Potts Point Avenue of Trees

 

Marrickville Trees

 

Vale Susan Ryan

Ms Ryan was elected to the Senate in 1975 as one of the first representatives for the ACT after it was granted two seats in the Senate.

She remained in Parliament for 12 years before retiring in 1987.

In 2011 she was appointed Australia's first age discrimination commissioner, later also serving as disability discrimination commissioner.

Former prime minister Paul Keating described her death as great loss and lauded her work as education minister in the Bob Hawke government.

"Her great achievement was to lift Year 12 retention rates in schools, which was an abysmal three in 10 when she took office in 1983, to end at nine in 10 in 1996," he said in a statement.

"This revolutionised education in Australia, most particularly for girls, who had averaged even fewer than three in 10 at year 12 in 1983."

"Susan Ryan was an indefatigable progressive across a veritable field of issues and ideas.

She never minded the heat in the kitchen. Revelled in it, in fact."

"Susan Ryan will be remembered as someone who sought to make our country bigger and more open to every citizen. She leaves a legacy that will endure."

           Susan Ryan and Bob Hawk

“Trump taxes show chronic losses and years of tax avoidance,”

Donald Trump, a self-proclaimed billionaire, paid only $750 in federal income taxes in the year he was elected US president, according to a stunning New York Times investigation that could shake up the presidential election.

“Trump taxes show chronic losses and years of tax avoidance,” was the banner headline on the paper’s website on Sunday. The president’s tax returns have long been the holy grail of American political reporting.

The president “paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency”, the paper reported, adding that “in his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.

“He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years – largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.”

In all, the paper said, Trump paid no federal income taxes in 11 of 18 years its reporters examined. Many of his businesses, including his golf courses, report significant financial losses – which have helped him to lower his taxes.

The Times also said the documents it had obtained “comprise information that Mr Trump has disclosed to the IRS, not the findings of an independent financial examination. They report that Mr Trump owns hundreds of millions of dollars in valuable assets, but they do not reveal his true wealth. Nor do they reveal any previously unreported connections to Russia.”

The paper said it would not publish the documents, in order to protect its source.

At a White House press briefing on Sunday, Trump made wild allegations about plots against him and about Biden, who he will debate for the first time on Tuesday. Eventually, he dismissed the Times report as “totally fake news”.

He said: “We went through the same stories, you could have asked me the same questions four years ago, I had to litigate this and talk about it.

“Totally fake news, no. Actually I paid tax. And you’ll see that as soon as my tax returns – it’s under audit, they’ve been under audit for a long time. The [Internal Revenue Service] does not treat me well … they treat me very badly. You have people in the IRS – they treat me very badly.”

The president added: “The New York Times tried it, the same thing, they want to create a little bit of a story. They’re doing anything they can. That’s the least of it. The stories that I read are so fake, they’re so phony.”

Pressed on why a billionaire only paid a few hundred dollars in the year he won the presidency, Trump insisted: “First of all I paid a lot, and I paid a lot of state income taxes too. The New York state charges a lot and I paid a lot of money in state. It’ll all be revealed. It’s going to come out but after the audit.”

The revelations threaten to damage Trump’s repeated claim to be a successful businessman and therefore a capable steward of the US economy.

The Times also said he has used “questionable measures” to reduce his tax bill. He faced a possible hit of “more than $100m” if he lost “a decade-long audit battle with the IRS over the legitimacy of a $72.9m tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses”.

It promised more stories in the coming weeks, adding: “The tax returns that Mr Trump has long fought to keep private tell a story fundamentally different from the one he has sold to the American public.”

Trump will face Joe Biden at the polls on 3 November. He has long resisted demands by political opponents and the media to release decades of tax information. He is the first president since the 1970s to keep his tax returns concealed.

Attenbororouh joins Instagram

 

Sir David Attenborough has signed up to Instagram for the first time to help spread his environmental message.

"I am making this move... because, as we all know, the world is in trouble," he said in his first video message on the social media platform.

"Continents are on fire. Glaciers are melting. Coral reefs are dying... The list goes on and on," he continued.

Within an hour of his first post, he had more than 200,000 followers, and by 16:15 BST he had 1.2m followers.

"Saving our planet is now a communications challenge," the veteran broadcaster said.

