Jamal Khashoggi not in the same league as his uncle Adnan

Cameron Stewart in The Australian, ­Thursday:

(Jamal) Khashoggi’s torture began shortly after he entered the consulate in Istanbul two weeks ago. It started with a beating and quickly escalated to his fingers being chopped off as the Saudis interrogated him … The dissident journalist died within minutes of the brutal attack in the office of the Saudi consul.

The Guardian ran Saudi Arabia’s most recent spin yesterday:

Saudi Arabia said … Khashoggi died in a “fistfight” inside its Istanbul consulate, Riyadh’s first acknowledgment of his death after two weeks of denials it was involved in his disappearance … “To say that I am sceptical of the new Saudi narrative about Mr Khashoggi is an understatement,” senator Lindsey Graham said.

His uncle, Adnan Khashoggi, died in 2017. An obituary in The Independent, London, in June last year:

Despite a fortune amassed through involvement in the some of the biggest arms deals of the 20th century, Adnan Khashoggi died peacefully at the age of nearly 82 … (His) family declared, “Our father understood the art of bringing people together better than anyone.” How crass it would be to mention that the weapons he helped sell perfected the art of blowing people apart … Khashoggi helped sell enough of these weapons to become one of the world’s wealthiest men … friendships with Saudi and Hollywood royalties, homes all over the world, a superyacht later sold to Donald Trump.

Canberra’s Russian embassy is unimpressed with Ukrainian movie Donbass; press statement, Friday:

Let’s leave artistic merits of this movie for critics to make their judgment and

talk like ordinary viewers, unbiased from political paradigms. From this point of view the Sergei Loznitsa’s trashy production causes only disgust due to its blatantly and brazenly racist and Russophobic content in the worst Nazi traditions. It is hard to imagine, what is going in the mind of a person, who depicts people of the Donetsk and Lugansk republics as ugly, rude, aggressive and mentally deficient characters with such a great relish.

David Stratton reviews the film, The Weekend Australian, Saturday:

Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa’s devastating Donbass unfolds in the disputed territory of eastern Ukraine in 2014-15 as pro-Russian forces, employing ­violently ruthless methods, take over the territory around the town that gives the film its title … It’s composed of a series of scenes that ­illustrate the chaos and horror of life in this part of the world. At a town meeting, an angry woman pours excrement over the head of a local official, claiming she has been libelled. A courageous German journalist and his inter­preter encounter a hostile unit of Russians who respond to his questions by calling him a fascist. Men, women and children … living in the most squalid conditions … (are part of a) convincing depiction of a nightmarish place where law and order is non-existent.

Republican Peter FitzSimons, The Sydney Morning Herald, Tuesday:

The popularity of rock-star royals and the desire to continue being reigned over by a family of English aristocrats are distinctly different things. Equally fatuous is the notion that Australia becoming a republic will have any ­effect whatsoever on the royal goings-on, that we of the ARM want to put a stop to it all. Never! See, for all the people that love the births, betrothals … and bon temps of the royals, the good news is that all of that will go on, even when we are a proud independent country beneath the Southern Cross!