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Contemporary politics,local and international current affairs, science, music and extracts from the Queensland Newspaper "THE WORKER" documenting the proud history of the Labour Movement.
MAHATMA GANDHI ~ Truth never damages a cause that is just.
Thursday, 2 July 2026
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Satellite images reveal extent of Venezuela's earthquake devastation
Satellite imagery has revealed the extent of building and infrastructure damage. (Reuters: Planet Labs)
In short:
Satellite imagery has revealed how many buildings have been flattened by Venezuela's devastating earthquakes.
Tens of thousands of buildings appear likely to have been destroyed or partially damaged, according to preliminary NASA data.
What's next?
While the official death toll from the disaster has risen to almost 2,300, the UN expects it could increase above 10,000.
Venezuela's
two devastating earthquakes flattened buildings and coated parts of the
nation's northern coastline in layers of dust and debris, satellite
imagery reveals.
In
the worst-hit zones around the port regions of La Guaira and
Caraballeda hundreds of buildings were toppled and thousands of people
trapped underneath mountains of debris.
On
Tuesday, local time, the president of the Venezuelan National Assembly,
Jorge Rodriguez, told reporters the latest government count of damaged
buildings had risen to at least 855 and another 189 had collapsed.
The
figures differ from the number of damaged and collapsed buildings
published by space agency NASA which estimated the quakes had likely damaged or destroyed 58,870 buildings according to a preliminary assessment of satellite data.
Mr
Rodriguez said the government believed more than 30,000 people were
located in the worst-impacted areas when the two quakes hit, with some
13,400 successfully fleeing the area as the disaster unfolded.
He
also confirmed on Wednesday, local time, that the death toll from the
two earthquakes had risen to at least 2,295, with more than 11,000
injured.
At
least 6,400 people have been rescued in the six days following the
earthquakes, including 5,380 saved in the first two days of Venezuela's
emergency response to the disaster, Mr Rodriguez said.
Those
figures dropped significantly in the following days, with just 1,081
additional people rescued from impact sites between June 27 and June 30.
"We must hold onto the hope of continuing to find people alive beneath the rubble," he said.
Mr
Rodriguez also told journalists that Venezuelan authorities had
recorded at least 782 aftershocks across the country since the first two
earthquakes struck.
According to the government the earthquakes damaged or otherwise compromised 38 hospitals nationwide.
The World Health Organization said it had so far evaluated 21 of those facilities, three of which were no longer operating.
Another six sustained damage and the rest were buckling under the influx of injuries.
The United Nations says approximately 50,000 people remain unaccounted-for in the worst-impacted areas.
Rescue
teams from Ecuador and the United States halted operations in the early
hours of Tuesday, local time, at a site in La Guaira's Macuto when they
stopped receiving responses from a mother and her three children
trapped beneath a nine-storey building after more than 40 hours of
trying to get them out.
"In the
end we believe the days have already passed and that what we will find
now is death," said Major Jorge Montanero, leader of the EQ11 team from
Ecuador's Guayaquil.
"Unfortunately things haven't developed favourably."
ABC North America correspondent Kamin Gock in Venezuela as a desperate search through rubble continues. (ABC News)
Some
search efforts are beginning to turn into recovery operations after the
critical 72-hour window to find survivors passed, the International
Rescue Committee (IRC) said in a statement.
"The scale of the response does not meet the scale of humanitarian need," the IRC said.
Not
all collapsed buildings have had professional rescue teams on site,
with relatives and neighbours working to remove debris to pull out
survivors or bodies, according to residents from various areas.
"There
is no doubt we are facing a figure higher than what has already been
reported," said Gianluca Rampolla, the resident UN coordinator in
Venezuela, on Monday.
"I can offer an estimate. We are procuring, and this has been agreed with local authorities, 10,000 body bags."
In
a book dedicated to ‘the bullied’, two former News Corp journalists
outline a behaviour pattern they call ‘getting Murdoched’, which they
say harms individuals and public debate
Nutt’s response, he tells the authors of a new book on the tactics and culture of the Rupert Murdoch media empire, was “Well, I’d say you were a despicable piece of shit.”
