the squattocracy of the so-call Liberal Party and then foisted on to the whole country, already lay in ruins, a victim of its own internal contradictions.
With their bloated dreams and a ballooning, inept bureaucracy metastasising across the social landscape, with the spiraling cost of everything, a broken democracy, they were witnessing first hand the march towards a totalitarian state.
On the evening news, the Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull touted terror, as he had done all year. 

Governments, when unpopular and concerned about their grip on power, perpetuate fear through the use of the media. Then fear becomes the ulcer of the masses that cripples their psyche and vanquishes their freedom, and incapacitates people and renders them impotent. Fear is conducive to regressive behaviours by responsible adults, where people become dependent on their government as a parent figure, to protect them from evildoers. So they become willing to relinquish their most intimate and sacred rights in order to feel safe.

Maud, commenting on The Australian website.

Terror raids across Sydney screamed headlines. 
Turnbull, that grey General of Stasi Australia, his pallid skin already peeling from the weight of the dead as they struggled to break through an appalling arrogance. Haunted by the ghosts of those he had been responsible for killing. The vainglory dreams of running the country, Il Duce, slamming into reality.  
Australia, one news report claimed, had just been responsible for dropping more than 800 bombs on Mosul in Iraq. 
What happened there was a war crime by any measure.
Now the attention had turned to Raqqa in Syria, the last redoubt, or so the propaganda claimed, of Islamic State.
There would be a very heavy price to pay for continued stupidity.

THE BIGGER STORY:







A family of suspected Islamist ­extremists allegedly plotted to bring down an Australian commercial jet by gassing the passengers, in what authorities believe was a major terrorist attack plan orchestrated by Islamic State milit­ants from within Syria.

Travellers were warned last night to expect major delays at the nation’s airports as authorities rolled out extra security measures to counter what sources said was a fast-moving, still unfolding terror conspiracy, the full extent of which was not yet known.

Four Lebanese Australians — two fathers and two sons — were in custody after police swooped on the cell and thwarted what they will allege was a sophisticated ­attempt to kill hundreds of people by crashing a civilian plane.

Airports around the country were on heightened alert as ­counter-terrorism police worked to learn all they could about the operation. It was only on Wednesday that police received intellig­ence about the alleged cell from authorities overseas.

Malcolm Turnbull described the alleged plot as “major’’ and “elaborate’’ and said the government would impose extra security on airports across the country.

ISIL militants are coming under further attack in the Syrian city of Raqqa by US-backed Kurdish-led forces.

American jets are carrying out airstrikes as fighters from an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias (SDF) advance further into the city, a stronghold of ISIL in Syria since 2014.

This as Syria’s army and its allies reached the edge of the last town held by ISIL in Homs province.

In Raqqa, fighters from the SDF alliance say they seized drones and ammunition from ISIL.

One fighter showed a reporter what they found. “We found these and took them. They would fly these and explore our areas, we took them. You can also see mortars, made by hand, and here are the planes and bombs they would make.”

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says ISIL fighters attacked the US-backed forces east of Raqqa on Friday, abducting a number of people.

PATCHWORK RAVINES A FREEZING WIND

Raqqa, Syria

"How's the new book going?" someone asked.
"The central event hasn't happened yet," Old Alex replied, and the thread disappeared into ordinary concerns as quickly as it came. 
There's no way you're going to fit in anywhere here. 
That night terror raids on Cleveland Street in Surrey Hills, Sydney, where he had spent so much time.
Life took place behind closed doors.
A cartoonist lived down the road.
They were up to no good, always. 
An old, moldy grey blanket was blown vertical in the wind, every rumple, every movement, coruscating ravines. 
There was treachery everywhere. 
The experts came. The experts went. Everyone was on a government payroll. There had been days when he had longed to sellout, if only someone was buying. 
Forgive me. Why hast thou forsaken? 
The landscape was undulating.
For he so loved. 
And became trapped.
The gig is up. 
We know you're not human. 
"What's the answer," a querulous old man demanded of him.
"To make democracy more attractive, to return to the original ideal of a participatory democracy, which is not what we have now."
As far as the querulous old man was concerned, bombing Muslims back to the stone age was the only solution. Teach them a lesson.
He watched a slavering crowd in Afghanistan kill a woman accused of burning a Koran. 
He thought briefly of intimate times on Cleveland Street, an unlovely traffic thoroughfare full of dust and decay, until renovation mania and soaring prices from overpopulation gripped the real estate market.
Operation Mockingbird. 
The manipulation of the mainstream media by the CIA.
Their experts had come to Australia to train the locals, and achieved very well. The Australian media had become so remarkably anodyne, so entirely non-controversial, so reliant on the spewing verbiage of the political class there was no answer. It made no sense. It could not have devolved this quickly without gross manipulation. Interference. 
We abandoned our sovereignty for no good reason. 
Destroyed public discourse. 
Surrendered to the bureaucracy's inane anti-capitalist orthodoxies. Manned, as they were, by the battalions of useful fools which had spewed forth from the institutions of "higher" learning, those preening tax payer funded centres of excess where the long march through the institutions was complete, and self-serving lecturers purported to shock their bourgeois students from the clasp of their middle class upbringings. It was all so tired. In a darkening, muffled clime. Where the shadows of the emissaries flickered around a circular horizon. The past destroyed, the future born. 
Indeed, the landscape undulated, the populace, or those that still remained cognisant, thrown into a freezing wind. 

