Hunt for machete killers amid calls for immediate ban
A political fight is brewing over speeding up an Australian-first machete ban after another slaying involving the deadly weapon.
The Victorian government will move laws in state parliament this week to ban the sale and possession of machetes from September 1 to combat their rising use.
The proposed ban came too late for a 24-year-old man, who was stabbed to death on Friday night by a machete-wielding group near the Marriott Waters Shopping Centre in Melbourne's southeast
The victim from Clyde was in a Lyndhurst car park when he was ambushed by up to 10 men, with some carrying machetes.
He was rushed to hospital, where he later died.
The man was the fourth person to perish in a machete-related murder in Victoria over the past six months.
His killers remain on the run.
The state opposition has seized on the brutal murder, declaring it will move to amend the government's legislation to make the machete ban immediate.
Victorians could not wait another six months for the weapons to be outlawed as there would be more home invasions, carjackings and murders in that time, Opposition Leader Brad Battin said.
"We need to make sure that we don't see the murder that we saw on Friday night again with machetes on our streets," he told reporters on Sunday.
"We need to make sure that families aren't waking up and seeing young offenders in their house with machetes."
Victorian minister Harriet Shing said the Lyndhurst attack was devastating and machetes would have no place on the streets under the ban, although there would be limited exemptions for hunting and agriculture.
She indicated the state government was not considering bringing forward the ban or accompanying amnesty period, which would run from September 1 to November 30.
"When the UK introduced this ban it took them around 18 months. We intend to do that ban in six months," Ms Shing said.
"I'm looking forward to receiving confirmation from the leader of the opposition that he would support these provisions when they come before the parliament this week."
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Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
China demonstrates coast guard capability to Pacific nations, step towards high seas patrols
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Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Why Is Trump Trying to Fire This Museum Director?
DONALD TRUMP'S ANNOUNCEMENT in a May 30 Truth Social post that he had fired the director of the National Portrait Gallery, Kim Sajet, on the grounds of supposed partisanship and commitment to 'DEI'—diversity, equity, and inclusion—has been the latest salvo in his fight to remake America's elite cultural institutions. But this time, the attack has foundered, as Trump lacks the legal authority to dismiss Sajet or hire her replacement—although you can bet that administration lawyers are looking for legal theories to legitimize Trump's action, or applying pressure on those actually empowered to fire her So far, Sajet, a 60-year-old Dutch art historian with a long career in American and Australian art museums who became the National Portrait Gallery's first female director in 2013, is reportedly still at her desk. The gallery's website still lists her as director, and its press releases give no inkling of any turmoil at the museum. The Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, of which the gallery is a part—and to which the task of hiring its directors is by law reserved—held an emergency meeting this past Monday to discuss the situation; one of its four regular annual in-person meetings is scheduled for Monday of next week. For now, everyone at the Smithsonian and at the National Portrait Gallery is maintaining a media silence. (Queries from The Bulwark have gone unanswered.) While the Smithsonian was created by Congress, gets two-thirds of its funding from the federal government, and has such a close relationship with the government that it enjoys certain kinds of legal special treatment, it is not an executive branch agency. (The seventeen-person Board of Regents always includes, by law, several members of Congress, the vice president, and the chief justice of the United States, who by tradition is usually elected chancellor of the Smithsonian.) As is inevitable in a museum as large as the Smithsonian and covering the subjects that it does, it has faced political controversies and pressures through the years. However, as Philip Kennicott points out, if Trump succeeds in ousting Sajet, this would drastically change the institution's status: all of the content and personnel decisions in its nineteen museums—seventeen in Washington, D.C. and two in New York—would fall directly under White House control. But leaving aside the issue of legal authority, there's also the question of Kulturkampf: What's really driving Trump's 'war on woke' in cultural