Under
the headline “Off his Nutt”, The Sun published photographs taken from
his children’s Facebook pages which showed his son Steve smoking a
roll-up, another son Johnny “prancing NAKED in the snow in Sweden”, and
his daughter, Lydia, holding a bottle of spirits “uploaded two years
before she turned 18”. Nutt complained to the UK regulator, the book
recounts, but it was several weeks before the photos were taken down.
In
Getting Murdoched, Australian journalism academics and former employees
at The Australian newspaper, Andrew Dodd and Matthew Ricketson, claim
personal attacks like this are part of a pattern in the 95-year-old
Murdoch’s sprawling global media empire, which today operates under News
Corp and Fox Corporation. “As former reporters we get that good
journalism and editorial abuse share many of the same characteristics.
For example, good journalism requires lots of persistence. Bullying
entails too much of it,” they write. And while they say that “of course
good journalism has been published and broadcast in News outlets”, they
argue that in many cases a line has been crossed.
“Murdoched”,
a term Dodd and Ricketson coin for the book, means to be “editorially
attacked when one’s ideas or deeds do not accord with the media
proprietor’s programs or publications”.
The
book examines “murdoching” across the US, the UK and Australia,
including dozens of interviews with prominent people and ordinary
citizens about the way they were treated in newspapers, such as The Sun
and the New York Post, and cable television network Fox News.
Dedicated
to “the bullied”, the book focuses squarely on Murdoch’s “way of doing
journalism”, Dodd and Ricketson write. The techniques include unleashing
a torrent of articles against particular targets “contesting even the
tiniest of points, so as to wipe the critic’s original ideas from
everyone’s mind”. Another is to attack the critic personally,
“pitilessly and repeatedly”. When all else fails, “murdoching” is
“simply continuing to assert something as true as if no one has ever
shown it was false”, they write.
“Murdoch
perverted the fourth estate function of journalism,” Dodd and Ricketson
write. “Instead of it being a way to hold power to account, Murdoch saw
it as a means of holding individuals to account, especially those who
held views contrary to his own.”
The
consequences, they argue, are severe: these tactics have a chilling
effect on democracy and seriously harm those who are targeted. And
across the US, the UK and Australia, the three markets where Murdoch’s
outlets are dominant, they write, the techniques employed by the
company’s journalists are similar.
Well
known Indigenous Australian academic Larissa Behrendt felt the
onslaught of “murdoching” when she posted a bad joke on social media.
She had watched an episode of US series Deadwood, which featured a man
having sex with a horse; and, earlier, on another program, she saw
Indigenous leader Bess Price commenting onwelfare measures for Indigenous people.
Behrendt
conflated the two programs and tweeted: “I watched a show where a guy
had sex with a horse and I’m sure it was less offensive than Bess
Price.”
Behrendt’s
post was picked up by The Australian, which published a front page
story headlined: “More offensive than ‘sex with a horse’: Larissa
Behrendt’s Twitter slur against Bess Price.” But it didn’t stop there.
Although Behrendt immediately deleted the post and apologised to Price,
the stories in the national broadsheet kept coming. There were 16
articles in 16 days. “It appeared as an assault on urban, progressive
and outspoken Indigenous people,” the authors write.
It
is one of the 50 cases examined in Getting Murdoched. Ricketson says
the Murdoch method often involves a reporter picking up on something
someone has said on social media, “either inadvertent, ill advised or
easily able to be distorted”.
“Then they will
blow it out of all proportion and say it disqualifies you from whatever
it is you’re trying to do,” Ricketson tells the Guardian. Common
targets, they argue, include climate scientists, women’s rights
advocates, Muslims and LGBTQ+ community members.
The
authors believe Behrendt was a target because she had already been
derided in another Murdoch paper as a fair-skinned person who had
“chosen” to identify as Indigenous for “political and career clout”.
(That previous article resulted in a 2011 federal court ruling that Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt breached human rights laws.)
Behrendt
told the authors the Price incident felt like a “psychological
assassination”. “I just felt destroyed by it,” she said. “I felt like I’d never come back from it.”
“This
is unfortunately what happens again and again,” Dodd tells the
Guardian. “The consequences for her were personally devastating. This is
the dark art that is practised by News.”