Tennis player Sir Andy Murray and body coach Joe Wicks were among those to post welcome messages.

Dont Extradite Assange ---- Journalism is nor a crime

 

Digital transformation made easy

Digital transformation made easy

The company’s head of operations, Chuthan Kanagasundaram says it was necessary to give customers a mobile-friendly option to recharge their phone plan without needing to venture outside of their homes.

Determined to make it as easy as possible, Lebara Mobile set out to add new digital payment options that were seamless on mobile. This included adding PayPal both as a payment option and also as the platform managing all payments within the app. This change in payment platform led to an improved online payment experience for Lebara’s customers.

“We wanted to simplify the recharge journey to a few clicks and make it easy for customers to pay on the go without the need to visit physical retail stores to recharge. We were also looking for a payment platform that worked well on mobile devices,” he says.

“Now, customers can click on a payment button, set up a payment type and enable a ‘remember my payment’ function to make the process easier each time. The tech upgrade has made the recharge journey possible with just a few clicks,” Mr Kanagasundaram explains.

“Our customers like the fact that there are no lock-in contracts and they have complete freedom and flexibility with Lebara Mobile. But our key priority in recent years has been digital transformation and making it as easy as possible for customers to top up their mobile plan digitally,” he says.

Proof in the results

The decision to future-proof the digital check-out experience elevates Lebara Mobile to one of the success stories of the pandemic.

“It’s no mean feat. Pre-paid mobile is a particularly competitive industry, and there’s the potential for high customer turnover,”Mr Kanagasundaram explains.

“We’ve managed to reduce customer churn during the pandemic due to the digital transformation we have implemented. In fact, the flexibility in payment options resulted in a 35 per cent higher uptake of the app than we had predicted,” he says.

Customers have also flocked to Lebara Mobile to take advantage of data banking, data gifting and the wide variety of low-cost international calls, which has proven to be valuable for customers calling loved ones overseas; particularly this year.

“The fact is that customers are always looking for a service with the best value. For this reason, we knew we needed to provide value as well as have a best-in-class digital experience,” he says.

“Despite the pandemic, it couldn’t have been a better time to launch, and downloads were much higher than we had expected. We know that partnering with PayPal gave customers a streamlined payment experience that reduced their recharge journey to a few clicks,” he says.

PayPal has remained at the forefront od the digital payment revolution for more than 20 years. By leveraging technology to make financial services and commerce more convenient, affordable and secure, the PayPal platform is empowering more than 300 million consumers and merchants in more than 200 markets to join and thrive in the global economy. For more information, visit PayPal.com.

The lit up gate

 

Slavoj Ziek Julian Assange has had his rights stripped away

Julian Assange has had his rights stripped away in a case that should alarm millions, but too few people care because his character has been assassinated. He might have to go to prison before he gets the support he deserves.

There is an old joke from the time of World War I about an exchange of telegrams between the German Army headquarters and the Austrian-Hungarian HQ. From Berlin to Vienna, the message is “The situation on our part of the front is serious, but not catastrophic,” and the reply from Vienna is: “With us, the situation is catastrophic, but not serious.” 

The reply from Vienna seems to offer a model for how we react to crises today, from the Covid-19 pandemic to forest fires on the west coast of the US (and elsewhere): ‘Yeah, we know a catastrophe is pending, media warn us all the time, but somehow we are not ready to take the situation seriously…’ 

There is a similar case that has been dragging on for years: the fate of Julian Assange. It’s a legal and moral catastrophe – just consider how he is being treated in prison, unable to see his children and their mother, unable to communicate regularly with his lawyers, a victim of psychological torture so that his survival itself is under threat. They are killing him softly, as the song goes.

But Britain's arrogant and dismissive government refuses to get off its high horse.

They are holding a man against his will, who has committed no crime. He is only being held at the request of the US government, which has charged him with espionage and conspiracy to commit computer intrusion, better known as hacking.

The truth is, they are embarrassed and furious that the details of their murky dealings in places like Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen were laid bare for the world to see.

At one point, Assange dumped a quarter of million American diplomatic cables online – making every news outlet on the planet aware of the type of dubious conduct the US military and its operatives had been indulging in.

How does this equate to being locked up on the same terms as killers, paedophiles and rapists?

If we close our eyes and change the names of those involved, we could be back in 1981.