institutions and what is it meant to accomplish? Right-wing critics have portrayed Sajet as an ideologue who, according to New Criterion executive editor James Panero, has 'shown contempt for the National Portrait Gallery's collection' and focused on 'politicized exhibitions.' The White House, meanwhile, has been touting a list of seventeen alleged transgressions by Sajet, from donations to Democratic politicians to past comments in favor of broader racial and cultural representation in art. But while Sajet's public statements and her stewardship of the gallery certainly suggest she shares the progressive sensibilities that tend to be standard in the art world, they also show that she is very far from being a militant ideologue or hostile to the gallery's collection. Are some of her choices and policies open to reasonable criticism? Of course. But much of the right-wing criticism directed at Sajet is far more ideological and intolerant than any of the offenses imputed to her—particularly considering that those offenses include an entirely accurate label for a portrait of Donald Trump. Share LET'S START WITH THAT LABEL, which various sources quote as follows: Impeached twice, on charges of abuse of power and incitement of insurrection after supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, he was acquitted by the Senate in both trials. After losing to Joe Biden in 2020, Trump mounted a historic comeback in the 2024 election. He is the only president aside from Grover Cleveland (1837–1908) to have won a nonconsecutive second term. The White House apparently thinks this text exposes the blatant hypocrisy of Sajet's statement that 'we try very much not to editorialize' and that the labels in the gallery's American Presidents permanent exhibition should be based on 'historical fact,' not the 'curator's opinion.' But where's the lie? The above quote is solidly based on historical fact. Moreover, it's also not the entirety of the label, which The Guardian has described as 'delicately crafted.' The supposedly incendiary part is preceded by a remarkably—you could even say, undeservedly—positive writeup: After a long career in business and television, Donald J. Trump overcame a crowded primary field to win the Republican Party's nomination and the 2016 election. His campaign slogan, 'Make America Great Again' (MAGA), has come to signify his supporters and his political agenda. During his first term, Trump appointed a record number of federal judges, including three Supreme Court justices. He brokered a series of agreements between Israel and several Arab nations, focused on immigration policy, and reduced government regulations. He also promoted the development of COVID-19 vaccines while making economic prosperity a key priority. If anything, I'd say the gallery was bending over backwards not to editorialize, with the effect of making Trump seem far more normal than he is. (Even a purely factual summary could have been far worse: There's no mention, for instance, of the fact that Trump is the first U.S. president to have been convicted of a felony or found civilly liable for sexual assault.) For what it's worth, the National Portrait Gallery label for Bill Clinton also acknowledges his impeachment for denying his sexual relationship with an intern while under oath. One could quibble with some of the other labels—read them for yourself—but overall, they simply don't show the blatant bias Sajet's detractors claim. Keep up with all our coverage of Trump's attacks on cultural institutions and universities—join Bulwark+ today: What about Sajet's supposed excessive commitment to diversity? She has drawn fire for a policy requiring, in her own words, that '50 percent of all the funds we would spend should go to a minority subject or artist,' a definition that apparently includes women. While such decisions don't constitute illegal discrimination, quotas are always counterproductive. Sajet has made no secret of her commitment to countering the image of the National Portrait Gallery as a showcase for 'the wealthy, the pale and the male.' But while this phrase may have fit the gallery's early years—of the 161 portrait subjects in its 1968 opening exhibition, all but eight were men and all but eight were white—it had already come a long way from those stodgy beginnings well before Sajet's tenure. Its 2007–08 exhibitions included four eighteenth-century portraits of Native American leaders, twentieth-century photographs of notable American women, and a tribute to hip-hop. Did Sajet's efforts to amount an overcorrection? Many of her 'diverse' projects would raise no eyebrows except in the truly fetid corners of far-right Twitter: for instance, the 2020 'Votes for Women' exhibition on the suffrage movement, or the 2019–20 tribute to black singer and civil rights icon Marian Anderson. Others sound ill-conceived: for instance, much of the 2015–22 series of social justice-focused