THE WORST POSSIBLE OUTCOME

Mosul courtesy LA Times

It was the worst of all possible outcomes.

They had created a journalist who knew how spectacularly incompetent they were, and how unethical.

He had been harassed, threatened, bullied and intimidated for years on end.

"I've had a great deal of difficulty dealing with the surveillance," he told one of the locals at his morning cafe. "It's been extremely intrusive."

He had hated bullies all his life, ever since being bullied at school and at home.

He had been to a high school reunion, and sat briefly looking at the beach where he had walked along as an adolescent after taking what he thought would be an overdose of aspirin, waiting to die. He was bashed when he got home for being late from school.

His life was rewinding backwards, and everything that had happened, every torment through that interminable winter, had compounded the feeling of destiny, of dark forces trying to extinguish him, of a kind of group madness which could not stand those who were different to themselves.

Who authorised the targeting of a journalist of more than 30 years standing?

Which head honcho, or head boofhead as he thought of them, had authorised the operation, the endless signs that he was being ridiculed, intimidated, yes threatened. They had tried to bring on an early heart attack. They had tried to encourage him to commit suicide. They had done everything they could to destroy him.

And in their insane pursuit they had destroyed themselves. For it would take only the most basic of public service inquiries to pinpoint the people responsible, and to use the information thus gained to topple them. Because if they couldn't handle a simple domestic operation aimed against a domestic journalist, how could they be handed the responsibility for the nation's national security? How could they be trusted to behave with dignity, to be beyond reproach, to justify their million dollar salaries.

The truth is even worse than you know, the Watchers on the Watch told him.

And he believed them.


THE BIGGER STORY:



https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/03/isis-leader-abu-bakr-al-baghdadi-no-longer-in-mosul

Western intelligence sources believe the Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is no longer in Mosul, Boris Johnson has said.

In an unusual reference to intelligence, the British foreign secretary said Baghdadi’s audio recording issued on Thursday calling for the defeat of the Iraqi forces fighting to liberate Mosul was “cruelly ironic since some of the intelligence we have suggests he had himself vacated the scene himself and is yet using internet media to encourage others to take part in violence”.

Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi urges fight to death in Iraq, audio claims

Read more

In his first address for a year, Baghdadi called on his supporters to “wreak havoc”, saying the struggle was a prelude to victory. Isis fighters patrolled the Mosul streets broadcasting Baghdadi’s call.

Johnson said the battle to recapture Mosul, in the face of Isis’s “scorched earth campaign”, would take time and represented “the coalition’s greatest challenge”. He also insisted lessons had been learned from the aftermath of the 2003 Iraqwar, making post-victory stabilisation in Mosul as important as the military capture of the city.

There is widespread concern that, despite a year of planning, there is little agreement among the many ethnic groups in the region on the future political structure of Mosul or the surrounding Nineveh province.

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THEY WANT TO KILL YOU

Postcards of Rome Courtesy Michael Fitzjames

Something odd had settled into the house, the burnt smell of witch's brew, and it was no longer safe.

Someone, or something, was trying to communicate with him, or warn him, and he slept as if extinguished, to avoid all revelation.

"What do you want?" he demanded to know in the middle of the night.

And answered his own question: "They want to kill him."

Somewhere along the line he had adopted the Thai habit of talking about himself in the third person.

They want to kill him. They want to kill you.\

The surveillance had driven him beyond distraction.

In fevered, sweatless nights he woke up being interviewed on television: "What do you think of the Australian authorities?"

The national security authorities.

 I think, I know, from my own experience, they are remarkably dishonest, astonishingly incompetent.

He intoned. He intoned. They wept and swept the remnants of failed operations.

They tried to cover their own diseased tracks.

They tried to hide their own systematic abuses.

For surveillance in and of itself was an act of intimidation and abuse, and he had experienced the full weather of it, from one day to the next, one month to the next, one book  to the next.

There will come a time, he felt like saying to the microphone in the car, when you will wish I was just abusing you; because at least then you knew what I was thinking.

Extra-judicial, without conscience, fired not by justice or truth or emergency necessity, not by protection of the homeland, certainly not by common old fashioned decency, the harassment aka surveillance was targeted at individuals who did not tow the government line.

And those who did not tow the line they wished to kill, without warrant, without judicial oversight, without conscience.

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And the power these secretive agencies had been granted by successive waves of gormless politicians had made them utterly, totally corrupt.

"Why are they so bad?" he had once asked.

"You've got to realise, there are some good people."

If only the good people were in ascendance, but they were not.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/11/02/middleeast/mosul-iraq-advance/

Karama, Iraq (CNN)The eastern suburbs of ISIS-held Mosul are in sight, but the Iraqi forces trying to liberate the city are still struggling to get there.
ISIS snipers, relentless gunfire and mortar shelling are still keeping troops from penetrating the city's border.
CNN Senior International Correspondent Arwa Damon, traveling with US-trained Iraqi counterterrorism forces, was just 200 meters from Mosul's eastern perimeter on Wednesday, with just a barren berm between her and more than 1 million civilians trapped in the city.