“There are lots of tactics, and there are lots of different ways of being ‘murdoched’”, Dodd says.
Ricketson
says so much has been written about Rupert Murdoch, in terms of his
biography, his succession battle and his business ventures, but not much
about the effect of News’ outlets on the body politic and on
individuals. Dodd was more motivated by seeing what he describes as
bullying “on an industrial and global scale” and watching “the effect
that it has on individuals on a very granular level”.
In
the US, the authors spoke to a trans teacher from California, Flint Del
Sol, whose online posts about his job and the student library for
LGBTQ+ kids he created attracted the attention of Fox News.
The story, headlined “California high school teacher boasts ‘queer
library’ with material on orgies and BDSM/kink”, caused Del Sol to
retreat from the world and the school to “freak out”, although it stood
by him, he told the authors. He said he had shared his posts hoping to
support other trans teachers and “create a community”.
“[Fox
News] wrote an article that essentially slandered my reputation, and my
community, intentionally mischaracterising the nature of my library and
the materials available to my kids,” del Sol told the authors.
After
three more Fox stories over the following months, he faced abuse, with
some opponents calling the school and threatening to burn it down with
kids inside. Eventually, there was a bomb hoax.
The damage News inflicts is compounded because the organisation is global, Dodd says. Illustration: Hardie Grant
Del Sol left the profession two years later and attributed his decision to being afraid for his life.
“I
left teaching because I was sure that one day I wouldn’t come home,”
Del Sol told the authors. “I hope no teacher ever has to experience what
I experienced.
“It destroyed my nervous
system and eroded my faith in the goodness and critical thinking of
people who had trusted their children to me for more than a decade.”
Dodd
says because News Corp is a global organisation, it becomes an echo
chamber across the markets. He says he has watched campaigns on Fox News
against the transgender community migrate to become talking points on
the right-wing Sky News Australian channel.
“It’s that much more dangerous as a company,” he says.
Prof
Nutt’s son eventually had a letter published in The Sun, clarifying
that the Facebook posts did not show drug use or underage drinking.
The
original article, Dodd and Ricketson write, seemed designed to punish
Nutt for his progressive views and suggest he was a hypocrite lacking in
credibility and moral authority.
“His
children – unfairly exposed, misreported and held up to ridicule – were
collateral damage,” they write. “Almost none of the tenets of ethical
journalism were observed.
“In other words, they had been murdoched.”
News Corp and Fox News were approached for comment.
Mike Thomson was mapping rock layers on the Antarctic Peninsula when he unearthed the bone. (Supplied: British Antarctic Survey)
In short:
Dinosaur fossils are extremely rare in Antarctica.
But
a bone found there in 1985 and kept in a drawer for almost 40 years has
now been confirmed as the first of the dinosaur fossils to have been
discovered there.
What's next?
Scientists say the find sheds light on the spread of dinosaurs across the planet's southern continents millions of years ago.
In December 1985, geologist Dr Mike Thomson was mapping rock layers on the Antarctic Peninsula when he unearthed a bone.
The meticulous notetaker pulled out a pencil and jotted down his initial thoughts about the fossil.
"Vertebra of large reptile," he wrote in his field diary, alongside a sketch of the 10-centimetre-wide bone.
Mike Thomson on James Ross Island on the Antarctic Peninsula in 1985. (Supplied: British Antarctic Survey)
Along
with other specimens found during the expedition, the bone was sent to
the British Antarctic Survey's (BAS) geology collection in England.
It remained there, unidentified and hidden inside a drawer, for almost 40 years.
Mike Thomson was a meticulous note taker, and recorded details of the fossilised bone. (Supplied: British Antarctic Survey)
That was until BAS collections manager Dr Mark Evans, who has a background in vertebrate palaeontology, took a closer look.
"When
I first spotted this bone in our collections a few years ago, I
suspected it was a dinosaur," Dr Evans said in a media release issued by
BAS.
The dinosaur bone was kept in a drawer for 40 years. (Supplied: British Antarctic Survey)
Dinosaur fossils have been found in Antarctica over recent decades, but they are extremely rare.
In fact, of all the continents, it has the fewest records, largely because of its extensive ice cover.
