Linkage

The owners of the Corkman hotel site in Carlton will build a replica of the heritage pub they illegally demolished seven years ago.

In 2016, Raman Shaqiri and Stefce Kutlesovski knocked down the pub that had stood on the site since 1854. They had no planning permission or building permit.

The pair bought the Corkman Irish Pub for almost $5 million in 2015 and plans obtained by The Age soon after the demolition showed them considering a 12-storey student housing project on the site.

After public outrage at the brazen demolition, then planning minister Richard Wynne ordered that the pub be immediately rebuilt. But after a drawn-out legal battle, the pair were given an alternative: get a new plan for the site approved by the planning minister or rebuild the heritage facade.

The mainstream, elite media seems especially flummoxed by the new Republican House Speaker, Mike Johnson of Louisiana. Johnson was an obscure back-bencher on Capitol Hill and remains a man of mystery with no apparent bank account or tangible assets. But the extremism of his Christian nationalist views — more radical than anything seen in American history — are no secret. Johnson believes that our country should be ruled by his own brand of religious fundamentalism which posits that the Earth is only 6,000 years old but inspires hateful policies toward the LGBTQ community and fringe opposition to women’s abortion rights.

That danger isn’t conveyed in business-as-usual fluff pieces like the Washington Post’s “House Speaker Mike Johnson’s Louisiana hometown guided by faith and family” article in which neighbors hailed the softer side of a man who was at the center of schemes to block the peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election. Another Post piece questioned whether Democrats could truly make a political boogeyman out of Johnson given “his low profile and quiet tone” — as if Christo-fascism isn’t so bad when delivered in a gentle drawl, from behind oversized dad glasses.

Photographer Andrew Chapman was 20 years old and at photographic college in 1974 when he started an assignment documenting the housing commission flats around Melbourne.

‘Back in those days you could just walk into a block of flats, take the lift up to the top floor and take photographs. It’s hard to believe it was that easy, but they were different times’

Johnson is a perfect avatar for this project of marrying Christian nationalism with Trumpism. He’s soft-spoken in ways that hide his extremism. He’s a folksy fanatic—as Nelson notes: “Even some LGBTQ activists have acknowledged his winning ways, as he undermines their very right to exist. After the prolonged, acrimonious process of selecting a Speaker, his humorous, aw-shucks manner may have come as a relief to his weary colleagues.”

But make no mistake: He is among the most extreme Republicans around. Speaking with Sean Hannity on Fox, Johnson described himself as “a Bible-believing Christian” and said that if you want to understand his politics, “pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.”

In a 2003 article, Johnson wrote an editorial declaring, “States have many legitimate grounds to proscribe [forbid] same-sex deviate sexual intercourse…. Proscriptions against sodomy have deep roots in religion, politics, and law.” He has described abortion as “a Holocaust.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Josh Paul, former director of congressional and public affairs for the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs. Paul recently resigned in protest against the administration’s plans to rush weapons to Israel. ​“A proposal in a legislative request to Congress to waive Congressional notification entirely for FMF-funded Foreign Military Sales or Direct Commercial Contracts is unprecedented in my experience. … Frankly, [it’s] an insult to Congressional oversight prerogatives.”

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“It’s also redundant with existing laws,” Paul says. The White House can unilaterally approve foreign military sales in ​“emergency” situations but must notify Congress and provide a ​“detailed justification.” The Israel waiver does not require any communication with Congress.

“So this doesn’t actually reduce the time, it just reduces the oversight,” Paul says. ​“It removes that mechanism for Congress to actually understand what is being transferred at the time it is being transferred.” Paul adds that the language came from the White House and received ​“pushback” within the executive branch.

Certainly, if you’re a smaller publisher, the likelihood of receiving a demand letter is lower, but if codec licensing goes through Patel’s “inflection point,” it’s going to affect a broad swath. After Apple lost and paid Nokia $2 billion, how many companies of any size would opt to challenge Nokia in court?

What to do? Clearly, you can’t assume that what’s happened in the past will keep happening in the future. In this regard, my initial article provided bad advice.

You should keep your ear to the ground and pay attention to any patent-related lawsuits or agreements. Now might be a good time to consult with a patent attorney to identify your risk and formulate mitigation strategies.

As stated in Patel’s article:

"Whether you’re a patent owner, a product/service provider or an IP services company, the acceleration of video licensing will affect your business. The companies that best prepare for this transition are most likely to avoid significant liabilities and capture a significant share of the value that will flow into the video IP marketplace. The video epoch is entering a new phase. Are you prepared?"

The home secretary claimed streets risked being “taken over” and that without action British cities would see “an explosion of crime, drug taking, and squalor”.

She added that many of those living in tents were “from abroad”. Those who were genuinely homeless would always be supported, she said.

But in a raft of criticism over her remarks, she was accused of “disgraceful” politics and of blaming the most vulnerable for her government’s failings.

Even former Tory MPs condemned her push to fine charities who give tents to the homeless – part of proposals pitched to be included in the King’s Speech on Tuesday.

Britain's two main political parties each made an example this week of an MP brave enough to break ranks and call for an end to the mass slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.

The ruling Conservative party sacked Paul Bristow MP from his government post after he wrote to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak: "A permanent ceasefire would save lives and allow for a continued column of humanitarian aid [to] reach the people who need it the most."

Labour withdrew the whip from Andy McDonald MP, effectively kicking him out of the parliamentary party. McDonald had said at a rally against the killing in Gaza: "We won’t rest until we have justice, until all people, Israelis and Palestinians, between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty.”

This should be a moment of great moral clarity for all of us. 

Netanyahu, who first became prime minister in 1996, has spent his political career nurturing Jewish extremists, including Avigdor Lieberman, Gideon Sa’ar, Naftali Bennett, and Ayelet Shaked. His father, Benzion — who worked as an assistant to the Zionist pioneer Vladimir Jabotinsky, who Benito Mussolini referred to as “a good fascist” — was a leader in the Herut Party that called on the Jewish state to seize all the land of historic Palestine. Many of those who formed the Herut Party carried out terrorist attacks during the 1948 war that established the state of Israel. Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Sidney Hook and other Jewish intellectuals, described the Herut Party in a statement published in The New York Times as a “political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to Nazi and Fascist parties.”

There has always been a strain of Jewish fascist within the Zionist project. Now it has taken control of the Israeli state.

“The left is no longer capable of overcoming the toxic ultra-nationalism that has evolved here,” Zeev Sternhell, a Holocaust survivor and Israel’s foremost authority on fascism, warned in 2018, “the kind whose European strain almost wiped out a majority of the Jewish people.” Sternhell added, “[W]e see not just a growing Israeli fascism but racism akin to Nazism in its early stages.”

Google intended its Web Environment Integrity API, announced on a developer mailing list in May, to serve as a way to limit online fraud and abuse without enabling privacy problems like cross-site tracking or browser fingerprinting.

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To do this, the system would need to check, via attestation, whether the visitor's software and hardware stack met certain criteria and thus was authentic. That's great until it's abused to turn away visitors who have a setup a website owner isn't happy with – such as running a content blocker or video downloader.

Technical types saw this immediately, and became concerned that Google wanted to create a form of digital rights/restriction management (DRM) for the web. One benefit could be that ad fraud might be easier to prevent; but the risk is that the API could be used to limit web freedom, by giving websites or third-parties a say in the browser and software stack used by visitors.

Apple incidentally has already shipped its own attestation scheme called Private Access Tokens, which while it presents some of the same concerns is arguably less worrisome than Google's proposal because Safari's overall share of the web browser market across all devices is far lower than Chrome's.