performance art events, Identify, seems heavy-handed or gimmicky. (That said: we're talking about a total of eleven events spread out over seven years.) One may also deplore lapses into grating left-coded academic or activist jargon of the sort that refers to people from traditionally disenfranchised groups as 'bodies.' On the other hand, some of the attacks on Sajet either attribute a nefarious radicalism to even the most moderate acknowledgments of the darker aspects of American history (e.g., her remark at the 2018 Atlantic festival that 'the 'portrait of America' has never been only about meritocracy but also social access, racial inequality, gender difference, religious preference and political power') or plainly misrepresent the content at the gallery. Thus, the New Criterion's Panero claims that the 2018–19 exhibition Unseen, featuring work by two artists critiquing the treatment (or exclusion) of race in traditional American portraiture, 'depict[s] the symbolic destruction of historical portraits in the permanent collection' and thus demonstrates Sajet's scorn for the museum's historical fare. Unseen was certainly a politically charged exhibition, although some of its messages—e.g., subverting mythologized or idealized notions of Thomas Jefferson or Christopher Columbus—were arguably pretty cliché by 2019. But the painting by Titus Kaphar in which a curtain with a famous Jefferson portrait is pulled back to reveal an image of a presumably enslaved black woman is actually quite striking, and it doesn't depict the 'destruction' of anything. (If Panero is referring to a partly sliced-up image of Andrew Jackson—another work by Kaphar—that image recreates a portrait installed in the Oval Office during Trump's first term, apparently not a painting in the National Portrait Gallery collection.) Other parts of the exhibition juxtaposed busts and life masks of people from American and European elites with busts of African Americans and Native Americans in a way that conveyed equal humanity, not destruction. Share More importantly: One doesn't have to like Unseen (which was underwritten by private foundation grants). But to suggest that it did not deserve a place in the National Portrait Gallery smacks of—say it with me—cancel culture. The backlash would be understandable if Sajet really had declared war on the gallery's regular collection and filled most of the available space with 'subversive' and activist progressive art. She has not. A look at current and past exhibitions under Sajet's tenure shows such subjects as antebellum portraits of West Point cadets; 'namesakes' of Washington, D.C. streets and avenues; Abraham Lincoln's contemporaries; early daguerreotype photos; charcoal portraits by John Singer Sargent; and tributes to the lives and careers of such varied American figures as Will Rogers, Sylvia Plath, Arnold Palmer, Nancy Reagan, Babe Ruth, John McCain, and Tom Wolfe. The ongoing exhibition Out of Many: Portraits from 1600 to 1900 still offers a reassuringly old-fashioned gallery of painting, busts, and nineteenth-century photographs of men and women as varied as Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Louisa May Alcott, Julia Ward Howe, and Thomas Edison—along with lesser-known but fascinating figures such as eighteenth-century revolutionary gazetteer Anne Catherine Hoof Green and nineteenth-century American-British black actor and playwright Ira Aldridge. There's also a four-year loan, running from 2023 to 2027, of a life-size 1865 painting of Abraham Lincoln by W.F.K. Travers. When the installation was announced, Sajet spoke enthusiastically of 'reunit[ing] the Travers painting with Gilbert Stuart's Lansdowne portrait of George Washington' with which it was displayed at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. In other words, the gallery's traditional content is still very much alive, well, and treated with respect and affection, not contempt. And if one may quibble with some of its more political content in recent years, some of the charges levied against Sajet by the right are far more blatantly and ham-fistedly political—for instance, the complaint about the gallery's display of Planned Parenthood's founder Margaret Sanger. Some of Sanger's views, such as support for the sterilization of people with mental disabilities, are today rightly considered repugnant, but she was a complex and important figure in American history. Last but not least: Also on the White House's list of seventeen supposed offenses Sajet has committed is 'a social media post praising Anthony Fauci,' honored at the National Portrait Gallery in 2022. Join now WE STILL DON'T KNOW EXACTLY WHY Trump decided to sack Sajet. His Truth Social post referred to acting 'upon the request and recommendation of many people.' Sajet's name may have been the first suggested for the chopping block by Lindsey Halligan, Trump's former defense attorney whom he