NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has a new plan to reopen her state’s economy, likely infecting tens of thousands with the deadly Delta strain of COVID-19. Press reports indicate that Berejiklian has overruled her own health officer to institute this new “roadmap to freedom”, which identifies October 18 as the planned date for shops, pubs, swimming pools, hairdressers, gyms and aged care centres to reopen. They will then be followed by schools on October 25. The trigger for these plans is the dubious target of 70% of people 16 and over having two doses of the vaccine.

The chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan has triggered a flurry of different responses. For those who opposed the war and occupation from the beginning, it's difficult to feel anything but rage.

The announcement that President Hosni Mubarak had resigned took just 30 seconds. The news electrified the streets of Cairo, then surged across the Middle East and the rest of the world. No-one needed the message translated; the cries and tears of elation from the people congregated in Tahrir Square said it all. A tyrant of 30 years who had been the envy of many of the world’s dictators had fallen at the hands of millions of his victims. 

2020 is gone, but it will not be forgotten. Like 1914, 1929, 1974 and 2001, historians will record it as a moment when the social and economic status quo was radically disrupted and a new era of politics was born. As with each of these evocative dates, the events of last year have both concrete and general aspects; triggered by particular and unpredicted incidents, yet fundamentally conditioned by longer-term contradictions that have been exposed and intensified by the crisis.