THE BIGGER STORY:

A TERRORIST plot to bring down a domestic flight with a bomb was at the centre of a series of raids across ­Sydney yesterday targeting an alleged Islamic extremist cell.

Wearing gas masks and ballistic ­armour, backed by fire crews and specially trained paramedics, officers from the Joint Counter Terrorism Team stormed three properties in Sydney’s west — at Sproule St, Lakemba, Renown Ave, Wiley Park, and Victoria Rd, Punchbowl — and a terrace on Goodlet Lne, Surry Hills, in the inner city.

The raids had been planned for ­several days and are understood to have been brought forward for ­operational reasons.

At Surry Hills, where parts of Cleveland St were shut down from 1pm to create an exclusion zone, a man shrouded under a bed sheet was ­escorted into an ambulance by police before being taken into custody.

As the arrest unfolded, paramedics attended to the man, who had a bandage covering his head, and a woman whose wrists had been cable-tied.

An elderly woman was also escorted from the scene by police, her head covered by a leopard-skin print jacket.

Several women wearing hijabs were also at the scene, as was a young boy.

When asked why he’d been ­arrested, the man said “No idea”, then added: “They bashed me.”

Neighbours described the man’s parents as a “lovely couple” who held barbecues every Sunday.

Relatives of two of the men arrested told media last night that they “love Australia”.

Neighbour Kate Harrison said: “There must have been at least 40 riot squad police with huge guns.”

Witnesses reported hearing a lot of screaming and dogs barking as police raided the property.

Islamic State fighters have now essentially been defeated in Mosul after a nine-month, US-backed campaign that destroyed significant parts of Iraq’s second largest city, killing up to 40,000 civilians and forcing as many as one million more people from their homes. Now, the United States is focusing its energies—and warplanes—on the ISIS-occupied areas of eastern Syria in an offensive dubbed “Wrath of the Euphrates.”

The Islamic State’s brutal treatment of civilians in Syria has been well reported and publicized. And according to Lieutenant General Stephen Townsend, the commander of the US-led war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, the battle to “liberate” these regions from ISIS is the “most precise campaign in the history of warfare.”

But reports and photographs from Syrian journalists and activists, as well as first-person accounts from those with family members living in areas under US bombardment, detail a strikingly different tale of the American offensive—one that looks a lot less like a battle against the Islamic State and a lot more like a war on civilians.

These human rights groups and local reporters say that, across Syria in recent months, the US-led coalition and US Marines have bombed or shelled at least 12 schools, including primary schools and a girls’ high school; a health clinic and an obstetrics hospital; Raqqa’s Science College; residential neighborhoods; bakeries; post offices; a car wash; at least 15 mosques; a cultural center; a gas station; cars carrying civilians to the hospital; a funeral; water tanks; at least 15 bridges; a makeshift refugee camp; the ancient Rafiqah Wall that dates back to the 8th century; and an Internet cafe in Raqqa, where a Syrian media activist was killed as he was trying to smuggle news out of the besieged city.

The United States is now one of the deadliest warring parties in Syria. In May and June combined, the US-led coalition killed more civilians than the Assad regime, the Russians, or ISIS, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, a nongovernmental organization that has been monitoring the death toll and human rights violations in Syria since 2011.

“This administration wants to achieve a quick victory,” Dr. Fadel Abdul Ghany, chairman of the Syrian Network for Human Rights recently told me. “What we are noticing is that the US is targeting and killing without taking into consideration the benefits for the military and the collateral damage for the civilians. This, of course, amounts to war crimes.”

And nowhere is this war against civilians more acute than in ISIS-occupied Raqqa, where trapped families are living under dozens of airstrikes every day.

