Global media mogul Rupert Murdoch has waded into Australia’s election race, calling a key ruling party policy unaffordable and drawing accusations from Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd that he was trying to oust the struggling government.
Murdoch, whose News Corp controls about 70 percent of Australia’s newspaper market, questioned in a Twitter message how an ambitious US$34 billion super broadband network being built by Rudd’s Labor Party was affordable in a slowing economy.
“Oz politics! We all like ideal of NBN [National Broadband Network], especially perfect for Foxtel. But first how can it be financed in present situation?” tweeted the Australian-born Murdoch, whose global media empire is now based in the US.
NBN is a plan to provide an Internet connection to every home, but the opposition has promised to spend less on the network and scale back its capability, reflecting tighter financial conditions, with economic growth forecast to slow to 2.5 percent this fiscal year.
Murdoch, who owns 50 percent of pay-TV operator Foxtel, was strongly criticized on the opening day of the election campaign on Monday when his best-selling Daily Telegraph ran a front-page headline “Kick This Mob Out” over a picture of Rudd.
Rudd, who has claimed underdog status ahead of a Sept. 7 general election, told reporters yesterday that there was no doubt Murdoch was determined to engineer an election defeat for the Labor Party after six years in power.
“I think he’s made it fairly clear ... that he doesn’t really like us and would like to give us the old heave-ho,” said Rudd, whose minority government trails the conservative opposition 48 percent to 52 percent in the latest opinion polls.
Rudd said Murdoch’s views on the election campaign largely mirrored those of conservative opposition leader Tony Abbott, who has promised to downsize the planned broadband network.
“Does he sense it represents a commercial challenge to Foxtel, to the major cash-cow for his company, or not?” Rudd asked. “It’s a free country, he’s entitled to those views. I’m sure he sees it with crystal clear clarity all the way from the United States.”
However, Rudd denied his criticism hinted at plans to challenge Murdoch’s domination of Australia’s newspaper market should Labor be returned to power, by changing media laws.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema