Senate Republicans are racing to pass a budget bill that is pivotal to President Donald Trump's second-term agenda ahead of a self-imposed 4 July deadline.

Party leadership have been twisting arms for an initial vote on the "Big Beautiful Bill" on Saturday, following the release of its latest version - all 940 pages - shortly after midnight.

Rank-and-file Republicans have been divided over how much to cut from welfare programmes in order to cover the cost of extending some $3.8tn (£2.8tn) in Trump tax breaks.

The sprawling tax and spending measure passed the House of Representatives by a single vote last month.

A new “water economics” needed to safeguard supplies of domestic water and make it a common good. Australia’s fossil fuels make it a rich “Climate Wrecker”. Carbon capture technologies fail to deliver.

Ask members of the public to list the top environmental problems and I reckon that plastic pollution, climate change and loss of biodiversity will feature prominently. I suspect that shortage of clean, accessible domestic (or fresh) water will get relatively few mentions.

Peter Sainsbury

Four senior executives at Palantir, Meta, and OpenAI have been formally appointed lieutenant colonels in the US Army following the creation of a “special” unit created for rich Big Tech mavens seeking military leadership roles.

US Army appoints Palantir, Meta, OpenAI execs as Lt. Colonels

BY WYATT REED

On June 22, a large portion of the France 2, 8 p.m. newscast, hosted by Laurent Delahousse, was devoted to the US attack on Iran.

Note 1. Clearly, this was far from a balanced presentation. Laurent Delahousse's tone, like that of his colleagues, was one of fascination, even admiration, for the US operation. It was as if we were back in 1991, at the time of the first Gulf War, when journalists, safely tucked away in their studios, played at scaring each other by inflating the "Iraqi threat" (the world's fourth-largest army), facing an armada representing at least a 100-to-1 power ratio. It was at this time that the first "military experts" appeared on television, in the guise of retired generals, proud of their sudden celebrity.

I was born and raised in Maryland, which is a pleasant way to be, but I’ll happily admit that New York is the center of gravity for my way of thinking. My father’s family was from the outer boroughs, and the city—New York, that is, unless you say it with capital letters, The City, which only ever means Manhattan—has been the distant background for me since my childhood in the DC suburbs. I lived in the city while I was in grad school and still try to make it back when I can. It’s a fine place.

The Great Mamdani Freakout

BY Jude Russo

The forms of 19th-century European fictions, including the Russian, have a powerful relation to older Christian stories, from the Bible to Bunyan. The novels meet the old tales with part parody, part dialogue, part rejection and reconstruction.

The Idiot
by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by David McDuff

The Poetry Of Reality is a podcast hosted by renowned evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins. This is an audio and video experience that tracks our acclaimed protagonist in his navigation of the natural world and his pursuit of truth through scientific curiosity.

WELCOME TO The Poetry of Reality

The ABC has long held a reputation as Australia’s sober, publicly-funded bulwark against tabloid sensationalism – the broadcaster you turn to when you want analysis, not alarmism.

Which is why their recent report “Company in charge of proposed incinerator outside Geelong has direct links to the Chinese government” on a proposed waste-to-energy plant near Geelong reads more like a Netflix drama: Red Furnace – China’s Great Bin Fire.

Fred Zhang

The Daily Mail has revealed that the grandfather of Blaise Metreweli, who is expected to become the first woman to lead the UK’s foreign intelligence service (MI6), was a Nazi collaborator who oversaw atrocities in occupied Ukraine.

Metreweli’s father, Constantine, was naturalized in British-administered Hong Kong in 1966. The London Gazette identified him at the time as Dobrowolski, known as Constantine Metreweli, of uncertain nationality.

In a story published Thursday, the Mail confirmed that Constantine was the son of a German-Polish Ukrainian man – also named Constantine – who worked for the Nazis and was implicated in the mass killing of Jews and other atrocities during World War II.

Suddenly, nothing grew

The crops around the planet died

The air went dry without dew

The wind carried sands that fried

Hot like a Venusian summer

Cold like a Martian winter

What happened asked rat number two

Rat number one could not answer

He was dead as two would soon be too

We’re completely out of luck

Number two thought, barely cogent

Those nuking monkeys with their muck

Their global warming let run amuck

That mega solar flare coming last night

An asteroid from Jupiter’s Trojan

Falling with its destructive might 

Dislodged by a stray rocket

Of a scientific dumb cadet

And Superman down with Kryptonite

In a ruined movie house on fire

Playing with no noise nor fanfare

All ills at the same time from the orient

French President Emmanuel Macron has warned that the international community must act to prevent Iran from leaving the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), which prohibits it from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Some Iranian politicians have threatened to withdraw from the NPT in retaliation for recent US and Israeli strikes on the country’s nuclear facilities.

While Macron argued the strikes were “genuinely effective,” he cautioned that the “worst-case scenario” would be Iran quitting the landmark arms control treaty.

These thoughts come to you from a bomb shelter underneath my hotel. My mobile tells me another one of Vladimir Putin’s ballistic missiles is headed our way.

I tell you this not for the drama, but to remind you that this is no longer a novelty for millions of Ukrainians.

It has been this way most nights for three years now. Being voyeuristic about it here would be to undervalue the emotional toll it has taken on so many people. I’ll be gone tomorrow, and they’ll still have to endure. 

Australia’s media establishment has a problem and it’s not just about declining revenues or shrinking newsrooms. It’s about a fundamental failure to understand where we live and what’s at stake in our own neighbourhood.

Bruce Dover

While authoritarian regimes weaponise information across the broader Indo-Pacific, Australian news outlets continue to treat our nearest neighbours as if they no longer existed. Certainly, the Middle East crisis and our daily obsession with Donald Trump’s latest pronouncements have added to our myopia, but have we forgotten where we live?

It is a quaint fact that the mediocre critic demands, in the one breath, a Parliament representative of all the people, and a Parliament of all the virtues and intelligences. A Parliament of genius would not represent the people, who are emphatically not genius, and Parliaments as they are, with one or two men above the average intelligence, and many men of average intelligence, and more men little better than morons, represents the nation — any nation.

RANDOLPH BEDFORD, Naught to Thirty-three (1944).

GUSNOTE: AND THIS INCLUDES WOMEN IN POLITICS AS WELL.... OKAY, I APOLOGISE....

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

Australia has sanctioned the Russian pop singer Shaman, along with 36 other individuals and seven organizations, according to the Australian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The list, published on Thursday, also includes renowned actor and TV presenter Vyacheslav Manucharov.

The people and enterprises were targeted for “engaging in an activity or performing a function that is of economic or strategic significance to Russia.” Those blacklisted are barred from entering the country and face asset freezes, meaning any holdings in Australia will be blocked.

The list of sanctioned individuals includes the head of the Republic of Tatarstan, Rustam Minnikhanov; Russia’s First Deputy Energy Minister, Pavel Sorokin; media producer Anton Zlatopolsky; journalist Aram Gabrelyanov; and three-time Olympic synchronized swimming champion and Moscow City Duma deputy, Maria Kiseleva.