The memoirs of Australia's most divisive politician since Pauline Hanson are released today, in a book which publishers say will provide a rare behind-the-scenes glimpse into the underbelly of political life in Canberra.
The musings of a former opposition leader who resigned after losing his first major election would normally be of only marginal interest in Australia, but the diaries of ex-Labor Party leader Mark Latham have dominated front pages and airwaves for more than a week.
Major issues such as approval for full privatization of telecoms giant Telstra and Prime Minister John Howard's trip to the UN world summit have been overshadowed by debate over the book's claims.
Latham, 44, was hailed as Labor's saviour heading into a general election last October. But voters emphatically rejected his leadership and handed Howard's conservative government a fourth term in office.
He came to the leadership with an admiration for former Prime Minister Paul Keating, who was renowned for calling his political opponents "scumbags."
Latham adopted similar vitriol in his 13 months as leader, referring to US President George W. Bush as "the most incompetent and dangerous president in living memory" and Howard's government as "a conga line of suckholes."
The former opposition leader turns his guns on his own side, including former colleagues whom he blames for his defeat, in The Latham Diaries.
The Labor Party is derided as a corrupt, irreparably broken, unelectable cesspit, while current Labor leader Kim Beazley is accused of orchestrating a smear campaign of sexual innuendos in his quest to get the top job.
"I wouldn't make him the toilet cleaner at parliament house, let alone the leader of the opposition," Latham told the ABC ahead of his book's publication.
Latham also reveals that his pre-election support for Australia's US alliance was not sincere, calling the pact "the last manifestation of the White Australia mentality" in reference to the country's discriminatory migration policies that were scrapped in the 1960s.
The book has sparked a political furore not seen since right-wing firebrand Pauline Hanson condemned Asian migration and Aboriginal welfare in the 1990s.
Labor campaign strategist Bruce Hawker said the bile and double standards revealed in the book would affect all politicians' standing in the community.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the