Juanita Hall

Helped make Australia #ScottFree She/Her #AlwaysWasAlwaysWillBe #BLM #Treaty #ClimateCrisis #SocialCapital #NewsCorpse #Resist #FBR #BlueCrew🌈🌊✊🏼

[Nicole Chvastek @NChvastek]

Someone with a shitload of cash is trying to rig our elections.

Or as TheGuardian reports:
ProOne Nation Facebook groups appear to be run by foreign ‘meme factories that monetise content..what experts call “engagement farms”

“TruthLies&Media”is live!

Promo Match Frame Editing

[AAP FactCheck @aapfactcheck]

One Nation leader Pauline Hanson made a series of false and misleading claims during an appearance at the National Press club, including that younger people are the "largest capital gains cohort".

[Misinformation Fact Checker. @MisinfoFact]

Are we just going to ignore that the LNP and the Greens' primary vote is only a 4% difference?

[Juanita Hall @JuanyHall]

Finally. A decision based on the good of the club 👏🏼

[AFL @AFL]

Michael Voss has resigned as Carlton coach, per @CalTwomey.

[Jon Cooper 🇺🇸 @joncoopertweets]

Damn, they’re coming out with new LEGO videos every day, and they keep getting better and better.

Of course, they’re only effective because they contain a lot of truth about the Trump regime and its policies.

[Jennifer Get In Good Trouble @TheJenniWren]

Jane Fonda has been fighting tyrants longer than Trump has been grifting. And she’ll tell you: this is FUN. Tomorrow we don’t ask permission to be free.

We show up, we roar, and we remind them exactly who holds the power. 👑🚫
#WeSayNoKings

[Shelly Kittleson @shellykittleson]

Former Reuters bureau chief who lost his job and is now struggling to survive as a taxi driver:

"In my previous jobs, I interviewed prime ministers and CEOs (...) We are all improvising, all one broken transmission or missed paycheck away from something even worse
(...) in the United States, more than 10,000 journalists lost their jobs between 2022 and 2024 (...) Google, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok have gobbled up the advertising dollars, and campy 30-second videos by influencers now deliver what passes for news on social media (...) my family (...) flew to Italy, where they could live rent-free in a family member’s home (...) After I said goodbye to them, I wept uncontrollably in the airport parking lot, not knowing when I would see them again (...) I trust an app to buy me another day"

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Robert Mueller died last night.

He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving.

He had integrity.

And tonight the President of the United States said good!

I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good.

I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word.

Good.

This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather.

That is what is happening. That is what has happened.

The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming.

America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner.

And the church said nothing.

Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary.

Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him.

Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart.

JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn.

These men are something more painful than monsters.

They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again.

Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing.

Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less.

That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him.

And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it.

When Trump is gone, they will still be here.

Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous.

That morning is coming.

Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say.

He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true.

He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad.

The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it.

That is all it needed to be.

A man died. His family is broken open with grief.

That is all it needed to be.

Instead the President said good.

And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[The Other 98% @TheOther_9]

This video was deleted from twitter by Elon Musk.

Let’s make sure it goes viral here.

[Brian Krassenstein @krassenstein]

BREAKING: Newly released clip of Donald Trump partying at Mar-a-Lago, dancing with his wealthy millionaire and billionaire friends within HOURS of the United States beginning an attack on Iran, including killing young children.

Historians will look back on this and wonder how this ever came about.

[Trey Yingst @TreyYingst]

The Iranians have started responding with missile fire against Israel.

[Sophia A. Nelson @IAmSophiaNelson]

WOW!! I mean, damn. A United States Congressman just called a thing a thing.
America, wake up. We must get this montrous man out of office. #EpsteinFiles

[Rep. Jim McGovern @RepMcGovern]

This isn’t some anonymous tip. This is sworn testimony, under penalty of perjury, from someone who said Trump threatened to kill her if she exposed Epstein’s sexual abuse.

[Ben Pennings @BenPennings]

Paywalled so article below. Go and subscribe to Crikey‼️

The Trump administration and agencies like the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) militia currently terrorising US cities will be quietly given direct access to Australians’ biometric information and ID documents by the Albanese government, in response to a US demand for tighter security for all countries with Visa Waiver Program arrangements.

Australians can currently travel to the US under visa-free arrangements via the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA). In December, the Trump administration began demanding that Australians and other ESTA users entering the US provide biometric information and social media histories, although requirements such as fingerprinting had long been in place in many US airports. Information-sharing between the US and other countries has also long been in place for individuals believed to have terrorist or organiser crime links.