"There is no escape route. There have been no routes that anyone has established in fact for the civilian population to leave," she said.



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DARK DARK POLICING

Burning oil fields near Mosul

The staff had been smote into the ground.

The curse had been cast.

It would travel through the chains of command, from person to person, under doors, through wires. These ancient curses  did not like the air conditioning of modern offices, but would reach their intended targets nonetheless. The air would thicken around them; and one day, if they were lucky enough to live that long, they would realise that nothing at all was going right in their lives, their health was worsening, and would realise that all the normal pieces of fortune that flowed their way were instead flowing out to sea, that nothing in their lives worked anymore; and as their power weakened the jackals would strike.

There were the usual happenstance meetings. An unlikely Christian told him what it was like to be a lesbian at a Seventh Day Adventist meeting. A Nepalese migrant told him how you could make $40,000 living with a Nepalese girl for a year, in order for them to gain PR, Permanent Residence.

Of all the scumbags they've let into this country, he said, and shrugged. And here were people, willing people, who would have made good citizens.

One of them had been fined for walking across a quiet street against a red light; the latest abuse in the ever spiraling catalogue of abuses of  Australian authorities, who had so little to do and had become so numerous in number that now they were booking people for the way they crossed a street. An empty street.

He had been tormented year in and year out by the Watchers on the Watch, those forces aligned against anyone who dare to speak out, the idle cruelty of castoffs, the unthinking remorselessness of government funding.

"I wish I could see a counsellor on how to cope with government surveillance," he told his doctor; and they agreed, there was no such counselling available.

In the darkest reaches, in all those nightmare reaches, where fascists stomped and pig ignorance prevailed, where predators stalked and kindly voices were drowned out, where the government abused its own citizens and showed no respect, where the crushing of spirit was the aim, in these barren places the worst survived; and briefly thrived.

Before the curse took them, too, and they whimpered into premature old age, dreaming of what might have been.

If only they had been good.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/11/battle-mosul-direct-iraqi-assault-isil-fighters-161101070901154.html

Iraq's prime minister has urged ISIL fighters in Mosul to surrender as an offensive to drive the group from the country's second largest city continues.

A day after Haider al-Abadi appeared on state TV to order ISIL, or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant group, to give up its positions, troops opened fire with artillery, tanks and machine guns on the fighters on the edge of the Gogjali neighbourhood.

"They have no choice. Either they surrender or they die," Abadi said.

The fighters responded with guided anti-tank missiles and small arms to block the anti-ISIL coalition's advance on Tuesday. 

Al Jazeera's Stefanie Dekker, reporting from east of Mosul, said that the battle is intense as ISIL fighters are putting up stiff resistance against the approaching forces.

"We are being told by the Peshmerga forces that the black sky is the result of ISIL burning oil wells and tyres in and around Mosul," she said.

"Now we know this is one of their tactics to try to obscure their position from coalition air strikes and also to obscure the ground. The smoke is incredibly thick, so it is an intense battle."

If Iraqi forces enter Gogjali, it will mark the first time troops have set foot in Mosul in more than two years, after they were driven out by a much smaller force of ISIL fighters in 2014.

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NOWHERE IS SAFE

Vanessa Walker The Lost Cities

There they were in these nether-reaches of dark games, everyone paid but him.

"What do you do when you get home, puff out your little fat chest and say: 'I did good today. I harassed an old man.' "

They told him, there in those long nights, of magnificent tranches of malfeasance, of malfunctioning agencies and incompetencies on a grand scale.

He turned, exhausted, and wished leprosy into their eyes.

Rotting souls and smelly feet and malignant intent, he had seen it all now.

And he had seen the way power corrupted their bureaucratic little hearts, while out in the deserts the gods awaited. He had seen the dark forms dancing at the edge of liquid scapes, and had seen the wotst that men were capable of, or begun to understand. Here on the outer reaches of consciousness, when they, in their mundane lives, were chortling self-satisfied, he had set the hares running, as the saying went, and just as they had tried to kill him, now the hounds they had unleashed would turn.

They were fleeing through forests, European forests, and across sands, Eritrean sands, and they were all, yes, they were all now slouching towards Bethlehem, for they had stirred the forces that should have been left unprovoked, And the Lord would not forgive, for they knew not what they did. Their callow, dissembling hearts, their personal greed, none of it would serve them well in the harsh landscapes they now entered, their eyes dripping blood as they ran.

These were the demons they had so unwisely woken, and the land that should have been safe was not safe, and the villages that should have been safe where children ran and played and old grandparents watched with pride, wind swept through them, arid and hot, and doors banged in deserted buildings, and times of festivity never came.

It was the season of killing, the harvesting of souls, and even in this far off place, the dark lords stalked and manipulated, and the bombs that rained down half a world away, they shook through their temporal dreams as surely as they destroyed the flesh upon which they poured.

And so it was he looked up and said: Leave me alone. You know not what you do. And the interconnections of everything, they ran every which way to hide their own disease stinking guilt and barren consciences they themselves had betrayed, and stoked not flames but bitterness as they stunk and slunk into the reaches, never finding the courage they so desperately needed.

