Australia

Findings surprise Australian researchers, though compatriots score higher on creativity than sheer volume

Who the fuck knew ? :)

Source: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-23/nsw-floods-live-updates-weather-warnings/105326094#live-blog-post-183316

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/35125231

Archived

The European Union is seeking a defence pact with Australia to deepen military co-operation in a move that highlights fears of a sharp increase in global instability.

The EU put the proposal to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in Rome on Sunday in the hope of matching other defence partnerships that have cleared the way for closer intelligence work and joint exercises.

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The move came as Albanese met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and pledged continued Australian support against Russia, including the delivery of Abrams tanks promised last October.

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The EU signed a defence partnership with South Korea in November to set up joint talks on security and intelligence, clear the way for military exercises, respect sea borders and work together on cybersecurity.

While the agreement did not name any adversaries, it focused on risks that have been aired in the past in relation to Russia and China, such as cybersecurity.

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Most small rural towns in Western Australia have a Co-op store.

I'm a bit sketchy on the details but my understanding is that they're not-for-profit's, they charge a mark up on the things they sell, but really just enough to pay wages for employees. Any left over money is distributed to the people who buy things.

Why do these only exist in small towns and why aren't they a thing in larger towns and cities?

It would be amazing to only pay cost plus wages for your groceries.

Sharing a dirty cell with a dozen others, constant sleep deprivation, cells with lights on 24-hours a day; poor hygiene and forced labour. These are some of what prisoners in Chinese jails are subjected to, according to Australian citizen Matthew Radalj, who spent five years at the Beijing No 2 prison – a facility used for international inmates.

Radalj, who is now living outside China, has decided to go public about his experience, and described undergoing and witnessing severe physical punishment, forced labour, food deprivation and psychological torture.

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"I was in really bad shape when I arrived. They beat me for two days straight in the first police station that I was in. I hadn't slept or eaten or had water for 48 hours and then I was forced to sign a big stack of documents," said Radalj of his introduction to imprisonment in China, which began with his arrest on 2 January, 2020.

The former Beijing resident claims he was wrongfully convicted after a fight with shopkeepers at an electronics market, following a dispute over the agreed price to fix a mobile phone screen.

He claims he ended up signing a false confession to robbery, after being told it would be pointless to try to defend his innocence in a system with an almost 100% criminal conviction rate and in the hope that this would reduce the time of his incarceration.

Court documents indicate that this worked at least to some extent, earning him a four-year sentence.

Once in prison, he said he first had to spend many months in a separate detention centre where he was subjected to a more brutal "transition phase".

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During this time prisoners must follow extremely harsh rules in what he described as horrific conditions.

"We were banned from showering or cleaning ourselves, sometimes for months at a time. Even the toilet could be used only at specific allotted times, and they were filthy - waste from the toilets above would constantly drip down on to us."

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The "good behaviour points system" [...] was a way – at least in theory – to reduce your sentence.

Prisoners could obtain a maximum of 100 good behaviour points per month for doing things like studying Communist Party literature, working in the prison factory or snitching on other prisoners. Once 4,200 points were accumulated, they could in theory be used to reduce prison time.

If you do the maths, that would mean a prisoner would have to get maximum points every single month for three-and-half years before this could start to work.

Radalj said that in reality it was used as a means of psychological torture and manipulation.

He claims the guards would deliberately wait till an inmate had almost reached this goal and then penalise them on any one of a huge list of possible infractions which would cancel out points at the crucial time.

These infractions included - but were not limited to - hoarding or sharing food with other prisoners, walking "incorrectly" in the hallway by straying from a line painted on the ground, hanging socks on a bed incorrectly, or even standing too close to the window.

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Former British prisoner Peter Humphrey, who spent two years in detention in Shanghai, said his facility had a similar points calculation and reduction system which was manipulated to control prisoners and block sentence reductions.

"There were cameras everywhere, even three to a cell," he said. "If you crossed a line marked on the ground and were caught by a guard or on camera, you would be punished. The same if you didn't make your bed properly to military standard or didn't place your toothbrush in the right place in the cell.

"There was also group pressure on prisoners with entire cell groups punished if one prisoner did any of these things."

One ex-inmate told the BBC that in his five years in prison, he never once saw the points actually used to mitigate a sentence.

Radalj said that there were a number of prisoners - including himself - who didn't bother with the points system.