MULTIPLE INCOMPETENCIES: MALICIOUS INSIDERS

Joshua J Smith

He shut his eyes and was immediately in the sky.
Below lava flows, ice on a frigid surface, treachery everywhere.
They were back.
"It's far worse than you know," they told him constantly. 
He already knew it was bad.
"Far worse."
"Name one thing in this country that works," an old contact queried, voice dripping with exasperated, almost amused irony. He had made his millions. He was safe in the hills. Old Alex was not. "Name one thing this government is doing right."
The country had the most expensive electricity in the world. The slowest, most expensive internet. Standards of living were falling. The cost of everything was rising. Wages, where there was work, were static.
Best in the world, best in the world, the Prime Minister blathered. For now there was nothing but blather everywhere. 
The NSW police killed a man at Central Station in Sydney, mimicking their American counterparts, who were notorious f***ups.
The Americans were offering training programs across the security realm; perhaps they had trained this lot. 
The truth was met in a prevailing cynicism, the blizzard storms at the end of time. 
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation grew worse, the public more detached. 
They wanted him out of here, his not-so-benign pursuers. 
In all their blather and bluster, he knew from personal experience just how truly incompetent they were. 
Here in a darkening clime. The wheels falling off. A truck tilting sideways as it slid off the highway, the driver slung free, but seriously winded. 
Australia, Australia. Land of the free. 
"It's democracy," he heard them whisper in wonder. "Free speech."
But there was no free speech. There was chronic, gross manipulation of content. There was an anodyne fairy tale at the bottom of the garden. There was extinguishing hope. There were even darker forces at play than the greatest conspiracy theorist could imagine. They had been betrayed more completely than even the greatest skeptic could imagine.
In an instant realm. Where the protecting sheaves had come down. The ring of fire doused. The mechanical arms of heaven creaking aside. They would reveal much. 
We want to talk to you, but cannot. There was disarray. No course of action but accreted bureaucratic insanity. 
"It's political. It's political."
Of course it's political.
Everyone has been betrayed.
The most striking feature of Stasi Germany, the greatest example of The Surveillance State: Everybody Spied On Everybody. Cousins on cousins.  Brothers on brothers. Neighbours on neighbours. 
"That's a good analogy," one of the Watchers whispered.
What were they looking for, the authorities? 
Incorrect thought. Betrayal of the state. 
Already, blasphemy laws were being introduced. 
Man, ultimately malleable, fell straight into line. 
Until it all collapsed. 
They had destroyed the country in order to save it, or so they believed, those in power, rewritten its past and its future, destroyed the present, thumped down on a once freewheeling culture. 
They were remaking the country. 
In a twinkling Australia had become one of the most oppressive and dispiriting places on Earth. All in the name of diversity, intolerance ruled.
Stasi Australia. Is that how the future would see the present?

THE BIGGER STORY:

26 July 2017 – Witnessing “complete devastation” in districts of Mosul, a senior United Nations relief official visiting Iraq lauded the massive humanitarian effort under way while indicating that the crisis is “far from over,” including for millions of Iraqis displaced throughout the country.

“I commend the achievements of the humanitarian operation in Iraq and wish to highlight the impressive national response,” said Ursula Mueller, Assistant Secretary-General and Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator in a press statement.

“One of the things that impressed me the most was the exceptional level of cooperation between national counterparts, UN agencies and front-line NGOs [non-governmental organizations],” she added.

From 24 and 26 July, Ms. Mueller met with senior officials and ministers from the Iraqi Government and the Kurdistan Regional Government, as well as members of the international and humanitarian communities.

She saw first-hand the complete devastation of districts in western Mosul's old city. “I saw homes and entire neighbourhoods destroyed; no doubt, countless tragedies remain untold among the rubble,” she explained.

With almost one million people fleeing Mosul, humanitarians' “worst-case” estimates were surpassed.




THE man who attacked a Sydney florist outside Central station on Wednesday night and was then shot dead by police has been named as Danukul Mokmool.

He was 30 years old and understood to have been a Thai national.

The half-brother of Mookmol said his sibling was suffering paranoid delusions before he left their western Sydney home last night, reported the Daily Telegraph.

His half-brother Charlie Huynh, 19, said Mr Mokmool had battled illicit drugs and the law for many years.

Four hours before his death Mr Mokmool left his home in Green Valley, fearing his family wanted to harm him.

THE GHOST WHO WALKS

Raqqa, aerial strikes

He could focus on the janitor, who had always been there.
Wise soul.
Or he could listen to the elaborate stories in his head, of an ornate, large sarcophagus, a lost tomb in the north of the country. An English lord who's skeleton was encased in a fine ceramic. How it was possible, in this remote place, he knew not. But the Lord just wanted to go home, and would move every kind of trickery and connivance through human affairs to get there, no matter how obtuse, unlikely or apparently unrelated it seemed. 
He wanted to go back to his shores, to his birthplace. As so many, a common instinct, he just wanted to go home.
The ghost emerged from the sarcophagus when he was alone in the cave.
"It's true," he said.
The Lord smiled, almost amused.
"Yes."
It was a jinn infested world.
Now the tomb was found, it was only a matter of process before he would be returned to his ancestral lands.
"I wanted to thank you," the Lord said, before promptly vanishing. 
Out in the real world, a shambolic mishmash of adopted ideologies, multiple incompetencies characterised Australian governance across the country. 
Old Alex had become victim, in his own anguished away, to exactly that incompetence, the blind brutality of secretive security agencies, the prejudices of thugs, the lies of self-serving bureaucrats.
"It's been an honour."
They were all decamping.
"It's official, then?"
"Yes."
What, that commonsense had prevailed? That the counterproductive effects of the surveillance and harassment he had endured for years had finally become so self-evident that even the thick headed thugs in their smart suits could see that.
Or the tasks would just be handed over to AIs, far more difficult to detect.
Trust no one.
The question would become, soon enough, as psychic wounds healed, what next? 
When not afraid, unable or unwilling to overcome mammalian fear of being watched, he had hoovered their brains. No wonder there were so many of them. They thought about sex incessantly, even when they were pretending they weren't. But he also listened to their bitches about their bosses, was told, repeatedly, of mind boggling malfeasance, the secretive trails of venal incompetence and self serving thuggery. Of the palace of fools they served. 
The country was dying.
Democracy was already dead.
The people had been betrayed, betrayed and betrayed again. 
And it was all due to the overlords. 
Populations were easily manipulated. It was the venality of the overlords, and the cruelties of the forces they served, that had to be brought to account. 
Killed.