They would not be born again.


THE BIGGER STORY:

MOSUL

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/10/town-tal-afar-focus-en-route-mosul-battle-161030060800595.html

Iraqi Shia militia groups have launched an operation to retake the town of Tal Afar from ISIL and cut the armed groups's supply lines from Mosul to Syria, a spokesman said.

Michael Pregent, Middle East analyst and a former US intelligence officer who served in Iraq, told Al Jazeera the militias' move was not sanctioned by Iraq's government.

He said the hope by Baghdad and Washington was that ISIL would use the western route to flee Mosul for a "final battle" later in its Syrian bastion of Raqqa.

"The Shia militias are operating outside the control of the Iraqi government. They're not responsive to US requests not to participate," said Pregent.

"The military operation wasn't to encircle Mosul, it was to force ISIL out into Syria. The Shia militias are blocking that now. It sounds like a good military tactic but it's not synced, it's not coordinated. And the Shia militias remain a wildcard, based on what they've done in Ramadiand Fallujah."

The Mosul offensive involves tens of thousands of soldiers, federal police, Kurdish fighters, Sunni tribesmen and Shia militias.

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DANGEROUS FRIENDS: THE REAL CRIMINALS

Picture Warren Clarke

Idiot tipsy girls, overweight from their McDonald's diets and daubed in Halloween makeup, prattled on behind him. Australia had so few traditions of its own the youth were adopting customs they had seen on television. His car had broken down in Wilson Street in Newtown, leaving him stranded on the public transport system. There was much to be desired. His head swirled. Are you really from somewhere else? There were collapsing landscape and fleeting forms whenever he shut his eyes. His level of frustration was rising by the day.

How many countries is America bombing? Asked one post on Facebook.

https://www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=how%20many%20countries%20is%20america%20bombing

The number turned out to be seven, according to the reporter: Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen and Somalia.

And Australia, having surrendered its sovereignty to the United State, was right in there bombing away as well.

And just as in the United States, it was a war unapproved by parliament, or in their case Congress, who were never asked,

The reporter estimated the US had spent $4 trillion and killed 1.3 million people in the combat zones.

Exactly how much Australia had spent on America's wars and how many people it had been responsible for killing, the Australian public would never know.

Meanwhile, Old Alex had been harassed, bullied, threatened, intimidated and ridiculed, ceaselessly, for years on end. And the senior public servants who authorised the operations, on their million dollar salaries and suites of privileges, knew perfectly well they were targeting and encouraging to suicide someone who had a history of attempts or suicidal behaviour. Exactly how that did not breach the Public Service Act in the most grievous way, how these people maintained their jobs and were not sacked, poor Old Alex would never know.

And so he spat in their face. Or brooded out the window as the girls twittered gossip to mundane to keep track of, and he shut his eyes and the landscapes collapsed and the night fled ever darker.


THE  BIGGER STORY:

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/inquirer/settling-in-for-long-campaign-to-free-mosul-from-islamic-state/news-story/c342010a8aea5a7254dd137750727799

David Kilcullen on Mosul

Besides their use of drones and chemical weapons, the defenders are making clever use of terrain. Mosul is bisected by the roughly north-south flow of the Tigris River. There are five bridges across the Tigris, one of which was destroyed in April by a coalition airstrike to prevent ­Islamic State moving supplies to the front. At least one other bridge has been damaged by airstrikes, and Islamic State fighters appear to have wired each remaining crossing point with explosives, placing a guard on each bridge and preparing to blow them up and fall back across the river as coalition forces approach.

They have also demolished key urban infrastructure including power stations and water supplies, and set fire to oil wells, a chemical plant and a sulphur mine, creating a poisonous smoke haze that has sickened ground troops and civilians and hampered coalition air operations. As assault units close in, Islamic State fighters have used smoke and the cover of darkness to pull out of outlying areas.

But far from fading away, they’ve tended to use temporary withdrawals as setups for aggres­sive counter-attacks, often launching multiple suicide truck bombs at once, working around the flanks and rear of attackers to strike headquarters or reserves. Ground that was cleared is often reinfiltrated by snipers who target ­advancing troops. Inside the city, the defenders have wired buildings with massive IEDs and laid deep minefield belts to channel the ­assault into prepared killing areas.

There are also substantial ­Islamic State forces outside Mosul, as shown by determined counter-attacks at Kirkuk and Rutbah over the past two weeks. 

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CLOSER

Sydney Street Scenes 2015/2016 Picture John Stapleton

The book was finished.


Helicopters buzzed over the scene, each trailing a burning trawl rope.


He grabbed on to one, it disintegrated into his hands. He grabbed on to another, it too disintegrated.


The burning ropes cut arcing flames across the darkening scene; dank with fear. Everywhere around him cinders swirled.


He grabbed another rope and it held, lifting him above the scene, just as the ground beneath him buckled and blew. He hadn't expected to die that day, although what gave him such conviction he could barely say.


Swept away from the scene, the arc lines of burning ropes and flurries of ash behind him in an instant, he barely dared to look down.


