The bell tower of the 143-year-old town hall in the French city of Limoges collapsed on Saturday evening after the building was set ablaze amid nationwide protests over the rising cost of living. The incident came as clashes between police and demonstrators escalated across France, with officers firing tear gas as tens of thousands took to the streets demanding economic relief and education reform.

J.D. Vance is approaching the halfway point of his term as vice president in an administration that has committed the United States to wars in locations from Ukraine to Venezuela to Somalia to Iran and beyond. All the while, the administration has threatened sending the military into other places across the world including Mexico, Greenland, and Cuba. In short, this presidential administration is fully committed to a warmongering agenda.

Vice President J.D. Vance’s Deceptive ‘Antiwar’ Campaign Speech

by Adam Dick

Communications minister Anika Wells has introduced Labor's Digital Duty of Care Bill, draft legislation amending the Online Safety Act, and it is off to committee. NSW premier Chris Minns has put armed police with automatic rifles on Sydney beaches under a social cohesion squad. Discretionary trust reform is also headed to committee, with the top 2% facing the 30% rate. Meta settled a $17 billion case over its algorithms.

Chapters:
00:00 Machine Guns on Beaches
00:40 Bondi and Gun Licences
01:43 Free Speech and Language
02:16 Trust Reform
03:20 Digital Duty of Care
04:26 Free Speech Hypocrisy
05:45 Palantir and Cellebrite
06:50 Regulating the Platforms
07:56 Algorithms and Addiction
08:57 Shifting Risk to Platforms
10:05 Anika Wells Slip-Up
10:50 Scam of the Week

This time it is over a humble, yet critically important hydrocarbon resource—diesel.

Pranay Kumar Shome, October 16, 2026

As has so often been the case lately, yet another round of U.S. exercises with its satellites has ended, but the aftertaste of violated international agreements and heightened international tensions remains. Live-fire drills, practice of amphibious operations and the transport of personnel, weapons, and military equipment, and even the largest scale of the exercises in their history (involving about 3,700 service members) – these are all perfectly typical, standard, and, one might say, expected aspects.

Security Exercises Over, Typhon Stays

Ksenia Muratshina, October 06, 2026

On Oct. 9, the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize Was awarded to Navi Pillay, the South African international lawyer who defended Nelson Mandela and the anti-apartheid political prisoners on Robben Island, and went on to serve as a judge on the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the International Criminal Court (ICC), then as U.N. high commissioner for human rights.

Human beings did not always believe in progress. At least not in the way we have. These days we say, “It’s 2026!” to express exasperation at a failing piece of technology, a persistent social problem like homelessness or a regressive social attitude. But no one said, “It’s 1148!” in the same way. In ancient and medieval times, people might conceivably have spoken about being on the right side of God but the idea of being on “the right side of history” would have been incomprehensible.

TIME OF MONSTERS

What Future for Liberalism?

WALEED ALY

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is facing mounting accusations that he ignored warnings ahead of the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack, as a bitter blame game over one of Israel’s worst security failures emerges in the final weeks of the election campaign.

Former Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar has filed a defamation suit against Netanyahu, accusing him of falsely blaming intelligence officials for the attack despite receiving repeated alerts about security threats.

The Hamas-led assault killed around 1,200 people in southern Israel, with another 251 taken hostage. Israel’s subsequent military offensive in Gaza has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians, according to the local health authorities.

The newly formed NSW Police Armed Response Command will soon be out on the streets, all in the name of social cohesion. What’s the scam?

The scam is that the police have taken over the ANZAC Range at Malabar, a coastal suburb near Sydney Airport, closing off the much-used and loved Maroubra Beach headland walk for weeks on end.

Social cohesion. Police practise their new machine guns at Sydney beach

by Kim Wingerei

For most of the human story, people who looked a lot like us – but with more interesting hair – wandered around in the forests and savannahs rooting up wild crops and hunting meat.

In the relatively recent past, someone domesticated grains and animals and, with food thus secured, the first towns were born. And with them came something never seen before: a large mob of people.

My view from the news chair: the worst of the mob is coming for us

BY Hugh Riminton

Across cultures and continents, these new mobs generally did two things: they established chiefs or kings to lay down the law and organise defence or attack, and they peeled off a priestly class to conjure up gods and explain what they offered and required.

And that’s how it has been for the past 10,000 years.

For every five plates of food served around the world, roughly one ends up in the bin. That adds up to more than a billion tonnes of food a year.

Meanwhile, 645 million people, about one in 13 of the world’s population, went hungry in 2025, according to the UN.

Which countries waste the most food, and how to reduce waste at home

This World Food Day, 645 million people are going hungry, yet more than a billion tonnes of food is wasted annually.

That gap is the focus of World Food Day on October 16, the annual UN observance marking the founding of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in 1945. This year’s theme, “Innovate today, nourish tomorrow”, calls for food systems that feed more people and waste less.

Australia is pouring billions into US and UK submarine industries while both countries struggle to meet their own naval needs. The risk is that AUKUS leaves Australia without the submarines it was promised.

A classic Ponzi scheme relies on early investors putting up hard cash to sustain a structure built on non-existent or undeliverable assets. The scheme survives only as long as capital keeps flowing and no participant calls time on the underlying insolvency.

Peter Briggs

It's lucky I was in the room for Katie Zacharia’s first White House press briefing - because it seems it might also have been her last appearance in the job.

She seemed very nervous and stilted on Tuesday as she read out prepared remarks about how proud she was to be working for President Trump. It made me wonder why she had rushed to hold a briefing - live on camera - on her second day in the job.

I was in the room for Zacharia's first - and maybe only - White House briefing

BY Sarah Smith

Vladimir Zelensky has emerged from the EU summit in Brussels with fresh promises of support but no deal on the additional €70 billion ($79 billion) he is demanding for Ukraine. Instead, European leaders tasked the European Commission with finding ways to meet Kiev’s growing financial needs, leaving the question of who will foot the bill unanswered.

The Ukrainian leader arrived in Brussels following a bitter public falling-out with US President Donald Trump over Washington’s decision to ease sanctions on Russian diesel supplies. His demands have put further pressure on Kiev’s European backers, who are already struggling with soaring energy costs, strained budgets and the prospect of a difficult winter.