@philmupp1@johnfor23089656 How? Foreign influence controls the direction no matter who has their hands on the levers of power. It was a quiet coup executed over decades. The last element is setting up their own armed forces; and that’s in the works.
#BREAKING 🚨 Ben Carroll will be the next Premier of Victoria, with Gabrielle Williams as his deputy, following a meeting of the Labor Party caucus following Jacinta Allan’s resignation
Goodbye to our last Kokoda veteran Reg Chard who has died aged 102.
Reg joined Army at 18 and fought bravely in New Guinea, WWII. He said of the toll of war on return: “My youngest brother said, ‘he talks like Reg but he doesn’t look like him.’”
Thank you Reg for everything 🇦🇺
We are supposedly at war to stop Iran from enriching the uranium we “obliterated” over a year ago.
Yesterday we signed a deal to help Saudi Arabia enrich uranium.
The first time the United States has ever helped another country enrich uranium on foreign soil.
The Saudis refused the inspection protocol 140 other countries accept. Too intrusive, they said.
Trump agreed. He signed a national security waiver to get around the rule.
The Saudis paid Kushner $100 million. They put $2 billion into his firm. They put another $6 billion into LIV Golf, which pays Trump properties to host its tournaments. They signed ten billion dollars in Trump-branded real estate deals in Jeddah and Riyadh. All in just the last few years.
But sure. My paintings.
@Peter_Fitz British are the most likely overstayers. You learn that in law school. Dunning and Kruger blowhards are right in the middle of this debate.
July 21, 1942 is the day the Japanese landed in New Guinea to start the Kokoda campaign. So here is the man who won the first Victoria Cross ever earned on Australian soil, fighting on that very track a few weeks later.
His name was Bruce Kingsbury. He was 24, a real estate clerk from Melbourne before the war, an ordinary young bloke who had gone off with his best mate to join up. He had already served in the desert against the Italians. Then Japan came south, and his battalion was rushed home and thrown straight into the mountains of New Guinea to try to stop the Japanese drive on Port Moresby.
By late August they were at a place called Isurava, a jungle clearing on the Kokoda Track, and they were in serious trouble. The Australians were badly outnumbered, and on the 29th the Japanese hit them so hard that they smashed through the right flank of the battalion and threatened to overrun the whole position, headquarters and all. If that flank collapsed, the line collapsed, and the road to Port Moresby lay open.
Kingsbury's own platoon had already been overrun and cut to pieces. He was one of the few left standing. And instead of falling back, he volunteered to join another platoon making a desperate counterattack, grabbed a Bren gun, and did something that should not have worked.
He charged. Straight into the Japanese, firing the Bren from the hip, walking into machine gun fire and clearing a path through the enemy with sheer aggression, cutting down man after man and driving them back. His rush broke the momentum of the whole Japanese attack and gave the Australians the moment they needed to stabilize the line. He saved the position at Isurava.
Then, as he paused to reload, a sniper hidden in the jungle shot him. He fell against a large rock that is still there, still known, and he was dead within minutes.
They gave him the Victoria Cross, posthumously, the first ever awarded for an action on Australian territory and the first of the war in Papua. His best mate, the one he had enlisted with, was near him when he died. Bruce Kingsbury, 24 years old, a clerk with a Bren gun, who ran the wrong way on purpose and held the line on the track that saved his country.
@Empireaesth Those guys are Light Horse soldiers, not 18 Brigade. Presumably they are 2/6 Cavalry Regiment - if the rest of the data is correct. They were the 6th Division cavalry component. The 18th Brigade was detached to form the 9th Div, the Rats of Tobruk.
@Peter_Fitz Thing is Pete, like ya republic, wanting it ain’t enough; ya need a viable and popular alternative.
The Sam Neill is my fav and may have the legs.