Life was brief, but he wanted to hang on one more day, as his stomach screamed and the rotors above thrashed towards the horizon. There would be no peace, not that day.


Nine hundred Islamic State warriors had been killed in the fight for Mosul; announced one report. So many died, and this was victory? It was a victory that would taste like ash for decades to come, here in perilous times.


He was emotionally exhausted from the book, which had been written under difficult circumstance, just as had the previous two.


The harassment of the authorities, the psychological operations designed to destabilise him, never ceased. If there were Flaws in the Glass they would pounce. They never learnt, and he acted stupider than he was; a tried and true method.


They fumbled and gashed and lashed; and it wouldn't matter how major or minor the sin, they would pounce. He had been called everything imaginable, harassed month in month out. It was government money, there was no reason to stop. Under the ASIO Act journalists were classified as Persons of Interest, and they felt it was within their purlieu to harass, threaten, bully and intimidate journalists as much as they liked, to encourage them to suicide, to whisper heart attack heart attack, in the hope of bringing on an early death.


For of free thought and freedom on speech in the Australia of 2016, there was none.


The country was now a pale shadow of the boisterous, larrikin country he had once known and loved; a travesty brought on by years of poor governance and rank hypocrisy at the highest levels.


There was a price to pay for war, and they would pay it if they could. And they would silence him, if they could. The bully boys, the bully girls, the henchmen, the henchwomen, the agents of the state.


NEWS


http://www.iraqinews.com/iraq-war/isis-burns-nine-militants-fleeing-battles-mosul/


(IraqiNews.com) Nineveh – Iraqi media outlets announced on Tuesday, that the Islamic State executed nine of its members by burning for fleeing the battles in central Mosul.
Al Sumaria News stated, “ISIS terrorist gangs executed nine of its members for fleeing the battle against the security forces in Mosul, by throwing them in trenches containing a burning oil, after tying their hands and legs.”
“ISIS used the burning oil trenches to impede the visibility of the Iraqi Air Force and international coalition air force,” Al Sumaria added.


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Daughter Henrietta Graduate, Sydney University. 2016.

At the women's college.

A GOD IN RUINS

Asylum seekers, Greek/Macedonian border

QUOTE

"Toyota is good for jihad," my driver said. I could only agree, noting that this was one advertising logo the Toyota company would probably forgo. There was moonlight now and I could see clouds both below us in the ravines and above us, curling round mountaintops, our headlights shining on frozen waterfalls and ice-covered pools.
Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation.

TEXT

He couldn't remember the exact circumstances which found him in that church in Ballarat, but it was easy to believe, in that gloom laden atmosphere, that Something Wicked This Way Comes. He had his own encounters with priests as a teenager, encounters he would rather forget. The heightened atmosphere of the day threw a harsh light on what had once been moral ambiguities, but were now simply abuse. Sometimes it didn't seem to matter much, in the light of so many stories, so much suffering; everybody's experience was different. Pain was not always sent to bless. Humility was a divine trait. His own experiences were now little more than fragile memories; unpleasant, but there had been much that had been unpleasant.

He could feel the furnaces burning beneath him, and the furnaces burning in the sky, the slipstreams of shadows, the insufficiently vanquished voices. All would be well, he was sometimes told, but at others the carping continued to erode. There were times he thought he could name his tormentors, but at others they were simply out of reach, beyond the border of the real, and he was simply batting at shadows.

They sat around grand tables in large houses, elegant luncheons with all their friends. It was never assumed otherwise, that they weren't interested in young men, in the sins of the flesh, and how they reconciled all that with their beliefs, and with the faith parishioners put in them, was never discussed. It was all too elegant, the conversation, the food, the houses, the accepted wealth. The fragilities of the flesh. All that God had made wonderful. Here in these remote places, the city limits not really all that far away, the infinite desert, stark beauties of the land. But there were shadows flying above, beyond and around them, and brief moments in time, asked to swim in the pool while fat middle aged queens drank too much champagne in the deckchairs cast round the garden, ugh, it was all too much.

If they could feel the end time coming, as it so often seemed, the thin veneer of the physical world, none of it came as a surprise, that destiny was finally being borne. He saw the shorts for a movie Eye in the Sky, and looked at the astonishingly rapid development of technology, and felt, if not gifted with crisis alarmed, puzzled, perplexed, saddened and perhaps even a little exhilarated by the desperately declining circumstances, a world that was driving headline into disaster, the perfidy of the great powers, the farce of American democracy played out on screens for all the world to see, and the ever expanding power of the Abrahamic God, drawing power from so many sacrificed souls, from the martyrdom of millions.

Trump. Hillary. The chatter of radio news from surrounding apartments and houses breaking through morning bird sounds, a blessed relief he sought, a consternation in ever changing moments, a world which was not his world, a time when all the greats could be accessed at a moment's notice, a click, a TV screen, a world far from the agrarian dreams he had sometimes held, instantly vapid, instantly revised, repatriated, a reclamation project on his own soul which would seem, even in the increasingly difficult circumstances the world now faced, to be a minor project in the face of so much history. The visitors, guardians one might have called them if they were not so dismissive of a single life, could barely contain their delight. Transcended, they ate not at flesh but at the soaring enthusiasms, the brief misunderstandings, the terrible doubts, held out a hand to assist before disappearing back into the matrix, as he struggled to find some sort of centre, to adhere to the motto of the day: "Steady as she goes."