However, in 2022, the Biden administration announced that in order to maintain participation in the Visa Waiver Program, countries would have to agree to an “Enhanced Border Security Partnership” (EBSP) with the US Department of Homeland Security, under which the US would have full access to other countries’ biometric and ID databases. It followed an incident in which a UK national who took hostages in Texas had been allowed into the US after being removed from a UK terror watchlist.

Under the EBSP, US agencies like ICE would be able to access Australian databases to vet anyone entering or seeking to migrate to the US. However, it would not be limited to people seeking to enter the US or who had ever been there. It would also apply to “individuals encountered by law enforcement in a border or immigration context in the United States”, a clear reference to ICE. As well as fingerprints, a DHS privacy study of the predecessor arrangement to EBSP stated that data sought by US agencies:

may include data such as: surnames; first names; former names; other names; aliases; alternative spelling of names; sex; date and place of birth; current and former nationalities; passport data; numbers from other identity documents; other biometric modalities such as facial images; and criminal, police, and immigration records.

This would clearly include both drivers’ licences and Medicare numbers. It’s unclear what, if any, guardrails there would be.

Countries began negotiating with the US on establishing EBSPs. The UK started negotiating even before EBSPs were made mandatory, but the European Union has taken much longer. In July 2025, the EU commenced the formal process of consulting on negotiations with the US, alarming privacy advocates and biometric security specialists, who saw it as part of a much larger push by the US to expand its access to biometric data.

The US has flagged that EBSPs must be concluded by December 31, 2026. “After this deadline,” the EU document notes, “the DHS will assess each country’s compliance with the EBSP requirement during evaluations for initial and continued participation in the VWP.”

As part of its proposed scoping about what information might be captured by the EBSP, the EU suggests information on “third-country nationals” would be caught, and “may include exchanges on citizens and their family members”, suggesting that your personal information could be accessed by US agencies even if you never travel to the US.

There has been no equivalent public announcement by the government here that it is complying with the demand for an EBSP or negotiating one; US DHS has not announced it has concluded one yet with Australia.

When asked detailed questions by Crikey about what stage EBSP negotiations were at, Home Affairs refused to provide any information, merely stating “visa requirements and policies are a matter for the countries that issue them” — a clear non-denial.

Home Affairs, via the Australian Border Force, holds extensive biometric information on any Australian who has travelled internationally or any foreign national who has visited here, as well as information gathered by intelligence and security agencies.

Home Affairs and its predecessor, the Department of Immigration, have repeatedly tried to slide through significant expansions of its collection of biometric data on all Australians, but have been thwarted by parliament’s intelligence committee. The most recent attempt in 2019 led to a blow-up between then Home Affairs minister Peter Dutton and Andrew Hastie, after Hastie, as chair of the intelligence committee, rejected a proposal from Home Affairs to turn it into a national biometrics hub for security agencies.

What guardrails there would be around demands from ICE for biometric or ID data on Australians or their families are thus unclear — even whether it will be limited only to requests about individual travellers or Australians in the US. For a government with zero record of pushback against US demands, it seems certain that the Trump administration will soon be able to comb through your most important identifying information at will. And we won’t be told a thing about it.

https://t.co/JN5OHaRspd

[bradpsychology @bradpsychology]

Labor leads 2PP in Redbridge poll: The media will focus on One Nation vs the Coalition, but the real story is the conservative block is shrinking among young voters -like vultures fighting over the dry bones of boomers.

[Noteworthy News @newsnoteworthy]

BREAKING: Video shows the moment shots are fired in front of the Bellagio fountains in Las Vegas, Nevada.

#vegas #bellagio

[Rick Wilson @TheRickWilson]

This is a lie.

[Hassan I. Hassan @hxhassan]

Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa gave one of his most significant speeches yesterday. Many watched it, but few noticed the core message.

He did two things at once, and he did them well.

He offered extensive and heartfelt thanks to the countries that stood by Syria after Assad’s fall. He named Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Bahrain, Egypt, and Jordan in particular. The tone was sincere. The response from those capitals reflected that. They admired the gesture, and for some, it renewed their sense of comfort about where Syria is heading.

But Sharaa was doing more than thanking allies. In the very act of acknowledging them, he was also defining limits.

He made clear that while each of these countries helped Syria return to its feet, none would dictate its path. He spoke in terms that balanced them against each other, not in terms that placed Syria under one of them. It was a careful act of equalization.

He made that point explicitly. He promised that Syria wouldn’t be under one singular sphere of influence as was in the past. He promised that it wouldn’t be a source of pressure or insecurity for any of its neighbors.

Syria is open to cooperation but closed to domination. Gratitude did not come at the cost of independence. That was the point.