THE BIGGER STORY:

YUNUPINGU PASSES



The soulful, high tenor voice of the singer and guitarist Dr G Yunupingu, who has died aged 46, brought him international celebrity, even though he mostly sang in the Australian Aboriginal languages of Gumatj, Galpu and Djambarrpuynu. He performed at concert halls around the world, sang for the Queen and for Barack Obama, and was hailed by Rolling Stone magazine as “Australia’s most important voice”. His bestselling albums achieved triple platinum status.

Yunupingu showed his unique appeal at his debut solo London concert in May 2009, when he was still little known in the UK. He sat motionless throughout, singing and playing the acoustic guitar, backed by a string quartet and the double bass work of his friend, producer and manager Michael Hohnen. He said nothing, apart from a final “Thank you”, but dominated the hall with his gently powerful and heartfelt singing. His melodies were straightforward, powerful and accessible, with their blend of folk, soul and gospel influences, along with a dash of reggae, and his poetic lyrics dealt with nature or his ancestors.

He started the performance with Wiyathul, a song that explaining the importance of the orange-footed scrubfowl to the Gumatj nation, and ended with a highly personal song in English, I Was Born Blind. Afterwards, he sat in the dressing room, still not speaking. “He won’t talk,” explained Hohnen, “but I can feel that he’s happy.” It was clear that he would become a world music celebrity.

Yunupingu was born blind, in Galiwin’ku on Elcho Island, off the coast of Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, and was a member of the Gumatj clan of the Yolngu people. The first of four sons born to Ganyinurra (Daisy) and Nyambi (Terry) Yunupingu, he became fascinated by music as a child. Following local custom, his aunts Dorothy, Anne and Susan all played a major role in looking after him, and sang him hymns they had learned at the local Methodist mission.

Later, Yunupingu joined the mission choir, and began singing standard hymns – Amazing Grace, The Old Rugged Cross or To Be a Pilgrim. He was a fan of western pop, particularly the songs of Dire Straits, Cliff Richard and Stevie Wonder, but these were matched against other, more ancient influences – the beliefs, customs and songs of his people. In later life his often spiritual compositions would blend western musical influences with lyrics that dealt with clan traditions and beliefs.

He never learned braille but was naturally skilful as a musician, playing the guitar, keyboards and drums, and he soon became celebrated far beyond Elcho Island. He first learned to make music when his mother and aunts arranged empty tin cans on the beach for him to hit with sticks. Then he was given a toy piano accordion, capable of playing 12 notes, by his parents, and his uncle gave him a guitar...

The Australian understands the 46-year-old from Elcho Island, off the Arnhem Land coast, was found in a beach drinking camp last week, just metres from a popular cafe, before being taken to the Royal Darwin Hospital, where he died on Tuesday.

Vaughan Williams, a musician and homeless services worker who has long worked with Darwin’s population of itinerant, mainly indigeno­us “long-grassers”, said he was horrified to discover his lifelong friend among a group of “f..khead” drinkers.

“These weren’t your usual drinkers — they were serious drinkers. Every indication was wrong and bad,’’ he said.

“I just don’t know how it could have happened without someone saying (Dr Yunupingu) has missed a bunch of renal visits. It’s un­believable. It shouldn’t have happened. He should still be alive, and if people had put simple processes in place, he would still be alive.”

Dr Yunupingu’s manager, the head of Skinnyfish records Mark Grose, called his client a “genius” and a “national treasure”.

Public debate in Darwin is commonly about the “anti-social behaviour” long-grassers attract, rather than about their wellbeing.

Domestic violence on public streets and intoxicated people ­falling onto — and sometimes sleeping upon — the roads are not unfamiliar sights for locals. Williams said he had found the singer at Casuarina Beach on ­Darwin’s northeast coast last Wednesday but been forced to return the following day with three other men to persuade him to be carried to a car and taken hospital.

“He couldn’t walk … he was so skinny,” he said. “I wanted to help him as soon as I saw him, but I couldn’t force him.”