THE BIGGER STORY:

ABC:

EU migrant crisis: French police move in to dismantle Calais camp; Greece-Macedonia border fence stormed
By Europe correspondent James Glenday, wires
Clashes have broken out between French riot police and asylum seekers as authorities began destroying makeshift shelters in the grim shantytown on the edge of Calais known as the "Jungle".
Police lobbed tear gas canisters at protesters as around 20 workers moved in to start pulling down the shacks by hand on Monday.
As night fell some 150 people threw rocks and struck vehicles heading for England on a port road which runs next to the sprawling camp.
Several trucks and cars were blocked by asylum seekers on the stretch of road overlooking a piece of ground which had previously been part of the Jungle.
Australian Kirsten Shirling of the Good Chance theatre group, based in the Calais camp, told ABC NewsRadio the protests flared up again on Tuesday morning.
"About 9 o'clock this morning they brought in the bulldozers and about 50 police cars and over 100 police with chainsaws, a water cannon and literally started evicting people by force," she said.
"Houses were pulled down by chainsaws and bulldozers, and when people were defending their houses that's when the teargas was fired.


SMH:

Live coverage: Day four of Cardinal George Pell before the abuse royal commission in Rome
Date March 3, 2016 - 6:53AM           

Day four of Cardinal George Pell's testimony to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, via video link from the Quirinale Hotel in Rome.

• Lawyers representing victims of abuse are now questioning Cardinal Pell
• Cardinal Pell has clarified his comment from earlier in the week about the abuses of Gerald Ridsdale that shocked many, in which he said it was a "sad story" but that it "wasn't of much interest to me".
• He said this morning: "I remember messing up the sequence completely. I regret the choice of words. I was very confused. I responded poorly."

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GUARDIANS, OR THE HARPIES ON THE WALL

Bali, 2002 Picture Courtesy AP

QUOTE

I have a fascination for the documents that blow through the ruins of war, the pages of letters home and the bureaucracy of armies and the now useless instructions on how to fire ground-to-air missiles that flutter across the desert and cover the floors of roofless factories.
Robert Fisk. The Great War for Civilisation.


TEXT

In the background, Cardinal George Pell was being hauled across the coals by lawyers being paid thousands of dollars a day to treat him with very little respect. It might have been a secular witchhunt, but there it was. Spotlight, an excellent film, won the Oscar for Best Picture. There were so many rivers running every which way. Harpies perched on walls. The occasional guardian offered sage advice. "Old habits die hard." The Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse in Institutions dragged on in excoriating detail. Many would have preferred to have died rather than be exposed to such public humiliation. Rumours ran every which way. The Church did not come out looking good. Travesties lay on both sides of the fence. Darkness in the swirls. You didn't have to look too far.

"I don't remember, I don't recall, very much at all."

The Church may have once been a foundation for Western culture, but Pell's comment on their obligation to follow Christian principles was met with derisive laughter from the audience. Crowd funding had covered the cost of alleged victims flying to roam.

Oh how sweet it would be to be in Rome.

He had sat often enough as a teenager at the top of the Spanish Steps, watching the sun rise over Rome.

Every ignominy, every scandal, every piece of hypocrisy, it was all burnt into a sea of conflicting standards. "I am not here to defend the indefensible," Pell said; and he had few defenders in the Australian media.

He had covered services in St Mary's where the now Cardinal Pell had officiated.

The initiation into the mysteries.

The formation, as the nuns called it. The creation of a link between the human and the divine.

He had been impressed by the atmosphere, the ritual.

What was now being labelled an abuse of power; while all around lay other abuses of spiritual power, in a world, in a realm, where everything was fragile; where some had departed to protect themselves; and others had arrived to protect a world blotting out in a period of conflict and terrible pain.

Humans were humans, celibacy an unnatural state, the exposes so damaging, the statistics so appalling, the discrediting so final, the damage so absolute. And while Christianity thrashed around in the destruction of itself, Islam was on the March. Child brides. Slavery. Tea boys. There were very dark forces afoot; everywhere.

There were spirits above the meditation sites, the founder of Falun Gong had claimed. And they could walk through walls, appear and disappear at will, here at The End of Days. A fast road to enlightenment.

Fighting was breaking out between refugees and border guards in Europe. The gloss had gone off Malcolm Turnbull. His own interior had changed, and he was simply adjusting. The old days when he had felt like a crushed entity at the bottom of an aquarium full of liquid lead had been vanquished. And sooner or later all these disasters would break through into another stream, and the scandals of one day would be the history of another; but few would survive the ignominy of loss of their own credibility.