But there was something about the distinctive shape of the vertebra that intrigued Dr Evans.
"After looking at it properly, I thought it was probably a titanosaur tail vertebra,"
he said.
Storage boxes for specimens like the Antarctic dinosaur bone. (Supplied: British Antarctic Survey)
"Looking back at Mike's notebooks, he knew it was a large reptile so it's very special to confirm his find 40 years later,"
Dr Evans said.
The bone is believed to be from a titanosaurus, recreated by an artist here. (Supplied: Andrew McAffee Carnegie Museum of Natural History)
Bone comes from largest type of dinosaur
Titanosaurs
were the largest of the dinosaurs to live on land, with some measuring
more than 35 metres in length, and weighing more than 15 tonnes.
"It
[was] a big, long-necked, long-tailed … type [of] dinosaur, a bit like …
brontosaurus," Dr Evans said in a video posted on YouTube.
The bone is thought to have come from a relatively small, or juvenile, titanosaurus about 6 or 7 metres long.
"So they are absolutely huge animals and this is quite a small one by comparison,"
Dr Evans said.
The bone was found in a marine rock layer dating back about 82 million years.
At the time, Antarctica was very different from the icy continent it is today.
"It was a heavily forested area, it was warm, it was temperate like the rest of the planet," Dr Evans said.
Scientists
believe the animal floated out to sea after its death, before
eventually being buried and fossilised on the seabed, BAS said.
The fossil was the first dinosaur bone to be found in Antarctica. (Supplied: British Antarctic Survey)
Professor
Paul Barrett, a researcher at London's Natural History Museum, said the
find sheds light on the spread of dinosaurs across the southern
continents.
"To date, no titanosaurs have been found in Australia, and there is only limited evidence of them in New Zealand,"
Professor Barrett said.
"Confirmation
of the presence of these animals in Antarctica makes it seem likely
that they travelled on to these areas, which were connected."
BAS
said researchers believe there is likely to be more evidence of
dinosaur records in Antarctica, which could emerge as the ice retreats.
'Needle in a haystack'
Associate
Professor Steven Salisbury, from the University of Queensland's
Dinosaur Lab, said only about a dozen dinosaur fossils had been found in
Antarctica.
"The reality is down there you are really searching for a needle in a haystack," Dr Salisbury said.
Steven Salisbury says the find is "an important piece of the puzzle". (ABC News: George Roberts)
While
Dr Salisbury was not involved in the research surrounding the
titanosaur fossil, he has previously undertaken several dinosaur fossil
hunts in the polar region.
"To
find the fossils of a terrestrial animal like a dinosaur [in
Antarctica], you're counting on the fact that a dinosaur has died
somewhere on the coast or near a river and that somehow its carcass has
found its way out into this shallow seaway, has not been too badly
scavenged and then has somehow made it to the bottom to get buried.
"And then you're stumbling across it as you're trudging through the snow and ice, 80 million years later.
"When
you start to think of it like that, you begin to realise your chances
are pretty slim and it is really just luck and spending the time there."
Dr Salisbury said confirmation that Dr Thompson's 1985 discovery belonged to a titanosaur was "significant".
"Not
only has it extended our timing of recognition of dinosaurs in
Antarctica, but it's added to the very sparse record that we do have,"
he said.
"So even though it's not the most spectacular of fossils, it is an important piece of the puzzle."
Benjamin Netanyahu has described a new agreement with Lebanon as a major win for Israel. (Reuters: Clodagh Kilcoyne)
On
Friday night, a triumphant Benjamin Netanyahu posted a video on social
media declaring a major victory in negotiations with Lebanon over the
war Israel is waging against militant group Hezbollah.
"This is also a major blow to Iran," he declared.
And
while it was obvious why Israel's prime minister would frame the
announcement in such a way, after weeks of domestic political attacks
over his handling of the conflict, it immediately highlighted a
contradiction in the deals the US was behind.
In
recent weeks, there has been a flurry of diplomatic wrangling aimed at
trying to drag the Middle East back to some form of relative peace, with
the US and its dealmaker-in-chief Donald Trump heavily involved.
