Investment NSW chief executive Amy Brown (Image: AAP)

Amy Brown’s prayer Investment NSW chief executive Amy Brown has had a hell of a week. Yesterday she gave “bombshell evidence” to the state upper house inquiry into the bizarre case of how the hell former deputy premier and one-man catastrophe-generation unit John Barilaro ended up getting appointed to a plum US trade commissioner role, despite an offer having been made to an eminently qualified (and less brazenly conflicted) candidate in Jenny West. Brown told the inquiry it had been her job to rescind the offer “due to a change in government policy to convert the roles into statutory officers appointed by a minister”. So how does she deal with all of this? An interview from February gives a clue:

“We give it to God and pray and pray and pray, and he will work out his purposes.”

It turns out Brown is profoundly religious (she tells Eternity News that, among other things, she models her management style on Jesus). It’s a genuinely revealing interview:

The way I maybe approached ambition early in my career was I’d always be trying to manipulate and engineer the situation. So let’s just say there was a promotion opportunity, I’d be trying to form alliances or big-note myself, or even plant seeds of doubt in decision-makers’ minds about people who might also be being considered for the opportunity.

Whereas I’ve realised that God’s plans are perfect. He has me exactly where he wants me and I don’t need to do anything to try and influence the situation.

So there you go. It was apparently divine will that Barilaro would once again derail and embarrass the NSW government for weeks on end, despite having left Parliament.

Add it to the bill Turkey announcing “victory” in its demands from Sweden and Finland (in return for supporting the pair’s admission to NATO) represents yet another betrayal of the Kurds by Western powers. The joint statement claims that Sweden and Finland recognise the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) as a “terrorist organisation”, and Turkey has already started pushing for the deportation of PKK members (as well as followers of exiled cleric Fethullah Gülen) — a move that many opponents of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan see as the first step to wider extradition moves against the broader Kurdish rights movement.

It’s only the latest move of this sort in a long, shameful history of abandoning the largest ethnic group in the world without their own state:

  • 1972-75: In 1972, US president Richard Nixon and national security adviser Henry Kissinger finance and arm an Iraqi Kurdish insurrection against Saddam Hussein, before abandoning them to their fate: having endorsed the Algiers Accord between Iran and Iraq, support for the Iraqi Kurds ceased. According to a 1976 report by the House Select Committee on Intelligence, the day after the agreement was signed, “Their adversaries, knowing of the impending aid cut-off, launched an all-out search-and-destroy campaign…”
  • 1991: Following the swift liberation of Kuwait from Saddam Hussein’s invading forces — aided by Kurdish and Shiite uprisings in Iraq that the US actively encouraged — Hussein is left in power, and the Kurdish and Shiite rebellions are crushed. Fearing a reprise of Hussein’s 1988 chemical weapons attacks on Kurdish civilians, more than 1.5 million Kurds flee their homes. Under international pressure, the US eventually and reluctantly enforces a “no-fly zone” over Kurdish territory in northern Iraq.
  • 2019: Then US president Donald Trump withdraws US troops from north-east Syria, accompanied by an explicit green light for Turkey to invade and remove the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in the area.

Never-ending Cory This is another for the file of “posts I immediately screenshot thinking they will be gone in minutes, only to find them happily still in the wild hours later”:

What can the former hard-right senator-turned-basic blogger-turned-Sky News host be talking about? Why the single quote marks around ‘snakes [sic] blood’? Who are the three people he knows who’ve drunk it? Other Twitter users have suggested that whatever Bernardi had been imbibing at the time of the tweet is probably not snake blood, but we couldn’t speculate.

A whole different kettle of fish According to The New York Times, Americans don’t know what a kettle is. Or at least that’s the inescapable conclusion one draws from the headline: “A Swift and Easy Way to Heat Water Without Using a Stove”, followed by the qualifier, “Consider the electric kettle.”