Things were changing, that was all. The sins of the Church exposed. The power of The Great Satan there for all to see. Humans, with so little love for each other, so prepared to exploit, appeared, often enough, to be doomed. Brussells does not have the right to change the cultural and religious history of Europe, the critics said more concisely than ever. And so the world spun, and there would be no rest.

THE BIGGER STORY

How Fairfax and Paul Sheehan bought the lies told by "Louise"


NICKY BRYSON AND MYRIAM ROBIN
Freelance writer and Crikey media reporter

A week after the story of "Louise", who claimed she had been gang-raped by Middle Eastern men, was first splashed on the front page, and four days after Paul Sheehan acknowledged how it all fell apart, The Sydney Morning Herald this morning broke its silence on how one of its senior writers published a story of horrific abuse and bureaucratic indifference that was, probably, false. But the paper maintains Sheehan's line that "key elements of the story were unable to be substantiated", despite the wealth of evidence that the story told to Sheehan was highly unlikely, and should have raised red flags for both Sheehan and his editors. The paper stated at the bottom of page 2 this morning: "In last Monday's paper, the Herald reported the details of an alleged sexual assault under the headline, 'The horrifying untold story of Louise', "A subsequent column printed in last Thursday's edition ... acknowledged key elements of the original story were unable to be substantiated. The original story, which has been corrected, included aspersions against the Middle Eastern community and raised untested allegations of inaction against the NSW Police. The Herald sincerely regrets the hurt and distress this report caused to these groups and unreservedly apologises." The story highlights a startling case of journalistic error, made all the more significant because it came from such a senior writer and was taken seriously enough to put on the front page of Australia's most trusted newspaper. Sheehan has apologised several times in the past week, and got on the front foot admitting his error before Fairfax's competitors got wind of it. He has been relatively transparent about the reasons why he came to believe 'Louise's' story despite little corroborating evidence. But if he had not, it is likely the scandal would have come out anyway. In the days immediately following the story's initial publication, many on social media noted that aspects of it seemed far-fetched. The similar claims made by a woman in several Reclaim Australia rallies were recalled. Some, like Richard Cooke, who tried to contact 'Louise' wrote that they found her a difficult subject who was unable to give journalists ways to validate her story.

EU migrant crisis: Stranded asylum seekers storm Greece-Macedonia border fence
By Europe correspondent James Glenday, wires

There have been dramatic scenes on the border between Macedonia and Greece as asylum seekers used a steel pole to break down a barbed wire fence.

About 7,000 people are stuck on the Greek side of the border trying to get through to Macedonia, and tensions boiled over at the Idomeni camp overnight.

Asylum seekers ripped away barbed wire from the border fence before using a pole as a battering ram to smash a section open.

Around 300 people forced their way through a Greek police cordon and raced towards a railway track between the two countries.

They threw stones at Macedonian riot police and shouted: "Open the border!"

Authorities responded with several rounds of tear gas, fixed the fence and then called in reinforcements.

At least 30 people, many of them children, requested first aid in the stampede that ensued, the charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said.

Skopje said one of its policemen was hurt and required hospitalisation.

The protest occurred several hours after Macedonia allowed just 300 Syrians and Iraqis to cross.
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WE ARE ALL BEING PLAYED - INCLUDING YOU

From Twitter Source Unknown

QUOTE

Terrorists, terrorists. terrorists. In the Middle East, in the entire Muslim world, this word would become a plague, a meaningless punctuation mark in all our lives, a. full stop erected to finish all discussion of Injustice, constructed as a wall by Russians, Americans, Israelis, British, Pakistanis, Saudis, Turks, to shut us up. Who would ever say a word in favour of terrorists? What cause could possibly justify terror? So our enemies are always terrorists.

Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation.

TEXT

Random, he said; and in the increasing sanity of his thinking... Well he could hear them still. But he was increasingly at peace. He had fulfilled one function and would soon fulfil another. Time stretched out. He made lists of things to do on paper. Dinosaurs and black holes and a million books he wanted to read. He made a shift into the positive. There were so many cruelties that had played out while he maintained silence; withstood the mocking, switched off the tormenters, distracted himself. "But doctor, I don't feel like that anymore, I don't feel the need to write myself off, to drown the voices," he said; and shimmered with a kind of ephereal pleasure, as a doomed world continued to spiral slowly into chaos; a descent into the damned.

There was a ceasefre in Syria which would last five minutes as Islamic State ran rampant, regrouped, ran rampant. The news was all appalling, a contrivance against dust, a theatre of the absurd in the American elections, a time ripe for the plucking. The words Donald Trump were on everybody's lips. The same betrayal of the middle classes which characterised American and Australian politics was throwing up mavericks. Malcolm Turnbull, smooth operator, had already proved just as disappointing as his predecessor, supporting indefensible wars, smiling for the cameras as his bombs rained down on the Middle East. He was killing more Muslims per month than his predecessor Tony Abbott. And he was even more hostage to his predecessor, and to the disastrous legacy of John Howard.

Smile, just keep on smiling. If it looks good it is good.

And besides, the people are all fools. We flirt with them at election time, pretend that our policies are in their best interests, remain openly contemptuous of their stupidity, but they are too stupid to notice; and go on about our blissful, self-important lives.