Britain's establishment has failed to learn the lessons of criminalising those with opposing political views who make life uncomfortable for them.

US media schtum on Assange’s plight despite 3 years of ‘flamboyant devotion’ to protecting press freedom – Greenwald US media schtum on Assange’s plight despite 3 years of ‘flamboyant devotion’ to protecting press freedom – Greenwald

It's an atrocious state of affairs for a democracy like Britain to not have evolved and progressed.

Bobby Sands was no ordinary criminal – and neither is Julian Assange.

The irony is that the spineless politicians who took both of their freedoms have more to answer for.

In Sands' case, it was the occupation of another country, and discriminating between people based on religion – Catholic or Protestant.

In Assange's case, it's the money-hungry excuses for public servants who sell British arms to countries like Saudi Arabia, UAE and Bahrain to use in illegal foreign wars or against their own people, on top of the litany of unethical military incursions of our own.

Britain has now claimed second spot in the global Covid-19 death toll, and there's no sign of the line of corpses stopping any time soon.

Our prime minister and his cabinet are the ones who should be looking at the inside of a cell, because of the criminal way they've handled Britain's Covid-19 response.

Healthcare workers are being forced to use swimming goggles and paper aprons as protection, and the emergency 4,000-bed hospital (which has treated 54 patients in total) in London is closing due to there not being enough staff available to operate it.

Then there’s the botched order of 17.5 million faulty antibody tests, and the foolish plan to attempt to achieve herd immunity – before panicking and deciding to backtrack and go into lockdown, weeks too late to prevent so many deaths.

The litany of heinous misdemeanours is lengthy.

But what's also clear is how our political leaders bend with the wind; they have no backbone or spine.

How many of the British government have risen up above the parapet and called out what's going on? A shambles. A travesty. A complete failure.

None of them.

Sands and Assange were, and are, composed of better stuff. They stood up for something of importance; they drew a line and refused to back down due to the conviction of their beliefs. Britain should stop demonising them, and instead copy them.

Sands famously said: “Our revenge will be the laughter of our children.”  Thirty-nine years later, we're still waiting to hear it. 

Apple and Pear !!!

It's fourth time lucky for Vincent Namatjira, great-grandson of acclaimed artist Albert Namatjira, who has become the first Indigenous Australian to win the Archibald Prize. More to come.

 

    It's fourth time lucky for Vincent Namatjira, great-grandson of      acclaimed artist Albert Namatjira, who has become the first Indigenous Australian to win the Archibald Prize.

Sen. Bernie Sanders tore into President Donald Trump

Sen. Bernie Sanders tore into President Donald Trump on Thursday, delivering an indictment of the president’s recent comments that doubted the integrity of the November election and portraying him as an imminent threat to democracy.

“It is terribly important that we actually listen to and take seriously what Donald Trump is saying,” Sanders said in an address at George Washington University in Washington.

The Vermont independent then went on to catalog all of Trump’s recent public statements about the election, including several weeks ago when the president claimed that “the only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election” and his repeated jibes about serving more than the two 

Despite Trump’s constant complaints about supposed mass voter fraud in elections, Sanders pointed to several studies — including the conclusion of Trump’s own White House commission on the matter — that have found voter fraud to be exceedingly rare.

He also assailed Trump’s efforts to cast doubt on the legitimacy of mail-in voting ahead of an election that is expected to see unprecedented levels of votes cast by mail because of the coronavirus pandemic. 

Sanders pointed to an interview in which the president appeared to admit that his opposition to including funding for the U.S. Postal Service in a coronavirus relief bill stemmed from his desire to thwart Democratic efforts to expand mail-in voting, and to Trump’s floating a delay in the election over mail-in voting.

He also noted that Trump himself appeared to encourage voter fraud earlier this month when he urged North Carolina voters to attempt to vote twice as a test of mail-in voting systems.

But Sanders pegged a large portion of his speech to more recent events.“Just last night Donald Trump went even further down the path of authoritarianism,” he said, referring to the president’s refusal on Wednesday to commit to a peaceful transfer of power should he lose reelection.

One rare citrus stands out: the exceedingly sour and bitter, yet exquisitely delicious, sanbokan.