SANDSTORM

Mosul, HMAD AL-RUBAYE/AFP/Getty Images

In a collapsing world, replete with apocalyptic imagery, nothing much hung by it. 
Old Alex had tried and failed, that had been the dominating feeling throughout life. 
He had told a psychiatrist once, and she had responded: "But you're in the newspaper today. I just read your piece. It's beautifully written."
But Old Alex had never succeeded in what he wanted to do, and journalism had been a leitmotif, a trap demanding time and energy, driven by money and a creative impulse, well sometimes, but in the end it was just about providing a stable environment for his kids.
And so the years rolled by and he found himself abandoned on a side road, sandy, rubbish from the highway accruing in corners, giant trucks roaring past, down the nearby New England highway. 
He could see them from where he stood.
Their wind caught him. His imagination soared.
But he was still on a side road. 
Trapped in a backwater. Surrounded by thickets. They might as well have been prison bars. He remembered those years of the Inquisition. He remembered the dismal conditions and the pain. How desperate he had been to escape. 
In the 21st Century, the surveillance which he had found so extremely disturbing, an outlandish and prolonged level of state funded abuse, along with the volunteers and the hunters and the easily stirred, providing a straight, central entry point into not just the dark nature of the state but the fluid, easily manipulated state of the society.  
It was a perfect petri dish for fomenting disaster, a societal wide train wreck. 
In amidst the surrounding seaweed, the dreaming suburbs, one of the soldiers recalled a sandstorm in Iraq.
Old Alex woke up muttering, as he had done so often: "Surveillance is harassment. And I have been very, very badly harassed."
But the high-tech weaponry, the government employed empaths, their various intrusive experts; and plain old pain-in-the-ass liberals and their side-kick thugs, foot soldiers for a greater evil, they had all moved on.
A janitor swept the corners of an empty warehouse.
Another era beckoned.
"I want to live with you," a man said in the heat, the heart of the moment. And was gone five minutes later.
"You can come with us," the spirits said. "We're going now."
"I want to stay on this planet," he said. "I feel obligated." 
And they were gone. Another escape route closed.
They might come back for him. They very well might not. 

THE BIGGER STORY:

How ISIL nearly stumbled on the ingredients for a 'dirty bomb' in Mosul



On the day ISIL overran the Iraqi city of Mosul in 2014, it laid claim to one of the greatest weapons bonanzas ever to fall to a terrorist group: a large metropolis dotted with military bases and garrisons stocked with guns, bombs, rockets and even battle tanks.

But the most fearsome weapon in Mosul on that day was never used by the terrorists. Only now is it becoming clear what happened to it.

Locked away in a storage room on a Mosul college campus were two caches of cobalt-60, a metallic substance with lethally high levels of radiation. When contained within the heavy shielding of a radiotherapy machine, cobalt-60 is used to kill cancer cells. In terrorists’ hands, it is the core ingredient of a “dirty bomb,” a weapon that could be used to spread radiation and panic.

Western intelligence agencies were aware of the cobalt and watched anxiously for three years for signs that the militants might try to use it. Those concerns intensified in late 2014 when ISIL officials boasted of obtaining radioactive material, and again early last year when the terrorists took over laboratories at the same Mosul college campus with the apparent aim of building new kinds of weapons.

REFUGEES: ADVOCATES AND PROPAGANDA FROM ALL SIDES

The United Nations' refugee agency has accused the Federal Government of a breach of trust over the United States refugee deal, saying it has broken a promise to resettle refugees with close family ties to Australia.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Filippo Grandi, said the organisation had "exceptionally" agreed to help resettle refugees on Nauru and Manus Island in the US because of the "dire" humanitarian situation they faced.

"We agreed to do so on the clear understanding that vulnerable refugees with close family ties in Australia would ultimately be allowed to settle there," Mr Grandi said.

"[But] UNHCR has recently been informed by Australia that it refuses to accept even these refugees.

"This means, for example, that some with serious medical conditions, or who have undergone traumatic experiences, including sexual violence, cannot receive the support of their close family members residing in Australia."

WHO AUTHORISED THIS?

It was a hard fought battle.
Have you heard? 
They've finally decamped.
The man glared as he passed, as if it was his fault the gross waste of time and money, caught out in the lies of their superior, was his fault.
Who authorised this? an official demanded to know, and went quiet at the answer.
Oldest trick in the book. 
Fool anyone. 
Give them hope we are leaving them alone at last. 
That they can finally relax, have their own lives back.
Be quiet or scary or out of control, be wimpish or brave or very funny indeed, let it roll, without the incessant critique," he had a camera on him the entire time", without the whispering threads of intelligence watching, the new surveillance technologies, without a care in the world.
As if.
Government funding.
There was no reason for remorse, apology, admittance of wrong.
They lifted their heads in an arrogant lion sweep, and on the distance, inside that impossible border, where the ghosts tried desperately to come to form and the giant Boschnian hummingbirds hovered over their targets, ready to suck the brains of the infidels and the desperates, the sad little men who followed him, there, he said: beware.
The authorities gained yet more information on how people behaved when they knew they were under surveillance.
He gained a deep sense of treachery. 
And of tyranny.
A collapsing state.
More would be revealed.

THE BIGGER STORY: 

ISLAMIC STATE EXECUTIONS TAL AFAR

Tal Afar (IraqiNews.com) Islamic State have reportedly killed 200 Turkmens, who were held by the militants in Tal Afar town, west of Mosul.

The Iraqi Turkmens, who included children and women, were held by IS militants two months ago and were killed during their attempt to flee toward safe regions, Nour Eddin Qablan, deputy chief of Nineveh provinvial council, told Anadolu Agency on Tuesday.

Islamic State has executed hundreds of civilians and security members since it took over large areas in Iraq over accusations of collaboration with the Iraqi security authorities or for attempting to flee areas under its control.

$70 MILLION SETTLEMENT PLUS COSTS MANUS ISLAND

 

Current and former Manus Island detainees will receive $70 million in Australia's largest human rights class action settlement.