If people had thought Australia would improve under Turnbull, they had so far been sadly mistaken.

They should put a forensic audience through the entire government, the judiciary, the bureaucracy, everything. And should ask one simple, basic question: why should someone sit in traffic for four hours a day, now the average commute in Sydney, and pay exorbitant taxes on their wages, and everything they bought, everything they did, virtually the air they breathed, to support this.

And hack the entire discredited shambles into a lean and mean organisation that served the people, not fed off them.

Australian democracy was in serious decay; but it would stumble on a little longer.

And then the terror attacks would come. And the cultural, social and religious landscape of the country, transformed into the present shambles by the social engineers, the liars, the lawyers, the bureaucrats, the social engineers, would change again. A freedom loving country would disappear; as easily destroyed as had been the sacred lands of the indigenous, that most beautiful country, a pearl of the divine; vanished and vanquished, just like that.

He was reading The Great War for Civilisation; in part, he guessed, to understand the origins of it all.

He hadn't been paying much attention when more than a million people died in the Iran Iraq Wars of the 1980s, when America backed their friend Sadam Hussein.

 He was paying attention now.

THE BIGGER STORY


By RAJA ABDULRAHIM and DANA BALLOUT

Feb. 28, 2016 8:16 a.m. ETWall Street Journal


BEIRUT—The Syrian regime and its Russian allies stepped up airstrikes on Sunday after a relative lull in violence a day earlier when an internationally brokered truce went into effect, according to antigovernment activists.

The activists and monitoring groups also linked to the opposition said some of the strikes hit areas controlled by Free Syrian Army rebels, who are a party to the partial cease-fire. A number of civilians were killed, the activists said.

The truce represents the biggest effort in years to calm violence in a war that has claimed more than 250,000 lives and displaced millions.

Russia had said it wouldn’t conduct any airstrikes on Saturday in respect of the partial cease-fire, which is meant to last for two weeks and help create a calmer environment to convene peace talks in Geneva on March 7. But on Sunday morning, Russian planes launched numerous strikes throughout the northern province of Aleppo, the activists said.

Aleppo has been the focus for weeks of an intense offensive by the regime, backed by heavy Russian airstrikes and Iran-linked militias on the ground. The offensive has largely targeted rebel groups rather than Islamic State.

“Yesterday Aleppo was calm, but airstrikes resumed at six in the morning today,” said local activist Yasin Abu Raed, currently in Aleppo’s northern outskirts.

Areas targeted today included the towns of Anadan and Hreiytan in northwestern Aleppo outskirts.

The Syrian regime, citing local sources, said “terrorist groups” linked to Turkey in the northern countryside of Aleppo targeted the town of Nubil with rockets Saturday night. The regime frequently refers to all its opponents as terrorists.

A map released by a Russian news agency Saturday showed small, limited areas the Moscow government considers covered by the cease-fire. The provinces of Aleppo and Idlib were entirely excluded.

The truce allows for continued attacks by the regime, the Russian and the U.S.-led coalition on both Islamic State and the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front, both of which are present in different areas in Aleppo province. The strikes on Sunday hit Free Syrian Army rebels in the Aleppo area, the antigovernment activists said.

Nusra’s exclusion is particularly problematic because it is present in much of opposition-held territory and is mixed in with more moderate rebels in many places. Moderate rebels fear the regime and its allies will use this as a pretext to keep attacking and said there were some immediate indications that this might be happening.

In Idlib province, where Nusra has a larger presence than in neighboring Aleppo province, airstrikes continued. Nusra Front fighters pulled out of some of their bases located within towns and cities “in order not to be an excuse for Russia to strike them,” one Nusra member said on Saturday.

Central Hama province was also targeted, the activists said. Clashes in western Latakia province between regime forces backed by Russian officers and Shiite militiamen and rebels were ongoing, activist said.

On Saturday, the Syrian Network for Human rights reported 14 cases of the cease-fire being breached. Antigovernment activists reported airstrikes and mortar fire from regime forces across a number of provinces in western Syria in areas controlled by rebels who agreed to the truce.

But overall, it was calmer than the previous week when the announcement of a cease-fire was met with an escalation of violence.

In the rebel-held Damascus suburb of Daraya, which the regime side struck with dozens of barrel bombs on Friday, residents were hesitant to spend too much time outside, unsure how long the lull would last.

“They are very cautious and afraid that the airstrikes will start suddenly,” local activist Shadi Matar said Saturday. “The residents haven’t forgotten what happened yesterday and all the days that preceded it.”

In another opposition-held Damascus suburb, Arbeen, the local council posted a video online of local residents taking advantage of the cease-fire to clear the streets of debris from past regime and Russian airstrikes.

Sydney Morning Herald Mark Kenny

Malcolm Turnbull's cut-price National Broadband Network is facing mounting delays and rising costs, according to a damning internal progress report obtained by Fairfax Media.

The report, marked "commercial in confidence" and "for official use only", sets out a litany of problems in delivering the Coalition's supposedly more budget-friendly fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) model.