has made a special assistant tasked with sniffing out 'improper ideology' in the Smithsonian. Sajet may have been in the sights of right-wing militants who saw her a symbol of the pervasive 'woke' dominance in cultural institutions, a dominance many on the right see as so insidious that it must be broken up by government muscle. It's also entirely possible that the real issue was just the label on the Trump portrait—which would be very much in line with Trump's ego-obsessed, vindictive, petty narcissism. As with the rest of Trump's self-serving anti-DEI crusade, looking for valid points in the charges leveled against Sajet is irrelevant: The real point is the power grab. Which is why, even if progressive culture can produce its own variants of conformity, everyone who values artistic freedom should be standing with Kim Sajet right now—and hoping that the gallery won't join the ranks of institutions that have caved to Trump. Otherwise, we may end up with a National Portrait Gallery where the text label that comes with Trump's portrait will simply say, 'GREATEST PRESIDENT EVER.' Zip this article to a friend or zip it up onto social media: Share
Newsweek
3 hours ago
- Newsweek
World Map Shows Countries That Owe China Money
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. Once the world's largest financier, China has in recent years become its top debt collector as grace periods expire on billions of dollars in loans issued to the global south. This year, a record $22 billion in debt to China is due from 75 of the world's poorest countries, according to a recent report from the Australian think tank the Lowy Institute. A Newsweek map based on World Bank data charts the external debts owed to China by more than 100 countries. Newsweek has contacted the Chinese Foreign Ministry for comment by email. Why It Matters China's lending spree peaked in the 2010s, generating more than $1 trillion in obligations tied to infrastructure projects under President Xi Jinping's flagship Belt and Road Initiative. U.S. officials have blasted the initiative as "debt trap diplomacy"—leveraging loans to gain control of critical infrastructure. China rejects this, saying its overseas lending operates on mutually beneficial terms. But as repayments mount, the burden will strain developing economies and divert resources from priorities such as health care, education and poverty reduction, the Lowy Institute wrote. What To Know China accounted for about 5 percent, or $441.8 billion, of the $8.8 trillion in public external debt owed by all low- and middle-income countries, according to data from the World Bank's 2024 report on International Debt Statistics. The figures cover the external debt stocks of public and publicly guaranteed debt to China, alongside countries' total external debt stocks as of the end of 2023. In absolute terms, Pakistan tops the list of Chinese debtors, owing $22.6 billion—almost a sixth of its $130.8 billion external debt. Argentina follows with $21.2 billion of its $266.2 billion external debt, and Angola owes Beijing $17.9 billion of its $57 billion external debt. When measured by the share of total debt owed to China, Djibouti is the most exposed, with more than 40 percent of its $3.4 billion external debt tied to Chinese lenders. In Laos, Chinese loans make up 30 percent of its $20.3 billion debt burden. Zambia follows with about 27 percent of its $29 billion debt owed to China. An October 2017 photo showing the development of Gwadar Port, operated by Chinese state-owned China Overseas Port Holding Company, in southwestern Pakistan. An October 2017 photo showing the development of Gwadar Port, operated by Chinese state-owned China Overseas Port Holding Company, in southwestern Pakistan. Kyodo News via AP What People Are Saying Riley Duke, a research fellow for the Lowy Institute, wrote in his May report: "China is grappling with a dilemma of its own making: it faces growing diplomatic pressure to restructure unsustainable debt, and mounting domestic pressure to recover outstanding debts, particularly from its quasi-commercial institutions." Mao Ning, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, told reporters on May 27: "I can tell you that China's cooperation on investment and financing with developing countries follows international practice, market principles, and the principle of debt sustainability." What Happens Next China is under growing international pressure to work with debt-strapped nations on restructuring their obligations. This could give the West a chance to regain some influence lost to China in the developing world, Duke wrote. Yet Washington may struggle to seize the moment, as the Trump administration scales back international engagement and U.S. soft power—pulling out of the World Health Organization, slashing the United States Agency for International Development's budget and planning deep cuts to the State Department.