Lawyers for the 1900 detainees have reached a conditional settlement with the Australian government and the operators of the Manus Island Regional Processing Centre.

Legal firm Slater and Gordon says the case has been settled for $70 million plus costs, currently estimated at $20 million, with no admission of liability.

Principal lawyer Andrew Baker said the settlement was an important step towards recognising the extremely hostile conditions the detainees endured on Manus Island.

"Most were fleeing religious persecution and violence," he said on Wednesday.

"They came to Australia seeking protection but rather than consider their cases onshore, the Australian government sent this vulnerable group of people to be held on Manus Island indefinitely."

Mosul, Iraq

CANCER ON THE BEACH

Cancer on the beach, he heard strange imagery which could not find a place. 
And then came the message, an old friend, who had bought a house in Ballina on the North Coast, had passed away. 
Old Alex had little to do with him in recent years.
He was under government surveillance, and so was his old friend, if that is what he was. He could not afford and did not want to be associated with the sins of others. 
They met when Old Alex was 15, literally half a century before. He was 19. As far as Alex was concerned, he was going out with someone really old.
Not to put too fine a point on it, everything was illegal back then. By the time he was getting to 16, he was getting a bit old for Paul. 
But it was Paul who had introduced him to the subterranean world of the Cross, to the all-night cafes and gay clubs, the prostitution, the bars, the infinite supply of drugs, the ever-ready queens ever-ready to buy you a drink, and as much else as their greedy, slimy little hands could purchase.
One course obviates another.
"It's a chance to put the record straight," one of the Watchers on the Watch observed, but there was nothing to put straight but the terrible record, the ridiculous performance and outlandish harassment of the agencies, the Clarion Cows of ASIO, the ruthless perfidy of operatives and politicians high and low.
A threat to power, it could not be.
A truthsayer. Could not be.
A patchy past. Could not be. 
Not in the era of The New Puritanism.
They would find something, a vulnerability, something they could use to destroy him and to protect the institutions by which they had been enslaved.
Alex hadn't realised Old Paul, who monickered himself the Pariah Queen, was dying.
Didn't know the cancer had come back.
Didn't know there had been cancer in the first place.
He had seen him one day on the cliffs of Ballina, a couple of years before, taking photographs, but he had been in his father's car and it hadn't been appropriate to get out and say hello.
Fifty years before his father had put a private detective on this very same man, and would quite possibly still recognise him.
So he didn't say hello.
Across a chasm of years. 
He just watched the world slide by. Noticed with irritation the likes or affirmations on Facebook. As if one of Paul's "boys" had worked out well and he was proud of it.
But there it was. He had seen it before. The great affection they sometimes held for the people who were supposed to have been their monsters. 
For nothing was black and white, in this terrible imprinted world. 
He didn't know what to say.
I will light an effigy for me and you. 

THE BIGGER STORY:

DAVID WROE IN THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

Ducan Lewis, head of ASIO with AG George Brandis

The intelligence watchdog's staff of just 17 people has "not kept pace" with its growing workload in keeping a check on the nation's thousands of spies, a major intelligence review has found.

The review, released this week, has urged the Turnbull government to triple the Office of the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security to 50 staff, in particular to allow it to carry out more random spot checks on the agencies.

The review by Michael L'Estrange and Stephen Merchant also recommends greater parliamentary oversight with an MPs' committee able to ask the watchdog to investigate particular spy operations.

"One advantage of increasing the number of staff would be to enable random and ad hoc inspections to be undertaken. They have access to everything but their capacity to even randomly sample that material is constrained by their numbers."

SHERIDAN IN THE AUSTRALIAN

Malcolm Turnbull & Peter Dutton

One obvious indication of the mess that is the government’s decision to create a department of homeland security is the absolute lack of coherent process behind it.

There was no report suggesting it, no systematic consideration by any consultant, bureaucrat, agency chiefs, interdepartmental community, no green paper, no white paper, no cabinet submission. Nothing.

Indeed, every time the proposal to shoehorn all the domestic security agencies into one department has been evaluated over the past decade it has been decisively rejected. Peter Dutton, who will be the new minister, is a good minister and rightly regarded as a standout within the government. But even his advocacy for this bad move has frequently taken flight from reality.

Thus the Turnbull government has announced what it describes as the biggest change in the organisation of national security in 40 years in the face of the opposition of every serious, systematic and even semi-official inquiry that has ever looked at the matter.

Of course over the next few weeks the government will drag out various agency chiefs to utter through clenched teeth some level of support for government policy.

They are all honourable, conscientious public servants and, in national security above any other field, they would never publicly undermine faith in government policy, whatever that policy is. Should these changes ever go ahead, and a future government reverse them, the agency chiefs will support that too.

The disadvantages of the new arrangements are obvious. Among many others, it will create a vast, sprawling ministry with too many agencies for one minister to lead effectively. Most importantly it will greatly diminish the critical contestability of advice, both at the National Security Committee of cabinet and at full cabinets. That contestability is central to good cabinet government.