By the company's own assessment, the giant infrastructure project has fallen two-thirds short of its benchmark construction timetable. Connection costs to each house or business are also blowing out. The model had been marketed to voters as superior to Labor's NBN because it was "Fast. Affordable. Sooner".

The "final design" process for connections - needed before construction can start - is running far behind schedule, according to the February 19 report.

While 1,402,909 premises should have been approved at the date of the report, the figure was sitting at 662,665 - 740,000 fewer than planned.

The snapshot says NBN Co has achieved 29,005 fibre-to-the-node "construction completions", while noting its internally budgeted target for this period was more than three times this at 94,273.

The report, which was never intended for public disclosure, reveals the extent to which the more than $46 billion project has drifted off course, mainly during the time when Mr Turnbull was in direct control as communications minister - the portfolio he held before replacing Tony Abbott as Prime Minister in September.

In a statement, nbn rejected claims the company is "at risk" of not meeting its targets but refused to be drawn on "alleged internal documents". 

"The company's management has proven repeatedly that it can effectively monitor and manage those risks," it said. "This is an incredibly complex project unlike any infrastructure build anywhere in the world."

Under the heading "Commercial in Confidence: Scale the Deployment Program", the report outlines a plethora of faults, including that delays in power approvals and construction are being caused by electricity companies which account for 38,537 premises or 59 per cent of overall slippages against the target.

Another 30 per cent of delays are down to material shortages...

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A HOLE IN THE WALL

Islamic State position taken out by Western airstrike Picture courtesy Telegraph

QUOTE:

As I write, Western countries (several, particularly the US, now with severely reduced international credibility) face a larger, more unified, capable, experienced and savage enemy, in a less stable, more fragmented region, with a far higher level of geopolitical competi­tion, and a much more severe risk of great-power conflict, than at any time since 9/11.

David Kilcullen, Blood Year.

TEXT: 

As the world drifted towards calamity, his head became more active. Military trained empaths roamed the perimeter. Two black cats, psychic animals, sat on the rooftop next door in the early hours of the morning; until he shooed them away. All the themes were coming into play. It was six months since he had finished Terror in Australia: Workers' Paradise Lost, and the story had continued to expand in the interim. The world was already transforming beyond reocgnition. 119, or was it 120, the day's reports varied, people had been killed in Islamic State bomb attacks in Syria. At the same time, the "Coalition", in itself a farce, announced there had been 38 bomb strikes in a single day. How many dead? How many injured? How many civillians? How many mujahadeen? Nobody would ever know.

Events which would have once been front page news barely rated a mention in the back of the papers. Australia's population had officially topped 24 million, that dream, vision, whatever you wanted to call it, of Malcolm Fraser, the aristocrat from Victoria who had dreamed of a big Australia. Well they had their big Australia, these so-called visionaries, but it was not a happy place. All the problems that were meant to be solved by a larger population had morphed into a whole new set of problems.

The lockout laws had created a backlash against the government, a people fed up with grotesque levels of regulation. The streets remained dangerous. Jerking ice addicts, already stricken, crippled, hobbling as if already destroyed, gathered in knots in the Cross. They made the pinned eyes or the desperate sweat of a former generation of heroin addicts look positively benign. "It's the perfect drug for the age, apocalyptic," he said at a party; people he had known for decades, sometimes it seemed for generations, so much had the world changed.

He had always said it, the world of the future will be nothing like the world we know now, in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s, from child to young man to flaunted, desecrated coconut, from meandering delinquent to earnest hopeful, as if reaching for the sky could salvage the Earth. But instead the world was full of fallen angels, and now a new awakening, those who had been seeded into the timeline. Sometimes there were accidents, as in his own case, his parents marooned on the neighbouring moon after their craft crash landed, his life, his memory, beginning with that most wrenching of departures. He missed them still, would always miss them. As the Earth, that void, filled his consciousness; and he survived in the undergrowth. Nobody would ever know.

But as unlikely as it seemed, there was now the Awakening. For every action an equal and opposite reation. And even in a place as remote as Australia, dismissed, these days, as a backwater; you could feel the stirrings, the brightest of intellects, the most piercing of lights, cast against those screens of pain, the souls being harvested for a Dark Lord, Lord of All The Worlds, as they so mistakenly described him, the greater the agony the more heightened the transformation, the cruelty of men beyond description, beyond any understanding. He was reading The Great War For Civilisation; and a great war it was, if size and consequence and the number of pointless deaths, rather than the depth of the ignominy, meant Great. He remained astonished at how cruel humans could be to each other. How little they cared for the deaths of others of their own kind. How little, in the end, life meant to them.

THE BIGGER STORY:

Russia warned of “a new world war" starting in Syria on Thursday after a dramatic day in which Gulf states threatened to send in ground forces.

Foreign and defence ministers of the leading international states backing different factions in the war-torn country met in separate meetings in Munich and Brussels following the collapse of the latest round of peace talks.

Both Russia and the United States demanded ceasefires in the long-running civil war so that the fight could be concentrated against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) - but each on their own, conflicting terms.

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