The
first clause in the agreement the US president signed to end the war
with Iran, which Israel and Lebanon were not parties to, explicitly said
there needed to be an immediate end to fighting on all fronts.
That included Lebanon, and the deal went further to demand respect for territorial integrity.
However,
the statement appeared at odds with Israel's ongoing occupation of
territory it seized in southern Lebanon — the so-called "security zone" —
during its invasion of the country in March.
Iran certainly saw it in those terms, demanding an Israeli withdrawal. Hezbollah, its proxy in Lebanon, did too.
And,
a week later, that contradiction was reinforced in a separate deal
between Israel and Lebanon, which was brokered by the United States.
Two deals at odds with each other
Under
the terms of that agreement, Israel would maintain its presence in the
"security zone" for as long as Hezbollah — considered a terrorist
organisation by many countries, including Australia — refused to lay
down its weapons and continued to pose a threat to Israel's security.
Donald Trump has been playing the role of dealmaker-in-chief in the Middle East in recent weeks. (Reuters: Evan Vucci)
Respecting territorial integrity in one deal and allowing occupation in the other doesn't seem to marry up.
The
agreement also said that only the Lebanese state had the authority to
make calls about the country's future, in what Israel's leaders saw as a
warning against Tehran.
"Iran is trying to force us into a withdrawal from southern Lebanon by force," Netanyahu told Israeli reporters on Saturday.
"Lebanon, Israel, and the US are essentially saying to Iran: 'This is none of your business. You have no status here.'
"You have no involvement and no role — not you, not Hezbollah, and not any terrorist organisation."
As
far as ambitions go, there are worthy goals in both deals —
particularly if, in a perfect world, they go some way to achieving a
level of stability in Lebanon unseen for decades as the country lurched
from crisis to crisis.
But the
deals were immediately at odds with each other, and show how the Trump
administration is running different approaches depending on who it is
talking to at any given moment.
In
the Iran deal, Washington gave Tehran a say over the conflict in
Lebanon as a precondition for broader regional peace, while cutting out
Israel and Lebanon's governments.
And
in the Lebanon deal, Washington has given Israel and Lebanon their say
for localised peace, while cutting out Iran and its puppet, Hezbollah.
The
latter agreement also relies on the Lebanese state and its armed forces
having the power to force Hezbollah to yield, as opposed to harbouring a
strong desire to remove the group — something Lebanese President Joseph
Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam have spent a lot of time talking
about since taking office.
In
the absence of that ability, the Lebanon deal could entrench Israeli
occupation in the country's south — which in turn could continue to fuel
the cycle of instability that has led to this point.
Over
the weekend, attacks from Israel in southern Lebanon continued. So too
did Hezbollah's retaliation, killing another Israeli soldier in the
process.
Even with now two agreements, the fighting is continuing.
Mixed messages
The original Iran deal also failed to make any mention of curtailing Tehran's missile and drone capabilities.
That's
despite it being a stated war aim for the Trump administration when it
opened fire on Iran back on February 28 alongside its Israeli partners.
The
absence of this topic fuelled anxiety for the Gulf states, which copped
a battering from Iranian attacks at the height of the war and are now
having to rethink their approach to dealing with such a threat in the
future.
When
Trump was asked about Iran's missile arsenal in the hours before signing
the Tehran deal, he replied: "If other countries have them, it's a
little bit unfair for [Iran] not to have some.
"A ballistic missile is not the same thing as what we're talking about when we talk nuclear.
"But if Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and they all have some, I would say in relative proportion, I think it's OK."
A
week later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was in the Gulf reassuring
the US's partners in the region that the issue had not been forgotten.
"We're
not going to do anything that undermines the security of our allies,
our longstanding allies in the region," he said in Kuwait.
The
next day in Bahrain, Secretary Rubio insisted that the Iran deal was
the starting point in their negotiations rather than being an
"all-encompassing document".
Keeping the Gulf states onside after the damage they experienced during the war, and have continued to feel in recent days during more US and Iran exchanges of fire, is crucial for the Trump administration.
But
running seemingly conflicting arguments in talks with Iran, compared to
partners across the region, only adds to the fears the relative peace
that is holding now could be short-lived.
