Anthony albanese

Anthony Albanese has failed to step up after the Bondi beach attack

It’s been three days since the jihad against innocent Jews at Sydney’s Bondi beach. A nation’s grief is swiftly turning to anger and Australia’s prime minister is floundering. As more is learned about the father-and-son killers who took 15 lives and wounded many more, questions are piling up. How did the father enter the country? How did security agencies lose track of the son, who not only imbibed his father’s Jew hate, but may have been further radicalized by reportedly studying with one of Sydney’s most notorious Islamist hate preachers? How did they manage to go to a militant area of the Philippines as recently as a month ago? How did the father manage to hold a gun license, given his own history and that of his son?

Will tech companies bend to Australia’s social media ban?

It’s all too easy to get hooked by the online world, to fall headlong into it, to spend hour upon hour immersed in it. Cyberspace has its good uses, but it also has its bad ones. Staying in control of your social media life is difficult enough as an adult, but for children it can be an especially dangerous world in which to dwell. Too often children are glued to their phones and devices, staring, scrolling, disengaged from the world around them. Many children are exposed to online harm, including bullying, grooming and shaming. Appallingly, many children are emotionally and psychologically damaged from social media exposure. Terribly, and tragically, some have taken their own lives as a result of what has befallen them online.

Trumpism rules the world

Whatever loopiness there is in Donald Trump’s personality is a loopiness born of isolation. For ten years the history of the world has revolved around him, not he around it. The events of last November have left Trump as, for all intents and purposes, the only remaining historical actor – especially after Xi Jinping’s retreat into obscurantism since the pandemic.

Trump Starmer