FLAYED BY THE PUTRID

Picture John Stapleton Lightning Ridge 7 December, 2016.

Storms circled the camp. He thrashed, feverish.
"It's very unusual weather, Lightning Ridge," he said. "Even for the Outback it stands out; as if some strange electro-magnetic resonance."
Lightning flashed across the low flung sky, squalls of rain in the distance.
The colour of everything changed.
"You're deliberately refusing to connect," someone said, there in those peculiar waking states he was doing his best to avoid.
"Yes," he mumbled into a sweat soaked pillow.
 What good would it do, simply to switch tormentors?
Most of his dreams seemed to be about complex efforts to find a home; large rooms, disappearing canyons, brief moments of comfort, where it seemed like there would be security, where he could establish himself; often he was with his children, sometimes not.
He had been hunted from one place to another to another, the authorities determined to make his life miserable wherever he went.
All because of things he had written, material which had embarrassed them.
And made perpetually homeless, for in the flight and fright state that was in his soul he would not stand and fight his ground, he could not ignore the endless manufactured ridicule generated by dark dark policing techniques of which the average punter had no ken.
But as a Targeted Individual, he knew just how bad they were.
And he kept asking: To What End?
There was only one answer: They wanted him off the mortal coil.
And as they hunted and hunted, he knew who the guilty were.
He knew that a former AFP officer had been directly involved; him and his charlatan mates protecting their own positions and their own misconduct at his expense; hunting and hunting, because that's what bullies do, without conscience, without character, without compassion.
He had been discrete about their identities in the past, the man who falsely claimed to have written a book that he had ghost written, and in those curdled, increasingly despairing dreams, and perhaps with a flair for the melodramatic, he wanted to write a last will and testament: 
In Case of My Death.
How the National Security Agencies of Australia destroy people's lives, Without Warrant, Without Judicial Oversight, Without Evidence. 
Vindictive, Vicious. 
The worst examples of the fringe elements of policing in the country.
Boofheads, Bully Girls, Tricky Dicks.
And he would begin with his own mutterings: "I have been very badly harassed for a very long time."
And so, in his dreams, yet another home turned out not to be a home; another refuge just another trap. 
And he woke up in Lightning Ridge, with storm clouds above a low horizon.

THE BIGGER STORY:

Click on this image to go to the Twitter account of a journalist working inside Aleppo, Ahmad Alkhtibb.

It is simply horrific. Nothing justifies this.

https://twitter.com/AhmadAlkhtiib




Syrian forces were on the verge of seizing a key rebel-held district of east Aleppo on Tuesday as Damascus and ally Moscow warned that rebels who failed to leave the city peacefully would be destroyed. After retaking control of about two-thirds of opposition-held east Aleppo over the past week, forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad advanced on the large residential district of Shaar. With the capture of Shaar, the army would hold nearly 70 percent of east Aleppo, four years after rebels first seized it and divided the ancient city. In Damascus, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement carried on the state SANA news agency that the government would not allow rebels a chance to "regroup and repeat their crimes" in Aleppo. On Monday, Russia and China blocked a draft resolution at the UN Security Council demanding a seven-day truce in Aleppo to evacuate the sick and wounded, and to provide humanitarian aid workers time to get food and medicine in.

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