UK BOOSTS AUKUS AS ALBO WAVERS ON PALESTINE

Top UK security officials have used the ongoing Exercise Talisman Sabre to declare AUKUS nuclear submarines and other military technology are the “bedrocks” of the country’s relationship with Australia, The Australian reports.

In comments written for the newspaper, British Foreign Secretary David Lammy and Defence Secretary John Healey said their country will always uphold “international laws that protect our way of life” in the Indo-Pacific region, and added that the UK will “always stand as the closest of allies” with Australia.

“From the battlefields of northern Europe to the frontlines of Korea and Afghanistan, our two nations have stood together when it mattered most. Today, we face a new era of threat, which demands a new era of Australian-British partnership,” the pair wrote.

“Our alliance will deliver the ‘defence dividend’ that sits alongside our strengthened security: creating high-skilled jobs, world-leading technologies and reinvigorating our proud industrial base in both nations.”

The comments came on the heels of the UK sending a carrier group to dock in Australia for the first time in decades, and days after Australia and the UK signed an agreement to press ahead with AUKUS for 50 years despite a US review into the deal.

Exercise Talisman Sabre, which runs from July 13 to August 4, is hosted by Australia and Papua New Guinea, marking the first time the country has co-hosted the exercise. Participating nations include the US, the UK, France, Germany, Canada, India and Japan.

In other foreign policy news, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Sunday said Australia had no immediate plans to recognise a Palestinian state, despite growing pressure inside the Labor Party to do so and recent international criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza.

“Quite clearly it is a breach of international law to stop food being delivered, which was a decision that Israel made in March,” Albanese told the ABC’s Insiders program on Sunday.

Albanese said Australia would be willing to recognise Palestine if there were proper guarantees such a state would be viable, ABC News reported.

“You need to recognise a Palestinian state as part of moving forward. How do you exclude Hamas from any involvement there? How do you ensure that a Palestinian state operates in an appropriate way which does not threaten the existence of Israel?” he said.

As The Sydney Morning Herald’s foreign affairs correspondent Matthew Knott wrote in an analysis piece published last night, Labor’s rank-and-file membership is increasingly demanding Albanese follow through with the party’s long-standing commitment.

Albanese’s own long advocacy for Palestine, which Crikey chronicled last year, is well known, though it has been muted in recent years as he rose through the ranks of Labor and government.

As Knott wrote, for Albanese “it’s all a matter of when, and how” a Palestinian state is recognised.

“Labor sources say Albanese is not ruling out recognising Palestine by the end of the year, and that he wants to move alongside other like-minded nations including the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand.”

US AND EU STRIKE ‘PRELIMINARY’ TARIFF DEAL

The United States and the European Union have agreed on a 15% tariff on US imports from the EU after a top-level meeting at one of Donald Trump’s golf clubs in Scotland. The agreement came just days before an August 1 deadline Trump had set to hammer out a deal or face 30% tariffs, and news of the agreement broke early on Monday morning, Australian time.

Trump and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen both faced reporters after the roughly one-hour-long meeting.

“Trump, reading from a paper, said the EU will agree to purchase $750 billion of energy. It will also agree to invest $600 billion more than planned in the US,” Politico reported.

Von Der Leyen said the 15% rate would be a ceiling, and apply to cars, pharmaceuticals and semiconductors. Tariffs on alcohol had not yet been agreed on, and Trump said steel and aluminium would continue to be subject to 50% tariffs.

Europe will purchase energy from the US worth $250 billion per year for the rest of Trump’s term, replacing Russian gas, according to Politico.

The deal appears to have staved off the promise of retaliatory tariffs on US goods by the EU of up to 30%.

The New York Times described the deal as “broad-brush” and “preliminary”. The outlet noted a lot of details were as yet unknown, including exact time frames and how investments would be measured.

“There are a few really big questions outstanding, underscoring the preliminary nature of the announcement. First: Is the EU dropping tariffs on cars to zero? President Trump made it sound like American vehicles will be gaining better market access,” Brussels bureau chief Jeanna Smialek wrote. “Second: Will the EU change its rules to accept more American farm products, and if so, how so? That was long viewed as a red line. And most importantly, what is going to happen with pharmaceutical tariffs, which are hugely important to Europe, a major medicine exporter?”

As Crikey has previously reported, the trade war between Trump and other trading partners, including the EU, has pushed Australia closer to Europe, with several EU-Australian negotiations underway. Facing its own uncertain future regarding US tariffs, Australia last week eased restrictions on the importation of US beef, although Prime Minister Anthony Albanese maintained at the weekend that the timing of that move was a coincidence.

A Resolve Political Monitor poll of more than 2,300 people found 46% of respondents said it would be a good thing if Australia became more independent of the US on foreign policy and national security, compared with 22% who said it would be bad, The Sydney Morning Herald reports this morning.

ON A LIGHTER NOTE…

Can life grow using arsenic? The claim was made by researchers who published a paper in the journal Science in 2010, sparking a long-running controversy that led to the study being retracted last week. As the journal put it in a blog post explaining the move, the study caused “a media sensation and a firestorm in the scientific community”, and complaints were raised from the get-go.

When the study, which posited that a bacterium found in a California lake grew by incorporating arsenic atoms into nucleic acids, first appeared in print in 2011, it was accompanied by several “technical comments” and an editorial note explaining the decision to publish.

