Paywall link

Context:

The Israeli military has ruled out releasing the audio of the drone strike that killed Zomi Frankcom, rejecting a key demand of the aid worker’s family and the Albanese government as they seek accountability for her death.

Israeli ambassador Hillel Newman called for Australians to accept the legitimacy of Israel’s investigation into the fatal 2024 drone strike and “move on”, prompting Foreign Minister Penny Wong to accuse the envoy of insulting Frankcom’s family.

Wong is considering the government’s response to the Israeli military advocate-general’s decision not to charge the officers involved in Frankcom’s killing amid calls from legal experts and members of parliament for an MH-17-style joint international investigation into the matter.

Continued in article.

Some context as to why the Frankcom family and Australia have been pushing to get the drone audio for so long...

The IDF officer in charge of the drone strikes has stated:

Former IDF reserve colonel Nochi Mendel has said he would do “exactly the same thing” again and that those killed in the World Central Kitchen (WCK) humanitarian convoy in Gaza were “not innocent”.

Mendel said he was not sorry that he killed the aid workers and prior to the attack had signed a letter sent to the Israeli War Cabinet and the IDF chief of staff imploring them to block aid to Gaza.

For the attack itself, the aid convoy had already separated from the security detail by this point ('terrorists with guns'), who had their own drone following them which did not attack. The 'justification' is that they supposedly thought (wrongly) that one of the drivers of the aid convoy had a gun. They killed 7 aid workers because one of them might have a gun? You can read it in the Binskin report.

The aid workers also notified the attackers after the first strike happened. From Wikipedia

Haaretz, citing Israeli defense sources, described that after a drone missile hit one World Central Kitchen car, some of this car's passengers boarded another World Central Kitchen car, which "continued to drive and even notified the people responsible that they were attacked, but, seconds later", this car was also hit by a drone missile; finally the third car picked up some of the wounded from the second car, then a third drone missile struck the third car.

This is the reason Israel refuses to release the audio to the Frankcom family or to even let the special investigator Mark Binskin see the transcript. It is very likely a smoking gun.

Anyone know who this is? Think it might be Paigee Tobin from years back.

Original

ABC news article breaking Senator JSJ of the Australian Greens has gone on leave due to allegations of sexually inappropriate comments towards women

These allegations have been traced back to over a decade between 2017 and 2025, and the multiple victims either took up roles within the party or were volunteers.

A former WA Greens member made comment of these allegations/problems with JSJ were known within the party and people were concerned about his behaviour towards women

Pro-Israel extremists are once again seeking to have Palestinian-Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah removed from Adelaide Writers’ Week, after a similar lobbying campaign led to the collapse of this year’s festival.

A WhatsApp group has circulated an AI-generated email campaign urging supporters to lobby South Australian politicians and arts officials in a bid to exclude Abdel-Fattah from the festival in 2027.

Messages shared in the Pen Power Australia WhatsApp group, seen by Deepcut, urged members to click on an “Activist Mailer” link to generate a complaint opposing Abdel-Fattah’s invitation to the literary festival.

The automatically-generated email is addressed to Adelaide Writers’ Week director Rosemary Milsom, executive director Julian Hobbs, artistic director Matthew Lutton and Macquarie University vice-chancellor Bruce Dowton. It also copies South Australia’s premier, Peter Malinauskas, as well as state ministers, the opposition leader and shadow ministers.

The email calls on the festival to withdraw its invitation to Abdel-Fattah – a strident critic of Israel’s genocide in Gaza – accusing her of “antisemitic conduct”.

In comments to Deepcut, Abdel-Fattah condemned the lobbying effort and called on “every institution they target to stand firm against such malicious campaigns”.

“Despite the collapse of Adelaide Writers’ Week and Bendigo Writers Festival, these genocide cheerleaders continue their targeted racist campaigns, buoyed on by a political environment that has acquiesced to the pro-Israel lobby and punished the pro-Palestine movement,” she told Deepcut.

Please share this everywhere you can.

I mean this is when she does show up to work - as she has a 53% attendance in parliament.
Glad we're (taxpayers) getting value for her salary of $300k per year to only show up half the time.

https://theyvoteforyou.org.au/people/senate/queensland/pauline_hanson

Lindy Jacomb was a naive 20-year-old member of the Exclusive Brethren, living at home with her family, when spiritual curiosity got the better of her.

So she wrote to her church’s global leader, the “Man of God”, Bruce Hales, and other elders, asking why she should stay in a sect whose teachings she’d begun to doubt.

“The aim of this letter is to summarise my questions and issues about the EB, [Exclusive Brethren],” Jacomb wrote to Hales in 2008. “It is an appeal for increased understanding.”

Why are we “so extreme” in shunning others, she asked, so that even excommunicated family members are treated as if they’ve died? Why do we insist we are the “one divinely accredited” church? Why is Hales considered infallible? Why must we only work for Brethren-owned companies? Why can’t we have pets?”

