ET TU, GEORGE?
As the NATO summit in Washington properly kicks into gear, the drama around US President Joe Biden’s future appears to be ramping up by the minute.
In an eye-catching op-ed in The New York Times, actor George Clooney, a vocal Democrat supporter and significant fundraiser, called on the 81-year-old to stand aside.
“I love Joe Biden… I consider him a friend, and I believe in him,” Clooney said. “In the last four years, he’s won many of the battles he’s faced. But the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time. None of us can.
“It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fundraiser was not the Joe “big F-ing deal” Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”
Former speaker Nancy Pelosi also attracted considerable attention when she told MSNBC’s Morning Joe show: “It’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run. We’re all encouraging him to make that decision. Because time is running short,” later adding: “I want him to do whatever he decides to do. And that’s the way it is. Whatever he decides, we go with.”
Elsewhere, representative Pat Ryan of New York became the eighth member of Congress to publicly call on Biden to stand down, telling The New York Times Biden should step aside as the party’s presidential nominee “for the good of the country”.
Team Biden also won’t be too happy with the fact ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos, who interviewed Biden just last week, has been caught on camera saying he doesn’t think the president could serve another term.
TMZ has published a video of Stephanopoulos telling a man, who approached him on the street to ask about Biden’s future: “I don’t think he can serve four more years.”
It’s not all doom and gloom for Biden though, new UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer is planning on gifting the 46th American president an Arsenal soccer jersey with the number 46 on the back when the pair meet for the first time at NATO, the Financial Times reports.
STICK TO THE MESSAGE
Labor MPs have told The Australian they thought the social media posts produced in response to the Coalition’s nuclear power plans were “silly” and called for a more serious debate on the future of energy.
However, the broadsheet said Labor MPs have instead been told to focus singularly on the cost of living crisis in their winter campaigning and leave the energy debate to the party leadership.
Senior Liberal sources also told the newspaper they were not expecting to receive much more info on the Coalition’s nuclear proposal until after Parliament’s winter break.
Speaking of the cost of living, the ABC highlights the Australian Bureau of Statistics has recorded a decrease in job mobility for the first time in three years, with commentators blaming interest rates and rising costs. The data also found many Australians worked part-time hours despite wanting to work full time.
The Guardian, meanwhile, reports the NSW government has been criticised for failing to end no-grounds evictions. Abolishing the evictions was pledged by both major parties in last year’s election but has yet to happen.
Those looking for a sporting boost from the news cycle will be disappointed to learn Australia’s Alex de Minaur had to withdraw from his much-anticipated Wimbledon quarter-final against Novak Djokovic at the very last minute due to a “freak” hip injury, the SMH reports.
“I felt a loud crack during the last three points of my match against [Arthur] Fils, and got a scan yesterday, and it confirmed this was the injury, and I was at high risk of making it worse if I was to step on court,” he said. His Olympics hopes are also now in doubt.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE…
A new species of dinosaur which roamed the Isle of Wight more than 120 million years ago has been discovered. The plant-eating Comptonatus chasei was the size of a male bison and weighed as much as an elephant, Sky News reports.
The dinosaur species was named after the late fossil hunter Nick Chase and the cliffs of Compton Bay where he initially made the discovery, The Guardian said. The find contained 149 bones, representing the “most complete new dinosaur found in Britain for 100 years”.
“It leaves me with a mixture of excitement at having been able to deal with such a rare specimen and also a sense of relief,” Dr Jeremy Lockwood from the Natural History Museum said.
“It’s also a great pleasure to name this species after the fossil hunter Nick Chase, who had a phenomenal ability to find dinosaurs.”
The museum said the newest member of the Iguanodon family would likely have roamed in herds, mainly as a defence against carnivores.
Say What?
I am relieved I have told you because now we can revel together in this madness. Assuming you still want to speak to me. (I hope you can forgive me.)
The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA)’s curator Kirsha Kaechele
Kaechele has admitted in a blog post that the museum displayed three fake Picasso paintings for over three years. Kaechele said she created the forgeries to match the colour scheme of the Ladies Lounge at the museum, the ABC reports.
CRIKEY RECAP
On what planet does Labor think Jillian Segal is right for a high-profile government role, particularly one as sensitive as an “envoy for antisemitism”? (The “envoy for Islamophobia” is yet to be announced, but one is promised by the prime minister.)
“Envoys” are stunt roles, made for announcement and little else. But it’s unusual to see someone with Segal’s history handed such a gig.
Facebook and Instagram advertisements promoting AI apps for generating sexual “deepfake” images of people without their consent are still being shown to Australians, despite the issue having been repeatedly raised with Meta.
As the Senate is set to consider a law that criminalises the creation of digitally created sexually explicit content made without an individual’s consent, Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads, is making money from advertisements for apps designed to create exactly that.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton claims Australia is the only country not to use nuclear energy out of the world’s 20 largest economies. This is misleading. Five other nations in the top 20 — Germany, Italy, Turkiye, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia — do not generate nuclear energy. Germany, Italy and Türkiye import very small amounts of electricity generated from nuclear sources, but Indonesia and Saudi Arabia don’t consume any nuclear power.
Australia is the only top 20 economy that doesn’t generate, import or have a plan to do so.
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Crossbow murders suspect Kyle Clifford held after three women killed (The Times) ($)
Israeli military orders the evacuation of Gaza City, an early target of its war with Hamas (AP)
Prominent New Zealand couple targeted in deadly US robbery (BBC)
Shackleton’s wrecked Endurance to get extra protection (The Guardian)
Man with 100 live snakes in his trousers caught at Chinese customs (The Telegraph)
Iraq court sentences a widow of ISIL leader al-Baghdadi to death (Al-Jazeera)
THE COMMENTARIAT
Trump 2025 Is Coming Into View — Thomas B. Edsall (The New York Times): Jack Goldstone, a professor of public policy at George Mason University, was perhaps the most pessimistic of those I contacted: “Democracy in the United States — though few realise it — is already dangerously undermined. Democracy shifts to dictatorship first slowly, then suddenly.”
The forces undermining democracy in America, Goldstone wrote in his email, include declining trust in institutions, the failure of wages to keep pace with the growth in gross domestic product, rising inequality and resentment toward immigration.
“So the basic conditions for weakening democracy have already been building for decades,” in Goldstone’s view, while “the guard rails to protect democracy have eroded as well”.
In 2022, I left court in tears. Standing in Parliament felt like deja vu — Anjali Sharma (SMH): Our journey has been driven by hope, by a belief that current and future generations deserve greater protection in the face of climate change. But it is tempered with the harsh reality of political inertia.
We face a world in which generations to come are faced with climate change increasing in frequency and severity, and we are pleading with our leaders for legislation that addresses this.
