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The Age
30-05-2025
- The Age
Giant dolls, an empty theme park and semi-trailers: The tourist trap that's now a lifeline for Russia
What in the World, a free weekly newsletter from our foreign correspondents, is sent every Thursday. Below is an excerpt. Sign up to get the whole newsletter delivered to your inbox. Manzhouli: Visiting the Chinese border town of Manzhouli, on the remote fringe of the country's northeastern Inner Mongolia region, is like stepping into a 'made in China' Russian outpost. On the highway linking the small airport to the city, two enormous Matryoshka nesting dolls tower over the horizon, rising almost absurdly out of nothing but the vast, flat steppe that sweeps across the border into Russia. The dolls are actually hotels and connected to a Russian-themed amusement park featuring Kremlinesque buildings topped with brightly coloured onion domes and spires in a pastiche of Moscow's Red Square. Arriving at night, as my translator and I did earlier this month on a flight from Beijing, is to be treated to a glittering vision of the city, its skyline of Russian gothic and European-style buildings lit by golden lights after sundown each evening. The mystique abruptly ends about 9.30pm, when the town's facade plunges into darkness, as though a city official has pulled the cord on a giant electrical plug. Manzhouli in the harsh light of day is a hustling township on the 4209-kilometre border between China and Russia, near the juncture with Mongolia. Its identity is split between being a Russian-themed tourist trap for Chinese travellers, and its foremost purpose as China's largest land port and economic lifeline to Russia. The best place to witness this stark juxtaposition is in a dusty carpark near the border checkpoint, where dozens of Russian and Belarusian trucks are stationed each day waiting for customs clearance under the gaze of the Matryoshkas looming in the distance.
Sydney Morning Herald
30-05-2025
- Sydney Morning Herald
Giant dolls, an empty theme park and semi-trailers: The tourist trap that's now a lifeline for Russia
What in the World, a free weekly newsletter from our foreign correspondents, is sent every Thursday. Below is an excerpt. Sign up to get the whole newsletter delivered to your inbox. Manzhouli: Visiting the Chinese border town of Manzhouli, on the remote fringe of the country's northeastern Inner Mongolia region, is like stepping into a 'made in China' Russian outpost. On the highway linking the small airport to the city, two enormous Matryoshka nesting dolls tower over the horizon, rising almost absurdly out of nothing but the vast, flat steppe that sweeps across the border into Russia. The dolls are actually hotels and connected to a Russian-themed amusement park featuring Kremlinesque buildings topped with brightly coloured onion domes and spires in a pastiche of Moscow's Red Square. Arriving at night, as my translator and I did earlier this month on a flight from Beijing, is to be treated to a glittering vision of the city, its skyline of Russian gothic and European-style buildings lit by golden lights after sundown each evening. The mystique abruptly ends about 9.30pm, when the town's facade plunges into darkness, as though a city official has pulled the cord on a giant electrical plug. Manzhouli in the harsh light of day is a hustling township on the 4209-kilometre border between China and Russia, near the juncture with Mongolia. Its identity is split between being a Russian-themed tourist trap for Chinese travellers, and its foremost purpose as China's largest land port and economic lifeline to Russia. The best place to witness this stark juxtaposition is in a dusty carpark near the border checkpoint, where dozens of Russian and Belarusian trucks are stationed each day waiting for customs clearance under the gaze of the Matryoshkas looming in the distance.
Sydney Morning Herald
28-05-2025
- Sydney Morning Herald
Australian man Lamar Ahchee arrested in Bali did not know package was drugs: lawyer
Police then followed Ahchee back to his Canggu apartment and made the arrest. A female staff member of one of Ahchee's neighbours witnessed the commotion in an alleyway beside the block of units. Lamar Ahchee's Bali lawyer, Edward Pangkahila. Credit: Amilia Rosa 'I came outside because I was curious – it was so noisy, a ruckus, so many officers,' she said, identifying Ahchee as the centre of the officers' attention after this masthead showed her his photo. 'That man [Ahchee] was trying to run, and the officer chased him. I tried to take a video, but they stopped me. They said 'no video', so I just watched. The officers and that man, he was like five metres from where I was standing. They crowded the alleyway. 'He probably got injured when he tried to run. He was trying to reach the main street. There must have been dozens of officers.' Ahchee could take heart from a similar case involving an English man, Thomas Parker, that concluded on Tuesday afternoon with a sentence of 10 months' imprisonment minus time already served. Parker, who also has Pangkahila as his lawyer, was arrested in Kuta on January 21 after collecting a package that contained more than a kilogram of MDMA on behalf of a person he knew to be a drug dealer, and of whom he was afraid. Investigators in that case dropped the charge that carried the death penalty after determining the package was not directly related to him. '[Ahchee's case] is like Thomas' case,' Pangkahila said. 'I can't speak for the police, but I can speak for my client. [Ahchee] had no idea what was in the package; he never admitted it was his, he never received or was promised payment. It was just a favour. 'My client was very upset. He was so upset he was throwing himself onto the wall and onto the floor … he is stressed because he knows the charges carry the death penalty.' Bali police will now work with prosecutors to complete Ahchee's interrogation and the investigation dossier. Once that is finished, a process that can take no longer than four months, prosecutors will prepare an indictment. Speaking after Parker's case, Pangkahila said even a 10-month sentence was too long and that his client should be free. Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what's making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.