So authorities resorted to other means of applying psychological pressure.

These included cutting time off monthly family phone calls or the reduction of other perceived benefits.

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But the most common daily punishment involved the reduction of food.

The BBC has been told by numerous former inmates that the meals at Beijing's No 2 prison were mostly made up of cabbage in dirty water which sometimes also had bits of carrot and, if they were lucky, small slivers of meat.

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To make things worse, they were made to work on a "farm", where they did manage to grow a lot of vegetables, but were never allowed to eat them.

Radalj said the farm was displayed to a visiting justice minister as an example of how impressive prison life was.

But, he said, it was all for show.

"We would be growing tomatoes, potatoes, cabbages and okra and then – at the end of the season – they would push it all into a big hole and bury it," he added.

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Another prisoner said they would occasionally suddenly receive protein, like a chicken leg, to make their diet look better when officials visited the prison.

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"You start to go crazy, whether you like it or not, and that's what solitary is designed to do… So you've got to decide very quickly whether your room is really, really small, or really, really big.

"After four months, you just start talking to yourself all the time. The guards would come by and ask 'Hey, are you okay?'. And you're like, 'why?'. They replied, 'because you're laughing'."

Then, Radalj said, he would respond, in his own mind: "It's none of your business."

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Another feature of Chinese prison life, according to Radalji, was the fake "propaganda" moments officials would stage for Chinese media or visiting officials to paint a rosy picture of conditions there.

He said, at one point, a "computer suite" was set up. "They got everyone together and told us that we'd get our own email address and that we would be able to send emails. They then filmed three Nigerian guys using these computers."

The three prisoners apparently looked confused because the computers were not actually connected to the internet - but the guards had told them to just "pretend".

"Everything was filmed to present a fake image of prisoners with access to computers," Radalj said.

But, he claims, soon after the photo opportunity, the computers were wrapped up in plastic and never touched again.

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Radalj said many of the prisoners had no way of letting their families know they were in jail.

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[After he was released from prison], just before he had boarded the plane in Beijing a policeman who had escorted him to the gate had used Radalj's boarding pass to buy duty free cigarettes for his mates.

"He said don't come back to China. You're banned for 10 years. And I said 'yeah cool. Don't smoke. It's bad for your health'".

The officer laughed.

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"Zoning and planning regulations that limit the supply of new housing increase the price of housing. For instance, Kendall and Tulip (2018) estimate the impact of zoning on housing prices and find that “as of 2016, zoning raised detached house prices 73 per cent above marginal costs in Sydney, 69 per cent in Melbourne, 42 per cent in Brisbane and 54 per cent in Perth”

From

https://crawford.anu.edu.au/sites/default/files/2025-04/Complete%20WP%20Varela%20Breunig%20Smith_2025%20compressed.pdf

An open secret. So, if we progressively change zoning, then a large part of the synthetic component evaporates? Apartments in NSW are a joke with over 53% needing remediation. So the planning laws don't work to create good housing. What are they really for?

Archived

Cyber attacks were the most common form of hybrid threat faced by Australia in the last decade, but economic coercion and foreign interference are not far behind.

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Analysts at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute have been tracking hybrid threats against Australia since March 2016, and between then and February 2025 have tracked 74 discrete activities targeting the country.

Given the growing state of digital connectivity across the globe, cyber security incidents and attacks make up approximately 35 per cent of all hybrid activity. Both private and public sector companies have been targeted by largely PRC-backed hackers, such as Naikon, APT40, APT27 and Aoqin Dragon, as well as critical infrastructure entities.

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“The ASPI research into hybrid threats underscores a key trend observation that we have always expected would occur: nation-state aligned threat actors are prioritising cyber security as the foremost battleground in today’s modern, digital world. Whether it is cyber-espionage or targeting critical infrastructure for sabotage, this type of conflict is no longer relegated to complex stories found in television and movies,” Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, told Defence Connect.

Economic coercion, foreign interference, and narrative & disinformation campaigns all make up about 20-25 per cent each targeted activity, and here again, China is highly active. China is thought to have engaged in efforts to sway debate toward far-right sources during the Voice to Parliament campaign, and its extensive Spamouflage network of fake social media accounts targeted an Australian rare earth mining company in recent years as well.

Journalists and members of the Chinese diaspora in Australia have also been targeted by Chinese influence and harassment campaigns.