When you think of Japanese cooking, chances are you may not think of citrus. But Japan produces some of the most diverse varieties of citrus in the world, and, after salt, the acidic juice from sour citrus is the single most important seasoning in the Japanese pantry. It finds its way into condiments like ponzu marinades and fermented chilli yuzu kosho; it is used to brighten the flavour of almost every dish – including sushi and sashimi – and it is made into an infinite variety of preserves, desserts and drinks.

Today, thanks to its ideal growing conditions, Wakayama remains Japan’s top citrus-producing prefecture. 

Straddling the Earth’s temperate and sub-tropical zones, the region benefits from long, hot summers and winters just cool enough to ripen citrus. And because Wakayama is a peninsula that juts out into the Pacific Ocean, it catches the heavy rainfall caused by the warm Kuroshio Current that flows up from the South Pacific along Japan’s eastern coastline, making the region the wettest semi-tropical area in the world.

Wakayama is Japan’s top fruit-producing prefecture, producing many varieties that form an essential part of Japanese cooking (Credit: Credit: kookookoo/Getty Images)

Wakayama is Japan’s top fruit-producing prefecture, producing hundreds of varieties that form an essential part of Japanese cooking 

As a result, Wakayama is commonly referred to within Japan as “The Fruit Kingdom”. And among the prefecture’s myriad varieties of juicy sweet mandarins, oranges and tangelos – and distinct lemon-like yuzu, lime-looking sudachi, mandarin-esque jabara, grapefruit-sized hassaku and bitter-orange daidai – one rare citrus stands out: the exceedingly sour and bitter, yet exquisitely delicious, sanbokan.

According to legend, it comes from a single tree that grew inside the castle

With its thick peel and unmistakably pronounced nipple, the sanbokan is instantly recognisable. It has a taste that is somewhere between a blood orange and a bitter grapefruit. Scientists have no idea how this unique citrus formed. Most say it’s a variety of orange. Others that it’s related to Japan’s ethereally fragrant yuzu. Some even say it’s a type of lemon. But according to legend, it comes from a single tree that grew inside the castle of the former feudal lords who ruled Wakayama prefecture until 1867.

I first heard about sanbokan from Shigeru Muroi, chef-owner of the Michelin-starred kaiseki restaurant Muroi in Kyoto, who told me that it’s his favourite citrus because, though very tart, it also has a sweet richness. 

He uses it when it’s in season each winter to finish his multi-course meals with a sophisticated, palate-cleansing flourish. Muroi also told me about the sanbokan legend: a samurai allegedly found the fruit growing wild sometime between 1818 and 1829 and brought the tree to the castle. Wakayama’s ruler restricted its cultivation and distribution so only those in the castle could taste it, and this “secret fruit” became part of the bracing diet of the feudal lord of Wakayama and his samurai followers.

Sydney Botanic Gardens

 

The WTO said the US did not provide evidence that its claims of China's unfair technology theft

The World Trade Organization has ruled that tariffs the US imposed on Chinese goods in 2018, triggering a trade war, were "inconsistent" with international trade rules.

The WTO said the US did not provide evidence that its claims of China's unfair technology theft and state aid justified the border taxes.

Chinese officials welcomed the ruling.

But the US said it showed that the WTO was "completely inadequate" to the task of confronting China.

Ambassador Robert Lighthizer, America's top trade negotiator, said the US "must be allowed to defend itself against unfair trade practices".

"This panel report confirms what the Trump Administration has been saying for four years: The WTO is completely inadequate to stop China's harmful technology practices," he said.

"Although the panel did not dispute the extensive evidence submitted by the US of intellectual property theft by China, its decision shows that the WTO provides no remedy for such misconduct."

China’s new idea to rev up growth: Elevators

In the past, Beijing has responded to economic slowdowns by greenlighting multibillion-dollar construction projects to quickly pump money into the economy. The latest idea is much less grandiose than a superhighway or a high-speed rail line.

Elevators will be retrofitted in as many as three million older, walk-up buildings. While elevators may pack a smaller economic punch, they provide a social benefit for a rapidly aging population.

Officials are hoping a national elevator project could help mitigate the economic effects of the pandemic, particularly on blue-collar workers. It could provide jobs to tens of millions of still-unemployed Chinese migrant workers.

Cathy Wilcox

 

The Morning Walk Pyrmont

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