The Prime Minister’s surprise revelation that he has raised the case against Julian Assange with US officials and urged that charges of espionage and conspiracy be dropped opens up many questions.

Mr Albanese thanked Dr Monique Ryan for her question on Wednesday 31 November, giving what appeared to be a carefully prepared and timed answer. The Independent MP for Kooyong sought to know what political intervention the government would make in the case, observing that public interest journalism is essential in a democracy.

By Alison Broinowski

Self-censorship from European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, after she deleted a tweet which mentioned Ukrainian casualties, is “humiliating”, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said on Wednesday.

He added that the climbdown showed the bloc is nothing but a US puppet.

“It is obvious that ‘Aunt Ursula’ was slapped upside the head by her bosses in Washington,” Medvedev said in a post on VK. “Seemed to hurt, too. It looks extremely humiliating.”

Sam Bankman-Fried, the former chief executive officer of crypto exchange FTX, has denied committing fraud.

The man once hailed as a legendary figure in the crypto industry told The New York Times he had had a "bad month" and had almost no money left.

French President Emmanuel Macron has arrived in Washington to discuss the unfolding trade row between the US and the EU over Joe Biden's protectionist Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). It's Macron's first visit to the US after the submarine deal debacle that sidelined Paris and cost the French a lucrative defense contract.

Macron's official visit to Washington will last from November 30 to December 2 with the French press insisting that the time has come to turn the page on the 2021 Franco-Australian submarine affair. 

BY EKATERINA BLINOVA

Everywhere in the world, we observe a multiplicity of media, but no pluralism among them. All refer to the same sources which convey the same vision of the facts. However, we all know that if the facts exist in a unique way, the way we perceive them is multiple. Already in the 80’s, UNESCO had highlighted "information imperialism"; this way of imposing a single perception and denying all the others. Today, this domination is manifested with the News Checkers. The only way to free ourselves from this system is not to create new media, but new news agencies.

Only the plurality of information can prevent war

by Thierry Meyssan

Chechens, Buryats and others who are “of Russia but are not of the Russian tradition” are acting with “cruelty” in Ukraine, the head of the Roman Catholic Church told the Jesuit magazine America in an interview published on Monday. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said such words go beyond mere Russophobia.

Ukraine’s people are being “martyred,” Pope Francis said in the interview, conducted last week at the Vatican. “Generally, the cruelest are perhaps those who are of Russia but are not of the Russian tradition, such as the Chechens, the Buryati [sic] and so on. Certainly, the one who invades is the Russian state. This is very clear.”

Morrison’s self-appointment to six portfolios says a lot about his contempt for the quality and integrity of decision making under his government. The response by PM&C officers, who were in the know, also raises questions about how adequately they exercised their responsibility for good government.

The report by former High Court Judge, Virginia Bell, into Morrison’s self-appointment to administer six departments was released last Friday and was immediately headline news.

By Michael Keating

A key feature of these appointments was that they were made in secret, not disclosed to the parliament or the public, and in most cases even the responsible minister was not informed.

In history books as well as in politics every story is shaped by where one chooses to begin the tale. The current fighting in Ukraine, which many observers believe to already be what might be considered the opening phase of World War 3, is just such a development. Did the seeds of conflict arise subsequent to Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s consent to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 after having received a commitment from the United States and its allies not to advance the West’s military alliance NATO into Eastern Europe? That was a pledge that was quickly ignored by President Bill Clinton, who intervened militarily in the former Yugoslavia before adding new NATO members from amidst the ruins of the Warsaw Pact.

Revealed: US Military Bought Mass Monitoring Tool That Includes Internet Browsing, Email Data

The “Augury” platform includes highly sensitive network data that Team Cymru, a private company, is selling to the military. “It’s everything. There’s nothing else to capture except the smell of electricity,” one cybersecurity expert said.

By Joseph Cox

Should the Dutch Court decision on the downing of Malaysian airliner MH 17 set a precedent for the trial of weapons suppliers? 

On November 17, the District Court of The Hague found Igor Girkin, Sergey Dubinskiy and Leonid Kharchenko, guilty of contributing to the downing of Malaysian Airways flight MH17 and the murder of all 298 individuals on board. 

By Paul Malone

The three were found to have helped arrange the deployment and transport into Ukraine of the Russian BUK missile system that was used to shoot down the plane, though they were not the ones who physically pulled the trigger.

A sentence of life imprisonment was imposed on the three men.  

A different election, but a familiar result.

Despite grand predictions of a Labor retreat, the government has maintained a strong majority in the Victorian parliament.

Questions of integrity and the premier's popularity dominated the hostile campaign period, but Labor stuck to its policy guns — it went directly to voters and worried less about the media.

There was a swing against the government – 3.5 per cent (two-party preferred) across the state – but the heaviest backlash was in Melbourne's northern and western outer suburbs, where Labor suffered a 6.7 per cent swing.

Oft described as Labor's heartland, the party must now address why voters in these suburbs have turned away.

Jens Stoltenberg IS A DANGEROUS MAN. HE IS AN IDIOT WITH A MINUSCULE BRAIN IN CHARGE OF A VICIOUSLY BIG APPARATUS OF WAR. Jens Stoltenberg SHOULD GO (BE FLUSHED). NATO IS A FASCIST ORGANISATION. Jens Stoltenberg IS A FASCIST WHO BELIEVES IN HIS RIGHT TO BE STUPID AND DANGEROUSLY AGGRESSIVE.

UNFORTUNATELY, IT IS DIFFICULT TO MAKE PEOPLE SUCH AS HIM SEE THE DISASTERS THAT THEIR STUPID POSITION ON ISSUES ARE ENGENDERING — UNLESS HE DOES IT PURPOSEFULLY TO LAUNCH WW3 AND BE BUSILY IN CHARGE OF THE BIGGEST DISASTER OF THEM ALL.

Europeans are about to face numerous hardships due to the Ukraine conflict, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told Germany’s Welt an Sonntag newspaper on Sunday.

Bye-bye, Kiev, hello Cote d’Azur: As Westerners send aid, here’s how Ukraine’s corrupt elites are profiting from the conflict

Officials and oligarchs have diverted much of the financial support sent to Kiev

There isn’t a Russian over the age of forty-five – 40 million people — who doesn’t know by heart Vladimir Lenin’s report on the work of the Council of People’s Commissars of December 22, 1920.