China’s efforts to impact the Australian economy include tariffs and bans on Australian produce, trade restrictions, and even consumer boycotts

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“Economic coercion involves actions that go beyond standard trade policy [such as tariffs], including: engaging in targeted boycotts; blocking access to essential resources; and imposing sanctions with the explicit goal of forcing political concessions.”

Military and paramilitary coercion only makes up about 15 per cent of hybrid activity, but as ASPI notes, such activity has increased in the last few years, and, again, China is the main culprit. Only recently, we have had the example of a Chinese naval flotilla performing firing drills in the Tasman Sea and aerial encounters between Chinese and Australian military aircraft in the South China Sea – all just in February 2025 alone.

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Of course, while China is responsible for the bulk of hybrid activity targeting Australia, it is not alone. China is responsible for 69 per cent of such activity, with Russia the next most active nation at 11 per cent of activity, trailed closely by Iran, which makes up fully ten per cent of hybrid threat activity.

Other nations make up four per cent of activity, unidentified hackers responsible for five per cent of threat activity, and ideologically motivated violent extremism is one per cent.

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The full court of the Federal Court in Sydney has dismissed Australian special forces veteran Ben Robert Smith's appeal to have a multi-million-dollar defamation loss overturned.

Mr Roberts-Smith sued in 2023 over a series of articles published five years earlier about allegations of war crimes in Afghanistan, bullying and domestic violence against a woman in Canberra.

In late March, his lawyers began an eleventh-hour bid to add a further ground of appeal by arguing there was a miscarriage of justice in the original trial.

I strongly believe the government needs to be the one telling LGBTQ+ travellers not to go to the US. They have warnings for other countries that don't accept X gender markers on passports, and the US has by all accounts started deporting everyone that tries to enter with one.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/34584517

Archived

Sweden, Australia, Netherlands, Germany and Denmark are the leading countries for per capita solar and wind generation capacity, according to data by the International Solar Energy Society (ISES).

Furthermore, it explains that global solar capacity has been doubling every 3 years, and wind every 6 years, whereas fossil and nuclear capacity and generation have been almost static in recent years.

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Combined global per capita solar and wind capacity is more than double hydro capacity, and seven times larger than nuclear capacity.

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The leading countries for speed of deployment of solar and wind (new Watts per person per year averaged over 2022-24) are Lithuania, Finland, Estonia, Sweden, Netherlands, Australia and Austria (Figure 2). Most of the leading countries are in Europe, along with Australia, Qatar, China and Chile.

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Solar PV capacity has been growing faster than all other electricity generation technologies combined since 2022. Since 2010, when it started publishing the World Energy Outlook, the International Energy Agency has vastly underestimated the growth of solar and other renewable energy technologies.

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Australian writer Yang Hengjun (杨恒均) has written an open letter to Australian PM Anthony Albanese from his prison cell in Beijing

He thanks the Australian government and expresses his love for Australia. He also writes of his dream that the Chinese people "should be free from fear, persecution and poverty."

Dr Yang, a former Chinese government official who migrated to Australia in 1998 and was a prolific pro-democracy blogger and novelist, also included Australia's embrace of multiculturalism and protection of freedoms.

Concerns for Dr Yang's health intensified last year with the revelation the 58-year-old had a large cyst on one of his kidneys.

While diplomatic breakthroughs on other fronts with China, including the release of journalist Cheng Lei and the winding back of effective trade bans, had raised some hopes of progress in Dr Yang's status, government sources warned last year his case was "very different" and there has been little evidence of progress.

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I moved out of the house where these were taken from last week. Nice memory.

Thanks to everybody who responded to my last thread asking how the system works. I went in thinking Australia had Winner Takes All (WTA) or First Past The Post (FPTP) for parliamentary elections of the House of Representatives, but found out it does in fact have preferential voting.

As a European living in a democracy with lower houses / parliaments / houses of representatives that have proportional representation (multiple parties in parliament forcing requiring coalitions) allowing only a single tick per list on the ballot, it's a little strange to see the choice in Australia seemingly come down to two political parties. There are multiple groups here fighting for preferential voting and you guys have it yet look like the UK or the US when considering voting outcomes.

Why doesn't preferential voting not lead to plurality in Australia and more choice? Have there been efforts to change the system in such a way that plurality can be achieved?

Thank you for your insights! This is quite interesting to me.