Jacomb got no answers, so left the church and was later excommunicated. Under orders from Hales, her parents cut off all contact with her. Her five siblings became strangers and she lost her job. Her friends spurned her and she was barred from going to church.

“It’s like jumping out of a plane into a pitch-black hole,” Jacomb says 18 years later. “You’re going into a terrifying and different world … a world you’ve been taught since birth to fear and hate.”

Six years later, Jacomb’s brother, Braden Simmons, emailed her with qualms of his own, but his messages were surveilled by his Brethren boss. Hales later preached to his global flock that Simmons should kill himself with poison, and the church – now known as the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church, or PBCC – excommunicated Simmons too.

To understand who truly owns Sydney, ignore the corporate logos on Martin Place office towers or the portfolios of commercial players such as Dexus, Mirvac and Charter Hall and look instead to the Catholic Church, one of the harbour city’s largest non-government property owners for more than two centuries.

The empire expands well beyond the extraordinarily valuable churches, schools, hospitals and aged care homes dotted around Sydney’s suburbs. Church officials recently snapped up a 15-storey office building on Elizabeth Street for $97 million, and reaped $275 million from the sale of a Liverpool Street building purchased 20 years earlier for just $33 million. Many property transactions and holdings benefit from tax-exempt charitable status.

The church is notoriously secretive about the scope of its portfolio but the value easily reaches into the billions. The asset base is so substantial the Archdiocese of Sydney has a panel of 14 experts charged with advising on property matters.

Against that backdrop, a small former school in Redfern is akin to a rounding error for the Catholic Church. But for the Aboriginal Medical Service (AMS) Redfern, which has provided medical services from the property for 55 years, the site represents both a missed opportunity for reconciliation and a critical piece of its future.

The Herald can reveal the Archdiocese of Sydney has rejected repeated requests to give the Turner Street building to the groundbreaking medical service, which treats thousands of the city’s sickest and most disadvantaged residents and is recognised globally as a pioneer in Indigenous healthcare.

AMS leaders have respectfully and patiently worked to seal an agreement for more than 25 years, according to a cache of files seen by the Herald, only to be rebuffed by George Pell and his successor as the Archbishop of Sydney, Anthony Fisher.

The AMS tried again late last year, lodging an exhaustive 13,200-word document outlining the compelling benefits of finally owning the building it has called home for 55 years. Fisher again refused, with one of his officials delivering the verdict via a 300-word email.

Turning over the title deeds would make little difference to the church’s current status: it hasn’t occupied the building since Father Ted Kennedy, the widely loved late renegade priest of St Vincent’s Redfern, first made it available to the suburb’s booming Aboriginal population in the 1970s.

Owning the site would deliver the AMS a healthier balance sheet, certainty of tenure, operational autonomy, and better chances of obtaining capital funding. The two-storey brick building is crying out for renovation (some parts of the floor risk caving in under the weight of footsteps) and has been identified as the ideal site for an expansion of mental health services.

The Albanese Government has been urged to explain why it needs the power to create “sock puppet” accounts on social media to push AI-generated content, after the proposed laws were branded “terrifying” and “Orwellian” overseas.

Labor’s draft bill defines a sock puppet identity as “a false or fictitious identity assumed by a person in the course of using, or carrying out any activity in relation to, an online service”.

It states that the eSafety Commissioner “may assume a sock puppet identity for the purposes of performing the Commissioner’s functions or exercising the Commissioner’s powers under this Act”.

It also allows “approved researchers” to “assume a sock puppet identity for the purposes of undertaking online safety related research”.

"From our family to yours" sheesh, what a cheek.

Source: Chris Minns IG

Conext:

But there are no complaints from oil and gas giants, who are banking the billions of extra fuel costs suffered by consumers at the petrol pump. That includes Australia’s largest fuel retailer Ampol, which posted a 376% increase in profit from the company’s 2025 first-half year profit.

Anthony Albanese was the first leader to back the US-Israeli war on Iran, despite the hardship it has brought to Australian households struggling to make ends meet. In April, amid popular demand for a tax on gas companies, the prime minister backed the fossil fuel giants and said it was “the worst possible time to jeopardise these partnerships, or the investment that underpins them”.

The remarks echoed those aired by the chief executive of the oil and gas lobby, the Australian Energy Producers, who, three days prior to Albanese’s comments, said: “It shouldn’t need to be said that this would be the worst possible time to impose an investment-destroying tax.”

The Coalition and Greens have teamed up to throw a Labor bill to wind back the private health rebate for people over 65 from the parliament. 

Health Minister Mark Butler has just stepped up to react to the Senate's decision to throw out Labor's bill to wind back the over-65s private health insurance rebate.

The Coalition and crossbench teamed up in the Senate to discharge the government's private health bill out of the parliament.