PAUL MALEY IN THE AUSTRALIAN

Malcolm Turnbull

The decision to proceed with Malcolm Turnbull’s home affairs super-ministry was never formally evaluated by the national security­ committee of cabinet, the government’s highest national security­ body, despite the NSC having met the morning the announcem­ent was made.

Less than a week after the Prime Minister announced the changes, a picture is emerging of a rushed, shambolic process that critics across the government believe­ was driven by political expediency rather than good policy.

The Weekend Australian has been told some of the key ministers affected by the changes were not told of the Prime Minister’s decision to go with the idea, which had been under consideration for some time, until just a few days ­before Tuesday’s announcement.

The Weekend Australian also understands that at the time of the announcement there was not one operative document circulated among ministers explaining how the arrangements would work.

Mosul, Iraq. So much for intelligence.

SIGNALING A CALL TO ARMS

"He's signalling," the AI concluded. Time in a womb. 

After millennia beneath the surface, they were breaching. 

Once ringed by fire, he could see them now for what they were.

Old Alex threw himself into hibernation. 

At the surface, there were many tensions. Frustrations in the camp. Tales of Afghanistan, Iraq. Urgent, the memories. Shocked, in their own multiple ways. Bored, infinitely bored. Restless. The soldiers wanted to get on with life.  

The country had lost its core. 

Demography is death. 

The Australian government mismanaged everything, as another winter saw the highest electricity costs in the world, the slowest and most expensive internet, a subsiding standard of living. Multi-billion, half-finished government infrastructure projects scarred Sydney. Public debate remained stifled. Virtue signalling entered the language. Gay marriage virtue. Homophobia non-virtue. Refugees good. Climate change good. Denier non-virtue. Virtue signalling in itself was becoming a complex code.

The government, as it preached Australia as a multicultural paradise, had badly mismanaged immigration, at record highs since the days of John Howard, a cause championed at the time by the Chamber of Commerce and few others.  It benefited the big end of town; and in a strange collusion of left and right, there amid the polemic on the long march through the institutions, in the scree of documents and committees and posturing politicians, it had become state doctrine, here to rewrite the nation. 

The overlords had never had it so good, so far from their original bloodlines, the birth of their pretensions. 

There was a terrible swamp. There were larger forces at play. 

The internet exposed new wonders every day. 

Genius children were born. 

They squalled as they were raised. The times will suit me, Howard had said. 

And now the entire country lived in the accreted future.

Success has many fathers. Behind the blizzard of hypocrisy, these progenitors of disaster never revealed their true motives.  

THE BIGGER STORY:




http://www.rudaw.net/english/middleeast/iraq/200720172


“As Prime Minister Abadi enjoys victory in Mosul, he is ignoring the flood of evidence of his soldiers committing vicious war crimes in the very city he’s promised to liberate,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch (HRW).

The organization released a report on Wednesday highlighting recent “relentless reports, videos, and photographs of unlawful executions” allegedly committed by Iraqi security forces.

In addition to the recent surge of photos and videos on social media showing the killings and beatings of war-aged Iraqi men, HRW offered testimony from international observers “whose evidence has proven reliable in the past.”

“A shopkeeper in a neighborhood directly west of the Old City that was retaken in April from ISIS took them into an empty building and showed them [on Monday] a row of 17 male corpses barefoot but in civilian dress, surrounded by pools of blood,” HRW reported being told by such observers, saying the bodies appeared blindfolded and bound.

http://www.news.com.au/finance/work/leaders/tony-abbott-says-he-was-advised-against-turnbulls-superministry-ministry/news-story/411dd1ab86bd7a86f19000c0e8cc6a14

FORMER prime minister Tony Abbott has revealed he was advised against establishing the new counter-terrorism department unveiled by Malcolm Turnbull. The prime minister on Tuesday described the move as the biggest change in national security for four decades.

Under the plan, which would come into force next year, a home affairs portfolio headed by Immigration Minister Peter Dutton would cover agencies including the Australian Federal Police, ASIO, Australian Border Force as well as customs and citizenship.

Mr Abbott says the issue was raised when he was prime minister but he was advised against it.

“The advice back then was that we didn’t need the kind of massive bureaucratic change which it seems the prime minister has in mind,” Mr Abbott told 2GB radio on Wednesday.

“I can only assume the advice has changed.

THE COUNTRY'S GONE BAD

"The country's gone bad," Old Alex said in a kind of despairing urgency. "I'm sorry you see it like this. I can't believe how quickly it's happened. The drift towards a totalitarian state."

He looked at degraded scenes.

"The culture is collapsing. I really believe that."

These were in an ancient tongue. These were prevailing forces. 

"We've been sent," he insisted, continuing a theme he had held since childhood.

There would be a different force. 

Nobody, no ordinary human, as they were constructed on this planet, could save the situation.

A declamatory tone.

Hawk Eye.  We are watching. We mean you no harm.

But high up they were plotting: How do you extinguish an intelligence like this? 

He would be happier in a group.

The swarm. 

Isolated from that extraordinary hive, caught on a mission they had foolishly, or bravely volunteered for, in the sense there was any choice, they were hunted as a threat to power. 

Sorry about this, one of the Watchers on the Watch transmitted. They remained perplexed. 