One of the technical comments published by the journal pointed out that the nucleic acids analysed had not been purified enough, “skewing” the original experiments by the possible presence of “undetected contaminants”, as the Associated Press reported at the weekend.

Science made it clear that there had been no suggestion of research misconduct or fraud — but said that in the past five years, “research integrity has become an even more important topic [and] Science has moved to retract papers more frequently for [other] reasons”.

The journal wrote that the authors of the paper disagreed with the decision to retract it, and added: “Despite our disagreement with the authors, we hope this decision brings the story to a close.”

Say What?

We’re terribly sorry.

Trey Parker

Few in the audience at San Diego’s Comic-Con International seemed to take South Park co-creator Trey Parker seriously when he apologised for a new episode of the long-running cartoon that showed a realistic-looking deepfake clip of US President Donald Trump lying fully naked in a desert.

CRIKEY RECAP

Macron’s recognition of Palestine leaves do-nothing Albanese in a corner


Anthony Albanese and Emmanuel Macron (Image: Private Media/Zennie)

The rapidly developing international response to Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank has left the Albanese government flatfooted, with French President Emmanuel Macron announcing this morning that France would recognise a Palestinian state.

French recognition of Palestine — “There is no alternative”, Macron emphasised in his statement — has been flagged by the president for several months, but appeared to have been put on hold in recent weeks in response, according to Reuters, to pressure from Canada and the UK.

That seems to have changed over the past week in response to growing evidence of mass starvation by Israel of Palestinians: the British media, including right-wing newspapers, have belatedly gone harder on the images of dying children coming out of Gaza (and far harder than Australia’s mainstream media have been prepared to go), and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has faced his own revolt on the genocide, with cabinet ministers urging the UK to also recognise Palestine.

The results are in! Listen to the Crikey-est 100 of Australian Songs

After a three-day open vote, here is your Crikey-est 100* Australian Songs, an alternative to tomorrow’s triple j Hottest 100 Australian song countdown, for the older, wiser music lover.

Yes, that’s 100 with an asterisk: as our rudimentary poll offered no way to rank the incredible volume of songs that got a single vote each, I had to stop at the number of songs that we could rank. That number happens to be 65.

“Friday On My Mind” by The Easybeats was the clear winner. When voting opened we did discuss the idea of lining up an interview with the triumphant artist, but sadly, after the death of drummer Snowy Fleet in February this year, only one member remains.

Hulk Hogan was the face of the most American of things: a billionaire press smackdown

Terry Bollea, who found a kind of kitsch superstardom from the 1980s onwards as wrestler Hulk Hogan, has died at the age of 71.

Much of the coverage today will focus on his MAGA turn in recent years, or his collection of ruined friendships on account of his single-minded, ruthless politicking during his time as World Wrestling Entertainment’s (WWE) biggest superstar. But as a publication which once faced similar attentions, our primary memories of Hogan centre on his role in one of the most consequential and weirdest chapters in American media history.

In 2012 gossip site Gawker published a portion of a sex tape featuring Hogan and a friend’s wife. Hogan launched an invasion of privacy lawsuit. In the course of the case it was revealed that he had also been recorded using racial slurs, which led to his (temporary, as it turned out) firing from WWE.

READ ALL ABOUT IT

Gazans welcome aid plan but fear it will not end crisis (BBC)

An emboldened China eyes more concessions from US at Stockholm trade talks (CNN)

Cook government’s plans for east coast advertising blitz to protect WA’s GST share (The West Australian) ($)

Iran executes two members of opposition group for attacking infrastructure (Reuters)

THE COMMENTARIAT

Michaelia Cash and Sussan Ley not on same page on flags and Welcome to Country – Joe Spagnolo (The West Australian) ($): It’s not exactly what Sussan Ley needed or wanted ahead of her visit to Indigenous and remote communities in WA next week. WA Liberal Senator Michaelia Cash has a right to her own views.

But the fact Ley’s most senior Liberal in WA and leader of the opposition in the Senate appears to be singing a different song to her boss on the contentious issues of Indigenous Welcome to Country and flag recognition is not a great look for the wannabe prime minister. That’s particularly so as Ley has only been federal leader for a short time.

To put it simply, there appears to be trouble in purgatory — specifically WA Liberal purgatory — where the party holds just four of 16 seats.

Think ‘Untouched’ shouldn’t have been in the Hottest 100? You may just be out of touch – Mary Ward (SMH) ($): It’s December 2014, somewhere in the days after Christmas. I’m 21 and in the passenger seat of a friend’s old Daewoo, taking turns to drive it up to Byron for that year’s Falls Festival.

It’s a stinking hot afternoon. The windows are down. We are approaching turn-offs for Forster and holding mild concerns about how our Korean chariot will handle the rest of the long trip. Its tiny back seat is packed to the brim — bags, tents, and another friend stuffed in among them. We should have left earlier, we say. Tired and sweaty, morale is sliding. Then, we hear the violins.

When “Untouched” by The Veronicas ranked third in yesterday’s Hottest 100 Australian Songs Countdown, ahead of more obviously “Aussie” classics like “Beds are Burning”, “You’re the Voice” or “Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again”, it took some by surprise.