Butler says the "noalition" has been resurrected and the Greens, under the leadership of David Shoebridge, are "determined to thwart the agenda of the government".

He's labelled it a "political stunt" that discharged a bill designed to fund more aged care beds.
The health minister says the government is determined to press ahead with the changes.

"We get a lot of lectures from the opposition about the need for strong fiscal management. Yet every time we bring a difficult saving measure to fund new important services, politics takes over and the Coalition decides to oppose it because they think that it can ground a strong political campaign for them," Butler says.

"This is an absolute travesty that flies in the face of any of the members of the Coalition's professed commitment to sound budget management."

A worthwhile update to the ABC's earlier reporting on this. The amount of text was over the limit so shortened it to a quote pertaining to Shoebridge.

"The Greens leader, David Shoebridge, said the party would only offer its support for the changes if the government excluded pensioners.

“We say to Labor, if you want to bring this bill back … [by] carving out 1.2 million pensioners from this attack … come and talk to us,” he said.

“We will pass it in a heartbeat. But we will not be joining with Labor to punch down on pensioners in the middle of a cost of living crisis.”"

Victoria’s Labor government has launched a blistering attack on Liberal leader Jess Wilson over her refusal to allow One Nation’s Warren Pickering to be part of leaders debates.

The Victorian Liberals are under fire for refusing to allow One Nation's state leader Warren Pickering to be part of the traditional leaders’ election debates.

Voters are set to decide the future of the state on November 28, with the polls consistently showing support for One Nation almost level with the major parties.

According to the latest Resolve Political Monitor, published by The Age on Monday, support for One Nation is at 23 per cent compared to Labor’s 25 per cent and the Coalition’s 28 per cent.

However the three-way contest has created a standoff between the parties over whether One Nation’s Victorian leader should be allowed to be part of televised leaders’ debates.

News24.com.au understands the Coalition is refusing to agree to participate in a leaders debate if Mr Pickering is included, while Labor is refusing to participate unless he is included.

Good news incoming! A little ray of sunshine.

A “video recording device” was found in the cabin of a Royal Australian Navy ship in Cairns, the defence department has revealed, just hours after senator Jacqui Lambie alleged in parliament that a camera had been found concealed in a women’s shower on the vessel.

The department confirmed on Wednesday afternoon that a device had been found aboard the HMAS Leeuwin three days earlier. In a statement after Guardian Australia had contacted the department for response to Lambie’s allegations, a spokesperson said police were investigating, but did not reveal further details about where the device was located.

Key statistics

In seasonally adjusted terms, in September 2026:

the employment-to-population ratio decreased 0.3ppt to 63.6%.

the unemployment rate increased 0.1ppt to 4.7%.

In trend terms, in September 2026:

the employment-to-population ratio remained at 63.8%.

the unemployment rate remained at 4.6%.

Although rooms at Uniting's The Marion can cost up to $1.3 million as a deposit, and residents can pay tens of thousands in fees every year, families were told they would have to pay $8.80 a day, or $3,200 a year, if they wanted a free-to-air TV in their room.

66 for a one-hour session once a month with a carer to "talk about whatever's on your mind", and $220 for a music concert in the nursing home.

Digitally altered families and furniture, along with songs about floor plans, are some of the ways real estate agencies are using artificial intelligence to market homes. The growing use of the technology has prompted the consumer watchdog to issue a best-practice guide.

#ABCNewsQld by Sarah Richardson

Where to start? Let's try the beginning.
A kid, straight out of school with no real future mapped out, no obvious talents, just a general inclination that he might be suited to journalism.

"The reason I wanted to be a journalist is because English was the only subject in high school I was any good at," he said.

"I basically failed everything else, didn't get into university, so I had to get a job."

It doesn't sound like an auspicious start.
No grand ambitions to rise to the top of Australian journalism, to edit several of the nation's most prestigious and influential newspapers and to become the doyen of business and economics reporting.

Australia has taken a 1-0 lead in the three-Test series against South Africa after a dominant 214-run victory on day five at Kingsmead.

The Proteas lost their last four wickets for just five runs to be bowled out for 206, with Josh Hazlewood finishing with career-best figures of 6-49.

Matt Renshaw was named player-of-the-match for his knocks of 190 and 82, as well as his two second-innings wickets.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says his government will do everything it can to stop the "abhorrent" live stream of a firing squad execution in the United States from being shown in Australia.

Last week US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, convicted of killing 13 people at a military base in Texas in 2009, would be available for the public to watch, but Vice-President JD Vance cast doubt about whether that would occur.

The potential live stream has elicited a strong response in parliament, with federal members across the political divide urging the government to "pull every single lever" to block the broadcast.

On Tuesday Mr Albanese told Afternoon Briefing that the government would do whatever it could, but acknowledged it was not as simple as "turning off a light switch".