Thrashing in invisible chains, a giant roaring, it was becoming increasingly impossible to maintain the perimeter, the chasms of fire that ringed the site, protected from the sky by thousands of rapidly sliding screens. They created a blur as they shifted in and out of protective focus. They could not hold.

There would be no barrier. They came, they left, they were on heightened alert. 

The country was well primed for a coming slaughter. 

There were people who could barely wait. 

God born in fire. The purification. While all around, the society was in an extant period of putrification. The ground was well prepared. The peasants, as the overlords thought of them, were offering up their souls and knew not. But their souls had rotted inside their own flesh. They had no spirit left; husks for the sweeping.

"Like cats."

Like little  tame animals. 

He looked at rotting teeth and listened to ribald jokes. 

"I wouldn't f*** her with your dick," never failed to solicit a laugh.

Year in, year out. 

    He, too, has been changed in his turn,  
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born. W.B. Yeats.

In the wider world the alarm spread. They were not waiting, nor hiding, not inching slowly, nor flowing across stones, they were galloping into destiny   

THE BIGGER STORY:




http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/mosul-massacre-battle-isis-iraq-city-civilian-casualties-killed-deaths-fighting-forces-islamic-state-a7848781.html

More than 40,000 civilians were killed in the devastating battle to retake Mosul from Isis, according to intelligence reports revealed exclusively to The Independent - a death toll far higher than previous estimates.

Residents of the besieged city were killed by Iraqi ground forces attempting to force out militants, as well as by air strikes and Isis fighters, according to Kurdish intelligence services.

Hoshyar Zebari, until recently a senior minister in Baghdad, told The Independent that many bodies "are still buried under the rubble". "The level of human suffering is immense," he said.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/the-times/islamic-state-orphans-face-angry-vengeful-iraqi-troops/news-story/1a62a66a6b8bab8260e4b3ceee1a9ffb

Caked in dust, dazed and emaciated, the two young sons of an Islamic State foreign fighter squatted in the rubble beside their injured father, silent, staring listlessly into the middle distance as they waited to learn their fate.

“Chechens!” proclaimed the Iraqi army troops as they crowded around their captives, who minutes earlier had crawled out from the rubble of the Old City.

Neither boy was older than 10 and they were evidently foreign: pale-skinned and grey-eyed, with long, fair hair falling past their shoulders.

Their father could offer them no help. Half naked, skin taut over his bones, he gaped and grimaced wordlessly beside them, deranged either by shellfire or a head wound.

The fate of these foreign children, unwitting remnants of the so-called caliphate’s last stand, has become the focus of a highly sensitive operation involving the Iraqi authorities, child protection agencies, the UN and foreign intelligence agencies.

Amid the febrile and retributive mood, with growing evidence of widespread vengeance killings of anyone connected to Islamic State, the operation has a simple aim: ensuring that these children survive long enough to be transferred to protective custody in Baghdad, pending repatriation.

INTELLIGENCE REVIEW:

https://pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/publications/2017-Independent-Intelligence-Review.pdf

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This Report sets out the conclusions we have drawn from an extensive, wide-ranging study of the Australian intelligence community conducted from November 2016 to June 2017. 

We engaged intensively with the leaders of Australia’s intelligence agencies. We also met with Ministers and Parliamentarians, with present and former members of the Australian and allied intelligence communities, and with senior officers of the operational and policy agencies that represent the primary customers of the intelligence agencies. 

Our Report draws heavily on the insights we derived from these meetings (which numbered over 150) and from our detailed analysis of the 34 Submissions we received from agencies and departments as well as the wider community. It is clear to us that the Australian intelligence agencies are highly capable and staffed by skilled officers of great integrity. They have performed strongly since the most recent review of the intelligence community in 2011, particularly in the areas of counter-terrorism, support to military operations and assistance in addressing the issue of people smuggling. 

Our agencies have a strong positive culture of accountability under law and to responsible Ministers. Individually, the agencies feature world-class tradecraft and very high levels of professionalism. They are held in high regard by their international partner agencies. A central theme of this Report is to provide a pathway to take those areas of individual agency excellence to an even higher level of collective performance through strengthening integration across Australia’s national intelligence enterprise. The aim is to turn highly capable agencies into a world-class intelligence community.

These forces of change are challenging the structures in place for co-ordinating the activities of our intelligence agencies. 

Those structures were established some decades ago on the basis of principles set out in the landmark Royal Commissions into the intelligence agencies conducted by Mr Justice Hope in the mid to late 1970s and early 1980s. The clear dividing lines he highlighted – between foreign and security intelligence, intelligence and law enforcement, intelligence collection and assessment, and intelligence assessment and policy formulation – continue to provide the foundations of Australia’s intelligence community.

We assess those delineations have broad enduring relevance. They capture, in particular, the essential requirements for a relationship of trust between government and the wider community in Australia about the legitimate uses of intelligence, and therefore the legal framework within which the agencies need to operate.

With an annual budget approaching $2 billion and about 7,000 staff spread across 10 agencies, it is clear to us that on size alone the Australian Government’s intelligence activities supporting national security are now a major enterprise. They would benefit from being managed as such.