Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull yesterday scrapped knights and dames from the nation’s honors system, less than one year after a furore sparked by the award of a knighthood to Britain’s Prince Philip, the husband of Queen Elizabeth II.
Former prime minister Tony Abbott, a staunch monarchist, reintroduced the honors last year, provoking criticism that he was out of touch with public sentiment.
Abbott was ousted by Turnbull in a party coup in September.
The politically disastrous decision to give Prince Philip the nation’s highest honor — Knight of the Order of Australia, on Australia Day, has been cited as the beginning of the end for Abbott.
The decision by Turnbull, a former head of Australia’s republican movement, to scrap the honors might be interpreted as a signal of his willingness to revisit the thorny question of the nation’s relationship with the British monarchy.
“Knights and dames are titles that are really anachronistic, out of date and not appropriate in 2015,” Turnbull told reporters.
Australian Greens Party leader Senator Richard Di Natale welcomed the decision, even as he used it to mock the government.
“It says something about the standard of leadership in this country that installing knights and dames was one of the most significant acts of our former prime minister, and undoing that folly is so far one of the most significant acts of our new one,” he said in a statement.
Others who received the honors were former Australian governor-general Quentin Bryce and Governor-General Peter Cosgrove, former Australian air chief marshal Angus Houston and New South Wales state Governor Marie Bashir, which Turnbull has said they can retain.
Queen Elizabeth is Australia’s largely ceremonial head of state, but has the power to approve the abolition of parliament, which last happened in the controversial 1975 toppling of former Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam’s administration.
Australia’s sometimes strained relationship with the British crown came to a head in a 1999 national referendum, when almost 55 percent of Australians voted against breaking with the monarchy, defeating Turnbull’s republicans.
However, Turnbull’s move into the leadership has buoyed the hopes of republicans eager to revisit the issue in a fresh referendum, despite his ranking of the faltering economy, not the monarchy, as his government’s top priority.
China’s military news agency yesterday warned that Japanese militarism is infiltrating society through series such as Pokemon and Detective Conan, after recent controversies involving events at sensitive sites. In recent days, anime conventions throughout China have reportedly banned participants from dressing as characters from Pokemon or Detective Conan and prohibited sales of related products. China Military Online yesterday posted an article titled “Their schemes — beware the infiltration of Japanese militarism in culture and sports.” The article referenced recent controversies around the popular anime series Pokemon, Detective Conan and My Hero Academia, saying that “the evil influence of Japanese militarism lives on in
DIPLOMATIC THAW: The Canadian prime minister’s China visit and improved Beijing-Ottawa ties raised lawyer Zhang Dongshuo’s hopes for a positive outcome in the retrial China has overturned the death sentence of Canadian Robert Schellenberg, a Canadian official said on Friday, in a possible sign of a diplomatic thaw as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney seeks to boost trade ties with Beijing. Schellenberg’s lawyer, Zhang Dongshuo (張東碩), yesterday confirmed China’s Supreme People’s Court struck down the sentence. Schellenberg was detained on drug charges in 2014 before China-Canada ties nosedived following the 2018 arrest in Vancouver of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou (孟晚舟). That arrest infuriated Beijing, which detained two Canadians — Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig — on espionage charges that Ottawa condemned as retaliatory. In January
Two medieval fortresses face each other across the Narva River separating Estonia from Russia on Europe’s eastern edge. Once a symbol of cooperation, the “Friendship Bridge” connecting the two snow-covered banks has been reinforced with rows of razor wire and “dragon’s teeth” anti-tank obstacles on the Estonian side. “The name is kind of ironic,” regional border chief Eerik Purgel said. Some fear the border town of more than 50,0000 people — a mixture of Estonians, Russians and people left stateless after the fall of the Soviet Union — could be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s next target. On the Estonian side of the bridge,
Jeremiah Kithinji had never touched a computer before he finished high school. A decade later, he is teaching robotics, and even took a team of rural Kenyans to the World Robotics Olympiad in Singapore. In a classroom in Laikipia County — a sparsely populated grasslands region of northern Kenya known for its rhinos and cheetahs — pupils are busy snapping together wheels, motors and sensors to assemble a robot. Guiding them is Kithinji, 27, who runs a string of robotics clubs in the area that have taken some of his pupils far beyond the rural landscapes outside. In November, he took a team
RSS