| ### "Be courteous to all, but intimate with few; and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence", George Washington. ### |
| ### "Be courteous to all, but intimate with few; and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence", George Washington. ### |
AAP Image/Lukas Coch
Late into the night on Nov. 28, the Australian Senate passed a "world first" law that bans under 16-year-old children from accessing social media.
The new law, once in effect, means young Australians will be barred from accessing platforms like TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, and X—age verification technology will be implemented by the Big Tech firms to ensure compliance.
Certain social media programs will be allowed, including YouTube and educational apps.
The centre-left Labor government achieved passage of the Bill with support from the centre-right Liberal-National Coalition amid a blitz of Bills on the last sitting day of Parliament in 2024.
"I think parents need help with this, and this is why I think there is a case for government intervention," he said.
"Partly because parents have to grapple with the ubiquity of phones and electronic devices, and the crude measure that some suggest—which is take away your kid's phone, or give them a non-smartphone without adding any apps—I don't think is particularly realistic," Sharma said.
"I think in today's era we expect our children to be able to be contacted and be contactable, and this is especially true in situations in many households today where both parents are working, and they are often not home when the children might be home or coming home from school."
Sharma added he did not discount that there were some benefits to children using social media, providing a way for them to stay in touch and stay connected.
"We all saw this during the COVID pandemic, when our children weren't going to school and they stayed in touch through messaging platforms, through social media platforms, and it allows them to build and maintain a social circle," he said.
"I also appreciate that the people who are isolated geographically or socially or otherwise, it provides them a way to build a community which might not be available to them in the real world.
"It's a bill to appease [media mogul] Rupert Murdoch," he claimed.
Shoebridge also described the short Senate inquiry into the legislation as a "sham" and said the evidence against a social media ban was "overwhelming."
Labor Minister Jenny McAllister noted the law would not come into force for a year, emphasising that keeping "Australians safe online" was a top priority of the government.
Social media platforms will also need to roll out technology to verify the minimum age of users.
"The Bill does not dictate how platforms must comply with the minimum age obligation," the explanatory memorandum states."However, it is expected that at a minimum, the obligation will require platforms to implement some form of age assurance as a means of identifying whether a prospective or existing account holder is an Australian child under the age of 16 years."
"By design, the Bill ignores the realities of the wider technology ecosystem and goes as far as to exclude entire industries and parts of society, including parents and caregivers, all of whom should be motivated and supported to work together to keep young Australians safe online."
Billionaire Elon Musk also weighed into the debate on the social media ban personally on Nov. 21, responding to a post from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese touting the ban.
Catholic school parents in Western Australia also argued that social media could impact children's behaviour.
"Parents are worried that children and young people are becoming desensitised to some of the content that they are seeing, and that it is leading to a distorted understanding of some serious topics," the advocacy group told the inquiry.
| ### "Be courteous to all, but intimate with few; and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence", George Washington. ### |
The last government spent £50m on Rwanda deportation flights that never took off, new figures reveal.
This included the cost of securing the flights, escorts to force migrants onto the planes and preparing and securing the airfields, Home Office documents show.
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Spending on the asylum scheme overall reached £715m before it was scrapped by Labour after the general election in July.
Other costs outlined include £290m paid to Rwanda's government, £95m on detention and reception centres and £280m on IT, staffing and legal fees.
The figures were published as Home Secretary Yvette Cooper gave a statement on migration in the House of Commons.
She said 84,000 people made small boat journeys from the day the Rwanda deal was signed to the day it was axed.
"This so-called deterrent did not result in a single deportation or stop a single boat crossing the Channel," she said.
"For the British taxpayer, it was a grotesque waste of money."
Initially launched by Boris Johnson in April 2022, the Rwanda plan was designed to deport migrants who had come to the UK after crossing the English Channel in a small boat to the landlocked east African country.
Its purpose was to deter further crossings in small boats, but its opponents claimed there was a lack of evidence it would have this effect.
By the time of the general election, and two prime ministers later, the scheme was not operational after facing several legal challenges.
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Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer scrapped it almost immediately upon taking office, saying the money would be diverted into a new Border Security Command aimed at smashing criminal people-smuggling gangs.
More than 20,000 people have crossed the Channel in small boats since his election win, figures published on Sunday show.
The total for the year is now 33,684, with more crossings since the five months Labour have been in power than the first six months of 2024 when the Conservatives were in government.
However, Labour sources said the 13,574 crossings from January to July were "unprecedented" for that time of year and were a 19% increase on the same period in 2023, 5% higher than 2022 and more than double 2021.
They added that weather played a "significant part" in the high number over the summer.
In her Commons statement, Ms Cooper pledged to "restore order" to the migration system, saying a recent "landmark deal" struck with Iraq will help stem the number of illegal migrants coming to the UK.
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has said an "effective deterrent for illegal migration" - such as the Rwanda plan - are among the ideas her party are considering as they set out a "new approach" on migration.
| ### "Be courteous to all, but intimate with few; and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence", George Washington. ### |
| ### "Be courteous to all, but intimate with few; and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence", George Washington. ### |
Patrice Lumumba, left, first Prime Minister of independent Congo in 1960. The CIA celebrated his death.
PHOTO | Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images
Historian Susan Williams grew up in Zambia. Like other scholars of her generation raised in former settler societies of southern Africa, she empathises with the continent's people.
Williams' widely acknowledged new book, White Malice – The CIA and the Neocolonisation of Africa, adds to her track record, testifying to this engagement. Almost a forensic account, its more than 500 pages (supported by close to 150 pages of sources, references and index) are as readable as a John le Carré novel.
But make no mistake: Williams ruthlessly reveals through factual evidence the unsavoury machinations of the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Africa during the Cold War until the late 1960s. While scholarly analyses of this era have increased, the literature mainly focuses on how geostrategic aspects had an impact on international policy. In contrast, this is the first detailed account disclosing a Western dirty war through detailed quotes from original documents and by those involved.
Published in 2011, her investigative research titled Who Killed Hammarskjöld? The UN, the Cold War and White Supremacy in Africa made history.
The evidence strengthened suspicions that the plane crash that killed the United Nations Secretary General and 15 others on 17/18 September 1961 near Ndola, in the then Northern Rhodesia, was no accident. As continuously updated by the Westminster branch of the United Nations Association, the disclosures triggered new investigations by the UN.
In 2016 Williams published Spies in the Congo: The Race for the Ore that Built the Atomic Bomb. The focus was on Shinkolobwe, the world's biggest uranium mine, in the Congolese Katanga province. Of crucial geostrategic importance, in the 1940s it supplied the Manhattan Project, which produced the first atomic bombs, which devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Shinkolobwe remained the main resource in the American nuclear arming of the 1950s.
Williams' new book seems like the third in a trilogy. Its title, White Malice, captures the racist arrogance of power, unscrupulously destabilising and (re-)gaining control over sovereign states as a form of colonialism by other means.
Not by coincidence, the book revisits the circumstances of Hammarskjöld's death and the relevance of Katanga. More room is devoted to a step-by-step account leading to the elimination of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of an independent Congo.
Another major focus is on Ghana since independence in 1957. Documenting the continental role of President Kwame Nkrumah, it explains why and how he was removed from office. His role in promoting pan-Africanism was equated with an anti-Western attitude.
All this is tied together by the interventions by the CIA and its predecessor, the Office for Strategic Services, often in cahoots with the British MI6. The detailed accounts offer insights into the secret operations then. The display of mindsets and their consequences do not require theory or analytical comment. The facts speak for themselves.
Both agencies shared access to the encrypted messages used in confidential communication by Hammarskjöld and other high-ranking UN officials. As quoted by Williams (p. 290), the CIA celebrated this as "the intelligence coup of the century".
The UK and the USA have still not disclosed insider knowledge concerning the deaths of Hammarskjöld and his entourage. Their secret agents were also involved in deliberations to kill Lumumba. Though they weren't directly participating in his abduction, torture and execution in Katanga, it suited their agenda.
Book cover shows a map of Africa with its western parts in a sniper's sights.
Nkrumah was luckier. A state visit to Beijing saved his life, when in his absence the military coup took place. Nelson Mandela was also "spared" by being imprisoned for most of the next 30 years. His arrest in South Africa in 1962 under the Suppression of Communism Act was based on information provided by the CIA.
Williams quotes a high-ranking CIA agent to illustrate the overall Western mindset. He declared in 1957:
Africa has become the real battleground and the next field of the big test of strength – not only for the free world and the communist world but for our own country and our Allies who are colonialist powers.
The strategy included replacing independent nationalist leaders with "big men" – autocrats who based their power on Western support, such as Mobutu Sese Seko. A track record in or commitment to democracy and human rights was not a prerequisite.
In contrast, leaders like Guinea's Sékou Touré were considered enemies. Arguing for a referendum rejecting continued dependency from France, he declared in 1958:
CIA operations were not confined to plots ending in brute force. Some were cultural programmes, unbeknown to many artists and scholars who received CIA sponsorship.
This included stipends to South African writers in exile, such as Es'kia Mphahlele and Nat Nakasa, as well as the sponsoring of cultural festivals and conferences in Africa. Williams (p. 64) quotes the future Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, who after discovering that he had unknowingly received CIA funds declared:
we had been dining, and with relish, with the original of that serpentine incarnation, the Devil himself, romping in our post-colonial Garden of Eden and gorging on the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge.
In a spectacular disclosure Williams presents details of CIA-funded concerts by Louis Armstrong, touring 27 African cities in 11 weeks during late 1960. This included a concert in Elisabethville, the Katanga breakaway province of Congo, at a time when Lumumba's end was near. According to Williams:
Armstrong was basically a Trojan horse for the CIA … He would have been horrified.
The US's obsessive anti-communism, which escalated in the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy, at times took lethal forms when governments or leaders were considered to be obstructing Western interests.
A sense of guilt or remorse remains absent. Mike Pompeo says it all. Then CIA director from January 2017 to April 2018 and Donald Trump's Secretary of State, "celebrated immorality", as Williams drily comments (p. 515). "I was the CIA director," Pompeo boosted in a quoted speech in 2019:
We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.
The story, unlike John le Carré's, is definitely not fiction. CIA operations, at times in collaboration with other Western intelligence agencies, were pursuing a hegemonic agenda with lasting impact.
About the Author: Henning Melber is Extraordinary Professor, in the Department of Political Sciences, University of Pretoria
| ### "Be courteous to all, but intimate with few; and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence", George Washington. ### |
Que la France quitte toute l'Afrique. La France n'apporte aucune valeur ajoutée en Afrique ( Idriss Deby) Les Français sont pauvres, voleurs et corrompus. Pourquoi la France est le seul pays qui se bat éternellement pour rester en Afrique ? Les Français sont corrompus. On a vu récemment 8 ONG françaises financées par le dictateur Kagame qui sont impliquées dans des affaires judiciaires contre Charles Onana. Il y a des médias et journalistes français financés par Kagame. Arrêtez tout cela. Vous contribuez à polariser la société rwandaise en soutenant une ethnie contre une autre. Aces les faux rapports et livres de Mr. Duclert financés par le gouvernement Français, vous avez réécrit l'histoire du Rwanda en faveur d'une ethnie pour vos propres intérêts Vous financez la guerre du dictateur Kagame contre la RDC via UE et Mozambique.