The Age
10-05-2025
- Politics
- The Age
Habeas corpus: Trump ‘actively looking' at suspending centuries-old legal principle of protection
'The courts aren't just at war with the executive branch. The courts are at war, these radical rogue judges, with the legislative branch as well,' he said. 'All of that will inform the choice that the president ultimately makes.' Habeas corpus is a centuries-old legal principle protecting any person – whether they are a citizen or not – from unlawful detention, and is sometimes known as 'the Great Writ'. It literally means 'you should have the body', typically referring to a person physically coming before a judge to review the legality of their incarceration. Loading It has been suspended in the US on several occasions, usually in wartime. More recently, the Supreme Court in 2008 found then president George W. Bush and Congress had unconstitutionally denied the writ of habeas corpus to people deemed enemy combatants and detained at Guantanamo Bay. Miller's suggestion the US is being invaded by illegal immigrants mirrors the legal argument the administration deployed to justify its invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to deport hundreds of people to El Salvador without review by an immigration court. Multiple judges have now blocked the government from deporting people under this law, and the matter will almost certainly be ultimately decided by the Supreme Court. But Trump has grown increasingly frustrated by what he regards as anti-democratic interventions by unelected judges. 'Our Court System is not letting me do the job I was elected to do,' he posted on social media on Wednesday. 'Activist judges must let the Trump administration deport murderers, and other criminals who have come into our Country illegally, WITHOUT DELAY!!!' Rumeysa Ozturk on an apple-picking trip in 2021. Credit: AP Last weekend on NBC's Meet the Press , Trump was asked whether everybody, including non-citizens, was entitled to due process under the law, as required by the Constitution. 'I don't know,' he said. 'I'm not a lawyer. It might say that, but if you're talking about that, then we'd have to have a million or 2 million or 3 million trials.' Loading Asked if he was required to uphold the Constitution, Trump said: 'I don't know … I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said.' Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what's making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.
The Age
09-05-2025
- Politics
- The Age
As I cover the world's biggest stories, my mind always returns to that Australian classroom
What in the World, a free weekly newsletter from our foreign correspondents, is sent every Thursday. Below is an excerpt. Sign up to get the whole newsletter delivered to your inbox. Rome: Right now, I'm sitting in a quiet corner of Rome, the Vatican's chimney stack just visible in the distance, waiting for the puff of white smoke that will declare a new pope. It's a moment wrapped in tradition, symbolism and centuries of history – the kind of global story I could have only imagined reporting on. The kind that once lived only in the margins of a high school history textbook, brought to life by a woman named Ms Needham. Three and a bit years ago, I left Australia with a suitcase, a passport and a quiet sense of disbelief. I was to cover Europe's biggest stories – the politics, the protests, the wars and the wonders. I've since stood inside a centuries-old chapel as Elizabeth II was laid to rest, and witnessed the pomp of a king's coronation. I've watched firelit protests engulf Parisian streets, heard air raid sirens in Kyiv and wandered the cobbled corners of Berlin, imagining the wall still looming above. In Krakow, I met survivors of the Holocaust. In London, I stood at the door of 10 Downing Street and watched four prime ministers walk in and out. So often, I was struck by deja vu – that eerie sense I'd been here before, only I hadn't. It was Ms Needham who'd taken me there first. As the world awaited smoke and meaning, I found myself returning to a simpler, more personal question: How lucky am I? And more quietly: Did I do Ms Needham proud? It was she who, from a classroom in Traralgon, made me feel the weight of Robespierre's guillotine and the grit of Mao's Long March. She made the horrors of Auschwitz more than just a name in a book, and the bravery of people such as John Monash something I could understand as a teenager. She turned faraway places and long-ago people into something intimate. Real. Not long ago, I came across a thought in a book from Greek philosopher Nikos Kazantzakis that stopped me cold: 'True teachers are those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross; then, having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create bridges of their own.'
