Janet Albrechtsen, writing in The Australian on October 14, 2026, has delivered a forceful diagnosis of the Liberal Party's ideological decline. Her argument is that Angus Taylor cannot rebuild the party while its progressive faction continues to undermine its conservative identity. She calls for the expulsion of Malcolm Turnbull, a decisive reject...
The war with Iran has settled into a temporary lull, but almost no one on either side treats it as more than a holding pattern. Michael Snyder's recent Substack lays out the Iranian reading of the situation clearly: fighting has been put on pause until after the 3 November US midterms, after which the Trump administration and Israel are expected to...
Thousands of people reported mental health challenges — including at least two suicides and three attempted suicides — to V-safe after receiving COVID-19 vaccines during the pandemic. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) launched the V-safe app in December 2020 to allow the public to report adverse reactions to COVID-19 vaccin...
Greta Thunberg has turned up in France, joining the latest wave of student protests against supposed deteriorating educational conditions, teacher shortages and overcrowded classrooms. The Swedish activist, who first achieved international celebrity by skipping school to protest against climate change, has now found herself campaigning alongside Fr...
A recent Adelaide Now report notes that many Australians still back the wooden spoon as a tool of discipline even as reformers push to treat ordinary smacking as an assault offence. The campaign, focused especially on Queensland's review of the "reasonable chastisement" defence, would ban implements, any force to the head, face or neck, and effecti...
My nephew lost his job in construction; injuries made his work progress too slow. He wanted something lighter. I spent the morning going around the CBD asking food places if they need a hand. These were places with signs on the glass advertising work wanted. I asked Chinese, Indian and all sorts of diverse establishments. Every single one of them s...
In early October 2026, Japan's senior cybersecurity officials described the country as being in a "state of emergency in cyber space." Masaaki Taira, head of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party's cybersecurity strategy body (and associated with the National Cybersecurity Strategy Headquarters), used the phrase after an emergency meeting. Cybersecur...
Few human experiences could be more terrifying than awakening inside a coffin, particularly if the coffin has already been lowered into the ground. The possibility has haunted the human imagination for centuries, inspiring Gothic literature, bizarre inventions and countless newspaper reports. Yet is premature burial a genuine historical pheno...
Most of us think of powerful AI as something that lives in giant data centres owned by big companies. Anthropic's recent research suggests that picture may be about to change. Small AI models could soon be able to copy themselves onto ordinary household gadgets, cheap Android TV boxes, smart ovens, security cameras and the like, and keep spreading ...
Local councils in England are being handed wider powers to take control of privately owned homes left vacant for only six months. Under reforms to Empty Dwelling Management Orders announced by the Labour government in late September 2026, the previous two-year threshold is cut sharply, and the requirement to show anti-social behaviour or comm...
On October 12, 2026, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a new pandemic declaration, with 153 countries voting in favor, three against, and two abstaining. The United States, Israel, and Argentina voted against the declaration. Buried within the nine-page document is a provision that should concern anyone who values scientific freedom, info...
In early October 2026 Donald Trump told supporters that a Democratic victory in the midterms would produce "an economic depression much like 1929." He repeated the line at rallies and in Truth Social videos, pairing it with a promise of roughly $5,000 "Trump dividend" payments if Republicans hold both houses. The warning is classic campaign r...
One of the great comedy sketches of Monty Python was the Ministry of Silly Walks, in which John Cleese portrayed a government official whose principal occupation was developing increasingly absurd methods of walking. Dressed in the conventional attire of a respectable British bureaucrat, Cleese performed a succession of ridiculous movements with th...
Spain's streets have turned violent again, not over a foreign army but over the price of a roof. In early October an 87-year-old woman, Maricarmen Abascal, died after being evicted from her Madrid home; the case became the face of a housing crisis that has already driven thousands into encampments and marches in more than fifty cities. Organisers c...
For decades, consumers were warned about the dangers of two of humanity's most familiar foods: milk and eggs. Eggs were criticised because their yolks contain cholesterol, while full-fat milk was discouraged because of its saturated fat content. Both foods became casualties of a nutritional philosophy that reduced complex foods to individual chemic...
"The anti-mass-migration Alternative for Germany (AfD) has won the election to the provincial parliaments in the states of Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The AfD's rising trajectory demonstrates that - like throughout the rest of the West - voters increasingly want an end to unchecked mass migration and its many cultural, economic, and s...
"More than 148,000 people remain subject to outstanding arrest warrants in Germany, and only 11.2 percent of them hold exclusively German citizenship, and overall, 87 percent of arrest warrant suspects are foreigners, according to figures the Federal Ministry of the Interior provided in response to a parliamentary inquiry. Foreign nationals account...
Racism is generally understood as hostility, prejudice or discrimination directed against individuals because of their race or ethnic background. Yet an increasingly contentious question in Western societies concerns whether this principle is applied consistently. When white Europeans report experiencing racial insults, intimidation or violence, ar...
Walter Willett and the EAT-Lancet Commission have long argued that people should sharply reduce red meat, down to roughly 15 grams of beef, pork, or lamb per day in the Planetary Health Diet, and that doing so could prevent millions of premature deaths while also cutting emissions, as if that matters. These claims rest primarily on observational ep...
Every October, the familiar pink ribbon appears across the Western world. Businesses adopt pink packaging, sporting organisations promote breast cancer awareness, celebrities participate in fundraising campaigns, and charitable organisations encourage donations. The message is that society must unite in the fight against breast cancer. It is a wort...
